There was a sentence in one of Christopher Booker's latest Sunday Telegraph articles which caught my attention:
....we must never forget that equally mad campaign some years back, led by the BBC and politicians such as Michael Heseltine, Chris Patten and Kenneth Clarke, to get Britain into the euro. In 2003 the BBC’s Evan Davis famously made a documentary explaining how happy the Greeks were at last to have a currency that was “stable” and “quite secure”. All these people were carried away by one of the greatest acts of collective make-believe of our time. As the resulting tragi-farce now unfolds daily before us, they also should never be allowed to forget it.
For anyone who wants to re-visit that famous documentary, there's a full transcript of it available online.
I have to say, on reading it (having Googled it this morning), that it turns out to be not quite as straightforward a pro-euro piece as Christopher Booker remembers it as being. A number of potential downsides were examined too.
And the Telegraph columnist doesn't quite do the BBC man justice, given that Evan didn't really explain "how happy the Greeks were" about the change to the euro (that was probably just hyperbole on CB's part) and Evan did interview quite a few Greeks who complained about price rises due to converting to the euro. Plus, Evan also qualified the word "stable" with "relatively".
That said, the overall impression I got from reading it was the Evan was indeed pushing the pluses more than the minuses when it came to joining the euro.
Please read it for yourselves though.
Looking back, however, the passage CB specifically refers to does make for grimly ironic reading today:
Please read it for yourselves though.
Looking back, however, the passage CB specifically refers to does make for grimly ironic reading today:
00.07.50 Evan Davis There's the Olympic Stadium. You'll be seeing more of that next year. 00.07.57 Evan Davis Now Barbara has fixed up an appointment for me with the chairman of the company whose site we've just been looking at. And he's one; he's a household name in Greece, right. He's a top man. 00.08.10 Evan Davis The folks in the market had complained [about price rises]. So was he yearning for the days of the Drachma? 00.08.16 Prodromus Emfietzoglou Welcome. Welcome. It's a pleasure to meet you. 00.08.17 Evan Davis Thank you very much indeed. Good to see you. Good to see you. Thank you for having us. 00.08.22 Evan Davis So we saw your Olympic site this morning. Very Impressive. Is it going to be finished on time? 00.08.27 Aston PRODROMUS EMFIETZOGLOU Chairman, Michaniki S.A. Certainly we will finish early, early September this year, so it'll be on time for the Olympic Games. 00.08.37 Evan Davis What was wrong with the Drachma? I mean why didn't the Drachma work quite as well? Was it the inflation? Because it did have much more inflation. 00.08.44 Prodromus Emfietzoglou It had inflation. As a result we had high interest. As a result we had difficult approach to, to the banks, so we had a disadvantage. Money was costing to Greek companies too much. It was a high burden. 00.09.06 Prodromus Emfietzoglou From the other side you have high inflation. So it was always an effort to cope with the inflation, to cope with the interest rates, and that was a problem. Now things are clear. We have a stable situation. Stability is very important for business. 00.09.30 Greek music 00.09.33 Evan Davis Stability - Gordon Brown's favourite word. It's not one of his five tests, but if it was, the Euro would pass. 00.09.40 Music 00.09.47 Evan Davis Before leaving Athens you've got to see the Parthenon, built two and a half thousand years ago when the whole concept of money was in its relative infancy. 00.09.58 Evan Davis You might ask whether the Euro could last two and a half thousand years, but I think that would be pushing it a bit, wouldn't it? But at least it does seem to pass the first requirement of a currency. It's relatively stable, it's quite secure and it's broadly accepted. 00.10.12 Evan Davis There are teething problems, and the Greeks have been the first to notice those, but at a kind of everyday level the Euro does work. 00.10.20 Evan Davis That's a useful message, yet it doesn't tell us why we might actually want to join. For that we move on.
Stability - Gordon Brown's favourite word. It's not one of his five tests, but if it was, the Euro would pass.
ReplyDeleteI think he meant "excessive borrowing and spending".