About Greece....

I can't pretend I went to listen to the waves on the subject of Greece's current woes, but thoughts occur...

1. Many people seem to line up on one side or the other. Either: they've brought it on themselves - corruption, very low tax collection rates, reckless borrowing, huge expenditure on arms (much higher as % of GDP than ours) All this economists and politicians tell us.  Or: they are victims of the rich nations of Europe and their leaders (Merkel being almost as keen on austerity economics as Osborne), they are being shafted by international capitalism and its agents -  banks and international agencies (IMF, ECB) rushed to lend them far too much, as our banks did to individuals pre-2008.

2. There seems to be validity in both views. In which case, the people of Greece have been betrayed by their governments down the years, and they are being crushed by international capitalism.

3. The Eurozone is a desperately bad idea. Nations don't just have different currencies, in the abstract, they have different cultures behind them. A Euro without closer integration of nation states (were that possible or desirable) was doomed to failure of one sort or another. Some people point to the USA as an example of a federation with a common currency. Nonsense - for all its differences, the USA is one country with powerfully centralising ideologies in balance with federal powers. The differences between Germany and Greece (or Italy, or....) are too significant for a common currency.

4. The Eurozone and its economic ideologies will at this rate destroy the EU. Because the bottom line is this: the people of Greece are in a desperate state. We are told they are already RUNNING OUT OF ESSENTIAL MEDICINES. Sorry to shout at you, but a member state of the EU is being allowed to collapse into crisis because of its past economic follies, whilst politicians quarrel. What sort of message does that play to the rest of the EU and the world? 

"Some people rob you with a six-gun, and some with a fountain pen." (Woody Guthrie)

"A plague o' both your houses! They have made worm's meat of me." (The dying Mercutio in "Romeo and Juliet.")

Thank - er, Gordon Brown, I think - for keeping us out of the Euro, but in the EU.

 Just a few unoriginal and probably ignorant thoughts to clear my head.