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michael eaude. meaude@cataloniatoday.cat - 9 September 2018 2.00 h

Chris Bambery.

Writer

‘Last autumn the Catalans LEFT THE BUILDING and they’re not coming back’

‘There is a democratic deficit and people want to escape the clutches of a central government’ ‘ON THE EVENING OF THE 2014 SCOTTISH REFERENDUM CATALAN FLAGS WERE EVERYWHERE, AND LOTS OF CATALANS’
‘Catalonia has been successful in integrating successive waves of migration; first from southern Spain and more recently from Africa and Asia’ ‘There have been Scottish UK prime ministers but no Catalan ones of Spain’
- michael eaude. meaude@cataloniatoday.cat

Along with George Kere­van, Bam­bery wrote the book, Cat­alo­nia Re­born: How Cat­alo­nia took on the cor­rupt Span­ish state and the legacy of Franco.

In Cat­alo­nia, in­de­pen­dence sup­port­ers were im­pressed by the funds so rapidly col­lected for Clara Pon­sati in her fight against ex­tra­di­tion. How wide­spread is sup­port for Cata­lan in­de­pen­dence in Scot­land?
We are both sup­port­ers of Scot­tish in­de­pen­dence and we see the drive for in­de­pen­dence in Cat­alo­nia and Scot­land as very much linked. We are not talk­ing about na­tion­al­ism in a “blood and race” sense or as it ap­pears else­where in Eu­rope, tar­get­ing mi­grants and Mus­lims. In both coun­tries there is a de­mo­c­ra­tic deficit and peo­ple want to es­cape the clutches of a cen­tral gov­ern­ment which does not rep­re­sent them. We see the two move­ments as walk­ing for­ward to­gether, their des­tinies in­ter­twined. On the evening of the 2014 Scot­tish ref­er­en­dum, crowds gath­ered in Glas­gow’s George Square pre­ma­turely cel­e­brat­ing vic­tory. Cata­lan flags were every­where, with lots of Cata­lans, too. Since then the ties have grown be­tween the two move­ments. Re­gard­ing Clara, she is a sym­bol of Cat­alo­nia and its re­pres­sion by the Span­ish state; a sym­bol who is in Scot­land and to whom we can give very con­crete sup­port. There is also dis­taste over her per­se­cu­tion, and that of oth­ers. That feeds human feel­ings of sol­i­dar­ity.
Both you and fel­low-au­thor George Kere­van be­long to the All Party Par­lia­men­tary Group on Cat­alo­nia. Can you ex­plain what this is?
George Kere­van was a Scot­tish Na­tional Party MP at West­min­ster from 2015 until 2017, and I was his Par­lia­men­tary As­sis­tant. We de­cided to launch the All Party Par­lia­men­tary Group on Cat­alo­nia in sup­port, not of in­de­pen­dence, but of Cata­lan democ­racy. Raül Romeva and Carme For­cadell came to West­min­ster and the APPG has held nu­mer­ous meet­ings on the sit­u­a­tion in Cat­alo­nia. British par­lia­men­tar­i­ans were in­ter­na­tional ob­servers dur­ing the Oc­to­ber 1 ref­er­en­dum, in­clud­ing George as an ex-MP. On a more per­sonal note, both of us were stu­dent ac­tivists in Ed­in­burgh in the early 1970s dur­ing Franco’s final crack­down and we were in­volved in or­gan­is­ing sol­i­dar­ity. There was a be­lief that Franco’s death would open the door to rad­i­cal change, if not rev­o­lu­tion. We both wanted to un­der­stand how that sit­u­a­tion was dif­fused. In ad­di­tion, at that time at every left­wing demon­stra­tion there were for­mer mem­bers of the In­ter­na­tional Brigades. The legacy of the Civil War was very real to us.
You ex­plain the unity of the na­tive and im­mi­grant pop­u­la­tions in fight­ing for “Llib­er­tat, Am­nis­tia, Es­tatut d’Au­tono­mia” in the 1970s. Why do you think that unity has not been re­pro­duced today?
In large part Cat­alo­nia has been suc­cess­ful in in­te­grat­ing suc­ces­sive waves of mi­gra­tion; first from south­ern Spain and more re­cently from Africa and Asia. It takes in the biggest per­cent­age of mi­grants who come to Spain and many have learnt Cata­lan, or at least their chil­dren have. The prob­lem lies among Span­ish-speak­ing mi­grants, mainly from South Amer­ica, who often don’t ac­cept that while all chil­dren learn Span­ish the pri­mary lan­guage in schools is Cata­lan. To win them over, the in­de­pen­dence move­ment needs to do more to put across an agenda of eco­nomic and so­cial change, re­ject­ing aus­ter­ity and show­ing how an in­de­pen­dent Cat­alo­nia could put in place poli­cies to ben­e­fit its peo­ple. That has been a weak link in our opin­ion. It would also help ad­dress those on the left in Spain who ac­cept the union­ist ar­gu­ment. On an­other front, the Span­ish state has ben­e­fited from the fact that post-Franco the move­ments in the Basque Coun­try and Cat­alo­nia di­verged. They were the strong points of the anti-fas­cist re­sis­tance. Today we see them grow­ing nearer each other. To­gether they can de­feat the Span­ish state.
As in Scot­land, sup­port for in­de­pen­dence in Cat­alo­nia hov­ers at around 50%. How do you think this sup­port could be in­creased in Cat­alo­nia to a clear 55 or 60%?
Yes! Firstly it could in the way just ar­gued. Dur­ing the 2014 Scot­tish ref­er­en­dum Rad­i­cal In­de­pen­dence and oth­ers put for­ward a more rad­i­cal pro­gramme for in­de­pen­dence ar­gu­ing for a State In­vest­ment Bank to drive job cre­ation, to take over the banks that were ef­fec­tively na­tion­alised in 2008 after the crash, to de­velop re­new­able en­ergy, cut arms spend­ing, and so on. There were the bones of a strat­egy for pri­ori­tis­ing wel­fare in a new state. The sec­ond thing is that cur­rently, in our view, the in­de­pen­dence move­ment has to pri­ori­tise de­fence of the pris­on­ers and those oth­ers fac­ing pros­e­cu­tion while build­ing the foun­da­tions of a new state from the grass roots up. In Ire­land, post-1916 the Re­pub­li­cans built mass sup­port through sup­port for the pris­on­ers. But in late 1918, after they won a West­min­ster gen­eral elec­tion, they cre­ated their own il­le­gal par­lia­ment, boy­cotted the se­cu­rity forces and began or­gan­is­ing their own courts and min­istries, and levy­ing taxes. We’ll pass on the other part of their strat­egy, which we would not urge! There ex­ists a pool of peo­ple, mainly on the left, who don’t sup­port in­de­pen­dence but would sup­port the re­lease of the pris­on­ers and the re­turn of the ex­iles. If you can mo­bilise them you can work along­side them and de­bate and, hope­fully, per­suade.
A strength of your book is its ma­te­ri­al­ist analy­sis of the forces in Span­ish and Cata­lan so­ci­ety. Much of the Cata­lan rul­ing class is union­ist. What does this imply for in­vest­ment and jobs in the fu­ture Cata­lan Re­pub­lic?
The ar­gu­ment that Cata­lan in­de­pen­dence is a pro­ject of the Cata­lan bour­geoisie for their own en­rich­ment angers us. The Cata­lan bour­geoisie never wanted in­de­pen­dence, at most au­ton­omy. Faced with the CNT and its own work­ing class, Cambó and the Lliga chose Primo and then Franco. Their ar­gu­ment is they want to lead Spain not leave it, al­though they have been largely ex­cluded from the for­mer. There have been many Scot­tish prime min­is­ters of Britain but no Cata­lan ones of Spain, ex­cept briefly dur­ing the Re­pub­lic of 1873. The drive for Cata­lan in­de­pen­dence has come from the mid­dle and work­ing classes, rep­re­sented by Es­querra in the 1930’s. Today it is di­vided be­tween three par­ties, an­other dif­fer­ence from Scot­land where the SNP is fairly dom­i­nant.

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