It’s twenty years, to the day, since the UK joined the European Exchange Rate
Mechanism – a decision that would, of course, culminate in our withdrawal on Black Wednesday, 16 September, 1992. Subsequent years of strong growth placed those events in a fresh context, but
here’s The Spectator’s take from 1990:
The dangers of stageism, The Spectator, 13 October 1990
Give the European federalists and inch, and they will take a kilometre. Commenting on Britain’s entry into the Exchange Rate Mechanism of the EMS, Sir Leon Brittan claimed that ‘Britain has begun
an inevitable move towards joining a full European Monetary System, including a single currency’. And the Guardian, which now outstrips even the Independent in Euro-enthusiasm, pronounced as
follows: ‘Be clear. We have finally signed up for the progressive stages of European monetary union.’
We have not, of course, finally signed up for any such thing. Comments such as those are of interest not because of their truth-content, but because of the language in which they are framed: ‘the progressive stages’, ‘an inevitable move’, and so on.
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