Spanish life is not always likeable but it is compellingly loveable.
- Christopher Howse: A Pilgrim in Spain.
Spain
- More on the fight-back in Spain against the impact of Airbnb and the like
- Details of those jail sentences for humungus, decades-long PP corruption.
- A good report on the chaotic political scene here, ahead of Friday's very-unlikely-to-succeed censure motion against Sr Rajoy in Congress. Will he resign? Nah.
- And here's Tim Parfitt with his weekly write-up on Spanish developments. He's not an admirer of Rajoy and the PP either. Just in case you haven't twigged that from previous columns.
Life in Spain
- I had thought that I might be the only person in Spain who felt I should write a book of anecdotes or jokes about my visits to the Post Office(Correos). But this comment comes from a columnist in yesterday's Voz de Galicia, in a short item posted below. My own belief is that the introduction of new technology over the last decade or so has caused the clerks to be even slower than they were when I came here in 2000. But I've become inured to it. As you do.
Europe: Italy
- The singular reason for Italy’s woes is its membership of a terribly designed monetary union, the eurozone, in which the Italian economy cannot breathe and which consecutive German governments refuse to reform. So says the Greek ex-Finance Minister, Yanis Varoufakis. He goes on to say that the Italian president has fallen into a trap and presented the far right with a gift they will now exploit ahead of new elections. See the full article below.
- A UK columnist has opined that the EU is a project that increasingly looks time-limited. And that his suspicion is that in a hundred years, the demise or drastic reform of the EU will appear inevitable in retrospect. How could it ever have hoped to build a unitary state out of so many magnificently diverse and democratic nations? Sound familiar?
The USA
- Could this happen anywhere else in the developed world?
The UK
- No one with any intelligence could doubt that the world needs a new model of capitalism. A Conservative minister has some ideas of what. See the 3rd article below.
Galicia/Pontevedra
- The proposal to limit cyclists to 5kph in pedestrian area has produced an OTT reaction from the Pontevedra Association of Cyclists. It would mean the death of cycling, they ludicrously claim. It turns out that the massive increase in the nuisance of speeding cyclists is a direct consequence of road planning aimed at making people stop using their cars in the city. Who'd have thought it.
Finally . . . Duff Cooper Bits and Bobs
- The only person more irritated than Churchill and DC by de Gaulle was the US president. Well, all the Americans, really. Including future president General Eisenhower. De Gaulle reciprocated the enmity, of course, being someone who was always looking to be slighted by Anglos. And revengeful to boot.
- DC's wife Diana was, allegedly, a beautiful socialite, and their wedding was the equivalent back then of the Prince Harry-Meghan Markle jamboree. Her 'job' was to appear in the papers and to receive gifts of large amounts of cash, expensive dresses and even cars from, for example, newspaper barons. She then moved on to 'acting' in silent movies, for which she was paid a prince's ransom. No wonder she and DC could afford to have more than 500 bottles of the best champagne in their cellar.
- Having driven one new car into a river, Diana went out and bought a new one. It caught fire the next day. Life was really tough for them sometimes
© David Colin Davies, Pontevedra: 29.5.18
THE ARTICLES
1. Mariana's box
Mariana travelled to Vietnam, as she usually does for work reasons, and before returning home she decided, to lighten her luggage, to send home by post a box with some things, some t-shirts, a bag of cashews, personal belongings...
The box, of course, arrived a month later than Mariana.
It has now been guarded for weeks at Barajas airport by the Soviet postal services of the Khrushchev era in Rajoy's Spain. Bolshevik officials have fun at Mariana's expense. They're asking for papers, plane tickets, visas, IDs, listings. One at a time.
The English measured the strength of the empire by the postal service. And it seems to me to be such a wise measure that I believe that in the museum of weights and measures in Paris, next to the iridium platinum meter and Foucault's pendulum, a properly stamped letter should be kept.
I've been going to the post office twice a week for 15 years. I have calculated it and I have 1,560 days, each of which made me feel like a spoilsport, someone who comes to annoy, an intruder.
Sometimes it occurs to me that I should write a book of anecdotes or jokes about my visits. For example, when I was attended by someone eating sunflower seeds, or when they asked me about the postal ratefor the city of León. Things to laugh at, bitter laughter.
Things such as education or the birth rate - a much more serious problem than Catalonia - things from Feijoo's Galicia, from Rajoy's Spain.
2. With his choice of prime minister, Italy’s president has gifted the far right; Yanis Varoufakis, the former finance minister of Greece and co-founder of DiEM25 (Democracy in EuropeMovement)
Sergio Mattarella’s defence of the status quo has ensured the success of racist and populist policies
Italy should be doing well. Unlike Britain, it exports considerably more to the rest of the world than it imports, while its government spends less (excluding interest payments) than the taxes it receives. And yet Italy is stagnating, its population in a state of revolt following two lost decades.
While it is true that Italy is in serious need of reforms, those who blame the stagnation on domestic inefficiencies and corruption must explain why Italy grew so fast throughout the postwar period until it entered the eurozone. Was its government and polity more efficient and virtuous in the 1970s and 1980s? Hardly.
The singular reason for Italy’s woes is its membership of a terribly designed monetary union, the eurozone, in which the Italian economy cannot breathe and which consecutive German governments refuse to reform.
In 2015 the Greek people elected a progressive, Europeanist government with a mandate to demand a new deal within the eurozone. In the space of six months, under the guidance of the German government, the European Union and its central bank crushed us. A few months later, I was asked by the Italian daily newspaper Corriere della Sera if I thought European democracy was at risk. I answered: “Greece surrendered but it was Europe’s democracy that was mortally wounded. Unless Europeans realise that their economy is run by unelected and unaccountable pseudo-technocrats, committing one gross error after another, our democracy will remain a figment of our collective imagination.”
Since then, the pro-establishment government of Italy’s Democratic party implemented, one after the other, the policies that the unelected bureaucrats of the EU demanded. The result was more stagnation. And so, in March, a national election delivered an absolute parliamentary majority to two anti-establishment parties which, despite their differences, shared doubts about Italy’s eurozone membership and a hostility to migrants. It was the bitter harvest of absent prospects and withering hope.
After a few weeks of the kind of post-election horse-trading common in countries like Italy and Germany, the Five Star Movement and League leaders Luigi Di Maio and Matteo Salvini struck a deal to form a government. Alas, President Sergio Mattarella used the powers bestowed upon him by the Italian constitution to prevent the formation of that government and, instead, handed the mandate to a technocrat, a former IMF employee who stands no chance of a vote of confidence in parliament.
Had Mattarella refused Salvini the post of interior minister, outraged by his promise to expel 500,000 migrants from Italy, I would be compelled to support him. But, no, the president had no such qualms. Not even for a moment did he consider vetoing the idea of a European country deploying its security forces to round up hundreds of thousands of people, cage them, and force them into trains, buses and ferries before sending them goodness knows where.
No, Mattarella chose to clash with an absolute majority of lawmakers for another reason: his disapproval of the finance minister designate. Why? Because the said gentleman, while fully qualified for the job, and despite his declaration that he would abide by the EU’s rules, had in the past expressed doubts about the eurozone’s architecture and has favoured a plan of EU exit just in case it was needed. It was as if Mattarella declared that reasonableness from a prospective finance minister constitutes grounds for his or her exclusion from the post.
Beyond his moral failure, the president has made a major tactical blunder
What is so striking is that there is no thinking economist anywhere in the world who does not share concern about the eurozone’s faulty architecture. No prudent finance minister would neglect to develop a plan for euro exit. Indeed, I have it on good authority that the German finance ministry, the European Central Bank and every major bank and corporation have plans in place for the possible exit from the eurozone of Italy, even of Germany. Is Mattarella telling us that the Italian finance minister is banned from thinking of such a plan?
Beyond his moral failure to oppose the League’s industrial-scale misanthropy, the president has made a major tactical blunder: he fell right into Salvini’s trap. The formation of another “technical” government, under a former IMF apparatchik, is a fantastic gift to Salvini’s party.
Salvini is secretly salivating at the thought of another election – one that he will fight not as the misanthropic, divisive populist that he is, but as the defender of democracy against the Deep Establishment. He has already scaled the moral high ground with the stirring words: “Italy is not a colony, we are not slaves of the Germans, the French, the spread or finance.”
If Mattarella takes solace from the fact that previous Italian presidents managed to put in place technical governments that did the establishment’s job (so “successfully” that the country’s political centre imploded), he is very badly mistaken. This time around he, unlike his predecessors, has no parliamentary majority to pass a budget or indeed to lend his chosen government a vote of confidence. Thus, the president is forced to call fresh elections that, courtesy of his moral drift and tactical blunder, will return an even stronger majority for Italy’s xenophobic political forces, possibly in alliance with the enfeebled Forza Italia of Silvio Berlusconi.
And then what, President Mattarella?
3. Hammond wants to curb capitalist excesses: Rachel Sylvester, The Times
The Tories know they need forward-thinking reforms of the free market to counter Labour’s rehash of 1970s policies
John McDonnell is absolutely explicit that he sees his role as to overthrow capitalism. His aim, he explained recently, is to create a socialist society and that means, if he becomes chancellor, “transforming our economy . . . in a way which radically challenges the system as it is now”. After a decade of wage stagnation and rising wealth inequality, it is a message that may appeal to voters who are tired of austerity and resent the rise of an unaccountable financial elite who look a little too comfortable on their luxury yachts. For the Tories, the revolutionary zeal of Labour under Jeremy Corbyn is a threat but it is also an opportunity if they can throw off their own ideological baggage in a way that is impossible for the hard left.
That may now be happening. Philip Hammond — seen by many of his colleagues as a small-c conservative — has become increasingly radical about the need for reform of the free-market liberalism championed by Margaret Thatcher. In his Commons office hangs an illustration portraying him as a goth, dressed in a black trenchcoat, with Doc Martens boots, multiple piercings and a Guardian tucked under his arm. The chancellor wants to be a disruptor rather than a reactionary on the economy.
With the high street under threat from the rise of online shopping, the jobs market transformed by the gig economy and the Treasury apparently powerless to extract enough money from the global internet giants, he is convinced that the current economic model is no longer fit for the digital age. Mr Hammond is working on a major speech about the need to modernise the free-market system and has asked his officials to draw up a list of proposals for a new approach.
The argument he has already begun making in private conversations at Westminster is that the economy is changing before our eyes at an unprecedented rate, but ideologues on left and right look backwards for solutions rather than seeking to prepare for the future. In his view, the Tories must defend but also reformulate capitalism for a generation that is attracted to Corbyn, even though his policies would undermine the choice, flexibility and individualism they take for granted along with their Uber app.
As the chancellor likes to tell colleagues, although a state-designed iPhone would be useless, the government has a duty to intervene to protect consumers and maintain competition in the era of robotics and AI. “If we don’t come up with a solution that makes people feel the system is working for them then Labour will come along and scrap it,” says one senior Treasury source.
While right-wing Tories promise a bonfire of red tape, Mr Hammond is considering what new regulation might be needed to curb the excesses of capitalism. Taxes could also be rebalanced. Although the chancellor was forced to ditch his plan to increase national insurance for the self-employed last year, he was right to identify the fact that the tax system has failed to keep up with changes in the way people work and shop, as well as how companies make their money.
At the same time, a free-market system, designed to promote competition, has allowed a small number of companies to become virtual monopolies online, with implications for privacy and democracy. Emmanuel Macron recently warned that the internet giants were in danger of becoming “not just too big to fail, but too big to be governed” at a time when the world is still paying the price for bailing out the banks a decade ago.
Across Whitehall, pure free-market liberalism is being challenged by reality under a prime minister who promised to “fix broken markets”. Rail services on the East Coast Main Line are being brought back under government control. The Tories have also promised to cap energy prices and are looking at how to punish property developers who “bank” land rather than building on it. Meanwhile, Matt Hancock, the culture secretary, has promised to tame the “Wild West” of the internet, with new laws for media companies designed to curtail everything from cyberbullying to online porn. “Humans created the internet and we need to make sure that it works for the good of humanity,” he says.
The public sector is reeling from the collapse of the construction giant Carillion, which was blamed by the Commons work and pensions select committee for “recklessness, hubris and greed” among the directors. Instead of idolising chief executives, a growing number of Tories have started railing against corporate greed. Nick Boles, the former planning minister, has urged the prime minister to take on the “robber barons” of the 21st century, with new curbs on executive pay and more public spending on infrastructure to balance the power of the private sector. George Freeman, the former head of the prime minister’s policy board, warns that the Tories must do more to tackle “crony capitalism”; an “economy” tent will be one of the central features of the Big Tent Ideas Fest he is organising at Hatfield House in September.
There are divides within the Tory party about how capitalism should be reshaped — between those who want to mirror Labour’s anti-wealth rhetoric by, for example, clamping down on boardroom pay and those, such as Mr Hammond, who favour more structural reform. What matters is action not words, of course, but it is striking how many senior Conservatives are willing to break with their party’s recent history.
Margaret Thatcher once said she wanted the free market to counter the “collectivist” drift in society with a more individualistic approach. “Economics are the method, the object is to change the heart and soul,” she explained. Now the personal has merged into the communal through technology in a way that changes people’s emotions and expectations. Mr McDonnell is right that the system needs to be challenged, but the truth is the economy has already been transformed and neither main party has fully caught up. Labour wants to go back to a 1970s world of renationalisation and taxing the rich. The cabinet is embroiled in a row about regulatory alignment with the EU after Brexit, when in fact it may be the internet giants from whom we really need to take back control.
The future will be owned by the politician who best understands how to use the power of the state to harness the new economic reality for the sake of the people.
Sergio Mattarella’s defence of the status quo has ensured the success of racist and populist policies
Italy should be doing well. Unlike Britain, it exports considerably more to the rest of the world than it imports, while its government spends less (excluding interest payments) than the taxes it receives. And yet Italy is stagnating, its population in a state of revolt following two lost decades.
While it is true that Italy is in serious need of reforms, those who blame the stagnation on domestic inefficiencies and corruption must explain why Italy grew so fast throughout the postwar period until it entered the eurozone. Was its government and polity more efficient and virtuous in the 1970s and 1980s? Hardly.
The singular reason for Italy’s woes is its membership of a terribly designed monetary union, the eurozone, in which the Italian economy cannot breathe and which consecutive German governments refuse to reform.
In 2015 the Greek people elected a progressive, Europeanist government with a mandate to demand a new deal within the eurozone. In the space of six months, under the guidance of the German government, the European Union and its central bank crushed us. A few months later, I was asked by the Italian daily newspaper Corriere della Sera if I thought European democracy was at risk. I answered: “Greece surrendered but it was Europe’s democracy that was mortally wounded. Unless Europeans realise that their economy is run by unelected and unaccountable pseudo-technocrats, committing one gross error after another, our democracy will remain a figment of our collective imagination.”
Since then, the pro-establishment government of Italy’s Democratic party implemented, one after the other, the policies that the unelected bureaucrats of the EU demanded. The result was more stagnation. And so, in March, a national election delivered an absolute parliamentary majority to two anti-establishment parties which, despite their differences, shared doubts about Italy’s eurozone membership and a hostility to migrants. It was the bitter harvest of absent prospects and withering hope.
After a few weeks of the kind of post-election horse-trading common in countries like Italy and Germany, the Five Star Movement and League leaders Luigi Di Maio and Matteo Salvini struck a deal to form a government. Alas, President Sergio Mattarella used the powers bestowed upon him by the Italian constitution to prevent the formation of that government and, instead, handed the mandate to a technocrat, a former IMF employee who stands no chance of a vote of confidence in parliament.
Had Mattarella refused Salvini the post of interior minister, outraged by his promise to expel 500,000 migrants from Italy, I would be compelled to support him. But, no, the president had no such qualms. Not even for a moment did he consider vetoing the idea of a European country deploying its security forces to round up hundreds of thousands of people, cage them, and force them into trains, buses and ferries before sending them goodness knows where.
No, Mattarella chose to clash with an absolute majority of lawmakers for another reason: his disapproval of the finance minister designate. Why? Because the said gentleman, while fully qualified for the job, and despite his declaration that he would abide by the EU’s rules, had in the past expressed doubts about the eurozone’s architecture and has favoured a plan of EU exit just in case it was needed. It was as if Mattarella declared that reasonableness from a prospective finance minister constitutes grounds for his or her exclusion from the post.
Beyond his moral failure, the president has made a major tactical blunder
What is so striking is that there is no thinking economist anywhere in the world who does not share concern about the eurozone’s faulty architecture. No prudent finance minister would neglect to develop a plan for euro exit. Indeed, I have it on good authority that the German finance ministry, the European Central Bank and every major bank and corporation have plans in place for the possible exit from the eurozone of Italy, even of Germany. Is Mattarella telling us that the Italian finance minister is banned from thinking of such a plan?
Beyond his moral failure to oppose the League’s industrial-scale misanthropy, the president has made a major tactical blunder: he fell right into Salvini’s trap. The formation of another “technical” government, under a former IMF apparatchik, is a fantastic gift to Salvini’s party.
Salvini is secretly salivating at the thought of another election – one that he will fight not as the misanthropic, divisive populist that he is, but as the defender of democracy against the Deep Establishment. He has already scaled the moral high ground with the stirring words: “Italy is not a colony, we are not slaves of the Germans, the French, the spread or finance.”
If Mattarella takes solace from the fact that previous Italian presidents managed to put in place technical governments that did the establishment’s job (so “successfully” that the country’s political centre imploded), he is very badly mistaken. This time around he, unlike his predecessors, has no parliamentary majority to pass a budget or indeed to lend his chosen government a vote of confidence. Thus, the president is forced to call fresh elections that, courtesy of his moral drift and tactical blunder, will return an even stronger majority for Italy’s xenophobic political forces, possibly in alliance with the enfeebled Forza Italia of Silvio Berlusconi.
And then what, President Mattarella?
3. Hammond wants to curb capitalist excesses: Rachel Sylvester, The Times
The Tories know they need forward-thinking reforms of the free market to counter Labour’s rehash of 1970s policies
John McDonnell is absolutely explicit that he sees his role as to overthrow capitalism. His aim, he explained recently, is to create a socialist society and that means, if he becomes chancellor, “transforming our economy . . . in a way which radically challenges the system as it is now”. After a decade of wage stagnation and rising wealth inequality, it is a message that may appeal to voters who are tired of austerity and resent the rise of an unaccountable financial elite who look a little too comfortable on their luxury yachts. For the Tories, the revolutionary zeal of Labour under Jeremy Corbyn is a threat but it is also an opportunity if they can throw off their own ideological baggage in a way that is impossible for the hard left.
That may now be happening. Philip Hammond — seen by many of his colleagues as a small-c conservative — has become increasingly radical about the need for reform of the free-market liberalism championed by Margaret Thatcher. In his Commons office hangs an illustration portraying him as a goth, dressed in a black trenchcoat, with Doc Martens boots, multiple piercings and a Guardian tucked under his arm. The chancellor wants to be a disruptor rather than a reactionary on the economy.
With the high street under threat from the rise of online shopping, the jobs market transformed by the gig economy and the Treasury apparently powerless to extract enough money from the global internet giants, he is convinced that the current economic model is no longer fit for the digital age. Mr Hammond is working on a major speech about the need to modernise the free-market system and has asked his officials to draw up a list of proposals for a new approach.
The argument he has already begun making in private conversations at Westminster is that the economy is changing before our eyes at an unprecedented rate, but ideologues on left and right look backwards for solutions rather than seeking to prepare for the future. In his view, the Tories must defend but also reformulate capitalism for a generation that is attracted to Corbyn, even though his policies would undermine the choice, flexibility and individualism they take for granted along with their Uber app.
As the chancellor likes to tell colleagues, although a state-designed iPhone would be useless, the government has a duty to intervene to protect consumers and maintain competition in the era of robotics and AI. “If we don’t come up with a solution that makes people feel the system is working for them then Labour will come along and scrap it,” says one senior Treasury source.
While right-wing Tories promise a bonfire of red tape, Mr Hammond is considering what new regulation might be needed to curb the excesses of capitalism. Taxes could also be rebalanced. Although the chancellor was forced to ditch his plan to increase national insurance for the self-employed last year, he was right to identify the fact that the tax system has failed to keep up with changes in the way people work and shop, as well as how companies make their money.
At the same time, a free-market system, designed to promote competition, has allowed a small number of companies to become virtual monopolies online, with implications for privacy and democracy. Emmanuel Macron recently warned that the internet giants were in danger of becoming “not just too big to fail, but too big to be governed” at a time when the world is still paying the price for bailing out the banks a decade ago.
Across Whitehall, pure free-market liberalism is being challenged by reality under a prime minister who promised to “fix broken markets”. Rail services on the East Coast Main Line are being brought back under government control. The Tories have also promised to cap energy prices and are looking at how to punish property developers who “bank” land rather than building on it. Meanwhile, Matt Hancock, the culture secretary, has promised to tame the “Wild West” of the internet, with new laws for media companies designed to curtail everything from cyberbullying to online porn. “Humans created the internet and we need to make sure that it works for the good of humanity,” he says.
The public sector is reeling from the collapse of the construction giant Carillion, which was blamed by the Commons work and pensions select committee for “recklessness, hubris and greed” among the directors. Instead of idolising chief executives, a growing number of Tories have started railing against corporate greed. Nick Boles, the former planning minister, has urged the prime minister to take on the “robber barons” of the 21st century, with new curbs on executive pay and more public spending on infrastructure to balance the power of the private sector. George Freeman, the former head of the prime minister’s policy board, warns that the Tories must do more to tackle “crony capitalism”; an “economy” tent will be one of the central features of the Big Tent Ideas Fest he is organising at Hatfield House in September.
There are divides within the Tory party about how capitalism should be reshaped — between those who want to mirror Labour’s anti-wealth rhetoric by, for example, clamping down on boardroom pay and those, such as Mr Hammond, who favour more structural reform. What matters is action not words, of course, but it is striking how many senior Conservatives are willing to break with their party’s recent history.
Margaret Thatcher once said she wanted the free market to counter the “collectivist” drift in society with a more individualistic approach. “Economics are the method, the object is to change the heart and soul,” she explained. Now the personal has merged into the communal through technology in a way that changes people’s emotions and expectations. Mr McDonnell is right that the system needs to be challenged, but the truth is the economy has already been transformed and neither main party has fully caught up. Labour wants to go back to a 1970s world of renationalisation and taxing the rich. The cabinet is embroiled in a row about regulatory alignment with the EU after Brexit, when in fact it may be the internet giants from whom we really need to take back control.
The future will be owned by the politician who best understands how to use the power of the state to harness the new economic reality for the sake of the people.
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