Catch as catch can

We could talk about the ins and outs of the legal sta­tus of the Cata­lan ref­er­en­dum - which will or will not have taken place at the start of this month – until we’re blue in the face or the cows come home (whichever hap­pens first) but the fact re­mains that the wish of 80% of Cata­lans to vote in a ref­er­en­dum on in­de­pen­dence was ig­nored then scorned then re­buffed then made il­le­gal by Madrid, with the re­sult that by the time you have read this, the face of Spain as we knew it will have changed for good. The Cata­lan pres­i­dent has in­formed the world, via the Fi­nan­cial Times, that his ex­ec­u­tive dis­poses of 6000 bal­lot boxes, and a ma­jor­ity in the Cata­lan par­lia­ment have voted the ref­er­en­dum into law (the union­ist par­ties chose to walk out of the cham­ber rather than vote no). For his part, the Span­ish pres­i­dent has stated in no un­cer­tain terms that the ref­er­en­dum ’will not take place’ and as a first taste of what lies be­hind those words, mem­bers of the Civil Guard (the Span­ish para­mil­i­tary po­lice) re­cently rushed to a print­ing press near Tar­rag­ona and – as they didn’t have a war­rant to enter the build­ing – began search­ing the ve­hi­cles of work­ers com­ing off their shifts (they didn’t find any­thing). They have now ex­tended their siege to two other print­ing presses and a small local paper. Ah, and Span­ish in­tel­li­gence op­er­a­tives are at­tempt­ing to lo­cate the above-men­tioned 6000 bal­lot boxes. And the state’s of­fi­cial bul­letin has pub­lished the names of around a thou­sand peo­ple who will be taken to court if they do any­thing to as­sist the ref­er­en­dum, rang­ing from the CEOs of Cat­alo­nia’s pub­lic TV and radio sta­tions, to the head of the Cata­lan po­lice. And I’ve just heard that Madrid has or­dered the Con­sti­tu­tional Tri­bunal to abol­ish the Cata­lan gov­ern­ment al­to­gether. All told, this is an ex­tra­or­di­nary case of a de­mo­c­ra­tic state blind­sid­ing a size­able chunk of its own cit­i­zens be­cause they wish to vote on their po­lit­i­cal fu­ture, and blam­ing it on a ’hand­ful of au­thor­i­tar­ian politi­cians in Cat­alo­nia’, per­haps for­get­ting that this ’hand­ful’ was given an ab­solute ma­jor­ity by mil­lions of vot­ers. In other words, what­ever Madrid does – if it con­fis­cates the bal­lot boxes, if it shuts down the Cata­lan gov­ern­ment, if it sends in the army, or if it backs down and al­lows the ref­er­en­dum to take place - that strange, con­tra­dic­tory ’Tran­si­tion’ which took place after Franco’s death, will now be over and done with. Ei­ther it will harden into some­thing not a mil­lion miles from the regime that came be­fore it (in Cat­alo­nia, at least) or it will be trans­formed into an un­flawed democ­racy voted in by those many Spaniards who would like to live under a flex­i­ble and trans­par­ent form of gov­ern­ment, even if that means al­low­ing the Cata­lans to de­cide for them­selves. Oh, and Brus­sels , it would be so nice if you could get around to let­ting us know where you stand on all this. Re­ally.