Well, the signs are not very promising. A bill from the Ministry of Finances supposed to contain extra taxation of luxury items (like middle sized cars) and strong punishment for tax evaders and a motley muddle of all sorts of other things, is being pulled back and forth. It has been submitted to Parliament where it MUST be voted, as has become tiresome by now, under urgency rules (meaning hardly any debate) to meet the prerequisites for the next tranche. Same old same old.

And in the same old same old way it is obvious that no one in government from the Minister to Ministry personnel, has done much thinking about what they want to pass. Clauses are being pulled out at the last minute to be changed or omitted. Other clauses are rushed in. In short a shambles of shoddy work. Not to mention some kind of tax on yachts entering Greek waters.

This to catch the nasty Greek tax dodgers! Hah! Gotcha! Hmmm… I don’t suppose it will do the high class marine tourism we are so desperate for though. Will it? Like the other problem. Liquidity. For banks to be able to loan again, the recapitalisation is not enough. Deposits in banks will have to grow. Moneys sent abroad must be enticed back, since in the deep and continuing recession we are in, newly generated income being deposited is very unlikely.

Government solution? Raise tax on interest earned and threaten to confiscate moneys from bank accounts if you owe the tax authorities over 500 Euro. Given that people who simply cannot pay the exorbitant taxation being so carelessly (not to so inhumanly) imposed, is it likely that anyone with small savings will leave their money in the bank?

And there are so many things like that. Slip shod work. On the cuff. Laws not thought out at all. Laws that will create further problems rather than solve anything.

It looks as though the whole government is in a blind panic. This conclusion is further corroborated by the government’s reaction to the terrorist attacks on journalists and government targets. (Thankfully bloodless so far.) Shrill shrieks with the sole intention of trying to blame the opposition SYRIZA party for all of these. Directly. Giving rise to suspicions that they may even be the ones behind all this merely to divert attention from their horrible, dangerous mishandling of government and to discredit a party they fear might win the next elections.

In any case, whatever is behind all this, what is obvious is that the government has lost its cool and is caught up in a raging panic.

None of this augers at all well for the future of this country.

In his meeting with Alexis Tsipras, Wolfgang Schauble is reported to have said that nothing can change in the Greek policy and that if Greece does not fulfill all the demands of the Memorandum, Greece cannot stay in the Eurozone. Well, he would say that wouldn’t he? Especially to that young upstart Tsipras.

Nevertheless, perhaps Mr Samaras should stop to listen and stop the vacuous boast that a Grexit is no longer on the cards. He should also perhaps stop to think that all this amateur shilly shallying and about turns are not, after all, conducive to solving the Greek problems but, instead are exacerbating them.

Perhaps he should also stop to wonder why it was big bad Schauble accepted Tsipras’ request to meet with him. If his government (Samaras’) is in no immediate danger of falling apart, perhaps Schauble would not have bothered with such a meeting. Why should he, when he has Stournaras almost literally licking his boots?

Then again perhaps Samaras has stopped to think about it. Not how to fix the economy. No. He leaves all that to anything the troika might get into their heads. But he may be thinking about the threat to his maintaining power from Syriza, a threat enhanced perhaps by Schauble’s willingness to meet with him, a threat he is trying to deal with by demonizing SYRIZA as a terrorist organisation.

But his government’s protests are so shrill and so obvious, that it may well be he feels power slipping out of his hands like water through a sieve, and can see no other way of clinging on to it.

Drawing up a serious, workable plan to start pulling Greece out of the crisis has proved far too much for him. He imagined sucking up to Merkel would have been quite enough. Well, it isn’t.