THAT SUMMER FEELING

DESPITE THE FACT THAT summer is upon us and under normal circumstances we might expect Britain should be more concerned about watching cricket and tennis and the price of strawberries, Portugal and Greece should be roasting sardines and slaughtering goats, respectively, and guzzling wine, in both cases, and Syrians should be doing nothing, as usual, the situation in these once mighty nations is far from easy as the dreaded crucial Thursday creeps towards us.

Que Syria, Syria

Presisent Bashar AL-Assad was elected head of Syria in 2000 after his father, the previous democratically-elected president, died. The job had been democratically lined up for his older brother, who died in car accident, which made the Syrian parliament have to lower the age requirements for being president to precisely Bashar’s age, so that everything would be “legal”. As an ophthalmologist, one might have expected Bashar to have a little more foresight in his policies when he noticed what was going on in the Arab Spring, particularly in Libya, which for many years was a single nation with Syria. Tomorrow the pro-democracy protesters, or “Islamic fundamentalists”, or “paid assassins”, or “mad dog criminals”, depending on how one sees the world, intend to hold their greatest movement of the last 106 days.

Elbow Greece

Minnesota-born Georgios Papandreou, the Greek PM, and son and grandson of previous Prime Ministers of Greece – a fact that shows that remarkable coincidences sometimes take place even in democracies – must have learned something from spending most of his life in the USA, Canada, the UK and Sweden, because on becoming prime minister the first thing he did was to honestly announce the state of Greek finances and debt. This led to the first collapse, and so, in a way, he is responsible for the mess. However, what he did not learn in these countries was a sense of democracy, given that the only member of his PASOK party who voted against his austerity measures earlier today has been expelled from his party and will thus lose his seat in parliament.

Allerta Portugalikos

My pun might be lost on those who have not had the benefit of a classical education, but there is very little I can do about that. Pedro Manuel Mamede Passos Coelho, the debonair, matching-tie-and-handkerchief new Portuguese PM and head of the Social Democrat “orange” Party, appears to possess some dignity. However, in a complete volte-face typical of politicians the world over, even before his government has been fully sworn in, he has just announced a special once-only “austerity income tax”, something against which he argued violently when in opposition, and which has not been used as an emergency measure since the time of the hated former PM and president Mário Soares. The outrage caused by this announcement is a rare case of a political honeymoon being over before anyone got their knickers off.

David and Uriah

Yet betrayal and u-turns are best seen at work in the hands of the recent master of these things, our very own David Cameron, cousin to Queen Elizabeth and direct descendant of King William IV. Cameron is also an unelected prime minister, depending upon the support of Nick Clegg and his lily-livered Liberals to stake his claim to office. Yet Cameron is acting as if Clegg does not exist (as is the Liberal Democrat party), pushing though a raft of ultra right economic policies and only conceding to the LibDems in their more fluffy and wooly demands, such as allowing homosexual men to hold hands in the street and to take away CCTV cameras from the doors of wine bars.

PUBLIC AWARENESS OF THE CYNICISM involved in Cameron’s approach is only just becoming apparent; tomorrow will see the largest anti-government protest in Britain since the 1970s, involving 750,000 public sector workers going on a one-day strike as a reaction to the news that their pensions will have to be cut in order to make them viable. This is after increasing student fees from £3,000 to £9,000 in order to allow students to “get a better deal”; after reducing government grants to local councils to less than 20% of what they were five years ago in order “to allow councils to provide better services”; after threatening to sell half of National Health Service provisions to private companies in order “to streamline the service” and give more efficiency “to everybody”; and proposing to reduce prison sentences by 50% in order to “save money” and “produce fairer justice”.

FORTUNATELY, IN THE UNITED KINGDOM WE HAVE an educated middle-class and a responsible, prying press that will not kowtow to politicians, and so the latter two measures were fiercely contested and the government had to back-track, or “listen to the people and respond”, as Cameron put it. As Cameron likes listening so much he will no doubt have his ear to the ground tomorrow.

IN THE OTHER THREE COUNTRIES facing a difficult Thursday neither of these elements are present. Friends of mine sometimes say I am a little harsh on politicians; by comparison this is true. But one single measure in each case in Greece, Spain and Portugal has been enough to ruin the economy. In each case I believe that the ministers responsible were well-meaning, but were as stupid and short-sighted as any Arab despot. In order to stimulate tourism, in a country with a lot of islands and sea with fish in it, the Greek government reduced taxation on charter boats to almost nothing about twenty years ago. The idea was that many entrepreneurs would invest in this profitable and expanding area of tourism. Am I alone in seeing what would happen?

PERHAPS NOT, AS I KNOW OF AT LEAST one journalist who saw what was coming down the pike. Alike laws in Portugal and Ireland had a similar result: in order to stimulate literary writing, both Ireland and Portugal exempted “writers” or “intellectual workers” from income tax (or reduced it to 5% in some cases). No minister ever bothered to define what a “writer” or “intellectual” was. The result in both cases was that hundreds of thousands of independent professional workers such as doctors, lawyers, dentists, accountants, film directors, actors, real estate brokers, financial advisors and translators – all of whom earning top wages even on a European scale – declared their income as “intellectual work” or “writing” (one article a year in a trade journal would be enough) and were thus spared thousands and thousands of Euros, Escudos and Irish Pounds in tax.

THE GOVERNMENTS OF THESE countries threw away tax income through an ill-thought-out policy. In the Greek case thousands of top-of-the-range yachts have been declared “charter boats” (one paying guest a year will do) and the professionals channel all their tax returns into the “charter business”, even if their main income is being a lawyer. This is a real example of governments getting it wrong; the easy way to recover the lost revenue  and get out of the mess is to increase income tax for the lower classes by 5% or so, or VAT by 11%, or to reduce wages by 20%, as in Greece. Or all three, thereby, whether through error or design, shifting the weight of tax from the upper middle class professionals to the lowest earners. People are protesting on the streets as it is; I imagine that if they knew and understood how their leaders make such stupid mistakes they would be a lot crosser.