Oh god, not him!

 

 

 

There is surely nothing more engineered to foster confidence about the Brexit talks than to see the charlatan Gove (the love child of a defrocked pixie and a gobby goblin) skuttling his elven way to Brussels to – to do what exactly?  To add his five pennyworths of facile, slimy lies to the morass of doublespeak that is the British ‘position’ in what should be negotiations?   

     God help us all when that chubby cheeked cheat speaks for Britain!  Still, I suppose Gove can use his White Queen trick of believing five impossible things before breakfast to encourage his verbiage (conveniently forgetting his previous belief that Johnson was supremely unfit to become prime minister) and marching forward to defend the indefensible.

     I felt physically sick when, on the news this evening, I heard that the British Government had offered up as a bargaining chip to bring the discussion to a ‘satisfactory’ conclusion the offer not to behave illegally!  How jolly decent of them because, of course, an Englishman’s word is his bond, unless it isn’t.   

     How the EU side can stop themselves from treating the shambles of the British position with anything other than contempt, I really do not know.

    

Let’s face it, at this stage of the “Never ending, stor-ree!” (just thought that I would throw in a reference to the true earworm that music is) the only thing motivating the British side is not, emphatically not, Britain.  Our negotiators couldn’t give a toss for the country and the bulk of the people in it.  Fishermen, the population of Northern Ireland, businesses, imports and exports, areas of deprivation, they have all been thrown off the bus – you know the one that the liars’ liar Johnson paints for recreation – and the members of Johnson’s third or fourth rate cabinet merely look to their wealth as they crunch over the bones of the suckers who ever thought that they might be of concern to them.

     The Conservative Party, as we are regularly told, is one of the most successful political parties in the western world, and it has got its power and its longevity by a callous disregard for anything other than its own survival.  If they do good, like the 1944 Education Act, it is almost by mistake, and they certainly did not reward the architect of that act, RAB Butler with leadership of the party when the time came to choose.

     Johnson, the Man Who Would Be Prime Minister, does not have the intellectual or moral worth to be able to sustain the role.  He has got to where he is today by systematically lying and showing utter disregard to anyone and anything other than himself and his ambition.

     His empty rhetoric way wow blue rinsed ladies of various Conservative Associations, but it doesn’t work when practical things have to be decided on the basis of that rhetoric.  Johnson has no interest in the rules and regulations that govern institutions, he is, as virtually everyone has pointed out, not a details man.  Unfortunately (for us) he has become prime minister at a time when a details man is exactly what is needed.  Rhetoric kills – look at the number of Covid deaths in the UK.  Rhetoric destroys – look at industry still desperately asking the government for leadership and information about what is going to happen in a few weeks’ time.

     “Get Brexit Done!” – the perfect meaningless jingle for Johnson, allowing him to sound dynamic while the empty platitude played well with people who wanted simplicity in an almost terminally complex situation.

     Now we are in the final days when all the detail that Johnson hates so much is everything.  Rhetoric has to be written down in legalistic words where there is no wriggle room for gaudy metaphor and inept simile.

     Johnson’s shoddy, corrupt government now has come to the crux of negotiations.  Real things have to be decided and the only, the absolutely only (I know that is tautology, but I feel it fits here) thing that is motivating Johnson is what he can get away with.

     He will, as he always has done in the past, junk anything and anyone to get what he wants.  His situation is desperate: No Deal will be a financial disaster, and even his most stupefied followers will have to own and admit it eventually; a thin deal will please nobody as everyone will feel hard done by; a generous deal will be regarded by the Brexit fanatics as an act of treason.  There is nothing that Johnson can get out of Brussels that is going to satisfy everybody.  Perhaps there is nothing that Jonson can get out of Brussels that is going to satisfy anybody.  And he is going to have to own it.  And he will not be able to do that.

     I can imagine somebody doing the sums (Johnson is far too lazy to do them himself, and besides he doesn’t really know who is in his party anyway) and trying to work out which deal would be the less disastrous.  And the disaster will not be related to the people of Britain it will be directly linked to the fortunes of the Conservative Party.  Politics, not logic or faith or economics or fairness or justice, is going to determine what we get from the “oven ready” deal that has taken four long years to cook.

     And unless Johnson uses the “Long Covid Symptoms” to fabricate himself a get out of parliament card, then he is going to have to own the disaster of his making in years more of his narcissistic premiership, when we will continue to pay the price.

 

I put that bad feeling that you have just read down to the fact that I got to the swimming pool an hour early this morning.  Today was ¡Fiesta! and tomorrow will be an extra day of holiday so instead of opening at 7 am it will open at 8.  An extra hour in bed?  Not really, I am programmed to get up, or at least get ready to get up, at 6.15 am, and if I say in bed longer I feel that I am cheating and I do not get any real benefit.  It is easier to get up at the normal time and do neglected housework to make the time feel valuable, and to give myself a warm glow of self-satisfaction!

     But today I forgot about the holiday and so I had to come back home and do neglected housework etc etc and complete the Guardian Quick Crossword, rather than fill in a single clue and then leave it for later after the swim.

 

 [Yes, I know this image is not upright, but it's too late and I'm too tired to re-jig it]

My catalogue raisonné continues apace with items of little value, but some interest, filling the pages.  Compiling the catalogue is forcing me to look again at some things that I have ignored for years.  For example, I have decided to list a copy of The Selected Poems of Oscar Wilde.  This is a volume printed in 1912 with a soft brown suede cover stamped with an interesting Art Nouveau flower design and with the title stamped in gold.  It is not particularly valuable, but it was bought by my father to give to my aunt who in turn gave it to me a quarter of a century later after my father’s death. 

     The suede is rotting and has an unpleasant feel to it, the binding is unravelling, the pages yellowing – and yet, it is important to me.  There is always something about reading the actual pages that people important to you have read before you, whose hands have held the volume in the way that you are holding it.

     Yes, I realize that this is Romantic nonsense, but it doesn’t make the oddly satisfying feeling I have when I handle the book any less real to me.

     A worthy addition to the catalogue!  And it takes my mind off other things.

 

 

 

Sad thoughts from abroad!

What can we expect in the next week or so in Catalonia?

A week, they say, is a long time in politics - indeed it is!  But what can you say about a country (Spain) where politics seems like a long dead art?  About a president (Rajoy) who seems to have no understanding about the political duties of his office?  About a division of powers of the three legs of constitutional democracy that have been blended together by the governing political party so that realistic separation does not exist?

Well, say what you like - but the reality of the responses is going to dictate the lives and livelihoods of a whole generation of people living in the country of Catalonia.

A declaration of independ

ence has been signed by the requisite Catalan politicians in the parliament, but its declaration has been delayed for a month to allow negotiations to proceed with the Spanish government.  A delay which was asked for by the EU as a sign of good will towards the Spanish government so that they were not forced into precipitate action.

And the response of the Spanish government?  A complete refusal to countenance any form of negotiation that might involve a realistic consideration of another and binding referendum about the independence of Catalonia.  Government leaders in Madrid have gone out of their way to say that all offers of outside mediation will be rejected because this is a Spanish internal problem.  No discussions will take place about the break up of Spain.  No!  No!  No!

The Catalan government has been given until Monday to clarify if it has actually declared UDI and, if they have not come back to heel by Thursday, then Section 155 of the Constitution will be invoked which takes away power from the Catalan parliament and allows Madrid to take over the running of the region.

The Socialist (!) party of Spain has said that if UDI is declared then they will support the right wing minority government led (!) by Rajoy in their actions against Catalonia.  The vacuous leader of the Socialist (!) party has suggested that there could be negotiations about changing the constitution and the relationship of the autonomous regions to start in six months time - as long as the Catalan government return to what the corrupt band of chancers who make up PP and PSOE call ‘the rule of law’.

For this to work, you would have to believe that the political group (PP) that engineered the rejection of a new relationship between Catalonia and the Central Spanish government and which was passed by both houses of parliament in Madrid and Barcelona, would suddenly change its mind and become reasonable.  PP was directly responsible for the rejection of something that could have assuaged Catalan resentment.  Nothing in the behaviour of PP over the last seven years since the rejection of an agreed settlement in 2010 suggests that they can be trusted in the slightest to negotiate with anything approaching honesty.

The action and inaction of PSOE and Cs have been equally disgraceful, and I treat anything they say with contempt.

So we have something of an impasse.  Neither side believes the other.  No common ground is clear.  No mediation is in the offing.  Disaster beckons.

The tensions in the Catalan parliament are clear.  There are those representatives who want an immediate declaration of UDI.  They say that the response of the Spanish government shows that they cannot be trusted.  They are going to get nothing by offering delay for negotiation because the Spanish government has clearly stated that they are not interested.

Indeed the Spanish government has noted the cracks in the Catalan government and they may well have thought that all they have to do is wait and the cracks will become open division.  Which they will exploit.

If UDI is declared then Spain will invoke Article 155.  Rule from Madrid.  This will infuriate the majority of the population of Catalonia.  There will be Civil Unrest.  Perhaps Rajoy doesn’t care.  He gains little electoral positivity from the poor showing of his corrupt party in Catalonia.  He can afford to ignore any loss of votes for his party because his status will increase elsewhere in Spain as some voters see a long delayed retribution for what they call the arrogance of Catalans and their open display of rejection of the law.

What else can this Titan of political inactivity do?  He could rule from Madrid.  As civil unrest increases and perhaps there are a few deaths he could then send in the army to, what was it the Russians used to say to justify their invasions of rebellious satellite countries? Oh yes, “We sent the army in at the request of the legitimate authorities in [insert name of country] to preserve law, order, liberty and democracy!”

They could then outlaw all the political parties that voted for UDI and signed the declaration.  They could fine, imprison and ban from political life those leaders who ‘misled’ the population.  They could then force elections in Catalonia allowing only the political parties that they deemed ‘legal’ to take part.

I am not Catalan, but from my observations of the people in this country, I do not think for a moment that they would stand by and allow this to happen.

An unsettled country would see institutions and businesses, including the sluttish banks of course, flee to Spain to be ‘safer’.  The financial situation of Catalonia would suffer, whether or not UDI was declared.  People would suffer.

But remember that Madrid is in the middle of the country.  It might be the capital of Spain, but there is no real geographical reason why the capital of Spain is where it is.  It is historical.  And Madrid has artificially bolstered the reputation and importance of the capital at the expense of other more attractive cities.  Like Brasilia, you have a ‘constructed’ capital city.  Barcelona however is on the sea, it has a port, it also has a major airport, and it is also on the main land route out of Spain through Catalonia and into France, part of the vastly important Mediterranean Corridor.  Spain will never want to lose that route, as it would cost it billions that it can't afford to construct another way through the Pyrenees.

Let me give you an example of how Madrid has engineered things.  When my postal vote for Brexit was lost, my replacement ballot was so late in getting to me that I had to go to the post office and get a special delivery of my “NO” vote against the lunacy of Brexit.  It cost a lot.  I was told by the post office people in Castelldefels that my letter would first go to Barcelona, and then it would be flown to Madrid and then be flown on to London and then to Cardiff.  Why?  Barcelona has a major international airport with direct flights to London and the UK.  But no, in order to bloat the services for Madrid and to make it appear more important than it actually is, all the mail was diverted on an extra, irrelevant leg of a pointless journey.  That story is not just about an important letter, but it is also about an attitude in Spain and Madrid.

Try as I might, I can only see disaster on the horizon.  An inflexible minority right-wing government has too much to lose by being ‘reasonable’, so I suspect that they will play true to form and think only of themselves and their party.  They have no concern for Catalonia and they will delight in using an iron fist in an armoured glove to crush what they see as a real threat to their comfortable corruption.

If Catalonia declares UDI then they will have to be in it for the long run, accept economic impoverishment and oppression and discover that it might be time to re-read some of the books that George Orwell wrote.  Those books have been considered as a literature of history, but they may now come to be considered as a guide to current affairs.

What a sad time it is that might be true!