Land Value Tax in Baden-Württemberg

I took part in an online talk/discussion about the introduction of Land Value Tax in B-W on Saturday, led by one of the hardcore Georgists driving it.

The whole process was as slow and painful as you can imagine. They set up an official lobby group in 2012 and spent years getting various existing organisations on board. They explained to the hard left "Die Linke" party that this would reduce inequality; they explained to the Green Party that it is a tax on use of natural resources; they told the NIMBY and nature preservation groups that this would discourage urban sprawl; they told the tenants' organisation that their landlords would bear the tax; they told the construction industry that it would not be a tax on development etc.

The background is that Germany has a very low level Council Tax called 'Grundsteuer'. The average bill per home is less than £400 a year. It's so low, there's not even a monthly instalment option, you just get a bill and you pay it, like you pay the gas bill or your home insurance. It has all the flaws of Council Tax. It bears little relation to the land value; there is no regional variation in final bills (so it's regresssive); it's based on valuations that are fifty years out of date, which is actually irrelevant as each local council can set its own tax rate (as a pro mille figure); proceeds are collected and spent locally etc.

For some reason, the German Constitutional Court (who have a say in these matters - they got rid of Wealth Tax because housing was taxed at lower rates than proper wealth, why not just include housing at market value, the same as everything else?) had decided that Grundsteuer was unconstitutional (not clear why) and the Federal Government had to come up with a fiscally neutral alternative. They came up with a complete fudge of a law that said each State can make up its own rules on some sort of replacement tax on land and buildings. So the lobby group fought hard for eight years, contacting endless politicians and attending hearings at federal, state and local level.

Some states went Home-Owner-Ist and have a flat rate per dwelling (more or less). Bavaria completely missed the point and decided that the tax should be a fixed amount of a few cents for each square metre of interior floor area. Some States base the tax on the total value (which is a step in the right direction, but makes valuations trickier and discourages development). Only in one state did they make any headway - B-W will introduce a low level LVT, payable by the owner/landlord in 2025. B-W is a very wealthy state in the south-west corner (Porsche and Mercedes are based there), which bizarrely enough is run by a Green-Conservative coalition. It had been solid majority Conservative for decades before that. Nordrhein-Westfalen is still prevaricating and could go either way. 

Inevitably, there was the usual Home-Owner-Ist bleating, even though the effective rate will be less than 5% of the site premium. Poor Widows in Mansions and so on. Which is weird, because the annual tax on a mansion near Stuttgart will only go up from £600 to £1,000 or something. People in flats in the periphery will see their annual bills go down from £500 to £300.

The presenter admitted that taken in isolation, the whole exercise had been pretty pointless and replacing Grundsteuer with an LVT of 5% would have precious little effect on anything. But at least they had their foot in the door. He said that it would be great if they could bump up the LVT and reduce VAT in tandem. (He explained that VAT rates are set nationally, so I'm not sure why he picked on VAT as the next on the hitlist).

I pointed out that the next tax to replace must be Grunderwerbsteuer, which is like Stamp Duty. It is a State-level tax (like SDLT in England and Northern Ireland; LBTT in Scotland and LTT in Wales). Each State can set its own flat rate (between 4% and 6.5%, no tiered rates as in the UK) and keeps its own revenues. That's pretty steep, and total revenues are slightly more than the total revenues from Grundsteuer (EUR 16 billion against EUR 13 billion). He agreed, and agreed that this would help get the construction industry on board, but that tax didn't appear to be next on his 'to replace' list (and wasn't up for debate anyway).

That's all really. It reinforced my view that the only way to persuade a government to replace taxes with LVT is via the ballot box. It doesn't matter if 95% of people hate the idea (rightly or wrongly) or simply don't understand the point. If you can get 5% of people voting for a Georgist party, the Big Two will adjust their policies to claw those votes back again. Which is another reason for a Georgist party to be doggedly centrist/apolitical. If it positions itself as hard left, the Tories won't care how many votes it gets; if it positions itself as neoliberal, the Labour party won't care.

"Money and Cryptocurrencies"

From J W Mason's blog:

In the quantity view, “money” is something special. The legal monopoly of governments on printing currency is very important, because that is money in a way that other assets aren’t. Credit created by banks is something different. Digital currencies are a threat or opportunity, as the case may be, because they seem to also go in this exclusive “outside money” box.

But from the Minsky-Mehrling-Graeber point of view, there’s nothing special about outside money. It’s just another set of tokens for recording changes in the social ledger. What matters isn’t the way that changes are recorded, but the accounts themselves. From this perspective, “money” isn’t an asset, a thing, it is simply the arbitrary units in which ledgers are kept and contracts denominated.

The starting point, from this point of view, is a network of money payments and commitments. Some of these commitments structure real activity (I show up for work because I expect to receive a wage). Others are free-standing. (I pay you interest because I owe you a debt.) In either case money is simply a unit of account. I have made a promise to you, you have a made a promise to someone else; these promises are in some cases commitments to specific concrete activities (to show up for work and do what you’re told), but in other cases they are quantitative, measured as a certain quantity of “money.”

Good summary. It's what I've always said. Things like gold or the metal in coins have an intrinsic value, but they aren't "money" in the true sense. True "money" is just a measure of indebtedness. I go to work, my employer owes me my wages. For every hour I work, he owes me a bit more. This accrued debt is formally settled at the end of each month when the balance in his account goes down and the balance in mine goes up. If - coincidentally - I use the same bank as they do, then as regards the outside world, absolutely nothing has happened. It's just a ledger entry.

Thought experiment #1. I am free to agree with my employer that he will pay part of my salary in Tesco vouchers. In which case Tesco's bank balance goes up by the amount he paid for the vouchers. Those vouchers are "money" in the narrow sense (no intrinsic value). I can take them to Tesco and exchange them for food.

Tesco is now indebted to me - they owe me some food. The outstanding vouchers which I haven't used yet show up as liabilities on Tesco's balance sheet and are assets from my point of view, I tuck them into my wallet alongside a few fivers or tenners. Tesco and I are both heartily indifferent whether I pay for my shopping with their own vouchers or with fivers and tenners. If I don't use them this week, I'll use them next week instead.

Or instead of giving me vouchers, my employer could pay Tesco to deliver me certain staple food items each week (and cut the salary payment into my bank account). My employer's bank balance goes down and Tesco's goes up - they now owe me some food, exactly the same as if my employer gave me Tesco vouchers. Once delivered, that debt has been paid (in kind rather than in "money") and we are back to where we would have been.

Thought experiment #2. All bank balances and debts (including govermnent bonds) are simply cancelled, bank notes in circulation are declared invalid. Every adult is given a small amount of the new notes in cash and we all start again. A modified version of this actually happened in Germany in 1948, and it did them their economy the world of good. As unfair as it might seem, did the total real wealth of that country plummet or even change in 1948 (ignoring balances held or owed by foreigners)? Clearly not. One man's loss is another man's debt relief and it cancels out to zero.

It would be quite a different thing if the German government had confiscated all gold in the country and dumped it in the Marianas Trench. Gold has intrinsic value and Germany as a whole would have clearly been a lot poorer afterwards.

Deutsche Bundesländer - vereinfachte Landkarte

Habe ich seit Jahren machen wollen:

Nice turn of phrase

From yesterday's Evening Standard:

So began the conversation — me stretching out my German, him rallying back in perfect English, in a Berlin bar last week at midnight, with the windows steamed up and people inside smoking like it was coming back into fashion.

'We Are xxxx, Everybody Hates Us'

I do not follow German football myself, but I noticed this piece about RB Leipzig and it got me thinking. If you read the introduction it seems to be mostly about corporation ownership of a football team and how the ownership by Redbull is a danger to the existing German club system. But clearly it is also about the people/fans of Leipzig, a proud, former East German city.

The images of the yellow Dortmand fans do not suggest to me merely a management dispute about controlling interests in a company. Rather, it seems to suggest that Germany my not have digested the previous great unification in Europe: just as they push ahead with the new one. I'm not sure how well the East and West fits in 2017, and have not discussed the issue for years, assuming the two categories had no meaning anymore in Merkel's Germany.

Moving on, change the nation, and what do we have here? This all puts England's most hated football team into a perspective that I never gave any consideration to before. Millwall FC, somewhere, lost in South London. How did they ever rise to be understood by rival fans, and themselves, as the most hated team in English football? Mystery to me.

Fun Online Polls: Immigrants in Germany in work & competing theories of gravity

The responses to last fortnight's Fun Online Poll were as follows:

What percentage of the 1.2 million Arabs who arrived in Germany in the last two years are in gainful employment?

1 percent - 34%
3 percent - 20%
5 percent - 13%
10 percent - 16%
25 percent - 9%
50 percent - 5%
All of them - 2%

The weighted average of those guesses is 10%, the true figure, as admitted by the German government, normally obsessed with downplaying any negatives associated with the recent mass immigration, is only 13%.

So the wisdom of crowds wins yet again! (I previously referred to an article in the Daily Mail that said the figure was only 3%, but let's give them the benefit of the doubt.)

The joke is that a couple of years ago, a lot of Germans were saying that immigration will be good for their economy because it helps ameliorate the effects of an ageing population, low birth rate and a shrinking working age population. That's all fine, provided the additional working age people are actually working, which quite clearly (in contrast to the position in the UK), they are not: they are a massive drain, even if we put social and criminal issues to one side.
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There was an interesting piece on BBC Radio 4 this morning about competing theories of gravity.

There's no point me trying to summarise, so please read this article before casting your vote in this week's Fun Online Poll.

Vote here or use the widget in the sidebar.

Fun Online Polls: Boris Johnson, Saudi Arabia & Migrants in Germany

The results to last week's Fun Online Poll were as follows:

UK Foreign Secretary criticised Saudi Arabia for starting proxy wars in the Middle East…

This is a terrible breach of diplomatic convention and he is endangering our weapons exports to a valued regional ally - 2%
Well said, that man! - 32%
He should have gone a lot further and mentioned their human rights abuses - 62%
Other, please specify - 4%

Top comment Pensieve: It's about time that someone told the Saudis we know what they're doing (even if we are beholden to them for a lot of our oil). Well done, Boris. PS I ride a bike and use a woodburning boiler for heating, so stuff your oil!

Good, I was with the majority on that one, thanks to everybody who took part, a good turnout with 99 votes.
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This week's Fun Online Poll:

What percentage of the 1.2 million Arabs who arrived in Germany in the last two years are in gainful employment?

Enter your guess HERE or use the widget in the sidebar.

Once you've entered your guess, you can check your answer here. The paragraph starting "On the bright side" is rather ironic, methinks.

BBC does "balanced" reporting

From the BBC:

German carmaker Opel plans to cut its workers' hours this year because it expects Brexit to hurt its UK sales. A spokesman for Opel said about 5,000 workers at its Ruesselsheim and Eisenach factories would be affected. Opel is owned by US car giant GM.

It has been mentioned that the Germans, for whom exporting is the national religion, are keen to maintain free-ish trade with the UK after Brexit and that their car manufacturers are putting pressure on the government in that respect. So this story is actually just about plausible - in the long run. In the short term, nothing has happened or will happen for a long time, which means that the excuse is a little thin - unless this is the German car manufacturers' subtle way of putting political pressure on the government, in which case fair play to them.

The pound has weakened against the dollar and euro since the UK's 23 June vote to leave the EU, adding costs for firms exporting to the UK.

That also seems plausible at first sight, although falling GBP does not add to exporting costs, it reduces them if anything and is more likely to put downward pressure on selling prices. Car manufacturers face a strange 'kinked demand curve', have huge sunk costs and are tied to a certain fixed level of average-cost minimising output, which means that they are probably better off maintaining GBP prices (and accepting lower EUR income) than cutting production. We will see.

So in true Mythbusters' fashion, let's call that one plausible.

Another German car giant - Volkswagen - has also introduced short-time working ("Kurzarbeit") at several factories, but not because of Brexit. It has been hit by slow deliveries from some component firms, the German broadcaster ARD says.

Why was it necessary to add "but not because of Brexit"? They might as well say "but not because of the weather" or "but not because of Germany's poor showing at the Olympics" or anything else totally irrelevant.

Fun Online Polls: Renewing Trident & Islamist attacks in Germany

The results to last week's poll were as follows:

Renewing Trident: Which statement do you agree with more?

Scrapping Trident would be an act of gross irresponsibility - 75%
The threat of mass murder is not a legitimate way to deal with international relations - 25%

You are a bloodthirsty bunch, I was in the minority on that one.

Top comment by Derek:

Meh.

As far as I can see, in the 1940 and 50s an independent British nuclear deterrent made sense. By the 1960s it was beginning to look a lot less independent of the Americans and by the 1990s it was beginning to look a lot less like a deterrent. In the 2010s it just looks like wasted effort to me. It's no longer independent and it doesn't seem to be deterring our current enemies. So I don't think it would be particularly irresponsible to scrap Trident. If we are going to replace it we need to do so with something independent and effective.

But then mass murder (or war as it is more commonly known) is a perfectly legitimate way to deal with international relations. Immoral, unethical and unjust but perfectly legitimate. There are plenty of laws governing what you can and can't do but killing lots of people is pretty much taken for granted, including civilians nowadays.

So I don't find I can pick either option.

Can't argue with that.
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I was on holiday in Karlsruhe - a hitherto sleepy, peaceful and prosperous university/tourist town - for the second time last year, just after Merkel had opened the floodgates and I got a bad feeling about it; there were gangs of them in full Islamic get up having loud discussions/arguments/prayer sessions in the park and behaving aggressively generally.

The inevitable has happened (despite what my auntie, the Green Party councillor in Karlsruhe, had to say about it last year), so that's this week's Fun Online Poll:

"How many more Islamist attacks will it take before Merkel realises it was wrong to let a million of them in?"

Vote here or use the widget in the sidebar.

"The motive for the attack is unclear"

The BBC surpasses itself with this one:

One man has been killed and three others wounded by a knife-wielding man near Munich, with police investigating a possible Islamist connection.

The man attacked four commuters shortly before 05:00 (03:00 GMT) on Tuesday at Grafing station. One of the victims died of his wounds in hospital. A 27-year-old German man was eventually overpowered by police and arrested.

Some witnesses said he shouted "Allahu akbar" ("God is great" in Arabic) but the motive for the attack is unclear.

From other reports, it is perfectly clear that he is a Muslim immigrant (possibly second generation).

Thoughts on Europe and Peace

From the BBC

Author Michael Morpurgo - best-known for his children's books such as War Horse - believes the UK should stay in the European Union.
"I do know my history, and I know we've been at peace for all these years - and that has something to do with Europe," he says.

I know my history too. I know that Germany never really had any interest in France in either war, and that both invasions were because of factors outside the EU - the alliance between France and Russia in WW1 and the alliance between France and Poland in WW2.

The start of WW2, and what drove a lot of support for Hitler was his policy of lebensraum, of taking over bits of Eastern Europe to ensure food security after WW1 blockades. After the Germans invaded Poland, France and Britain declared war on Germany, leading to the invasion of France.

What's really created peace in Europe is the tractor and other agricultural improvements. No-one is going to invade bits of Polish or Czech arable land any longer. It's just not worth the costs. The tragedy is that the mass adoption of tractors started in the mid-1930s, and if that'd happened a few years earlier, things might have turned out differently.

I'm someone who believes that the EEC once worked because it was the "right-size" organisation for what we needed in the early 70s to the mid-90s, but it doesn't now. We trade with places like China, Vietnam and Africa in a way that we didn't back then. And we don't need a superstate. We've got organisations like the WTO to do global trade.

Fun with student numbers

From the BBC:

More than a million young people will be enrolling in universities in England and Germany this autumn. But in financial terms their experience couldn't be more different.

In Germany tuition fees have been abolished, while England has the most expensive fees in Europe, with every indication that they are likely to be allowed to nudge even higher...

In Germany, about 27% of young people gain higher education qualifications. In the UK, the comparable figure is 48%. The expansion in university entry in the UK has been one of those changes that has been so big that no one really notices.[wot?]

A report from the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development last month claimed that more than half of graduates were overqualified for their jobs. In contrast, the institute said that only 10% of German graduates were in non-graduate jobs.

Same old, same old.

In either country, about one-quarter of jobs are "graduate jobs". So nearly all of the one-quarter of Germans who go to uni get graduate jobs; and about half of the one-half of Brits who go to uni get graduate jobs.
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If you ask me, the German system makes more sense. The cost to the taxpayer ends up much the same whether you send one-quarter to uni for "free" or whether you send one-half to uni and impose a graduate tax aka tuition fees, and this was YPP policy anyway (there is nothing new under the sun).

The article does make the point that has been made here before (probably by The Stigler) that it might still be worthwhile going to uni, because it gives you the edge when applying for a non-graduate job, but this just pushes the problem onto somebody else (the non-graduates looking for non-graduate jobs).

I suppose the Germans can get away with it because their secondary education system is much more egalitarian, so everybody has a fairly equal chance of ending up at uni. If the UK did it, there would be squealing that the reduction in the number of student places disproportionately hits people from state schools.

The counter-argument to that is: so what? Some people get twelve years "free" state primary and secondary education; other people pay for those twelve years out of their own pockets and then get three years' "free" higher education. The former group probably still gets better value for money.

And also because German unemployment is lower, so there is less pressure to mask unemployment figure by getting a million or two young people off the books for three years.

Oooooo, the irony..

Building on my earlier post, there is also this gem from the same article:

"...One CDU member who used to work with Mrs Merkel agrees. "[The announcement of the referendum] was the moment that things changed. Up until then we'd all agreed to work with the Greeks, support the Greeks, pay for the Greeks. All that was OK if they were willing to reform. Many Germans go to Greece to enjoy the culture, the food, the history.

"But they also go there and see what the [Greek] government has wasted its money on.

[I'm sorry, just run that past me again? Whose money has it wasted exactly?]

You see these huge air-conditioned Daimler buses which go to nowhere with just one passenger. We've all seen them."...

This is those German made 'Daimler Buses' that Germany loaned money to Greece to buy, that he actually admits that they 'wasted their money on', when it was perfectly obvious that Greece didn't/would never have the wealth to pay for them in the first place.

As I asked, who are the mugs?

You couldn't make it up.

Daily Mail on top form

Spotted by Pyotr Wasik (who I still assume is Flashman) in The Daily Mail:

[Complete and utter bastard] Andreas Lubitz was signed off by two different doctors for the day of the Germanwings disaster but failed to tell his employers, it has been reported...

It also emerged today that his parents only discovered that their son was a mass murderer just minutes before the bombshell press conference by prosecutors in Marseille. His mother, a piano teacher, and father, a successful businessman, were understood to be in the French city at the time of the announcement, but kept separate from the victims' relatives...

The couple's £400,00 two-storey detached home in Montabaur, a town 40 miles from Bonn where Lubitz is thought to have grown up, was also searched by detectives.

Boris, you spendthrift twat, here's how it should be done.

From snipelondon/scoop:

Just four regular commuters are now using the Emirates Air Line cable car between Greenwich Peninsula and the Royal Docks, down from 16 last autumn, new figures released to The Scoop reveal.

Only four Oyster card holders used mayor Boris Johnson’s £60m link more than five times in the week ending 19 October, triggering a regular users’ discount.

Now, what was Boris thinking when he commissioned this?

I can only assume he was thinking of the Wuppertal Schwebebahn, one of the greatest forms of public transport ever.

They wanted to link up a few towns in a steep-sided river valley, but by the turn of the 20th century, the only practical solution was to build a monorail directly over and along the river itself. Just for extra kicks, the carriages hang underneath the rail, not above it.

I've been on that, it is awesome, but of course, most people using it are normal commuters*, so for them it's no more exciting that taking an underground train is for people who take the underground every day. So you have to play it cool rather than jumping about excitedly and saying "OMG! We are in a train several yards above a river!"

* The added joy of this is that the Schwebebahn is known locally/colloquially as the "Pendelbahn". The German word "pendel" can mean two quite different things. I didn't dare ask whether "pendel" refers to the side-to-side rocking motion (like a pendumulm) or the fact that people use it for commuting i.e. going back and forth.

U- and Z-Turns Of The Day

U-Turn

From the BBC:

Telecoms giant BT is in talks with Telefonica about buying the O2 mobile network from the Spanish firm...

The irony is...

In 2002, BT spun off O2, then called BT Cellnet. In 2005 it was acquired by Spain's Telefonica for £17.7bn.

Taking irony to the next level...

[O2's] value is around half that paid by Telefonica. Deutsche Bank values O2 UK at £9bn, while UBS values it at £9.6bn.

Z-Turn

From the FT:

Germany has made a dramatic appeal to Sweden to help it out of an energy dilemma that threatens Europe’s biggest economy as it shifts away from nuclear power and fossil fuels to renewable energy.

Oops, caught with their trousers down after they overreacted to the Fukushima meltdown.

And what does the German government want 'Sweden' to do..?

Sigmar Gabriel, Germany’s vice-chancellor, warned Sweden’s new prime minister Stefan Löfven last month that there would be “serious consequences” for electricity supplies and jobs if Sweden’s state-owned utility Vattenfall ditched plans to expand two coal mines in the northeast of Germany.

I'm not sure what level of irony we're on here. Waving the Greenie flag, the Germans want to go from nuclear to renewables... but first they're taking the retrograde step back to coal, and the coal which they want to use was theirs anyway before they sold it off to foreigners.

Squaring the circle, we get this...

Angela Merkel’s cabinet is due to meet next week to discuss mothballing some coal-fired power stations as a means of helping the country reach its carbon goals.

But Berlin’s lobbying of Stockholm underlines a view held by some in the German government that coal-fired generation is vital to the security of the country’s power supply.

"Private schools Business Rates relief warning"

From the BBC:

Independent schools could lose millions in business rate relief under a Labour government unless they worked more closely with state schools. Shadow education secretary Tristram Hunt says many private schools are not doing enough… "The only possible answer to whether they earn their £700m subsidy [over the course of the next Parliament] is a resounding and unequivocal 'no'."

Ho hum. £700 million divided by five years divided by 700,000 pupils is a princely £200 per pupil per year*. The value per pupil of the corporation tax exemption appears to be another £200 per pupil per year. So peanuts in the grander scheme of things.

But what possesses the man to refer to these very modest tax breaks as a subsidy?

Even if the government actually paid £400 cash per pupil per year, that's still only one-twentieth of the overall average cost of one state pupil for one year.

It looks to me as if private school pupils are subsidising state school pupils and not the other way round.

Disclaimer: Her Indoors decided that our kids would go to private schools, it costs an arm and a leg and I'm not entirely convinced it's worth it. So if anybody wants to ban private education outright, I wouldn't actually be averse to that idea. It would 'level the playing field' a bit, save a lot of parents a lot of money and in principle, there'd be more 'pushy parents' thus hopefully driving up standards in state schools. Or this is how it works in Finland and Germany**.

What sort of a stupid name is Tristram anyway? Twat.

UPDATE: DBC Reed presents this in Hunt's defence.

* Business Rates is the least bad tax and not a cost to 'businesses' anyway, as Tim Worstall came out and explained recently in Forbes, although it is probably still a real cost to these schools as I guess nearly all of them own their own premises.

** UPDATE: Re Rich Tee's comment, I do have first hand experience of the German school system in Bavaria (the rules differ slightly from state to state). Basically, at age 11 kids get tested/ranked; the top half go to a Gymnasium (Grammar school up to age 19 or so), the bottom half are divided between Realschule (secondary modern up to 16 or so) and Gesamtschule or Hauptschule (sink schools for no hopers). It is possible to be promoted up or demoted down a school, or move from Realschule to Gymnasium at 16/17 if you're bright enough, so the 11-plus is not the absolute end of the matter.

It seems to work fine to me. On the whole, Germans are well educated. There are some private schools, but these are for kids who can't hack it in a state school but whose parents have a few bob to spare. There is no snob value attached; you are marked as 'somebody who couldn't hack it in a state school'.

BBC on top form

From the BBC:

Germany is now the world's second most popular destination - after the US - for immigrants. And they are arriving in the hundreds of thousands...

And they are being welcomed with open arms - by the government at least - because Germany has a significant skills gap, and a worryingly low birth rate.

"Immigrants are on average younger and the German population is on average older, so immigrants are welcome," says Dr Ingrid Tucci, from the German Institute for Economic Research. "It's important to attract students and highly qualified people. So the government is making it easier for them, trying to invest and put a culture of welcome in place."

That sounds like a fair summary, even twenty years ago the Germans - bureaucracy and people alike - struck me as pretty even handed vis-a-vis immigrants from first world countries (German bureaucrats treat everybody like shit, foreigners and natives alike), but what's this..?

Private papers recently published by the German news website Spiegel Online reveal Chancellor Kohl told then UK Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in 1982 that he wanted to halve the number of Turks living in Germany. They did not, he said, "integrate well".

Today they are an established community. Stroll through the Berlin district of Neukoln and you pass hundreds of businesses run by their children and grandchildren.

In the window of one of the restaurants here, a large chunk of roasting meat turns slowly on a spit. Inside, a woman with a headscarf sips tea from a glass in front of a counter stacked with kebabs and and flatbreads ready for the lunchtime rush.

The BBC is merrily conflating "established" with "integrated", methinks.

If you can spot 'their' areas a mile off, then Kohl has been completely vindicated.

See also Northern Ireland: both loyalists and republicans are clearly "established" but you can hardly describe the two communities as "integrated".

"Telephones banned in Germany by Frankfurt court"

From the BBC:

A court in Frankfurt has found that telephones are being used to arrange car-share agreements involving drivers lacking the necessary legal permits to operate under German law and has banned the use of the devices.

It has emerged that telecom companies were told last week that users of their "low-cost" tariffs could no longer take passengers and faced a fine if they continued.

But a spokesman for Deutsche Telekom said it had decided not to suspend telephone services, adding that the ban was not enforceable while an appeal process was ongoing.

"Germany is one of the largest markets for telephony in Europe," he said.

"We will continue to operate in Germany and will appeal the recent lawsuit filed by Taxi Deutschland in Frankfurt. You cannot put the brakes on progress. We will continue our operations, regardless of whether some users are offering or requesting ridesharing services throughout Germany."

A check of DT's customers confirms that drivers continue to offer pick-ups in Munich, Berlin, Hamburg, Frankfurt and Dusseldorf to people who contact them using the telephone.

Germany's Interior Minister Thomas de Maizière applauded the court's decision, pointing out that telephones are also often used to arrange other types of criminal activity, such as drug deals or shifting stolen goods.

"This is a big step forward to a crime-free Germany," he added. "If you have something to say, please communicate by open postcard, using clear hand writing to speed up the text-recognition process."

"Elk freed from Dresden office building"

We haven't had one of these stories for ages, from thelocal.de:

The elk, which has been spotted several times in the Dresden area during the weekend, had been grazing nearby when he was startled by a group of onlookers and police and fled.

“This is a sign of panic,” said a press spokesman for forest management company Sachsenforst. “He doesn't know where to go any more.”

After five hours in the office block the animal was anesthetized, loaded into a container and taken away on Monday afternoon. He was released in eastern Saxony.

Which reminds of this story, from The Daily Mail:

Almost 25 years since the Iron Curtain came down, deer roaming the Czech-German border still balk at crossing areas where electric fences one lay.

A study of the animals in the Sumava national park, in the Czech Republic, has discovered that red deer are avoiding the once perilous areas where three parallel electrified fences were patrolled by armed guards - despite the creatures having no living memory of it.

Nearly 500 people died trying to cross the barrier, which isolated the communist world from the West. According to a seven-year study, the invisible border has become instilled in the [deer] population, and will be handed down generations.