Skip to main content

Winter chill

As I have come north from Lithuania, the weather has grown more wintry.

Riga, yesterday was down to about minus 10, and catching the early flight up to Tallinn this morning has brought me to even chillier climbs: it is currently minus 19. I will not make smug comments about the chaos that a little snow and temperatures of about zero have brought to London. It just irritates me that when winter comes to Southern England, their disorganization makes the tiny problem into a crisis.

It is the first time that I have done all three Baltic Capitals in a single week for some years. It is interesting seeing the relative progress. Despite Labour shortages which, in Vilnius, mean that there are very few taxis, the overall picture is extremely positive. The construction boom in Vilnius is particularly impressive. Meanwhile Riga has become a bustling hub for the whole region with plenty of flights across Europe, and now beyond, offered by airBaltic, the SAS owned dynamic little airline. Ryanair are looking to make Riga a regional hub too, with the prospect of a whole new second terminal being constructed. Compared to the bright lights of Riga, Tallinn seems a little sleepy, but energetic young entrepreneurs are creating a very impressive change in the economy.

Though there are concerns that Latvia might be overheating economically, it is hard to find any particular trigger that would cause immediate disruption. Though times are particularly buoyant, and a slow down will come soon (ish), there is still much to admire in all three countries. Not least their ability to cope with bad winter weather!

Meanwhile I received a phone call yesterday from a friend at the British Embassy in Tallinn. Rather charmingly, the President of Estonia has decided to confer a decoration on me to celebrate the 89th anniversary of the founding of the Republic. I am touched and also delighted to see that several friends have also received (probably much more deserved) recognition too.
Labels:

Comments

Paul Evans said…
My job involves researching the Latvian and Lithuanian legal markets, I've been calling Riga from snowy London all morning. Such friendly people in both countries, I used to run our Iceland desk and they were a truly miserable bunch.
10:49 am
Jo Christie-Smith said…
The disorganisation in southern England is because the only weather we can actually cope with is a light drizzle...whether this is because it is the mean or the modal of our actual weather, I don't know. Of course, that would assume that we were capable of planning for any type of weather at all....
11:13 am
Anonymous said…
Well, Cicero, congrats on the Esto-gong, well done.

However, what AirBaltic should really do is to offer cut-down prices for intra-Baltic flights. It's more expensive to fly from Riga to Tallinn than to go via Stockholm, Berlin, Helsinki, Copenhagen, and even London -- and I certainly do not mean just Ryanair and Easyjet! This is a huge tourism potential.
5:22 pm
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Post Truth and Justice

The past decade has seen the rise of so-called "post truth" politics.  Instead of mere misrepresentation of facts to serve an argument, political figures began to put forward arguments which denied easily provable facts, and then blustered and browbeat those who pointed out the lie.  The political class was able to get away with "post truth" positions because the infrastructure that reported their activity has been suborned directly into the process. In short, the media abandoned long-cherished traditions of objectivity and began a slow slide into undeclared bias and partisanship.  The "fourth estate" was always a key piece of how democratic societies worked, since the press, and later the broadcast media could shape opinion by the way they reported on the political process. As a result there has never been a golden age of objective media, but nevertheless individual reporters acquired better or worse reputations for the quality of their reporting and ...
1 comment
Read more

The Will of the People

Many of the most criminal political minds of the past generations have claimed to be an expression of the "will of the people"... The will of the people, that is, as interpreted by themselves. Most authoritarian rulers: Napoleon III, Mussolini, Hitler, have called referendums in order to claim some spurious popular support for the actions they had already determined upon. The problem with the June 2016 European Union was that the question was actually insufficiently clear. To leave the EU was actually a vast set of choices, not one specific choice. Danial Hannan, once of faces of Vote Leave was quite clear that leaving the EU did NOT mean leaving the Single Market:    “There is a free trade zone stretching all the way from Iceland to the Russian border. We will still be part of it after we Vote Leave.” He declared: “Absolutely nobody is talking about threatening our place in the single market.” The problem was that this relatively moderate position was almost immediately ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Liberal Democrats v Conservatives: the battle in the blogosphere

It is probably fair to say that the advent of Nick Clegg, the new leader of the Liberal Democrats, has not been greeted with unalloyed joy by our Conservative opponents. Indeed, it would hardly be wrong to say that the past few weeks has seen some "pretty robust" debate between Conservative and Liberal Democrat bloggers. Even the Queen Mum of blogging, the generally genial Iain Dale seems to have been featuring as many stories as he can to try to show Liberal Democrats in as poor a light as possible. Neither, to be fair, has the traffic been all one way: I have "fisked' Mr. Cameron's rather half-baked proposals on health, and attacked several of the Conservative positions that have emerged from the fog of their policy making process. Most Liberal Democrats have attacked the Conservatives probably with more vigour even than the distrusted, discredited Labour government. So what lies behind this sharper debate, this emerging war in the blogosphere? Partly- in my ...
20 comments
Read more