Jörg Haider

There was me leaving for Austria this morning and getting out of my bed at 6.30 am, I was already confronted with the news from Austria; Jörg Haider, who was apparently driving too quickly, has died in a car accident. Now, I can just envisage some of my readers asking who Jörg Haider is, or rather was? Well, Jörg Haider was a right wing populist who said some silly things but the sort of silly things that made him popular with a lot of Austrians and, indeed, facilitated him playing a very important role in Austrian politics since first becoming the first minister in the Austrian region of Carinthia in 1989. It's not really the place here to provide you with Jörg's detailed biography; you can google him if you want to. No, it is probably enough to report a little conversation one radio journalist had with a young Austrian lady on asking her what she thought about Jörg Haider's death and follow on by giving one quote from Jörg. Anyway, the young lady thought that his ideas were good but that they are difficult to put into practice and one of Jörg's ideas was to build camps in fields for foreigners living in Austria. That was only one of his ideas and the really good thing is that Jörg was an Austrian born in Bad Goisern in Upper Austria in 1950 and not an Austrian born in Braunau am Inn in, what is now Upper Austria, in 1889 or an American born in New Haven, Connecticut in 1946.