Be honest. How many of you have googled David Casa’s article in today’s Independent? At the risk of becoming a right royal pain in the arse… we did. Interesting results really. Before we tell you what we found out it is important to remind readers why we are kicking up such a fuss. It’s not just the cut & paste business and lack of attribution of sources that are irritating.
There is of course a major problem in this business of unattributed snippeting but beyond that there lies the most major of issues: what do politicians like Casa think they are doing with this type of column. Regurgitating other people’s work is lame – but it also, as we have pointed out, smacks of lack of respect toward the reader. The authors of such articles are just sending in strings of words amounting to columns simply to occupy space on a paper as some form of unpaid advertisement. The effort to prepare the content is minimal – in all probability Casa does not even write his articles himself but asks some lackey within his entourage to do so. Said lackey is lazy. Very lazy.
Take this week. The article is about “Combating the turmoil” and does manage to convey an idea of various EU measures combating recession. What we do not immediately notice is that once again chunks are being recycled. These paragraphs, for example, appear in Casa’s article for the Times on the 13th of August and in today’s Independent:
Tourism has been affected by the turmoil and consequently this is leaving a dire effect on our economy. While in the first months tourist arrivals declined, so did those from cruise liners as well as tourist expenditure. This is more evident when looking at statistics of tourists from the United Kingdom, which declined in particular in the first six months of this year, also owing to the weak pound.
[—] Finance Minister Tonio Fenech has crafted a plan that deals with the crisis, while safeguarding jobs and keeping our country competitive. Our national competitiveness is established by an array of factors, primarily by the state of our physical, social and cultural environment as well as our national institutions and particularly by the type and quality of our labour supply. We must remain competitive to ensure a stable economy that thrives.
The EU plan aims to boost demand, which has quite obviously diminished in the recent months. It is also looking to save jobs and help restore confidence in the aftermath of the global credit crunch, which analysts say has pushed the world’s biggest economic bloc into a long-lasting downturn, with unemployment predicted to rise by 2.7 million over the next year and a half. The commission is urging governments to organise their responses in order to fuel demand and boost consumer confidence whilst safeguarding the most vulnerable members of society.
And talking of jobs, the national effort within the job sector is matching that which is carried out on a European level through our work within the EPP. The European Employment Strategy has been developed in order to encourage exchange of information and joint discussions by all member states, thus trying to find solutions or best practices together which could help create more and better jobs in every member state.
I was the EPP’s spokesman for the European Globalisation Adjustment Fund, and this helped me witness first hand the demand and support provided by this structures of this sort. European Globalisation Adjustment Fund (EGF) supports workers who lose their jobs as a result of changing global trade patterns so that they can find another job as quickly as possible. This is one of the many structures within the EU that is helping in providing a cushion effect from the recession, as well as safeguarding jobs, or reintegrating those made redundant. The top requirement is investment in human capital in order to establish a well-trained and highly motivated work force.
The space [—] at the beginning of the quote is what differs between the two pieces. One states “In the midst of all this economic turmoil” and the other states simply “With all this economic turmoil”. The Independent article needed a new ending… hence the Europa.eu, Employment and social affairs pages provided a nice closing idea:
The drive for more and better jobs is not at any cost, however. The Union’s long tradition of ensuring a decent working environment throughout the EU and of protecting workers’ rights continues to hold good. Common standards for all cover minimum rules on working conditions, collective redundancy, part-time and temporary work, health and safety at work, maternity and parental leave, equal pay for equal work, and protection against sexual harassment.
The bulk of the Indy and Times twin articles also beg further googling but I am tired and this is really my lunchbreak so I should be doing more interesting things than blogging. In any case… Casa (or Casa’s understudy) have a severe case of repeat offending on their hands… and guess what… nobody cares!
