Greece

Thursday

Paul Wood

‘The smugglers don’t care’

 Lesbos A young woman in a headscarf stumbled over some rocks and onto the beach. She stood there, rigid, stunned, then burst into tears. A grandmotherly German tourist hugged her. ‘It’s over now, you’re safe,’ she said. ‘You’re in Europe.’ A Burmese man from the same boat looked around anxiously and asked: ‘Will the police here beat us?’ It was after dawn on the Greek island of Lesbos, the sun glinting off the turquoise sea, an idyllic holiday-brochure landscape of hills with whitewashed houses. But the Turkish coast is so close that you can see it, and so this tiny island has become the front line in Europe’s migration crisis.

Douglas Murray Douglas Murray

Despair springs eternal

The literary emissions of the left are hardly ever enjoyable, but they can be instructive. Last year Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the 21st Century became one of the biggest-selling political books of the year. Like a thousand-page Soviet report on tractor production, it hardly seemed intended to be read. The point of its success was that it could be said to ‘prove’ the left’s argument. They could then hit their opponents over the head with it and move to the next stage. Last year they questioned some premises of capitalism and now Paul Mason, the economics editor of Channel 4 News (and Spectator diarist), is here to say that capitalism

Martin Vander Weyer Martin Vander Weyer

Do Nikkei and the FT really share the same journalistic values?

It’s nearly 30 years since I worked in Japan, but I still have a few words of the language and a certain idea of how the place worked. The role of the business press, for example, was to trumpet export successes of Japanese corporations, and not to report shenanigans in which securities firms boosted prices of selected shares by pushing them to housewife investors, to generate campaign funds for favoured politicians. So I’m curious how the Financial Times will fare under its new owner Nikkei, the very Japanese media group that has paid £844 million to acquire the world’s most prestigious business title. Has the culture changed since my day?

Thursday

The Spectator

Letters | 23 July 2015

Don’t write off Assad Sir: Ahmed Rashid refers to our ‘Arab allies’ supporting al-Qaeda (‘The plan to back al-Qaeda against Isis’, 18 July). Clearly they are no allies of ours, so thank you Mr Rashid for pointing this out. Apart from that, his perspective is peculiar. He starts off by accusing Assad of plunging Syria into a bloody civil war. Clearly that is not the case. The civil war was started by Assad’s opponents, encouraged by the ‘success’ of the Arab Spring elsewhere. Of course we now see that the ‘success’ was illusory. He also suggests that Assad is finished. Now that his ally Iran has come in from the

Taki

High life | 23 July 2015

I think back to my Greek childhood and longing for the once cosiest and most romantic of cities overwhelms me. Actually it’s too painful to think back: all the blood spilled during the communist uprising, the beautiful neoclassical buildings destroyed by greed and lack of talent, the impeccable manners of the people that showed respect for the elderly, the church and the nation. They all went with the wind, that horrible sirocco from the south that has been used as an excuse for crimes of passion committed under its influence. This ache for a lost past is nothing new. Elsewhere and memory are most vivid in one’s mind, as are

The Spectator

Portrait of the week | 23 July 2015

Home Parents would be able to have their children’s passports removed if they were suspected of planning to travel abroad to join a radical group, under provisions outlined by David Cameron, the Prime Minister, to deal with Islamist extremism. It emerged that five British pilots embedded with allied forces had been taking part in air strikes over Syria, which Parliament had voted against in 2013. Julian Lewis, the Conservative chairman of the Defence Select Committee, accused Mr Cameron of making up policy ‘on the hoof’. Lord Richards of Herstmonceux, the former Chief of the Defence Staff, said that in order to defeat the Islamic State, ‘tanks would have to roll

James Bartholomew

Degrees in disaster

So farewell, Yanis Varoufakis. You used to be Greece’s finance minister. Then you resigned, or were you sacked? You took control of the Greek economy six months ago when it was growing. Yes, honestly! Growth last year ran at 0.8 per cent, with forecasts of 3 per cent this year. The government had a primary budget surplus. Unemployment was falling. Until you came along. Varoufakis was a product of British universities. He read economics at Essex and mathematical statistics at Birmingham, returning to Essex to do a PhD in economics. With the benefit of his British university education he returned to Greece and, during his short time in office, obliterated the

Thursday

The Spectator

Portrait of the week | 16 July 2015

Home The government postponed a Commons vote on relaxing the Hunting Act in England and Wales after the Scottish National Party said it would oppose the changes. Scottish police admitted that a crashed car off the M9, reported to them on a Sunday, was not examined until the Wednesday, when one of the two passengers inside it was still alive. She died three days later. A case of H7N7 bird flu was found at a poultry farm near Preston, Lancashire, where 170,000 chickens were slaughtered. British people were being urged by the Foreign Office to leave Tunisia because ‘a further terrorist attack is highly likely’. Up to 5,000 were flown

Harry Mount

Greece Notebook

At the weekend, I tried — and failed — to get some money out of an empty cashpoint near Omonia Square. The Eurobank cashpoint was covered in fresh anti-German graffiti: ‘No to the new German fascism,’ it read in Greek, ‘No to the “dosilogous”.’ That’s the Greek for Nazi collaborators in the war. For any cashpoint users who couldn’t speak Greek, the graffiti artist helpfully added, in English, GERMANY= 卐. If the new, German-led EU austerity package goes ahead, the swastikas will keep spreading through Athens. I felt sorry for a German family eating ice cream in the deserted Estia café in Plaka. The couple, with four strapping children and

Martin Vander Weyer Martin Vander Weyer

A deal for the good of the world, but in Vienna rather than Brussels

As an occasional lecturer on the abstruse topic of the efficacy of sanctions in conflict resolution, I find myself much more excited about the emergence in Vienna of a settlement of the Iranian nuclear stand-off than I am about a third Greek bailout — which left-wingers of the Syriza party regard as a vindictive form of sanctions regime designed to humiliate the government in Athens and remove its fiscal autonomy. The only thing that’s clear about the Greek crisis is that it’s not over: impossible to see how it could be ‘over’ without the debt relief Prime Minister Tspiras asked for but the Germans adamantly refused. Even if the €68

Wednesday

Lloyd Evans

PMQs Sketch: Cameron’s lurches to the left

‘Put that on your leaflets,’ snarled Cameron at PMQs. Inwardly he was gloating. Labour voted against Tory welfare reforms last night so the PM was able to boast that Labour is fighting the new living wage. Some say Cameron is lurching to the left with his Five Year Plans and his state-controlled pay rises. The same applies to law and order. He’s getting a pinkish tinge. Philip Davies asked him to review the regulations governing early release for serious offenders. Cameron said he’d give it a go. It’s not good enough, he seemed to imply, having murderers murdering people shortly after gaining their freedom by promising to become pillars of

Tuesday

Toby Young

An independent Scotland could easily have been the next Greece

I wonder how many Scots who voted ‘Yes’ in last year’s referendum are watching events unfold in Greece and having second thoughts? It’s not quite a ‘there, but for the grace of God’ moment, but it’s not far off. This analogy depends upon two big assumptions, both of which will be disputed by the nationalists. The first is that Scotland would not have automatically been allowed to remain in the EU following a ‘Yes’ vote, but, as a new state, would have had to apply for membership and, as a condition of joining, would have been forced to join the euro. How questionable is this assumption? The Scottish government’s position has

Monday

James Forsyth

The Germans have just changed the whole dynamic of the Euro

The ancient Greeks used to drop iron bars into the sea to demonstrate the permanence of the agreement they were signing. The point was that the deal would last until the iron floated to the surface – that it was irreversible. The Euro was meant to be the same: once a country had joined it could —and would — never leave. It was for all time. But last night’s discussions have put paid to that notion. We now know from the German’s proposals for a ‘temporary’ Greek exit that a country can leave the single currency. This changes the whole dynamic of the currency union, weakening the position of countries

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

Sorry, but Greece isn’t victim of a ‘coup’. It’s a victim of the Euro

After 17 hours of negotiations Greece and its creditors have just agreed a third bailout deal – and already there’s a new hashtag campaign on Twitter protesting that #ThisIsACoup. Paul Krugman agrees. Why so? The terms of a €86bn, three-year bailout involve sharper sending cuts than those rejected by the Greeks in their recent referendum and flogging some €50bn of Greek assets which would be held in trust by some suitable institution in Athens (not outside it, as had been mooted earlier). If Greece didn’t agree, it was going to be offered “swift negotiations on time-out from the Euro” (below). This seems to have focused minds. And this time: no wriggle room, no referenda. The Greek parliament

Sunday

Douglas Grant

The Greek result shows that ‘Yes, we can!’ is over

Conventional wisdom has it that David Cameron’s decision to make the ‘In’ cause in the European referendum the one that asks Britons to vote ‘Yes’ is one that gives the Prime Minister the upper hand. Saying ‘Yes’ makes people feel good. It’s positive. It’s progressive. Perhaps that was true in 2008 when Barack Obama swept to power, but times have changed. Last Sunday 61 per cent of Greeks voted ‘No’ to the bailout terms proposed by the country’s creditors. Many commentators argued that ‘no’ had a stronger case, whatever the question, in Greece given its history.  On October 28, 1940, Greek Prime Minister Ioannis Metaxas was faced with an ultimatum: allow

Friday

Charles Moore

Euclid’s theorem of the Irish

The excellently named Euclid Tsakalotos has become the Greek finance minister after the sacking (tsaking?) of Varoufakis. He was educated at St Paul’s in the 1970s, and went on to Oxford. This atrocious suffering made him, even at the time, a supporter of Irish republicanism. In March this year, he popped up at a Sinn Fein conference and began his speech by apologising for his English accent, adding that ‘in mitigating circumstances, I am married to a Celt’. Euclid’s theorem is that the Irish are ‘honorary southerners’, now forming an arc of leftist insurrection which runs from Dublin, through Podemos in Spain, to Athens. Given the horrors inflicted on these

Thursday

The Spectator

Letters | 9 July 2015

The case for Daesh Sir: For once the admirable Rod Liddle has got it completely wrong (‘You can’t take the Islam out of Islamic State’, 4 July). We absolutely shouldn’t call the homoerotic, narcissistic death cult ‘Islamic State’ — not because it offends ordinary Muslims, nor because it has nothing to do with Islam (it has everything to do with Islam) but because it legitimises and validates the preposterous project. The media has a responsibility not to run terrorist propaganda unchallenged. Politicians, including the Prime Minister, are starting to wise up to this and should be applauded for doing so. We are in an information war with our enemies. Let

Peter Jones

Tsipras vs hubris

The EU finds it difficult to understand what drives the Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras. Quite simply, he is a fifth-century bc Athenian democrat living in a 21st-century oligarchic world. Ancient Greeks feared two conditions above all that would mark them out as losers and bring undying shame: humiliation (hubris is the key word) and dependency. Hubris in ancient Greek meant ‘physical assault’, which broadened into behaviour calculated to degrade and humiliate others, all the worse if it were done (as Aristotle says) for the sheer pleasure of showing your superiority. A court case illustrates the point. One Ariston had been badly beaten up by thugs he had had trouble

Taki

High life | 9 July 2015

Wow, what a week. London may be bad for one’s health, but it sure makes it fun on the way to where we’re all going. I’m determined not to mention Greece — too much has been written about my poor country, most of it quite nice — so I will stick to London in general and The Spectator in particular. It began with a nostalgic party for about 28 chez George and Lita Livanos, childhood friends, in their treasure-filled house in Mayfair. A drunken lunch in a St James’s club followed, five old buddies reminiscing about the days when hangovers didn’t register. Then it was on to The Spectator’s summer

Charles Moore Charles Moore

The Spectator’s notes | 9 July 2015

Even if everything goes wronger still, the Greek No vote is a great victory for the left. Until now, the left has not mounted a serious challenge to the claims of the EU. It is extraordinary how it has been cowed. The single currency, especially a single currency without a ‘social dimension’ and political union, is the classic ‘bankers’ ramp’ against which the left always used to inveigh. It is a huge collective device to put banks before workers, if necessary reducing the latter to poverty. Greece is an almost perfect example of this, with the rescue designed to save European banks, not Greek people. More than a quarter of