The Euro: Thatcherism by other means

It’s a grim time for supporters of the Euro project like me.  Hardly a day goes by without hearing some highly patronizing person going on about how a country fixing its exchange rate is a terrible idea  because it can’t then devalue when it hits trouble, and how the austerity policies in the Euro zone are doomed to fail.  One irony is that many of these people are from the the political right; the sort of people who think that the Thatcher revolution of the 1980s was not just a good thing, but a turning point for the British economy.  In fact the Euro advocates are proposing very similar medicine for southern Europe.

The UK economy inherited by Mrs Thatcher in 1979 was a mess.  Both unemployment and inflation were persistent, and the country was referred to to as “the sick man of Europe”.  Mrs Thatcher’s solution was to focus on the long or medium term drivers of success, with utter contempt for short-term palliatives.  She progressively liberalised the economy, and in particular the labour market, then dominated by trade union power, and taxation, which had reached punitive levels on the rich (and not so rich, come to that).  In macroeconomic policy she believed in squeezing down inflation through tough monetary and fiscal policies.  Interest rates soared.  Amongst other things, the pound rapidly appreciated.  This was all part of the medicine.

The results were indeed dramatic.  Unemployment got much worse, with devastation sweeping through great swathes of industry – all of which makes our current troubles look like small beer, even though, according to GDP statistics, we are supposed to be in a worse mess now.  But in due course the economy prospered and reached undreamed of heights – though some parts of the country never recovered.

Back to the Euro zone.  The underlying problem with all of the currently struggling economies, except Ireland maybe, is not entirely dissimilar to that faced by Britain in 1979.  A host of product market, labour market and tax inefficiencies have conspired to make their economies relatively uncompetitive.  The political will to tackle these problems has been lacking.  Before the Euro they could simply let their currencies slide to offset this lack of competitiveness.  But all this did was to ensure that the living standards of citizens stayed below their potential.  And it was unsustainable in the long term; eventually you get to stagflation and even hyperinflation – a fate which Portugal in particular was reaching before the Euro project offered rescue.  Once in the Euro devaluation is not an option, and so politicians have to focus on medium and long term reforms.  This is what they are now doing, some with more enthusiasm (say Portugal) than others (say Italy).

Mrs Thatcher, of course, would never approve of a country joining the Euro – she treasured national sovereignty too much – but she would have approved of many of its consequences.  Mrs Thatcher did not believe in devaluation.

But this is hardly an advertisement for the Euro for many.  A lot of people still think that the Thatcher years were a period of gratuitous violence with adverse consequences that we are still suffering.  It was she that was responsible for the trashing of so much British manufacturing, with the appreciating pound very much part of this.  And the work she started was capably continued by Messrs Brown and Blair, since a high pound, together with aggressive exporting practices from China and India, had a similar effect in the 2000s – albeit compensated by unsustainable jobs in finance and building.

And there is no avoiding that the southern European economies need to go through a process of harsh economic reform, or else suffer a slow slide into poverty.  Euro advocates had always foreseen this; what they had not foreseen was that reduced government borrowing costs once in the Euro would allow these countries to put off the evil day, only to make it infinitely worse when it arrived.

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