We were supposed to be cruising on the Nile this week but,  for entirely understandable reasons, the trip was postponed . So we consoled ourselves with a few days at the end of the week in Paris. This afternoon we went to Notre Dame and admired the great rose window. In 2002 I visited the cathedral one lunchtime during a work trip and recognised the massive bulk of Helmut Kohl, the former German Chancellor, sat in the pews, staring up at the same window. He had lost his wife the previous year and was in bad odour because of a party financing scandal. I had had a ringside seat during the German unification process and the constitutional conferences leading up to economic and monetary union – both achieved thanks in no small part because of Kohl’s statesmanship. He looked ‘down’, and I wanted to say to him only that history would surely judge him kindly. But before I had made up my mind he stood up and a group of about six bodyguards materialised around him – I had missed my opportunity and I regretted this. However, when I came out of the cathedral I saw that he had been spotted by a group of German schoolchildren who had surrounded him admiringly. There was a happy smile on his face and the gloomy introspectiveness of the cathedral interior was forgotten.

Since December last the European Economic and Social Committee has had a new policy setting out procedures for dealing with psychological and sexual harassment at work within the secretariat. Our human resources colleagues organised a lunchtime information session with an excellent guest speaker, Katja Janssens, a psychologist and psycho-social prevention adviser at the Council of Ministers. Although I was theoretically on holiday, I happily returned to participate in this session so as to underline the management’s commitment to the new policy at all levels. One of the more interesting aspects of the new policy is that it recognises the subjectivity of the harassee whilst maintaining objectivity about the alleged harasser. (Within an international, polyglot administration bringing together so many different cultures the potential for misunderstandings is high.) But, as with all the best policies, the basic spirit of the policy is prevention, through awareness raising and mediation, rather than ‘cure’ (formal procedures).

I saw Chinatown when it first came out (1974). With my sixth form film society (which we ran ourselves – I shall write a post about that one day) I had seen Knife in the Water , Cul de sac and Repulsion and I remember having difficulty at the time in making the connection between the darkness at the heart of those films (I hadn’t yet seen Rosemary’s Baby) and the sophisticated, natty, witty, multilayered narrative of Chinatown. In retrospect, having just watched Chinatown again this evening, there is a seamless linkage between it and Polanski’s earlier work and, indeed, several of his later films. What sets Chinatown apart from the Chandler/Hammett private eye yarns that, at one level, it mimics is the nature of the darkness that Jack Nicholson’s character, Jake Gittes, slowly uncovers. This is not the sister/daughter of Faye Dunnaway’s character (Mrs Mulwray), fruit of the self-righteous incestuousness of John Huston’s bluff tycoon (Noah Cross), though that would surely have provided a satisfactory climax to a Chandler tale; no, it is the altogether vaster darkness that would turn deserts into orange groves, dam rivers on dangerously shifting foundations, and spread Los Angeles ever further and wider. For the flood hinted at by the name of Huston’s character is the flood of humanity, a race that, as Polanski knew only too well from his own childhood, was capable of unspeakable crimes against itself.

This evening we watched Kes (1969), Ken Loach’s first full-length feature film and ranked seventh in the British Film Institute’s Top Ten (British) Films and among the top ten in its list of the 50 films you should ‘see by the age of 14’. Today, the scenes of industrial valleys and coalminers give the film an elegiac tone that would have been absent when it was first released, and the broad Yorkshire dialects, newsagents, milkmen, paper boys, pubs and council houses add to the impression (as they so often do with Loach films) that one is also watching a slice of cultural history (I wonder how my children related to the caning scenes at school; I never lost my sense of outrage at getting beaten by bullies in suits). The film includes what must be one of the funniest football matches in a film (the only other I can think of is in Bedknobs and Broomsticks – you can see the match here).  David Bradley, playing Billy Caspar, is utterly convincing, right down to his desolate realisation that there is no escape from the tedious oppression of economic and cultural deprivation. Caspar, the film hints, is doomed to end up down the pit, like his older brother. This imaginary Caspar would still have been down there in 1984, when the Miners’ Strike signalled the end of an industry and of a way of life. Indeed, both our children spontaneously made the link with Billy Elliott.

Third from the right in the picture is Dave Chambers, who has spent the past five months as a trainee in the Secretary General’s secretariat. The trainees are like gold dust to us. We are a very small organisation and we need all the help that we can get. From Day One Dave was in the thick of things, from business continuity plans to the annual work programme. Like all the excellent trainees before him, Dave became a fixture, an integral part of the team. But all good things come to an end and this afternoon we bade him farewell, convinced that a bright future lies before him. The person in the picture behind us, incidentally, is the late Jacques Genton, the Committee’s first Secretary General. After he passed away in November 2008 we decided to name the meeting room where the management board meets every Monday after him. As I chair the meetings I often wonder what he would think of things today.

Peter Morgan (United Kingdom, Employers’ Group), one of the Committee’s most experienced and respected members, rounded off this morning’s plenary session with an opinion on a new draft regulation for the European Network and Information Security Agency (ENISA). If you want to learn more about ENISA’s work, it is worthwhile going to its website here. In his modest and characteristically understated way, Peter Morgan scared the daylights out of us all by reminding us that, as we became ever more reliant on the internet, computers and mobile telephony, so we become ever more vulnerable. From identity theft to cyber attacks on governments and industries, what was once a sci-fi future is now decidedly with us. At every level, from the individual to the organisation, from local authorities to governments and international organisations, we have to start taking security very much more seriously.

This morning the EESC’s plenary session debated and adopted, by a very large majority, an opinion on enhancing economic policy coordination. The rapporteur, Stefano Palmieri (Italian, Employees’ Group – picture), unabashedly hopes that a genuine common economic policy and the coordination of budgetary policy will follow on from economic policy coordination – at least in the euro area. However, the opinion is strongly critical of the top-down approach of the European semester and of the minimal role given, above all, to the European Parliament which, Palmieri argues, should play a key role in monitoring and assessing the corrective measures proposed by the European Commission. The limited role of the institutions representing the citizen – the Parliament, but also the consultative committees – risks creating another legitimacy deficit which risks, in turn, undermining what the Commission proposes. The Palmieri opinion is an excellent example of how the Committee can forge a consensual view among the many different interests it represents.

The EESC has two Vice-Presidents. One, Jacek Krawczyk (Polish, Employers’ Group) is responsible for budgetary and financial affairs. The other, Anna Maria Darmanin (Maltese, Employees’ Group) is responsible for communication matters. Today, Anna Mara set out her stall for her mandate, adopting the motto ‘Say It, Do It, Tweet It!’ ‘Say It,’ she explained, is about enhancing the Committee’s dialogue with civil society. ‘Do it,’ is more about enhancing the Committee’s dialogue with the other institutions. ‘Tweet It,’ is about extending the Committee’s communication activities, including embracing the new social media (Anna Maria is herself a keen ‘Twitterer’ and Facebook user). During her presentation Anna Maria listed some of the Committee’s communication activities and a few statistics. Perhaps the most impressive statistic is that the EESC’s entire communication budget is about the size of the communication budget of an average European Commission Directorate General. Considering that, the EESC does very well in the crowded market place that is ‘Brussels’…

The President of our sister consultative committee, the Committee of the Regions, spoke to our plenary session this afternoon. Mercedes Bresso, like our own President, Staffan Nilsson, spoke first about the excellent cooperation between the two Committees at administrative level. Our ‘joint services’ are a shining example for the other institutions about how to realise synergies and economies of scale. She then shifted to the political level and addressed the major challenge facing us all at the moment; how to achieve a job-rich recovery from the economic and financial crisis. She stressed in this context the vital role that local and regional authorities play. In the ensuing debate, over and above the discussions about the economic re-launch and the role of local authorities (as major spenders), two strong themes came across. The first was that the EU is ‘not a cost, but a means’ (Henri Malosse, President of the Employers’ Group) and that we must all fight to reverse the terms of the debate; what, in other words, is the cost of ‘non-Europe’? In a sense, it could be argued that the cooperation agreement between the two Committees is a small-scale example of this. Such cooperation requires finely-tuned governance mechanisms and political goodwill but, in terms of the advantages it brings, makes obvious good sense. The second is that, at a political level, the Committees could, and should, do more together in addressing common themes and challenges. The evident cooperative spirit of both Presidents this afternoon augurs well for such cooperation. For a taste of that spirit, you might want to visit Staffan Nilsson’s ‘comment’ page here.

A very worrying article in this morning’s Financial Times reports that the number of chronically hungry people in the world is approaching 1bn. World Bank President Robert Zoellick stated that the rise in food prices had already pushed an additional 44m people into extreme poverty. The number of undernourished people in the world (last year about 925m) will hit 1m by the end of the year. Since the poorest people spend more than half of their income on food, they are very vulnerable to price rises. The prices of wheat, corn and soyabeans have hit 30-month highs recently, after bad harvests, export restrictions and increasing demand in emerging countries and in the US and Europe. Once again, I am reminded of what Jeremy Rifkin said in the European Economic and Social Committee last September (see post here). The idea of 1bn chronically hungry people out there – and all through the accident of birth – certainly provides a broader perspective to things….