Lavengro in Spain

Tourists

This has appeared in Guardian Unlimited:

Barcelona ends bar ban on badly dressed tourists

Wearing a T-shirt and baggy shorts to a chic cocktail bar is apparently a protected right in Barcelona. Two years ago, the Boadas bar put a sign at the door barring anyone in tourist attire. But the city office of civil rights recently overturned the ban, saying it was discriminatory. A decree says access to a public establishment cannot be denied for "reason of birth, race, sex, religion, opinion or any other condition or personal or social circumstance," which apparently includes taste. Other bars and businesses have rallied behind Boadas, defending its right to keep out what some call "low-quality" tourists.

According to Google News at the time of writing the Guardian is the only source of this information in any language on the Internet, though I have managed to find confirmation in Spanish that this case has been in progress. But I suppose that the Guardian has to concern itself with the interests of its holiday-making readers.

The Azores photo

Lest we forget.

(The one on the right is the waiter who brought the coffee and Bush took a bit of a shine to him.)

Blair moves on

I have said that in retirement as British PM Blair should be sent to The Hague to stand trial; instead, in an expression of irony not seen since Henry Kissinger was awarded the Nobel peace prize, he is apparently to be made the quartet’s envoy to the Middle East. Presumably, the argument is that as a war criminal himself he will know how to deal with the people – on all sides – that he meets there.

Of course it would not have been necessary to consider sending him to The Hague if the British Parliament had done its job of impeaching him when it had the chance; but the craven Labour Party refused. Far from that, the Labour Party has never even taken the trouble to debate Iraq, a majority of Labour MPs voted for the illegal war, and every member of the cabinet at that time bears responsibility for the invasion and the appalling aftermath. That obviously includes Gordon Brown, who was happy to provide the funds for the military operations. The mess in Iraq is Labour’s responsibility as a result of Labour’s war on the country. The existence of a new Labour PM should not be allowed to obscure that, though no doubt the spin-merchants will be employed en masse to achieve just that end.

Merkel pulls it off

After a truly fraught weekend summit at which Angela Merkel and Nicolas Sarkozy did a bad cop / good cop routine with Merkel threatening to call the IGC with 26 members but excluding Poland, they truly proved their worth (despite my earlier comment, I feel now that the French left simply was not up to what was required of winning the presidential election) and the awkward squad was brought into line, though not without very great concessions. That means mainly the UK (yet more opt-outs) and the frightful and frightening Polish twins, whose absurd cry of ‘Give us the square root or give us death!’ was transformed overnight into ‘OK, we’ll take your double majority system in ten years’ time if we can keep the present system, which benefits us greatly, until after the next round of budget negotiations for 2013.’ Spain has a similar population to Poland and thus also benefits under the Nice arrangements (which were negotiated by Aznar) and the PP opposition have not been slow to criticise Zapatero (ZP) for accepting the double majority in principle; but this Spanish government, unlike its predecessor, supports the EU and reckoned that by giving way on the Nice voting formula, which was inevitably doomed in the long run anyway, it could gain influence where it counts – at the heart of Europe. That calculation has been shown to be correct, with ZP doing very well at the summit.

Meanwhile, Blair can return to Britain to tell his joyful people the news that:

• British law is not subordinate to EU law (even though it is, and has been since the Maastricht Treaty)

• The EU High Representative for Foreign Affairs will not usurp the UK’s permanent seat at the UN Security Council (even though there was no suggestion that he ever would be able to do such a thing, and the French, who also have a permanent seat, would most certainly have had something to say about that suggestion had it in fact been made. And moreover, member states will retain full control over their foreign policy, which means that the UK will still be free to launch unprovoked invasions of foreign countries without let or hindrance from Brussels)

• That the British people will not have to enjoy the extension of their rights that is afforded to the EU’s other 400m citizens

• And finally, with the support of Andreas Whittam-Smith in the Independent, that the dastardly French have excised all mention of free markets from the Treaty (even though what has happened is that it has gone from the statement of intent but remains firmly embedded in the text of the Treaty, where it is mentioned a number of times).

The BBC has a good description of the effects of the summit on EU foreign policy by Paul Reynolds.

The International Herald Tribune has a good article focusing on Sarkozy's role.

BBC and terrorism

The BBC continues to do its best for ETA/Batasuna, praising it with faint damns.

This piece has appeared on the BBC on the very day that the UK and Spain are in confrontation at the EU summit. How odd! What a coincidence!!

The BBC has not, however, considered it necessary to report that yesterday morning the Guardia Civil found a car with 130 kg of explosives, detonators, and other bomb-making equipment in Andalusia close to the Portuguese border. The occupants escaped before they could be arrested. There can be no doubt that they were planning a terrorist attack.

Pre-Europe

Máximo, El País, 22-6-07

Blair and the EU

As I have described here, two years ago Blair turned up at an EU summit with the intention of wrecking it by trying to force the reopening of a matter (the reform of the CAP) that had been settled earlier to the professed satisfaction of the British Government. Now he is up to his tricks once again just a few days before he leaves us for good, though unfortunately handing over to an apparently even more Eurosceptic British PM. In 2004 Blair personally negotiated and signed the European Constitutional Treaty; now that the matter is back on the table he has reneged on his public actions.

Blair’s spin doctors and his friends in the media may have succeeded in training the Great British Public to forget anything that happened more than a week ago, but in the rest of Europe people still have their memory capacity intact and they notice such things.

Blair and the beasts

For once Blair was telling the truth the other day when he said that Britain's media were feral beasts. But a resigning prime minister is ill advised to point out that the country he is leaving behind him after ten years of government is infested with feral beasts roaming at large -- especially when he has spent those ten years pandering, cringing and toadying to the most feral of all the beasts.

Britishness

As the UK struggles with its national identity, how to define Britishness, and how to manage its immigrants, Walter Oppenheimer writes in today’s El País:

[Kelly and Byrne] incline towards a system like the Australian one, which gives points to immigrants and removes them depending on their knowledge of the language, their knowledge of the local culture, their participation in organizations of civil society, but also depending on their criminal record, their antisocial behaviour, or whether they drop litter.

It is to be hoped that the requirement to know English is not to be applied to those who go to the United Kingdom for the very purpose of studying the language. And it is a pity that the penalty for antisocial behaviour is not applied also to the Britons, whose youth vandalism reaches levels that are unimaginable on the continent.

The points proposal would exclude citizens of the European Union, perhaps because if these countries applied the same standard to British people, barely a minute proportion of those who live in Spain, Cyprus or France, for example, would pass an exam in local language and culture.

The point about English-language students is very valid. The EFL industry is big and it would be ridiculous to prevent people from going to the UK to study English because they don’t speak the language. But how could such a system be policed? Will language schools have to hand their students over to the police if they fail their exams? Not only would that kill the industry stone-dead in the UK (and lead to its moving to Ireland and maybe even Holland and Scandinavia), but it might be tricky as the exam results take a couple of months to appear (as with GCSE and A-level).