Interviewed on the Andrew Marr Show this morning Michael Gove again showed scant regard for the truth where his own interests are at stake. The EU, he claimed, was to blame for high youth unemployment in Greece.
First, he is clearly unaware that Greece has frequently been taken to task for the unreliability of its employment and other statistics. Secondly, youth under-employment has been a feature of the Greek economy since long before its current economic woes, as indeed is likely to be the case in patriarchal, agrarian societies where a sizeable sector of the economy consists of small family-run enterprises. Are the children involved in one way or another in looking after the family flocks or newspaper kiosk counted officially as employed or unemployed, especially when they do not receive any formal wage? And, thirdly, at his age Mr Gove should know that, like all unreformed clientelist states, Greece has been heading for its present comeuppance since before he was born, even if, as things have turned out, the pain may have been exacerbated by joining a club of rather more sophisticated governments – and that was a matter of what the Greeks call filotimo, family honour, and geopolitics rather than cool-headed calculation.
It is not many weeks since, in a Sunday Times interview, he also blamed the Eurozone for the existence of Greece’s far-Right party, Golden Dawn, apparently ignorant of the fact that in 1936 General Metaxas staged a military coup that set up an explicitly Axis-type fascist dictatorship that was only overthrown by the advent of WWII; that a similarly fascistic kind of police state came into being in the late ‘forties during a civil war and continued in power through most of the ‘fifties, to reappear in the Colonels’ Dictatorship from 1967 (the year of Mr Gove’s birth) to 1974; and Michaloliakos, the current leader of Golden Dawn, has been involved in far-Right politics since the 1960s. All of this long before Greece’s membership of the EEC (in 1981), let alone the Eurozone, was ever thought of.
And why do I put him into bed with Paul Mason? Because he too likes to distort the Greek situation – economic and other – to suit his wishful thinking. I recently heard him on BBC 3’s Private Passions compare attending a performance of Corpus Christi, a play that portrays Jesus and the Apostles as gays – an act about as shocking in Greece as producing cartoons of the Prophet in Iran – that was booed and jeered, unsurprisingly, by Golden Dawn supporters to being subjected to the kind of repression prosecuted by the Nazis against all that they disapproved of in 1930s Germany.
These people have got an agenda which they are determined to promote irrespective of whether or not it fits the facts.
I think I might almost recommend Aristophanes’s punishment for illicit bedfellows: a radish up the fundament and depilation by hot ash.
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