Quango - A Common European Destiny

For all the naysaying, in truth the future looks bright for Europe. It's soon destined to become a happy place: one of smoke rising from clearings populated by simple daub and wattle buildings, of a few restrained grunts coming from a woodland where a man is stabbing an elk with a sharpened rock for his dinner, of the happy the peals of laughter from womenfolk binding a stranger into a wickerman. An idyll, where no one asks about the Spanish bond rate any more, because there is no such thing as Spain, no such thing as bonds, no such thing as anything that doesn't involve killing an elk for dinner, or what the prospect of a calf born with two heads might mean for the next harvest. The complex abstractions of the EFSM will melt away as a human lifespan retreats back to an average of thirty years, and packs of children play happily in the ruins of the Bundesbank.

Of course, in order to get to this new post-everything Ruritania, we will first have to survive the Eurozone meltdown.

This will not be easy, as the Foreign Office acknowledged this week, when it drew up fresh guidance for its overseas embassies on what they should do if there is a wave of disorderly default.

According to the Telegraph, the FCO has told them to prepare for riots, civil unrest, looting and more general mayhem if the dominoes start to tumble. They want to have escape lines in place, should large numbers of British citizens find that the ATMs have stopped working, their travel company has gone bust, or Portugal is suddenly at war with France.

These days, the unthinkable has become not only thinkable, but according to one British minister, the government's entire planning department has shifted to a when-not-if basis. The Cabinet are not the only ones starting to put down defences before the inevitable War For Shiny Things. EasyJet, too, have reportedly developed detailed plans on what would happen if the Mallorcan holiday run suddenly became a mercy mission.

No news yet on RyanAir. It seems likely they'd align themselves with Spain's new military junta and commence bombing of Catalan villages if it meant Michael O'Leary could leverage his stock price by 3 percent. Indeed, major drug companies have already been through something of a dry run on an entire nation running dry – when Greece ran into trouble, the government forced them to accept government IOUs for life-saving medicines, rather than the cash they'd initially been promised. But for all their ongoing scenario planning, most large multinationals would be screwed more than they ever let on. Ten years ago, the lawyers who drew up their complex international contracts didn't bother to write into these contracts even one or two lines of provision for what would happen if a nation left the Euro. Thanks to some overworked junior clerk waving it through in 1998,  if anyone does leave, it will instantly invalidate large portions of various multi-billion pound deals.

As usual, though, it is the ruthless cunning of City traders that is most ahead of the game when it comes to profiting from the end of the world. One City trader, who declined to be named, admitted that he and his sizeable team were running through "war games" exercises on a "weekend scenario": massive default on a Friday, then making the phantom trades on Saturday and Sunday that would let them come out on top. The hope being that if their frenetic activity could corral enough zeroes on the end of their ledger account, they'd be able to use those zeroes to fight off all the Poplar residents armed with baseball bats who'd besiege Canary Wharf, intent on Piñata-ing them and grabbing whatever warm clothes they could prise from their dead bodies.

That would be potentially the most comforting aspect of the post-Eurozone Europe. In a hundred years, as our descendants convened a tribal council to pick over whether Magreeb from the neighbouring village was a witch, they would at least be pretty damn sure that she wasn't descended from a banker.

Illustration by Joss Frank

Previously: Quango - Andy Lansley's Disembodied Head