Winston Churchill said that democracy was the worst system of government known to man, except for all the others. Watching events across the Channel these past few months, one could be forgiven for concluding that the leaders of the European Union – and especially of the 17-nation eurozone – had adopted that view as their own, but only after striking off the final clause. Europe’s democratic deficit, which has always been a glaring disfigurement of the much-vaunted European ideal almost from its beginning, has been growing in scale in parallel with the increase in the financial deficit.
Indeed, the pace of “de-democratisation” has quickened during the past few weeks. We have seen elected governments in Greece and Italy effectively dismissed by Brussels, Berlin and the bourse, and replaced by administrations of so-called “technocrats” – a term which embraces everything from top-ranking bankers to military men and professors of this and that. In Italy, it is not just the prime minister who falls into this category – not a single member of his new cabinet has been elected to anything, least of all the Italian parliament. To be sure, this disgraceful process has attracted criticism in this country, if not from Brussels or Berlin. But it is noticeable that most of the British objections have come mainly from the Euro-phobic right. There has been a remarkable silence from the standard-bearers of the European ideal. This is deplorable; is it really the case that concern for democratic principle is restricted to UKIP and the right-wing of the Tory Party? If so, we really are doomed.
But if events in Rome and Athens have attracted a certain amount of disapproving attention in the newspapers here, the same cannot be said of something even more outrageous that happened last week in our own backyard. It emerged that the Irish government had been required to submit its draft budget to the German Bundestag for its approval before the actual budget was placed before the Irish Dail – which is not due until December 6. But the Irish people would never have known of this scandalous attack on their sovereignty – a sovereignty which it took them 500 years to wrest from us, the British – if one of the budget’s contents had not leaked back to Dublin from Berlin.
The explanation offered to justify this humiliation is that it was necessary to meet a German legal requirement to conduct a quarterly review of the 65 billion euro bailout programme for the bankrupt Irish economy. It was claimed that the budget committee of the Bundestag had by law to review and approve such documents before it could release the necessary funds. Very democratic for Germany, perhaps, but pretty undemocratic for the Irish.
Meanwhile, the luckless Spaniards are now doomed to several more years of even deeper austerity, condemning many millions of them to a return to the kind of poverty not seen since the days of Franco’s fascist dictatorship. Well, you may say, they voted for their new, right-wing government and that’s democracy – which is true, as far as it goes. But as a Spanish journalist remarked of the recent election: “The people were told by their politicians that they were going to be the victims of a robbery. Then they were asked to say what kind of robbery they would prefer.”
It all makes one wonder how long the ordinary people of Europe will put up with being made to pay the crushing price for the decisions of the fantasists who constructed the single European currency. Angela Merkel has talked about the danger of war if it all goes catastrophically wrong. Somehow, I don’t think that’s very likely. But revolution? Hmm.
I have been puzzled by the way in which the row over the relaxation of border controls at our ports and airports has been reported and debated. The whole brouhaha has centred on who told what to whom, and when. Did Brodie Clark tell Teresa May what he was doing? Did May tell Clark what he ought to be doing? Which set of rules was in operation when? Since very few of these issues can be determined at this late stage, it has boiled down to a simple question of whether you believe May or Clark, which seems to have got the Home Secretary off the hook.
But in fact, the issue is much simpler than that, and cannot be in dispute. The Government’s programme of spending cuts has meant that some 900 jobs in the Border Agency have been scrapped. In other words, there are 900 fewer people manning the passport desks at Heathrow, Dover and other ports of entry. So of course there are vastly longer queues, leading to the inevitable angry scenes and the pressure on people like Brodie Clark to wave lots of weary and indignant passengers through the unmanned checkpoints or face a mini-riot. It is all of a piece with the mass sackings of Inland Revenue staff at a time when the government is desperate to increase the tax take, and the coupling of cuts in health service staff with threats to sack NHS managers if they allow the service to patients to suffer. Never mind the wrongness of the overall policy, that’s just the Tories. It’s the raw incompetence that astonishes.
