Parthenon from west (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Dr Alf brings us an excellent and passionate article from John Redwood about the soon to end Greek crisis.

John Redwood, like me, does not believe in the EU, in its present unreformed form, so no matter what the EU did, he would be against it. His position on people and countries who owe money is a lot less sanguine than the position he takes vis-a-vis Greece but I have never once heard him rail against the £12 billion gbp a year we give in overseas aid or the money that was paid to bail out the banks.

Those banker bailouts involved every Western taxpayer being “stitched up” and in the case of Britain the banks that got away with the out and out theft of taxpayers money were our own and those responsible are walking about in public with impunity today.

The Greeks are not “taxpayers” in any sense that a rational person would understand it, they are instead people who consume more than they produce at the expense of other people. Benefit recipients are like that and so are corrupt African dictators. Where they differ is in terms of geography but what makes them all the same is a propensity to blame others for their plight and to expect others who have done the right thing to bail them out and pay for them.

Greece has never reformed its economy in the 70 years since the end of World War 2 and is not going to do so now. So now we have German and French banks being bailed out supposedly at the expense of the Greek people and we are supposed to want those banks to take a haircut, so that Greece is not subjected to austerity. We, in the UK, have been subjected to austerity by our own banks which we have bailed out 3 times and we have paid our taxes and yet for us it is a matter of “get on with it” and “take it on the chin”.

John Redwood should speak for us, not the Greeks, and if he is worried about rapacious banks, ripping people off, he should look much closer to home.

John Gelmini