Nigel Farage: Devaluing the Mediterranean to Third World Status

We are devaluing the Mediterranean and it's leading towards Third World status. No amount of socialist state spending can mend this imbalance, and it's about time - if people here cared for the citizens of Europe, particularly in the south - that we admitted the euro does not work for Southern Europe, and it's time that we broke it up and gave countries currencies that reflected their current economic status. Joint Debate: European Semester. European Parliament, Strasbourg, 25. February, 2014. Source: europarl YouTube channel.

Translated by: Jadranko Brkic

(see video below transcript)

Transcript:

Speaker:

Now for a minute and a half I give the floor to Mr Farage on behalf of EFD group.

Nigel Farage:

Well, I've sat here this morning feeling like the odd man out. I mean, to me it's beyond parody for the Greek finance minister, Mr Kourkoulas, to come along here and tell us our fortune.

'The policies are bearing fruit!'

'We're going to tackle unemployment!'

And no one says anything. No, because of course everybody here is tied up with the same obsession: the obsession that the euro must and will work; the obsession that you'll use the crisis to build a United States of Europe.

What you could have told them, Mr Koukoulas, is that according to the respected medical journal The Lancet, there are now 800,000 people in Greece without access to welfare or medical care.

You could have told them that. But even if had they would not have listened, so obsessed are they with building the euro.

Okay, simple lesson in economics. When you have two countries that are completely at different stages of the economic cycle, one currency needs to devalue, but if those countries are pegged or tied inside the same currency and they cannot devalue you have to devalue the country. And that is what is happening to the Mediterranean. We are devaluing the Mediterranean and it's leading towards Third World status.

No amount of socialist state spending can mend this imbalance, and it's about time - if people here cared for the citizens of Europe, particularly in the south - that we admitted the euro does not work for Southern Europe, and it's time that we broke it up and gave countries currencies that reflected their current economic status.

Thank you.

Mr Lamberts, would like to put a question to Mr Farage. Would you like to take that question? Yes. Phillippe, you have 30 seconds.

Phillipe Lamberts (Belgian Greens MEP):

I think that many things you said make alot of sense in terms of devaluation in a currency union is inevitable if there are no transfers. Now, would you then applying the same reasoning to the United Kingdom, say that if the economic cycle of Wales or Scotland or Mnorthern Ireland are different, then probably the best solution would be to desolve the currency union, and to then leave each part of the current union live its not on life eventually with monetary devaluation, instead to solve these asymmetries?

Speaker:

Thank you. Please Mr Farage.

Nigel Farage:

Late Eddie George, the Governor of Bank of England made, he said it's tough enough to have an interest rate that worked for Newcastle and London, let alone to have one that worked across the whole of Europe. So that is a valid economic argument.

However, the taxpayers in London do not object strongly to transfers going to Newcastle or Scotland, or whereever they may be needed, because we are part of the same country. And the problem you've got with the Eurozone is not just this huge economic imbalance between North and South, but an increasingly the taxpayers of the North do not want to go on subsidizing the Soth, because there is no sense of European identity. We are very different countries.