The Euro. The European Central Bank. Are you asleep yet? These are, after all, the words that are an insomniac’s dream.
Well, not anymore. Like a bolt from the blue, a Greek politician has grabbed centre stage and has made us sit up and take notice of Europe’s crumbling finances.
But it’s not Alexis Tsipras [ok], Greece’s new Prime Minister who swept to victory this week making the most headlines, it’s his new finance minister Yanis Varoufakis.
Quoting Dylan Thomas, Mr V thundered: “Greek democracy chose to stop going gentle into the night and will instead rage, rage, rage against the dying of the light.”
Ooh, things just got a whole lot more interesting.
Mr Varoufakis calls himself “an accidental economist”, is a Greek Australian and had a bonza time studying at Essex University.
He and his boss Mr Tsipras, labelled a leftie and a firebrand, are in charge now, much to the horror of the German, French and British governments.
They are a few seats short of a majority, we’ve been told but this comes as no surprise to those of us who have long suspected that all politicians are a few players short of a full squad.
So, now, like a wild night out in a plate-smashing tavern, anything could happen.
The French, Germans and our own Chancellor George Osborne are warning them not to do anything crazy like send Greece crashing out of the Euro, or refusing to pay back the mega massive debts owed to Brussels.
Greece’s new bosses may or may not be reckless but they’re certainly not afraid to speak their minds when it comes to the debt.
According to Yanis, the austerity package which came as part of the £260bn Euro bail-out five years ago was doomed from the start.
He compared the huge austerity drive forced on Greek people as “like waterboarding” and said “...every eight or nine-year-old child would know...” it wasn’t going to work.
And that “black hole of debt”, as he calls it, has got bigger rather than smaller since 2010.
All the cash that’s been pouring into Greece has been “going down the drain”.
It’s all going on the humongous interest charges, rather than paying off any of the actual debt.
This is hardly news to the rest of us. We know the Brussels bureaucrats can’t add up.
So, instead of fixing the Greek economy, they’ve made it worse because it’s shrunk by a fifth and debts have gone up, not down.
That’s like living off celery soup for six months and finding you’ve put on 10 pounds.
Or stuffing bank notes under your mattress for a year, then discovering there’s nothing there except bed springs.
This is great timing, as the Greek election came in the same week us Brits passed a major milestone, or is that millstone, of our own.
It’s now less than 100 days to the General Election on May7.
Wouldn’t it be amazing if our politicians and economists started quoting Dylan Thomas (although, maybe not drinking as much as the Welshman did) and, shock, horror, telling it like it is.
They could take a leaf out of Yanis Varoufakis’s poetry book and say what they think, rather than coming out with all the usual, carefully rehearsed party lines.
No, five years of cut-backs hasn’t fixed the economy. No, we don’t owe less on our national debt and whichever party gets in next will have to make more cuts than a high street butcher.
Our politicians do a lot of talking but when I hear them, none of it rings true. In fact, I’d go as far as to say it’s all Greek to me.
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