At the Brexit-related cabinet last week — as revealed by James Forsyth in these pages — David Lidington made an intervention in support of the Prime Minister’s approach to the negotiations. He was, he said, the only person present who had been an MP at the time of ‘Black Wednesday’, when the pound fell out of the ERM on 16 September 1992. It had been so disastrous and divisive, he went on, that the government must at all costs avoid a repeat over Brexit. Many heads nodded sagely. Mr Lidington, a moderate and public-spirited man, was quite right about the pain caused to his party 26 years ago; but the interests of the Tories and of the nation are not necessarily the same thing. It was ERM entry and the attempt to defend a hopeless exchange rate for sterling which caused the anguish. Black Wednesday was the happy release. It was an almost unmitigated benefit to Britain. It exposed the folly of trying to have fixed (or, possibly even worse, semi-fixed) exchange rates. It ushered in a long period of prosperity which was not undermined until Gordon Brown became prime minister 15 years later. And it made it politically impossible for Britain to join the euro. Contrary to Mr Lidington, the real lesson of Black Wednesday is that we can never successfully pursue an economic, commercial or monetary policy shaped by the needs of European integration. Mrs May’s one-third Brexit known as ‘Chequers’ proposes to make the same mistake, and could well produce the same pain. A full Brexit would be a second Black Wednesday. Many senior Conservatives do not see it this way. They are on the wrong side of history.
A pendant to this point is the campaign called ‘Norway for Now’.
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