Even if everything goes wronger still, the Greek No vote is a great victory for the left. Until now, the left has not mounted a serious challenge to the claims of the EU. It is extraordinary how it has been cowed. The single currency, especially a single currency without a ‘social dimension’ and political union, is the classic ‘bankers’ ramp’ against which the left always used to inveigh. It is a huge collective device to put banks before workers, if necessary reducing the latter to poverty. Greece is an almost perfect example of this, with the rescue designed to save European banks, not Greek people.
More than a quarter of a century ago, however — influenced, perhaps, because Jacques Delors was on one side of the argument and Margaret Thatcher on the other — the mainstream left decided that Europeanism was an essential badge of respectability, and gave up thinking about the matter from that day to this.
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