In the midst of openDemocracys discussion of the forces that shape landscape, the Czech Republic was faced with a vivid illustration of just how powerful these forces can be, in the form of the recent floods that devastated much of the landscape and townscape of our country. This experience has been an immense human and cultural disaster. But it might be of special interest to openDemocracy readers for another reason, namely that it has provided our government with an excuse to bypass the democratic process in its desire to change the countrys taxation system.
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Our family lives just behind Prague castle, on top of a hill and thus high enough to escape the floods. With a three-month-old baby, we spent hours watching instant flood coverage delivered by Czech television, and telephoning our friends to ask whether they were safe. Many of them were grievously affected by the disaster.
Those who owned properties in Mala Strana, Holesovice or Karlin experienced the worst of it. The lucky ones had only to carry out tons of mud, and then clean and dry their homes. In Karlin, a few nineteenth-century houses collapsed, while others are still waiting for what the building experts will say. One friend has a furniture shop in the flooded area. He now has to pay for a shop-full of saturated jink. Hundred-year-old trees in Stromovka, the largest and the most beautiful park in the city, have been uprooted. Kadir, the elephant in the Prague zoo did not make it to safety.
Still, those living in Prague were fortunate. Prague is a wealthy city and house owners in Mala Strana will manage to reconstruct their houses and businesses soon. The real suffering is in the countryside. Many who owned nothing but a scrappy old Skoda and a small house inherited from their grandparents (and who lived on a minimal income from farming) are now left with a little piece of land in the flood plain land on which the authorities will no longer allow them to build. One person we know went to the hospital to pick up his wife and their newborn baby. He did not know how to tell her that they had nowhere to go.
Taxing goodwill
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Although we have not been directly affected by the floods, our lives will be changed for many months hereafter. The underground railway, the arterial system of our capital, is no longer working in most parts. People cross the city in a few packed trams, while the sillier citizens queue endlessly in their cars and others spend many hours walking to and from their offices. Walking sounds romantic, until you realise that the first of the three tube lines will not re-open until Christmas and that the severely damaged line that goes alongside the Vltava will run again only later next year.
It is interesting that these underground chambers, that were to protect us from nuclear attack in the cold war years, could not protect us from water. To dig deep seems sensible when you fear attack from the air; it is madness when the enemy is water. And who would have thought that the Vltava, the river celebrated by Smetana in Ma Vlast (My Country), the most famous of all our patriotic works of art, would one day prove our enemy?
Even if our own home was not inundated, there is a sense in which we will, for many years to come, share the suffering the floods have created with its real victims. And the cause is more political than meteorological. Our centre-left government has decided to put the burden upon the people in the form of increased taxation. The unfair and hurried tax reform has little to do with the environmental catastrophe.
The newly-elected Prime Minister, Vladimir Spidla, who has always dreamt of the Swedish model of a social welfare superstate, took this opportunity to increase VAT, income tax on the wealthy and tax on petrol. Those who were not affected by the floods will have a hard time protesting against tax increases, when the ostensible cause is help for the needy. Their protests can therefore be conveniently ignored. In hard times, the Czech people unite and are ready to help each other, through charities, non-governmental organisations and other initiatives of civil society. After all, we do not need the superstate to control our solidarity with, and sympathy for, those whose homes and lives have been damaged.
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The government argues that the floods caused damage that will cost tens of billions of Czech crowns. But they do not emphasise that most of this will be paid by insurance companies, municipalities and the property owners themselves. Why especially should the latter now pay extra towards the building of the new superstate, when so much of the cost of the disaster already falls on them?
Even in its young history, our beloved country has endured more extensive upheavals than this. No special taxation was imposed to cover losses from the coupon-privatisation of the early 1990s, even though it effectively destroyed Czech industry. We have directly paid not tens but hundreds of billions of crowns in order to restore the state banks so that they could be sold off to private investors. Recently, the government made a profit from selling the whole of the gas utility sector; the telecommunication monopoly has been sold, and the whole energy business is now on the market. We can therefore afford to pay for the damaged underground and infrastructure from money that already is in the hands of the state.
We cannot help but think that the worst punishment that the Czech nation has to face after the floods is neither the damaged towns and villages, nor the Prague underground, but this immature and presumptuous tax reform, the purpose of which is to exploit civic emotion, in order to enlarge the power of the state.
