NewYear, the 3rd

It has a little bit of a third New Years Celebration in a row: first to 2020, then the year of the rat and finally Brexit. a commemorative coin, a celebratory speech and surely for many some form of hangover feeling …

Of course this date is a fake – and it is impossible to assess history before it actually happened. What we just witnessed is not more than another stage of long process. Still, it is a crucial one. I will not try to make an analysis of it. However, three points are worthwhile to be mentioned.

I.

Let’s start with the kind of success story: it is the extremely low unemployment rate on the island. According to The Economist we see in unemployment rate of 3.8 percent. So Brexit is already now a success? The Economist – and mind it isThe Economist – highlights of the following context:
* A low unemployment rate
* Young people sticking to their job and not ready for change
* And the stability translates into stable low wages.

In the labour market, loyalty does not pay: shifting jobs tends to be a good way of getting a salary boost. In 2017 the average pay rise for a worker staying with the same employer was just 1.1% after inflation compared with 5.4% for someone making a change.

And

You might also expect supposedly flighty 20-somethings to be eager movers. Yet younger workers remain more wedded to their current jobs than they were before the financial crisis of 2007-09. There is a similar trend in other rich countries, but it is particularly pronounced in Britain. Young Britons’ reluctance to move may be part of the explanation for their dismal wage-growth. In the five years after the crash, they experienced a larger cut in real wages than their older colleagues.

Success? Things are open for discussion.

II.

I do not recall the time and occasion of the proposal of a “EU-free day”: all fees and taxes due, all regulations and bureaucratic procedures to be accepted -of course, everybody having the own national money in the pockets. Difficult to imagine? Trying to buy a computer, produced by a global enterprise, while you are residing in China. Go to the website of HP, DELL, xyz – at least in one respect they are global: you cannot find what you. It is a language problem, of course; however in this case the language problem is the fundamentals of the computer you buy are geared too the country where you buy  in this case China. It may be even more obvious, if ui look at the Huawei mobile phones: for the Western market they have all are Google preinstalled while it is banned here. Then you may try going to a European site, ask for instance a friend in Germany or France to buy a laptop with an Italian keyboard. Please do not forget, to send a train ticket or flight billet – such keyboard will not be available in Gemany or France. As you will be more lucky if you go to the Internet. – there’s a good deal of deceiving – anyway we may speak of a veil of globalisation. It is topped by Apple, of course: they offer you to come into the shop, nowadays called store. You can go there and they will help you going to the Italian website and buy the computer online. The last hurdle: you will need the codice fiscale (the Italian tax number), an address in Italy and a friend who sends it from there to you. Writing the last hurdle, does not mean that the curtain falls: instead of saving  the VAT, you will have to pay import tax – on top of the money paid for transport.

III.

Did you ever have the spiderweb apps? Well, it’s just another expression for a broken screen. It had been a little bit of a nuisance, so I decided to get repaired. Is so often, Guo Min helped me, suggesting:
Don’t go to the high-street. There is the small workshop – actually as well on the high-street, the Lushan road, but it is kind of hidden – under the rarely used stair case. It is such cheaper.
So, one day, in the evening when I went home, I stopped there and asked the guy if he could repair the screen. Kind of spontaneously he replied

No!

I walked on, not thinking much about it anymore. But then, a few hundred metres further, there had been another “under-the-stairs-shop” – here it a lady and she looked is a phone, checked a number, look something up in the catalogue and on the Internet, finally saying

Yes, that’s no problem. It will take about three hours
—

Great, I’ll be back tomorrow.  what time do you start business?
—
10:30

– and that had been the time I arrived there the following day.She looked at me, shook her head:ù

I am sorry, but I cannot repair it – it is a foreign phone.

—

Hum,

I look at the brand-name, saying:

Foreign? But it is the leading Chinese brand, isn’t it?

—

Yes, indeed, but you bought it abroad, right?

—

Yes, that is a fact. And of course I know what you mean ….

So I trotted away, not thinking about it any further. Another day Lv visited me, saw the broken screen and she said

I sorted out, don’t worry.

A couple of keystrokes on the phone:

It is a workshop nearby – he will still do it if we go there now. He won’t close the shop then.

So we went there, about one hour later the screen had been replaced –  but the brand-name, ingrained in it, had not been the original – just that of the main competitor.

IV.

Now, don’t believe I will let you go. In actual fact, we are arriving now at the most exciting point the the tragicomedy. according to the one article in teleSUR

For proponents, Brexit is a dream “independence day” for the U.K. escaping what they cast as a doomed German-dominated project that is failing its 500 million population.

And another article is headlined 

Scots: Leave a light on for Scotland because we will be back

Indeed, a mess, isn’t it. As outlined earlier, and anecdotical, there are truly “good points”, favoring the EU. And we should not forget that the British orientation for independence is prevailing since a very long time – some will surely remember the fear and hostility around the tunnel; for others this remembrance day may be about the various anti-social, even anti-human(e) attitudes. I remember e.g. the way of dealing with the BSE-issue. I remember one Council meeting – the British refusing to accept a “package” (it contained a major social initiative) unless the discontinuation BSE-trade limitation would be included into the package. A very sad example of ignorance of human rights. The EU could you at least mean some control of such imperialist, anti-humanist, most egoistic behaviour. One of these successive stories, although not especially concerning, is the progress in the area of gender equality –  though this is still limited, it is undeniable. Nevertheless, there is the trap we easily forget consciously ignore: in actual this European Union is a project of the centre-states, Germany still playing a leading role. And the historical comedy – or is it a parody – is, that Scotland – or to be precise the Scottish independentistas – want to counter British colonialism by joining the Franco-Germanic imperialism. – This could, indeed, emerge one day as  real tragedy of the commons. 

*****

Brexit – a kind of third New Years eve and New Year … . One of the visible similarities consists in the fact, there is much ado about it, a lot of it is for us, as people from all ways of life, just like a pool with many bubbles: some shallow waters, dangerous currents, and of course stretches of smooth sailing and many paired with traps. But I suppose in the end, it is just about opening another web, and we will be easily victims of the spider – on both sides of the border, not so much both sides of the classes. though there will surely be a hangover for everybody.

It reminds me of in some strange way of something – when theGerman Basic Law had been discussed, Kurt Bachmann said the German Bundestag something like the following

Although we are going to vote this act today, you will see the we will be the strongest defenders at some stage in the future.

Indeed, so it came. And so it seems to be with the institutionalized Europe: although we had been fundamentally critical about it, about THIS Europe, we are now those who are defending it in the most pronounced way.