How a group of laid off workers took over an uninhabited island and began their protest.

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.

Guest post by Jennifer O’Mahony

On March 1st in France, immigrants were encouraged to stay at home, protest, and spend nothing as a nationwide protest against the country’s latent problems with immigration and national identity.

Peggy Derder, Nadir Dendoune and Nadia Lamarkbi, three French professionals in their thirties, hit upon the idea of la journée sans immigrés, or the day without immigrants, after years of endless police checks and discrimination. The trio were encouraging anyone who is an immigrant, of immigrant origin, or who feels solidarity with immigrants and wanted to contest their treatment to take these three simple measures for just one day. In a political system where there are no black or Arab representatives, despite the fact that these minorities make up 10% of the population, people of immigrant origin wanted to make their invisibility and silence symbolically evident in workplaces around France.

Their aim was to make their compatriots see how different their country would look and sound if France’s minorities did not exist. The demonstration also sought to highlight the economic contribution that minorities make, and the range of industries they operate within France. Demonstrators were hoping to empty offices, stop public transport and close stores. The idea quickly spread and similar demonstrations were seen in Spain, Italy, and Greece. continue reading… »

Youth unemployment data across the EU suggest that countries with more developed apprenticeship policies have minimised the worst effects of the downturn.

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.

[Article was wrongly attributed initially. The correct author now listed.]

The Dutch government collapsed early on Saturday morning, with the Dutch Labour party leaving the coalition over a disagreement with Christian Democrat Prime Minister Balkenende’s proposal to extend the country’s military commitment in Afghanistan, beyond the coalition’s earlier agreement to withdraw by the summer with all Dutch troops leaving Afghanistan by the end of the year.

The 16 hour long Cabinet meeting had led Labour leader and deputy PM Wouter Bos had pulled out of Friday’s progressive governance conference in London, at which British PM Gordon Brown was joined by centre-left premiers and party leaders from around Europe.

Labour’s withdrawal from the Cabinet leave the government without a majority coalition, and will lead to new elections within three months. The parties face local elections on March 3rd. Dutch public opinion backs the Labour stance on withdrawal, though is equally divided over whether the issue ought to end the government.

The Netherlands has had the most volatile politics in western Europe in the last decade.

Geert Wilders’ populist anti-immigration Freedom Party (PVV) hopes to make significant gains, having won 9 seats as the fifth largest party in the last elections in 2006.
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A senior German Bishop has responded to the latest child abuse scandal to hit the Catholic Church by suggesting to a local daily newspaper that the ’sexual revolution’ of the 1960s and 70s was at fault for abuse by priests.

According to German news website ‘The Local‘, Walter Mixa, the Bishop of Augsberg, told the Augsburger Allgemeine Zeitung that “The so-called sexual revolution, in which some especially progressive moral critics supported the legalisation of sexual contact between adults and children, is certainly not innocent,” before adding that the media was also at fault.

The article from which these comments are taken can be viewed in slightly mangled English via Google Translate, which gives this version of the Bishop’s remarks

Bishop Mixa emphasized in these “heinous crime” was the “so-called sexual revolution, certainly not innocent.”We have seen in recent decades, especially in the media, an increasing sexualisation of the public, which also promotes abnormal sexual preference rather than limited,” said Mixa.”Especially progressive morality critics had” even the legalization of sexual contact between adults and minors required.

If anyone come up with better translation then the original German language version of this article is here and please do feel free to post your efforts in comments.

The Bishop was commenting on a scandal that engulfed an elite Catholic school in Berlin at the beginning of the year, which kicked off, in January after a former priest who’d taught at the school between 1975 and 1983 admitted to forcing boys into having sex.

Canisius College, which is operated by the Jesuits, has since admitted that systematic sexual abuse did take place during this period and that it undertaken by at least two priests, although one is reported to have denied having had any part in such activities.

In keeping with previous scandals of this kind, these admissions have opened up a sizeable can of worms for the Catholic Church. It’s now thought that more than a hundred former pupils of Canisius have either contacted lawyers, or the school itself, with complaints of sexual abuse, while the Jesuits have issued an apology and admitted to covering up case of abuse at schools in Berlin, Hamburg, St. Blasien, Goettingen and Hildesheim.

The worldwide Jesuit order has also confirmed the existence of similar cases in Spain and Chile.

Earlier this month, Der Spiegel published a report which suggested that at least 10 church employees in Germany are currently facing accusations of sexual abuse and that at least 94 clerics and church laymen have been suspected of abuse since 1995, only 30 of which were prosecuted due to legal time constraints on pursuing cases.

Clearly, the Bishop is hoping that the timing of these cases, which date from the mid to late 1970s and early eighties, will lend some credibility to his efforts to blame clerical involvement in acts of  schoolboy buggery on the media and on the liberalisation of wider society.

This is, however, entirely at odds with the evidence of abuse that emerged as a result of similar scandals in both the US and Irish Republic.

In the US, the John Jay report found evidence of sexual abuse within the American Catholic Church dating back as far as 1950, whiles Ireland’s Commission to Inquire into Child Abuse (CICA), which published its finding only last year, uncovered evidence of systematic abuse in Ireland’s state funded but church-run reformatory and industrial schools stretching back to the 1930s. CICA found that sexual abuse, ranging from improper touching and fondling to rape with violence, was endemic in boys’ institutions through the entire period covered by the inquiry, although not so in girls’ schools, where the main risks of sexual abuse came from predatory male employees/visitors and from outside placements.

More importantly, in terms of Bishop Mixa’s comments, much of the evidence, from Ireland in particular, dates from a time long before the ’swinging sixties’ and the so-called ’sexual revolution’, leaving him- and other members of his church – desperately short of a cop out.

Thanks to the Greek financial crisis, there is now a new punch line to an ancient music hall joke. The correct response to the question ‘I say, I say, I say, what’s a Greek urn?’ is no longer ‘oh, about 50 drachmas a day, I reckon’ but rather ‘4% less than they used to, on account of the latest public sector pay cut’.

The decision, taken by socialist government of George Papandreou, comes in response to a debt crisis that might have been more easily manageable but for the actions of hedge funds, who on Friday alone took $79bn in bets on the future value of the euro.

These people have also staked huge sums of money on a fall in the value of Greek government bonds, most prominently through the use of instruments known as credit default swaps. The price of CDSs has hit record levels in recent days.

Outfits such as Paulson and Moore Global Investment, who are leading the pack on this one, are politely described in the financial press as ‘speculative investors’. The second half of that designation might conjure up connotations of solidity. In the public mind, investment equates to new plant and machinery or roads and and schools and bridges.
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At the end of 2008 a European challenge had emerged – cash injection or hands on heads.

French President Nicolas Sarkozy who voiced his aggravation with German Chancellor Angela Merkel for not implementing a measure of fiscal stimulus said, “While France is working, Germany is thinking.”

Merkel was actually remaining loyal to the “Stability and Growth Pact” (SGP), the purpose of which was to tune the euro so it would be able to compete with the US Dollar and strengthen the stability of the euro-zone.

Now, in January 2010 we might be starting to see some early signs of this European challenge. The UK has had a surprise fall in unemployment figures – which may have part-time jobs to account for.
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Edward McMillan-Scott MEP may take legal action against the Conservative Party after an internal appeal panel upheld his expulsion from the party.

He says his treatment went beyond that of any Conservative MP involved in the Westminster expenses scandal, and that the five year ban contrasts with the two year expulsion of Den Dover, the former Tory MEP who was expelled for two years in 2008 when he refused to pay back “unduly” claimed expenses payments worth over £538,000.

This is not about me: it is about the values of the next British government … In the context of the Westminster expenses scandal, for which no Conservative was expelled, this will be seen by many as a serious case of double standards. The party seeks to prevent my candidacy in the next European election merely for taking a stand on matters of personal conscience. This raises very serious ethical, legal and political issues. [Telegraph]

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Last week the Southern Italian region of Calabria (’the toe of the boot’) became the theatre of a depressing anti-immigrant witchhunt eerily reminiscent of last century’s Ku Klux Klan violence in the US.

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.
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Just for the avoidance of doubt:

1) The democratically elected Icelandic government, under EU/EFTA financial regulation equivalence rules, agreed long before the crisis even began that it would guarantee compensation of the first EUR20887 of deposit to retail depositors in Icelandic banks from other EU/EFTA countries.

2) The Icelandic banks, with explicit permission from the democratically elected Icelandic government (as part of the economic boom that vastly enriched Icelanders for many years), actively marketed their savings accounts to depositors from other EU/EFTA countries.

3) The Icelandic banks then went bust and lost their depositors’ money.

4) This means that, unequivocally and in every possible sense, the Icelandic government is responsible for paying the first EUR20887 of compensation to retail depositors in Icelandic banks from other EU/EFTA countries. They agreed to take on that debt, and retail depositors in the Icelandic banks made the deposits on the basis that the Icelandic government weren’t a bunch of ropey shysters who’d refuse to pay debt that they owed.

5) For understandable reasons of domestic harmony, the governments of the UK and Netherlands (where the majority of Iceland’s victims were located) agreed to pay the compensation themselves, and subsequently chase the Icelandic government for the money it owed.

6) Today’s populist refusal by Iceland’s president to pay the UK and Netherlands government the US$5bn it owes as a result, despite the extremely generous payment terms they’d been offered, represents every single Icelandic person nicking more than US$10,000 from British and Dutch taxpayers.

If that’s democracy, screw it.

Update: Dsquared in the comments has a good summary of the Iceland situation:

The basic story here is that a small and wildly self-regarding Nordic nation, with a history of electing right-wing governments on the back of get-rich quick schemes, did so. Then that right-wing government proceeded to deal with its creditors in an amazingly stupid and dishonest manner because it wanted to pretend that something close to boom levels of consumption could be sustained. Then it all fell apart and a left-wing government was elected and started trying to clean up the mess. Then the elected President (from the same party as said right-wing government) decided to veto the solution. And this is, in some way, Gordon Brown’s fault.

He’s also written the whole, erm, saga up as a morality play. Well worth a read.

contribution by Left Outside

Tory MEP Dan Hannan has a dreadful top ten reasons to leave the EU (H/T Thomas Byrne). I hold no love for the EU but I hold Dan in even deeper disdain. This list has not changed my mind.

1. Since we joined the EEC in 1973, we have been in surplus with every continent in the world except Europe. Over those 27 years, we have run a trade deficit with the other member states that averages out at £30 million per day.

Correlation is not Causality. Perhaps, just perhaps, not being in a free trade area with other European states would have lead us to run a worse deficit with the rest of the world. Perhaps, just perhaps, allowing UK Governments to protect inefficient UK firms would have lead us to run smaller surpluses with other continents. I certainly don’t know; evidently neither does Dan Hannan.
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Millions worldwide have cheered the individual action of Massimo Tartaglia, the man who last Sunday whacked Berlusconi in the teeth. A divisive, dodgy, inflammatory right-wing Prime Minister got what he deserved, many commented online.

However, two days later, it’s important to make a cool-headed assessment as to what the blow landed on Berlusconi’s gob really means in the short to medium terms.

Until Sunday, Berlusconi’s coalition were showing their biggest cracks since their landslide election victory in April 2008. His hacking at the Italian constitution caused a series of unexpected rifts within his own coalition. By last week, one of his most senior and influential allies, Gianfranco Fini, was all but considered no longer part of Berlusconi’s coalition.

Most significantly, on Friday, Mr Casini, a former centrist partner of Berlusconi’s government, called for the formation of a broad ‘Republican front’ to finally defeat the billionaire Prime Minister.

And if you also take into account the spectacular sexual scandals that marred the Prime Minister throughout the summer, for the first time in years Silvio Berlusconi looked all but rock steady.

By Sunday evening, however, everything had changed.
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Was the invasion of Iraq illegal? Yes, I think we have now got almost enough evidence to conclude that George Bush and Tony Blair were more concerned to effect regime-change (which has no basis in international law) than with Saddam Hussein’s supposed possession of WMD in defiance of UN Security Council resolutions.

Does it matter? Yes, because if you selectively disregard international law than you weaken its framework and that makes the world a more dangerous place. Blair and Bush also unleashed a bloody maelstrom in Iraq itself which killed hundreds of thousands of innocent people.

Are Bush and Blair war criminals? Possibly. Customary international law recognises the existence of the crime of aggression and some international criminal tribunals (Nuremburg and ICTY) have prosecuted people for this offence. But the crime is not a part of British law and the International Criminal Court has also not yet defined it or granted itself jurisdiction to hear cases. Hopefully this anomaly will be dealt with next year (although the outcome could be a fudge) but the court will not be able to hear cases retrospectively.

If we instead have to content ourselves with the ‘court of public opinion’, I would like to be clear what I do and do not consider these two leaders guilty of.
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Obviously one should never condone the use of violence against anyone, least of all man in his seventies…

But – be honest – given a clear shot, you would… wouldn’t you?

John Demjanjuk – currently standing trial in Munich, accused of complicity in the murder of 27,900 Jews at Sobibor concentration camp in world war two – is 89 years old and apparently in failing health.

Let’s work on the basis that he really did do the wicked things of which he is accused; the prosecution is seemingly confident of its case, even almost 70 years after the killings took place. Is justice really served by putting Demjanjuk in the dock?

That’s the question Holocaust historian David Ceserani asks in the Independent this morning. Ceserani, himself Jewish and the author of a recent book on Eichmann, has previously advocated that perpetrators of Nazi genocide should be brought to book in all circumstances, irrespective of the passage of time. But in this instance, he takes the opposite stance.

Let us grant that if Demjanjuk is as ill as he looks, and not just play acting, than incarceration is out of the question. Banging up elderly and frail individuals – even elderly and frail former death camp guards – is clearly inhumane. The good society extends humanity even towards those who did not show it themselves. What we are still left with is the educative value of the judicial process.

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So, it’s looking like it’s lightweight, little-known Belgian Prime Minister Herman Van Rompuy for the President of the European Council, and lightweight, little-known Baroness Ashton (current UK European Commissioner, Peter Mandelson’s almost invisible replacement) for the High Representative of the Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy.

Two no-marks, for two jobs that many have claimed are among the most powerful in the world.

Does anyone seriously believe that Van Rompuy has what it takes to impose his will over the likes of Sarkozy, Merkel and Berlusconi in Council meetings?

Does anyone seriously believe that *anyone* is going to take Baroness Ashton seriously, a woman who’s been at the Commission for only a year, and was unqualified even for that? (See also…)

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When New Labour’s election strategists sat down to look over the results of the 2005 general election, in which the party lost more seats than they expected, they quickly came to two very clear conclusions.

One was that middle-class opposition to the war in Iraq had spawned a protest vote from which the Liberal Democrats had been the main beneficiaries and had cost them a number of marginal seat. The other was that working class antipathy towards immigration was costing the party votes in its traditional heartlands.

Six weeks later, the government joined the race to the bottom on immigration in earnest with the publication of a new Immigration, Asylum and Nationality Bill, which become law in 2006, restricting the right of appeal against refusal of entry that had previously been afforded to students, dependants and visitors to only human rights and discrimination grounds and imposing fines on employers who employ migrant workers who lack the necessary paperwork, i.e. entry clearance, leave to remain and/or a work permit.

The Conservatives may have spawned the mantra that ‘it’s not racist to talk about immigration’ but it was New Labour who gave it legitimacy.
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Where in Europe has the left has made a popular breakthrough, has a chance of making a real difference, even if in highly adverse circumstances, and has a policy that combines openness, democracy and sustainability? The answer is in Greece, but is the British left capable of taking any notice?

After twelve years in power there has been a sorry reversion to post-45 parochialism, except that an obsession with America has replaced the Empire as if singing the international meant dancing to the tune of the White House.

Of course, one reason for this is that social democracy is in ruins across much of the continent of its birth. But George Papandreou’s PASOK party, having just last month gaining a surprising absolute majority, is different.

It is working to adopt a form of progressive government that combines green development, democratic openness and international reconciliation. How does New Labour measure up when seen in this modest comparative light? It is a painful question.
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EUOBSERVER / BRUSSELS – The European Alliance of National Movements, the coalition of far-right parties formed last month in Budapest, has failed in its an attempt to get its hands on European Parliament cash, as the jumble of reactionary rightists did not manage to file the application on time.

The alliance, which includes the UK’s BNP, France’s Front National and Hungary’s Jobbik, says it wants its share of the around €11 million that the parliament hands out every year to pan-European political parties, informally known as ‘europarties’.

Full Report…

Oh wow, have we got an exclusive for you today.

Recently our mole in Brussels managed to sneak a hidden camera into a policy meeting of the European Conservatives and Reformists group, where members from the British Conservative Party, Poland’s Law and Justice Party and the Czech Civic Democratic Party were attempting to thrash out a common position on the future of the European Union following the ratification of the Lisbon Treaty by all EU states.

To say that the meeting became a little heated at times would be a bit of understatement, as you’ll see in a moment if you head down below the fold…

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