THE Greek bailout seems to have done little to calm fears of a crisis in the euro-zone - quite the contrary. Spain's prime minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero, for one, has got jolly cross about suggestions that his own basket-case economy could be looking for financial aid. This is someone way out of his depth and better suited to his usual pursuits of showing how modern he is by picking fights with Spanish religious leaders and generally waging student-ish culture wars than handling a major real-life economic emergency. Yet easy 'though it is to look down on these assorted ex-dictatorships and the lavish social provisions they clearly felt they deserved and could afford once in the European club (don't you love Greece's '13th and 14th month' salaries?) you wonder how different is our own economic situation. No, not the ballooning debt, about which plenty has been written, but the sense of entitlement - to parental leave, 'work-life balance', free money for new-born children, beer money for sixth formers (sorry, 'educational maintenance allowances') and all the rest. It bears repeating that we are competing with people in India, China and elsewhere who are better educated and harder working than we are, and who enjoy few if any of these amenities. Not that you would notice, from the hazy, lackadaisical way we seem to be drifting towards an inconclusive Election tomorrow. JUST a couple of footnotes to my column in today's edition of The Mail on Sunday, in which I suggested that there are big vested interests in our current, unbalanced economic set-up, in that one major party has parked lots of its supporters in our bloated financial services and property businesses and another has parked lots of its supporters in a puffed-up public sector. This, I suggested, was reminiscent of the behaviour of a post-colonial African state that carves up the economy on tribal/political lines. Following on from that, I am not sure the developing-country parallel is not just as good as the analogy often drawn between modern Britain and some sort of clapped-out pre-1989 east-European people's republic. The random acts of criminal violence and the corruption in high places certainly seem more 'Third World', as we used to call it, than Communist bloc, as does the enormous influence wielded by big global corporations. I referred in the column to Rejoice! Rejoice!: Britain in the 1980s, by Alwyn W. Turner, just published by Aurum. Not the least of this excellent book's achievements is to persuade me to take seriously the notion of 'the Eighties'. Usually on this issue I am like a top-hatted statesman of old pouring over maps at peace conferences, a convinced partitionist. Everything up to December 1984 I would parcel off into a big unit of recent history stretching back to 1969, and everything else I would bundle up with the Nineties and beyond. 'The Eighties' would go the way of Austria-Hungary. Mr Turner has made me think again. Finally, how's this for a description of Britain's current woes? They are 'the result of the fatal alliance between politicians who gave the people everything they wanted in return for votes, and the people who voted for the politicians who promised them the impossible, as if no-one ever expected the bill to arrive. 'This fake prosperity created a cloud of indifference to reality and the delusion that we could tolerate politicians' incompetence, business leaders' greed and a useless public sector.' As some of you may have guessed, this is actually from a review of the Greek economic disaster, from Nikos Konstandaras, managing editor of the daily newspaper Kathimerini. Thank you for reading this and have a good (if rainy) bank holiday. The Gods that Failed: How the financial elite have gambled away our future, by Larry Elliott and Dan Atkinson, is published by Vintage (£7.99)
05 May 2010 10:20 AM
Greece: the end of an illusion or two
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02 May 2010 11:32 AM
Economic imbalance: it works for some
Thursday, 6 May 2010
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