Not really BBC bias other than an example of why the EU is so hopeless and yet the BBC still cheerleads relentlessly for it.
Doesn’t this from 2011 all look familiar…I had to keep checking the date to make sure I was reading it properly….
Eurozone: UK ready to back IMF bailouts
The government now believes, I’m told, that there are only three ways out of the current crisis – one they hope for, one they fear and a third they are ready to accept.
They are:
1. Eurozone leaders succeed in getting last week’s deal back on track despite Greece’s plan to use a referendum to secure a better deal
2. Greece leaves the euro
3. Enhanced IMF funding for the Eurozone’s struggling economies
So just how good is the EU at solving its problems?….4 years ago Greece was a basket case with exactly the same problems (or rather they had the same problem just less debt) and the EU kicked the can way down the road….and Greece is still a basket case.
Why didn’t the EU just grasp the nettle in 2011 and either cough up and take the losses or allow Greece to slide off back to the Drachma? Instead they pumped in even more money for no gain….and which they look to lose either way.
Can’t really see the problem with letting Greece refinance its loans….the UK just paid off its debts from WWI last year…and we helped Germany and Japan retool after the war and become the economic powerhouses that ironically drove our own industries into the ground.
The price of an ‘EU’, that grand political project, will have to be paid if they want to keep the show on the road….this is surely what the EU was all about…the rich countries bailing out the poor…..reality is beginning to sink in about what the EU really means…..a redistribution of funds from the rich to the poor…even if the poor have beggared themselves.
Janet Daley in the Telegraph should possibly have the last word……
What we are seeing now is not just a struggle about debt, or national power, or even democratic accountability. This is really the endgame for the great mythical beasts of the last century. First, there is post-war Europe’s fear of its own populations which no one has bothered to re-assess for 50 years. Then we have the last gasp of Marxist delusion which uses 19th century social conditions to understand the post-industrial world. Surely we should be able to move on. We don’t want another 100 years of this, do we?
The least painful option for Greece, even though it is still an excruciating one, is to leave the EU. We all know why and how Greece was allowed to join in the first place – Why? Because EU leaders wanted to expedite EU expansion – How? By cooking the books.
Here’s a prediction; Greece will not leave the Eurozone. There will be an agreement on their debts one way or the other simply because Greece is a very small part of the EU and something which can be ‘managed’ as opposed to a Grexit which cannot!
The stock markets agree with my prediction, a prediction I made long before the snap Greek referendum.
It’s a shame, because only an EU exit can genuinely save the people of Greece.
Yes, Merkel has more or less said that she will sanction any amount of Greek misery to paper over any cracks in the “European project” which seems to have a quasi- religious significance amongst the German elite. The German public semm to be getting worked up about their money disappearing down a bottomless pit. But you would think the Germans would have learnt something from the experience of exchanging the ostmark one for one with the DM. Most industry in the East became uncompetitive and vast quantities of cash had to go East to prevent collapse. I paid a 5% solidarity tax for years and so played a shameful but minor part in creating the “New Germany”. The Germans can’t have it it both ways. If they were willing to spend trillions on a Greater Germany, they should now be willing to spend a couple of hundred billion on a new “Holy Roman Empire”. Eleftheria i thanatos – it could be both for the Greeks