The news from France is very bad. Over the summer, President Sarkozy and the French Government have deported about 1,000 Roma people to Romania and Bulgaria. The mass expulsion of a community (based on ethnicity), the likes of which we have not seen in Europe since the Second World War, was duly met with widespread [...]
The Right, particularly the French right, always plays on fear. It’s one of the major reasons why in 2002, Chirac and Le Pen ran their campaigns on security, which made the distinctly un-authoritarian Socialist candidate Lionel Jospin loook quite far out to sea. Sarkozy, with a distinctly more right wing agenda than Chirac ever ran, [...]
The phrase National Identity has become increasingly familiar in current political discourse, despite the fact that nationalism and nationhood are far from being new ideas in Europe. Typically, it is the Right and Far-Right which profits from and occupies itself with concerns over identity. Excluding Gordon Brown’s occasional remarks on possibly considering planning a “British [...]
More petition signing today. Less successful than yesterday for some reason, everyone we spoke to were either tourists, (Je ne suis pas d’ici) or just amazingly busy (Pas de temps, pas de temps, pas de temps) though not as many were actually in favour of the new tramline. Yesterday I very nearly saw someone get hit [...]
Today I embarked on the first of the international political practice of leafleting and petition signing. I’ve thus been getting involved in the campaign against the construction of line 2 for trams on the Promenade des Anglais, which is the long walkway and road that goes along the front of the sea and, of course, [...]
