Those whom the Gods wish to destroy, they first send mad. So predicted some ancient Roman sage, who obviously understood the mentality of the rulers of the Roman Emprire and its successor, the European Union.

I’m sorry to bang on about the Eurozone, but the extraordinary efforts of the member countries to bail out Greece in order to protect their precious project beggar belief. Full marks to those Slovak politicians who last night dared to point to the emperor’s lack of clothes, but it still seems likely that their victory will be overturned by the end of the week in a new vote.

Let’s just look at the facts: Greece is bust and the team from the IMF and European Central Bank auditing Athens’ progress in implementing the conditions of the last bail-out deal agree that not enough has been done. So what happens? the powers that be decide to let them have a few more million euros anyway.

In the real world, you don’t solve your debts problem by borrowing more money. So why should we think that this works for governments? We now have a totally bonkers situation where the rich northern European countries are pouring umpteen billions of taxpayers’ euros into a bottomless pit to maintain the illusion that the Eurozone works.

All these shenanigans might be quite entertaining if their ramifications were not so serious. The costs of sticking bandaids over the gaping fizzures in the grandiose European edifice are likely to tip the whole continent back into recession. Money spent bailing out banks or bankrupt economies cannot be spent on financing businesses. And recession in the EU, which is the UK’s biggest market, will inevitably adversely affect British companies.

So I’m afraid it’s going to be a while longer before we see what Norman Lamont used to call the green shoots of recovery.

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