Thoughts from Pontevedra, Galicia, Spain: 4.1.21

Night’s candles are burnt out, and jocund day stands tiptoe on the misty mountain tops.

Spanish life is not always likeable but it is compellingly loveable. 

- Christopher Howse: 'A Pilgrim in Spain'*  

 

Living La Vida Loca in Galicia/Spain   

The Ministerio de Sanidad calcula que el número de contagios derivados de las fiestas explotará a partir de mañana. I'll bet!

A cocktail of booze and drugs regularly causes bizarre traffic incidents and arrests here in Galicia - a  by-product of one of our main industries - importing and selling-on heroin, cocaine and hash. Yesterday, a 'youth'(about 30) crashed his car into another one at a petrol station, threatened a waitress in the adjacent café, sprayed a fire extinguisher around the place, damaged the waitress's car and was duly arrested. The Voz de Galcia hazards a guess he was drugged to the eyeballs. I'll bet!

Here's María's New Year, Same Old: Day 3.  A Clarification. I have the same problem, of course.   

The UK

Needless to say, problems with new technologies aren't confined to Spain. I called the UK government's NHS Overseas Healthcare unit this morning and - after first enduring a lot of machine-given info and then 'talking' to the 'virtual assistant' - I was cut off just after she said she was handing me over to a real person. Twice. There's no Enquires email for this unit but there is a Complaints email address. To which I've naturally written, in high dudgeon. Maybe no one's returned to work yet, after Xmas and NY. 

The UK & The EU

If what I read in the Spanish press is anything to go on, there isn't much understanding in Europe of the macro factors behind Brexit. The Economist article below does a good job of identifying these.

But ignorance isn't/hasn't been confined to Europe, of course - as this fulminating post from Richard North establishes.  

 

The USA

The latest Trumpism. Does anyone still believe he's not a crook? Sadly, the answer is, of course, Yes.  A lot of folk.  Said Adam Schiff, the lead prosecutor at the impeachment trial: Trump’s contempt for democracy is once again laid bare. 

I guess it's possible - though not very - that he'll end up in gaol. 

Spanish and Gallego

Going down the rabbit hole of tontolabas/tontolahabas/tontolaba, meaning stupid or foolish . . . There's no doubt its origin is linked to la haba, the fava bean. Indeed, reader DrNostoc has pointed out that these beans can trigger a particular condition. However, this site - which cites this one - tells us that the word stems from the practice of putting a fava bean in a Roscón de Reyes, which - by pure coincidence - is the traditional Spanish pastry for the Epiphany/Los Reyes of January 6.

Correction: canita should have been cañita.

Yet another Gallego word for idiot/fool/ingenue - Papán.  

THE ARTICLE

 

The story of a divorce: How Brexit happened

Britain went from enthusiastic commitment to the EU to an acrimonious departure on unfavourable terms

Britain’s history meant it was always ambivalent towards the European “project”. 

The vote in the House of Commons to approve Britain’s membership of the European Economic Community on October 28th 1971 was greeted with widespread jubilation. The “yes” vote was larger than expected, and it passed with a majority of 112. Leading politicians went off to celebrate in different ways—some to parties, while the famously buttoned-up prime minister, Edward Heath (pictured), returned to Downing Street in a mood of elation and played the first prelude and fugue from Bach’s “The Well-Tempered Clavier”.

As Britain completes its departure from the eu half a century later, there is little celebration. Even determined Eurosceptics complain about the terms of the withdrawal treaty, particularly over fishing. Others are regretful if not furious: according to the latest poll, 48% of Britons now think the country should remain in the eu, while 38% think it should leave. There is nervousness, especially among the businesses that trade with Europe, about how the relationship will work. And there is residual puzzlement on both sides. How did it go so wrong?

For most continental countries, building European unity was a reaction to the horrors of the second world war and its aftermath. The Germans were escaping Nazism, the French defeat and collaboration, the Italians dictatorship, the eastern Europeans, when they eventually joined, Soviet domination. Britain was the only member that felt no need to escape from its past—indeed, in many ways, it preferred wallowing in the past to confronting the future. For Britain, unlike the rest of Europe, the nation state is something to be celebrated rather than transcended.

Britain’s imperial history also made a difference. Its empire was larger and more recent than other European nations’. Culturally, the British feel closer to America, Canada and Australia than they do to Europe. Two-and-a-half times as many British expatriates live in the English-speaking world as on the continent, and Britain’s main ethnic minorities are from Commonwealth countries. That English is the language of the world gives monoglot Britons the sense that they are at home anywhere.

Politics on both sides of the channel reflected this ambivalence; Heath’s passionate Europhilia was unusual. Charles de Gaulle famously vetoed Britain’s first application to join in 1963 on the grounds that Britain “is insular, she is maritime, she is linked through her exchanges, her markets, her supply lines to the most diverse and often the most distant countries”. Most of Britain’s leading post-war politicians shared the general’s doubts. Harold Macmillan, a Conservative prime minister, worried about the emergence of a “boastful, powerful ‘Empire of Charlemagne’” and applied to join in part in order to change Europe from within. Hugh Gaitskell, the Labour leader, worried that a federal Europe would mean “the end of Britain as an independent European state…the end of a thousand years of history”.

Politicians’ doubts led a Labour government to hold a referendum on membership in 1975, only two years after joining. But strike-ridden Britain was a mess and Europe seemed to offer a more stable and prosperous future. Over two-thirds of voters wanted to stay. The establishment, too, had come round. The Economist put a picture of a young member of staff wearing a tight t-shirt, emblazoned with “Europe or bust”, on the cover. Margaret Thatcher, subsequently a Eurosceptic pin-up, campaigned enthusiastically for continued membership (pictured overleaf), and in the 1980s it was she who persuaded the union to take its most important step forward of that decade—the single market.

From the start, Britain was unhappy about the terms of its membership. Farming was the main point of contention. Committed to free trade in food since the abolition of the corn laws in 1846, Britain had a tiny agricultural sector compared with its neighbours and enjoyed cheap food. The eec kept farmers in business by imposing high tariffs, making consumers pay high prices and handing out subsidies. As a result, Britain was the second-largest contributor to the European budget, until Thatcher got “our money back” in 1984.

But it was supra-nationalism that most bothered the British. From the first Britain saw itself as the champion of a Europe of nation-states that came together voluntarily to make the business of the world easier to conduct. But in the eyes of its founders, Europe was a political project whose purpose was to bind the continent so tightly that future conflict would be inconceivable. As Europe moved towards an “ever closer union”, the tensions grew.

Two speeches and a treaty

In the 1980s Euroscepticism was confined to the extremes. Its leading champions were Enoch Powell, so far to the right that he had parted company with the Tories, and Tony Benn, a hard-left Labour man. Jacques Delors, president of the European Commission, did much to change that. He gave a speech to the Trades Union Congress in 1988 in which he anticipated that most future legislation would come from Europe. Thatcher responded with her Bruges speech: “We have not successfully rolled back the frontiers of the state in Britain, only to see them reimposed at a European level with a European superstate exercising a new dominance from Brussels.” Euroscepticism burgeoned inside her party.

The Maastricht treaty of 1992 drove the union closer together, and Britain and the other member states further apart. The eu’s residents became “citizens of the Union” with fundamental rights including the freedom to live wherever they wanted. The word “economic”, which had first attracted Britain, was dropped. The adoption of a single currency created pressure for ever-greater pooling of sovereignty. Optimists thought that Britain could have its cake and eat it by being half in and half out. Pessimists argued that the pressure to pool sovereignty would make this position impossible to maintain.

Those speeches and that treaty served to recruit young enthusiasts, such as Daniel Hannan, who joined the older hard core of Eurosceptic Tory mps such as Sir Bill Cash and Sir John Redwood. Outside Parliament, the movement coalesced into pressure groups such as the Bruges Group and Sir James Goldsmith’s Referendum Party. The United Kingdom Independence Party (ukip), a bunch of provincials ridiculed by metropolitan Europhiles, got nowhere in Westminster elections but made ground in European ones.

Three men and an issue

The global rise of populism after the financial crisis poured fuel on these sparks. Britain proved especially susceptible, partly because of the size of its financial sector, and partly because David Cameron’s government slashed spending, hurting poor areas most. The Labour Party lurched to the left, electing Jeremy Corbyn, a hard-left Eurosceptic, as leader. ukip grew in strength, snapping at Mr Cameron’s heels, demanding a referendum. In order to weaken its position in the 2015 election, he promised one—believing, in his hubristic way, that if he actually had to hold one, he would be able to swing it. To his surprise, he won the election—having fallen into the trap the Eurosceptics had set him.

The Leave campaign’s victory was forged by three men and an issue. Boris Johnson, formerly mayor of London, provided a smiling face as the front for a movement that had usually worn a snarl. Dominic Cummings, the campaign’s ideologue, provided it with the brains it had previously lacked. But the Leave campaign’s most powerful weapon was perhaps Mr Corbyn. His lukewarm campaigning for Remain and known distaste for the eu probably tipped the result for Leave.

The issue was immigration. Britain had supported the eastward expansion of the eu partly on the ground that a larger Europe seemed like an alternative to a deeper one. But enlargement gave low-paid Europeans a chance to better themselves by moving to Britain, thanks to Tony Blair’s refusal to follow 12 other eu countries in making use of a seven-year brake on citizens of the new states exercising their right to work. The number of Polish-born residents in the uk increased from 56,000 in 2001 to 911,000 in 2016 and Romanians from 14,000 in 2004 to 310,000 in 2016.

In places into which eastern Europeans had flooded, the Leave vote was especially high. But immigration had a broader, more pervasive effect on the vote. The government’s failure to reduce the foreigners’ numbers, despite repeated promises to do so, contributed to the feeling that Britain had lost control of its destiny in the most important aspect of national policy—determining who lives inside your borders. To vote “out” was, in the Leave campaign’s slogan, to “take back control”.

Four players and a dangerous game

Even difficult marriages are hard to end. Over half a century, European legislation had become part of the warp and weft of British law and European and British business thoroughly entwined. Lawyers contracted thinking about rights to their European counterparts. Businesses happily embraced European regulations.

The nature of the referendum made leaving all the harder. Voters were offered a binary choice about a complicated set of relationships. There was nothing on the ballot paper about the single market, the customs union or how the 500km-long border between Northern Ireland and the republic of Ireland, freighted with history and fraught with tension, should be dealt with. The asymmetry between the complexity of the problem and the simplicity of the question ensured that the referendum debate was both shallow and mendacious.

Given how many issues the referendum left undecided, the terms of Britain’s departure could have been settled in any number of different ways; and the close result—48:52—argued for the “soft” Brexit that most mps favoured, with Britain remaining close to Europe. That the outcome has been a “hard” Brexit, with Britain leaving both the single market and the customs union, is a consequence of the way four interested parties chose to play their hands.

For Theresa May, a Remainer bounced into the premiership after Mr Cameron’s ignominious resignation in the wake of the referendum, offering a “hard” Brexit looked like a way of keeping the right wing of her party onside. The 2017 election shrank her majority and made her their hostage. When she softened her position on Brexit, they got rid of her and replaced her with Mr Johnson, who boldly sacked a bunch of recalcitrant Remainers, bringing the parliamentary party to heel.

For Mr Corbyn, opposing the Tories’ position was more important than achieving an outcome that kept Britain close to the European Union. For the Liberal Democrats, a purist determination to overturn the result looked like the best way of distinguishing their position from Labour’s, so they went into the 2019 election with the slogan “Bollocks to Brexit”. The clash of absolutes eliminated the middle ground.

The Europeans also contributed to the “hard” outcome. They could have compromised with Mrs May when she was desperately trying to sell her softer deal. But member states had their own particular demands—so, for instance, negotiations went to the wire over French fishermen’s insistence on continued access to British waters—and the eu wanted to make it plain that those who leave the club cannot enjoy the benefits of membership.

The vote to leave thus led to one of the most turbulent periods in recent British history. Careers, such as Mrs May’s, were made and destroyed with extraordinary speed. Precedents were broken. When the government prorogued Parliament to get its way it was slapped down by the Supreme Court. The Conservative Party, once the party of toffs and the middle class, was rebranded as anti-European and working-class. And a country which had been lukewarm about the continent saw the birth of a pro-European movement flying the European flag daily in Parliament Square.

The ructions are not over. The referendum has strained the United Kingdom’s bonds. Scotland voted for Remain by a large majority and Northern Ireland by a smaller one. To avoid creating a hard border between Northern Ireland and the republic, a border has been established inside the United Kingdom, between Great Britain and Northern Ireland. That will have consequences. A majority of Scots now want independence, and support for Irish unification is growing. The most striking consequence of that historic day in 2016 might not be Britain’s exit from a European Union that it never loved but the break-up of the nation-state whose sovereignty the Brexiteers sought to defend.

* A terrible book, by the way. Don't be tempted to buy it, unless you're a very religious Protestant.