“Looking up at the huge modern edifice of the euro tottering, tilting and melting – a Corbusian nightmare as imagined by Dalí – it is easy to forget how prevalent was the view that Britain would condemn itself to a second-class status in Europe and a lesser role on the global stage if it stayed out of the shiny new currency. Even some of the staunchest Eurosceptics, who saw that the euro was economic folly and a constitutional affront, fretted privately that it would bulldoze all before it……It is astonishing to hear the very same people who said Britain would be consigned to irrelevance outside the euro now insisting that we have a neighbourly duty to prevent its implosion: we do have such a duty, but it is based on hard-nosed self-interest, not obligation to the continental sages who – betraying their ignorance of history and its magnificent unpredictability – once insisted that their grand projet would inevitably succeed.”
|
|||||
Samizdata quote of the dayNovember 8th, 2011 |
 10 comments to Samizdata quote of the day |
   |
||||
All content on this website (including text, photographs, audio files, and any other original works), unless otherwise noted, is licensed under a Creative Commons License. |
|||||
UK PM David Cameron has been pretty consistent about how the Eurozone should deal with the problem. The Eurozone countries should allow the ECB to print the necessary Euros to buy up all the unwanted debt from Greece, Spain, Italy, Portugal and Ireland and monetize it.
This is the only way this crisis can now be solved as it has been allowed to fester and fester until there are no middle tier solutions left.
However, despite the compelling logic of what David Cameron is saying, it will be refused and refused by the Germans until probably Greece and possibly even Italy have undertaken some form of default.
Only then will the Germans allow monetization to take place and it will be too little too late.
However, from an anti-EU perspective, this is all wonderful because it has shown Merkozy in their true forms as EU tyranny comes from behind the curtain. Between them they have effectively undermined the PM of a sovereign nation within the EU and caused that country to seek a new PM and (eventually) a new government for having the insolence to seek a democratic mandate for the austerity measures being imposed on the country.
I suspect that some of those who were considering joining the Eurozone will now have a serious think about whether this is in their personal or national best interests.
Given the events we have watched with growing horror over the last 18-months or so, it would be an extremely courageous PM (in the Yes Minister perspective), who would propose taking the UK into the Euro.
Job Done.
Can we leave yet?
What a great article. It’s filled with gems, any one of which would have made a fine SQOTD. A couple:
“After 1989, the EU and the idea of the euro filled the Marx-shaped hole in the world-view of the Left, and presented a new teleology in which a whole continent was going to be bound together, inexorably, by a single currency.”
“The psychology of the EU – a postwar elite bureaucracy – is entirely out of kilter with this very modern surge of popular protest: technology-driven, non-hierarchical, anti-elitist. It is like trying to connect an old ribbon typewriter to an iPad.”
The whole thing is definitely worth a read.
I watched Will Hutton on wiggy Neil’s This Week prog last thursday, STILL maintaining that “when this crisis is over…” Britain should join the Euro because it is a very good idea.
Crisis? what crisis??? This is meltdown you moron!
When is the braindead leftie bastard ever going to learn? Or iDave for that matter, who has the twat as an advisor.
Rab, if you’ve not seen this and would like to boil yer pish, take a look. Oh and don’t have anything to hand to throw through your screen.
The Hutton Delusion
Thanks for the link Xen. Yes that’s what I saw (two weeks ago then, doesn’t time fly?)
Gawd Hutton is getting like the clapped out Clive James isn’t he? And the link to the studio discussion is worth a look folks. He gets chewed out by everyone, Johnson, Portaloo and Wiggy, wriggling like a worm on a hook. Most heartwarming!
Oh and I’m always very calm when operating expensive equipment, especially when it’s mine 😉
He’s an obvious flake and charlatan, like Tony Giddens (remember him?), and what I find really interesting about him and people like him is that they are wafted ever upwards on the back of always getting everything completely wrong.
This phenomenon is as bad as the failed politician syndrome by which Patten, Mandelson and Kinnock (for example), but most notably Patten – 19 years since the voters gave him the heave-ho, via Hong Kong, Yurp and, of course, the Oxford Chancellorship and the BBC – are immunised from what ought to be the effects of their own inutility.
If welfare removes the link between virtuous behaviour and reward, these phenomena are the posh versions of welfare. It’s depressingly fascinating
Remember Iceland? They had to let their banks crash, and they are now managing the recovery. Perhaps Europe should just let the Greeks squirm, and their banks fail, so they can pick up the pieces later, and make a better fit. Be cruel now, so that everything eventually becomes kind in the future. though I suppose that politicians can’t think beyond the electoral cycle.
Nuke, that’s a great point. We’re currently seeing in the U.S. the effects of politicians trying to string the housing bubble along, instead of letting the ineveitable happen. Real estate is sliding away slowly and painfully, and any possibility of recovery is being pushed further into the future.
Cousin, why worry about the future? After all, what has the future done for us, lately?
I agree with the specific banking point about Iceland – they were right to let the private banks go bankrupt.
However, we should not use Iceland as a general example to follow – letting the banks go was about the only thing they have done right.
As for the Eurozone.
For Mr Cameron and co to say we must support it, via the IMF (so he can pretend he is not subsidizing it) or there will be terrible suffering in Britain is actually correct – but misses an important point.
THERE WILL BE TERRIBLE SUFFERING ANYWAY.
The credit bubble financial system (and the Welfare States) of Europe can not be saved for ever – and out subsidizing them will just put off what will just happen later (and worse).
And our own credit bubble financial system (and our own out of control Welfare State) can not be propped up for ever either – the system will fail here also.
“In the long run we are all dead – the job of a regime is to think about today, not tomorrow”.
It is the long run – and whilst the collapse may not be tomorrow, it can not be long delayed (no matter what insane antics the elite engage in).