Getting The PIIGS In

I have always said that the euro, and thus the Eurofederalist project, would be finished as soon as the Germans refused to pay for, say, the Portuguese, or the Italians, or the Irish, or the Greeks, or the Spaniards. But even I thought that it would be one of them. Not all of them. All at the same time.

Not that I like the term PIIGS. But let them adopt the arrangement that one of them had into the 1980s, of issuing their own currencies, but with the values of those currencies fixed permanently at whatever that of sterling happened to be at the given time. An option for plenty of other countries, too. Indeed, for as many as wanted to adopt it. Costing us nothing, as the former Irish arrangement cost us nothing. The euro has failed, vindicating those, such as Gordon Brown and not Ken Clarke, who insisted on staying out. Deal with it. Adopting the dollar means subservience. Deal with that, too.

Portugal is England's oldest ally. The Irish situation was as above; the resumption of this arrangement has nothing to do with any territorial claim on the Irish Republic's part, because there no longer is one. But Spain still has one, about which she could bang on to her heart's content in the run-up to elections, since this state of affairs would empty any such words of the slightest practical meaning. Likewise, the Greeks and the Elgin Marbles? Why not?

And after the return of the Sterling Area, beginning with countries none of which was ever in the British Empire (what is now the Irish Republic was in the United Kingdom, something quite different and the key to understanding the true history of the Irish in the British imperial period), how about the return of the Commonwealth Preference Area, again including, as the Commonwealth itself now does, countries whose accession constitutes, entirely voluntarily, their first ever tie to Britain?