Thoughts from Galicia: 9.9.17

Spanish life is not always likeable but it is compellingly loveable.

- Christopher Howse: A Pilgrim in Spain. 

If you've arrived here because of an interest in Galicia or Pontevedra, see my web page here.

Life in Spain

• University-wise, things here are getting better, though not much.
• Cataluña. BBC News, as of yesterday. The region/nation could have been invaded by the time you read this.
• Techology: I wish companies would get it right. I don't mind receiving prompt messages as much as a month before my car is due for a service but I object to getting reminders after it's been done. Even worse, the phone call I got 2 days ago. But that did give me the chance to sound off!
• Here's The Local's view of the best Paradors in Spain. The first was featured and much lauded here on December 8 last year. And on the previous day too.
• This is supposed to be a very short video showing the voting slip for the imminent independence referendum in Cataluña but, as ever, it won't upload. It shows the Yes box stationary but the No box moving rapidly around, making it impossible to tick it . . .
  
  
  
  

I've tried without success to find it on Youtube and the net.

I was just thinking yesterday about the arrogant pronouncements of the non-elected EU Mandarins - including the egregious Plonker Juncker -  when along came the article from Ambrose Evans-Pritchard which I've appended to this post. Needless to say I share his sentiments.

This is a welcome addition to Pontevedra's old quarter, as it replaces an ugly ruined building. But I do feel it displays a lack of architectural ambition. Strangely - unless they're going to add granite surrounds to the windows - it's neither in the Galician nor Portuguese vernacular. Rather Andalucian, perhaps. But at least - unlike the ruin - it's not covered in dirty posters and graffiti. Yet.

I'm travelling to Madrid on the night train again tonight. Or, rather, I'm not - as this service has been withdrawn. Plan B is also unworkabe as all seats on today's and tomorrow's day trains are taken. Possibly because of students and holiday-makers returning to the capital. So, it's the bus for the first time, leaving at 10.30 and arriving a mere 8.5 hours later in the south of Madrid. Hopefully, I'll be able to manage a siesta on it. And maybe a pleasant conversation or two.

Finally . . .  My thanks to reader Geoff for advising I can negatively include (i. e. exclude) specific words and phrases on Google Alerts. I'm now trying this in respect of "Super Fast Galicia" and a few other things.

Today's cartoon:-

THE ARTICLE

Triumphant Brussels likens Britain to the Third Reich: Ambrose Evans-Pritchard

So it has come to this. Brexit is now akin to the worst episodes of totalitarian mass murder in the 20th century.

“EU policymakers and officials are returning to their desks with a spring in their step,” writes the Brussels think-tank, Friends of Europe, the high priests of EU orthodoxy.

“This summer has seen the ‘Brexit effect’ quietly gathering momentum, so much so that it's shaping into one of the most spectacular own-goals of European history, on a par with Germany's Third Reich or the Russian Revolution.” All that is missing is Mao’s Great Leap Forward.

Such is the febrile mood in Brussels. The note is illuminating on many levels, but the main thrust is a celebration of imperial might. “Negotiations with the UK are demonstrating the sheer power of the EU,” it says.

“For a decade it had appeared flabby, struggling ineffectually with the eurozone's difficulties and then with the migrant crisis. Now, the Brexit process is revealing the EU's solidarity and its worth. It's a lesson that isn't wasted on the watching world.

“Thanks to Brexit, the value of the European project is coming into full view. For the average European, the technical details of economic integration have been invisible to the naked eye. The European Union's many virtues are being laid bare for all to see.”

It has been a mission impossible for Brussels to explain the complexity of EU regulations or to sell EU's daily diet of technical standards to the people. “Bizarrely, the UK government is performing exactly that feat. David Davis has had to backtrack on a lengthening list of issues. The most significant climb-down has been London's grudging acceptance that EU law, and thus the rulings of the European Court, will continue to hold sway in Britain,” it said.

Actually London has agreed no such thing, beyond a transition phase over limited issues, and even then the role of the ECJ may be ‘indirect’. But never mind.

“That concession looks set to be followed in many other areas. Theresa May's Government had previously been adamant about cutting connections and ‘taking back control’, yet on key questions like electronic data regulation and privacy the UK has advanced suggestions for maintaining links with Brussels.”

So the desire for cooperative ties – stated long ago in Theresa May’s Lancaster House speech and at EU Council meetings – is capitulation. But again, never mind.

The message is clear: Brexiteers betting that others would follow in a pan-EU domino effect have been confounded. So have those who thought UK withdrawal would shake the EU system to its foundations. Europe has regrouped. Its line is hardening. It is Britain that is now on its knees as the economy crumbles.

It so happens that the piece is written by an old friend of mine, the group’s chairman Giles Merritt. His 2016 book ‘Slippery Slope: Europe’s Troubled Future” is a fine exploration of the EU’s own deep malaise. That even this wise owl should be in thrall to such hubris – some might say chest-thumping euro-nationalism – tells us what is in the Brussels water these days.

Jeremy Browne, the City’s EU envoy, said that his conclusion after long talks across the Channel is that the EU is still treating Brexit as “primarily an internal disciplinary matter”, with little thought of anything beyond.

As a ‘Gedankenexperiment’, imagine how we in Britain would have reacted if Scotland had voted to leave the UK. While saddened, I hope my reaction would have been to respect the legitimate wish of the Scottish people to run their own affairs and to bid them well, as would most Telegraph readers. I believe the British government would have bent over backwards to help the Scottish state.

The EU sees Britain’s quest for independence in another light. Mr Browne says that beyond the crude reflex of punishment it is deeply divided and has no vision for any sort of long-term relationship. The UK is rebuked daily for lacking statecraft in these talks but the EU is arguably worse.

Brussels faces an enveloping crisis in which Britain is leaving, relations with Turkey have collapsed, the enlargement process is finished, and Ukraine is in limbo. This cries out for a profound strategic review of its neighbourhood policy. What the EU should be doing is to work out how to deal with an outer ring of states that are not destined for “ever closer union”, yet wish to have close trading or military ties. So far we hear nothing beyond pedantic, legalistic, nitpicking. It has not risen to the new challenge.

But I digress. The Friends of Europe paper wilfully misreads this year’s political events in the EU, as does the Brussels elite in general.

The French elections in May were not a validation of the European project. Some 49% voted for extreme parties or protest movements with a eurosceptic hue in the first round. The fact that Emmanuel Macron ultimately won does not conjure away this landscape. The Front National’s Marine Le Pen won 34% (compared to 1.8% for UKIP in June). Such a result was once unthinkable.

Yes, the cyclical recovery since early 2016 has lifted spirits. Negative interest rates, $2 trillion of quantitative easing, and a fiscal mini-blitz, have belatedly rescued southern Europe from depression. To the extent that these countries have huge output gaps – after having been waterboarded by austerity overkill – they are now enjoying a mechanical ‘V’ shaped catch-up.

But the European Central Bank will soon have to wind down QE, even though this will leave the Italian Treasury alone in the market trying to fund €400bn (£365bn) of debt each year. The 20% gap in North-South competitiveness has not gone away. Germany is still running a corrosive and illegal current account surplus of 8.5% of GDP with the complicity of Brussels, invariably craven on such matters.

There is still no fiscal union, no debt union, and no shared banking liabilities. The German constitutional court has ruled that any serious move in such a direction would violate the Grundgesetz in any case. If there were a fiscal union – by some miracle – it would advance the EU project from its current state of authoritarian technocracy to outright tyranny.  

It would concentrate parliamentary powers to tax and spend in the hands the Eurogroup, a body that answers only to itself. Given the way that EMU officials toppled Greek and Italian prime ministers, forced the Irish state to swallow vast sums of junior bank debt to shield the European banking system, and secretly ordered changes to the Spanish constitution, I hate to think where this would go.   

Friends of Europe says that “once the British had embarked on the tortuous process of negotiating their departure, the disadvantages of leaving quickly became apparent". 

What this really means is that it is extremely hard for a country to extract itself from the EU after forty years, ‘infantilised’ to the point where it no longer has trade treaties or control of its own nuclear industry. On that we can agree.

Brexit has demonstrated to everybody what has happened over three decades of treaty-creep: the Single European Act, Maastricht, Amsterdam, Nice, and ultimately Lisbon. It has shown how close Britain has come to losing sovereignty altogether.

Mr Merritt states that Brexit has made visible the once-hidden “virtues” of the EU. Yet what he mostly says is that the pain (allegedly) being suffered by Britain is becoming apparent to people across the EU.

As a daily consumer of the European press I would agree that such a scarecrow effect is at work. Readers are subjected to a relentless barrage about what is happening in the UK that borders on fiction. German newspapers are particularly fond of the words ‘Katastrophe’ and ‘Kernschmelze’ (meltdown) in conjunction with Brexit.

If that is your only source of information you might indeed think that Britain was in the grip of rampant pauperisation, and that wolves are on the loose among the abandoned towers of the Canary Wharf. For what it is worth, UK manufacturing growth in the third quarter is running slightly ahead of eurozone growth. Let’s keep it quiet.

The decline in Europe’s eurosceptic parties has little to do with any re-found EU ‘virtues’: the operative word in this context is fear.

I was recently reading the thoughts of Harvard anthropologist Michael Herzfeld, writing about Brexit from a mountain community in Crete. The villagers are flabbergasted that the British dared to take such a step.

“These highly intelligent observers, some of whom have lived abroad, have experienced rough treatment from the European Union, for which, as for Greece’s leaders, they now have neither patience nor affection. They know about hard-bargaining and cannot see how any member state can realistically opt out,” he writes.

“They already ‘know’ there is no real way out: as one man put it, their government said ‘No’ in the morning and ‘Yes’ in the evening – and the British government, he argued, will be forced to do likewise or suffer dire consequences.”

The EU priesthood has certainly acquired a habit of overturning referenda by fair means or foul. “We have instruments of torture in the basement,” in the immortal words of Jean-Claude Juncker, the grand inquisitor.

They reversed the Danish ‘No’ to Maastricht, and the Irish ‘No’ to Nice and Lisbon, and Dutch and French ‘No’ to the European Constitution (reinvented as Lisbon), and the Greek ‘Oxi’ in 2015.

Now at last they face a referendum to be reckoned with. The old guard in Brussels is having great difficulty coming to terms with this novel experience. They will.