These were the words in Ireland, Spain, Portugal and other euro members last Monday when the Greek Finance Minister attempted to become confrontational with the EU and the eurozone.
He was welcomed by a blank refusal by countries like the afore-mentioned who had chosen the austerity path, suffered tremendously and are now out of the danger zone. They did not look kindly on a country which shirks from the same kind of medicine.
Around the table, on Monday, these countries became even more hardline, if that could be the case, than Germany and the Nordic countries.
That stands to reason, for if the populations in these countries sense that concessions have been made to Greece, the support for the austerity measures would melt and Southern Europe will see sprout copies of Syriza with the consequent meltdown of the entire eurozone.
It is with satisfaction that we see that the government of Malta has steadfastly taken this path as well, as was confirmed by the words of Prime Minister Muscat in Parliament on Tuesday, and by the words expressed in Brussels by Finance Minister Edward Scicluna.
It is also with satisfaction that we note what was said by the Leader of the Opposition also on Tuesday and that there is unanimous and bipartisan support for Malta's demand that the loan made by Malta must be paid back.
As a Spanish minister remarked, that was money the populations of the various countries in Europe could ill afford and were made out of sympathy with Greece in its predicament but each country has its own needs and expects its money back.
It seems however that one important facet of the situation resolutely escapes notice. This is the political aspect, whose exclusion from the debate is strange but seems as though one utters a swear word in the middle of a conversation among educated people.
It was through no natural cataclysm that Greece found itself in this situation. For years after emerging from the armed forces dictatorship, Greek governments outbid each other who could offer the more generous welfare state to the citizens, who could put more people on government books, who could fudge the books and make the Europeans believe Greece had turned a page, and who could dream up dreams of glory such as the Olympics which Greece could ill afford.
As in other countries we may care to think of (maybe including Malta) this statalist approach was the inheritance of Leftwing governments, aped and abetted by Rightwing ones. The people became nurtured on an assistentialist fare which saw a job with the government as an inherited right.
Come the crisis and the Centre-Right government, in conjunction with the European Commission and ECB as well as the World Bank tried to row back some of the more outrageous examples of profligacy. The austerity was badly handled and no care whatsoever was taken to avoid putting more burdens on those who could ill-afford it. The other countries who took the austerity measures, such as Ireland, took special care to avoid doing so. And in Greece, the rich, the connected, continued to live the opulent lives they always lived, to the anger of the rest of the population.
Hence the reaction, hence Syriza. The rest of Europe will now see whether its commitment to bring the rich to heel will be implemented or whether the rich have already stashed their earnings outside the country, as happened, for instance, in Cyprus when that country had its crisis. One can rest assured the Syriza government knows how to alleviate the sufferings of the downtrodden.
But Greece is not Cyprus: it is far larger and any future deterioration of the crisis will affect the rest of the Eurozone. Besides, its banks are if we can say so, in a far worse situation than that of the Cypriot banks in mid-crisis. Now that ECB has turned off the faucet and is being picky on how allow access to ELAs, the situation in the country is at a very delicate stage.
Hopefully, as the latest news indicates, there will not be any breakdown in the negotiations, no Grexit, nor chaos in the country. So far, the clash at Ecofin has been largely one of terminology. If the two sides succeed to go over the hump posed by the conflicting claims of the past weeks and months, they can find a way of negotiating on a plan which has a better chance of succeeding than the many commitments made by the preceding government most of which were then found to be unworkable.
By standing firm, as they did on Monday, the rest of the eurozone may have done a favour to Greece.