Quote Originally Posted by BramleyMiller58 View Post
Hopefully it'll not return to the old days

Remember it going up to 10% and 15% in just one day
Cue panic in the Bramley58 household

Pulled out of ERM and it went back down
I remember that day very well. I had bought my accountancy practice, the office building and a new house so I was pretty much exposed to the interest rate. 10% I could afford but 15% I could not. I knew I had to make two people redundant the following morning. The morning came and I bottled it. Just as well because news filtered through that we were out of the Exchange Rate Mechanism and the previous day's interest increase had been reversed.

Many years later I happened to be sat next to Norman Lamont at a Eurosceptic dinner in London and I asked him about that day, which they called Black Wednesday and we call White Wednesday, when the UK crashed out of the ERM and with that giant leap freed us from ever joining that financial disaster, the Euro.

I told him about my situation at the time and asked him if, during that traumatic day when they tried to keep us in the ERM if they had considered what the 5% increase would do to small businesses. He was honest enough to say to me "We never gave it a thought."

The ironic thing is that Norman Lamont is a Eurosceptic but yet when he was in office he was promoting the EU's cause without any conception of the harm it was doing to us. There are many more like him, in public office today.

When Lord Lamont stood up to speak at the dinner I told you about he said something that I will never forget -

"I know of no benefit that we get from being a member of the European Union that we would not get if we were not members of it"

And he should know.