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That’s the headline in today’s Gazeta Wyborcza. They led with the same story yesterday, the one about British workers demanding jobs for British people. Yesterday’s front page article was surprising in that I was able to read it through without flinging the paper on the floor – and it was written by Jacek Pawlicki. Sure, he didn’t get to the heart of the story: are these foreign workers really undercutting local workers? Are they being paid less than locals doing the same work? Is a collectively bargained pay scale agreement being broken? How much do the workers earn in pounds and pence? But journalists rarely ever have the wherewithal to find out how much people earn when it comes to covering such disputes. It’s much easier to call the working class racist than to do the maths. (Even the Guardian, somewhat closer to the source, seems to have little or nothing about the money.) Also, Pawlicki, despite nearly twenty years of Polish experience with parliamentary democracy, still finds it strange that British workers do not share the views of their rulers:

The protests are all the more curious given that Great Britain has always been a bastion in the EU of the free market and a liberal approach to economics – in 2004 as it was one of the first countries to open its labour market to citizens of the new EU member states.

Still, it could have been worse. Today’s coverage, though, is a little harder to stomach. It’s accompanied by some comment on page 2 from Konrad Niklewicz. He points out the gigantic economic benefits of cheap labour, apparently unaware of the unreasonable desire of Neanderthal trade union types that some of those benefits accrue to workers. Niklewicz, then, openly supports the paying of Polish workers in Britain less than British workers in Britain and yet somehow it is the trade unions that are (see headline) the bigots.

It’s all quite depressing. No doubt some violence will befall emigrant workers, drawing condemnation from absolutely everyone – even God will break His silence – and the employers will laugh all the way to the bank on the moral high ground, as the exploited are again divided against each other.

Too make a long story short, a bunch of Polish spies (or Military Counter Intelligence agents) on duty in Afghanistan put photographs of themselves with their full names on a popular website here called “nasza-klasa” (our class). It’s a school reunion site where old boys, schoolmates, Taliban fighters and so on meet up to see how their old buddies have aged, got fat, got married, tried to occupy one’s country and so forth.

Prompted by this, I decided to devote this one to absurdities of Polish life. Like for instance, the requirement that in order to sit a driving test you must have done a course in a driving school. If you fail you have to do a supplemental course in a driving school. Guess where the examiners are recruited from? Well from the driving schools, of course. What matters is not that you can drive but that your driving school papers are in order.

Here’s a direct quote from Jarosław Kaczyński of PiS: “I am against a referendum because it would certainly produce unambiguous [jednoznaczne] results… I think that referendums should be held in those countries where public opinion is against [the Lisbon Constitution]. The people should not be cheated. The decent thing would be to have referendums in England [sic], France and Holland.” (Nasz Dziennik, March 12th, reprinted in Nie). On second thoughts, I’m not sure that is so absurd. He’s only saying what all the Eurocrats think: no referendums because people might vote for the “wrong” thing. When Ireland rejected the Nice referendum, the exercise was simply repeated until the people voted yes.

Nie also tells of the following happy situation in the administration of public health service in Poland: the NFZ (roughly equivalent to the UK’s NHS) draws up reports on abuses in the health services (overcharging the state in various ways) but the organ that is empowered to do anything about the abuses doesn’t get the reports because the NFZ is not obliged to hand them over, which it doesn’t want to do because if it did it (i.e. the NFZ) would get less money from the state to provide health services. Clear? Of course not.

I commented before on Konrad Niklewicz’s bizarre ideas about who should sponsor the debate on GMOs – i.e. the companies that stand to earn most from their introduction, not scientists, the state or, God help us all, opponents. And here a week or two later is the same Niklewicz writing about how lobbyists rule in Brussels. One example is the “Competitivness [sic] in Biotechnology Advisory Group,” of which the dismayed Niklewicz writes: “It does not have a single non-governmental organization representative; it has six scientists and twenty business representatives” (Gazeta Wyborcza March 28th). This article is shoved back to page 30, the business section, unlike the same author’s clarion call for business to lead the debate on GMO, which was on page 2.

Another curiosity of Polish law: it is possible to libel the dead. Roman Giertych has to publish an apology to the family of Jacek Kuroń for remarks he made in 2006. (Kuroń died in 2004.) I’d take Kuroń’s side against Giertych any time, living or dead, but in my innocence I really did think that dead people had no say in the matter.

When Minister for Justice Ziobro left office he had to return some of the gimcracks our rulers are given to help them oppress us. Specifically, something like three mobile phones and a laptop computer. Ziobro, a man of impeccable morals, obviously had nothing to hide and the damage evident in the returned laptop was purely from wear and tear. He was a hard man, Ziobro. The laptop is on the road to recovery of data now, though. The unencrypted data shows that he was writing the scripts for the State TV news service. On second thoughts, I’ll put that in the passive voice: scripts for the State TV news service were written on his laptop. The encrypted stuff will be denuded and demasked in the next week or two.

It’s no wonder the present government is doing nothing.

Gazeta Wyborcza is once again heroically forging the way forward in enlightening the benighted masses of Poland. This time the subject is GMOs. To the journalists’ dismay, most Poles don’t want them. In today’s paper Konrad Niklewicz has a short think piece on page two about the question: GW has been debating the subject for the last two weeks but what is really needed is a public information campaign. Who should organize it? The government? No (“niekoniecznie”). The problem with the government is that some of its members are opposed to GMOs. Also, its election promises included hostility to transgenetically modified plants. Niklewicz, therefore, rules them out. The initiative, instead, lies with industry and its related GMO lobby. So it’s okay for those with a vested interest in pushing GMOs to inform us about them but it is not okay for those who are opposed, even if they do happen to be our democratically elected representatives.

While we’re at it, why not have a chemicals and cosmetics company lead the public information campaign on the beauty myth? Or let the cigarette industry inform us about the dangers of smoking…

Niklewicz writes that BASF earned 57.9 billion euros last year. Just 1% of that would buy a lot of “study and education,” he writes, though he doesn’t put the words in inverted commas. By an extraordinary coincidence, BASF has an ad on page seven of the paper. Perhaps the company has already started informing us about GMO.

Today’s Gazeta Wyborcza contains an article on Chavez and Morales which is too outrageously partisan to pass up even though I’ve mentioned the subject before. It’s by Maciej Stasiński, which I suspect might be the name of a computer program which shuffles and deals out US-approved cliches about “populism,” “demagoguery” or “the free market.” Here are the first few sentences of what is ostensibly a news report (i.e. not an opinion piece or an editorial) about the Vienna summit:

The summit of 58 presidents and premiers was to open the road to dialogue. And maybe it would have worked, had it not been for the two greatest populists in Latin America: the Venezuelan Hugo Chavez and the Bolivian Evo Morales. The oil and gas wealth which the two control has turned their heads and prompted them to a demagogic and nationalist crusade against the free market [my italics]

Any political commissar could be proud of that. It’s a wonder Stasiński didn’t brand them “lap dogs” or “fellow travellers”… The rest is too awful to read but dipping in more or less at random I came up with this pearl:

Morales did not spare Spain’s socialist prime minister Jose Luis Zapatero either, even though he [Zapatero] supports him. He upbraided Zapatero for Spain’s failure to meet its promise to cancel Bolivian debt and double economic aid.

So you see, Morales is a miserable ingrate for daring to criticise a supporter. As for the substantive issue — has Spain really reneged on promises made to Bolivia — of that Stasinski has not a word to say. Nor does he explain what he means by “free trade” but we can be almost certain that “trade” would be a more accurate description of what is on offer, since inevitably any deal on the table will include patent protection laws.

On the facing page of the paper is an article and two interviews about France. You may have heard of France: its productivity is greater than that of the US and yet they have a 35 hour week. The article headline is: “Is France a ’sick man’?” Of course it is: just look at the first questions in the two interviews carried out by Konrad Niklewicz:
“Can France be reformed at all at all?” [Okay - I put in the second "at all" myself]
“France and Holland are two founder members of the EU. Holland is reforming and liberalising all the time, while France has ossified in its shell. Why?”
Clearly there is no agenda here. These questions are wide open and could invite any kind of answer — especially when, like Niklewicz, you put them to two Christian Democrat Euro-politicians.