Mountains,

Music

00.00.00.00

landscapes,

villages

Colvin: Welcome to Padania. 

00.09

Literally, Padania means the country round the river Po - but the separatists pushing for Padanian statehood see it covering the whole of what's now Italy's north.

They want a border that would cut off cities like Perugia, Rome and Naples as members of a separate south Italian State.

People eating and drinking

This is a rally - they call it a festival - for the separatist movement, the Northern League.

00.32

Much of the local population has come out for the evening, in an area where a staggering fifty to sixty percent voted for the independence movement at the last election.

Their leaders say the Northern League has the only sane solution to the chasm between north and south - cut the north loose.

00.52

Pivetti intv

Super:

IRENE PIVETTI

Northern League MP

Pivetti:  The economical life is completely different between North and South, the economy in the South virtually doesn't exist.  It's aided by the State.  The State is the first and often the only employer.

01.03

Men talking and drinking,

Colvin: But the Northern League's critics say that far from being sane and reasonable, the party's intentions are in fact militaristic, racist and anti-democratic.

Intv with De Blasio

Super:

CARLO DE BLASIO

Writer/

Commentator

De Blasio:  It is a danger for everybody in the country, but I make this metaphorical image of the Northern League.  They are like a bomb without the Semtex inside.  And it's ready to explode as soon as the Semtex is provided to such a bomb.

 01.38

Colvin: What is Semtex, the explosive in that case.

De Blasio:  The explosive is the consensus of the people which has been growing up to a point.

Village in landscape, streets and houses, people walking along, Colvin with Mayor

Colvin: We travelled into the valleys to the little town of Sedrina, to explore the reasons why so many Northerners now want to break away from the Italian nation.

02.04

With two thousand five hundred people it looks quiet enough - the sort of place you'd drive through without a glance.  But the Mayor, Agostino Lenisa, was keen for us to see that behind the somnolence of the high street lay a hive of Northern industry.

The limestone quarry for the local concrete works - a big taxpayer and a source of scores of jobs.

02.27

Signor Lenisa took us on a mayoral visit to one of his most successful constituents - FCM, where they make doorframes.  Gianfranco Gamba and his brother started it on their own in 1974.  Now with high tech equipment and a workforce of fifty, they produce 900 frames a day.

Intv with Gianfranco Gamba

Gamba:  Our business has succeeded little by little.  It's grown because we know what we're doing, and having grown up in it we know the business.

02.57

Factory work being done, building, intv with Gianfranco Gamba continues

Colvin: FCM has grown to a turnover of around 50 million dollars a year.  It's owners resent having to pay the government in Rome a tax bill that amounts to 72% of their profit and whether it's regional resentment or north/south racism, they believe they could never have made a go of it in the south.

03.14

Gamba:  I really don't think so.  I don't think so, because the people in our area really aren't like them.  I don't say this because I have anything against those people, but they don't have the attitude - they don't have work in the blood, that's the way it is.

03.34

Intv with Mayor Lenisa

Lenisa:  Here people get up in the morning and they do something they work to put food on the table regardless come what may.  But we've seen how people are elsewhere in Italy - not the north - there's this feeling, this reliance on the State, on State money, this feeling they're waiting for handouts.

03.59

Cars, police arresting, viaduct, Colvin with Lenisa, buildings

Colvin: You could dismiss it as Northern pride and anti-Southern prejudice but for the reality that tax money going South has been blown on massive corruption and incompetence.

04.27

Like this Sicilian viaduct built entirely so that those involved could  rake off a percentage in bribes - many Northerners have come to believe they are on a road to no where.

04.39

In Sedrina they pay around five million dollars a year in communal taxes.  Their new town hall is being built on borrowed money - because Rome only gives less than a fifth of the tax take back to the region.

04.53

Pan down building, men outside building, shopkeeper showing coats

And what makes it worse is the vast grinding bureaucracy of Italy's tax department.  There's often a little group of businessmen picketing Milan's tax office - part of a structure so inefficient that it commonly takes decades to get a rebate from Rome.                                    

05.20

A shopkeeper, like the furrier Roberto Bertini can feel crushed not just by the sixty two percent he has to pay - but the sheer antiquated weight of the system. 

05.27

Like many businessmen, he believes Northern autonomy could free him from the shackles of Rome.

Intv with Bertini

Super:

ROBERTO BERTINI

Furrier

Colvin and Bertini outside shop

Bertini:  We're the most heavily taxed people in Europe.  So obviously we can't progress.  We lose the power to invest, we can't expand, but in fact have to keep contracting up to the point where the State will have to lend a hand - business in Italy is treated like rubbish, treated like nothing.

05.46

Colvin: Bertini recently rationalised his shop, closing one display window, taking down a sign and removing a pavement flower pot.

06.10

Each of those three things accrued a separate tax.  Removing them cost him a whole day's queuing in three different departments of the tax office.

Men walking along

Angry crowd noises

06.30

crowd clapping

Colvin: Frustration's like that mean that wherever he goes in the region the Northern League leader, Umberto Bossi is guaranteed a reception that varies from enthusiastic to rapturous.

Rome's greatest weaknesses are the League's greatest strength.

06.45

Bossi speaking at microphone, men guarding

Bossi:  They're trying to get hold of one thing:  what's the thing they want?  The wealth of the North.  There's only one thing - control of the Northern economy.

06.52

Colvin: Yet there's a sinister side to the League - starting with the Greenshirts who guard the great leader.  Echoes of a darker era of Italian history - and hard to reconcile with Bossi's own claims to model himself on Gandhi.

07.09

Bossi:  Gandhi was the greatest secessionist in history.  He succeeded in freeing India from the British empire without a shot being fired, non-violently, that's how Gandhi did it.

07.20

Intv with De Blasio

De Blasio:  Ah ha ha, it's preposterous.  Gandhi was always condemning violence and I've been hearing Bossi in private meetings without TV cameras or radio mikes and when he's alone, when there are no public eyes on him he is absolutely violent. 

07.40

He attacks the State, he attacks democracy and once he told - I have two bullets in my pocket for a magistrate which is trying to accuse us of corruption. 

08.01

You know, this is not the language Gandhi used and I think such a comparison made by a man like Bossi is simply outrageous.

Bossi walking

Crowd sounds

08.22

through crowd

Bossi talking to camera

Colvin: Bossi remains a Northern folk hero - and trademarks like having Italian camera crews forcibly ejected from his rallies have done him no harm at the grassroots.

His greatest test, though, is coming up - with the threat of a declaration of Northern independence.  I asked him when it would happen.

Bossi:  The fifteenth of September at Venice, after a three day festival, there'll be a million people lining the banks of the Po, at the end of the Festival there'll be a declaration of Independence by our Committee for National Independence.

    08.50

City scenes

Colvin: No-one believes this will mean that cities like Milan will suddenly become part of a new State.  Bossi's urban support in particular isn't strong enough for that yet.  But it's the seed of an idea that's taking root in fertile soil.

09.08

Even the softest line Northern League MPs - like the immensely popular Irene Pivetti - are now preparing for a major standoff with Rome.

Pivetti (laughs):  Yes, the problem is how they do that because of the Parliament of the League and the government of the League are political organizations of a party. 

09.26

Of course, if somebody can try to say that they are institutions - the embryos of a future country but I don't believe it.

Colvin: You're awfully close to a confrontation with the State itself?

09.56

Pivetti:  Oh, yes, probably.

Colvin: ... confrontation?

Pivetti:  Yes I think so.

Little band of marchers with flags

The outright opposition for the Northern League's plans is small.  This little band of stalwarts belong to the Democratic Italy group.

10.09

Arrive and start scraping

Their weekly mission - to scrape off Northern Republic stickers plastered on road signs everywhere

Paolo Guerra: This is not what the major of Italian people want. We are not republic of the North. We are Republic of Italy - and it is not true that the people put this one.

Colvin: So you fear the breaking up of Italy?

Paolo Guerra: Yes I'm proud to be Italy and I don't want to be Repubblica Del Nord.     

10.24

Flags, Romano Prodi at mic, walking through crowds, being interviewed

Colvin: It's only months since Italians elected Romano Prodi prime minister, a moderate who also wants to keep Italy united.  Northern separatism is one of Prodi's greatest challenges, but beyond decentralising measures the new government's been reluctant to confront it directly.

10.46

Intv with De Blasio

Super:

CARLO DE BLASIO

Writer/

Commentator

De Blasio:  They know they can't do that because we are in a period of so called transition. In the last few years we've been voting I don't know how many times and the governments have been following one another at a busy rate. It's a clear space for manoeuvring for people like Bossi who is very smart, clever, treacherous and sly sometimes. And he understands that he has a chance to do that without being confronted and opposed by the State so there is a space of manoeuvring which he is exploiting.

11.06

Train station

Created by Garibaldi, the unified Italian nation may almost be at the end of the line.  Only a period of stable, efficient, clean central government can hold it together.  If it happens, that will be a small Italian miracle.

11.47

ENDS