Dawn

Dawn

Sunday, July 03, 2011

Who do they think they're kidding?


This sign – or something similar - appears on numerous blocks of flats in and around Pontevedra city. And doubtless in many hundreds of other cities throughout Spain. What it actually means is that between 75 and 100% of the flats – depending on how long ago they were built – are unsold. And that you can knock the price right down.

The Spanish economy: Edward Hugh's view on the robustness of this is not shared by everyone, of course. Here's Charles Butler of Ibex Salad with a contrary opinion on the competitiveness of the country's economy.

I'm still being highly entertained by the Iranian government's slant on world events, as trumpeted on PressTV. The network's stated goals are to:- “Heed the voices and perspectives of the people of the world; build bridges of cultural understanding; encourage human beings of different nationalities, races and creeds to identify with one another; and to bring to light untold and overlooked stories of individuals who have experienced political and cultural divides firsthand." In practice, what this means is obsessing about Saudi Arabian and American support for the “oppressive” government of Bahrain and interviewing every malcontent they can find in the USA.

My fig tree, as some will recall, gave me 25 figs earlier in the year – 24 more than in any previous year. And now it's decided to give me around 50 more in a second crop. But, as I don't eat this fruit, I guess they'll all wither on the branches again. Incidentally, the Spanish for fig is “higo” and the Gallego and Portuguese is “figo”, the name of the famous footballer, of course. Which reminds me that the Spanish and Gallego words for 'savings' are ahorros and aforros, respectively. Which is, I guess, another example of greater Gallego similarity with the original Latin and, thus, of its 'superiority” to Spanish.

Spanish society has a lot more live-and-let-live attitude than others. On balance, this is a good thing but it still amazes me how accepting the Spanish are – especially mothers with toddlers – of cyclists who ride along the pavements at high speed. Not just kids but adults as well. True, these people show great skill in weaving in and out of the pedestrian traffic and in avoiding those who make a sudden turn to left or right. But it's just an accident waiting to happen. Which reminds me, I came up against one such cyclist the other day, under some scaffolding where there was only space for one person (or bike) to proceed. I stood my ground for thirty seconds or so, while the kid used his balancing skills to keep the bike upright. I should've waited for him to fall off but, in the end, squeezed past him and walked on. Next time!

In ten years, there's never been a time when there weren't roadworks in and around Pontevedra city. As a result, we now have twenty or thirty more roundabouts than we did a decade ago. These, in theory, improve traffic flow. But this presupposes that drivers will courteously leave a gap through which traffic can pass if there's a jam on on their exit road. Which rarely happens here. It also presupposes that the traffic will use both lanes on a roundabout but this is actually illegal in Spain, where all drivers are told to use the outer lane unless they're making a U-turn. The end result is often chaos. And accidents, of course. Fortunately, I drove for three years in Tehran and have a seven-year old car which I'm not afraid to scratch or bump. So I can bulldoze my way through roundabout logjams. Which often gives me the pleasure of having Spanish drivers angrily blow their horns at me. Makes my day, in truth.

Finally . . . As I can't cite Times articles because of the paywall, here's the full text of a beautifully written article by Matthew Parris on the EU, with which I found myself in full agreement. The article, of course. Not the EU:-

Is it inevitable that Britain stays a full member of the European Union? Or that the EU continues with only one kind of membership? I’ve begun to wonder and I’m sure I’m not alone. Somewhere in the landscape of our political imagination something big has shifted. Certainties look uncertain. Impossibilities intrude as possibilities, are smilingly dismissed, but return.

When it comes to Europe I’m quaintly typical of millions of my fellow Englishmen. Testy. Confused. Mindful of the vision but despairing of the reality. Irritated by the bees in anti-European bonnets yet unmoved by the infatuation in enthusiasts’ eyes. By turns tepid, truculent or torn, I’ve all my political life been suspicious of passions on either side.

The result has been inertia. “Drag our feet but stay part of it” has been every British governments’s grumbling conclusion; string along with what suits us, obstruct what doesn’t, keep out of the wilder schemes and leave the dream of ever closer union to run into the sand. Most of all, we’ve been nervous about imperilling our national interest either through careless provocation of our allies and customers over the Channel, or careless infatuation with our common European home.

What, then, if there were a vote today? Would I still vote to stay? Probably. But that assumption of inevitability is leaking away. I’ve begun to daydream about halfway houses, two-tier membership arrangements, a semi-detached relationship in which the Franco-German core of the European project do what they surely have to do next if their dream is not to die: create a hard-edged and more exclusive Euroland in which harmonised taxes and spending, and harmonised debt-to-GDP ratios, run alongside the already unified currency. And we British stand outside that.

I’ve begun, too, to wonder whether, once the full-speed-ahead brigade of members had thrown off the yoke that we, the steady-on brigade, have imposed, both sides could get off each other’s backs. This could go beyond the economic sphere. Human rights, employment legislation, perhaps even the movement of labour ... once we’d stopped tripping and blocking those who wanted to proceed, they could return the favour by leaving us to our own devices.

Sir John Major, speaking to a private Conservative Party meeting on Thursday night, speculated upon (he did not assert) the possibility that if the euro is to be supported by EU members such as Germany, then as quid pro quo such members may before too long want a “fiscal union” to go alongside monetary union. He wondered, in short, whether if Germany and France were to pay the mortgage, housekeeping rules for all the household must follow. He implied that there was economic logic to that: the logic that drove him to keep Britain out of the single currency in the first place.

I agree. In the short to medium term, those members of the EU who wish (and can afford) to keep the euro will have to pool their sovereignty over domestic economic management: borrowing, spending, taxes. So far, much of the development of the EU has been gradual — “creeping” or “evolutionary”, depending on your slant; offering doubters no dramatic Rubicons at whose banks to declare “we will not cross” — but this would be a leap, a Rubiconic moment. It could not be done by stealth, or despite us. Here, we British could say: “We will reset our relationship with this altered institution — or we will leave”, and mean it. And not panic if we had to make good the threat.

Adding to that sense of leap must surely be the abandonment of the illusion — or pretence — that for full members of the EU, being outside the euro must be a transitional phase: a waiting room before entry. It may still feel like that for some. It used to feel like that for us British. It doesn’t any more. This being so, we could demand that two groups, two philosophies, acknowledge a real, not temporary, difference: not a Europe of different stages along a road to the same destination, not a two-speed Europe, but a Europe of two mansions: one intent on removing its internal walls, the other resolved to keep them. This acknowledgement should end the resentment on one side that the others are holding them up, and the resentment on the other that they are being pushed where they do not want to go.

None of this thinking is new. Much of it was always foreseeable. In a sense, nothing has changed. But I speak of a tsunami, nevertheless, because we are in the middle of one change: a change of underlying mood. We begin to see that the monolith is not omnipotent. We really could do this.

When what was ever thus looks as though it will be always thus, controversy is left to romantics. To me and to the majority of my countrymen, British Europhiles and British Europhobes have seemed to have a streak of romanticism about them. The rest of us kept out of the argument — or joined it in a desultory way — because, like it or loathe it, there seemed something awfully solid about Brussels. Lumbering, yes; infuriating, anti-democratic and brain-dead. But a political fact: a windmill at which only the quixotic tilted.

Queen Victoria, said H. G. Wells, “was like a great paperweight that for half a century sat upon men’s minds, and when she was removed, their ideas began to blow all over the place, haphazardly”. For most of our political lives the immutability of our EU membership has had that paperweight quality. Now comes the wind.

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