Greece’s tragic Great Depression is the ultimate symbol of the European Union’s failure

Let one thing be clear: what Greece has endured during the last seven years is not merely a recession, but a full-blown, Jarrow March, 1930s-style Great Depression.

Since 2008, the unemployment rate in the birthplace of democracy has not slipped below 25% and around the same amount has been knocked off national income.

The depression is literally squeezing the life out of the country – with 94% cuts to hospital budgets the starkest feature of its austerity - and has fostered extremist politics.

Now Greece is heading for a state of emergency and exit from the euro after its democratic government refused to make additional cuts demanded by creditors.

Like every Greek tragedy, the country’s ill fate and descent into the abyss seems to have long ago been fixed - and yet it was and is still entirely avoidable.

Greece shoulders some blame for its parlous finances before the global banking crisis, but since then the chief architect of its misery has been the European Union.

The ruling European Commission, together with two other unelected bodies – the European Central Bank and International Monetary Fund - have forced Greece to drink the twin poisons, presented of course as necessary “medicine”, of cuts that can never bring about real growth and debts that it can never repay.

Greece is the clearest possible example of the failure of austerity – especially the triple-espresso eurozone version that makes Britain’s own disastrous policy, watered down by George Osborne after his initial programme triggered a second recession and caused our debt to balloon, look decidedly decaf.

It also represents the ultimate failure of the European Union, whose earliest mission was to enhance the peace and stability of a continent ripped apart by two world wars.

In 2008, had the EU agreed to back Greece’s debts and allowed the country to balance its books organically through growth – and not suffocating the economy by slashing budgets, privatising and thereby redistributing wealth from the poor to the rich – the country would not nearly be in such a hole.

Instead, having ignored the lessons of the 1930s, we now risk having a failed state either inside the EU or, if Greece leaves, just outside, with Middle East terror on its doorstep, a humanitarian crisis on its shore and an aggressive Russia desperately searching for weakened clients to help it undermine its Western nemesis.

Britain, having witnessed both a pre-World War II depression that was worsened by austerity and a post-war boom in which a debt that was almost three times bigger than today’s in scale was steadily shrunk by spending and not cutting, should know better than to sponsor such an economically illiterate policy at Brussels – and, indeed, at home.

Yet it is hardest of all to fathom why Germany, a country whose own descent into the abyss of the Third Reich was in large part caused by a depression-triggering austerity programme imposed on it by foreign nations demanding punitive reparations after the First World War, is the EU’s biggest champion of such a dangerous policy.

The EU’s flagship austerity programme’s main proponents, who surely know full well that forgiving Greek debt and provoking annoying requests from others is much less costly than allowing a Grexit and a proving the single currency was liable to crumble, are almost always wealthy finance chiefs and virtually never economists.

I fear they will risk Greece failing or at least being forever on the brink because they refuse to tolerate what they see as a “far-left” government or encourage the electorates of other countries to follow suit and possibly infringe the rights of the richest 1% to scoop up a bigger and bigger share of our national incomes.

This, in a nutshell, is the EU’s problem: it is a tool of corporations who, while happy to receive public bailouts, resent states and pesky democracy.

I confess that I enjoy the passport perks of EU membership, the idea of cooperating with neighbours and other rights they guarantee.

But, in most other ways I would be happier to leave what has become a rotten, undemocratic institution that is a driver of impoverishing austerity.

I look at what has happened to Greece and I feel utter shame in Britain belonging to what is either a deeply misguided or cruel organisation.

Sadly, the chief proponents of a British exit are nearly all people on the Right who have no problem with rising corporate power, the emaciation of our public realm or, indeed, immigration by the sort of tax-dodging super-rich oligarchs who are busily converting fellow Londoners’ homes into dizzyingly expensive safety deposit boxes.

Tory eurosceptics and members of Nigel Farage’s Thatcherite tribute band frequently talk about reducing European “red tape”– meaning they want fewer workers’ rights, such as the EU guarantee to a minimum of 28 days’ paid annual leave.

And for all these people talk about not being isolationist and reaching out to the world, I know they only mean in terms of trade and never purely for humanitarian reasons.

Yet, if there was a realistic vision for leaving the EU that was truly progressive – like forging a new Britain in which people were put before profit and our country helped rather than condemned long-suffering Greece - I would vote to exit in a heartbeat.