Spanish life is not always likeable but it is compellingly loveable.
Christopher Howse: A Pilgrim in Spain
Note: As it's Thursday, several of the items below have been borrowed from Lenox Napier's Business Over Tapas
Spain
- From El País in English comes: More than 850,000 people over the age of 80 live alone in Spain. Data also shows that 53.1% of people between the ages of 25 and 29 are still living with their parents.
- From Money Saver Spain: A new programme with grants for the purchase of electric and plug-in hybrid cars and more has been launched for 2019. Anyone who is legally resident in Spain is eligible to apply. The Spanish Government has set aside 45 million euros for grants for the purchase of electric and plug-in hybrid cars, electric motorbikes and other vehicles. The scheme is called Plan Moves 2019...
- From the consumer organisation Facua: Vodafone [a subsistence of a British company] is chosen by consumers as The Worst Company of the Year. In the 10th edition of the awards organized by Facua since 2010, Endesa came in second place in the voting.
- La Ser reports that 80% of all wedding are now civil affairs and almost half of all children are born outside wedlock in Spain.
- Best short comment: All in all, a classic EU fudge, another kick of the can: Brexit still looks far from over.
- Second best: Nothing had changed.
- Ways forward?: See the first article below.
The EU
- M Macron seems to have done himself no favours in Brussels last night.
- Cruel but accurate:-
The UK
- Is this Britain's worst ever humiliation? See the second article below for the answer.
The Way of the World
Finally . . .
THE ARTICLES
Reinventing politics won’t solve Brexit mess: Daniel Finkelstein, The Times
Desire to change the system is understandable but none of the reforms being pushed now would cure our big problem
On the day in 1933 that Franklin Delano Roosevelt was inaugurated as United States president, the New York Herald Tribune ran a banner headline giving its view of the way out of the financial crisis that gripped America: “For Dictatorship if Necessary”.
The newspaper was not alone in urging FDR to assume extraordinary powers in those rocky days when complete collapse threatened. As Roosevelt prepared for office the syndicated columnist Walter Lippmann urged him on. “A mild species of dictatorship,” he wrote, “will help us over the roughest spots in the road ahead.” When the new president told the crowd at his inauguration that he stood ready to take such powers if Congress failed to act, he received a cheer so great that his wife Eleanor found it “a little terrifying”.
A desire for action and for order instead of argument and deadlock often accompanies great moments of national challenge, so it was not entirely surprising to learn from the Hansard Society this week that 54 per cent of people agree that “Britain needs a strong leader willing to break the rules”.
Roosevelt in the end eschewed the advice of those pressing dictatorship upon him. He decided on the route of consent rather than rule-breaking, and quite correctly. Indeed, preserving American democracy at a moment of crisis is one of his signal achievements. Rule-breaking sounds fine until it is someone else’s strong leader breaking your rules. He decided that it wasn’t American. And it isn’t British either.
The general feeling that the British political system is failing is, however, not to be lightly dismissed. We’ve got to do something about these politicians who have taken us to the very brink, think some people. We’ve got to do something about these politicians who have refused to take us over the brink, think others. We’ve got to do something about these politicians who can’t agree about brinks, thinks everyone.
For if there is one sentiment that we all seem to agree on it is that “when this is over, we are going to have to do something about our politics”.
What I want to do is just gently question this consensus. It’s important that I begin by emphasising that I am neither satisfied with our present politics nor do I set my face against reform. However, I do think the idea that we are stuck on Brexit because there is something wrong with the way we are doing politics is glib and basically incorrect.
There are, in my view, two sorts of ideas about changing politics. The first are ones that we have already tried, and that have made our position on Brexit worse. The second are those we haven’t tried yet, and they would make the terrible position we are in worse still.
Let’s look at the first group. Having an EU referendum at all was a political response to disillusion with politics. It was initially championed by a group of Conservatives — the MEP Daniel Hannan was the leader — who argued that the reason people were fed up with politics was that politicians couldn’t do any of the things they promised. This was because they had given their power away to unaccountable bodies.
They proposed a more direct form of politics, what they called direct democracy, and a referendum, particularly one that promised release from the EU, was an example of politics unmediated by politicians.
Except, of course, that it hasn’t been and couldn’t ever be. Because in its wake there are thousands of questions that need to be settled and even the advocates of the first referendum appear wary of using a further referendum to settle any of them.
In the meantime many popular ideas for political renewal have dug us even more deeply into the hole. Parliament taking control, for instance. Has anyone else noticed that the more control parliament has taken the bigger the fiasco has got? We have become less and less capable of taking a decision.
The other fashionable idea — that we should have less whipping and more voting with conscience — hasn’t helped either. Nor has giving more power to party members, another reform that enjoyed universal acclaim.
It has also, despite the pickle we are in, proven more difficult to get rid of the government because, after years of campaigning by people wanting political renewal, we have introduced a fixed-term parliament act. The idea of this was to weaken the powers of the prime minister by removing the power to call an election. Instead it has strengthened the power of the prime minister to remain in office even when parliament doesn’t support the PM’s programme.
I advocated many of these ideas and still support them. They may have made some things better and be justified in their own terms. All I am saying here is that they have made the inability to decide about Brexit worse.
So those are the fashionable ideas we have implemented so far. What about the new ones?
Well, there is reform of the House of Lords, of course. High time for that and I am (and always have been) strongly in favour. Naturally, it wouldn’t make the Brexit position better. A reformed House of Lords would not show the restraint that the unelected House does. Present lords know they (all right, all right, we) lack democratic legitimacy and readily give way to the will of the Commons. Without this there would be an entire extra layer of disagreement and deadlock that couldn’t be overcome. To think about it is to shudder.
A federal parliament with strong regional and national vetoes would produce a similar outcome, and then there is proportional representation. The present party system definitely requires challenge, and I suppose it is possible that replacing the static internal coalitions of ancient parties with the fluidity of smaller parties may help. They’d be building new alliances and this could produce a habit of making agreements. That might have come in handy these past months. Yet just as likely it would have produced a Balkans of different policy positions even harder to untangle than the present knotty problem.
The simpler suggestion that what we need is to sweep everyone out of parliament and start again, perhaps in Wolverhampton, has a sort of populist appeal but the relief is likely to be temporary at best.
So let me finish with this. On Monday ComRes produced a poll that showed that 40 per cent of people saw revoking Article 50 as an acceptable outcome, while 38 per cent thought the same of leaving with no deal. The same proportion found a second referendum acceptable.
My point is not to put anyone off having a go at political change. It is just to note that the real problem is that if parliament is stuck on how and, in a substantial minority of cases even whether, to achieve Brexit, it is not because it fails to represent reality or public opinion. It is precisely because it does represent reality and public opinion.
2. A national humiliation: Never was so much embarrassment caused to so many by so few: Robert Tombs, emeritus professor at Cambridge University and the author of “The English and Their History”
Can a whole nation be humiliated? If it can, then this must be what it feels like. Except for the minority of hard-line Remainers, who are probably cheering, we must all feel a mixture of disbelief, anger and embarrassment.
But directed against whom? The people of this country have done nothing that deserves humiliation. Only that minority who seem to revel in national declinism can think that. Most people voted for the eminently rational course of leaving a failing EU.
It is the Government and Parliament, intimidated by pro-EU lobbies and much of the media, who have brought about the humiliating spectacle of a Prime Minister grovelling to our “partners”. Mrs May has been humiliated more than any of her predecessors that I can think of. But the country and its people? Only through being tarnished by its Government’s lamentable failure.
Is this the worst it can be? Far from it. In the 1956 Suez crisis, Sir Anthony Eden, the prime minister, had secretly plotted with the French and the Israelis to launch an illegal invasion of Egypt and then backed down when the US threatened to collapse the pound. That humiliation of a prime minister was compounded by blood unjustly spilt and the country was rightly shamed.
When, in 1976, with inflation out of control and sterling collapsing, we had to ask the IMF for the largest loan ever given to a developed country, that was a genuine national humiliation. We, as a people, seemed hopeless, unable either to govern ourselves or to earn our living. That humiliation went far beyond Westminster.
Go back further, to the Thirties. The Munich surrender to Hitler was a collective act of fear, but it was not Britain’s alone, and for all his shortcomings, Neville Chamberlain was sincerely trying to stave off a global catastrophe.
To find further humiliations we have to go way back. We suffered shocking military defeats during the age of Empire: against the Boers, the Zulus, the Afghans, the Sudanese. In all these cases, small bodies of troops were cut off far from help. Perhaps tragedies more than humiliations.
We often think of the loss of the American colonies as a humiliation, and the prime minister of the time, Lord North, is often dubbed “the worst”. But this followed a world war of Britain alone against the French, Spanish, Dutch and Americans, and the country had never been really wholehearted in fighting anyway.
Today’s humiliation is different from any of these. It is less tragic, less important, less necessary, less widely shared. There is a frivolity and stupidity about the present situation that makes it humiliating in a manner perhaps unique in our history: this is black comedy, not drama. Had our rulers shown a modicum of honesty, consistency, judgment and courage, we would not be where we are today.
Never was so much embarrassment caused to so many by so few. But the humiliation is theirs, not ours.
Finally . . .
- The past is a different country. Try at 3.05 and 10.13 . . .
THE ARTICLES
Reinventing politics won’t solve Brexit mess: Daniel Finkelstein, The Times
Desire to change the system is understandable but none of the reforms being pushed now would cure our big problem
On the day in 1933 that Franklin Delano Roosevelt was inaugurated as United States president, the New York Herald Tribune ran a banner headline giving its view of the way out of the financial crisis that gripped America: “For Dictatorship if Necessary”.
The newspaper was not alone in urging FDR to assume extraordinary powers in those rocky days when complete collapse threatened. As Roosevelt prepared for office the syndicated columnist Walter Lippmann urged him on. “A mild species of dictatorship,” he wrote, “will help us over the roughest spots in the road ahead.” When the new president told the crowd at his inauguration that he stood ready to take such powers if Congress failed to act, he received a cheer so great that his wife Eleanor found it “a little terrifying”.
A desire for action and for order instead of argument and deadlock often accompanies great moments of national challenge, so it was not entirely surprising to learn from the Hansard Society this week that 54 per cent of people agree that “Britain needs a strong leader willing to break the rules”.
Roosevelt in the end eschewed the advice of those pressing dictatorship upon him. He decided on the route of consent rather than rule-breaking, and quite correctly. Indeed, preserving American democracy at a moment of crisis is one of his signal achievements. Rule-breaking sounds fine until it is someone else’s strong leader breaking your rules. He decided that it wasn’t American. And it isn’t British either.
The general feeling that the British political system is failing is, however, not to be lightly dismissed. We’ve got to do something about these politicians who have taken us to the very brink, think some people. We’ve got to do something about these politicians who have refused to take us over the brink, think others. We’ve got to do something about these politicians who can’t agree about brinks, thinks everyone.
For if there is one sentiment that we all seem to agree on it is that “when this is over, we are going to have to do something about our politics”.
What I want to do is just gently question this consensus. It’s important that I begin by emphasising that I am neither satisfied with our present politics nor do I set my face against reform. However, I do think the idea that we are stuck on Brexit because there is something wrong with the way we are doing politics is glib and basically incorrect.
There are, in my view, two sorts of ideas about changing politics. The first are ones that we have already tried, and that have made our position on Brexit worse. The second are those we haven’t tried yet, and they would make the terrible position we are in worse still.
Let’s look at the first group. Having an EU referendum at all was a political response to disillusion with politics. It was initially championed by a group of Conservatives — the MEP Daniel Hannan was the leader — who argued that the reason people were fed up with politics was that politicians couldn’t do any of the things they promised. This was because they had given their power away to unaccountable bodies.
They proposed a more direct form of politics, what they called direct democracy, and a referendum, particularly one that promised release from the EU, was an example of politics unmediated by politicians.
Except, of course, that it hasn’t been and couldn’t ever be. Because in its wake there are thousands of questions that need to be settled and even the advocates of the first referendum appear wary of using a further referendum to settle any of them.
In the meantime many popular ideas for political renewal have dug us even more deeply into the hole. Parliament taking control, for instance. Has anyone else noticed that the more control parliament has taken the bigger the fiasco has got? We have become less and less capable of taking a decision.
The other fashionable idea — that we should have less whipping and more voting with conscience — hasn’t helped either. Nor has giving more power to party members, another reform that enjoyed universal acclaim.
It has also, despite the pickle we are in, proven more difficult to get rid of the government because, after years of campaigning by people wanting political renewal, we have introduced a fixed-term parliament act. The idea of this was to weaken the powers of the prime minister by removing the power to call an election. Instead it has strengthened the power of the prime minister to remain in office even when parliament doesn’t support the PM’s programme.
I advocated many of these ideas and still support them. They may have made some things better and be justified in their own terms. All I am saying here is that they have made the inability to decide about Brexit worse.
So those are the fashionable ideas we have implemented so far. What about the new ones?
Well, there is reform of the House of Lords, of course. High time for that and I am (and always have been) strongly in favour. Naturally, it wouldn’t make the Brexit position better. A reformed House of Lords would not show the restraint that the unelected House does. Present lords know they (all right, all right, we) lack democratic legitimacy and readily give way to the will of the Commons. Without this there would be an entire extra layer of disagreement and deadlock that couldn’t be overcome. To think about it is to shudder.
A federal parliament with strong regional and national vetoes would produce a similar outcome, and then there is proportional representation. The present party system definitely requires challenge, and I suppose it is possible that replacing the static internal coalitions of ancient parties with the fluidity of smaller parties may help. They’d be building new alliances and this could produce a habit of making agreements. That might have come in handy these past months. Yet just as likely it would have produced a Balkans of different policy positions even harder to untangle than the present knotty problem.
The simpler suggestion that what we need is to sweep everyone out of parliament and start again, perhaps in Wolverhampton, has a sort of populist appeal but the relief is likely to be temporary at best.
So let me finish with this. On Monday ComRes produced a poll that showed that 40 per cent of people saw revoking Article 50 as an acceptable outcome, while 38 per cent thought the same of leaving with no deal. The same proportion found a second referendum acceptable.
My point is not to put anyone off having a go at political change. It is just to note that the real problem is that if parliament is stuck on how and, in a substantial minority of cases even whether, to achieve Brexit, it is not because it fails to represent reality or public opinion. It is precisely because it does represent reality and public opinion.
2. A national humiliation: Never was so much embarrassment caused to so many by so few: Robert Tombs, emeritus professor at Cambridge University and the author of “The English and Their History”
Can a whole nation be humiliated? If it can, then this must be what it feels like. Except for the minority of hard-line Remainers, who are probably cheering, we must all feel a mixture of disbelief, anger and embarrassment.
But directed against whom? The people of this country have done nothing that deserves humiliation. Only that minority who seem to revel in national declinism can think that. Most people voted for the eminently rational course of leaving a failing EU.
It is the Government and Parliament, intimidated by pro-EU lobbies and much of the media, who have brought about the humiliating spectacle of a Prime Minister grovelling to our “partners”. Mrs May has been humiliated more than any of her predecessors that I can think of. But the country and its people? Only through being tarnished by its Government’s lamentable failure.
Is this the worst it can be? Far from it. In the 1956 Suez crisis, Sir Anthony Eden, the prime minister, had secretly plotted with the French and the Israelis to launch an illegal invasion of Egypt and then backed down when the US threatened to collapse the pound. That humiliation of a prime minister was compounded by blood unjustly spilt and the country was rightly shamed.
When, in 1976, with inflation out of control and sterling collapsing, we had to ask the IMF for the largest loan ever given to a developed country, that was a genuine national humiliation. We, as a people, seemed hopeless, unable either to govern ourselves or to earn our living. That humiliation went far beyond Westminster.
Go back further, to the Thirties. The Munich surrender to Hitler was a collective act of fear, but it was not Britain’s alone, and for all his shortcomings, Neville Chamberlain was sincerely trying to stave off a global catastrophe.
To find further humiliations we have to go way back. We suffered shocking military defeats during the age of Empire: against the Boers, the Zulus, the Afghans, the Sudanese. In all these cases, small bodies of troops were cut off far from help. Perhaps tragedies more than humiliations.
We often think of the loss of the American colonies as a humiliation, and the prime minister of the time, Lord North, is often dubbed “the worst”. But this followed a world war of Britain alone against the French, Spanish, Dutch and Americans, and the country had never been really wholehearted in fighting anyway.
Today’s humiliation is different from any of these. It is less tragic, less important, less necessary, less widely shared. There is a frivolity and stupidity about the present situation that makes it humiliating in a manner perhaps unique in our history: this is black comedy, not drama. Had our rulers shown a modicum of honesty, consistency, judgment and courage, we would not be where we are today.
Never was so much embarrassment caused to so many by so few. But the humiliation is theirs, not ours.
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