Single market, competition & trade

The eurozone has suffered a deep recession – bigger than the US and about as bad as that in the UK. Public finances across the eurozone have worsened dramatically, and in some cases now look perilous.

It is 20 years since the Berlin Wall crumbled and political and economic freedom started spreading through Eastern Europe. Today, however, the region is mired in deep recession.

The Greek economy is on a very dangerous course. Unless the government takes steps to boost productivity and strengthen public finances, Greece faces a bleak future. 

Disasters often provoke unseemly bouts of finger-pointing. This has certainly been true of the global financial crisis. In the Anglo-Saxon world, libertarians have blamed it on governments, and governments on ‘bankers’. 

Britain’s media and political class have a right to be sceptical about the EU, even hostile to it. But they also have an obligation to be honest about the economic implications of a retreat from full membership of the Union. Their failure to do so is dishonest and poses a serious risk to Britain’s prosperity. 

The British tend to deride France as a hopelessly statist, anti-entrepreneurial country full of bolshie workers intent on extracting disproportionate rewards for their labour and a state too weak to resist them. This characterisation is not wholly inaccurate.

The financial crisis has provoked a dramatic contraction in world trade. With economic activity declining and job losses rising, protectionist pressures are mounting.

Christine Lagarde, the French finance minister, threatens to walk out of the London G20 summit unless France gets its way on tougher financial regulation. The toppled Czech Prime Minister, Mirek Topolanek, who happens to hold the EU presidency, describes the US fiscal stimulus as “the road to hell”. Not one EU leader deems it necessary to support Gordon Brown publicly when he tries to drum up support for a more concerted international effort to revive the global economy.