1930s redux

Been away in Prague for a week, of which more later, but have woken up this morning to some really scary and appalling news from all over Europe - not least in this corner of it. The EU, which was, in large part, formed to prevent the rise of fascism again in the continent, seems now to be a venue for the resurrection of that disgusting ideology.

I'm sure there is much wringing of hands all over the Net regarding the two MEPs that have been elected from the extremist BNP in the UK. And so there should be. Also, regarding the rise of the extreme right in Holland, Italy, Austria, Finland, etc etc. (All over Europe in fact).

Here in Romania, the extremists (PRM) won 2 seats with 7% of the vote, which is pretty shit, and especially when you see that the two people they'll send are life-long tosser, anti-semite and Ceausescu's poet, Corneliu Vadim Tudor, and in second place egomaniac nut job with a Jesus complex and owner of Steaua Bucharest, Gigi Becali. The latter of those two is more of a joke figure than anything to be really scared of, but it remains to be seen how actually being elected to something will go to his head. It's certainly difficult to see him enjoying his time in the European parliament - after all you don't get on TV very much and you have to spend time with a bunch of foreigners. I anticipate he will set new records for non-attendance.

But it's in neighbouring Hungary where things like the success of the BNP and PRM really pale into semi-insiginficance. Hungary in which the right wing "populist" (populist being a codeword euphemism for racist) Fidesz party got a massive 56% of the vote. (Fidesz being a party which desperately reaches out for the votes of the far-right, pandering to the anti-semitic, anti-Rroma views of the extremists and not distancing itself from any of these, cutting deals with various neo-nazi parties down the years). Now, the government in Hungary is massively unpopular, and it may well be that a large proportion of those 56% come from people who are voting for Fidesz just because they are the only real opposition, so let's not jump to too many mad conclusions from that performance.

But we can and should draw a lot of conclusions from the rise and rise of the nazi Jobbik party who picked up an absolitely terrifying 15% of the vote. 15%. A party who are allied with what can only be described as a fascist vigilante movement called the Magyar Garda, a bunch of black booted thugs with fascist emblems and a suspicious salute whose self-proclaimed role is to protect people from "gypsy crime". A party whose members make statements implying that sterilising Rroma woman would be a way to control the population. A party who play up anti-semitism (Hungary, by the way, seems to be the only country in Europe where anti-semtism still seems to be an acceptable, almost mainstream, viewpoint). Indeed one of its new MEPs, Krisztina Morvai, who seems to have been on a campaign to charm and convince journalists in the Western European press that she and her party are not a bunch of disgusting extremist scumbags, only last week made some incredible anti-semitic comments on an internet forum.

Really. These people are utter scum.

Is Europe fucked? Is facsism really back? Is this the beginning of the new 1930s? We've got the economic depression, we've got the rise of nationalisms, we've got the apparently electable extreme right neo-nazi parties. It scares the living shit out of me, to be honest. I mean I don't think that the European parliament will be the venue for this new fascist rise (the PRM is going to have a hard time dealing with Jobbik, for example, as the PRM hates Hungarians. Likewise the Italian Northern League is hardly going to get into bed with the PRM since half their current rhetoric is anti-Romanian), but in general there really feels like there is a tide of really disgusting views sweep[ing over Europe.

More tolerance news from Italy

Piergiorgio Stiffoni (no sniggering at the back, that really is his name, apparently) who is a Senator from the ever-delightful Northern League party in Italy (and hence part of that country's racist government) on the subject of Romanians: "If an extraterrestrial came down to earth and asked me what Romanians specialised in, I would say "rape""

(That's my translation of Se un extraterrestre scendesse sulla terra - dice Stiffoni - e mi chiedesse qual e' la specializzazione dei rumeni, gli risponderei 'lo stupro', which since I don't speak Italian is quite possibly slightly wrong, but not by much I think)

If an extraterrestrial came to earth and asked me what members of the Northern League specialised in, I would respond "being disgusting bigoted xenophobic scumbags", and then I'd ask if I could borrow his ray-gun.

With friends like these

I've recently been perusing English language blogs that have the word Romania in them for research/laughs. It's quite remarkable how many of such things are written by American missionaries. What are all these people doing here? I have no objection whatsoever to people who have their own beliefs and faith, but I think the idea of travelling half way round the world in order to attempt to shove it down someone else's throat is, how can I put this delicately, fucked up.

Anyway, before I launch into my full-on anti-missionary rant, I'll take a deep breath and share one (non-missionary, but possibly just as bad) I came across yesterday. This was not a blog set in Romania, but from a Conservative county councillor from Kent, one Kevin Lynes. I don't have a great deal of time for tories, I have to say (this is a bit of an understatement), having grown up politically in the dark days of the Thatcher government, but that doesn't mean all people who are conservatives are necessarily scum, just deluded :-)

Anyway, Kevin, who seems to like to go by the name Kevin, which presumably is Tory party policy these days, in deference to "Dave" (he might go the whole hog and try "Kev" I suppose, but for now he's opted to sit on the fence between old and new Toryism and gone with Kevin. Probably quite wise. Keep your options open and all that), writes of a meeting he had with Prince Radu, the son in law of "the current King Mihai" (he's not really the king, fact fans, he's just a bloke, but let's not let that interrupt our enjoyment of Kev's insightful comments). Apparently Romania has been robbed of its national identity (as far as I can tell, this means it has been robbed of its monarchy, which I would contend is not quite the same thing). Mind you it can't harm to have people, even people like Kev, looking out for Romania, so while I'm taking the piss a fair bit, the outcome is probably not, in the grand scheme of things, a waste of time. But there were two bits of the commentary which really cracked me up (well one cracked me up and the other made me laugh in that kind of tragicomic-head-in-hands type way).

The laugh out loud bit was this: "I felt compelled this weekend to send an email to the Prince’s office to thank him for taking the time to talk to us and to commend him on his vision document. Within three hours, even with the time difference, he had replied warmly and personally to thank me for my message."

Even with the time difference? It's an email, Kev. It's not affected by time differences. Honestly. It doesn't sit in a queue waiting for the clocks to catch up, it just goes. You're going to have to trust me on this.

The other bit was this "He fundamentally could not understand why the European Parliament can discuss the shape of bananas ad nauseam, yet cannot bring itself to debate the theft of a national identity.".

The old bananas line! I thought it had died out. For those unfamiliar with the Euro-Sceptic arm of British politics and media, there was (is) this obsession with the idea that the EU tried at some unspecified point in the past to define how straight and how curved a banana could officially be. Now, I have asked many people who have said this to provide evidence that this debate actually occurred, but so far none of them have actually done so. Now the EU is very hot on documenting things, and you can be quite sure that if it really did come before the European parliament that there would be very clear and accessible records of such an event. Despite this, I have yet to see any evidence of this incredible, fantastic, self-parodic event. I would like to hazard a guess, just a hunch you understand, that IT NEVER FUCKING HAPPENED.

Aren't you glad, that given the implosion and incompetence of New Labour people like Kev are going to be running the country soon. We'll soon sort those Eurocrats out!

Alacant post

Am currently in Alicante (or Alacant as it's known in Valenciano, the local language/dialect of Catalan) working on a European Union project. One day, before too long, I must write a post outlining why I think the European Union has an awful lot going for it, despite its (well-reported) flaws. And not just because I've been flown to the warmth of the Mediterranean coast (27 degrees today) from the grey, rainy and prematurely chilly Csikszereda (8 degrees today!). No, I have real reasons not associated with my personal comfort. Honest.

Corruption article

Not really my thing to just link to articles and not add anything of my own, but am a bit pressed for time, and wanted to make sure that anyone who hadn't yet seen it, has the chance to see this article by Tom Gallagher on corruption in Romania and the EU's response to it in the FT (today is the day that the report comes out, which will almost certainly contain the usual finger wagging inaction)

Racism returns to the European mainstream

What the hell is going on in Italy? Berlusconi is using his first weeks in power not only to evade prosecution in all the corruption trials he's up against, but he and his government seem hell-bent on returning the country to the days of Mussolini.

Recently, for example,

Italy's highest appeal court ruled that it was acceptable to discriminate against Roma on the grounds that "all Gypsies were thieves"

(taken from this article)

I mean...christ on a bike, this is fucking appalling (I hope you'll excuse the language, but when talking about acts as repulsive and racist as those which the Italian government is currently engaged in and engaged in supporting, strong language is unavoidable)

When an angry mob went on the rampage and burnt down a Rroma slum, the government's response was... to praise them.

This is a country in Western Europe. In the G8. in 2008. And it is being run by a bunch of vile extremist throwback bigots and no-one is saying or doing a thing about it. It's appalling.

The EU prides itself (with no little justification) on helping to rebuild a Europe shattered by war and fascism, and to ensuring that the conflicts of the past could never happen again. Yet it sits idly by while one of its core members returns to the 1930s.

Milking it

A couple of years ago, I pondered on the impact that EU membership would have on the small farmers of Romania. Just to clarify, the farmers of Romania are not, to my knowledge, any smaller than farmers anywhere else - many are of average height and build, while some are even quite tall. There are just rather a lot of them (farmers of all sizes) and they mostly have very small farms. In fact many of their farms would not actually be described as farms by most people and more like "having a cow or two in their back garden". In fact, I think I should probably go with smallholder, so as to not delude you as to the scale of their operations.

Anyway, I have recently learned a little bit more about what EU membership means for these smallholders (and indeed what having all these smallholders means for the EU). Specifically in the dairy sector.

You see, the way things work around here is that people in villages own a cow or two. Every morning people open their gates, and the cows wander out on to the street and follow each other and the village cowbloke who escorts them all to a field where they all spend the day quietly pondering the scenery, rambling, and painting watercolours of the tranquil countryside. At the end of the day, they are led back through the village, during which walk they all peel off and go into their own homes. Really, they do that, they don't need to be guided or anything, and the cowbloke doesn't need to recognise all the cows, they just go home of their own accord. I mean cows may not be the most actively intelligent of animals, but they are not, well, sheep.

[By the way, and I have no idea whether this is true or not, but the joke around these parts is that the one place that it doesn't work like this is in the Ploiesti area, in which everybody has so little to do, that they all take care of their own cows. Sort of a one-cow town]

Anyway, before they all go out for the day to their alfresco creche (Kühegarten?), they get milked by their owners. The aformentioned owners then take the milk to the village collection point, where it is deposited and cooled and then at some point picked up by the tanker which takes it all to the dairy. I think in the past, much of this dairy activity happened in the village itself, or at least in some villages, but with the changes brought upon by the EU, the only dairies that remain are the large ones which can afford to ensure all procedures and tests are met, and which are usually situated in the major population centres. So a fleet of tankers is despatched every morning to the collection points in the villages, where the milk is transferred to the tanker and brought back to the dairy, where it is tested and pasteurised and what have you (ie converted into good things, like butter, or crimes against humanity, like cheese).

Now this process is pretty much the only way that the old system of lots of people with few cows each can sustain itself (and not morph into the agribusiness model of very few people owning all the cows), but it obviously has a number of problems inherent in it. The main one is that it takes a long while to isolate a problem. If one cow is receiving antibiotics, for example, that cow's milk cannot be sold (because milk cannot legally contain antibiotics). But if the owner and the village vet keep it secret (because obviously you lose income for a while), then the antbiotics show up at the dairy, meaning that the whole tanker full is unusable. At that point, all of the villages on that tanker's route are under suspicion, and the next day the milk of all those villages will be checked at the collection points to determine which village it is. From that point, I guess the guilty cow can be identified, arrested, and charged, but it's at least a three-day process. The other problem is that there are an awful lot of people who have been milking cows for a awfully long time who now have to re-learn some things to ensure that the milk they obtain is cleaner (in terms of bacteria content).

I also learned that each of these producers has to have a quota to sell the dairy issued by the EU (or I presume issued more locally, under EU rules). Because of Romania's smallholding culture, there are 250,000 of these quota holders in this country. That is one half of all the quota holders in the whole of the EU. That's one of those statistics that sounds like it should be really interesting, but when you delve deep down into it, it's kind of hard to see why. A bit like this post, I fear.

Germany

What does Germany mean to you? What images are conjured up by that name? Well-engineered cars? Hitler and the Nazis? Good football team marred by that diving cheat Jurgen Klinsmann? Cleanliness and efficiency? Towels-on-the-beach at 7am? Central axis of the new European project? (Possibly unfortunate use of the word "axis" there, sorry) The country that much of Europe (and the world) aspires to be? Excellent beer? A "cuisine" that is over-reliant on sausages and cabbage? Fast trains and speedy autobahns? 99 Luftballons? Marlene Dietrich? Unnatural love of David Hasselhoff and The Kelly Family?

For much of Eastern Europe, it would seem, Germany is seen as one vast second hand car dealership. And not just cars - lorries, buses, forklifts, I dunno, probably helicopters and stuff too. Just this weekend, for example, I was passed on the road to Sovata by a bus just bought from Germany going like the clappers. It was a bendy bus too (I'm not sure if bendy bus is the technical name for one of those buses with a kind of concertina bit in the middle, but you know what I mean. Omnibus Articulatum or something.) The roads, car dealerships, and free-newspapers-that-sell-cars are filled with recently imported vehicles. In Csikszereda, most of the lorries that ply the town delivering stuff or transporting stuff around still have evidence of their German roots - slogans and logos of companies in Hamburg, stickers in the window saying "Heinrich", that kind of thing, while sporting a Romanian number plate with an HR (Harghita) designation (It may not, in truth, be "most", but it's a significantly high percentage).

If ever you mention in passing that you're looking to buy a car, everyone you know will know someone whose livelihood depends on going to Germany, buying up cars and driving them back. I'm serious. At times I wonder if there is anyone sitting on the planes that fly between Frankfurt/Munich and Bucharest, or whether there are vast bottlenecks in Hungary as swarms of Romanians drive their German vehicles home. A casual observer at the border crossing at Oradea would probably assume that Romania is a vastly popular holiday destination for Germans, based on all the German registered cars coming through.

This year the Romanian government has imposed a punitive tax on these incoming cars, the so-called "first registration tax", by which every car being registered for the first time in Romania is subject to a high tariff. This tax, it is rumoured, comes as a result of intense pressure from Renault who own Dacia and who are therefore the biggest sellers of new cars in Romania. The EU has told Romania that this tax is illegal and a hindrance to free trade or something, but so far it has not been removed, though the assumption is that sooner or later it will have to be (court cases in Poland and Hungary have already put paid to similar laws in those countries). When it is rescinded, apparently, everyone will have to be paid back, but since this is Romania the levels of bureaucracy that will almost certainly be involved in getting it back will be so time-consuming that many people will just not bother, giving the government a nice little tax-windfall which they can use on hushing up the CIA torture camps or whatever.

This trade in vehicles from West to East, by the way, is not limited to the Germany-Romania corridor. As far as I can tell it is common all over Eastern Europe, and, indeed, if you go to www.mobile.de (which is the virtual parking lot for a large number of these vehicles), you will come across loads of dealers who specify which Eastern European languages they speak. Similarly, while Germany is the main source, other countries are also helping supply our quiveringly addictive need for second-hand cars. A friend recently went to Italy to accompany and translate for some blokes from here who drove over a couple of car transporters and bought up a bunch of cars that had been rescued from flood waters, filled with mud and obviously not working. The theory is that you bring them home, clean them up, fix them and then sell them for 4 times what you paid for them (with the danger that they will not be repairable cancelled out by the profits on the ones that are). His story about the whole negotiation and "marketplace" in which it took place is pretty funny - involving the mafia, Bulgarian gangsters, Moldovans, Romanians and god knows who else.

The reason for this post at this time? Yes, I have just bought a second hand VW Golf, imported from Germany, and currently going through the registration process. (As ever a bureaucratic and slow plod, speeded up by knowing someone who knows someone at different stages of the way). It is a very nice car though, with one small complaint - it has a cassette player in it. It was built in 2003, for christs sake, why on earth did Volkswagon think putting a cassette player in it was a good idea? Why not just go with a bloody gramophone? Vorsprung Durch Technic, and all that stuff.

Side effects of the smoking ban

I spent last week in Aberdeen, which, being in Scotland, has a full on smoking ban in pubs, restaurants, etc. (England & Wales don't yet, but Scotland does). Walking into a genuine UK style pub, and finding nobody smoking is somewhat strange at first. I've been in countries and states that have smoking bans before, but pubs are different - I mean I grew up passively (and, at times, actively) smoking in pubs, and having one without the all pervasive smell of smoke is almost as weird as being in one that doesn't serve beer or sell crisps.

The hotel I was staying in, for example, had a cellar pub bit in which there were at least 10 TV screens showing football from various different locations simultaneously. The night I walked in it was packed with men - many of whom I took to be oil-workers, as they seem to make up much of the transient population of the city ("Aberdeen: Oil Capital of Europe" signs proclaimed, though I'm figuring there must be somewhere in Norway that has at least as good a claim on that title) . A bar full of burly looking blokes watching football and not a whiff of smoke. Very peculiar and somehow unsettling (much more unusual than the lack of women, for example)

But then it was that I began to realise the downside of the smoking ban. That is that the benefit of cigarette smoke is that it is extremely effective at masking any other odours hanging around. And in this bar, I soon realised, there was very definitely an odour. And it was fairly pervasive, almost to a post-match-changing-room level of acridity. Funny, they never mention B.O. when discussing the pros and cons of the ban, do they? Mind you, as unpleasant as the smell of poorly-deoderised sweat may be (and it is, believe me, very unpleasant), at least your clothes don't stink of other people when you get home.

Not just BO, apparently

What the EU means for me

Yesterday, I got my new residency permit for Romania. Things have certainly changed. In the space of two years I have now had (and reported on) three entirely different documents which allow me to remain here. The first was a kind of rubbishy handwritten passport thing. The process to get this document was both expensive and baffling.

This document lasted a few months before being superseded by a fancy hi-tech card that had to be issued in Germany. Once again this was not exactly cheap. In fact by the time I'd got that one, I'd spent somewhere in the order of €200 in total on various documents enabling me to live here (and that doesn't include the money it cost me to set up a company which gave me legal permission to even start applying).

But now things have changed. Out has gone the German-issued laminated card, and in has come some other official looking large scale piece of paper. Because now, of course, Romania is in the EU, and my ability to stay here is determined by that new status. (Romanians can't stay in the UK longer than 3 months, but fortunately for me the Romanian state chooses not to reciprocate - though I would quite understand and even applaud them if they did). Anyway, the new piece of paper, with all the documentation and stuff that was needed to get it, cost me a sum total of 4 Lei. That's approximately €1.20. That sum still involved two different receipts of 1 and 3 Lei each from two different offices in two different parts of the town, with associated queueing, but let's not quibble about that.

The only downside of the whole thing is that while the card was very convenient and easy to carry around with me, this new document isn't, and if I were to stuff it in my wallet it would disintegrate within a couple of months, necessitating a replacement. And of course, being British, I don't possess an ID card. I don't fancy carrying around my passport all day every day, so will have to come up with some system to cope with the Romanian need for people to have official ID on their persons at all time. Hopefully my driving licence will do the trick.

Anyway, I thought you'd all be glad to know of the advantages of EU membership for me. It's not all strict legislation and baffling regulations you know.

Irony

With much of the far right of (old) Europe convulsed by the threat of the vast number of Romanians (read: gypsies) flooding across the continent, it seems that Romania has given those scummers something to be glad about: "Romania's first gift to the European Union" is apparently Vadim Tudor and his coterie of extremist nationalist wankers, making up the numbers for the European Parliament to have a neo-fascist caucus.

(But what I don't understand is that this is possible because this bloc now has enough MEPs in it to be formed - but Romania has never had any MEP elections - where are these MEPS from? Can anyone help?)

Please the Press in Belgium

Romania’s accession to the EU has thrust the country into the international media spotlight. Well, to be more accurate a few people with metaphorical torches are poking around looking for the latest human interest story / political bombshell / zeitgeist-capturing headline. In so doing, one or two of them have happened upon Csikszereda Musings and have asked for help.

In my role, then, as the Ciuc Depression’s resident media slut, I have been contacted by the following:

• A journalist for a reputable English national newspaper (there are only two reputable English national newspapers, and it wasn’t the Guardian), who had been asked to write a story on the floods of Romanians heading for the UK and the glorious hopefulness of a new life in Hull or Stoke or somewhere. I told her that it was not much of a story, and if there were floods of migrating Romanians they would almost certainly be going to Spain or Italy. She managed to wangle her way out of doing the story, but pointed me in the direction of the story she probably would have written had her editor not relented. (It's pretty good and worth the click). It turned out that a grand total of 4 Romanians flew into Heathrow on January 1st – two of whom were students there and the other two of whom had established work contracts. [Later edit: Apparently this is ambiguous and could be interpreted as me saying that the Times is Britain's other reputable newspaper. As it is owned by Rupert Murdoch, I'd like to refute that right now. OK?]


• I got interviewed on a podcast! It was only very recently that I worked out what a podcast was, and now I’ve been on one. By the time they’ve been yesterday’s news for about 5 years, I might do one myself. By then you’ll all be blogging with video chips wired into your eyeballs so we can all see exactly what you’ve been seeing. Anyway, Mark from Amsterdam interviewed me and you can listen to it on his website here (and so learn what I actually sound like. I realize that this is such a tempting thought that I must ask you to refrain you all from clicking at the same time in case it buggers up his bandwidth or something. I’ll draw up some kind of rota or something so you can all find a quiet time to go on). I daren't actually listen to it myself, since my entire recollection of the interview is Mark asking me a question about what Romanians think, or what the reaction has been in Romania, and me egotistically answering with what I think, like that's more interesting to people.


• Someone from BBC Radio (Cambridgeshire) might be in touch, I’ve been informed. It’s a mate of my brother’s actually, who may have agreed that talking to me live on air was a good idea at some point on New Year’s Eve (the night of the year when we make all our best decisions), and be now trying to avoid making the call. So, we’ll count that as an unlikely occurrence until further notice.


• That’s it actually

In the cold light of day, that’s not exactly the world’s media beating a path to my door, I must confess. Still, if anyone else wants to contact me to pick my brains on the EU, Romania and the relationship between Romania and Britain, take this as a come hither look with a saucy wink.

Early spring or late autumn?

It's 8 degrees C as I type this. 8 degrees above zero. In January. In Miercurea Ciuc. It's unfeasible.

I blame the EU. (Romanians will soon learn that one of the advantages of EU membership for the government is that they can blame anything they like on Brussels. The British and French governments are masters at this. And then they wonder why public opinion is euro-skeptical)

The hour approaches

The following have recently (I mean in the last couple of days) appeared in the main square, finally. I wondered if anyone would ever make any kind of reference to the imminent accession, and it seems that now Christmas is out of the way, that people are starting to at least acknowledge that January 1st is just around the corner.


This one's outside the Culture House, nicely symmetrical in its bilingualism.

The next two are directly opposite outside the county council building (known locally as "The White House")


As you can see they show the happy European family welcoming Romania into their midst. At least I assume it's Romania. In fact the "blue" of the flag is so dark as to be effectively black, occasioning me to actually wonder for a while about the logic of giving people the opportunity to be Belgian. I mean they must be blue, but it's really really hard to tell.

The lampposts have all received the following decoration:
That white flag, in case you were wondering is the local one. I think it's the flag of Csikszereda, but it could conceivably be the flag of Haromszek, the old Hungarian county in which Csikszereda was.

And finally a signpost pointing west to our new home (seen from both sides so you can see there's no language bias)

La Dolce Vita

Harrowing article from today's Guardian about the plight of migrant workers (Romanians among them) in Southern Italy. Driving through small towns in Southern Romania you see loads of these hastily printed flyers on lampposts advertising work in Spain and Italy. I often wondered what kind of conditions the people who signed up for these deals ended up in.

4 tier Europe?

I remember a few years ago there was talk of having a two tier EU. There would be the countries that believed in it and wanted to work together for some undefined glorious European tomorrow in one tier, and the countries that didn't believe in it but were too scared to be left on the outside in the other tier. The UK of course was one of the latter.

Since 2004, we've effectively had this two tier Europe, but it's slightly different from what was first thought up. This is down to Europe admitting a series of buffer states to protect it from the perceived terrible ravages of immigration. These buffer states (look it up on a map if you don't believe me) form a thick barrier of cabbage, sour cream, and beer from the Baltic coast of Poland in the north, through the former Czechoslovakia, Hungary and down to the Adriatic in Slovenia. This cabbage curtain effectively allows the Western end of the continent to limit immigration from further east (though they clearly need to set up some kind of floating buffer states between north Africa and various Spanish and Italian islands, to really make sure they've blocked off all the avenues.)

In admitting them, existing European states made choices as to whether to allow citizens of those nations (now to be EU citizens) should actually be allowed to live and work anywhere they liked in the Union - what the EU was supposed to be all about in short. To its credit, the UK opened its doors, unlike many of the nations which were supposed to be all about EU integration and the like. This was often talked up in comparing the relative economic performance of placeslike the UK and Ireland which opened up and France and Germany which didn't.

So for a while we had a three speed Europe - countries who were actually making use of the idea of the union to gain ground economically; countries who were not doing that, but were "old Europe" and hence more powerful in the grand scheme of things; and the countries being stripped of their human resources to fuel the UK's economic growth.

Now, however, cowed by tabloid scare headlines and racism towards gypsies, the UK and Ireland have decided to close the door to Romanians and Bulgarians, thus creating an underclass of Europe within the Union itself. It's fucking disgraceful. Is my country run by the Daily Mail? It certainly feels that way.

Now Romania could respond to this with reciprocity, making life hard for Brits who want to live and work in Romania, and in fact that would be a good idea (despite the fact that it would be a pain in the arse for yours truly). But the fact is that there aren't that many of us who want to be here, and most who do come work for large multinationals who can afford to jump through bureaucratic hoops. Instead, what the Romanian government should do is to make it hard for Brits to buy property here. The UK press is full of articles about the advantages and benefits of buying property in Romania and Bulgaria, and a policy denying Brits the right to own property in this country would upset a lot of people over there (and the kind of people who are likely to be having dinner parties with politicians and journalists). So, Calim and Traian, what do you say? Give New Labour something to think about, the xenophobic scumlords that they are.

Here are the most recent comments of the BBCs Europe editor on the subject of Romania and emigration 28th September (the comments section at the bottom is worth a read, if only to get all steamed up about people such as the cretinous "Steve H, of Littlehampton"), and October 26th (ie today - hence not many irate comments yet from Little Englanders (Littlehamptoners?))

Close the door behind you

So, Romania is in. After much umming and ahhing, the EU has finally given the green light for us and Bulgaria to join. I'd write a long post about what this means for the country, but I don't have the time. Basically short term pain for long term gain will be my conclusion, you can fill in the tedious actual analysis yourself.

I presume tomorrow's right wing tabloid press in the UK will be full of stories about how 719 million gypsies are now poised to descend on London, or how already the first purse snatching of the new EU has been attributed to a Romanian.

Interestingly, I have a Ukrainian colleague/friend/guest visiting at the moment, who is gobsmacked that Romania should be on the verge of joining while Ukraine looks unlikely to have the chance for the next 20 years (hence the title of the post), given the respective wealth, state of development, etc etc of the two nations. Politics, innit?

Ease and Wizz

Marosvasarhely (otherwise known as Targu Mures, otherwise known as Tirgu Mures, otherwise known -by almost no-one- as Neumarkt) has an airport. This fact is very convenient for us, since it happens to be Erika's home town and we have a place outside her parents' place to park the car if we wanted to fly anywhere. However, less convenient until very recently was the fact the only places you could fly to from there were Bucharest and Timisoara. True, you could then fly on to somewhere else, but it took a long while and was not that useful, particularly when it only took half an hour more or so to drive to Otopeni where the main Bucharest airport is.

Now however, things have started to change. First Malev started offering a service from Budapest, and they have been followed by WizzAir. For those unfamiliar with WizzAir, it is a low cost Hungaro-Polish airline (I think), and it's actually fairly good, in my experience. This is a stroke of genius on their part. Not because it makes my life easier, but because there are loads and loads of people from the Marosvasarhely area who are living in Hungary, having fled there in 1990 (Something like 95% of Erika's high school class live in Hungary, for example). And their prices are so low that they undercut both the train and the minibuses that ply the same route. They've also cunningly looped themselves into the potential tourist market for the area by naming the airport "Transylvania Targu Mures" - and since it is the most convenient airport for Sighisoara, it will pick up a fair amount of tourism one day, I reckon.

Anyway, we flew to England via this route (one flight to Budapest, a night at some friends' and then a flight on to Luton). The airport is very small and a little bit rubbish looking from the outside - grass on the runway, 30 year old petrol trucks, generally a little bit run down - but inside it is very clean and sparkling new. So new, in fact that little touches like the cafe/bar are not actually open yet. This proved a slight problem as our plane turned out to be 2 hours late. A little digging revealed that this was because the Vasarhely plane had started its day in London and at that time every plane leaving England was doing so with a minimum of two hours delay thanks to the need to stop anyone bringing anything whatsoever on the plane with them in case they started to beat the stewardesses with a rolled up newspaper or some such dastardly act. (I do appreciate the need for security, but to give an example of just how ruthlessly this was all enforced, a friend was travelling with his 6-year-old son, and they made him (the son) take the batteries out of his hearing aid, hand them to an armed guard, who then carried them on to the plane, and ensured that they were locked in a safe on board only to be released after the journey).

[Happily, the extra wait without any form of entertainment passed easily because to Paula any place is much like any other, and to Bogi, who was about to embark on her first flight, the whole thing was insanely exciting anyway.]

Coming back this week, of course we had to brave the security measures ourselves, since leaving the UK you have to jump through all the requisite hoops (unlike leaving Romania or Hungary two weeks earlier). By this time things had been eased slightly, and I was allowed to bring a newspaper, and we were able to have a bag with nappies and stuff in it. We did, however, have to demonstrate that all liquid-ish forms of babyfood were non-explosive, which meant I had to taste the water and the apple juice which we had prepared for P, and Bogi kindly volunteered to taste the two jars of baby food (one of which was some blended facsimile of "Vegetable Lasagne", so it said), which as you might imagine was not terribly apealing at 5am, which is when we checked in. The "lasagne" got a very definite thumbs down, while the apple and yoghurt dessert was pronounced quite nice.

We then (well a few hours later) had to do a quite farcical sprint through Ferihegy airport - because WizzAir is a low cost airline it only sells individual tickets, so we had one set of tickets for the Luton to Budapest leg and one set of tickets for the Budapest to Marosvasarhely leg. There were no systems in place to allow us to be checked all the way through. And of course, our experiences on the outward journey had let us know that we would be using the exact same plane. So, what we had to do when we arrived at Budapest airport was get off the plane, go through immigration, collect our suitcases, go out, check in to the new flight, go through security and then get back on the same plane (while our bags would go through the systems and be replaced back on that same plane too). All in less that 45 minutes. This seemed to me frought with hazard and so we worked out our strategy in advance. We got seats right at the front so as to be the first off the plane (this is easy to do when you have young kids as they let you on first and there are no assigned seats). Then after immigration I took Paula and all the passports and left Erika and Bogi waiting for the suitcases while I went round the airport and back into check-in. I explained my predicament to the bloke at the desk and he said, "Well check in closes in 12 minutes". To which I responded that I knew that, but since I was here, and we were all here, and I knew the plane was here, couldn't he hold it for a while in case we didn't all get through in time. Thankfully he saw the sense of this and issued our boarding passes there and then and held on for a while after he should have to close the flight. This only worked because we could work in a team though, individuals hoping to pull off the same stunt would have been stuck.

And so finally, we made it to be greeted by the same crew who were happy to see us back (mostly because Paula is just about the most charming baby in the history of the universe, a fact I state without a hint of bias). Half an hour or so later we were back on the grassy runway of Transylvania Targu Mures. (It's one of those small airports where you have to walk to and from the plane - none of these fancy tunnels or even buses). The baggage reclaim room may have to be upgraded soon, since it consists of one end of a conveyor belt manned by two blokes who grab every suitcase as it emerges and put it on the floor around themselves. A full plane load of passengers and a full plane load of bags most assuredly do not fit in this room.

WizzAir have obviously decided that the Romanian market is the next one to hit up as they are advertising loads of new routes coming soon - Vasarhely to Barcelona and Roma (direct) and Bucharest to all sorts of places, including a direct Luton flight, which will be even more appealing. We're already thinking of a winter break to Rome.

I'd like to add here that I have absolutely no connection to WizzAir, and I will not make any profit out of extolling or publicising their services, but if anyone from Wizzair does chance upon this post and wishes to comp me a few tickets, I'd be happy to accept their kind offer.

More on anti-Romanian bigotry

Just as an addendum to yesterday's news, after I wrote it I went out and saw the headline on the Daily Express which was something along the lines of "Romanian Scum Plan Invasion". They weren't the exact words, but given the readership of the Express and the people who work for it, it's clear that this was the meaning. (I think it actually said "Romanians Set to Flood Britain"). So now Romanians are the new bete noire of Europe - first Spain and now the UK. I don't doubt that the right wing press in Austria and Germany and elsewhere is saying the same shit too.

I should point out to Romanian readers of this blog that the Express is a noted extreme right wing rag read by (1) sad deluded elderly people who hanker after a day when food was rationed, German bombs were raining down on our cities, and there were no black people in the UK; (2) rural in-breds who have never actually been beyond a 5-mile radius from home and who have never even seen an immigrant in the flesh; or (3) members of the British National Party (our answer to Vadim Tudor's Party of the Great Romanian Nightmare). It shouldn't be assumed, though, that it is on the margins of British society, as I imagine it (and it's fellow bigoted muckspreader the Daily Mail) probably speaks to about 25% of the population. So while it doesn't mean that the nation has suddenly turned into a hardline fascist state full of anti-Romanian hatred, neither does it mean that the depth of bigotry among the small minded few should be underestimated.

(Some other choice headlines are quoted in this Independent article)

Poles Apart

Quite interesting being in the UK at the moment. Yesterday the government announced figures for the number of Eastern Europeans who have come to the country since the 10 new members acceded to the EU in 2004. Apparently the predicted figure of something like 15,000 a year has turned out to be more like 500,000 in the first two years plus, the vast majority of whom have come from Poland. Predictably this has led to calls from the Conservative Party (Motto: "Still the party of casual racism, whatever image makeover we may have tried to bamboozle you with") to make sure Romanians and Bulgarians are not given the same rights to move here as everybody else was. Equally predictably the Labour Party (Motto: "Taking policy decisions from the editorial pages of the Daily Mail") have started making noises of a similar limitation. Now obviously there's no way they can tell Romanians and Bulgarians to fuck off without it looking terribly discriminatory (since they quite happily let everybody else come), so they're kind of backed into a corner on this one.

Mind you, everybody (well, outside the Daily Mail and its Little Englander readership) are at pains to point out how beneficial all these people have been to the UK economy. And of these 500,000 ish people fewer than 1000 are on the dole and claiming benefits, so it's a bit much to go on about the drain on social services. There is of course a serious downside to this influx of people - not on the UK, which is doing fine, but in Poland and Lithuania and elsewhere whose workforces are being sucked dry of most of the young qualified workers who have opted to become builders and hotel workers in the UK rather than put their qualifications to good use at home.

Today's Guardian editorial points out that there are likely to be fewer Romanians wishing to move to the UK, for a number of reasons - the major one being that there really isn't much of an established Romanian community here, whereas there was a Polish one. [Although to ruin their argument they also say that there are fewer English speakers here, which while true in real terms is probably not true in per capita terms - Romanians young people speak excellent English in my experience, and the number of people passing advanced level exams from the University of Cambridge's suite* of international English language qualifications is very very high in Romania. (*I use the word "suite" because I've done a fair amount of work with them and know that's what they call them, so it's not just me being poncy)]

Anyway, since Germany is apparently now changing its mind again, it sounds like Romania may not get in at the end of this year after all, so it all may be academic for now.