Berlusconi: riding the ripple

One of the few commentators who understand that Berlusconi is not being judged by an Anglo-Saxon Protestant electorate, but by an Italian one, is the author Tim Parks, who wrote a sensible piece in the Guardian this week. In it he says 'I have yet to meet an Italian who thinks Berlusconi should resign over this.' Nor have I encountered one either.

More bad news for the lefties: Berlusconi's approval rating is 61%. Compare that to Brown (!), Merkel, Sarkozy and the rest. And he is also about to welcome the great and good for the G8, in the earthquake torn city of l'Aquila, a political masterstroke.

Michael Jackson

I keep a list, which I look at from time to time, of famous people who died at an age I have already passed: Christ, Mozart, Shelley, John F Kennedy etc. It serves both to bolster confidence that things could be worse and to remind one of one’s own ineffectuality.

My first thought about Michael Jackson was that I wasn’t in the least surprised to be writing his name on it. Whereas the deaths of other much older people in the music business – Mick Jagger, Paul McCartney, Bruce Springsteen, would cause you to stop and think, with Jackson it seems, with hindsight, just obvious.

His many fans must hope that he will be remembered for his music, but it is his life and lifestyle which has too often been the story: the strange pallor, the children, the bankruptcy. Unlike, say, Elvis Presley or David Bowie there was nothing about Jackson’s lifestyle that anyone would have wanted.

And now the stories will run, the unauthorised biographies will be written and the money will flow in and pay off the debts. Hey-ho.

Europe: something new

Have a quick read of this

1. Free enterprise, free and fair trade and competition, minimal regulation, lower taxation, and small government as the ultimate catalysts for individual freedom and personal and national prosperity.

2. Freedom of the individual, more personal responsibility and greater democratic accountability.

3. Sustainable, clean energy supply with an emphasis on energy security.

4. The importance of the family as the bedrock of society.

5. The sovereign integrity of the nation state, opposition to EU federalism and a renewed respect for true subsidiarity.

6. The overriding value of the transatlantic security relationship in a revitalised NATO, and support for young democracies across Europe.

7. Effectively controlled immigration and an end to abuse of asylum procedures

8. Efficient and modern public services and sensitivity to the needs of both rural and urban communities.

9. An end to waste and excessive bureaucracy and a commitment to greater transparency and probity in the EU institutions and use of EU funds.

10. Respect and equitable treatment for all EU countries, new and old, large and small.

Doesn't sound too bad, does it? It is the declaration of the new Euro-parliamentary grouping formed around the Conservative Party, which has left the EPP, containing the ruling parties of France and Germany, where they couldn't have even whispered point No. 5.

Let's hope they all mean it.

Italy votes (2)

Thought so. The turnout appears to be well below the 50% required, although the polls are open today as well. In my area it was 9%.

It has been said in one paper that if you want a low turnout, have the vote when people have recently voted on something else, and time it for the start of the holiday season.

Er, Silvio......

Italy votes

Italy is at the polls again today, for the second time this month. This time it is a referendum on the voting system, which would get rid of the coalitions that have governed since the war, and award the largest party with a few more seats to enable it to govern. The referendum would also abolish the practice of party leaders standing in multiple seats and then choosing one of them, leaving the representative of that seat to be chosen by the party hierarchy.

Word has it that most of Berlusconi's party would vote yes, whilst the noes complain either that their party would be eliminated or that it doesn't address the real problem which is the list system anyway.

Chances are however that the turnout will fall below the 50% of eligible voters required and Umberto Bossi of the separatist Lega Nord, which will never be big enough to form a government but which has a big say in the coalition, will breathe a sigh of relief.

France: beyond reality TV

Anthony Brocheton, Marie Adamiak and Arno Laize, participants in the French reality TV show Ile de la Tentation (don't ask) have successfully sued the TV production company, claiming that their presence on the show amounted to employment. They are therefore subject to the 35 hour week, and entitled to paid holidays, and can claim unfair dismissal when voted off the show.

You really couldn't make this up.

Gaddafi and timing

He’s just left, after four days. The old fraud appeared, accompanied by his bodyguard of buxom females in matching lipstick, in a Mussolini uniform, sunglasses and a Phil Spector wig; attached to his left breast was what looked like the I-Spy book of World Flags and to his right a monochrome picture postcard, wilting in the damp warm air (it turned out to be a picture of a Libyan anti-Italian freedom fighter). He stayed in a tent and signed business deals with whoever came in, looking as if he might swoop on Emma Marcegaglia (chairman of the Italian Business Confederation) and carry her off on his charger.

It was all great theatre, worthy of both the Italian and Libyan political stage. One thing I took issue with, though. Franco Frattini, who until now seems to have made a very good fist of being foreign minister, cancelled appointments when the great leader was two hours late. I insist he was just trying to be polite. The rule in Italy is that 20 minutes is acceptable in Milan and Turin, 40 minutes in Bologna and an hour in Rome. South of Rome it is anybody’s guess if your appointment will be kept on the same day or at all. These rules apply to business meetings, speeches, ceremonies, everything except where there is free food, in which case it pays to be early.

I love the Italians dearly, but when they clean up their own timing they will be in a position to criticise others.

Pizza: the real thing

The Pizza Margherita, recognised by pizzaphiles as the true Neapolitan pizza, is 120 this month. It was created to commemorate the visit to Naples by Queen Margherita of Savoy, the wife of Italian king Umberto I.

To get the real thing the base must be made of durum wheat flour, fresh yeast, water and sea salt. The topping consists of olive oil, San Marzano tomatoes in slices less than 8mm thick, fresh basil and buffalo milk mozzarella, in the red, white and green of the Italian flag.

It is then cooked for a very short time at 350C which means you need a proper bread oven.
But it’s worth it.

The BBC (yet again)

No. No, no nonono.

Sir Alan Sugar cannot front a major television series at the same time as being, effectively, a minister.

I myself don't agree with celebrity politicians but if that's what Gordon Brown wants, he is entitled to elevate him to the peerage (why do we pretend that the Queen has anything to do with this?). Soon to be Lord Sugar (fitting as deputy to the honey-tongued Lord Mandelson) his new job required him to be in the Lords. That's because it is a political job, whether you call it minister or tsar or nabob.

The new series of The Apprentice will run over the likely date for the election, and every time his programme appears it will show a favourable light on a government minister, even at a time when appearances by politicians are regulated by law.

The BBC really must force him to choose between one and the other.

Truth by any other name

What do you think about this?

'he said that the British public were angry about the "many ways the liberal elite have transformed this country."

"For the last 50 years, more and more of the people of Britain have watched with concern, growing dismay and sometimes anger as an out-of-touch political elite has transformed our country before our very eyes," he said.

Perfectly true and unexceptional?

WRONG! For the words were spoken by Nick Griffin, and therefore must be an insane fascist rant.

Europe votes

I have often been critical about the EU (and rightly so) but one aspect needs to be flagged up as more or less good. It is the rule that residents of an EU country, who are nationals of another EU country, can vote in the country of their residence.

Thus it is that I have had the pleasure of voting in my town of residence (Rome). It was bloody hard work with all the paperwork (which Italians love), and I had to go down to the electoral office an hour away to get my voting card, but voting in a strange country under a strange system was a real pleasure. Something like 15 parties, each with a colourful logo and smiling face, fielded hundreds of candidates, and you could vote either for the candidate or the party, in which case they would allot your vote.

I don't agree with the proportional representation system, believing it entrenches the parties and the political class, I didn't agree with what almost all of them had to say, and I didn't agree that the election was conducted more or less on national lines (as it was in England). But I did get that frisson of being a part of a democratic system and participating in it.

Good fun.

Airbus

Airbus have been having some bad luck of late, what with the one ditching in the Hudson River and the recent disaster just off Brazil. So I was sorry to receive this from a usually well informed source.

A brand new Airbus 340-600, the largest passenger airplane ever built, sits just outside its hangar in Toulouse , France without a single hour of airtime.

Enter the Arab flight crew of Abu Dhabi Aircraft Technologies (ADAT) to conduct pre-delivery tests on the ground, such as engine run-ups prior to delivery to Etihad Airways in Abu Dhabi . The ADAT crew taxied the A340-600 to the run-up area. Then they took all four engines to takeoff power with a virtually empty aircraft. Not having Read the run-up manuals, they had no clue just how light an empty A340-600 really is. The Takeoff Warning Horn was blaring away in the cockpit because they had all four engines at full power. The aircraft computers thought they were trying to take off, but it had not been configured properly (flaps/slats, etc..) Then one of the ADAT crew decided to pull the circuit breaker on the Ground Proximity Sensor to silence the alarm. This fools the aircraft into thinking it is in the air. The computers automatically released all the Brakes and set the aircraft rocketing forward.

The ADAT crew had no idea that this is a safety feature so that pilots can't land with the brakes on. Not one member of the seven-man Arab crew was smart enough to throttle back the engines from their max power setting, so the $200 million brand-new aircraft crashed into a blast barrier, totaling it. The extent of injuries to the crew is unknown due to the news blackout in the major media in France and elsewhere. Coverage of the story was deemed insulting to Muslim Arabs. Finally, the photos are starting to leak out. Airbus $200 million aircraft meets retaining wall and the wall wins.

The crime of Berlusconi

It is becoming increasingly apparent that the British newspapers and broadcast media are getting hysterical about Silvio Berlusconi and that this hysteria stems from having nothing concrete to say.

The first problem is that they assume Berlusconi’s constituency is White Anglo Saxon Protestant. It is not. It is Italians, who think in a rather different way.

For the second half of the twentieth century any reference to Italian politics was that it was a joke. No one could resist mentioning the corruption, or that Italy had had 48 governments since the fall of Mussolini. No one blamed the insane proportional representation system for causing that; it was simply Italian madness. When Berlusconi tried to change it, towards a British-style First Past the Post ballot, they all said he was fiddling the system, cheating.

Now we have had a period of some stability, with only one Prime Minister in six of the last eight years, and they complain he is a dictator.

There was a perfectly absurd claim that Berlusconi controlled the media, without anyone investigating exactly what influence a Prime Minister has on the state channels, which, if people could face watching them, are often openly critical of him. The British government appoints the Director General of the BBC but no one claims Gordon Brown is in control of the media (he wishes!). And it is hard to claim that Berlusconi controls the newspapers and then claim that he might be forced out of office by a campaign run by La Reppublica (the Guardian’s equivalent, but without that organ’s self-righteousness) and followed up by the Corriere della Sera (Independent but less of a rant), La Stampa, l’Osservatore romano and God knows what else.

Berlusconi will not be forced out of office by the Noemi Letizia story: whereas British newspapers would lead with ‘Berlusconi: my shame!’, most Italians think ‘Complimenti! Forza!’. Discussion in my local agricultural wholesalers was whether at 72 he had the energy to satisfy the girl properly, ‘whereas I......’. But ‘good luck to him’ they say.

They say his party contains former fascists, without saying that the opposition contains former communists who accepted money from Russia during the cold war. The President, Giorgio Napolitano, is one of them.

Nor are Berlusconi’s brushes with the law a huge point of interest. Italians have had years of this and believe, not inaccurately, that most individual politicians and most governments since 1948 have been for sale. ‘But how could you bribe Berlu....? He’s the richest man in Italy!’ And everyone knows the judicial system is politicised: prosecuting magistrates and defence attorneys are openly of the left or the right, so if you are attacked by a left wing magistrate you hire a right wing avvocato and vice versa.

I am not saying Berlusconi is innocent of the accusations against him, nor denying that his relationship with an 18 year old (the age of consent is 14 here) has been inappropriate. I am just saying how it plays in Italy. And how it plays is that he has a 75% popularity rating. Remember a British politician who achieved that?

Compare Berlusconi’s open hiring of some big breasted starlet to advertise the ‘Clean Naples’ campaign with the weaselly spinning of Mandelson and Campbell, or Ed Balls’ declaration that the Tories would fire 45,000 teachers, without mentioning that their figures for cuts were taken from Alasdair Darling’s budget. The British people have been fed a diet of lies from cunning plotters behind the scenes, paid with the people's money. If the Italians have got a clown who wears his faults on his sleeve, who is the luckier?

But let me give the outraged lefties a steer. Berlusconi’s crime is to have let this stuff be the story, to act diligently when there was popularity at stake (and his handling of Naples and Alitalia has been little short of brilliant) but not to take the long term decisions necessary. Before long Europe will emerge from recession but to get going again it will need not inflationary stimulus but tax cuts financed by spending cuts. Berlusconi knows that he should cut the size of the State but knows it will be unpopular. He has failed to prepare the political ground for it, while Italy needs 70 billion euros each year to service its debts. A mature statesman (and he wants to be President) would now be seeking cross party agreement on which areas the State could leave, and on freeing up the labour market so that employment will grow without barriers.

Berlusconi’s crime does not stem from his actions. It is his inaction.

MP gets it right

I know we hear too much about the parliamentary scandal thing but you should read an excellent article in the Times by Chris Mullin, who would make an excellent Speaker. He understands that this is not just about bathplugs.

PR raises its head again

Incredibly Alan Johnson, one of several undeclared candidates to be leader of the Labour Party, has declared Proportional Representation to be the solution to the nation’s ills.

I really had thought this nonsense had been laid to rest. It is only ever raised by people or parties staring defeat in the face. Now we are going to have to put up with months of fallacious drivel as the proponents talk about change (as usual) and ‘fair votes’ (Ha!).

Each time you argue with someone proposing PR they say ‘Ah, but that’s not the system I would have used. Let’s just agree the principle of ‘fair votes’ and we’ll work out the rest later.’

This time, however, Johnson has made a specific proposal: the system wanted by the Jenkins Commission in 1998. You will remember that Tony Blair, not confident of winning a majority, made overtures to the Liberal Democrats who named this as their price and Blair agreed to a commission headed by Lord (Woy) Jenkins, a clarety old windbag who, alone in the country, took himself seriously. Woy’s and now Johnson’s, suggestion was called AV Plus.

Under AV Plus 80% of MPs would be elected on the alternative vote system and 20% on a party list. Let us take the position of the parties at the moment and extrapolate to a general election in a single constituency: Cons 40%, Lab 30% LibDem 20% others 10%. No one would have an outright majority so we proceed to second preferences, Others (such as UKIP and Greens) being eliminated. The likelihood is that both Conservative and Labour voters would put LibDem as their second vote, whereas LibDem voters would put 50/50 Lab and Con. So the LibDem soars into a commanding lead. No wonder they liked it. But the result is that the party that only 20% thought the best to be elected wins.

Now let’s look at the other 20% of MPs. These would be party placemen. And to whom are they accountable? The Party. Not the people.

PR entrenches the party system, institutionalises the cosy corruption which we are trying to get rid of. Remember Helmut Kohl in Germany. He was caught with his hand in the till and his constituents, rightly, threw him out. But he turns up in parliament the following day as one of the Party List. His party had raised two fingers to the electorate and appointed him. Is that what we want? That some odious sleazebag gets to run the country even though his electorate rejected him?

No. PR is exactly what we don’t want.

Tattoos

I am not attracted to women who try to look like merchant seamen, and never having wanted to look like one myself I have been critical of the modern passion for tattoos. And they are very painful to remove.

I now read that starlet of the moment Hayden Panettiere (I don't know if that is her real name; the surname means 'baker' and she appears to have been named after an Australian cricketer) wanted a tattoo on her back of 'living without regrets' in Italian in large letters (vivere senza rimpianti). But they spelled it wrong. And now she is stuck with it. Daft cow.

The people speak

'the public are scenting blood', I wrote a week ago, 'and demanding it'. Douglas Hogg will stand down at the next election (I don't know if he has done a deal to become Lord Hogg of the Moat) and now the Speaker has said he will go on 21st June, the first to be slung out of office since 1695. As Voltaire observed of the execution of Admiral Byng, it is good to kill a Speaker from time to time, in order to encourage the others.

There's something about popular uprising. It starts off as an unalloyed good thing: 'A bas les aristos' is the popular talk, wrongs are righted and the balance of society gets fairer. But the problem is the public never nows when to stop. Suddenly the leaders of the revolt are perceived as not being tough enough and it's 'à la lanterne' everyone who is suspected of wavering.

I wonder how we will look back on this time: 'Bliss it was in that dawn to be alive, but to be young was very heaven' ? (sorry about the french leitmotiv) Certainly a wrong is being righted and certainly a few of the sinners will be for the chop, but is it going to get silly? 'They're all just in it for themselves, let's get rid of the lot of them', you can hear it in pubs and on radio 'phone-ins.

The first sign of silliness is that Esther Rantzen is thinking of standing. Perhaps we should mark this point as where the nonsense is beginning and leave the overpaid self-publicising old trout to advertising for ambulance chasing solicitors.

The BBC

So. 70% of British people profess themselves to be Christian, and a lot more were brought up as Christians and do not profess any other religion; unlike almost all other western nations we have an established, constitutionalised religion (Christianity) and the BBC have got a new head of religious broadcasting, Aaquil Ahmed, a muslim.

At a time when we are despairing that our politicians are out of touch with the zeitgeist, we really should spare a thought for the BBC, who do zeitgeist-free policy as a regular gig. This organisation is paid for by virtually the entire population, and yet is run by, and for the benefit of, the leftie chattering classes, the sort of people who think it is clever clever to have a muslim head of religious broadcasting in a Christian country, who think it is their job to give religion a bit of a shake-up; people who have no connection whatsoever with the ordinary Briton (and would hate to do so).

Someone needs to give Mark Damazer a sharp kick up the backside and remind him who he is working for. Indeed perhaps I should - his holiday home (these people are never knowingly underpaid) is down the road.

I criticise the BBC a lot, but as I said recently to a friend who works for it, it is because I feel it is partly mine. The people who run it, however, think it is exclusively theirs.

Corruption (2)

I must say I thought the MPs' expenses thing would eventually just go away, the public's opinion of their politicians much the same as it always was (low). But this has dragged on for such a long time (one commentator said he was a bit surprised when reminded that it was only Day 5 of the revelations - it felt like Day 27) that the public are scenting blood, and demanding it.

Douglas Hogg, whose father and grandfather were distinguished Tory Lord Chancellors, has claimed for cleaning the moat round his castle, and it just won't do. the public won't have it. Nor is it enough that he repay it: if a burglar gives the goods back he is still a criminal.

Anther has claimed for trimming the grass round his helipad (he claims it isn't really a helipad but that makes his arrogance even worse). These, and other appalling examples, should result in David Cameron withdrawing the whip. They knew that the allowances were for things directly needed for them to function as MPs, and they were taking the mickey. Now they have been caught with their hands in the till and there can only be one outcome.

I don't expect any such action from the Labour Party, but it would be welcome. Bagehot in the Economist reports 'Public paid the Chancellor's stamp duty' is his favourite headline.

Good grief.

Corruption

While the nation shows its inexhaustible appetite for stories about the venality of our politicians we should cast a thought towards areas where it is even worse. This from the excellent Berlaymonster blog.

The EU Joint research centre (no, I've no clue what it does, researching marijuana for all I know) based in the Northern Italian town of Ispra, employs a little over 1,000 people. Of these around a fifth, 230, have claimed injury benefit, and between 1996 and 2002 some 5.7 million euros was handed out.

An audit discovered 46 members of staff collected 35 000 euros on average, 23 more than 50 000, eight claimed more than 80 000 and one or two cashed in almost 300 000 euros from the injury benefit system accorded to those on the European Commission's payroll.

76 of the 230 even had the misfortune to suffer a second accident, increasing their claims.But 42 of them - 42 members of staff out of little over 1000 - declared AT LEAST NINE ACCIDENTS EACH between January 1986 and July 2003.

Details were sent to the Italian police of 14 cases (why not the whole lot we shall never know) but the suspects claimed that they hadn't been informed and so their rights were breached.

The 14 have now been awarded 3,000 euros each in compensation.

Just think about this as you go in to vote.