Greece had literally no choice. The ECB threatened to deliberately nuke Greece's economy if they left. Since the process of leaving would have required about 5 years of careful extrication to be done painlessly and the ECB and switching off emergency lending can be done in hours (they gave Greece a little taster of that), Greece was in no position to do really do anything except kowtow to ECB demands, which they did.
Meanwhile Varoufakis's contingency plans to wrest control back of the tax agency from the troika and issue an alternate currency as a first step to potentially leaving attracted Orwellian charges of high treason.
If the EU/ECB wanted to make it possible for Greece to leave without nuking their economy, they could have, which probably would have been more conducive to being paid back in the long (long) run. They went for their pound of flesh instead.
All of which makes me wonder what they have planned for the rest of Europe.
Do you mean anything other than "stopped lending additional funds" here?
> Orwellian charges of high treason
By whom? Where? When?
As I said, Greece's treatment could have been a lot better, but this doesn't apply to the UK. The UK is not a member of the Euro, is much larger than Greece, and potentially could have a much better position.
(Even more ludicrous is the idea of "Frexit". France have got literally everything they wanted out of Europe, including the Strasbourg gimmick)
That's the switch which they can use to turn everything off, but what is also prohibited is implementing policy to actually dig them out of this hole without needing additional lending assistance which you'd think the EU would be in favor of if being paid back were actually their goal.
>By whom? Where? When?
Pro-EU Greek judges, aided and abetted by opposition parties:
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2015/jul/27/greece-cris...
It's worth noting that not everybody in Greece is against Greece's harsh treatment - some are profiting from it, in fact.
Anyway, that was basically the only route out (issuance of a new parallel currency or tax anticipation notes) and it's telling that the ELA got switched off in the following few days and how furious many in the EU were that he actually had a plan to get out.
>As I said, Greece's treatment could have been a lot better, but this doesn't apply to the UK.
Greece's treatment is inhuman. The EU was directly responsible for triggering a humanitarian crisis not even to get their money back (that debt is clearly a lost cause since 2011), but simply to inflict punishment for punishment's sake.
No, it doesn't apply to the UK. There are a lot of parallels though, mostly because the Tories and Labour's Blairites share a similar ideology to the ideologues at the ECB.
Greece's treatment demonstrates the depths the EU appears willing to sink to, however. Past behavior is indicative of future behavior.
Are you thinking of Greece here?
The "imposed austerity" was purely the choice of the Conservative government in the UK, and the "concessions" demanded seemed to be an end to freedom of movement, which was always a non-starter and wouldn't make the lives of Brits better in any discernable way.
What has happened is simple: there has long been a war inside the Conservative party between the pro-EU side and the anti-EU side. Cameron hoped that calling a referendum and deploying "project Fear" which had won the Scottish indyref would settle the question. Unfortunetely he'd misunderstood the Scottish result and Project Fear was hugely counter-productive.
This is why UKIP have ceased to exist in the council elections: they're now in control of the Conservative party.
(I mean, if I wanted to make a case against the EU, I'd do it on the basis of how Greece was treated - but even Greece didn't choose to leave, as they recognised that it would make them even worse off economically. UK anti-Europeanism seems to be built around a mixture of desire to deport foreigners, "bendy bananas" lies promulgated by Boris, and hatred of the metric system)