25/05/2012
"One Bond to rule them all; One Bond to find them; One Bond to bring them all; and in the darkness bind them". When the septics start
taking the mick, you just know the end must be nigh.
But even more sinister â if you are in that frame of mind â is the case of Mr Clegg and the
missing eurobond. There he was, off to Berlin to breathe hell fire and fury about Merkel's refusal to do the deed yet, when he got there, not a word about eurobonds did escape his lips.
The obedient little europhile had been "warned off" by the avenging Angela herself, leaving a nonplussed Clegg with nothing else to do but express his admiration for the effciency (sic) of the German economy, chirping that the lessons to be derived were essential for the "re-wiring" of Britain â whatever that means.
Meanwhile, Clive Crook â the appropriately named former chief Washington commentator of the
Financial Times - has been writing for Bloomberg,
telling us that the seeds of the EU's crisis were sown sixty years ago.
This is a man who hasn't the first idea what he's talking about, demonstrating yet again that, when it comes to politics, financial journalists are so often out of their depth. Largely, Crook is relying on the same hagiography
followed by Peston, which also goes to show that, when it comes to the analysis of historical events, the majority can easily be wrong.
Crook, like Peston, takes as the turning point the Maastricht Treaty, completely oblivious that
to the roles of Spinelli and then Delors and the fact that Maastricht was part two of a two-part treaty, following on from the Single European Act.
Does it really matter, you might ask? The answer is of course in the affirmative. The sequence and the narrative behind them coming into being proves without doubt that the single currency (and economic and monetary union) was a political project, engineered entirely to promote the cause of political union.
We set this out in
The Great Decpetion, recording that there were two British MEPs involved in the process, Stanley Johnson (Boris's dad) and Richard Balfe.
The basic narrative came from an account in French, by
Jean Marie Playret director of the department of historical archives of the European Union. It doesn't get much better than that. I translated the document â all 35 pages of it â and on the back of several interviews with Richard Balfe, wrote up the story which appears in the book.
I sent Richard the draft as a check, and the man who had been intimately involved in events as Spinelli's political advisor affirmed that the account was essentially correct. When Booker and I published, we thought that our revelations might provoke some interest, but it was not to be. The book was scarcely reviewed, and the real background to the single currency has been largely ignored.
But the remedy, such as there is one, lies in the understanding that it is a political project. There is no economic solution â politics got us into this mess, and only politics will get us out, and even then it is going to be very messy. But only when the politicians recognise that the euro is part of a failed experiment, and decide to unravel it, will the torture begin to end.
Meanwhile, the play acting
goes on with Citigroup economist Michael Saunders assuming that the Greeks will exit the euro on 1 January 2013.
It is unlikely that this date has been plucked at random, but it is not what it seems. Saunders is actually saying that the exit will not occur
before the end of this year, which is undoubtedly a blind, to clear the decks for an earlier exit without the markets pre-empting it.
Greece's exit will not, of course, solve any problems for the euro. The "colleagues" are not yet ready to admit that their experiment has failed, and
are still playing games, pretending there is a fix. But the time must come, or they will drag the whole of the global economy down with them.
Perhaps if a few more people knew their history, there might be more pressure for a swift political resolution, and less pretence that there is an economic solution to this crisis. In time, we will find out, but the longer it takes, the more damage it will do, and the more it is going to cost us.
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