Category: Europe
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Nothing temporary about work
[This article was first published in Catalonia Today magazine, February 2018.] The good times are back and we don’t need Prozac! The conservatives who run Spain and most of Europe would have us believe this is because the economic growth figures and employment statistics are apparently rising at a faster rate than they have…
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A ray of hope for Europeans
[This article was first published in Catalonia Today magazine, December 2017.] Ultra-conservatives will always do what their natures demand. Given any opportunity, they strangle democracy while at the same time claiming that it is democracy that they want to breathe life into. The horrifying repression in Catalonia is an extreme illustration of this…
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Tragedy in Turkey
[This article was first published in Catalonia Today magazine, September 2017.] Where to begin when we look at Turkey? Here is a part of the world with so much culture and history in its favour but in the last couple of years it has become somewhere you would not choose to live and you would even…
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Democracy and other duds
[This article was first published in Catalonia Today magazine, May 2017.] At a time when the European Union appears to be slowly falling apart, its highest court was fixated on whether a woman at one workplace in Belgium should be allowed to wear material covering her head. As a staunch non-believer in religion, I…
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“The role of culture in Europe’s crisis.” (My translation.)
Below is my translation of *Marcelo Expósito’s contribution to the session on "Diplomazia Culturale dell’UE", as part of the meeting: “How Can We Govern Europe?” held at the Camera Dei Deputati, Rome, November 18, 2016. (*Marcelo Expósito is a Deputy for Barcelona from En Comú Podem and is the Third Secretary of the…
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Albania’s pain
[This article was first published in Catalonia Today magazine, November 2016.] When I was a curly-haired (and more ignorant) twelve year old in the Cold War years of the early 1980s, one day our History teacher asked the class a general knowledge question: “Who is the world’s longest-serving current dictator?” Nobody had the…
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Lessons from Paris
[This article was first published in Catalonia Today magazine, January 2016.] The recent tragic terrorist murders in Paris (and sadly also elsewhere) can teach us plenty. And if we choose to not learn all that we can from these tragedies then we are as good as inviting further bloodshed and horror. One of…
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Badly chosen words
[A version of this article (under the tittle "Carefully mischosen words") was first published in Catalonia Today magazine, November 2015.] I’m a huge fan of the UK’s public broadcaster, the BBC. It still produces some of the best TV anywhere in the world but one thing it does tests my affection for it. Even…
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Refugees in a strange land
[A version of this article was first published in Catalonia Today magazine, October 2015.] Now even the Daily Mail’s editors have finally accepted that British Prime Minister David Cameron’s "swarms" of refugees need to be helped. The next question has become one of where Europe’s newest asylum seekers and victims of war…
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TTIPing us over the edge
[This article was first published in Catalonia Today magazine, June 2015.] While we are all going about our daily business this month, big business is going about trying to make sure that Europe is run purely in its interest. If agreed to by the European parliament, the new Free Trade Agreement between the…
Brett Hetherington 