DAY 217 - COLMAR TO KOGENHEIM: 24.3 MILES (48,600 STEPS)

26 November, 2011

24.3 miles (Total: 2157.2 miles) –48,600 steps (Total: 4,625,401 steps)

I arrived in Colmar in bad shape—I had worn my long-johns for the first time and was severely chafed. I arrived into Hotel Ibis in Colmar like John Wayne entered into the saloon at Dodge. I didn’t sleep well–I haven’t since my accident. I seem to be incapable of not rolling over onto my left shoulder during the night, which sends a shooting pain through my arm and shoulder and the resulting throbbing will keep me awake for a couple of hours, after which I drift off and an hour later I will do it again. I was sorry to be in such bad shape because Colmar was a beautiful town and full of history. I would have enjoyed nothing better than doing my usual routine of finding my place to stay, having a shower, putting on my casual (non/less-smelly) clothes and wandering out into the town to find something to eat. This was impossible on a number of levels, not least that all my clothes and my rucksack had been left in Mulhouse and were due to be picked up by Rob and Peter when they arrived the next day and then taken up to Strasbourg.

I set off the next morning from Colmar feeling in worse physical shape than I had felt for many months – a combination of lack of sleep and the constant pain in my shoulder. The painkillers no longer seemed to have any effect. As I was leaving Colmar I turned onto the N83 which was showing on my map as a duel carriageway just as the A35 motorway was ending, but just as I was walking down the side of the road, I was stopped by the police who told me that walking on this road was forbidden (he actually said ‘Verboten’ which threw me a bit as I thought I was still in France). Anyway, this intervention messed up my plans for the day and meant that I needed to take a less direct route around fields and forests than I had planned for or calculated. All in all this was not going to be a great day, except for one thing, and that was the arrival of my dear friends Rob Parsons and Peter Vardy who were coming out to give support with the luggage for a few days, but they would not arrive until early evening.

I tried to think on ‘other things’ than the discomfort of my chafing from the day before and of my shoulder and arm. As I left Colmar there was a huge replica Statue of Liberty on one of the traffic islands. The statue looked too intentional to be a mere publicity stunt and when I reached the McDonalds at Selstat, I was able to look up the history of the replica statue. It was erected in Colmar in 2004 to mark the centenary since the death of Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi who was the sculptor and designer of the Statue of Liberty and was born in Colmar.  I was quite fascinated by the history of this iconic monument:

I had thought that it was a gift from the French to the American people to mark their achievement of Independence from the British, but in fact it was jointly funded by private subscription, with the French funding the statue and the Americans funding the land and the pedestal. Moreover, it wasn’t actually constructed until 1876, a century after the Declaration of Independence and took ten years to fund, build and dedicate. Its arrival in New York was marked by the first ticker tape parade.

Part of the reason for the delay was that France around 1870 was far from free and was under the repressive dictatorship of Napoleon III, who took them into the Franco-Prussian War in which   Bartholdi served as a major. The French lost that war and with it went Colmar, Alsace to be part of Prussia. The experience of this war clearly had an impact on the design of the sculpture by Bartholdi and resulted in the piece originally being called ‘Liberty Enlightens the World’ and was intended to be a lighthouse at the entrance to New York harbour.

Bartholdi managed to secure the help of his friend Alexandre Gustave Eiffel to undertake the great structural engineering requirements of the statue. Of course Eifel would leave his own mark on the iconic landscape of the world a few years later with his completion of his eponymous tower in Paris. At the dedication service of the Statue of Liberty in New York in 1886, President Cleveland stated that the statue’s “stream of light shall pierce the darkness of ignorance and man’s oppression until Liberty enlightens the world“. Powerful words, but they were spoken to a new nation which was seeking to heal the wounds of a bloody civil war and in which ignorance was still to oppress large numbers of former slaves for nearly another century.

After my Chicken McNuggets in Selestat, I hobbled back to the road to contemplate the meaning of ‘liberty’. I concluded that liberty must be for something, not just from something. That liberty needed to be balanced by responsibility. That liberty was the freedom to do what we should, rather than to do what we want. That if my liberty is to be respected, then I must respect the liberty of others, because my freedom imposed on others is not their liberty, but their tyranny. That liberty is a state of mind not a nation state. That liberty thrives where there is security of love and is extinguished where there is fear and hate and therefore, if you want to open men’s minds, then you must first warm their hearts. That we are shackled, not just through the chains of dictators and despots, but through our debts, our addictions, our envy, our greed, our selfish-ambition.   Ultimately our freedom is secured not by the laws of man, but by the love of our neighbour.

DAY 216 - MULHOUSE TO COLMAR: 25.7 MILES (51,400 STEPS)

25 November, 2011

25.7 miles (Total: 2132.9 miles) –51,400 steps (Total: 4,576,801 steps)

The days are closing in now. Often I start in the dark and finish in the dark. This can be a bit hazardous when travelling along main roads, as it is nice to be seen. It is also hazardous as I found when you are forced off the main roads and get lost in a dark forest (pic) close to the Black Forest! My cousin Stephen, before he left, had lent me a head torch; it was a great addition as it had a flashing red light function as well as strong LED white beam. I look like a miner and actually feel quite positive about the nostalgia of that connection.

The miners were heroes for us growing up in the coalfields of Durham and Northumberland. I am normally not given to strong arguments, but as I placed the torch on my forehead I got a flashback to a vigorous ‘altercation’ with a ministerial colleague outside the Members’ Dining Room in the House of Commons following the then Conservative government’s decision to announce the closure of the thirty-one coal mines, effectively turning out the lights on the mining industry in the UK all with one week’s notice!

The trigger for the debate was the massive underestimation of what this decision meant. I was told that there were ‘only’ 25,000 workers impacted, to which I protested that this was a blow for millions of people whom, though they have never worked in the mines, have an affinity for these brave and proud men who worked in such appalling conditions to keep the lights on and the fires burning. Just in the north east of England alone, the mines used to employ 225,000 people at their peak and almost every family had a member who had been a miner.

The minister rebuked me for being sentimental and blind to the economics of the mining industry and the need to eradicate subsidies. The markets wanted the government to take action to remove subsidies and privatise the former state owned industries. I responded by asking him whether he took the same view about farming which received equivalent state subsidies? He said that farmers were important to maintain the natural landscape of Britain. I agreed, and added that the miners were important to maintain the social landscape of Britain too. The only difference was that he probably knew lots of farmers, but thought a miner was someone under the age of 18. The latter point was a cheap shot and I later apologised for it, which in turn weakened my case and reminded me that in politics as in sport, it is always advisable to play the ‘ball’ and not the ‘man’; by playing the former you might just score, by playing the latter you might just concede a penalty.

My substantive point was that we weren’t going to remove the subsidy, they were simply going to change to whom the subsidy was granted, for all they were going to do was to put the miners on Incapacity Benefit and other state benefits so there would be no net saving to the taxpayer at all, but there would be a massive social cost in creating benefit dependency for generations to come.

I of course recognise that for the miners and the appallingly led NUM (National Union of Mineworkers) saw it merely as a social issue and were unwilling to even engage with the debate over economics, or that industry and consumers now had a choice of abundant supplies of cheap gas and oil and therefore there was a need to raise productivity so as to keep down costs.  As a result, consumers would express their great admiration and loyalty for the miners as they switched to gas central heating in their homes.

If the unions and the Labour Party chose to see it only as a ‘social’ issue about keeping communities together and providing the dignity of work, then the Conservatives made the opposite mistake of seeing it as purely an economic argument and refused to weigh in the social consequences of such moves. We now know that the issue was not social and it was not economic, but it was socio-economic.

Interestingly enough of course, there was not quite the same ideological hue and cry about inefficiencies and subsidies from the markets when they required a £100 billion bail-out from the taxpayer to keep the banks in business. Clearly the Labour government were mindful the social impact of losing banker’s bonuses on community cohesion St John’s Wood  and Kensington (careful now—you almost gave away another penalty—does he ever learn!). Essentially we are told that a state owned bank was a systemically important investment in the economic infrastructure, whereas a state owned mine was a drain on economic efficiency. Or perhaps it is just when it is our job on the line, it is an ‘investment’, and when it is someone else’s it’s a ‘subsidy’.

The mining communities deserved our respect and gratitude as a nation for their service.  There should have been a longer period of transition, perhaps as long as twenty years, to allow communities to adjust and for the new generation to be equipped with the skills to establish the enterprises which would be the new life blood of those communities. I am absolutely convinced that both the economic and social costs would have been far less over time; we may have actually seen today members of those communities receiving their incomes from a new business rather than from an old Post Office.

I am gratified to see that the present government recognise this as David Cameron has spoken so often of the value of community, as has Iain Duncan Smith about the value of work. It is a shame they weren’t in charge of these aspects of policy in the eighties and nineties, but government is an imperfect animal because it relies on imperfect people to administer it, imperfect people to elect it and, dare we say during the Leveson Inquiry, even imperfect people to report and comment on it. If we have the humility to acknowledge this weakness we might actually witness the strengthening of our public discourse and quality of our decision making as a result.

VIDEO DIARY - DAY 212: REFLECTIONS ON LEAVING SWITZERLAND

21 November, 2011—Video Diary

Basel, Switzerland to Mulhouse, France