One thing I know for certain is that this year the EU elite will go on forcing the peoples of southern Europe to suffer in the name of the euro. No matter how much the Greeks, Italians, Portuguese, Spanish and French suffer, the elite in Brussels, Frankfurt and Berlin will go on telling them that their industries are failing, their workers are unemployed and their national debt burden continues to grow because they have not yet suffered enough.
Yet we all know suffering will not heal their economies. The only thing that will heal these economies is for them to get out of the economic and monetary union with Germany. Instead, the EU and Berlin will go on demanding the Mediterranean countries impose 'internal devaluation'. Every honest economist identified 'internal devaluation' at the start of the crisis as a reckless, brutal policy and so it has proved to be.
"What is happening across southern Europe is human sacrifice to save the political project of the euro"
What is happening across southern Europe is human sacrifice to save the political project of the euro. Now of course the extra horror of deflation will mean even less investment and even less growth in the eurozone. The European central bank will be powerless to stop it.
There is another crisis, a social and economic crisis, resulting from the unhindered movement of millions of people across borders. In Britain, some opinion polls show that uncontrolled – and by EU rules, uncontrollable – migration is the number one issue among voters. As the UK general election in May approaches, the two big legacy parties, the Conservatives and Labour would rather not debate this. However, UKIP has forced it onto the political agenda.
The political divide in the UK and increasingly in other countries across the EU, is not any longer between left and right. That is yesterday's politics. The political divide now is between those parties across the EU, such as UKIP, who want to restore the common sense of national control of borders and immigration. Our opponents are the undemocratic elites wedded to the 20th century fantasy of a Europe without borders, run by technocrats without elections.
There is another continuing crisis, too; the industrial crisis of jobs and factories shutting down throughout the EU and reopening in the low cost, light regulation economies of Asia and the Americas. Now even China is heading into recession, showing massive spare capacity among the Asian giant's cheap-labour factories.
These three crises are of course all just parts of a single great crisis: the crisis of the loss of democracy. There is a helplessness felt by people across the countries of the EU. The people elect representatives to their national parliaments only to find the representatives cannot control economic or monetary policy. They cannot control immigration, cannot control regulation, nor control the destruction of factories and jobs. This is driven by the ideological demand for economic and monetary union at any cost.
I don't think anyone knows what will happen. I just know that I want our British democracy back. I expect in the coming months to see that more and more people of the great historic nations across the continent will want their own democracies back too.