International

A shopkeeper I was chatting to yesterday summed it up: everyone goes on about Greece with its lazy Greeks, but Greeks aren’t really like that, are they? As a small businessman he knows how to run his own business – work hard, with long days and paperwork at the weekend. Just the kind of person you find so many of in Greece, a country of merchants and small independent business people, and right now it’s they who are getting hit. That’s what gets me about Geert Wilders: first it was the fanatical Muslims, now it’s the lazy Greeks. Basing your approach on prejudices seldom produces good policy. It’s a good thing, an extremely necessary thing, that we should debate amongst ourselves the question of whether we should really be putting more money into a bankrupt country, but if so we should at least be speaking about the real situation.

The situation in Greece is that there exists a small, rich upper crust which holds both economic and political power. The major political parties are run by a few families and this has been the case for decades. Networks of nepotism have also created a situation in which the rich pay hardly anything in tax, and revenue must come from people who lack the means to bribe the tax inspector. Income differentials are therefore skewed accordingly: the richest 10% account for just over a quarter (26%) of the national income, while the poorest account for only one euro in forty, for 2.5%. Forget all the talk of easy money and excessively high pay: the average independent, self-employed person works sixteen hours a day and earns very little.

In Greece a ‘can’t pay, won’t pay’ movement is under way. People are fed up of taking the rap for the debts which the elite have allowed to accumulate. In a recent Dutch TV news programme it was shown how, simply by refusing to pay the tolls, small business people in a town accessible only via the toll-road have been able to survive. The ‘can’t pay, won’t pay’ movement is starting to gain support.

I see nothing wrong with this. Austerity policies will lead only to more economic shrinkage and still more misery. The state should be investing – in a tax office which is able to collect money from those who have it, from the rich, and in a knowledge economy which would make Greece less dependent on tourism and shipping than is currently the case. You don’t achieve these things through spending cuts. Extending further loans to a bankrupt country does no good to anyone but the banks, when Greece will use it simply to reduce its debts to these banks. Restructuring of the debt, and eventually probably the replacement by Greece of the euro with a new currency, could offer relief.

So you won’t hear any talk from me of lazy Greeks taking money from our pockets. It’s the speculators and managers who are doing the stealing. As long as the EU protects them, ordinary people will be the victim. Perhaps Wilders might take action against this Bilderberg gang – but no, because in the end he belongs to it as well.