The Basket Case

Misunderstanding is widespread on what is faced by the eurozone member-states financially and economically. Unlike the United States all the countries of the European Union have developed welfare services, particularly in education and in health, accessible to all. They have no need to budget for the embodiment of voters aspiration in these areas, as well as cope with the financial and economic recession. They are already factored in. Nor have they immensely high levels of private debt. Europeans save. Except for England.

England has very expensive welfare services, certainly, but they are profit centres for providers and regime control conduits throughout the economy and the geographical country. The return of children of economic migrants to their country of origin for schooling, for example, is marked. French, Germans, Greeks, Italians, Poles and no doubt everyone else, do not leave their children at the mercy of state schooling in England. Though they will often return to use the better universities, which are still resisting the mauling of New Labour.

As well as having high levels of personal savings and low levels of debt, continental Europeans have homogeneous societies that are balanced enough to provide for feeding, housing, clothing, transporting, connecting and entertaining a healthy, educated nation. Of course they are not debt-free, particularly of public debt, or untainted by the financial 'obscenities' (to use 'Lord' Mandelson's term), perpetrated over the last dozen years and centred on London. But on the whole, European banks have had much better regulated practice, and much more conservative attitudes.

Some countries will have lower living standards than others resulting from 60 years under socialism. And the cost of the rehabilitation of their societies will spread to the rest of Europe, just as it did from the rehabilitation of eastern Germany. But this will be taken on, and taken care of, on a case by case basis, as the German Chancellor and the Polish Finance Minister have said. And if Germany and Poland do not know about the ups and downs of recovery from 60 years of socialist failure then who does? Not the socialist Scottish creep who has seized power in our country - or his ill taught advisers. If they knew how silly they sound they would be quiet.

The United States will manage. Ostensibly, autarky is not something it is keen to practice, but it certainly can if it wishes to, or needs to. For the last dozen years financial shenanigans that are punishable in the United States have been undertaken in London. Now we face the off-loading onto London and the entire UK economy of the debt surfacing in America and across the world. It is noteworthy that the only other economies in our hemisphere in truly serious trouble are Ukraine and Georgia, both United States-under-Cheney-produced thorns in the flesh for Russia, who will, in the end, have to sort them out (in more ways than one).

Yes, Lithuania, and Hungary are in difficulty, but their support costs in the tens of billions and will be, if not readily, undertaken in the interests of European Union solidarity and self-preservation. Ireland was an overspill sump for the financial casinos of unregulated activity in the UK; as ever, Ireland is a special case but enjoys the strength of membership of the EU (and both leverage, after the Lisbon treaty vote, and some popularity there) and of the euro. It won't be allowed to fail any more than eastern Europe, even when taken case by case, will be abandoned.

Who will save England? An American unregulated financial playground, with a residual reserve currency and a destroyed manufacturing base; of little further strategic value; with a deeply damaged society, represented by a hectoring, lecturing, delusional, unelected bully. A regime drawn from a once national party whose geographic base has collapsed and whose political base, and moral raison d'etre is in meltdown. An unelected regime that refuses to face the electorate. An unhelpful, non-communitaire, popularly unwilling member of the EU. A wrecker, protagonist and prosecutor of illegal wars, a torture state.

Only a general election now can set us on any kind of footing to start negotiating and organising our way out of this New Labour disaster.