To introduce another bad analogy in to the conversation, eating cheese is not immoral but forcing a 10kg block of cheddar into somebody's mouth is.

Black Wednesday still has political and economic consequences more than 20 years later - the UK is not a member of the Euro and the Right may potentially pull us out of the EU altogether. The (de)merits of both positions notwithstanding, Black Wednesday certainly still has a huge psychological effect on our relationship with the rest of Europe.

Another way of looking at it is this: had the pound remained on the ERM, Britain would have remained on-track to join the Euro. Assuming no devaluation of the pound (the incident that caused Britain to leave the ERM), the pound would have become part of the Euro at a ruinously high exchange rate relative to the Deutschmark. In the financial collapse of 2008, Britain would not have been able to lower interest rates or run quantitative easing. This is basically the predicament that Spain, Italy and Greece are in (though Greece has other problems). They have been forced to carry out "internal devaluation" by cutting spending and wages, and due to the sticky prices effect this basically means making very large numbers of people unemployed.

Of course, you could argue another counter-factual, that Britain within the Euro would have tipped the balance of power in the ECB in favour of a much more doveish monetary policy from 2008, and thus saved Europe from calamity. It's really hard to speculate about these kinds of reflexive dynamics.

Just a FYI, some of us feel that eating cheese is immoral.

Hmm, true. I had forgotten about veganism, sorry.

Except Great Britain is the sole maker of cheese, and forces under threat of violence the citizens of the UK to pay their taxes and other debts in cheese, and it costs Britain nothing to make cheese.

They didn't force a 10 kg block down any ones throat, they choose of their own volition to buy 10 kg of cheese at price they knew to be outrageous, to maintain their manipulated price of cheese because they are the sole maker of cheese.

So as the sole supplier of cheese they fucked up the market by flooding it with cheese, then realizing what they had done bought fuck loads of cheese that costs nothing to produce to maintain their inflated price of cheese. Fuck them.