British membership of the European Monetary Union seemed at the time this 'biography' was prepared the most likely method of introducing an independent central bank to Britain. But once this was unexpectedly achieved by the Blair government in a domestic context, immediately after it came to office in 1997, when it granted full operational independence to the Bank of England, much of my economic interest in the subject lapsed.

The remaining economic advantage of the euro for Britain is that it would abolish the overshooting and undershooting of sterling against an area responsible for the greater part of British trade. The disadvantage is summarised by the popular slogan "One size fits all". The European Central Bank would have to find one interest rate for an area extending from the Algarve of southern Portugal to the north of Scotland and the west of Ireland to the Czech borders. It has been difficult enough for Bank of England's Monetary Policy Committee to find a single interest rate appropriate to both the South East of England and the manufacturing areas of the North and Midlands.

The economic issues are thus finely balanced. The five tests set out by the Labour Government in 1997 are highly subjective and will be declared to be satisfied if and when Tony Blair believes he can win a referendum on the subject. The remaining issues are political. The euro can be, but does not have to be, a step towards a closer political union in Europe. The passions aroused by this latter subject derive from, on the one hand, English nationalists who are attached to everything that is symbolised by the Queen's head on British notes and coins; on the other hand by European federalists who regard political union as an the principal objective and who have not thought out a fresh rationale for the project since the time after World War II - when the present European institutions were established with a view to making another war between France and Germany impossible.

As someone who regards units of government as matters of convenience I find the whole issue overblown, as I have tried to explain in the Introduction to my latest book, Essays Moral, Political and Economic, published for the David Hume Institute (of which I was president) by the Edinburgh University Press in 1998.

In domestic economic policy, the Blair government has more or less continued with the better aspects of the Thatcher regime. Indeed some of its Welfare to Work policies have been an improvement on anything previous Conservative governments dared put forward. The biggest innovation has been the extension of in-work benefits to provide a minimum income for all, which is a clear improvement on living on the dole. My main worry is the excessively puritanical influence on forcing people to work rather than merely providing opportunities and incentives. This links up with my wider libertarian worries.

The late Edmund Dell remarked: "the Blair government wishes to approach as near as possible to neo-liberalism while still differentiating itself from it for domestic political reasons." But both critics and supporters of the Government go too far in attributing to it a 'Thatcherite' economic agenda. Whatever the political instincts of Tony Blair or Gordon Brown, it is still a Labour Government, most of whose members and advisers had spent their intellectual lives looking for areas of market failure and are still largely unaware of the studies of government failure. The advantages of reducing union power and privatisation took a long time to reveal themselves and indeed were to a large extent responsible for the good performance of the British economy which Labour took over; so the disadvantages of the minimum wage, the extension of union rights and the too eager acceptance of the Brussels Social Chapter may make themselves most evident after a long lag.

But I worry much more about the 'communitarian' rhetoric of the 'Third Way': in other words its stress on the group rather than the individual. Some backroom Labour advisers are obviously needled when I mention this aspect and would rather have to cope with a full-blown Tory attack. But my main doubts about Labour Government have sprung from the weakness of its commitment to personal freedom. Whether it is the treatment of immigrants, the restriction of trial by jury, the general administration of criminal law, or its control-freak endeavours to regulate education, the Government has been restrictive and reactionary. The Conservative Opposition under William Hague has been still worse, trying to trump the Governmment on every such issue. Thus the Conservatives have held no attractions. A Gladstonian liberal could have found much fault with the Asquith and Lloyd George before World War One, he or she would not have wanted to change them for the massed rank of Tories with their bellicose and protectionist instincts; and a similar situation could apply today.

Even on economic issues the Conservatives are no longer in advance of Labour: a tell-tale example being their rejection of road charging, which is so clearly the market-based approach to traffic, congestion and transport problems. And on the more headline issues, they have reverted to promising tax cuts from unspecified improvements in efficiency, while refusing to rethink any of the frontiers of the Welfare State.

Nevertheless, my most recent efforts have been devoted to advocating a humane individualism and protecting it from fashionable but ill-conceived, attacks. This is the subject of the first chapter in my latest book of essays. Indeed I have felt that contemporary economics does not provide too many answers, or even leads into, current problems. For instance it utterly failed to predict the collapse of Soviet style Communism. Nor did it anticipate the problems associated with the promotion of a market economy in Russia, which are more a matter of the rule of law and the establishment of civil society than the minutiae of monetary and fiscal policy.

But I am even less impressed by the revival of cloudy metaphysical speculation on the 'nature of man' or the nature of 'the person'. I do not know whether to be amused or alarmed that anti-scientific New Age writings occupy more space even in highbrow book shops than serious philosophy or science. The nature of human beings is a biological question to be investigated empirically and not a matter for profound armchair theorising. Such reflections have led me to take an interest in Darwinian pyscology - thus coming full circle to one of my earlier interests - but alas as a critical spectator rather than as a participant. And the last thing that I wish to do is to exchange the aridities of economic factionalism for the tribal warfare of different varieties of social biologists, sociologists and anthropologists.

The majority of economic writers and their readers are now most interested in the brave new world of digital technology. The new technology undoubtedly marks a big advance in communications and in bringing together of the world in a global economy, but no more so than past advances such as railways, electricity, the internal combustion engine or (the best analogy) the Transatlantic cable which was inaugurated in 1868.

Information technology will not enable capitalism to escape from the cycle of bubble and burst which has accompanied it from the beginning. At most better policies can hope to mitigate its severities and try to staunch the secondary and tertiary effects.

Despite my reluctance to go overboard for digital methods, I have nevertheles astonished some people by establishing a personal website - www.samuelbrittan.co.uk . It remains to be seen whether this will be successful in drawing attention to the essays and reflections to which I wish to draw readers.

{Selected Works >>>}