Europe has an even bigger crisis on its hands than a British exit

[OnMyWayID 1,489]

Europe has an even bigger crisis on its hands than a British exit

if Europe's policy elites could not quite believe it before, they must now know beyond much doubt that they have lost Britain. This island is no longer part of the European project in any meaningful sense.

British defenders of the status quo were knouted on Sunday. UKIP won 27.5pc of the vote, or 29pc after adjusting for the negligence - or worse - of the Electoral Commission in allowing a spoiler party with much the same name to sow confusion. Margaret Thatcher's Tory children are scarcely more friendly to the EU enterprise.

Britain's decision to stay out of monetary union at Maastricht sowed the seeds of separation, as pro-Europeans fully understood at the time, though almost nobody expected EMU officialdom to clinch the argument so emphatically by running the currency bloc into the ground with 1930s Gold Standard policies and youth unemployment levels above 50pc in Spain and Greece, and above 40pc in Italy.

European leaders must henceforth calculate that the British people will vote to leave the EU altogether unless offered an entirely new dispensation: tariff-free access to the single market along lines already enjoyed by Turkey or Tunisia; and deliverance from half the Acquis Communautaire, that 170,000-page edifice of directives and regulations that drains away sovereignty, and is never repealed.

...

Yet Britain is the least of their problems. The much greater shock is the "Séisme" in France, as Le Figaro calls it, where Marine Le Pen's Front National swept 73 electoral departments, while President Francois Hollande's socialists were reduced to two.

Mr Hollande's address to the nation on Monday night was mournful. He had no answers beyond a few pro-forma utterings about "growth, jobs and investment", instantly undercut by his vow to press on doggedly with the same contractionary policies that led to disaster. His premier, Manuel Valls, even had to announce that the president would see out his five-year term, as if this were already in doubt.

It is widely claimed that the Front is eurosceptic only on the surface. Perhaps, but when I asked Mrs Le Pen what she would do on her first day in office if she ever reached the Elysee Palace, her reply was trenchant. She would instruct the French Treasury to draft plans for the immediate restoration of the franc, that great symbol of emancipation from the English occupation (franc des Anglais).

...

Italy's new leader, Matteo Renzi, bucked the trend with a record vote of 41pc for the centre-Left, but his triumph is no less a threat to the EMU policy regime. After watching fellow Socialists in Europe destroy themselves trying to perform root-canal surgery on their economies without anaesthesia, he is going for growth whatever they may say in Brussels about EMU deficit rules. If anybody has the panache to lead a reflation revolt, it is this irrepressible Tuscan gambler.

Yet the elections have thrown up another wild card. Germany's Alternative fur Deutschland (AfD) has stormed onto the scene with 7.5pc of the vote. For the first time the anti-euro movement has an electoral platform to rail against bail-out policies or any deviation from orthodoxy by the European Central Bank. It is now even harder for Chancellor Angela Merkel to yield ground, whether on a debt redemption fund to chip away at legacy debts, or on the pace of fiscal retrenchment.

Strasbourg's Hemicycle is to become a chamber of militancy and protest where a Babel of voices shout down all action in languages the others don't even understand, like the Habsburg Empire's Cisleithanian parliament in its final years as the polity was falling apart.

Europe's leaders are counting on recovery to rescue them, relying on the rest of the world to generate the necessary demand, but creating none itself. This is courting fate at a time when China is choking its credit boom, most of the Brics are in trouble and the US Federal Reserve is tightening.

The entire article is here: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/comment/ambroseevans_pritchard/10861252/Europe-has-an-even-bigger-crisis-on-its-hands-than-a-British-exit.html

[Jacque67 7,328]

Agreed. Great article!

[Peikko 1,575]

Do not agree. Britain will stay in the EU and the EU will continue, although it may of course evolve. People who know what it actually means to be a participant know this, there is no exit plan.

[Mr. Big Dog 10,747]

If France was to back out, the European project would be dead. But I don't see France backing out at all. The French did not vote against the EU but against their political establishment at home. They are fed up with a poor economy and high jobless rates that have persisted for decades now. So they voted in protest for the xenophobes around Le Pen. But Le Pen and her FN have zero answers to any of the issues that France must address if it is to prosper. Their populism will carry them only so far. Austria had this wave, as did the Netherlands. They all got over it. And so will France.

Britain? Who cares, really? Let them do what they want to do. They'll be back at the table soon enough.

[OnMyWayID 1,489]

You are probably right (replying to "the truth" on them staying together).. Though if the economies continue to stagnate for a few more years I could see it start to unravel.

Edited May 30, 2014 by OnMyWayID

[Mr. Big Dog 10,747]

You are probably right.. Though if the economies continue to stagnate for a few more years I could see it start to unravel.

But that would make those economies worse, not better.

[OnMyWayID 1,489]

But that would make those economies worse, not better.

I wasn't commenting on the intelligence of it happening... People start to panic and bolt to their own detriment.

[Peikko 1,575]

There is certainly a vocal minority who will loudly complain that Britain could do things better if they were out of the EU, but that's not really realistic. I am sure the economic problems will not go away though, until we all, as a world get on board with a sustainable economy as apposed to an exponentially ever increasing one. The population can't keep growing to support this, the world has finite resources. Another way of thinking is required, eventually.