A view from the terraces

Those of you who follow this blog and my Twitter stream know how exercised I get about politics and elections in particular. And that my great regret is that I cannot vote here in the UK.

A short explanation of how I've got myself into this situation follows:

My native Finland was declared independent in1917, an event that surprised everyone, not least the small deputation that had gone to Moscow to meet up with Lenin with the vague hope that Finland as a Duchy of Russia would get more autonomy with the new leaders. In Finnish popular culture it's believed that Lenin was in good spirits on that particular day on 6th of December, and that he was a friend of Finland because some of his Communist allies had given him refuge in the neighbouring country during the Russian civil war.

As a result from this rather surprising development, Finns decided that they'd protect their fragile independence next to the mighty Mother Russia with all the legislation they could muster. One of these pieces of law was not to allow dual citizenship.

Later, as a concession, children born to one Finnish and one foreign parent abroad could have dual citizenship until they were eighteen, only if the parent retained his/her Finnish passport. So you can see, for me there was no alternative but to keep my Finnish citizenship. I wanted my children to be Finnish as well as British.

When Finland changed the law, it coincided more or less with the 18th birthdays of my children. In any case, by the time we sorted out the children's dual citizenships, the process of applying and gaining UK citizenship had been tightened up and made more expensive.

Not being a UK citizen doesn't normally affect me at all. Not until there is an election. I studied Political Science at the School of Economics, and worked at the BBC as a translator/journalist focusing on politics and economics in particular. Voting is a right (particularly for women) that has been bitterly fought over. Who's in government affects me personally and what happens in the country I live. The importance of exercising your right to vote is also an old hobby horse of mine.

For me watching the run-up to the elections and the results programme is like having your hands tied behind your back and being gagged. Luckily I haven't been, so I can still make my own kind of analysis of this, the most unusual British result.  

Firstly, I want to know why this result is such a surprise. The country is in financial turmoil; the world is in financial turmoil. None of the parties dealt with the real issues honestly during the campaign, something that was for once picked up by the media. No-one told the electorate where the cuts in public spending were really going to come from, apart from cutting down on a few paper clips in Whitehall. Not one of them discussed immigration in real terms, i.e. that the UK actually needs more young people to pay for the pensions deficit in the next 50 years and so. And that having these people come from somewhere like Poland would actually be quite handy. Or that it's pretty difficult to put a limit on immigration from another country in the EU. Or that immigration is a two way street: emigration being the other side of the coin. Talk to the Spaniards living  on the Costa del Sol for example.

I also believe the British electorate had to elect blindly -or on the basis of which one of the leaders looked trustworthy enough during three televised debates, which were so stage managed, nothing interesting transpired. So is it any wonder there wasn't a landslide for one particular party?

As far as the electoral system goes, having been a supporter of proportional representation for years (we have PR in Finland), I think if anything, this election has shown that the UK is not in favour of electoral reform. The LibDem vote did not change significantly. Their policies just did not stack up in the harsh light of day. I was astonished when they published their manifesto: to radically change income tax at a time when the country's economy is on a knife edge is sheer madness and speaks of a party that does not believe it will form a government (on its own at least).

So what's the future? I am of the opinion that Cameron should form a caretaker government and announce a new election in six months' time. But only because by then I also might have got my act together and applied for British citizenship. See, we all just think about ourselves. Sadly, that also seems be true about the politicians.

No, I'm not that Helena Halme

I think I have a real life double. I've never met her, but I keep hearing about her. Last night on Twitter I was asked if I free-lance as a translator on YLE (Finnish Broadcasting Corporation).

No, I don't.

Now, Halme is not an uncommon name in Finland, nor is Helena, but with five million people in a country the size of Britain it is unusual to have a person of the same name to:

1. Be born in the same year, and month, and day.

2. Live in the same part of Helsinki.

3. Have a bank account at the same branch of the same bank as you. (Don't ask me how I know all this, but I do - this was before identity theft or privacy laws were invented)

4. Start translating for the Finnish TV around the same time you start as a translator for the BBC in Britain.

Is she stalking me or am I stalking her? Or perhaps we are twins separated at birth?

PS. If you are that Helena Halme and reading this, do send me an email. It's about time we met...(*hears scary movie music*)?

My life as a spy

My career in UK started as translator/ journalist at the BBC Monitoring Service in Caversham. There I listened to Finnish and Swedish radio broadcasts, selected relevant news items and translated them into English.

The Degree in Political Science from the Swedish School of Economics in Helsinki gave me the language skills as well as an understanding of society. That was the theory. But the translation work wasn't easy for me. The transcripts had to be quick and accurate. There's no such thing as old news.

I'd learned Swedish in the school playground in Stockholm, and had no idea of grammar. My Finnish mother tongue suffered during the three years spent in Stockholm. Although I took my Baccalaureate in Finland, I still have some serious gaps in the language. And those of you who know Finnish know it's complicated. Some say only Cantonese is harder to learn. My school English was just that, school English. The little I'd learned at university was useful, and the learning curve at the BBC was steep. But after only six months I was a fully fledged Monitor, and was let loose on the news all on my own.

Translation became second nature. Even now when I hear Finnish or Swedish spoken I immediately think of how I'd put it in English.

The news aspect of the work thrilled me. While I was there, Chernobyl happened. Suspicions of a nuclear accident were first reported on Swedish radio, before the Finns admitted to some seriously high levels of radiation in their atmosphere. This was few hours before the story broke worldwide and the Soviet Union released the awful truth of the nuclear catastrophe. Our little four-man team worked through the night to translate everything Finnish Radio said, as well as the comments on Radio Moscow in Finnish and Swedish.

Many other nationalities were also represented at the Monitoring Service. As I'd only recently moved to Britain, it was wonderful to be with people who were fellow aliens in this country. Many of them had not arrived here as easily as I had. Many of them were homesick for a country they thought they'd never see again. I often think of my friends who now freely visit their homes in Estonia, Czechoslovakia, Poland or Russia.

The reason I'm reminiscing about my time at the BBC Monitoring is that the current manuscript, The Lost Daughter, tells a story of a Finnish girl working at the Monitoring Service. She befriends a Russian girl whose quest to find her missing father takes them both back to Helsinki. The story is fictional, but based on my experiences at the BBC.

My Finnish team leader once said, 'We're all spies here'. And in the same breath she told me I wasn't allowed to discuss anything I heard or saw with anyone outside the organisation. 'You signed the form didn't you?'

So is it any wonder that even after all these years I'm still intrigued?