SPANISH LIFE/CULTURE
Bullfighting in Spain:
A survey conducted earlier this year by Ipsos Mori indicated that 60
% of Spaniards disapprove of bullfighting. So, Does it have a future? asks Al Jazeera. Click here for their answer.
Swearing: See Number 4 in yesterday's list of Spanish traits. When I showed Carmen – the waitress in my
watering-hole – a foto of the kitten which has adopted me and which
insisted on sitting on my shoulders as I tried to fit a cat door
yesterday, she exclaimed Coño! The equivalent word in English also
begins with C.
Spain's Jews: Click here for an article from The Times of Israel on the initiative of offering rapid naturalisation of descendants of those who were expelled in 1492. Bizarrely, the vast majority received this honour via a royal decree, not under the relevant statute.
Vueling Airlines: To my surprise, this has been ajudged to be the third worst airline in the world. I think I've flown with them and don't have any bad recollections. Not that any airline these days provides good recollections. No. 1, by the way, was Emirates, followed by Singapore Airlines and Air New Zealand. In its early days, SA was almost too good to be true - empty planes, great food and beautiful air hostesses. They might still be. Iberia, sad to say, is 14th worst. Both Iberia and Vueling now belong to the IAG Group. Which is basically British Airways. Who seem to have their work cut out.
THE SPANISH ECONOMY
Structural Problems: I mentioned these the other day. Here's Don Quijones on the biggest of these - the two-tier unemployment system. Nice to see DQ and I agree on the boom(bum) of 2000-2007 - I called it phony; he calls it insane.
THE UK
Brexit: See the amusing but serious article at the end of the post, with which I have no difficulty in agreeing. The more I read here in Spain about Brexit, the more I realise there's not a lot of understanding of either Britain or the British in the rest of the EU. But I guess this isn't particularly surprising.
GALICIAN STUFF
The Camino Francés: The Voz de Galicia warns here - in Spanish - of 70 dangerous spots here in Galicia. The worst are said to be on the Arzua-Pedrousa stage, near O Pino. See here on this, in English.
FINALLY
A Quotation From Mark Twain: In the first place God created idiots.
A Quotation From Mark Twain: In the first place God created idiots.
THE GALLERY
CURRENT CORRUPTION CASES
The first one may surprise you. Unless you live here . . .
The case
|
Who
|
Position
|
Allegation
|
Status
|
A surprise?
|
|
Ex-king
|
Tried to bribe the
authorities not to proceed with the corruption case against his
daughter.
| |
Gürtel/
Correa
|
37 politicians and businessmen
|
Senior position holders
|
Illegal party financing
|
Trial just begun
after many years of investigation.
|
The Black Cards
|
Numerous
ex-politicos and businessmen
|
Senior position holders
|
Use of 'black credit
cards' to avoid taxation on income
|
Trial just started
|
Bog standard case
|
Ventura Sierra Vázquez
|
The mayor of Vilareño de Conso, Galicia.
|
Falsification of
docs and corrupt practices.
|
Trial just started
|
Bog standard case
|
José Ramón [Nené] Barral
|
The ex-mayor of Ribadumia, Galicia
|
Money laundering and
drug smuggling
|
Under investigation
|
Bog standard case
|
María Antonia Munar
|
Ex-president of the Balearics parliament
|
€4m
bribes for changing property
classifications
|
Awaiting sentence. 4 years demanded.
|
ARTICLE
Remainers and Eurocrats
will never bully the British people into giving up on Brexit: Janet Daley
Clearly, the Brexit
story is going to be full of drama. In the last week alone we have
had an appeal to the High Court on behalf of the sacred sovereignty
of the British Parliament – and Marmitegate. Neither of these
things was what it seemed.
The solemn court
action, couched in the high-flown language of British democratic
principle, was just a peculiarly brazen attempt by irreconcilable
Remainers to appropriate the most powerful argument of the Brexit
campaign for their own purposes.
Meanwhile, the
manufacturers of Marmite were playing a familiar version of poker
with retailers called Let’s Rip Off the Consumer. And both of these
charades were blatant political ploys in Project Fear Mark II.
Let’s look at the
more “serious” farrago: that splendidly pompous court action. In
a quite shameless volte face, some of the people who had been most
insouciant about the relegation of British parliamentary authority to
European Union powers, were now arguing passionately that the
government cannot trigger Article 50 without the permission of
Parliament.
Apparently confident
that no one would notice the contradiction with their previous
attitude toward the matter of sacrosanct parliamentary power, the
legal campaign launched with a burst of self-regarding publicity. The
official actor in the case, investment fund manager Gina Miller, told
Sky News: “We have a parliament that is sovereign. We have a
functioning democracy.”
She went on, “Are we
now saying that we can go back to … 18th century politics where
governments can overrule parliaments which will happen when we leave
the EU? For me that is a very dangerous place to go.”
Seriously? Where were
Ms Miller and her Remain friends when parliamentary power was
routinely being subsumed under the EU treaties and handed to the
European Commission which doesn’t have the virtue of being elected
by anybody. Oh please.
Absurd and transparent
as this is, there is a risk that it could pull the public debate into
a siding which would be a monumental waste of time and energy. The
referendum was not a glorified opinion poll.
While legally, its
status was “advisory” – because we do not make law in this
country by plebiscite – its function as an instruction to
government was explicitly accepted in the act of parliament which
initiated it. Therefore, there should be no issue here: the
executive, whether you like it or not, has the right to carry through
the decision of the electorate which parliament agreed that it should
consult.
Because the mechanism
of referendum is exceptional, there are ambiguities which can be
exploited by interested parties but this is as obvious a case as it
is possible to imagine of an attempt to deny the clear intention of
the original parliamentary act that called the referendum.
The lack of absolute
clarity about the relative power of the executive and parliament is
often attributed to Britain’s lack of a written constitution.
But in countries with
elaborately detailed, legally binding Constitutions such as the
United States, there is endless litigious dispute about who has the
legitimate right to overrule whom in a system in which two branches
of government are elected and the third (the Supreme Court) is
appointed by the executive and ratified by the legislature.
In truth, having an
unwritten constitution is a blessing in a fast-moving world, allowing
a responsiveness to changes in public feeling that can put
cumbersome, inherently conservative written models to shame.
Britain, for example,
was able to enact a law against sexual discrimination with alacrity
when the mood of the times demanded it, while in the US – the home
of modern feminism – the Equal Rights Amendment to the Constitution
never passed into law because it failed the laborious process of
ratification by the necessary number of states.
A written constitution
is an instant antique, framed inevitably in the terms and the
attitudes of the generation which composes it – which is why it
never occurred to the drafters of the US constitution that there was
anything wrong with owning slaves.
So no, there is nothing
inherently unsatisfactory about the present British arrangements –
and nobody of good will and fair mind could possibly doubt what was
intended by Parliament when it approved the Referendum bill, or what
must follow from the result of it.
But legitimate argument
is not what this is about – just as the fall in the value of the
pound was not the cause of Marmitegate. They were both attempts to
create a miasma of confusion, anxiety, obfuscation and delay during
which, it is hoped, the British public will lose its nerve and
retract its command to the government to carry on with Brexit.
The Marmite case,
hilarious as it was, reminded me once again how useful it is to have
a long political memory.
You too may be old
enough to recall that back in the day when we were asked to vote in a
referendum on the Common Market, the most heated popular issue was
the cost of food. Those opposed were adamant that food prices
would rise as a consequence of losing our special trade relationship
with the Commonwealth: dairy products and lamb from New Zealand, and
particularly cane sugar from the West Indies, would have to be
replaced by more expensive versions from European member states.
Enthusiastic Joiners adamantly denied this.
Result: we stayed in
and food prices went up (and we didn’t even get the cheap wine we’d
been promised as a consolation).
Moral of the story:
when people are determined to accomplish a political end, they will
say almost anything. The native wit and scepticism of the British
electorate must be on full alert.
Much of the
huff-and-puff coming from the EU is blatantly political and
self-serving: what Francois Hollande and even Angela Merkel are
saying now is tailored for the home market. They are both facing
difficult (in Hollande’s case, terminal) election periods and
Brexit is a threat to the stability of the EU which they could do
without.
The uncritical,
unquestioning coverage given to their pronouncements by the
intransigent Remain sections of the British media is pure mischief.
Some of this may be motivated by sincere despair over the referendum
outcome but at least a portion of it is sheer domestic spite: the
Friends of George Osborne who are determined to make this a fight to
the death.
That brings me to the
third bizarre intervention of the week. The President of the European
Council, Donald Tusk, added his contribution to Project Fear Mark II
with a textbook threat: so terrible for Britain will be the
consequences of Brexit negotiations that the country will beg to be
allowed back into the club.
No softer options, no
loosening of ties, no friendly agreements to maintain civilised
relations: there can only be “hard Brexit” or “no Brexit”,
and when we glimpse the full horror of that pitiless wasteland
outside the boundaries, we will repent and reverse our decision to
leave.
But wait – I thought
it was impossible to retreat once we started the clock ticking with
Article 50. Wasn’t that the original warning? There’ll be no way
back, no way of cancelling the outward trajectory after you start the
process, blah-blah? So which is it? Will we inevitably be cast out on
our fundaments or will we be allowed to crawl back on our knees?
I’ve said this before
and I’ll say it again: the British are brave to the point of
perversity. Trying to bully them is entirely counterproductive.
They also have a
sardonic sense of the ridiculous which, rather like a taste for
Marmite, is incomprehensible to those who do not share it.
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