Lavengro in Spain

Voting in Spain (with update)

Under the Maastricht Treaty EU citizens can vote in the European Parliament elections in the EU country in which they are resident. This means that we can vote in Spain’s elections a week on Sunday. Jane will be away that weekend so she will vote by post.

The regulations for applying for a postal vote are available on the internet. The process starts with a visit to a post office at least ten days before the election; she went this morning and on showing her residence (ID) card she was given a form to fill in. She had to sign it in the presence of the PO clerk, who checked that the signature on the form matched what was on the card. Spanish citizens would present their national ID card. There is a procedure for illiterates. The internet site clearly states that a driving licence or passport is acceptable if it has a photo, even if the document is out of date. As a result of this process, a registered letter has been sent with Jane’s application for a postal vote to the local election authorities. One day next week she will receive a registered letter with the relevant papers; she will have to receive this letter personally from the postperson who delivers it. She will then place her ballot paper (i.e. the list for her preferred party) in an envelope and send it, by registered post again, to the returning officer at the polling station. Postal votes must be sent at least three days before polling day and the Post Office delivers them to the polling station at 09.00. Any others that come in before 20.00 are also delivered; after that they are sent to the local Electoral Commission for later counting. In the 2004 general election 559,730 applications for postal votes were made, of which 6,170 were refused. Once you have made an application for a postal vote it is impossible for you to vote in person. Also, votes must be cast on election day itself, so if you die between sending off your postal vote and the day of the election, your vote won’t be valid.

I will be here, so I will vote in person. This means that I will go to the polling station with my poll card (useful but not compulsory) and identify myself as described above. I will have taken a printed list for my preferred party and put it in an official envelope. In the past I then handed this envelope to the person in charge of the table in the polling station that takes my votes and he or she would put it in the box. It has now been decided that after thirty years of democracy people can be expected to know how to put an envelope in the box for themselves. Any envelope that is empty is counted as a blank vote (i.e. a vote for ‘none of the above’) and any that contains more than one paper is ignored. Note that this means that there is no need for security about blank ballot papers; in fact, ballot papers are not marked by the voter because each party has a separate paper with its list, colour coded for easy counting. Parties send out official lists and envelopes with their election literature and many people go to vote with their paper already in the envelope ready to put in the box. This system also means that the vote is totally anonymous, unlike the British system of keeping a numbered counterfoil of each ballot paper which is referenced to each voter.

The ballot box itself is transparent, which allows people to check that it does not mysteriously fill up over lunchtime but also symbolises the transparency of the democratic process. The people running the polling stations are members of the public selected for the task, like jury service in the UK. You can get out of it in exchange for an administrative fine. People are horrified at the idea of having public employees running elections. Each table has a person responsible for it and a few scrutineers from the parties. The votes are counted in the polling stations and the results are phoned through to the Interior Ministry, which manages the count for national elections; regional or municipal authorities run their own. Voting finishes at 20.00; the first results come in at about 22.00 and by midnight it’s all pretty well over. Occasionally there will be disputed papers or late papers from postal or overseas votes, which hold up the count; the D’Hondt method is complicated and sometimes it can be a few days or even a week before the final result is known if one seat hangs on a handful of votes. Because the Canary Islands are one hour behind the rest of Spain, TV election programmes cannot be shown there until their polling stations have closed.

British-style canvassing is unknown in Spain, people do not display posters in their living-room windows and, while there are exit polls, the parties do not collect details of people voting – and would get very short shrift from just about everybody involved if they did. The campaign will end on the Friday evening, the day before polling day being a day for reflection when no electioneering is allowed.

Update Thursday 4 June: On Tuesday morning the doorbell rang and a registered letter from the election authorities was delivered for Jane. Normally when you receive registered mail you just sign for it and put your ID number on the form and that’s that; you can receive mail on behalf of other people. In this case she had to show her ID card and the postwoman herself copied the number onto the receipt. As expected, the envelope contained a copy of each list for the elections (36 of them, I think she said) and two envelopes. She put her selected list in the same sort of envelope that is used in the polling station (as above) and then put that in another envelope that was addressed to the returning officer of her polling station. Later that morning I took the envelope to the post office and sent it by registered post, free of charge. I was able to do that it because I got a receipt that I gave to her. OK she trusts me, but there is still a receipt that the voter can ask for if someone else posts the vote, thus maintaining the chain of security.

If she had not been available when the envelope arrived, she would have had to go to the post office to collect it in person.

On Liberty

In his BBC blog Mark Mardell says:

And hands up who loves liberty? Ah yes, it goes with equality and fraternity doesn't it? Three-quarters of French agree "the freedom of the individual citizen must be maintained under all circumstances - so long as this does not have a negative effect on any other citizen". Only a third of Brits agreed with this heavily qualified assertion that freedom is, on the whole, a good thing.

Heavily qualified that assertion may be, but it is indistinguishable in meaning from the words of John Stuart Mill (On Liberty, 1859):

The liberty of the individual must be thus far limited; he must not make himself a nuisance to other people.

How things have changed since the heyday of British Liberalism.

Pharmacies

Just a year ago, at the end of May 2008, I received a translation through an agency. It was a routine job, but it was one that I was pleased to do. It was a comment from a Spanish association of pharmacists objecting to EU proposals to reform the pharmaceutical retail business. I was especially pleased to read the other day on EurActiv.com that this submission has been successful:

Pharmacists have expressed relief following a landmark judgement by Europe’s top court which upheld the right of EU countries to insist that pharmacies are owned and operated exclusively by pharmacists.

The decision is a setback for pharmacy retailers and some major supermarket chains seeking to expand into pharmacy. Limitations on who can run pharmacies are in place in a number of large European countries, including Germany, Italy, France and Spain.

Briefly, Spain has a lot of small pharmacists, and I like it that way. Within five minutes’ walk of my flat there are six retail pharmacists. The one that I normally use is, like most pharmacies, open from 09.00 to 22.00 every Monday to Friday and Saturday mornings, one keeps normal shop hours, closing in the afternoons, and another is open 24/7. In reasonable reach of any part of the city there will be duty pharmacies that are open overnight and all day on Sundays; in Barcelona city there are twelve all-night pharmacies serving a population of about 1.8 million people. Some pharmacies offer other services such as testing for blood pressure, cholesterol and so on, others may specialise in cosmetics, while there are those that carry a wide range of surgical supports and special bandages. When I was immobilised recently with a severe attack of gout in both feet, a wheelchair hired from a local pharmacy (35 euros for a fortnight) proved invaluable. Every Spanish pharmacy has a weighing machine that prints out your weight, height and body mass index, and a bin by the door where people can place unwanted drugs for safe and ecological disposal. The shops are marked in the streets by a green cross, which often doubles as a digital clock and a thermometer.

Each pharmacy must be owned by a pharmacist, who must be on the premises, and no pharmacist can own more than one shop. Thus we do not have chains, and pharmacies have individual character. My liking for this system is heightened by an unfortunate experience that I had in Britain. My mother-in-law wanted to have a prescription filled. I offered to go to the branch of Boots that is about ten minutes’ walk from her house. When I got there I was attended at the fully-stocked pharmacy counter by a man whose name tab identified him as the licensed MRCP for the shop. I showed him the prescription and with a perfectly straight face he told me that that branch didn’t do prescriptions. Why not? Because there is another Boots within a mile. I set off there, but when I arrived a quarter of an hour later it had closed. I had no choice but to go back home empty-handed and return to the more distant Boots (the one that actually did prescriptions) the following day.

Well, at least it wasn’t a Sunday. If you need a pharmacist on a Sunday in Britain you’ll find that the one duty pharmacy in the county is open from 12.00 to 12.30 on Sundays when there’s an r in the month (except November).

Gays, Muslims and the general population

On 8 May El País (Madrid) published a survey which, it claimed, showed that European Muslims are less loyal to their countries than those in Canada and the USA. I am not sure that the figures (below in the screenshot) really bear out this conclusion, but I was amazed to see the the results of the third survey. We know that Muslims in general don’t think much of homosexuals but:

Are homosexual acts morally acceptable?  (general population/Muslims %)

France: 78/35

Germany: 68/19

UK: 58/0

Yes, nul points from British Muslims for the idea that people of the same sex might fall in love with each other. But the figure for the general population is also shaming for a country that likes to consider itself tolerant and gay-friendly. It’s just like the Empire. The UK is good at exporting thugs who want to tell the foreigners how to do things but isn’t too good at getting things right itself.

Labour’s take it or leave it consensus

Those of us who do not support the Labour Party have long known that its arrogance and tribalism (and its liking for strong government) lead it to oppose any suggestion of a coalition or accommodation of any kind with any other party. And I have mentioned before how the British version of la pensée unique leads to closed, incestuous groupthink in British life. But even when Labour tries to open up it just can’t get it right. As Gordon Brown said yesterday about reforming Parliament:

"I hope other parties will be able to accept my proposals. I want to do it on a consensual basis."

The Speaker goes

An archaic relic of Britain’s Constitution has gone and there is much talk of reforming Parliament.

Hint for progressives: Something important happened in 1789.

Dealing with public servants

I have mentioned the possibility of a Spanish general being sent to prison for screwing up the identification of victims of a plane crash, precisely for falsifying public documents (death certificates).

It has just been announced that General Vicente Navarro has got three years in prison and a fine. A major and a captain have got eighteen months each.

How many British MPs will end up in prison for misappropriation of public funds?

 

Thick fog is said to have caused the crash near Trabzon in Turkey

I see that the BBC has picked this up. It is a fair report. My only comment is about the picture caption. It is true that it was foggy, but it is also true that the Ukrainian crew had not rested properly (they had been working for a long time and had slept in the plane); they had never flown into Trabzon before; and they didn’t speak English, so communicating with air traffic control was difficult. They also did not (as they should have done) have enough fuel to divert out of the fog in Trabzon to an alternative destination airport. They tried three times to land, and on the fourth they got lost and crashed into the mountainside.

The plane was a rattletrap and there had been complaints made before about the quality of then planes. It was chartered at the cheapest possible rate, though in line with NATO rules. For that reason the political  scandal was enormous, quite apart from the misidentification of the bodies. Federico Trillo, who was Defence Minister at the time, was criticised though he has never been called to account publicly. He does seem to have disappeared from politics, though.

The uses of accountancy

Spain is not short of political scandals. We have a lovely one going on right now with Francesc Camps, the President of the Valencian Community, being charged with corruptly receiving suits in exchange for letting contracts without the tedious necessity of issuing tenders. And when it comes to size of political scandals, Spain can lead the world (well, the non-Italian bit of the world at least).

(Picture, El Jueves. The man flying the plane is Camps’s nemesis Judge Baltasar Garzón (yes, The Man Who Arrested Pinochet).

 

But there is one thing that has been puzzling me about this latest British scandal, and it is crystallised in today’s Guardian:

Brown had to spend a day and a half checking his national insurance and tax as the Telegraph splashed claims that the prime minister had swindled the taxpayer over his cleaner's contract.

The British PM receives a rather large salary. MPs’ and ministers’ salaries (even without expenses) do not exactly place them on the breadline. They have rather more than many self-employed and freelance people. Such people routinely employ accountants to make sure that their paperwork is in order, but the most important man, and presumably one of the busiest, in the UK can ‘spend a day and a half checking his national insurance and tax’. Jack Straw was so busy running whichever ministry it was at the time that he didn’t keep his eye on his council tax status. Why didn’t he just send all the papers to an accountant? Whether or not the Commons Fees Office should have audited MPs’ claims more closely is one thing, but when it comes to payments to the State there can be no excuse at all for not getting it right. And saying ‘I was awfully busy running the country and I just made an honest mistake’ is no excuse at all.

The prostitute, the police officer and the judge

A father who asked an undercover police officer posing as a prostitute to take his 14-year-old son's virginity has been given a suspended prison sentence. … Judge Jonathan Teare said [to the father]: "What you were doing that night was to expose your 14-year-old son to a prostitute because you didn't know she was a police officer.

BBC

Perhaps on reflection the judge might wish that he had said: "What you were doing that night was to expose your 14-year-old son to a woman you believed to be a prostitute, not knowing she was in fact a police officer.

Britain stakes claim for sea bed

Britain has asked the United Nations to give it territorial rights to a large area of the South Atlantic Ocean.

The submission - before the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea - is for territory around the Falkland Islands, which is also claimed by Argentina. The area in question is beyond the 200 miles of territorial rights that states almost automatically get around their coastal waters. It covers an area around the south Sandwich Islands, south Georgia and the Falkland Islands. And the western limits of the claim are about 300 miles or so from the Argentine coast - about the same distance as the Falklands.

So far, so unsurprising. Countries do this to line up their claims to mineral and fishing rights. A Russian submarine planted a flag on the North Pole not so long ago. Denmark is hanging on to some vestigial sovereignty over Greenland to keep itself in the game. But the BBC goes on to say (my emphasis):

As well as the claims around the Falklands, the UK has also made submissions for extensions of its territorial waters around Ascension Island, the Bay of Biscay and Rockall, in the north Atlantic.

The Bay of Biscay??? Is Sir John More’s corse claiming sovereignty from the rampart in Corunna to which it was hurried? Is this the UK’s response to the enlarged EU? What on earth is going on? I think we should be told. The BBC has scooped El País and Le Monde on this one!