Europe will thrive. But we could be doomed to a life on the fringes

There is a Little England-ism that would have us leave the EU fold. It would be a disaster

• 
• • Will Hutton
  • The Observer, Sunday 10 June 2012
  •  

Santander: familiar on our high streets and part of the Spanish banking system that needs bailing out Photograph: Kumar Sriskandan / Alamy/Alamy

Taxi drivers and eminent commentators are agreed. The euro is an unmitigated disaster. It should never have been launched. Europe's elites over-reached themselves, locking the proud peoples of Europe in a disastrous straitjacket without any democratic mandate or ongoing accountability. This is payback time. Its collapse won't be pleasant, but the sooner the whole experiment is ended and Europe becomes no more than a loose association of free-trading nations with freely floating exchange rates the better. Eurosceptics have been vindicated.

This has become a settled British media and political consensus and now hardly seems the moment to challenge it. After all, Spain needs a massive bailout of its tottering banking system, including Santander, so familiar on every British high street, before the Greek election next Sunday. This appears to have been agreed yesterday. If Greece were to leave the euro before the bailout is complete, the bank run would overwhelm Spain and spread elsewhere. The EU and the IMF have only days to avoid a calamity. Southern Europe would confront run-away inflation and slump.
Nobody knows what will happen. Now Spain has got its bailout, Germany will agree to a fully fledged European banking union before the end of June, in which all eurozone countries guarantee each other's bank deposits and bank debt, agree common banking supervision and joint means to ensure every eurozone bank has sufficient capital. This should cut the poisonous link between the banking crisis and the public debt crisis. I also bet that the next Greek government will cut a deal to allow it to stay in the euro with less austerity.

In addition, a combination of ultra-cheap money and big infrastructure spending, again agreed reluctantly by Germany, across the continent will start to lift the European economy. The EU will have muddled through and the system held, because in the end the costs of break-up or for any one country exiting were just too prohibitive.

But the situation is dangerously volatile and the Germans may be too slow to act. It may be that we face months of bank runs and pandemonium and that the euro is reduced in essence to a north European euro bloc, including France and Germany but not most of southern Europe. But the big point is that one way or another the euro will have survived in some form because the member countries will have pulled together. And what will remain will be immeasurably stronger and more integrated – a euro area with a banking union, common governance of fiscal policy and political structures to match. Not a federal superstate but a new amalgam of nation states within a new international architecture – and with a newly forged European identity.

One of the byproducts of the crisis is that every European has become aware of the continent's interdependence. What happens in Greece, Spain, Ireland, France or Germany affects everyone else. Like it or not, we have to co-exist. In which case, this becomes a moment of existential choice for Britain. Eurozone members are not only fighting for the euro because the costs of collapse are so awesome. Europe must have a monetary order to underpin its ambitions to be a single market.

Devaluation, touted as a panacea across the British economic and political spectrum, certainly works for an individual country if it can devalue against others that hold their currencies stable. But as Keynes argued so effectively, if devaluation becomes the default policy for the entire system – the temptation in a world of floating exchange rates – then the consequence is disaster. It is an invitation for everyone to engage in beggar-my-neighbour economic policies by trying to rig their currency to boost their exports and minimise their imports, just as China has been doing for 30 years. A single market needs an accompanying monetary order – a heartland Keynesian proposition. This is not a doctrine of euro elites. It is how a single market can be made to work for all its peoples.

Which is why post-crisis Europe will be so tough for Britain. The EU that survives with its euro will be the centre of the European order. It will set interest rates and fiscal policy that will become the benchmark for every other European country. It will be the biggest and most desirable market in Europe and it will set the rules for how trade is conducted within its jurisdiction. Already it is happening. Senior ministers and officials have recognised that Britain had to agree to the banking union – with incalculable consequences for the City – but could do little or nothing to shape it. Financial regulation will be organised in Brussels for the benefit of euro member states. If we don't like, we can lump it. It will be across the board, from economics to climate change.

There is general delight that we are not part of this emerging superstate – a language that misrepresents what Europe is becoming. A referendum will cement our detachment or even lead to exit. Sceptics say the model for us to follow is Switzerland. The truth is that we would be a sort of Greater Guernsey, suffering an accelerated economic rundown. We will proudly float the pound, despite evidence that what floating means in practice – for a country with a huge international financial sector such as ours that sucks in capital from abroad – is systemic overvaluation and the evisceration of our traded goods sector: an economic doomsday machine.

Our foreign-owned car industry, dependent upon exports to the EU single market, will gradually migrate back to Europe or low-cost Asia. On a range of key strategic interests – finance, agriculture, fishing, transport, energy, IT and data security – benchmark policy will be made in Brussels, Paris and Berlin. They will have brought the EU through the crisis; their debts will be to each other, not us.

For the British Eurosceptic none of this counts. The vision is of endless austerity, prioritising deficit reduction above all else and evisceration of the social contract at home, and a refusal to recognise interdependence abroad or that there is any need constructively to create rules and an international order, especially in Europe. We should all resolutely tighten our belts and export our unemployment to others in a world of floating exchange rates and nonexistent international rules. It is a doctrine of arid meanness and nationalistic jingoism, an appropriate editorial line for populist centre-right newspapers, but nonsensical for a state with real interests to protect and advance. Britain stood aside from the euro crisis. It will stand even more aside from what follows, leaving us not just economically diminished but culturally shrunken.

A Eurosceptic hero alongside sainted Maggie? It's got to be Gordon Brown

The judgments for which Gordon Brown was mocked look rather different now we've seen David Cameron in action

• 
• • Jonathan Freedland
  • guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 8 November 2011 21.00 GMT
  • larger | smaller


Gordon Brown and his wife Sarah say farewell to the German chancellor, Angela Merkel, at a meeting at No 10 on the eve of the 2009 G20 summit. Photograph: Dan Kitwood/Getty Images

Few arguments are more unfashionable than the one I am about to make: the case for Gordon Brown. Unfashionable because, 18 months after he left office having led Labour to its second worst result since 1918, Brown still arouses intense loathing. At the Conservative party conference I saw otherwise calm Tories foam with anger at the mention of the former prime minister, furiously tearing away at his every trait, personal and political. That hatred is outdone in some corners of the Labour forest by diehard Blairites still seething at the memory of how Brown thwarted their hero in Downing Street before chasing him out of it.
Illustration by Belle Mellor
With enemies on both sides, that leaves few defenders in the press, a fact compounded by the ex-PM's near-total invisibility, his appearances in the Commons rare. The torrent of memoirs from colleagues, Alistair Darling's the latest, have only damaged his reputation still further.

Not many would attempt to push aside the mountain of anecdotes detailing Brown's impossible behaviour as both colleague and boss. Even his most ardent admirers now accept that Gordon Brown was temperamentally unsuited to the job of prime minister.

And yet posterity's judgment of leaders does not rest solely in their hands. The conduct of their successors matters too: Clinton looked better after George W. History may yet have similar second thoughts about Brown, reviewing his record in the light of what has followed.

Take last week's fiasco of a G20 meeting in Cannes, which did little to solve the crises in Greece and Italy, and whose most enduring legacy may prove to be off-mic comments made by the host, Nicolas Sarkozy. Contrast that with the meeting of the same group chaired by Brown in London in April 2009, which agreed a $5tn stimulus to the world economy and was duly hailed for preventing a global recession tipping over into a global depression. A year later the highly respected Brookings Institution predicted "that in coming years, the London G20 summit will be seen as the most successful summit in history".

Part of that was good fortune on Brown's part: in 2009 the US and Germany were in broad agreement on what needed to be done. But much of it was down to Brown's own actions as chair. The very attributes that infuriated his domestic colleagues were put to their best use: he worked around the clock preparing for that summit, hectoring, manoeuvring and bullying his fellow world leaders until they had buckled to his will. These were the same behind-the-scenes methods he had used a decade earlier as he pushed fellow finance ministers to relieve developing countries' debts. It wasn't pretty, it wasn't telegenic, but it was effective.

How very different it is today. It was ironic to hear George Osborne castigate his European counterparts for simply "waiting on developments", since that's exactly what he and David Cameron do at these international powwows. One veteran of the summit circuit says that the two Brits regularly turn up with no agenda of their own, so unlike Brown and, to be fair, Tony Blair, who almost always arrived with a plan, ensuring, in the tired phrase, that Britain punched above its weight. (I'm told that, rather poignantly, Brown is still the man with a plan: he was ready with detailed proposals on jobs and global finance had Osborne not blocked him for the top post at the IMF.)

What is even harder for the Tories to stomach is that it was Brown who delivered what they themselves long insisted was the critical policy goal of the past two decades: keeping Britain out of the euro. It was Brown and his legendary five, impossible-to-meet tests that restrained the gung-ho Blair and ensured Britain stayed out of the single currency. Absurdly, Osborne has tried to give the credit for that to William Hague and his save the pound campaign, which rather forgets that both Hague and his campaign were crushed in 2001. If Eurosceptics want to have a hero whose picture they can put on the wall alongside the sainted Margaret, I'm afraid that it's got to be Gordon. That they can't is testament to a visceral hatred not only of Brown but of his chief lieutenant at the time, whose opposition to the euro was total and decisive: Ed Balls.

Least fashionable of all is the case that Brown was right on the deficit. The coalition's entire programme is predicated on the notion that Brown was incontinent with the nation's money, running up colossal debts. But the rise in borrowing from some £40bn to £170bn was not the result of a crazed spending spree. It was the consequence of the crash of 2008 and the subsequent collapse in economic activity, consisting mostly of increased welfare payments – including the dole for those thrown out of work – and declining tax revenues caused by fewer people earning wages. This was a deficit created by crisis, not by profligacy.

If Brown was not the source of the disease, what about his remedy? His preferred approach – over which he fought with, and lost to, Darling among others – was to secure the recovery first, get the economy ticking over nicely, and only then start attacking the deficit. If the economy were growing, shrinking the deficit would be less painful; tackling it too early risked sucking out demand, choking off the recovery and so, paradoxically, increasing the deficit.

Well, guess who called it right. The last quarter with Brown in charge saw growth of just over 1.1%, surpassing all expectations, with unemployment coming down. The economy appeared to be getting back on its feet. But then the deficit fetishists of the coalition took over and the economy stalled, with more growth in that last Brown quarter than in the next four Cameron quarters combined. Suddenly Brown's insistence that growth had to come first looks prescient and wise.

Indeed, there are judgments big and small for which Brown was mocked at the time but which look rather different now. As PM, he overruled Darling, preferring to increase national insurance rather than VAT. Now, thanks to Osborne, we've seen the calamitous impact of a VAT rise on both inflation and demand. More crucially, Brown realised at the start that the economy had to be central, refusing to be diverted to other projects, however worthy, including promised constitutional reform. Barack Obama may well wish he had made the same call, putting healthcare to one side and focusing exclusively on jobs.

Of course, there was much that Brown got badly wrong. Hailing the end of boom and bust was absurd; relying on City and house price bubbles to raise cash was fatal; failing to run a surplus during the good times foolhardy.

But what's intriguing is that these were mistakes made as chancellor, on which Brown's standing remains high. Perhaps a revision is in order, downgrading his record in No 11 but upgrading his performance in No 10. The Conservatives won't ever undertake such an act of revision, the historians might not do it for decades to come. But Labour, whose future prospects partly depend on knowing what to say about its recent past, should do it much sooner.