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From Our Own Correspondent
Sunlounger economics
00:28:21
In a week full of elections near and far, Mark Lowen says Sunday's vote in Greece be...
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But now, presenting the BBC Radio 4
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Correspondent/Reporter
edition, here's Kate 80 today, perhaps the most significant international economic development of our lifetime, and we spotted it while sipping a drink by a hotel pool in Nairobi, a grand new town in the Republic of Ireland. The houses are there, a gleaming station, too. But where are all the people? We learn why going to the loo can be a hazardous business in the Russian Arctic, and how a statue in a Roman square casts a chill shadow even on the sunniest of spring days. It's been a week dominated by elections at home and abroad, and arguably the most critical of them all takes place in Greece tomorrow. But the vote to replace the caretaker administration, which has run the country for the last six months, goes ahead in an atmosphere of considerable disenchantment. The electorate is expected to punish the two main parties, which pushed for painful austerity measures. The new government, when it finally emerges, faces a tough task. The country's in a fifth year of recession. More than a million people are out of work, and Mark Loewen in Athens says many Greeks just don't believe their politicians can lift the country out of crisis.
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BBC Correspondent
The grass in front is coarse and overgrown, and there's a snarling coil of barbed wire lining the top of the fence. The approach is hardly welcoming, but then it's not intended to please the eye, for this is where the first of Greece's new detention centers for illegal immigrants now lies, in the somewhat bleak Athens suburb of Amygdalesa. It's a controversial, many say opportunistic scheme first announced just weeks before this Sunday's election. At dusk, a handful of youths gather outside with little else to do. A couple are wrapped in Greek flags. 18 year old Costas is keen to talk, educated and someone who should be part of the next generation, ready to rebuild this deeply troubled country. But it turns out all he thinks about is leaving. Our future is dark, he says. I'm not anti immigrant, but I just don't want this center in my backyard. Why is the government spending money on this and not on creating jobs? He tells me his parents are now both unemployed, and he tries to work on weekends to provide for his family. We fight just to live, he says. This is unacceptable for 21st century Europe. I'm the one who will become an immigrant soon. I have to get out. As night falls, Costas and his friends put up their hoods and set a couple of rubbish bins alight on the main crossroads and attempt to show their anger. Though the flames soon die out and the few firecrackers don't even draw the police anymore. In a country now so used to violent anti austerity demonstrations, this one pales in comparison. The mood in Amygdaleza seems as hopeless as the protest itself. And well over a quarter of the people here are unemployed. And it is that financial hardship that has gone hand in hand with a rise in anti immigrant feeling. 80% of migrants to the EU pass through Greece in increasing numbers are now attacked. They have become targets of blame, perhaps even scapegoats for a nation still struggling to understand how it has become mired in its worst recession since the Second World War. The government has turned on them too, focusing on illegal immigration as a key election issue and introducing the detention centers, rather than talking about how to bring growth back to this indebted country. But if the two parties in government hoped the strategy would salvage some votes in the run up to the poll, they were mistaken. For almost four decades, the same parties have alternated in power here. One socialist, the other conservative. No other party has had a look in. But this time it's different. The big two are seen as the parties that have brought Greece to its knees, that have pushed through punishing austerity measures, that are accused of pocketing money themselves while leaving their compatriots to suffer. Their MPs are pelted with food while walking in public. Yet yogurt is the substance of choice. Most can barely leave their office without security. I have never traveled to or reported from a country in which there is such visceral hatred towards the government and in fact, towards most politicians. Almost every person I speak to talks of betrayal. There is an overwhelming sense that Greeks place their trust in a political class that has steered this country towards record unemployment, soaring poverty levels and and a feeling of seemingly perpetual crisis. And yet, beyond the social unrest, Greeks are fighting back. Grassroots initiatives to respond to the crisis are springing up across the country. I've watched potato farmers from northern Greece launch a scheme to sell their products directly to the buyers, cutting out the costly middleman so as to benefit both consumer and producer. In the central Greek city of Volos, I witnessed a community reverting to an older economic model, an alternative to the euro, in which People exchange their goods and services in a barter on which many now depend. A handful of university graduates have formed a network to offer free online tuition to children whose parents can no longer afford extra lessons. There are more and more deliveries to homeless shelters and soup kitchens from Greeks who can spare some clothes and food. There is a strong sense of solidarity that has emerged here, a feeling of we're all in it together. Trust in each other has replaced trust in the political class, and so will a new Greece emerge after tomorrow's election. Certainly a changed political landscape is expected, with many here flocking to the smaller, newer parties turning their back on the mainstream and towards the unknown. But nobody expects miracles. The recession will deepen. Unemployment will continue to rise. Perhaps, though, it will provide some here with a feeling that they have at least had their say and and vented their emotions. This is the country that gave the world democracy, and it now faces the most unpredictable democratic test in decades.
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Correspondent/Reporter
Mark Loewen in Athens Economics is also the key issue for campaigners who've begun to lobby ahead of a referendum in Ireland later this month on the EU's fiscal treaty. The economy there did a sharp U turn in 2008 when a decade long property boom collapsed, leaving Dublin banks tottering amid piles of debt. Left stranded were thousands of brand new buildings, homes and offices, many of them now standing empty. Petroch Trelawney has been to visit one development that epitomises the ambition and then the puncturing of that economic bubble.
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BBC Reporter
It's just before 10 o' clock on a weekday morning, but I'm the only passenger to get off the train. The gleaming new railway station has five platforms, even though for most of the day there's only an hourly service. The automatic ticket gates are wide open. As I pass, a lone attendant nods from the depths of his kiosk. At the bottom of the steps is a plaque cast in metal with golden lettering. Adamstown Station officially opened on 16th of April 2007 by Anthishek Bertia Hearn April 2007 one of the last optimistic months, a time when hope was still in the air. Just before the so called Celtic Tiger economy got sick and then fell fatally ill. Adamstown epitomises the ambitions of those years of growth that started in the mid-1990s. Dublin was getting rich quick. Multinational companies were recruiting new businesses opening. Served by economic migrants from Eastern Europe and returning Irish hoping to claim their piece of the Celtic dream, the city needed new homes for its burgeoning population and so in 1998 plans were laid for a grand new town. 10,000 dwellings to start, 25,000 citizens. The location chosen could hardly have been better. A greenfield site alongside a mainline railway less than 15 minutes from Dublin and near the trunk road, which links the capital with the country's northwest. In 2006, at the height of Ireland's housing boom, the first properties went on sale. In scenes that seemed common at the time, potential purchasers queued around the clock. 330 houses sold in the first two days alone, more than half to first time buyers. Adamstown. It's a whole new ball game, proclaims the slogan on the glossy brochure I'm handed by the immaculately groomed estate agent minding the show house. How's business? I ask. Slow, she admits. Today's price list has four bedroom townhouses starting at €215,000. A similar property would have cost half a million euro before the collapse. Outside the window, a security man watches me from his van parked by the wooden hoardings surrounding where the next phase of houses will be built. When will work start? I continue. My friend doesn't seem sure at first, but then her estate agent's bright confidence clicks back in. In the next few weeks. I hope she nods. What's it like to live here? Quiet, she says. Very quiet. Currently, just over 1200 homes are occupied. Families with school age children are well provided for. There are two primary schools and a secondary level college. The rooms of the giraffe creche are packed with younger children, but they're one of the few signs of life I see as I walk the town's streets. Other than a postman, a pair of council workers mending a pavement and a solitary jogger, the place seems empty. The silence is only broken by announcements from the station. Tannoy blown across town on the breeze, telling non existent passengers to step back from the platform edge as a fast train is approaching. The place has the feel of an American suburb rather than a bustling Irish town. The first people who chose to live here were assured that their pioneering spirit would be rewarded. There would be nearly 50 shops, nine restaurants and two public houses to date. A single convenience store, a hairdresser and a pizzeria are the only community facilities. Four parks would provide residents with a green oasis. There were mock ups of a grand library on a square with open air cafes, promises of an eight screen cinema. And yet there is a sense of community here. There may not be a church, but there is a gaa, a Gaelic Athletic association club. There are walking and cycling groups. The proliferation of South Asian Names in the line up of the Adamstown Cricket Club and the provision of English lessons in one of the schools reflect an increasingly multicultural island. And even though they represent little more than 10% of what was planned, the houses that have been built are pleasing, confident buildings, more modern in style but also nodding to Dublin's Georgian architectural heritage. New towns across the world, from Chandigarh in India to Tsuen Wan in Hong Kong to England's Milton Keynes, have all taken time to find an identity to become loved by their citizens. As I walk back to the station, past hopeful posters and empty cycle racks, I contemplate what the years ahead hold for Adamstown. Like many aspects of Irish life at present, it's as if a pause button has been pressed. The place waits in an extended holding pattern. But the future is not completely without hope.
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Correspondent/Reporter
And that was Petroch Trelawny. Speculation about the viability of the Eurozone continues to dominate coverage of world finance. Some of our Europe correspondents seem to be reporting on it perpetually. No doubt, of course, that it is a serious business and is slowing world growth. But if you look outside Europe and North America, you'll find some countries doing very well indeed. Among the emerging and developing economies, China's expected to grow at more than 8% a year, India at around 7%, and even Sub Saharan Africa at a respectable 5% plus. That is, after all, pretty much the rate the United States was enjoying back in the late 19th century. They called it the Gilded Age, when America was emerging as the world's preeminent superpower. Justin Rolatt in Kenya recently says this two track growth is leading to some fundamental changes in the world economy.
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Holiday Reporter
This programme brings you insights from reporters in extreme locations. What you don't usually hear is a report composed in the comfort of a sun lounger beside a sparkling pool in a tropical resort. But I make no apology for admitting that that is precisely where this report was conceived. And yes, at times I enjoyed a long cool drink. As I wrote, because the palm fringed white sand beach of my Kenyan holiday hotel turned out to provide the perfect VI vantage point from which to observe one of the biggest stories of our time. I'd expected that the other holiday makers would be like us middle class Europeans enjoying a special treat. And two thirds of the guests were just that. What was intriguing was the other third. At breakfast on the first morning there were two Chinese couples at the table next to ours. They turned out to be from Beijing and were taking a couple of days by the beach as part of an African safari trip that didn't surprise me unduly. I've reported on the rise of Chinese tourism in Africa for the BBC and know it is the fastest growing tourist sector on the continent. But there weren't just Chinese families at the hotel. A couple of days later there was a big wedding. The bride and groom were British of Indian descent. At least half of the guests had flown in from the subcontinent. Add to that the parties of other Indian and Chinese guests, the Russians and the scattering of Kenyan families escaping from Nairobi for some R and R on the beach and it became apparent that a sizeable minority of the people staying at the hotel were from what economists would call developing or emerging economies. Now the top elites, even in emerging economies have always had enough money to shell out for a top class hotel. But the people I was sharing my holiday with weren't government ministers or tycoons. They were just ordinary middle class people like me. It began to dawn on me that my Mombasa hotel illustrated in microcosm a much larger, quite possibly the most significant international economic development of all our lifetimes. The great levelling of the world economy. The statistics show just how dramatic the progress of that process is. The International Monetary Fund is forecasting that next year the so called developing world will out produce the developed world for the first time. What a turnaround. As recently as 10 years ago, the developed world still dominated the world economy, producing 3,3/5 of world GDP. Now let's be clear, this isn't a product of the financial crisis. The crisis accelerated the process, bringing many developed economies to a standstill. But it didn't cause it. Because this isn't about the west going into decline. Most developed economies aren't shrinking. What is happening is that the rest of the world is just getting richer a whole lot quicker. And this vast rebalancing of wealth across the globe shouldn't really come as a surprise. One day we made the effort to drag ourselves away from the various attractions on offer in the hotel to venture into town, into Mombasa. This great East African metropolis was a cosmopolitan trading hub even while London was a regional backwater. Its ancient trading culture predates the rise of Europe and the West. And you can still see its influence in the mosques and minarets, in the spice markets and in the faces of of the so called Swahili people, the Muslim descendants of marriages between local Africans and Arab traders and settlers. Indeed, standing in the centre of Mombasa, you realize the rise of the developing world is really just a return to business as usual. After all, until the 18th century India and China were the richest countries on the planet. The historic anomaly is the incredible concentration of wealth in Europe and America that followed the Industrial Revolution. Economists call that chasm that opened up between east and west the Great Divergence. Well, looking around the pool of my hotel, I realized what I was witnessing was nothing less than the growing momentum of a great convergence of the world economy. It will be many, many years before average incomes in developing economies like China and India match those in the west, if indeed they ever do. But what was clear from that sun lounger in a Kenyan holiday hotel was that for the middle classes at least, the world is rapidly becoming a much more equal place.
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Correspondent/Reporter
Justin Rolat There the Russian leader Vladimir Putin's promised to spend more on welfare and on revamping the armed forces. It will all cost a great deal of money, which he believes can be found by exporting more gas and oil. With old gas deposits becoming depleted, Russia has had to move further and further north in search of fresh energy supplies, and many hopes now rest on the Yamal Peninsula. It's said to contain the largest onshore gas reserves on the planet. Lucy Ash has been to The Yamal, a 400 mile long finger of tundra extending far above the Arctic Circle, which is also home to the Nenet people and their vast herds of reindeer.
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Lucy Ash
I had been putting it off for as long as possible, but after several cups of tea I just had to go. Gritting my teeth, I crawled under the tent flap and into the knife sharp wind. As I squatted in the snow. I was almost toppled by a blow from the side, then warm breath on my exposed buttocks, loud snuffling and the sound of licking. Nobody had warned me that reindeer loved the salt in human urine. Go away.
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Presenter
Scram.
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Lucy Ash
I shouted. I tried again in Russian, but there was still a forest of antlers above my head. What's get lost in Nenets? I asked when I eventually made it back inside the conical shaped tent or chum poker faced. Nina, the brigade leader's wife, handed me a stick. Next time take this. There are dozens of rules you have to observe when living with the herders. The so called laws of the tundra. The Yamil Nenets follow a centuries old animistic religion that governs every aspect of their daily lives. For instance, I notice women lifting ropes over their heads while men just walked over them. That's because females who menstruate are considered unclean, so they have to avoid stepping over reins, lassoes or anything that's been in contact with the herd this taboo is supposed to guard the family's reindeer from disease or predatory wolves. No wonder that the Nenets are fiercely protective of their reindeer. The animals provide them with their main food, especially in winter, when, apart from fish, there's nothing else in the tundra. We were offered chunks of fresh raw meat and encouraged to dip them in a bowl of congealed reindeer blood. Nanetski ketchup, joked our host, Nikolai. My producer Albina, a vegetarian brought up in California, looked a bit sick and nibbled a cracker. Reindeer supplies supply clothing and shelter. It was spring and only minus 15 Celsius, but our extreme weather anoraks and sleeping bags weren't up to the job. Nina dressed me in a yagushka, a brightly embroidered coat made from a double layer of eight reindeer skins. It was toasty warm, but there are even thicker winter coats for men who have to sleep outside with the herd in temperatures down to minus 50. I've never been a shoe fetishist, but I did lust after a pair of thigh high reindeer fur boots. All Nenets wear them, from toddlers to grandparents. Reindeers also provide transport, and they cover a lot of ground. In the Nenets language, Yamal means edge of the earth, and each year the herders travel hundreds of miles up and down this wind blasted peninsula along migration routes which have existed for millennia. Vegetation on the permafrost, mainly mosses and lichen, is sparse, so the herders are constantly on the move in search of fresh pastureland. Some Yamel Nenets have settled in villages and the regional capital, Salighad, but more than half are still genuine nomads. Closer to the villages, they often use snowmobiles. Most have mobile phones, and I spotted satellite dishes mounted on sledges so they can watch TV in their tombs at night. But otherwise, the 21st century seems a long way off. I admit that I went expecting a story about the inexorable decline of a once vibrant culture. A famous documentary by the nationalist film director Stanislav Gavarukin depicted the Chukchi, another Siberian ethnic group, as a rootless people destroyed by bureaucracy and vodka. But the Nenets are survivors. They've endured a turbulent history, from persecution by the Tsars to Stalin's terror, from enforced collectivisation to the chaotic transition to a market economy. Now, though, these tough and resourceful people face a new, potentially more lethal threat. Because the Kremlin is short of cash and needs to sell more gas this summer, the giant Bovinenkova field halfway up the Yamal peninsula will start production every year Billions of cubic meters will be exported to Western Europe. New pipelines, drilling towers, tarmac roads and the world's most northerly railway line are gradually swallowing up the tundra. The Nenets complain of pollution and dwindling numbers of fish. In the offices of the state monopoly Gazprom, there are glossy posters of reindeer sledge races, and the energy minister, Sergei Shmatko, was eloquent about protecting the herders and their environment. But that's on the surface. Moscow is far more interested in what lies under the permafrost. Basically, we look at this part of the world, the Arctic and Yamal in particular, as a depository for energy security, shmatko admitted. And energy security may also mean political security for Vladimir Putin as he enters his third term.
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Correspondent/Reporter
Lucy Asch in northern Russia, there aren't many cities around the world which have as much to offer the sightseer as Rome. Even after visiting the Colosseum, the Sistine Chapel and the Forum, there are thousands of other wonders to behold. But it's not only a place of stately reminders of the Roman Empire and of churches, it's also full of statues. Alan Johnstone says that while they may often melt into the colourful backdrop of Roman life, many bear witness to extreme extraordinary moments in history.
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Presenter
I suppose that over time I'll get used to them. They'll eventually become so familiar that I'll pass them by the way the Romans do, with barely a glance. But I'm still new to this city, and for now at least, its statues keep catching my eye. And they're so much a part of the fabric of Rome that you're constantly rubbing shoulders with them, glimpsing them through archways or passing them on the piazzas. Figures emerging from the realms of myth, faith and history. And sometimes you can almost imagine that in their stony silence, they're looking right back at you. Just along from the spot where I wait for my bus every morning, high up on a wall, there's a larger than Life St. Francis of Assisi. With a halo hovering over his head, and dressed in a cassock, he looks as if he's just dashed out of the church behind him. But to me at least, the way he raises his arm is slightly unfortunate. It makes me think that the saint might be trying to hail one of the taxis in the square below. But where would he want to go, I wonder, if he was on business? Just up the road to the Vatican, I guess. But further along the street, there's nothing to distract you from the power of the pieces that stand in the entrance to a palazzo. Among them, two towering male figures face each other. They are Jesus and John the Baptist, and they're close to perfect, almost touched into life. Out of stone, Jesus, dressed in not much more than rags, is bending forward so that John can trickle over his head some of the water from the River Jordan. Stand there and look hard enough for long enough and you start to feel some of the drama of the that moment that's captured and hangs in the air between the two men. But of all the statues that I've come across in Rome, none has made more of an impression than the one in the Campo de Fiori. The square has been a marketplace for hundreds of years, and every day people mill about the stores that sell flowers and cheeses and much else. And at cafe tables round the piazza's edge, you can sit and watch the shoppers in the sunshine. It's a busy, bright, lively place, but looming over the center of it is an extraordinarily sombre presence, a huge, dark figure with a terrible story to tell. It's a statue of the philosopher Giordano Bruno. He stands above the market wrapped in a heavy cloak, and he stares out from under a hood pulled low over his eyes. He came from a town in the south, on the plain behind Mount Vesuvius, and he started life more than 400 years ago as a friar in a religious order. But he began to think what were back then, dangerous thoughts. He started to say that maybe ours wasn't the only inhabited planet in the universe. And he believed that the Earth revolved around the sun, which, of course, it does. But at the time, in the eyes of the religious powers in Rome, the things that Bruno said were heresy. He was interrogated and tried by the Inquisition and spent seven years in jail, according to the Vatican's account. For a moment, Bruno seemed to waver and be tempted to accept that he was wrong. But in his prison cell, he somehow found the strength to write a letter to the Pope saying that he believed what he believed, come what May. And so, at dawn on a winter's morning in the year 1600, the prison gates swung open. Through them came Giordano Bruno, surrounded by guards. They'd forced a metal gag, like a horse's bit into his mouth. They'd made sure he could say no heretical thing as he was marched through the streets to the Campo de Fiori. And there, in the middle of the square, he was stripped naked and burnt to death. I suppose that later that morning, the traders just swept aside Bruno's ashes and got back to business as usual. But centuries on, his admirers put up the statue in his honour on the place where he died. And he'll stand there now, forever, a reminder of the barbarity of the past. The courage he showed when he started writing. That last letter is an extraordinary thing. He's a martyr in the long struggle for freedom of speech and thought. But if you know Giordano Bruno's story, even on the sunniest day, his statue brings a touch of gloom to the Campo de Fiori.
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Correspondent/Reporter
And Alan Johnson in Rome's ancient city centre brings this edition to a close. I'll be back next Saturday with dispatches from correspondence far and wide. I hope you'll join us then. Goodbye.