THERE’S YOUR EXPLANATION

In his ar­ti­cle on the fac­ing page re­gard­ing the eco­nomic sta­tus of Barcelona and Madrid within the Span­ish state, Ed­uard García – a mem­ber of the Econ­omy Sec­tion of the Cata­lan Na­tional As­sem­bly – clearly spells out the chal­lenges that Barcelona – and there­fore also Cat­alo­nia – faces as the lead­ing eco­nomic power in Spain due to its rel­e­ga­tion in im­por­tance given that Madrid is the state’s po­lit­i­cal cap­i­tal. I would like to thank Ed­uard for his ex­pla­na­tion, since it pro­vides a clear pic­ture of the sce­nario I have for years tried in vain to suc­cess­fully por­tray to friends and ac­quain­tances, whether fel­low res­i­dents or vis­i­tors.

I vis­ited Madrid very re­cently for sev­eral days to at­tend a con­fer­ence. Nat­u­rally, given my 28 years liv­ing in Cat­alo­nia, I have been many times be­fore, and my im­pres­sion of the city, al­though ad­mit­tedly only brief this time, was once again one of a rather con­tented peo­ple calmly going about their busi­ness, which con­trasts dra­mat­i­cally with the lifestyle I find my­self wrapped up in liv­ing here in Barcelona.

Allow me to clar­ify: here in the Cata­lan cap­i­tal I find not only my­self, but many of the peo­ple I come into con­tact with on a daily basis, rushed off their feet try­ing to achieve some kind of work-life bal­ance, while be­moan­ing the fact that the in­fra­struc­ture around them is not up to the stan­dards you would ex­pect given the busi-ness – in the lit­eral sense of the word – of the peo­ple who live here. And as I have con­stantly told peo­ple for years, and men­tioned in this col­umn at least once, that lack of in­vest­ment is partly due to the Span­ish state not meet­ing its fi­nan­cial com­mit­ments with the tax money it re­ceives from the var­i­ous re­gions, Cat­alo­nia being one of the prin­ci­pal – al­though I has­ten to add, not the only – vic­tim of this eco­nomic neg­li­gence.

I am con­stantly met with the same ar­gu­ment by any­one who ac­tu­ally takes the time to lis­ten to my moan­ing, namely that it is the same every­where: the wealth­ier re­gions of a state must bear the weight of pay­ing for the poorer ones. At which point I have his­tor­i­cally strug­gled to for­mu­late an ar­gu­ment as to why “Spain is dif­fer­ent” in this re­spect, de­spite know­ing deep down that it surely is. For­tu­nately, Ed­uard has now done that for me with his pre­cise ex­pla­na­tion on the fac­ing page of how the wings of re­gions, in­dus­tries and peo­ple are “eco­nom­i­cally clipped” in order to ben­e­fit oth­ers.

So to all of those who have had to tol­er­ate my con­stant moan­ing about the un­fair­ness of work­ing our a**** off here in Cat­alo­nia and not reap­ing suf­fi­cient re­wards for all that hard work as our taxes flow into the pock­ets of the cor­rupt and the in­com­pe­tent, rest as­sured that I won’t be air­ing such griev­ances ever again, I’ll sim­ply send them a copy of Ed­uard’s ar­ti­cle for them to gain an ap­pre­ci­a­tion of why we are not liv­ing in a much more ef­fi­cient and pros­per­ous city. Not to men­tion the ob­vi­ous eco­nomic rea­son why many Cata­lans think in­de­pen­dence would be the right move for Cat­alo­nia.