Why Won't the EU's Leaders Accept the Euro Is Fatally Flawed - and Allow Greece to Go Bust?

MAIL ONLINE: Yesterday afternoon, Jack Straw became the first senior Labour politician to declare that Greece would leave the euro.

Even BBC correspondents, who often content themselves with parroting European Commission press releases, have grasped that something is wrong.

Little wonder, when Greece’s debt is now growing faster than its economy; making it a mathematical certainty that it will not pay its creditors. The international markets know it: long-term Greek government debt is trading at around two-thirds of its nominal value.

Indeed, the only people who still believe (or pretend to believe) that Greece can remain solvent are the eurozone finance ministers, who have just agreed another bailout.

In a statement of stunning complacency, they praised Athens for a ‘significant and necessary adjustment effort’ which would contribute to ‘avoiding a default’.

They took the same line a year ago, when they offered Greece €110 billion to get through what they insisted was simply a short-term cash crisis.

Now, despite those assurances, they are set to release another €80 billion.
Such bailouts are not useless, but actively harmful: the last thing an over-indebted country needs is more loans.

Why, then, are the eurozone governments doing it?

They know that the bailouts are unpopular with their own constituents.

Every week, German newspapers bulge with stories about wealthy Greeks avoiding tax.

Why, Germans ask, should we have to pay more tax so that Greeks can pay less? Why should we have to work until 67 so that they can retire at 63?

For many Greek professionals, paying your dues to the taxman has become a lifestyle option. Read on and comment » | Daniel Hannan, Conservative MEP for South East England | Tuesday, June 21, 2011

Daniel Hannan: Government-run Healthcare Would Be ’Deeply Un-American’

MEP Dan Hannan's 'Brezhnev Apparatchik' Attack on Gordon Brown Is a YouTube Hit
THE TELEGRAPH: An MEP's withering attack on Gordon Brown in which he likens him to a "Brezhnev era apparatchik" has become a surprise hit on the internet.

Daniel Hannan challenges Godon Brown
Daniel Hannan, the Conservative MEP for South East England, publicly lambasted the Prime Minister over his economic record after he addressed the European Parliament on the global financial crisis on Tuesday.

With Mr Brown looking on, he told fellow MEPs that Britain was entering the recession in a "dilapidated condition", with an "almost unbelievable" deficit.

In a blistering riposte to the Premier's calls for a concerted international effort to tackle the crisis, he accused the former Chancellor of trying to "spread the blame" and called him a "devalued Prime Minister".

The three-and-a-half minute speech, which drew cheers and laughter from fellow MEPs in Strasbourg, was not covered on mainstream broadcasts.

But it was posted on the video sharing website YouTube shortly after the sitting and attracted 90,000 viewers within 24 hours after being picked up by US news outlets and political blogs.

In the most critical passage, he told the Prime Minister: “When you repeat, in that wooden and perfunctory way, that our situation is better than others, that we are well placed to weather the storm, I have to tell you, you sound like a Brezhnev-era apparatchik giving the party line.

"You know and we know, and you know that we know, that it's nonsense."

Accusing Mr Brown of losing his moral authority by failing to live up to his own rhetoric, he said that 11 years of his stewardship had left the entire country in "negative equity".

Every British child is now born owing around £20,000,” he said.

“Servicing the interest on that debt is going to cost more than educating the child.”

He added that Mr Brown, who hopes to strike a "global new deal" at the summit of G20 leaders in London next month, was “pathologically incapable” of taking responsibility. >>> By John Bingham | Wednesday, March 25, 2009