Cities of an emerging nation

Curious country, Italy. It’s where I was born. And it’s taken a while to become a country at all, though it does seem to be emerging as one now.

One of my college lecturers told us that immediately after the Second World War, only 50% of the population was bilingual in dialect and Italian. The other 50% was monolingual in dialect.

Today, however, although I don’t spend much time in the deep South, it’s my impression that wherever you go people are fluent in Italian, which has emerged as truly a national language. That’s why I feel that the country is becoming, at last, a real nation.

Even so, some of the great divisions continue to exist. As if to prove the point, after travelling to Turin on Sunday, on Monday I went to Bolzano – or Bozen. Why two names? Because it’s in the Alto Adige, way up in the Alps, but that’s also called the Südtirol, the south Tyrol. The Tyrolean Tyrol is, of course, an Austrian province.

In other words, the Alto Adige – Südtirol is a traditionally German-speaking region which was once part of Austria. There are, indeed, still local movements calling for the province to leave Italy and rejoin Austria.

Bolzano, or Bozen, flies the Italian flag alongside the region's
And has the sense to feel proud of being in the EU, too

Even so, when I was there, I heard Italian spoken in the street at least as often as German, and I’ve not yet met anyone up there who can’t speak Italian if they need to. Moreover, as in other parts of Italy, the national flag flies proudly alongside the region’s and that of the EU on public buildings.

Still, Italian unity remains slightly out of step with local emotions. There are Milanese who are clear that Africa starts at Rome. For my part, I’m convinced that Austria starts at Milan.

Perhaps I should declare an interest: I was born in Rome.

In any case, so far am I from disliking Milan that it was with great pleasure that I arrived there on Tuesday evening. It’s a spacious city, with great avenues and fine buildings, the new alongside the old testifying to the continued dynamism of the place. A dynamism reflected in the people themselves: there are crowds on the streets, laughing, chatting and enjoying themselves. It is truly a joy to visit.

It’s just that, like Austria, the city seems to lay a little too much stress, for my liking, on order and efficiency. And some of those structures are rather more imposing than completely charming. At least to my taste. I feel that some buildings in Milan or Vienna weigh rather heavily on the Earth. They’re more impressive than elegant.

Rome isn’t quite as clean as one might like, the streets aren’t quite as free of potholes as one might hope, and the atmosphere is just a little more chaotic than an Austrian, say, might wish.

It’s also pretty corrupt. That has nothing to do with whichever party’s in power. Every party that ever secures the governance of Rome can be sure to have scandal pour down on its head within a couple of years or so. And, to my knowledge, always with justification.

But, boy, does Rome have soul. And charm, too. Taking the edge off the awe.

I realise that I may be alone in regarding Milan as Austrian. You may, in fact, find it slightly odd, because I view Bozen, which some residents want to make Austrian, as turning increasingly into Italian Bolzano. And, I have to admit, it isn’t just because a city’s in the North of Italy that I strikes me as Austrian. That’s the discovery I’ve made in Turin, a city that seduces me more every time I go there.

One of the many arcades in Turin

It’s a city of gateways and arcades. And along the arcades are cafés, restaurants and shops, each rivalling the next for charm and elegance. Where Milan seems focused on modernity and a pressurised existence, Turin preserves an older, quieter, more relaxed and, above all, more lived-in style. Lived-in, I should add, by people who know what it is to live pleasantly and in comfort.

One of the many gateways

And it has its amusing paradoxes too. Though it belongs to a country which has long been a Republic, it clings on at least in name to its royal past – after all, this was where the kings of Italy came from when the country still had kings. For instance, I had a wonderful cappuccino in the ‘Cafeteria del Re’, the King’s Cafeteria, complete with the symbol of a crown.

The king's cafeteria
Attractive place. Good coffee too

It’s not clear to me that a King would ever have frequented anything quite as common as a café, especially one that calls itself a cafeteria, but hey, something that’s royal in name only, with no king in sight, it’s precisely as royal as I like things to be. But then I’m a republican, as well as a democrat, a statement I hope will cause some confusion among my American friends.

Anyway, I was happy to be back in that fine city and confirm yet again that there is real charm in the north of Italy. A different kind of soul, more discreet and self-possessed than Rome’s, but soul nonetheless. It’s lovely. Perhaps my second favourite Italian city – Venice and Florence naturally being in a class of their own.

The taxi driver who brought me in from the airport told me that Turin was the most French city in Italy. Perhaps that explains my preference. Because France is the country of my second citizenship, whose passport I’m proud to hold.

And, I have to admit, I prefer it to Austria…

Italy: African, Austrian, neither or both?

Africa, Northern Italians tell me, starts at Rome.

Ah, my native city. English though I am, I always feel a certain sense of homecoming when I return to Rome. But I can see what the Northerners mean. The streets are potholed, the pavements are filthy, the traffic noisy and congested. There are certainly aspects of Rome that feel more appropriate to, say Lagos.

Of course, Romans say that Africa starts at Naples. I don't know what Neapolitans say. I can't really say I know that noble city. Perhaps, with no obvious metropolis south of them, they say that Africa starts at the African coastline, which would be less amusing though it would have the merit of displaying more geographical sense.

For my part, I'm always inclined to say that Austria starts at Milan.

Just to clarify, I realise that Austria is a fine country, with glorious Alpine scenery and gem-like cities set in it at one end, the majestic if slightly ponderous city of Vienna at the other, with the Danube - not, to be honest, really all that blue - flowing through it. But my comment about Milan is more about certain other characteristics: a degree of self-satisfaction, a shortness of self-deprecatory humour or, to put it another way, an inclination to take oneself too seriously, to say nothing about a somewhat impersonal efficiency a little short of warmth.

Of course, Milan's a lot further south. So in a sense, it's rather like Austria with better weather, the same remark I frequently make about Australia and England. Not that the Australians thank me for it, and I don't expect the Milanese would either.

Passport queue at Milan's Linate airport
As seen by Gianfranco Repetto (@gfr70)
who suffered even longer than I did

My latest trip to Milan challenged both my beliefs about the city. In some respects, it's very much in Italy. Though, on this occasion, I found the weather far from Italian: I turned up to cold under grey skies, with rain bucketing down. Honestly, I could have stayed in England and it would have been no worse. It was a relief to get inside the terminal building at Linate airport, though that's where the city began to show itself to be far more Italian - or perhaps African - than Rome ever is. Fiumicino airport outside Rome works well. Passengers move rapidly from plane to passport control to baggage retrieval. It's a smooth process. The Austrians would be proud.

At Linate, I found myself in a twenty-five minute queue to get through passport control. Now, that's partly my own country's fault: if Britain in its xenophobia hadn't refused to join the Schengen area, we would have been able to enter Italy without even showing a passport, so I'd have sailed through to the baggage area.

But even without the Schengen benefit, there are other European nations which have passport-reading machines in place. In a rather wonderfully African way - I've had some epic adventures trying to cross African frontiers - we just stood in a queue that was glacier-like in its movement, while the two policemen on duty methodically, systematically and ponderously checked two or three hundred passengers' passports one by one.

The baggage hall was a mess, too, with much of its ceiling down and a great deal of scaffolding up, all part of a major refit, apparently. I wonder if they're going to instal passport readers?

Several carousels were out of service. It came as no surprise when I couldn't find my case on any of the few still running. I went to one baggage information counter, only to be told to go to another. Where I stood and waited for a further unconscionable time, even though there was only one person ahead of me in the queue. The woman behind the counter was full of goodwill, but her computer system wasn't that functional, and she seemed to have to record much of the information on paper.

What made it worse was that the man in front of me was Norwegian. Neither he nor she spoke particularly good English, which made it particularly entertaining to listen to a long conversation about just how to record one of the letters in his name, the distinctly Scandinavian ø.

Fortunately, however, she turned out to be friendly and helpful, as I discovered when it was finally my turn to be helped. In fact, after a few questions to establish the basic facts, she asked me, "are you sure your bag's not there? The system shows that it was on the plane."

I went back to the carousels and - picture my joy - there was my bag at last! It was a matter of moments to go back and thank the lady for her help, before getting a taxi to whisk me through the sodden streets to my hotel and a meeting for which I was, in the end, only a few minutes late.

The scene outside the hotel - as wet as England

The hotel was full of strangely dressed people. Elaborate hairstyles. Eccentric clothes. Heavy makeup. I wondered for a moment what sort of a hotel I'd drifted into. But it turns out that it was Milan fashion week. What I was seeing wasn't people preparing for a Halloween-themed fancy-dress party but the chic classes in what I suppose one has to call creations.

An elegant lady heading out into the rain
of Milan Fashion Week

Since fashion, like football and the English hallmark warm beer, is something that has rather passed me by, the elegance left me more than a little cool. I just felt sorry for anyone who, having spent so much time and probably no insignificant amount of money to make themselves look that way, had to go out into the rain to get to the next show they were visiting. It was amusing to see how difficult it could be to get through a revolving door with an open umbrella. I hoped for their sake that they'd find their taxi journeys more Austrian than African (I've had some memorable taxi trips in Africa too), since I had now seen how Milan, as I had now learned that Milan as well as being Austrian in weather, could also be African in service efficiency.

Although, to be quite honest, I do have to qualify what I said about my missing case. It does occur to me, in retrospect, that it may have been on the carousel the whole time. That I just didn't see it in my flustered state after the frustration of the passport queue.

But, hey, I'm not going to admit that. It'd spoil the story.

Birds of a Brexit feather?

Birds of a feather flock together, they say. Or to put it the way the French do, tell me who you hang out with, and I’ll tell you who you are.

Erdoğan, Trump and May. Birds of a feather? 

Germany has just elected a president of the centre-left, backed by both the two biggest parties, Angela Merkel’s Christian Democrats, and her coalition partners, the Social Democrats.

It was interesting to be in France last week. Support for the Conservative candidate for the presidential election in May has collapsed, following the publication of revelations about his use of nearly a million euros of public money to employ as political assistants his wife (who claims she did no work or him) and his children (who weren’t qualified for the work they were ostensibly asked to do. Meanwhile, the far-right candidate, Marine le Pen, may we have seen her support peak, at a shockingly high level – perhaps as high as 30% – but with a growing probability that she’ll struggle to raise it any higher and will therefore miss her chance at the presidency. This has raised hopes that  a moderate candidate of the centre left, Emmanuel Macron, may take the prize.

Following on from the defeat of the hard right candidate for the Austrian presidency, it begins to feel as though the unappetising xenophobic nationalism that has gripped Trump’s America and Brexit Britain may not after all be unstoppable. It may, indeed, already have reached its high-water mark.

There’s a glimmer of hope in the darkness, then. A sense that the infection that has been poisoning our societies can be resisted. A growing feeling, even, that Europe can pull together, stand united, and uphold the kind of values we thought, in pre-Trump days, were secure in the democracies.

Sadly, for those nations where the populist currents have already wreaked their toxic harm, that doesn’t make life any easier. Facing a cold, bleak world out there, Britain is having to go, cap in hand, to some dubious friends. In order that it can leave the EU and turns its back on the old friends who may soon be making a stand for the principles we previously believed Britons held dear.

Theresa May was proud to be the first foreign leader to visit Donald Trump. That’s the man who, on grounds of security against terrorism, has been trying to exclude foreigners from seven countries which have never been the source of an attack on American soil. Foiled by the judiciary in his first attempt to impose that diktat, he has resorted to attacks on judges worthy of autocrats anywhere. He’s not keen on journalists who dare to criticise him either.

His visitor, it seems, isn’t that keen on them either. It has been revealed that May’s government is planning legislation against whistle-blowers that threatens them, and journalists who publish the information they provide, with prison. Another hallmark of the authoritarian regime.

Which leads neatly into the tale of May’s next foreign visit, to Turkey. There she called on Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, the strong man who hasn’t merely attacked the judiciary in words, but has dismissed 125,000 people from their jobs, including police and judges, on no better grounds than a denunciation by anonymous informers. Indeed, he even has 45,000 in gaol facing terrorist charges.

Trump and Erdogan. These are the people Brexit Britain has to hang out with.

Does that tell us what Britain’s becoming? Because that feels like a pretty dismal picture of the nation.

Crossing borders

It’s curious how two business trips provided me with two angles on the same issue. With only one conclusion.

On the first trip, I visited a couple of hospitals in New Jersey. To get there, I flew to Philadelphia, which isn’t in New Jersey, so I was a bit surprised. I shouldn’t have been: if I’d been better informed on the geography I’d have known that Philadelphia is right on the Pennsylvania-New Jersey border and the hospitals I was going to were close by.

Nothing more natural, then. My destination was in a different state, but the same nation. And yet, it might not have been. In the early years of the United States, that name was definitely a plural – people talked of “these” United States. Only later did USA become a singular noun, as the federation increasingly subsumed the states.

And yet I suspect that had the states remained separate, I would nonetheless have flown to Philadelphia to reach southern New Jersey. The Americans are pragmatists. Their pragmatism would have demanded open borders and easy travel across them for business.

In the second trip, I attended a meeting of Italian doctors in the Alpine resort of Cortina d’Ampezzo. It’s in the Veneto, the province of Venice, and perhaps it would have made sense to fly there and drive up. Somehow, though, I didn’t feel like doing that and taking the long haul up from the plain into the mountains.

Perhaps I just didn’t like the idea of a plane to a plain.

So instead I flew to a mountain airport, at Innsbruck. That however isn’t even in Italy. It’s in Austria. Hiring a car there to drive to Italy simply wasn’t a problem, though. Indeed, within half an hour of leaving the airport I was driving over the spectacular countryside of the Brenner Pass and crossing the border into Italy. However, I only knew that I’d entered another country because a road sign told me: no one flagged me down, no one checked my papers, no one made any more fuss about that border than about the one between Pennsylvania and New Jersey.

The change in language might have been striking, but not even that was entirely the case. Innsbruck is in the Austrian Province of Tirol. The other side of the border was the Province which has a double name, Süd-Tirol or Alto Adige, with the first, German name, given before the second, Italian one. What was true of the Province was true of the towns, such as Kiens/Chienes, Brixen/Bressanone and several gloriously literal ones, such as Neunhäusern (literally nine houses)/Nove Case (I leave the translation as an exercise to you).

Frozen Alpine lake:
Lago di Landro also known as the Dürrensee

Cortina, though, is just out of that area and into Italian-Italy. Even there, however, there are memories of the long association, and the tensions, with the Austrian neighbour to the north. The hotel where I stayed proudly displayed a portrait of Austrian Emperor Charles I (or actually ‘Karl der Erste’, in German). Not far away there was a memorial to General Antonio Cantore, who met his death while in command of a Division of ‘Alpini’ (Italian Alpine troops), struck down by an Austrian bullet in 1915.

That was during the First World War which brought to an end the Austro-Hungarian Empire he’d been fighting with, as one of its consequences, the detachment of Süd-Tirol from Austria and its incorporation as Alto Adige into Italy.

The monument to General Cantore
at Cortina d'Ampezzo

Today there are, no doubt, still Austrians and maybe even South Tirolese who regard that incorporation as an injustice and would like it reversed. It isn’t going to happen, though. Why bother, after all? If an Innsbrucker wants to visit Sankt Lorenz/San Lorenzo in Sebato, she jumps in a car and goes there. No Alpino division bars her journey. No Austrian sharpshooter is tasked with killing its commander.

It’s rather like Pennsylvania and New Jersey. It strikes me, at least, that things are altogether better that way. Free travel, open borders, easy communication. It feels better than walls and bullets.

That leaves me troubled by one question. Given all that, why on earth has a majority of my countrymen opted not to support the organisation that makes all that possible, the EU, by remaining a member? Why has it decided instead to withdraw and prefer barriers to passes?

And why on earth have the Americans elected a man who specifically wants to build a wall along the southern border, instead of seeking solutions in good neighbourliness and openness?

Deadly centenary

A hundred years ago today, nearly 60,000 British young men – not for the most part soldiers, but civilians in uniform – who had been reasonably fit and well in the morning, were injured or dead in the evening.

Nearly 20,000 of that number had been killed. It remains the worst single day's losses by the British Army in its long and not always glorious, but usually bloody, history. The French, heavily engaged on another part of the front, at Verdun, were less involved but still lost 1500. The Germans, on the other side, lost 10,000 – 12,000.

This was the first day of the Battle of the Somme. It was the British Army’s first massive engagement of the First World War. In the end, the battle would last another 140 days and cost 1.3 million lives. Both the French and the British lost 400,000 and the Germans 500,000.

To set that 1.3 million in context, the English city of Birmingham has a population of 1.1 million, the German city of Munich 1.26 million and the French city of Marseille 800,000. The four-month battle had the equivalent effect of wiping out the entire population of any of those cities, and in the case of France, you could chuck in Lyon too.

Achievements of the Somme offensive

At its greatest extent, the Allied advance was five miles.

It was unfortunate that Lord Kitchener, probably the only British officer whose authority might have imposed a different plan from the one carried out, was drowned at sea. But even Douglas Haig, who had direct responsibility for the offensive, wasn’t anxious to attack on the Somme. He preferred an offensive near Ypres in Belgium, where the Germans were far less well dug in. He got his way a year later, in what came to be known as the Second Battle of Ypres, by which time the Germans had much improved their defences, so the battle was again a massacre and failure.

At the Somme, it didn’t help that the seven-day artillery barrage that preceded the offensive had little effect on the German trenches of even the barbed wire in front of them. Indeed, because the shells cut some paths through the barbed wire, it gave the Germans a clear indication of where to concentrate their fire when the British came.

It also didn’t help that the barrage stopped ten minutes before the assault started. Ten minutes were more than enough for the Germans to emerge from their deep dugouts and be ready to greet the British advance with the deadliest of fire.

Still, the battle wasn’t an entire failure. One of the aims was to relieve the pressure on the French at Verdun, and it achieved that. But did it achieve anything else?

Should the Germans or the British govern Tanganyka? Or isn’t it better to leave it to the Tanzanians?

Should the Germans or the Japanese hold on Tsingtao in China? Or is it best to leave it to the Chinese, so that the only legacy of that foreign occupation is quite a pleasant, light, German-style beer served in Chinese restaurants?

Is it appropriate that a government in Vienna should run Prague? Or could it be left to the Czechs?

For these things, the civilians in uniform died or were maimed. I suspect few people feel today that the cause they died for was worth the sacrifice. And the worst of it is that twenty years later, their heirs were called on to fight out the conflict again.

Leaving the only real lesson to learn today, the hundredth anniversary of that great killing, is that we should never, but never, do it again.

Adapting to post-imperial life: hard for Austria. Just as hard for Britain.

It’s always a joy to make a new friendship. I particularly enjoyed meeting a new Austrian colleague the other day. In conversations covering a wide range of subjects – work, naturally, but much else besides – he struck me by his intelligence, culture and thoughtfulness. Among other matters, on Austria itself.

The country entered the century as the dominant partner in the dual monarchy of Austria-Hungary. That monarchy, or rather Empire, ceased to exist after the First World War, where it made the mistake of fighting on the wrong side. That’s not wrong in any moral sense, simply wrong in the sense that it was the side that lost.

Now many years ago my wife and I visited Hungary, and we were struck by the liveliness of resentment over the loss of territory that component of the Empire suffered after the war. To give some of the peoples within the old borders of Hungary their own countries, Hungary was deprived of 72% of its territory; because borders are never neat, 31% of ethnic Hungarians found themselves outside Hungary – a total of 3.3 million people, in such countries as Czechoslovakia or Romania. 80 years on, there was still considerable bitterness on the subject.

So it was interesting talking about Austria. In 1914, at the outbreak of war, the Empire covered a population of 52.8 million. After the post-war settlements, the newly separate nation of Austria had just 6.5 million. In other words, it had lost seven out of eight people over which it had previous ruled.

The new dispensation required some radical mindset adjustments. The view an Austrian might have had of the nation’s place in the world no longer corresponded to reality. To take just one obvious change, the old Empire had been a major naval power, but modern Austria is landlocked. Above all, though, Austria no longer had an imperial role.

An Austrian fleet? Not a sight we’d see any more...
Austro-Hungarian WW1 warships at Pola, today in Croatia

Indeed, it was one of the smaller countries of Europe.

If Hungary had such difficulty adapting to these changes that it was still struggling with them eight decades on, one can imagine that the re-examination Austrians had to undergo would have left them deeply perturbed and confused. There were serious internal conflicts within Austria between the wars, leading to the emergence of extremist movements, and preparing the ground for the eventual Nazi annexation.

All this reminded me of a statement the late left-wing Labour MP Tony Benn once made: “the last colony of the British Empire will be England.”

We too in Britain had to come to terms with a post-imperial life. It hasn’t always been easy. Nor is the process complete: the Iraq War showed a continuing desire to pursue a far bigger role on the world stage than Britain’s real power justifies. At least Austria has reconciled to its position as a prosperous but small European state. That has made it a fully integrated member of the European Union.

With a referendum on EU membership due on 23 June, that’s not an adjustment that Britain has fully made yet.

Business travel: the glamour rediscovered

I’d forgotten how glamorous international business travel was, not having done any for a few years.

Fortunately, as I sit at a departure gate in Vienna airport with the prospect of another five hours travel to get home in the small hours, I can console myself for the renewed glamour by remembering the pleasure I’ve had from spending time with a bunch of colleagues: Germans, Austrians, a New Zealander and even an Italian who looked after me brilliantly: he it was who met me at the airport and insisted at the dining table in our hotel last night that there was no point not taking the whole bottle of wine and only having a glass each – we’d certainly finish it. As, indeed, we did.

But that was about the peak of glamour. Otherwise I took a taxi from the airport to an airless meeting room avoiding, in a city full of splendour, any sight worthy of note apart from the Danube (which you really can’t miss and, in my experience, is never blue at Vienna).

From the stifling meeting we got a taxi to the hotel, which we had failed to choose strategically: it took us nearly an hour to do get to it, 20 kilometres away. At one point, we even passed a sign telling us we were entering Vienna. I had no trouble believing we’d left the city, since we’d spent an unconscionable time struggling through traffic jams on motorways to get to that point, and we could have been just about anywhere.

That bottle of wine in the hotel wasn’t an indulgence, but a relief.

This morning we have another forty-minute taxi ride, this time for seven kilometres through the morning rush hour. That took us to another airless room where we spent the next six hours, bar a break for a canteen lunch, in another meeting.

As it happens, the meeting went well. I’d been sent out there because I’d had the misfortune of winning an unenviable, and undeserved, reputation for being a fluent German speaker. It’s one thing to be able to trade a couple of sentences and sound plausible with a colleague met in a corridor; it’s another to stand up in front of a meeting and sound as though you were competent. As my wife likes to ask me, “how can you have spent so long learning German, and even living out there, to still speak it so badly?”

Still, I got through the ordeal, by dint of judicious calls on my Austrian and German colleagues to field any question I felt too hard to handle. That was pretty well any question more complicated than “did you have a good trip in?” I’d learned the word for traffic jam, “Stau”, so I was fine with that.

Fielding the questions in that way had a double benefit: I could dodge the bullet, and even look like a real team player.

We still hadn’t seen any sights, apart from the Danube, which was visible from the conference room window. Though still not blue, it looked increasingly attractive as the meeting rolled on and the atmosphere became stuffier.

The Danube from the terrace of the bar
Majestic and fine – but who ever decided it was blue?

In the end, a small group of us did go for a drink down by the side of the river to celebrate a day that had avoided disasters. That was fun. And, as well as the pleasure of some congenial colleagues, I did also manage to have an Apfelstrüdel yesterday and a Wienerschnitzel at the airport just now, so, hey, I do at least have the sense of having been in Austria.

But glamorous? Decidedly not.

Syrian refugees, Jewish refugees, and inadequate responses.

David Cameron has declared, with great solemnity, that Britain would “live up to its moral responsibility” by allowing in some of the refugees from Syria.

He then announced that living up to that responsibility meant committing the country to taking twelve refugees a day. Out of the four million that have already fled the fighting in Syria.

That reminded me of a wonderful, late friend of ours. Bob was born a Jew in Vienna in the twenties. He was there as German troops entered Austria in 1938, and Hitler declared the country part of the Third Reich. So he had the privilege of living as a Jew under Nazi rule for a year or two.

Jews being forced to clean pavements in Vienna under the Nazis

Like most Jews around him, he spent the time trying to get out before it was too late. Eventually, he received permission to travel to Britain with one of his sisters, a rescue for which he would be profoundly grateful for the rest of his life.

What excited far less gratitude was the sights he saw daily in the queue for visas outside the British consulate. I’m only quoting him and don’t have independent evidence that this happened, but as he told it, officials from the consulate would walk up and down the queue and offer priority treatment to anyone who had the means to pay for it. Pay them, that is, not Britain.

Worse than the corruption, however, was that though his sister and he were saved, none of the other members of his family were. Father, mother, the other siblings, his extended family – they all stayed behind and they were all murdered.

Britain had many reasons for not accepting all these Jewish refugees. There wasn’t enough housing. Funds were tight. We had enough problems of our own.

But how does that stack up against the prospect of being subjected to murder in cold blood, in many cases with extreme cruelty beforehand? How does one measure the impact of a refusal to take these people – people, I stress the word, humans like ourselves – against the practical problem of finding housing, of squeezing out a little money to feed them, of finding it in ourselves to offer them some kind of welcome?

Cameron talked about morality. He knows there are already four million refugees from Syria. Taking twelve a day, a total of 20,000 over five years – 0.5% – seems a little low in comparison. A bit like taking Bob and his sister and leaving all the rest of his family to be fed to the gas chambers by the Nazis. And with so few being taken from so many, just imagine the new opportunities for corruption.

There is certainly morality at stake here. But only as a measure of how woefully short Cameron’s government is falling.

A fairy tale with a touch of reality: not sparing the rod, to make the Prince

Remember all those fairy tales we’d hear as children, with their courageous, handsome princes, who’d suffer a bit (perhaps living as a frog for a while) before everything worked out just fine?

It strikes me that adults ought to be able to cope with truer tales of princes and their changing fortunes. I happen to have one right here. I hope you enjoy it.

Once upon a time, there lived a Prince whose father never went to war, but was still called “the soldier King.” That was because he’d built a wonderful army that could have defeated the forces of any of his neighbours, had he ever used it. But he didn’t.

One day, the King told his son, “I want you to be a fine soldier too. You’re going to learn to be strong and courageous and lead other soldiers.”

So he gave him a good beating in front of the courtiers, because he’d let himself be thrown from a bolting horse, or had put on gloves on a cold day, or whatever.

Like so many fathers, the King also gave his son toys to play with. Toy soldiers. Only these were alive – children, like the Prince, a whole regiment for him to train.

Sadly, the Prince had certain behaviour traits that the King his father didn’t particularly like. He regarded them as “effeminate.” To help his son overcome such terrible drawbacks, he would beat him from time to time or point out what a girl he was, to the other courtiers.

When he was eighteen, and a proper soldier in the grown-up army, the Prince met another officer, nine years older, he could get really close to. They used to write poetry and play the flute together. In fact, they got so close that one day the Prince told him he couldn’t stand life at court any more and intended to run away to another country where his uncle was King. At first, his friend begged him not to, but when he realised that there was no way of talking him out of his plan, he went along with it.

Unfortunately, the plan was betrayed and the young men were arrested. As officers, they had to face courts martial. The court refused to judge the Prince, saying it didn’t have the authority, but it sentenced his friend to life imprisonment for desertion.

“Prison? Not good enough,” bellowed the King, “chop off his head.”

"Off with his head," cried the King

So they did, and the Prince had to watch until he fainted. When he emerged from three days of despair, the King put him in gaol for a few months, but decided he didn’t need to suffer severe punishment – perhaps I should say further severe punishment – so exiled him to a castle in a cold northern region. That suited the Prince, who collected a nice library, and lots of friends (all men). He started writing, poetry and philosophy, and made friends with the greatest poet of the time, who was also a philosopher.

He wrote a great book about how a ruler should be honest and virtuous, and not at all like the nasty Kings of the past. One can guess that they included his father.

Then his dad finally died, and the young Prince took the throne himself. It was a wonderful moment. At last, a philosopher would be King, and rule for the good of humanity, cultivating the arts and the sciences, and building a land of peace, plenty and pleasure.

Alas, it was not to be.

He wrote at once to his friend, the philosopher. 

“You know that book about how rulers should be virtuous? Could you please make sure it doesn’t get published after all?”

Sadly, it was too late to stop it appearing.

In the same letter, the Prince, who was now King, also mentioned that he was adding a few more battalions to his father’s wonderful and unused army. And then – he used it. When a woman came to the throne of the next door country, he decided that would lead to so much dissension that he could nip in and take one of her juiciest provinces. So he did.

But he kept the flute going and the poetry. And had fun with his friends (all men). His dad had made him marry, but he left his wife in the capital to run the official court (which she did rather well), while he went to a nice palace he’d built some miles away and enjoyed himself with his own court of like-minded friends.

The philosopher came too, but he was a rather important man himself and didn’t like dancing to the King’s tune. So in time he ran away, and was arrested by the King, just like the King had been arrested when he was a Prince. At least the philosopher wasn’t executed. After some uncomfortable weeks, he was allowed to leave.

The other friends discovered they could enjoy themselves splendidly, just as long as they enjoyed doing exactly what the King wanted. Though some of the time he wasn’t there, as he became highly effective at killing lots of his enemies, using the army built by his father the Soldier King, who never soldiered. The son proved rather good at soldiering, much to the annoyance of his neighbours.

A fine tale, isn’t it? And sadly rather more real than the ones we listened to as kids.

The Soldier King was Frederick William I of Prussia. His son was Frederick II, who after his first war decided he’d like to be called “the Great”, so of course he was. The decapitated officer was Hans Hermann von Katte. The uncle was George I of England. The deserted wife was Elisabeth Christine of Brunswick-Bevern. She stayed in Berlin while Frederick lived in his palace of Sans Souci (“No worries”) in Potsdam. The philosopher and poet was Voltaire. Maria Theresa was the Empress of Austria who lost Silesia to Frederick.

History doesn’t record whether many of them lived happily ever after.

Fritz der Große playing the flute

Rosenkranz as entertaining as Guildenstern

Austrian politics provides wonderful entertainment for the uninvolved spectator.

A few years ago we had the flamboyant Jörg Haider. As leader of the hard right Austrian People’s Party, he turned it into a national force before not so much leaving it as storming out in a temper to found another even harder right-wing organisation. He naturally stood for everything that was pure and orthodox and traditional – white, Christian, European, German-speaking. On the other hand, he kept it quiet that he was gay, something that emerged after his death, an event lamented only by a lover who at least had the guts to come out of the closet and mourn his partner publicly.

The loss of Haider left a terrible gap on the European stage. It’s now been filled by Barbara Rosenkranz, candidate for President from the same Austrian People’s Party in which he made his name.

It would be great if she could find herself a running mate called Guildenstern, since Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are dead is one of my favourite plays. Though it wouldn’t really be appropriate: the play features two rather inoffensive and quite attractive characters to whom everything seems to happen, evoking the sympathy of the onlooker. Nothing like Austrian Freedom Party people.

The one point on which I, worryingly for me, actually agreed with Rosenkranz was in her opposition to laws against Holocaust Denial, as exist in Germany and Austria. I find it terribly worrying when we try to ban beliefs or statements of belief: at worst, such a ban seems to breach freedom of thought, at the very least it breaches freedom of speech. And let’s not forget that, as Søren Kierkegaard pointed out, ‘people demand freedom of speech as a compensation for the freedom of thought which they seldom use’. I certainly insist on the right to talk at length about matters without necessarily knowing, or thinking, much about them. One of the great pleasures in life, I feel.

In any case, why should we care whether people think, or claim to think, that the Holocaust never happened? To me it sounds about as sensible as claiming that the Roman Empire never happened. After all, I never actually saw the Roman Empire any more than I saw the Holocaust, and all I have as evidence that it existed is documents and remains, all of which you could believe had been specifically created to fool us into thinking the Roman Empire had existed. If you’re sufficiently paranoid or sufficiently dumb.

As Tom Cruise points out in A few good men, stupidity isn’t against the law. Nor should it be.

It’s frightening to find I agree on anything with a representative of the Austrian People’s Party, so it was a tremendous relief to read that she’d dropped her objection to the Holocaust Denial law. She wants to be President. She realised that changing her position was the price – like Henry IV of France converting from Protestantism to Catholicism in order to take the throne, pointing out that Paris was worth a Mass, she understands that nothing so trivial as a fundamental belief ought to stand in the way of access to high office.

So Austrian politics continues to entertain and to edify. In this case, it offers a powerful vindication of the principle that everyone, even a radical like Rosencranz, is at heart as opportunistic as the best of us.