Spanish life is not always likeable but it is compellingly loveable.
- Christopher Howse: A Pilgrim in Spain.
If you've arrived here because of an interest in Galicia or Pontevedra, see my web page here. Garish but informative.
Spain
- I had a sneaking suspicion that the (very few) PP party 'activists' voting for a new leader wouldn't go for either of the female candidates. Sure enough, they elected the much-lower-profile, less-experienced Pablo Casado. Maybe because he isn't tainted as much with the endemic corruption of the party over the last god-knows-how-many decades. Or maybe merely because he has cojones.
- As I suspected, the judge who's furious with the German court for insulting him, the Spanish judicial system and, indeed the entire nation was born in 1963 and attended school, college and university during the decades before and after Franco's death. One can be sure that his (far?)right-wing views are impeccable. Here's his Wiki page.
Life in Spain
- It's commonly said the Spanish don't do tipping, in contrast with the Americans who suffer guilt pangs if they don't leave 20-25%. I thought of this yesterday when I saw that the folk before me at my table had left 10 centimos on a bill of €8. Or 1.25%. Not uncommon. Fortunately there's no longer a 5 centimos coin.
The UK: Brexit
- After 2 years of farce and government incompetence, these seem to be the basic camps in the UK:-
- Leaver pessimists: Knowledgeable people like Richard North who've always supported a flexible, progressive exit - in his case the Flexit. North et al believe the chance for this has gone. Also in this box is the writer of the article below, who believes that chaos will ensue primarily because the the Commission has made a succession of bravura mistakes, rooted in arrogance and ignorance of the strength of the British commitment to its own democratic institutions and the character of its people.
- Remainer pessimists: These fear that Hard Brexiteer fanatics (led by Jacob Rees-Mogg) will ensure a failure to reach agreement with Brussels, leading to an apocalypse when the UK crashes out of the EU next year.
- Leaver (and some Remainer) Optimists: For example, Simon Jenkins of the Guardian. These believe that common (and business) sense will prevent a No Deal Brexit and lead to last-minute compromises which will avoid chaos and allow things to carry on more or less as before. Possibly on the EEA or EEA/Efta model. One of which might or might not be the Norway Option increasingly being talked about by all sides. How much this resembles North's Flexit, I suspect only he could say.
- Remainer Optimists: These believe that Mrs May now has no chance of getting any option through parliament (for which, ironically, they thank the Hard Brexiteers such as Rees-Mogg) and that the UK government will have no option but to swallow humiliation and stay in the EU. Possibly after another referendum which reverses the result of the last one.
- As for me, I've always been an optimist along the line of Jenkins, and I find his column persuasive. But I know that Richard North is far more knowledgable than anyone else commenting on this saga. And he has rejected the panglossian Jenkins view thus: If people really had the first idea of what "no deal" actually meant, in detail, there would be such a storm of protest that no politician could even think of pursuing this line. But as long as they have their heads in the sand and, with the complicity of the media, practice mushroom management on the rest of us, the coming disaster will be on us before the majority realise how damaging it will be. So . . . . On balance, I fear pandemonium next year. But I'd have to be stupid to bet on any particular outcome. Unless the odds were fantastic and a tiny outlay could bring me a small fortune.
Russia and The USA
- In the context of his (secret) discussions with Putin, Trump has taken to citing 'security for Israel'. The suspicion is that this is a softening-up of the electorate in advance of the announcement of a deal with Russia over Syria. Leaving Assad in power, of course.
- Meanwhile . . . The federal indictment of Maria Butina, charged with being a Russian agent, has attracted plenty of media attention this week — but mostly for the wrong reasons. Many stories about her case have been filled with salacious allegations about her sex life . . . What has been missing in the media narrative is the indictment’s ominous significance. The Butina case is almost certainly the opening move in a brand new front in the Trump-Russia investigation. And there's a Spanish connection. Read about it here.
Galicia/Pontevedra
- Here's El Pais on the subject of phony camino signs. Porriño gets a mention.
- Yesterday, I tried a new place for my pre-prandial coffee at 12. It took 15 minutes to arrive and, at €1.50, was the most expensive I've had outside Madrid. Possibly because it's on said camino. Won't be going there again.
Finally . . .
- Twice in the last week or so, one of my neighbours has asked me to go and wake up her son as he was late for college. I could do this because their back door was open. Last night, the son in question asked me if he could pass through my house and garden to get to his house. He confirmed that their back door is always unlocked. I wish the bastards who broke into my house by removing my kitchen window had known that.
© David Colin Davies, Pontevedra: 22.7.18
The EU's rejection of our final offer is a disastrous move that exposes the arrogance at its core: Janet Daley
So presumably this is it. We have finally arrived at the end – or the beginning of the end – of our spectacular game of chicken with the EU. It must be clear now who is prepared to sit longest on the track in the path of the oncoming train. Michel Barnier has thrown out what Mrs May claimed was her last and best offer. He will not bend, perhaps having been misinformed by hubristic Remain campaigners that the political discontent in Westminster will cause her to give way. But she will not – cannot – retreat because she knows the real truth about Westminster and the electorate.
This ending, however, still has the capacity for mystery and re-interpretation. There are serious signs of illogic and derangement where you might have least expected them. Theresa May, under as much pressure as seems humanly endurable, remains weirdly calm – at least in public – while the immaculate Michel Barnier appears suddenly to have lost his way, or at least to be sending out confused signals. How else to explain the EU Commission’s (which is to say, Mr Barnier’s) odd decision to warn, in characteristically apocalyptic terms, of the consequences for the EU of a no-deal Brexit?
What a cataclysm that would be, the Commission exclaimed, in the terms it is accustomed to use when addressing feckless British negotiators. Established trade arrangements would break down. Britain would lose its access to thriving markets. Just think of the chaos and collapse that would follow for that hapless country. Oh, wait. Actually that argument applies on the other side of this negotiation too: the peoples of the EU, we can now disclose, have a very great deal to lose. Hence last week’s unprecedented set of warnings to the households and businesses of Europe, as the prospect of no-deal becomes more and more plausible – thanks largely, as Mr Barnier did not say, to the intransigence of the EU Commission.
The guidance warned of the enormous cost in lost sales, reduced trade, slower growth and higher tariffs. Billions in national export income would be threatened just as thousands of expensive new customs procedures would need to be instituted. So tumultuous and far-reaching would these consequences be that every family and every enterprise in Europe must begin now to make contingency plans (detailed instructions enclosed) for this dire eventuality.
So for once, the alarming message is not being directed at the UK - whose fate Mr Barnier has presumably written off - but to those member states of the EU who are generally regarded as its greatest and least critical enthusiasts.
Once again the ghost of Project Fear stalks the land, only this time it is dragging its chains through the very heartland of the European project. Yes indeed, it is not the usual malcontents of the Visegrad East or the Club Med who face the greatest economic cost from the UK crashing out but the stalwarts of EU solidarity: the French, the Dutch, the Germans and – good grief – the Irish, on whom so much negotiating capital has been spent.
Could it be that, quite suddenly, it has occurred to the EU Commissioners that pushing the UK government to the brink and beyond, so that no-deal becomes the only politically possible option, might not have been so clever? Mr Barnier, in his statement last Friday, may have presented the expected categorical rejection of the UK government’s White Paper on the predictable grounds – that it abrogated the integrity of fundamental EU principles – but he also implied that this need not be the end of the story. (More work to be done, more discussions to be had, always further possibility of agreement, blah-blah.)
What are we to make of this? For the Commission to dismiss the White Paper, which blatantly engaged in “cherry-picking” bits of the single market and transgressed the sanctified free movement rule, was to be expected. But why couple that with a calculated campaign to spread alarm and despondency among European states about the most likely result – a no-deal exit? It is just possible that the Commission (like its Remainer friends here) is genuinely confused and worried: it has over-played its hand and must now try to prepare the ground for the ensuing calamity by implying that this ending was inevitable. We were, they might be preparing to say, just upholding the precious Fundamental Principles: the resulting damage isn’t our fault. Who knew that the British would be so intransigent? To judge by the latest statements from the Commission’s best friend, Leo Varadkar, the EU mood has become vaguely hysterical. As the Brexit Blog has noted, Dublin’s threat to ban British planes from flying through Ireland’s airspace would, carried to its logical conclusion, mean that Mr Varadkar would have to take a boat to future EU summit meetings. Has everyone gone mad?
There are a very small number of plausible explanations for these events. One is that the EU Commission (which is to say Mr Barnier and possibly Jean Claude Juncker, at least before lunch) are engaged in a rational, calculated effort to establish that they always understood the risks of their own hard line in these negotiations: the outcome may have been regrettable but it could not have been avoided given the need to preserve the Fundamental Principles. I would give that account seven out of ten on the scale of likelihood.
Another possibility is that they are actually preparing the ground for some major concessions to Britain by scaring the living daylights out of all those French farmers, Italian olive oil producers and German car makers who, as they now admit, have so much to lose. That seems to me to rate no more than one out of ten, since a climbdown of this order would be a gross humiliation for Team Barnier. Then of course, there is the most likely explanation of all: that the Commission has been in bad faith all along. That it made a succession of bravura mistakes, rooted in arrogance and ignorance of the strength of the British commitment to its own democratic institutions and the character of its people.
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