Spain's Next Government: Here's one explanantion of what's going on. Topically it asks why Spain still loves the EU, even though it's been disastrous for the economy. Good question. As for the way ahead, it opines that: One thing that would
help would be for Rajoy to step down as prime minister. That would
ease tensions with both Ciudadanos and PSOE and could smooth the way
for a different PP leader to become prime minister in partnership
with one of the other parties. Sadly, the stubborn, arrogant Gallego is not going anywhere soon, I fear.
Spain's Economy: The OKUN index measures the sensitivity of loss of employment to falls in a country's GDP. Spain's is apparently the worst in at least the developed economies. Too many poorly educated people in low-tech industries, it's said. Construction being the obvious one. And (cheap) tourism another, I guess.
Galicia's Population: This has been falling for years and is now at the same level as it was in 1960. Its birth rate is only 1.07, as against Spain's already low rate of 1.48. These compare with France at 2.05, Germany at 2.00 and the UK at 1.90. At its worst, Galicia's plight is that entire villages in the hills are dying off. Anyone want one?
Book Recommendation: The Moorish Whore, by Rebecka Scott, with whom I greatly enjoyed my Camino Inglés last week. By the way, I've learnt - via Rebekah - of yet another new camino in Galicia - El Camino Invierno. This apparently majors on visits to various vineyards. So I'm now doing my research and will report further. Meanwhile, there's always The Spiritual Way. As if.
Finally . . . Whatever I feel about the merits and demerits of the EU, I've never felt impelled to compare it with Nazi Europe. Unlike one TV pundit.
Brexit is a
disaster, but we can build on the ruins.
This is a crisis of
astonishing proportions, but also an opportunity for the changes the
left has long sought
By George Monbiot
Let’s sack the
electorate and appoint a new one: this is the demand made by MPs,
lawyers and the 4 million people who have signed the petition calling
for a second referendum. It’s a cry of pain, and therefore
understandable, but it’s also bad politics and bad democracy.
Reduced to its essence, it amounts to graduates telling nongraduates:
“We reject your democratic choice.”
Were this vote to be
annulled (it won’t be), the result would be a full-scale class and
culture war, riots and perhaps worse, pitching middle-class
progressives against those on whose behalf they have claimed to
speak, and permanently alienating people who have spent their lives
feeling voiceless and powerless.
Yes, the Brexit vote
has empowered the most gruesome collection of schemers, misfits,
liars, extremists and puppets that British politics has produced in
the modern era. It threatens to invoke a new age of demagoguery, a
threat sharpened by the thought that if this can happen, so can
Donald Trump.
It has provoked a
resurgence of racism and an economic crisis whose dimensions remain
unknown. It jeopardises the living world, the NHS, peace in Ireland
and the rest of the European Union. It promotes what the billionaire
Peter Hargreaves gleefully anticipated as “fantastic insecurity”.
But we’re stuck with
it. There isn’t another option, unless you favour the years of
limbo and chaos that would ensue from a continued failure to trigger
article 50. It’s not just that we have no choice but to accept the
result; we should embrace it and make of it what we can.
It’s not as if the
system that’s now crashing around us was functioning. The vote
could be seen as a self-inflicted wound, or it could be seen as the
eruption of an internal wound inflicted over many years by an
economic oligarchy on the poor and the forgotten. The bogus theories
on which our politics and economics are founded were going to collide
with reality one day. The only questions were how and when.
Yes, the Brexit
campaign was led by a political elite, funded by an economic elite
and fuelled by a media elite. Yes, popular anger was channelled
towards undeserving targets – migrants.
But the vote was also a
howl of rage against exclusion, alienation and remote authority. That
is why the slogan “take back control” resonated. If the left
can’t work with this, what are we for?
So here is where we
find ourselves. The economic system is not working, except for the
likes of Philip Green. Neoliberalism has not delivered the
meritocratic nirvana its theorists promised, but a rentiers’
paradise, offering staggering returns to whoever grabs the castle
first while leaving productive workers on the wrong side of the moat.
The age of enterprise
has become the age of unearned income, the age of the market the age
of market failure, the age of opportunity a steel cage of zero-hours
contracts, precarity and surveillance.
The political system is
not working. Whoever you vote for, the same people win, because where
power claims to be is not where power is.
Parliaments and
councils embody paralysed force, gesture without motion, as the real
decisions are taken elsewhere: by the money, for the money.
Governments have actively conspired in this shift, negotiating fake
trade treaties behind their voters’ backs to prevent democracy from
controlling corporate capital.
Unreformed political
funding ensures that parties have to listen to the rustle of notes
before the bustle of votes. In Britain these problems are compounded
by an electoral system that ensures most votes don’t count. This is
why a referendum is almost the only means by which people can be
heard, and why attempting to override it is a terrible idea.
Culture is not working.
A worldview that insists both people and place are fungible is
inherently hostile to the need for belonging. For years now we have
been told that we do not belong, that we should shift out without
complaint while others are shifted in to take our place.
When the peculiarities
of community and place are swept away by the tides of capital, all
that’s left is a globalised shopping culture, in which we engage
with glazed passivity. Man was born free, and he is everywhere in
chainstores.
In all these crises are
opportunities – opportunities to reject, connect and erect, to
build from these ruins a system that works for the people of this
country rather than for an offshore elite that preys on insecurity.
If it is true that
Britain will have to renegotiate its trade treaties, is this not the
best chance we’ve had in decades to contain corporate power – of
insisting that companies that operate here must offer proper
contracts, share their profits, cut their emissions and pay their
taxes? Is it not a chance to regain control of the public services
slipping from our grasp?
How will politics in
this sclerotic nation change without a maelstrom? In this chaos we
can, if we are quick and clever, find a chance to strike a new
contract: proportional representation, real devolution and a radical
reform of campaign finance to ensure that millionaires can never
again own our politics.
Remote authority has
been rejected, so let’s use this moment to root our politics in a
common celebration of place, to fight the epidemic of loneliness and
rekindle common purpose, transcending the tensions between recent and
less recent migrants (which means everyone else). In doing so, we
might find a language in which liberal graduates can talk with the
alienated people of Britain, rather than at them.
But most importantly,
let’s address the task that the left and the centre have
catastrophically neglected: developing a political and economic
philosophy fit for the 21st century, rather than repeatedly
microwaving the leftovers of the 20th (neoliberalism and
Keynesianism). If the history of the last 80 years tells us anything,
it’s that little changes without a new and feracious framework of
thought.
So yes, despair and
rage and curse at what has happened: there are reasons enough to do
so. But then raise your eyes to where hope lies.
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