Quote of the day 12th February 2015

“The Greeks have made it impossible, unless they come up with some brilliant solution, to stay in the Euro.”

(Ken Clarke, interviewed at Conservative Home here.)

I have been posting quotes on intelligence this week: today the above is one of many great quotes from an article which displays it.

Ken Clarke would certainly have been leader of the Conservative party and very possibly Prime Minister were it not for the tragedy that his views on Europe were so different from those of most Conservatives. (Just imagine how different the 2005 election would have been if the Conservatives had fought it with a  leader who had opposed the Iraq war at the time, for instance.)

But whether you agree with Ken or not - and I certainly don't agree with him on everything - I don't think there will be many intelligent and open minded people who can read the article from which I took the above quote without at least one or two of his comments provoking a reaction along the lines of "He's got a point there."

Comments

Jim said…
But is the main crux here, they have made it impossible because they don't want to stay in the Euro? So they dont need a brilliant solution
Chris Whiteside said…
I honestly don't know whether either Syriza or their voters were thinking it through that far, and I have a horrible fear that the answer is that they were not.

But I do know that when someone as pro-Euro as Ken Clarke, but who unlike many people of that view has a mind capable of being influenced by evidence, thinks and says publicly that it is time to start planning for "Grexit" then the case for preparing a positive future for Greece outside the Euro and the Eurozone without Greece is strong.

There are two opposite and equally ludicrous British fantasies about the Euro. The one which most of the political class believed fifteen years ago was that joining the Euro would be good for Britain and it was inevitable that we would join within at most a decade.

Only a handful even of the dwindling band of Federalists still think that now - Ken Clarke does not expect it in his lifetime.

Much more persistent among the far from dwindling group of hardline Eurosceptics is the view, in my view equally silly, that the Euro has been a disaster for all participants and will collapse soon.

People who have convinced themselves of this are living on another planet.

The Euro has been a disaster for countries like Greece, Spain and Italy which were insane to join it and should never have been allowed to. For Germany, and for countries which have economies closely aligned to Germany and are willing to accept the loss of independent economic policy which it entails, the Euro has been reasonably successful - the recession was caused by poor worldwide regulation of banks and exacerbated in the Euroland by overly severe monetary policies which the relevant countries would probably still have followed if they had retained their own currencies, and not by the Euro per se.

If the Euro was likely to collapse, it would almost certainly have done so five years ago. A monetary system which has survived the past sixteen years can survive almost anything.

The fact that I think the Euro is here for the long term does not mean Britain should have joined it or that Greece should stay in it.
Chris Whiteside said…
I will expand on the above comment in a post next week.
Jim said…
Yeah, I don't doubt that its here to stay, just i never did think many places went into it for the right reasons, well actually none of them went into it for the right reasons, but then it does work for some, and will continue to do so. I also don't think the loss of independent monetary policy is such a bad thing in the stronger cases.

I also agree that Greece, Italy & Spain should never have been allowed in and would also extend that to Ireland and Portugal.

Also I totally agree the UK is better off out of it. I can also see a two tier - Eurozone inner core and none Eurozone outer core type EU in the future.

perosnally though i would much prefere an outer outer Norway style answer for the UK in the short term future, whilst not a permanent answer, it would allow single market access and trade deals to be kept for now, whilst we re join the top tables of the WTO.
Chris Whiteside said…
I agree with most of what you say there: unfortunately quite a few countries went in because they thought it made political sense rather than because it made economic sense.

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