The lights are on but is anyone home?
In light of UK Prime Minister David Cameron’s “Up yours, Delores” last week, how isolated is the UK in Europe? The Guardian newspaper would have us believe that this is literally the end of the world. The UK isn’t a member of the Euro, to which we can thank former PM Gordon Brown, possibly the only good thing he ever did. Why the UK should have any role in how a foreign currency is administrated is beyond this author. The UK is still in the EU, indeed nothing has changed since Cameron’s decision to go it alone. The only momentous part is that a European leader actually had the gall to say no to the extension of the EU gravy train. Could it be that rather than help rearrange the furniture as the Euro ship sinks, Cameron decided instead to leap in the first lifeboat. He’s already seen Greece effectively drowned by its so-called mates France and Germany. He probably thought, ‘I’m not even in this club, why hang around’.
All year The Economist has warned that Europe’s piss-poor attempts to prop up the Euro have been heading for disaster, crippled as they have been by France’s President Sarkozy and Germany’s PM Merkel who have domestic agendas to deal with, and an intransigent European Central Bank (ECB) refusing to be seen as lender of last resort as far as sovereign debt is concerned. The ECB only agreed this month to provide a safety net for European banks which, considering the current Euro crisis started in the summer, is a glacial approach. Even so, European inter-bank lending is drying up as it did following the collapse of Lehmans in 2008, a sixth of all deposits have been withdrawn from Greek banks and Greece is effectively bankrupt, though the bunker mentality in Brussels would have you think otherwise. These are hardly makers of confidence that there is any plan to lift the Euro from its woes. So much for the summit to end all summits.
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