Is it hypocrisy or Stupidity - or is there another more flattering explanation? Like many others, I have been puzzling all this past week to understand the mental processes of most Labour MPs and most Trade Union Leaders, confronted as they had been with successive announcements of lay-offs, plant Closures and bankruptcies nationwide. I had no problem understanding their alarm and concern at these events and their angry rejection of assertions that unemployment is a price worth paying for holding inflation to 21/2% per annum. I understand too their correct focus on the UKs high bank rate and exchange rate as a major cause of job losses - and their demand for immediate interest cuts.
What I don't understand is why the great majority of those who are now so vigorously protesting against high interest rates should be blaming Eddie George and the Monetary Policy Committee when they themselves passively acquiesced - indeed in many cases welcomed,- the abandonment by the Chancellor of Government control over interest rates 12 months ago. And why they are not now demanding either that the Chancellor resumes - as Clause 19 of the legislation allows - control over interest rates or that he changes the instructions to the Governor and the Monetary Policy Committee so that they are obliged to take account of unemployment, the exchange rate and economic growth and not just the target 21/2% inflation rate - when setting interest rates.
And what is quite beyond me is why these very same people, the Backbench MPs of the Parliamentary Labour Party and Trade Union Leaders whose members are so directly concerned with job maintenance, should be still supporting the Government's policy commitment to join the European Single Currency, the EURO, and to subject our interest rates for ever more to the decisions of the wholly independent European Central Bank in Frankfurt. Who, do they think, will be listening to their protests then?
These are not just anomalies or paradoxes about which we can simply shrug our shoulders. MPs should now demand in Parliament the change of policies that events have shown to be so essential. And their constituents - and in the case of the Trade Unions, their members -should now demand that their elected representatives fulfil their trust and defend the interests of those who elected them.
"Our most precious possessions are often those things that we take for granted. That is true of our own personal health and it is true of the health of the body politic where freedom self-government, and democracy are possessions beyond all price.
It is only when these possessions are taken away or are under acute threat, that we recognise just how valuable they are. We had a taste of it when, during those dreadful two years, from October 1990 to September 1992, we abandoned control over our own currency and allowed our economic fortunes to be decided by the rules and rulers of the Exchange Rate Mechanism over which we had no control.
How much greater a threat to our democracy is the present proposal that we should now for ever abandon our own currency, the pound sterling, and substitute for it the European euro!
THE THREAT TO OUR DEMOCRACY
To hear some people talk about it, you would think it was just a matter of changing the faces that appear on our bank notes. In fact, it is the greatest challenge to our continued independence and self government that we have ever had to face in times of peace. For, as part of the single currency deal, we lose not only our currency but our independent central bank as well. The Bank of England would become no more than a branch bank of the European Central Bank in Frankfurt. And at the same time all future British governments in deciding here the balance between public expenditures and tax revenues will have to accept that the decision has already been made for them by the terms of the Maastricht Treaty which forbids them, under threat of heavy financial penalties and fines to exceed the Treaty limits.
And the British people and we their Members of Parliament in both the House of Commons and the House of Lords will be powerless to change these arrangements these rules, however harmful they may turn out to be. For we will have surrendered the right of our democracy through elected Members of Parliament and Governments, to take those decisions that the British people want.
TWO CHANCELLORS OF THE EXCHEQUER: UNITED ONLY IN SURRENDER TO FRANKFURT AND BRUSSELS
And the extraordinary thing, the disgraceful thing, is that the two men most directly involved and responsible, Mr Kenneth Clarke the Chancellor of the Exchequer in the Major government from 1992-l997 and his successor Mr Gordon Brown, the Chancellor in the present Blair government, are united on one great matter: they are determined to abolish the office of Chancellor of the Exchequer and to strip the Treasury bare of its powers and functions in respect of the British economy. In the future, they both agree, and they are both passionate advocates of it, the British economy must be ruled not by elected Ministers of the United Kingdom but by foreign bankers and Brussels bureaucrats to whom the powers of decision and economic self government will have been surrendered.
Some countries on the continent may find good reasons for making these extraordinary surrenders of democratic self-government. Although it is a striking fact that not one of them has first sought, through a referendum the consent of their own people to what they propose. Those reasons are certainly not any serious expectation of economic benefit: they are entirely based on their wish to form an ever-closer union of European states, with the goal of establishing a new single European state to take the place of the eleven nation states who have recently joined, the single currency and Euroland.
We in Britain, while we have genuine goodwill towards, and desire to co-operate with, our European neighbours do not wish to abandon our own democracy and self-government. We shall not therefore join the single currency and we shall not become part of a Federal Europe.