The Italian Northern League have, as promised, launched their ‘bring back the Lira’ referendum campaign. Whilst at this stage there is something vaguely comic in all this, remember it is a wild card which will be floating around if Italy’s economic crisis worsens.

The Italian Northern League party launched a campaign to revive the lira at an 85,000-strong rally of its supporters on Sunday (19 June) The party, which holds minister posts in Silvio Berlusoni’s government, called for a revival of the lira as a “parallel currency” to the euro, which would remain the currency of the state budget, tourism and foreign trade. Under Italian law, a referendum must be held if half a million signatures are collected.