Occupied city rejects tyranny of Muslim mobs

There is a school of thought in international relations that says that tit-for-tat fighting is such a tragedy, and an avoidable one. Strike and retaliation, vicious circle, dance of the doomed: Northern Ireland, the Middle East, Kosovo. Why can’t one of the parties be rational and just stop: defend itself, but refuse to fight back. Eventually the other party would see sense and stop fighting too: peace, compromise and decency would break out.
Sweden has been the principal international advocate for pacifist rationality in international relations and, as it went to the polls on Sunday, has a finding to impart to the rest of the world. Being nice doesn’t work.
For Sweden has applied its international theory of rationalist pacifism to its domestic immigrant relations, showering asylum seekers who have poured in through open doors while the rest of Europe have closed theirs with benefits, tuition, housing and huge doses of tolerance. The reward: Sweden has the highest figures of rape in Europe, fifty percent up on the last year alone, twice as high as the UK and ten times higher than Denmark; assault figures in the southern town of Malmo – gateway for most immigrants - are ten times that of the much larger city of Copenhagen across the Oresund straits, for the Danes have much stricter immigration rules. The papers are full of blond girls with bleeding, slashed faces; of high school pupils have invented and patented a kin d of chastity belt that stops young girls from being raped, top tips on the teenage letters pages to avoid being sexually hassled. The papers are full of accounts of clan feuds, honour killings; of gang rapes by Muslim boys of teenage girls cycling to parties; beatings administered to young Swedish men outside pubs and at bus stops where their mobile phones are seized. As one academic report by a Lund university sociologist put it, quoting young perpetrators, often from countries such as Bosnia, Somalia or Iraq, who were interviewed on why they did it. “We do it because we want to wage war on the Swedes. They are weak, frightened and wimpish. It is easier than working.”
And the counter response? The tendency has been for Swedish society to say: well, it’s really our fault, because they are not well integrated. So we have to be nice, not tough. No tat for the tit.
Signs of the times:
When I was in Malmo, the town where I grew up, this summer, I read all the stories: about the violence: about the notorious suburb of Rosengard, where police, public transport or the rescue services are reluctant to go, as residents turn up with hammers and stones:
At one of those perfect Swedish summer parties where the girls look like angels and the ceilings and walls are white I asked people what they thought. I out down reticence to discuss the problems with immigration in their midst to provincial, smug political stupidity, far from the intellectual environment of Brussels.
But as a friend said later: “It is such a taboo subject, the ultimate taboo.” People have very strong feelings. Indeed, on the day of the general election, I received an email from a close relative – a liberal, middle aged professional woman, part of one of the Hillary Clintonesque high flying women’s networks, whose friend had sent a round robin email entitled: “Don’t forget to do your duty today.” It was accompanied by two off colour jokes: “Everyone seems to be wondering why Muslim terrorists are so quick to commit suicide. Let’s see now. No football, no pork BBQ, no hot dogs, no golf, no lobster, no beer, rags for clothes and hats, constant wailing from the guy in the tower, you can’t shave. A wife you can’t choose wears a bag over her head and smells like a donkey. Then they tell when you die it all gets better? Really, is there a mystery there?” Then: a cartoon: “Look pay attention. I am only going to show you this once.” It has an Arab holding a bomb whose fuse is lit. “Suicide Bomb trainings school.”
This is from the usually politically correct upper middle class woman, from the acme of liberalism, the Massachusetts of Europe.
Another sign of the times. A good friend of mine, a classical singer for the top choir in Sweden, a self described social liberal, voted for the Swedish fascist party because they are the only party openly discussing the problems of immigration at the election. “Immigrants say they mug people because they are humiliated by Sweden. What fucking humiliation? The fact that Sweden gives them money, shelter, education. Is that humiliating for them?”
Patrick, a big, muscular guy in his thirties, then related an increasingly common tale: in a bar one evening, he was hassled by a Muslim immigrant, he smiled and said: “I refuse to be provoked. Come on let me buy you a drink.” The man said no, Patrik described being watched all evening then, on leaving, was beaten up. “They couldn’t get me down on the ground so they couldn’t dance the samba on me. But I had scars afterwards. Why can’t the police post people in these entertainment districts? It will cost society far less: a broken jaw can put a man out of work for six months: think of all the hospitalisation and sick leave costs.”

He, his mother, and several educated friends – one for instance works at the State Art Museum across in Copenhagen, increasingly a refuge for many Swedes – have all voted for the Sweden Democrats, as the far right party is called.
The Sweden Democrats had their best election ever, with several percent of the vote, but their success was confined to southern Sweden, which has born the brunt of the immigration; but ultimately policy will be determined by the new right-of-centre government, composed of conservatives, liberals, agrarians and Christian democrats. The prime minister elect, Fredrik Reinfeldt, has promised to increase police numbers, lengthen sentences for rapists and robbers, and the principal plank of his economic policy is to reduce taxes for the low paid, reduce employers’ taxes and make it easier to hire home help: unemployment benefits will be slashed; the state aim is to reduce Sweden’s high youth unemployment – the highest in Europe for ethnic Swedes, higher still for immigrants. Immigration is far from being Sweden’s only problem; it is part of the widening gaps between the comfortable, highly efficient, highly educated middle class who give Sweden’s its high growth rate, and what penumbra society belonging to what Reinfeldt calls the “outsiderhood” – people retired off early, on disability benefits, and young white Swedes who cannot their foot on the ladder. Young immigrants are just one of several outsider groups.
It is early days of course and perhaps he feels economic solutions are sufficient for integration, but perhaps immigrant violence needs a political solution too.
Denmark, across the straits from Malmo, has a strongly unapologetically tough approach to immigration. In addition to the flexible labour market laws that go even further than Sweden, the country has tackled the cultural and social problem head on: cutting the number of new asylum seekers to a bare minimum required under the Geneva convention, it works on assimilating the not inconsiderable number – 6 percent, about the UK figure – of immigrants already in the country. Pupils have to speak Danish before they start school.
And then there are specifically tough attitudes towards immigrant crime – in Sweden in contrast, while Reinfeldt talked about unemployment and crime, he not once mentioned the word immigrant in debates.
Danish courts recently put in prison for two and half years a sixteen year old boy from Kurdistan who had stolen a Dane’s mobile. After he has served his sentence, he will be deported.
“It is tough, but the boy was given many chances by society and we are sending a signal here,” says Copenhagen’s chief of police, Henrik Svindt.
Youth unemployment rate in Denmark is the OECD’s lowest, crime is as the statistics below demonstrate, lower too. It remains to be seen whether Reinfeldt will work at overturning these statistics; probably a good place to start is stop sentencing rapists to 80 hours of community service – which, one social worker said, is about the perpetrators “really just playing with their X-boxes”.

Israel loses fiercest European critic

There is a new government in Stockholm: what is Sweden's new foreign policy going to be like and who is going to represent it?According to an unscientific internet poll in the newspaper Dagens Nyheter, the public favourite for the post of foreign minister is Cecilia Malmstrom, the young liberal MEP, who is praised in a recent editorial for "knowing everything about the EU and Russia" and who would bring "fresh oxygen into the palace" where the "social democrat heriditary aristocracy" have been sitting for too long. Another Brussels personality who has been tipped for the post is the very tall and photogenic Anders Wijkman, a Christian democrat who knows a lot about green issues. Lena Ek, another liberal, could also be brought home. Talks are ongoiung and silence has descended over government offices at Rosenbad this week; the decisions will be revealed on October 6. Of other possible candidates, Carl Bildt, the right's last prime minister - 12 years ago - and noted international statesman - has said he wouldn't want the job and the right's senior Swedish MEP, Gunnar Hokmark, is unlikley to have to pack his bags for a new life in Stockholm. IN his revealing, recently published biography Reinfeldt admtted that Hokmark, who once ran a rightwing think tank, had "plagued the life out of the party" in the 1990s. Hokmark is not very popular with the Swedish media either, which lamented his unmemorable appearances on Swedish television during the last euro elections. "Can anyone remember what he said?" commentd one. ANother commentator wrote about Hokmark's links to an outfit called the European Enterprise institute, a carbon copy of the US neo conservative think tanks, which agitates against the EU's environment policies and workers' rights; and one of whose lobbyists was described by the Independenty last year as "itman for Exxon Mobil." What of policies? Sweden will continue its engagement in traditional issues such as human rights, free trade and enlargement. But there will be some differences too. There will be less worship of the UN, less uncritical flirtation with the third world, where a more critical democracy perspective will take place. Reinfeldt, the new prime minister, has said he will not immediately ratify the constitution. EU policy is an interesting white space at the moment; but Reinfeldt's party, the moderates, are much more Euroscpetic than they used to be.Then there is the Middle East. If Sweden will be bereft of the services of the chairman of the Sweden-Israeli friendship association, as Hokmark is, it is still likely to take a more Israel friendly line. Government officials in Jersulam were reportedly dancing jigs of joy when the most pro Palestian government in Europe lost the Swedish elections on September 17. Sweden broke ranks with the EU in May by awarding a Hamas minister a visa, and public hostility betweeen Israel and Sweden under the social democrats go back a long way: in April Sweden dropped out of militray exercises where Israel was present, with ex prime minister Persson lamenting "Israel's history of violence." Anna Lindh, the Swedish foreign minister a few years ago, once said "Israel is a democracy balacing on a thin line." A low point in a bad relationship came in 2004 when, at a display of modern art in Stockholm, the Israeli ambassador wrecked an exhibit that appeared to glorify a suicide bomber in front of TV cameras - a story which made worldwide headlines.Afterwards he criticised Sweden as a country where "people are afraid of Arabs but against Jews they can do what they want," adding that"Jews are hassled by Muslims everywhere - on the tube, in schools, in the street."Swedish commentators retorted that the action, coming from a diplomat with forty years experience, was planned in advance and with the full approval of the Sharon government to distract attention to a Swedish conference on genocide, and ramping up the hostile relationship between Israel and Europe was imperative to prevemnt Europeans from any influence whatseoever in the Middle East, which would remain a US-Israeli fiefdom. These outbreaks of hostility could now be a thing of the past. Though some commentators worry that sections of the Swedish christian demnocrats and liberals, two government parties, are "so pro Israeli it seems that Christian Zionists have been acting as their prompters", singling out the youth associations. A writer on the liberal Expressen out it: "I don't quite trust the new government; there is a worrying amount of bonkers thinking in the political right in Sweden on foreign policy. The youth associations seemed to have turned into neoconservative sects who pray to Bush and bombs with the same ideological fervour. She added: "Can we be sure that today's tired and lie-infested foreign policy is not replaced bysupport for everything the US does and throws the hope of a just peace in the Middle East overboard?"Maybe not as much as that. But relations with US, as with Israel, are bound to become closer than the days when the US withdrew its ambassador to Sweden and Stockholm was a refuge for every liberation movement in the developing world

Teenage scribblers and provincial Brussels

I have a confession to make. I can’t take the EU’s journalists – the guys and gals who work for EU Observer, European Voice, EU Politix, and, bringing up the reat, EU Reporter, seriously.
They can’t write for a start. They have got the sentence rhythm and sentence structure of a news story about right, applying the gift for mimickry of wannabes, but they have no journalistic insight, apply no journalistic intelligence. They are just teenage note takers. “MEP warns…” Yeah, and suck my dick.
Everyone I talk to about this says, “Yeah, you know, they are all very young.” But why don’t they hire someone older? As they rush around from press conference to press conference, like eager university students, you think: I bet Washington is better served than this. But then the EU is not very serious.
The average person in Brussels is a 26-year-old girl who works for a lobbyist, or an NGO. Who is she? She is from an Italy, or Belgium, or Poland. She lives in an apartment somewhere, sharing a flat with a Spanish food scientist who works for the Valencia regional office to the EU..
She puts her make up in the morning, which takes forever. Appearance is all in Brussels. She puts on the EU uniform: grey slacks, a poloneck sweater. Then she goes to work, if it is not a public holiday, of which there are many.. She has a book by Kundera in her bookshelf, and when dressed up in her bourgeois-bohemian continental daywear, she clatters down the steps to the metro at Gare Centrale you would think: if this was the opening scene in a modern French movie she would be falling in love in the course of it; but in fact she has a boyfriend - he works for the European Voice. She is very proud of this. The European Voice is cool. In her world, this paper – which is just another trade mag, there are loads on the web – is top drawer. What she does all day? Perhaps she sends a pdf file, sends a few emails, reads her local newspapers. Grabs a baguette sandwich from the area around the Place de Luxembourg, which has the world’s highest density of poky little sandwich shops, and are open between 1 and 1.05 pm every weekday afternoon.
Boring? Not at all.
There is her whole private life, a bewildering array of friends, all 26, all of whom provide a network in Brussels. She might be earning unjustifiably much on what some could see as out-relief for the privileged young of Europe, the nieces and nephews of Italian senators But she feels part of a greater whole. Her lobbying makes a difference (she thinks.). And when the EU does stuff on television, well, she is part of it.
I write about this template woman, and there are loads of women who fulfil this template, because she is the exact typical person of the European Voice’s readership demographic. They did a survey on this and say so, they are not shy. Dana Spinant, the editor, is only about 26 herself.
And what are this young woman’s views. She likes and believes in all the rationalist world-improving schemes.
She thinks the prime minister of Colombia – picketed by the commies in the European parliament – is a bad man. And she hates the Kaczynski brothers, who run Poland. They want to bring back the death penalty, limit abortion, hate the EU!
I have undergone an about turn on this. I read a faintly disapproving piece in the EU Observer. It was written in the usual metronomic style that simulates professionalism, The article was about the new regime how the Poles at the EU embassy had jumped ship – ie been sacked – for their pro EU views by new Warsaw administration and were looking for jobs in the EU institutions. Perhaps the article was their job application: the virtuous, educated Euro-Poles. The Kaczynskis are not very house trained, unfortunately.

No better

I loathed the smugness of the article, and I realised one I had prepared earlier, clipped together from reports from Poland and altogether more overtly censorious was no better.
I thought: scratch this. My earlier article – Andrew Rettman’s article. It is all rubbish.
It is arrogance piled on with and talent spread very thinly; and I am not surprised the brothers hate Brussels. Who are these people, the virtual careerists, in their virtual world? This place is shit. Anyone for yet another seminar on the single market? I’m off to write about Sudan.

Another small country faces one party purge

Halfway through the last Swedish election TV debate, Goran Persson, the Swedish prime minister, looked sideways at his left wing partners, waved his hand and thereafter seemed to fade as if to say: actually I don’t really want to win anymore, not if it means dealing with these guys for three more years. For the last eight years the social democrats have ruled in a minority government that has taken parliamentary support from the greens and the former communists under an unspoken agreement: a single party government gives the social democrats the advantage of appearing strong, lone rulers, while the outrider parties peddle influence behind the scenes. In contrast, the right-of-centre opposition has often appeared a four headed, fractious monster.
This was now set to change: the Greens’ feisty party leader Maria Wetterstrand insisted on cabinet posts if the left coalition won again; the ex-communists, under the equally feisty Lars Ohly, had said it wanted to be included too.
In a moment of opportunistic footsy the large and bumbling Persson – who loves cooking and shopping for different kinds of sausage - metaphorically stretched his hand over and rested in it the lap of the most centrist opposition party. The agrarian Centre party’s strongwoman Maud Olofsson – described as the Pippi Longstocking of Swedish politics, aged 54 - crossed her legs said a decided and public no to leaving the of carefully forged alliance, headed by her crown prince, the young conservative leader and prime minister elect, Fredrik Reinfeldt, 41, who has spent two years creating a strong right-of-centre Alliance to dispel old memories of fractiousness..
Thus rejected, Persson seemed to sit back and contemplated his future partners in government, as if he had suddenly realized their radicalism for the first time: one of which wants to abolish nuclear power – “non nuclear and”, as opposed to Persson’s studied “non nuclear if” - the other which wants to leave the EU, he might have thought: well, being a land-owner living in a southern Swedish mansion with his new wife might not be so unappealing after all.
In the event,: the opposition won a convincing victory on Sunday night, but it not without its being preceded by moments of nail-biting anxiety in the closest competition in a generation: while the economy has been growing at a sturdy 6 percent a year, and life was good for those in work, the opposition accused the social democrats of presiding over Sweden’s slipping into a post materialist leisure society, a society of young bloggers - with the highest youth unemployment in the old EU – a figure, had the statistics not been massaged, that would probably have been even higher.
The fact that the head of the unemployment service carried out a number of statistical and methodological ruses to keep unemployment down and help the social democrats was one of the instances of a problem the new government has said it wants to deal with: the election was so close because the social democrats, who have ruled for 65 of the last 74 years – a world record – have filled Swedish civil society with social democrat placemen who have soaked the country in the ruling party’s values.
As a result, though generally regarded as tired on the job, and with few fresh ideas, the social democrats and their outriders – despite being on autopilot, and faced with an unusually hungry opposition - held the right wing alliance almost to the end.
Polls put the blocs within a percentage point of each other for months.
A Swedish prime minister has wide discretion in the appointment of the dozens of autonomous agencies/quangos/boards that run much of Swedish life, from the unemployment service to the social welfare agency, the integration board to national schools agency : they are all connected to the party - see picture of the spider's web with the party in the middle - the posts are not advertised and the criteria never specified. In a recent TV interview, Reinfeldt, the new prime minister, says that while it is not wrong that the government appoints people to carry out its work, and should have the final say, the process should be subject to transparency and the posts should be advertised, as in other European countries.
One of Persson’s good friends, Bo Bylund, runs the employment service, and has been accused of putting healthy people on sick rolls and capable people on stupid retraining programmes, and failing to applying European unemployment criteria to Swedish figures, making them much lower than really are. Another friend, a former deputy prime minister, runs state television, which was held by the largest newspaper Dagens Nyheter’s commentator as being “soft on the prime minister”, refusing to rein him when he attacked the opposition during a debate.
Many ambassadors and county sheriffs are former political figures, not civil servants or career diplomats. All of these agencies wield considerable sums of money to shape public opinion, disguised as “information”, which tilt Swedes towards a social democrat view of looking at things. A brief controversy erupted when, for the nationwide mock elections held in schools, pupils were given a CD with the political history of socialism to inform their choice. The head of the school board is another social democrat.
A lot of the patronage flows from the prime minister directly, who rules one of the most centralized, most executive based countries in Europe. Only a third of cabinet ministers are MPs – there is only chamber – and so have a political powerbase beyond the prime minister’s patronage. The rest are recruited directly from outside. One potential check, parliament, is extremely weak, since MPs are elected by party lists, because of the lack of polarities of religion and class, in Swedish societies; and much legislation comes from Europe – the chair in the council of ministers is the
Reinfeldt has promised to make changes to the selection system; and while reform of parliament’s powers compared to the executive might be some way off, a coalition government of four parties – effectively four firsts among equals – will inevitably dilute the power of the prime minister as never was during the Persson era. All this will be subject to discussion, and eagerly watched.
First though there is going to be a purge of social democrats the executive agencies – starting with the hapless Bylund.

Was Rwanda saviour a stooge of big business?

Another thing for the 1,000 EU soldiers to think about as they deploy in the Congo to supervise that country's election and general transition to further development after a brutal five-year civil war that ended in 2003.
Hotel Rwanda is a moving film about THAT genocide that ends with a kind of Killing Fields scene, hero, heroine and children all reunited in a refugee camp safely behind rebel lines. At least the British directors didn't have the tastelessness to put Imagine on the soundtrack.
But in fact that movie, which builds on a generation of western journalists "work" on the genocide, has now become part of a cover-up, that conceals western involvement in a much larger slaughter in the Congo.
The structure of The Rwanda Genocide as mediated is of a regretfully vicious-mass killing of the arrogant former colonial collaborators, the thin nosed, pale skinned Tutsis, by the more bantu Hutus when ethnic tensions exploded when the ethnic Hutu president died in a plane crash in April 1994. The west did nothing - but Tutsi rebels who had once fled to Uganda a generation before came back in force, drove the Hutu mass killers away - across the border to the Congo - and made peace. The wise but young rebel leader Paul Kagame, trained at the US staff command college at Fort Leavenworth, then became president, and things have been pretty quiet in the region since. So goes the standard narrative.
In fact the Rwanda Genocide, which everyone knows about because a number of US journalists have written books about it, has served to obscure the much worse slaughter that happened in DRC subsequently, when up to four million people died - a genocide hardly anyone knows about.
The Rwanda genocide provided an alibi for Kagame who, after being lionised by the press became a US friend to invade Congo under the pretext of rooting out remaining genocidists - for the real purpose of securing US mineral resource and business interests in the mineral rich Congo basin. In the course of this large numbers of Congolese have been slaughtered.
Phillip Gourevitch, a staffer at the New Yorker, won the national book award for Rwanda: We wish to inform you that tomorrow we will be killed with our families. And Samantha Power, once a correspondent with US News and World Report, leveraged her writings on the Rwanda genocide in 1994 into a lucrative tenure at the Harvard School of Government; Kagame gave both writers access to the battlefields during the crisis, with a tight management that was not apparent at the time. Continued good contacts can be demonstrated by the fact that Powers has invited her African friend to lecture at her school; while Gourevitch has written laudatory profiles on Kagamel along with Laurent Kabilka or the DRC, as a new breed of leader.

Kagame invaded then Zaire in 1998, a country where George Bush the elder - who has interests in the mining corporation Barrack Gold - is just one senior figure in a interlocking network of senior American politicians, executives, and businessmen with extensive interests in having Congo's mineral deposits safeguarded. Just to give a flavour: recently Kagame spoke at the James Baker institute in Washington; their he met his patron, George Bush Sr; one of the Baker institutes chief advisor id the director of Total Fina, with extensive interests in the Congo. Bush Sr is a good friend of Bill Clinton, who allowed the kingpin of the African mercenary organisation Sandline Maurice Templesman to host a Corporate Council for Africa on board air force one: Templesman knows every warlord in anglophone africa, and the ACC’s members include alliburton (Dick Cheney); Lazare Kaplan; Chevron-Texaco (Condoleeza Rice); Exxon-Mobil; Asea Brown Baveri (Donald Rumsfeld); Cargill; Archer Daniels Midland; Jean Raymond Bouelle Companies; defence giants McDermott, Sikorsky, Northrup Grumman, GE, Raytheon, Boeing and SAIC (Science Applications International Corporation) and SAIC.
In return for Kagame’s rebels providing security of supply to these mega corporations of Congo’s minerals including coltan - used in the mobile phones - and cobalt, used in extensively in the space industry, payment in Congolese diamonds are transferred or sale in Brussels and Antwerp.
Meanwhile, every day, displaced Congolese die outside the copper-cobalt mines of Lumumbashi for lack of basic medical supplies. Can we look forward to a book by Gourevitch detailing his old mate Kagame's less than heroic activities In the Congo, and the full story behind his various US sponsorships? Somehow I doubt It.

Maroc

TANGIERS

“What are you doing here?” said the young Moroccan.
The ceiling fan whirred over Barca and Real Madrid
posters . Bottles of Flag Speciale beer
were on the table.
I replied:
“What are you doing here?”
He just looked at the TV, tuned to a gameshow on
Spanish TV.
This seemed to be the answer: don’t know. Just
waiting, like so many others in Tangiers: many
Moroccans smuggled themselves into Europe,
by
dangerous speedboat, others waited, sometimes in vain,
for work visas.
Earlier I had met a small man, round glasses,
who
stopped me in the bazaar.
“Sir, may I show you an excellent restaurant?”
“I have already eaten.”
“Are you interested in souvenirs?”
“I have all my souvenirs, I am leaving tomorrow.”
I let him lead me to a bar. Then I asked him why he
was doing eking out a job as a guide. He told me he
had lost his job as a manager, and that he was living
with his sister. There was no social security. His
dream was to go and work
in Spain. I gave him 10
dirhams.


CASABLANCA

While I would be flying out of Gibraltar, just a short
ferry ride from Tangiers, I had flown into
Casablanca
two weeks earlier..
The film of the same name – whose outdoor scenes look
nothing like the city, it was filmed in a Hollywood
backlot - hinges on a coincidence: two former lovers,
played by Bogart and Bergman, meet by coincidence in
a
bar in Casablanca, a long way from where they had
parted.. It was amusing therefore that I had a
completely coincidental encounter of my own, in a
café, with a London consultant friend I hadn’t seen or
heard from for a year, John. “Of all the gin joints in
all the towns...” I burst out. He was on a business
holiday trip too and travelling alone, so we agreed to
spend the evening together.
Some people bring out
the trickster in you. John was
one. We were going to score with muslim women.
The corniche area was supposed to be the
nightlife
area, but there was just a lot of families licking
icecream, and men in all the bars looking at each
other with long faces and sipping soft drinks. There
was exception: two pretty girls sitting on their own.
We sat down next to them, and I started conversation.
After a while we agreed to each other we were going
places. We went to a nightclub.
“What are you doing here?” my girl said and poked me
in the chest.
“Hey, this is easy,” I said. My girl – John picked –
told me helpfully where a cash point was. She sent
her friend, younger and bustier and pretty
when she
caught her friend’s eye and they did belly dance moves
in their seats to the music together. Why wouldn’t she
go? “Because of the police. If they see me.”
On the way back to their place – a “friend’s
apartment” – in separate taxis, we were indeed stopped
by police. I had to bribe the cop 100 dirhams or he
would throw me into a cell for the night, according to
the taxi driver. I rendezvoused with John and his girl
later outside a
“friend’s apartment” – which we later realised was a
euphemism for brothel – we had both had enough.
There
were more outlays ahead: a door guard, “just
another
100 dirhams” my
girl said. The girls already cadged a
lot of drinks, nightclub entries, mobile phone topups
and cigarette packs off us. John said: “Moroccans are
always into business, always trying to rip you off,”
We decided to call it quits.
In the taxi, John said: if only the girls hadn’t been
prostitutes.
The taxi driver, a student, said: all unaccompanied
women in Morocco after dark are.
He also said that sleeping with a Moroccan woman who
wasn’t your wife could earn you a year in prison

THE MOUNTAINS

I wondered whether it was effect of the Koran, reading
of which was said to be like dipping into a river,
lacking a
narrative of the bible. Moroccan carpet
salesmen. didn’t build up their arguments, but just
repeated certain phrases over and over again.
“Why drink from a river when you
can you drink from a spring.”
“Western Union no problem – take the carpets home, pay
later when you send money. I trust you my friend.”
“I AM NOT INTERESTED.”
He poured me
another tea. When I had left my hotel in
the Todra gorge, half an hour earlier, I was followed
by the hotel owner ten
steps behind, then his mate, Mohammed: I just wanted
go for a walk to the nearby village, but inevitably,
flanked by both of the, we ended up in his private
carpet shop. There followed a ten-minute sales
spiel.

After what I thought was a successful communication of
my non interest, we went for another tea, this time on
the carpet shop terrace, surrounded by a
vista of mountains, red in the setting
sun, in three
directions. I sighed and let my thoughts wander,
until:
“Western Union, no problem.”
Memo to self:
Some people just don’t get the message.

THE DESERT

There is a certain age when many men buy a boat and go
to sea. The desert is a kind of sea. In the last town
in Morocco
, where the highway ended, and where there
was an old sign somewhere that said it was 52 days to
Timbuctoo, I hired Ibrahim and his Mercedes
240.
The desert poured past, the light as blinding as
darkness, the sand as white as snowfield. Stones and
gravel, gravel and sand, sand and stones.
Heat distorts perception, perhaps it was one
hour or many.
It was early evening now, and dunes – huge dunes,
could be seen for miles away,
I was glad to see trees: when the ground is flat, the
sky sinks. Trees raise the sky by being big yet there
is so much further to go. It was an oasis – there were
some berber mud houses. We parked and ate
some dates
off the trees.

We began to climb, at the top of the dune, we saw a
quilt of dunes, set in relief by the sun, stretching
to the horizon. Then the stars came out, billions of
them. The stars were like green chandeliers….I
switch on the shortwave radio. Above me is a wonderful
sense of cool, listening to the rise and fall of
interference, the rolling of the huge roaring breakers
of space…..
I sent a text message to Brussels. There is no reply.

HOTEL

Back in the hotel in Rissani, after a week in the
desert,
I look at the mirror. My face is haggard, worn
down
by the sun, eroded like the mountains that turned
into rocks, the rocks that turned into sand. Life is
like jumping off a skyscraper, and this summer I have
passed the halfway point
Who is she? Imagine Anne Frank grown up on a good
diet. Elongated limbs, once an ugly duckling but now
statuesque. She used to smile like Anne Frank on the
cover, total devotion, and flap her fingers on my
naked chest whenever she wanted to say something or
was worried. Or, when she was sad, she would dangle
her handbag slowly like a pendulum. When she looked at
things there was this
intention: you could read it. I
am going to look. And then she turned her head and
looked. “I am very clumsy,” she would say. But also
very strong:
with a friend she carried a table four
flights up to
her flat off the Grand Place, very elegant and large.
And she was never ill.
Later she was very cute when she was angry. She had an
IQ of 160, had just started working for the European
Commission, and was 26. She had dumped me shortly
before starting her new job.

MARRAKECH

The Red city, in what is known as the square of the
dead, Djmaa El Fnaa. There are berbers, Gnawa
music, monkeys, fire, dentists. I go to a fortune
teller. He is summoned by a
salesman of alternative
medicines, who speaks French.
“How much will he charge?”
“150 dirhams.”
“Sure?”
“Yes.”
And we sit down next to buckets and boxes of
traditional herbal medicines laid out on a large
carpet in the square, lit by kerosene lamps, smokes is
rising from the food stalls, lit up in a ghostly way
by
their kerosene laps, and there is the sound of
drummers and snake charmers. The fortune teller gives
me six sticks inscribed with Arabic script which I
have to wrap strips of cloth. I let the strip hang
from the stick, grab the two ends, bring them together
and wrap them in unison around the stick. Six times,
and he puts it between a
large notebook in his lap,
writes furiously in Arabic as if a prescription – he
is neat, balding, looks like a Swiss accountant, quite
fair skinned, but for his jellabiyah, leans forward
several times, as if a stomach ache, making several
guttural sounds, opens the notebook and asks me
to
ynravel the strips. This I do: three strips of cloth
come off the stick completely – I wonder how this is
so
When this happens, the herb seller, who acts as our
translator, says: bad news. This means problem. The
fortune teller reads the messages on the unfortunate
sticks and tell me my fortune: I am a dreamer, have
missed lots of opportunities in life. I give a lot to
my friends and lovers without expecting
anything
back.These people are afraid of me though because I
represent a threat, and don’t return the attention. .
They think I am going to kill them. Ania is a
good
person, but to be back together with her, I must not
contact her, he will write a spiritual letter. I must
bury it under my pillow and within five days she would
contact me.
“Let her come to you,” he said. Then he
asks 1,500 dirhams. .
“Oh dear,” I say.
We haggle it down to the original
figure, a tenth of this, but the fortune teller will
not write the letter.
“That is a shame,” says the salesman, grinning
embarrassedly. “I really wanted to see for myself
it worked too.”

I did my story, on medical caravans.
Basically three days in a taxi.
Back in England, she never called. I consoled
myself
that the letter wouldn’t have made any difference;
that it was pure superstition.
I continued
waiting, like the Moroccans in Tangier, hoping,
waiting
– waiting for the exit visa

The problem in a nutshell, literally

The American historian Michael Lind observes that a society has to provide for its biological and cultural perpetuation and be capable of defeating and deterring its enemies. Today every European country fails on that count, producing too few children and failing to integrate its immigrants in a way necessary to perpetuate the culture of the host nation.
Europe may not produce failed states like Somalia or Sierra Leone, but are they failed societies – shrinking, self sterilising, lacking martial courage and communal cohesion.
Why then is the commission taking five EU countries to court for failing to charge the requisite 15 percent VAT on nappies. Europe’s yuoung people need every incentive they can get to have more children. Let us hope there will be no further action against Hungary, Malta, Poland, Portugal and the Czech Republic, who were sent a "letter of formal notice" by the commission on 18 July for charging a mere 5 percent VAT on their nappy products, and that the commission reviews its VAT policies in a family friendly manner next year. That might be a small way toward addressing Lind’s diagnosis, although as many saloon bar demographers are aware, much, much more needs to be done.

EU freedoms worsen controversial UK health reform

McAvan contra mundum


Thank goodness for the independence of MEPS.
Few in Brussels ever cast a sideways glance across the channel at the
NHS , Europe’s second largest employer after the Red Army; whose annual budget of about £85bn is actually about equivalent to that of the European Union. Its health service status ring-fences it from the attentions of the single market enforcers.
Yet the venerable British institution is undergoing unprecedented reform which some compare, in its own world, to the collapse of the Soviet system. And in fact, the NHS is introducing a single market of its own.
The new reforms involve an enormous expansion of patient choice, a new payment system for hospitals, foundation trusts, independent sector treatment centres, practice-based commissioning.
A lot of doctors are unhappy about this, partly because the pace of change has come so fast, notes Julian Legrand, a professor of social policy at the LSE and a former No 10 adviser, wrote recently. Partly because doctors are losing their autonomy. Consultants are used to having their own fiefdoms; now they have to deal with hospital managers on the one hand and performance targets on the other. They also have more constraints on their rights to prescribe medicines.
Targets, redolent of the Soviet era, are losing their popularity. But the reforms present another threat: that of the market, which is increasingly becoming a substitute for targets. Legrand argues that the discipline of the market is an improvement over the discipline of command and control targets, since these are disenfranchising, while the market offers more scope for initiative and dynamism.
The downside is job insecurity, but people lose their jobs in command and control systems also, and are in such systems much less able to get another job. Anyway, doctors can always go abroad.
With doctors, targets were far from popular, but this new system appears even less so.
At several spring and summer medical conferences that I attended, I heard them complain bitterly about the system. One compared being a GP in the new choose and book NHS – where GP and patient will sit in front of a screen and choose hospitals - to being a maitre’d in a restaurant. The loss of a sense of status is palpable, despite the recent salary increases. The BMA annual plenary voted to oppose the reforms, against the wishes of their leadership. “because the BMA leadership want their gongs” in the words of a health academic.
“If the government continues like this by the end of the decade the NHS will effectively have disappeared as a national institution providing the most economical health services in the world, freely and equally to all,” Colin Leys, a health expert opposed to the government’s reforms told me.
“The ‘NHS’ logo will still exist, but increasingly just as a logo attached to private hospitals and GPs’ surgeries.
“Soon entire clinical services – for example, mental health or paediatrics – will become unavailable locally, as hospitals drop unprofitable activities in order to survive in the market, and without any opportunity for the public to prevent it.
“This unevenness will be offset by new opportunities to buy ‘superior’ or ‘enhanced’ services through ‘copayments’.
“Those who can afford it will buy the kind of services that the NHS was created to provide free to everyone, regardless of ability to pay. Everyone else will get a ‘basic’ service, which will decline steadily as the middle class loses interest in it, and good staff flee to better-resourced and less stressful work. If this picture seems far-fetched it is because government spin and media bias have prevented a clear picture emerging.
Most of it has already occurred, or is explicitly planned.”
He could well be right. While choice is good in theory, it needs an informed customer, and healthcare is not cereal. It will favour the well off, who can afford to travel to take an advantage of the freedom to go wherever they wish..
Hospitals will be further consolidated by uncertainties of the system of payment by results in arrears, which will mean less cash flow for many hospitals, already impoverished by high management consultancy fees (An unrelated fact: Patricia Hewitt, the health secretary, is a former management consultant herself.) Any benefits of choice will lose out to inequality pf provision, as rural and unprofitable hospitals close down – it will be like the fiasco of railway privatisation. As Leys puts it: “Most people want as little choice in hospitals as they do in fire brigades.”

The interesting implication for Brussels is what impetus this will give for a health services directive this autumn. The directive says patients can go abroad for treatement if the waiting lists at home are too long - and the home state will pay, which could expand choice dramatically., though the exact details of the conditions have yet to be ublished. Although current ECJ judgments say that choice of care abroad is subject to waiting lists at home, one doctor I spoke to said that, since choice of any UK hospital was now being offered, he would be happy to let the money follow the patient abroad as well, especially if it was cheaper. This will be an interesting quandary for Labour MEP Linda McAvan, the socialists’ health spokeswoman. She is tentatively in favour of a health services directive; but has also said carelessly – or obliviously?- that: “Most people just want to decent, functioning care locally.” Which, of course, would be much more at risk from continental choice - France or Germany, take your pick - a la carte.