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.