Anyway, as this low, dishonest decade heads towards the near-certain wreckage of the next one, there was a clearly identifiable point where this direction of travel could have been changed and we could have started doing things a different way. That was the Greek debt crisis.

That was everybody's chance to say we need to stop doing everything by huge doses of austerity, piling unpayable debt onto people and justifying it by calling them freeloaders and pricks.

It was everybody's chance to show that we meant what we said when we said that "economics is not a morality play" and that pragmatism needs to trump "credibility" every time.

It was also everybody's chance to understand that austerity (sorry "credibility") over a long period means the deterioration of politics, and inevitability a deterioration in the direction of authoritarians and racists.

You would have thought that lesson had been learned in the Thirties, but unfortunately the only lesson we learn from the Thirties now is to compare with Hitler everybody we want to go to war with.

There was another chance to relearn that lesson in the disaster that overcame Russia in the Nineties, but who cared about what happened there when there was so much easy money to be made? Boy, did that go well in the end.

(Or, you know, the fact that the collapse of Yugoslavia was immediately preceded by a gigantic recession. I could go on. But you get the point, as Gill Scott-Heron once said.)

But back with Greece. Wasn't it all "the Greeks" fault? No it wasn't, not that I care if it was. Didn't Syriza fuck it up by being unreasonable with everybody? No they didn't, and you know they didn't.

Of course the conservative parties who dominated the EU then and now had no interest in putting a stop to extreme austerity. But for nearly every one of these conservative parties, there was a social democratic party. Not, mind, that you would have noticed.

All of them - and I mean not just the parties, but their supporters, their backers in the comment columns, and so on - had the opportunity to raise their voices and say this was no good, it was time to change direction.

That was their social democratic moment. It was also your moment to show that the European Community was worth standing up for. And they blew it. They were nowhere to be found. They ran away.

And *haven't* things gone well since then.

Extreme austerity prevailed (as did austerity in the UK) because, when it was important *not* to have a consensus, the people who should have been challenging that consensus kept their heads down. (That's a kind way of putting it.)

So, in a sense, if the social democratic parties have failed to revive very much since then, they have no-one to blame but themselves. In another sense, of course, the whole point is that they *did* have somebody else to blame, and by God they took the opportunity.

There will *always* be somebody else to blame, some reason to walk away (and boy, that reason will always be good!) and I guess that the people who did so then are always going to do so in the future.

Water under the bridge now, I suppose. But really, you people. If the next decade is full of petty Putins and Erdoğans, of minorities being picked on and hunted and expelled, that's because Fuck You is the whole of the law.

You had a chance to put a stop to Fuck You. Right in front of you, and you didn't take it.

Because you were never going to.

Everything that happens happens because nothing else was ever going to happen.

I don't even think that's completely true, but it's mostly true. All of the weight of history is on its side.

And if there's another chance to turn the tide in the next decade, we'll turn up our noses at that one too.

God bless us all, every one.