Sandra the Suzuki - 7th August 2017

I woke up to my alarm with a very foggy head. Lack of sleep and the red wine hangover were not a nice combination. I quietly changed, so as not to disturb John, and then went downstairs for breakfast. It was just after 9:30am, and I had planned to call the car company before the original pick up time. I hovered over the food choices at the buffet, opting for bread and spread with coffee and juice. I connected to the Wi-Fi, looked for the phone number and made the call. They were happy enough for us to arrive later, so I ended the call and proceeded to eat and read the news on my phone. The breakfast room had only the tail end of the breakfast crowd, some mulling over their day ahead sipping their second or third coffee. The staff were a little less diligent in their cleaning as they may have been an hour earlier.

I returned to our room, and slowly woke John up. It was now around 11am, and we needed to travel part way across the city to get to the car hire place. We both showered and changed, still snoozy from the past 16 hours of mayhem, and checked out of the hotel. I was keen on getting that hotel receipt for Wizz Air to refund. The receptionist was chirpy, happily inviting us back again soon.

We then clunked our large suitcase over and around the roadworks outside, and onward to the main boulevard. We approached a tram stop that followed the curved road south, then west, towards the Danube. We scrambled for tickets to get on the approaching tram, but a lack of confidence in what we were buying saw us consult over the options again, and wait for the next tram. We boarded the modern tram that came next - others we had seen being somewhat older – and stood the 5 stops it took us to the foot of the bridge that spanned the Danube to the south of the centre. Grand buildings of Imperial style and faded grandeur lined the route. Many had shops or bars on their ground level, with accommodation or offices rising above them to 6 or 7 storeys. The tramlines ran down the middle, with two or three lanes of traffic either side, complete with pedestrian walkways sliced between them all.

Once off, we took a side street that was less broad but still very much a thoroughfare to the neighbourhood. Trees lined the pavements, adding to the shaded nature of the street; a nice rest from the already rising morning heat. We dropped into a bakery so John could get some breaded items for his breakfast, and then continued for 5 minutes before turning right onto yet another smaller side street. On the ground floor of a newly built apartment block was our car rental place. After waiting for 15 minutes for the client ahead of us to be sorted, we were served. We had a small but sporty Suzuki that we name Sandra for the entirety of the journey. After ‘papping’ John in the driver seat, we entered our directions into the in-built sat nav and departed.

Now, one thing to probably check before you depart in a car with in-built sat nav in a foreign country, is that the language is set to English. We learned that quickly, having to interpret the visual guidance without audio, as we navigated wide boulevards with tramlines intersecting, on our rush out of the city. Despite that, John did a Class A job of getting us out and on to the ease of open motorway. We dared not tamper with the sat nav, lest we lose our way or focus. And so, the rest of the journey to Novi Sad was conducted in Hungarian.

There was no drawn out departure from the city. It was an abrupt transition from urban concentration to rural expanse. The journey was uneventful in itself, no topographical or architectural points to note. The Danube and Tisza rivers helped produce the flat Great Hungarian Plain. Agriculture thrived in this environment, and its richness is one of the reasons why it has been hotly contested in the past. Miles upon miles of fields and farms were what lay either side of us.

Conversations rang of expectations for the days ahead, and more concrete plans for the afternoon and evening before us. John firmly placed beer as one of those priorities. My Spotify playlist made for motivational listening in the background, a mix of indie and pop hits of the 90s and Noughties. We stopped just before the border to top up the car with petrol, stretch our legs, and grab a coffee. Minutes after pulling back out on to the motorway, we were at the border. I had anticipated that it would be rather busy, as it was a major artery between two countries, and the border of the EU. However, only three cars were in front of us on the Hungarian side, which was repeated as we crossed no man’s land to the Serbian checkpoint.

Again, the monotony of the vista resumed. The odd village was passed, but never a city. Szeged and Subotica, on either side of the border, were 20 or so kilometres away from the motorway. In Serbia, though, we had to pay at tolls to use the motorways. To be fair, there were only two occasions that we had to pass through a tollgate, and we could pay the £2.50 fees with card, so the passage was cheap and easy.

As we approached Novi Sad from the north, hills began to emerge out of the horizon. You could imagine this being a part of the Hungarian state, as it once was, if you married geography to state boundaries. Yet, since the creation of the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes following World War I, this territory lies firmly in Serbia; albeit in an autonomous province called Vojvodina. A majority Serb population lives alongside a sizeable Hungarian population. This is noted in the bilingual road signs we passed. Smatterings of other groups live here too – Vlachs, Romanians, Croats and so on. Back further, Germans of Saxon descent lived in the area that had periods within both the Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian Empires – and formed the Military Frontier of the latter. Furthermore, Vojvodina is also comprised of three partial geographic areas in the region. The Backa, which has a corresponding region in Hungary; the Banat, which has a corresponding region in Romania; and the Srijem, a wedge of land south of the Danube but north of the Sava, which extends into Croatia.

I was reeling all these facts off to John along the way, before we slipped off the motorway. We travelled along an approach road into the city, and this was clearly the neighbourhood where the Gypsy community lived. On the outskirts, it lacked any visible state support for better infrastructure or a cleaner environment. It is a similar case across Eastern Europe, and we come up for scrutiny too.

We came to the central part now, and turned towards the works site for the building of the new bridge across the Danube. It did not look like it had moved any further forward from when we were here the previous year. We drove along the riverside for 100 yards, and then turned right into a concrete housing estate. We parked up, faced the heat of the mid-afternoon, and trundled our luggage to the front door.

The mother or neighbour of the owner came to meet us, and gave us our keys. We could see the Danube from the window, at an angle, and the place was basic but clean. Its main value was that it was a 5-minute walk to the centre of the old town. We left immediately after I made a call to my mother, to tell her about our fraught overnight journey, and went straight to a bar on the shopping street. We visited the same place we ate at last year. John got his promised beer.

We mulled food options elsewhere, but settled on where we were. So, after eating, we had a proper walk around the city. The main, open expanse at one end of the shopping street was quiet, as the searing heat kept people in the shade. Parked on a pavement was a water tanker providing free water to passers-by.

We looped around the old city centre, taking in the brutal National Theatre, and the back streets with their cafes and shops. We found a snug bar with a patio area out back and had a couple of beers. Dusk approached before we left, and we were starting to feel tired. So, we walked back via the river to look at the Fortress. We had an early night, so we could be fresh for Belgrade the next day.

LGBTI Rights, Social Democracy and South East Europe

The coming together of three of my passions – The Labour Party, LGBTI rights, and the countries of South East Europe. This conference/workshop was a follow up from one held in Belgrade last year. Initiated by the European Forum for Democracy and Solidarity, and hosted by the Labour Party through the Westminster Foundation for Democracy; this session sought to provide practical aims and objectives for delegates, from the social democratic sister parties of the region, to pursue further LGBTI rights.

To put LGBTI rights in context of the countries of South East Europe, one only needs to look at ILGA Europe’s ‘Rainbow Europe Map’. The range amongst all the countries of the former Yugoslavia sees Croatia place 10^th and Macedonia 39^th out of the 49 countries of Europe. And this is solely on legislative terms. The attitude of society towards LGBTI people is overwhelmingly negative, and is hardening.

So the objectives for the conference delegates – representing Bosnia & Hercegovina, Croatia, Macedonia, Montenegro, Serbia, Slovenia and Vojvodina; as well as leads on LGBTI groups from Sweden and the Netherlands – were threefold.

First, the delegates had to contextualize the struggle for LGBTI rights. This came from speaking about their experience of furthering LGBTI rights both in society and within the party, the uneven passing of LGBTI legislation across the countries in the region and its relation to EU accession, and learning from the experiences of LGBTI social democratic groups in Sweden, the Netherlands and the UK.

Second, the delegates had to analyse and evaluate the successes and failures of integrating LGBTI rights into their social democratic parties. Here, breaking into three groups helped each group focus on one or two countries at a time, but allowing the entire delegation to pick out differences and similarities during the roundup at the end.

Third, the delegates had to then draw together an action plan for them to take practical steps to further LGBTI rights.

Throughout the conference, many shared observations were made. One of the agents of change in advancing LGBTI rights that was mentioned was the EU. Delegates commented that the EU guided the hand of Governments into passing legislation, even if only as a ‘box ticking’ exercise. Governments could easily ‘blame’ the EU on the need to pass these changes in order to achieve the overarching objective to join the EU. However, these changes have not yet acted as an agent of change in society.

Another observation was that the party leadership’s seemed to be positive towards the LGBTI community in most countries, but it was the middling and lower ranking membership of those parties that had a problem of accepting LGBTI rights. However, it was pointed out that future leaders and representatives of the parties were where delegates could exert pressure to further LGBTI rights, both in the culture of the party and future party policy. The youth sections were agreed as a starting point to entrench political education on LGBTI rights and increase activism.

And so it followed that many delegates agreed there seemed to be no comprehension amongst party members or some leaders as to how or why LGBTI rights were central to the values of social democracy. This turned into a debate on the meaning of social democracy, which the delegates would take back to their parties.

The lack of leaders, local and national, to either come out as LGBTI or be pro-LGBTI was a constant weakness most delegates raised, especially from Macedonia. Lack of visibility meant there was a lack of seriousness to accept the LGBTI agenda, as it is seen as an electoral negative rather than a potential electoral positive. Those contributors not from the region emphasised the parallel processes of greater visibility meaning greater social acceptance – and hence less electoral disadvantage.

The conference ended after delegates from each country agreed to small, achievable steps to take. These included arranging a meeting with the leader of their party, asking for a safe space in Headquarters for LGBTI members to meet, asking for an email to go out to all party members to make them aware of the existence of an LGBTI party group, setting up a Facebook group, and looking towards future local government elections to develop cost-free pro-LGBTI policies.

The success of this conference will be seen in the actions that these individual delegates take. As I said in my remarks at the start of one of the sessions, they are the founders of the LGBTI rights movements in their parties, and through those they will change laws and societies, and continue the march towards LGBTI equality. A heavy burden for them to shoulder, but one this conference motivated them to lead.