We are witnessing a new ideological battle, opening across many fronts. On one hand, we have the Euro-ideologists, sleepwalking to their own doom by believing that regulation, protectionism, stifling of the markets and assurance of the French and Polish (but mainly the French) agricultural sector and the German manufacturing sector, will get them out of trouble. This is not going to help anyone in the end. The French-style grand projet to establish the euro, as a glorious symbol of European Unity and (my most hated word) Solidarity will undoubtedly be seen by history as the most ludicrous, expensive, embarrassing and pointless waste of valuable time, resources and wealth any politician anywhere could ever have thought would work, remembering there were (and still are) no safeguards in place, the very ones every City economist worth his/her salt could have told you, even back in 1989, when this idea was originally raised by the French President, who used it as a bargaining tool for German reunification: you reunify, but you must give up your Mark in favour of a unified European currency. This was the first enormous, screamingly stupid step towards our demise as a world power.
On the other hand, we have the plutarchs and economists, capitalists and investment bankers: those shameless abusers of the lobbyist fringes of the political greasing machine. For every shamelessly corrupt politician, there are five shamelessly corrupt economists. And the two groups overlap heavily. The plutarchs are the politicians and the politicians are the plutarchs, but their smoke-and-mirror tactics mean you never see it this way. It is evident that there is a great deal of neoliberal unease about bringing some justice into the world. It would mean their enormous salaries would have to be cut, prompting them to threaten to leave for the Far East. Let them go, I say. If they care more for their salaries than their country and the people in it, then they are the first group of people we need to encourage to leave. Let them make some other part of the world a less safe place to live in.
But what bothers me the most, is still that gut feeling that we could be doing more: politicians meet at summits, conferences and visits all the time. The greatest problem with the EU is that there is no room for a visionary. 27 countries, soon 28, need to sit round a table and debate the immediate future. No one politician really wants to seem like he/she is occupying too much of the sunlight, and so they all stick to their mundane, inglorious, uninspired agenda interrupted by the odd coffee break, to beat out new directives for all the 27 countries to implement. They have forgotten three very important things:
- The EU dream is sucking the life out of democracy by putting power in the hands of the European Council of Ministers, which basically means it matters not one iota who is in national parliaments, who was elected as national and local representatives, because all the main decisions will be taken at this intergovernmental level, so whoever is elected, will soon find out that there is a "process" that needs to be adhered to, and there is little room for fresh ideas, and even less room to have fresh policies at national level.
- While they are navel-gazing in Brussels and Strasbourg, the rest of the world is getting on with the serious business of trade, industry and business. India, China, Singapore, Brazil, Australia and the like are the places to be. This is where we find the action. Whilst the Europeans are slowly receding from the world stage, others are making headway. Europe needs a guide.
- And finally, one size does most definitely not fit all. Buy a T-shirt in a shop, size M. It will fit mediums, but it will be too big on smalls and maybe the most corpulent won't even get it over their arms. The euro is a far bigger burden than necessary.
The European Union will not die if we now say "OK, we're obviously not ready for a unified currency quite yet, so let's go back to the old system for a while." Many will applaud this decision. Once this is done, we can get on with doing the things Europe is good at: the sharing, pooling and improvement of cooperation in intelligence, policing, education, manufacturing, food production, military, tourism, agriculture and food, justice and many other areas of life where we can build a common purpose. While all this is going on, we need to listen to the people. It is the people who vote for the politicians, and the people who will deselect them when the time is right. If one politician oversteps his/her jurisdiction, it is only right that they are evicted. Europe needs some old-style visionaries of the likes of William Beverage or Willi Brandt; realists and ideologists at the same time. People who can see a good idea and run with it, not afraid to stand up to lobbyists and big business.
And we do have people like this around us, but those greasy politicians will not let them get anywhere near them. They obviously have a lot to hide...
People like Deborah Meaden, entrepreneur and straight-talker, an upstanding citizen with business sense and an eye for justice. And this is the cunning naïvety of politicians (yes, an oxymoron) - on BBC Question Time last week, The government minister on the show was impressed by what he heard, as was the audience, and tried to curry favour by saying that he had often tried to recruit her. This was an utter lie. She said the minister had never even picked up the telephone. What do politicians have against people with ideas?
Finally, I leave you with this thought: David Cameron, the darling of the banking world, did what I would have done last Friday in telling Merkozy where to get off, but he did it for thr wrong reasons. He did it not "in the national interest", but in the banking interest. People think the UK's action shows a country not going at the speed of the others, at a much slower rate. In fact, I beg to differ. The UK is in fact going faster than all the others, but the rest of Europe has just not caught up with the idea yet, that soon they'll all be wanting to go their separate ways. In the coming year, there are elections in Greece, France, Finland, Slovakia, Slovenia and Lithuania. These elections will mark the beginning of the end for the European dream (if there ever really was one). I, for one, believe that the UK was wrong to ditch the Anglosphere in favour of its geographically close neighbours. British people have more in common with Australians, Indians, Canadians, South Africans and West Indians than they ever did with Belgians or Italians. They would be considered as not really foreign by a large percentage of the population. It is time for the UK to seek them out and ask them to forgive them for the naïve assumption that any continental European had the answers to the UK's need to find a place in the world.
