The Eurozone is, to borrow an expression, in a bit of bother. The financial pages of newspapers are filled with lots of arrows pointing downwards and graphs which fall off the edge of the page. Bond markets have decided that Italy and Greece should suffer unsustainably high interest rates on their loans, as investors run scared and put their money in more reliable places, like pyramid schemes or underneath their mattress. The Greek government is just a few bad invoices away from giving Ocean Finance a call.
Vocal protests, occasionally violent, have been common in Greece since the recession began, as austerity measures take their toll. However, the good ship Democracy has arrived at the harbour and protester’s fears have been assuaged by the appointment of a non-elected bod (and former European Central Bank Vice President) to Prime Minister after the previous incumbent, George Papandreou, offered his people a say in their future via a referendum on Europe’s bailout terms. I know, letting his country have a say in one of the most historic issues facing the ancient nation: what a fool! Anyone holding a fistful of Euros in one hand and a cigar in the other could have told him that his plan was pure folly. He was hastily shot down by a gang of technocrats demanding interventionist governance with the democratic accountability of all the Arab leaders we have been trying to dispose of these past few months.
In Italy, Silvio Burlesconi has been forced to resign. Not because of the multitude of court cases he was facing, nor because of allegations of corruption which have been blighting the ageing lethario for years. He went the way of Papandreou after fat men wearing suits in charge of pension funds ran scared of his country’s ability to pay back debt. In his place is Mario Monti, another unelected official given control of a nation above the people’s will, even though he sounds like a character from a children’s Xbox game.
Getting rid of Burlesconi has understandably delighted many Italians fed up with decades of embarrassment on the international stage, but replacing him with an unknown bureaucrat has hardly resulted in elation. “He may have been a bigoted, corrupt and sleazy Prime Minister, but at least he was our bigoted, corrupt and sleazy Prime Minister”.
Portugal and Ireland have also had to seek bailouts as Angela Merkel rushes from summit to summit like a wife who is painfully aware of her husband’s philandering, yet keeps up appearances nonetheless. She must realise that the Euro is disintegrating before her very eyes yet Merkel maintains that greater political integration is the light at the end of the tunnel.
Yes. Handing over more fiscal control to the shady European Commission (a body whose members don’t even know what they exist for) and the toothless European Parliament (which, let us not forget, counts Nick Griffin among its members) is without doubt the best route out of the quagmire.
Meanwhile David Cameron and George Osbourne, despite heading one of the three biggest countries in the EU and therefore holding considerable authority and clout, sit at the sidelines and snigger like schoolboys not picked for the football squad. “Look at Nicolas, demanding the ECB buy up bad debt to safeguard his nation’s exposed banking sector. He is so gay!”
We can now be thankful that Gordon Brown did not enter us in to the Euro. It would be nice to say that his actions were based solely upon sound economic theory. We could look upon his legacy more cheerfully if he genuinely knew there was a strong likelihood that one day individual countries would be stuck in a rut when bad times came calling, unable to devalue their currencies and trade themselves out of recession. But Tony Blair was desperate to deliver the Euro and this was reason enough for Brown to stick with sterling. He would have sold his own grandmother if it displeased his boss. Everyone knew that Brown had five criteria that had to be met before Britain entered the Euro, but no-one realised that number three was “Tony Blair gets grumpier the longer we stay out”.
George Osborne has been blaming “ill winds” (a brilliantly rude phrase which suggests that sitting downwind of the Spanish Finance Minister after a spicy curry might be to blame for recession) from the Eurozone as the reason for poor growth and unemployment figures, which pulls off two classic Tory tricks at once. He gets to apportion the blame elsewhere for a mess that he is at least partially responsible for and gets to stick the boot in to the Germans and French as well.
Everyone’s a winner! Except everyone who’s not massively rich.
Welcome To The Deadzone 