Juliet Samuel:
The lesson of the Greek tragedy is that if you’re going to surrender you might as well do it fast
Syncharitíria! It means “congratulations” in Greek. Not that anyone will be saying it with much enthusiasm. In August, Greece will emerge, at least partially, from 10 years of bailouts and austerity after agreeing a deal to restructure its debt (again) with its Eurozone creditors. Unemployment is at 21 per cent and Greece is now committed to government surpluses for the next 40 years. But hey, crack open the ouzo!
Greece’s experience is a salutary lesson in how not to handle the EU – a lesson that Britain has ignored. When Athens was at the peak of its bargaining power in 2009, and could have brought down the Eurozone, its panicked leaders grovelled. Six years later, when EU leaders had had enough of Athens, and German and French banks had cut their Greek exposure, a new, populist government played and lost a very expensive game of bluff with Brussels.
Britain is following in these footsteps. We have been throwing away all our best cards (autonomy over triggering Article 50, the cash, access to our market), alternating supine with belligerent rhetoric, issuing hollow threats, fighting among ourselves and failing to prepare seriously for any outcome but surrender. The EU doesn’t even have to play against us, because our government is so inept it has generated its own opponents, from Airbus’s panicking executives to the arrogant Remainers of the Lords.
It’s too late to mitigate the effects of leaving without a deal. The Government needed to have laid out an independent trade policy, procured the systems required to run it, set up new regulatory agencies and educated businesses about how to navigate it all. Instead, it has set itself up for a wholesale surrender. If it is going to do that, Greece’s example shows that you should do it fast. The longer you bluff, when your opponent knows you’ve already laid down your best cards, the more expensive it gets.
Before landing at JFK, New York, American Airlines plays a short video about passport control. This used to be a stern, bureaucratic list of dos and don’ts. Not anymore. As I flew in on the way to another wedding (I’m in that period of life, when there are at least four a year), I watched a plump, white immigration officer give a tutorial on the airport’s wonderful new immigration system.
He smiled determinedly throughout. Putting your fingerprints on file with the US government is all so easy and great, he said. It’s all electronic, he said. Enjoy your chat with a “friendly” border official, he advised. He didn’t advise what to do if there were only unfriendly officials available.
It was grim to watch in the same week as the US suddenly saw a rather different image of its own borders: a news photograph of a two-year-old girl sobbing in terror as her mother, a Honduran migrant caught by border patrol, was searched. After the search, mother and daughter were taken together to a processing centre.
Under Donald Trump’s “zero tolerance” border policy, unlucky children could be separated from their parents and kept for several weeks in facilities that look an awful lot like prisons, in metal cages, before being sent to foster homes while their devastated parents are prosecuted. But that image of the crying toddler unsettled the system. The public didn’t like it. Washington didn’t like it. And Mr Trump himself was uneasy.
As he signed an order to halt the family separations (by locking up the kids with the parents), he mused aloud: “The dilemma is that if you’re weak, if you’re weak, which some people would like you to be, if you’re really, really pathetically weak, the country is going to be overrun with millions of people… And if you’re strong, then you don’t have any heart. That’s a tough dilemma.”
There aren’t many humane ways to deter immigration, but societies don’t like to witness their own cruelty. Mr Trump, it seems, might have found the line the US isn’t prepared to cross.
In New York, grime and underdevelopment are crammed in alongside excess and ambition. “The oculus”, the new transport hub of the World Trade Center, is a study in both. I entered it on the Path train, a transit link from New Jersey that rattles slowly and unimpressively to a stop by a grubby platform bathed in the fetid heat of a New York summer. But take the escalator up one floor, and you emerge into the brand new concourse of the $4 billion (yes, billion) oculus.
It’s all white, Italian marble. The floor polished to a soft matte sheen, the ceiling ridged with curved, marble spines, the air is cool and still, the ambience serene. From there, you emerge, blinking, into the central shopping space, an enormous vaulted cathedral of white struts stretching high into the sky above you like the ribcage of an enormous whale. You step from a commuter’s drudgery into a place that could be a palace occupied by an alien, billionaire cult leader from a Hollywood science-fiction flick.
The whole thing is totally impractical, cost double its budget and was years late. But damn, it’s impressive.