Wall Street Journal
November 1, 2010
"A far away country … [with] people of whom we know nothing." So said Neville Chamberlain of Czechoslovakia in 1938. If David Cameron and his Tory colleagues were not so familiar with Corfu, they might say the same of Greece. They would be as wrong about the consequences for Britain as was Chamberlain. Recall: Mr. Cameron negotiated peace in his time with the anti-EU faction of his party by promising to call a referendum before allowing any additional transfers of sovereignty from Westminster to Brussels. The Prime Minister quite reasonably assumed that the Lisbon Treaty would not be revised during the life of this Parliament.
Along came the Greek debt crisis and German Chancellor Angela Merkel. The tawdry tale of Greek profligacy needs no repeating. Nor does the decision of its euroland colleagues to bail it out, with Germany bearing the major share of the financial burden. Germans worked hard to become competitive in world markets, and have been rewarded with an unemployment rate three percentage points below the EU average of 10%. No surprise that German voters resent seeing the fruits of their labors eaten by retirement-loving, work-shy Greeks who partied while they sweated and saved.
Everything is in place for a bit of artful recasting of the prime minister's referendum pledge. Austerity does not seem to be reducing Greece's deficit at the pace promised when its government pried bailout money from the IMF and Brussels. Tax revenues are falling short of expectations, either because the crackdown on evasion is falling short of its goals, or because the International Monetary Fund's warning that austerity will stifle growth and tax receipts is proving prescient.
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