Is It Really Too Much To Ask? by Jeremy Clarkson
Author:Jeremy Clarkson [Clarkson, Jeremy]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Non-Fiction, Humor, Anecdotes, Political, British, Comedy, Biography, European
ISBN: 9781405914147
Publisher: Penguin UK
Published: 2013-09-25T22:00:00+00:00
No more benefits: I’m putting the idle on the bread and sherry line
Put your hand on your heart and answer this question honestly. Do you have the faintest idea what’s going on in the eurozone? We are told there’s a terrible crisis that has mutated and gone airborne, but it’s like the worst kind of bad dream, the sort where you can’t actually see what’s in the shadows. You’re running and you’re terrified and now you’re on an escalator and, aaaargh, it’s going the other way!
Angela Merkel, the German chancellor, likened it last week to the Second World War but I think she’s wrong. People knew at the time what caused that and they knew what had to be done to solve it.
The current problems facing Europe are more like the First World War.
There are many historians who have spent their lives trying to work out why millions of young men were forced to die in a bloody, muddy French trench, and the upshot is: no one has a clue. The Serbs wanted a port in Turkey. This enraged the Austrians. And they were enraged even more when a Serbian gang shot one of their royal family. They were so cross in fact that Germany decided to attack Russia.
Then, like your big mate in the playground, it declared war on France and, for no reason at all, thought Belgium ought to be roughed up as well. What the Belgians had to do with a dispute between Serbia and Austria, God only knows, but this was the trigger that brought Britain into the war. And for reasons that are as transparent as concrete, that brought Japan in as well.
Of course, they said it would all be over by Christmas. In the same way as they said the financial crisis was solved when the US insurance giant AIG was rescued. But it wasn’t. Millions and millions of people were being killed and this caused the Americans to think: ‘You know what? We should send some of our young men over to Europe so they can be killed as well.’
People must have sat about back then thinking, ‘What the bloody hell is going on?’ in much the way that people are sitting around now trying to get a handle on the eurozone crisis. It is unfathomable, a big potpourri of vested interests, national stereotypes, market reactions, furious students, gormless politicians, petrol bombs, trillion-euro debt and unbelievably complex economics. Trying to sort it out is like trying to untangle the headphone lead to your iPod while blindfold, wearing mittens and being attacked by a bear.
What they seem to be doing is throwing out the concept of democracy by replacing elected leaders with backroom technocrats. And hoping that this will appease the computer that controls the markets.
At times such as this the world should turn to the motor industry for help. In the First World War Henry Ford spent time and money trying to organize a peace conference, and few would disagree that the recent
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