The unmentionable downsides

Sticking with the Berlin Wall theme, I've just noticed an article published on the Guardian website a couple of days ago lamenting the collapse of communist East Germany. The author takes a predictable roasting for her efforts in the comments section, which I'm not entirely comfortable about. Of course her conclusion is wrong - the upsides of German reunification far outweighed the downsides. And more pertinently, it was the East German electorate themselves who freely chose that path - right or wrong - in the election of 1990, the first time they had been given the chance to choose their own destiny in decades. But it nevertheless shouldn't become unsayable to point out that the downsides existed. Indeed, there were horrors right across the former eastern bloc countries as a result of the end of communism - economic collapse, the abrupt withdrawal of familiar social safety-nets, a nosedive in Russian male life expectancy, and perhaps worst of all, the unimaginably brutal Balkan wars of the 1990s.

The film Goodbye Lenin concludes by offering a fairytale reconciliation between the west and east - an alternative reality in which the Berlin Wall is opened to allow refugees from the west to escape the capitalist rat-race. The point being that the reality of the oppressive socialist state was a grotesque parody of the ideals it had supposedly been founded on - but that those ideals on their own merits nevertheless remained inspiring. The trouble with the 'post-ideological world' that the aftermath of 1989 has bequeathed us (in truth that simply means a world in which most politicians are camped in the same narrow ideological space) is that there appears to be no ideals left at all - our leaders believe in nothing other than competitive managerialism. It was deliciously encapsulated in that moment when Tony Blair (as recently as 1994 an avowed socialist himself) was asked by one of his own backbenchers to provide a brief summary of his political philosophy. Blair responded by wittering on about investing in new equipment for the health service.

Mr Barroso, tear down this wall

Twenty years and one day after the Berlin Wall was breached, it's sobering to read this assessment from April by Belarussian journalist Maryna Rakhlei that the wall never fell, it just moved a little to the east. The paradox is that the restrictions of movement for people on the eastern side of the divide are now primarily imposed by the authorities in the west, ie. the Schengen zone. Rakhlei cites statistics showing that visits by Belarussians to neighbouring Poland are down by 90% since that country joined the EU, and visits to the Baltic states are down by nearly as much. Twenty years ago, of course, Belarussians could travel fairly freely to the Baltic states as they were part of the same country, the Soviet Union. It seems extraordinary that, in some places, the collapse in communism has actually led to a greater physical confinement.

Belarus itself is the closest we have in Europe to a continuation of the old eastern bloc ideology. It does not style itself a communist state, but it arguably more closely resembles one (in the pre-1989 understanding of the term) than, say, the People's Republic of China. It even maintains Soviet relics such as the KGB.

Is this a 'free hit' by-election for the SNP?

On the day back in May that it became clear the Glasgow North-east by-election was actually going to take place (yes, 'supremely confident' Labour have now been running from the constituency's voters for the same length of time there's left to go before the general election), I posted here to express my jitters. I was concerned at the past history of by-elections that had proved to be pivotal moments, and had changed the political weather. I was more than a touch uneasy that the SNP's fate at the next election might rest, as I put it, on a 'typical mad as a bucket of frogs by-election campaign'. But here we sit four days out from the Glasgow NE vote, and I can already say with confidence that is not the case. Why? Paradoxically, it's because of the prevailing narrative that this is going to be a routine Labour hold. I've no inside knowledge from the ground, so I don't know whether that's true or not, but the perception that it is true has one key effect - it's killed all interest in the contest, and there will therefore be very little interest in the result, unless there is a major surprise. Glasgow NE simply can't produce a momentum shift in public opinion without...well, a bit of publicity. This is not going to be another Glenrothes, with SNP activists having kittens on Thursday night pondering the consequences if they don't win. It's beginning to have the feel more of a Hamilton South-type contest, where a narrow defeat on a huge swing could potentially even produce a little momentum for the SNP. All thanks to the expectations game - one of the curious features of by-election campaigns. In the immortal words of Abba, you can feel like you win when you lose.

I saw a little of BBC2's 90-minute programme this evening to mark the twentieth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, which reminded us of how the crucial factor was weekly Monday demonstrations in Leipzig that grew bigger and bigger until eventually the authorities could not cope with them. I started wondering how Tom Harris reacted as he watched those demonstrators on TV twenty years ago. Doubtless he would have been busily making snide comments about how all those "students" needed to "grow up" and embrace "mature" politics. After all, nobody ever changed the world by taking to the streets, holding placards and chanting slogans - eh, Tom?

And one other thought, Tom - doesn't an irrational hatred of inconvenient political demonstrations constitute an "emotion"?