Spanish Irony

Oh the irony! Spain blocks Theresa May's Brexit!

Remember the tales we were told about Spain blocking EU access for an independent Scotland? It was always load of toro-s&1t, designed as part of Project Fear. As Paul Kavanagh, the Wee Ginger Dug and the wonderful Pilar Aymara have repeatedly explained the 'Spanish Veto Myth' is exactly that - a myth created by the tabloids to scare swing voters to 'No' in the independence referendum.

But now the Spanish snake has turned to bite Theresa in the bum. Gibraltar, according to today's Financial Times, is the rock in the sandal of the Tory party's Brexit.

¡No passarán!

Dear Aymara

23rd June 2036

Dear Aymara

Happy 20th birthday!

When your dad - my son - met your Mum in that refugee detention centre in Greece back in 2015 her situation was desperate. She had escaped with her sister from the cluster bombs of Aleppo and then spent three months walking across Turkey trying to avoid the kidnappers and the people-traffickers.

You were born on the day that Britain voted to stay in Europe.

Thanks to a massive vote in Scotland in favour of staying in, the UK voted 51% to 49% to remain. It was horribly close. The campaign for the EU Referendum was particularly nasty, focusing on migration in a way that hinted at, even if it did not directly condone, discrimination. This was especially ironic in Britain whose islands were populated by migrants who had settled there after the last ice age, and then by endless waves of peoples - Romans, Vikings, Normans… after that. Britain had been the source of huge migrations to Canada, the USA and Australia, and then had taken back the people of the world either as refugees (the Jewish children and the Norwegian resistance during WWII) or because it needed the labour force. The result is that the Glasgow I know and love is a wonderful mixture of Vikings and Pakistanis, of Picts and Italians (Mr Nardini in Largs always made the best ice cream!), of Afro-Caribbeans and Irish.

I am a migrant, one of the hundreds of thousands who has taken advantage of the EU to move to Catalonia (remember your tenth birthday, when we cerebrated Catalonia becoming independent? That was a p-a-r-t-y!!!) You spent last year as an Erasmus student in Paris being a migrant. You and I know that migrants are good for their adopted country; you were able to help your new friends in Paris to understand what happened in Syria all those years ago and I saw the lovely pictures of the dinner you cooked for them; dolmades from Greece, Kebab Halabi from Aleppo and cranachan from Scotland!!

In the end the EU referendum was not about migration. It could never be about migration in a country made by migrants. It was about beliefs.

The closeness of the vote, like the Referendum in Scotland two years previously, made us all think. What did we believe in? Did we believe in a US style of capitalism, focused on individual freedoms? Or in the European style of welfare state that protects people who are poor, in pain or in need?

Thanks to the EU Referendum our special European model, the welfare state, was revived.

That meant the end of a set of political beliefs started when I was about your age by a Westminster leader called Margaret Thatcher. She believed (it sounded reasonable at the time) that if you cut back on the state's responsibilities and cut taxes, the rich would be encouraged to be more entrepreneurial, building new businesses and creating new jobs. The result would be that the wealth would 'trickle down' to the poor.

By the time you were born (under a different prime minister called David Cameron - but I doubt you know his name, he left no mark in history) it was obvious that this idea, called 'neoliberalism', did not work. The gap between the rich and the poor had widened. Not only had neoliberalism made hundreds of thousands of people in the UK poorer, it had allowed people of wealth to stash away billions in secret hiding places, including many former British colonies. The wealth was not trickling down. It was bleeding out.

The people of the British isles - migrants all of us - voted for our belief in a welfare state.  The revival of the welfare state has finally started to close the gap between wealth and poverty. You and I and 500 million other people across Europe have benefited in the last 20 years from the results of that choice by the people of Britain. We have had opportunities - from your education to my pension - that we might not have had, had Britain voted itself out of the arms of Europe.

Enjoy every day of that - your birthday especially.

Love

Grandpa

European Bounty

What are we to make of Europe? What has happened to the idea that Europe, the EU, would help us construct a fairer society, one in which absolute poverty and exaggerated wealth would disappear?

Europe has, or has had, a model that used progressive taxation to pay for a broadly inclusive health service, free education, rights for women, workers and minorities, and more or less functioning democracies. These were common characteristics of a common market. They saved many from the levels of poverty seen in the paragon of free markets, the USA. They also saved us from wars (in which, as in all wars, the poor foot soldiers suffer most.)

And then came Grexit. A poor country that had been loaned billions on easy terms by the banks, the IMF and member states. Easy terms that did not include, as perhaps they ought, a requirement that Greece strengthen her institutions and, specifically, her capacity to gather taxes. The markets, followed by the bankers of Frankfurt, lost confidence in Greece. The Troika swooped and austerity, the only paradigm in town, was imposed.

In the shadow of the Troika, the questions at the top of this article have started to gnaw at the hearts of people on the left. Janan Ganesh in yesterday's FT described "the left's wrath at Brussels (and Berlin)". Zara Kitson, candidate for the Scottish Green Party in an excellent article in last week's The National wrote about "...the Troika bullies [as] representatives of the neoliberal status quo." "...the vision of the EU as a beacon of peace and reconciliation, democracy and human rights [is] now under threat of being hijacked for good by free market fanatics." Zara called for the people of Europe to "...stand up for an alternative European project...to defeat austerity and xenophobia, and to promote peace and sustainability, whilst pushing to make the Europe of our intentions become the Europe we're a part of."

Raül Romeva is the lead candidate for Junts pel Sí, the single candidature that is planning to stand in September's elections for the Generalitat, the Catalan parliament. The group is pro-independence, or at least pro- the right to chose independence for Catalonia. Last year he published* "We Are a European Nation (and a tricky dossier)," a collection of essays on Catalonia and the EU. He is a highly qualified commentator, having been an MEP 2004-14 and supervisor of elections in Bosnia and Herzegovina for the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe in 1996 and 1997.

In Raül's view the "...current 'EUreality' is a union, but only of states. Peoples and people have become a secondary issue." The debate about Europe has become yes-no , in-out "...while we have forgotten other equally important [variables]...the nuances, the 'how', the 'why' and above all the 'for what'." He argues that we need the power of a Europe that works together if we are to meet the superpowers like the US and China, or the more insidious powers of the mega global corporations. And, drawing a line between Scotland and Catalonia, he argues with Zygmunt Bauman that the European Union or a future Federation of European States offers the best guarantee that the identities of small nations will be protected.

For Raül, the challenge we are facing is ideological, not economic; "...crude neoliberalism is now not only found in the boardrooms of the leading economic and financial entities. It has made itself soul and master of the groups that are directing the main European institutions whether they be in Brussels or the main capital cities."

Like Zara's "stand up...to defeat austerity", Raül calls for a people's mutiny. A peaceful, democratic mutiny to take control of the European ship of state.

Europe links Catalonia, Scotland and poverty. The existence of the European Union as a powerful binding force allows small nations to evolve safely into states (we don't have to create states out of wars in the old way.) Europe, with its protective human rights, workplace and environmental legislation (yes, yes there is not enough of any of it) at least limits the scope of poverty. And the European model, the one that the Troika appeared to break, is the model that limits the greed of wealth and salves the wounds of poverty.

That Europe, the caring, sharing Europe, the Europe in which Scotland and Catalonia could be independent, is worth fighting for.

Time for a mutiny.

Romeva, Raül. Som Una Nació Europea: (i Una Carpeta Incòmoda): Catalunya Vista Des d’Europa. 1. ed. Barcelona: Rosa dels Vents, 2014. www.magradallegir.com.