Thus, perhaps, the pound has been slightly stronger than would have been best. So the strong economic performance over the past few years has occurred against a background of certainty that we wouldn't be joining the Euro any time soon combined with a relatively strong pound. Actually, of course, the pound has weakened recently, especially against the dollar. Furthermore, presumably at some point the British economy will go into recession. After all, the business cycle has not been abolished.
Harvests still fail, wars still happen, the price of oil still goes up and down.
So at some point British business will stop doing so well, the pound will become weak relative to the Euro, and we will rely on those same manufacturers who complain of doing badly out of the strong pound to do well for us out of the weak pound, and drag us out of recession. Having a floating currency and being able to follow our own monetary policy has served the British economy very well since we left the ERM and used monetary policy to meet our own domestic needs. And through all of that time we have not been outside the Euro block without it causing large-scale bankruptcy or job losses at all. First a little context on Japan. This is certainly a worthwhile amount of investment, and we wouldn't want to lose it.