Spanish life is not always likeable but it is compellingly loveable.
Christopher Howse: A Pilgrim in Spain
Spain- Yet more on Las Fallas, this time from The Local.
- As you'd expect . . . . Embittered Francoist ghosts are emerging from the shadows they've been secreted in since 1978. Can you imagine this happening in Germany?
- A positive overview of Spain’s economy from Bloomberg Economics: The brightest star in the euro-region for the past few years, promises to keep shining this year. Growth has been supported by higher government spending, notably the recruitment of more public sector workers, but private sector hiring remains strong and wages are steadily picking up. That suggests that any decline in the government’s contribution won’t leave a gaping hole in the economy.
- Be warned. . . Ahead of the general elections in Spain on April 28, political parties such as the PP and Vox are turning to whatsapp in a bid to reach a wider audience
- The Spanish might not be the most polite people in the world when it comes to interactions with strangers but, in (illogical?) compensation, they have a huge Samaritan element to their make-up. My younger daughter and her husband erred in deciding to bring 3 carry-on bags to Madrid yesterday, along with 2 small kids and a buggy which is at least twice the size and weight of the one she used to be carried around in. Laden with my own regular-size suitcase and one of the carry-on bags, I was offered help at least 5 times on the staircases and escalators of the metro. Possibly 10.
- Which reminds me . . . Friendly Rentals is the name of the company which owns the flat my son-in-law chose for their 10 day stay. Friendly maybe but not entirely customer-oriented. For, wherever your flat is located and wherever you arrive in Madrid, you then have to make your way to an office in a side-street in the city centre to pick up the keys and sign a form which tells you about the €200 'damage deposit' you have to pay. Not easy when you have 3 bags, 2 little kids and a buggy. Worse, you can only do this between 3pm and 9pm. Outside these hours - up to 2am - they will send someone to meet you at the flat and charge you €30 for this. All of which - though the flat is fine - would put me off using them again.
- To me at least, it's annoying that, every time you get near to Portugal in a car or a train, Movistar sends you 3 messages about their services in Spain.
- Going to Madrid by train at night is a 12 hour trip, for 620km. During the day, it's now down to a mere 6-7 hours. Or around 100kph/60mph on average. Not exactly whizzing down. Just after Ourense. I noted what looked like a parallel road being built alongside the railway tracks but soon realised this was the bed for the AVE high-speed train tracks, promised for 2020. Maybe.
- As I've said before - in a society in which statistics are often given to three decimal points, it seems strange that departures from Pontevedra are at the 'inexact' times of 08.18 and 21.28, rather than 08.15 and 21.30. With correspondingly odd - to my eyes - arrival times in Madrid. Is it an Anglo hang-up that trains should depart on the quarter and half hour? Reflecting a different attitude to time?
- The only other person as knowledgable as Richard North on the EU and Brexit is Christopher Booker, his co-author. In an article in the Sunday Times, Booker wrote: After years of Brexit make-believe, reality is finally closing in on our politicians. See the full article below.
- Picking up on this article in his blog yesterday, RN North opined: We are trapped in a web entirely of our own making of the dereliction of our government, and its utter incompetence which has has brought us to the brink of failure and economic catastrophe. Getting into his stride, RN added: What is perhaps even more damning is that those responsible have no real idea of their own inadequacies and have neither the capability nor the humility to understand why they have so roundly failed. Nor do they have the first idea of what they need to do to make things better. They look failure in the eyes and can only promise us more of the same. . . . With nothing to offer us but dribble from the likes of the oaf[Boris Johnson], it is left to the sheeted dead to squeak and gibber in the streets. They do not even have the wit to realise how loathed they are.
- As we know, one of the worst human states of mind is uncertainty. So, no wonder the logistics manager of a German machine-tool maker in the UK wails: “If someone would just make a decision, good or bad I don’t really care. Then I'd know what I’m dealing with.”
- In today's blog, RN points out: The only thing consistent about Brexit, it now seems, is that just when you think it has got as bad as it can get, it gets worse. On that basis, one fears that the worst is yet to come.
- Chickens coming home?: Italy is the first G7 country to sign up to China's Belt and Road, widely seen as a front for strategic ambitions. . . Italy is selling itself lock, stock, and barrel to the Chinese Communist Party, flouting the EU’s tough new line on Beijing and openly taunting the Franco-German axis. . . It is a way to take revenge against the EU policy elites for years of enforced austerity and their failure to deliver on ‘New Deal’ promises of an investment blitz. But it also risks a diplomatic rupture with US for questionable economic gain. See the full article below.
- Word of the Day: Muchedumbre, a word I particularly like as it rolls off the tongue.
English
- There was a kerfuffle in the UK recently about a (female) politician using 'coloured woman' instead of 'woman of colour' in respect of a colleague. I was reminded of this last night when watching a US news channel in which there was a discussion of the treatment of Muslim women. I had to rewind to confirm that, instead of 'veiled women', the politically correct term - in the USA at least - is currently 'women of cover'. Dear dog.
- Astute readers will have guessed that, in the bit yesterday about the cellulose factory in Pontevedra, 'smilingly' should have been 'smellingly'. I'd failed to notice that the spellcheck had automatically changed it. Just as it did recently - I saw this morning - when I'd written he perdido in an email and it had become he perfidious. Which must have confused the Spanish recipient.
1. After years of Brexit make-believe, reality is finally closing in on our politicians
We are trapped in a web entirely of our own making. Christopher Booker. The Times.
On Jan 21 2017 I predicted that when, within a few weeks, Theresa May arrived in Brussels to present the EU with her proposals for Brexit, its negotiators would be “staring at her in disbelief ” that she could come up with anything so flimsily unworkable and “potentially catastrophic”.
The reason for this, I suggested, was that “she showed so little sign of understanding the fearsome complexities of what a successful disentanglement from the EU would involve”. To underline this I quoted the verdict of that week’s Der Spiegel, that she was “clearly living in the German equivalent of cloud-cuckoo land”.
What prompted such shocked responses was that, after months of insisting that she wanted the UK to continue enjoying “frictionless” trade “within” the EU’s internal market, she had finally decided with her Lancaster House speech that she wanted to remove us completely not just from the EU, which was all the British public had voted for, but also from its internal market.
The only thing that is certain about our referendum result is that, whatever else the 17.4 million of us who voted Leave thought we were voting for, it was not the ever-more-chaotic shambles of an impasse we are looking at today. Yet this was ultimately made inevitable by the fact that Mrs May went into the negotiations without any workable plan that might get around those complexities, which to this day she has never understood.
As a few of us were urging long before the referendum, there was only one practical way to secure the outcome which most people in Britain would probably have welcomed if it had ever been raised to the centre of our national debate: the only one which would have met the requirements of the referendum result by taking us completely out of the EU without inflicting potentially catastrophic damage to our economy.
As I have said too often before, if only we had chosen to join Norway in the European Free Trade Association and thus to remain within the European Economic Area, we would have freed ourselves overnight from three quarters of all the EU’s laws and the jurisdiction of the European Court of Justice, while continuing to enjoy near “frictionless” trade with the internal market from outside the EU itself.
We could not only, like Norway, have won the right as an independent country to make trade deals with the outside world, but had influence in shaping the laws of the single market. We need never have heard of the Irish border problem.
In short, we could have avoided 95 per cent of all the intractable difficulties we are now faced with in all directions. Yet none of this was ever honestly explained to us or properly debated. Instead our politicians chose en masse to take us into a labyrinth in which every passage inevitably leads only to a dead end. On Thursday, when the Benn amendment offered Parliament a last chance to look again at that “Norway option”, it was rejected by just two votes. We are trapped in a web entirely of our own making. But external reality is now finally closing in on our years of make-believe.
2. Italy drawn to the promise of China's Silk Road in defiance of Brussels. Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, The Daily Telegraph.
Italy is selling itself lock, stock, and barrel to the Chinese Communist Party, flouting the EU’s tough new line on Beijing and openly taunting the Franco-German axis.
The techno-utopian Five Star Movement is chiefly responsible for this effusive embrace of Xi Jinping’s authoritarian model. Its leaders suppose there to be a pot of gold in the Middle Kingdom, available to buy Italy's bonds and to pay for Rome’s unaffordable spending plans.
It is a way to take revenge against the EU policy elites for years of enforced austerity and their failure to deliver on ‘New Deal’ promises of an investment blitz. But it also risks a diplomatic rupture with US for questionable economic gain.
Italy is to become the first G7 country to sign up to President Xi’s $1.2 trillion Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), billed as “globalisation with Chinese characteristics”.
Other G7 powers have kept their distance, eyeing this grandiose venture suspiciously as an instrument of political control and a Trojan Horse for strategic and military ambitions.
Some 50 deals are already under negotiation. They are loosely combined under the rubric of the ‘Silk Road’, the preferred Italian name for the BRI with its nostalgic overtones of Marco Polo and the pioneer spirit of the Venetian Republic.
They cover customs, engineering, telecoms, banking, infrastructure projects, and above all ports, with Genoa and Trieste first in line. A memorandum of understanding has been approved by Rome. It is likely to be signed by the Chinese leader when he visits the Quirinale on March 22.
Corriere della Sera says talks include ties to the shipping and military conglomerate Fincantieri, as well as Ansaldo, Enel, Italgas, Terna, Sace, and Snam. “Practically the entire system of the country is rushing to strike deals with China,” it said.
The coalition’s ‘Italy First’ Lega party is for now going along with the policy to avoid a breakdown of the governing alliance. But leader Matteo Salvini is issuing louder warnings. “If it is a matter of helping Italian companies to invest abroad, we’re ready to talk to anyone. But we’re absolutely not going to let foreign companies colonize Italy,” he said.
Five Star, founded by Beppe Grillo, has promoted the idea China will help Italy pay for its spending plans
Five Star leaders are eurosceptic and anti-American in equal measure. The Lega has courted Donald Trump and is far less ready to burn its bridges with Washington. The US ambassador in Rome has already warned that Italy can kiss goodbye to intelligence sharing if it lets China’s Huawei into its G5 network.
Nor is it clear what the economic value of the Silk Road really is. It has proved to be a Faustian Pact for African and Asian states drawn into the net over last five years. Many ventures are white elephants leaving only debt peonage. There is ever-louder grumbling that the scheme is a mix of colonialism and resource rape. Malaysia is trying to renegotiate terms.
Five Star’s pro-China lurch comes as the European Commission issues its own policy blueprint - EU-China: A Strategic Outlook. It states for the first time that China is a “strategic rival” and calls for stronger measures to defend Europe’s industrial and engineering base.
There must be a unified policy in dealing with critical infrastructure, tighter rules on foreign state ownership of assets and takeovers with subsidized credit, and an end to forced technology transfers. “The EU should robustly seek more balanced and reciprocal conditions governing the economic relationship.”
Views have been hardening in North European capitals and within the EU institutions. The EU’s External Action Service has reportedly briefed diplomats that 250 Chinese spies are operating in Brussels. "We cannot become a new colony of the Chinese empire,” said Antonio Tajani, president of the European Parliament.
Chancellor Angela Merkel choose to overlook the destruction of Germany’s once dominant solar industry by Chinese firms copying its technology. Berlin was eyeing the bigger prize of the Chinese market. But it is increasingly wary of attempts to buy up German hi-tech engineering firms.
Alarm bells are ringing over Beijing’s ‘Made in China 2025’ plan to dominate ten strategic sectors by means of subsidy and cheap state credit. Germany’s Mercator Institute describes it as a predatory system, akin to a war-time structure. Agents of China’s Strategic Support Force are lodged inside companies.
Brussels warns that Europe must close ranks or let China pick off states one by one. Greece has already become a doormat, letting the Chinese shipping group COSCO acquire the port of Piraeus as the “dragon head” of Xi Jinping’s entry into Europe.
Athens has since obligingly blocked EU condemnations of Chinese human rights abuses and incursions in the South China Sea. It has dragged its feet on tougher EU screening measures for Chinese investments.
The defection of Italy is more serious for EU strategic unity. The country still has the second biggest manufacturing hub in Europe.
In a sense the chickens are coming back to roost for Europe’s policy elite. Austerity overkill imposed on southern Europe during the eurozone debt crisis led to a collapse in public investment and an economic depression. The resulting surge of bad debts in the Italian banking system caused a credit crunch and a vicious circle.
The rigid pro-cyclical rules of the Stability Pact were partly to blame, but real power was held by hardline Ordoliberals in the German finance ministry using the European Central Bank as their enforcer.
The South endured this contractionary squeeze on the implicit promise of a quid pro quo later. The recompense never came. Northern Europe has continued to block fiscal union, joint debt issuance, and pan-EMU bank deposit insurance.
The Juncker Plan for investment is too small to rebuild crumbling infrastructure or to lift the Club Med region out of the structural trap. The victims are taking matters into their own hands.
Five Star leaders think Beijing can fund their reflation plans, turn Palermo into a new Rotterdam with a $5bn port project, and take the ailing Alitalia off their hands.
They have found their guru in Michele Geraci, state undersecretary for economic development, a former City banker who later taught for ten years at universities in Shanghai and Hangzhou. He has drunk deep from the cup of Xi Jinping’s Leninist ideology.
His original mandate was to close the trade gap with China. He concluded that Italy was unlikely to gain China’s attention short of a dramatic demarche. Beijing jumped with alacrity when he broached the Silk Road. Lega sources say the issue has snowballed out of control.
Mr Geraci has established a China Task Force and has been commuting back and forth to Beijing, circumventing the normal controls of the Italian foreign ministry and the security apparatus. His sympathies for Mr Xi’s iron-fist regime were spelled out in an article for the blog of Five Star founder Beppe Grillo, in which he not only argued that China could bring down Italy’s bond spreads but also extolled the Communist Party’s policies on crime, migration, and social disorder.
His apologia caused such alarm that 23 China-experts have written a joint response accusing Mr Geraci of latching onto a highly repressive system as a model. His comments “bear witness to a very dangerous drift that is taking place today in many western societies.”
Mr Geraci suggests that China’s cities have found a place for migrant workers in crime-free harmony through common respect for the ‘social pact’. The authors retort that police methods are brutal, crime figures are fiction, and migrants are trapped in the neo-feudal ‘hukuo’ system without full civil rights, vulnerable to mass eviction at any time.
They call it breath-taking for Mr Geraci to lavish praise on China’s public security system at a time when the media is muzzled, activists are being jailed in large numbers, a million Uighurs have been sent to reeducation camps, and the score-based “social credit system” based has become a potent tool of totalitarian control.
Mr Geraci protests that other European states are in bed with the Communist regime. Germany exports seven times as much to China. Britain has attracted €80bn of Chinese investment in the last fifteen years, he claims, including funds for the Hinkley Point nuclear project. Italy is belatedly trying to catch up.
Critics say is too late. Six years ago in the era of Hu Jintao it was still plausible to think that China was opening up and that this might lead to cordial Sino-Western cohabitation. But Xi Jinping has moved in another direction.
He has bottled economic reforms, sacrificing growth in order to tighten party control. The jaundiced view of China-watchers these days is that the country is slipping into structural decline and the middle income trap. Its workforce is shrinking. Its current account surplus is vanishing.
China will no longer be a net exporter of capital. It cannot afford the luxury of a $1.2 trillion Silk Road when the money is needed at home. Chinese economists admit privately that much of Mr Xi’s majestic talk will come to little.
The Lega’s Matteo Salvini is letting Italy’s Sinophile policy run for now. It gives him leverage against Brussels. Sooner or later he is likely to cash in his lead in the polls and force a snap election. Five Star may fade from the Italian political picture.
A way will be found to make the Silk Road less worrying by operating through the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank. It is a tool of Chinese power but at least operates with discernable rules.
Brussels has learned a salutary lesson. If you pauperize member states and run monetary union only in the interest of creditors, they will turn elsewhere for love.
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