Thatcher's Official Biographer Endorses Syriza

Charles Moore writes:

If you could, would you vote for Syriza in tomorrow’s election in Greece?

The extreme-Left, rich-bashing, bank-hating party is ahead in the polls. It promises an end to austerity and demands debt forgiveness.

It intends to defy the “Troika” – the means by which the European Union and the IMF impose their will on all those eurozone countries who, in their eyes, have been naughty.

Writing this in true-blue rural Sussex, an owner-occupier with a decent job and some savings, I ought to be one of the last people on our Continent to want Syriza to win.

It is an untried, unstable grouping of various types of Communists, fun-revolutionaries and Greens. It is pro-euro, but won’t pay the price of euro-membership.

Its Thessaloniki manifesto is as ambitious and seemingly unworldly as St Paul’s epistles to the citizens of that city 2,000 years ago.

But St Paul did famously say, in the second of those letters to the Thessalonians, “if any would not work, neither should he eat”.

Greece today is a country where euro-austerity has made it impossible for a huge proportion of its population (roughly half its young people) to work. It follows that many of them cannot eat.

Thousands of Greeks, often from the educated middle class, queue each day at soup kitchens. There is reportedly a smog over Athens caused by the burning of wood: people can no longer pay their heating bills, so they forage, or burn the furniture.

Even from where I sit, some symptoms of these troubles have been visible since the credit crunch of 2008.

Only in the past few months have real wages here in Britain begun to rise, after years of stagnation. Housing for poorer people is desperately short. There are food banks in Hastings nearby.

But this country has some huge advantages. We have an independent central bank which was able to introduce quantitative easing (QE) when slump loomed rather than, like the European Central Bank on Thursday, years later.

We also have our own economic policy, because we have our own currency [thank you, Gordon Brown].

Greece has, almost literally, nothing, because it has little policy freedom, a currency whose value it cannot affect and a deflation that makes its debt-to-GDP ratio arithmetically unbearable.

It is being told what to do by exterior powers whose first interest is not the welfare of Greece, but that of the system they have invented to run more than half the Continent.

Part of the point of a small, weak country such as Greece being in the euro was supposed to be to protect it from international financial storms. The opposite has happened.

The system incited it to borrow and spend madly, but then, when it did so, decided to punish it till the crack of doom.

If Greece alone were at stake, the mighty in Berlin, Frankfurt and Brussels could quite happily let it leave the eurozone at once and reach a rate for its new drachma that would eventually make it competitive once again.

But they won’t, because of what they fear might follow in Spain, Italy, Portugal, even France. Nor, however, will they wholeheartedly undertake its rescue within the system.

Truly, the country is being broken.

In these circumstances, it is hard to disagree with Syriza’s leader, Alexis Tsipras, when he says: “We must end austerity so as not to let fear kill democracy.”

I was amused to read a learned, anxious article in the Financial Times this week, which speculated about whether Mr Tsipras will ultimately let “reason or unreason” prevail. The author did not say which is which, as if FT readers all knew.

But where is the “reason” in the centrist, moderate Greek parties which, for several years, have conspired with the Troika to impoverish their country? Might there not be some reason in electing a party prepared to make “impossible” demands?

Then the European elites might be frightened enough to give it what it asked for. (David Cameron, please note.) If they don’t, would things be much worse than before?

Greece’s situation is more like a colonial than a democratic one.

The old colonial powers hated extreme liberation movements, and clung on by buying off the princelings and merchants of the countries they ruled.

But the lesson those movements learnt was that it was by unreason and the threat of revolt that they ultimately prevailed. Colonialism thus gave rise to extremism.

The eurozone is run colonially – with Greece as a troublesome outlying territory and Germany as the dominant and most exacting power.

Syriza is the logical, desperate response to this. If I were a Greek, I might well think: “Why not vote for it and see what happens? I have little to lose.”

Before the credit crunch, there was talk of something called “The Great Moderation”, which was supposedly bringing eternal prosperity to the free world.

Our leaders have had to shut up about that, but there remains, even in Britain, a curious desire to shore up what went wrong.

This is surely The Great Unreason – more unreasonable, even, than the student Marxism of Mr Tsipras.

You can see this in the reaction to the European Central Bank’s QE on Thursday. Most people spoke well of it because it might help the eurozone out of deflation.

It probably does put off the evil day, and it was certainly a diplomatic coup by Mario Draghi to have outmanoeuvred the strict German doctrines that until now have prevailed.

But what people are not talking about is his ultimate purpose. It is to do, as Mr Draghi promised two and a half years ago, “whatever it takes to preserve the euro”.

What will it take, exactly? Why should we want it?

In Britain, the prevailing mood is to sigh with relief that we are not in the thing, and encourage those who are to sort it out. We assume that this can be done.

But surely the lesson of the past few years is that it can’t, for the essentially simple reason stated in the Eighties, when Jacques Delors first claimed that Economic and Monetary Union was the best thing since unsliced baguette.

One size cannot fit all. The attempt to make it do so is financially punitive, socially cruel and politically unmanageable.

As the state of Greece shows, we have now tested the Delors theory almost to destruction.

So I wonder if we are right to envisage – long-term – a Europe of two sorts coexisting: one with the euro, one without.

It is certainly a more attractive prospect than an entire Continent bound into one currency like Sauron’s “one ring to rule them all” in Tolkien.

But if the euro does not and cannot work, even for many of its existing members, isn’t that already very damaging for all of us, and will it not become more so the longer its collapse is postponed?

If – when – the euro fails, there might really be a chance to build a European Community based on cooperation rather than coercion, and nations rather than union.

The saddest thing in all this is the plight of Greece. But the strangest thing is the state of Germany.

As Margaret Thatcher predicted and Helmut Kohl and François Mitterrand pooh-poohed, the single currency has made Germany by far the most powerful country in Europe. It has made it more competitive by giving it a relatively cheap currency.

But the euro also threatens to debauch Germany’s unimpeachable post-war achievement, financial soundness.

Mr Draghi’s attempts to create a genuine monetary union make the zone’s most important nation terrified that it will lose what it sees as its money to the beggars.

The suffering south is trying to take the money of the oppressive north. This is a recipe for strife.

So each step towards completion of the euro-dream makes its ultimate break-up both more likely and more explosive.