How bad is this fall in the pound? In a word: hideous.Measured against a basket of other currencies – the best way in this globalised era to test a currency's strength – the pound has fallen in the past year by around a quarter.
This is more than any previous devaluation in the past century – greater even than in 1931, when, under Ramsay MacDonald, the UK was forced to abandon the gold standard and saw the pound plummet by more than 24 per cent against the dollar.
Greater than after Black Wednesday and the abandonment of the Exchange Rate Mechanism; worse than in 1967, when Harold Wilson was forced to make an extraordinary televised statement to the nation claiming that the "pound in your pocket" would not be worth any less after his devaluation.
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