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.

Look me up

Ladies and Gentlemen,

May I present my latest project: a new homepage to showcase my skills and experience. Very important for the active job seeker.

I'm still working on the colour scheme and layout, but I'm quite pleased with the result so far, especially considering my fairly basic html skills.

I'd welcome any suggestions and feedback :)

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.

Portfolios for Journalists

I have spent the past few hours creating several portfolios, showcasing my articles and other works. I tried out different providers, and naturally, there are good and less ideal solutions. Here is a little overview over my three favourite ones (all of them free to use):

1. Contently. In my opinion, this is the best and most intuitive portfolio creator. You simply enter publications and links of your clippings, and the website turns them into beautiful tiles, photos included. It also calculates different statistics, e.h. how many words you have published in total (77k in my case), how many followers you have on social networks, etc. Contently is quick, simple, but very effective. Thanks to Juanita for recommending this service.
https://sabinekurz.contently.com

2. Pressfolios. Similar to Contently, but a little less easy to use. There is a limited number of clippings you can showcase on your individual site. I like that you can create different categories for your articles. Registration is by reservation or invitation only (if you want me to invite you, leave a comment), but I was given access within a few hours.
http://sabinekurz.pressfolios.com

3. Torial. And finally, there is also one German portfolio creator. It's possible to enter all kinds of different media kinds, including books, videos and radio broadcasts. You can opt to keep your portfolio invisible until it is finished. Torial is still in Beta mode, they plan to add features that will cost something, but so far everything is for free.
https://www.torial.com/sabine.kurz

All about sex

[Another article written for university.]

Her life is all about sex. She reads, writes, and talks about it. Thinks about it - a lot. And on her office window high up above the city, there is a three-letter sign: SEX. Some people might say she is obsessed with it, but for Jocelyn Wentland sex is her job. She is a sex researcher at Ottawa University, and has been studying relationships, both sexual and otherwise, ever since she took a sexuality class as an undergraduate. Wentland is very outspoken person who feels comfortable with using straightforward street-level sexual words, which don’t always sound exactly scientific or academic.

"Stefan Franke" / www.jugendfotos.de

For her honours thesis at the University of British Columbia, she looked at why women have casual sex. Wentland says, "We found that women engage in casual sex for the same reasons men do: They are drunk, they are horny, they want to do it, the guy is hot and they want to take him home from the bar."

Since then she has moved on to focus on how both gender's definition of relationships have changed, on which she focuses for her PhD thesis. "Classically, you hear ‘relationship’ and think of committed, long-term, monogamous situations, ending in marriage, kids and a house in the suburbs. But for many people, especially young adults, the notion of what qualifies as a relationship is very different."

Many might only think of strangers and the classic one-night stand when hearing 'casual sex', but Wentland sees a more nuanced definition in her research. There are three other types of relationships she looks at: the 'Booty Call', 'Fuck-Buddies' and 'Friends With Benefits'. "They are casual sex relationships, but they are ongoing, and there is an element of knowing the person, which is definitely not there with the one-night stand," she explains.

But with all these nuances, there's also the problem of defining casual sex. "Are we talking about intercourse, any kind of sexual activity, oral sex and do both people get oral sex? That is a big problem with the literature, that researchers don't define casual sex." Her very own definition for casual sex is the “sexual activity that happens outside the context of a committed relationship”.

While friends and family know what she does for a living, Wentland is a little careful in telling other people. She has two ways in which she answers what her job is. If it is a friend, or someone who she thinks can handle the truth, she says sex researcher. Other people get the more diplomatic answer, a psychologist or a relationship researcher. But the reactions can still be quite interesting. "I've heard everything from 'I can't believe you're getting a PhD in that' to: ‘You must be some sex-crazy nymphomaniac' and everything in between", says Wentland. That might be why many of her fellow researchers identify themselves as relationship researchers. "That's safer, essentially. Maybe I'm just pushing the envelope, but I'm happy to do sex research."

And for all the time she spends researching relationships and sex, she cannot define her own sexuality. "I will have to think about that", she says with a shrug. "Yes, I do sex research, but my personal life is pretty private to me." She continously tries to separate the research from her personal life: "My career is very different from my sex life."

She pauses a moment to think, then says, "I notice that I am immersed in this pretty much full-time: Reading about sex, writing about it, researching it, analysing sex results and findings from my study. I am always in it, and I am able to talk about really intimate and personal things, but they are not that intimate or personal to me, because I have that researcher's hat on. For me, sex is not something that only happens behind closed doors." She has had dating partners in the past who had problems with her being a sex researcher. "They would ask me whether this was Jocelyn, the sex researcher or Jocelyn, the girlfriend," she says. "It's a balance. Sometimes I have to remind myself that not everyone lives the life of a sex researcher."

“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.

Earthquake!!!

There's been a tiny earthquake in the Montreal region, which, reportedly, could be felt even in Ottawa. I didn't feel anything, I was sound asleep, but when I saw all the wonderful Twitter posts, I couldn't resist writing to a few earthquake experts to find out how often things like this actually happen.

82% of Montreal believe this morning's earthquake was Quebec literally trying to separate from Canada
— Stats Canada (@stats_canada) October 10, 2012

The first scientist that answered wasn't in Ottawa. She'd flown to California to do earthquake research. How ironic - she traveled 500 miles to get closer to earthquakes, and then missed the one in her home town.

1st picture of damage in Montreal from that 4.5 magnitude earthquake. twitter.com/KennyB899/stat…
— Kenny B (@KennyB899) October 10, 2012

Anyway, I will try to get some nice radio interviews with earthquake experts and will then publish them on here sometime. Stay posted. Don't let the big bad earthquakes get you.