Tuesday 30 April 2013

ABDICATION

Should monarchs resign? Long ago, the question would have appeared absurd to most people. Kings (women were generally excluded) were chosen by God, ruled by God's favour, suffered defeats if they sinned, and were called by God to heaven at the appointed time. Against that background, abdicating would have been not just odd, but positively immoral.

True, the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V chose to abdicate in 1555, some three years before his death. That was part of a complex inheritance settlement, in which he gave Spain and the Netherlands to his son Philip II, and the other Habsburg lands, plus the Imperial title, to his brother Ferdinand. Charles probably viewed it as an internal family matter rather than anything else.

In England, King Edward VIII abdicated in 1936, not long after he had come to the throne. That was because he insisted on marrying divorcee Wallis Simpson, a decision that was incompatible with his status as Head of the Church of England, which at the time did not allow divorced people to have a church wedding. The abdication caused a constitutional crisis, but the country probably ended up with a better king because of it.

However, one country that seems to have a history of abdications is Holland. It may be because it hasn't had a monarchy for very long (indeed, Philip II spent much of his reign trying to subdue rebellion in the Netherlands, a policy which eventually failed, and resulted in the establishment of one of the world's first republics); but all of its last three monarchs, all women, have abdicated. The latest, Queen Beatrix, did so today after 33 years on the throne, despite being a sprightly 75-year old and hugely popular. Her son, King Willem-Alexander, is the first Dutch king since 1890.

Queen Beatrix' stated reason for voluntarily giving up now was to allow younger blood to take over. This is an issue which will increasingly affect Europe's monarchies, for while Charles V became Emperor at the tender age of 19, Willem-Alexander, the continent's youngest monarch, is already 46. Britain's Queen is 87 and seems likely to keep going for some years, while many of the others, including Denmark's Queen Margrethe, are in their 60's and 70's. A raft of younger Princes and Princesses, many present in Amsterdam today, are ready to take over; should their elderly parents stand aside and let them?

My personal view is no. Once a monarch starts choosing when and how he/she completes their term, then it begins to look a lot more like a presidency; in which case, why not let the people have a say? Monarchy is, at bottom, slightly ridiculous (or, at least, anomalous); making it less ridiculous would in my view take away some of its mystique. Holland may be happy with a tradition of abdication, but Holland should remain the exception rather than the rule.

Walter Blotscher

Monday 29 April 2013

GARDENING

It's still not really spring yet here in Denmark (the average temperature in April seems set to be the lowest for 25 years), but I am busy gardening. On Saturday my wife and I planted carrots and lettuces; and yesterday my mother-in-law came and cut down my rose plants, so that they will bloom even better. I mowed half of the hacienda on each day, so it is all looking nice and green.

All that is needed now is some sun. But that is not in my gift.

Walter Blotscher

Sunday 28 April 2013

J.K.ROWLING

I have only ever read one Harry Potter book, the first in the series. It didn't do much for me, I have to admit. But the affairs of the boy wizard obviously do have an appeal, since the seven books have sold more than 450 million copies, been translated into 73 languages, and been turned into 8 films. There are not many authors in history who can beat that.

Three of the biggest admirers were my own children. Since we lived in Tanzania and then Denmark, I had to enlist my mother to buy the latest hardback copy in English, as soon as it came out, and send it on by post. Whereupon my eldest son would disappear for a couple of days, hand the book to my second son, who would do the same, and then finally to my daughter. The books got bigger and bigger, the last one being a real doorstep, but their enthusiasm remained undimmed.

Against that background, I approached J.K.Rowling's first non-Harry Potter book, The Casual Vacancy, with a degree of scepticism. Sure, she can write for children; but what about for adults? I was pleasantly surprised. The story, about the machinations of a local parish council, rattles along at a good pace and kept me interested (more than can be said for Ulysses, say, which I found almost unreadable). It was not great literature, but it was certainly not rubbish. If she writes another book for adults, then I will certainly read it.

Walter Blotscher

Saturday 27 April 2013

SCHOOL REFORM (6)

On Thursday, the Government stepped into the middle of the dispute between the teachers and their local authority employers, imposed a settlement that was approved by Parliament yesterday in a speeded-up legislative process, and thereby ensured that children will go back to school on Monday after a forced absence of 4 weeks. That was a bit longer than I had expected, but the Government were keen to try and suggest that they would let "the Danish model" take its course.

The teachers feel that the Government has merely imposed the same settlement that the employers had wanted from the start. The existing rules on non-teaching work hours will be scrapped, decisions on how much preparation is needed for each subject will henceforth lie with the headmaster, and the special rule for 60-year old teachers (who have long been allowed to work four weeks a year less for the same pay until they retired) will be scrapped. The head of the teachers' union called the whole negotiating process a farce.

However, although the employers have won on the issue of principle, they have not got everything their own way. Headmasters will have the power to decide when and how non-teaching work will be carried out; but if it is done at weekends or other unusual times, then teachers will get large overtime payments. And although the special rule for 60-year olds will go, it will be phased out over a long period of time (only teachers who are younger than 50 will not be affected at all) and without any loss of pension rights. And there will be an extra Dkr.1 billion for training. In other words, the settlement will be expensive.

The next couple of months will be taken up with getting through the exams taken in the last year of school (one of the official reasons why the Government stepped in), so there should be a lull in the conflict. However, it is likely to blow up again as the Government begins to tackle the underlying reason for wanting to change teachers' working practices, namely in order to move to a greatly expanded school day similar to that in the U.K. Given teachers' widespread anger at the terms of the imposed settlement, agreement on this will not be easy. Expect more posts on this subject later this year.

Walter Blotscher

Thursday 25 April 2013

VARME HVEDER

Tomorrow is Store Bededag ("Big Prayer Day"), so this evening I was invited to eat varme hveder ("hot wheat buns") at my mother-in-law's.

In the olden days, Store Bededag involved real praying. So when the bells rung out, all work and trade had to stop. Including baking. The bakers adjusted by making wheat buns the night before, which their customers could warm up on the day itself.

Modern life being what it is, Danes are no longer prepared to wait until the next day for their treats, so the hveder are now eaten the night before. They are toasted in the oven and eaten either savoury, with cheese and sausage, or sweet with jam. I had four of them, two of each, washed down with strong coffee and a cleansing ale. I was particularly taken by my mother-in-law's boysenberry and blackcurrant jam, which I had never tasted before.

Since tomorrow is a prayer day, I think I will join in for a bit. I will be praying that it holds dry, while I lay my flagstones on the back lawn and then go for a cycle ride.

Walter Blotscher

Wednesday 24 April 2013

CHAMPIONS' LEAGUE

The semi-finals of this year's football Champions' League have come down to a Germany v. Spain affair; Bayern Münich against Barcelona, and Dortmund against Real Madrid. The Spanish are the eternal favourites when it gets to this stage of the competition, but the Germans appear to be catching up. Last night Bayern won their first leg by a stunning 4-0, this evening Dortmund won 4-1. Although there are still second legs to be played, it looks like being an all-German final at Wembley, which is not what the bookmakers would have predicted a month ago.

Walter Blotscher

Tuesday 23 April 2013

GOING CHEAP

What do you do with derelict property? In Denmark, most houses in that condition are in rural areas. Young people move to the cities; and if they do come back when they start a family, they tend to want to build something new rather than live in a thatched farmhouse requiring oodles of maintenance. The solution is a dollop of central Government money to demolish the buildings, of which there are an estimated 10,000 or so.

However, creating a hole in an isolated field (which can then be grassed over or otherwise left to nature) is a different kettle of fish from creating a hole in the middle of a city. The U.K., which has the oldest average housing stock in Europe (a legacy of the fact that it was the first country to experience the Industrial Revolution), has lots of pockets of urban blight in old industrial cities. Boarded-up windows, graffiti, petty crime, rubbish and closing shops give an incentive for residents to try to move away, making the problem worse.

Some cities, starting with Liverpool and Stoke-on-Trent, have come up with a novel idea. The houses are offered for sale for £1, albeit with certain conditions. These can vary, but include obligations to do up the property (using a loan taken out from the local council) and to live there for a specified minimum length of time. By excluding rich people and those who already own another property, it encourages low-income families who might not otherwise be able to buy a house, and thereby increases the chances that property ownership will gradually grow into community.

This is an imaginative approach to what is a genuine problem. There is a housing shortage in the U.K., but there are also lots of empty properties. Trying to close that gap is worth the attempt.

Walter Blotscher

Monday 22 April 2013

TYKMÆLK

I love tykmælk. The word translates as "thick milk", and is a yoghurt-like product widely sold in Denmark.

I have it most days, cold and topped with ymerdrys, which is a blend of dried rye bread and sugar. But tonight I went one better, with forest fruit ice cream topped with tykmælk. It was yumptious.

Walter Blotscher

Sunday 21 April 2013

HEALTH OR JOBS?

Denmark is losing jobs in the rural areas north of the German border, as Danish consumers exercise their E.U. rights and trundle across the border to shop in Danish-owned hypermarkets. The main reason is the lower taxes and duties in Germany. These are particularly high on beer and sodas, two goods which lend themselves to borrowing a trailer and driving down to Flensburg for a shopping fest. I have done it myself a couple of times.

Differences in VAT apply to all goods. But the duties on beer and sodas were introduced by the Danish Government as a health measure, not least in order to combat spiralling obesity, particularly in children. Cutting the duties would slash the incentive to shop over the border. But what about that health issue?

When push came to shove, as it did this evening, shopping in Denmark rather than Germany (and the retail jobs associated with it) won out over slimmer children. As part of its long-touted "growth package", the duties will be sharply reduced. Danes in the future will be richer, but fatter.

Walter Blotscher

Saturday 20 April 2013

RHUBARB (2) 

Roughly a year ago, I stuck my spade into my mother-in-law's rhubarb plant and took half of it away to be planted in my kitchen garden. It did pretty well, rhubarb obviously being hardy things, and I got a fair few sticks from it during the course of 2012. However, when I came to turn over the soil back in February, I forgot that there was a rhubarb bulb sitting in the corner. Since it was mid-winter and the soil was quite hard,  I mistook the bulb for hard earth and diligently hacked it into small pieces. Which made me rather sad.

However, what works once can also work twice. So I asked my mother-in-law if I could hack off another bit of her plant, and do the same thing again. Rather surprisingly, she told me I could take the rest of it. So I dug it up last week, and transplanted it. It is already thriving, with seven or eight stalks beginning to poke through the soil. So it looks as if 2013's crop will be pretty good.

As for the rest of the kitchen garden, it looks pretty much the same as last year, and is all set for me to plant the potatoes tomorrow or Monday. The one major difference is that I have cut down a lot of the overhanging trees on the left, in order to let in more sunlight. Last year's potato plants stood at roughly 45 degrees, as they sought the sun over on the right. They should have an easier time of it this year.

Walter Blotscher

Thursday 18 April 2013

SCHOOL REFORM (5)

Danish "folkeskoler" teachers, those teaching children up to the ages of around 16, are still locked out. But teachers at "gymnasier", the academic sixth forms, which children attend from 16-19, have been hard at work for the past month. Pressed by the Government in the same direction (i.e. to give up the right to decide how they organise their non-teaching work hours), their union capitulated in return for a generous dollop of cash.

That deal was put to the membership, who have just voted on it. Not surprisingly, a resounding 85% rejected it. However, because of a quirk, the new deal will come into being on 1 August anyway. That is because the gymnasier teachers negotiated with the employers as part of a broader coalition of academic groups, which also included university staff. So the gymnasier teachers' no votes have been outweighed by the other groups' acceptances.

What the vote does clearly show is how unpopular the employers'/Government's proposal is amongst teachers. However, that is highly unlikely to have any effect.

Walter Blotscher

Wednesday 17 April 2013

GYLLE (2)

It's the gylle season at the moment, which means that it stinks round our house. Literally at the moment, since the pig farmer from round the hill is spraying the field on the other side of our hedge as I write. My son, who has been in Basel for the past couple of years and so is not used to it, says that he feels nauseous.

Gylle is a big problem, which makes the item on last Sunday's news very interesting. ST398 is a variety of MRSA ("methicillin-resistant staphylococcus aureus"), the flesh-eating bug normally encountered in hospitals, but which in this case is found in pigs. Using genome sequencing, scientists discovered that ST398 originated in humans, and then jumped across the species to our porcine friends. It first came to the authorities' attention, when the six-month old daughter of a Dutch pig farmer had to go into hospital for an operation to cure a heart birth defect. Not only was she carrying the bacterium, so too were the rest of her (otherwise healthy) family. The daughter survived; just. But the long-term implication was that the pig farmer started thinking seriously about how to control bacteria on his farm, bacteria which by definition are highly resistant to antibiotics, use of which has soared in the animal husbandry industry in Europe.

After years of trial and error, he thinks he has found the answer. The solution is not to attack the nasty bacteria directly, but to bombard the pig areas with positive bacteria. The pigs themselves are given a sort of bacteria shower every day, which they seemed to enjoy. Anyway, without space to grow, the nasty bacteria die naturally. The Dutch farmer estimates that he has reduced his use of antibiotics by 95%.

Reduced use of drugs is of course a good thing in itself. But the real winner for us rural folk is that the smell is also greatly reduced. The smell in urine is caused by the bacteria which help to break it down. Less bacteria, less smell.

The authorities here are reluctant to recommend the new system on the basis of one man's experience, and a Dutchman to boot. But they are committing money to have it documented. Which means that by the time  next year's gylle season starts, it may not be so unpleasant to live here.

Walter Blotscher

Tuesday 16 April 2013

BOMBINGS AND THE MEDIA

There were two accounts of bombings in the media today. The first concerned the explosions in the Boston Marathon, that killed three people; the second was about the bombings in Iraq that killed at least 31 people. Guess which got more coverage.

I am not saying that one is better or worse than the other, both are equally reprehensible. My point is that more than 10 years after the Iraq invasion, and some years after the Western troops were withdrawn on the grounds that there was no longer any need for them, the country remains an extremely dangerous place, in which bombings are commonplace. So commonplace that they rarely merit a mention in Western media, and then only as an item down the list, not as a headline.

When historians look back on Iraq in 50 years' time, they will shake their heads at the vast amount of resources - human, financial, other - spent in Iraq, in order to achieve what? Pretty much nothing.

Walter Blotscher

Monday 15 April 2013

GOODS AND SERVICES (5)

I continue to be amazed at how cheap things are. Now that spring has finally arrived (allowing me to go out cycling this afternoon for the first time in 2013 without leg and arm warmers), my wife bought some tools for the garden. Two trowels and a sort of fork thingy cost a miserly Dkr.50; while a pair of gardening gloves weighed in at a meagre Dkr.39. I don't know how they (and I don't know who they are) do it.

Walter Blotscher

Sunday 14 April 2013

TIGER WOODS, WINNER OR CHAMPION? (2)

Tiger Woods was back in the news this week. Since I last posted on him, three years ago, he has not added to his tally of 14 majors, and had slithered down the rankings. However, strong performances recently have brought him back to world number one, and he was the favourite to win this year's Masters, a tournament he has won four times previously. He was going well, pushing for the lead in the second round, when disaster struck. A short third shot at the par 5 fifteenth looked likely to give him a birdie; instead (and very unluckily) the shot hit the flag, bounced back off the green, and landed in the creek. Taking a new shot with a penalty, he ended up with a bogie 6 instead of a birdie 4.

But things didn't end there, because he didn't play the new shot from the right place. The rules are complicated, but you basically have three options when your ball goes in the water. Woods chose the option of playing the shot from the exact same position as the earlier one. But he dropped the ball a clear two yards further back from where he had played the first one. Normally, that constitutes a 2-stroke penalty; so, in signing his card without that, Woods opened up the possibility of being disqualified from the tournament. The relevant committee spared him that (wrongly, in the view of some commentators, notably 6-time major winner Nick Faldo) and merely gave him the two-shot penalty. But that bizarre event at the fifteenth had cost Woods four strokes, derailed his momentum and scuppered any realistic chance of winning.

Against that background, you might have expected Woods to have shrugged his shoulders, accepted it was not going to be his year, and played freely for the rest of the tournament. He didn't. The intensity, sour expressions, absence of a smile, and all the other stuff were on constant display. Tiger Woods is a very, very good golfer, but he is also a real pain as a sportsman.

Walter Blotscher

Saturday 13 April 2013

MORTGAGE INTEREST RATES (2) 

I have today received notification of the new interest rates on the various mortgage loans on our house. These are set every six months, so the rates will last until 1 October.

Two and a half years ago, I thought that the rates were almost ridiculously low. Since then, they have continued to fall. The coupon rate on the two 5% guarantee loans is now 1.36%; while that on the 6% guarantee loan is down to 1.01%.

Can they fall any further? Back in 2010, I would have said no, and I was wrong. Now I am saying nothing.

Walter Blotscher

Thursday 11 April 2013

MARGARET THATCHER

Margaret Thatcher, the U.K.'s first and - to date - only female Prime Minister, died earlier this week. What did I think of her?

I'll be up-front about this, I didn't like her. She was supposedly much influenced in her views by her father, and she tended to run the country much like a grocer's shop in Grantham; there was lots in the way of housekeeping and admonishments, and little in the way of vision. She had a relatively small number of fixed views, prejudices even, and she stuck to them through thick and thin. She (and, even more so, her supporters) made that out to be a virtue. But I was always reminded of Keynes' famous comment "when my information changes, I alter my conclusions. What do you do, sir?". No matter how much new information Mrs. T. received, she never changed those gut conclusions.

She was a successful politician, in that she was Prime Minister for so long. But she is also a reminder that power exercised over a long time (and British Prime Ministers are very powerful, witness how Tony Blair got the country to sleepwalk into the Iraq War) makes people think they are invincible. At the end, she did not lose at the ballot box and resign, but was ditched by her own party, fed up with an increasingly autocratic stance that brooked no dissent. As a civil servant in the Treasury (Finance Ministry) at the time, I saw how policy proposals painstakingly thought through by Ministers and civil servants, and sent up (never round) to Number 10 for final approval, were sent back with a curt "no".

Perhaps the most egregious example was a huge consultative document by the Inland Revenue which tried to sort out the tangled mess governing "residence", the basic principle underpinning taxation. Because of individual tax cases decided long ago, the U.K. had a tax loophole, whereby people who were resident, but non-domiciled, did not pay U.K. tax on their foreign income unless they remitted that income to the U.K. The classic case was Greek shipowners living in London. The Revenue wanted to sort residence out and do something about the loophole, with a proposal for change that included very generous transitional arrangements. Yet those same Greek shipowners, many of them contributors to the Conservative Party, persuaded Mrs Thatcher that they would move to New York if the proposals were introduced. After a year of work, a simple no got the proposals withdrawn. But the problem didn't go away; indeed, it is somewhat ironic that 25 years later, the Revenue is from 6 April 2013 introducing a statutory test for residence in order to bring much needed clarity into what is a fundamental part of the law and administration.  

In the same vein, what seemed like decisive decisions back in the Thatcher era were in reality merely postponements. She may have beaten the miners, but the U.K.'s overdependence on the City for economic growth remains today. She may have banged her handbag on the E.U. table and got "her" money back; but the question of Britain's budget rebate has not gone away, nor has its role within the E.U. The U.K. has still not got over her (negative) obsession with the Germans. As a civil servant, I worked on the famous NHS review that was supposed to settle how the country provided and financed healthcare; Governments are still grappling with that issue today. The final status of the Falkland Islands is still not settled. Her instinctive ("mother knows best") centralising tendencies, exemplified by the poll tax debacle, have not been reversed, with the result that London, which has more people than Denmark and many other E.U. countries, still has limited local Government and absolutely no tax-raising powers. Perhaps worst of all, she was a ground-breaking woman in a male-dominated profession, but did nothing for women in general.

It is also often forgotten how lucky Mrs Thatcher was in having such inept opponents. The grandees of the Tory party failed to take her seriously as a woman, letting her slip through the leadership race as a dark horse, and unseat Ted Heath. Jim Callaghan failed to go to the polls in the autumn of 1978, when he was leading in the opinion polls; the Winter of Discontent and a witty slogan "Labour isn't working" allowed her to win in 1979. Her opponents in her first Cabinets (the "wets") were feeble. With her popularity very low and her Foreign Office team actively negotiating with Argentina to hand over the Falkland Islands, the junta jumped the gun and invaded, giving her the opportunity to win the subsequent war (just) and appeal to national pride. The miners' leader Arthur Scargill led a strike without holding a ballot first, thereby alienating moderates who believed in democracy, splitting his own union, and leading it to eventual defeat. People believed the rhetoric that she was a tax-cutter, failing to distinguish between cuts in income tax rates and tax take as as a percentage of GDP (overall taxes went up during her reign, mainly because of the doubling of VAT to 15% in the 1979 budget, which also caused a recession). Abroad, communism was always doomed to failure, it was just a question of when.

Luckiest of all, she had to fight a Labour Party under Michael Foot and Neil Kinnock that spent most of its time promoting barmy policies of unilateral nuclear disarmament, widespread nationalisation and extreme socialism. One member of the shadow cabinet called Labour's 1983 election manifesto the longest suicide note in history; it was true. With the opposition split between Labour and the Social Democrats, the U.K.'s first past the post electoral system allowed Mrs. Thatcher to win elections with more and more M.P.'s, despite getting fewer and fewer votes. Unfortunately for her, the new intake were ideological neophytes who thought she walked on water. Eventually, the party came to its senses and got rid of her.

Mrs. Thatcher did some good things. She abolished foreign exchange controls, and cut tax rates from the ridiculous levels under Labour to a maximum of 40% (tax revenues went up). In sending Lord Cockfield to Brussels, she provided the impetus behind the Single European Act (though she later pretended that she hadn't understood what she was signing). She started the long tortuous process which eventually led to the Good Friday Agreement in Northern Ireland. But the U.K.'s greatest peace-time Prime Minister? No.

Even privatisation, the policy most associated with her, wasn't something she invented. That honour should rightly go to a Treasury official called Gerry Grimstone, whom most people have never heard of. But history is written by the winners, which is why I doubt he will be given a funeral in St. Paul's Cathedral when he dies.

Walter Blotscher

Wednesday 10 April 2013

SNOW IN APRIL

We have had snow here for what seems like months. The last of it melted from the front lawn today, though not because it has become warmer, it was simply replaced by sleet. Temperatures are still around freezing.

They say that warm air will arrive from Spain next week. About time.

Walter Blotscher

Tuesday 9 April 2013

LOCAL NEWSPAPERS

The local paper in the rural part of Denmark where I live is called Lokalavisen, which translates as "the local paper". Local it most certainly is, with news of village fetes, golden wedding parties, neighbour disputes and such like.

I was struck by the blazing headline in this week's edition; "Married Couple Get Dog Turd on their Driveway". Can you get more local than that?

Walter Blotscher

Monday 8 April 2013

FABIAN CANCELLARA

Fabian Cancellara won Paris-Roubaix yesterday for the third time, to cap a great Spring Classics campaign, which included wins in E3 Harelbeke and the Tour of Flanders, and third in Milan-San Remo.  

He wasn't quite as dominant as the last time he did the Tour/Roubaix spring double, back in 2010, but it was still a fantastic performance. Since that time, he has been a marked man in the classics, with all the other teams ganging up on him. In 2011 the favourites watched each other, letting second tier names win the two races. In 2012, Cancellara looked by far the strongest, but crashed in the feed zone during the Ronde, breaking his collar bone in four places and putting him out for the rest of the first half of the season. In his absence, his great rival Tom Boonen won the double for the second time, equalling the record number of wins in each race (three in the Tour, four in Paris-Roubaix).

This season the roles have been reversed. Boonen nearly lost an arm, after a cut in his elbow turned sceptic. Since then, he has had a series of crashes, that have disrupted his preparation. A further crash after just 19 km in the Ronde finally wrecked his spring campaign, and left Cancellara as the overwhelming favourite for the two Monuments.

Cancellara still had to deliver though, and without a strong team to help him. A normal professional cycle race is around 200km, but the Monuments are 250-260 km, and that extra distance really counts at the end. Furthermore, the cobblestones in both races play a crucial role, since it becomes much more difficult to slipstream the rider in front of you when your wheel is bouncing around all over the place. Cancellara's strength is that he can put on the afterburners and power away from other riders on the cobblestones, even if they are in the world's top ten. It's great to watch.

I am already looking forward to next year's Cancellara-Boonen rivalry, which has overshadowed everybody else for the past 5-6 years. Cancellara has a chance to equal the record number of wins in each race, Boonen to beat them. If they both stay healthy, then it should be a great scrap.

Walter Blotscher

Sunday 7 April 2013

SCHOOL REFORM (4)

The schoolteacher lockout has now been going on for one week. 600,000 schoolchildren up to the age of around 16, and 270,000 young people doing an apprenticeship-type course (social worker, for example), are kicking their heels at home. Two-earner couples are finding it difficult to have their children looked after.

The lockout is a sensitive issue in the Blotscher household, not least because my wife is a teacher. Since we do not agree on everything, I will tread carefully.

The core of the dispute is about the way in which teachers organise their work. Danes almost universally work 37 hours a week. Although there are some variations, teachers on average teach 22 lessons a week, representing 16.3 full hours. The remaining time is taken up with preparation, marking, meetings, talking to parents and such like. If it takes the individual teacher less time to prepare than that, then they get a windfall; if it takes longer, then tough. In either case, how and when non-teaching work is done is pretty much up to the individual teacher.

The employers - mostly local authorities - have long wanted to change this arrangement. In particular, they want the ultimate power over how non-teaching work is organised to move from the individual teacher to the headmaster. In other words, teachers would negotiate with their headmaster about how much preparation is needed in individual subjects; and if this were less than the current arrangement, then the teacher would be assigned other duties.

On this, I side with the employers (and against my wife). I don't think that schools are so different from other organisations - either commercial companies, or non-commercial public sector bodies - that there should be a deviation from the principle that it is the boss that ultimately decides how work should be organised. I also doubt that this change - in itself - would have a big impact in practice. True, there would be a few headmasters, whose new power would cause a rush of blood to the head. But no leader can lead an organisation without the support of the people who work in that organisation. So massive changes to the current work arrangements would be short-sighted.

However, there is a reason why the teachers should be concerned. That is because the Government has already submitted a proposal, whereby schools would remain open for longer hours, much more in line with the system in the U.K. Many activities (eg sport) that currently take place outside school would be brought within the school day. In order for this to happen, teachers must be physically present at the school for more hours during the day. That can only really happen if the headmaster decides that they should be there; which in turn requires the change outlined above.

In other words, it is widely believed - and I agree with them - that the employers are taking the position they are taking, because the Government has already decided to change the way schools are run; and that that change will automatically lead to more teaching hours, and so to a squeeze on preparation and other non-teaching activities. There are two problems with this. The first is that it is unproven that the way to make schools better is to have a longer school day; some countries have longer days and worse results, some the opposite. The second is that the process is contrary to the way the "Danish model" of labour relations is supposed to work, namely that employers and employees negotiate and come to an agreement, while politicians stay out of things and accept the result. This is not completely possible in the case of teachers, since the central Government is itself an employer of teachers. Nevertheless, difficult as it may be, the Finance Ministry (qua employer) is not supposed to do the bidding of the Finance Ministry (qua the purseholder for the Government).

What happens now? The problem for the teachers with a lockout is that it leaves them worse off, drains their strike fund, and saves the employers around Dkr.50m a day in foregone wages. On the other hand, it makes a lot of parents annoyed, since their children can't go to school, and at a time of year when exams are just around the corner. Against that background, I expect the Government to step in and impose a settlement some time before the end of the third week of the lockout. Enough time to distance themselves from the idea that they are not letting the parties find a settlement on their own, but not enough time to completely bankrupt the teachers' union and ruin schoolchildren's exam revision. I also expect that settlement to back the employers' position more than the teachers'.

Whatever happens, this is a watershed for Danish labour relations. Public sector labour disputes tend to be strikes, in which employees try to impose their demands for better working conditions and/or more pay in the face of stingy employers. This time, by contrast, it is the employers who are making demands. The eventual resolution of the dispute - and there will be a resolution at some point, though it may well be imposed - will cast its shadow over the Danish labour market for years to come.

Walter Blotscher      

 

Saturday 6 April 2013

BANG & OLUFSEN

B&O is everything that a Danish company is supposed to represent; first-class design, top-quality production, very high prices. Way beyond my league.

Unfortunately, it is also in deep trouble. Sales are plummeting in Europe; and although rich Chinese and other Asians are beginning to buy expensive televisions and stereos, Europeans are cutting back even faster. 125 stores are being closed in Europe, which will reduce costs; but B&O still expects to lose Dkr.150-200 million at the operating level in this financial year.

The problem is that B&O also represents other things that Denmark has, notably sky-high labour and production costs. Despite restructuring, I'm not convinced the company will survive in its present form.

Walter Blotscher

Friday 5 April 2013

ZERO DARK THIRTY

I watched Zero Dark Thirty at the local cinema last night. We knew it wouldn't be popular, but a total of seven customers, including my wife and me, was under expectations. An elderly man three rows in front, who ended up having two helpings of popcorn, said he couldn't understand why more Danes didn't watch it. I agree.

If you haven't seen it, the film is about the obsessive search for, and eventual liquidation of, Osama Bin Laden, seen through the eyes of the monomaniacal CIA agent who eventually pieces the puzzle together. She is very well played by Jessica Chastain, who was deservedly nominated for an Oscar (but didn't get it). She gets imperceptibly dragged further and further into the things that are necessary to combat terrorism, including water-boarding and similar unsavoury things.

What I liked about the film was that it didn't judge whether this was right or wrong, it simply presented things and left it up to you. Maya gets her man, but ends up with no friends and not much of a life. Was it worth it? It doesn't say.

Walter Blotscher

Thursday 4 April 2013

THE IMPORTANCE OF ELECTRICITY

It is my daughter's (she of the There And Back Again blog) nineteenth birthday today, so congratulations to her.

She is currently living in some village in Rajasthan, so we arranged that she would Skype with us this afternoon for a chat. Unfortunately, when it came to the moment, there was a power cut - a fairly common occurrence in India - and she couldn't get through. The power came back on half an hour later, and there was some sort of communication, but it didn't really work. We had to ring her on her mobile phone, presumably at great expense.

When we lived in Tanzania, there were power cuts all the time, so I got used to it. After 13 years back in Europe, you get used to the opposite, namely that the power is on all the time. Today's incident reminded me how much we all depend on it.

Walter Blotscher

Wednesday 3 April 2013

MOBILE PHONES

It was 40 years ago today that the very first call was made on a mobile phone. Martin Cooper, a senior engineer at Motorola, called a rival at another telecoms company in order to say that he was ringing from "a real cellular telephone". Nowadays there are more than 6 billion mobile phone subscriptions in the world, which represents quite a change.

Mr. Cooper's phone was of course bigger than a brick and probably just as heavy. At the time, he thought that they would probably get smaller, but even he has been surprised by just how much smaller and just how much more sophisticated they have become.

It must be nice to have been the first human to have done something which eventually becomes so ubiquitous. I doubt that it will ever happen to me; though you never know ....

Walter Blotscher


Tuesday 2 April 2013

HUNTING (2)

I have never been a fan of hunting, either the English or the Danish version, though I do like to eat most of the things that hunters catch (I draw the line at fox). But there are a fair number of people, for whom killing animals is an obsession. I once knew a guy in Tanzania, who could think of nothing else. Tanzania is admittedly a great place to go hunting, but even so, he was very dull.

One of history's great animal killers was the Archduke Franz-Ferdinand, the guy whose assassination in Sarajevo in 1914 provided the trigger for the First World War. He travelled the world looking for things to kill, and two of his trips to Poland nearly brought the European bison to extinction. He was an enthusiastic fan of the newly invented machine gun, which I would think was cheating, but he obviously didn't. Thousands of his kills were stuffed and hung in the imperial hunting lodges dotted about Austria-Hungary, notably Konopiste in Bohemia. The Nazis so liked the decorations that they used the lodge as a rest home for the S.S.

However, even the diligent Archduke would have had a hard time keeping up with Johann Georg, the Elector of Saxony during the first part of the seventeenth century. Nicknamed "Beer George" because of his fondness for drinking, he became Elector in 1611 when his elder brother had a heart attack after quaffing beer while in full armour. Johann Georg was one of the few rulers to see out the whole of the 1618-48 Thirty Years War, spending his time drinking, hunting and trying to avoid fighting. Between 1611 and 1653 he registered some 113,629 kills, which is impressive if you don't have a machine gun to help you.

Walter Blotscher

Monday 1 April 2013

APRIL FOOL'S DAY

1 April is April Fool's Day, when people traditionally come up with ridiculous, but plausible, stories. As such, it is not a very good day for blogging, since nobody will take what I write seriously. So I won't.

Walter Blotscher