Lavengro in Spain

Formidable? Ce n'est pas l'amour.

Nicolas Sarkozy is very unpopular at home and has lost all his friends in Europe. He desperately needs someone to be nice to him.

Gordon Brown is very unpopular at home and has never had any friends in Europe. He desperately needs someone to be nice to him.

They can swear their undying love for each other, but nothing will come of it in the end.

Religious sensibilities and artistic expression

German Muslims are not happy about the stage version of Salman Rushdie's Satanic Verses that his being presented in a theatre near Berlin. El País reports great controversy:

"We regret that the religious feelings of the Muslims are being treated in such a provocative way," said Ali Kizilkaya, President of the Council of Islam in Germany. "Nevertheless, we do not in any way want to try to prevent the performance," he added.

This reminds me of the film of The Last Temptation of Christ. I quote from Wikipedia:

Protests against the movie from religious communities began before the film had even finished production. The studio was expecting a backlash due to the controversies revolving around any media treatment of Christ (see dramatic portrayals of Jesus Christ), but the protests accompanying Last Temptation were unprecedented. Major religious leaders in the United States blasted the film in fiery sermons, and condemned its subject matter as pornographic.^{[citation needed]}

On October 22, 1988, a French Catholic fundamentalist group launched molotov cocktails inside the Parisian Saint Michel movie theater to protest against the film. This attack injured thirteen people, four of whom were severely burned.^[2]

In 1989, Albuquerque high school teacher, Joyce Briscoe, showed the film to gifted history students at La Cueva High School, raising a storm of controversy by parents and local Christian broadcaster KLYT.^[3]

In some countries, including Mexico and Chile, the film was not released for several years.[2]

I saw that film in Barcelona. There were armed guards outside the cinema.

Boycott the Olympics!

Should the West boycott the Olympic Games in Beijing? Of course it should. So should the East, the North and the South. If we could get rid of this pestilential festival of nationalism that haunts the world every four years – as if the American elections weren't enough anyway in a leap year – it might be possible to introduce some sanity into things.

And if anyone really cares who is the fastest, the highest and the strongest, let the international sports federations hold their own competitions. Err, but don't they do that anyway?

Printers

Has anyone, anywhere, and at any time, come across a computer printer that would not, if it were human, be taken away and locked up immediately under the provisions of the Mental Health Act?

A remarkable insight

This remarkable insight into the human condition has appeared on the BBC news web site. Good heavens! Why did I not think of it for myself?

 

HAVE YOUR SAY

The culture of sickness works in favour of the employee, it's easy to say you are sick without proof   Andrew, Sheffield

Britain and Europe, yet again

Today’s El País reports that the British House of Commons has ratified the Lisbon Treaty and quotes Jim Murphy, Minister of State of Europe as follows (my translation from Spanish, including the direct quotation):

Although he insisted on the UK’s desire to be at the heart of Europe, he ruled out any possibility of his country giving up border controls on travellers from the EU. And he took refuge in sentimental reasons rather than in operational questions to justify that: “It is a question of national sentiment, of national heritage, of national treasure. We have a great sense of borders. As a Government and as a people we believe that that is right and we are not going to change.”

The essential contradiction here is one that continually eludes British politicians. It is impossible to be at, or anywhere near, the heart of Europe while refusing to participate in basic elements of European integration such as Schengen and the euro. One reason why Blair will not become the President of Europe – apart from the fact that warmonging is not looked on very kindly on this side of the Channel – is precisely that while he was in Downing Street he did nothing at all to bring his country closer to Europe and did quite a lot to damage the EU by acting as Bush’s Trojan horse.

“Europe’s real problem is not the democratic deficit, it is the efficiency deficit,” he said.

Like many other parts of the world, Europe has no great desire to take lessons from a country that is not at all popular and is not evidently a model of anything in particular worth adopting. The British attitude underlying this statement is not new though; it reminds me of the local government reform in the early 1970s. As it happened, my MP (Graham Page, Crosby) was the Minister for Local Government at the time and I went to hear him speak on his proposed reforms, especially as his plan to merge Crosby with three completely disparate towns (Bootle, Formby and Southport) into a mess called Sefton was far from popular. He said in so many words that the change would lead to greater efficiency, and that when the choice was between democracy and efficiency, the decision was in favour of efficiency.

“Europe must continue showing people what is important for their lives: making the market work, protecting the environment, security.”

If you want to tell Europe what it must do, you must first engage constructively and positively with it. And if you do that, you might notice that the European Commission has done quite a lot to make the market work. If I want to see Microsoft, or the airlines, or the car manufacturers, or the banks brought to heel, I would rather have Brussels doing it for me than London. After all, we have seen recently how efficiently the much vaunted British financial market works, haven’t we? As for the rest, the EU is actually doing things about the environment. And the security nightmare at airports is a result of the UK suffering a major panic attack in the summer of 2006, closing the world’s air-transport system down for a week, and bouncing the EU into adopting a regulation with a secret annexe that benefits security companies and annoys the citizens.

Britishness

This letter in today’s Guardian

After a fitful night trying to de-rattle our bedroom's ageing sash windows, at 6.42am I looked out into our street, where I could make out through the driving rain a man heading for the station, leaning into the gale-force wind, riding a unicycle! I felt very proud to be English.

reminded me of several things that I am glad to have left behind me a long time ago:

· Ill-fitting draughty windows

· Poor transport resources

· Inadequate precautions against inclement weather

· National pride.

The astonishing Hugo Chávez

In Britain, people’s views of dictatorships depend on whether or not they agree with the ideology of the dictator. In Spain, people can spot a dictatorship when they see one, and they dislike it even if it does make the trains run on time or provide a decent (albeit basic) health service.

The adoration of Fidel Castro and Hugo Chávez has no resonance here, where events in Latin America are reported with no ideological filter. Just why one of the richest cities in the world should be buying oil at below market rates from a relatively poor producing country is one question that never seems to be asked; whether or not British opinion about the leader of that country is influenced by this state of affairs is apparently something that is never even thought.

‘Send ten battalions to the front, including the tanks.’ This order was given by Hugo Chávez to his defence minister in the course of the president’s weekly TV show Alo Presidente as his response to Colombia’s bombing of the FARC drug-peddlers in Ecuador (as a result of which the FARC seem to be on the point of collapse). Chávez also made it clear that he would send his newly-acquired Russian Sukhoi fighter-bombers.

‘I have given the order not to mobilise a single soldier to the borders.’ This was the response of Juan Manuel Santos, the Colombian Minister of Defence. His President, Álvaro Uribe made the position clear. ‘Colombia proposes to denounce President Hugo Chávez of Venezuela to the International Criminal Court.’

In fact neither of these courses of action will be necessary – and the second would have got nowhere anyway – because at a stormy summit in the Dominican Republic they agreed to call their respective tanks and lawyers off. ‘They want to do with me what they did with Milosevic,’ said Chávez. Now, isn’t there something rather heartening about that tale of the power of the ICC, and the fact that lawyers can be more powerful than tanks?

Based on an article in El País by the Venezuelan economist Moisés Naím (9-3-08).

Meanwhile Chávez is hearing this from Luis Tascón, a respected parliamentary deputy from his own party: ‘With all respect, Major, I ask you to respect me too and to remember that I was fighting for the revolution before you set out on the revolutionary process.’ In particular Tascón accuses Chávez’ number two Diosdado Cabello of corruption and amassing a fortune.

On Saturday 87,467 party members were called to vote for the party’s fifteen-member executive committee. People are wondering why a party that boasts some five million members should have such a small internal electorate. In fact, the members will choose a thousand people. The President will whittle this number down to 69, and the final fifteen will then emerge. These people will decide the candidates for November’s elections for mayors and governors. So much for democracy. In the words of President Chávez himself: ‘In recent months, encouraged by what happened on 2 December [the constitutional referendum that Chávez lost], there has been talk of the idea of Chavism without Chávez (…) This is an absurd notion at this stage of the process, which is intended to sow doubt, open breaches, walls [sic], divisions. (…) Indiscipline has done us much harm. There are people who claim to lead factions and are starting to campaign and hand out papers. I am going to show them up, to wage internal war against indiscipline.’

Based on an article in El País by Francisco Peregil (9-3-08).

Doesn’t Ken Livingstone have nice friends!

Spanish elections

Much of the dust has settled since Sunday’s elections. The final results are:

                                                                                                                                                               

	2008 (75.3%)			2004 (75.6%)
Party	Seats/350	Votes	%	Seats	Votes	%
PSOE*   Socialist	169	11,064,524	43.64	164	11,026,163	42.59
PP*   Conservative	153	10,169,973	40.11	148	9,763,144	37.71
CiU*   Centre-right Catalan Nationalist	11	774,317	3.05	10	835,471	3.23
EAJ-PNV   Centre-right Basque Nationalist	6	303,246	1.20	7	420,980	1.63
ERC   Left Catalan separatist	3	296,473	1.17	8	652,196	2.52
IU   Communist /Green coalition	2	963,040	3.80	5	1,284,081	4.96
BNG   Left Galician Nationalist	2	209,042	0.82	2	208,688	0.81
CC-PNC   Canarian party	2	164,255	0.65	3	235,221	0.91
UPyD**	1	303,535	1.20	-	-	-
Na-Bai   Left Navarre Nationalist	1	62,073	0.24	1	61,045	0.24

 *Pending count of overseas votes. One seat may change from CiU to PP and one from PSOE to PP.

**A new party, centre-left and anti-nationalist.

The main difference is in the rise of a two-party system; PSOE and PP have each gained five seats, allowing the PP, which clearly has lost, to claim its best result ever. The big losers are without doubt the United Left (IU) and the Catalan Republican Left (ERC), both of which have fallen below the threshold of five seats that are necessary to have a separate group in the Parliament with access to money and group speaking rights; there is a mixed group for the odds and ends but it is not quite the same thing.

The two Catalan parties together have their lowest representation ever and the Basque left separatist party EA has lost its only deputy. IU has lost badly; it had been making noises about insisting on a ministry as its price for keeping Zapatero in the Moncloa and now its leader has resigned. ERC also had hoped to be in a position of influence but has crashed spectacularly. It did well for special reasons last time and its failure has had a side-effect in Catalonia, where its leader in the Catalan government has resigned his ministry to spend more time with his party and in particular to challenge its leader Josep-Lluís Carod-Rovira, who has finally noticed what I have been saying for a long time (and more than once), namely that ERC is in a ‘state of political adolescence’. Zapatero has several options and needs no formal agreement or coalition, but his options with the Catalan and Basque nationalists are limited because the Socialists in those areas, in government in Catalonia and in opposition in the Basque Country, are opposing the Nationalists. The electoral system distorted the result. The IU leader pointed out that with almost 4% of the votes (his party’s worst result ever) he has less than 1% of the seats; Rosa Díez, who won a seat for UPyD in Madrid, has pointed out that she got more votes than the PNV, who won six seats. Nevertheless, the distortion is far less than what is produced in Britain, where a third of the votes gives a hefty parliamentary majority. (A truly proportional result in Spain would have been: PSOE: 160, PP 147, IU 14, CiU 11, PNV 4, ERC 4, UPyD 4, BNG 3, CC 2, Na-Bai 0). Franco’s old party the FE de las JONS got 1557 votes in Catalonia, four down from its 2004 total. Although there are signs that things may be changing, there is still nothing like the British BNP or French National Front in Spain.

The state of the PP is uncertain; Mariano Rajoy, a John Major figure who was appointed as his successor by Aznar and accepted without question by the party, has now lost two elections, and even if they say that the last election was stolen there can be no doubt that the PP’s strategy of increasing tension has failed this time; his future is in doubt after losing one an election that he went into with an absolute majority and then this second one. Despite what they said though, the defeat is no real surprise. At the very beginning of the campaign there was a spectacular bust-up between the Mayor of Madrid and the President of the Community (Regional Government) of Madrid which only made sense if they were fighting for the succession to Rajoy after he had lost. These two represent the liberal and conservative wings of the party respectively, and Rajoy opted to support the conservative side, in line with the extreme line of his campaign, thus committing the classic mistake of oppositions of moving to a more extreme position. His position is uncertain, even though the party big-wigs most closely associated with the deception of four years ago about the bombs were sidelined in this election campaign.

The Socialists are obviously very happy and I am pleased that they will continue in government. As a British Liberal who wouldn’t touch Britain’s Stalinist Warmongering and Labour Party with a bargepole in find myself quite happy with what is in fact a Social Democrat party that has no hang-ups about running a market economy. It is good that they have not achieved an overall majority. In the past both PSOE and PP have has overall majorities in their second terms and it has not proved successful. The introspection that results from needing no external input to government policy and from having no internal debate about it, leads to bad policy – as was proved conclusively in the UK by the way the Labour Party walked blindly over the cliff of the Iraq war.

One banner outside the PSOE office on Sunday night read ‘PSOE has won. The bishops have lost’. If only it were that clear; just the other day the bishops elected a hard-liner as their chairman. It is quite probable, however, that the curiously privileged position of the Catholic Church in what is constitutionally a secular state will be approached in this legislature.

The number of women in this Congress has not changed; it is still about 36%. This is in spite of a law requiring parties to put at least 40% of each sex on their lists. It is said that the parties have regarded this as a quota for women; and also that the number one positions are overwhelmingly held by men, which leads to a male predominance in the winning positions. All of that may be true but it may also be true that the parties have to some extent kept their lists more or less the same as last time and it will take some time for women to establish themselves. The President of the Madrid Community (see above) is a woman, as is the Deputy Prime Minister. IU is the most right-on party but oddly when its leader was making his rather long-winded speech (‘the two-party tsunami’) accepting responsibility for his party’s debacle he appeared on the platform with fifteen or so of his party’s leaders, only two of whom were women.

Much has been made in the British media of the economic downturn. It is undeniable but has been exaggerated; to say that Spain has the highest unemployment rate this century may be true, but it refers to only the last seven years and the present rate is light years away from the rates of the 1980s and 1990s. Likewise, the Spanish banking system is not on the point of collapse, whatever the ‘Anglo-Saxon’ media may say. As I have mentioned, they have done better than many others in the subprime mortgage scandal, showing variations in results for 2006/7 ranging from ‑17.8% to 29.0% (with one exception at 177.0%) while figures for international banks range from ‑48% to ‑11%.

And last but by no means least there is the murder of Isaías Carrasco on Friday by ETA as he was setting out to work in a motorway toll-booth. Campaigning was stopped but that was not a big matter; with Saturday as a non-campaigning day for reflection there was only Friday evening to go anyway and the effect was minimal. He had been a councillor in the Basque town of Mondragón and when he lost his seat last year he opted not to keep the bodyguard that he had had. Someone in the town knew that and told ETA, who followed him checking up on his movements. His family refused to receive the mayor of the town; she is from ANV, a Basque party that has taken over from Batasuna, which has been made illegal because it is run by ETA, and in line with her party policy she had refused to condemn the murder. The fact that ANV was supported on the council by IU certainly cost IU a good number of votes in the Basque Country and probably in the rest of Spain too. The bereaved family also refused to meet the lehendakari (Basque President) whose own PNV party members do not need bodyguards. The attitude of the PNV to ETA reminds me very much of the Irish government’s attitude to the IRA in the 1950s and 1960s. Of course they condemn violence, of course they want a peaceful solution, but somehow they never seem to take the essential political steps that would bring that solution any closer.

IKEA and Scandinavian politics

CHAUVINISTIC FURNITURE NAMES

Is IKEA Giving Danes the Doormat Treatment?

By André Anwar in Stockholm

Emotions against IKEA are running high in Denmark, where researchers claim the wildly popular Swedish home furnishings company only names cheap doormats and wall-to-wall carpeting after Danish towns, reserving Swedish names for its more expensive furniture. The discovery has the proud Danes itching for revenge.

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