Bravado masks fatalism among Britain's Greek diaspora

In Brussels, eurozone countries were agreeing to a third bailout, worth €120bn. David Cameron was keeping UK money out of it, except for our contribution to the IMF, while trying not to whistle jingoistic triumphalism – which is not all that easy when you have "two world wars and one World Cup" going round your head. Mervyn King's report for the financial policy committee was warning that the collapse of the eurozone was the biggest threat to the British economy (the extent of the banks' exposure to sovereign debt may be small, but a crisis of confidence would screw us all). And the streets of Athens looked like Glastonbury – minus the mud; plus the teargas … Standing in London's Greek heartland, I feel a curious detachment, a curious out-of-body nonchalance that people also describe when they're remembering a car crash. Rather than post-traumatic stress, this is mid- or even pre-traumatic stress. In the seconds before the end of money, all the colours look mesmerising. Moscow Road is home to St Sophia, the oldest Greek church in London and a fabled hangout for the Greek diaspora, since with the church came a number of restaurants and cafes. Outside Byzantium Café, Saki, who is 72 and remembers the declaration of Cypriot independence ("You British knew what was going to happen"), is relatively sanguine. "You could drop a bomb in the middle of Europe and two things would survive: Greeks and cockroaches. When we built the Parthenon and the Acropolis, the rest of Europe was still living in the trees." Nikos, who has lived in the UK for 40 years, didn't take seriously the threat – still looming on Friday morning – that Germany wouldn't agree to the bailout. "They owe us €575bn anyway. Greece is the only country that never got a penny from reparations after the war." Nobody here thought the street protests would translate into a real hurdle to the passage of next week's austerity measures (upon which the bailout relies) through parliament. But while everybody seemed relaxed, disinclined to believe in the importance of the crisis – a young man said: "If there's a serious threat to the rest of Europe, they'll save Greece to save themselves" – this didn't seem to be bravado so much as fatalism. The problem of tax evasion in Greece has been well documented in discussions about the background to this crisis, but the source of it – the antipathy between every class and the political class – informs every viewpoint. Chrissa, who has been in London for two years, says the transition from drachma to euro ratcheted up prices for no real reason beyond the fact that everyone was on the make. "Everybody could see that the government gets to eat money out of the country." (Papandreou's rightwing predecessor, Costas Karamanlis, ran a notoriously bent operation, but in fairness, the corruption had been going on for decades.) Saki talks of a system in which nepotism, bribery, theft, anything that can stand between a government, its collection and fair distribution of tax, was rife. "Of course it was a problem that the tax system wasn't fair. But people with high incomes don't pay tax anyway." Dinos, who owns the delicatessen opposite, says: "I blame the politicians. They should have plundered less money from the country." It's interesting, in the light of all this, to go back to the criteria for joining the euro, all of which were economic or fiscal. They were: inflation rates; annual deficit and government debt (and this proved more flexible than it appeared, when Germany and France had high deficits in 2005); whether or not the country was a member of the exchange rate mechanism, and whether or not it had devalued its currency since it joined; what its long-term interest rates were. Questions such as "how crooked are your politicians? How robust are your civil institutions and legal contracts?" were considered needless, even impolite. And yet, discussing the crisis, all anybody talks about are corrupt politicians and a taxation system that – letting so many escape through the cracks – in effect levied at random. Fatalism is the wrong word: it's more like a wry "call this chaos? This is just the beginning of chaos."