Vagabond in Bulgaria

The snow had melted sufficiently by the weekend to allow me to drive down to the flat in Sofia – the snow was still lying in the Romanian fields but no longer in the Bulgarian ones. Midweek, however, the snow struck again! Earlier in the month, when snow melted in the south, the walls of a dam in the south of the country had crumbled and an entire village was inundated – with 10 deaths. The history and management of the dam give a good insight into governance issues in this part of the world. Noone apparently understands what its purpose was and its ownership was split between three bodies – with obvious (and tragic) results. The story appears in the current issue of Bulgaria’s monthly English magazine Vagabond which is always a good read.

The current issue gave me useful data on the property market -

Property prices in Bulgaria will continue to fall, experts say, but it is difficult to predict whether the downward trend will be gradual or whether the property market will crash like it did in 2009. In Sofia, the average price of residential property is 40 percent lower than in 2008, as buyers now typically pay 700-750 euros per square metre. The majority of properties are bought by first-time buyers, usually young families, who take out mortgages to buy small flats. Russians continue to be the chief purchasers of holiday properties.

Another article also threw some light on another issue which has been vexing me very recently – relating to interactions between foreigners like me and Bulgarians. An Italian friend of mine spent almost a decade here, building up a great network of contacts – which, ultimately, did nothing to further his prospects. He left the country with some bitter comments about outsiders never being accepted here. At the time I simply could not agree since I have quite a few people here I count as real friends. However, I have noticed recently the different assumptions about hospitality. I am very open – but find it difficult to get many friends to visit me in my flat. And it is rare to receive an invitation. An article by a Professor of multi-cultural communication confirms the point that inviting foreigners to one’s home is a very big deal here – and makes the point in relation to facial expressions that “if you smile at people they will think you are either laughing at them or that there is something wrong with you”!! Little wonder that I was viewed as a madman initially by some of my local staff when I headed a project here in 2007/08!

The current issue also contains an article about the great network of small rural guesthouses here in Bulgaria where you can eat local produce; get friendly family hospitality and access to great leisure pursuits (including horse-riding). A great Guide from the Bulgarian Alternative Tourism Association can be downloaded here
And, if you are into serious mountain climbing, then this looks a great oroganisation to contact for advisers and guides
While I’m on the subject, here’s also an outsider’s view of the top 15 places to visit in Bulgaria. And also a nice piece (in English if you scroll down) about Balcic in the far North-East corner which used to belong to Romania.
I’ve been renewing my contact with some of the small galleries here in Sofia and saw a nice-looking and well-sized Zhekov for 1,500 euros – the same price a picture of his went for in the December Victoria Auction. The painting at the top of this post is a Zhekov - which hopefully explains why he is one of the top Bulgarian painters for me. 

In a small antique shop very nearby which seems now to be stocking painters from the genre and period I like, a superb (anonymous) painting of Rila Monastery from the mid 20th century was to be had for 150 euros.

And the painting above is Vladimir Kavaldjiev from the 1960s was on sale at a 2010 auction for 750 euros but can now be had for 600.

Lessons from Scotland

My home country, Scotland, is in the news these days. It has had a Nationalist government for more than 4 years – and its citizens will in a couple of years be asked to vote on independence from the UK. Somewhat perversely, perhaps, I rarely blog on matters relating to Scotland - which is most remiss since it has been experiencing some interesting developments in the past 2 decades. The debate within Scotland aabout independence has been going on for decades - but a new constitutional debate has started recently in England. Outsiders (of whom there are many amongst my readership) cannot understand the present debate without knowing something about the past - recent and not so recent. This post must, therefore say something about how we got to the present point.

I left Scotland in the early 90s just as a remarkable development was taking place there – Scottish civil society and its establishment (political, municipal, legal, religious) coming together from disgust with the results of consecutive UK elections of the 1980s which had left the ruling Conservative government with not a single one of the 70 odd Scottish members of parliament being Conservative. The Conservative government (which lasted from 1979-1997) - let alone its neo-liberal agenda - was simply felt to have no legitimacy in Scotland. Bear in mind that the 1703 Union of Scotland and England had left Scotland with its separate legal and religious systems and an educational system which also went its own way, helping to forge a strong sense of Scottishness in schools - whose composition was more mixed and democratic than in England.

In 1988 a cross-section of prominent members of Scottish society came together to form the Scottish Constitutional Convention - and started a process which lasted a decade. The Convention produced not just the blueprint for the 1999 Scottish Parliament (which had last met in 1707) but, perhaps more importantly, the social and political momentum to ensure its achievement – and the creation of a more consensual way of governing. The details can be found on the archives of the Convention of whcih this is an excerpt -

In July 1988, a constitutional steering committee, composed of prominent Scots and set up by the Campaign for a Scottish Assembly, recommended the formation of a broadly-drawn Scottish Constitutional Convention to make plans for the future governance of Scotland. All political parties were invited to take part. The Conservative Party declined to participate from the outset. The Scottish National Party, although involved in the initial preparatory work, was ultimately unable to accept the principles of consensus underlying the Convention's aims, and therefore did not join its deliberations. It is important to record that many individuals from both these parties have supported our work publicly or privately.
Nonetheless, the Convention is beyond question the most broadly representative body in Scotland. It has enjoyed the support of the Scottish Labour Party the Scottish Liberal Democrats, and a number of smaller parties. In all, the Convention has included 80 per cent of Scotland's MPs and MEPs; representatives of the great majority of local authorities; and many important elements in Scottish civic society, including the Scottish Trades Union Congress, the churches, ethnic minority groups, women's movements, and sections of the business and industrial community. Current membership is listed as Appendix II.
The Convention held its inaugural meeting on 30 March 1989 in the Church of Scotland's General Assembly Hall in Edinburgh. It adopted a declaration, which was signed by all its members. This was a Claim of Right

Those wanting more on the fascinating detail of the process should read here. It is a real case-study in consensual change - demonstrating that those who want to achieve significant change have to have patience and humility. Lasting change is never aachieved by slogans and the demonising which passes for most political activity these days.

I had been one of the leaders of Strathclyde Region from the mid 1970s which included half of Scotland’s population - the Scottish Nationalist party began to win seats and put the Labour Government of the day under such pressure that a Bill to enact a Scottish Parliament was enacted. I took part in a referendum in Scotland in 1979 which asked the Scottish electorate whether they wished the Bill creating a Scottish parliament to be implemented. A total of 1,230,937 (51.6%) voted at the referendum in favour of an Assembly, a narrow majority of about 77,400 over those voting against. However, this total represented only 32.9% of the registered electorate as a whole - compared with the 40% reuired by the Act. The Labour government accepted that the Act's requirements had not been met, and that devolution would therefore not be introduced for Scotland. This led to the withdrawal of nationalist support from the Government, its loss of a vote of Confidence and a General Election which the Conservatives won.

The emasculation in the late 1980s of local government by Thatcher forced me to look elswhere for a career. An invitation from Ilona Kickbusch, the Director of WHO’s European Public Health’s division came at the right time - to help her construct a network for health promotion in the countries of recently liberated central and eastern europe. The senior position I held in a Region had given me access to various European networks throughout the 1980s.
I have therefore had to follow its political developments from afar, in particular –
• the abolition by the London-based Conservative Government of the Regional system of local government in the mid 1990s;
• the election in 1999 (thanks to the New Labour government) of a Scottish Parliament and Exective which was, thanks to a new system of proportional representation, a coalition of the Labour and Liberal parties;
• the increasingly independent path taken by the Exective in matters of social policy eg ensuring free care of the elderly (unlike England)
• the appointment in 2007 of a minority Nationalist government – with a pledge to organise at an appropiate time a referendum on independence
*a stunning Nationalist over-all majority in the 2011 elections
• its style and content of government – which is more social democratic than that of New Labour eg resisting university fees

postscript
As I drafted this post, I began to feel a bit guilty about going into history. I feel a lot better now that I have just read today's article from one of the key figures in the Scottish Convention - appealing for Scots to cast their minds back to that period - when Scots voted in the referendum of 1997 they knew they were voting not just for a transfer of powers or for a mini-Westminster, but for a parliament that had been designed, conceived and carefully planned over six long years of vigorous and often heated debate. I should know, I bear the scars. It was to be a parliament, we said, 'radically different from the rituals of Westminster; more participative, more creative, less needlessly confrontational – a culture of openness'.

That vision has to some extent been fulfilled, but it is time to move on. The point is – and this is what Prime Minister Cameron does not seem to get – that Scotland's parliament was not a gift of Westminster. Home rule was home-made. It must stay that way.

The future of universities

For some time now I have been wanting to comment about two issues – first, whether funding and expectations of universities throughout the world has not reached an unrealistic level; and, second, the more coherent and urgent shape taken by recent discussions about the possible negotiation of a more independent status of my small country (Scotland). A report issued at the beginning of February by the Scottish Executive on the governance of Scottish Universities brings the two issues nicely together.

I have, of course, been highly critical of university social sciences on this blog – but it was the iconoclastic chapter about higher education in in Ha Joo Chang’s 23 Things they don’t tell you about capitalism which brought my thoughts to a head.
An article in the London Review of Books contained an excellent summary of the current misgivings about the direction taken in the past few decades by British Universities -

We are all deeply anxious about the future of British universities. Our list of concerns is a long one. It includes the discontinuance of free university education; the withdrawal of direct public funding for the teaching of the humanities and the social sciences; the subjection of universities to an intrusive regime of government regulation and inquisitorial audit; the crude attempt to measure and increase scholarly ‘output’; the requirement that all academic research have an ‘impact’ on the economy; the transformation of self-governing communities of scholars into mega-businesses, staffed by a highly-paid executive class, who oversee the professors, or middle managers, who in turn rule over an ill-paid and often temporary or part-time proletariat of junior lecturers and research assistants, coping with an ever worsening staff-student ratio; the notion that universities, rather than collaborating in their common task, should compete with one another, and with private providers, to sell their services in a market, where students are seen, not as partners in a joint enterprise of learning and understanding, but as ‘consumers’, seeking the cheapest deals that will enable them to emerge with the highest earning prospects; the indiscriminate application of the label ‘university’ to institutions whose primary task is to provide vocational training and whose staff do not carry out research; and the rejection of the idea that higher education might have a non-monetary value, or that science, scholarship and intellectual inquiry are important for reasons unconnected with economic growth.
What a contrast with the medieval idea that knowledge was a gift of God, which was not to be sold for money, but should be freely imparted. Or with the 19th-century German concept of the university devoted to the higher learning; or with the tradition in this country that some graduates, rather than rushing off to work in investment banks, might wish to put what they had learned to the service of society by teaching in secondary schools or working for charities or arts organisations or nature conservation or foreign aid agencies or innumerable other good but distinctly unremunerative causes.
Our litany of discontents makes me realise how fortunate I was to have entered academic life in the mid-1950s, and thus to have experienced several decades of what now looks like a golden age of academic freedom, It was a time when students were publicly funded and when the Treasury grant to universities was distributed by the University Grants Committee, largely made up of academics and working at arm’s length from the government; they understood what universities needed and they ruled with a light touch, distributing block grants and requiring only that the money be spent on buildings, teaching and research. It was a time when the ‘new’ universities of the 1960s were devising novel syllabuses, constructed with an eye to the intellectual excitement they generated. Of course, there were fewer universities in those days, and only a minority of young people had access to them. It is a matter for rejoicing that higher education in some form or other is nowadays potentially available to nearly half of the relevant age group. But because there are so many universities, real and so-called, there are fewer resources to go around and the use of those resources is more intensively policed. As a result, the environment in which today’s students and academics work has sharply deteriorated. When I think of the freedom I enjoyed as a young Oxford don, with no one telling me how to teach or what I should research or how I should adapt my activities to maximise the faculty’s performance in the RAE, and when I contrast it with the oppressive micro-management which has grown up in response to government requirements, I am not surprised that so many of today’s most able students have ceased to opt for an academic career in the way they once would have done.

But that is to look at things very much from the perspective of the academic. Ha-Joo Chang looks at it from the point of view of the student and of society as a whole. In 23 Things They Don't Tell You about Capitalism, South Korea-born Chang offers a critique of education in his home nation. In a chapter titled "More education in itself is not going to make a country richer", he takes issue with "the common myth that education was the key to the East Asian miracle". Chang argues that "an unhealthy dynamic has been established for higher education in many high-income and upper-middle-income countries". Once enrolment reaches a certain rate, "people have to go to university in order to get a decent job" - even though most jobs do not require specialist training in higher education. The case of Switzerland shows that high national productivity can be achieved with low university enrolment, Chang suggests. However, rich nations such as the US and South Korea waste resources on higher education "in the essentially zero-sum game of sorting" - that is, establishing each individual's ranking in the hierarchy of employability. "When everyone accepted that educational performance is really the right measure of your innate capabilities, there is all the interest in the world to help your children to produce better educational achievements. Parents started hiring private tutors and sending them to expensive cramming schools."
In his book, Chang argues that "what really matters in the determination of national prosperity is not the educational levels of individuals but the nation's ability to organise individuals into enterprises with high productivity". Chang says the situation "does change over time but you need a lot of effort. You can't just decide tomorrow not to discriminate against people from lesser universities."
A diminishing of the attachment to higher education would also require great investment in sources of employment for people not cut out for university, he adds.

In the next post, I will introduce the Scottish context (where local students do not pay fees) - and give a flavour of the independent report commissioned by the Scottish government on the management of Scottish Universities. Interestingly the committee was Chaired by a German with irish citizenship who became Principal of a Scottish University a few years ago. He has an interesting blog.

A new language for political change?

Where is the modern equivalent of the classic "What did you do in the war, daddy?” – to make us oldies face up to our moral responsibility for the degraded world we have allowed to develop in the past 30 years?
The last post started out as a confession – but then got sidetracked into an annotated bibiography. So let’s get back on track.
I was, in many ways, typical of an important strand of the generation which was at university in the early 60s – and which helped release the economist and managerial gene from Pandora’s box. We knew better than our parents. Everything needed to change - organisations (particularly the public ones) were outdated and needed to be shaken up in the name of managerialism. The compacency (if not self-interest) of officials needed to be challenged – whether by community activists or by market forces. I was no believer in markets – regional development, after all, was my first great passion. And I had read my Galbraith and realised how oligopolistic and manipulative our bigger companies were (although even these were being threatened in the early 80s by young, upstart companies – at least in some sectors).
It was indeed a cultural revolution if not a Reformation– with rationality being the new religion and social scientists the new priests. Trade unions were seen even in the Labour Party to which it had given birth and succoured over decades as Luddites – as part of the collectivism from which we were to be saved.
What I was trying to say in the last post was that we have allowed the worship of choice and of market forces to go too far. Too many people, of course, have been deceived into thinking that corporate power is the market. And it has been all too easy for those marketing the market (in the media) to link anything collectivist with a dangerous or depasse socialism.
So a new language seems to be needed to reassert civilised values – and perhaps it’s the language of "The Commons" some references to which I stumbled upon recently. The most interesting is a manifesto of sorts from a German -

Over the last two hundred years, the explosion of knowledge, technology, and productivity has enabled an unprecedented increase of private wealth. This has improved our quality of life in numerous ways. At the same time, however, we have permitted the depletion of resources and the dwindling of societal wealth. This is brought to our attention by current, interrelated crises in finance, the economy, nutrition, energy, and in the fundamental ecological systems of life. These crises are sharpening our awareness of the existence and importance of the commons.

What exactly are the Commons? They are the fundamental building blocks and pre-condition of our life and social wealth. They include knowledge and water, seeds and software, cultural works and the atmosphere. Commons are not just “things,” however. They are living, dynamic systems of life. They form the social fabric of a free society.
Natural commons are necessary for our survival, while social commons ensure social cohesion, and cultural commons enable us to evolve as individuals. It is imperative that we focus our personal creativity, talents, and enthusiasm on protecting and increasing our social wealth and natural commons. This will require a change in some basic structures of politics, economics, and society.

More social prosperity instead of more gross domestic product! When the economic growth curve drops and the GDP sinks, it seems threatening to us. Yet appearances deceive. The GDP merely maps production figures and monetary flows without regard for their ecological or social value; such numbers do not measure the things we truly need to live, – they may simply count their destruction. Social prosperity cannot be measured through such means. A reduction in the GDP does not necessarily signal a reduction in the real wealth of a society. Recognizing this fact widens our perspective and opens doors for new types of solutions.

More detail can be found in report of a December 2010 Conference and its proceedings; and in the papers of this site

Everything for sale?

Last September, I wrote with some indignation about a Romanian journal labelling an article I wrote for them "left-wing”. Despite my work as a Labour Party Councillor in the 1970s and 1980s (the last 5 years on a full-time basis), I was always opposed to its statist bias. Put this down to the influence of Karl Popper, Ivan Illich and Paulo Freire. As a result, my main contribution to politics in the West of Scotland was to drive an agenda of support for community structures and inititatives. When the Labour party had its left-right split after its 1979 defeat, I was left feeling homeless – with neither option attracting me. And my suspicion of some attitudes in state professionalism and ambivalence about public sector trade unionism led me to view with some sympathy some of the Thatcher policies on contracting-out and privatisation of public services.

I feel, therefore, I can be fairly objective in assessing the results of the privatisation which has swept the globe in the past 30 years. With the exception of gas and electricity, I think the results have been disastrous. This post is written for open-minded readers who want some guidance on useful material on the issue - particularly from the British experience (which has, after all, been at it for 30 years now).
For how privatisation of water, social care etc have panned out I mentioned recently the Public Services International Research Unit of the University of Greenwich which has been giving great briefings on the consequences of privatisation globally for more than a decade.

Privatising the UK railways is perhaps the greatest disaster story – with subsidies to the private rail and track companies being almost three times (at constant prices) the subsidies which british Rail received – and the level of consumer comfort, convenience and satisfaction at an all-time low. Christan Wolmar is the great historian of UK rail privatisation

The English academic, Julian le Grand, was one Tony Blair’s advisers and promoter of the idea of releasing market forces into British social services such as health and education.
Perhaps the text which best captures the hopes and fears is The House of Commons Select Committee on Public Administration 2005 report - Choice, Voice and Public Services and, particularly the 190 pages of evidence it received from both sides of the ideological fence.

The most prolific writer on (and critic of) the privatisation of the british health system is Allyson Pollock – whose most recent book on the subject is NHS Inc. She also blogs occasionally about the issues. The UK government is now attempting (for England only) the most dramatic set of changes ever seen - wcich would effectively dismantle the public Health Service - here is the view of an independent peer (and medic) who was once a Minister of Health.

The role which market mechanisms do now play in education (and might further in the future) can be followed in the second volume of the House of Commons publication mentioned above. An acadenmic treatment is Education Management Organisations and the Privatisation of Public Education: A Cross-National Comparison of the USA and Britain and an angrier statement from a practitioner in Education for sale.
One of the most formidable books I have on my Sirnea bookshelves is Robert Kuttner’s Everything for Sale – the virtues and limits of markets (1996) which received the following accolade from the late economist Robert Heilbroner "I have never seen the market system better described, more intelligently appreciated, or more trenchantly criticized than in EVERYTHING FOR SALE." A New York Times review gave a useful summary of the book -

Mr. Kuttner's target is the total faith in the market-pricing system held by economists of the Chicago school (and by members of two allied scholarly movements in the fields of political science and law -- public choice and law and economics): their idea that whatever is must be optimal if it is the result of the operation of a market. More broadly, Mr. Kuttner wants to dismantle the view that markets essentially work and government interventions essentially don't. By relentlessly piling on example after detailed example of market failure and government success, he gradually makes the idea that all efforts to modulate the market are doomed seem like a blind prejudice that has been holding the nation inexplicably in its grip. If you're ever challenged to name ''just one thing'' the United States Government has ever done right, you'll be fully prepared to answer after reading ''Everything for Sale.'' There are all sorts of necessary social and economic goods, Mr. Kuttner says, that markets can't be relied upon to provide. Free markets underinvest in pure research, so government needs to finance it, or to structure the economy so that private companies can afford to conduct it. Government made us prosperous by creating the higher education system, railroads, canals, commercial aviation and the Internet. Moreover, markets generate problems -- pollution, dangerous products, economic disasters like bank failures -- so they need to be regulated. Regulation does not retard growth: ''The zenith of the era of regulation -- the postwar boom -- was the most successful period of American capitalism.'' Finally, markets fail to provide all citizens with such essentials as health care, physical safety and basic economic security, so these have to come from government.
Demonstrating an impressive mastery of a vast range of material, Mr. Kuttner lays out the case for the market's insufficiency in field after field: employment, medicine, banking, securities, telecommunications, electric power. This material isn't exactly riveting, but it is presented clearly and convincingly enough to qualify as self-improving reading matter. Then he shows, over and over, how his primary villains, academic free-market ideologues, have pushed society in the direction of abandoning carefully constructed solutions to market failures -- solutions that were working quite well.
Mr. Kuttner is an unapologetic social democrat, a believer in America's moving in the direction of a Western European or Scandinavian-style mixed economy, with a bigger Government, higher taxes and stronger unions. One of the strengths of ''Everything for Sale'' is Mr. Kuttner's complete lack of the usual tendency in journalists and policy intellectuals to keep the discussion within the frame of the political possibilities of the moment. He wants to change the debate entirely. He insistently attributes our economic problems to political, not market, failure. For example, American blue-collar workers are underpaid, he says, because it isn't skills they lack but political power. Conversely, the solution to most of the market's deficiencies is not fine-tuning but ''a redistribution of economic and political power.'' As Mr. Kuttner explains (in italics), ''There is no escape from politics

Kuttner’s book deal, however, with the economic arguments. It does not really go into the politics. For that you have to read Colin Leys’s Market-Driven Politics (2001). It was Leys who helped me understand exactly what is meant by the dreadful word "commodification” and his book shows how it started to be applied in the UK in the 1980s to such fields as health and broadcasting. Leys is actually a development economist and most of his material on the internet is therefore on that topic – although an interesting preface to a new book of his called Total Capitalism is available here

The photograph is of Loch Lomond in Central Scotland - a National Park for public benefit and therefore free from development and market forces.

Consultancy....again

Eighteen months ago I highlighted a story about the English health service spending 300 million in the previous year on consultancy companies – equivalent to the pay of 10,000 nurses. This was just the tip of the iceberg – with spending on consultants having got out of control under New Labour. A 2006 book on the subject suggested that spending had gone up 10 times under them. Four reasons for this –
• New Labour’s initial suspicion of the senior civil servants who had served a radical right Conservative Government for 18 years
• a naivety about the implementation of complex IT projects (and lack of coordination on them)
• The curious combination New Labour had of managerialism and social engineering
• the jobs and connections many of the new Ministers had had with big consultancies when in opposition.

A story in today’s Guardian indicates that in New Labour’s final years, the spending increased by a factor 50 to one in one department. The Ministry of Defence apparently spent only 6 million pounds a few years ago on consultants but its bill came in at 297 million in 2010. Curiously, The Guardian tries to put the blame on the Coalition Government but, on my arithmetic, 2009.2010 was still on the New Labour watch. What will be interesting will be to see the figures for 2011 – when the present government started its programme of reducing defence manpower by 60,000.
The paper did report a few days back that government departments have spent 30 million pounds hiring temporary staff to cope with the shortage of staff they are experiencing after the redundancies of the past year.

Exactly a year ago I drew attention to the publications of the National Audit Office (NAO) on the subject. The NAO is supposed to be the nation’s financial watchdog but started to look at the issue of consultant use only in 2005. Since then it has issued various reports exposing the bad practice and issuing both recommendations, guidelines and the inevitable “toolkits”. Their last report (issued in October 2010 for the new government) gives a useful overview of issues - and one of the annexes to the significant 2007 report is a helpful set of guidelines on increasing the commitment of clients and consultants during the projects.
It’s sloppy journalism on the Guardian’s part not to give this sort of background – and follow it up eg by asking whether the NAO has been asking what use departments have been making of their guidelines.
For those interested in the consultancy business, a more analytical study of the different types of consultancy has been done by a Canadian think-tank.

On the subject of slack journalism, it is a blog in Paris which tells us here in Bucharest that several Romanians have been on a hunger strike in an attempt to get some transparency on the crimes committed during the communist era. Doru Maries is near death - having been on hunger strike for 90 days. The local media have apparently given no coverage to this.

Presidents...and presidents

Yesterday I watched Sarkozy’s opening speech of the French Presidential campaign which he delivered to 10,000 faithful at Marseilles. A stirring event – like 2 previous he delivered recently before he actually declared his official candidacy. So far I haven’t seen Hollande on TV5. Both candidates are up against a strong National Front challenge – so hardly surprising that Sarkozy’s speech was virulently nationalist -

Aimer la France, c'est refuser d'accepter les 35 heures (the working week which Sarkozy has tried to break) c'est refuser de promettre la retraite à 60 ans (...) c'est refuser d'augmenter les dépenses et d'augmenter les impôts en pleine crise de la dette (...) c'est refuser d'aborder l'immigration par la seule posture idéologique", a-t-il lancé.  « Quand on aime la France, on n'est pas du côté de ceux qui, pour défendre leurs intérêts, bloquent le pays et prennent les Français en otage (...) on a l'obsession de ne pas l'affaiblir (...) on dit la vérité aux Français sur ce que l'on veut faire, sinon on jette le discrédit sur la parole publique", a poursuivi le chef de l'Etat sous les applaudissements. (Liberation)

"Je me souviens qu'au début, j'ai fait de la politique parce que je voulais agir, je voulais résoudre des problèmes, je voulais aider les gens à surmonter leurs difficultés, a poursuivi le candidat de l'UMP. Mais en me tournant sur toutes ces années, j'ai compris que le combat essentiel, c'est celui que l'on mène pour le pays qui nous a vu naître. Il n' y a pas un seul combat qui soit supérieur à celui qui mène pour son pays." (Le Monde)

For a detailed assessment of the policy platforms, we have to go to a blog which actually gives us a useful insight into the socialist candidate Jean-Luc Melenchon who is also running and attracting about 8% in the polls at the moment and whose manifesto is apparently a best-seller

The German Presidency is, as they say, "honorific” – and, with both of the last 2 incumbents having to resign, there are those who suggest the post is unecessary. This is to disregard the moral authority which incumbents such as Richard von Weizsacker and Johannes Rau brought to the country. Weizsacker was a Christian Democract and President 1984-1994 and West Berlin Mayor 1981-84. Rau was a Social Democrat; President 1999-2004 and Head of the huge RheinWestphalen Land (Region) from 1978-98.
I was spellbound listening to the speeches of the former as he made his famous gentle and highly civilised commentaries. A Foreign Affairs review expressed it well -

More than any of his predecessors in the presidential office, he has used that supraparty position to address fundamental issues, such as the ever-present unease about the German past, and he does so with clarity and admirable forthrightness. He has what few statesmen nowadays have: moral authority, and in his book-with its intelligent interlocutors-he turns from the past to the present and the future. His greatest worry concerns the vitality of liberal democracy in the enlarged Federal Republic, particularly in light of the power of German political parties in politics and public life generally-their power and the paucity of their imagination, the failure of their leadership. He is remarkably candid in his criticism of parties that only seek electoral gain and calls for a more active citizenry and regrets the immobility of Germany's political life, "the Utopia of the status quo." German commentators have seized on formulations that clearly hit the inadequacies of the present government, but these are incidental and inevitable. Weizsäcker's criticisms go far deeper. It took courage and, I suppose, the deepest concern to disturb the political complacency of his country and to do so with thoughts that in the German context and in some parts recall conservative criticisms of the Weimar period. But Weizsäcker's aim to strengthen, to vitalize liberal democracy is beyond question.

Johannes Rau was a son of a Lutheran priest and this showed in his approach. You can see a speech here which he delivered to the Israeli Knesset, the first German to address it.

I was lucky enough to meet both of these men informally and can therefore vouch personally for the humility they brought to their role. Weizsacker was holidying in Scotland and popped in quietly to pay his respects to the leader of the Regional Council. As the (elected) Secretary to the majority party, I had private access to the Leader’s office and stumbled in on their meeting. Rau I also stumbled across when in a Duisberg hotel on Council business. He was not then the President – but I recognised him when he came in with his wife and a couple of assistants, introduced myself ( as a fellow social democrat); gave him a gift book on my Region which I happened to be carrying and was rewarded with a chat.

I am glad to see that, with the nomination of Glauk, Germany seems now to be returning to its tradition of Presidents with moral authority. The German political system seems to me one of the best - with the leaders of strong Laender in the 2nd chamber acting as a responsible challenge to the Executive. Typical that, despite all the so-called discussion which has been going on for several decades about the reform of the British second chamber, this option has never been presented forcibly..... 

Some readings on the crisis

It may not have been evident from recent posts that one of my central concerns is the identification of an agenda for social change which is capable – by its appeal, relevance and clarity – of uniting a significant block of change agents in Europe at least. Two of my common moans are the insular nature of so much of the writing about this which one finds in the English language; and the failure of so many of the writers to build bridges to others writing on relevant subjects.
These faults were very evident in a Noreena Hertz pamphlet entitled Coop Capitalism just published by Cooperatives UK. Hertz is, apparently, one of these young celebrity Economists who have been taken up by the mass media and one of whose faults is to present ideas as if they were new. I’m not sure, for example, if her use of the term "gucci capialism” adds to our understanding of the crisis we face – and her references to examples of cooperatives are highly selective and superficial (Mondragon gets no mention). She allows this blurb about her to appear in the pamphlet -

many have described Professor Hertz as a visionary and she is one of the most influential economists on the international stage. Her work is considered to provide a much needed blueprint for rethinking economics and corporate strategy. For more than two decades Noreena Hertz’s economic predictions have been accurate and ahead of the curve. In her number one best-selling book “The Silent Takeover”, Hertz predicted that unregulated markets and massive financial institutions would have serious global consequences whilst her 2005 best-seller, “IOU: The Debt Threat”, predicted the 2008 financial crisis. Her books have been translated into 17 languages

Here is an example of how the media treat her – but here a more serious treatment of her ideas . I realise, of course, that such a comment could be taken as an example of how the left tear one another part – but change agents need to show more modesty and generosity in their referencing of relevant work.

Labour Left has published a 300 page Red Book which can be downloaded here. Labour Left’s ambition is 

to generate ethically socialist policies for inclusion in the next Labour General Election manifesto. We aim to intellectually reclaim what it means to be left and we wish to help Ed Miliband steer a course away from Neo-Liberalism. It is clear from the surge in new members, especially younger ones since the General Election in 2010, that there is an appetite for socialist policies that tame the excesses of capitalism and re-balance the UK economy in a way that is fairer to the have-nots

Unfortunately, like all collections, the book’s contributions are ad-hoc (if worthy) presentations of various ideas relating to health, education and environmental issues – with no wider analysis of policy contexts nor argument as to whether the particular ideas would be supported let alone successful.

At the other end of the analytical and geographical spectrum is a major publication from the European Trade Unions Institute which, in 300 pages, looks at the changes in the infrastructure of each of the main European economies in the last 20 years. It takes as its starting point Colin Crouch’s insight about the strange non-death of neo-liberalism and is entitled A Triumph of Failed Ideas – european models of capitalism
It made me realise how seldom I have referenced the valiant efforts of various European Trade Unions and their research bodies in their tracking developments of the past decade eg the fantastic public services international research unit of the University of Greenwich which has been giving great briefings on the consequences of privatisation for more than a decade; NHS policy briefings ; European Services Strategy Unit.
But I have just come across what, for me, is the best source of radical thinking and activities in Europe – the Transform network which issues a biannual journal.