I see the G8 has a brilliant solution to the problems of the eurozone. President Obama says it’s time for “growth and jobs”. Jolly good. That’s the stuff. Let me show you how to create employment – the Brussels way.
Come with me through the streets of Athens, not far from Syntagma Square, and your mind will reel with the horrified realisation that history is not a one-way ratchet, that human progress is not guaranteed, and that a proud country can be reduced – by years of torture and bullying – to a state verging on total political, economic and moral collapse.
You will see businesses boarded up and windows smashed because no one has the money or the energy to fix them, and on almost every wall a riot of graffiti full of poisonous hatred for politicians. You will see people sitting on cardboard, heads down, hands out, or pushing trolleys full of scrap metal.
Not far from the town hall, I saw a man using the pavement as an operating theatre to eviscerate a mattress for its springs. In the eyes of every politician there is a glassy humiliation, a sense that the fate of the nation is no longer in their hands. Even worse than the humiliation is the dread that things will deteriorate further still. Thousands are now being fed by soup kitchens.
Unemployment is rising by the day, and among young people it now stands at a shameful 54 per cent. Yup, folks – those are the results of an EU plan to produce “growth and jobs”. It was called the euro, and it has been a catastrophe for Greece and pretty bad (with one notable exception) for the rest of the continent.
As far as I can understand the “strategy” of the EU, it is now to prepare for Greece to
