Sound advice from a well known source: It is a good thing to follow the First Law of Holes: if you are in one, stop digging – Denis Healey.

Most British Gazette readers will remember Denis Healey PC, CH, MBE, now Baron Healey of Riddlesden in the West Riding of the County of Yorkshire who served as Secretary of State for Defence from 1964 to 1970 and Chancellor of the Exchequer from 1974 to 1979.
Many will remember him as the man who axed the TSR2 and the CVA-01. Lord Healey however was the man who carried out the public spending cuts during the financial crisis during that Labour government’s tenure of office.
It was Lord Healey who came up with the now famous quote: “….It is a good thing to follow the First Law of Holes: if you are in one, stop digging….”
The leaders of the Eurozone countries need to take this advice (from one of their own – Lord Healey was a founder Bilderberger) and act on it. Immediately.
The leaders of the EU have two choices: they can dismantle the present structure of the EU and the Eurozone in an orderly and planned manner or they can wait and allow the markets to do it for them. The latter will of course be more violent.
The EU is currently composed of 27 suzerain members: Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Cyprus, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malta, the Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden and unfortunately, the United Kingdom.
The Eurozone consists of: Austria, Belgium, Cyprus, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Luxembourg, Malta, the Netherlands, Portugal, Slovakia, Slovenia and Spain.
What needs to happen is this: The European Union and the Eurozone must simultaneously contract and further integrate. The wish of the Europhile federalists to vest sole economic and fiscal sovereignty in the EU (from the members) must take place. At the same time the European Union and the Eurozone must comprise the following members: Austria, Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, Luxembourg and the Netherlands.
The other members of the Eurozone: Cyprus, Estonia, Finland, Greece, Ireland, Malta, Portugal, Slovakia, Slovenia and Spain must leave the Eurozone, resestablish their former currencies and also leave the European Union and join the European Free Trade Association (EFTA) currently composed of: Iceland, Liechtenstein, Norway and Switzerland.
The remaining members of the EU who are not in the Eurozone: the Czech Republic, Denmark, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Romania and the United Kingdom should leave the EU and join EFTA as well.
What would this achieve?
Well of course for the UK it would restore lawful, constitutional government. For the other countries (and also the UK), it would mean that they could begin to recover from the crisis. For the now smaller EU/Eurozone it would mean stability and the prospect of future prosperity. It would also mean that their banks would be saved from collapse!
OK, who would be the losers?
These would be Russia and the USA. These two Great Powers would loose influence for the smaller more coherent European Union would emerge onto the world’s diplomatic stage as a supra-national state that would have coherent economic and foreign and security policies.
It is very likely that long overdue reform to the Security Council of the UN would follow with France and the UK losing their permanent seats and these permanent seats been given to India and the European Union.
Although British Gazette readers may be critical of Lord Healey, his CV shows him to be a man of a far greater calibre than today’s offering of mediocrity we see on the Commons benches – on both sides.
Denis Healey was educated at Bradford Grammar School. In 1936 he won an exhibition to Balliol College, Oxford, to read Greats where he was involved in Labour politics, although he was not active in the Oxford Union Society. At Oxford Healey joined the Communist Party in 1937 during the Great Terror but left in 1939 in protest over the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. He succeeded Edward Heath as President of Balliol College Junior Common Room. Denis Healey achieved a double first for his degree, awarded in 1940.
After his degree, he served in the Second World War with the Royal Engineers, in the North African Campaign, the Allied invasion of Sicily and the Italian Campaign, and was the military landing officer for the British assault brigade at Anzio. Leaving the service with the rank of Major after the war – he declined an offer to remain as a Lieutenant-Colonel – Denis Healey joined the Labour Party. He narrowly failed to win the Conservative-held seat of Pudsey and Otley, during the 1945 General Election, but doubled the Labour vote losing by 1,651 votes.
Denis Healey was elected to the House of Commons as MP for Leeds South East at a by-election in February 1952 with a majority of 7,000 votes, after the incumbent MP Major James Milner left the Commons to accept a peerage. At the General Election in 1955 he was elected as MP for Leeds East, in which capacity he sat until retiring from the Commons in 1992, receiving his life peerage.