Douglas Carswell's Blog

Not a penny more

Last week Britain agreed to let the rest of the European Union go ahead with its mutual suicide pact - if that's what they want to do.

But they must do so outside the framework of the European Union as a separate Fiscal Union, or FU. Britain will not be part of it.

This makes the government's decision to commit zillions of pounds to bailing out the Euro over the past 20 months look all the more mis judged. Bailout-and-borrow has not only been a spectacular failure - it has made the problem worse. Most of the "rescued" countries today have far more debt than they did when this nonsense all began.

Those Foreign Office mandarins who urged us to contribute to the bailouts in order to give us influence are look pretty foolish today.  It was, of course, Alistair Darling who signed us up, at Sir Humphrey's urging, in the dying days of the last government to the temporary bailout fund (albeit that he had the sense to keep us out of the permanent mechanism*).

But why on earth has the Coalition spent 20 months tamely carrying on with more of the same, again at Sir Humphrey's suggestion?

If we see the FU as a doomed venture, what possible logic made us commit to underwriting it with mountains of taxpayers' money?  What possessed ministers to agree to increase our liabilities via the IMF to an eye-watering £40 billion?

And if we have at last called the Euro debtor union's bluff, what made us endorse putting one of their chief cheerleaders, Christine Lagarde, in charge of the IMF? It is like putting the debtors in charge of the bank. Doh.

We have expended far too much money and diplomatic effort into remedies that will only make the Eurozone's troubles worse. Britain ought to encourage others to take the only two steps that would set Europe free from this monetary monster; Default on the debts and Decouple from monetary union.

(* - I have a transcript of the telephone conversation between Darling and George Osborne which proves it was Darling who kept us out of the permanent mechanism)

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