Andrew Neather: For a lesson in real hardship look at Greece
Andrew Neather
3/10/2012
The grape-pickers gathered around a makeshift altar in the winery as a chubby Greek Orthodox priest intoned prayers over a bowl of water. The water thus made holy — a miracle? — the black-clad priest sprinkled it on us with a bunch of basil. A harvest blessing — and in Naoussa this year it will be good. But it’s hard to escape the feeling in Greece that the country needs little short of a miracle to save it.
What is striking is not the headlines — the government announcing fresh budget cuts on Monday as part of an €11.5 billion package, or the predicted drop in GDP of a quarter between 2008 and 2013. It’s the way the crisis is cutting into the daily lives of all but the richest Greeks in a way still unimaginable even in recession-bound Britain.
Disposable income has plummeted 30 per cent in the past two years. All wages and salaries are down, while taxes are up sharply. The price of petrol has almost doubled. It is hurting the middle classes: one smart Athenian told me, “everyone thought their child would be a lawyer or a doctor”, but now some young people are instead returning to the land.
Further down the social scale, it gets worse. The suicide rate, once one of Europe’s lowest, has doubled. Food banks are swamped. And support for the neo-Nazi Golden Dawn party hit 22 per cent in one poll last week.
The winemakers I was there to visit told a sorry tale. Sales of wine in Greece are down 60 per cent. Half of the country’s wine wholesalers have gone bust. “The hotels and restaurants are a dead industry,” one producer told me. “It’s killing us — people have no money to go out,” said another. Credit has disappeared: he has to pay his Italian bottle manufacturer and Portuguese cork-maker in cash.
The impact isn’t all negative. Winemakers are redoubling their efforts to export. There is a rash of tech start-ups. And in Thessaloniki, winemaker Yiannis Boutaris, the independent mayor elected in 2010, has managed to squeeze more than 30 per cent in cuts from the city’s bloated budget.
Still, seeing a European country in this spiral is a reality check for any Brit. Politicians on both sides here compete to run down the state of our schools, our transport, our public finances. We lazily describe slightly scruffy services as “Third World” (Heathrow a “Third World airport”? Try Thessaloniki). In truth, as we fleetingly realised during the Olympics, we’re a prosperous, secure, pretty well-run country. As the euro crisis deepens, we may need to tighten our belts — but we should keep a sense of proportion.
