Would you vote for this man?

The picture of me that will be used to woo the voters of Mariehamn.

STADSFULLMÄKTIGE: 513

Paperwork and a Letter to the Editor

The deadline for getting all the paper work in for the election, this monday, is fast approaching. For the elections to the Lagting this is quite simple: the candidate just has to sign their name on the right form. For the municipal elections the proccess is considerably more complicated. For every candidate that stands you need three people who aren’t standing and who are registered in the same municipality to support their candidature. The form is not particularly well-designed, and it’s easy to see why people don’t always get it exactly right.

We’ve got an additional problem in Mariehamn, because we have so many candidates they exceed the number allowed on one list. We’re having to have each candidate on their own list and then we’re building an electoral alliance between all of the lists! This means the filling in of an additional form and more collecting of signatures. The idea is no doubt to discourage larger lists, but the electoral system rewards you if you have more candidates. I forsee a long weekend getting all the paperwork in order…

Here’s a link to a letter to the editor of mine on “hemspråksundervisning”, which was a response to this by Petri Carlsson.

Spring Fair

This weekend sees the arrival of the spring fair in Eckerö. The Social Democrats will be there (my eldest daughter is a bit sick, so I’m not sure I will be), as will the Centre Party and the Independent Party Group. There will be the usual balloons and sweets on offer, but we are also doing a questionaire about what the most important questions are before the autumn elections, and we are going to be giving out copies of our language policy platform. Eckerö is a pretty strong region for the nationalistic parties on Åland, so it will be interesting to see how well we are received there.

Return to Åland’s Radio

I had another meeting today with Astrid Olhagen at Åland’s Radio. Bignazari Behrang had decided that he would take the 15 minutes offered to him at the earlier meeting for a broadcast in Kurdish. He has the equipment needed to record a demo programme, with the exception of a microphone, so we either needed to borrow one or get him some time in a studio to record the programme. I understand that they expect what they broadcast to meet certain standards, so the important thing is to produce a demo. Then we have something concrete and the ball is back in their court.

Astrid has conceded that informing listeners in another language falls within their public service remit. And what’s more, those who don’t speak Swedish pay license fees too (no taxation without representation and all that). However, they don’t seem so very enthusiastic about the whole idea. Apparently, there wasn’t a microphone there that we could borrow. Likewise, we will find out sometime next week about an eventual studio time. In the meantime, I shall be exploring if we can borrow a microphone from somewhere else.

During the meeting, it came up that representations had been made before by others who wanted to broadcast in Finnish. I don’t know the details, but we don’t have anything broadcast in Finnish, so I suppose they must have given up. We are not going to give up.

Flat Tax and other thoughts

I’ve just given a presentation in the Lagting on flat tax.

Simplifying it a bit, a flat tax is where everyone pays the same tax rate regardless of how much they earn. In reality, most flat taxes aren’t flat because there is usually an amount which you pay 0% on. This injects some progressivity into the system – the amount that isn’t taxed is a greater proportion of low earners’ pay, so their tax rate is lower on average. You also get rid of tax deductions (usually with exceptions) when you introduce a flat tax.

I’m against it for three main reasons-

1. It will increase inequality – increased economic inequality is linked to higher crime rates, poorer health, lower levels of trust and a mass of other bad stuff.
2. It isn’t fair to require the same tax rate of everyone regardless of how much they earn. Taking 30% from someone who lives on a low income has a far more dramatic impact than from someone with a high income. Those with lower incomes spend more of them on necessities such as food, accomodation, etc.
3. It will envitably lead to cuts in the welfare state.

Unfortunately, as usual, I was extremely nervous. I knew my stuff and I’d prepared, but it didn’t feel like it with an audience in front of me. The presentation went ok, but ok isn’t good enough for me. Still, I won’t get any better at it if I don’t persevere. On the plus side, I did manage to get some useful tips from my uncle-in-law (an undisputed master of the craft of public speaking) on the way home.

Radio Åland Update

Well, I’ve had that meeting with Astrid Olhagen today and it was interesting to hear what she had to say. She had actually read my blog post from last week (please feel free to comment on this if you are reading it, Astrid), which was a bit of a surprise, and while saying that I had oversimplified the arguments somewhat, she offered variations on them – concern over monitoring the content of broadcasts / where will it end, there are 74 languages spoken on Åland, we can’t give them all a slot.

There were a couple of positive things to be taken away from the meeting though. The first is that no decision has been taken that broadcasts cannot be made in other languages, so in principle it is possible. In practice, it appears it’s up to Astrid herself to decide if it actually happens. The second positive point was that, without promising anything, she conceded that a 15 minute slot might be possible. She emphasized that it was a question of resources. So the 15 minute slot is her – in my view not too unreasonable – opinion on what an acceptable resource allocation would be. I shall keep you posted on further developments.

Public Service Radio?

Yesterday, I met and chatted with Bignazari Behrang. He is originally from Iran and has been living on Åland for over a year. Before moving to Åland, he lived in Sweden for 10 years and during his time there did some radio broadcasting in Persian and Kurdish.

There is a small (Kurdish) Iranian community on Åland and he wanted to do something similar here for them. Behrang took his ideas to Ålands Radio, the public service broadcaster, but they turned him down. Bignazari told me they had refused him because they didn’t have a slot for his broadcast. Looking at the programme listings on their website, this just doesn’t seem like a credible excuse. They usually don’t broadcast anything after 7pm and many programmes are repeated to fill earlier schedules.

As I see it, public service radio has a duty to inform and it will do this better by broadcasting in other significant minority languages on Åland. Why don’t Ålands Radio want to do it then? Well, I’ll be meeting with Astrid Olhagen next week to find out. She’s responsible for the content of what they broadcast, so it will be interesting to see what she says.

My own suspicion is that it will be “if we start broadcasting in Kurdish/English/whatever, then we won’t be able to say no to broadcasting in Finnish.” I also suspect that they are a little worried about controlling the content of what is broadcast in non-European languages that are not understood outside their minority communities.

I’ll let you know what happens next week.