l****z
发帖数: 29846 | 1 I see the G8 has a brilliant solution to the problems of the eurozone.
President Obama says it’s time for “growth and jobs”. Jolly good. That’s
the stuff. Let me show you how to create employment – the Brussels way.
Come with me through the streets of Athens, not far from Syntagma Square,
and your mind will reel with the horrified realisation that history is not a
one-way ratchet, that human progress is not guaranteed, and that a proud
country can be reduced – by years of torture and bullying – to a state
verging on total political, economic and moral collapse.
You will see businesses boarded up and windows smashed because no one has
the money or the energy to fix them, and on almost every wall a riot of
graffiti full of poisonous hatred for politicians. You will see people
sitting on cardboard, heads down, hands out, or pushing trolleys full of
scrap metal.
Not far from the town hall, I saw a man using the pavement as an operating
theatre to eviscerate a mattress for its springs. In the eyes of every
politician there is a glassy humiliation, a sense that the fate of the
nation is no longer in their hands. Even worse than the humiliation is the
dread that things will deteriorate further still. Thousands are now being
fed by soup kitchens.
Unemployment is rising by the day, and among young people it now stands at a
shameful 54 per cent. Yup, folks – those are the results of an EU plan to
produce “growth and jobs”. It was called the euro, and it has been a
catastrophe for Greece and pretty bad (with one notable exception) for the
rest of the continent.
As far as I can understand the “strategy” of the EU, it is now to prepare
for Greece to leave the single currency. Not that the Greeks themselves are
anything like psychologically ready to quit: the politicians are punch-drunk
, exhausted, and appalled at the loss of face and loss of security that
would go with a sundering from “Europe”. Most voters choose pro-euro
parties. But money is being withdrawn from banks; events are gathering
momentum; and it is clear from their remarks that other EU leaders are
getting ready for an outcome which until recently was held to be impolite to
mention: the Grexit.
And then what? And then the strategy would appear to be to cauterise the
amputation; to circle the wagons; to issue the most ringing and convincing
proclamation to the markets that no more depredations will be tolerated; and
to get the Germans to stump up, big time, to protect Spain and Portugal. We
are told that the only solution now is a Fiscal Union (or FU). We must have
“more Europe”, say our leaders, not less Europe – even though more
Europe means more suffering, and a refusal to recognise what has gone wrong
in Greece.
The euro has turned out to be a doomsday machine, a destroyer of jobs, a
killer of growth, because it entrenches and exacerbates the fundamental and
historic inability of some countries to compete with Germany in making high-
quality goods with low-unit labour costs. Unable to devalue their way back
into the game, these countries are forced to watch industry wilt under
German imports, as the euro serves as a giant trebuchet to fire swish German
saloon cars and machine tools across the rest of Europe.
Germany is almost alone in recording economic growth in the first part of
2012; Germany is doing well from the euro; and so the theory is that Germany
should pay to keep the whole racket going by bailing out the improvident
and the uncompetitive, just as London and the South East subsidise the rest
of the UK.
Alas, it is not a strategy that is likely to work. As Angela Merkel has made
clear, there is little political support – let alone popular support – in
Germany. EU leaders may want a fiscal union, but it is deeply anti-
democratic. We accept large fiscal transfers in this country because Britain
has a single language and a single political consciousness in a way that
Europe never will. Rather than creating an “economic government of Europe”
, the project will lead to endless bitterness between the resentful donors
and the humiliated recipients, as these diminished satrapies will be
instructed to accept cuts and “reforms” – designed in Berlin and
announced in Brussels – as the price of their dosh.
And it is not as if the markets will believe in these “firewalls”, or not
for very long. If they can prise away Greece, they will know they can prise
away others. As long as the euro can break up, there is always a risk that
it will break up. So it is frankly unbelievable that we should now be urging
our neighbours to go for fiscal union. It is like seeing a driver heading
full-tilt for a brick wall, and then telling them to hit the accelerator
rather than the brake.
Europe now has the lowest growth of any region in the world. We have already
wasted years in trying to control this sickness in the euro, and we are
saving the cancer and killing the patient. We have blighted countless lives
and lost countless jobs by kidding ourselves that the answer to the crisis
might be “more Europe”. And all for what? To salvage the prestige of the
European Project, and to spare the egos of those who were wrong and muddle-
headed enough to campaign for the euro.
Surely it is now time to accept that the short-term pain of a managed euro
rupture – a wholesale realignment, possibly a north/south bisection –
would be better than continuing to immiserate so many people around the
continent.
At the end of a day in Athens, I was so sad at what I had seen that I went
to a kafeneion and ordered a metaxa. And then another. At length, I fished
into my wallet and found a rather handsome banknote, with an image of Apollo
from Olympia. “Not today,” said the owner, politely declining my drachmas
. “In a month, yes.” It will be awful for Greece, and turbulent for
Britain, but at present I can think of no better solution. |
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