Well, well, well. This blog gets more and more like the 38 bus. Nothing for ages and then three come along at once. But to the point …
There was a super article in the comment columns of the Daily Telegraph written by Mayor of London, Boris Johnson: Dithering Europe is heading for the democratic dark ages.
Whether you like the guy, or whether you think he’s a dangerous buffoon, the article is extremely well written. He makes his case that “A Greek economy run by Brussels will ignore the lessons of history, leading to more misery“.
But it also contains some lovely touches. Just his opening sentences are a masterpiece:
It is one of the tragic delusions of the human race that we believe in the inevitability of progress. We look around us, and we seem to see a glorious affirmation that our ruthless species of homo is getting ever more sapiens. We see ice cream Snickers bars and in vitro babies and beautiful electronic pads on which you can paint with your fingertip and – by heaven – suitcases with wheels! Think of it: we managed to put a man on the moon about 35 years before we came up with wheelie-suitcases; and yet here they are.
He goes on:
Aren’t they grand? […] Isn’t that what history teaches us, that humanity is engaged in a remorseless ascent?
On the contrary: history teaches us that the tide can suddenly and inexplicably go out, and that things can lurch backwards into darkness and squalor and appalling violence. The Romans gave us roads and aqueducts and glass and sanitation and all the other benefits famously listed by Monty Python; indeed, they were probably on the verge of discovering the wheely-suitcase when they went into decline and fall in the fifth century AD.
History teaches us many things and we fail to learn most of its lessons.
Boris concludes:
If things go on as they are, we will see more misery, more resentment, and an ever greater chance that the whole damn kebab van will go up in flames. Greece will one day be free again […] for this simple reason: that market confidence in Greek membership is like a burst paper bag of rice — hard to restore.
Without a resolution, without clarity, I am afraid the suffering will go on. The best way forward would be an orderly bisection into an old eurozone and a New Eurozone for the periphery. With every month of dither, we delay the prospect of a global recovery; while the approved solution — fiscal and political union — will consign the continent to a democratic dark ages.
As it happens I agree with him. But that’s not the point. I was struck, first and foremost, by Boris’s excellent and amusing prose. Silver spoon or not, he’s well educated, intelligent, amusing and can look at the world from a fresh perspective. The world needs more like him, and in positions of power and influence, just without the party political agenda.
I believe that it is better to tell the truth than a lie. I believe it is better to be free than to be a slave. And I believe it is better to know than to be ignorant. The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary. The most dangerous man to any government is the man who is able to think things out … without regard to the prevailing superstitions and taboos. Almost inevitably he comes to the conclusion that the government he lives under is dishonest, insane, intolerable.
