Airstrip One

Incidentally...

Iain Murray puts me straight on my assertion that the gold standard was incidentally involved with foreign policy. It's all to do with the role of foreign banks and their inconvenient habits of collapsing, making investors nervous about Britain's banking system.

Doesn't convince me, as going down this road makes almost all large economic issues ones of foreign policy - the competitiveness of high tax economies is one example. Of course our economy is affected by foreign events, but economic management is not in itself a matter of foreign policy.

I doubt that this is an issue over which the Times will be quaking in their boots.