Samizdata

As regulars will know, one of my pet dislikes is “Rod” Liddle, a man who likes to think of himself as a sturdy Leftie but who, in fact, increasingly sounds like the sort of BNP supporter that you might encounter in a bar and who insists on telling you about how so many of our problems are the fault of “the blacks”, etc. Liddle has strayed, arguably, over the line before, but like a man emboldened by his own seeming ability to keep pushing his agenda without severe damage to his bank balance, he has finally gone over the top with all the mad brio of Prince Rupert of the Rhine charging at Cromwell’s infantry in the English Civil War.

In a particularly stupid article for the Spectator (behind a subscriber firewall), on page 17 of the print edition, Mr Liddle reflects on the problems of Greece, and its horrendous debt. He rightly regards Greece’s decision to join the euro as a disaster, as Greece has proven itself incapable of handling the sort of interest rate more suitable to Munich or Lyon. However, in his clumsy way, he reflects on the differences he sees between southern Europe and the more “puritan” North. His title for the article (possibly written by a sub-editor), is: “How did I get it right on the euro? Easy. I was racist”.

“Insofar as I understood the economic permutations of what it would mean to be in or out of the single currency, I was vaguely opposed to joining. But my real reason for objecting to our membership of the euro was, and still is, I’m afraid, straightforwardly racist. I didn’t want to have the same currency (or government, effectively), as people in the south of Europe, who, I thought were, in the main, lazy, hot-tempered and uncivilized.”

(Emphasis, mine).

Here’s another gem:

“But it cannot be mere coincidence that the countries in trouble are those in the south, and that the further south you go the worse these problems become, until you reached the dislodged chunks of marble and the flaming fast-food shops of central Athens, where one protester said to the camera crews: “We don’t owe any money, it’s the others who stole it!”

What is so cretinous about Liddle is his use of the word “racist” instead of what would be more accurate – “culture”. It is, arguably, the culture of some countries – by no means all – that helps explain such things. But the idea that there is some sort of general rule that says the further south you travel, the worse the population behaves, is bunk. My wife’s small country, Malta, which is even further to the south than Greece, has a conservatively-run banking system, strong public finances and a relatively strong respect for property rights and the rule of law. It is also a member of the euro-zone. Maybe all those years of Malta being under the British Empire might have helped, as our “leftie” Mr Liddle might argue, but Malta exhibited many fine qualities long before the Brits, in the form of Lord Nelson, showed up. It is bizarre to claim that the further towards the Equator you get, the sillier, more corrupt and naughty people become. As Liddle must surely recall, in chilly Scotland, once famous or infamous for its puritanical version of Christianity, for example, a large chunk of the populace now lives on benefits, and many of the traditional characteristics once associated with the land of Adam Smith, James Watt and David Hume seem to be notable for their absence. This is a cultural, economic and political development which cannot be explained by reference to some glib reference to geography, much less the race, of the people in question. Even more unfortunately for Liddle’s notion is the example of Iceland, and its catastrophe of failed banks. Those blue-eyed folk with their blonde hair seriously screwed up.

Good ideas can be discredited by bigots purporting to advance them, if we allow these people to speak without rebutting their biases and showing them for the fools and knaves that they are. And Rod Liddle, however amusing he can sometimes be, or correct about something like the euro in one sense, is a bigot, and the kind of friend Eurosceptics can do without (I sometimes wonder whether he is working for the other side). Well, now he is on the record – he’s a racist, and seems to be proud of it.

London mayor and newspaper pundit Boris Johnson has a good article in his usual Daily Telegraph redoubt and it is getting a lot of attention, as it should:

“The Greek debt crisis is deepening, in other words; and there are only two options. We could continue down the road we are on, in which the euro shambles becomes an invisible and surreptitious engine for the creation of an economic government of Europe. Indeed, there is a sense in which the slow-motion disaster of the PIGS – Portugal, Ireland, Greece, Spain – has been terrific for the federalist cause. Bit by bit we seem to be creating a fiscal as well as a monetary union, in which huge sums – including about £20 billion of UK bail-out cash – are being transferred from the richer to the poorer parts of the EU. The idea is that Germany, France and others should “socialise” the debts of the periphery – take them on, in other words – so as to keep the eurozone together and to stop the domino effect, with all the attendant damage it is feared that would do to the European banking system.”

“These profligate and improvident countries would be obliged, in return, to submit to a kind of economic supervision that is now proposed for Greece. Taxes, spending, benefits – all the panoply of economic independence – would then be subject to agreement with Berlin and Brussels. I sometimes think Kohl, Mitterrand, Delors and co instinctively knew that this would happen.”

Oh, they knew. They wanted this to happen – maybe not in the wrenching, embarrassing way that has manifested itself in the case of Greece, Ireland the rest, but they surely wanted economics to be melded to the service of politics.

“They probably calculated that if only they could achieve monetary union, the euro would create such strains that the de facto creation of a United States of Europe would be impossible to resist. The trouble is that there is just no democratic mandate for anything of the kind.”

Democracy, schemocracy, as Mel Brooks might have put it.