PENDLE MP Gordon Prentice today backed a Labour backbench rebellion over Europe which has sparked a new crisis for Tony Blair.

He is one of 50 Labour MPs expressing outright opposition to joining a single currency in defiance of official policy.

The backbenchers - almost a fifth of the Parliamentary Labour Party - want the party's support for a single currency dropped.

Officially, Labour is broadly in favour of the idea although it does not rule out a referendum on the issue.

Mr Prentice and his 49 colleagues are signed up to a glossy leaflet "Europe Isn't Working" which warns that a single currency would lengthen Europe's dole queues already containing more than 20 million. The 50 also claim a single currency would require a crippling £12 billion cut in jobs and services in Britain to meet the terms of the Maastricht Treaty.

Unless Labour had a massive Commons majority, the 50 dissenters could be enough to wreck any more to a single currency.

The party leadership was playing down the development insisting this was an "insignificant" development compared to Tory splits.

But one rebel - former treasury minister Denzil Davies - said: "We don't believe that the levers of economic power should be handed over to bankers.

"This is something we can't run away from.

"If we go into government as a party without a clear view, this issue would dominate right from the beginning."

Mr Prentice, MP for Pendle, was unavailable for comment as he is in Brussels attending a conference on international telecommunications.

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