THE WORLD’S RICHEST BEGGAR
By David Vance On December 20th, 2011Great article over on the Daily Telegraph…
“Euro rage is reaching new heights over Britain’s latest outrage.
Our refusal to pony up a further €31bn we cannot afford, to prop up a monetary union that was created against our wishes and better judgment, and with the malevolent purpose of accelerating the great leap forward to a European state that is inherently undemocratic.
It is being presented as treachery, Anglo-Saxon perfidy, and the naked pursuit of national self-interest.
Let me just point out:
1) The UK never agreed to such a commitment in the first place. The line was written into the December 9 summit communiqué in an attempt to bounce Britain into handing over the money.
2) The UK does not consider the rescue machinery to be remotely credible as constructed.
3) The eurozone has the means to tackle its own debt crisis, if it is willing to use them. These include fiscal pooling and the mobilisation of the ECB.
As eurozone politicians never tire of reminding us, their aggregate debt levels are lower than those of the UK, US, or Japan. They are right. So get on with it and stop begging.”
Yes, Mr Pritchard writes a good article.
‘While certainly humorous, entertaining and very, very childish, the recent war of words between France and Britain has the potential to become the worst thing to ever happen to Europe.’
The French demands that it is us, in the UK that should be downgraded, does bear some justification. When we take a look at a comparison of the debt levels between the various G10 countries, you can see why they get a general sense of unfairness of their treatment by the ratings agencies.
I offer the following link for perusal, and I hope it doesn’t scare too much…
http://bit.ly/se7m0v
‘the UK’s consolidated debt (non-financial, financial, government and household) to GDP is… just under 1000%. That’s right: the UK debt, when one adds to its more tenable sovereign debt tranche all the other debt carried on UK books (and thus making the transfer of private debt to the public balance sheet impossible), is nearly ten times greater than the country’s GDP.’
As all this data must be known to Brussells and to Sarkozy, so what does that make of his recent comments? It certainly smacks of literally ‘kicking a foe when he is down!’ with the malicious intent of finishing him off, ‘once and for all’, so perhaps we should regard remarks coming out of the EU as something rather more than just a spiteful spat.
As crass as Sarkozy is, surely even he, a man of little brain, must realise that you cannot squeeze blood from a stone. Who goes to the poorest member of a family for a loan? especially when knowing that a default of repayment would finish that member off for good. That just has to be his intenion – DeGaulle gets his vindiction at last!
I must say the data in the graph has more of a Halloween than a Christmas flavour about it. Taken in context with the Unions promised strike action,