Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘UK’ Category

Sainsbury likes to portray itself as a customer oriented family-friendly store but one policy that they’ve recently introduced in the Forestside store in Belfast is distinctly anti-family and the implementation of it is very anti-customer.

As you’ll have noticed, I’ve posted next to nothing over the last month. A total of seven posts vs what would have been a more normal 30 in fact.

That’s because I’ve been over in Northern Ireland trying to sort out some administration since June 5th and only got back home on Friday evening.

Now, I wasn’t expecting there to be much change in the traffic on my websites but the blog is different. The most commonly held belief is that you need to post at least once a day to keep up the traffic. That seems reasonable: after all, blogs, for the most part, cover “current events” in some fashion so without the regular updates, the traffic on a blog is bound to drop off quite quickly, isn’t it?

Well, the funny thing is that the blog traffic didn’t drop at all by any meaningful amount. The number of hits showed very little change at all nor did the adsense income. The number of subscribers via Feedburner dropped about 10%. The number of incoming links as counted by Technorati went up.

So little was the change that it has me wondering if the best strategy would be to build up a blog over six months or so then start a new one.

Northern Ireland hasn’t been in the international news much lately but that’s not really an indication of peace as such, more an indication that violence isn’t happening which isn’t quite the same thing (welcome as non-violence always is, of course).

In fact the first indications of the arrival of peace was on its way started quite a number of years ago and, to my mind, was the arrival of the supermarket chain Tesco in 1997.  Prior to that the only UK supermarket chain operating in Northern Ireland was Marks & Spencer which had opened in 1967, 2 years prior to the start of the troubles, and hadn’t bothered expanding much since then. Nothing really says that peace is coming quite like big chunks of cash being invested.

However, the more certain arrival of peace (as opposed merely to reducing violence) was really only in the last few years and that has been marked in two very noticeable ways. Firstly the investments being made in the local economy are massive these days: you can’t drive more than a mile or two in Belfast without seeing building works of some kind. That’s also an aspect of the second point which is that there has been a large scale migration to Northern Ireland by everyone from the Poles to those that left because of the violence. Combine those two and the booming of the economy is very noticeable.

One very obvious side-effect of that mass immigration is that the house prices are going through the roof (hence the building work everywhere, of course) which is effectively a catching up on rises that didn’t happen in the last 30 years. The banks don’t seem to know what has hit them and mortgages are now available for up to 8 time salary (vs the maximum of 3 times just 3 or 4 years ago).

Anyway, at least Northern Ireland can now stand as an example of what it’s like when you do get to the end of the violence. Hopefully, it’ll provide an encouraging example to areas of the world that are still immersed in a culture of violence such as Colombia.

Kyle over at immigration orange always has thought provoking articles and one of the most thought provoking that he has had recently was his piece on the support of terrorists in Colombia by Chiquita Brands.

Chiquita didn’t just decide to support terrorists for the sake of killing people, it justified paying $1.7 million by considering it as protection money for its employees. Does that make it right though? Well, no, it doesn’t but it’s only one high profile example of people making decisions that are expedient at the time.

However, that’s the least of the problems that such support causes. Although the public perception of their aims might be different, terrorist organisations often co-operate with one another and some of that money from Chiquita no doubt found its way back to fund killing of people in Northern Ireland. Would Chiquita be quite so happy if some of their money is found to have been used to fund terrorism in America too?

The fundamental problem is that a number of products that everyone buys are produced in countries where peace is something that might come in the future and the reality of the present day is violence from one or more groups within the country. Doing business in a country like that does entail problems and there is no short-term way around that.

Unfortunately the short-term alternatives aren’t great either. Chiquita and others pulling out of Colombia doesn’t make the problem go away as others will take over the plantations and those bananas will still be sold internationally. In fact, if that wasn’t the case the impact on the Colombian economy could be catastrophic which wouldn’t be good for the cause of peace either: as seems very clear with the recent experiences in Northern Ireland, a strong economy makes the incentive for terrorism dry up very quickly.

We can’t know for sure what Chiquita’s money was used for but $1.7 million is an awful lot of money that would have been much better spent in the cause of peace.

I’m sure that it’s been there for ages but I just noticed that the playground in the ground of the Stormont Estate had been dedicated to the memory of Mo Mowlam.Mo was one of the many politicians who have fallen by the wayside along the path to peace in Northern Ireland. As Secretary of State for Northern Ireland from 1997 to 1999 it was she who presided over the Good Friday Agreement which is essentially the basis that has established peace although, as can only be expected, it did take quite a while after the signing of that agreement way back in 1998 before various pieces of the puzzle fell into place and a few years after that before people in NI and elsewhere finally got around to accepting that peace had apparently arrived.