Spanish life is not always likeable but it is compellingly loveable.
Christopher Howse: A Pilgrim in Spain
Spanish Politics- Can anyone be this stupid/unaware?
- Rebekah Scott might well provide help to 'pilgrims' on the camino de Santiago out of the goodness of her heart but she's under no illusions about the tightfistedness/parsimoniousness of many of them. In her book A Furnace Full of God, she writes:- What was a rugged path of repentance and suffering is now a series of day-hikes for spiritual consumers. The bare-bones infrastructure for ascetics has become a cheap holiday attraction for those whose eyes glitter at 'something for nothing'. The historic Pilgrim Way is a collision of capitalism and old-time Christian simplicity. The outcomes are fascinating, moving and sometimes grotesque. I don't get the impression her box for voluntary donations towards food and a night's stay gets very full.
- We're told now that the O Burgo bridge works will be finished in February, against the forecast of last October. But I see the year hasn't been mentioned.
- If I were the chap near me who's had his car his twice on the corner, I'd be preparing to sue the local council for negligence. The distance between the outer line of the parking lane and the line in the centre of the road is below the width of the average car, even with its wing mirrors retracted. And well below what it is in font of my house and further down the hill. But he might not have 5-10 years to devote to this, with a low chance of success.
- The most common street name in Galicia . . . ? Church Street.
- A united Ireland would be good for everyone: See the thoughtful first article below.
- A senior police officer has admitted that his force ignored the sexual abuse of girls by Pakistani grooming gangs for decades because it was afraid of increasing “racial tensions". This went on for many years.
- Ffart and his mob . . . It's like organised crime except it's disorganised crime.
- Trump might well have a sister working in the Pontevedra fish and seafood market:-
Russia
- Nice:-
The Way of the World
- Mass disillusionment has prompted a chilling disregard for the institutions that underpin our freedom. See the worrying second article below.
- And maybe read this fascinating book:-
Spanish
- Word of the Day: Lobezno: Wolf cub.
- Still no evidence that an article of mine appearing in The Local has added even single person to my readership. So, I'm glad it was an old article and not one I'd written last week . .
1. A united Ireland would be good for everyone: Matthew Parris
Rather than obsess about the ‘break-up’ of the UK we should accept that the Republic and north are moving ever closer
Faster than many realise, the time is coming to think dispassionately about the unification of Ireland. When the expected border with the rest of the UK is established in the Irish Sea the case for reuniting north and south will get its biggest boost since partition in 1921.
I suggest this may not be a bad thing. Before describing unification on the whole island of Ireland in the language of the “break-up” of the UK we should remember that there will be a corresponding coming-together. We should think about the gains. The idea makes so much sense.
“It is hereby declared” (says what has come to be known as the Good Friday agreement between the British and Irish governments) “that Northern Ireland . . . shall not cease to be [part of the UK] without the consent of a majority of the people of Northern Ireland voting in a poll.”
The agreement goes on to require the UK government to hold such a poll if “at any time it appears likely to [the secretary of state] that a majority of those voting would express a wish that Northern Ireland should cease to be part of the United Kingdom and form part of a united Ireland”.
And how likely is that? We already have the first straw in such a wind. Four months ago, before we even knew a border was to be established in the Irish Sea, a poll conducted in Northern Ireland for Lord Ashcroft’s Conservative Home website gave — for the first time — a slender margin (51-49 per cent) for unification. The demographics were clear: only the over-65s showed a clear majority against. The younger the respondents, the more they opted for unification. Ninety per cent of nationalists and (more surprisingly) 33 per cent of unionists thought a poll would occur within the next decade. Teasingly, one in ten self-declared unionists either said they would vote in favour or didn’t know how they’d vote.
It is difficult to see how the next few years could do other than accelerate this trend. After Brexit in a fortnight’s time, and unless the whole of the UK later decides to stay within the EU in all but name, then Great Britain’s economic habitat begins to diverge from Northern Ireland’s, which, as the withdrawal agreement stipulates, will remain in close alignment with the EU’s. Divergence is the only rationale for Brexit, and Northern Ireland is not going to diverge: a prospect that Dominic Raab, the foreign secretary, has said is good news for the province.
The euro is increasingly accepted there; goods will remain able to travel freely across the land border with the Republic but not the sea border with Great Britain; and though these changes may make little immediate practical difference, there’s such a thing as a change in the weather in the confluence or divergence of cultures. An all-island consciousness is developing steadily, particularly among younger citizens.
But how about the Republic? Though the Irish constitution formally commits the country to unification it has become commonplace in Britain to respond with a knowing wink, and the observation that pigs will fly, and the last thing Dublin actually wants is the ruckus and expense of taking on the burden that is the north. I used to believe this myself. I no longer do. Just think about it: wouldn’t you, if you were an Irish taoiseach, dream of being the statesman who made the dream of a united Ireland come true? What laurels. What a legacy. You’d be a second de Valera, your victory less dubious than his.
And there’s evidence the mood is changing in the Republic. Four years ago a poll there found that a third of voters favoured unification. Last summer two thirds did. Historically the cause had been associated with anger rather than positivity but (said the Irish writer Finn McRedmond in a magazine article last year) “the argument is no longer tied to the Troubles, and an accompanying anti-English sentiment”, but to “economic logic”. Moderate opinion in the south, worried about Brexit-related turbulence, sees the constructive case for unity.
McRedmond cited as sharply instructive the blunder made last year by Mary Lou McDonald, leader of Sinn Fein in the Republic, when she marched behind a banner that read “England get out of Ireland”. “The stunt,” writes McRedmond, “garnered widespread criticism. Taoiseach Leo Varadkar’s deputy, Simon Coveney, didn’t mince his words when he called it ‘offensive, divisive and an embarrassment’. This incident was symptomatic of a party that has misread the room.”
Mr Varadkar reads the room differently: “People who you might describe as moderate nationalists or moderate Catholics,” he says, “who were more or less happy with the status quo, will look more towards a united Ireland . . . I think increasingly you’ll see liberal Protestants, liberal unionists, starting to ask the question as to where they feel more at home.”
But who will pay? Northern Ireland has been a laboratory test-bed for regional subsidy and the experiment has failed spectacularly. Before we get too excited about “levelling up” in the English north and Midlands, we should take a look across the water. The province has been a bottomless pit. At around £12 billion net per annum, Northern Ireland costs the taxpayer slightly more than our net payments to the EU. We pay more to keep the province in the Union than we’ll get back by leaving the EU.
It would be worth it if it were achieving its object but it isn’t. Beset by corruption and by politically driven public spending on hopeless investments, the province and its people are victims of a political class that Westminster keeps paying not to be difficult, thus engendering a culture of threatening to be difficult. We throw money at them to go away. They are not loved across the water and they know it. It’s a wretched and humiliating fate visited on them, and it’s partly the fault of the English who, to adapt one American journalist’s words, will do anything for Ulster except read about it.
It isn’t working. Not far south of Belfast, in the Republic, it is. Neither side has much by way of natural resources but, instead, tremendous human resources, which only one side has learnt to harness. Meshing the two together will be painful — look how difficult it has proved in Germany — but it can be done; and done better without us. England has not been good to the Irish, or good for the Irish. It is time we had the humility to recognise that. Northern Ireland, I sense, is already on the road to such a recognition.
2. Teflon Trump is just the start of the West’s post-democratic apocalypse
Mass disillusionment has prompted a chilling disregard for the institutions that underpin our freedom
The great political question of the moment in America is not, will Donald Trump be convicted in the Senate impeachment trial? (Answer: almost certainly not.) Nor is it: will the proceedings themselves damage his chances of re-election? (Answer: almost certainly yes - but not very much.) It is actually, why do so few American voters seem to care about the incident that provoked the impeachment, or, for that matter, about any of the countless instances of their president’s outrageous behaviour?
To answer that query - or even to begin to understand it - requires a wider examination of not just this individual presidency, or even just that particular country. There is a transformation taking place in the political cultures of many developed societies which may be of historic significance for the West, of which the Trump personality is simply one very notable manifestation. But let’s look at the American example first because it is so stark and because, as is frequently claimed, what happens there often anticipates what will occur everywhere else. It may be difficult for a British (or any European) onlooker to comprehend precisely why that national indifference to the Trump presidential style is so shocking. Let me try to explain.
Americans are schooled (literally) to regard their democratic institutions and the document that created them - the Constitution - as sacramental. There is a reason for all those references to the Founding Fathers and the careful semantic examination of their intentions, which feature constantly in the pronouncements of leading politicians on all sides of American party politics.
It is rooted in the fact that the Constitution is a sacred text: it does not simply outline a form of political organisation, it is secular theology. The particular brand of modern democracy inaugurated by it, and the elected offices which are designed to uphold it, are the foundation of national identity. Indeed, they are the only source of common identity that this population of disparate, displaced people possess.
In other words, the agreement to uphold the Constitution is what makes you American, wherever you or your forebears came from. It is worth saying, in case you think this sounds flippant, that there is some basis for the enormous reverence in which the documents that founded America’s nationhood - the Declaration of Independence and the preamble to the Constitution (“We the people…”) - are held. They are perhaps the finest expositions ever written of the 18th century doctrine of a social contract between government and people.
Indeed, one is taught at school in the US that the Constitution is exactly that: a contract in which the people’s rights (as enumerated in the appended Bill of Rights) will be guaranteed in return for obedience to the law. So for those educated in the tradition of American patriotism, this is, or was, a very serious business. But increasingly, the populace does not seem to take either the ignorance of its president on basic Constitutional principles, or the rules of behaviour that have always been considered appropriate for the highest office of government, with any great seriousness at all. (Even though the inaugural oath made him, as it does every president, promise to “preserve, protect and defend” the Constitution of the United States of America).
This is particularly startling because the very citizens who used to be seen, and would still see themselves, as fervent patriots, are the ones who will apparently remain loyal Trump supporters however many blatant transgressions he makes against the traditional standards of presidential conduct. So what is going on here?
Something very drastic must have happened to the American psyche over the past generation to have created this paradoxical interpretation of patriotism which can accept contempt for the fundamental national values that once united the population. And indeed, something very terrible has happened. The great unwritten promise of America - not inscribed in the Constitution but always tacitly understood - was the doctrine of limitless opportunity.
Much analysis of the Trump phenomenon, and many of the explicit claims made by the man himself, attribute his popularity to the crisis of the “left behind”. The economic stagnation of the Rust Belt and the collapse of working class employment has produced an endemic sense of hopelessness that most Americans have never known or ever expected to know. Not since the Depression, which is now too far back for most living memory, have vast expanses of the US been so lost to apparently incurable economic decline. As everybody seems to agree, this is the secret of Trump: his “make America great again” pitch is a specifically economic one. It is the protectionist “bring the jobs home” refrain that paints him as a saviour of the people.
Whatever else he says or does - demanding that a foreign power give him dirt on an electoral opponent, expecting the US Attorney General to act as his own private lawyer, threatening his security service chiefs if they refuse to do his bidding - can be written off because he promises to reinstate the American dream of self-improvement and self-determination.
That much we know. But not many commentators seem to have extrapolated the full consequences of this or seen what it might mean for more volatile countries. Because, in truth, it is not Trump’s magical personality that has smashed through the old monumental beliefs and standards: it is the post-industrial apocalypse.
So here at last are the real questions for all of us, with America leading the way: is the post-industrial economy going to produce a post-democratic age? Will the collapse of the old livelihoods with their promise of endless improvement to standards of living, bring such disillusion that it will break the modern political settlement? And if it does, how are the freedoms which we now regard as “natural rights” to be guaranteed once respect for the institutions is gone? We - as well as the Americans - had better come up with some better answers than Trump’s pretty soon.
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