An Italian Lesson

We all know what Berlusconi is - some even think he's a loveable rogue.

Berlusconi rules only with the the consent of the Northern Leagues and Gianfranco Fini's Alliance. This is not merely a terrifying ideological combination, but a mark that the industrial workers of the north, Italy's economic powerhouse, have left the social democratic building.

Italians are essentially concerned with their own well being, not as a nation but as family groupings and very local loyalty exchanges between such groups. The North has been kept on side with all Rome governments since the second War only by: the steadily growing economy ; by enormous subventions, particularly to agriculture, from the European Union; by the immigration into the North being mostly from Italians of the South (and that most grudgingly accepted).

The wealth transfers from North to South, and from the productive economy to state and government client bases has finally become too much to bear. Work export under the pressures of globalisation, the redirection of EU subsidy to new member state entrants, the right-on politically correct agendas of the left and their undermining of local social and cultural exchange systems, the failure of their unreformed trade unions to defend their living standards and offering instead their direction of funds and attention to agendas wholly outside the world of work, have precipitated this.

And with this has come the racialism that excludes non EU immigrants to living, literally, outside the walls of towns and cities; denied residence and thus any enjoyment of the social wage they help to fund of nursery schools, education, health services, wage top ups, social housing - nothing can be accessed. People in great poverty cannot wait for slow legal process, as the elected mayors of so many northern cities know. Further, many who voted for the Northern Leagues want complete secession. An independent state in the north of the peninsula that is separately a part of the European Union.

What has been done in Italy by the kind of New Labour idiocy practised for the last 11 years in the United Kingdom has come to fruition in ways that can be only too easily projected onto the UK . And the counterpart of Fini and his National Alliance, the British National Party, is steadily advancing towards power.