No more excuses - you've got to blame the people!

 

My full-time teaching career started with my going for interview in Kettering, a town in Northamptonshire of which I had not previously heard.  (As I was an aspiring English teacher, I do hope you appreciated my not ending the last sentence with a preposition.)  Anyway, I got the job in what was then Kettering Boys’ Grammar School, but which had become Kettering Boys’ School by the time I took up my post.  I spent a year and a bit there learning my craft and finding out that full-time teaching was a truly demanding job.

     I had long moved back to Cardiff when the Northampton that I knew went, I’m tempted to say pear-shaped, but that image is not grotesque enough for what actually happened to the political landscape.

     This link will take you to a lucid explanation of the appalling mismanagement of the council resulting in its bankruptcy: https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-northamptonshire-56488909

     In the recent elections, the electorate of the two new political entities that were formed from the rubble of what had been destroyed by the past administrations, saw fit to vote majorities to the Conservatives – the party which caused all the trouble in the first place.  The electorate have AGAIN voted for people who callously and viciously made their lives much, much worse through criminal mismanagement of public funds.

     Why?

   That plaintive question has been echoing through my mind as I have considered the decisions the electorate have made not only in Britain but also here in Spain.

     We have recently had elections for the council in Madrid and the electorate here have voted (in a record turnout) for a council which will be made up of PP and Vox.  The first of those, PP, is the most corrupt political party in Western Europe – and that is not my prejudice speaking, just type in  “PP in Spain corruption” and you will find a shockingly wide breadth of coverage of what is almost comical illegal behaviour.

     If you want to be more specific then you could search for “PP Corruption in Madrid” and you might come across something like, https://elpais.com/ccaa/2018/09/30/madrid/1538326069_865164.html

Where, even if you don’t understand Spanish, it doesn’t take much to make out what the headline “La década viciosa de Madrid” might mean, and you will be able to see some of the unsavoury characters who have defiled the city over the last ten years.

     And people voted for them!  Again!

     In a 71% turnout, 44.7% voted for PP!  The other party that the corrupt and corrupting PP will govern with is Vox.  Vox is usually described as a “far right” party, but it is simpler and more realistic to consider them as Franco supporting fascists.  Their pronouncements and policies are repugnant.  They are rabble rousing scum.  And they have pledged to support PP “to keep the left out”.  If you add the 9.1% of the electorate who voted for Vox  to the 44.7% who voted for PP, you have a clear majority of the voters choosing right wingers and fascists to form their government of choice!

     By way of comparison, in the Catalan parliament out of 41 representatives, only 2 members of PP were elected! 

     Catalonia truly is another country!

    

     Meanwhile in Britain, the third-rate incompetents, bullies and liars who comprise the ‘government’ of Johnson, the liar-in-chief, are gifted with gains.  Hartlepool, which has been a Labour voting constituency since its inception votes Conservative.  Admittedly, it was an area which overwhelmingly voted for Brexit and presumably, the voters have seen or heard nothing negative enough with the lies of Johnson, and the criminal mishandling of the Covid response, or the Brexit train-crash of financial and social disaster to make them doubt the positivity of voting for a shameless narcissist and his corrupt crew!

     If Johnson had been watching European politics (as if!) then he would probably be considering a snap General Election.  The Zombie leader of the PPs in Madrid has shown just how much an electorate can ignore when they are asked to put their cross next to a party which is corrupt, selfish, criminal, menial, duplicitous, mendacious, uncaring, and all the other insulting adjectives that come to mind in describing your typical Conservative, no matter whether it be in Spain on in the UK.

     God help us all!

 

Tomorrow is Toni’s birthday.  The Family will be arriving in instalments and we should have a good celebration.  Perhaps then I will be in a more mellow mood and my writing might reflect that.

     We’ll see!

 

 

    

Deja vu - again!

 

There was a time (I’m sure that there was a time) when Corporal Jones’s hysterical injunction in Dad’s Army “Don’t panic!” was funny.  We could laugh at his over reaction to all and every situation as he blindly staggered around in all directions!  Now his gibbering proclamations seem to be the absolute norm as each new day brings in news of yet another backward, self-harming, political disaster.  The seemingly inexorable slide to the right of people as they feel that traditional politics has done nothing for them is horrific.

The latest backward step has been taken in Spain, to be specific in Andalusia in the south of the country.  This region is the most populous in Spain and has been ruled by PSOE (the so-called Socialist party of Spain) for over thirty years.  As with all political groupings that have had power for so long, Andalusia is full of crony-corruption and the word “socialist” is the title of the party is a grotesque misnomer.

Years of mismanagement came to head in the local elections on Sunday.  Added to mismanagement of the region, you could consider the fact that this is the first real opportunity to give a reaction to the “Socialist” Prime Minister who has taken over from the irredeemably corrupt PP group of conservatives; an opportunity for disenchanted (ha!) PP voters to move over to another right-wing party like the sluttish Ciudadanos party who will link with anyone if they can get a whiff of power and, for the first time since the demise of the dictatorship in Spain, an extreme right party Vox.

Both PP and PSOE have lost seats, so the only way that the party can retain power is by joining with another party.  Podemos is the most left-wing mainstream (sort of) party in Spain, but even if PSOE and Podemos joined together, they would not be able to gain a majority.  On the other wing, the three parties of the right and extreme right would have a majority if they decided to work together.

Seats
PSOE–A			30.28%
PP			23.85%
Cs			19.27%
AA			15.60%
Vox			11.01%

Popular vote
PSOE–A			27.95%
PP			20.75%
Cs			18.27%
AA			16.18%
Vox			10.97%
PACMA			1.93%
Others			2.38%
Blank ballots			1.58%

In response to the situation in Catalonia and the strength of the independence movement there has been a marked growth in nationalistic politics in Spain with much waving of the Spanish flag and chanting of ¡Viva España!  Both PP and Ciudadanos have moved substantially to the right with the new leader of PP actually saying that colonialism was not a bad thing, but was the creating of a Greater Spain!  Ciudadanos has become more stridently anti-immigrant, and I am ashamed to admit that this discredited party actually has the largest number of seats in Castelldefels – though no majority and they are therefore not in power as all the other parties have combined to keep them out.  Quite rightly too!

But it is a national disgrace that a party like Vox has managed to gain seats in any regional parliament.  The Constitution of democratic Spain (flawed though it is) is only 40 years old.  Franco died in 1976, this is not ancient history, how has the reality of the dictatorship become so blunted that people can vote for a party like Vox?  But they have.  And we will have to deal with the movement that could well become a national phenomenon.

As in so many countries around the world politics is now so divisive that reasonable discussion seems to be beyond virtually everyone.  Fact based evaluation seems to be passé nowadays as we live in a post-truth environment where opinion is valid and is proof enough in itself without relation to the wider world of reality.

Vox is the shadow of fascism rising again.  Their hate filled rhetoric utilizing all the tropes of the extreme right are depressingly familiar with anyone who has read the history of the twentieth century.

 

I suppose that one of the major differences between past situations in the twentieth century and the here and now is the abdication of the “leader” of the free world from a collaborative engagement as an ally with the people of the democratic world, to a detached, petty, Twitter dominated, isolationist nationalism.

And as if the world situation was not dire enough, I get the results from my first Catalan examination tomorrow!