This Brexit Business has discombobulated the British political classes, with the likes of Nick Clegg and Alastair Campbell, not exactly natural soulmates, desperately seeking ways to reverse last year’s referendum result while sundry Tory Brexiteers urge Mrs May to throw her toys out of the pram and declare a sort of Brexit UDI. Meanwhile much of the British media treats everything coming out of Brussels as wisdom personified while anything London says is a load of old cobblers. That, of course, may be true … but it rather glosses over the fact that, whatever the scale of our own troubles, the EU has big problems of its own, from separatism in Spain to extremism in Austria to massive Italian sovereign debt to the inconvenient truth that the most powerful country in the EU will take months to form a new Coalition Government, which is a bit of a pain for Mutti Merkel when the rest of the EU is looking to you for leadership. One man who’s seen the EU close up and had to grapple with its Byzantine ways and myriad problems is Yanis Varoufakis, former finance minister of Greece. This is his take of the week. |
Tags: