The New Statesman

For Yanis Varoufakis, lockdown has not been a time of contemplation. “I have more work now than I ever did. As you know, everything has shifted to Zoom meetings, which means zero separation between the private and the public,” he explained when we spoke recently, during one such video call.

What are we to make of a political class that proclaims its ethical commitments but that cannot bring itself to endorse the only concrete actions that would honour them?

The left-wing party’s embrace of austerity created the conditions for a parasitic and cruel oligarchy to return
The Greek right is back: greedier, uglier and more focused than ever. The incoming New Democracy government is determined to reclaim full control of the state on behalf of the most parasitic segment of Greece’s oligarchy and, of course, of our country’s ruthless creditors.

Forget the People’s Vote: the upcoming elections for European Parliament have become the new second referendum. To one side, Nigel Farage hopes to gather the Leave vote behind his new Brexit Party. To the other, a splintered coalition of Greens, Changers, Lib Dems, and Labour candidates are campaigning for Remain. Both sides agree on the primary purpose of these European elections: “vote so you can be heard on Brexit.”

The memory of past greatness can be debilitating for a people who feel they have failed to rise to a historic occasion.  We Greeks have been burdened by this sensation at various moments in our postwar history: in 1967, when we failed to prevent a military coup; or more recently in 2015, when we allowed the troika of the EU, the IMF and the European Central Bank to crush us. Brexit Britain is, today, wallowing in a similar sense of having betrayed both its past and its future. A “Speech of Hope” for Britain is now more necessary than ever as the country endures a humiliating impasse.

Britain is teetering on a knife’s edge: about to crash out of, or back into, the European Union. Either outcome would represent a defeat for democracy in the UK and in the EU. Crashing out would inflict substantial economic hardship on the weakest in Britain. It would boost jingoism and parochialism, drive England further apart from Scotland and Ireland, and expose the UK to the vagaries of a Trump administration eager to divide Europe and to liberate US corporations operating on British soil from all social and environmental constraints.

In 2016, shortly before the EU referendum, Yanis Varoufakis warned that the UK was destined for a “Hotel California Brexit”: it could check out but it could never leave. The former Greek finance minister spoke from experience. In 2015, his efforts to end austerity – “fiscal waterboarding” – were thwarted by the EU (a struggle recorded in his memoir Adults in the Room: My Battle With Europe’s Deep Establishment).

The Left must adopt a new, credible EU policy agenda: It’s time to explain how the bloc, and the euro, could be run differently, democratically and sustainably

Italy’s recent political crisis has at once confirmed the European Union’s unsustainability and the left’s impotence.

After successfully quashing Greece’s 2015 debtor’s prison break, Europe’s deep establishment has embarked on a mission to declare the country’s economic and social crisis over. To recall Tacitus, “they make a desert and they call it peace”. Since 2015, the Greek state has paid its creditors a sum equal to the aggregate pre-tax revenues of all Greek businesses over an 18-month period. And as if these pounds of flesh were insufficient, between now and 2030, the state must pay the creditors almost twice that sum, and more than three times the same amount between 2030 and 2060.

Yanis Varoufakis Q&A: “My despondencies have become a source of energy”

The economist talks “Stairway to Heaven”, game theory, and how to make good predictions.

What’s your earliest memory?

The first time I flew in a passenger plane. I must have been about four and I was very impressed and very scared by it.