TIED UP IN DEBT

AMUSING AS IT IS TO WATCH PORTUGAL’S politicians attempting to deal with a crisis, it is nevertheless difficult to forget that the solutions the government has found to do so are downright daylight robbery from the average people, particularly those who earn the least. The latest measure, announced in a press conference yesterday, is that the lowest-rate pensioners, who receive around 218 Euros (£190) per month if they are lucky, and those who earn less than 550 Euros (£500) – a considerable number of the young people who actually have a job – will still have to pay the special “Christmas tax” this year “as a loan” to the government, which will be “repaid in full”, it was gleefully announced, “in most cases”, in 2012, at a date to be established.

MOST PEOPLE HERE KNOW THAT Portuguese politicians, in keeping with the characteristics of the Portuguese race, would rather eat their own babies than give anyone any money back, so the prevailing glumness is because the next two Christmases will not be as merry as they once were.

YET SOME SOLUTIONS FOUND for the crisis abound in good sense and far-sightedness, if not decorum. This is perhaps the case of the measures announced yesterday by the new Minister for Agriculture, the Sea, the Environment and Territorial Administration (I kid you not), the good lady Professor Assunção Cristas. Under her “Cool Air” initiative, there will be untold savings for the country by turning off the air conditioning in the ministerial offices between the 1st of June and the 30th of September.

THOSE OF US WHO HAVE WORKED in the stinking, polluted hole that is downtown Lisbon in the summer will know that the average temperature in July or August is a sweat-dripping 34º Centigrade, made even less tolerable by the cramped, insect- and rat-infected, non-Feng Shui premises of most public buildings.

YET HELP IS AT HAND. The canny minister has unusually foreseen the problem and anticipated a solution. Male civil servants will be allowed to work without wearing a tie during these months, which will, according to law teacher Cristas, make it possible to allow an increase of temperature of about “three to four” degrees.

GIRLIE CRISTAS, WHO WAS BORN IN AFRICA and represents the CDS-PP, the only party representative of the extreme right in the Portuguese parliament, obviously knows how to deal with temperature. Yet when asked yesterday by one of those rare journalists who question their leaders in Portugal as to whether the heating would be turned off in the winter, and the clerks would come to work in coats, she declined to answer.

MY SUGGESTION FOR BOOSTING TEMPERATURE over the winter months would be as simple as the minister’s for the summer. Men could go without ties in the summer, and female clerks could take their skirts and blouses off in the winter. This would have the dual advantage of keeping the temperature up, and steaming over the windows in ministerial offices, so no one would be able to see what was going on inside this humungous ministry.

(My picture shows the recommended dress code for male ministerial civil servants in Portugal the last time anyone actually did any work.)