I admit that I am no great fan of Chris Giles at the FT, but I had no idea that he was quite as unpleasant as he shows himself to be in an article on Greece in this morning's FT that is headed:
The Greek people are enduring the consequences of their prime minister's childish misbehaviour
Greece has achieved much since receiving the bailout loans, reducing budget deficit from 15 per cent of national income in 2009 to 3 per cent in 2014. It has implemented many necessary economic reforms; and the programme began to work, with Greek output growth topping the eurozone league table in the third quarter 2014. This progress was made despite Greece persistently failing to implement fully the reforms to which it had agreed.
And then he says:
Deploying the kind of tactics that would shame student politicians, the Syriza government has thrown all this hard-won progress aside in an attempt to extract more money from other European countries.
Staggeringly Giles ignores that Tsipras was elected by popular mandate.
And equally staggeringly there is no mention in the article of the cost of the reforms. There is no hint that GDP has fallen by 25% or that more than 50% of the young are unemployed, or that healthcare has disappeared for many or that poverty has reached levels the EU should never tolerate. No, according to Giles all that matters is that the banks were in sight of being repaid and Tsipras took that away from them. Why he might have done so is not even mentioned.
It takes a special form of indifference to human suffering to be able to view the world through such a lens. It's one I hope I never understand.
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Giles has just made it plain that he is not a journalist.
He is just a propaganda mouth piece for the criminal banking fraternity.
Giles is incapable of ever producing a written piece that resembles journalism.
Here’s a message for you, Giles:-
Get off your hind end and do some proper research before your write anything else!
Why is such an abject, intellectually dead character writing for the FT -for the sake of some spurious notion of balance? One has to have at least one neo-liberal ‘goon’ on the staff?
I quite agree Richard. The nastiness of the A-level economics neo-liberal brigade is quite something to behold. Yet I fear that the media and the interim situation will bring a ‘yes’ vote, and the chance for freedom for Greece and perhaps a different Europe to the bankers’ vision will be lost.
I realise the Greeks are in a mess, but have they made any efforts to improve their tax collection rates? Michael Lewis wrote a great article in his book Boomerang on Greece which noted that it had (in 2010) the highest proportion of self-employed people in the EU and they almost all paid no tax. Three-quarters of doctors, for example, claimed to earn less than EUR 15,000 and were thus below the tax threshold. There were no prosecutions for tax evasion, ever. Tax officials who whistleblew on corruption were fired. Public sector wages were three times the level of private sector wages.
Has it changed so much in the last 5 years that this is no longer the case? It is clearly wrong that people should be punished for the idiocies of their government, but in the end, Greek society as a whole decided that for around 10 years at least (2000-2010) they would stop paying taxes and instead fund extraordinarily inefficient public services through borrowing (and tolerate an extraordinary amount of corruption to boot).
Pensions were payable at 50 to people in “onerous” jobs, which included teachers and hairdressers, for example.
I really don’t know what the answer is to the current position, but using “democracy” as an excuse doesn’t wash: a country has every right to democratically decide not to pay its creditors. They do not, however, have any right to determine what the creditor does in response: that is the creditor’s democratic right.
How long has Syriza been in the job?
Have you data on what they have done?
Why blame them then?
Shall we have an educated debate, not name calling?
It is just an indifference to human suffering that is depressing, it is the petty mindedness and gleeful superiority too.
“Staggeringly Giles ignores that Tsipras was elected by popular mandate.”
Just because Tspiras has been elected by popular mandate does not exempt criticism of him and his colleagues when they do indeed behave like student union politicians. Seriously, if a UK government behaved in the way that the Greek government has in the past 6 months we would be embarrassed. The present Greek government must be one of the most incompetent that Europe has ever seen in recent times.
Of course criticism of Tsipras is fair
I never said anything else
I said Giles ignored the evidence to pursue wholly unacceptable claims
I am right
You just resorted to ad hominems in his support
“We” would be embarrassed by the UK government’s behaviour over the past 6 months if we’d voted for them. As it is, the emotion is somewhat more icy.
It’s a financial newspaper for crying out loud, not the London edition of the Christian Orthodox Herald or whatever it is called. The FT is not meant to do cutting edge sympathy; there are other places for that.
It should be doing cutting edge financial journalism such as for example showing there is no connection between agricultural subsidies and food security or how it is that the EU country that had the highest per hectare farm subsidies until last month is now likely going to need emergency measures to feed people at the bottom of society by year end. Or the FT could choose any of the subjects that Roger Flem mentioned. That’s the journalistic failure of people like Giles.
He is being unpleasant, and speaking to a given audience. Is Greece an experimental platform to test reforms, structural changes that will inevitably follow this contagion to other nations. Its was not so long ago that Greece’s debt GDP was at a similar level as US and UK (percentage wise) current debt levels. All we lack (so far) is the use of violence.
It alarms me that this has come down to personalities. Tsipras & colleagues certainly aren’t blameless in this but Juncker, Merkel & Schauber seem far more culpable. I was impressed by the post you put out a couple of days ago, Richard, pointing out that saving a failing institution is actually everyday work, it literally happens every day with companies. The directors etc, the workforce have to face some fairly unpleasant cuts & the creditors just have to face a pretty substantial, sometimes near total write-off.
It isn’t happening in this case because, partly, the creditors seem to have got it into their heads that they’ll get back 100c in the € -er, no guys that’s not happening. Also because of the sort of behavioural silliness that you’d like to think a decent Receiver would iron out. There is now more bad blood than you’d get if a Black Pudding Manufacturer’s refrigeration unit packed up.
The result, sadly, is we’re left with only 2 outcomes each more unpalatable than, er,the output of a Black Pudding Manufacturer whose refrigeration unit packed up. It really didn’t have to be like this.
I couldn’t find this anywhere in the print version.