Spanish life is not always likeable but it is compellingly loveable.
Christopher Howse: A Pilgrim in Spain
Note: A few of the items below have been borrowed from Lenox Napier's Business Over Tapas of last Thursday.
Spanish Politics
- Here's a view on Franco's bones with which I totally concur. Not all Spaniards will agree, of course.
- HT to Lenox for this site providing numerous examples of fake news (bulos) re Cataluña. In Spanish.
- El País tells us here that there are now 2.198 'super wealthy' folk in Spain, 5% more than in 2018. Also in Spanish.
- Spain, it says here. will keep the seasonal clock-changing until 2021, whatever happens in other EU states.
- See that article for the impact of permanent summer time on Galicia. Even, I think, without Spain moving to the 'right' time zone of the UK above it and Portugal to the west of it. Or below it, in the case of Galicia and Portugal.
- Talking of . . . .
- Click here for a sort of explanation of why Spain doesn't occupy the whole Iberian peninsula. Or if you just want to laugh/grimace at some execrable pronunciations of Spanish place names.
- Richard North today: For all that, the issues have been rehearsed with such frequency that even the media seems to be struggling to maintain an interest, while real people are switching off in their droves. Sometime today, something may happen, or it may not. As to the party games in parliament, the mood amongst ordinary people seems to be "wake me up when they're over". With the clocks going back on Sunday, though, we got the first taste of the dark evenings to come, which will make for a difficult election campaign. In a way, that symbolises where we're at. We are entering a period of darkness and it will be a long time before we see the light.
- Me: There's a lot of nonsense said and written about why Brits voted for exit from the EU. The first article below enshrines the view I've had for more than 20 years, since first reading stuff from Richard North and Christopher Booker on the origins and true objectives of the EU. Not the ones that Brits were told about. Everyone is entitled to repudiate this view, of course. Unless their argument merely amount to 'The EU is better for me personally'.
- The second article is from a similar perspective.
- Ffart: You know, [the special forces] are very smart. They’re very technically brilliant. They use the Internet better than almost anybody in the world, perhaps other than Donald Trump. The mind-blowing aspect of those words is that Ffart actually believes the last 5 of them. Then there's the usual reference to himself as someone else. Perhaps that's how he salves his conscience. Not that we've had any evidence at all that he's in possession of one.
- Saturday Night Live does a Ffart rally, in New Mexico. Which is going to have a wall between it and Colorado, says Ffart.
- Tickets for the rugby World Cup final against South Africa are being offered for up to £12,500 on resale website, with one ticket listed as “sold” for more than £50,000. What the market will bear, apparently.
- When I woke this morning, I was pleased to see it was 6am, or 7am before the clocks went back early yesterday morning. So, I got up. An hour later, I realised I'd looked at my Spanish dumbphone, which - unlike my smartphone - still shows Spanish time. Meaning I'd got up at 5am . . .
- I'm now trying to convince myself I've had enough sleep, as I've read that this attitude determines how tired you feel during the day.
1. Neither America nor the EU. Britain must go its own way after Brexit: William Waldegrave, ex Conservative minister.
Britain needs a new narrative. Whether we leave, or whether we stay; whether the prime minister’s deal sticks, or whether some other path leads to a reversal of the decision of 2016, the old stories are dead.
In 2016 we reaped the reward for having, for 40 years, not quite told ourselves the truth about Europe: namely, that it was a political enterprise to bring ever-closer union to the peoples of Europe; to build a new polity that would eventually supersede the nation states. Even the pro-Europeans denied it and said it was all about making money.
Absurdly, people claimed they had been deceived by Europe — “they told us it was just a common market and then made it into something else” — when it was we who were deceiving ourselves. It was always something else. The inevitable slow-motion crash as reality dawned led us to where we are now.
The crash has left us without a plausible national narrative. Winston Churchill and Harold Macmillan had crafted the beneficent myth of the three circles — empire/Commonwealth, America and Europe — at the centre of which Britain played a unique linchpin role.
This myth served us well. But its purpose was to ease our recession from the superpower status we still held in 1945. It has done its job. Let us quietly lay the talk of the special relationship to rest; honour and enjoy the friendships of the Commonwealth, but not imagine it as a source of geopolitical leadership. And as for Europe? Well, we have to start again — even if we stay. Especially if we stay.
Telling a new national story could be a wonderfully liberating thing to do. No more punching above our weight. That way ends in a knockout eventually. As others have freed themselves from past defeats, let us be courageous enough to free ourselves from past victories and look forward.
Nations, like people, are happiest when the identity they choose to celebrate is closest to reality. We need now to craft our national narrative around the truth and talk about the future, not the past.
In my book Three Circles into One, I have tried to start a national conversation about what those future narratives might be. Could it be “Singapore-on-Thames” — a low-taxing, low-regulation entrepôt future, where all that matters is making a safe home for traders?
It’s just possible, I suppose, but I am deeply sceptical that a nation of our size, with our rumbustious democracy and our ancient attachment to individual liberty, could ever stomach the slightly creepy subterranean authoritarianism that allows such stability in the real Singapore.
What about throwing in our lot with America as a sort of political subsidiary of Washington, accepting its trading rules and sailing the seven seas in the wake of the US navy? But why on earth would we want to swap a position as one of the triumvirate that runs Europe for the position of a dinghy tied behind the USS Enterprise? “Taking back control” surely cannot mean that.
Then there is the “returnist” option. If we leave, we could conceivably decide one day to return. If we did so, it would be on different terms. We would need to commit ourselves to the objectives entailed by the Treaty of Rome, join the euro, go for ever-closer union and try to build a European counterweight to our erratic neighbours both to the east and to the west.
This does not seem a very plausible narrative at the moment, at least, and presupposes a successfully surviving and developing EU to rejoin, which is not a certainty. But if Europe were to succeed in its ambitions, there will soon be those who espouse it.
If we do not leave, the principles of returnism are relevant much sooner. We could not scrabble back into the EU, say via a second referendum, still opposing the fundamental ideals of the union, forever in a grumbling minority. If we stay, we should stay as wholehearted members. The old status quo, where we were half in and half out, half for, half against, led us to this place of division and disruption: we cannot simply rewind the reel and go on as before.
Finally, there is a fourth narrative that assumes we do leave. Why not try punching at our weight as an independent, well-run, middle-sized nation, along the lines of Canada?
Give up the trappings of imperial nostalgia — the seat on the security council, the nuclear weapons, the aircraft carriers and the rest. Design a defence strategy aimed at our needs and not the world’s. Put our formidable scientific, institutional and cultural resources to work to rebuild our left-behind former industrial areas. Genuinely lead in both the science and engineering needed to tackle climate change.
Rebuild our battered Union by learning from others how to reform our constitution and make Scotland want to stay. Tell a story of ourselves based on the true position of what could be one of the happiest and most productive nations on earth.
An optimistic and exciting Britain, yes, but not a Britain forever looking backwards to long-gone imperial glory.
2. It’s always more than the economy, stupid: Dominic Lawson
Values matter more to voters than forecasts traduced by politicians
Within the lifetimes of most of our citizens, the size of the British economy will have been reduced to near zero, as a result of Brexit. Zimbabwe will seem like paradise, by comparison. This, at least, was the implication of remarks by Amber Rudd, the erstwhile remain campaigner who quit the cabinet on the (now demolished) proposition that Boris Johnson was not interested in negotiating a deal with the EU.
The former work and pensions secretary told Sky’s Sophy Ridge that leaving the EU would “hurt the economy I think by 4% to 6% a year”. But Rudd went on to say that it was “still the right thing to do” because the country had voted to leave in the 2016 referendum. Even though I voted leave, I would definitely not think it was the right thing to do if I genuinely believed it would knock roughly 5% off the economy every year. At that rate our GDP would have dropped by more than 50% after 15 years, and only Zeno’s paradox would stop it falling to nothingness.
Perhaps what she meant to say was that our economy would imminently shrink by up to 6%, if we changed our existing relationship with the EU to that implied by the prime minister’s deal. As it happens, almost every politician promoting a second referendum is claiming this, and, what’s more, insisting it is what the Treasury’s own figures show.
Thus, at the very start of her Commons speech against the withdrawal bill, the Liberal Democrat leader Jo Swinson declared: “The government’s own assessment in November 2018 looked at the impact of a [replacement] free trade agreement on the British economy and concluded that it would mean that our economy would shrink by more than 6% — greater than the amount that the economy shrank during the financial crash.” Her new colleague Chuka Umunna repeated this almost verbatim. The same assertion was made by the Liberal Democrat representative, Caroline Voaden, on BBC’s Question Time last week.
The presenter Fiona Bruce, usually quick to challenge her panellists, did not query this: perhaps because it is being said so often that she too believes it to be true. But it is a grotesque falsehood. What the Treasury assessment of 2018 actually said was that the British economy would be about 6% smaller in 15 years, under a free trade agreement, than it would have been had we remained in the EU. But given that the Bank of England and Office for Budget Responsibility also assume a “trend” annual growth rate of around 1.5%, this implies we will have a significantly larger economy in 15 years, albeit less large than it would have been if we had stayed in the EU (roughly 18% bigger, rather than 24% bigger).
Brexit campaigners have long argued that the Treasury models — which in 2016 spewed out the nonsense that if we voted leave the economy would instantly go into recession with a rise in unemployment of at least 500,000 — are deeply flawed. But even on the Treasury’s own disputable 2018 assumptions (one of which had zero net migration from the EU) its forecasts are for continued growth in the economy.
These dishonest or ignorant campaigners for a “People’s Vote” have also seized on a much more recent report by the highly regarded UK in a Changing Europe, to claim it as “proof” we will be doomed to poverty outside the institutions of the EU. The actual analysis, headed by the distinguished former chief economist at the Cabinet Office Jonathan Portes, forecasts that on the basis of the “goods-only” — or Canada-minus — trade deal Johnson wants with the EU, per capita GDP (the figure that really matters to people) would be around 5% smaller in 10 years than if we had remained part of the EU single market and customs union. Put simply, the figures suggest that in 10 years’ time our per capita GDP would have risen from its current level of £31,000 to £33,500 under Johnson’s envisaged trade deal, compared to £35,500 if we had remained in the EU. So even on this projection, the notional average British citizen would not feel any sense of economic loss: that occurs when we lose what we had, or assumed we would have.
Both this and the 2018 Treasury forecasts are based on the so-called gravity model, which asserts an inverse square law between distance and benefit in international trade: for example, it presumes that distance alone will reduce trade between the UK and China, relative to that between the UK and France, by around 280-fold. This is the mainstream economists’ critique of the Brexit strategy of relying less on trade with the low-growth EU and negotiating bilateral trade deals with the fastest-growing parts of the world.
But the shrinking costs of transport, new internet-based technology and the rise of “weightless” trade in services offer a challenge to the gravity model. Portes himself notes conscientiously: “As with all forecasts, the findings of this report should be used with caution . . . Modelling economic impacts of hypothetical scenarios is fraught with difficulty.”
It’s not clear the EU itself shares the view that the UK is going to be enfeebled by leaving. The German chancellor, Angela Merkel, warned that post-Brexit, “a potential competitor will emerge for us. That is to say, in addition to China and the USA, there will be Great Britain as well.” And France’s European affairs minister, Amélie de Montchalin, complained: “I don’t want to be confronted with a fiscal paradise on Europe’s doorstep.” The UK probably won’t become the so-called “Singapore-on-Thames” the EU fears: but it’s striking how nervous they are about how we will exploit our autonomy outside their regulatory one-size-fits-all system.
It was a desire for greater national autonomy — notably over immigration — and not economic self-interest, which animated the 17.4m who voted leave. Telling them: “you idiots, you will make yourselves poorer,” is not just itself idiotic: it completely misreads what was, at its heart, a demand for more national democratic accountability and a greater closeness between the rulers and the ruled.
After all, if it were the case that only financial self-interest, rather than a values-based sense of what feels right, was the sole determinant of votes, then no one of well above average income would ever vote Labour. But they do in their millions, because they have a vision of what sort of country they want to live in. That doesn’t make them stupid, or contemptible.
But it is stupid and contemptible to threaten leave voters with false claims of imminent penury and mass unemployment, as part of a campaign to persuade them that they made a terrible mistake in not believing the same scare stories first time around.
Fortunately for their peace of mind, they have long since stopped listening.
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