Last year I made a big effort to meet separately with each of the directorates in the European Economic and Social Committee’s administration. This was a big success (for me as, I hope, for my colleagues) and I learned a lot. This year I have decided to take the exercise one step further by trying to meet with each of the administration’s units separately. The exercise got under way this morning with a working breakfast with all of the colleagues who service the Committee’s Section for Transport, Energy, Infrastructure and the Information Society (TEN). It was good fun and, once again, I learned a lot. I am a lucky Secretary General because I have a very professional and highly motivated workforce and together we work very hard to maintain a good atmosphere and a good working environment. Events like these enable me to feel the pulse of the Committee’s engine houses and also just to express my appreciation.

Today the European Economic and Social Committee hosted the twelfth European Fourth World People’s University, meeting this time on the theme of ‘Citizens united for a Europe active against persistent poverty,’ and jointly organised by the ATD Fourth World Movement and the EESC. The universities provide a space for dicussion and reflection with people living in poverty, in order to find, learning from their personal experiences, ways to fight sever poverty. The event brought together some 180 delegates from eleven European countries – people who have themselves experienced persistent poverty – and representatives of the European institutions and other players in the fight against poverty and social exclusion. The University, which was opened by EESC President Staffan Nilsson and closed by the Chairwoman of the Committee’s Social Affairs and Employment Section, Leila Kurki, broke up into three workshops addressin the themes of: ‘citizenship and living together with our differences’; ‘citizenship and access to fundamental rights to all’; and ‘citizenship, participation of all and representation of people living in poverty.’ For, as President Nilsson said in his opening address, ‘Poverty is not only a material problem resulting from the distribution of wealth; it means also being deprived of the fundamental right to civil and political participation.’ The University was a nice example of the way the EESC throws its doors open to all aspects of organised civil society.

This morning I had the pleasure and privilege of welcoming and talking to a fact-finding delegation from the recently-established Moroccan Economic and Social Council, led by its distinguished President, Mr Chakib Benmoussa. The delegation is in Brussels for a three day visit featuring meetings with the European Union and Belgian institutions. The Moroccan ESC was officially inaugurated on 21 February 2011 and is thus a very young institution on a learning curve. In the discussion the representatives asked questions that demonstrated to me that, whatever their specificities, all consultative bodies are part of the same family and face very similar challenges in, for example, fostering consensus, ensuring representativity and measuring impact. The European Economic and Social Committee is delighted to host our Moroccan guests and accompany them throughout their visit and, indeed, to assist and support their institution as we can, convinced that the consultative function plays an important flanking role. I was thrilled at the end to receive from President Bemoussa the Moroccan Council’s first two opinions (both own-initiative) on youth employment and for a new social charter.

To Nieuwpoort, to the mouth of the Yser river, to celebrate two birthdays. There was not a breath of wind and the sea and the river were calm. A long walk inland treated us to sightings of all sorts of waders and seabirds. Later, at the dinner table, I learned two interesting historical/nautical snippets. The first concerned the characteristic sets of piles that mark the river channel and act both as mooring stations and buffers to prevent ships hitting the sides. The Flemish (and the Dutch) call these ‘Dücdalven‘ (‘duc d’Albe‘ or, in English, Duke of Alva). By all accounts, Fernando Alvarez de Toldeo, the third Duke of Alva, a Spanish General and Governor of the Spanish Netherlands 1567-1573, aka ‘the Iron Duke’, had an unfortunate habit of executing his opponents and generally massacring communities. His infamous ‘Council of Troubles’  had at least 1,000 people executed and in Brussels in June 1568 he was responsible for the simultaneous decapitation of twenty-two noblemen; the execution of the Counts of Egmond and Hoorne followed a few days later. Sailors gave the gallows-like piles his name, imagining that every time they threw their mooring ropes at the piles they were hanging the Duke. It’s so nice to be remembered. The other snippet dated from the last war when, in 1943, the coastal regions were threatened with famine. A vast shoal of herring miraculously swam up the Channel and hovered off the Belgian coast for long enough for the fishing boats to bring back rich hauls that staved off hunger. After a quick surf I found a folk memory of the event at this blog site (p. 25). Perhaps other readers can provide better references. In any case, the locals still have vivid memories of this biblical intervention. The region seems so prosperous now but not so very long ago local people lived only off of what providence sent swimming into their nets.

Like many of my compatriots, I listen every morning to the Today programme on BBC Radio 4. This morning there was a fascinating discussion (it’s at around 134 minutes here) between one of the presenters, John Humphrys, right-wing Conservative MP John Redwood and the head of the Institute for Fiscal Studies, Paul Johnson. The subject of the discussion was the current maximum 50 p income tax rate. Johnson explained that even before the government increased the rate to 50 p, the top 1% of income tax payers (those earning over £ 150,000 a year) had been paying 30 % of all income tax. The Treasury, in other words, was highly dependent upon them. Half of that 30 % came from the just 40,000 people who were earning over £ 500,000 a year. These were precisely the people with the means to seek expert advice on how to reduce liability and/or move elsewhere. It was hard to know what effect the 50 p rate had had but when the rate had been at 40 p the government had got more revenue from the top 1 % than when it had been at 60 p (in the 1980s) or 90 p (in the 1970s). John Humphrys had clearly expected an ideological approach from John Redwood and was just as clearly disappointed. Redwood was solidly pragmatic. The government needed to maximise revenue and therefore it had to make sure that top taxpayers ‘stayed and paid’. Johnson added that, though it was difficult to tell and there were no statistics yet, the 50 p rate seemed to be a bit above the revenue maximising rate and had a sort of psychological significance. And it was recalled that as a shrewd Chancellor Gordon Brown had always kept it to 40 p…

This evening we watched a curiosity, the Coen brothers’ A Serious Man (2009). Set in 1960s Minneapolis (which is where the brothers grew up), the film (described as a ‘dark comedy’) documents the unravelling life of Job-like figure Larry Goprik, as he struggles with an unfaithful wife, a free-riding, hypochondriac brother, a growing adolescent son (with his own problems), unhelpful rabbis, money-grabbing divorce lawyers and the vagaries of life in general. The opening scene, set in a Polish shtetl in the early 1900s, suggests that Larry might be jinxed but, no, the brothers later denied this. Life can just be like that and, indeed, it frequently is. Joel was quoted as saying ‘It’s always fun, and to be quite honest we’ve been doing this for 25 years, heaping shit on characters.’ Certainly, as the film ends, more is about to hit the can. Poor Larry. Poor us!

This morning it was my turn to co-chair (together with Gerhard Stahl) the 13th bi-monthly meeting of the Secretaries General of the European Economic and Social Committee and of the Committee of the Regions together with the Directors of their Joint Services and their Human Resource and Finance Directors. This is one part, an essential part, of the governance mechanism that makes the pioneering cooperation agreement between the two Committees work. On the agenda this morning: preparing the next meeting of the Political Monitoring Group (another part, at political level, of the governance mechanism); budgetary and financial affairs (and particularly the draft 2013 budget); human resources (both Committees have introduced tele-work and were happy to learn that this is going well); the work programmes of the logistics and translation directorates; electronic document management; and areas for further potential cooperation with the other institutions. It was a rich agenda but all went well.

In early this morning to make my choice and cast my vote in the European Economic and Social Committee’s annual video challenge. There is a strong field of some forty videos and it is great fun just to surf through them and enjoy the entrants’ creativity and inventiveness. But if you are not an EU employee you could also win yourself an I-Pad! Voting is open until midday today and I warmly encourage anybody who is interested in how Europeans see Europe to take a look.

Hard on the heels of the untimely death of Davy Jones, of The Monkees fame (and the man whose mid-1960s obiquity obliged David Robert Jones to become David Bowie) comes news of the equally untimely death of Lucio Dalla. If the Monkees’ hits (and their zany television show) will always remind me of my childhood, Dalla’s music will forever remind me of my first years in Italy. Dalla was from Bologna, which is where I was living and studying when Balla Balla Ballarina became a big hit (in 1980). Dalla, who started out in jazz bands, was perhaps best known for Caruso, but Balla Balla was part of the aural wallpaper of that year and an integral part of my Bolognese experience because Dalla had only recently (so we were told) quit performing in some of the osterie we frequented as students and was fêted as a good local lad who’d made good. In any case, he belonged to a rich stable of brilliant Italian singer-songwriters who had honed and polished their talents long before the big time struck.

To the Warehouse Studio this evening to see the English Comedy Club’s current production of Terence Rattigan’s Separate Tables. The play is set in the Beauregard Private Hotel in Bournemouth in the mid-1950s. It has two acts, separated by eighteen months, and all of the scenes take place in the dining room and lounge. The England of the 1950s – drear, repressed, – is well portrayed. It was a land of poor food and seedy lodging houses and of spinsters and widowers eking out a sort of existence in south coast hotels. A former politician’s past catches up with him and a philanderer masquerading as a retired major is unmasked.  The hotel staff and the ‘permanent guests’ provide the social backdrop. This is Fawlty Towers with gall. It is also a world that has disappeared. Looking at the play today is a little like opening a first edition of an Elisabeth David cookery book. The grey world of rationing that David fought against has also gone, yet we read her recipes today with the same pleasure we watch Rattigan dissecting social mores and repressed passions. This is a strong production with a good cast. It’s on until 10 March and is well worth watching.