Governing
in Spain: This week's discussions between the king and political
parties hasn't resulted in a viable government. This increases the
chances of a left-wing coalition carrying the day. As expected, the
ex/acting President, Sr Rajoy of the PP party, declined to go through the humiliating
experience of being officially voted out of office. We now await the
outcome of next week's discussions. The most likely prospect is a left-wing coalition of PSOE, Podemos and the small far-left IU party. So, who
will get the office goodies?
Driving
in Spain: This is a bit from an article on common mistakes made
by British drivers. I've adapted it for people who drive on the right,
as in Spain. Everyone knows the drill at roundabouts. Signal left
if your exit is past 12 o’clock, thereby sending a clear message to
other road users about your intentions. But too many people forget
the next part of the sequence: signalling right when they want to
turn off. “You should do this midway through the junction before
the one you’re taking. This will ensure everyone knows where you’re
headed and will clear a path accordingly.” In
a word - Nobody knows this
is Spain. And, indeed,
the law may be contrary to this British rule. Result? Chaos on
roundabouts and a need to be very, very careful that, if you're going
straight ahead, you won't be crossed by someone on your right who's
signalling right, as if to exit, but who's really going on to another
exit. Or even back where (s)he came from. You've been warned.
Only
in Spain?: As the search
for new lows in reality shows goes on around the world, Spain has
come up with a corker – Who wants to be a nun? Or,
as El reality is
entitled in Spain: Quiero ser monja.
More on this madness here. And here in Spanish. Looking at the foto,
I'd say the 3 on the right of the line have no chance of 'winning', as Spanish
law obliges all nuns to be under 5 feet/150cm. Or that's my
impression, at least, from what I see on the streets. Good evidence
for this comes from the left of the foto. Though I suppose it's
possible convent life forces everyone to shrink and they all started
off taller.
The
Daily Telegraph: This once-great UK
newspaper is in serious decline. One aspect of this is its appalling
editing process, now farmed out overnight – it's said – to
teenagers in Australasia who don't have a spellcheck on their
computers. Today, this has resulted in a new verb, as in:
Stock market carnage bolsters demand to scrap pensions cap
threathening 'middle-class savers'.
Good luck with it if you're foreign. Or an English-speaker, even. As
if that weren't bad enough, here's the caption underneath a foto of 2
men with long beards: Asmaa Al-Kufaishi,
36, and her sister Reem, 24, praised after challenging the men who
had set up a stall in Oxford Street.
Finally
. . . The EU:
Here's an article from Charles Moore which sets out my own view of
this institution, held for a good 20 years now.
European
civilisation is in danger of succumbing to the EU empire
As we await details of the PM’s deal, we should take a
different look at our relationship with Brussels
Next month, unless there is a last-minute slip between Brussels
cup and British lip, we shall be inundated with detail about what
David Cameron has won from the EU. He will claim that his package
will create the “reformed Europe” which he seeks. Indeed, he is
saying it already, before he has actually got it.
Therefore, he will continue, the British people can confidently
vote to remain in the EU. His Cabinet, though technically free to
advocate a Leave vote, will all have endorsed his deal in advance, so
any referendum rebels will be made to look self-contradictory.
There will be time to analyse the hectares (this is Brussels, so
the word “acres” sounds wrong) of small print. Before that
happens, I want to stand back and look at the European referendum
choice from quite a different point of view. My question is: “Is
the EU good for European civilisation?”
Here in Britain, we tend to think of the EU in a “transactional”
way. We set off what we get out against what we put in, and calculate
the profit and loss. (In literal financial terms, we lose about £10
billion a year.)
On the Continent, this is not how it works, though most member
states fight hard for concrete national advantages. For the European
elites, the EU is not a transaction, but a journey towards a new
state of being. They may disagree strongly about policies, but not
about the big idea. It is a case of “My Europe, right or wrong.”
Their beliefs are not economic, but political. Indeed, even the
word “political” does not fully express the thought. Their
reasons are civilisational. To them, the EU is the solution to
Europe’s ancestral hatreds and power struggle, the only viable
project for peace across the continent. They also see it as a way of
perpetuating European values (behind which the old word “Christendom”
still lurks) against tyranny and aggression – for example, Putin’s
Russia and growing Islamism.
If they are right, should Britain stand aside all the same? Should
we say – as some Eurosceptics always have – that the continent
means only trouble for us? Should we rate our freedom to decide our
own destiny so high that we need not worry what happens across the
water?
I reckon not. Much as I want to get out of the EU, I would not
vote Leave if I thought that, by doing so, we would make it harder
for European civilisation to survive. Different though Britain is, in
many ways, from its neighbours, it is a part of European
civilisation. The wider Anglo civilisation of North America,
Australia etc is closer to us, obviously, than, say, Italy or Greece,
but that, too, is European in character, though not in geography.
In this sense, we have no choice. We are European, so we would be
mad not to want the best for Europe. When we so famously stood alone
in 1940, it was not because we didn’t care about the fate of
Europe, but because we did.
So is it true that the EU reconciles Germany and France, makes the
powerful countries respect the small ones and secures new entries
into the democratic fold? It would be odd flatly to claim that it
does not, when so many member states retain their faith in it. It is
striking that virtually all the countries which threw off the Soviet
yoke in 1989 either are, or want to be, in the EU.
It won’t do just to jeer: “Yeah, well they want the money,
don’t they?” They do – and what’s wrong with poor countries
wanting more money? – but they also see it as a place of greater
safety. If you are a Pole, you are just as patriotic as any Briton,
but you live in a place which the distorted patriotism of others laid
waste. As Putin ravages Ukraine, you start to imagine that it could
happen again. One has to respect these feelings.
But the EU’s claims about what it has done need closer
inspection. It is not true, for example, that it assured post-war
peace. The main peacemaker was the Nato alliance, especially the
determination of the United States to rebuild Germany and hold back
Soviet communism. It was Nato, operating through leaders like Ronald
Reagan, Margaret Thatcher and Helmut Kohl, which later created the
conditions in which the Berlin Wall could come down without the world
falling apart.
By contrast, the EU’s price for the reunification of Germany –
the creation of the single currency – has been the most
destabilising act in the history of Europe this century. Germans
nowadays tell Greece (and Spain and Portugal and Italy) what to do –
not because they have the evil intent of old, but because the euro
puts them in charge of the zone’s money. The “European Germany”
which Kohl wanted thus becomes indistinguishable from the “German
Europe” which he feared.
This development shows something else. The EU is a funny mixture
of being too strong – imposing regulations, telling member states
how to run their economies, ignoring its own laws when it suits it,
thwarting the results of referendums and even elections – and too
weak – lacking the mechanisms to manage members’ debts, determine
tax policy, punish transgressions or defend itself.
It is not a dictatorship, but an empire, in a world where other
empires have disappeared. One of its oddest claims is that the future
cannot consist of nations. Yet all the main players of the future are
sovereign nations – China, India, America, the countries of the old
Commonwealth.
When a real crisis arises, the EU cannot act. It failed in the
former Yugoslavia in the 1990s and finally had to let the Americans
come to the rescue. Today, some say the EU is more vital than ever,
because of Russian adventurism. But the miseries of Ukraine suggest
that the EU cannot successfully fill the vacuum created by President
Obama’s abandonment of American strength.
When the Schengen area of open borders was created 30 years ago
(with Thatcher’s Britain opting out), the idea was to give reality
to the shared space which the dreamers wanted to become the United
States of Europe. As we are now seeing, this cannot survive the
arrival of hundreds of thousands of mainly Muslims refugees from the
Middle East. Yet the response of the Schengen area – and the
eurozone – to every shock is to try to reinforce what already isn’t
working. The EU suffers from imperial overstretch.
Mr Cameron rightly makes much of the fact that Britain is a member
of neither Schengen nor the eurozone, yet does not follow his own
logic. If we benefit from not being in the key features, what is the
continuing reason why we should be in the thing at all? The EU is a
journey, not a steady state, and the 21st-century evidence is that it
is travelling in the wrong direction.
I don’t want the EU to fall apart, because I fear chaos. But I
do want it to reverse its imperial direction, which ultimately
imperils European civilisation. For a Eurosceptic, the referendum
debate is about whether this can be achieved only by getting out.