The Spectator /John R. MacArthur (extracts)– All through our trip to Greece this August, beginning in Athens and ending in Crete, I was struck by the grim expressions on the faces of so many of the people, even on the most prosperous islands and in the most upscale neighbourhoods. This didn’t stop many of them from smiling through their weariness. The restaurateurs and shopkeepers certainly were glad to meet anyone with money to spend, but I also sensed genuine courage and determination, beyond mere neediness, to survive the fiscal screws now being applied by Frankfurt and Brussels.
Greece’s history of resistance to foreign domination had already seized my imagination when we visited Athens, where I paid homage to Lord Byron in Vyronos, the street named for him near our hotel in the Plaka. It’s difficult to feel romantic about Greek rebellion against Ottoman tyranny in the vicinity of so many cheap trinket shops, graffiti and beggars, but such is the poet’s power that even the shadow of Lord Elgin’s vandalism of the Acropolis couldn’t dim my excitement about Byron’s political footprint. But for me Elgin’s offence paled in light of contemporary German cruelty. As the guide put it, ‘We’re not our own country anymore.’
On the island of Naxos, the prosperous-looking administrative capital of the Cyclades, Greece’s actual depression hit me. We were staying in a hotel owned by the New Democracy governor of Naxos, Ioannis Margaritas, and supervised by his charming wife, Maria Polikreti, also a high school classics teacher.
Even hard-working, pro-euro capitalists were penalised by the European Commission’s economic orthodoxy. Maria didn’t absolve Germany of blame, but she was more critical of the prevailing orthodoxies of the Greek political establishment — in particular, too many unmotivated public employees. ‘When I tell people I want to quit teaching to work more in the family business, they are astonished,’ she said. ‘Why would anybody give up the security of a civil service job?’
I don’t doubt that Greece’s public-employment sector is bloated, or that tax collection is corrupt, or that Greek politicians, both left and right, have been lying to their constituents for decades about the state of public finances.
Everywhere I went people spoke about the left-wing government of Alexis Tsipras with cynicism and a sense of betrayal. The beleaguered prime minister, meanwhile, sounds increasingly desperate about Greek’s impossibly high debt payments and EU strictures on his government’s freedom to spend, tax and hire under the terms of the 2015 bailout.
In a recent interview with Le Monde, he denounced ‘the EU’s neo-liberal intransigence’ regarding debt relief, and made a pretty good rhetorical joust: ‘We need to decide collectively if we’re a European Union or a German Europe.’ However, with a stagnant GDP, an unemployment rate of 23.5 percent, and no important friends outside of renegade economists like Joseph Stiglitz, it’s hard to see how Tsipras can avert further humiliation for his country.
Which is where Britain could step in. While the foreign office negotiates new trade terms with the EU, why not request a special trade relationship with Greece on humanitarian and historical grounds? This would infuriate the Germans, of course, so the UK could counter with an invitation to Tsipras to join the Commonwealth — a symbolic gesture that would acknowledge Greece’s status as a de facto German colony as well as Athens’ ambition to once again be independent along with all the former British colonies. Absurdly romantic? Lord Byron would have approved, and so might have Sir Arthur Evans, whose generous gift to Greece of the Knossos archaeological dig in Crete stands in brilliant contrast to Lord Elgin’s thoughtless greed.
Thus might Brexiters be magnanimous in victory and lobby the British Museum to return the Elgin Marbles to Athens, at least on the basis of a permanent sharing agreement — say, three years at the Acropolis Museum and then back to England for three years. It is a sort of historical crime not to reassemble the British-held pieces of the Parthenon frieze with the smaller sections I saw mournfully displayed in Athens. With that act of diplomacy might begin the reassembling of the broken pieces of Greek democracy and pride.
