Yes jake, a deal has indeed been done. The markets have rallied and everything in the garden is lovely.
Meanwhile, private investors in Greece lose half their cash (if they agree to do so), tax revenue in Greece continues to fall whilst State spending there continues to rise, the Greek state sector workers continue to retire at 57 on 80% pay, and nobody is quite sure where a major plank of the “deal” – the £1 trillion bailout fund – is actually going to come from when (not if) it is needed. Some deal.
You are quite right, the problem with the single currency lies with enforcement of its conditions. I would disagree that all the nations who joined properly met the entry criteria. Greece certainly did not, Ireland and Portugal almost certainly cooked their books before their entry and Italy may have been economical with the truth about their affairs. But enforcement will not be possible without full political union with Brussels having full powers over taxation and spending in all the member states and that is not going to happen.
This latest “deal” is simply more sticking plaster. We heard all this in May, we heard it again in July and, almost certainly, we will hear it again some time in the first quarter of the New Year (if not sooner) when the details of the latest deal prove inadequate or unacceptable. All any of these deals is doing is shifting vast sums of capital from the nations that have to the nations that have not and sooner or later the electorates of the donor nations will find a way to call a halt to the lunacy.
Nothing would please me more than for the UK to be part of a successful European trading bloc. The EU is not such an animal, it is an ideological pipe dream. The Euro in its current form cannot survive (something I believed from its birth, not just in the last week) and Eurocrats show no sign of taking the necessary steps towards making either of them work properly. Until they do, unpalatable and unacceptable as it may seem, the UK is better off outside both institutions.
It makes no difference who wins the next General Election in the UK. All the main parties have the same policy. Just what it will take to make at least one of them change their stance I really don’t know.