THE SUNDAY TELEGRAPH – Editorial: For the sake of the nation, a deal should be struck, and quickly.
The ideal outcome from last week’s election, as we argued forcefully in these pages, would have been a government – preferably a Conservative government – with the mandate and majority needed to tackle the urgent problems that this country faces. We stressed that the haggling and uncertainty that accompany a hung parliament would make it all but impossible to restore the public finances to order, get a grip on immigration, reform the education system, and much else besides. Yet the absence of a strong government is about to cost us extremely dear in another way, too.
As we report today, Nicolas Sarkozy, the French president, has persuaded other members of the eurozone that they can interpret a clause in the Lisbon Treaty so as to force every country belonging to the EU to contribute unspecified, and potentially unlimited, sums to bailing out insolvent members of the eurozone. It means that to keep the single currency going, in the event of future Greek-style collapses, Britain will have to write a blank cheque.
This cynical, underhand and anti-democratic move has been prompted by the stresses that the colossal budget deficits of the weaker members of the euro – Greece, Portugal, Ireland, Spain, Italy – have placed on the currency itself. Last week, France and Germany agreed that Greece should receive an emergency loan of 110 billion euros. The injection of cash is at most a stay of execution, not a solution to the problem, whose root cause is that Greece, being in the euro, cannot devalue its currency and so cannot make its exports competitive, and thereby earn the money it needs to repay its debts. The obvious solution is for Greece to leave the euro. But that would be a humiliation for Europe’s politicians and bureaucrats, for it would show that the fundamental objection to it – that it could not be viable across countries that are at such different levels of economic development – is correct. So, instead, they have decided that in future all the other members of the EU, including Britain, will foot the bill. >>> Telegraph View | Sunday, May 09, 2010
