Iceland’s role in the implosion of the international financial system caught most of us unawares. Trotsky doesn’t seem to have mentioned it as a possibility as far as I can establish but the Icelanders have certainly got Gordon Brown rattled. Talking about how the British Government was dealing with the collapse of Landsbanki Iceland’s prime minister Geir Haarde said it was “not very pleasant” to learn that anti-terror laws were being used to deal with the company. Fighting talk!
My knowledge of the Icelandic banking system is fairly sketchy but I was in the country last year and my internationalism demands that I step up in defence of little Iceland as it looks likely to be the next scapegoat in the war on terror. Here’s something I wrote last year.
I’m brimming with useful facts about Iceland.
Its earliest known inhabitants are thought to have been Irish monks looking for somewhere quiet to contemplate their god. Though I’d have though that Ireland in the 7th or 8th century would have been fairly quiet anyway.
Did you know that Iceland is Europe’s largest producer of bananas? Or that it has the largest aluminium smelter in the world? There are plans to build an even larger one. These wonders are made possible by the incredibly cheap electricity that they can produce here.
Anyone looking for enlightenment about the politics here will have to seek that elsewhere. I’ve tried reading the local papers and watching the news but the language is incomprehensible. Though there is a nagging feeling that in some deep part of your brain you should be able to understand it.
Still class struggle there must be. How can you have banana plantations (or greenhouses) and smelters without it?
There is one horse for every three people in Iceland.
Reykjavík is a bit like Croydon without the racy glamour. Everything in it, and surrounding it, seems to have been built in the last thirty years. You could not guess that there has been a settlement on the site for a millennium. I’m told that the average wage is about £21 000 a year. It’s a wonder there hasn’t been a revolution if that’s true. I find myself swearing every time I do the mental arithmetic to work out the price of things in pounds. Partly this is because I’m not too hot at hard sums. More usually it’s because of the prices. I think I paid £18 last night for a lovingly micro waved fish stew made of potatoes and cod with a pint and a half.
Only 1.5% of Iceland’s farming land is cultivated.
Earlier today I went horse riding for the first time in ten years and the third time ever. My theory that watching a couple of westerns every week would compensate for a lack of practice was not entirely wrong, even if it wasn’t adequate preparation for the thigh muscles. This being an efficient Scandinavian type of place they help you get over that by taking you to the local open air swimming pool and geo-thermal hot tub. You sit immersed in very warm water while a freezing rain blows into your face. That I quite enjoyed but very few holiday experiences are improved by the arrival of a primary school class splashing water at each other and randomly shrieking.
Iceland is a wonderful place. Echo and the Bunnymen first gave me the hankering to visit when they had themselves photographed here on an album cover. The landscape is hard but gorgeous and you cannot imagine how pure the air is outside cities. Take out a mortgage and come soon.
You can’t graduate from school in Iceland without passing your swimming exam.
The horse in the photo is not a pony. It is an Icelandic Viking Warrior Stallion.
This has proved to be a very popular post. Here is a bit of a commentary from our Icelandic correspondent.
“Did you know that Iceland is Europe’s largest producer of bananas? Or that it has the largest aluminium smelter in the world? There are plans to build an even larger one. These wonders are made possible by the incredibly cheap electricity that they can produce here.”
The combined capacity of the aluminium smelters in Iceland is less than the largest smelters in the world.
Iceland does not produce any bananas, there are a couple of greenhouses that have one banana tree each, just to show that it can be done. The entire consumption of bananas is imported.
“I’m told that the average wage is about £21 000 a year. It’s a wonder there hasn’t been a revolution if that’s true.”
There certainly would have been a revolution if that was true, this seems to be the average wage for a factory worker, the lowest negotiated wage (and the unemployment benefits) are much lower than this but the average wages for the whole population are much higher.
Loved your article though but note that Scandinavia is to the east of the British isles, Iceland is to the north-west. Iceland is not Scandinavian and although there has been some Scandinavian influences Iceland is also, and to a far greater degree, influenced by things non-Scandinavian.
I met Ian McCullough in a club in downtown Reykjavík when the Bunnymen were shooting the cover for the Porcupine album and the Cutter video back in 1983, lovely memories.
Kveðja, Sigvaldi
Liam redux 
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