Why Germany won’t support Cameron’s election wish

While preparing my new website (coming soon), I stumbled upon this political column that I had written for one of my Journalism classes last semester and wanted to share it with you. It was written in November, so there are a few references to Christmas and other past dates. However, it's still up to date in most aspects and will probably be so until the general election in May.

Courtesy of Wikimedia

 

 Freedom of movement has been a basic principle of European co-operation since the Treaty of Rome in 1957, which founded the European Economic Community - the forerunner of the European Union. But now this principle is under threat as Britain calls for restrictions on freedom of movement inside the EU. One of the biggest and most verbal opponents is Germany.

 

This weekend, as thousands of white balloons were released to symbolise the fall of the Berlin wall on the 9^th November 1989, it becomes apparent why Germany won’t back down on this issue. The wall divided Berlin for 37 years, separating families, friends and neighbours. Its fall became a powerful symbol of the end of the Cold War, and is still deeply embedded in the memory of most Germans.

  

Courtesy of Wikimedia

As long as there are still parts of the Berlin wall standing, Germany won’t budge. For Germany, as for many other EU countries, freedom of movement is a sacrosanct right. According to Der Spiegel magazine, Angela Merkel recently told David Camerion that the British insistence on restricting freedom of movement would be a “point of no return” and could sharply increase the risk of Britain leaving the EU.

 

Courtesy of Wikimedia

However, the UK might find common ground with the EU’s biggest country on the issue of curbing benefits abuse and poverty-driven migration. The current debate about possibilities of limiting benefits abuse by European migrants has already happened in Germany.

Just like David Cameron is currently courting the right-leaning Tories and UKIP sympathisers by promising to limit EU migration, Angela Merkel’s Christian Social Union promised get-tough measures as regional elections were held in August this year. "Who lies, flies" was the maxim for the proposed law designed to show Europe that Germany is no longer a soft touch for "benefits tourists." 

Under the new law, those EU citizens who arrive in Germany will have a six month period to try to find work before being asked to leave "if they have no reasonable prospects of finding work." Individuals will not be entitled to benefits if they have not paid into the system. The proposal will go before both houses of parliament before the end of the year and is expected to be ratified into law.

However, there is doubt in both countries about how many EU migrants actually abuse the system. In Germany, labour minister Andrea Nahles told Der Spiegel: „We cannot quantify the amount of abuse correctly. We don’t know exactly what these numbers look like”.

Numbers about EU migration show a different picture than what some conservative politicians like to paint: About as many Britons live in the EU as EU citizens in Britain, so any limitation to freedom of movement would affect them as well. In total, more than 14m EU citizens are resident in another member state, that’s 2.8 percent of the total EU population.

 

Courtesy of Wikimedia

Lord Oakeshott, the Liberal Democrat peer who uncovered the figure in a parliamentary question, said the high numbers of Britons abroad proved that freedom of movement was a “genuine two-way street”. “As many Britons work or retire across the Channel or the Irish Sea as other Europeans come here,” the Lib Dem peer told the Financial Times.

With Christmas fast approaching, David Cameron is unlikely to be given his biggest wish of reducing EU immigration, but instead he might get the next best thing, a European willingness to talk about poverty-driven migration and changes of rules about benefits – endorsed by Germany.

Join the Ch@tter

For the past few weeks, I have been involved in a really innovative news project - namely, The Ch@tter - and am proud to say that we are now online and live - check it out here.

Also, please follow us on Twitter and like us on Facebook.

And we are always looking for contributors, so please get in touch if you want to have your say.

Stirling Minds: Jock Scott (Entrepreneurial Focus)

This article was published in the 2014 edition of Stirling Minds, the Alumni magazine of the University of Stirling.

Jock Scott

BA Philosophy 1982
Mediator, Abune


"After 25 years in human resources, I wanted to use this experience to do something different.

I’m a bit of a change junkie and like the challenge of developing and maintaining relationships in the most difficult of circumstances.

I’m used to dealing with difficult organisational problems and understand the enormous pressures they put on both management and the individuals involved. And I have been involved in countless disputes.

So I trained as mediator.

Winning is fun - Stirling University Photography Competition

After winning the Stirling Uni Photography Competition in the category "Student Life", our images are now shown in an exhibition at the Macrobert Centre at the university for the next three weeks. There was a nice little ceremony on Monday (see picture below). And I got 150 pounds in high-street vouchers. Happy :)

I took this picture on the top of our local mountain Dumyat (only 418m high, but still a lovely summit to hike up to) after a snow storm - only minutes before we couldn't even see the ground below our feet, and the next moment the clouds disappeared and Stirling's main landmark, the Wallace Monument, was framed quite nicely by them.

The happy winners

Living off the streets

Saturday was spent in Glasgow, hunting for photo opportunities for a university assignment. The topic: Living off the streets - i.e. buskers, homeless/jobless people, fundraisers, painters,... It was a group project, and we had to produce two edited photos each, which were then arranged on a photo board together with a short article on the subject. We managed to photograph quite a wide range of subjects, more than I had thought possible after spending only a few hours on Glasgow's high streets.

Here are my own two photographs (to enlarge, click on them, although somehow they aren't as sharp as the originals):

An accordion band in Stirling.

An Asian tourist filming a Spanish guitarist with his iPhone.

Here the entire photo board.

“I gave up everything”

[This is an article I wrote for university.]

Born in India and educated in Scotland, Tessa Ransford founded the Scottish Poetry Library in 1984. Now aged 73, she lives on her own in Edinburgh and still writes poetry every day.

I have rheumatism, so when I get up in the morning, I first do around 20 minutes of exercise. At the same time, I'm listening to radio programmes like “Start the Week”, or “Woman's Hour”, depending on what time I get up.

I have porridge for breakfast, but that's partly because of a thyroid cancer operation I had last autumn - I couldn't swallow hard things like cereals, so now I have porridge. I sometimes eat bread and marmalade, but I always end up throwing away the rest of the bread, because it is very hard to get through a whole loaf if you live on your own. It's not fair, the supermarkets say “Two for the price of one”, but you don't want two if you live alone.

After breakfast I buy the paper and go for a walk. I love listening to the birds while walking though the park. I do any shopping I need, come back, have a coffee, and then I write until lunchtime. I'm writing every day. At the moment I am working on a review of a book in which Scottish poetry was translated into German. But I don't get paid for this work. I don't make a single sou, in fact I lose money by being a poet.

In the eighties, I had my first two or three books of poetry published, and although they'd been reviewed, I didn't have anyone to talk to. I was a housewife, I didn't have anyone to get feedback from. In those days, even if you had poetry published, you didn't mention it to anyone. It was very isolated.

So in 1981, I started a workshop for people writing poetry, called the “School of Poets”. There were twelve of us. It was a workshop for people who were already writing, not for people who thought they might like to write. I called it “practicing poets”. People rather jeered at that, saying that any genuine poet wouldn't need any teaching. It was incredible what some said. But my reply was: “You don't know what you need to know until you need to know it”. You're always learning and experimenting. You're absorbing new ideas. So the interaction with other poets is vital.

After that, through meeting those other poets and realizing the emptiness of the literature scene for poets, I founded the Scottish Poetry Library in 1984, and we got some funding and got the project started. I felt, no one else is going to give up everything for this, so I did. Lots of people contributed wonderfully, but me, I gave up everything. Everything, that's what it took. I don't regret doing it. There's no point regretting things.

I ran the library for 18 years, until it moved to the building it's now in, and then I retired. My work wasn't for nothing, it succeeded, the Poetry Library has got a huge amount of money now and it's doing really well.

I got an OBE for the work I did with the Poetry Library. It was very exciting. I felt that it was important to accept it because of all the work other people had done to make it possible, it wasn't just for me. It was in Holyrood Palace, and Sean Connery was getting a knighthood the same day. I was in the same building with the Queen and Sean Connery, and the captain of the Scottish Rugby team.

You can almost see Holyrood from my window. When I first came to this flat, I wrote poems looking out of the window for a year. “Shadows from the Greater Hill” consisted of poems from different seasons and different times of day. Since I had the operation, I've used the view over Arthur's Seat once again for inspiration. The painter Cézanne painted this mountain Mont Sainte-Victoire over eighty times. Well, Arthur's seat is my Mont Sainte-Victoire. It's so close, you can almost touch it.

After writing, there's lunch. I like rice, tea, marmite and butter. I love butter. I always put lots of butter on my bread and lots of butter in my cooking. I don't care about cholesterol. I think that's because we were short of everything when I was a child during wartime. I try to have salad and fruit often. I used to have chapattis for lunch, but now I have pancakes.

After lunch I check my e-mails, and usually work until 5.30, if I don't have the grandchildren here after school. I have eight grandchildren, six boys, two girls. The eldest is 25, she's a professional dancer and singer, the youngest is seven. They are all amazing.

My father was a Royal Engineer. After the First World War, he was posted to India. That was what happened in those days, it was quite normal to go to India, and he stayed there for 25 years.
I think it was a big culture shock for me coming to Scotland having been born in India, but I was only a child. What made me realize that it must have been pretty traumatic was when I came back again, having spent eight years in Pakistan, when I was 30, and then I felt the culture shock consciously - that, what I must have experienced unconsciously as a ten-year old. I was married to a church of Scotland missionary, and went with him to Pakistan. I learned Urdu and Punjabi by using index cards. 300 sentences written on little cards with a bamboo quill. In one of my books that comes out this year, there's this poem called “Don't mention this to anyone”, which uses some of the Urdu model sentences we had to learn.

I consider myself Scottish, and I want independence for Scotland. I want it badly. Desperately. I remember being in the Poetry Library once and this man in a long black coat came in. It was a cold winter's night, and he walked around the library without saying anything. But then he came to my desk, slapped a book down on the table and said: “This is the best poet in Scotland.” And I said, “Oh, that's interesting, where are you from?”, and he replied “London”. And that's just typical! I mean, I was so furious, I was livid, but I just smiled and said: “Thanks for coming from London to tell me who the best poet in Scotland is.”

After writing all afternoon I look at the news and have supper. I don't eat much meat. If the children are coming, I might get some to make a stew, but not for myself. I make things like macaroni cheese, risotto or fish pies - simple food. I used to cook for four children, so it had to be simple.

A person I would love to invite to dinner is Lynne Truss. She wrote this amazing book about Tennyson, “Tennyson's Gift”. I read it in hospital and it kept me alive. She's incredibly witty and funny. We'd have lots of laughs. So I would have her and Maggie Smith. She's got that bitter edge, and I like people like that. I don't like people who are too goody-goody.

If I'm not going out in the evening, I read and watch the telly and do my knitting. I decided to take up knitting again when I had the thyroid operation, because I had to rest, and with not being able to dash about, I thought it would be nice to do some knitting. So I knitted a big scarf. I asked my daughter, who's a midwife, what to knit next, and she said that they're always looking for little squares for the premature babies. So I'm knitting squares for premature babies now. It feels nice, I like doing it. I'm contributing to the future.

The teacher

There are no official statistics on the number of German nationals living and working in Scotland, but the German consulate in Edinburgh estimates it at 40,000 people. One of them is Kerstin Pfeiffer, who is teaching German at Heriott-Watt University in Edinburgh. After living in Scotland for more than eight years, she has no desire to go back to Germany. “I am rooted so deeply into Scottish earth now, I am here to stay,” she explains. She studied English back in Germany, and did her PhD in medieval drama at the University of Stirling, while teaching German at the same time.

When she first came to Scotland, she planned to stay for a year. But when the year came to a close, she decided to linger here a little longer. She likes the openness and relaxed manner of the Scottish people. She likes how unbureaucratic Scottish life can be. She likes how informal and welcoming people communicate here. And then there are the highlands, just half an hour away, where everything is calm and quiet, where Kerstin Pfeiffer can relax and enjoy the beautiful Scottish countryside. Now, in her mid-thirties, she feels like there is nothing that could make her decide to move back to her home town in Rheinhessen, a rural wine-growing region in the federal state of Rhineland-Palatinate.

However, when asked about her feeling of national identity, she makes it clear that she is not just from Germany, but, more specifically, from Rheinhessen. “In our area, local patriotism and pride in our heritage is still very strong,” Kerstin Pfeiffer explains. She enjoys being able to speak her local dialect there without raised eyebrows and pitying glances. And really, if she has to identify herself as other than from Rheinhessen, she would say that she is European. “I only say 'I'm from Germany' when people abroad ask me about where I come from. It would be too much explaining otherwise.”

Kerstin Pfeiffer enjoys living in Scotland. But there is one thing she could do without. “Sometimes I feel afraid walking home on a Friday evening because there are so many extremely drunk people on the streets,” she tells me. Even though she comes from a region splattered with vineyards and wineries, the Scottish binge drinking culture is something she had not seen before.

In a recent YouGov survey commissioned for the annual Anglo-German Königswinter conference, 40 percent of Brits and almost as many Germans questioned thought that the attribute “drunk” applied to the British population. In stark contrast to that, only very few individuals thought that German people could be described in the same way. Germans who had visited Britain in the past were actually more likely to describe the British as “drunk” than those who had never been to the UK.

But other than the fear of drunken Scots, Kerstin Pfeiffer has so far had nothing but positive experiences in Scotland. Sometimes, when she tells other people that she's from Germany, they tell her about their favourite currywurst-stalls and long nights in a Bavarian Bierzelt (beer tent).