Spanish life is not always likeable but it is compellingly loveable.
Christopher Howse: A Pilgrim in Spain
Spain- If you're new to Spain, here's a list - from a young Anglo-Spanish couple - of the solecisms you can easily commit, in increasing order of wrongness:-
- Putting your bread on your meal plate
- Leaving one hand under the table during a meal
- Offering a guest alcohol in the evening, before 8pm
- Offering to help with washing up dishes [Assuming you're ever invited into someone's house]
- Being 'heavy' in social circumstances, not sticking to light matters.
- Misinterpreting loud shouting as anger
- Generalising about Spain
- Calling Catalan a dialect
- Using 'usted' willy nilly.
- Mentioning the civil war.
- Here's Think Spain on the changes in Spain since the intro of democracy 40 years ago.
- And here's Político on that empty Spain controversy.
- And El País on Semana Santa fun options.
- The other side of semi-booming Spain: Away from its labyrinthic historic centre and the expat-filled beaches, Malaga’s dusty, sunbeaten streets have been swept by Europe’s latest populist uprising. In the depths of the eurozone debt crisis, suited workers would root through the street’s bins and the unemployed would snake out of the job centre, the labour market as parched as the dry river that dissects the city. Years later, Andalucia’s unemployment rate has fallen but remains at an eye-watering 21% and youth employment is stuck at 45%. In December, the far-Right Vox saw an unprecedented surge in support and took 12 seats in Andalucia’s regional election, seizing two seats in Malaga and more than a 10th of the city’s votes. It marked the first seats won by a far-Right party in the post-Franco era as the Socialist Party’s support collapsed in its poorer southern heartland. For Pedro Sanchez, Spain’s prime minister and the centre-Left party’s leader, the bruising highlights an existential threat that could see his party cast aside as the politics of old.
- Same guy: Faced with a populist uprising on both the Left and Right, Sanchez has indulged the demands of the insurgents. In January, Spain’s lowest-earning workers enjoyed a 22% hike in the minimum wage to a monthly rate of €1,050, (£902) the biggest pay jump since the Seventies. It is Sanchez’s bribe to voters ahead of this month’s general election that has been called to end Madrid’s stalemate. But it is a gamble that could prolong the pain for the millions still unemployed and risks triggering a setback in the eurozone’s brightest economy in recent years.
- On the other Andalucian hand . . .
- If, despite everything, you still don't know what a Customs Union is and why so many folk are averse to one between the UK and the EU, read the article below.
- Customs Union 2: The EU is a protectionist racket, thinks at least one UK columnist.
- A good step. Probably. Britain's new Duty of Care laws will finally make tech giants accountable. The era of self-regulation for online companies is over.
- Bit depressing, if understandable:- Brexit-weary voters long for political strongman. More than half of Britons want a “strong leader willing to break the rules”, a new survey on the state of parliamentary democracy has found. In findings that suggest large parts of the country are ready to entertain radical political change, nearly three quarters of people felt that the British system of governing needed “quite a lot” or “a great deal” of improvement.
- Spellchecks are extremely useful but at times infuriating. If I type a foreign word in Apple's word-processing app - Pages - the latter will not just highlight the word but automatically change it into something English, at least twice before it accepts it. I'm sure I can prevent this but, at the moment haven't been able to find out how. I mention it now only to explain why yesterday's gardez l'eau became garden l'eau.
- Still on words . . . Google Translation is also very useful but can be diastrous. Witness all those bizarre menus around the world. Today I discovered that the preferred Spanish word for the English mad(meaning insane) is enojado, or 'angry', This is American usage, of course, and I doubt I can get Google Translate to base its translations for me on British usage.
A push for customs union should be known as a soft-in-the-head Brexit
Last week was always going to be extraordinary – but I hadn’t imagined that it would be that extraordinary! Almost anything can happen now.
The so-called “soft” Brexit that we could be heading for should more accurately be known as a “soft-in-the-head” Brexit. Its primary characteristic is likely to be membership of the customs union. Some people imagine that this means the same thing as endorsing free trade. But it doesn’t. It means free trade with other EU members, but it also means submitting to the EU’s trade policy with regard to non-EU countries. Thus, we would continue to impose the EU’s common external tariff (CET) on imports from the rest of the world. And we would continue to hand over to the EU the bulk of the £3.5bn that we currently collect in tariff revenues.
Under Theresa May’s Withdrawal Agreement, we would also agree to maintain “regulatory alignment” with the EU. Given these two points, we would be practically unable to conclude free-trade agreements (FTAs) with other countries. Worse than this, we would be a part of whatever trade agreements the EU forged with other countries, regardless of how badly such FTAs served our own interests. Having left the EU, we would no longer have a say in the negotiation of such FTAs.
Which other countries are in such a position, you may well ask? Norway is often bandied about as an example – yet it is a member of the single market, but not the customs union. No, the European country that is a member of the customs union is Turkey, with exemptions for agricultural goods. This should give you a clue as to quite how unappealing this “Out of the EU but still inside the customs union” status would be. The House of Commons may not be voting for Christmas but it may soon be voting to be Turkey.
It is often misleadingly asserted that much of the rest of the world belongs to customs unions, including the countries of North America, which belong to Nafta. But Nafta is not a customs union. It is a free-trade agreement. This means that no CET is imposed and Nafta members are allowed to set their own tariffs and conclude their own FTAs with third parties, just as Canada has recently done with the EU, even though there is no such deal between the USA and the EU. Similarly, in Asia, Asean is a free-trade area and not a customs union.
Compared to belonging to the customs union, the option of leaving without a deal has been appallingly traduced. Parliament has voted to prevent such an outcome but this is still not watertight. For if there is no agreement with the EU either now or after a further delay then, unless we rescind Article 50, we will leave “without a deal”. This outcome is widely described as a “disorderly” Brexit. What a wonderfully civil servicey word “disorderly” is. Disorderly? O heaven forfend! Can you imagine Churchill or Thatcher quaking at the thought of being “disorderly”?
But the very words “no deal” sound negative and threatening. Yet they simply mean leaving the EU without an overarching agreement, as envisaged in the Lisbon Treaty. Many mini-deals have already been concluded on a wide variety of issues and there can be many more. Moreover, although we don’t know what the EU would do, the UK has already announced its tariff rates in the event of a no-deal Brexit.
Ironically, in an important respect, the Withdrawal Agreement is in fact a “no-deal” Brexit because it says virtually nothing about the terms on which the UK would trade with the EU. Mrs May’s deal is really a declaration of unconditional surrender before we begin to talk about the terms of the peace. You can surely guess how that negotiation would go.
Of course, the Governor of the Bank of England, Mark Carney, has recently tried to take supporters of no deal to task by suggesting that their belief that it could be painless was ridiculous. Yet he was attacking a straw man. If we leave without a deal, there are bound to be some disruptions and dislocations. Everyone acknowledges that. The only relevant questions are how serious these would be, what we can do by way of preparation to minimise them and how quickly we would recover afterwards. Mark Carney’s predecessor, Lord King, got it right when he said recently that a no-deal Brexit was perfectly feasible and that the critics had wildly exaggerated the difficulties and downsides of leaving on these terms.
Furthermore, Brexit is primarily about sovereignty and feelings of belonging, rather than matters of customs unions and single markets. Man cannot live by integrated supply chains alone. Millions of people have fought and many have died for this country. You don’t do this for a customs union or a single market, and not many British people would do it for the European Union.
Now the British people face a great battle of ideas. After the chaos, betrayal and national humiliation of recent weeks, we are on the brink of a political revolution. It will have far greater consequences for the economy than any sort of Brexit.
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