Douglas Carswell's Blog

Euro crisis; the Treasury response got it very wrong

For almost two years this blog has called for a policy of default and decouple in response to the crisis in the Eurozone.

How ministers and experts scoffed at the suggestion. How Treasury officials rolled their eyes.

Instead, they pursued a policy of bailout-and-borrow.

First under Labour, and then under the Coalition, billions of pounds were committed to proping up a currency we chose not to join. Far from reluctantly inheriting this policy from Gordon Brown, many more billions have been committed to proping up Europe's recessionary mechanism by this government than the previous.

In pressing all that extra lending on to struggling Euro states, we pushed them further into debt.

Not only was it predictable that bailout-and-borrow would fail. This blog - amongst others - predicted it at the time. But still the experts carried on - and in doing so, consigned millions of Europeans to misery.

As Peter Oborne magnificently puts it in today's Telegraph, "it can no longer be morally right for Britain to support the single currency, a catastrophic experiment that is inflicting human devastation".

He goes on to remind us how "George Osborne has steadily lent his support to the Eurozone". "Greece" says Peter "must be allowed to default and devalue".

To paraphrase Lord Melbourne, what all the experts in the Treasury told us needed to happen, has not happened. What assorted bloggers and backbenchers said should happen has come to pass.

Back to all posts