During the financial crisis, we saw measures around the world to prop up the global system. The EU was very slow into the process ,and some continental banks such as Deustche Bank came very close to disaster.

Many parts of the EU, particularly Club Med countries, have continued in a moribund mode with very large public debt to GDP ratios, in particular Italy - and we all know what happened to Greece.

Italy has seen almost no growth for nearly twenty years and the EU system effectively means it was incapable of recovering, perhaps ever, and that was before coronavirus. Any attempt by the Italian people to change their fate as a slave state of the EU project has repeatedly been crushed with Brussels parachuting into the position of Prime Minister technocrats who were a reliable part of the project

All this has suited Germany, who have enjoyed an artificially low currency valuation while engineering a system of credit which has allowed Club Med to continue buying, effectively all adding up to an unfair subsidy to German industry, quite apart from the German KFW private sector preferential loan system, which is free of state aid rules.

Underpinning all this also has been the City of London, whose strong regulatory regime, reliability and access to deep capital markets has propped up EU ratings. All the while the European Central Bank is sitting on bundles of bad debt, bought over the years since 2007, as bust governments were propped up by bust banks buying bust bonds. Ultimately, all this only defied gravity because of funny money printed by the ECB.

No doubt the ECB thought it would eventually be able to socialise that debt amongst European taxpayers, including the UK. Brexit has cut off that greatest of payers leaving Germany and a handful of others to foot the bill. There is no evidence within the EU so far of anything other than the supremacy and insularity of the nation state. The EU appears to be the paper tiger that it is, once tested.