The euro won’t collapse, Barack Obama won’t lose the White House – and Labour’s lumbered with Ed Miliband.
By Janet Daley of Daily Telegraph.
It has become this column’s tradition to commemorate the start of a new year by making negative predictions. According to my own rules, I may only contra-predict events which seem, at the moment, to be reasonably likely to occur. So here it is – my list of Things That Will Not Happen in 2012 (even though you thought they would):
1) The euro will not collapse. That is to say, it will not cease to exist as a currency, despite the philosophy and the economic assumptions on which it rests being utterly discredited. As a consequence of the latter, the euro as an idea will have to be reinvented as a purely pragmatic way of avoiding a catastrophic banking collapse rather than as an idealistic solution to the historic mutual loathing of neighbouring European nations.
This downgrading of the single currency project from idyllic dream of eternal harmony to half-baked, impromptu rescue operation will create enormous bitterness and dissatisfaction. Accusations and recriminations will fly across borders, making last year’s preliminary skirmish between Nicolas Sarkozy and David Cameron look like a pillow fight. More important, what remains of the euro in the conceptual sense will become even less plausible: the suspension of disbelief required to sustain it will exhaust the moral resources of the European political class. So the currency will survive but credible democratic politics as we know it will largely be at an end.
2) A corollary to number 1): fully-fledged democracy will not return to Greece or Italy – whatever promises are now being made about elections in the coming months. If elections are held in the near future, they will involve the participation of caretaker candidates, whose “technocratic” function will be remarkably similar to the puppet regimes which have been put in place by the EU (which is to say, France and Germany). Indeed, they may be the very same people seeking the imprimatur of a popular mandate. This will not particularly worry the Italians, who are contemptuous of their own politicians, believing them to be either criminals or clowns, and whose social solidarity allows them largely to ignore national politics which they see as inherently ludicrous.
But the Greeks will rebel – and the disorder that results will make it impossible for the euro, even in its reconstructed form, to prevail in that country. So Greece will be ejected, perhaps from the EU as well as the euro, not for economic reasons but for political ones: because it will not embrace the deception of the new euro myth that it is only the survival of the single currency which can save us from hell on earth. Greece will be excommunicated and then quarantined so as to avoid the spread of its dangerous dissident views.