YV

Well, the treaties do have to change, and the rules must be changed. They are idiotic; they cannot work. But! Politically speaking, if you go out there and say to people, “Vote for us, because we believe that we need to change the rules so as to ameliorate the crisis that is destroying you,” people will look at you and say “Well, changing the rules will take twenty years: do you want us to die in the meantime?”

So, this is why I have been working on the Modest Proposal. The question is, what can be done tomorrow morning to stabilize the crisis effectively, to stabilize the lives of citizens — to stop this punitive austerity, within the rules. That’s not because I don’t want to change the rules, but because the only way of changing the rules is by creating a kind of green-investment-led growth [to boost] the incomes of the victims of the crisis so that we can have the political space in which we can then start having a genuine discussion about what kind of rules we want, once we have changed them.

To give you an example, take green investment: it’s not that we need something like FDR’s New Deal. 5 percent of GDP can be spent on infrastructure. In the present era, unlike in the 1930s, we need green infrastructure. Green energy, a green transport system: Europe is really very much behind in all these areas. So, we need something like five to six hundred billion [euros] a year. Where does the money come from? The [EU’s member] states can’t afford it, and there’s all sorts of rules. Is there anything we can do, legally, tomorrow morning, to get that five hundred billion? We think, yes.

We are making a very clear proposal. You have the European Investment Bank, which belongs to all of us. It’s been issuing junk bonds now for twenty-five, thirty years, they are AAA rated even by these terrible credit agencies. Say it issues five hundred billion every year. But some say, “No you can’t do that, the price [of the bonds] will fall, the yields will go up” and so on.

But it just takes one press conference. The European Central Bank could announce just for those bonds, and for no others, that if the yields start going up, it will buy them. But they will not be divided. Because in Europe today we have around two and a half trillion euros in the banking and financial system doing nothing, sloshing around, just bidding up house prices and doing damage but not being invested. So, we just need one press conference.

Of course, you need the political will, for the leaders to give the orders for that to happen. But here is an example of what you can say to people out there who ask, “So what’s the solution?” I’m not saying that it will be implemented. But to get people angry with the establishment, not with the foreigners, the other, the Muslims, the Jews, the Greeks, the Germans, and so on, what you have to do is to channel the anger properly, into a rational anger.

This crisis is unnecessary: we could change it tomorrow morning. It’s not that we’ll have socialism, it’s not that we’ll have the best of all possible worlds. But it’s something far, far better than what we have today. That is how you build up your political capital as a progressive.