Given a fair wind, we will negotiate our way into the Common Market, head held high, not crawling in. Negotiations? Yes. Unconditional acceptance of whatever terms are offered us? No.
If you rattle along at great speed everybody inside is too exhilarated or too seasick to cause any trouble. But if you stop everybody gets out and argues about where to go next.
From now on, the pound abroad is worth 14 per cent or so less in terms of other currencies. That doesn’t mean, of course, that the Pound here in Britain, in your pocket or purse or in your bank, has been devalued.
This party is a bit like an old stagecoach. If you drive along at a rapid rate everyone aboard is either so exhilarated or so seasick that you don’t have a lot of difficulty.
On 5 September, when the TUC unanimously rejected wage restraint, it was the end of an era, and all the financiers, all the little gnomes in Zürich and other finance centres about whom we keep on hearing, had started to make their dispositions in regard to sterling.
There is something utterly nauseating about a system of society which pays a harlot 25 times as much as it pays its prime minister, 250 times as much as it pays its members of Parliament and 500 times as much as it pays some of its ministers of religion.
I get a little nauseated, perhaps, when I hear the phrase ‘freedom of the press’ used as freely as it is, knowing that a large part of our proprietorial press is not free at all.
