Austerity really works, doesn't it? From the Telegraph:
Repeated doses of austerity under international bailouts have almost tripled Greece's jobless rate since its debt crisis began in 2009, weighing on an economy in its sixth year of recession.
Overall unemployment has risen to an all-time high of 27 per cent, data showed on Thursday, while joblessness in the 15-to-24 age group jumped to 64.2 per cent in February from 59.3 per cent in January.
The simple reality is that no nation can possibly repay its debt when most of those able to create the wealth to repay what is due are forced out of work.
That can only lead to spiralling debt, social unrest, political chaos and extremism.
That is what austerity is delivering in Greece.
And that's what many economists are still demanding. As well as George Osborne.
Be very, very worried. Especially when none of this is necessary. Putting those people to work is what would solve Greece's debt problem. And all that requires is a printing press to make money.
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Yes – having more cash printed would bring the treasury billions in the money they make selling it to the banks – a lot of this treasury income has been lost as electronic bank money has replaced it.
Worrying though how much unemployment a population will tolerate – already 27% in Spain yet it hobbles on. Without political representation people don’t know where to turn and the main danger is, as you’ve commented, a lurch to the right as those parties are most vocal.
Richard, I visited Greece many times when I was younger, starting in 1964, and actually read Modern Greek at Oxford, spending a semester at Thessalonika University in 1967 (leaving only a week before the Colonels’ Coup), and doing research at Athens University for two years in 1969-70 and again in 1972.
In those years, memories of the Occupation, and the savage Civil War that followed it, were still very fresh, as people remembered Nazi brutality, and the war-time famine, when people starved in the streets, only to be followed by the savagery of internecine killing.
These were a people who knew about real pain, and real suffering, and who could not believe their good fortune when they emerged from all of this, first with the restoration of democracy in 1974, then with their accession to the EU in 1981, and finally into the apparent sunny uplands of economic prosperity and international recognition in the years that followed, until the 2007-8 crash.
And now they have been plunged back into a new Occupation – this time, not by Nazis, but by Neo-Liberals, who have the same Nietzschean ideology of contempt for the “weak”, the ordinary people, with their ordinary – actually, with 64.2% youth unemployment EXTRAordinary – pains, and have the gall to say this is “good” for them, that it will strengthen them. Or worse, that the pain of some is balanced out by the fortune of others, so that on balance everything’s fine, when those in pain are actually dying (think ATOS and IDS here in the UK!)
The Greeks, who had centuries of foreign domination before winning their freedom in 1821, used to have an image of their country as “Psorakostaina” – impossible to translate, but meaning something like “the poor old widow of Kostas”, depicted as a ravaged old woman, dressed in black, struggling to survive under successive blows of fate.
Many Greeks – certainly many older Greeks (as many older Spaniards or Portuguese, who also experienced dictatorship and in Spain also Civil War) must have wondered if “Psorakostaina” was biding her time, waiting for her moment to return.
And she has, so fulfilling Lear’s words “As flies to little boys are we to the gods: they kill us for their sport.” I believe we must stand by Greece, because “An injury to one is an injury to all”, and we are next, as long as Gideon, and Cameron, and IDS, and Hunt, and May, and Lansley, and Pickles, and Maude, and all the other monsters are in charge.
I wonder how many remember that Quakers began Oxfam to relieve famine in Greece?
Wow, Richard! No, I didn’t know that. Thank you.
I’m not sure this is relevant but I went an AGM of the ATL -a teachers’ union. I am a retried member. What I heard was frightening. I heard of s school not far away where salaries are individually based-on performance-and the staff have it written into their contract they will not disclose their salary to colleagues!
2)Ofsted are raising the bar so that when a school ‘fails’ or is just satisfactory, it is pressured into becoming an academy. The idea being that the privatised model works best.
3) there is an increasing downward pressure on staff and longer school days or terms.
4) A school in Devon, in the regional news today, is being criticsed by the NUT as their principal received a salary of £200,000 p.a.
Yet Mr. Gove compares us with Finland where they don’t have an OFSTED, performance related pay and holidays and the length of the day are the same or shorter. They believe in a collegiate approach. Finland is high on the list of places to do business in yet it is a eurozone member with a social democratic tradition. It shows that one doesn’t need to live in a Fox News country to attain high standards.
The economic philosophy and political values which are grinding the future of youngsters in Greece and Spain is also, in my view, undermining the education system of this country.
There is an understandable fear about speaking out but I feel sure the majority of parents and teachers reject this ideology.
Yet again there is an example of how apt the title of your book The courageous State actually is.
Incredible, isn’t it?
And it’s happening here
There’s no point beating around the bush: 64.2% youth unemployment isn’t ‘a prescription for political turmoil’, it’s a real source of danger – crime with a death-toll comparable to low-intensity warfare and the gang wars of Medellin, punctuated by rioting that passes beyond ‘civil disturbances’ and into the realms of ministers reporting that ‘order has been restored’ while denying stories about mass graves and automatic gunfire.
They might even be perfectly rational in seeing fascism as a lifeline; rational, but desperate and dangerously deceived.