Michael Meacher MP

One thing the Right is really good at is turning a blind eye as diaster steadily builds up and then blaming everyone else when it happens.   Osborne is a past master at this, ignoring the riskiness of deregulated banks and then trying to make the victims pay (‘We’re all in it together’).   But Lagarde at the IMF really takes the biscuit.   Saying that the Greeks should pay their taxes is a saloon bar absurdity.   The truth is that avoiding/evading taxes has become a cancer in politics everywhere, including Britain and her own France, but that’s not the root of the Greek problem at all.   That derives, first, from the eagerness of the Eurocrats to wave Greece into the fold without any serious checks of its capacity to withstand long-term competition with German industry, and secondly from the equal eagerness of French and German banks to pour billions of euros into Greece without any proper assessment of the creditworthiness of the recipients. (more…)