FraserWords

‘Corporate Europe will now turn on Greece with even greater ferocity, for the unelected establishment cannot afford democracy to insist upon the return of power to people. Greece’s suffering is not over.’

That’s what I wrote last week, and that’s exactly what has happened.

All along I’ve said the same: business-dominated corporate Europe will not permit the success of a democratically elected socialist government. Business has spent too much money buying democracy across the continent to allow the people to have it back. So it has proved.

In the end it was a very simple process for German leaders and their allies, the unelected and unaccountable banking and business interests that run the continent for their mutual benefit.

Right-wing politicians and businessmen reacted with predictable shock and anger to the sheer effrontery of the Greek people’s democratic decision – and ignored it completely. Other European nations showed the union has now abandoned its founding ideal, of strength through solidarity in the face of difficulty, by displaying remarkable cowardice and obediently swinging into line behind the money and opposite the democracy.

Today, this stopped being about the European Union. This subjugation of Greece, this brutal dismissal of a people’s needs and wishes, is not about an organisation created to maintain peace. It certainly isn’t about democracy or people’s rights. As for solidarity? Strength through unity? Don’t be stupid.  This is about business interests subverting political values with the help of compliant politicians.

What sort of terrible world can this be – a world in which Nigel Farage is right? Because it is as he warned: national sovereignty has been overcome at financial gunpoint and handed to unelected bureaucrats. And Europe let it happen. When economic might lined up against the poor, the needy, the weak, Europe stood obediently aside and let might put the boot in.

Unless dramatic democratic change is forced by the widespread disgust at the way Germany has forced its right-wing ideology on the very weakest of the weak, rather than extend the sort of helping hand that Germany itself once received, left and right are now going to unite against the European Union.

I never envisaged a day when I would vote ‘no’ in an in-out European referendum, but today that day came. Today, if you asked me to stand up alongside Farage and campaign for a ‘no’ vote, I’d do it.

Because today, a Europe dominated by banks and business interests looked at a country with a 26% unemployment rate, a country in which one in four people labour beneath the poverty line, a country which has experienced terrible suffering for five years now, and said none of those sadnesses was as important to their Europe as money. Nothing matters to Angela Merkel’s Europe as much as money.

That’s not a Europe I want to vote for.

Nothing changes the courage of the Greeks and their Syriza leaders in the referendum, and nothing diminishes the bravery of their fight. They’ve tried to stand against the market forces that got everybody into this terrible predicament, and they have drawn the full wrath of the rich, the greedy, the powerful, the unelected. I profoundly hope the rest of Europe now joins the brave Greeks in a continent-wide movement of revulsion at this appalling brutality, this frightening subversion of democracy, this ugly coup.

 Talking of cowardice…

I imagine the British Labour Party will be announcing shortly that it fully supports the attack on Greece, just as Harriet Harman supported the Conservatives’ petty assault on child tax credits. Welfare cuts in budget: £12 billion; amount the taxpayer lost by decision to sell RBS bank back to the Tories’ city chums in the private sector? £13 billion. Yet still this pathetic excuse for an opposition didn’t have the spine to oppose. I told you this, too, months ago: the Labour party is worth nothing, is unnecessary, is pointless, if it slavishly follows the Tories. Fortunately, Harman’s cowardice provoked a backlash from Labour members, so many of whom see the need for an opposition that good old Jeremy Corbyn is now running second in the leadership race. Let him win, and I might one day be interested in Labour again.