Spanish life is not always likeable but it is compellingly loveable.
Christopher Howse: A Pilgrim in Spain
Spain- A French challenger for Renfe? I wonder if they could manage to get a high-speed train from Madrid to Galicia before 2030.
- I've said more than once that: 1. there are too many layers of government in Spain, and 2. 'Andalucia' is a byword for corruption. The PP party wants to kill 2 birds with one stone.
- Here's a tale of a doing-his-bit-Brit.
- A funny thing . . . In the café I go to en route to my watering hole, they give you 2 churros with your coffee. But one waitress always gives me 3. And now all 3 of the waitresses have started to do so. Osmosis? Ironically, I'm trying to lose a bit of weight and have finally got down to what I was when I came here almost 19 years ago. Life is a bitch at times.
- Someone has voiced my thoughts this morning: Before I die I want to see our politics move on from bickering about Europe. But the fetishising of compromise proposed by archbishops, royalty, scared business leaders and most of the really nice people in British public life bids fair to prolong these agonies indefinitely. All seem blind to a great truth: there is no sustainable half-in, half-out solution to be had. For the British, satellite status will never bed in. The journey, once started, cannot be to a halfway destination without the implicit recognition that we should never have started it; because halfway is worse than staying put.
- I believe I said months ago that, rather than proceed with any emerging form of Brexit, it would be best to give up on it and revoke Article 20. But it might need a second bloody referendum or general election to achieve this. God help the country.
- On the issue of a referendum, see the common sense article of a disappointed Leaver below.
- Ambrose Evans Pritchard is not the only one worried about Italy and its threat to the entire Project (see the 2nd article below). Read Don Quijones on this issue here.
- How true. . . . We are stuck for ever in this pointless circle of Brexit hell because we have two party leaders who are hostage to members with whom they do not agree. Both the Tories and Labour have put far too much power in the hands of people who do not represent the general public.
- No wonder neither leader wants a general election. And British politics is about to undergo a huge transformation.
- Ivo Vlaev, a professor of behavioural science at Warwick Business Schoo,l says consumers are being seduced by the “expectation of reward behind the click”.
- 'Zombie notifications' and the science of social media - how tech giants use psychology to trick us. See the 3rd article below.
- Those cheeky Portuguese. Not content with advertising Oporto - correctly - as The airport for all Galicians, they're now offering courses in North Portugal for Galician students.
- An interesting chap I read about this morning. Prime Minister of Spain for a few months, despite being Dutch.
1. I was against a second Brexit referendum. Now it's the only way of fixing this almighty mess. Jeremy Warner. Daily Telegraph.
If anything, this horror show has strengthened my support for Brexit.
Was I wrong to back Brexit? Those on my side of the debate have been laughing off the various disasters for quite a while now. Don’t worry, we have said, it was never going to be easy, but it will all come right in the last minute.
Unfortunately, it didn’t. Which raises an awkward question: did I get it wrong? As a lifelong Europhile who voted Leave after much heartache and agonising, I like to think I’m open-minded about this. With another six months ahead of us, there is plenty of time to reflect.
Does anyone seriously think an extra six months will make this Parliament vote for that deal? A general election may be the only way to break the deadlock – but polls suggest that, with things as they are, Nigel Farage’s new party (together with his old one) will decimate Conservative support. Brexit might end up meaning Jeremy Corbyn.
If that isn’t cause for a rethink, I’m not sure what is.
Everyone has their own reasons for choosing a Brexit side and for most, I suspect, it’s a balance: does the good outweigh the bad? Which, of course, depends on the weight you put on each argument. With so much changing, it’s normal to reassess.
Yet of the many strange things we are seeing during this debacle, one of the strangest is how few have changed their mind – in spite of seeing the Brexit process turn into a top-to-bottom horror show. The mayhem has not put them off.
And why? Because mayhem was expected. The leader of every political party in Parliament, business groups, trade unions, scientists, actors, spy chiefs – all urged the country to vote Remain. Those who declined to do so knew that they were capsizing the boat and expected to see important people splashing around for quite a while.
The language and tactics used by Donald Tusk and others has also reminded people like me how I was naïve to think the EU would ever reform. I thought they would have to, given how many European voters were unhappy. But the EU has prided itself on its intransigence, seeing refusal to compromise as a strength.
Populism is the result, which the EU responds to with more intransigence. Their Brexit message is that those who try to leave the EU will be weakened and humiliated. Fair enough: they played rough, and won. But who wants to be a member of a club that behaves in this way?
Then comes the economics. Philip Hammond is wrong to say that “nobody voted to be poorer”. A great many people believed the Treasury’s warnings and thought there would be a price to pay directly after the referendum.
Its forecast of 500,000 job losses sounded a lot, but I expected some. Instead, far more than 500,000 jobs were created. This doesn’t mean no one trusts experts. It means we can’t take Brexit forecasts or warnings very seriously, as it’s hard to predict. People will not be so ready to believe that Brexit – with a deal, or without – might mean economic collapse.
The problems we have had leaving the EU have underlined how deeply its rules were ingrained – and how deep the problem ran. The two-year timeframe has proved unworkable because things are far worse than even Brexiteers thought.
They turn out to have been naïve in their assessment of how far EU rules had penetrated British government. I never quite believed the argument that the EU was holding Britain back, and thought claims to the contrary were exaggerated by people who loathed Brussels for ideological reasons. I owe them an apology.
Plenty of things have been worse than I expected. Brexit has lobotomised the Conservatives. I underestimated how they would be unable to think about or do anything else while this was going on, or how many MPs would be destroyed by the arguments. The social and welfare reforms I was keen on have all stalled.
Then comes how Britain is seen abroad. The Brexit vote was always going to be perceived by critics as a xenophobic yawp, so we needed a prime minister able to assure EU nationals that they would not be threatened and emphasise the global nature of Brexit. Theresa May seemed to relish going the other way, with an abrasive tone and hardly any warm words for our allies.
The idea of Britain turning away from European people (as opposed to the EU) pained me then, and does now. The Dutch, Swedes and Germans needed us to help win battles in the EU and we are deserting them. I like the idea of my children being able to live, work and study anywhere in Europe, and mourn the loss of this.
But this comes down to perhaps the biggest reason why Brexit still has such support, mine included. Things have been working very well for people like me, for some time. But a great many people are concerned, and thought globalism had over-reached. They didn’t want to destroy it, but they wanted it dialled down.
The cliché is of the angry, poorer, lesser-educated white man who felt like they were being ignored or treated like roadkill in front of the juggernaut of modernity. They felt politics was running away from them.
We can see reflections of this the world over. In America, it led to Donald Trump. In Europe, it has led to populism. In Scotland, it almost led to independence.
And in Britain, it led to the narrow vote for Brexit. A democratic realignment, forcing politicians to realise that the rules they are playing by, forged in the late-Nineties, are long out of date. The nation state is back. Border control is back. Neither is a bad thing. Those who value them are not bad people.
If support for Brexit were dependent on how the Tories have handled it, a second referendum would be a slam-dunk for Remain. But it’s about far more – which is why, after weighing it all up, I’m more inclined than I was in 2016 to think that Brexit is necessary. Trying to ignore the demands of those who want it guarantees far worse problems later on.
What, you might ask, could be worse than the political mess we see now? If we give up on Brexit, I suspect we will find out.
2. IMF fears Italian debt spiral, and Macron is making it even more dangerous: Ambrose Evans Pritchard.
Italy is one small shock away from a sovereign default of global scale. The International Monetary Fund is not allowed to state this openly but that is the message of its latest Fiscal Monitor.
The public debt ratio is to ratchet up from 132.1pc of GDP in 2018, to 134.4pc in 2020, and 138.5pc in 2024. The final figure is academic. Bond vigilantes will take matters into their hands long before then.
The budget deficit will blow through 3pc next year, reach 3.7pc by 2022, and approach 4pc by mid-decade in chronic violation of the Maastricht treaty. This all assumes that there is no global recession and that nothing goes wrong.
America is no pretty sight either. Donald Trump’s wasted fiscal stimulus pushes the US debt ratio from 105.8pc to 110pc over the next four years. But the US is a sovereign superpower with its own central bank. It borrows in its own currency. Italy borrows in “D-Marks” that it cannot print.
Lorenzo Codogno, ex-chief economist at the Italian treasury and now at LC Macro Advisors, says Italy may already be beyond the point of no return. We now await the consequences of the summit of Dec 14 when EU leaders set in motion the final denouement, with scarcely a word of comment from the press.
Specifically, it cleared the way for easier sovereign debt restructuring with private creditors. It ruled out rescues by the eurozone bail-out fund (ESM) unless debt is deemed sustainable by the EU authorities. This was imposed by the northern creditor powers.
“Other European countries are preparing for Italy’s default,” said Mr Codogno. Anybody hoping to understand what lies ahead in Euroland should read his bombshell article in the International Economy entitled “Italy’s Coming Banking Crisis”.
If France’s Emmanuel Macron had read it he might be less insouciant about the ramifications of a no-deal Brexit for his own country and for the EU project. Euroland is already in industrial recession. It has no margin for error and no monetary defences.
A cross-Channel rupture of financial links and supply chains is exactly the sort of shock that would crystallise these risks. Were Mr Macron to force such an outcome – this week or at a later review stage – he would risk pushing Italy over the edge.
The lesson of mid-2011 is that once confidence breaks, the bond spreads of the weakest EMU states can go “non-linear” in a heartbeat. There is no saviour this time. The ECB is not allowed to buy Italian debt without formal activation of the ESM rescue machinery and a vote in the Bundestag. “Do whatever it takes” is no longer operative.
The Banque de France is taking its own precautions. The Haut Conseil de Stabilité Financière has quietly raised its countercyclical capital buffer for banks to 0.5pc. So it should.
The French and Italian banking systems are joined at the hip. Exposure to Italy is 47pc of CET1 core capital for BNP Paribas, 29pc for Credit Agricole, and 556pc for the nationalised Franco-Belgian Dexia. Total linkage is equal to 12pc of French GDP. France’s data agency INSEE says a hard Brexit could lop 1.7pc off French GDP. That would leave Mr Macron having to justify his first recession to the gilets jaunes, who are not forgiving.
Risk spreads on Italy’s 10-year bond spreads are currently 256 basis points. Past episodes of stress place the danger line is near 325. That is when contagion hits Portugal and Spain. Rome says the game is up for Italy at 400.
The IMF’s Global Financial Stability Report has a section on the eurozone’s “sovereign bank doom loop”, which is very much alive. Italian banks have built up €360bn (£310bn) of their own country’s debt, or 10pc of total assets. Spain and Portugal are not far behind. “The nexus could spread sovereign strains across the financial system through a complex web of interactions and negative feedback loops,” it said.
Rising spreads force banks to write down holdings under mark-to-market rules. This erodes their capital buffers, forcing them to curb credit. The deepening economic slowdown eats into tax revenues. Government finances become even less sustainable. The vicious cycle feeds on itself.
The fund said a “severe scenario” would drive down Tier 1 capital ratios by 230 points in Italy, 150 in Portugal, and 120 in Spain.
Insurers would be caught in the maelstrom. They own 15pc of eurozone debt and 25pc of bank bonds. They are loaded to the gills with BBB-rated debt. The rating agencies can be relied on to deliver their trademark coup de grace and push the whole financial system over the edge with a string of downgrades.
Yet somehow Mr Macron supposes that his country faces no serious risk from a no-deal Brexit. “France is the best-prepared country,” he says, to the consternation of the French confederation of small business (CPME). It has not even been told what forms to fill out. One can only suppose that Mr Macron is ignoring the amplification effects of a financial and confidence shock in economies already near recession.
Of all the mysteries of the Brexit saga, Mr Macron’s behaviour is the strangest. He must suspect that the eurozone cannot survive the next big downturn as constructed – his own finance minister says so – yet he is pushing brinkmanship with Brexit Britain to the point of rupture.
He is betting everything on a Franco-German condominium, as if it were possible to restore the lost parity of the Fifties when Algeria was still part of France, and a truncated West Germany was governed from Bonn.
French author Coralie Delaume calls this delusional in her new book Le Couple Franco-Allemand N’Existe Pas – no translation needed. A reunited Germany has long since turned towards the hinterlands of Mitteleuropa.
After almost two years Mr Macron’s grand bargain with Germany has come to nothing. Chancellor Merkel has not agreed to any form of fiscal union or joint debt issuance, and why should she since his country is the greatest serial violator of the Stability Pact?
Her successor, Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer, is likely to give him even less. She has charged out of the gates as a German souverainiste opposed to any form of “European superstate”. She wants to close the European Parliament’s second home in Strasbourg.
Mr Macron aims to turn Europe into a first-rank military power yet poisons relations with the one Western European country that actually has fighting forces, and is willing to use them. He pushes Europeanist ideology a l’outrance yet his own people are almost as eurosceptic as the British.
The trouble with doubling down at the gaming table is that in the end you can lose everything.
3. 'Zombie notifications' and the science of social media - how tech giants use psychology to trick us. Olivia Rudgard, US Technology Reporter, San Francisco
'Zombie notifications' - so-named because when you think you have killed them, they rise from the dead
In years gone by, communities might have gathered at church or in the pub to share gossip, form friendships and update each other on their lives. Today, these two great institutions are in decline and instead we have the smartphone.
The little devices in our pockets repeatedly grab our attention, prodding us with alerts and bleeps all day and often all night too. In the decade or so since the creation of the smartphone, we have come to accept this as part of life, sometimes handing over whatever information we are asked for just to keep them quiet. The dopamine hit we get from tapping at our smartphone screens is addictive. But what makes these alerts so irresistible? And what happens when we say we don't want them - but social media refuses to leave us alone?
Ivo Vlaev, a professor of behavioural science at Warwick Business School says consumers are being seduced by the “expectation of reward behind the click”.
When our smartphone gives us a nudge, we expect to see something funny, or interesting, or which makes us more informed about our peers. Our brains are constantly on the hunt for new and surprising knowledge, to improve our understanding of the world and our survival skills. “We are consistently on the lookout for new information, for discrepancies between what we expect and what’s actually out there,” he says.
Naturally, the problem comes when new information is neither funny, nor interesting, nor useful. Take “zombie notifications,” so-named because when you think you have killed them, they seem to rise from the dead. This reporter has her own Facebook notification settings dialed up to exclude all alerts not directly related to her own posts, photographs, events and messages, but until earlier this month was still receiving alerts when distant acquaintances and old schoolmates posted photographs, status updates and links.
Tapping through on the alert to a page entitled “manage settings for this notification” simply brought up a page showing that they were already - in theory - disabled. At peak, these “zombie notifications” were arriving two to three times each week, for months. They only ceased when the Telegraph contacted Facebook to ask about how to turn them off.
A cursory search of Twitter found many other people complaining of the same thing. One British user posted images which exactly matched this experience, showing a notification that a friend had posted a photo followed by a page showing that these alerts were already off. “The gag is I literally saw an ad in brighton train station on thurs telling me ‘facebook lets u control all notifications’,” she wrote. Asked about this, a Facebook spokesman initially said the incidents appeared to be a “bug”, but the company did not respond to further questions about how widespread it was or who it was affecting.
Users also complain of being repeatedly directed to the Marketplace section of the app even when they have nothing to buy or sell. In one example, a Telegraph reporter was sent 16 red notifications prompting him to view rental property in the area in the space of four days, seemingly triggered by a cursory search of properties he made shortly before this onslaught.
It’s not just Facebook. Twitter once told you only about interactions with your own tweets, but now alerts you to tweets it thinks you might be interested in, based on your relationship to the people liking or posting them. A long-term offender is LinkedIn, which regularly alerts its users to posts added by people they rarely interact with, as well as job suggestions and site-generated news and events.
Why are unwanted alerts so irritating, given the dopamine rush notifications usually give us? Vlaev says we are like gambling addicts who have asked for voluntary exclusion from a bookmakers and been sent promotional emails anyway. By turning them off, he says, we are essentially recognising the pointlessness of the alerts. We are saying: “I’m not going to optimise my evolutionary fitness by doing this all the time, clicking on this link.” But this self-preservation instinct is being ignored.
Steven Weber, a professor at UC Berkeley’s school of information, is unsurprised. “Facebook’s business model is it sells advertising. Everyone kind of knows that, but sometimes I feel like it’s not really fully understood, that is the core engine that drives the company, and so everything is about engagement with users, because that’s the fuel,” he says. "Data is like an intermediate product. The fuel that really drives it is your eyeballs on the screen.”
In the disaster zone of social media PR, this might seem like small fry. People are being prompted to look at an app that they have already willingly downloaded and signed up for. It’s nothing when compared with incitement to genocide, anti-vaccine rumours, or dangerous and harmful conspiracy theories which have been seen on Facebook and elsewhere.
Nevertheless, it can be a distraction and a productivity-killer, and there's evidence that social media addiction can eat into sleep and decrease well-being. But until it drives significant numbers of users away, it's unlikely to stop. “People might express a little annoyance but ultimately that’s not the metric that they measure, the metric they measure is user engagement. So unless and until that annoyance translates into less user engagement, there’s no reason for them to really act on it," says Weber.
They might be forced into change. On Tuesday a bill was debated in the US Senate which would curb the ways companies manipulate our behaviour. Known as “dark patterns”, these are confusing pages and unclear default settings which trick users into giving over their personal information. “Misleading prompts to just click the ‘OK’ button can often transfer your contacts, messages, browsing activity, photos, or location information without you even realizing it,” said Deb Fischer, one of two senators who introduced the bill. It is also designed to curb “compulsive usage” among children under 13.
The website which popularised the term, darkpatterns.org, has a “hall of shame” with some of the most egregious examples. In one case, a user was shown a red “1” next to his name while logged out, but upon logging in had no notifications. In another, users have red dots which are impossible to clear next to the Facebook watch tab, or the messenger tab. Other companies use these tactics to confuse users into agreeing to new privacy policies, prevent them from unsubscribing to emails and dissuade them from cancelling subscriptions.
But Weber thinks the bill is likely to fizzle out. “I don’t think we’re going to see any federal legislation that is going to regulate practices on platform firms in any significant way this year.” Tech regulation is not a vote-winner in the US, and the election coming up next year means this is a top concern for politicians. The technology industry has also been lobbying hard to make sure it isn’t subject to punitive regulation, and he believes companies have been doing “just enough” to ensure it doesn’t happen.
Very strict laws, like those recently passed in Australia, are also helpful, because tech companies can hold them up as examples of overreach for wary US legislators. “It would be different if there were Christchurch kind of event inside the United States, and a mass shooting in a New York city subway was streamed live on Facebook for 15 minutes,” he says. “But the zombie notifications? It’s just like a bunch of mosquito bites, at the end of the day.”
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