This little PIG went to market

The PIG I allude to is Portugal, Ireland and Greece.

The market? Well, that’s the one that had started off as the eminently sensible Common Market and evolved into the uncontrollable monster that we know today as the European Union.

But it is still a market - a money market where member states, bankrupt and bereft of morals, go for hand-outs.

Big ones.

It’s where Dick Turpin and turpitude come together.

Portugal, we now learn, would like their hard working, economically prudent neighbours around Europe to dig deep. Deep enough to find 80 billion euros to patch up their profligacy.

It’s not fair. It’s not right. And it’s not on.

Except that it is….on, I mean.

But why?

Well, that’s easy.

Our unelected representatives collect prodigious sums of money from member states.

They then skim off the cream to cover their salaries, pensions and expense accounts. And when I say expense accounts, I really mean the pâté de foie gravitas of expense accounts.

It’s serious stuff.

From what is left, they then exercise vicarious munificence in doling out our dosh.

It is in their interest to keep the show on the road, the train on the track and their snouts in the trough.

Pigs all.

So what’s the solution?

Instead of hand-outs, let’s offer secured loans.

In return, the Portuguese might offer the Algarve, the French their vineyards, the Italians their art treasures and the Germans their sausage industry.

Fortunately, Britain didn’t subscribe to the Euro. But if we had, what could we have offered that Europe would possibly want?

Well, probably nothing of any real value except the desperate promise that one day we would take back Neil and Glenys Kinnock.

Poor Europe has suffered for long enough.