Spanish life is not always likeable but it is compellingly loveable.
Christopher Howse: A Pilgrim in Spain
Spain- Joaquín Sorolla [y Bastida] is one of my favourite artists and I've visited his house/museum/ gallery in Madrid a couple of times. Highly recommended. Here's news of an exhibition in Dublin. You might have missed it in London.
- But, if paper-folding is your bag, this will be of interest, assuming you're living in or visiting Spain.
- Still on culture, as widely defined . . . . Everyone knows that the Spanish adore noise. Less well known is their love of flames. See here for something described as even madder than Las Fallas of Valencia.
- Many - but not all - Spaniards also enjoy doing things to bulls. And some of these folk even go so far at to combine bulls and flames. Though not impressively.
- A cockle warming tale.
- Galicians are getting ever more anxious/angry/vociferous about Portugal's success in attracting both customers - think plane passengers - and businesses to the north of the country. I do hope some saner voices are calling for an examination of how they're doing this, rather than just playing the victim.
- A headline you won't see very often: A knifeman carrying a ferret attacks a government worker.
- See the article below for some timely advice, maybe, for Brussels.
- Nice quotes:-
- Bucket lists are killing the places we love. Travel should be about human contact, not the joyless tick-box and selfie-stick mentality of the world’s tourist hotspots.
- An old rule: when politicians talk about the importance of compromise, they mean compromise by everyone else.
- Just in case you ever wondered about those voices in your head. . .
- Beware the emasculating spirit of Jezebel.
Does any other developed country give such prominence to people like this?
The US
- Times cartoon . . .
- More than 300,000 citizens have signed a petition about the change of a street name in New York which would mean Trump Towers' address would read President Barrack Obama Avenue. Nice one.
- An interesting take on the Fart marriage.
- I asked the other day about how stupid Fart really is. Here's one answer.
- Word of the Day:- Comecocos. The first sentence seems to be missing and presumably refers to comer meaning 'to eat'. The citation of origami is a nice coincidence. Or is it??
- Last night's 8.30 concert near my table was traditional Galician ('Celtic') music. To my relief, it was a bit quieter than those of previous nights but, if I'm honest, equally un-melodic. Don't tell anyone Galician I wrote this. Especially my good friend, Fran.
Europe risks losing the UK to the Americans for half a century unless it changes course fast: Ambrose Evans Pritchard, The Daily Telegraph.
For three years the EU has treated Brexit chiefly as a disciplinary issue. Brussels is learning late that Britain’s strategic realignment is just as much a bidding war, and Europe’s bid has come in too low.
The Americans have swooped into the vacuum. They have wooed this nation with sweet whisperings. Unless the Europeans attempt some seduction themselves – and I would not count on it – Washington will steal the diplomatic prize from under their noses.
Britain is a diminished prize but not a trivial one. It still absorbs €400bn (£370bn) of EU goods each year, Europe’s biggest surplus market. The military spending of the US, UK and Canada together is four times greater than the combined defence budget of the rump EU.
The UK will be drawn deep into the North American orbit. This is incompatible with the EU’s regulatory structure. Once it happens, there will be no turning back in my lifetime. Trading patterns will harden for half a century or more.
The French and German leaders – among others – have both stated that Britain must pay a price for leaving the EU treaty mechanisms. The terms must be worse than the existing status quo, and be seen to be worse. It is the “no cherry-picking” doctrine.
The EU did not have to take this course. It might have concluded that the federalising logic of monetary union was always going to rub against the British political grain, and therefore that an amicable separation on terms of mutual recognition would be in everybody’s interest.
A group of leading European academics argued for a new dispensation along these lines, calling for a Continental Partnership for all the nations in the EU that want close ties without the conveyor belt of ever greater integration. “There may be a temptation to apply punitive terms to the UK’s exit and the new relationship,” they said. “An exceedingly unfavourable deal would be liable to damage everyone and would not achieve cohesiveness within the EU itself.”
Others issued parallel warnings. Germany’s former EU commissioner Günter Verheugen said Brussels had “taught us a lesson in how one should not deal with a member state that wants to leave.” The country’s IFO Institute said the EU was playing a “very dangerous game” trying to trap the UK into a colonial relationship and warned that any deal perceived as coercive would fall apart.
It also predicted that Britain would find a better suitor if pushed too far. That is more or less what is now unfolding. The diplomatic tornado of the last two weeks has been astonishing. The EU is, for the first time, faced with a war of manoeuvre. European officials continue to talk sternly about the terms of another Brexit extension, as if that were the matter in hand, and as if they still controlled events.
The twin visits of Dominic Raab and Liz Truss to Washington last week were a watershed. If you want a loose 1940 parallel, this was “destroyers for bases” and the Tizard Mission, the precursor of lend-lease. The US will be on Britain’s “doorstep, pen in hand” waiting to sign a fast-track trade deal, said secretary of state Mike Pompeo.
White House national security advisor John Bolton is offering “sector-by-sector” trade deals in rapid-fire succession, purportedly with no “quid pro quo”. He suggested that US lawyers have found a way to circumvent WTO restrictions on partial trade accords.
Legal challenges would take at least a year. By then events will have moved a long way. The WTO is in any case fighting for its institutional life. Its charter mission is to bring about the freest trade possible. If it were to become a forum for obstructing trade in the unique circumstances of post-Brexit disruption, it would be courting fate.
Countries contemplating challenges would have to weigh this carefully. Mr Bolton has long upbraided the EU for treating voters as peasants. In a speech to the American Enterprise Institute two years ago, he compared Brexit to the American Revolution. Both were attempts to reassert long-held prerogatives of self-government being whittled away.
“It was a vote against distant, arbitrary, unaccountable power,” he said. “Brussels, to the majority of the British people, was the George III that we saw.
“The hidden story is that within the EU itself – though EU leaders don’t like to say it – they see it the same way. It is why they are so worried about the precedent of Brexit. There is a secular theology about the EU, which basically holds that no rational person can disagree with the idea that the EU is a good thing. That’s why the UK’s heresy is so threatening, and why the blasphemers must be punished.”
The EU gamble of the last three years has essentially failed. Britain has not been tamed a la Grecque. It has been driven further away. Yet Europe’s policy elites have yet to face up to the implications. Some cling to the hope that Parliament will block a no-deal. Others repeat like a stuck record that Boris Johnson will gain nothing from bluff.
Brussels is now drifting into an economic and geostrategic crisis. German output contracted in the first quarter. Forward looking-indicators point to a German-Italian industrial recession spreading through the eurozone economy by the end of the year.
The EMU bond markets are pricing in a deflationary slump. The currency bloc has no mechanism to fight this. Interest rates are already minus 0.4pc. Further cuts risk doing more harm than good through damage to the banking system.
Quantitative easing cannot force any meaningful compression of maturity spreads at this point. Only fiscal largesse on a grand scale can lift the eurozone off these reefs. That is made almost impossible by the EU’s legal machinery of spending restraint, and by the long shadow of German fiscal ideology.
The chances are that it will soon face a eurosceptic Salvini government in Italy with a “minibot” parallel currency in its back pocket. The composite nature of the EU and fundamental disputes over how the eurozone should be governed leave the European project with a low pain threshold. How low? We will find out in the coming downturn.
Is Britain’s Trump temptation an invitation to jump from the frying pan into the fire? There is a critical difference. NAFTA is not a customs union. Free trade with America does not entail the legal subordination of the EU political market, or the writ of the US supreme court over large areas of national life.
Under the EU’s Political Declaration the UK must accept chunks of the Acquis indefinitely. It stipulates “level-playing field clauses” over state aid, competition, the environment, social policy, employment, climate change, and “relevant tax matters”. The state aid clause means the EU will retain a hold over Britain’s farm support policies. Fishing quotas will remain.
The UK must accept the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights “as an essential prerequisite” for talks. This has nothing to do with trade. Recent cases have shown that the European Court is determined to use this to pursue broad judicial activism.
The stasis of the Acquis blocks radical reform by Left or Right. A deal with the US will certainly be a “tough old haggle” – as Boris put it – and inevitably entails bowing to predominant US power, probably beginning with Huawei.
But to present the British dilemma as a choice between two variants of infeudation is to misunderstand the European project. The US is offering a trade deal. The EU aims to maintain a lockhold over how this country governs itself. Chalk and cheese.
No comments:
Post a Comment