Angela Merkel has the whip hand in an orgy of austerity
The novelist and polymath Anthony Burgess published a selection of book reviews and essays in the 1980s called Homage to QWERT YUIOP. One of the pieces was called The Whip and in it Burgess discussed le vice Anglais, the derisory term given by the French to the masochistic sexual preferences of upper-class Brits.
Burgess was in no doubt that the taste for the whip had affected the way Britain had been run, and he was probably right about that. In the 1970s, the Bank of England had an instrument for controlling the amount of credit in the economy, which its practitioners lovingly called the corset. Enough said. When Denis Healey accused the Thatcher administration of sado-monetarism everybody got the reference. With its references to fiscal restraint and the tightness of monetary policy, economic management at the time was coloured by the language of the dominatrix – and still is, of course.
Why was this? Burgess thought it had quite a lot to do with the British public school system in which there existed "a kind of bond of shameful-shameless intimacy between the members of the ruling class those schools were concerned with turning out. To have beaten, been beaten, witnessed the same beatings is a red badge of something."
If he was writing today, Burgess would probably not be surprised by the alacrity and relish with which David Cameron (Eton), George Osborne (St Paul's Boys) and Nick Clegg (Westminster) accepted the need for painful austerity on their arrival in power in May 2010. What might exercise his brain would be the way in which – in economic terms, at least – le vice Anglais is no longer confined to these shores but has become the fetish du jour across the whole of Europe.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/economics-blog/2012/jan/08/eurozone-crisis-angela-merkel-whip-hand
