GREECE IS STILL BEING BETRAYED BY THE EU
Yesterday’s BBC news bulletins carried the wonderfully uplifting story of how after eight years of political upheaval, riots on the streets and extraordinary economic privation, the dark clouds over Greece are finally lifting.
after several years in which the country was kept afloat by the munificence of the eurozone countries, they trumpeted, athens is at last free from an EU bailout programme of €61.9 billion (£55billion) in emergency loans. that was part on an eight-year rescue package worth £258billion.
all that was missing was a chorus from the feel-good summer movie Mamma Mia! Here We Go again, set on an idyllic Greek holiday isle. Well, I am sorry to spoil the party, but on my recent visit to athens for a seminar, everything I witnessed showed nothing could be further from the truth than this so-called fairy-tale recovery.
Far from saving Greece from pecuniary disaster, the harsh economic medicine forced on the country by the EU and Germany in particular as a condition of the bailout has resulted in death by a thousand cuts.
the country’s once elegant capital has become one of the most depressing and untidiest cities in Western europe, a city in terrible decay. shops on once booming boulevards are shuttered, while cranes stand idle over the shells of unfinished buildings and much of athens is covered in ugly graffiti. even the awnings around Greece’s most revered ancient site the Parthenon, home of the athenian acropolis, is covered in unsightly painted scribbles and drawings.
the hardships and deprivations I encountered during my recent visit were everywhere – and all the more heart-breaking in that they had been caused by european leaders who were masquerading as people bearing gifts.
take Maria, a cheerful, close friend of my family who spent years studying fine art and the science of paper conservation including a period at the prestigious smithsonian museums in Washington. today, she struggles to make ends meet.
TO help pay her way she spends almost every waking hour using scrap paper to hand-make table decorations for Greek weddings. the burden of work means that she is only able to visit her ageing parents, some four hours travel time from athens, two or three times a year.
a hospital doctor among our acquaintances has seen his monthly pay cut to €1,200 (£1,071). It is only his social conscience and love of his country that has kept him in athens.
some 70,000 highly skilled professionals including doctors, dentists and pharmacists have left the country as part of a broader Grexodus of 500,000 people.
the best way for any country to emerge from financial crisis is to increase its national income so that tax revenues rise and global debts can be paid off. But during the last eight years, Greece has moved in precisely the opposite direction. National output has slumped by an astonishing 25 per cent. the result is adult unemployment of 20 per cent. even more shocking and socially disruptive, some 40 per cent of 18 to 25-year olds are out of work.
Without any income for the young, it is now commonplace for three generations of the same family to be forced to live cheek by jowl in the same crowded apartment. the fact is that the austerity imposed by the eurocrats has ruined Greece and done nothing to relieve it of its monstrous level of debt.
It has snuffed out entrepreneurship, as well as created a poisonous political legacy where a far-Left Marxist party headed by Prime Minister alexis tsipras rules with the support of fanatical politicians on the populist right.
the end of the EU’s bailout programme may technically mean that Greece can return to the international markets to borrow again, but any notion that the world’s commercial bankers and financiers will be queuing at athens’ overcrowded and dilapidated airport to lend – and pour good money after bad – is a fantasy.
after all, the country is still sitting on a debt pile of €289billion (£258billion) which the International Monetary Fund puts at 191 per cent, or almost twice the nation’s total annual output.
to place that in context, it is more than two times the ratio of Britain’s national debt to output, which after a decade of UK cuts to public services and surging tax incomes as the economy has grown is now, thankfully, on a downward path.
Not only that, Greece’s stricken financial system is currently being kept afloat by short-term cash assistance of some € 40billion (£35.6billion) per month from the Frankfurt-based european Central Bank. Without this help, which is akin to that provided by the Bank of england to the British banks at the height of the financial crisis a decade ago, the four biggest Greek lenders would be effectively bankrupt.
together the bad loans on the books of these banks – Piraeus, alpha, euro Bank and National Bank of Greece – amount to €101billion (£90billion) or 50 per cent of the total, the highest level of any country in the european Union. Indeed the banks, the lifeblood of any Western economy, are so indebted they cannot lend any more.
WHICH means the small and medium-sized enterprises that are the country’s business bedrock cannot get the finance they need to carry on and invest. Nor do ordinary consumers find it possible to obtain credit.
this desolate financial scenario is a direct result of the austerity conditions demanded by Brussels eurocrats and German central bankers. over the last eight years successive Greek governments have been forced to attend no fewer than 95 meetings at which the most stringent measures have been imposed on them.
the results for the Greek people have been nothing short of catastrophic.
yet in their determination to preserve the greater political project of the eurozone and the EU, and to keep Greece as their client state, Brussels and German politicians have been utterly ruthless.
In spite of personal appeals from the International Monetary Fund’s euro-supporting managing director Christine Lagarde to forgive Greece its debt burden and allow the country to be given a fresh start, the eurofanatics have been unrelenting in their determination to keep the debt anvil hanging around its neck.
Greece is in an armlock it cannot escape because of a combination of its debt burden and the fact that its membership of the eurozone means it can no longer devalue its currency. and the EU and Germans are determined to keep it that way to save their precious euro.
so despite the joyous news bulletins about the bailout yesterday morning, be in no doubt that this Greek tragedy is very far from over.