GIFTING THE GREEKS

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Combine the usual left-liberal bias of The World Tonight with its habitual Europhilia and put Jonty Bloom in charge and you'll get the sort of biased discussion of the EU summit on Greece that we heard on Thursday's edition of the programme. There were three interviewees, all of them firm Europhiles.

First up was Quentin Peel of the Financial Times. Mr Peel seems to share Jonty's preference for the French integrationalist model of Europe, "a coordinated economic policy", over the somewhat more cautious German approach. "But the consequence of what's been happening today in Brussels", said Bloom, "would seem to be that the people who said you couldn't have a Eurozone without that political co-operation, with the financial ministers getting together and having a common policy were right." Prudent Germany's understandable reluctance to make its hard-pressed taxpayers pay for Greece's disgraceful and reckless behaviour was discounted. Germany must help Greece and save the sacred Euro was the clear assumption here: "But Germany will, when push comes to shove, stand behind the Eurozone and that means standing behind Greece eventually?"
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Next up was French finance minister Christine Lagarde. Jonty's Mason-like opposition to sort of remedies needed to tackle an insane level of deficit were apparent here: "But doesn't this also mean that there is a very real danger of Greece going into an even worse recession because it is having to slash spending so much?" You can imagine our Labour politicians blessing Bloom for asking that such a question. All elephants in every room were ignored here.
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The final guest was, perhaps, the most inevitable of all. There just had to be someone from a Europhile think tank. This was arch-Europhile Simon Tilford chief economist of the Centre for European Reform. (For a sample of his thinking see http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/jul/05/european-union-eurosceptic-britain-membership). Jonty and Simon got on like a house on fire.
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Have you heard anyone from a Eurosceptic think tank on the BBC recently? There's certainly been no-one on any of the programmes I review. This is hardly democratic.
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