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.

Bad science affects Brussels

It is the big asbestos racket, with customers paying millions of pounds or euros for unnecessary removal of the banned material, and European Union legislation is party to it.
Asbestos has been called the leading occupational-related disease killer in the western world by the Health Protection Agency, and there is no doubt that some varieties of the substance the Greeks called unquenchable fire is responsible for lung cancer, asbestosis and mesothelioma, cancer of the lining that surrounds the heart, and one of the most painful and aggressive forms of illness known to man: it is almost invariably fatal and caused solely by asbestos exposure.
But the main, once most frequently mined variety of asbestos, Chrysotile, is almost completely harmless; this banned – but useful material – which sits in millions of homes and offices, is at the centre of a great swindle involving lawsuits, trumped up survey dangers, expensive removal palaver.
It is, as campaigner John Bridle, of Asbestos Watchdog UK, whose advice has saved dozens of companies – including Anglican churches - from asbestos ruin , the greatest swindle of our time.
But why was chrysotile banned in Europe in the first place? The answer in two words: bad science.

David Bernstein, a soft-spoken American ticologist living in Switzerland, was first asked to look into the real science behind chrysotile back in the late nineties, when it was already becoming apparent that chrysotile was on its way out. He had had a life time in toxicology, with several achievements.
And this issue piqued his interest:
“The reputation of asbestos couldn’t get any worse; so it was a challenge to my professional curiosity. Were all asbestos varieties – specifically chrysotile - really as bad as it was made out?”
Asbestos is a commercially convenient way of grouping together the only naturally occurring mineral fibres, magnesium silicates; there are three main varieties, of which chrysotile, white asbestos, is one, the other two are amosite, brown asbestos, and crocidotile, or blue asbestos,, these two have more “Powerful” properties – the fibres are longer and tougher - , but all three have the same uses, and their appearance when extracted from the rock of the colours of the names is similar. Mineralogically, they are distinguished by the principal metal in the silicate, magnesium and iron respectively,
Asbestos is a naturally occurring, stringy minerable fibre “angels’ hair” which occurs naturally in seams of rock; when rocks are broken out, pulverised and filtered away with meshes, you get the fibres. The stuff has been known since antiquity for its magic combination of properties: tensile, heat and acid resistant, incredibly strong, yet as weavable,
The ancient Greeks and Romans used it in lamp wicks of the “eternal flames of the vestial virgins”, funeral dress from the cremation of kings and in napkins that could be cleaned by being thrown into the fire; its fibres were used to strengthen clay pots and insulate suits of armour. Charlemagne had asbestos table cloths. After visiting a mine in the 13th century, Marci Polo was able to report that the fibres came from stone, not the wool from lizards as previously believed. But already Pliny the Elder warned of its health risks of the slaves who had sickness of the lungs, but they were in such awe of the asbestos’s seemingly magical properties that they ignored its symptoms.
Commercial manufacturing began in the 1880s with the creation of open pits in Canada and Russia, and elsewhere: Reports of its dangers in antiquity had been forgotten. As the material began to on an industrial scale, its insulating, heat resistant, incredibly strong properties made it become appreciated as indispensable acoustic and thermal insulator – in fire curtains in theatres to roofing felt; added to caulking, adhesives, acoustical plaster, ceiling tiles, cement and electric wire insulation, sprayed fire-proofing products.
In all it is estimated that it was used in over 3,000 products; production peaked in the 1960s and 70s, when millions of tonnes were imported into Europe. But soon the alarm bells started to ring. As early as 1897, an Austrian physician was convinced that dust inhalation was the cause of "emaciation and pulmonary problems in asbestos weavers and their families." At about the same time, the Lady Inspector of Factories in Great Britain recommended the installation of "a scheme of applied ventilation" to minimise the accumulation of dust.
An article in The Lancet in 1934 presented evidence of a link between asbestos and lung cancer. Dr. Richard Doll's landmark paper: Mortality from Lung Cancer in Asbestos Workers (1955) found that the incidence of lung cancer among men at a Turner & Newall asbestos factory in Rochdale was ten times the national norm. Rates of mesotheliomia, an irreversible and rare cancer of the linings of the lung which results from the inhalation of asbestos fibres over an extended period, grew rapidly and asbestos was discovered to be the only known culprit.
Estimates from deaths from asbestos related disease in the UK – which has a population of 60 million – vary from anything between 90,000 and 500,000 people over the next thirty years. To make a comparison, the lower range estimate is equivalent to the number of people who die in traffic accidents every year. The health and safety executive estimates it is the single greatest cause of work-related deaths in the UK.

As awareness of the harm caused by asbestos has risen, measures have started to be taken.
First of all, there were strict health and safety rules introduced for workers; maximum exposure levels were set and controlled. And the stuff has been phased out. New production, import and the use of Crocidolite, or blue asbestos, whose needle-like fibres were the strongest and most acid resistant of all, was used in yarn and rope lagging and its high bulk density made it suitable as spray-on insulation; imports peaked in 1950; restrictions governed its use from 1969; it was banned in 1985. Then there was amosite, or brown asbestos, whose harsh, spiky fibres had good tensile strength and were resistant to heat. It was banned in 1986. Then chrysotile, the most flexible fibre, as weavable as cotton, often used as reinforcement in asbestos cement, responsible for ninety percent of historical production – though much smaller proportion of the asbestos in the ground – was banned in several European countries before receiving a Europe-wide ban by EU directive in 1999, to which all members had to and did comply by 1 January 2005, including the new member states. Chrysotile is still in use for new applications outside Europe, notably the US and Asia – although the EU has pushed for a global ban. It is to the ban on chrysotile that we will return.
There is a vast amount of asbestos about – in the housing and business premise stock; and the current situation in the UK is that, left undisturbed, the asbestos causes minimal harm. It is only when torn up that the fibres enter the air passages that it can be dangerous – according to the Health and Safety Executive. With homes it is up the owner what he wants to do – though you might be sitting just metres away from a source. Since 2004, all business premises have to undergo an asbestos survey; this can cost hundreds of pounds. And then, if the surveyors estimate the asbestos poses a risk to health, likely to come loose, it may have to be removed,, at a cost of millions.
This, according to John Bridle, is where the corruption starts.

Ninety percent of all asbestos in use is chrysotile. Early surveys estimated it as dangerous as the other two. For instance, Davis (1978) exposed rats to a rather harsh regime: he took compacted blocks of asbestos, ground them with a so-called hurricane grinder, for days at a time, then, aerosolized it by blowing a fan through a passage past the noses of caged rats. He did this with all the major asbestos types and the results were similar. After a seven hour, five day a week, 12 month a year regime, between 25 and fifty percent of the rates had developed lung tumours – all this at exposures very much higher than a human being would endure. Bit still, indicative, no?.
But this science is flawed says Bernstein. Nothing was known then about the importance of fibre length, and fibre length distribution, and how to set up the experiment to avoid contamination. Microscopes were less advanced then. There was less concern about contamination – all asbestos types were assumed to have the same carcinogenic properties; they were likely to be contaminated with each other. And then there was the problem: the danger of science of putting the cart before the horse; the conclusion, the thing that was supposed to be proved, was worked into the experiment.. It had been observed from any number of people that asbestos was carcinogenic, and so the experiments just increased doses until there was cancer in rats.
“It was early days, people did not know what they were looking for,” says Bernstein. “You can’t blame them.”
These early findings, along with the infamous South Carolina epidemiological study, which – erroneously – showed that workers exposed only to white asbestos had elevated rates of cancer and mesothelioma – form the scientific bedrock for those in the European commission and the World health Organisation who refuse to re-open the dossier on Chrysotile ban.
Bernstein and colleagues carried out their own experiments. By drawing on his own colleagues, and of research published elsewhere in the 1990s, he found the following:
The mineralogical differences between chrysotile – its calcium component – and the amphiboles, as blue and brown asbestos are called, with their metallic component, iron, did not make a difference in its interaction once inside the lung. But bio-persistence and length of the fibre did.
The unique awfulness of asbestos is the fact that they are fibres, longer than they are thin, and that that they are extraordinarily bio persistent. The lung is equipped with filters that keep out spherical particles of a certain size; smaller particles that slips through are cleared away by so-called macrophages, a kind of white blood cell that digests foreign debris. Fibres can slip in through the filters because they are thin; but once inside, the longer fibres are too large to be removed by the macrophages; they eventually decay by other means, but in the meantime they irritate the lung cells. The smaller ones are nothing to worry about: they are treated as particles and removed by the macrophages. According to Berman (1995) fibres shorter than 10 micrometres do not contribute to rats’ cancer risk; and the measure most highly correlated with tumour incidence was the concentration of fibres greater than or equal to 20 micrometres in length. Potency appears to increase with increasing length, with s longer than 40 micrometres being about 500 times more potent than structures between 5 and 40 micrometres in length

What was the bio-persistence of chrysotile? Earlier this year, Bernstein and colleagues used Wistar male rats and exposed these to an air control group and to two chrysotile exposure groups at mean fibre aerosol concentrations of 76 fibres longer than 20 micrometres for 5 days/wk, 6 h/day, during 13 consecutive weeks followed by a non-exposure period lasting for 92 days. Animals were sacrificed after cessation of exposure and after 50 and 92 days of non-exposure recovery. At each sacrifice, subgroups of rats were assessed for the determination of the lung burden.
What they found was, first of all, no damage even at high concentrations of chrysotile – five thousand times higher than found in the work place, no lung scarring, no granuloma; and almost no long fibres; in fact there was a very short half life for chrysotile – equal to that in fact of vitreous synthetic fibres, glass fibres, which remain legal but regulated throughout the EU. In contrast an amphibole, tremolite, of the same family as brown and blue asbestos, showed lung damage. Why does chrysotile have such a short half-life? Because its fibre structure is that of a rolled up carpet, with its magnesium ions on the outside, due to the different bond lengths between the silicon hydroxide but and the longer oxygen bonds in the magnesium bit; this exposes the brucite magnesium to the lung liquid, which dissolves the so called brucite and which leaves the silicate bit vulnerable to the acid action of the rest of the lung. Amphiboles are made of sterner stuff, forming long horizontal rods, and a half life tens of times longer than that of chrysotile. “Chryostile quickly dissolves into what is basically talcum power,” says Bridle. Chrysotile’s half life for long fibres is one day for some varieties; for crocidolite is almost two years.
So why did early studies show that chrysotile caused lung cancer in rats? Because of overload of the system; in early experiments, including Davis 1978 and Coin 1992, when chrysotile was milled, for days at a time, using the hurricane grinder, not the best equipment for the purpose, because its metal scythes contaminated the samples, and changed them chemically, it produced an enormous number of microscopic particles that could not be detected by the phase contrast microscopes in use at the time; when rats breathed these in over a year at a concentration much higher than any man would endure, the particles – as diesel or even talcum powder particles would do – overloaded the rat’s lung system, clogging it up and reducing the ability of the macrophages either to deal with the small particles are break down the larger ones, which remained as carcinogenic fibres. The fact that chrysotile is unusually brittle, breaking under lung fluid into ever smaller pieces, also plays a part.
This did cause tumours; but it was not its asbestos fibre quality that did this – unlike ; it could be by particulate matter at enormous exposure. As a reference point, Bernstein used a synthetic fibre permitted by the EU called CMS – calcium magnesium silicate – with a large number of added particulate matter, which showed the same tumour creations as chrysotile ; another fibre, X607, similar to CMS but without particles added, showed no damage. In other words, scientific methods picked up on the wrong thing – the residues produced by a flaw in the equipment, and would have done so with any synthetic fibre;
Chrysotile is no more harmless than synthetic fibres – and these are permitted by the EU.

What about the epidemiological studies? There have been many, but they have suffered from methodological problems – more bad science. There was more dust in the air there is today; there was contamination of different kinds of asbestos at plants; workers’ histories and confounding factors such as their smoking habits were not scientifically gathered. .
A recent analysis by Hodgson et al, last year, fitted two models to the data of the male mesothelioma deaths in the UK between 1968 and 2001 , and predicted exposure patterns compared to the actual exposure patterns depending on importance of amosite and crocidolite. Chrysotile had no weight in either model. Another Survey showed that while South Africa is noted for amphibole mining it has also mined about 100,000 tons of chrysotile per year. Cases of mesothelioma have not been
found in the South African chrysotile miners and millers despite decades of production. The authors suggest one possible explanation for the scarcity or absence of the cancer may be the relative lack of fibrous tremolite, an amphibole that may occur with chrysotile ore elsewhere – and which distorts findings. A much bigger survey of surveys, published this year by a scientist called Charles Yarborough in the international Journal of Toxicology, shows similar resulrs.

Irrationality about asbestos defies any attempts to relegalise it. Legislation on synthetic fibres went to DG enterprise, that on chrysotile to DG Health, who have their own agenda; it is a political issue. The world health organisation, when conducting trials on synthetic substitutes for chrysotile, refused to open the dossier on chrysotile itself – apparently on direct, supervening orders from WHO’s director general.
There is a big industry involved here. Both Bridle – who runs asbestos watchdog, devoted to reducing unremoval and litigation costs to British firms – and Bernstein went to Bangkok recently on a mission: to get invited to an asbestos conference, organised by their nemesis, Laurie Kazan Allan, who runs an asbestos newsletter, rather triumphalist in tone, that notes each victory for the asbestos ban lobby.
“I could come, but I had to make some adjustments, but Bridle wasn’t welcome at all,” says Bernstein. Bridles added: “Kazan’s brother runs the largest firm of layers dealing with asbestos compensation.” There are tales of crooked experts on the payrolls of law firms, ready to tell lies in court, exploiting fears about chrysotile which, when locked into asbestos cement which forms much of the survey work of the “salesman for removals firm” that the “averagely ill trained survey firm now is.”
The Berlaymont was closed in 1991 to remove white asbestos costing millions and has been replaced with rock wool, which if anything is more harmful. Businesses with embedded and harmless white asbestos in the UK are paying huge fees to decontaminations firms to clear out tonnes of rubble which turns out only to be harmless white asbestos in two tiny insulation boards. There is a lot of ignorance, a lot of council inspection zealotry, a licence for cowboys, and a lot of money changing hands. Bridle, who worked in the cement industry, set up asbestos watchdog to advise on small firms facing ruin. While there are of course thousands who face cancer from the dangerous varieties of asbestos, up to a million households face the chrysotile survey problem. Dead people – who have breathed in naturally occurring asbestos all their lives – now cannot be buried because it would contravene, in theory, the EU’s laws on hazardous waste.
Bernstein has lobbied Ispra, the EU’s technical standards research unit, based in Italy.
“Why don’t you take another look at white asbestos. They never did.”
“The European Union won’t change the law on chrysotile,” says John Bridle. “Because the trade unions stand a lot to gain from the law suits, and they put pressure on the Labour party, who resist a change in Brussels.”
So the chrysotile issue joins the annals of bad European science, whose previous chapters include the Y2K problem, hostility to GM crops and aversion to nuclear power.

Sweden's election

New Leader and policies

Labour can take a modest consolation from the fact that “Yo Blair”, who, in the words of Maureen Dowd, hovers around Bush with the eager-to-please manner of oan abused wife, at least appears as a kind of JFK figure for one electorate, that of Sweden. As a small country, Sweden is ahead of the UK in the policy innovation curve, but the system does not appear to throw up great leaders.
Swedish social democracy is widely admired without the movement having any globally famous figureheads since Olof Palme was assassinated 20 years ago – which is a reason why Europe’s most hegemonic ruling movement, is facing its closest contest in a generation in Septeber’s general election: the latest polls put the opposition Alliance bloc, consisting of agrarians, conservatives, Christian democrats and liberals, at 52-48.
Goran Persson, the social democrats’ prime minister since 1996, is regarded as competent but not very charismatic. An excellent orator, a big man in all senses, he has been in power for a long time, 11 years.
Opinion formers haven’t talked of a successor to Perssion, this might be thought strange. Type in “departure” and “Persson” into the biggest newspaper archives and you get about three articles in the last 18months that even address the question. Perhaps it is
because the alternatives are so unappealing that no commentator wants to bring the events to pass by starting a debate on the succession question. Margot Wallstrom, the communications commissioner, is by far the most popular candidate but she has said no: she is on the right wing of the party, and doesn’t want to face media scrutiny of her Euro-federalism.
e alternatives are: the finance minister, Par Nuder, who is on top of his brief, but regarded as an egocentric, competent technocrat. Thomas Bodstrom, the justice minister, is regarded as opportunist eye candy
Vote one, get another – get one of these guys. No thanks. Few think Persson will serve another full term.
So what about Fredrik Reinfeldt, 41, leader of the biggest opposition bloc party, the moderates – formerly the Right party
One rare Q&A reveals that Reinfeldt likes Lord of the Rings; One Flew Over a Cuckoo’s Nest, Swedish country music. He collects stamps. In the photo he is pear-shaped, dumpy, has cocker spaniel eyes, sits on his children’s swing, fashionably shaven headed which makes him look a bit younger than he is. Could have been a male nurse; probably bullied as a child; everyone’s designated driver, everyone’s Bob.

Policywise, he has turned the party more leftwards than it was under the great Carl Bildt, his predecessor.In fact with two centrist parties standing foursquare, commentators have list each leader’s policy strengths. .
Persson is regarded as stronger on healthcare; health outcomes remain the best in the world; and a new care guarantee has just been introduced to allow treatment anywhere in the country or even abroad if it cannot be done locally in three months.
Persson also leads on foreign policy. The Swedish papers make much of the fact that he often pops over to Downing Street to administer TLC to Tony. He is one of the EU’s longest serving leaders, and knows the Brussels process inside out
Reinfeldt is not conspicuously international. He comes across as a bit eurosceptic – unlike Carl Bildt, the previous moderate PM and second most famous Swede on the Brussels scene. This gives him a certain appeal with the electorate, who feel Bildt sold them a bum deal on the EU. But among those in the know there is the fear he won’t improve Sweden’s low profile in Brussels to compensate for the fact that Persson offers expertise here and now. Even if his euroscepticism is just a show, it will take him a while to build contacts; he doesn’t know anyone in Labour, no equivalent relationship between Swedish moderates and the Tories; since Swedes don’t develop contacts in Europe outside Scandinavia and the British isles this is a bit of problem.
Reinfeldt’s relationship with Bildt would make an interesting study. Bildt was a strong, internationalist leader; his big achievement was to bring Sweden into Europe; after losing power he threw himself into the Balkan situation as the EU’s peace representative; he lost interest in domestic politics, and didn’t fight very hard and lost the 1998 election, On his departure, he left behind a grouping of callow market fundamentalist dauphins, little baby Bildts, no one really connected to the Swedish population; and it was not surprising that it scored its worst ever result in 2002 under its equivalent of Duncan Smith, Bosse Lundgren. Reinfeldt has done a lot by bringing the moderates from a 15 percent party back to a 30 percent party. It is well known he feels that Bildt turned into a vehicle for pushing Sweden into Europe; and that the party was centred too much on himself.
Part of his efforts to change the party’s austere neo-liberal image, as a party full of people with Asperger’s syndrome, was to say that no one should root around in the moderate party “box” for their favourite tax cuts. But it will always struggle to shake off the image as the party of business; Sweden has the heaviest unionisation rates in the world. Tax is another tick for Persson.

Reinfeldt has some nice proposals for schools; but then there is a trio is linked issues where he really scores over Persson, according to Expressen’s political editor Anders Jonsson. Persson has really failed on criminality. Rapes in certain parts of the country are up 40 percent on the last year alone; violent crime is about 30 percent on the last five years. Although Sweden’s economy has not done so well since the IT bubble six years ago, with low interest rates and low inflation, hidden unemployment could be as much as 12 – 13% if you include those on study schemes and those who don’t have the energy to sign up according to political journalist Anders Jonsson. Both these issues are discussed and connected to the third big issue, which is barely mentioned: immigration.
Sweden is now the great immigrant country of Europe – 13 percent foreign born, far more than the UK, Finland or Denmark on par with France. About a quarter of the population is of foreign, usually Muslim, stock. And it never had any colonies.
How is Reinfeldt dealing with this? This is very interesting, because it could be the clincher in the election. No doubt the Swedish right has looked at neighbouring Norway and Denmark, where only those parties that have trimmed their sails to the pervasive sense of threat from the Muslim world have flourished. An astonishing fifty percent of the Danish electorate voted for parties hostile to immigration; Sweden’s different political culture, which places less importance on liberal openness to discuss solutions without fear of censorship; more on woolly elitist tolerance. But there are signs that the white working class are every bit as fed up with the lack of integration – the soaring social security bills and crime rates – as their Danish counterparts. The working class are the key social democratic constituency.
Expect them to tougher then, on this issue, than the social democrats.
So here we are, let's see how the election pans out.

Here's a cigar to Cuban health

SO what will Fidel’s biggest positive legacy be? Surely the fact that his country has achieved European life spans and the western hemispheres second best child mortality rates on an annual health budget per capita of $251.
European countries spend ten or fifteen times as much for no better result. In fact, because of their more developed health systems with expensive medicines and gadgets that keep unhealthy people alive, the equal level of lifespan gives a misleading picture. There are fewer respirator years included in the Cuban figure.
Part of DG Health’s remit is sharing best practice between European countries, the Cuban example shows the limitations of such a narrow approach, since their commonality is greater than their system differences. Health budgets are high, and growing, everywhere in Europe. So what can Cuba teach us?
Forget expensive treatments that chisel away a few extra weeks or months at the wroing bookend of life; Public health is the big battleground today; for Europeans are as bloated as their health budgets.
The fact that today’s young obese generation will be the first in history to die earlier than their parents is relatively well known in Europe, but nothing from the various seminars and conferences on this evergreen issue that I have attended at least has suggested an insight. .
Cuba’s situation – partly involuntary - does. Fidel’s kingdom has been under a US embargo for 40 years, so doesn’t have any McDonalds; the fast food revolution has passed it by. There are petrol shortages, so people walk everywhere. Doctors are poorly paid – pay is a big slice of health budgets – and the country trains the best doctors in Latin America in return for which they have to do three years in the Cuban provinces. A lot of US citizens, mostly black, also attend the Pan-American medical school for an apparently free education at the Cuban state’s expense; in the US med school costs $20,000.
There are also exercise groups for the elderly – every morning, iun the subtropical breezes of the parks near the Malecon; and 24-hour policlinics that take the pressure off hospitals. As a middle income country in the 21st century, the country has benefited from the vaccine revolution, and the elimination of childhood diseases; it doesn’t have the ghastly ailments of the tropics; and yet also avoids the tip-over into degeneration suffered by the modern west. Lifestyle wise, the country is stuck in the 1940s and 1950s, in a kind of permanent wartime of rationing and moderation: Brits for their part never ate so well as during the Blitz. A recent Newsnight film showed a lot of old people on porches looking youthful and content; and I am sure the occasional cigar and more rum won’t alter their positive health picture.
Meanwhile, over in America, the average citizen has 14 drugs prescriptions and people tell jokes – ie metaphorical truths – about having medicine cabinets the size of walk-in freezers The news comes out the average American is 50 pounds heavier than his grandfather – though, interestingly, no taller. Here, the Europeans have more than caught up.
We are all adult enough to be able to separate Castro’s one party politics, his round up of journalists and imprisonment of dissidents, to the positive benefits of Cuba, some of them accidental. European health ministers should make a study trip without prejudice, to the land of nutritiously but excessively fed black kids kicking ball or old people doing stretch exercises in Havana. There are two bearded icons whose faces sell T-shirts in the developing world today; Che is the other, better, one; for he began as a doctor.

EU Wine lobby's health claims questioned

As reports filter out that the commission’s DG Sanco is going to be targeting alcohol consumption next, there are rumours that the Brussels wine lobby is distancing itself from the beer and spirits lobby – that they want to place clear blue water between them and the other drinks, which do not have wine’s “glass-a-day-keeps-the-doctor-away” reputation. Presumably because they want to escape the legislation predicted for the drinks industry. There is no honour among thieves!
But is the wine producers’ snobbishness justified? Not if a recent study by Danish researchers is anything to go by. Ditte Johansen and Morten Gronbek of the Danish National Institute for Public Health wanted to find out whether the wine is healthier than beer or whether it just that those who tend to buy wine tended to live healthier lives.
Data were taken from 3.5 million transactions at 98 Danish supermarkets over six months. – the modern supermarket data collection system gives gives a sample base that is unusually large for science, and indeed one wonders whether it can be used elsewhere. The authors noted that purchase records are a more reliable indicator of consumption than self reporting, which understate the quantities for heavy drinkers for reasons that do not take a genius to fathom.
The findings were as follows: “Wine buyers bought more olives, fruit or vegetables, poultry, cooking oil, and low fat products than people who bought beer. Beer buyers bought more ready cooked dishes, sugar, cold cuts, chips, pork, butter, sausages, lamb, and soft drinks than people who bought wine. Wine buyers were more likely to buy Mediterranean food items, whereas beer buyers tended to buy traditional food items.”
In other words wine itself is not necessarily healthier than booze; it could be merely that those who consume wine lead healthier lives (as well as being more educated, better off, etc). This backs up numerous scientigic surveys which haven’t penetrated the public consciousness
That small amounts of any alcohol are good for you. More investigations are clearly needed; but it could be that you might have to get back in the boat, wine lobbyists.

Let's have an Arab commissioner

The college of commissioners has a collective talent; compare them, to say a board of an international company and, to put it bluntly, whatever other merits they may have, there is if nothing else a superior distribution of expertise in relatively obscure languages; a democratic spread, all bases covered. Bar one: Arabic, a language spoken by more Europeans than the populations of seven of the ten new member states.
In post-enlargement Europe, there is therefore a glaring gap of representation and
understanding here. The Estonians (1.5m), Maltese (0.4m) and Slovenians (2.3M) - or, to take a larger example, Finland (5m) all have their spokesmen at the top table in touch with domestic opinion and insinuate their particular national perspective:
They explain why the Maltese want a reference to God in the constitution; why the Swedes have an aversion to alcohol and a fondness for the oral, flavoured tobacco that isn't-quite-snuff.
And so on.
The 6m European Arabic-speakers - whose satellite channels ironically provide the only continent-spanning common media space- do not.
Big issue, a taboo issue.
And of course bound up with the Muslims in Europe question. (There are 18m, more numerous than the Dutch.)
The issue goes beyond that of democratic representation to pragmatism, since many of the problems Europe faces today require understanding of the Arab world, within Europe as well as beyond.
The truth is, the EU is still living in the past, because of the impact of the enlargement countries and their obsession with history. .At some point you’ve got to stop hearing the words “Yalta” and “Munich” emerging from the European parliament’s east European members and engage with the 21st century.
It’s also excessive to have yet another tranche of east European commissioners.
Here is why.
Tens of thousands of Africans have crossed into the Canary islands this
year, twice as many as last year, and hundreds more have died
trying.
Obviously better relations with Morocco and Algeria are a priority. A meeting this summer in
Barcelona was regarded a success, but the question is whether the planned
razor wire and sea patrols would work; the proposed development aid to Africans to
encourage them to stay at home is far less than the remittances they send back; so the Africans will keep on coming.
More and better dialogue is required with the Maghreb countries.
A second issue. The "sharpest end" of the immigration problem is the growth in numbers and violence of young Muslims in Europe's big cities. I know this might be a difficult thing to ask of the people ensconced in the EU institutions, but if you leave this psychologically hermetic world and move in the real Brussels environment, you will realise there is a lot fear and anger towards young North Africans, not all of it unjustified.
What about having a commissioner in touch with North Africans’ urban problems in the cities of the EU?
A third issue: freedom of speech. The EU was at sea when faced with the challenge to freedom of speech posed by the hostility towards the Mohammed cartoons. The commission could so with someone who speaks Arabic, knows what the satellite channels are saying and has read the Koran.
It is probably too late to deprive the Bulgarians and Romanians of their commissioner, but why not set up an extra post? Twenty-eight is not so different from 27. An Arabic speaking commissioner with the portfolio of relations with the Maghreb, urban lack of integration and with a joint communications-media responsibility, along with Margot Wallstrom, with a special remit for the Arab world? One possible candidate: Dalil Boubakeur, president of the French council of Muslims. . It could be that he is too French, but there must be others of his ilk, elsewhere.

Abortion could give birth to EU narrative

An abortion ban near you?

The interparliamentary meeting - involving the European parliament, and national parliaments - held recently in Brussels to discuss the future of Europe was not well attended by the press. I counted five on the press gallery, nt including myself. Three of those were evidently student journalists - from Austria, perhaps? - and one slept through the entire morning, sitting at the back, until shaken awake by his eager colleagues. Even the booming voice of James Allister, who upbraided president Borelles for not letting him speak "despite the fact I have been here since five past nine" - could not awake our friend.
The main issue of the debate, on Europe day, was that of the constitution; there was little on health, but the Austrian presidency had provided a useful briefing paper which allowed one to speculate. Namely, on the following.
Judicial cooperation in civil matters would, under the constitution, work on the basis of codecision between parliament and council, where the council has to act in a qualified majority. The exception is family law where there has to be unanimity among member states. With 25 member states of widely different cultural morals on marriage, cohibitation, abortion etc this is unlikeIy to happen. As MEP and constitutional expert Richard Corbett has noted "Abortion is not in the original treaties and is unlikely to be given thelack of consensus on these issues." But it is not impossible. If the constitution ever happened, article III-69 allows nominated areas of family law to be legislated on via parliament “if there are cross border implications”
Well, abortion has cross border implications, if two estranged partners come from different countries and the woman chooses to have the abortion in a more liberal country. In fact, abortion tourism is itself a cross border activity. So will that mean a harmonisation in the abortion laws? Well, there has to be unanimity among council first, so that is unlikely to happen.
Just as well perhaps. There has been since the end of communism a surge in conservatism on abortion across the east bloc, and also in Italy.
Here are a few examples
In March, the centre right government in Slovakia collapsed after a conflict between the two major governing parties over a draft agreement with the vatican that could restrict abortions. The SKDU and the KDH, which are both parties that have the name Christian in them, had worked out a draft agreement with the Vatican that the Slovak government would not insist that hospitals run by the Catholic church has to perform artificial abortions or assisted fertilisations”.
The SKDU wanted to postpone the issue until September, but the more conservative KDH wanted a resolution immediately. New elections will be held in June.
This is a cultural sea change in Slovakia arguably related to the end of the secular communism. During that era, abortions were quite freely performed. Indeed, it used to be the main form of birth control since contraceptives were scarce. But since then the number of abortions has plummeted from 70,000 a year to about 20,000. Part of the reason is of course freer access to contraceptives: another reason could be - more church teaching, as the country turns against the loose morals of western culture that have swept through the country; and this time, unlike during communism, the church is not suppressed.
Slovak conservatives against abortion will find an ally in Poland’s ruling coalition, where the Justice and Law party’s president, the appalling Jaroslaw Kaczynski, is a staunch foe of abortion, a view shared by his twin brother president Lech. Poland has long had one of the most restrictive laws in Europe on abortion. This law will soon be examined by the European Court of Human rights, as Alicja Tysiac, a Polish mother of three who is nearly blind, has brought a suit against the Polish government - increasingly loathed across Europe - after doctors refused to terminate her third pregnancy even as they warned that giving birth would further damage her eyesight.
According to a recent report in the Associated Press, the laws could tighten even further. Both the Vatican and the US administration has given support to eastern Europe's anti abortion movements, the report says.
In Italy the recent election stirred up the abortion issue, as more and more hospitals refuse to carry out abortions for conscientious reasons. A recent documentary by the BBC said women are now having to go to Barcelona to have abortions before it is too late. Ireland and Malta have long banned abortion.
Perhaps it is just as well that these issues are legislated nationally, and set to be so for the forseeable future. But here is a thought: abortion as a pan European issue - and indeed other values - would pretty quickly create a single European political space. However unresolved and unresolvable, value politics and intese debates around it is what sets America apart from Europe. If after a serious threat to impose common abortion standards across the continent - countries agree to disagree, as the US states do - it might be unifying. Those who want a United States of Europe, for what it is worth, might start here.
The debate would be carried out a volume capable of keeping awake even student journalists.

Commissioner to side with drinkers in EU strategy

Calling time

As Europe dances and drinks the summer nights away, a debate is going on at Brussels’s DG Sanco, the EU’s health ministry: how far should the new alcohol strategy aimed at curbing Europeans’ drinking go?
Due to be published after the rentree in the post-summer cool of September, the strategy follows on from a hard-hitting report on Europe’s “growing alcohol problem”written in June on behalf of the commission by London’s Institute for Alcohol Studies.
Given that the IAS has close links to the temperance movement, its tough recommendations should have come as a surprise to no one, and suggests that some among the professional busybodies in the directorate who ordered the report secure in the knowledge of its perspective favour opening a broad new front in the war against unhealthy lifestyles. Perhaps EU officials are flush with a sense of success in the battle against that other addiction, tobacco. In recent years, EU law has set maximum limits on tar and nicotine yields, imposed new and larger pack warnings, and most recently, effected a tobacco ad ban in press, internet and radio across Europe. Germany, with its large tobacco industry and libertarian instincts, uniquely did hold out against the ad ban for much of this year, but in June caved in and said it would comply, having been threatened by European court of justice action by health commissioner Markos Kyprianou, who has taken up the tobacco hostility baton of his predecessor David Byrne with relish. Smokers’ stronghold Germany is also weakening under EU peer pressure to limit smoking in public places. (A great deal of the money behind smoking bans comes from major pharmaceuticals – namely Glaxo, Novartis and Pharmacia and Upjohn in Europe and Johnson & Johnson in America – all of whom want to earn much money from expensive smoking cessation products; but that is another story.)
The IAS report, by World Health Organisation stalwart Peter Anderson, notes that, while drinking has dropped greatly in southern Europe, it has grown enormously in northern Europe in the last two decades – almost doubling in the UK. Growing personal wealth is one cause. Another important factor is the freedoms of the single market to import large amounts of alcohol from cheap countries for personal use. In Scandinavia they talk of the domino effect, where each state monopoly engages in downward price competition with its neighbours who in turn are competing with low-tax Estonia and Germany.
The total health cost of alcohol to EU countries in 2003 was $125 billion, about the same amount as tobacco. There are dozens of ailments attributable to alcohol, and more are being discovered – the connections between alcohol and the transmissions of HIV for instance.
Showing clear inspiration from Nordic alcohol policy models, the report recommends a ban on alcohol advertising, warning labels on wine bottles, a minimum licensing system for alcoholic products across Europe, a minimum buying age, a standardisation of blood alcohol limits for driving, and four other recommendations.
The question to be asked now, though, is: how many of the Copenhagen-based Anderson’s recommendations will be reflected in the strategy. As silence descended on DG Sanco – there was no press release to accompany the IAS report – insiders report “strong and varied opinions” inside the DG as to how to frame the strategy.
While there are some zealots inside the DG, the boss is not one of them. During his confirmation hearings in 2004, Kyprianou made ambivalent noises about the fight against alcohol, and insiders report that he remains far less keen at pursuing drinking than smoking..
He is reportedly wary of taking on the drinks industry, which has lobbied heavily against targeting “the product instead of targeting the heavy drinkers themselves” and which questionw the scientific credibility of the report.
As the commissioner for one of the smallest and least powerful DGs, Kyprianou could also be wary of the way the report’s recommendations transgress on to the territory of other, bigger DGs, such as DG taxation, DG transport, DG internal markets, all of whom jealously guard their competences.
Several I spoke to agrees there will be something: the one that would get the biggest consensus support in the council and parliament under a Finnish presidency that is strongly pro-restrictions is reportedly a lower maximum blood alcohol concentration limit for young and public vehicle drivers; 0.2 permille, contrasting with 0.5 for other drivers. (0.8 in the UK) “This is one piece of legislation everyone could rally around,” notes Lisette Tiddens-Engwirda, head of the European doctors’ union CPME.
The alcohol strategy comes only shortly after, elsewhere in the institutions, DG agriculture’s attempts to get European producers to tear up their vineyards in return for compensation, because currently too much of the wine goes unsold and has to be turned into biofuel at great expense. In short, some restrictions, but no full-out war, as on tobacco.

Banning this vice too makes it worse

Maria Carlshamre MEP has some interesting ideas. She also keeps interesting company.
A prominent member of the women’s committee, Carlshamre was recently convicted of financial irregularities, basically declared a bankrupt, and was nudged out of her party back home, the Swedish liberals, a few weeks ago.
Having realigned herself with a new party on the Swedish scene called Feminist Initiative, the former journalist, a rather single-note politician, remains in the European parliament - against the wishes of the Folkpartiet, those Swedish liberals, who say she was elected on a mandate for them and them only. But she remains in the parliament's liberal group ALDE.
So what is her new berth like? The Swedish feminist movement is not short of firebrands, including the head of the women's shelter organisation was was secretkly filmed calling all men "walking dildos" and gthe Uppsala university academic - a professor, no less - who says there are a satanic rituals carried out in the woods by gangs of Swedish men; without providing proof.
Carlshamre's new party is led by the most successful feminist of her generation, 58-year-old Gudrun Schyman, an ex alcoholic best known for stripping off her underwear and urinating half naked over a TV star's shoes at a society cinema premiere. But before launchinng Feminist initiative, she led Sweden's communist party to record election results, combining a devil-may-care charisma with in-your-face feminism - as if Sweden wasn't already the world's most egalitarian country. Another thing she has in common with Carlshamre uis that she, too, has been convicted of financial crimes - fiddling her taxes. As the Swedish tabloids put it: "New women's party headed by Eco (economic) bandits!"
One of the party's leitmotif policies is to take a hard line on prostitution. Sweden already has the toughest laws on prostitution anywhere - men can actually go to jail for it - but Schyman wants to export the laws Europe-wide. Whether the stance is a popular or not with the cowed Swedish electorate, her attacks on Germany's liberal brothel regime expected to benefit from the world cup have earnt her plenty of publicity, Carlshamre will be doing her bit: the latest entry on her website says she is in Frankfurt talking to prostitutes organisations.
Since legal prostitution is partly an issue of political philosophy, where the continental and Swedish approaches do not meet, Carlshmre frequently argues that a ban on prostitution reduces sex trafficking - which is illegal everywhere.
As evidence, she quotes a report ordered by the parliament's women's committee, and carried out by a network of sociology researchers called Transcrime.
This argument is worth examining. In fact, her assertion might not be in the Satanic rituals league of complete bollocks, but her argument does not stand up. For the report shows that prostitutes trafficked to sweep-it-under the carpet Sweden have a worse existence than prostitutes trafficked elsewhere. According to the small print of a survey, violence levels of women trafficked to Sweden is 50% higher than those who go to Germany, and they get to keep less of their money.
Reasons? There is actually a body of literature on this, and the wisdom of reducing the wicked consequences of prostitution by illegalising it is by no means established. A Swedish female academic, Petra Ostergren, who has written extensively on prostitution, has a few suggestions why women trafficked to Sweden get a worse deal. Because prostitution has been driven off the streets,women are more dependent on pimps, who can beat women with greater impunity since they are afraid of going to the police because they will be deported. Street prostitution, for all its sordidness, at least alows trafficked women to assess the customer. When it is done over the internet or via pimps, the first she gets to see of his customer is when he has a foot in the door. Another reason is that the good hearted customer who might in other countries have warned police he suspects a woman he uses of being trafficked is to afraid of reporting to the police since he himself may be jailed.
Sweden's "success" at reducing visible trafficking is often trupted as a argument foro exporting its model elsewhere, but it ain't that simple. As the report admits, the trafficking has gone underground now, and what you don't know you don't know.
Those closer to the scene that MEPS and party leaders are in fact sceptical of a hardline prostitution aproach: prostitutes themselves. While they condemn trafficking, incidentally, many take pride in the fact that it is a profession. They are in fact rather insulted by the likes of Schyman and Carlshamre sopeaking on their behalf and saying it leads to general depravity including, ironically, alcoholism.
All this would have mattered less if it were a domestic issue only; but tyhe Swedish anti prostitution a argument has travelled well to at least one country - the UK. A white paper launched by Home Ofice Minister Fiona MacTaggart earlier this year plans to go down precisely the Swedish route, marking a turnaorund from ideas floated during the Blunkett years when liberalisation on the continental model was on the cards.
The British police would love a hardline aproach to prostitution.
Opinion in the UK has already been warmed up by a number of censorious articles in the press - ranging from the Guardian to the Telegraph - on police in the UK arresting people traffickers, the awful lives of trafficked women. The world cup could see slew of articles on Germany's depraved liberal brothel regime, which expect a boom in custom from fans - anything to get at the Germans.
But legislators should reflect on the effects of Swedish laws, and indeed those have been who pushing it. Prohibitionism in legislation seldom has the intended effect.

MEPs and their non existent press attention

Today I went to the European parliament's office in London for a press briefing on needlestick injuries. The building is just off Queen Anne's gate, a very exclusive well, Queen Anne-architectured, part of town. The airport X-ray machine was set off the main entrance and rather pointlessly they gfed my bags through. (I could have concealed stuff in my coat, after al, wich they didn't check.) such small absurdities you become familiar with when dealing with the EP: just like all the unread reports in 20 languages that pile up in rows of pigeon holes outside the press centre. (How many footbal felds of paper do they use up?)
Once inside, the atmosphere was cosy if a bit seedy. An official told me that many MEPS avoided coming to London to give press briefings on their eurolegislation, because they were afraid no one would come. No one came to this press conference either, held by John Bowis MEP.

Hi Honey, I'm back

The main geopolitical event of the week is apparently the EU-Russian summit at Sochi. There have been talks on gas security, and also on easing visa restrictions.
Will travel to Russia be the same without it? Visits to that dank building in Kensington, occluded by its own private cloud, the bullet headed man who let the anticipatory queue in in groups of five, groups where camaraderie quickly grew after exchanges of nervous jokes?
No longer, apparently. So going into Russia will be easier. So will coming out of Russia.
The east Europeans must have mixed feelings about the latter. There are opportunities for greater trade, but as anyone who has spent time in the European parliament will tell you, it is clear that Russian imperalism remains a sore point.
At plenary speeches accompanying reports on human rights in Russia from the European parliament, the speeches there certainly thick with denunciation from MEPs, perhaps more than is politic. Polish MEPS spend their allowances engaging in vanity publishing projects - distributed free to parliamentarians and assistants - featuring their favoured historians to remind us of Stalin’s crimes, as if west Europeans didn’t know enough about this. (King of England in 1832, anyone?) Politicians like Toomas “My English is better than yours” Ilves, an Estonian socialist, have exhibitions on international women’s day that talk about the suffering of women under, you guessed it, Stalin.
The Balts in particular, with their large, 50 percent minorities of Russians, and which are being emptied of their professionals, their natives, going west to work, might be also ambivalent of the facilitation of family reunification that visa free travel offers. After all, if the UK cannot keep track of its illegals; why believe Estonia could be capable of doing so? And then there is Latvia, which already complains of being infiltrated by 1,000 KGB spies.

Could North Africa join the EU?

Preposterous, one might say, Morocco, Algeria and Egypt let alone Saudi Arabia are not geographically European, one of the essential criteria for joining the EU, one would have thought.
The joint national and European parliament meeting documents seems to think so .
"Any debate on further enlargement to the south appears moot: the countries of North Africa or the Middle East, while unarguably important neighbours, would have difficulties making a credible claim to European Union.*” (footnote follows, which I quote in full: because it is important; “*Morocco explored this territory with an application for membership of the EEC in 1987; it was rejected because of the Treaty provision limiting to community membership to ‘European states’. However Geography as such does not provide a sufficient basis for defining the ultimate shape of the EU either: on the one hand with Cyprus the EU includes a country that culturally clearly belongs to Europe. On the other hand Turkey (Ed’s note: a candidate) lies with the greater part of its territory outside 'geographical Europe.'"
The main text does go on to say that “ultimate limits of the EU boil down to” future membership of Ukraine, Belarus, and the Caucasus - Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan."
However the document also states that “EU enlargement could theoretically lead to expansion of greater than 35 member states”.
Now consider the next paragraph, speaking of the EU’s mediterranean neighbours: “The Euro-mediterranean partnership and Barcelona process aimed at increasing political dialogue, stepping up economic and trade relations (Creation of a Euro-Mediterranean free trade area by 2010). A document of March 2003 spoke of the EU’s neighbours as being a closer ring of friends with the prospect of economic integration with the EU, extending to the “four freedoms”, though subsequent action plans have toned down the “four freedoms”.
Finally, the document says “European neighbourhood policy” developed by the Commission in May 2004 in the EU offers its neighbours a privileged political and economic partnership, building upon a mutual commitment to common values.
So, sorted? Actually the Maghreb might be luckier than one thinks.
It is true that the document then says ultimate membership should be limited to the former Soviet republics; but the footnotes say that “geography” should not be the only definition. Indeed, if ‘mostly Asiatic’ Turkey - which would bring Europe to the borders of Iraq - or even more farflung Azerbaijan - a muslim state bordering Iran -- ever joins, then - the argument could surely be posed: why not a Europe, some may say, that ends in the Saharan desert.
The argument, when things get that far, might then be strengthened by membership, at that time, of the well established halfway house membership:
The document does not explicitly rule out offering North Africa the “four freedoms” - trade, services, movement of people - which is one of the most potent advantages of EU membership.
North Africa has friends who like all this.
The book Eurabia, by the academic Bat Ye’Or, alleges that there has been a long term conspiracy, going back decades, between elites and Arab establishments to bring about, ultimately, a single confederated entity - one powerful impetus being to shore up global French influence, whose elites have often treated Francophone North Africa as their baronial domain, with strong financial interests in the region, and for whom North Africa as part of Europe would revive Gallic dreams of a European-Mediterranean empire allowing France to play a more prominently leading role across Europe than presently. One of the aspects of the European-Arabic dialogue is the Euro-Med assembly,which meets regularly in Brussels, and whose activities might - if you are into conspiracy - be worth looking into.

No show from Falconer

What is the purpose of this?
The European parliament's briefling booklet on the constitution publishes letters to Michael Martin, the speaker of the house of commons, and to Lord Falconer, the Lord Chancellor, inviting them to the joint parliamentary conference. Well, they didn't come.
At the risk of attracting ridicule, that they are not treated seriously by the mother of parliaments, are they trying to show up the arrogance of Britain's senior parliamentary figures?

Heathcote Amory's liquid lunch

It is May and Europe’s thoughts turn to the moribund constitution. Which is why the European parliament has been organising a get together between it - the allegedly most powerful legislature in Europe - and national parliaments.
With a maximum of 212 national parliamentarians attending, there were 70 MEPS. - including some usual British suspects as Richard Corbett, Andrew Duff and Charles Tannock - separating into four working groups: one to discuss the EU in the world and its external borders. Working group two discussing globalisation and the European economic and social model, group three discussing freedom, security and justice and group four devoted to the union’s future financial resources.
I went along to the building nicknamed caprice des dieux - after that cheese, and because of its similar ovoid shape - and sat in at the proceedings.
I was intrigued: almost everything in the new constitution would increase the areas of EU legislation subject to codecision - -ie European parliamentary, as opposed to intergovernmental, say. If every institution can be seen as organism whose sole raison d’etre is to fight for its own survival, then what interest do national parliaments have in coming to the table?
The difficulties are further compounded by the fact that the two bodies are of a different nature: one is a working legislature - ie, as alluded to an earlier entry, MEPS are having to compete with the technocrats in specialist knowledge to form judgments.
The others are material from which governments are formed, and so are expected to shut up for much of the time. As Arlene McCarthy MEP said: “If you want to do something come to the European parliament; if you want to be someone go to national legislatures.”
Given this mismatch, one can understand why senator Honorio Novo, a Portuguese leftist, and national deputy, took a truculent view of the idea of national and European parliaments being yoked together to drag the constitution back into life.
In his bluntness, he even resorted to the imagery of English humour: “This constitution is pining for the fjords.”
But he was in a minority. Several speakers noted that Finland has just become the 16th country to ratify the constitution, by parliamentary means. A majority of Europeans, headcount wise, were therefore for it - a stance known in Europe as the Juncker position, after the fanatically europhile Luxembourg prime minister who presumably has the least to lose from giving up his small nation’s national sovereignty. Here the view was forcefully argued by many deputies. “The constitution is alive and kicking,” said one Pole. “50 years after the Schuman declaration we have the same institutions for 25 nations as for six,” said Inigo Mendez de Vigo, a famous Spanish MEP. “A break in the journey is not the end.”
Moreover, a commission paper was about to be produced on the constitution and Chancellor Merkel was expected to make a statement on it.
So is the ball rolling or not? Politics is as much about creating reality as reflecting it, and both sides were trying their best.
On the anti-constutition side, David Heathcote Amory, who made a late intervention seemingly over refreshed after entering with his colleague Charles Tannock, doesn't seem to think so when he said:" No powers at all are being returned to the member states. We have to build a Europe from below up not top down." When I left, I was the only journalist in the press gallery. Only three had turned up at all.

The counterfeiters' most profitable product

Today I went to a conference on the dangers of counterfeit ink.
Printer firms are apparently reluctant to highlight the growing problem of counterfeited printer ink, which is cheap and profitable, for fear customers will use almost as expensive brand name alternative suppliers. As everyone knows, printer firms recoup the fact that they often sell the printer units at a loss by selling cartridges of ink expensively. Use has grown since the advent of digital cameras.
And therefore it is not perhaps surprising that counterfeiting too has grown fivefiold since 2001.
Perhaps 5% of ink is counterfeited, a figure that rises to half in Mexico. The advice is to avoid funny packaging, low prices, beware of ink that runs dry quickly - one way for the firms to make profits is not to fill up the cartridges to the top.
The consequences can be dire.
Here is an example. A firm called Multi Tech in the US sold cartridges at prices too good to be true via ebay in the US. Customers who initially thought they had a great deal, were soon in shock: there were illegible printouts, clogged inkjet printers that took hours to clean, or the printers just broke and had to be sold for scrap.
One person called Terry Schumacher from Mesa, Arizona, bought eight cartridges for his Stylus Epson 1280 for $150 but soon found it was a bad bargain: while packaging was a flawless copy, the ink started spitting everywherer when he tried to start making copies. Another person, a Gigi Diacomo from Minnesota, found that false ink ruined the printhead of her Epson 825 printer. They gave up after a few hours trying to repair the printer. And yet the deal had seemed so good: a third below normal price for a number of cartridges whioh were sealed and had holograms. So what to do?
Call the commission of course, which has promised to launch one of those white papers that may or may not end up as legislation.

The commission could watch you everywhere

Today I am off to the World Customs organisation, near the Gare du Nord. In the bowels of this big, grey type building there is to be a conference on the dangers of counterfeit ink.
Will it be as intriguing as the last visit?
Last time I came here was on a rainswept February morning for an East West security conference featuring a lot of high level Russians, Chinese, including Gao Jian (pictured) Director-General for Security, Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Peoples Republic of China, Anatoly Safonov, Russia’s special terrorism representative - but also the US ambassador to the EU, Boyden Gray. Jose Manuel Barroso, head of the commission, was there too.
I spent the lunch hour interviewing the rep for firm called SAP firm which sponsored the event who demonstrated a computer program that could link cars to people to events (such as criminal incidents) and to CCTV camera sightings. For example: type in a registration number and you could find out it was last spotted at ta CCTV camera in London, or crossing the Luxembourg border and that it was bought in 1985 by this and this credit card. All this vast hive of interconnected information on Europe’s citizens and everything they do seemed to be the ultimate instance of big brother. The problem, as always, is the vast amount of information. But the program flag up odd events, such as a person paying for his ticket five minutes before departure on several successive occasions
I looked at him as he spoke. Who was it who said that liberty dies to the sound of thunderous applause? Not necessarily. Perhaps it comes in the monotone of a man selling a vacuum cleaner.

Launch credo: elitism is good

Spring weekend in London. Whenever you come back to the real world you always think about the huge EU publicity machine you have left behind, aware of its huge communications budget. You think of a particular debate, a debate carried out among journalists, and between officials: and that is, how can the EU communicate itself to the public? The European parliament has recently relaunched its website, in an attempt to become more user friendly. (And with the new dot eu suffix). Its slogan is: 457 million people at one address. (www.europarl.europa.eu). Some wags have said: and no readers. It is still to policy-oriented, too boring.
The thing is, the EU is not supposed to be democratic. It is the old argument of whether politics is an expertise or best exercised on the democratic principle. The Eurovision song contest model - where juries produce the Finnish winner, whereas the professional judges of yesteryear came up with Abba and the surprisingly good 1975 Dutch hit ding-ding a dong - is just another instance of how the masses, I am afraid, don't always know best.
The question is as old as Plato, but it is probably more true than ever before. The rewards of modern life are convenience; the price is complexity. So we have to leave modern politics to the experts.
You won't read the above in any of MEPs' increasingly numerous blogs, because they daren't tell their electorates - they themselves are becoming moree expert to keep with the ever rmore technocratic commission.

Norway, not another oil-rich Muslim state

What is happening in Norway? The country is completely
off the EU radar.
The country has now grown the western world’s largest
anti-immigration party when no one has been looking,
that is what.
Commentators insist though that Carl Hagen’s
Fremmskrittspartiet, or Progress Party, isn’t another
European far right party, a label it rejects. It calls
itself populist.
How has it managed to secure a 34 percent support in
the latest polls, in early April, making it the
largest party in the country - and three-and-a-half
times bigger than any other opposition party?

Fewer foreigners please

For a start it wants to cut taxes as well as boost
spending. Norway has a huge amount of money from its
oil income stashed away - 200bn euros, described as
the world’s largest pension fund. The leftwing
coalition government, led by Jens Stoltenberg, says it
cannot spend this money now, since it would send
inflation soaring. Anyway the cash is needed for
leaner times, when the oil runs out.
But Hagen wants to spend the money now, on schools,
hospitals and old people’s social services. A second
reason is that he wants to limit non-western
immigration to a thousand people a year - Britain
receives 1,500 people a day. Both these - possibly
unrealistic - policies appeal to an extraordinarily
loyal and often elderly cadre of voters and helped the
dapper 62-year-old into second place in the elections
last autumn. But now the Muslim cartoons crisis has
put further wind in the party’s sails.

Wrecked embassies, wrecked reputations

Because the country is next door to Denmark, and
because a Norwegian magazine was the first in the West
to republish all 12 cartoons, in January, its Damascus
embassy, along with Denmark’s, was torched in the
protest riots three months ago. Norwegian citizens
were evacuated from Syria.
As Scandinavian products were boycotted across the
Muslim world, an Anholt national brand survey, in
which panels from dozens of countries evaluate each
nation’s image, showed that Denmark fell from a
respectable position in Egypt to bottom of the table -
far below the US. Eighty percent of Egyptians did not
agree with the statement that Danes are honest.
Norway’s results were only a little better. In other
Muslim countries the results were similar. The report
noted: “This is quite significant. People’s views of
other countries are generally quite fixed and stable,
and it takes something very serious indeed to make
them revise their views. Above all, it takes something
personal.”

“The best person is he who repents”

Damage limitation was called for - or so thought the
government.
After the fires, it moved into conciliation mode.
Velbjørn Selbekk, the editor of the tiny Christian
periodical Magazinet, who had firmly resisted pressure
by Muslim extremists and the Norwegian establishment
to retract, was cajoled into a joint press conference
at a major government building by Norway’s minister of
employment. As Selbekk apologised, flanking him was
Mohammed Hamdan, head of the Islamic council of
Norway, who accepted his contrition on behalf of 46
Muslim organisations. Hamdan said:
“You are now under our protection. The prophet
Muhammed says everyone makes mistakes, but the best
person is he who repents.”
Then, the Norwegian government sponsored a team
comprising representatives for the Islamic council of
Norway and from the Lutheran church in Oslo to tour
the Gulf on a peacemaking mission. One of the people
they visited in Qatar was top Muslim leader Dr Yusuf
al-Qaradawi, who has reportedly supported suicide
bombings, and has publicly bragged about how “Islam
will conquer Europe”. The “moderate” al-Qaradawi was
apparently not entirely satisfied with Selbekk’s
apology and told his visitors that Norway ought to
introduce Islamic blasphemy laws. "Freedom of
expression is all about expressing an opinion. In the
cartoons case, there is no opinion or
counter-opinion," he told Islam Online.

“Freedom is Norway’s fundamental value”

Back in Oslo, mainstream media were careful to be
inclusive, but hyperactive blogs said Selbekk’s
humiliating apology to the Muslim leader in return for
pardon and protection was reminiscent of the state of
dhimmitude - the submission of non Muslims living in
Muslim societies to Sharia law. According to the
website Dhimmiwatch, Dhimmis, "protected people", are
free to practise their religion in a Sharia regime,
but are made subject to a number of humiliating
regulations designed to enforce the Qur'an's command
that they "feel themselves subdued".
While opposition politicians were cautious about
criticising all this, Hagen differed; he made a clear
demarcation in favour of the right to publish. Whether
it was accompanied by the dog whistle sounds of racism
- the country has a 6 percent immigrant population -
was for his listeners to decide. “Many Imans come from
countries where freedom of speech is not a
reality...They are trying it tear down our defences
that protect freedom of speech. When they have done
this, they will always be saying: ‘Now you must
respect this.’
“The Progress Party is going to stand up for freedom
of speech as a fundamental value. The government
should not be behaving as if its regrets the fact we
have freedom of speech in Norway,” he told
Aftenposten.
In polls, the party’s popularity rose by about eight
percentage points between January and April,
overtaking Labour, the largest party in the coalition.
It now has three supporters for every two it had at
the election.

“Dialogue is not appeasement”

So what next? Hagen has always wanted to be prime
minister, but in 27 years as party leader he has
always been locked out of the mainstream, like Vlaams
Blok. (Which he distances himself from).
For him it is too late, since he is stepping down
later this year in favour of the feisty Siv Jensen;
the next election is in 2009.
There are signs the country’s establishment are taking
the party more seriously, as it tries to sanitise
parts of its manifesto, and its best hope for the top
post - unless it grows further - is probably coalition
support from the now heavily depleted Conservatives -
the right’s traditional ruling party - who are
prepared to break the cordon sanitaire imposed by the
other parties.
Things would not be easy for this new alliance as the
party, which originally grew out of a protest movement
against Scandinavian high taxes and political
conformism would have to divest itself of the
indulgent habits of perpetual opposition: Nineteen out
of 20 economic experts recently said the party’s
economic policy didn’t add up. And its integration
policy? Aftenposten - the voice of liberal Norway -
has, despite not agreeing with everything about
government’s softsoaping of the Muslim community,
repeatedly warned against going down the hardline
Danish route on integration; Harvard Narum, a
political commentator, wrote: “The Progress Party has
clearly chosen to equate dialogue with appeasement.
This does not bode well for the important integration
and immigration debate in the time ahead.”
So Stoltenberg will be torn if he takes on the
Progress Party’s populist agenda. But there are
clearly votes to be won from the pressures many
Norwegians feel their small country is subjected to
from the Muslim community abroad and at home.