“At least we removed a sanguinary dictator” is a sentence that oozes hypocrisy from each and every pore, a phrase rendered even more vomitous and hollow when you look at the hateful game of “this dictator good, that dictator bad” that Tony Blair played so well during his reign.

And so consider what his good mate and Michael Jackson impersonator Colonel Gaddafi is currently doing to his own people in Libya.

In the last few days we learnt that his troops are “firing on civilians” and that 104 people have been killed in last week’s pro-democracy demonstrations.

Courtesy, in no small part, of British military help agreed at the height of the Blair empire, the bitter irony being that while he was rinsing his gob with sermons on “exporting democracy to Iraq”, Tony was shaking hands with Gaddafi and signing lucrative arms deals.

Our former Prime Minister, the same person who for years pontificated about the importance of removing Saddam the sanguinary, has been a staunch supporter of a selection of brutal Middle Eastern torturers and tyrants, Gaddafi and the “immensely courageous” Mubarak (see this for courage) to mention but two.

The ongoing events in the Middle East are the most painful reminder of Blair’s corrupt morality.

Well, not anymore.

With his never ending scandals denting his popular support and the Italian right looking increasingly divided, Berlusconi is desperate for any vote he can grab.

This is why he announced on Saturday that the unashamedly far-right party La Destra (The Right) have now joined his coalition and that one of their top dogs will soon be offered a ministerial post.

La Destra is Italy’s direct equivalent of the BNP, except even more fascist. Though no doubt a very small party, tallying just over 680,000 votes (2,2%) at the 2009 European Parliament election, the group are the country’s most outspoken apologists for the country’s fascist past.

And indeed theirs is vintage stuff: from their fascist-era typeface adorning their literature to their continuous references to christianity, “action” and “traditional values”, all the way to their überfascist official slogan of “Dio, Patria e Famiglia” (“God, Nation and Family“), one thing you can’t accuse La Destra of is lack of coherence.

However, how the “god” and “family” bits are going to sit next to a Prime Minister known for his penchant for orgies, libertine parties and underage prostitutes, no-one has yet managed to explain.

Between 2000 and 2007, unemployment in Britain was never any higher than 5.5% (see this) while, in the same period, the German figures were regularly double that rate – between 8 and 10 per cent (see this).

But over the last two years UK unemployment has overtaken Germany’s at a hair-raising pace. While our jobless rate is now tickling 8%, in Germany it decreased to 7.3% at the start of 2010 and then further lowered to 6.7% in October – again, its best figures since reunification.

And so a number of legitimate questions arise. Why is it that after registering a slump of -4.7% last year, Germany is now forecast to end 2010 with a GDP growth of 3.6%, its fastest pace since reunification, while Britain is still finding its feet?

What are the Germans doing that we’re not, to the extent that many analysts are now openly talking of a “German Miracle“?

The answer lies in a policy that the German government adopted at the start of the crisis. It’s called kurzarbeit and it literally means “short work”. While other countries spent unprecedented sums on bailing out banks or dubious stimulus programmes, Chancellor Angela Merkel’s government (at the time a coalition of centre-right CDU and centre-left SDP) took a unique gamble by spending huge sums bailing out its work force.

And that’s because, under kurzarbeit, employers hit by the downturn are encouraged to keep their workers part-time rather than make them redundant. The Federal Employment Agency () will cover up to 67% of lost wages and will also take care of national insurance and other contribution.

The idea is that:

a) mass redundancies often mean a permanent loss of skilled work and specialised trade, especially in the industrial sector. By keeping workers active through a combination of part-time and training, the economy benefits the moment trade picks up – which is exactly what happened as Germany boomed in 2010;

b) the focus on employment and wages spared the country a vicious circle of mass unemployment leading to a drop in both tax revenue and consumer confidence – in turn leading to vast numbers of people defaulting on their mortgages and loans. In other words, as the money reaches consumers directly, it flows back into the market straightaway.

This may look expensive at first (£5.1bn a year), but it saved Germany a fortune in both welfare costs and bailing out banks.

Compare what Germany spent on their bail-out: 1.4% to 2.2% of gross domestic product (between €34bn and €52bn). In Britain it was a staggering 19.8%, almost a fifth of its GDP – and that’s before the official cost was actually discovered to stand at an even higher £850bn.

Of course, the experiment is not without its critics. From the left, it’s often said that Germany’s recovery has taken place at the expense of the rising numbers of low-wage workers and unprecedented wage restraint. From the right, the objection that kurzabeit would simply lead to “a backlog of job cuts”, to quote what the president of the German Bundesbank said last year.

But more recents news report that Germany’s industrial sector is currently in need of 34,000 engineers and 23,000 factory workers. Indeed, a German success story.

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A longer version of the article is here

We binge on hundreds of celebrities, some more worthless than others, while we laugh at their imperfections, dimpled thighs and sweaty armpits as sported by Heat, the Sun or the Daily Mail.

We love to remark on how thick, shallow and uneducated they are. We sneered at Jade Goody’s “pig ignorance“, laughed at Paris Hilton’s dumb quotes and we frowned at how detached from the real world the superrich and the superfamous are.

But then the moment a celebrity displays the tiniest existence of grey stuff between their ears, for some reason, we go apeshit and we scoff and pour scorn at them.

Whether it’s Eric Cantona making a stand against the banks, Colin Firth criticising the government over tuition fees, or Jemima Khan defending Wikileaks, the media predators just won’t let them get away with it. Go back to your pampered world. Stay thick, stay shallow and stay supine, is the warning. [Incidentally, note how the toss-arguers always invariably end up siding with the powers that be].

Jan Moir kicked off the proceedings yesterday with an extremely snidey swipe at “darling Jemima. She was pictured looking particularly fabulous at an earlier Assange hearing; standing on the court steps with her blonde hair flying and her big liberal heart beating fit to burst”, wrote the right-wing columnist.

Today is the turn of the Independent to pull her up on her quote that she shouldn’t be called a “socialite”. How dare she say she isn’t. Oh the scorn, the tutting, the disdain.

Christina Patterson goes even further. In one of the most convoluted opinion columns in living memory, she insinuates that “the very beautiful, and very rich, and very famous for her famous boyfriends, Jemima Khan”, may not be genuinely interested in “the cause of freedom of speech”.

“It’s also possible that [Jemima Khan and Bianca Jagger] did the calculations before making the deal”, sentenced Patterson. “On the one side: beauty, money, glamour. On the other: ‘rock star’ looks, a delicious sense of self-righteousness, and the aphrodisiac of massive, world-leader-embarrassing power”.

Damned if they do, damned if they don’t. Here’s the message to every celebrity: show an interest in something and the papers will pick you to pieces.

Yet in two and a half years, all the Italian government managed to knock out was a number of controversial immunity bills (which critics slammed as “tailor-made” to protect the scandal-ridden PM from prosecution) and a series of anti-immigration measures dictated by Berlusconi’s openly xenophobic coalition partners the Northern League.

Otherwise, the Berlusconi ship started treading water pretty much from the off.

First, there was “his brand of bombastic politics”, as aptly branded by Sarah Vine in the Times. A style more akin to an Emperor with no boundaries and no sense of decorum produced the first casualty when his wife Veronica Lario announced she wanted a divorce.

Her words (“I cannot remain with a man who consorts with minors“) opened a can of worms, with more reports following that the 74-year-old PM was at the core of a network of call girls paid to be sent to his residence (his own lawyer famously described prostitutes as “goods” and Berlusconi as “the end user“).

And while increasing questions were raised over a PM whose behaviour left him exposed to blackmail, Italy found itself grappling with a number of unresolved issues. From cuts to education and street riots, organised crime and uncollected rubbish, as well as rotting heritage in Pompeii and growing poverty, Italy under Berlusconi appears in a total state of chaos.

The final straw came last month in the guise of a 17-year-old aspiring model known as ‘Ruby’.

When the girl – who first met the PM at one of his notorious “parties” – was arrested for theft in Milan, it emerged that Berlusconi pressurised police to free her. The PM admitted he helped Ruby, but lamely denied interfering with the justice system.

Last week’s news that Berlusconi’s loyal long-erm ally and House Speaker Gianfranco Fini took the unprecedented step to leave the government and take with him a number of ministers and MPs signalled the beginning of the end.

“Sometimes I think this is the government of pretending that all is well without taking into account society’s problems”, said a visibly fed-up Fini in a public speech. “There’s a sort of moral decadence, consequence of the progressive loss of decorum from those same public figures who are supposed to set the example”, added the right-wing leader, obviously aware that his words would trigger political earthquake.

Fini’s supporters declared that they will vote against a crucial vote of confidence on December 14. They may have enough MPs to bring Berlusconi down for good.

The irony is that the end of the empire is not being caused by any particular government policy backfiring or, even less so, by a centre-left opposition still in tatters. Berlusconi’s coalition is simply, literally, imploding.

What will happen next nobody knows. But, two weeks from now, the action of a few dozen MPs may end up in history books as the official end of Berlusconismo.

With tuition fees in the UK set to reach £9000 a year, the cost of Higher Education (already high by EU standards) is going to be the most prohibitive in Western Europe.

Let’s take a look.


[Copyright Martin Rowson, Guardian]

Although in France admission to universities is extremely selective, most universities are almost free (€174 a year), the exception being some private Business Schools or the ultra-prestigious Grandes Ecoles which can exceed €12,900 a year. However, 26% of all HE students (generally from low income families) receive generous bursaries (see this and this).

Students in Germany have to fork out €100-200 per semester. There are penalties (as in tuition fees as such) for students who don’t complete their courses on time (see this)

In the Netherlands, undergraduates under the age of 30 are required to pay €1620 a year.

In Sweden, all universities are completely free for all EU students. There is only a registration fee of around €30 Euros per semester (see here).

The same system is in place in Norway, although the registration fee is slightly higher (€50 per semester).

In Denmark, university courses are completely free for all EU students, while in Spain the system at state universities is more complex. Aside from an annual registration fee of up to €20 a year and a number of ancillary costs (i.e. various paperwork and certificates that will not exceed a total of €200 anyway), students are charged “per credit”, that is to say, more or less, for every module they study. A single credit will not exceed €16. However, students will be charged an extra 25% if they’re re-sitting and an extra 70% on their third attempt.

On average the total annual cost of university fees will range between €800 and €1,000.
source: http://www.studyineurope.eu

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The good news, is there are online universitiesthat offer degree programs that are often much more affordable.

Stuck between the obvious ideological clashes between those who think such “brave” and tough measures are the “inevitable” legacy of the Labour years, and those who instead call the Budget “reckless” and “dangerous for the recovery“, there appears to be a third category of people.

Yes, you guessed it: LibDem MPs. We don’t really know where the Lib Dems stand, do we?

Less than two months ago they were kicking and screaming that the planned Tory VAT rise was a “bombshell“. They even started a poster campaign about it and incur the wrath of many a Tory hack, including The Spectator’s Fraser Nelson who slammed it as a “dishonest” and “misleading” campaign (see here).

Labour, for instance, can hardly lecture anyone when they signed up to Tony Blair’s ‘Encyclopaedia of Amazing Betrayals’ for a whole decade. But even Tony Blair waited two or three years before making a mockery of the now infamous Labour manifesto promise over tuition fees to mention but one of his “pretty straight” deeds. And that’s saying something.

My problem isn’t with the Tories. I respect the fact that they’re doing what they have to do as a Tory party. They may have kept a couple of things quiet during the election, but they are a Conservative party, we all knew their history and their beliefs and what to expect from them.

The Conservatives are simply practising what they’ve preached all along: the importance of a slimmer state. They believe in it. You can’t say fairer than that. But the LibDems. What do they actually believe in? If they can change their mind so quickly, easily and radically over the timing, scale and quality of cuts, VAT, tax, state benefits, or the best way to achieve recovery, what tells you that they won’t change their mind over anything else if a dogbone is dangled before their eyes?

Sunny says “screaming betrayal at the LibDems won’t work” and that’s this is not only a sign of “tribalism” but also “downright silliness”. They add that “all [this] does is push Libdems further towards the Tories”.

But by focusing on the red herring, he glosses over the devastating consequences of what the LibDems did: following the fine Blairite tradition of turning yet more election manifestos into disposable arse paper that can be dismissed within weeks on the basis of where the most rewarding political wind blows.

Sites like Liberal Conspiracy often go out of their way to find any inch of Tory wording or semantic that would justify lashing out at anything vaguely Thatcherite (that’s not tribalism, is it?), so why shouldn’t Lib Dem politicians be harshly criticised or exposed when their political errors are so obviously blatant and their votes crucial for Tory policies to be implemented?

When the LibDems and the Labour left where (rightly) slating New Labour over Iraq, PFI or tuition fees, did Sunny write “easy with calling Tony Blair ‘traitor’ or ‘Bliar’ or else we risk turing these policies into a Tory monopoly”?

At which point does the game of triangulations end and principles can be asserted to the point that we can call a crap policy or an obvious betrayal by their name – that is, a crap policy and an obvious betrayal?

Commenting on cuts and “difficult budget decisions”, Deputy PM Nick Clegg said recently that his government would “not” do it “the way we did it in the 80s”. “We’re going to do this differently.”

The acute observer, however, may have learnt the bitter way that, whatever the Lib Dem leader says, the exact opposite is true. In fact, his public declarations read in reverse should be coveted as the best way of predicting government policy.

And so, yesterday’s announcement that projects worth £2bn are getting axed (with another £8.5bn suspended) is a clear sign that, for all Clegg’s posturing, the 80s are actually back with a vengeance.

To quote Chris Dillow, “[W]hen Clegg says he’s going to do things differently from Thatcher, he’s right – he’ll cut overall spending by much more than she did”.

The significance of yesterday’s cuts is immense. It offers a clear glimpse of the ideological direction taken by the Con/Dem administration.

The Coalition are not cutting back on things such as council-funded festivals, public-funded anti-obesity ads or – even better – the salaries handed on a tray to the Chief Executives of Network Rail or the Royal Mail.

No. The axe is falling on public projects which were crucial in both the public and private sector. Cuts are going to affect job creation (mostly in the private sector), 21st century manufacturing, the health service and measures to help the unemployed.

Those include scrapping a much needed new hospital in the North-East and cutbacks on the Future Jobs Fund, a scheme that was created during the recession to help the long-term unemployed with jobs or training.

But probably even more significant was the massive blow dealt to manufacturing firm Sheffield Forgemasters.

Their £80 million loan would have created skilled jobs and stimulated the supply chain in low carbon power generation. It was a good investment both in terms of future green technology and long-term support of a specialised UK company with only one direct competitor in the field of heavy steel forgins and steel castings – in Japan. Other foreign companies will soon be vying to fill the gap.

Quite clearly this government is not interested in diversifying the economy away from the financial sector. They are repeating the short-termist mistakes that led us to the crisis in the first place. They are not interested in a forward-thinking manufacturing base and they have no plan for growth other than praying that their Ideological Hymnsheet may deliver the goods.

And the 11th Chapter, first epistle to the Free Marketeers, Verses 2-16 states clearly that the government shouldn’t invest in manufacturing and that mass unemployment is a price worth paying. Amen.

And yet the police are still trying to piece the story together. It was unclear what exactly tipped 52-year-old Derrick Bird, the killer, over the edge. Was he having financial problems? Did he have a row with his fellow taxi drivers over queue-jumping and touting?

Did he fall out with his relatives over a will?

Did years of solitude and a broken marriage take their toll?

No-one will probably ever find out. The only certainty is that something made Bird lose the plot completely. Something flicked a switched that got him to embark on a deadly rampage, killing thirteen and injuring more in a mist of rage reminiscing of the worst horror films.

Derrick Bird was certainly angry and frustrated. But there are a lot of angry and frustrated people about. He was a bit of a loner. But luckily most quiet people don’t usually pick up a gun and aim at random passers by.

Bird didn’t fit the stereotypical Daily Mail and Sun profile of council-estate-dweller-turned-monster courtesy of New Labour and dole handouts and he wasn’t, at least on the surface, a “victim of neo-liberalism” and the bankers’ crisis either. He lived in a quiet town and he wasn’t party to any rival gang.

The simple, terrifying, fact is that we can all suddenly lose it. Anyone, anytime. There is little point in trying to rationalise or establish visible patterns that would explain behaviour like the one seen yesterday in Cumbria.

Some commentators like Peter Squires in the Guardian wrote that better and stricter gun control “could have prevented [the] Cumbria shootings”. And yet, without wishing for a second to play down the tragic nature of the events, this is only the third such incident in 23 years.

Like Richard Ford points out in the Times, both after Hungerford in 1987 and Dunblane ten years later, gun laws were significantly tightened with the Violent Crime Reduction Act of 2006 adding further restrictions.

Yes, 1.3 million shotguns in the UK are way too many. And, for the life of me, I can’t think of anything good that’s ever come out of gun-ownership and the intrinsic machism that come with it (incidentally, why is it always men who are responsible for mass shootings?). I agree that no guns would mean no gun violence and that knives, slingshots and baseball bats, however dangerous, can’t be compared in terms of deadliness.

Yet – let’s keep it within perspective and say something positive for once – 3 appalling incidents in 23 years from a total of 1.3m shotguns in the country means that 0,0002% of firearms in Britain have resulted in an incident like the one seen yesterday.

There is no point in passing further legislation just to impress public opinion. No law can do anything when a person loses it like Derrick Bird did.

The fact is, an alarming number of Brits are happy to be treated like imbeciles the moment there’s a whiff of international football in the air.

The rumours appear to have been kickstarted by (make a wild guess) the Sun when they published an article under the header “Bid to ban England tops in World Cup pubs“.

Anyone with more than a brain cell would have detected that the headline had nothing to do with the facts.

The article itself refers to none other than “suggestions” sent by the Met to a few pubs in Croydon with a history of football-related disturbances. Just a couple of non-compulsory tips about hiring security staff and introducing dresscode restrictions (see Tabloid Watch for a better analysis).

Yet the frothing at the mouth took no time to kick in. Several Facebook groups (see here, here and here for a sample) were set up before you could even utter the word “idiot” and, like dogs who’ve just been ordered to sit, lie down, bark and run, people started spewing up disturbing amounts of online rage, working themselves up against not just the “PC brigade” and “elf & safety” killjoys, but also immigrants (see this delightful group called “if our england tops am banned your sari should b2“)!

And yet police forces up and down the country have been stepping forward to dispel the myth. Staffordshire police said that “there is no truth in [the rumours] whatsoever”, while West Midlands Police denied that there is any directive whatsoever about a ban. A spokesperson dismissed the rumours as “nonsense“.

But, no. That’s not enough. The Sun seems to be unable to show its “patriotic” credentials without having to whip up more imbecilic siege mentality. They just can’t do it, can they?

And so the tabloid decided to produce the headline Ooh-arr ya? Cornish ban England flags. Except that no such thing ever happened in Cornwall or elsewhere. The Sun just concocted the headline on the basis of a Facebook group comprising 55 people and a quote from a man representing the minute Cornish separatist movement. That became Cornish ban England flags.

Today the Daily Mail joined in with the words “Clampdown: Workers are increasingly being banned from flying England flags“, based on two stories about a private refuse collection firm in Liverpool and taxis in Canterbury not being allowed to wave flags for visibility reasons.

Nevermind the taxi firm made it clear that “[they] have been fully supportive of [taxi drivers] wearing England shirts”, the Daily Mail insists it’s a “clampdown on public patriotism”.

Again, siege, threats, bans, enemies, paranoia: the equivalent of an aggressive pisshead unable to handle his drinks – as he works himself up that everyone’s looking at him funny.

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cross-posted from Hagley Road to Ladywood

If the Times is to be believed today, the House of Lords is set to become the fattest parliamentary chamber in the world.

There are currently 736 sitting Lords, or 707 if you take into account disqualified ones and other exceptions- see here for a full summary.

The coalition government, however, has agreed to appoint up to 172 new peers (77 extra Tories and 95 extra LibDems) in order to “rebalance the upper chamber”, which is currently under a Labour majority. According to the Times, “[t]he first wave is expected soon”.

This will potentially bring the total to a maximum of 908 peers, nine times the number of the US Senate and thirteen times that of the German Bundestrat.

Luckily the place is generally empty, so at least fitting them all in shouldn’t be much of a problem. Costs however, will sore big time.

Officially, the coalition has agreed to reform the House of Lords and increase the number of elected members.

For the time being however, the Con/Dem looming act of political patronage would even tower over anything attempted by Tony Blair. And that says something.

Let’s leave aside the long list of differences (technical, fiscal, substantial, ethical, practical, etc) between the two types of “donations”. Let’s leave aside “solemn and binding” promises.

The best way to gauge weight and influence as carried by Lord Ashcroft vs the Unions is to check the relationship between donors and political parties.

Not a single senior Tory has publicly said a bad thing against the Belize-based tycoon. They said a lot of things, but nothing bad. And how could they, given that the Baron has pumped around £5m into Tory coffers?

Now look instead at how Labour is actively laying into Unite the Union in the middle of a delicate industrial dispute with British Airways.

There’s a trade union “proudly” handing around £3.6m a year to the Labour Party and publicly announcing that they made “tens of thousands of calls” to their members urging them to vote Labour at the forthcoming elections.

So what does the Labour Party do in return?

Public support would be too much, so forget that. How about neutrality and balance in the midst of the biggest industrial dispute of the year so far, that is the British Airways strike?

Fat chance. First, Transport Secretary Lord Adonis echoed BA boss as he called the strike “totally unjustified”. “I absolutely deplore the strike”, the unelected Baron told the BBC’s Andrew Marr, adding that “it poses a threat” to the future of BA.

But Adonis went further. Sounding like your average Daily Mail column, he warned that “passengers should not be held to ransom by [Unite]“.

Yesterday Gordon Brown joined in. Again, he slammed the strike as “deplorable and unjustified”. Can you imagine David Cameron or George Osborne using those words against their biggest donor?

For 13 years, Britain’s unions have acted like a battered dog who keeps going back to its tormentor.

With few exceptions, like the Fire Brigade Union (which, to their honour, disaffiliated in 2004), the unions keep getting the shit kicked out of them by the Party but then always crawl back, cheque in hand, to Master Labour.

In a different world, this incredibly insightful piece of research by the housing and homelessness charity Shelter would be front page news.

Referring to 1971 as a starting date, Shelter discovered that if food and other essential items had gone up as fast as the average property price, a box of washing powder would now cost £28-53, a jar of coffee over £20 and a pint of milk £2-43.

Would you put up with that? Well, we certainly did with house prices.

Unaffordable housing has been one of the most neglected issues of the pre-election campaign.

The news is full of stuff like Nick Clegg wanting to join salsa classes with David Cameron rather than Gordon Brown. But in the meantime, homes cost way more than they ever did in history and the paradox is that if prices don’t keep ballooning, “financial experts” call it a tragedy.

Yet, the impact of inflated property prices has proven devastating.

There were 40,000 properties repossessed in 2008. Last year, the official number went up to 46,000 -an average of 126 repossessions a day. That’s around 200,000 people going through a heartbreaking ordeal of not knowing where they’re going to sleep the next day and where they’re going to put their things.

However, the figures don’t even show the full picture. Like some analysts noted, anti-downturn measures such as the Mortgage Pre-action Protocol have merely deferred the inevitable, meaning that repossessions that weren’t allowed to take place in 2009 will anyway within a year or so.

More importantly, no-one has taken into account the dodgy ‘Sale and Rent Back’ schemes, which the Financial Services Authority (FSA) only recently regulated. Their significance added an extra 25,000 lost homes to the 2009 figures (read more here).

Two months ago, it was revealed that around one million people had to rely on credit cards to help cover their mortgage or rent in 2009.

When so-called “reality TV” programmes started mushrooming up one after the other, many commented on the fact that the only “real” thing about them was in the name.

And yet, as they quickly saturated television, their artificial, dumb and repetitive formula will probably be judged by history as the Noughties’ worst cultural legacy.

Back in 2005, we wrote that a Temping Idol or Casual Employee Academy would have been a good antidote to the binge of televisual fakery that goes by the name of “reality”.

Now, a dramatic story is actually underway and it’s no fake.

A group of workers barricaded themselves on Asinara, a small island off the northern coast of Sardinia. For decades, and until 1997, the island was used as a maximum security prison, and its only inhabitants were prisoners and warders.

After being collectively laid off four months ago, on February 24, a group of workers from a chemical company called ENI landed at Asinara and set camp at the old prison.

This is when their L’isola dei Cassintegrati, “Redundancy Island”, started. Though there are no celebrity and no television crews, the workers are hoping to direct collective focus towards their plight.

Their families help them set up a Facebook group which has already gained over 14,000 supporters. It reads:

“Redundancy Island is a ‘real’ reality, unfortunately, where no-one is famous but everyone is jobless. Hidden away on an island which is the symbol of what a once Great Sardinia which is now in the throes of a deep crisis, we are dwelling in cells which are no worse than the prison bars that the national government, the regional one and ENI presented us with.

There are no yachts, billionaires or showgirls on this island, just the crude reality of unaccountable politics and a state-controlled company – ENI – pursuing its business goals as they trample on hundreds of families. Not least, a group of brave workers fighting for their rights”.

Since redundancy notices were served in November, the workers have had to make do with a single 800 Euro payout.

“It’s embarrassing that we have to mimick Celebrity Island to remind people of what’s going on in both Italy and Sardinia”, said one of the protesters to Italian daily la Repubblica.

In Britain, 17.9% of those below the age of 25 are unemployed. True, some countries are faring even worse. The percentage is 21.5 per cent in Ireland while, in Spain, the jobless amount amongst the young has now reached a staggering 42.6 per cent.

Countries like Denmark and Germany, however, show a different picture – with the unemployment rate amongst the under-25s standing at 8.9 and 10.5 respectively.

Of course, there is no obvious reason for this disparity. However, Germany has long been known as a country placing apprenticeships at the core of its education system.

The German system is a model for youth work contracts. It is called ‘the dual system’. Once completed compulsory education, either at 16 or 19, a worker can start an apprenticeship at a company which can last between 2 and 3 and 1/2 years. During this period, for two days a week, the apprentice will have to learn the theoretical background at a vocational school known as Berufsschule.

The precise skills and theory taught on German apprenticeships are strictly regulated. The employer is responsible for the entire education programme.

There are aroud 350 trades to choose from: anything from accountant to builder or from medical worker to baker.

About two thirds of young people who finish school decide to begin an apprenticeship every year.

The fact that the contract is really an ‘apprenticeship’ doesn’t mean that the worker has no rights. Unlike other countries such as Italy, contracts designed to help the young are not misused to maximise profits out of unprotected workers. The company is required to pick up the social security costs as well as unemployment insurance and pension entitlements.

What varies is the salary. For instance, an apprentice metal worker in the Baden-Wurtemberg region will earn around 810 Euros a month during his first year, €861 in his second, €937 in the third and €988 in his fourth. His counterpart in Berlin will probably take home €100 less each month.

This can partly explain why there is a lower percentage of university students in Germany when compared to other Western countries, but there is a much lower percentage of people entering the German labour market with no qualifications. This seems to have protected, at least partially, German workers and job seekers from the worst effects of the downturn.

Britain, instead was hit on two fronts.

One one side, the 1980s and 1990s saw a sharp decrease in the number of apprenticeships which was only reversed through increased investment since 1997. The number of learners of all ages starting on the Apprenticeships programme has more than doubled from around 75,000 to around 180,000 today.

On the other side, the Labour government was guilty of placing unrealistic expectations on the University system. You may remember the old Blairite obsession with having 50% of people in Higher Education by 2010. It was never going to be economically sustainable, which is why the Government is now -very shyly- trying to support graduate internship positions.

At the moment, it’s not going very well. Out of 725,000 unemployed 18-24 Britons, there are 3,400 graduate internship positions, only 47% of which are paid.

In short, the sceptics argue that weakening the BBC will be a gift to its private competitors and a blow to public services on both radio and television.

I am totally in favour of the BBC. I think a competitive state-owned TV is sacrosanct and whoever thinks the BBC should be dismantled and/or privatised is purely driven by rampant ideology.

However, the current cost of a TV licence is £142.50. In 2000, it was just £104. In ten years, an increase of around 36% – without anyone asking licence payers if they agreed with the way the corporation expanded.

Aside from areas where everyone agrees the BBC was “largin’ it” (i.e. Jonathan Ross’s salary), why does the corporation have to cover so much stuff: from news in 32 languages through TV channels abroad all the way to Radio Times?

Are we sure it is the duty of a UK taxpayer-funded public service to include, say, BBC Canada? Then why not BBC Denmark or BBC Spain?

Is BBC Prime really that essential? Are we certain dismantling it would be “allowing the corporate media barons to have (it) their way”? And how about BBC Lifestyle for Singapore and Hong Kong?

Does the BBC need so many radio stations (in succession: One, 1Extra, Two, Three, Four, Five Live, Sports Extra, 6 Music, Seven, Asian Network)? And, yes, it’s a shame if 6 Music went. But it’s not as if music was dying before its creation.

Does the website need to be so gigantic? If it was a tenth its current size, it’d be already one of the biggest and most effective online resources available. What’s the need for comprehensive gardening or travel sections? Again, are we sure that’s a public body’s obligation?

There’s nothing wrong with being ambitious. Unfortunately though, it doesn’t come for free. Many would rather have a slightly smaller BBC and a slightly reduced scope but an improvement in quality and service. Many others would rather the TV licence didn’t go up faster than inflation.

It all started when senior Observer columnist Andrew Rawnsley, anxious to plug his new book The End of The Party, quoted a number of staff at No.10 Downing Street accusing the Prime Minister of making their life a misery with his pongy mouth.

This ignited a political battle over whether Gordon Brown suffers from halitosis or whether this is simply a Tory conspiracy aimed at discrediting the Prime Minister as recent opinion polls indicate Labour is making up some lost ground.

According to one of Rawnsley’s sources: “the air in our Downing Street office is really unpleasant. Each time the PM opens his gob we recoil in horror. It’s like being hit in the face by a rotten onion”. “Needless to say”, the source adds, “the whole thing’s ruining our lives. We dread coming into work”.

A senior adviser complained of getting “routinely shoved aside” by the Prime Minister’s breath. “You get this stolid stench lingering on. It’s just beastly. Something is rotting inside that man’s guts”, he noted.

Richard Littlejohn added his bit in his Daily Mail column, calling the Prime Minister “a Scottish sociopath” and describing “volcanic, irrational outbursts of cock breath”.

Peter Mandelson stood up for the Prime Minister: “There’s a difference”, he said, “between a boss with halitosis and one with a temperamental mouth”. “What comes out of his mouth may be demanding, but it’s not halitosis”, the Business Secretary noted, rejecting calls from the Conservatives that the Prime Minister should submit himself to an ‘Halimeter Test‘, a clinical device which is very effective at determining levels of certain VSC-producing bacteria.

Sarah Brown weighed into the row about her husband’s breath insisting he doesn’t suffer from halitosis.

The Prime Minister’s wife followed a string of senior Labour figures in defending him, saying “What you smell is what you get”.

“I know him as a hard-working decent man and he isn’t anything else”.

In what’s been interpreted as a coded swipe at David Cameron, Mrs Brown added: “At least he doesn’t conceal his real breath with chemical stuff like Airwaves or Fisherman’s Friend. What you smell with my husband is what you get. It’s all genuine and natural”.

In the meantime bookmakers are taking bets on which issue will be raised next in an attempt to bring Brown’s political career to an end. Stinky feet and sweaty balls are current favourites at 2/1.

I don’t know about you but I’ve never met anyone -not a single person – who’s ever quit smoking after reading health signs on packets of fags. Like, NOT ONE.

Introduced in the early nineties, warnings such as “Smoking kills”, “you’re gonna die” and “What a piece of shit you are for smoking” were made to cover at least 30% of a cigarette pack in 2003 – presumably a measure for the inattentive. Most recently, “picture warnings” have also been introduced, along with measures to “hide cigarettes under the counter”.

But with alcohol the contradictions will just be comedy material.

Here’s a government that makes a substance available 24/7, practically everywhere, but then goes apeshit that those bottles and cans don’t carry a clear enough warning that the same substance is bad for you.

In fairness, eradicating booze culture in Britain is no easy feat. If anything, the problem’s spiralling out of control.

Ask any foreigner and one of the first things they’ll tell you is that Britain’s a country of pissheads, that they’ve never spotted such massive amounts of binge drinking anywhere else and that, put next to an average Brit, Boris Yeltsin looked like a teetotal.

Watch most British TV programmes, dramas or soaps and every other scene takes place to a background of one or more stressed out characters knocking back a shot of whisky, vodka or other.

Someone said somewhere that a large sign on both fags or booze saying “Thank you for your contribution to the tax man” would probably make a stronger impact. The Government should definitely give that one a go.

“Pointless outrage”, he called it, as he wrote in the Times that “Israel takes care with its targeting, [the Palestinians] don’t”.

Like he still does over Iraq, Aaronovitch was oozing confidence that yet another war was “morally just”.

Around that time, Amnesty International and other observers obtained evidence that Israel had used white phosphorous -reports also substantiated by Aaronovitch’s own paper, the Times. All “pointless” stuff, of course.

And yet the UN too, with the Goldstone report, accused the IDFS of using “disproportionate force”, a claim that was immediately rejected by the Israeli government as “flawed from A to Z”, “biased” and “ludicrous”, along with allegations that white phosphorous had been used.

One year later and the tune has changed. The Israeli government published its report to the UN, admitting -crucially- that “[S]everal artillery shells were fired in violation of the rules of engagement prohibiting use of such artillery near populated areas”. In particular, the report refers to a UN compound sheltering 700 civilians that was set ablaze by white phosphorus shells.

Which, I guess, goes to show the “pointlessness” of overpaid commentators a-la Aaronovitch.

Also, like Andrew Rawnsley remarked in Sunday’s Observer, the former PM’s job was made a lot easier by the “feeble” nature of the panel:

“Time and again, they approached an interesting subject area, stumbled around like people in the dark trying to find the light switch and then abandoned the quest without leaving themselves or anyone watching much the wiser about the most divisive war in the last century of our history”.

I don’t normally agree with Peter Hitchens, but he nailed it right on the head when he wrote:

“Mr Blair, questioned in a feeble and disorganised way, talked himself out of trouble by answering questions he hadn’t been asked and not answering the ones he was asked. His interrogators mostly didn’t notice this simple trick, which dishonest people instinctively use”.

All we learnt is that, after years of reasons for going to war mutating faster than the Sars virus (in succession, WMDs, violation of UN resolutions, Al Quaeda, human rights and ‘regime change’), we are now told that 9/11 was what really did it.

The former PM said: “The crucial thing after 9/11 is that the calculus of risk changed… After September 11, if you were a regime engaged in WMD (weapons of mass destruction), you had to stop.”

Yet, even if you agreed with this line of thought, it would only make sense if they’d held accountable each and every regime that was suspected of engaging in WMDs. You do it only with one and it’s like trying to contain a bursting dam with a brolly.

And, in any case, hadn’t the slippery christian said in the infamous Fern Britton interview that he’d have gone to war anyway regardless of WMDs?

Not to mention that no-one raised the simple straightforward objection that Iraq had jack to do with 9/11. If anything, a number of countries were far higher in the list of potential involvement. The hijiackers, for instance, were from Saudi Arabia, Egypt and the United Arab Emirates. No evidence whatsoever existed of any link between Iraq and Al Quaeda.

The panel also failed when Blair was asked why he had insisted on a second UN resolution if he now thinks that the first one was enough to legally justify the war. They allowed him to slip out of that contradiction without further prodding.

Fair enough suspicion. Fair enough emotions running high. Fair enough the desire to appear tough before so-called rogue states. But can you raise raze an entire country to the ground purely on that basis – in the 21st century? Can you be so geo-politically inept and blind to the extra oil you’re going to pour on the flames? Can you play with so many people’s lives just like that, when the motivations are so hit and miss?

It has been years now that Tony Blair has been getting away with lame justifications such as “God will be my judge on Iraq“, “I did what I thought was right for the country“, or ” I believed in it. I believed in it then, I believe in it now“.

But you ask any prime minister, president, führer or member of a junta and they’d probably say, through history, that they too believed in what they thought was right. And that is just shit.

But the main point is this. According to the Daily Mail, Mrs Donnison and her husband had just split up. In fact, “the couple’s marriage had been falling apart for a long time”, adding extra strains on the woman.

No doubt if Iain Duncan Smith’s tax break for married couples had been already in place the two would still be together. Under the Tories’ proposals, with children under 3 the Donnisons would have been entitled to a tax allowance.

And surely an extra twenty or thirty quid extra a month would have helped them patch their differences and nipped family arguments in the bud.

Yesterday I wrote about a similarly disturbing case.

Last week another court case went on about a merciless, sadistic murder that took place in a “neat” and “respectable” privately rented terraced home in the town of Chilton, Co Durham. With the exception of some sporadically recycled wire copy, a piece in the Mirror and the local press, nationwide the case went largely unnoticed.

And yet it was the prefect tabloid material, a case so shocking that it would not be out of place in a horror movie script.

It was a killing so savage, cruel and calculated that the DCI leading the investigation said he “had never seen anything like it” in his lengthy police career

But Fiona Donnison’s child murders won’t spark any national debate about Broken Britain, Labour’s social engineering, lazy council estate dwellers or even the decline of coal mining: the killer was (very) wealthy so she simply snapped, that’s all.

Yesterday’s papers couldn’t agree more. In essence, the widespread opinion across the spectrum was that another British institution is going, that the usual City “short-termists” are making a mint off the back of a local community, that the economic long-term interests of the country are being ignored and that Britain’s surrendering to one too many foreign takeovers.

But scratch beneath the condemnation for Cadbury boss Roger Karr’s own admission that job losses were an “inevitability“, the CEO’s £12m payout, or the simple fact that the buyers Kraft are a company ridden with something like £22 billion of debt, and few grasp the fundamental reasons behind the potential loss of Cadbury.

For instance the fact that the industrial policy of the past thirty years has been coherently and systematically biased towards the professional short-termism that turned London into the Mecca of City spivvery. And that’s under the active complicity of both Tories and Labour.

For all the hollow cries from Gordon Brown that he’ll do his best to secure jobs and the right-wing revulsion at foreign companies sucking the blood out of British firms and then binning them after a couple of years, this is a script we already saw with Rover and more recently with Bosch and Corus: sorry very much, but it’s all shareholders uber alles and tough for whoever’s left to mop up the mess.

Bournville is one of the prettiest areas of Birmingham as well as one with a fairly solid community spirit. One can only imagine what would happen if the factory that’s provided a living to thousands since the 19th century was to up sticks or be significantly scaled down.

And yet the picture’s pretty clear. Like they point out at Unite, wherever it’s gone in the past 10 years, “Kraft has sacked 60,000 workers to pay for other companies it has eaten up”.

The sourest irony of all is that the £7bn Kraft raised to table the bid were financed by RBS which is 84 per cent owned by the British government.

And until any of the major political parties will say loud and clear that Britain can’t carry on turning into a country exclusively centred around City gambles with the rest working in call centres and mobile phone shops, we will witness similar devastation time and time again.

So would all the opinionmeisters that today are crying crocodile tears for the loss of a British institution be prepared to change their tack given that they normally spot the dark shadows of “socialism” lurking behind the slightest governmental intervention?

Would they be prepared to accept that only a state that plays a bigger role in protecting manufacturing can halt the dependence on Bullshit Economy? Would they be able to clock that protecting long-term stability, often the default policy in France, the US and Japan, doesn’t mean that Stalin and Lenin are on their way back?

Sign the petition to Keep Cadbury Independent here.

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Picture from Flickr

The Daily Mail headlines ranged from IS SWINE FLU ALREADY HERE?; and SWINE FLU: IT’S GETTING SERIOUS, to SWINE FLU NOW THE BATTLE TO CONTAIN IT, and KILLER FLU IS HERE.

And that’s without counting the paper’s first page warnings that “65,000 could die [and] one in three could get infected”, printed in the 7 July 2009 edition.

So you will excuse us if we laughed out loud this morning when the same paper published what is already on course as the most ridiculous article of 2010, a faux-outraged piece by Christopher Booker that states: After this awful fiasco over swine flu, we should never believe the State scare machine again!

Booker’s piece follows yesterday’s report by Fiona McRae: The ‘false’ pandemic: Drug firms cashed in on scare over swine flu, a reference to the recent claims by Wolfgang Wodarg, health chief at the Council of Europe, who recently branded the H1N1 panic as “one of the greatest scandals of the century”.

Wodarg pointed out that too many things don’t add up. From the World Health Organisation changing the definition of ‘pandemic’ in order to include the H1N1, to the fact itself that the so-called “swine flu” affected infinitely less people than any other pandemic in the past or even seasonal flu, with fatality rates “considerably less lethal than feared“.

Just to give you an idea, the infamous pandemic of 1918 affected 500 million people, that is 33 per cent of the world’s population, whereas the so-called “swine flu” or (“killer flu” to quote the Express) affected an estimated 600,000 people worldwide with a death rate of 0.03%.

In short, the Daily Mail has radically changed its tune. From equating a sore throat with the grim reaper all the way to Mr Wodarg’s views – now that’s quite a Road to Damascus.

So when Christopher Booker concludes his article by saying that “misreadings of the scientific evidence [...] can eventually make all of us look very silly indeed”, he should speak for himself and his mates at the Daily Mail. And then, perhaps, look up the word “ridicule” in the dictionary.

First off, the background. Like in most of Europe, fruit-picking is carried out by immigrants, except that in the South of Italy, those are largely underpaid and illegal – under the ruthless watch of the local mafia (n’drangheta), one of the most powerful groups of organised crime in the country.

Reports suggest that up to twenty thousand illegal immigrants in the region are paid £20 for a 12 or 14-hour working day minus a £5 ‘fee’ handed to their gangmasters for transport and “protection”.

They live in appalling conditions, amassed in rat-infested warehouses with no light and poor sanitation and with nothing to do but work and sleep – effectively becoming profit fodder for the n’drangheta. Every morning they are rounded up together, packed into rusty trucks and driven to orange or olive groves.

Last month, a report by Italian daily la Repubblica highlighted a ticking bomb, comparing the migrants’ living conditions to concentration camps. “About seven hundred of them live jam-packed into a derelict paper mill”, wrote reporter Carlo Ciavoni.

Calabria is also the poorest and least developed Italian region. The grip of organised crime is visible at all levels. Many councils in the area were long ago “dissolved” on suspicion of mafia infiltration and provisionally handed to a commissioner.

It is against this background that one of the ugliest pages of European history was written last week. On Tuesday a legal immigrant from Togo was wounded in a random pellet-gun attack which was reportedly carried out for fun by youths associated with the local mafia clans.

This became the spark for the immigrants’ frustration. Obviously letting off steam for their subhuman exploitation, hundreds took to the streets of a town called Rosarno. According to the BBC, “the protesters clashed with police in riot gear [...]. Cars were burned and shop windows smashed. Many shouted ‘We are not animals’ and carried signs saying ‘Italians here are racist’”.

It’s at this point that Ku Klux Klan-style lynching took over.

In succession, immigrants were runover by cars (and in one failed attempt, a bulldozer), more locals began shooting at any non-white person they could spot (injuring several) and, in many cases, gangs of youths beat up migrant workers with iron bars. Amongst shouts of “negroes out”, about thirty immigrants ended up in hospital.

Things turned even uglier when volunteers who were spotted taking meals and warm clothes to the migrants became the target of a spontaneous local residents’ demonstration. A crew from national television RAI was pelted with stones and, according to peacereporter, journalists were threatened with phrases ranging from “don’t you dare take photos” to “mind your own fuckin business”.

In the end, three hundred policemen were called into the area to save the immigrants from being lynched.

In the midst of all this mayhem, the target chosen by Home Secretary Roberto Maroni, from the far-right Northern League, was clear: “In all these years illegal immigration has been tolerated without doing anything effective, an immigration that on the one hand has fed crime and on the other has led to situations of extreme squalor such as that at Rosarno”. “All the clandestine ones will be expelled. Someone could have died there”, he added.

The article echoes what he already said yesterday on BBC Radio 4′s Today programme.

The former Archbishop and current member of the Balanced Migration Group followed a template that we’ve recently seen far too often from the usual suspects: a) if you talk about immigration you are branded a racist b) if you want to stop the BNP from growing you need to “seriously address the concerns” c) Britain is a Christian country.

To which the answers are:

a) Immigration has been discussed relentlessly for the whole of the past decade. All the best selling dailies -we’re talking millions and millions of copies everyday- have been hammering the point in that immigration is the scourge of our times. It’s a myth that a national debate is not taking place. Far from being cornered with accusations of racism, on countless occasions the tabloids have perpetrated outright lies about immigrations – with most politicians rushing to endorse their “grievances”. Take a look here for myth-debunking on several levels.

b) The fact that the BNP rise can be stopped by stealing their clothes is simply the most pathetic way to give in to them. At what point would Nick Griffin give up? A white-only policy? Barbwire erected along the borders? Repatriation? Two passports one for “ethnic Britons” and one for “civic Britons”, to quote Griffin’s criteria? What exactly does it mean that we need to “seriously address their concerns”?

c) Britain has indeed Christian roots, but what makes her an amazing country is the fact that on so many levels -and unlike other Christian countries- she has managed to evolve with the times, adopting tolerance and secularism which should rank amongst the country’s proudest traits. Luckily the BNP hasn’t clocked it yet, but insisting on the Christianity vs Islam angle doesn’t rub off on the British population at large because, quite simply, the country has not been interested in religious divide for donkey’s years.

Carey made a good point about the “deeply socially divisive” nature of “immigrants who immediately establish their own tribunals to apply Sharia”, but he’s hardly the one to talk about “socially divisive” actions. In fact, if it was for people like George Carey and his own notion of “Christianity”, for instance, homosexuals would still be forced into hiding. Which, come to think of it, would be in line with his calls to “address the concerns” of the BNP.

Not many may remember, but during his tenure as Archbishop, Carey managed to alienate thousands of people with some of the most right-wing/medieval views to ever emerge from Canterbury.

He has always fiercely opposed an equal age of consent and even employment rights for lesbians and gay men. He condemned legal rights for LGB couples (including next-of-kin access) and actively repressed any homosexual involvement in the clergy.

This is also the man who said he was proud of Britain’s leading role in arms manufacturing and whose most compassionate words were his calls for the release of Chilean fascist dictator General Pinochet.

Placed next to him, Pope Ratzinger looks positively liberal.