Watching Italy

Contrary to what seems to be the conventional wisdom, Mr Timpson isn't the greatest celebrity in Europe and Crewe is not the centre of the world.

How much more fascinating to watch the volatile Mr Berlusconi trying to manage the fissiparous tendencies in Italy, the strongest of them - the Northern League and the Movement for Autonomy (of Sicily) - embedded in his coalition. Tito Boeri picks out three main challenges.

First, fiscal federalism.

• The Northern League calls for fiscal federalism to prevent public money going south, with proposals that 90% of tax revenues stay in the areas that generate them.
  
  
• The Movement for Autonomy wants revenues from oil refined on the island to go to Sicily.
  
  
• Mr Berlusconi's party has endorsed a bill recently voted on in the Lombardia region. It keeps 80% of revenues from VAT in the region in which it is generated, 15% of the income tax, and all the revenues from taxes on oil, tobacco and gambling. The bill also proposes devolving a number of programmes funded at the national level to local administrations, limiting how much redistribution can occur across regions.
  

This, says Mr Boeri, would leave some regions without sufficient resources to pay school teachers.

Italy badly needs to cut public spending, which has grown faster than its gross domestic product, especially at the local level. By making local governments fiscally responsible it could reconcile these two goals, by imposing political costs if they run large deficits.

The Italian finance minister has called fiscal federalism the "mother of reforms".

Second, there are conflicting demands for yet more changes in the electoral law.

Third, Mr Berlusconi needs to resist the temptation to fulfil his manifesto pledges to cut taxes in clumsy ways.

Of course there are other issues. Economic growth is flat, partly thanks to Italy's membership of the eurozone, which stops it devaluing, its usual salvation in the past. The former governor of the Bank of Italy - now a senator and part of Mr Berlusconi’s political movement - has been ordered to stand trial over alleged wrongdoing in the country’s banking scandal of 2005. (He was alleged to have favoured an Italian bidder for a bank over ABN Amro and looked pretty bang to rights at the time.)

But the government also proposes strong measures against immigrants and crime. A decree will provide for "easier" expulsion of illegal immigrants - and the confiscation of property they might have rented from Italians! Illegal immigration would become an offence carrying a jail sentence of up to four years. Illegals might be detained in centres for up to 18 months pending their eventual expulsion . Officials insist the plans do not violate EU law. But this looks unlikely - the re-establishment of border controls would violate the Schengen agreement.

And new measures aimed at the Mafia would lead to greater confiscation of their assets and eliminate plea-bargaining in court.

Misha Glenny focuses on the huge power of the Camorra and other criminal groups.

For years, it has been dumping rubbish and toxic waste brought in from northern Italy on lucrative contracts in and around residential areas.

Now Neapolitans, he says, are setting fire to this garbage indiscriminately, provoking a crisis of public health.

Glenny points out that the European commission is contemplating action against Bulgaria for failing to act against corruption now that it has got into the EU and got its hands on the money. When it comes to Italy, he says, Brussels has always applied double standards (as it does to fellow founding member France when it smashes debt ceilings that are supposedly mandatory in the eurozone).

Cracking the whip over a weak accession state such as Bulgaria is easy. But the EU appears scared of threatening similar measures against Italy. If Berlusconi's government fails to adopt serious measures against the Camorra in Naples, the time has come for the EU to take as tough an approach to Italy as it does to Bulgaria. It is simply outrageous that Naples is suffocating under a blanket of smoke and xenophobia generated by an organised crime syndicate that Rome refuses to challenge.

And where are these troubles and crime centred? In the south. Which brings us back to the Northern League. How much more interesting than our own dear Crewe.

Or perhaps Italy is more interested in Mr Timpson.