A lot of sense being talked in Davos this year. (For a change?).
Again the euro crisis at the center. Again The Frau’s myopic, narrow minded, totally unimaginative way of dealing with the crisis comes under fire. No doubt again she will see nothing, hear nothing and insist on frog marching the eurozone straight down the road to extinction through austerity.
But perhaps the direst of warnings has come from George Soros who said that the European Union “is undemocratic to the point where the electorate is disaffected, and ungovernable to the point that it cannot deal with the crisis it has created.”
As the relevant article in The Guardian tells us, Philip Jennings of UNI (the international trade union federation) is particularly concerned about something that is attacking not only the Greek economy but the whole fibre of Greek society with a vengeance, the savage stripping of hard won workers rights. In this respect he says, and I quote “Technocrat governments are playing with political gunpowder. The eurozone is going too far.”
This is something our own technocrat prime minister should stop to think hard about before he goes about legislating against the last vestiges that remain of industrial bargaining rules.
What is the point of a European Union at all, if all it can come up with as a “solution” to the problems it has created is to abolish all the values Europe not only stood for but fought hard to establish and paid for in blood sweat and tears.
The French Revolution and the rights of man. And, we must not forget Clement Attlee and Nye Bevan’s heroic achievement in setting up a truly admirable welfare state after the ravages of war and at a time of extreme financial hardship for their country after such a catastrophic war.
Technocrats should go back to their desks and do what they can do best. Drawing up plans and working out figures. They should not be entrusted with making policy. Just as the old saying was you could not trust the Generals when it came to making war. Well of course not! They should not be the ones to decide when to go to war! God forbid. And this goes equally for technocrats in deciding economic policy. God forbid, once more. Their job, which they seem to have forgotten, is to execute the political decisions taken by those whose duty it is to do so.
Of course the only problem here, not only in Greece, but everywhere else too it seems, is, to misquote a Bob Dylan song *: “Where have all the politicians gone? Long time passing. Long time ago. Where have all the politicians gone? Gone to graveyards every one. When will they ever learn? When will they ever learn?”
* (I give the Marlena Dietrich version out of a misplaced sense of malicious fun. Perhaps a German woman will listen to another German woman).