Dear Lloyd

Dear Lloyd,

I hope all is (very) well with you.

At the Brexit de­bate we at­tended in Palma in 2016, I re­call that you were the very op­po­site of stuffy; so I hope – fin­gers crossed – that you won’t ob­ject to this open let­ter to you, which will ap­pear in the De­cem­ber edi­tion of Cat­alo­nia Today mag­a­zine. It con­cerns – no sur­prises here – the Cata­lan Sit­u­a­tion.

As you know, six for­mer Cata­lan min­is­ters, two civil and cul­tural ac­tivists and a for­mer Speaker of the Cata­lan par­lia­ment – non-vi­o­lent peo­ple whose be­lief in democ­racy is un­shak­able (as I know well enough from hav­ing spo­ken to many of them per­son­ally) – have now been sen­tenced to longer terms of im­pris­on­ment than most rapists and not a few mur­der­ers (I could cite spe­cific cases); on top of which, eight Cata­lan politi­cians, ac­tivists, and mu­si­cians have fled into exile in the not un­rea­son­able be­lief that they would re­ceive an un­fair trial in Spain (and also that they can do more good for the cause of Cata­lan in­de­pen­dence there than they can here); and on top of that, in re­cent weeks 199 peo­ple protest­ing against the sen­tenc­ing have been ar­rested and 600 in­jured (by po­lice or right-wing thugs) on the streets of Cat­alo­nia.

The sen­tenc­ing of the min­is­ters, ac­tivists and the Speaker of the Par­lia­ment has also been con­demned as un­ac­cept­able by quite a few – but not enough – politi­cians, in­tel­lec­tu­als, artists and writ­ers around the world. Specif­i­cally in the UK, those who have spo­ken out in­clude Scot­land’s First Min­is­ter, the Shadow For­eign Sec­re­tary and the All Party Par­lia­men­tary Group on Cat­alo­nia.

But the most re­cent – and most damn­ing – in­ter­na­tional crit­i­cism has come from Amnesty In­ter­na­tional, whose de­tailed re­port re­leased in No­vem­ber states that the “de­f­i­n­i­tion and in­ter­pre­ta­tion” of the crime of sedi­tion by Spain’s Supreme Court, “runs con­trary to…human rights”.

As re­gards the two im­pris­oned civic lead­ers, Jordi Cuixart and Jordi Sànchez, Amnesty af­firms, even more bluntly: “they must be re­leased im­me­di­ately and their con­vic­tions quashed”.

I have wit­nessed some of the suf­fer­ing ex­pe­ri­enced by the fam­i­lies of those in jail at first hand. When Jordi Cuixart was held in a Madrid pen­i­ten­tiary for nearly half a year, his wife, Txell Bonet, and their baby son had to travel hun­dreds of kilo­me­tres each week to see him be­hind a glass screen for 40 min­utes. (Mr Cuixart, now in a Cata­lan pen­i­ten­tiary, is in the odd po­si­tion of being guarded by war­dens sev­eral of whom are mem­bers of the large cul­tural as­so­ci­a­tion over which he pre­sides). Most of the other pris­on­ers also have young chil­dren, who will be adults when their moth­ers and fa­thers are fi­nally re­leased from jail.

As for those in exile, their sit­u­a­tion is, by any ac­counts, ex­cep­tional. They can move freely around most of the EU, with the al­most unique ex­cep­tion of the one coun­try of which they are pass­port hold­ers. Two of them have been elected to the Eu­ro­pean Par­lia­ment (as has the im­pris­oned for­mer vice pres­i­dent of Cat­alo­nia, Oriol Jun­queras) with a total of over two mil­lion votes, yet Spain is putting on all the diplo­matic pres­sure it can muster, so as to pre­vent all three of them from tak­ing their seats.

As for the re­cently ar­rested peo­ple in Cat­alo­nia, nine were de­tained on charges of ter­ror­ism, but the Ter­ror­ism Act was, strangely, not ap­plied to them. Of the re­main­ing seven, two were in­ter­ro­gated for long pe­ri­ods of time with­out their lawyers being pre­sent and con­fessed to we know not what (they re­main in jail). Four have had their ap­peals for re­lease ac­cepted by the Na­tional Court, but are still being held in cus­tody. (The re­main­ing pris­oner’s case is under re­view). The uncle of Jordi Ros – one of the two peo­ple in­ter­ro­gated – has said in an in­ter­view that his nephew was trans­ported blind­folded, that guns were pointed at his head, that he was put in soli­tary con­fine­ment and de­prived of sleep, and that his sep­tu­a­ge­nar­ian par­ents were also threat­ened with ar­rest. (No ter­ror­ist at­tacks have taken place, no ex­plo­sives have been found, and no po­ten­tial tar­gets have been de­tected).

As for the demon­stra­tions of the last few weeks, there have been count­less doc­u­mented ex­am­ples of pro­to­col-ex­empt po­lice bru­tal­ity (beat­ings to the head and chest, rub­ber bul­lets fired at face level, etc.); there have also been re­li­able re­ports of sex­ual ha­rass­ment in­side po­lice ve­hi­cles.

All of this – and all that is still to come – has hap­pened be­cause, ac­cord­ing to many ob­servers, Madrid has been un­able to deal with Cat­alo­nia using po­lit­i­cal means, or in­deed even to con­ceive of doing so. This does not mean that Spain is – to use a phrase bandied about to ex­cess – a ’fas­cist state’, but rather a ma­jori­tar­i­an­ist one, mean­ing – in this case – that the ma­jor­ity of peo­ple in Spain who fully ac­cept their des­ig­nated na­tion­al­ity and the pre-em­i­nent sta­tus of the Span­ish lan­guage are, in ju­di­cial and po­lit­i­cal terms, as free as the cit­i­zens of any EU coun­try you care to name. The mi­nor­ity who do not – and their po­lit­i­cal rep­re­sen­ta­tives – can have, and have had, their civil rights whipped away on the spot: from the point of view of the Span­ish ma­jor­ity – and its po­lit­i­cal rep­re­sen­ta­tives – they are sim­ply not to be trusted. (Phrases such as ’trai­tors’ and ’coup plot­ters’ have been used freely by union­ist politi­cians). All this within a con­text in which sur­veys taken from 2017 through to this year show con­sis­tently that be­tween 76% and 82% of the Cata­lan pop­u­la­tion want a ne­go­ti­ated ref­er­en­dum. But I’m ab­solutely sure you know all this and more.

In a nut­shell, the sit­u­a­tion here has be­come as un­ten­able as it is un­just. So I have taken it upon my­self to ask you – im­plore you, if I have to be hon­est – to clar­ify this to those in the For­eign Of­fice, with a view to even­tu­ally ob­tain­ing some kind – any kind! – of of­fi­cial British con­dem­na­tion of what is hap­pen­ing here. (This is, of course, a sim­ple mat­ter of civil rights, not of whether one is for or against a Cata­lan Re­pub­lic).

I am well aware that this is not your brief: that this is not a part, nec­es­sar­ily, of your job. I am also aware that writ­ing to you pub­licly like this could be in­ter­preted as im­per­ti­nent, but I have no wish to be so: like mil­lions of other peo­ple here, I am pre­pared to do ab­solutely any­thing – as long as it’s non-vi­o­lent – if I think it might be at least a lit­tle help­ful with re­gard to the ab­so­lu­tion of the pris­on­ers and the re­turn of the ex­iles.

You are the of­fi­cial rep­re­sen­ta­tive of the British gov­ern­ment in Cat­alo­nia, and if it and other gov­ern­ments turn a blind eye to what the Span­ish one is doing here, things will even­tu­ally go from bad to worse to atro­cious. About that I have no doubt what­so­ever.

Any­thing that is within your power to help us would be (much) more than wel­come.

Here’s wish­ing you, sin­cerely, a very happy Christ­mas.

opin­ion