One February morning

Demon­stra­tions – and God knows, I've been on a few – tend to leave me, once they're over, in a state of post-coital sad­ness, with­out the perk of there hav­ing been any sex (and much less an or­gasm). No mat­ter how big and beau­ti­ful the demo, once it dis­solves, it's dif­fi­cult not to feel that it's been more or less point­less, not least be­cause the pow­ers that be which most demon­stra­tions tar­get, are past mas­ters in the art of ig­nor­ing them. On the 6th of last month, how­ever, a protest took place in Barcelona that was, well, dif­fer­ent. To start with, it took place in front of a cour­t­house at 8.15 on a cold, windy Mon­day morn­ing, be­cause at that time on that day, the for­mer Cata­lan pres­i­dent, vice-pres­i­dent and Min­is­ter of Ed­u­ca­tion were due to be hauled up in front of a judge, ac­cused of crim­i­nal dis­obe­di­ence and breach of trust for hav­ing or­gan­ised a pop­u­lar con­sul­ta­tion on the in­de­pen­dence of Cat­alo­nia in 2014. Over 2,300,000 peo­ple voted, 90% of them in favour of leav­ing Spain. The cen­tral gov­ern­ment (ac­cord­ing to the jour­nal­ist Pere Martí, who wrote a book on the sub­ject) was flab­ber­gasted and hor­ri­fied in equal mea­sure. After all, the Span­ish prime min­is­ter had been say­ing to any and all vis­it­ing states­peo­ple who were cu­ri­ous about the Cata­lan sit­u­a­tion, that 'the im­mense ma­jor­ity of Cata­lans wished to re­main Span­ish'. The con­sul­ta­tion, in­com­plete though it was (a lot of peo­ple didn't bother to vote be­cause it had no legal ef­fects) mud­died the image of a hap­pily united España which Span­ish lead­ers have been pro­mot­ing, in their dif­fer­ent ways, for three cen­turies. Any­way, there we were, 40,000 of us (so said the Mu­nic­i­pal Po­lice) pressed to­gether like so many pen­guins in front of the cour­t­house, early morn­ing gusts whip­ping our faces as we waited for the ac­cused to turn up. This start-of-the-week sto­icism notwith­stand­ing, many if not most peo­ple there, my­self in­cluded, had never voted for their par­tic­u­lar party, and never will, it being a lit­tle too con­ser­v­a­tive for our taste: a sure sign that the in­de­pen­dence issue has now gone way, way, way be­yond party pol­i­tics; the slo­gans most shouted - “We're going to vote!” - and the ban­ners most bran­dished - “Democ­racy!'”- con­cerned the uni­ver­sal prin­ci­ple be­hind this year's up­com­ing ref­er­en­dum. The trial was crit­i­cised by MEPs from every sin­gle po­lit­i­cal group in the Stras­bourg par­lia­ment, some of whom mooted the pos­si­bil­ity of in­ter­ven­tion by Brus­sels. The Lib­eral In­ter­na­tional de­scribed the pro­ceed­ings as a “farce” and Canada de­clared them de­mo­c­ra­t­i­cally un­ac­cept­able.

For their part, the Span­ish gov­ern­ment and media ridiculed the thou­sands stand­ing in the wind (the Min­is­ter for the In­te­rior called us a “cir­cus act”) or claimed that we were “putting il­licit pres­sure” on the judges. By the time you read this, at least some of the knock-on ef­fects of this kan­ga­rooish trial will have made the head­lines. And more than a few cit­i­zens will have fas­tened their seat­belts for the ride ahead.