From here on, the more squabbling there is, the better we will be

As most financial journalists with a reasonable breadth of euro-contacts will tell you at the moment, the Paris v Berlin v ECB briefing war has been at its height for several weeks now. I can also report that in the last two days, it’s gone up several notches; and as usual, it began in the Elysees Palace.

There’s a very clever piece of black diplomacy going on here. The French know that the one large bone of contention between Berlin and Washington is that Tim ‘Bazooka’ Geithner would like to raid the ECB for market-reassuring firepower (anything to save the Fed) and Das MerkeSchauble would rather eat glass than do that. But the French want exactly the same thing, for use in the sandbagging of its banks (anything to save the gold reserves). So Berlin faces a war on two fronts re this one; but they’ve done his many times before, and they aren’t going to give in.

This morning, I learn, Sarko threw another hissy fit about this, yelling in the presence of several shocked aides to the effect that “the big-arsed Kraut” is deliberately throwing France to the wolves. He has a point, although not completely – see this morning’s Slogpost. She’s more in the business of knocking Napoleon down a peg or two rather than strangling him.

But this is far from the only problem Nico has. Although a couple of polls last week showed him getting a bounce on the basis of tough-talking to Italy and Greece (the French like shouting at foreigners even more than we do) it’s already obvious that, at the first sign of real job losses, les syndicats (the Unions) are going to get seriously uppity. Yesterday, Peugeot dispensed with the services of 3,000 car workers and middle management – none of whom, by the way, are being given the obligatory red card: all are being paid or pensioned off at their own wish. But Le Monde reported that union leaders were ‘furious because they’d been told all the  job losses would be pushed overseas’. Workers of the World Unite, and all that.

The French workforce is, without question, the most unreconstructed leftover from the 1970s still extant on Earth. Watch French TV news bulletins about industrial relations, and it’s remarkable how many of the syndicalistes look like Derek Hatton. But as I hinted in this morning’s piece here, Germany is a long, long way from being united behind the Integration Blitzkrieg.

“We need a common market, not one currency,” said Anton Börner during an interview with the BBC yesterday. He is the president of the BGA, an German industry federation that represents 120,000 small and medium-size exporters in Germany. This SME sector is a driving force behind German surpluses, and represents huge success in contrast to the UK’s pathetic failure. Börner went on to point out that, “The German taxpayer is not going to pay anymore….the southern European countries need to do the job themselves, and not wait for money from abroad.”

Anton Börner represents a view in Germany with which I’m very familiar: small and larger private family businesses dismissive of City slickers, who do their best to give banks as little money as possible…..and above all, who mightily distrust the hubris of politicians and their spendthrift ways. It also exists further up the food chain among the more provincial banking sector….and further down, it is rife among the the ordinary German Arbeiter: as in the UK, the SPD is far from getting every working person’s vote in the BundesRepublik.

This is the many-headed hydra with which the CDU leadership must deal. When exporting entrepreneurs like Börner say they want free trade not Superstate bollocks, there is hope for us all. When sober bankers say they prefer Triple A to a Grosseuropa, we can relax slightly. And when blokes like the FDP’s Frank Schaffler challenge the complete drivel masquerading as integrationist rationales, then the democratic heart might even start to sing a little.

I say this because the road to the USE is far from a clear run for those in Berlin, Brussels and Washington who’d like to zoom along it. In an odd kind of way, I rather hope the markets lose the plot as things deteriorate: there is every chance that, having got themselves into a feeding frenzy, the bond folks will lose the plot, upset the whole apple-cart….and then fall foul of the common sense still alive and well in real, sharp-end, growing business sectors.

What a delicious irony it would be if good old-fashioned capitalism delivered us from the clutches of geopoliticians, investment bankers, and jelly-spined politicians.