SYRIZA'S victory in Greece's national marks the start of the end-game for the euro ("Left celebrate Greek poll win", The Herald, Janaury 26y).
Last week's one trillion euros of quantitative easing has caused turmoil in the currency and bond markets, and came far too late. If Alexis Tsipras gets his way on Greek debt relief, Italy (with a real GDP still 10% per cent below pre-crisis levels), Spain (with unemployment at 23 per cent) and Portugal will want the same. If he does not, and Germany, the Netherlands and Finland hold the line, then Greece will be forced out, and will be followed by the others, and possibly even France.
What should Britain do? We should take advantage of the situation and speed up our preparations to leave the EU altogether. Membership costs us billions in budget payments which, as we know from last autumn's farcical events, will only rise as our economic growth triggers further additional contributions. The bureaucratic red tape and politically-correct directives on business, the environment, energy, health and safety and from the European Court of Human Rights cost us Brits further billions, simply because our relatively uncorrupt and law-abiding political and business culture is not fully replicated in most of the other member states: they just ignore what does not suit them.
Our first step should be unilaterally to revoke the Common Agricultural Policy, and, if we must subsidise farmers, replace it with our former deficiency-payments approach built upon world free trade in agricultural products. Thereby, as one of the world's biggest food importers, we would by-pass the support for continental farmers that is explicit in the policy's Common External Tariff. Food here would become considerably cheaper to the benefit of the unemployed and low-paid: their real incomes would rise. Moreover, we should then no longer be complicit in the immoral dumping of surpluses and in the trade impediments that undermine the third world.
Last week at the World Economic Forum in Davos our captains of industry (those chaps whose instinct is to seek trade restrictions and subsidies from which they would profit) were as usual warning against leaving the EU. It is true that we should then be outside the single market. But that market has to operate World Trade Organisation rules, and they limit the tariff on manufactured goods to an average of three per cent of value. That is trivial because it amounts to less than the recent rise in sterling against the euro. Moreover, there is still no single market in services, which account for 75 per cent of UK GDP (as compared with 14 per cent for manufacturing).
Politically, what is quite staggering about all this is that it is the UK parties of the left - Labour, the SNP, the Greens and the Liberal Democrat- who line up with capital and big business to do down the poor and the unemployed in Southern Euroland and in the developing world. Furthermore, they conspire to squeeze money out of the working class here in order to pay the excessive membership fee of EU. The SNP are the worst of all. They would impoverish us and wreck Britain just to stay in the EU. Have these lefties lost the plot? Well, I think so.
Richard Mowbray,
14 Ancaster Drive, Glasgow.
Why are you making commenting on The Herald only available to subscribers?
It should have been a safe space for informed debate, somewhere for readers to discuss issues around the biggest stories of the day, but all too often the below the line comments on most websites have become bogged down by off-topic discussions and abuse.
heraldscotland.com is tackling this problem by allowing only subscribers to comment.
We are doing this to improve the experience for our loyal readers and we believe it will reduce the ability of trolls and troublemakers, who occasionally find their way onto our site, to abuse our journalists and readers. We also hope it will help the comments section fulfil its promise as a part of Scotland's conversation with itself.
We are lucky at The Herald. We are read by an informed, educated readership who can add their knowledge and insights to our stories.
That is invaluable.
We are making the subscriber-only change to support our valued readers, who tell us they don't want the site cluttered up with irrelevant comments, untruths and abuse.
In the past, the journalist’s job was to collect and distribute information to the audience. Technology means that readers can shape a discussion. We look forward to hearing from you on heraldscotland.com
Comments & Moderation
Readers’ comments: You are personally liable for the content of any comments you upload to this website, so please act responsibly. We do not pre-moderate or monitor readers’ comments appearing on our websites, but we do post-moderate in response to complaints we receive or otherwise when a potential problem comes to our attention. You can make a complaint by using the ‘report this post’ link . We may then apply our discretion under the user terms to amend or delete comments.
Post moderation is undertaken full-time 9am-6pm on weekdays, and on a part-time basis outwith those hours.
Read the rules hereComments are closed on this article