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.

Who killed Ian Tomlinson?

 

Legal fact No. 1

Ian Tomlinson was unlawfully killed by a Metropolitan Police officer (BBC)

Legal fact No. 2

Ian Tomlinson was not unlawfully killed by Metropolitan Police officer Simon Harwood (BBC)

So, who unlawfully killed Ian Tomlinson?

An ass	The law	A British bobby

This might be a good time to recall a previous post.

Gibraltar, by Jingo

It has been my experience over the years, in  real life as well as online, that the mere mention of the word Gibraltar is enough to turn otherwise intelligent, rational, sane and thoughtful Brits into gibbering, jingoistic flag-waggers as if by magic.

There is a lot about Gibraltar that is simply not reported in the UK since the base emotion of patriotism is strong enough to overcome, or perhaps inhibit, any proper analysis of the situation. If I were to suggest for example that Spain has several legitimate grounds for concern over the Gibraltar government's policy on bunkering, would your average British patriot:

a) Agree

b) Disagree

c) Not have a clue what I was talking about.

Comments are closed. I’ve been through it all before, several times.

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.

Eurodoom – or perhaps not

While British Eurosceptics are quick to write off the euro as being doomed, those who care to look will see a curious thing. Despite the current crisis the euro has held its own with sterling for the last three years, This graph from Oanda.com shows how there was a great devaluation of sterling in 2008 but since then there has been no real overall change in the exchange rate. Obviously the markets do not see the state of the euro in such dire terms as the British media do. Or perhaps sterling is just as doomed as the euro.

Met chief resigns

Metropolitan Police Commissioner Paul Stephenson has resigned. I said as soon as he was appointed that he was heading for trouble.

He says, ‘my integrity is completely intact.’ Indeed, he is a proud man.

Pulling up the ladder

This letter appears in today’s Observer (my emphasis):

… A necessary condition for getting the chronically unemployed off benefits is a rise in the minimum wage. Simply curtail immigration and the market will up unskilled pay rates. Nothing less than the unthinkable, namely a UK opt out from the EU accord on the free movement of people, will do.

No outsider is going to worry about the social costs of our growing underclass or feel any sense of obligation to do something about it. This is our problem and it can only be resolved by ourselves. It follows that our citizens have priority over would-be immigrants. Home solidarity trumps both international solidarity and unbridled capitalism.

Yugo Kovach, Winterborne Houghton, Dorset

Now it may be the case that the Kovaches have been settled in Dorset since the days of Alfred the Great, or at the very least that one Guy de Kovach was a trusted lieutenant of William the Conqueror. But on the other hand, that may not be the case.

The crisis – as easy as 1, 2, 3.

1. The greedy banks, aided and abetted  by their malevolent friends in the rating agencies, cause untold misery and mayhem in the world’s financial and economic system.
2. The democratic governments of the affected countries are left picking up the pieces. They have an idea. Maybe the banks could play a part in clearing up …
3. The greedy banks, aided and abetted  by their malevolent friends in the rating agencies, kick the democratic governments in the balls and scream, ‘Don’t even think of it or I’ll rip them off with my bare hands, make mincemeat of them, and force them down your throat for tomorrow’s breakfast.’

Along the gutter and down the drain

Seldom has the expression Good riddance to bad rubbish been more literally true than with the closure of the News of the World. It is too much to say that that newspaper itself was responsible for me leaving the country, but when I decided at the age of 25 that my destined career was to be an EFL teacher outside the UK (and there was no shortage of jobs for such people in the country), the smug superiority in morals (private and public) and the holier-than-thou prurience (private and public) that prevailed in the UK were most definitely things that I was extremely glad to get away from. And though it was 1978 when I finally left to live abroad permanently, the same applied in the pre-Murdoch days in which I grew up. This is about the Profumo scandal (1963).

04 Editor Of Sunday News

 

‘Media give false impression of demo’ – Independent

In its leader about the demonstration in London the Independent says (my emphasis):

Pictures of injured police and masked youths smashing windows and cash-points … could not but taint the day of protest as a whole. It is no wonder that trade-union leaders moved quickly yesterday to insist that the actions of a few hundred people should not be allowed to detract from the main message of the official protest. But this is, to an extent, what happened; the force of the pictures made that inevitable.

That may very well be true but it leaves a big question mark hanging in the air: Where did such forceful pictures come from and how did people come to see them? The answer of course is that they were published in the media. So the Independent is clearly admitting that people inevitably have an inaccurate, distorted impression of what happened on Saturday because they believed what they saw in the media. These pictures for example are from the Independent itself:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

What is really saddening, but not at all surprising, is that the Independent seems utterly unaware of the irony of what it is saying.