The return of Beger

Feeling down? Listless? A little depressed? Think it’s maybe the start of those pesky autumn blues?

Well, you are wrong. You are feeling like that because you have been deprived of the joys of having former MP Renata Beger constantly occupying the TV politico-spotlight. Now she (left of photo) is back! But who is that woman she is leaving the court building with?

I suppose this post should be labelled: “post-fourth republic nostalgia”. Of all the weird and whacky characters during those heady, Law and Justice/Self Defence,/League of Polish Families coalition years, Renata Beger was one of my favourites.

But since her party - led by another all time great of Polish politics, Andrzej Lepper - was chucked out of parliament last autumn by the wise voters of Poland, Renata has disappeared from our screens.

Until now. She is starting her trial for allegedly using small bribes to get people to round up the thousands of signatures needed before they can officially become a parliamentary candidate.

Renata, bless her, says that she has been stitched up by the media. Gazeta Wyborcza had done an undercover exposé on her, which is how she came to be in court for electoral fraud.

Her party - Samoobrona, or Self Defence - is no stranger to the courts and the legal process. In fact, Andrzej Lepper and his bunch of merry men - and Renata - have seen more legal action than many of the lawyers that represent them.

Sex scandals, public order offences, dubious electoral behaviour…you name it, they been accused of doing it.

So, after the court was adjourned today, Renata,who loves having her photo taken, was captured walking out of the building. Or maybe it wasn’t today but one of those other times?

But who is that woman with her in the slightly….well, I want to be a gentleman here, so you can fill in the rest of that sentence by yourself. Clue - it’s something to do with her dress sense. And the age she is. And the profession she practices.

Is she one of Renata’s good-time girlfriends? Is she her PR? For sure she can’t be her stylist!

Nope…that’s her lawyer!!!

Get the feeling she is going to lose this case? Renata faces a 10,000 zloty fine - around 5,000 dollars.

Owimpians of Poland

No, I don’t have a speech defect: I mean oWIMPians. Polish athletes came home from the Beijing Olympics, a little shame faced, today, bringing with them just 10 medals - three gold, six silver, one bronze. That’s poor. I’ve seen more medals on the chest of an old age pensioner on Remembrance Day.

What a bunch of wimps!

And the statistic of just ten medals gets worse when you consider only two of them came in the proper sports events - the track and field (by “proper sport” I exclude ‘synchronised nose picking’ and the like).

The ’blame game’ started even before the athletes touched down at Warsaw airport. Thenews.pl reports:

During the games, Polish athletes, including fencer Sylwia Gruchala and runner Marek Plawgo, said that their poor results in China were due to the ubiquitous irregularities in their respective sports associations, such as alcoholism in the Polish Fencing Association and favouritism in the Track and Field Athletic Association.

Alcoholism in the fencing association? Scary! Can you imagine someone coming at you from the Polish fencing association, dressed all in white with that strange face mask, brandishing a sabre, or whatever, while dangling on the end of a piece of string and at the same time being completely pissed out of their heads!

Surly a few health and safety issues there?

MP’s like Jaroslaw Govin (Krakow, PO) have waded in, repeating the accusations against the sports associations, made by athletes …who failed.

I am sure it is partly to do with funding and a lack of good people to administrate sport. Blah! But that can be said for administrations in Poland, generally. Maybe, however, what Polish athletes really lack is the balls to win - even the synchronised beach billiards squad could do with those.

Poland, frozen conflicts and new ‘cold wars’

Stop blogging for just four months over the summer and what happens? The world - certainly this part of it - has changed. And not for the better.

The deal between Washington and Warsaw on the anti-ballistic missile system last week was signed by Condoleezza Rice and her buddy, Foreign Minister Radek Sikorski (pictured below) as the guns in the Caucasus were still warm and smoking.

Russian troops were still pulling out - or were they? - of areas in Georgia they had occupied since President Mikheil Saakashvili sent many of his troops to certain death by ordering them, somewhat ludicrously, to take back control of South Ossetia, one of the small, pro-Russian breakaway regions his nation lost after the nasty war in the early 1990s as the Soviet Union collapsed around them.

Poland - in the shape of its government and particularly its president, Lech Kaczynski - has been using the conflict between Moscow and Tbilisi to nail their colours to the mast of “protecting freedom and democracy” of the brave young George against the might of an imperialistic old dragon in the Kremlin.

The Novosti Russian news agency reported Saturday:

Two more NATO ships, a Polish frigate and a U.S. destroyer, passed through the Bosporus strait and entered the Black Sea on Friday evening to boost the alliance's presence in the Black Sea, where it is delivering humanitarian cargoes to Georgia, a source in the Turkish navy said.

But the only people cheering from the sidelines, as politicians and media pundits reached for the ’new cold war metaphors’ were probably a few arms dealers. Georgia needs even more US arms! Patriot missiles coming to Poland! American troops to set up a garrison in Poland! Yippee!

And people like President Kaczynski must have been cocker-hoop! Here was HIS mission - his reason to be. As he said - “Russia has now shown its true [imperialistic] face.” Someone had to stand up to them. Didn’t they?
The war in Georgia galvanised travel-averse old Kaczor into a radical transformation. Suddenly, before our incredulous eyes, he turned into Action Man interested in notching up a few frequent fly miles vouchers. As the war raged in South Ossetia, a duck-like Rambo figure emerged from the Presidential Palace in Warsaw, rounded up fellow New Cold War Warriors from Presidential Palaces and PM Offices in Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Ukraine, and set off in Poland’s Air Force One for Tbilisi.

But where Kaczynski goes, farce quickly follows. At one point during the flight the pilot - fearing that Tbilisi airspace was still controlled by Russia - refused to go to Georgia and re-routed the plane for safer climbs in Azerbaijan. But President Kaczynski first ordered that the pilot be sacked - then took control of the plane. Kind of. I can almost imagine him - almost - gripping the joystick in sweaty hands as he said, his voice firm with purpose and intent: “I am the Polish Commander-in-Chief and this plane is going to Tbilisi!”

Sadly, that was just my imagination. Actually the pilot touched down somewhere in Azerbaijan and then Kaczynski and crew were forced to endure a four hour car journey for his date with destiny.

Kaczynski goes to Tbilisi

And what a heady experience it must have been. President Kaczynski is no longer popular at home. But here, in front of crowds of Georgians, he could appear the hero. Here were a few leaders sticking a finger up at Putin, almost daring him to do his worst.

But while President Kaczynski was forging a new reputation for himself as a 21st century Pilsudski - well, he can dream - the rest of us were feeling decidedly nervous. The signing of the anti-missile deal, the war in the Caucuses, are both the result of national and international elites looking for a sense of their own worth - and that goes for Moscow and Washington, Tbilisi, Warsaw and Paris. The price, meanwhile, the average Central and Eastern European- in-the-street is paying is a more unstable region.

We are left with more questions than answers. Why did Saakashvili start a war with Russia he knew he would lose? Did he expect President Kaczynski - his main supporter internationally - to send a few Polish F-16s over Moscow? Did he not realise that Polish F-16s are having a little trouble flying over Warsaw these days, so naff and knackered is consignment given to them by Washington? Did he honestly think that acting like the loose canon he is would make Georgia’s chances of joining Nato any greater?

And why do so many people think that Moscow is acting from a new position of strength when they are actually trying to hang on to what are, realistically, meaningless pieces of territory in South Ossetia and Abkhazia? This is not strength - it shows their desperation, weakness and diminishing influence in the region.

Is the anti-missile shield really needed at all? Are the existential threats more the product of post-Cold War and War on Terror fantasies? Will the shield really make us safer? Is a further antagonised Moscow really worth it? Wouldn’t some creative diplomacy be a better way for international leaders to spend their time?

One of Us?

More questions: What did Bush say to Saakashvili in private as he praised him in public? When the Georgian president was contemplating making his suicidal move against South Ossetia two years ago he reportedly got more than an earful from Colin Powell. “Back off!,” was the clear message.

Bush often says that Saakashvili - in reality an authoritarian who has more in common with someone like Putin than many realise - is “one of us”; Bush often reminds us that Saakashvili is “western educated.” Which is true - but there again, so is George W Bush “western educated.” So what does that say about the state of Western Education Systems?

the beatroot returns...

...on September 1. I was musing about a multimedia thing, and there will be elements of that, now and again, but usually it is going to be the same old rubbish.

See you then.

New by the beatroot

A guest post on Polandian.

Eurovision - nobody loves us, we don’t care

The last post

Well...kind of. After three years and 646 posts, the beatroot is going into a summer hibernation - as all root vegetables should do at this time of year - only to re-emerge in the autumn bigger, better…etc.

We will be back in a slightly different form, however, taking a little more multimedia approach. And I am still going to write for other places. In fact, I can write more often elsewhere.

Thanks to everyone who has passed through here, at some time or another - and particularly the regular commentators, who helped give us a reputation for being a bit better than the ordinary blog.

And there has been quite a few folk passing by.

From January 1, 2008, we have had 289,248 hits with 238,814 uniques.

In April, the last full month, we got 79,542 hits and 65,303 uniques.

I know some commercial web sites in the English language in Poland that would be pleased with that.

The reasons for the summer break are many: over work, the need to recharge batteries, etc.

The Beatroot Republic

But mainly it’s because the beatroot has run out of a subject. This blog was really about Poland under the Fourth Republic - that two years of lunacy from the Law and Justice government.

It’s been six months since the demise of one of the strangest governments in Europe, certainly in my lifetime. And little did I expect to be caught up in it all.

So in case your memory has dimmed, let me remind you of how it was.

At one time we had a government with a cabinet made up of six inch nail swallowers, bearded ladies and other circus freaks.

The PM was Jaroslaw Kaczynski, leading the charge against what he thought was a cabal of communists, still clinging on, post 1989, in public institutions, government, organized crime and media. Jaroslaw didn’t just think there were legions of Reds huddled together under his bed - he was of the impression that they were under his nose, his hat and probably under his pet cat’s basket (I never did find out what his cat‘s name is, so let‘s call him Sebastian).

Jaroslaw launched an assault on what became known as the uklad by setting up a counter uklad. The nepotism that Poland has indeed laboured under since the fall of communism continued - except now we had a different bunch of cronies fighting over the spoils of being in power in this poor, long suffering country. Why a decent people like the Poles can’t ever get themselves a government good enough for them, we can only ponder on as one of those great unanswered questions - like, how large is the universe; or why it is we can’t tickle ourselves?

So close was the net he weaved around him that many expected Sebastian the Cat to get a job as Minister of Feline Affairs.

But he resisted. He did, however, end up by doing something even stranger - appoint Roman Giertych and Andrzej Lepper as his vice prime ministers.

This was too much for many of Kaczynski’s supporters, and it was all down, down from there into an inferno of madness.

Still, for a blogger, it was groszy from heaven. Every day brought some gory fascination. It was like watching the political equivalent of a slow motion car crash, on a loop.

If you came in late and have no idea what I am talking about then feel free to look back through this blog….and I never had to make one word of it up….Cue here wobbly screen like they do in old corny movies when cutting to another time, a memory, or when it’s a dream sequence.

Yeah, perhaps it was all a dream. And now we have woken up, haven’t we?

Haven’t we?

That's all, folks.

Potty Polish PM admits he ‘did inhale’

This summary is not available. Please click here to view the post.

We forgive you Tomaszewski!

Two Brits have sent me a link to their myspace page where you can hear the first hymn by English football fans in support of the Polish football team at this summer’s Euro 2008 football championships in Switzerland and Austria.

And it’s a great little song! Written by Will Hetherington and Rupert Slade - the latter lived in Poland for four years - it's about an English football fan depressed after England were knocked out of Euro 2008 by Croatia. He was thinking like I was thinking - who to support now? No Scotland or Ireland in the finals either (and Wales never qualify for anything, anyway). Just then, Magda, the Polish barmaid in the English pub he is sitting depressed in, pulls him a pint and suggests he support Poland - well, there are hundreds of thousands of Poles in the UK.

The title refers to the goalkeeper of the 1973 Polish side who (in)famously knocked England out of the 1974 World Cup finals.

Polska Song (Come back Tomaszewski - all is forgiven)

Sitting in the pub
The final whistle's still ringing in my ears
All our hopes are dashed
And summer laughter's turned to tears

In the final game,
All we needed was a draw,
But Beckham couldn't bend it,
And now three lions roar no more

But I'm shaken from my blues
The sound of singing full of pride.
Haven't you heard the news?
Poland's gone and qualified

Polska, Polska, naprzod Polska,
You're our boys in white and red.
Polska, Polska, Come on Poland
Go where others fear to tread.

From London to Warsaw
From The King's Head to The Swan
Polska, Polska, naprzod Polska
Together we are strong.

Don't look so down
Says Magda pulling me another beer,
Wipe away that frown
And find yourself another team to cheer.

Whatever colours we wear
Our passion is the same
'Cos football's here to share
So come and join us in the beautiful game

Well my team are firing blanks
And the summer fills me with woe
I may not know Krakow from Gdansk
But I'm willing to give it a go

Polska, Polska, naprzod Polska,
You're our boys in white and red.
Polska, Polska, Come on Poland
Go where others fear to tread.

From London to Warsaw
From The King's Head to The Swan
Polska, Polska, naprzod Polska
Together we are strong.

Hear Polska Song here.

Fritzl, Austrians and ...Radio Maryja?

The shocking, disgusting and incomprehensibly cruel case of the Austrian ‘children in the cellar’ has made some commentators look for sociological causes, in some unlikely places, for what is really the individual act of a psychopath. Even Poland’s cranky, ultra-conservative anti-Semites at Radio Maryja have been dragged into the increasingly wild comment-fest.

Many commentators have tried to explain, what I believe is almost the unexplainable, by trying to find something buried deep within small town Austrian culture. And they seem to be finding it in a place even colder and darker than the cellar under Josef Fritzl’s house in Amstetten.

The locals knew something, didn't they? So why did they look away, pretend it wasn’t happening?

Apparently, it’s all to do with Austria’s anti-Semitic past. Yup! Of course it is. But not only Austria's dark past. Look at this bit from Howard Jacobson’s column in the Independent (UK).

As chance would have it – let's call it chance, anyway – the unremarkable provincial Austrian town of Amstetten has looked away before. There was a concentration camp in Amstetten. Not a big one. Just a sub-camp of Mauthausen, of which there were approximately 50 dotted around lower and upper Austria. Since Mauthausen's speciality was extermination by means of slave labour, in particular the extermination of politically educated and vocal enemies of the Reich, we might fairly assume that Amstetten's speciality was the same. It is also worth noting that Amstetten was a camp for women.

Whether it is equally worth noting that the Polish Catholic radio station Radio Maryja [my italics] – a continual embarrassment to the Vatican on account of its nationalistic and anti-Semitic utterances – has opened several bases in the Austrian Tyrol, the first of them in Amstetten, I don't know…

Well, if he doesn’t know whether it was worth pointing that out - and I would argue that it was ridiculous to point that out in the context of this story - then why bother in the first place?

It says here (under religious antisemitism) that the founder of Radio Maryja, the anti-Semite Father Tadeusz Rydzyk, decided in 1999 to expand his operations in the Tyrol region, adding to the base already set up in Amstetten, the town where the disgusting Fritzl imprisoned his daughter and children.

That said, the small town of Amstetten (eastern Austria) is not in the Tyrol region, which is in the west of Austria, as is the district of Amstetten - which is a different place. Could this be a mix up with Radio Maria International (which Rydzyk did have an involvment with back in the 1980s in Bavaria) which does have a place in Amstetten?

Whatever. What has that got to do with this case? Where is there evidence that any lingering anti-Semitism in Austria, or anywhere else, had anything to do with such a freak case such as this?

Maybe Brendan O'Niell in spiked is right. What Jacobson and others are alluding to is this: Catholic Austrians, like those Radio Maryja listening Poles, are not like us. They are from the East and so do not think and behave as we do in western Europe. They live in a denial culture, hiding from their past, deaf and blind to their present.

That the ultra-conservative loonies at Radio Maryja can be dragged into a case so shocking - because it is so unusual - maybe shows up something a little disturbing about some western European thinking about Central and Eastern Europe. It tells us nothing, however, about what caused a psychopath like Fritzl to do what he did.

Update - maybe someone can help, here.

In the Jacobson article linked in the above post it claims that Radio Maryja had a base in Amstetten and then expanded and has now many bases in the Tyrol region.

But the town where Friztl lived is in east Austria. Tyrol is in west Austria. There is also a Amstetten district in west Austria, but very far from the eastern town of the same name.

We have also failed to find evidence that Radio Maryja has bases in Austria, as is claimed in the Jacobson article and the other link I give in the original post.

What we have found is that another radio network, Radio Maria does have a base in Amstettel.

Father Rydzyk of Radio Maryja had contact with a Radio Maria in Germany in the 1980s.

Could Jacobson be mistaking Radio Maryja with Radio Maria?

Help!!!

Poles decide London mayoral election?

That’s what the losing candidate Ken Livingstone told Polish Radio this week.

'The Polish vote may be anywhere between 60 and 100,000 and therefore it’s become a decisive vote. We all expect this to be a very close election.'

'So the Polish community will effectively determine the outcome.'

Well, with the Conservative candidate Boris Johnson winning by 140,000 first and second preference votes then the Polish vote may well have been decisive.

There has been a record turnout in the election for London’s mayor. OK, the turnout is still only 45 percent, but that’s about ten percent better than usual.

And out of the 2.4 million voters who did go to the Poles yesterday, maybe up to 100,000 - the number who registered to vote - were from Poland.

So both the main candidates - the incumbent Ken Livingstone and conservative rival Boris Johnston were on to the Polish community in London during the election campaign to try and appear as their candidate.

Livingstone, or instance, promised a Polish day in London every year, to fall on May 3, Constitution day in Poland.

Former Polish prime minister (and once actiong mayor of Warsaw) Kazimierz Marcinkiewicz - who is now based in London working for the EBRD - reportedly gave his pledge to Boris Johnson.

And many observers believed that many Poles were likely to have given their vote to Boris, as Livingstone’s old nickname, dating back to the 1980s when he was a hard left local government politician, is Red. And maybe Poles, who wouldn’t know too much about the guy and how he is, these days, a typically British ideologically-lite politician, maybe they were not too keen on candidates with a nickname like that.

Heaer both leading candidates on the Polish vote here.

Prince Charles opens Jewish centre in Poland

His Royal Highness was in Krakow today opening the new Jewish Cultural Centre, which he helped set up and partially funded himself. But the Polish media have been more interested in the Mrs Royal Highness (she's the one on the left - photo by Mada Matyjaszek) who accompanied him.

Prince Charles was in Krakow back in 2002. The story goes that when on a tour of the city he was inquisitive about the Jewish history of the place. It is the city of Polanski, of Schindler’s List - it’s in the outside world’s imagination of Poland’s Jewish history. But when Charlie found out that there was no significant Jewish centre left in the city, he was amazed.

Cue uniquely strange British Royal English accent (and to think they once called the English accent Queen’s English - have you actually heard that women speak? It’s like no other accent in England.)

“Bout that‘s absolutely scanduuuulloos… I moist do something aboot it,” Charles declared, large ears flapping impressively.

And so he did. Through a foundation based in London he helped develop the Jewish Cultural Centre in Krakow - a five story building to house cultural events and much more.

He also shelled out a few quid from his own pocket (or, being a Brit myself, should that be he even shelled out a few quid from my pocket - the British have always shelled out on behalf of these parasites, after all).

And so it came to pass that Prince Charles - future King Charles III (snigger) - came to Krakow to cut a few ribbons and unveil a few plaques.

But watching the media coverage of his visit this evening, it is the fact that he has been accompanied by his new-ish wife, Camilla Parker Bowles that has caught their attention.

Of course, the typically British upper class equine Camila (why do they all look like horses?) is no match for the supposed beauty of Princess Diana (although, let’s be honest: Diana was the beauty they wanted her to be, not the one she was). Camilla will never be the world media star that Diana was.

Maybe the world will remember Camilla as I do. Back in the heady days in the early 1990s, when Diana was separated from Charles, there was a transcript published in a British tabloid - and never refuted by the Palace - of a conversation between the future king of England and his long time equine lover. The conversation, recorded by some ham radio nerd, included the memorable lines by Charles to Camilla:

Oh, how I wish I was your tampon [!].

Why there wasn’t a republican revolution the moment that crap dropped onto the doorsteps of the UK is, and will always be, a mystery. A man who would rather be a tampon than a monarch is really only fit to be …a royal tampon.

But more importantly - nowhere in the media coverage was it asked why some British royal was the one who initiated a project that should have been essentially Polish in character. Even a tampon has more imagination than that, apparently.

Gorbachev signed JP II contract killing?

The weekly Wprost, out tomorrow, shows a politburo document, signed by Mikhail Gorbachev, which appears to warrant a KGB contract killing on John Paul II.

Or so claims veteran American journalist iJohn O. Kohler n a book, also released tomorrow, Chodzi o papieża szpiedzy w watykanie (About the Pope. Spies in the Vatican). The politburo document, seen by Dastych, says: "Use all available possibilities to prevent a new political trend, initiated by the Polish pope….[…]…if necessary - reach to means beyond disinformation and discreditation."

The document, which dates back to November 1979 - one year after Karol Wojtyla became pope - is signed by eight top Party officials including Konstantin Rusakov - ominously the guy who coordinated action with the Polish Communist party, and Mikhail Gorbachev.

Gorbachev, for all his glasnost, was obviously deeply worried about the potential of John Paul II to inspire what he later partly did - Solidarity, the fall of the Berlin Wall, and so on…

In Rome, Pope John Paul II was shot four times on May 13, 1981 by Mehmet Ali Hagca, who had vowed to kill the pope back in 1979, though before the politburo document was signed. Hagca’s motives seem to be ultra Turksih nationalist, not in pay of the KGB.

Krakow tolerance march passes off peacefully

Observers reckon a few hundred gays and lesbians [and friends - see comment] took part in the annual Tolerance March in the conservative southern city of Krakow, today.

The demonstration last year ended with 13 arrests and plenty of argy-bargy from the usual suspects in All-Polish Youth and other groups that attract people fond of very short hair cuts.

John Beauchamp, who provides these photos (see more on his flickr page) told me that he thought that there were more reactionaries in the market square in the centre of town than there were gays and lesbians.

And almost outnumbering both groups were the police, assisted by dogs (who were on their own tolerance march in celebration of their usual doggedly polymorphous sexual desires).


Though the whole thing passed off without any violence, the atmosphere has been a little tense for a few days now in Krakow - with posters put up by arch-conservatives warning the people of Krakow that if gays and lesbians are continually allowed to march and protest then ‘gay marriages’ will surly follow, and Sodom and Gomorrah will stalk the land having their wicked, wicked way with Poland.

But you get the sense that the issue of homosexuality hit a peak a year or two ago. As a rallying point for the increasingly marginalised catholic-nationalists - who, lest we forget, were in government only half a year ago here in Poland - the bogey men and women of the gay and lesbian community are losing (quite literally in some cases) their allure.

Poland’s teletubby ombudsman hangs up handbag

Ewa Sowinska, who leapt (big foot first) into international infamy when she accused a Teletubbie of being gay, has resigned from her post as Children’s Ombudsman.

She had to - she was going to be sacked by the government and parliament, anyway. Her critics say she is only concerned, not with the welfare of kids, but pushing her League of Polish Families catholic-nationalist type agenda whenever she can.

And she can try and laugh it off, but calls for gays not to be allowed to work with children - perhaps she wants a kind of sexual orientation lustration process? - and the time when she was concerned over Tinky Winky’s sexual and emotional wellbeing will always be what she will be remembered for.

More on the background to this on the excellent Uzar News.

IVF for married couples only, says Polish ‘liberal’

Jaroslaw Gowin, from what commentators misleadingly refer to as the ‘liberal’ Civic Platform, told Radio Zet today that only married couples should have access to the wonders of the IVF procedure.

Why? Well, Govin, who is on the bioethics parliamentary committee looking into IVF treatment in Poland, told Radio Zet:

"Only a mother and a father are capable of giving a child a proper upbringing. Most dysfunctional children, including victims of paedophilia, are born out of wedlock.”

Oh, really? What a berk.

Govin was refering to the bill introduced by his own government which does not discriminate against married couples being able to get the treatment.

The IVF issue became front page news last November after Health Minister Ewa Kopacz announced plans of reimbursing couples from the state budget. One in five couples have trouble conceiving here, and the demand for IVF is growing

The opposition Law and Justice (PiS), alongside Catholic organizations and other usual suspects have opposed the state paying for the procedure and oppose IVF in general, of course. Newspaper articles have been written accusing women who get medical assistance to get pregnant as ‘immoral’. Men are reduced to being ‘sperm donors’.

Maria Środoń from MaterCare International, which describes itself as an association of Catholic Obstetricians and Gynaecologists says:

The mother is just reduced to virtually a breeding animal. Likewise, IVF dehumanizes the sperm donor. He is required to achieve arousal in a clinic closet with the aid of pornography.

Blimey! Women as ‘breeding animals’. Men being forced to use pornography to get off in hospital clinics! Call Radio Maryja – and you had better be quick!

Despite opposition from the usual quarters, IVF is legal in Poland – its just that the state refuses to pay for it. Clinics have been performing the procedure since 1987.

It’s also becoming a booming market among foreigners coming to Poland to conceive, as the price of treatment, say for a British couple, is much less in one of the forty clinics here than in London, for instance.

The government has drawn up a bill on IVF regulating the procedure but is almost certain to back down on funding IVF from state coffers. So childless couples who can’t conceive the normal way better be well off. Poorer couples will just have to do without.

It’s one thing to oppose IVF from a religious viewpoint – but to stoop to the pathetic arguments used by Jaroslaw Govin, that kids born out of marriage will somehow be more at risk from child molestation, etc, etc, is just pathetic. And let’s stop the labeling of the current governing party as ‘liberal’. Civic Platform is populated by atavistic political recidivists, like many political parties in Poland. Period.

What’s left of the Polish Left?

Not much. And this weekend saw another lump fall off the alliance of leftwing parties.

On Saturday, ex-communist Marek Borowski (on right of photo, mid nose facilitation) announced that he was taking his party, Social Democracy of the Republic of Poland (SDLP) out of the Left and Democrats (LiD) coalition with the ex-communist Democratic Left Alliance (SLD). Borowski said that this was because the SLD had failed to consult his SdRP party when kicking out the Democratic Party (PD) - made up of some old Solidarity leaders such as Bronislaw Geremek - out of LiD.

Marek Borowski’s SDLP is actually a splinter group of SLD. So a splinter group has left a coalition made up of members of a party they used to be a part of.

To recap: SLD ended the LiD alliance with PD, while SDLP left the left alliance over SLD not consulting them over kicking PD out of LiD. LiD was also made up of the non-communist leftwing Labour Union (UP), but nobody bothers to tell them anything.

Are you following me? Well, if you are then you are doing better than many of the Left’s former voters, who have been deserting them in droves over the last five years.

From the heyday of the 2001 election, when the SLD bagged 42% of the popular vote and a majority in the Sejm, the leftwing vote has all but collapsed in elections since.

So SLD - itself a coalition of left wing parties which got together after the immediate collapse of communism, and which has its roots in the old Polish United Workers Party, but has a policy programme identical to most social democratic parties in Europe - has decided to shift leftwards, in a desperate attempt to get some of its old support back.

The row with the Democratic Party included two issues: the anti-missile shield in Poland - which SLD opposes but the PD is for - and Poland’s restrictive abortion laws, which PD are for keeping pretty much as they are, and SLD wants to liberalise.

Where have all the voters gone?

Much of the left in Poland is saddled with the yoke of their history - they were in the communist party. So many of the more liberal Poles, like my girlfriend, would never vote for them even if they agree with their programme. Sje is not going to vote for people who made her mum’s life difficult because she, as a school teacher, had the cheek to refuse to join the Party.

Their second problem is that, on the economic redistribution issue that should be on any left or left of centre party’s agenda, there are many parties trampling on this ground. Kaczynski’s Law and Justice party relies on much of its support from poorer Poles. The Polish Peasant’s Party, now in government with Thatcherite conservatives, have always positioned themselves on the redistributionist left. So do the now out-of-parliament Self defence and League of Polish Families.

The third problem is that too many of these guys have links with corrupt rich people who got their hands on the goodies in the wake of the fall of communism. This tends to have very bad consequences for trust scores in focus groups.

So the secular Left finds itself making and then breaking alliances, chasing smaller and smaller amounts of voters. Poland needs a strong secular left/social democratic party, which could slot into the populist areas possessed at the moment by Kaczynski and other conservatives.

The problem is, the country doesn’t seem to trust the ex-communist left to deliver that politics.

And making and breaking LiD alliances between SDLP , SLD, UP and PD is going to do nothing other than alienate the dyslexic vote.

Polish president PiSed?

Should the President of Poland renew his AA membership? And no, I don’t mean the Automobile Association. And does anybody care?

Well, the ruling Civic Platform’s Janusz Palikot (above) does. The MP with the big fortune - worth 333 million zlotys according to Wprost magazine - and the big hair, has also got a big bee in his bonnet about whether President Lech the duck Kaczynski has got a drink problem.

It all started with a post on Palikot’s blog - all MPs have blogs these days, in their desperate attempt to ‘connect’ with the people - where he demanded that the President publish a detailed record of his health due to concern that the head of state has a drink problem.

He later apologised for his remark about the alcohol but repeated a demand for a record of the president’s health be made public.

That was back in January. In February, the court in Lublin declared that there ‘was a lack of public interest’ in pursuing the case in a libel court.

Well, indeed. But the matter still seems to be consuming the political and media class here (when the same people are not, many of them, consuming vast amounts of alcohol. Show me a journalist that doesn’t drink and I will show you a blue hippopotamus wearing patent leather stilettos).

Law and Justice (PiS) MPs, the party from which Kaczynski hails from, have been getting very upset about the whole business. One of them, on TV last night, stormed out of a TVN studio mid interview, so incensed was he at the allegations that there was something wrong with ‘his President.’

Palikot has remained on the offensive about a subject of dubious importance. If Kaczynski isn’t an alcoholic then maybe “he has Alzheimer’s” is the type of comment he comes out with.

Kaczynski does pop into hospital quite often. We also know he likes a drink. In one meeting with Prime Minister Tusk they got through half a case of wine between them and advisors. But does that make him a lush? He doesn’t speak very clearly, but then neither does his twin brother Jarsolaw. And the nearest Jaroslaw gets to the good times, apparently, is a plate of scrambled eggs.

There is an expression, He drinks like a fish, but is there an expression, He drinks like a duck? And is the reason for the President's dithering and incompetence down to booze?

If you answered yes to any of the above questions then maybe you should stop drinking so much.

Warsaw Ghetto Uprising 1943

As April 19 falls on Passover this year, the ceremonies commemorating the 65th anniversary of the Ghetto Uprising are being held today.

In town was Shimon Peres - the only Israeli president anyone has ever heard of. Israeli presidents are like Irish presidents: they could have been in the job five years and the first you hear of them is when they are resigning, or fighting another election. Peres took part in the long, solemn ceremony at the Monument to Ghetto Heroes, in the Muranow district, just to the north of the centre of the capital.

I used to live in that area and the ‘Jewish quarter’ doesn’t feel very Jewish anymore. No Jews there anymore. There are a few reminders of the past - a street named after the founder of Esperanto, Ludvic Zamanhof, for instance. The Nozyk Synagogue survived the war - the Nazis used it for storage space. A small part of the wall. Even the Monument to Ghetto Heroes on Zamenhofa Street is quit modest, surrounded by nasty 1950s apartment blocks.

In fact, so unlike how it was - as are most places in Warsaw - that when they filmed Polanski’s The Pianist, they didn’t shoot it in Moranow, they shot it across the river in the Praga district. See the scene on ljhjblaApril 19 from the film here.

President Peres is here till Thursday, and then the current Polish-Israeli fest will be over.

Cunning linguists

Digital Polish language channel TVN Lingua has bought two seasons of the UK version of Big Brother as an example of English as a ‘living language’.

One of the housemates to feature in the programmes is Jade Goody. Jade became a Big Star in Britain because of her Big Brother appearances; so big, in fact, that she was invited back for last year’s Celebrity Big Brother.
Unfortunately, Goody was thrown out of the house after a bizarre dispute with Bollywood star Shilpa Shetty (video example here - Jade is the one in glasses)

So what kind of ‘living English’ can TVN Lingua viewers expect from Our Jade? Well, here are some of the quotes that got her in trouble during last year’s Celebrity BB. To Bollywood star Shetty, on Celebrity Big Brother, January 2007:

You're a fucking loser and a liar. Go back to the slums.

You're not some princess in fucking Neverland. I don't give a shit. You're not some princess here.

Your head's so far up your arse you can smell your own shit…

And so on. But what use would Goody and the rest of the housemates be to Poland’s aspiring linguists? The Guardian UK:

Urszula Majewska, the chief executive of the Polish TVN Lingua channel, said the programme was an ideal way to show how English was actually spoken, but admitted that she "wouldn't recommend it for teenagers".

Well, quite. BTW, Urszula Majewska’s qualifications for being chief executive of a TV channel rests only, I am informed, with the fact that she was once personal assistant to head of TVN Mariusz Walter and is a graduate of English Studies at Warsaw University.

Oh, and once TVN Lingua viewers get the hang of Goody’s ‘living language’ then maybe they can stay up for the adult show Zabawy z jezyczkiem…which is a play on language meaning either’ Play with language’ or…‘Play with the tongue’.

I see TVN really is full of cunning linguists.

Dull old Warsaw?

Warsaw has been voted third most boring European capital.

The survey by tripadvisor.com from a sample of 1700 travellers put excruciatingly dull Brussels as most soporific European city, followed by the deathly dull Zurich. Warsaw staggers in third.

The survey has odd aspects, however. London, for instance, is simultaneously voted third most friendly European capital, but second most unfriendly European capital.

Go figure.