Time after time

Last month, The Times of Lon­don pub­lished an ed­i­to­r­ial about the re­sults of the Span­ish gen­eral elec­tion, in which it de­scribed Vox as an ’ultra-na­tion­al­ist party’ and Ciu­tadans as a fake cen­trist party that had ’tacked to the right’. So far, so cor­rect. But when the ed­i­to­r­ial gets around to talk­ing about Cat­alo­nia, it comes out with the same weary old tropes that could have been se­creted by any staff writer on La Razón (or El País, for that mat­ter). Cat­alo­nia, we learn, is ’one of the wealth­i­est re­gions of Spain’, the im­pli­ca­tion being, as al­ways, that the pro-in­de­pen­dence move­ment is noth­ing more than an at­tempt to take the money and run: ’the more that is of­fered to the Cata­lans, the more is de­manded by the rad­i­cal sep­a­ratists... its politi­cians want to hang on to tax rev­enue’, some­thing that ’bur­dens a na­tion [Spain] which still has pock­ets of se­ri­ous poverty’. (By the by, what is so ’rad­i­cal’ about want­ing po­lit­i­cal in­de­pen­dence? Does that make, say, the SNP and the New Cale­do­nians rad­i­cal too?). The Times then rec­om­mends that prime min­is­ter Sánchez strikes ’a firmer tone on Cat­alo­nia’. Who­ever wrote – or lifted – this text, clearly hasn’t seen the sur­veys among those Cata­lan res­i­dents who want po­lit­i­cal in­de­pen­dence, which show they are mo­ti­vated by a wide range of fac­tors, in­clud­ing tax­a­tion (Cat­alo­nia has a fis­cal deficit of nearly 10% per year; the next most taxed re­gion of Eu­rope, Bavaria, loses a mere 4.5%); other is­sues are im­prove­ments in pub­lic in­fra­struc­tures (in­clud­ing 11 major road build­ing pro­jects long since promised and never ex­e­cuted, plus 200 mil­lion euros – pledged over a decade ago – which have not yet been in­vested in Cat­alo­nia’s rick­ety over­ground rail net­work; major so­cial re­forms, which the state keeps pro­hibit­ing, such as Cata­lan gov­ern­ment sup­port for those who can’t af­ford their util­ity bills (Cat­alo­nia too has ’pock­ets of se­ri­ous poverty’); guar­an­tees that the Cata­lan lan­guage won’t be whisked out of sight (the three right-wing par­ties in Madrid want to shut down Cata­lan pub­lic tele­vi­sion – an au­di­ence leader – and ’in­tro­duce’ Span­ish into the Cata­lan pub­lic ed­u­ca­tion sys­tem, as if it weren’t al­ready there, and if the Span­ish spo­ken by Cata­lan school leavers weren’t two points higher than the av­er­age for Spain as a whole). The ed­i­to­r­ial also fails to point out that the in­de­pen­dence move­ment is mainly left-wing and non-eth­nic (for in­stance, the Cata­lan min­is­ter for so­cial af­fairs is of Mo­roc­can ori­gin, and the pro-indy can­di­date for the may­or­ship of the town of Figueres in last month’s elec­tions is a mem­ber of the Roma com­mu­nity). And just how much ’firmer’ does The Times think Sánchez can get, with seven artists and elected politi­cians in nec­es­sary exile, and a kan­ga­rooish court judg­ing nine po­lit­i­cal pris­on­ers (five of whom were voted into the Span­ish par­lia­ment, only to be ’sus­pended’ two days later). What a pity The Times staff hadn’t read the Scot­tish jour­nal­ist Neil As­ch­er­son, who, also last month, pub­lished a well-in­formed and up-to-date piece on Madrid’s at­ti­tude to­wards Cat­alo­nia in the New York Re­view of Books, con­clud­ing: ’In West­ern Eu­rope, a cen­tral au­thor­ity that can only main­tain it­self by re­pres­sion must change its ways or per­ish’. Bingo. Com­pared to As­ch­er­son, The Times is man­i­festly be­hind it­self.