Dawn

Dawn

Friday, December 13, 2019

Thoughts from Pontevedra, Galicia, Spain: 13.12.19

Spanish life is not always likeable but it is compellingly loveable.   
                  Christopher Howse: A Pilgrim in Spain
Spanish Politics 
  • The king - as if he had much choice - has accepted that Mr Sanchez of the PSOE will - yet again - try to form a functioning government. His chances don't look much better than they've been for some time now. 
Spanish Life 
  • The stealing of avocados is big business down in Andalucia, says El País here, in Spanish.
  • Here's a video, also in Spanish, on how to spot a hidden speed-radar. I have to admit I didn't find it very illuminating or helpful. It's a bit late to find you've just flashed past a car you can identify as a police vehicle equipped with radar.
Galician Life 
  • Our region's birth rate is now the lowest it's been since 1941, and is the lowest in Spain. Here's how the 19 regions shape up:-

Interesting to see that both North African enclaves (not 'colonies') number among the 5 positive places.
  • On average, Galician kids are now 7 ko heavier than they were 40 years ago (1979). How much in 2039, one wonders.
  • AVITURGA is the trade association - web page here - for the owners of tourist properties here. Its mission seems to be to fight the attempts of administrations - regional and municipal - to eliminate current excesses.
  • I wonder if there'll now be one for e-bike and e-scooter riders who don't like being forced off pavements and out of pedestrianised zones. In theory at least. 
  • As if we didn't know, our AP9 autopista is now one of the most expensive in the country, the tolls having risen by twice the inflation rate in the last decade. Someone is making a lot of money from it. Am I right to recall it now belongs to a venture capital fund?
The UK Election
  • Well, that's certainly a result. And not one many expected, and even fewer predicted. Jeremy Corbyn has said he won't be leading the shattered Labour party into the next general election. But this is 5 years away and people are rather more interested in what he'll be doing in the next 5 hours. And whether the 'hard left' will retain control of the processes and mechanics - the levers of power - of the party. If not, will a new centre-left party now arise to replace it for non-Tory voters? A lot of people hope so but vamos a ver. If so, I doubt it'll be called anything like 'We Can' (Podemos) or 'Citizens' (Ciudadanos). My pure guess is 'The Social Democrats'. 
The EU
  • See below for one pre-election prediction - apparently accurate - of how the EU leaders would react to a Johnson victory. By the way, it's a sobering read for those who are fans of both the current - about to be ex? - Labour Party and the rather right-of-centre EU.
The USA
  • Fascinating - but unsurprising - to see how Ffart interpreted the IG report in the parallel world in which he lives. As do his fans, of course.
  • But it remains true that the Senate will never convict him of the offences that justify his impeachment.
Spanish 
  • Phrases of the Day:  
  1. Saltar por los aires: To come to light.
  2. Presencia de envergadura: Large scale attendance
Finally . . . 
  1. Friday the 13th: Unlucky for some. Labour Party politicians in particular, I guess.
  2. The sort of un-minced-words review that I like: 'Jumanji: The Next Level' — Generic, charmless, automated bilge
THE ARTICLE

All is forgiven: Europe's leaders pray for Boris, horrified by thoughts of a Corbyn upset: Ambrose Evans Pritchard.

One thing is certain as voting day finally arrives: Europe is rooting for Boris Johnson.  The more seats, the better.

Nobody in high office will say it. A few Commission diehards might still hope to overturn Brexit  - or still imagine that such a reconquest would be digestible - but the overwhelming view in the great capitals is that further years of British civil war and cross-Channel brinkmanship risk a strategic debacle.

They can only roll their eyes at the naïveté of Hugh Grant and the Beautiful People, as if tactical voting can surgically deliver the right hung Parliament: that is to say a revocation referendum, without that little extra problem of an anti-NATO Marxist, one who thinks that Mao’s Great Leap Forward was a success, finds no fault with Vladimir Putin, and excoriates Western self-defence.

Never forget that the EU has become - structurally and legally - a corporatist-capitalist alliance that forbids its members to pursue genuinely left-wing policies. Syriza learned this the hard way in Greece.

“If they wake up on Friday morning to a Corbyn government, the mood in Brussels will be close to panic,” said Andrew Duff, a veteran EU insider and president of the federalist Spinelli Group. “It would be a disaster. They don’t want a timebomb thrown into the European security system.”

“They are praying for a government with a big majority that can end this bloody nonsense, and that means Boris. They don’t have any respect for the Remainer coalition,” he said.
It is the same message from Sir Ivan Rogers, former chief Brexit negotiator and now author of serial broadsides against the British political establishment. “Remainers who think the clock can be put back are, I think, in denial about where mainstream Continental elite opinion is,” he said.

The wishful thinking of blue sky Brexiteers finds its symmetry in Westminster’s pro-European menagerie. “Most of the EU elites now see a Johnson outright victory as the quickest route to getting the Withdrawal Agreement through. If he wants to overstate what changes he achieved .. so be it. ‘Whatever he needs to say…’ they shrug,” says Sir Ivan.

The EU diplomatic fraternity think a fat majority should allow Boris to pull off another of his conjuring tricks. It lets him jettison Jacobite trouble-makers - in EU eyes - and those pushing for a sovereign Brexit. It clears the way for the great pivot back to Europe: a customs union by the back door, dressed up as a patriotic victory with inimitable Borisian chutzpah. 

Europe is in any case exhausted. It has paid a higher economic price than it expected by pushing Theresa May too far on the Irish backstop and precipitating her downfall. That misjudgment caused another year of cliff-edge showdowns, frozen investment, and a depressed sterling exchange rate that has undercut a weakened Germany already in industrial crisis.

Britain has got its condign punishment, of course, but so has Deutschland Inc, vulnerable because of its reliance on Anglo-Saxon demand and a perennial trade surplus to stay afloat. German industrial output has dropped 5.3pc over the last year, and not just because of China. Over the last five quarters the UK has grown by an accumulated 1.5pc (mediocre, yes) but Germany has grown by just 0.5pc.

Every major country in Western Europe is facing an internal political drama of one kind or another. France is in the grip of an open-ended general strike of elemental significance, a test of whether the exorbitant modèle français can be rendered fit for the globalised 21st Century.

Germany’s Social Democrats have lurched hard-Left, voting for a wish-list of fantasy demands under a puppet leadership controlled by the militant Juso tendency of Kevin Kühnert. They want a wealth tax, a rent freeze, the reversal of the Hartz IV labour reforms, etc. The coalition with Chancellor Angela Merkel limps on but in a state of ideological divorce and on borrowed time. The post-War political centre in Germany is crumbling. The October earthquake in Thuringia had a whiff of the Reichstag elections of 1932.

A second vote this year in Spain has failed to deliver a government. This time the raw Vox party has vaulted to third place calling for a Falangist liquidation of Catalan secessionists (nota bene, Nicola Sturgeon). Italy is preparing to rescue the huge ILVA steel plant in Taranto - a postcard of Mezzogiorno distress - after having already rescued Alitalia, both in breach of EU state aid law.

Europe can only dread another Brexit marathon, with a neophyte Corbyn team, ending in a second referendum on stitched-up terms that would never be accepted as legitimate by 17m Britons. But there is an even larger reason why they now need Boris: they are in a dangerous neighbourhood, preyed on by Putin and Turkey’s Erdogan, urgently trying to revive a “braindead’ NATO. They need to hug the UK closely to the Continental defence family. Boris Johnson is happy to oblige.

It is often said - usually by preening trade experts - that security matters count for little when it comes to brutal haggling of trade deals. This is patently untrue. They shape everything. Specifically, they have shaped French policy towards Brexit ever since that first moment of bonhomie between Boris and Emmanuel Macron, that cheeky foot on the Élysée table in July.

Cambridge historian John Keiger, a specialist on French diplomacy, says this Entente Cordiale was firmed up in President Macron’s annual addressto French ambassadors a month later. It is now foreign policy doctrine.

He stated that Russia must be brought back from the cold (to head off a Sino-Russian alliance with fateful implications) but also that the new European order “must  include very deeply Great Britain. Whatever the outcome of Brexit, we must continue to think in affinity with Great Britain. On the military front, on the strategic front, on all issues. History and geography have their reality. It is a form of determinism, and we must include them (the UK).”

“Macron thinks in great sweeping terms of history, the way the French do, and for him Brexit is mere froth,” said professor Keiger. It is a foreign policy reflex dating back to the 19th Century. In the end, the imperative is always to keep Britain on side.
After all, it is British aircraft that currently carry French troops in the Sahel. It was the British and French that acted together in the Balkans, and again in Libya - when Germany (a good European a la carte) voted with Russia and China against its allies in the UN Security Council. “Senior French officers are very worried about Germany as a military ally. At least the British are relatively reliable when they commit, and they  have proper armed forces, not ones that work nine-to-five,” he said.

France went through its own Frexit when it withdrew from NATO’s integrated command in 1966 at the height of the Cold War. NATO was careful not to overreact. France got away with some cherry-picking but it also sought to be an even better ally by way or recompense. The lesson has not been lost on Mr Macron, student and heir of Charles de Gaulle.
The Macron-Johnson friendship does not surprise me. Both are Gaulliste but also green, centrist, Europeanist intellectuals with a shared sense of history and multicultural tastes. But it is nevertheless striking how well they seem to get on after burying the Referendum hatchet.

A camera caught them at a UN summit working over Iran’s Hassan Rouhani almost as a double act. They were caught again jostling amicably at the G7 in Biarritz, where it was duly noted that Boris backed Macron - not Trump - on the large strategic issues of the day. They were caught again this month at Buckingham Palace with Justin Trudeau ribbing the US President.

We can only imagine what a Corbyn-led Britain would do to NATO and the anchoring role of British diplomacy in the rickety trans-Atlantic alliance. As his own shadow cabinet laments, he is a “security risk”.

By all means vote Labour if you want free tuition fees, free broadband, a 32-hour week, or a blitz of 1970s nationalisation. But don’t do so thinking it will lead to better relations with Europe.

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