Tagged with Eurozone Debt Crisis

How Britain could assist in the fight against ISIL without air strikes

ISILThe performance of Jeremy Corbyn on the Andrew Marr show was extraordinarily impressive, puncturing in a number of places the complacent rationalisations that David Cameron has presented for British involvement in the Syrian civil war. Let us remind ourselves that this is an issue that the Conservative Party is also divided over, with MPs such as Julian Lewis and John Baron likely to oppose the government.

There is a strong case that British military involvement would be wrong and counterproductive in the fight against so-called Islamic State of Iraq and Levant (ISIL), and would not only increase the terrorist risk to the British people, but also endanger British interests internationally. Continue reading →

Austerity is a hard untruth for Europe to swallow

MerkelTsiprasThe most galling aspect of the Conservative Party’s ongoing political success is that its all-important austerity narrative is objectively, straightforwardly untrue. Every Conservative politician of note must be fully aware of this, and there are no words to describe the cynicism that it requires to keep trotting out the flagrant lie, year in, year out. The imposition of harsher austerity in the government’s first two years was almost certainly related to the choking-off of growth in that time; in the course of 2012 and 2013, the Treasury quietly sidestepped into the milder fiscal approach advocated by Labour in 2010.

Public sector and welfare cuts have had devastating humanitarian impacts, but the government still sends vast amounts of money sloshing through the economy through Quantitative Easing and other approved channels. David Cameron and George Osborne have carved out a political existence based on a policy which neither man either believes in or has ever fully implemented. Continue reading →

The two scenarios now facing Greece

Alexis Tsipras, GreeceThe victory of ‘no’ opens two scenarios. The most likely is the further effort by the Syriza-led government to reach a new agreement with the Troika, but it is not clear why it should be given something that had not been given before. The financial upheaval of recent days may be such as to induce the Troika to grant Syriza an agreement to save the face of all. But the substance would be the continuation of austerity.

Instead, a decisive choice to leave the euro and the EU would put Greece in a situation that would be unique in Europe, a country that decides to regain their economic and democratic independence. This requires enormous political courage and determination. The country would enter into a kind of war economy, or more precisely in an economy of controls, those that the influential Italian economist Federico Caffè saw as necessary to ensure full employment. Continue reading →

What are the Labour leadership candidates saying on Greece?

Labour Leadership Candidates and now they are 4_edited-1Yesterday’s vote in Greece was a momentous occasion. Almost two thirds of a people, many with politics far removed from that of its leadership, said no to demands for more austerity from the well-heeled bureaucrats of the IMF and European Central Bank, and the ministers of the European Commission. It won’t be until tomorrow that we’ll know what the troika are going to do in response. Reasoned heads would suggest a debt write down and allowing Greece space to grow its economy to meet its obligations. This, after all, is the oh-so radical demand Syriza are pushing – it’s hardly all power to the Soviets combined with the socialisation of private property. Yet as past behaviour indicates, the troika are anything but reasoned. Continue reading →

The Real Greek Crisis

VaroufakisMost people will feel that they don’t need to look far for an explanation as to what lies behind the Greek crisis. Lazy reporting and racial stereotyping will persuade them that the Greeks – a feckless lot, no doubt – have spent more than they should, got into debt, taken out loans from the hard-working Germans and now won’t repay the loans because they refuse to tighten their belts.

But there is another narrative that tells a somewhat different story. That story is one of a powerful economy enforcing its will on its weaker neighbours and refusing to acknowledge that it has thereby made it impossible for them to dig themselves out of a hole. Continue reading →