Bruce wrote:

Major's stock is slowly rising.
For one thing thanks to him we don't have
the additional burden of being in a single currency that's liable to
collapse soon.

You can thank the Tory Right for that, and subsequently Gordon Brown,
but not John Major, unless you are prepared to justify a major
re-writing of history.

It wasn't Gordon Brown who negotiated the opt-out in the Maastricht Treaty
that meant the UK could decide later whether or not to join the single
currency. Nor was it really the Conservative Right backbenchers who forced
that one - Europe really only exploded as an issue in the Conservative Party
after the point had been negotiated. (Thatcher has tried to rewrite history
on this, with some success.) Without that opt-out the UK would have been
swept in.

As Chancellor of the Exchequer under Margaret
Thatcher, John Major took the UK into the Exchange Rate Mechanism and,
as Prime Minister, ordered the massive rise in interest rates on Black
Wednesday. He was avowedly pro-ERM and pro-Euro.

I think some time spent reading about modern history would be very
helpful to you.

Yes I work in modern history in my day job. I am also aware that Major was
pro ERM just as virtually all informed opinion was at the time, and also
that long term this country has been repeatedly obsessed with one form of
fixed or at least stable exchange rates or another, whether the Gold
Standard, the ERM or all those inbetween. And once in the country was
committed to maintaining that rate as best as it could. But being committed
to the ERM was not the same as being committed to going the full way into
the single currency.

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