European Parliament, Strasbourg, 12 September 2012
Transcript:
Thank you, well I begin today on a happy note, to
remember, that it is twenty years ago this very week that the United
Kingdom, having been signed up by the Conservative government to the
exchange rate mechanism, broke out of the exchange rate mechanism.
It
was a great liberation for us and of course once having been bitten we
didn't join the euro project thank goodness. Sadly the same is not true
for the rest of Europe and I thought through the last 18 months or so
that the economic logic of why Britain left the ERM would apply
particular to those Mediterranean countries and I foresaw that actually
those countries would leave the eurozone, probably with Greece leaving
this year.
But I now have to accept that I've been wrong about
that, because I have totally underestimated the complete fanaticism, Mr
Barroso of you, your college of commissioners and the European Central
Bank.