LONG LIVE CZECHOSLOVAKIA!

The Guardian is generally a very fine newspaper, both in its dead tree and online versions, and they do a cool range of podcasts. But they do produce the odd glitch from time to time, and they sure managed one last Thursday in their daily news podacst. They had a woman banging on about a recent UNICEF report, which, shock horror, shows that kids in Britain live on a level of poverty virtually unmatched in the industrialised world, and she was making the point that everything was relative and that what would be considered poverty in the UK was rather different from what would be considered poverty in Czechoslovakia.

My strong suspicion that life for kids here is actually far more pleasant in most ways than it is in the UK is not why my ears pricked up at this or why I'm writing about it now; rather, it's the fact that it's now over 14 years since Czechoslovakia ceased to exist and yet there are still people who should know better but are happily displaying their ignorance of the world by perpetuating Neville Chamberlain's words at the time of the Munich betrayal of 1938 about "a far-away country...people of whom we know nothing".

I have mixed feelings about this. I loved Czechoslovakia - at the time of the 'Velvet Divorce' I was living in Slovakia and I have lived in both parts of the country - and still believe that the split was engineered in a shamefully undemocratic way by two men who both wanted to carve out careers for themselves in the two halves of the country and recognised that they could do so far more easily without having to keep compromising with the other. Step forward, gentlemen.

In the red corner we have Vladimir Meciar, the Slovak leader at the time of the split, an ex-boxer and throwback to the Socialist strongman school of leadership. He and his party, HZDS, governed Slovakia for much of the 1990s in a distinctly retro, thuggish, and autocratic style. A joke of the time is illustrative:

Q: Whose photograph does Meciar have in his wallet?

A: Slobodan Milosevic...

These days, a combination of ill health, old age, his own political bankruptcy, and changing times have pretty much sidelined him, thank the Lord.

His Czech counterpart Vaclav Klaus, on the other hand, is still very much on the scene. He's the president of the Czech Republic these days, which makes licking a postage stamp symbolically a far from pleasant thing to do. He is an ardent disciple of Margaret Thatcher, with the same kind of petty provincial you-can't-tell-me-anything-I-don't-already-know arrogance and disdain for others as her. Like her, he is particularly contemptuous of anything connected to Europe. The joke that says it all about him:

Q: What's the difference between Vaclav Klaus and God?

A: God doesn't think he's Vaclav Klaus.

But let's get back to the subject. There are special cases like the Czechoslovak National House in London where the past lives on, but otherwise there really is no excuse for referring to Czechoslovakia as a living entity these days. A few years ago I was in Tallinn, Estonia, doing some work. The guy who introduced me to the group of Estonians I was going to be working with introduced me as "Simon, who has come from Czechoslovakia to be with us". For a brief moment I wondered whether I should begin my own spiel by telling them all what a pleasure it was for me to be in the Soviet Union. On reflection, I thought better of it. Which was probably wise. So follow my example, people, and buy an up-to-date map...