What’s good about austerity (whatever the Greeks think)

The only question I remember from my Oxford moral philosophy paper was ‘What is integrity and is it a virtue?’ In the margins of all the politicking that follows the victory of Syriza in the Greek election, I hope someone asks: ‘What is austerity, is it a virtue, and why has it worked in the UK and Ireland but failed in Greece?’ My own definition of austerity in the context of financial crisis, when I debated it with former Greek finance minister George Papaconstantinou, was ‘a synonym for frugal, uncorrupt government supported by willing taxpayers of the sort that has been largely absent in southern Europe’, at which George got very emotional and accused me of stereotyping.

Emotion will rule in Syriza’s demands for release from debt-service penury — because the bailout terms were designed to favour creditors rather than stimulate recovery or protect the vulnerable, and because Germany’s position is forever tainted by war guilt, hence Alexis Tspiras’s first gesture as prime minister, visiting the site of a Nazi atrocity. European Commission president Juncker says Greek debt reduction is ‘not on the radar’, but I don’t trust him and his Brussels establishment not to compromise if they think it will postpone the euro’s existential crisis even for a few months. I have more faith in Mario Draghi of the European Central Bank and Christine Lagarde of the IMF, both of whom I suspect agree with me that austerity really is a virtue and whatever sympathy we may feel for its ordinary citizens, Greece is an incorrigible basket-case, victim not of international conspiracy but of decades of its own rotten leadership.

Plenipotentiary

Obituaries of Leon Brittan largely failed to mention his most important intervention on the global stage. I refer to his championing of Chinese membership of the World Trade Organisation, a cause which he pursued as EU trade commissioner and vice president in the late 1990s.