When Will They Stop The Pretence And Ditch The Toxic Single Currency?

One of the main aims of creating the EU was to secure prosperity. Instead, it is impoverishing a whole continent and exterminating talent

By Simon Heffer

We keep being told the eurozone crisis is over, but it manifestly isn’t. The refusal to admit that the euro can’t survive in its present form is poisoning the whole European economy.

The Portuguese government is tottering. Greece faces its emergency funding from the European Central Bank being stopped.

The French government is at war with the European Commission over the imposition of tough austerity policies.

Spain and Italy desperately need a devaluation if their goods can become competitive in world markets again — something only leaving the euro can achieve.

In the meantime, the eurozone’s rigid economic policies are having a devastating effect on the young — with youth unemployment heading for 30 per cent across the single currency area, and in Greece it is just under 60 per cent. 

German ministers are so jittery about this latest crisis that they have invited young people from across the continent to work in Germany — even though their own economy is in recession.

 Although many of these desperate young Europeans are looking for possible employment in Britain (which, thankfully, is freed from the shackles of the euro), many more are considering moving to the U.S. and Latin America.

In that sense, the calamitous policies of the eurozone have created similar dire economic conditions to those experienced in the late 19th century, when waves of Europeans left dead-end lives in the old world to build better ones in the new.

Back then, though, it was peasants who were leaving hierarchical societies where they had no opportunity to prosper. Now, it is middle-class young graduates who find that Europe’s economy cannot offer them any hope.

One of the main aims of creating the EU was to secure prosperity. Instead, it is impoverishing a whole continent and exterminating talent.

When will they stop the pretence and ditch the toxic single currency?