Lavengro in Spain

His Excellency regrets

In 2007 my aunt died in the UK. As her executor and heir I had to get access to her bank account. That meant having my signature to a document witnessed by a notary or an officer of Barclays Bank. I phoned the British consulate in Barcelona and arranged an appointment. I turned up with the document for signature, my British passport and my Spanish ID card. I signed the paper, a consular stamp was affixed to it, I paid a fee and that was that.

Now my wife is in the same position with regard to her mother’s estate so she phoned the consulate. She was told to make an application by email. She did. This is the reply that she received.

[My comments]

My emphasis.

Dear Sir/Madam,

We are very sorry to learn of your recent bereavement. Please accept our sincere condolences.

[This is blatantly untrue and insincere. They send a form letter without acknowledging the sex of the person they are writing to, even though they know it]

Thank you for your e-mail.

Please be aware, this service may also be provided by a Spanish Notary or a UK Lawyer in Spain. You may find this service can be provided more quickly and at a lower cost than offered by the British Consulate. Please refer to the following links for a Spanish Notary or English Speaking lawyer in your consular area.

[Not all UK lawyers are notaries. Many of those who work in Spain are likely to be specialists in corporate, financial or property law. Moreover, although it mentions ‘a UK Lawyer in Spain’, the link in fact goes to the consulate’s list of English-speaking Spanish lawyers – quite a different matter.]

If you wish to proceed with your application at the British Consulate, please email us scanned copies of the following documents.

* A completed & signed appointment request form, attached.

[This form is reproduced below.]

* Original valid British passport or Passport/National ID of your country of nationality.

* Your Certificado de Emapdronamiento (Town Hall registration certificate) or original, valid Spanish Police Registration Certificate (green document which bears your NIE number and your address), or other proof of address. Please refer to the following link for suggested list of documents which are accepted for proof of address. Please note the proof of address must match the address stated on the declaration.

[That hyperlink does not lead to such a list.]

* Death Certificate of deceased.

* The document to be sworn at the Consulate.

* If the document to be signed refers to any exhibits, a copy of each exhibit.

* If the document refers to the attached will, a copy of the will.

[Why on earth is all this documentation required for the simple act of witnessing a signature?]

Once your application has been approved we will contact you within four working days of reading your e-mail to confirm that you have provided the correct documents and to tell you how to book an appointment or to request further documents.

Regards,

Consular Services | TEL: 902 109 356 | FAX: 00 34 91 714 6403

[There is no name at all despite the ‘sincere condolences. It is very hard to avoid the conclusion that they just can’t be bothered to provide the service and are being deliberately obstructive. The title of this post refers to the song by Noël Coward.]

With apologies to several British diplomats who I know will read this.

Click to enlarge images.

Politics in stereo

Yesterday was very odd. I kept seeing and hearing the same thing twice. In the UK, when the economy should have been the priority, a strongly nationalist government was being coerced by a weird party of political teenagers that wants to make the country independent of the EU in order to build Little England. The Labour Party was dithering partly because it fears being on the wrong side of popular opinion, partly because of internal division and partly because it has a very dubious track record on the issue. There is a principled small centre party that is clearly in favour of the Union but its voice goes largely unheard amid the clamour of the media that follows the nationalist line of its owners.

Meanwhile in Catalonia, when the economy should have been the priority, a strongly nationalist government was being coerced by a weird party of political teenagers that wants to make the country independent of Spain, and thereby of the EU, in order to build Cuba on the Med. The Socialist Party was dithering partly because it fears being on the wrong side of popular opinion, partly because of internal division and partly because it has a very dubious track record on the issue. There is a small principled centre party that is clearly in favour of the Union but its voice goes largely unheard amid the clamour of the media that follows the nationalist line of its government paymasters.

Catalonia’s magical mystery tour

Catalonia is setting out on a magical mystery tour with two drivers steering in different directions. The one heading to the right thinks he’s Moses and the one heading left imagines he’s Fidel Castro. This curious arrangement was set up by 71 of the 135 vehicle mechanics; the fact that the mechanics who check the vehicles are in the pay of the drivers provides all sorts of benefits in certain circles, though sadly the archives of the bus’s music system have been sold off.

Of the hundred passengers on board only 44 actually bought tickets for the journey with these drivers; the rest are just being carried along. The destination of this excursion lies outside the EU but few of the passengers know this so hardly anyone has brought a passport. Indeed, it is not certain whether the drivers know this themselves but whether they do or they don’t, it doesn’t make any difference because they have already said that they will just crash the bus through any barrier that they may meet. The back right wheel of the bus is wobbling badly and may very well come adrift. That could cause a bad smash of course but if it happens before the bus drives out of the EU it could prove to be a blessing in disguise.

The Leader of His People

Artur Mas prepares to lead the Catalan People to its True Destiny in the Promised Land of Independence – with xoriço per a tots – whatever Brussels says.

El Poble

Els Països Catalans

El President

Count me out.

The British media and Catalonia

The British media are known for their support of anything that leads to instability in Europe (here for an egregious BBC example). In an interesting piece of toadying the Guardian reports on Artur Mas’s recent visit to Brussels.

Catalonia’s regional leader sought to call the European Union’s bluff on Wednesday over a rising tide of national fragmentation and secessionism within the EU, demanding to know what Brussels will do if some of the union’s member states splinter for the first time in EU history.

…

He came to Brussels to try to sway minds on Catalan secessionism and to demand answers to the pressing questions being thrown up by the prospect of the emergence of new states within the EU.

True as far as it goes I suppose – that was what he intended to do – but there are some serious omissions in the article. For example, contrary to the impression that Traynor gives Mas didn’t meet a single EU official while he was in Brussels – and that was an even worse outcome than on his recent (and very expensive) trip to Moscow, where he did get a short time with a junior minister of culture.

The author of the Guardian’s piece was presumably at the same press conference as Teresa Küchler, the Swedish correspondent from Svenska Dagbladet, who said that he was being “intellectually dishonest” by asking voters, if he gets to hold a referendum, whether they want an independent state within the European Union. She also pointed out that other countries as well as Spain would probably consider vetoing any independent Catalonia and she doubted whether Catalonia had enough money to set up the institutions that would be needed to join the EU.

Then Scottish socialist MEP David Martin, pointed out “contradictions” in Mas’s speech, for example “when he refuses to share his resources with Spain but says he is happy to share those resources with the rest of the EU”. “I understand that you prefer to ask in the referendum if people want an independent Catalonia in the EU, but that isn’t up to you,” Martin warned him.

(Based on Yahoo! News in Spanish)

There is a serious discussion of how independence for Catalonia or Scotland would affect their EU membership on Brian Barder’s Ephem’s blog. It seems quite clear that a territory that secedes from an existing member state would be treated as a non-member of the EU and would have to apply for new membership.

The grand old President Mas

Oh, The grand old Duke of York,
He had ten thousand men;
He marched them up to the top of the hill,
And he marched them down again.

And when they were up, they were up,
And when they were down, they were down,
And when they were only half-way up,
They were neither up nor down.

The grand old President Mas has one and a half million men and women, or so he says, and he marched them up to the top of the hill of possible independence, as we see in this picture, with the promise of a referendum asking ‘Do you want Catalonia to be a new state in the EU?’

The problem is that when he got to the top of his hill he found a letter from the EU saying that he’d come to the wrong place and that they wouldn’t have anything to do with an independent Catalonia.

So now he has to turn round and march his people back down the hill because he neglected to do his homework beforehand, and we must hope that he is able to achieve this difficult manoeuvre in good order. If not we might be singing the Ibarretxe song:

There was a young lady of Riga,

Who smiled when she rode on a tiger.

They came back from the ride

With the lady inside,

And the smile on the face of the tiger.

Prince Cristòfol and Holly Mary

A Catalan tourist site CataloniaTours has its own distinctive way of attracting customers:

The catalan royal household I & II

Only from a really naval tradition, like the one of the catalan royal household, explorer and conqueror of the Mediterranean, is possible to be imagined the technology and the knowledges necessary to beginner a voyage through the Atlantic in 1492.

Cristòfol Colom [Christopher Columbus] was catalan, from Barcelona, member of the catalan royal family who took the catalan nation to its expansion in the Mediterranean.

Is in that magnificent time when the conception of catalan nation like a territorial and linguistic unity between brother countries and form equal to equal, that got the Principality of Andorra, the Principality of Catalonia (Including North-Catalonia, nowadays under the French state), the Valencian Country and the Balearic Islands.

Only the constant will of anihilate the catalan historic memory by the Spanish people explains the misrepresentation of the nationality of Cristòfol Colom, that made to believe that he was Genoese.

We've prepared two diferents tours, the Catalan Empire in Mediterranean, and the catalan discovery of America:

I - The Catalan Empire in Mediterranean

We'll discover the Basilica of Holly Mary of the Sea, built by the population and to the population at the beginnig of the fourteenth century.

All sic, both linguistically and historically speaking! Those who prefer their medieval history both better sourced and better written will find that the expansion of the Catalan nation in the Mediterranean under Roger de Flor involved extreme violence:

In a warfare of twenty years a ship or a camp was to become their country; arms were their sole profession and property; valour was the only virtue which they knew; their women had imbibed the fearless temper of their lovers and husbands; it was said that with a stroke of their broad-sword the Catalans could cleave a horseman and a horse; and the report itself was a powerful weapon.

Edward Gibbon, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, chapter 62.

and political incompetence:

In less than a single decade they had inflicted almost as much damage on the Byzantine Empire as the Turks had done in a century. And they had been paid by the Emperor to do it. In order to find their wages, Andronicus Palaeologus had been obliged to debase his coinage and to impose still heavier taxes on his already desperate subjects. The damage they had done in Thrace was to take generations to repair; the flood of refugees they had driven from their homes was to create near-famine in Constantinople. Had they kept to the terms of their agreement with Andronicus, concentrating on pushing back the Turks and renouncing all territorial ambitions for themselves, they might have turned back the Islamic tide and the whole future history of the Levant might have been changed. Alas, they did not; instead, almost exactly a century after the Fourth Crusade, they dealt the Empire that they had come to serve yet another paralysing blow, from which it would not recover.

John Julius Norwich, Byzantium, The Decline and Fall, conclusion of chapter 16 The Catalan Vengeance.

Violence has been absent from Catalan politics since 1991. Let us hope that, despite modern-day political incompetence, it stays that way.

It is said that this site is connected with the Generalitat (Catalan government).

Home and abroad

Spot the difference.

UK News

The UK's hopes of economic recovery are being "killed off" by the eurozone crisis, the chancellor says, as Spain requests a eurozone loan for its banks.

Europe News

Spain's decision to request a eurozone loan of up to 100bn euros to help its struggling banking system wins broad international support.

And a little later on the main and Europe news pages

Spanish PM Mariano Rajoy says a decision by eurozone ministers to help Spain shore up its struggling banks is a "victory for the euro".

with no change on the UK page.

They seek him here …

Yesterday upon the stair

I met a man who wasn’t there

He wasn’t there again today

Oh, how I wish he’d go away.

 

William Hughes Mearns

The foreigners are doomed!

	They’re all doomed! DOOMED!

The Independent’s relentlessly Eurosceptic economics correspondent Hamish McRae foresees, in the best Scottish tradition, gloom and doom for southern (i.e. Catholic) Europe. He worries about the million or so people that the UK ‘has living’ in Spain, as if all of us were not workers and permanent residents but expatriate retirees, are just here for the cheap fags and booze and willing to return if things get tough. And he reassures us that ‘we’, by which he apparently means the British state, are preparing to help those million people if the foreigners screw up completely and Spanish cash machines run out of money. Such is the nature of a self-fulfilling prophecy that this panic will be monged and wildly overvalued by the City of London and disaster in the Mediterranean will be provoked – deliberately or not according to your point of view.

He also says:

If you were abroad over Easter and noticed the exchange rate, you may have been surprised to see that sterling is not as weak as it has been of late. The pound yesterday was at its highest since mid-February 2011. The rise has been particularly against the euro…

It is (deliberately?) unclear what he means by ‘of late’. If he means the last three months he is demonstrably wrong. The sterling/euro exchange rate for the last 12 months has been this:

In early July last year sterling reached a low point of €1.1136 and the other day it reached a high of €1.2060, which is lower than the high point of €1.2079 reached in early January.

At that lowest rate last July, a cup of coffee or a beer that costs 2 euros would have changed from £1.80 to £1.66, a 15-euro lunch would cost £13.47 instead of £12.48 and a dinner for 50 euros would be £44.90 against £41.46. That, remember, is taking the lowest dip on the 1-year graph and its second-highest point, and is using the interbank rate. By the time banks have had their share the effect on the total budget of a weekend away is hardly severe. Certainly my British friends who were here last weekend didn’t mention any particular problem.