Dawn

Dawn

Thursday, June 27, 2019

Thoughts from Galicia, Spain: 27.6.19

Spanish life is not always likeable but it is compellingly loveable. 
                  Christopher Howse: A Pilgrim in Spain
Spain
  • Details on that heat wave . . .
  • And advice on how to complain about it in Spanish.
  • Spain's impressive cuisine. Well . . . that of the Basque Country and Cataluña.
  • Some more of Spain's pluses.
  • During the phone bum (boom) of 2002-7, Spain's population - as I recall - rose by around 10%, from around 40m to around 44m. Then - during La Crisis - it fell back, as immigrants returned home and young Spaniards fled to seek work elsewhere. But now it's rising rapidly again. Maybe all those unoccupied new(ish) homes will eventually be sold.
  • A friend has told me that at least part of last Sunday's religious procession comprised some of Pontevedra's lawyers. The men I compared to a mafia group. Here they are, carrying a statue of their patron, The White Virgin of Lawyers:-
  • And here's a foto of something bizarre that's recently appeared in front of the city's Fine Arts building, near the Alameda. A dog is about to show its appreciation of it. On behalf of all of us:-

UK Politics/Brexit
  • Now far too boring to comment on. Though the first article below is pertinent. And well worth a read.
The EU
  • The EU will come to regret its economic blackmail of Switzerland. The Swiss have become mere collateral in the EU’s desire to cow Britain into submission. See the second article below.
Social Media/The Way of the World/The USA  
  • Breakthroughs in telecommunications inevitably trigger social rupture, and often wars and revolutions: the invention of the printing press, mass-market newspapers, the radio, terrestrial TV – which drove protests and dramatic social change in the Sixties – and satellite TV. The internet and social media are testing our remaining structures to destruction. If you haven't already done so, see the first article below.
Spanish
Finally . .

  • 17 things not to do when staying in other people's houses:-
    1. When your host says “What can I get you for breakfast?” the answer is “I’ll make myself some toast”. It’s not “What’s on offer?” thereby forcing them to start listing all the cooked options like a brunch waiter. 
    2. Don’t get up late or early, both are equally tiresome.
    3. Unless you have been specifically asked to bring your dog, don’t.
    4. If your dog is discovered to have messed everywhere, clear it up, rather than assume your hosts have it covered. 
    5. When your host says “Would anyone like a glass of rosé?”, the correct response is “How lovely” and not “Ooh, have you got any champagne?”
    6. Do not spring any dietary surprises. As in suddenly announcing you’re not that keen on prawns on prawn night.
    7. Do fit in with your host's plans. If they’ve arranged for you to go to drinks with the Whatsits, on no account say “I think I’ll just stay here if you don’t mind”. They do mind.
    8. Don’t know more about the area than they do. Very tactless. No-one likes to think others got there first.
    9. Don’t as if it would be OK if your other friends who live locally nipped over and had a look around, maybe stayed for supper.
    10. Don’t be a lifestyle stalker. A certain amount of snooping is par for the course, and even flattering. But don’t wander around like an estate agent sizing up the fittings and furnishings and asking how much everything cost.  
    11. Don’t have an opinion on your hosts' recent renovations.
    12. Don’t steal: Apparently some guests think certain items are on the Do Help Yourself list, e.g. books in the spare bedroom, bottled water, hats they borrowed for a walk.
    13. Don’t take back the things you brought if they're unused. Just because no-one ate the gouda doesn't mean it's yours to reclaim.
    14. Don’t pick a fight with their children or the other guests, or alternatively show no interest in the children or the other guests. 
    15. Don’t bang on about anything unless your hosts are clearly dying for you to. 
    16. Don’t use all the hot water.
    17. Do get on the right side of the dogs.

    THE ARTICLES

    1. Remainers' irrational terror of Boris epitomises our toxic new politics: Allister Heath, the Daily Telegraph

    Our national discourse has mutated into a holy war

    What has happened to us, to our politics, to our pragmatism? There was a time when, even after a heated discussion, we could agree to disagree, perhaps after a reconciliatory drink, and part as friends: yet that was before wilful misrepresentation, hysterical catastrophism and ad hominem argumentation became the norm.

    These days, it’s easier to discuss erstwhile taboo subjects such as money, religion or even sex than it is to discuss Brexit or Jeremy Corbyn. People are developing sophisticated political radars to gauge whether an acquaintance is on-side or not before they dare to broach politics.

    Millions are retrenching into their comfort zones: a YouGov poll earlier this year showed that 37 per cent of Remainers would be upset if a close relative married a Brexiteer. The latter remain more open-minded, but both sides are isolating themselves, fuelling a vicious circle whereby misunderstanding builds upon misconception.

    Like in America, our discourse has mutated into a holy war, with two rival theologies pitted against one another, convinced that the other side is not just wrong but also self-evidently morally inferior. It’s a horrendous, civilisation-imperilling regression. We no longer debate: we try to annihilate the other side, destroy our opponents, get them fired from their jobs. We don’t really attempt to convince, either. Our gang can do no harm; theirs can do no right. We are moral; they are immoral. It’s barbaric and it is profoundly illiberal.

    This applies to the battle of Brexit, of course, but also increasingly to all other political issues, from attitudes to crime and punishment to the economy, with the Corbynite machine another driver of polarisation. There are only two tribes, and we all have to be conscripted into one: a simplistic form of Manichaeism is now all but compulsory. There is no third way, no nuance, and no benefit of the doubt.

    The extreme reaction triggered by the possibility that Boris Johnson could become our next prime minister provides a perfect illustration of our descent into post-democratic nihilism. I hope Boris wins, that he assembles a brilliant team and that he delivers Brexit and an economic and political renaissance, against all the odds.

    But to a vocal minority, the prospect of Boris as PM is absolute anathema: they cannot imagine anybody worse. Corbyn may come for their house and assets, but they don’t care: irrationally, it’s Boris, a social liberal who wants to cut their taxes and likes banks, whom they loathe. With anybody else, they would disagree, even furiously; they would wish them to fail and campaign against them. But with Boris, the response is sheer, unmitigated fury: it’s a reaction that transcends the range of usual political emotions.

    It’s not just that they believe he would be incompetent or wrong or misguided or unfocused. It is more akin to an allergic reaction: Toby Young, the journalist, has described this affliction as Boris Derangement Syndrome, itself a condition brought about by Brexit. They cannot see anything good about Boris, and want to believe the absolute worst in him.

    Many believe that he ought, by rights, to be a Remainer: they see him as a class traitor because educated, internationally minded people are not meant to be Brexiteers. They believe that he didn’t tell the truth in the referendum, conveniently forgetting all of the Remain side’s wild exaggerations. Uber-Remainers are also triggered by Boris as a person: he symbolises the amateurish, chaotic, eccentric Brit, pitted against the expert European technocrat. No wonder the idea that he paints red double-decker buses on boxes has pushed so many round the bend.

    Such pathological hatred is merely the logical end-game of a polity in crisis, where trust has evaporated. In a Centre for Policy Studies panel discussion I took part in this week, the US journalist Megan McArdle argued that the crisis befalling our politics is the product of technological upheaval.

    Breakthroughs in telecommunications inevitably trigger social rupture, and often wars and revolutions: the invention of the printing press, mass-market newspapers, the radio, terrestrial TV – which drove protests and dramatic social change in the Sixties – and satellite TV. The internet and social media are testing our remaining structures to destruction.

    There is a lot to be said for this explanation, but it is best combined with another shift that predates Twitter: the emergence of an ultra-emotional, secular righteousness as the main force on the Left, replacing both Marxist-style class war and consensual social-democratic approaches. Old-fashioned socialism at least pretended to be intellectual; its proponents used to claim that conservatives were the emotional ones. The new Left, by contrast, pride themselves as explicitly instinctive, governed by passion and snap moral judgments.

    The seminal works here are the social psychologist Jonathan Haidt’s The Righteous Mind, as well as his more recent The Coddling of the American Mind. As Haidt points out, there are six main moral intuitions: fairness, justice, liberty, loyalty, authority and sanctity.

    The Left judge almost everything by the first two, and don’t really realise that there are moral intuitions other than their own, fuelling their anger; the Right by the last four, though they are usually more aware of the first two, which makes them more puzzled than angry. Such self-awareness is a key differentiator between Lefties, conservatives and libertarians.

    The framework can also explain the row over the EU, though in this case both sides are a combination of Left and Right. Brexiteers tend to emphasise liberty – the right of nations to govern themselves. Remainers are sticking up for the authority of the elites and the establishment. Both sides are loyal, but some to the idea of Europe and others to that of the UK.

    Western societies were meant to have evolved beyond such atavistic modes of behaviour: pure reason, rather than gut feeling, was meant to rule the world. It turns out that beneath a veneer of sophistication, we remain as driven by passion as ever. We are judgmental, tribal animals. It’s a humbling, crushing realisation: progress is impossible and civilisation is always on the brink. Whether or not Brexit happens – and I dearly hope that it does – the UK’s political crisis is not about to end any time soon.

    2. The EU will come to regret its economic blackmail of Switzerland: Pieter Cleppe, Open Europe, the Daily Telegraph.

    The Swiss have become mere collateral in the EU’s desire to cow Britain into submission

    While Brexit negotiations have stalled, tensions between the European Union and Switzerland are ramping up.

    Since 2014, Switzerland and the EU have been trying to amalgamate their existing 120 bilateral treaties into a single agreement. Yet the Swiss refused to concede to EU terms without clarification on certain issues; in response the EU now looks likely to cut off Swiss stock exchanges from the Single Market within days in retaliation for their failure to ratify the treaty quickly enough.

    As a leak last week revealed, their reasons for doing so are, quite transparently, to make an example of Switzerland “in what is probably the decisive phase regarding Brexit”, according to the commissioner in charge of the talks. In other words, Switzerland, a member of EFTA and Schengen, a country that has paid billions into the Brussels coffers over decades, and enjoyed a largely amicable trading relationship, has become mere collateral in the EU’s desire to cow Britain into submission.

    But the Swiss are refusing to back down, threatening to retaliate by banning EU stock exchanges from trading Swiss shares. About 30% of trading in Swiss blue-chips takes place in London. Opposition is not only coming from the right-wing populist Swiss People's Party, but also from trade unions. The Swiss Parliament has instructed the government to return to the negotiating table.

    For the EU, these problems date back to the 1980s, and an initiative by then-Commission President Jacques Delors, who inspired the legendary Sun headline “Up Yours Delors!” following one of his clashes with Margaret Thatcher. Delors, keen to design a uniform system to deal with neighbouring “third countries”, proposed to grant them full access to the single market, but only in return for adopting all the EU’s rules and standards. Lack of a veto over these rules inspired Jens Stoltenberg, the PM of Norway, which did adopt this arrangement, to brand his country a “fax democracy”. It didn’t take sovereignty-loving Swiss voters long to figure this out, and they rejected a similar arrangement in a referendum in 1992.

    Back then, the EU respected this outcome and went on to negotiate a package of bilaterals, granting the Swiss selective market access in return for selective rule-taking. Today, however, the EU dismisses this arrangement, which closely resembles the government’s “Chequers plan” for the future EU-UK relationship, as “cherry picking”.

    There are many parallels between Brexit and the EU-Swiss relationship, and in fact the British government should be ramping up coordination with Switzerland, to counter the EU’s attempts to increase its regulatory powers on the back of disrupting business.

    The proposed framework agreement between the EU and Switzerland contains two issues that would be troubling not just for Swiss politicians, but could be rejected in the Swiss public referendum which will follow if their government concedes to the EU terms. First of all, the agreement introduces an arbitration mechanism, with a role for the European Court of Justice, into the Swiss-EU relationship. Until today, that wasn’t the case - all previous disputes were resolved by politicians. The arbitration mechanism anticipated in the framework agreement is effectively the same as that agreed by Theresa May with the EU in November. The Swiss government seems to have conceded on this issue, but whether it will survive its own direct democracy is another question.

    Secondly, the EU favours “dynamic alignment”, which means that the Swiss would be forced to accept updates of the EU rules they have aligned with in return for market access. It is a long-standing EU frustration that this wasn’t negotiated in the 1990s. The reason was of course the deep Swiss attachment to democracy and suspicion of agreeing to accede to EU rules that aren’t properly understood.

    All in all, the Swiss-EU relationship has been so smooth that the EU’s ultimatums and threats to restrict trade look disproportionate and uncharitable in the extreme. Switzerland has contributed billions to EU projects, and granted free movement, so that today almost one in four inhabitants of Switzerland does not have Swiss nationality, 80 per cent of whom are EU citizens. In short, how can the EU treat a friendly neighbour in this way?

    In 2018, eleven EU countries, including Germany and the UK, opposed the EU Commission when it suggested cutting off access for Swiss stock exchanges. Now the Commission is getting its way, ignoring warnings from Business Europe, the confederation of European industry, not to escalate.

    One EU diplomat told the FT that because “we’re not going to treat the Brits any worse than Switzerland”, hinting that failure to punish Switzerland with loss of market access for refusing to bow would be seen as a dangerous precedent. Though Switzerland will likely manage to mitigate the damage through its protective measures, it would signal that the EU is willing to restrict market access when it fails to increase its regulatory control over a trading partner.

    Given the deep seated love of self-government in both Switzerland and the United Kingdom, two of the oldest democracies in the world, self-destructive attempts to hurt trade in a bid to gain more regulatory control will only fail. When faced with a European country that does not seek to belong to the customs union or single market, yet nevertheless enjoys a smooth trading relationship with the bloc, the EU should not abandon the flexibility that has driven prosperity on both sides, over decades. Instead, it should channel some of its past pragmatism in approaching its future relationship with the United Kingdom.

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