The Elderly Interrailer

So here I am on my annual summer holiday on a TGV train between Paris and Bordeaux. This is something I have been meaning to do for years, to revisit an Interrail journey that I first did when I was 16 or 17, it is so long ago now I can`t even remember how old I was.  That journey really changed my life and had a role on how I was going to go on and view the world.  In those days, in the early 70s, foreign travel was nowhere as common place as it is today and even if Brits did go abroad it was normally for a week or so to the English enclaves of the Costa Del Sol so even if they were travelling "overseas" they could still get those British cultural staples of warm brown beer and fish and chips. Particularly for a lad like me, uneducated, from the South Wales Valleys and not from a particularly affluent background European​ travel was almost unheard of.  My older brother had visited Paris a few years earlier but that was seen as almost unspeakably exotic and bohemian. Looking back though these mists of time i am still somewhat baffled as to what motivated me to want to go on that journey. Advertising played its part as I remember there was a damp billposter  under a railway arch near my house which told of this fairly newly established scheme called interrail which provided cheap international rail travel for those under 26 in Europe and Morocco. MOROCCO FFS!!!! If Paris had seemed unspeakably sophisticated to me you can imagine how Morocco sounded.

Fair play to my parents I didn't have to hassle them that much to stump up the cash for me to go on my first interrail trip.  To be honest i think they saw it as an opportunity to get away from my local environment for a while as I was going off the rails a bit and also I managed to get two of my friends to say they would come with me so although  know they did struggle to finance it I think they thought they would be letting me down if they didn't. In the end although it didn't really help with me going off the rails for a while it was a seminal event in my growing up.  It took me out of my comfort zone of my own cosy environment and made me aware there were other ways of doing things, other ways of viewing the world and our way at home was not simply the only or even the best way.

I am only a few days into my trip but I already feel the spectacles of the 'other' altering the way I view things back at home. Reading my Facebook, Twitter and news feeds from back in the UK it strikes as a country obsessed with brexit and that not moved on one iota from where we were at during or even before the referendum. The leavers are adamant that they won the referendum fare and square and that we are going to leave no matter what.  The remainers on the other hand argue that the referendum argument was won on lies and anyway it was only "advisory" and should be simply ignored.  To me to be honest neither of these arguments sounds credible.  I don't know what the solution is to this mess the UK finds itself in but whichever way you look at it the country is split 50/50 and any solution needs to take both sides with it which neither of those previous arguments does. Believe it or not here in Europe people don't care about Brexit, they have other things in their lives and it hardly makes the news at all. Britain is in a crisis of its own making and only Britain can get itself out of it. To be perfectly frank I have gone past caring as I am disillusioned by the behaviour of both sides.  Although I am convinced the UK will be poorer on many levels through brexit I think I personally I will survive (although I will probably lose my job) but that is something I can live with. So, whatever side you are on just stop adopting a dog in a manger attitude and think how we can all move on from where we find ourselves at the moment.

Brexit bill: Damned if you do, damned if you don’t

Again I feel motivated to write this blog through some of what I feel is the unmitigated tosh that I have read and heard over yesterday’s vote on the Brexit bill and particularly the comments from certain sectors condemning Jeremy Corbyn’s three line whip on Parliamentary Labour Party members to vote in support of the bill.

Now let me get one thing clear at the start of this blog; I am a committed and ardent remainer.  In my opinion the simple in/ out referendum should never have been held, in many ways in itself it was an affront to democracy. The issue of whether the UK should or shouldn’t remain a member of the European Union is an extremely complex and nuanced one and one that simply could not have been effectively addressed by a simple in/ out referendum and certainly not by a referendum which in the end, let’s be honest here, was not about the EU but became about immigration and feelings of alienation from the political class. Again don’t get me wrong here, I do have serious misgivings about the EU, Just look at my earlier blogpost from June 2013 “A Blue Flag With Yellow Stars” and I am fully cognisant of the “Lexit” argument as to why we should leave the cosy, neo Liberal Capitalist club. Ultimately however the reason that I am an ardent remainer is that when you take all the pro and con arguments into consideration a Tory engineered Brexit, I am convinced, will leave the poorer people of the UK and Wales in particular worse off and I cannot see any benefit to the UK that will offset that.

OK so I have nailed my colours to the mast; I am a committed remainer, albeit a conflicted one. That said I am fully aware that we lost the vote and it is no good pretending otherwise which it seems to me some other remainers want to. This then brings me to the conundrum that Labour and Jeremy Corbyn are facing at the moment. To me it seems they are between a rock and a hard place. Labour campaigned for remain, don’t let anybody tell you different; but the vote was lost to the Leave camp. So now what are Labour to do? Ignore the views of the electorate of this country, many of whom are Labour voters and do all they can to block the Brexit process. It seems to be in doing this the Party will stimulate a political backlash from people who feel that their views, which they believe in passionately, are being discounted as unimportant. The other option which Labour seem to be pursuing and which seems far more pragmatic to me is to accept the vote has been lost and to put in process an approach which seeks to negotiate the best possible outcome to Brexit for the majority of people in this country.  

To be honest I despair when I see 47 Labour MPs have voted against the Party directive. Surely if the events of the past eighteen months for Labour have taught us anything is a disunited party is not appealing to the voters and that members of the Parliamentary Labour Party should show a bit more humility in respecting the views of their constituency members and supporters.  While I can maybe understand it for those MPs who represent areas that strongly voted remain but when you see the likes of Owen Smith and Chris Bryant who represent constituencies that voted strongly to leave vote against their Party and their constituents it beggars belief that they cannot see that this falls right into the hands of UKIP and their ilk who accuse Labour of becoming a party of the metropolitan elite that no longer represents the views of the working people of the UK.

OK these are not good times for Labour and I am not going to cast blame in any one direction other than to say that we all need to take a hard damn look at ourselves. Those that decry and blame Corbyn and accuse the party of selling out on the Brexit cause, rather than just moaning and complaining tell us your plans of how we move forward from this difficult situation and do what Labour says it will always do, take everyone with us and leave no one behind.

The Italians of South Wales or the Italians in the Rain

First of all with this blog let me thank all those people who have encouraged me with my blogging, you know who you are.  I don’t think I am a natural blogger, I only started it because some of my Twitter followers suggested it and I never cease to be amazed that people read my inane rantings but I am more than thankful that you do.

One barrier that I encounter in relation to blogging is finding a topic that I think people will be interested in and that is the case with the topic for this blog, but on reviewing my past blog I did notice that I had promised to recount my ongoing relationship with Italy.  This together with @edanaming who comes from an Italian family herself asking me about it has finally prompted me to commit my experiences to print. As my relationship with Italy covers some 40 years I have a lot to say I’ll split this blog in to two so not as to bore you too much, first I will tell you about the Welsh Italians and then I will tell you about my relationship with them.

You don’t need to have followed me for long on Twitter or read many of my blogs to know that I am a product of the South Wales Valleys. Now you may or may not know anything about the South Wales valleys or the people who live in them but you may be surprised that we are a pretty varied bunch. Prior to the industrial revolution the valleys of South Wales were one of the most sparsely populated areas of the United Kingdom so when coal mining and iron production developed in the area people had to move in to work those industries.  While some moved in from elsewhere in Wales, particularly the rural, agricultural West, others moved from further afield.  

My own surname is testament to the Irish contingent of this immigration but growing up in the valleys in 60s and 70s I was surrounded by immigrant families with their roots in Poland, Spain and of course Italy.  The Italians were an integral of any valley community at the time as illustrated by the character Bella Lasagne in Fire Man Sam. 

Every valleys community had their Italian café serving frothy coffee (cappuccino type concoctions made with Nescafe instant coffee), steamed pies (a strange South Wales delicacy),”singles” (cigarettes sold individually for the cash strapped) and of course that Italian staple, ice cream.

If you are interested in reading further about the Welsh Italians there is a good book out on the subject called “Lime, Lemon and Sarsaparilla” http://amzn.to/1LzIKad .

Another interesting fact that you probably don’t know about the Welsh Italian community is that the vast majority are from in and around one town Bardi in the Emilia-Romagna region of Northern Italy.  Over the years I have visited Bardi many times and it is an amazing place, a valleys town itself located in deepest rural Italy and where on market day on a Thursday in the main piazza you will hear Italian being spoken with a distinctive South Wales accent and where when I meet people there and I tell them I am from Merthyr the first thing they will say is “So you know the Viazzanis and the Fulgonis” which of course I do.

Another useful link if you want to know more about the Welsh Italians is The Amici Val Ceno http://bit.ly/1LkTVpc

Anyway, I digress, to be continued ….

A Blue Flag With Yellow Stars

I was recently asked to contribute to a current affairs programme on the BBC Wales (The Wales Report) looking at:

• 1/ under employment  in South Wales and
• 2/ the ramifications of the UK leaving  the European Union (EU). 

I was more than happy to contribute particularly in relation to the continued membership of the EU by the UK as it never ceases to amaze me as I go about my daily life the amount of people that I come across who are just generally antagonistic to the EU and the European project in general.  Particularly for residents of the South Wales Valleys I really don’t understand it!!!  When people say “Well what has the EU ever done for us?” I just say look around you.  How often do you see building projects  or other initiatives badged with that little blue flag with yellow stars? Are people blind?

Considering we are one of the poorer areas of Europe our towns and cities and our roads are in remarkably good condition and a significant element of that is related to EU funding.  I really don’t want to get into the minutiae but initiatives such as the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF)and the European Social Fund (ESF) have ploughed billions of money into the Welsh economy for over ten years.  Now I don’t want to make out that everything is rosy in the European funding garden, far from it.  Considering the length of time that particularly The Valleys  and West Wales have been eligible for the highest level of Objective One/ Convergence funding it could be argued that not as much has been achieved as might have been.  Broadly I would agree with that argument, however I also believe there are a number of different factors that have conspired to make that the case.  It is too simplistic and easy to blame bad management of the programme and projects, as some have.  True, there has probably been an element of this but I believe that the issues are far deeper and more complex.

Over the years I have been involved in, in one way or another with a number of European funded projects  and it has always struck me one; how difficult it is to get the money in the first place and two the amount of bureaucracy involved in running such initiatives  that comes via the European bureaucracy such as the Welsh European Funding Office (WEFO).  This beaucracy in particular is incredibly risk averse and because of this it stifles any innovation or flexibility in project delivary.  This might be all very well and good if we are talking about building a road but is not conducive to a successful outcome if an initiative is trying to identify and implement strategies to assist people in accessing employment.  The whole system seems weighted against any form of innovation or change of project delivery.  All the bureaucracy seems interested in is ensuring targets are met even if things change and they are the wrong targets.

One can point to the easy targets such as the £6.1M of EU money that went to the likes of AWEMA

or my own  personal bugbear the anachronistic Common Agricultural Policy (CAP)   but the reality of the situation is unsurprisingly that things are a lot more complicated than that.  If the UK were to leave the EU and Wales lose European funding I am convinced it would make a palpable impact on the people of Wales. It has been estimated that 200,000 Welsh jobs are directly or indirectly linked to membership of the EU.  In a nation of a little over 3 million that is an awful lot of jobs.  More fundamentally EU funding has been used to improve and support some of those very basic things in life that we often just take for granted and don’t notice but make all the difference to our quality of life.  At its most basic Europe has experienced a fantastically long period of peace.  Historically the continent has been blighted by wars precipitated by one “nation” or group conspiring to ensure that their interests or beliefs are adhered to rather than the wider interests of the people of the continent .  I know that it may be a little far fetched to argue that this period of European peace is simply down to the EU but it must be said that these days disagreements are resolved via debate in places like Brussels rather than in train carriages in woods following years of bloody battles.

Peace is something that many of us take for granted as it is something that we have known all our lives, in a relatively short period of time it seems many have come to take for granted  something that our parent, grandparents and great grandparents yearned for.  On top of that those little things that we can enjoy during peace time such as meeting friends and having a coffee in a smart town centre, having a picnic in a pleasant park or taking our children or grand children for a swim in a municipal pool.  It is these little things that make all the difference to our lived lives and to those of us who live in Wales just open your eyes and have a look around you and notice how often projects and initiatives tht are improving these basic pleasures have a little blue flag with yellow stars.

For a good Blog post on Wales and the EU have a look at: http://bit.ly/11OUXja 

Dr Nostromo

 9^thJune2013

Remember the Children of Oradour-sur-Glane

I do not normally watch the “topical debate” TV which is on on a Sunday morning but this morning for some strange reason I did.  Tony Blair was on the programme, the former Labour Prime Minister of the UK.  While not a massive fan of the man due to his Iraq  policies and various other reasons he is probably the Labour Prime Minister that I have had the most time for during my life time and when the interview came round to the topic of the European Union I found myself agreeing  with everything he said.

As I have said before many in the UK unfortunately are reluctant Europeans and we have suffered for it in the past and unless we change our attitude toward The Union I fear we will suffer for it in the future. There does seem to be in the UK very little stomach for the European project with the general feeling “what’s in it for us”.

I would have thought that one very quick look at history might at the very least give a hint as to what use the EU has been to the people of Europe.  Just cursory look through the pages of wars in Europe (http://bit.ly/WBy0PE ) would show that post 1945, particularly Western Europe, has been relatively conflict free.  From its nascent beginnings at the post war 1948 Hague Conference surely this co-operation between the nations of Europe has contributed to this long period of relative peace.

Europe the continent has produced some amazing achievements, but the blight of the continent has been conflict and war. Throughout the various European countries towns like Pisa, Arras, Exeter, Swansea, Coventry, Dresden and Berlin, among others,  have paid a terrible price not just in the precious lives of their inhabitants but also in the destruction of culture, history and the ethereal soul of those communities that many are still struggling to recover from.

While it is true that  towns on the UK mainland such as Coventry, Plymouth and London experienced extensive bombing and human misery but many towns and cities of mainland Europe experienced the sheer trauma of occupation and often the accompanying atrocities. If in any doubt just think what happened in Oradour-sur-Glane and that was just one town in one war.  The history of European war is unfortunately littered with such stories.