Like many spoilt brats, the EU tried to run before it could walk – when it not only launched the Euro, but also expanded the Eurozone with indecent haste. Now the precocious boy-dictator has a broken leg called Greece…and boy is it turning ugly.

Way back in 2008, The Slog’s sister (or is it Nanny?) site wrote this:

‘The EU, for example, is only a wobbling toddler as supra-national states go: local politics still dominate, while the obvious waste, corruption and unreal lifestyle of the Brussels bureaucracy remains bitterly resented almost everywhere in the Union…’

The nby/slog axis has insisted since 2006 that tying together 25+ separate countries in different economic cycles with entirely different output structures was the silliest piece of hubris since Icarus went on a day-trip to the sun. We also said consistently that the Germans were uninterested in bailing out the Lithuanias, Hungarys, Greeces and Spains….and UKs.

Merkel very nearly scuppered the whole ‘deal’ over Greece at the summit last week – and she was quite right to stick some steel up the Brussels spine. A new poll in Germany on Friday showed she has the overwhelming support of German electors overall – and business there in particular. But the EU Commission itself (remarkably) rang some alarm bells when it issued a statement the day before saying that ‘the large differences in performance by country threaten both confidence and cohesiveness’. (“Please mummy – I stuck my hand in the fire, and now it hurts yaaaaaaaaaa”).

But to make things worse, weekend figures in Athens show the recession there deepening. So in this context, who’d be ECB boss Jean-Claude Trichet? He would like more monetary discipline, but the politicians would like less. Twas ever thus….but one suspects the pole-climbers will win the debate – thus launching the EU on the autoroute to hyper-inflation. It is also, mind you, another example of how the current version of capitalism can never hope to please many folks at once: Benthamite it isn’t.

Meanwhile it’s good to see that the FT has joined The Slog camp in naming and shaming the Euro as ludicrously overpriced. I’m waiting another few weeks yet before I change my Sterling into French-summer Euros.