“….when a previous Tory Chancellor gave us "Black Wednesday"....a certain Norman Lamont. “
Yes Mikey. A result of our disastrous adventure into the ridiculous European Exchange Rate Mechanism. That bold experiment, you will remember, was a precursor to the Single Currency. Nobody learned from its outcome; the euro was still launched despite shambles that was the ERM and dire warnings of its likely shortcomings and the rest, as they say, is history.
It was not a party political issue. Had the Labour Party been in power at that time I doubt they would have done anything differently. All politicians of the major parties were (and to a certain extent still are) in total thrall to the EU. It could do no wrong; the future was the EU; everything the EU said and did must be good; ergo, any opposition to the EU must be bad. Well, in the intervening 25 years it has been shown that the EU has been nothing but an unmitigated disaster for millions of people across Europe. So please, let’s not lay the blame for those disasters on any particular UK politicians or parties. As far as the EU goes they are all the same (bar UKIP, of course). Well they’ve been dismissed as far as that particular project goes and it’s time to look forward to something different which might, just might turn out to be far better than you expect.