Thoughts from Pontevedra, Galicia, Spain: 1.2.21

 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

Where foreigners buy property in Spain. I had difficulty with the most frequent flag. It resembles Andorra’s but that struck me as very odd. Turns out to be Romania’s . .

Talking about maps . . . Looking at that of my barrio today, I noted there were said to be 2 pharmacies in my street. Whereas there certainly aren’t any. I guess they’re the registered offices of the owners. So, judging by the size of the houses, it must be a profitable line of business.

I was looking at the local map because Google doesn’t do the tracks in the forest behind my house and I’m trying to draw up my own map. Which, for the last 3 days, has meant tramping through mud at times up to my knees. And even falling into the stuff, and struggling to get up. Today I’ll return to see this, which has just become visible from the track below it because of tree cutting.

By the way, for speakers of Gallego, I believe it should be Choza, not Chozo. At least according to the dictionary of the Real Academia Galega.

The last 2 nights have seen power cuts in my house - as evidenced by the flashing clock lights on my hifi system. Because of all the rain? Or the storms which have brought it?

The widespread vaccine queue-jumping in Spain has reminded me of the importance here of the ‘personal factor’. Which leads to croneyism, of course.

María touches on this here: New Year Same Old: Days 30 & 31

 

The EU  

It seems a lot of people have belatedly realised the EU's incompetent leader(s) can't be voted out by a damaged electorate. As there isn't one. But quite possibly the current President will eventually be ousted by the national power-brokers, rather than by angry voters. Maybe falling on her sword.

Meanwhile, here’s the view of Ross Clark of The Times: Von der Leyen may yet be forced to resign, but the problem goes far deeper than that, to the democratic deficit at the heart of the EU. Von der Leyen is, in effect, the head of supra-national government and yet she is not accountable to voters; rather she was installed as a result of behind-the-scenes horse-trading between the larger EU member states. The European Commission’s constitution is a recipe for ending up with failed politicians who, though rejected by their own citizens, can rely on powerful friends to swing them an impressive retirement job.

And another view can be read in the brutal article below, from the influential German paper, Bild.

From memory, Spanish examples of the EU equivalent of the UK ploy of  'kicking incompetent politicians upstairs' to the House of Lords are Loyola de Palacio and José Manuel Garcia Margallo. Or 'motormouth' as I prefer to call him.

 

Right now, this looks like a very costly practice for EU citizens. Of which I'm one, of course. Sobering to read this morning I'd be getting the vaccine this week or next week in the UK. Here? Maybe April, too late for the birth in the UK of my latest grandchild.

The second article below is from a dedicated Brexiteer and so I guess he can be forgiven for making much of the moment. In triumphalist vein that British politicians are scrupulously - and correctly - avoiding.

The USA

Hey, ho.  Donald Trump’s entire legal team have walked out days before his impeachment trial - having refused to build the case around his baseless allegations that the 2020 presidential election was stolen from him. They had wanted to argue on the constitution doesn't permit the conviction of a president who's left office.

Another day, another team of 'highly respected' alternative lawyers.

  

English

I used the word/phrase ‘hifi’ above but wonder if many younger folk will know what it is. All 'streamers' now, it seems. No need for expensive machinery. Just for a highly expensive phone.

Finally . . . 

I've just noticed that today's date is a palindrome . . .

   

THE ARTICLES

1. Ursula von der Leyen’s mess has disgraced Europe: Peter Tiede, chief political reporter for Bild 

Oh, how we Germans made fun of those strange Brexit birds with the weird Euro-populist Boris Johnson at their head. Marching out of the EU. Ridiculous! Well, they’ll soon see what they’re left with. Without Europe. All alone.

Now we see it. All of us — 83 million Germans, and all of Europe — undersupplied with vaccines, left lagging behind not only the US and Canada but also Britain! Of all the people, it was Johnson who got it right: he ordered vaccines for the British in time, generously and sufficiently. In surplus!

And we? We have done everything wrong and are struggling with a vaccination disaster. Germany, of all countries! Industrial power, clever nation, kings of cleanliness and order. We screwed up. We ordered too little, too late. We were too stingy, too lame. As a result, Poland and Hungary are already wondering what on earth the EU is all about.

In Germany, vaccination appointments for the elderly have had to be cancelled, if they actually got any at all. There is chaos in the land of order. We are confused. Self-doubt leads to anger: we will not have vaccinated 70% of Germans before the autumn. And that is the best-case scenario.

This is devastating on a human level for the people who urgently need the vaccine and for those who will die because they did not get it in time. It’s also devastating on a political level: the US launched the biggest vaccine procurement programme in history last April and the UK started ordering soon after that. Johnson negotiated as tough as nails and paid well for them.

And what did the EU do? It created the biggest confidence-destroying programme in its history. On top of this, Brussels and the governments of the EU states have managed to confirm the old prejudice of a sluggish Europe. Ursula von der Leyen, the European Commission president, denies all blame. Whistling loudly in the dark and thus damaging even further any confidence in her ability to run the EU. Music to the ears of the populists and anti-democrats.

Von der Leyen started a dispute with the vaccine supplier Astrazeneca, which was supposed to look daredevilish but was just dumb. She has disgraced Europe.

As Germany’s defence minister, she had already failed miserably in the procurement of helicopters, aircraft and weapons. Angela Merkel ordered her away to the European Commission. Just as Europe has been doing for decades with its discarded political personnel: disposed of like nuclear waste in the final repository of Brussels. That is the story that Johnson has told the British again and again. He, the European populist. Now, we agree with him.

Worse still, Von der Leyen has either knowingly lied to 447 million Europeans or didn’t know what she was talking about. Both are intolerable.

The EU’s contract with Astrazeneca reveals that the commission negotiated badly and did not secure any binding rights. It did not do what it is supposed to do: take care of our Europe. And our 27 governments either did not intervene or intervened too late.

The contract with Astrazeneca and the vaccination disaster are a declaration of bankruptcy for Brussels, an indictment of the 27 member states. An insult for us Europeans and especially for convinced Europeans like me. And the fact that we in Germany can only vaccinate at a snail’s pace, that we are left behind by countries like Italy, Bahrain or the United Arab Emirates, is our humiliation. Especially when we look at the island that once belonged to our EU.

It is embarrassing because now we are the fools.

A Chorus of condemnation

Germany Ursula von der Leyen is facing criticism across her native Germany, where the EU’s vaccine travails remind many observers of the numerous mishaps that occurred during her time in charge of the defence ministry.

Der Tagesspiegel, a Berlin daily, said Brussels’s refusal to own up to its mistakes was “jaw-dropping” and “bordered on shamelessness”. Bild accused Von der Leyen of either “lying to the faces of 447 million Europeans” about the bloc’s contract with Astrazeneca or being ignorant of its contents. Die Zeit, a pro-European weekly, described the vaccine debacle as the best present imaginable for Brexiteers, while Der Spiegel said it could turn out to be the “worst catastrophe of [Von der Leyen’s] political career”.

Austria Österreich, a tabloid, has derided the EU’s vaccination strategy as a “total disaster” and said Von der Leyen’s decision to antagonise the companies as “just about the stupidest thing you could do in this situation”. Niki Fellner, its editor-in-chief, called for her to be sidelined from the talks as soon as possible. “The EU should form a taskforce with three or four heads of government — in the best case, Merkel, Macron, Kurz [the Austrian chancellor] and Rutte [the Dutch prime minister] — who will take over these botched talks,” he wrote. “Or each EU member state should negotiate with the vaccine producers bilaterally.”

Hungary Budapest has turned east, unilaterally approving China’s Sinopharm vaccine. “If vaccines aren’t coming from Brussels, we must obtain them from elsewhere,” Viktor Orban, the nationalist prime minister, said. “It doesn’t matter whether the cat is black or white, as long as it catches mice.”

2. Europhiles have finally had their eyes opened to the hideous reality of the EU: In a display worthy of 1960s Nasserite dictators, over the last 72 hours Eurocrats have broken every norm of civilised behaviour: Daniel Hannan. Daily Telegraph.

Remainers were right. Brexit has indeed led to an outbreak of populism, protectionism and chauvinism. But not on the side of the Channel they expected. 

The EU’s behaviour over the past 72 hours has been so demented, so self-wounding, that it is hard to know where criticism should begin. 

Let’s start with the bare facts. Brussels is in dispute with AstraZeneca, the British-Swedish pharmaceutical company, over the late delivery of some Covid vaccines. For what it’s worth, the EU seems to have a staggeringly weak case. It published its contract with the firm but, far from being any kind of “gotcha”, that contract showed that AstraZeneca had simply promised to use its “reasonable best efforts” to fulfil the order, the same form of words it used with the UK, which also saw some late deliveries. The rights and wrongs of that dispute, though, are beside the point. The EU’s quarrel is with AstraZeneca, not with Britain.

In pursuit of its quarrel, Brussels announced plans to block the export of vaccines from a completely unrelated company, the American corporation Pfizer, to Britain – vaccines which no one disputed that the UK had purchased, and on which the EU did not pretend to have any legal claim. 

In other words, Brussels was threatening to halt the sale of life-saving drugs to a neighbouring country, not in response to any provocation, but simply because it was cross that that country was further advanced in its vaccination programme. 

It gets worse. In order to deflect criticism from its hopeless record in ordering vaccines, the European Commission aimed its law expressly at Britain. Its export ban did not apply to other neighbouring states, such as Iceland, Morocco, Egypt, Syria, Ukraine or Belarus. The only country in the vicinity to be targeted was the UK.

It gets worse still. To make sure that no vaccines could enter the UK, the Commission announced that it was excluding Northern Ireland from the single market arrangements which it had previously insisted were so critical to the peace process. Incredibly, it didn’t notify Britain or Ireland in advance, and its move united every party in Dublin and Belfast against it (as well, for that matter, as every party at Westminster except the SNP), eventually forcing it to back down. Still, a point was made – a point that cannot now be unmade. For four years, EU negotiators claimed that the merest possibility of a border in Ireland would risk a return to terrorism, and worked to convince the world that this was a risk that Britain was somehow prepared to run. Yet it took precisely 29 days before the EU itself announced such a border.

It gets even worse than that. Annoyed at Britain’s success, European leaders started casting doubt on the efficacy of the AstraZeneca product. Engaging in the kind of nuttiness which gets people banned from social media, Emmanuel Macron claimed that the vaccine “didn’t work”. In other words, the EU is breaking every norm of civilised behaviour and threatening expropriation over a vaccine which, from sheer sour grapes, its leaders claim is ineffective.

Let’s summarise. The European Commission elbowed aside its member states, which had begun their own procurement programmes, and insisted on negotiating en bloc for the 27. It moved slowly and bureaucratically, reportedly because it was holding out for vaccines produced by Continental firms. In the end, three months after Britain, it signed a contract with AstraZeneca similar to that which some of its nations had tried to sign earlier. As criticism mounted, it panicked and lashed out – smashing the principles of due process, private property and free trade in the process.

Eurocrats are behaving not so much like mini-Trumps as like 1960s Nasserite dictators. They are deliberately disrupting supply at the height of a pandemic. And their petulance, shockingly, is aimed at the only pharmaceutical company in the world which is high-mindedly offering the vaccine to all comers on a not-for-profit basis. 

The British government, like AstraZeneca, wants to spread the inoculation programme globally, reaching countries that can’t afford their own vaccines. This is the thanks we get.

For at least some British Remainers, the events of this week have served as what Western Communists used to call a “Kronstadt moment”. Kronstadt, the site of a naval mutiny against the Bolsheviks in 1921, became a shorthand for the moment when a previously loyal party member suddenly grasped the true nature of the Soviet regime. For some, it came with the 1956 Hungarian rising, for others the 1968 Prague Spring. For some, it never came at all. But it always involved a wrenching mental reset, a readiness to look again at old certainties.

Consider the assertions made by the two sides in the 2016 referendum. Eurosceptics argued that the EU was slow, introverted, bureaucratic, inefficient, ready to make up the rules as it went along, a bully and a bad neighbour. Europhiles saw it as principled, internationalist, effective, generous, rules-based and committed to global trade. If we treat those two views as verifiable claims, which has just been falsified? 

When Remainers, including Labour and Lib Dem MPs and every expert that the Guardian could wheel out, argued last year that Britain’s refusal to join in the EU’s procurement scheme would cause needless deaths here, they undoubtedly believed it. But it is Boris Johnson’s conviction that Brexit would mean a more agile Britain that turned out to be right.

More agile – and, I hope, more generous. It is a pity that, instead of quietly asking Britain to sell it some spare doses, the EU behaved so peevishly. But the UK should hold itself to a higher standard. Because of our successful procurement programme, we will end up with a vaccine surplus this year. We should use that surplus to benefit less well-stocked nations – our friends in the Commonwealth, naturally, but others, too. We might, for example, prioritise Ireland, to which every town in Britain has family connections. We might help our oldest ally, Portugal, currently experiencing a surge of infections. We should, in short, be the positive global force that the EU is failing to be.