My first and final word on the Greek deficit crisis

This is the first time I have been moved to write a blog post on the Greek debt crisis and for good reason. I have always refrained from commenting on the situation, unless directly asked to, as despite being ethnically Greek (half Greek to be precise), I have never lived there and cannot legitimately claim to be anything more than a 'plastic bubble'. However, my family does lives there, several of my friends do work there and I do follow the situation closely from the relative comfort of my laptop every day, so I definitely do have an opinion.

The reason I am choosing to express/vent that opinion now is that (a) I have taken about all the Greece bashing I can stand here in the UK from people who think they know what they're talking about because they buy only directly imported Feta cheese on their weekly visit to Waitrose; and (b) I am tired of people insisting I answer for "my people's profligacy" when they see my surname for the first time.

So, I'm only going to say this once.

Yes the chickens have come home to roost after decades of high public spending and unpaid taxes. That's not just the case in Greece, but also in California and to a degree almost every other country in Europe. This may well be a lesson that Greece could only ever learn the hard way, but they are not a special case. Virtually every western government has been guilty of spending beyond its means, so viewing Greece as some backwater whose fate could never befall them would be a massive mistake.

Yes, cuts clearly need to be made, but before you dismiss all Greeks as a bunch of lazy wasters in need of some tough love, consider the human cost that Greeks across the country are having to bear. Unemployment of 16% and rising, the deepest recession in years, increased VAT, increased income tax, and a new property tax with power cuts threatened for those who cannot pay. Suicide rates are spiralling, sick patients lie on camp beds in emergency rooms for up to 12 hours waiting to be treated, diabetic patients are on the verge of death because they cannot afford their insulin, while hospitals are ruuning out of almost all supplies.

As for the outpouring of rage over the Greek Prime Minister's decision to call a referendum on the latest round of budget cuts, I generally do view referendums with suspicion because of their tendency to empower heads of government at the expsense of their legislatures, often to pass ridiculously populist measures that wouldn't survive 10 minutes of parliamentary scrutiny (think Swiss minarets). In this case though, the need for a referendum is real and justified. The parliament has voted through successive budget cuts at the behest of the government in spite of large scale popular opposition. Greece is approaching the point at which its democracy has ceased to be representative and so must go direct. In any case, if Papandreou can't bring his people with him on this one, he has no remit to negotiate on their behalf.

Now, in the words of Forest Gump, that's all I have to say about that.

Still proud to be a Lib Dem

So, the Lib Dems are less popular than the BNP? In Barnsley, maybe. Otherwise, can the media please get a little perspective in the aftermath of Thursday's by-election?

I still remember the days when the Lib Dems swept all before them at almsot every parliamentary by-election, but no-one ever intimated that these victories were anything more than a protest vote against the government of the day, even though the unmatched quality of the MPs voted in at those elections, such as Sarah Teather, often had just as much to do with it.

If the significance of the Barnsley by-election is that a vote for the Lib Dems is no longer a protest vote, but a vote for a party in government to be carefully considered come the next general election when it matters most, then I'm fine with that. In the meantime, being dealt the occasional kick up the backside by an electorate determined to be heard, a custom that has been endured by successive Labour and Conservative governments long before the coalition, is a small price to pay and also a testament to democratic accountability.

The bigger threat to the party's long term electoral prospects is the risk of voters across the country as a whole concluding that they are no better off with the Liberal Democrats in the coalition and of the party's members concluding that they made a mistake in joining it in the first place.

Both are wrong. Even the government's most controversial decisions have not shaken by belief in this, including tuition fees. When I first joined the Liberal Democrats, tuition fees were one of my biggest issues and a large part of the reason I signed up over nine years ago. I remain just as certain I made the right decision now as I was then.

A unilateral Conservative (or Labour for that matter) government would have consented to limitless US-style tuition fees as recommended by the higher education review led by Lord Browne, which the latter commissioned and the former supported. The politically expedient thing for the Lib Dems to have done once faced with the responsibility of setting government policy on the matter would have been to implement their pledge to not vote in favour of raising fees (they never pledged to abolish them entirely during the election campaign as is often claimed). Instead, they forced the 'Browneites' to compromise by taking full responsibility for the policy and placing a cap on tuition fees, increasing access to financial support for part-time students, and raising the threshold for repaying student debt to protect graduates on lower incomes.

Nick Clegg and Vince Cable could have sat on the sidelines their party had been restricted to for so long and pat themselves on the back for ticking off another promise kept on their manifesto, while students across the country were left to rue the consequences of their cowardice. They didn't and faced the consequences for their courage instead in the form of mass protests and the burning of effigies. I do not envy the daily dilemnas they must face, but am proud to still be a member of a party that is brave enough to confront them in the name of the national interest, rather than play duck and cover and be anihilated anyway.