Dancing out in space

Last month the Cata­lan pres­i­dent signed a law which al­lows Cata­lan cit­i­zens to be con­sulted about what­ever a ma­jor­ity of them deems con­sultable. This law is no ma­gi­cian's rab­bit: the power to im­ple­ment it was con­ceded to the Cata­lan gov­ern­ment by Spain's Con­sti­tu­tional Court [TC] back in 2010. The TC must have thought – in its retroac­tively re­mark­able ig­no­rance of the pop­u­lar mood here – that it would be used to de­cide whether a mo­tor­way should be widened there or a tun­nel drilled here, that kind of thing. But as soon as it was dis­cov­ered that the law was going to be used to ask whether Cata­lans wished to leave Spain or not, the court – and, in­deed, the union­ist politi­cians who back it to the hilt - flew into a strik­ingly un­pre­pos­sess­ing tizzy. It should be said that in gen­eral, the TC tends to tor­toise­ness: it took seven years to give its bless­ing to gay mar­riage, and four to de­cide to bowd­lerise the 2006 Cata­lan Statute of Au­ton­omy. But last month, it man­aged to sus­pend the Cata­lan Law of Non-Bind­ing Con­sul­ta­tions in just seven hours. With the re­sult that any­one, vol­un­teers in­cluded, caught mak­ing any prepa­ra­tions at all for the con­sul­ta­tion - which is due to take place on No­vem­ber 9th – can now be in­dicted on the spot. The mi­nor­ity union­ist par­ties in the Cata­lan par­lia­ment prac­ti­cally bayed in ec­stasy when the ban came through: for them, as for the Madrid gov­ern­ment, an abid­ing ki­bosh had fi­nally been put on the en­tire sov­er­eignty process. So it upset them when the fol­low­ing day there were pro-con­sul­ta­tion demos in 880 Cata­lan towns and vil­lages (Barcelona in­cluded). Mr Mar­gallo, the Span­ish for­eign min­is­ter - who, a few months ago, had fa­mously claimed that if Cat­alo­nia be­came in­de­pen­dent it would find it­self 'drift­ing in outer space' (sic) for ever and a day - warned that any fur­ther street protests would be 'highly dan­ger­ous'. In short, here we are being muz­zled by a re­lent­less le­gal­ism which ex­horts us all to treat the 1978 Span­ish Con­sti­tu­tion as if a di­vine fin­ger had scrawled it in stone. But there are signs that the Span­ish state it­self is not being nearly so scrupu­lous: for ex­am­ple, on Sep­tem­ber 11th – the day of the pro-indy V formed in Barcelona by 1,800,000 peo­ple – the main or­gan­is­ers, all of whom were ex­pect­ing phone calls from var­i­ous for­eign media, found that every five sec­onds they were get­ting ones from their own phone num­bers, and had to shut down their mo­biles. Now who could pos­si­bly have or­ches­trated this (highly il­le­gal) ob­tain­ing of per­sonal data and sub­se­quent tele­phonic bom­bard­ment? An­swers on an en­crypted post­card, please.