EU keeps fumbling and spending

There's much silly talk about that EU heads of government shouldn't be on holiday. For all the good they've done so far, they may as well stay there.

Their predecessors were told that the new euro would never last, because of the differences in economic performance between member countries. Perpetual subsidies by the north to the south on the necessary scale were never going to be practical politics, but the EU's politicians recklessly shut their eyes to that - among them the facile Blair.

So the politicians shovelled their voters into the eurozone, and now they are fumbling its restructuring into manageable units, at continuing costs to their taxpayers. If they had kicked out Greece and Portugal as soon as it became obvious they would have to default and devalue at some point, there would certainly have been turmoil. But turmoil will happen anyway. In the politicians' defence it is argued that they had to give their banks time to cut their holdings of doubtful sovereign debt. But who was responsible for the financial regulation which allowed banks to get into that situation in the first place?

So for all their fumbling and bumbling the politicians may as well stay on holiday. But the French are probably busy, working on plans to obfuscate their banks' huge holdings of Greek debt, maybe with the aim of palming them off onto some EU institution or other.

How long will EU taxpayers continue to put up with this? Opinion polls may show them expressing high levels of trust in the EU - but for how much longer?

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The Guardian continues its series reporting how beastly things are for people in Greece under the austerity. Yes ... and? Things are a lot beastlier a few miles away across the Mediterranean. Greece doesn't believe in paying its debts. Never has. In governance, as a country you pay for what you get, and Greece has chosen governments which continue to run up debt the country won't be able to repay.

The world - and even the EU - will at some point stop lending to Greece altogether, because it thinks it won't get its money back. Greece will have to default on its debts. But that won't do it much good unless it can also contrive a currency devaluation. Only question: will it do that after a revolution, or before? By the time Greece accepts the inevitable, how much more of their countries' money will the banks and the eurozone governments have squandered?