Spanish life is not always likeable but it is compellingly loveable.
Christopher Howse: A Pilgrim in Spain
Spanish Politics- This article, from the USA, puts Spanish developments in a wider - and worrying - context.
- El País distinguishes here between the astonishing Gürtel and ERE corruption cases. I'm not sure I'm totally clear on the distinction(s). At least they share one aspect - no one really knows whose accounts all the money ended up in. And little, if any, has been returned.
- The Times avers that Franco's legacy continues to a long shadow over Spain. See the first article below.
- I didn't know that your driving licence here tells the police a lot about both your car and about you. As regards the latter, the numbers on the card tell them whether you have any of these restrictions:-
- Can only drive within a radius of X km from the house
- Cannot drive above X kph
- Can only drive accompanied by another driver
- Can't drive on autovias/autopistas
- Is excluded from taking any alcohol [bus and taxi drivers??]
Is this level of detail unique to Spain? I've never heard of anything like it in the UK but might well be out of touch.
- Sad to hear that an increasing percentage of Spain's 14-18 year olds are smoking. The number is up from 8 to 9%, with 50% of them having vaped this year.
- Even sadder to read how high the incidence of domestic violence is down in Andalucia. Is the blood also hotter down there? Ironically, this is where Vox - with its aim of abolishing the concept of male violence - first came to power. Perhaps it's no coincidence.
- I've mentioned that little or nothing seemed to have been done on Pontevedra's O Barco bridge during the 6 weeks I away. Specifically, I'm sure this pile of the (ugly) new metal railings was there when I left:-
Yes, they do look like cages for chickens in a battery farm.
The UK, the EU and Brexit
- If you think - either as a Brexiteer or a Remainer - that Brexit will be done and dusted by the end of 2020 - as promised by Boris Johnson - then you need to read either Richard North's blog today or the article below.
- I'd guess the writer of this article is pretty left wing, though not necessarily wrong. A Taster: They celebrated Draghi for “saving the euro.” There’s some truth to this last claim. But it’s rather a questionable achievement. Precisely because Draghi “saved” the euro, he’s also the man who blackmailed governments into implementing crippling austerity measures and neoliberal “structural reforms” — and who crushed whoever dared to resist. He is the man chiefly responsible for transforming the eurozone from a dysfunctional but formally democratic monetary union into an unprecedented governance structure in which governments are disciplined and punished. Through the mechanisms pioneered by Draghi and his “activist” approach to central banking, formal democratic processes have been systematically subverted through financial and monetary blackmail — first and foremost at the hands of the ECB. Under such governance structures, one may reasonably question whether eurozone member states can still be considered democracies, even according to the narrow “bourgeois” understanding of the concept. Ultimately, Draghi symbolizes the dangerous rise to power of the unelected technocrats — “experts” who claim to be untainted by politics, but who in fact embody capital’s desire for unfettered domination.
- Who knows? There might be some intelligent folk who favour Brexit on these grounds, as opposed to merely hating foreigners and dreaming of a revived British empire.
- As for the future . . . One hopes this isn't totally true.
The USA
- Can Ffart's Republican defenders stoop any lower? I guess so. Vamos a ver. The good news is that their self-abasement in Ffart's favour seems to be counter productive.
- Word of the Day: Prevaricación. 'A false friend', thanks to those go-everywhere Romans.
- Spanish: To criminally hand down a verdict/judgment which you know to be false. In the words of the dictionary of the AR: Delito consistente en que una autoridad, un juez o un funcionario dicte a sabiendas una resolución injusta.
Finally
- DIY is not my thing. But I regard this bolt on a bar's bathroom door to be beyond even my level of incompetence:-
If you haven't realised it's upside down, you're even worse than me.
THE ARTICLES
1. Gone but not forgotten: Franco’s legacy casts long shadow over Spain: Isambard Wilkinson
The dictator’s exhumation comes at a time when the country has never been more politically fragmented or polarised.
Shining new tiles behind the altar indicate where Francisco Franco’s grave lay until last month when Spain’s Socialist government removed his body from the vast tomb known as the Valley of the Fallen, where it had lain since he died in 1975.
Today is the first time the Prior of the Abbey of the Holy Cross and his monks have commemorated the November 20 anniversary of Franco’s death in the absence of the dictator’s remains. “The exhumation was a profanation of the church,” says Father Santiago Cantera. “It’s a basic human right for the dead to be left in peace." Pedro Sánchez, Spain’s acting prime minister, however, called it “a great victory for Spanish democracy”. Most Spaniards agree but they could be forgiven for wondering whether the exhumation has effectively brought El Caudillo back from the dead.
It came just before a general election that left Spain more politically fragmented and polarised, with the ultra-nationalist Vox becoming the country’s third biggest party.
Spain was considered immune to the far right but the rise of Vox has prompted warnings from the left about a return to the dark years of Franco, who ruled from 1939 after his civil war victory, until his death.
Analysts reject the spectre of a return to the Franco years as scaremongering to mobilise left-wing voters but the dictator’s exhumation and Vox’s electoral success have revived questions over Spain’s attitudes about the dictator and the legacy of the civil war.
The political polarisation has also led to further unpicking of La transición, Spain’s much-lauded smooth transit from dictatorship to democracy in the late 1970s.
The basilica, carved into a pine-forested mountain northwest of Madrid and surmounted with a cross one and a half times higher than the Statue of Liberty, has now become the focus of this debate.
Subterranean, windowless, a modernist mausoleum built on a pharaonic scale, the church is Spain’s biggest mass grave. Its catacombs contain the remains of nearly 34,000 Spaniards who died during the civil war. Partly built with forced labour, Franco originally intended it only to honour his own side, but, to give the impression of national reconciliation, he also filled it with bodies of Republicans dug up secretly from mass graves. They were not the fallen of war but those executed in cold blood.
Last week Spain’s government said it would try to exhume the remains of 31 of those Republicans whose families had requested for them to be reburied elsewhere, redressing what Mr Sánchez called a national “dishonour”.
Looking out across snow-powdered rocks surrounding the basilica, Father Santiago - a Franco sympathiser whose resistance to El Caudillo’s exhumation was overruled by the Vatican - says he opposes the proposal. “The state has now assumed powers over human remains that allow it to violate sacred places,” the Benedictine prior told The Times. “The Valley of the Fallen was created to honour all the dead of the war,” he added. “Our daily job is to pray for Spain’s peace. But that peace is now in danger because exhumations are stirring up old animosities and divisions.”
However, fresh roses on what is now the only tomb in the basilica marked with a name, that of the fascist leader José Antonio Primo de Rivera, and the ceiling mosaic of its dome depicting Nationalist forces heroically fighting alongside an artillery cannon, still tell the dictator’s version of history.
Emilio Silva-Barrera is among those leading the fight to end what he calls “the pact of silence” over Spain’s Francoist past. He co-founded the Association for the Recovery of Historical Memory after he discovered the remains of his own grandfather, who was executed by Franco’s forces, in a mass grave in Leon. For him, the dictator’s exhumation was an essential part of reparations to his victims.
“Since Franco’s exhumation we have received hundreds of emails from people asking us to find out if their grandfathers are buried in the Valley of the Fallen or to help them remove them,” he says.
Mr Silva criticises La transición, which was underpinned by an amnesty for Franco’s supporters. “The reconciliation was between political parties, not between people,” he says. “My family did not renounce the right to know where my grandfather was buried.”
About 100,000 civil war victims of Franco’s forces are thought to lie in unmarked graves. After Mr Silva’s group started leading exhumations of Republicans from mass graves across Spain, the former Socialist government of José Luis Zapatero in 2007 passed the Law of Historical Memory, supporting research into the civil war’s disappeared and ordering the removal of Francoist symbols from public view. But the law has been divisive, sparking criticism from right-wingers who say it broke the spirit of the transition. Vox’s leaders say they want to repeal it, claiming that their vocal opposition to Franco’s exhumation boosted support for their party, although their opposition to Catalan separatism was the main driver for their rapid success.
“The Republicans assassinated my grandfather and dumped his body in the sea,” said Luis Gestoso, a Vox MP. “But I don’t want to throw that in anyone’s face. It was a civil war. The worst kind of war. We should not open old wounds.”
It’s a debate that’s been cynically commandeered by politicians, says Carmen González, a senior analyst at the Elcano Institute think-tank in Madrid. “The debate has been crafted by politicians but it does not reflect public opinion,” she says. “Most Spaniards believe the Francoist legacy has been completely overcome.” But she says the rise of Vox does not equate with Francoism. “Too many things and years have passed since Franco, she says. “Vox is explained by present conflicts, there is no need to look at the distant past .” Ms Gonzalez adds that her own grandfather was executed by Franco’s forces and her family does not know where his body lies. “I don’t care. It is only a corpse.” Her father and her brother both married women from right-wing families. “It made it impossible to speak about the civil war,” she says. However, Ms Gonzalez says that although the Valley of the Fallen is “an oddity” which does not trouble most Spaniards, she concedes that it is an important issue for some left-wing voters and a minority searching for their dead.
Among those is María Purificación Lapeña who is trying to recover the remains of her grandfather and great-uncle who were executed by Francoist forces and believes may rest in the basilica’s vaults. “It is going to be difficult because the boxes containing the bodies of Republicans were not named or numbered,” she says. “But we have to try. My father is in his late nineties and wants to find out before he dies.” Echoing the Socialists’ plans to turn the Valley into “a museum of memory”, Mrs Lapeña wants the monks to be thrown out, all the bodies removed and an education centre created “like [what] happened with Nazi concentration camps, to teach people what happened under Franco.”
Father Santiago recoils at the idea. “That is something totally different from Franco’s exhumation,” he says. “It would create a serious problem because it would be an attack on a religious monument.”
The prior may underestimate modern Spain. Today, at Madrid’s Mingorrubio-El Pardo municipal cemetery, Franco’s new resting place, flowers and Spanish flags had been placed in front of his new tomb, encased in a relatively modest vault in keeping with his reduced circumstances. But only about 50 nostálgicos and diehard fans came in dribs and drabs, standing in front of the vault, praying and making the sign of the cross.
An elderly man, who did not want to give his name, said that he had come “to pay homage to a man who had done great good for Spain at a time when it was totally destroyed”. Saying that he voted for Vox at the last election because it stood against cronyism and was not ashamed to speak about Spain, he added: “Sánchez [the prime minister] has done nothing but profane a tomb. He will be known as Sánchez the Profaner”.
For the majority of Spaniards, Franco remains very much dead, but as the filmmaker Alejandro Amenábar said earlier this week, “his ghost floats and generates suspicion”.
Talking of things dragging on and on . . .
2. Brexit is a never-ending story that the coming election will struggle to resolve: Jeremy Warner, the Daily Telegraph.
A bare bones free trade agreement, with tariff and quota free trade in goods, is eminently doable in the time available but the deep relationship sought is politically much more difficult
“We are off to a flying start. I see absolutely no reason we shouldn’t do it in the time available," Boris Johnson, the Prime Minister, told the CBI this week in response to widespread scepticism that a post-Brexit comprehensive free trade agreement (FTA) is possible with the European Union in the 12 months allowed under transitional arrangements.
Normally, even relatively unambitious free trade agreements, such as that between Canada and the EU, take far longer. Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) negotiations with the US similarly went on for years, before eventually collapsing.
Sajid Javid, the Chancellor, is similarly optimistic. “They told us we couldn’t renegotiate the Withdrawal Agreement in just a few months but we did," he said last month in Washington. “It is certainly possible to reach an FTA within a year, and both the EU and Britain are committed to that."
Commitment is one thing, delivery another. With good reason, business lobbies remain unconvinced. To all intents and purposes the time allowed is actually less than a year, since the Withdrawal Agreement stipulates that if a further extension is sought, it must be done by 1 July.
This would imply that the FTA has essentially to be in the bag before then to be certain of avoiding a no-deal outcome by the end of the year.
Complete illusion
The notion that Boris Johnson’s Withdrawal Agreement “gets Brexit done” is at best optimistic and at worst downright disingenuous. It is merely a staging post on the road to a series of cliff edges, and therefore in itself very unlikely to lift the business uncertainty that has been hanging like a cloud over the British economy.
In the event of a Boris Johnson victory at next month’s election the pound will no doubt bounce a bit and business investment revive somewhat, but more in relief that a hard left Corbyn government has been avoided than any lifting of Brexit uncertainty.
Nor are hopes of a swift FTA born out by the reality of Boris Johnson’s much touted, ultra-fast renegotiation of the Withdrawal Agreement.
There was in fact no breakthrough of any significance secured in that renegotiation. What we’ve ended up with is only a version of what was on offer all along from the European Union – that is for Northern Ireland to stay in the customs union and common regulatory area in order to honour the Good Friday Agreement.
Recall that this was the arrangement that Theresa May categorically rejected because it would “undermine the UK common market and threaten the constitutional integrity of the UK by creating a customs and regulatory border down the Irish Sea. “No UK Prime Minster could ever agree to it”, she said.
She was wrong. Boris Johnson is that Prime Minister, casually throwing Ulster unionists under the bus in the process.
None of this is to argue that there is no form of FTA that can be negotiated in the time available. A bare bones FTA, with tariff and quota free trade in goods and foodstuffs, is eminently doable, according to Lorand Bartels, reader in international law at Cambridge University, and can in essence be written on one side of a piece of paper.
Furthermore, it is something that in theory the EU would be happy to agree, since EU nations collectively enjoy a considerable trade surplus with the UK in goods. On the face of it, therefore, the advantage in any such deal would be theirs, not ours.
But tariffs and quotas are not the main issue here; rather it is regulatory compliance.
Trade might still be significantly impaired and slowed by border checks to ensure EU standards are met. Holland has already said that it will ban all movement of livestock from Britain regardless. This is just a harbinger of the much wider regulatory issues the negotiations will encounter.
Causes for optimism
In any case, the UK aspires to much more than a bare bones FTA. It wants a deep and comprehensive trading arrangement that would notionally include services, and particularly financial services, where the UK currently enjoys a big trade surplus with the EU.
Again, according to Bartels, this is not altogether impossible, even in the limited time available. The talks have the advantage of beginning from the position of complete convergence between the two jurisdictions.
This makes them quite unlike a normal trade negotiation, where the purpose is regulatory alignment. In this case, it will be about the right to diverge.
There wouldn’t be a great deal of point in leaving the EU if it is not to set our own path; without divergence, the UK is left in a worse position than it is now, as a supine rule taker.
In this regard, Bartels has an ingenious solution: that some kind of mechanism is put in place, adjudicated by joint committee, that would calibrate market access according to regulatory alignment.
If the negotiations are on the basis that all aspects of access have to be pre-agreed, and the degree of compliance set in stone, argues Bartels, then they have little chance of success.
Yet if a much looser arrangement is determined which allows for divergence over time, but restricts access accordingly in line with an agreed institutional formula, then the deeper relationship sought could be possible.
Only two problems. One is EU paranoia about cherry picking – that almost any divergence, be it on environmental or social standards, might allow the UK to undercut EU producers. The other is hardline Brexiteer opposition to anything that looks remotely like “Brino” (Brexit in name only).
It has long been suspected that Boris Johnson is a soft Brexiteer at heart, but his problem in agreeing a high degree of continued alignment is his 28 parliamentary hardliners, all with very comfortable majorities. They would rather die in a ditch, to coin an expression, than agree to extend the transition.
Their ranks are likely to be further swelled in the coming election, which means that in order to extend so as to secure the full-fat FTA Johnson aspires to, he may need a rather bigger majority than generally appreciated – at least 40 according to estimates by Samuel Tombs of Pantheon Economics.
Get Brexit done? Would that it were so. The “NeverEnding Story” is more like it.
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