Provence, in the south of France, does not get any worse. During a week's break at my rented retreat recently, I thought once again of how God smiled on the French and the Romans were quick to get the message.
This is not knowledge confined to this side of the Atlantic either. American tourism in Provence was rising fast until first, Sept. 11 and second, French opposition to the war in Iraq -- which has looked more and more well-founded as the months have gone by -- took its toll. But neither has prevented arch US hawk on Iraq Richard Perle from enjoying the comforts of his villa last summer in ... well, in Provence, as a matter of fact.
But there is always a cloud on the horizon, and in Provence it is the strong showing of the far-right and anti-immigration National Front. It was therefore some consolation to find that opinion polls in advance of the coming regional elections did not show much change in the proportion of National Front supporters from last year -- indeed a slight decrease. And the running story last week in La Provence was that Jean-Marie Le Pen, the grand (if that is the word) old man of the French National Front was being disqualified from registration as a candidate in the forthcoming regional elections because he did not personally own property there, his base in Nice being the property of his Party.
Any sense of hope one felt about this however was soon dented on return to London, where the tabloid press was in a state of hysteria about the putative threat of mass immigration from eastern Europe, and calling upon the Blair government for tough measures. There is no underestimating the depths to which the right-wing tabloid press in the UK will sink in order to increase circulation by stirring up racial hatred. They are especially good at suggesting that there is a world out there waiting to invade Britain and take advantage of its welfare state.
Racial hatred
Unfortunately, on this occasion they have been joined by David Goodhart, the widely-respected editor of the prestigious, liberal intellectual monthly Prospect. The last thing Goodhart wishes to do is to stir up racial hatred, but in claiming that there is a conflict in modern democracies between the "solidarity" a nation needs and the "diversity" of multiculturalism, he has given ammunition to the prejudices of the tabloids at a sensitive time.
Personally, I think he has raised a false dichotomy, and I am not much impressed by woolly statements such as "the progressive centre needs to ... develop a new language in which to address the anxieties, one that transcends the thin and the abstract language of universal rights on the one hand, and the defensive, nativist language of group identity on the other." Watch this space ...
Goodhart and others seem to be concerned about the prospect of a big inflow of east European workers after the enlargement of the EU in May. The amazing thing about this is that although enlargement has been in the cards for years, and long been a goal of successive British Conservative and Labour governments, it seems to have taken the British press by surprise. All the surveys suggest that forecasts of large inflows of migrant labor have been much exaggerated. Moreover it has, in any case, been UK government policy for several years to encourage "economic migrants" to fill job vacancies in the UK health service, the British building trades and catering and other services. This all makes perfect economic sense.
There is something absurd and inconsistent about the recently prevailing economic philosophy which states that free movement of capital is fine, but free movement of labor is not. People tend to migrate either out of desperation or a sense of adventure (in which latter case the migration is often temporary). A decent society should welcome economic migrants and asylum seekers. Indeed, many societies which consider themselves decent are comprised to a remarkable extent of the descendants of economic migrants and asylum seekers.
In their New York Times bestseller How Democracies Die, Harvard political scientists Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt said that democracies today “may die at the hands not of generals but of elected leaders. Many government efforts to subvert democracy are ‘legal,’ in the sense that they are approved by the legislature or accepted by the courts. They may even be portrayed as efforts to improve democracy — making the judiciary more efficient, combating corruption, or cleaning up the electoral process.” Moreover, the two authors observe that those who denounce such legal threats to democracy are often “dismissed as exaggerating or
The Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) caucus in the Legislative Yuan has made an internal decision to freeze NT$1.8 billion (US$54.7 million) of the indigenous submarine project’s NT$2 billion budget. This means that up to 90 percent of the budget cannot be utilized. It would only be accessible if the legislature agrees to lift the freeze sometime in the future. However, for Taiwan to construct its own submarines, it must rely on foreign support for several key pieces of equipment and technology. These foreign supporters would also be forced to endure significant pressure, infiltration and influence from Beijing. In other words,
“I compare the Communist Party to my mother,” sings a student at a boarding school in a Tibetan region of China’s Qinghai province. “If faith has a color,” others at a different school sing, “it would surely be Chinese red.” In a major story for the New York Times this month, Chris Buckley wrote about the forced placement of hundreds of thousands of Tibetan children in boarding schools, where many suffer physical and psychological abuse. Separating these children from their families, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) aims to substitute itself for their parents and for their religion. Buckley’s reporting is
Last week, the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) and the Taiwan People’s Party (TPP), together holding more than half of the legislative seats, cut about NT$94 billion (US$2.85 billion) from the yearly budget. The cuts include 60 percent of the government’s advertising budget, 10 percent of administrative expenses, 3 percent of the military budget, and 60 percent of the international travel, overseas education and training allowances. In addition, the two parties have proposed freezing the budgets of many ministries and departments, including NT$1.8 billion from the Ministry of National Defense’s Indigenous Defense Submarine program — 90 percent of the program’s proposed
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