Spanish life is not always likeable but it is compellingly loveable.
Christopher Howse: A Pilgrim in Spain
Spain
- With a hard Brexit looming, I can go for Spanish or Irish nationality. The former would take 3-4 years, cost me a lot of time and money, cause great stress and mean giving up my British passport. The latter could be done relatively cheaply in 6 months and I'd have dual nationality. A true no-brainer, even if becoming Spanish would be more logical. So, guess who's waiting for a copy of his Irish grandmother's birth certificate.
- Even if I did become Spanish, The Local tells me here (again?) of the 7 Spanish habits I'll never acquire.
- As for Brits in Spain who are probably going to remain British, here's The Local (again) with everything they need to be doing right now.
- Still on Brits in Spain . . . Mark Stucklin writes on the numbers here, taking a punt at why they've been going down and concluding it has little to do with Brexit. MS cites - as I have - the infamous Model 720 as a major reason. And he goes even further than me in his description of it . . . Given that the big decline in European expat communities took place between 2012 and 2014, I assume that one of the factors driving the decline was the introduction of onerous Modelo 720 worldwide asset declaration form in 2012. Many people have told me this is one of the main reasons why they have decided not to live in Spain, so I assume this factor is reflected in these numbers. The Modelo 720 declaration, which looks suspiciously like a cynical ploy by the Spanish tax authorities to grab wealth from expats, is a mind-bogglingly stupid obligation that leaves the country worse off. Spain would attract more expats and tax revenues without it.
- As for Brits who are merely visiting in cruise ships . . . Some Spaniards are shouting Basta ya!
- Here in Pontevedra, work might or might not be proceeding on O Burgo bridge. For several days now, there've been several piles of granite slabs, waiting for someone to do something with them. And there's a fork-lift truck, on the far left:-
The EU
- At least someone is willing to speak truth to power: According to the French Agricultural Minister: President Trump's threat to impose tariffs on French wine in retaliation for France's digital services tax is madness: It's absurd for a political and economic debate to say: You tax the 'GAFA,' we will tax your wine. It's completely stupid. Someone won't be pleased.
- I'll wager you didn't know that Boris Johnson and Emanuel Macron are cut from the same cloth. See the first article below - from AEP - for this revelation.
- Make the most of your summer holidays. Just in case. As: A perfect storm is brewing which could hit Europe hard in the autumn, with devasating economic and political consequences.
- I never knew there was - and could never have imagined there being - a European Cricket League but there is. And this is a video from one match - in Spain! - between Romanian and French sides to prove it.
- One despairs . . .
- Topical word of the Day: Viaje
- When I was young, LC used to mean Luncheon Voucher. Now it's the 'name' of a British Insurance company which I'm pretty sure used to be Liverpool Victoria. They have a TV ad telling you that their quotes come from the heart, with love. Does anyone really believe this?
- A propos . . . Here's a question I read yesterday: When you see an advert for a company trying to come across as progressive, are you more or less likely to buy their products? Do you feel an instinctive affinity with it, and its efforts to change the world in a certain direction? Or do you feel spoken down to, and just wish that the company would get on with the business of providing goods and services? See the article this came from below.
1. Boris Johnson's true political confrère is Emmanuel Macron - not Trump: Ambrose Evans Pritchard, the Daily Telegraph
Boris Johnson and Emmanuel Macron are the true political twins, the sibling intellectual leaders of sibling nations with a powerful sense of their own historical exceptionalism.
Donald Trump is thousands of cultural miles away from this intimate fraternity. His populism is of an entirely different kind, with objectives that have nothing in common with the green, liberal, free-market, pro-immigrant, and globalist ideology of Borisian Brexit.
Whatever sort of political animal Mr Macron purported to be two or three years ago, there can no longer be much doubt that his true colouring has nationalist hues. Note the Cross of Lorraine suddenly appearing in the Macronian coat of arms at the Élysée Palace.
This heraldic double cross dating back into the mists of medieval France was of the symbol of defiance after the loss of Alsace and Lorraine in 1871.
The maquisard Resistance revived it in the Second World War. It was on the flag of Free French forces who landed on Juno Beach in 1944. It is potent stuff.
“Nationalism is a betrayal of patriotism,” said Mr Macron at the D-Day memorial to fervent applause from the gullible globalists. But where does the line between them lie, and how many times has he himself crossed it?
Evocation of French symbols is a hallmark of his presidency. You could hardly miss the copy of Mémoires de Guerre by Charles de Gaulle sitting open on his desk in the official portrait. The Left-leaning books of Indian Nobel economist Amayrta Sen and Labour’s Anthony Giddens - once his guides - are long gone.
Mr Macron abandoned the Socialist Party that reared him when it no longer served as a trampoline. This enarque from the sanctum sanctorum of the French elite campaigned in 2017 as a ‘populist’ outsider - with a chutzpah that exceeds anything that Boris has ever done - against those same elites quietly funding him. He then reinvented himself as the heir to General de Gaulle, the incarnation of la France éternelle.
There is a coherence to this Gaulliste pivot. Mr Macron has smashed the fetid party system of the Sarkozy-Hollande era and reduced the National Assembly to a cipher, just as de Gaulle - “neither Left nor Right” - sought to smash the parties of the Fourth Republic and establish a Jupiterean presidency.
The official portrait shows Mr Macron standing in front of his desk, flanked by the Tricolore and the EU flag. Be careful of this double message. The gold stars of Europe confuse a lot of people.
It has long been Quai d’Orsay orthodoxy that France maximises its leverage and promotes its national power best through the institutional system of the EU, but that does not in itself make French policy less nationalist in purpose.
One of Mr Macron first acts as president was to block a take-over of the French shipyards at St Nazaire by Italy’s Fincantieri. This breached both spirit and law of the EU single market, and he knew it.
France’s Europeanist national strategy was compelling in the early years of the EU project. The Brussels machinery was modeled on the French civil service. A single Frenchman - Émile Noël - ran the Commission from 1958 to 1987. Pre-unification Germany wished to disguise its own rising power and let France lead. The Lotharingian condominium worked for both sides.
Today’s talk of Franco-German parity is quaint etiquette. Berlin took iron control when push came to shove in the eurozone debt crisis. This did not escape the notice of the French people - just as souverainiste by political anthropology as the British. A Pew survey in June 2016 found that 61pc of French voters had an “unfavourable” view of the EU, higher than it was in the UK before the Referendum.
Those numbers are fluid. The surge of Gallic euroscepticism has since subsided. But it is a willful misreading of Mr Macron’s victory in 2017 to proclaim it a vote for Europe. It revealed only the electoral limits of Marine Le Pen. She still won 34pc despite all the baggage of the Front National.
If and when Boris takes up the invitation to visit Mr Macron, the two leaders can swap tales on their World War Two icons, and the Prime Minister can perhaps give the French president a bound copy of his Churchill biography.
They can chew on the Greek and Latin classics, digress into Averroes and Islamic scholarship, talk history for hours, and contrast this richness with the incorrigible philistinism of Donald Trump.
They can spar over who is really the greenest, Mr Macron as the guardian of the Paris Accord and Boris as the champion of net zero emissions by 2050.
If Boris wanted to rattle the French leader, he could let slip that one of his first acts is to ditch the Tory party’s immigration targets and explore an amnesty for illegal migrants - finally killing off the false notion so fatally encouraged by Theresa May that Brexit is all about immigration.
Mr Macron has in the meantime lurched to the right with draconian curbs on migrants, to the point where he threatens to outflank the Front National and is accused of inhumanity by Human Rights Watch for allowing the use of pepper spray against children.
They can each parade their multiculturalism, Boris a step ahead with two Britons of Subcontinent backgrounds in his top four offices of state, and the son of a Czech Jewish refugee at the Foreign Office. Mr Macron talks well but his inner core is strikingly white.
So yes, Boris is the more socially progressive of the two - hiding this from shire Tories with well-honed contempt for political correctness - but the two leaders are at least in the same cultural orbit, alumni of Eton and ENA, and citizens of the world.
Nobody would ever have thought of conflating Boris, Brexit, and contemporary Britain with Trumpian anti-globalism if it had not been for the accident of concurrent timing, and because Mr Trump hijacked the Brexit triumph for his own campaign purposes.
It is true that a blue-collar backlash occurred in both countries - just as it has in France - and that this boosted Brexit numbers. It pushed the Referendum over the line. But that does not tell you what Brexit is all about. A large bloc of the population reached the conclusion long ago that the EU is moving in a direction that cannot be reconciled with democratic self-government. Half France feels much the same way.
I can see why the Liberal Democrats' Jo Swinson wishes to muddy the waters by tweeting pithily that “Boris Johnson is basically what you’d get if you sent Donald Trump to Eton.” It is in her urgent interest to do so. A centrist Boris threatens to eat her political lunch.
What baffles me is that anybody should fall for this slapstick. Why is the false equivalence of Brexit and Trumpism so mechanically repeated in the parts of the UK media, and by that channel across the world, in the face of overwhelming evidence?
Let us just say that perceptions are ‘sticky’ to borrow a term from Keynesian economics. In the end the facts will out. Stay the liberal course, Boris, and dazzle your critics with unexpected actions.
2. From Gillette to Waitrose, 'woke' companies alienate Middle England at their peril: Benedict Spence, Daily Telegraph.
Gillette is under fire from men’s rights activists and rightwing publications for a new advertisement that engages with the #MeToo movement and plays on its 30-year tagline “The Best A Man Can Get”, asking instead: “Is this the best a man can get?”:
There is a price to pay for virtue-signalling to the Millennial market
I have a question for you. When you see an advert for a company trying to come across as progressive, are you more or less likely to buy their products? Do you feel an instinctive affinity with it, and its efforts to change the world in a certain direction? Or do you feel spoken down to, and just wish that the company would get on with the business of providing goods and services?
The answer will of course depend on a number of factors; what the message is, what the product is, and so on. But I suspect the majority reading this will tend to sway one way rather than the other. And that’s because, in today’s market economy, by and large, companies aren’t pitching to you. If anything, they’re actively looking to annoy you.
Increasingly, we are seeing more and more examples of companies ‘going woke’. There was the famous Gillette advert earlier this year, which, to use the lingo, ‘called out toxic masculinity’. Then we had the Colin Kaepernick campaign in the US, when sports giant Nike took a firm line in favour of a certain type of identity politics. In the UK, too, we see it everywhere, from HSBC’s "you are not an island" series (slapping Brexit voters in the face), to Waitrose’ recent announcement that it is to stop stocking game killed using lead shot. Waitrose, meanwhile, is the same supermarket that sacked William Sitwell for a fairly vanilla and obvious joke about vegans.
These are big things and little things, sweeping changes and tweaks, but all with the same aim: to show customers the company is going in a certain direction. The problem is, most customers aren’t following suit.
To take one example, just one in four people in the UK consider themselves ‘feminists’. Just 7 per cent, meanwhile, say they are vegans. For all the talk of a surge in numbers, the percentage of the UK who are signed up members of Jeremy Corbyn’s identitarian Labour outfit is a little over 0.7 per cent.
So, why the drive to go woke?
By and large, it is because the people manning the desks in the PR departments of these companies fall into these demographics; they are young, university-educated, urban middle classes, and therefore have an overblown idea of quite how important, or popular, these views are. It is these same individuals driving the culture of ‘diversity training’ and other such movements in the workplace, straight from the student union culture of forcing men’s rugby teams to attend seminars on rape culture, or leading calls to ‘de-colonise the curriculum’.
In short, companies are looking to appeal to these relatively small demographics, believing either that theirs are the views of now, or, at least, the views of tomorrow. Gillette’s CEO Gary Coombe came out this week to say on record that was what the company was aiming for with its advert, to ‘win the Millennial market’.
In order to do so, Gillette and others essentially have decided to pick sides in an increasingly fractured society, divided down lines of age and politics. The Gillette advert, for instance, angered an awful lot of people for its very deliberate potshots at stereotyped ‘male’ behaviour, whilst Nike’s Kaepernick campaign won it nothing but scorn from a very large, very patriot, swathe of the American public.
Nike’s share price and sales benefitted — the raft of publicity it generated saw its calculated gamble take off. That said, given the demographics it already appealed to in the first place (inner-city American youth culture) that should hardly be considered surprising: South Central LA or downtown Detroit are hardly flag-waving Trump-voter hubs.
But is this a sure-fire winning strategy? Don’t count on it.
For all the Millennial may be the consumer of tomorrow, today is when bills need to be paid. And though Waitrose may feel it is doing some good by cutting out lead shot, for example, that does nothing to endear it to its core consumers who, for now, remain the group with the most disposable income — Middle England.
It is this section of society companies like Waitrose should be appealing to, not making them feel out of touch and unwelcome by taking moral stances on issues many of them don’t agree with, or sacking people for saying the wrong things. Gillette, too, sells far more razors now to white men of a certain age than it probably does to almost all Millennials combined. What kind of strategy is that, to actively alienate them?
The simple fact is, for companies like Waitrose, virtue signalling doesn’t pay wages or rent. Not for no reason is it having to close stores and lay people off — almost 700 are slated to go this month. Sooner or later, the posturing firms and businesses that made their money from Middle England, only to throw it back in their faces are going to have take stock of their decisions, and ask themselves a question of their own: What is the cost of being woke?
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