CITY AND SUBURBAN
Ever closer union wider still and wider shall thy bands be set
CHRISTOPHER FILDES
This really is open season for shooting my foxes. First Norman Lamont, then Jacques Attali, now the European exchange rate mechanism — it is beginning to border on cruelty. They have all been rolled over, cold and stiff, except for the ERM, which is just cold. Nothing stiff about a fixed exchange rate system which has come unfixed. In theory the ERM is not lost but gone before — to wider bands, which will let exchange rates vary by one- third before anything need happen. All together now, with pomp and circum- stance:
Wider still and wider Shall thy bands be set: Ever closer union - You ain't seen nothin' yet.
All that has been saved from the wreckage is a group of faces, some of them, if I may say so, scarcely worth the effort. I am con- ducting a sweepstake (the Lamont Stakes) on the number of ministerial resignations in Europe. Low Field is favoured. There can be no question of the pound going back into this pseudo-system as a gesture of pseudo-solidarity. As for the idea that it can or should turn into the next stage of monetary union, starting punctually on New Year's Day — the timetable, so the Prime Minister says, is wholly unrealistic. Not only the time table. This is a distrac- tion that Europe can do well without. Fixed exchange rates have distorted its economics and deepened its recession, which is why they proved insupportable. Recession and protection which come with it, put off the day when Europe can be one free market. In the Euro-calendar, that (if you remem- ber) was the significance of 1992, which (if you remember) was last year. Promoters of the single currency pretend that we need it for the single market. Why should we? The single market and the single currency have been at odds with each other and still are. It is easy for British policy to choose between them and we shall never have a better chance.
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