Catalonia, Nation-Building

The National is the only UK newspaper to headline the significance of yesterday's vote in the Catalan Parliament, the Generalitat.


Because yesterday the Catalan parliament directly challenged the Spanish government and its constitutional court (the Tribunal Constitutional) in two votes. The first was a vote to accept a route-map to independence, and the second to create a new Catalan social services agency.

The route map - in Catalan it is called the 'procés constituent' - has 11 points, laid out in detail in Catalan in Vilaweb. In summary, the plan is for a transparent, participative, process in which the Catalans would create a Constituent Social Forum (Fòrum Social Constituent*, FSC) with civil society and the political parties. the FSC would debate the various points of the future Constitution, and encourage public participation in the creation of a Constitution.

In a second phase, the Generalitat would pass 'laws of disconnection' with Spain, and create a Constituent Assembly (Assemblea Constituent) - in effect a new government - which would finalise the Constitution and put the final document to a public referendum. At the moment at which the public vote in favour of the constitution it would come into power, creating a new Republic of Catalonia.

The Madrid interim government uses the constitutional court to break many of the laws that are passed by the Catalan parliament. Because the government in power can select the judges who sit in the constitutional court, it is in effect just another arm of the ruling Partido Popular. It is absolutely not an independent judiciary.

But Madrid is at a very weak point at the moment. Paul Kavanagh, whose Wee Ginger Dug comes from Valencia and who is an expert on Spanish politics, was correct to point out yesterday that enfeebled Madrid is much more bothered about Gibraltar than it is about Scotland. Unable to form a government despite two general elections, Madrid politicians are doing what Tories and Labour in Westminster know best; focusing on me-me-me egos, stabbing each other in the back and then in the front, and not getting on with forming a government. There is every possibility that there will be a third, fourth or fifth general election here. 



Meanwhile, the Catalans are quietly getting on with building their own state.
 

*I'm having difficulty translating the much-used Catalan word 'constituent' into English. It means 'constituting' in the sense of 'we are constituting a new state.' [UPDATE; Thanks to @michauthor for putting me onto this Wikipedia page, which gives the translation as 'Constituent Assembly.']

Catalonia, Nation-Building

The National is the only UK newspaper to headline the significance of yesterday's vote in the Catalan Parliament, the Generalitat.


Because yesterday the Catalan parliament directly challenged the Spanish government and its constitutional court (the Tribunal Constitutional) in two votes. The first was a vote to accept a route-map to independence, and the second to create a new Catalan social services agency.

The route map - in Catalan it is called the 'procés constituent' - has 11 points, laid out in detail in Catalan in Vilaweb. In summary, the plan is for a transparent, participative, process in which the Catalans would create a Nation-building Social Forum (Fòrum Social Constituent*, FSC) with civil society and the political parties. the FSC would debate the various points of the future Constitution, and encourage public participation in the creation of a Constitution.

In a second phase, the Generalitat would pass 'laws of disconnection' with Spain, and create a Nation-Building Assembly (Assemblea Constituent) - in effect a new government - which would finalise the Constitution and put the final document to a public referendum. At the moment at which the public vote in favour of the constitution it would come into power, creating a new Republic of Catalonia.

The Madrid interim government uses the constitutional court to break many of the laws that are passed by the Catalan parliament. Because the government in power can select the judges who sit in the constitutional court, it is in effect just another arm of the ruling Partido Popular. It is absolutely not an independent judiciary.

But Madrid is at a very weak point at the moment. Paul Kavanagh, whose Wee Ginger Dug comes from Valencia and who is an expert on Spanish politics, was correct to point out yesterday that enfeebled Madrid is much more bothered about Gibraltar than it is about Scotland. Unable to form a government despite two general elections, Madrid politicians are doing what Tories and Labour in Westminster know best; focusing on me-me-me egos, stabbing each other in the back and then in the front, and not getting on with forming a government. There is every possibility that there will be a third, fourth or fifth general election here. 



Meanwhile, the Catalans are quietly getting on with building their own state.
 

*I'm having difficulty translating the much-used Catalan word 'constituent' into English. It means 'constituting' in the sense of 'we are constituting a new state.'

See's a pound, son

The Scottish Government is starting to make noises about a currency for an independent Scotland...with the predictable response of the Tories that 'the SNP want to take the pound from your pocket.'

The media are stuck in their old trope - that it was love of the pound that saved the Union in the September 2014 Referendum.

In fact, as Rob Johns at the University of Essex showed in a fascinating and detailed analysis after the Referendum, the pound was only one of a number of factors.

Dr Johns uses data from two large-scale (n=5,000) studies prior to the Scottish Referendum. He shows that voters in Scotland thought it likely, back then, that if Scotland stayed in the Union, the UK would vote to leave the EU. They felt it was likely that the gap between rich and poor would grow wider, and that welfare benefits would go down.

In other words, prior to the September 2014 Referendum, voters were already factoring in these consequences of staying in the Union.

But 42% of voters said it was unlikely that they, personally, would be better off if Scotland became independent, against 23% who felt that it was likely. Combine this with the fact that older people intended to vote no (around 70% of the 70+ age group intended to vote no) and you had a No-wins combination. 

Keeping the pound was a small part of the picture, and may be linked to the willingness to take risks in general. Yes voters were much more willing to take a risk than No voters. No voters felt that there was a danger that they would lose out in an independent Scotland.

So it's not about the pound. It's about whether we can show the voter, especially older voters and women, that they will be better off (or at least, not worse off), in an independent Scotland.
 

Dropping Billions on the Bomb

The Westminster parliament will vote today to renew the Trident missile system. We know it will vote that way because the Tories and most of the Labour Party support the renewal. In 2007, MPs backed "Tony Blair's bid to spend between £15bn and £20bn" on new submarines to carry the Trident Missiles.

As always happens with major defence projects, Tony Blair's £20 billion turns out to have been an under-estimate. CND's latest estimate is, er, more than ten times that amount at £205 billion.

These estimates are how it looks today. We can be sure that if we renew Trident, and then look back 40 years from now, the spend will be substantially more.

In 40 years, assuming an accident does not happen.

Westminster's atomic bombs are housed west of Glasgow. Upwind of Glasgow. So when there is an accident, a leakage, a wee dropped component or weakened gasket that releases nuclear material into the atmosphere,  it will endanger the entire Central Belt - most of the population of Scotland.

And an accident will happen. As submariner William McNeilly pointed out two years ago, the human errors in safety systems meant that Trident is a "disaster waiting to happen."


And the cost! George Kerevan writes an excellent piece in today's National describing the hidden costs of the atomic bomb. Even if the cost were not to rise - even if CND's maths is wrong and we were just spending the £23 billion that the MoD claims - those are billions that are not being spent on hospitals, on schools or on people living in poverty. Each of these alternatives would produce more prosperity than dropping billions on the bomb.


For Scotland, Trident is worse than useless. As a piece of defensive equipment you'd do better to toss your Sgian Dubhs into the Clyde.

The military threats to Scotland are not going to be answered with an atomic bomb.

Because the bomb is a moral outrage, a weapon that would kill millions of civilians and destroy millions of hectares of land. For what? So that the other side could lob a bomb at us, at Faslane, in turn destroying most of Scotland's people and land.

Despite the cost, despite the uselessness, despite the potential for killing the people of Scotland, Westminster's English MPs will vote today to impose Trident on Scotland. Scotland is abused and degraded by this decision.

BoJo Woe

The pantomime that is Westminster just got funnier. BoJo for Foreign Secretary is worse than the nightmare of my last blog.

Funnier for some. But this further-right Conservative government, led by a Prime Minister whose views on migration ended up on the side of go-home advertising trucks, is going to come down hard on Scotland.

This will be a government that sticks to its £100 billion Trident missile renewal. That's £100 billion that will not be spent on the NHS, or on social welfare, or on better benefits for the poor, or on ending the iniquitous benefits tribunals.

This will be the government that will make Brexit mean Brexit, against the democratically expressed will of the people of Scotland and despite the implications. Because Brexit means the removal of the few protections that the EU provided for workers and consumers, and the removal of EU grants to voluntary organisations, universities and rural projects across Scotland. Those grants don't particularly help the better off...but they do have an impact on people on average wages, or less.

BoJo may be a joker of a Foreign Secretary. But he will not win many laughs in Scotland. His appointment confirms that Westminster still revolves around the privileged few.

It is past time that Scotland stepped away from the Bullingdon Club, and made its own, independent, international, European way in the world.