The night before last, I watched the Katya Adler program on divisions in modern European states and was absolutely fascinated by what I leaned about Germany. The support for the right wing party (AfD which translates to ‘Alternative for Germany’) is very highly concentrated in what used to be East Germany and AfD is the now the largest Opposition party. Adler does not really try to give an explanation for this so I hunted on the internet and discovered the following post. Who this piece was written by I do not know but it seems a very well-informed and concise summary of the political makeup of Germany at the moment. The writer thinks many explanations for the rise of the far right discount the accountability that was missing at the west’s side during integration. You can say ‘right wing bad’ all day but you have to understand that people don’t go to these extremes unless they themselves are disadvantaged by the system and therefore seek radical change. Germany spent a ton of money on its social welfare systems to help immigrants, but we see no active push to help Germans who are living in areas with declining industries in the east. On top of that the privatisation of the East after the wall came down happened in a way that massively benefited west German companies but paid little respect to industry workers in the East resulting in mass unemployment and declining economy while the West boomed. Now what is interesting about this explanation is the way that it maps over onto the support that the declining and ‘left behind’ areas of the UK give most support to Nigel Farage’s Reform party and may well be part of a much more common geographical and socio-political pattern affecting many European societies. I am reminded of the ways in which the Victorians in their limited ways by instituting clean water supplies for all of the population (and not just the ‘deprived’ areas) and providing universal education may have helped to stave off revolutionary papers that might otherwise have developed. And to bring the argument back to Germany again, we should not forget that Bismarck’s social reforms in the 1880s introduced the world’s first modern welfare state to Germany, aiming to undercut the appeal of socialism and secure worker loyalty to the monarchy. Key initiatives included mandatory health insurance (1883), accident insurance (1884), and old-age\/disability pensions (1889). Key details of Bismarck’s social policies included reforms, known as ‘State Socialism,’ were designed to reduce the political influence of the Social Democratic Party (SPD) by providing benefits that made socialist revolution less appealing to the working class. When Meg and I went on a river cruise from Berlin to Prague going through many of the territories of what was formerly East Germany, we had the benefit of many lectures on modern Germany and learned that those living in what was the prosperous West Germany were subject to a tax to attempt to bring the East of Germany up to the same living standards of the West. A story that was told at the time was that many factory workers from the East were unused to the rigours of a full 8 hour factory shift because their outdated industrial infrastructure meant that machinery often broke down and workers had to be sent home (short of a full day’s shift work) until it was repaired or patched up. So I found all of this programme fascinating and will look forward to next part, concluding a tour of Spain and turning again to modern day France.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I visited the Methodist centre in town and engaged in a conversation with a Mancunian who happens to be in my Tai Chi class tomorrow. She had brought her husband along (a retired builder) and we shall probably meet again for coffee after or class tomorrow. Although our times in Manchester we exchanged some reminiscences of places that we knew- particularly the domestic science college known as ‘Domski’ which had an architecture suggesting a toast rack with a fried egg paced along side it. Indeed this particular building was known to all of us as the ‘Toastrack’. opposite which were a block of terraced houses, some of them overlooking Platt Fields park and one of which Meg and I bought and stayed in for three years. Before I went home, I went to a local hardware store to purchase some cleaning materials not available in my local supermarket. After I came home, I made myself a salad lunch which, to be completely honest, I did not enjoy that much and perhaps some of the ingredients did not quite ‘blend’ I knew that I had an ENT appointment in the local hospital so I allowed myself 20 minutes to get there and another 20 minutes to park. But I was fortunate as I secured a place when someone else was just leaving. I was seen by high grade medical technician\/audiologist who gave me as much time and attention as was required which turned out to be about three quarters of an hour. The intermittent tinnitus that I have experienced since Meg’s death could well be a sort of post traumatic stress syndrome after the months and years of caring for Meg when I was under immense strain but the audiologist was gong to add me to her tinnitus clinic which she thought might be beneficial to me but I was quite at liberty to stop attendance if I thought that no real benefits were being derived. We actually spent quite a lot of time talking about some scientific issues. One of these was the book entitled ‘The Grieving Brain’ written by a neuroscientist who explores the biochemical changes that occur within the brain when a long standing relationship (such as a marriage, or death of a parent) comes to an end. I also told her about the Hanna Fry series on Artificial Intelligence and we discussed, at some length actually, the ways in which AI was impacting upon the education of the younger generation of doctors and the implications that this may have for the development (or non development) of traditional clinical skills<\/p>\n\n\n\n
After my hospital appointment, I drove back to Bromsgrove and then conducted my weekly shop which, as it turned out, was quite a light week this week. Then it was a case of getting the shopping unpacked not forgetting that the wheelie bins have to be dragged out to the end of the drive ready for collection in the morning. There appears to be nothing that grabs my attention on the TV this evening, but I dare say that a good trawl of the BBC iPlayer might reveal something that I had missed. Meanwhile, attention is turning in the Iran war to the effective closure of the Strait of Hornuz which represents a real ‘choke point’ for world shipping. It is not just oil which is affected here but also a massive array of raw materials such as helium and sulphur which will have an impact on a wide array of manufactured goods, not least the chemical fertilisers needed in agriculture. So inflationary pressures across the world will soon be given a huge upwards twist unless the war ends quickly.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The night before last, I watched the Katya Adler program on divisions in modern European states and was absolutely fascinated by what I leaned about Germany. The support for the right wing party (AfD which translates to ‘Alternative for Germany’) is very highly concentrated in what used to be East Germany and AfD is the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8111","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8111","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8111"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8111\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8112,"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8111\/revisions\/8112"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8111"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8111"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8111"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}