Iceland – out of the Eurozone – less likely to repay Nothing good or bad but thinking makes it so
Following their referendum Iceland are even less likely to repay the considerable sum that the country owes to the United Kingdom and to the Netherlands. Iceland, as you may have noticed, has gone bankrupt. You will never read from the Europhobic national newspapers that Iceland is outside the Eurozone. Instead they are too pre-occupied with predicting the possible crash of currencies within the Eurozone, or the Eurozone itself – none of which has shared the fate of Iceland.
It must be a year at least since conservative columnist Janet Daley predicted the collapse of the Eurozone. She isn’t the only one. Greece is very much on the ropes. We do not deny that. All countries have their bad times. Iceland and Greece have been enduring very bad times, but the one that has really gone to the wall is the one which is outside the Eurozone. Can you imagine the hullabaloo and crowing that there will be if the situation had been the other way round?
As the United Kingdom continues to thrash around in the financial waters with little sight of seeing the shore, let alone actually getting there, the “pundits” tell us how “fortunate” we are that this country has stayed outside the Eurozone. Every time that I go to Western Europe I pray that we could be a little less “fortunate”. The critics, clinging to the Shakespearian maxim that there is “nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so”, will continue to present their thoughts as if they were fact.
Nick Farage, the UKIP Member of the European Parliament, was left with egg on his face when he shouted abuse that would shame a naughty schoolboy at Herman Van Rumpoy, President of the European Council, in the European Parliament. Instead of being thrown out of the session and able to present himself as the “victim” of European intolerance he was merely fined – much less dramatic.
It is reported that serial headline-makers Neil and Christine Hamilton, whose names have become synonymous with the “sleaze” years of the last Conservative administration, are thinking of joining UKIP, or, at the very least, voting for them. Birds of a feather may well flock together. Among its considerable merits the European Union provides a voice for a strange ensemble of false prophets, cranks and overgrown schoolboys whose sole purpose in political life seems to be slagging off the very entity that gives their very being a semblance of purpose.
The European Union, and the Eurozone, by the way, are still there.
Clayton Goodwin 7th March 2010
Michael Foot has left us A good man of principle
Michael Foot, who has died aged 96 years, was an excellent orator and journalist, an inspiring politician and a thoroughly good man. Even his opponents, of whom there were many, gave him that. I remember immediately after the 1983 General Election in which he led the Labour Party to overwhelming defeat lunching with a bank manager, a typical Conservative voter, who told me: “Michael Foot is a good man – that was his problem – the public prefer a nice man to a good man”.
I remember Michael first from listening in childhood to his radio appearances, mainly with Any Questions, and then as a student in the early-1960s hearing his speeches at first-hand, usually at rallies of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. At that time when oratory was oratory, and not sound-bites honed by spin doctors and focus groups, radical speakers Michael Foot and Dr Donald Soper provided entertainment as well as information and passion. It was a pity that I – like so many others of my generation – could not go all the way with him on Socialism.
Foot was handed the poisoned chalice of leadership after Labour had been crushed in 1979 and the party was rent apart by internecine strife. The history books will show the loss but not necessarily the man. He was in the wrong place at the wrong time. In perhaps the first general election in this country to be determined by modern marketing and propaganda methods he, and his party, appeared to be out-of-date, an impression enhanced by his already advancing age and characteristically dishevelled appearance. Yet his opponents respected him even while they trashed him.
Although they led the same political party Michael Foot was the antithesis of the glib Tony Blair. He came from a family grounded in old Liberalism, being one of those outstanding politicians whose shift to Labour wrecked the Liberals as a major force. Socialism seemed then to be the “new dawn”. Movements of the “future” turn too often and too quickly into relics of the “past”. Foot defines that time in our national life when Labour and Socialism (the terms were not then as incompatible as they have now become) were the expressions of hope, of faith, and of reform.
It is a pity that he was ever elected leader of the Labour Party, or that being elected he accepted the call. His sense of duty forbade him to refuse. Michael defined individuality. He was at home on the back benches, a maverick, a considerable maverick, who personified the conscience of the movement. Leadership required compromise, compromise in policies and presentation of which he was not capable, and that way led to a humiliation he did not deserve. What he did deserve, however, was to be judged as a man – a politician and journalist – of principle. There have not been too many of those in our public life.
