Gordon Brown Saved The Pound

Peter Hitchens writes:

As for Gordon Brown, the absurd distorted hate figure which the Useless Tories used with such effect to drum up their dying vote in 2010, it is most interesting to read Alastair Campbell’s latest diaries.

Mr Campbell is at last becoming interesting, as he has no need to keep secrets any more. And one of two really interesting things in his serialised memoirs (in the Guardian)  is the detail of the real row between Anthony Blair and Gordon Brown.

This was always portrayed as a sort of soap opera personal rivalry, between sunny, charming Anthony and grim, dour, unhinged Gordon. But in fact there was an issue - and it was British membership of the Euro. Brown, well-advised by the (almost equally mocked and misrepresented) Ed Balls, successfully resisted great pressure from Blair and most of his ‘modernising’ Cabinet colleagues (themselves backed by those keen Tory allies of David Cameron, especially Michael Heseltine and Kenneth Clarke) to abolish the Pound Sterling.

In short, Gordon Brown saved the Pound.

However bad our economic circumstances are now, imagine how much worse they would be if Blair, Heseltine and Clarke had got their way. And wonder how things would have been if John Major, or David Cameron, had been in office at the time, with no Balls or Brown to stand in their way.

Yet Tory voters were persuaded to hate and loathe Brown, while they were urged to vote for and admire David Cameron, a man who had by then reneged on his promise of a vote on the Lisbon Treaty. And yes, he had, and I was there when he announced it and tried to wriggle out of his commitment, and he knew what he had done, and he looked thoroughly ashamed of himself and fearful he would be found out.

It is an interesting example of people being persuaded, by propaganda, to do wholly irrational things. And it bolsters my view that, until modern neuropsychpharmacology was invented (plus steroids), and until there was widespread use of cannabis, individual madness was far less common in our world than the madness of crowds.