A hard-won government in Spain can teach us a lot

It’s been a long haul, but Spain at last has a confirmed government again.

That matters to me particularly because we now live in Spain, land of our Brexit exile. Others, though, might also find much of relevance in the difficult road that got us here, littered as it was with obstacles, many of them self-inflicted.

Pedro Sánchez addresses the Cortes

Let’s start with the positives.

Spain has its first coalition government since the end of the Franco dictatorship and the restoration of democracy in 1978. That brings it into line with most countries in Europe, where government always requires negotiation between parties and compromise to reach an agreement that commands broad support. It’s not the case in Britain, of course, where Members of Parliament are still elected by simple majorities in individual constituencies. As a result, parties with minority support nationally can command a huge majority in Parliament. As is the case today.

I’m not sure that this leads to better government.

Pedro Sánchez, now the confirmed Prime Minister of Spain after holding the role in an acting capacity since last April, and leader of the centre-left Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party (PSOE), has agreed a joint programme for progressive government with Pablo Iglesias, of the anti-austerity, harder-left Unidas Podemos Party (UP). That has kept the right well away from power, even though the far-right Vox now has a major parliamentary presence.

You read that right. A joint programme for progressive government. And the hard right out of power.

How many, in Britain, the United States, Poland, Hungary, Turkey or Brazil would give their eye teeth to have such a government? And how many, particularly in Britain, the United States, Poland, Turkey or Brazil would like to see the far right well away from government?

So, now the negatives. 

The Spanish left nearly didn’t pull the trick off, and its worst enemy was itself. As in Britain and the United States especially.

That joint programme between PSOE and UP was something that could have been agreed months ago. Say, straight after the General Election in April, which left the PSOE as the biggest single party in the Spanish Parliament – the Cortes – with 123 seats, while UP had 42. PSOE was up significantly, while UP had lost seats, but at least between them, they had 165 MPs, just 11 short of the 176 needed for a majority in the 350-seat Cortes.

They couldn’t reach agreement. After six months of negotiation, new elections had to be called in November. Both parties lost seats, three in the case of the PSOE, though it was still the biggest party in Parliament, while UP lost seven. Now their task had become far harder, since they’re now 21 behind the magic number for a majority.

Far worse still was the surge in support for the quasi-fascist Vox, which shot up from 24 to 52 seats to become the third biggest parliamentary presence.

The PSOE-UP failure to compromise before the November election meant that when they finally did, the two parties of the left were working from a weaker position, and against a far more vigorous opposition. Note and learn, British Labourites or American Democrats: you risk it all when you decide to dig your heels in and refuse to budge on principle. Insisting on doing it all may leave you unable to do anything at all. The price of intransigence can be a Trump or Boris government.

Sánchez has at least avoided that fate, but by the tightest of margins. He couldn’t win his investiture on Sunday (yes, Spanish MPs can work on Sundays) when an absolute majority was required, in the first vote; on Tuesday however, with the bar lowered to requiring simply more Yes votes than Noes, he squeaked through, by just two votes with eighteen abstentions.

Those abstentions were won through hard negotiation. Sánchez had to make agreements with eight parties, covering 313 different commitments, to secure those abstaining votes. Not all those commitments are compatible with each other. Government, with so much to deliver to keep minor parties at least neutral, and up against such a powerful right, isn’t going to be easy.

This is particularly true in the specific circumstances of Spain. Some of the commitments Sánchez has had to make concern the status of Catalonia and its desire for independence. That’s something he can’t grant and retain his support in the rest of Spain; it’s going to be challenging to give the Catalans enough, short of independence, to keep Tuesday’s abstainers in line.

With a powerful and ferocious right-wing Opposition, he and Iglesias are going to have torrid time implementing their programme. It’s going to be enthralling to watch. I’m at least glad they have the opportunity to try – after the crushing defeat of the British left in December, being able to do as much as Sánchez can in Spain seems a distant dream.

There were some good moments in the investiture debate.

One of the most moving was the standing ovation offered to Aina Vidal, who turned up to vote despite undergoing aggressive treatment for cancer.

Aina Vidal stands to acknowledge the ovation for her presence

Another was Sánchez’s reference to one of the iconic figures of the Second Spanish Republic, the one overthrown by Franco. Manuel Azaña told his compatriots, “we are all children of the same sun and tributaries of the same river”.

In Britain and the US, I can’t help feeling that we’re all children of the same deeply disrupted climate system, and tributaries to the same traffic jams.

Maybe the Spanish example can help us towards a more encouraging future.

BBC or Better Be Careful what you wish for

“Democracy,” wrote the American journalist and wit HL Mencken, “is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.”

There are times when some on the left seem convinced that they know what they want, and getting it good and hard might refocus their minds. Not that I’d like it to happen: we’d all suffer if they did.

What makes me say this is the internet meme I keep seeing, with a picture of Peter Falk as Columbo, making his trademark comment: “Excuse me sir… just one more thing” and then asking the (apparently) killer question, “why does the BBC never quiz the Tories about doubling the national debt to £1.9 trillion?”

Back in 2010, the Tories had promised that their austerity programme was a necessary evil to reduce the national debt. It is indeed ironic, at the very least, that after nearly a decade of the evil, the debt, far from being reduced, has doubled. So why doesn’t the BBC quiz the Tories about this sad state of affairs?

The BBC is primarily a news organisation. The doubled debt may be deplorable, but it isn’t news. It isn’t because nobody is quizzing the Tories about it. Not Labour, for instance. If Labour took up the issue in the current general election campaign, it would become newsworthy.

Why doesn’t Labour do that?

Because it would face a counter-attack demanding to know how it intends to reduce the debt. Since Labour is more concerned with some urgent spending commitments – on the NHS, Education and the Police, among many others – the last thing it wants to do is to paint itself into a corner as committed to debt-cutting.

The truth is that the national debt is not an issue in the election campaign. The NHS is. Education. The Police. Housing and homelessness. Workers’ rights. The issues, in fact, on which Labour is quizzing the Tories and on which the BBC also should.

That the BBC were planning to make life difficult for Boris Johnson on such matters is reflected in Johnson’s apparent reluctance to be interviewed by Andrew Neill. Jeremy Corbyn was badly mauled by Neill. Boris would doubtless prefer to be called gutless for ducking the same experience than run that risk. Not honourable or courageous, but wily.

If he doesn’t face the same inquisition as Corbyn did, that’s not the BBC’s fault. It’s Boris showing how deviously he plays the political game.

But back to the national debt. Let’s be clear: for instance, it would be wrong to think that the BBC doesn’t talk about it at all. It took me about three minutes to find a recent piece on the subject. It included a graph showing how the debt has climbed. It’s true that it shows £1.8tn rather than 1.9, but that seems to be down to its reasoning in terms of ‘net’ national debt. Don’t ask me what the difference is – at best I’d be guessing.

The BBC on rising national debt, in a piece from 6 November

It’s true, though, that the national debt isn’t front and centre of the BBC’s news coverage. We don’t get news bulletins telling us that “with the national debt at £1.9tn, double the level when the Tories came to power, rescue workers are still struggling to rescue survivors or recover bodies from the earthquakes in Albania”.

A TV channel that behaved in that way wouldn’t be providing news, it would be peddling propaganda. That’s the way things are in the US.

There’s nothing wrong with propaganda, as long as it doesn’t pretend to be news. This blog is propaganda, for a specific point of view (mine). If you don’t like it, that’s fine. There are plenty of others to choose from – the Skwawkbox on the left, for instance, or Guido Fawkes (or the Daily Mail) on the right. What those channels have in common is a lack of journalistic standards. We publish what we believe to be true, or in some cases would like to be true, without verification or evaluation.

If you’re more comfortable with reading material that confirms what you believe, stick to the propaganda. But I think we’d all do far better to have independent organisations publishing seriously checked material, which we can interpret as we wish. As C P Scott, the iconic editor of the Guardian put it, “Comment is free but facts are sacred”. I’d like to have my facts served up to me as accurately as possible. Then I’ll make up my mind.

The BBC doesn’t always get things right. But it does one hell of a lot better than most. For that, I’m hugely grateful.

By way of contrast, take a look at Hungary. It has just announced that it’s pulling out of the Eurovision competition. In itself, that’s hardly world-shattering. What makes the decision importance is its motivation: it’s undoubtedly because the Hungarian authorities see Eurovision as “too gay”. The Hungarian government is increasingly homophobic. There’s little doubt that’s why the nation has pulled out of the competition.

But the decision isn’t the government’s to take. It’s up to MTVA, the national TV network. The problem is, MTVA does what the government tells it to do.

See? What happens when you start demanding that your national broadcaster serves one side more than it currently is? There’s no guarantee it’ll support yours.

Knocking the BBC in Britain doesn’t necessarily serve the cause of the left. It’s far more likely to assist the hard right, which is just as critical of the organisation and far more powerful.

Be careful what you wish for. You may get it a lot harder than you wanted. And there may be nobody out there to cover your denunciations when that happens.

Racism and xenophobia: we need to recapture the spirit of Cable Street

It was as shaming as it was sad to learn that Muslim female colleagues of my wife’s are afraid to visit France.

It was photos from Nice that had been the final straw. They showed four armed policemen converging on a woman in Muslim clothes on a Nice beach, to tell her to wear less. My first thought was of my youth, when the cry was for women to wear more on beaches. Ironic that society always feels it can tell women what to wear or not to wear.

French police move in on an existential threat to our civilisation:
a woman wearing too many clothes on a beach in Nice

My second thought was bleaker. Whether we like the police or not, we all ultimately rely on them. They’re supposed to make us feel safer, indeed to keep us safer. At their best, they should only be a threat over things we’ve done; but these police were a threat for what that woman was. Nothing suggested she’d done anything to harm anyone else, but because she was Muslim and felt the need to follow what she believed were the strictures of her religion concerning dress, she became a target for the police.

Where does a woman like that turn for protection if the police start off predisposed against her? No wonder my wife’s colleagues are so afraid of France. They feel unwelcome in a country that prides itself on being the homeland of human rights.

Sadly, we’ve been here before. At the end of the nineteenth century and for the first few decades of the twentieth, in many countries it wasn’t safe to be a Jew. Dress differently to mark your Judaism and, particularly in central or eastern Europe, you gave up your right to expect the police to look after you.

In some nations, the movement went to terrible extremes. In Germany, it turned into Kristallnacht where Jewish shops and business were vandalised and many Jews were beaten or killed in the streets, a harbinger of the full-scale Holocaust to come. In others, it was an insidious, subterranean hostility, which might be as mild as a refusal to allow a Jew into a club: you may remember the story of Groucho Marx, who was told he could join a club on condition he didn’t use the pool; he asked whether his daughter might be allowed to wade in up to her knees, since she was only half Jewish.

In Britain, the British Union of Fascists had been organised by a former Labour (and previously Conservative then independent) MP, Oswald Mosley. It wanted to bring anti-Semitism out into the open and even aped the militaristic uniforms of the German and Italian Fascists. In October 1936, the BUF decided to march through heavily Jewish areas in the East End of London. Anti-Fascists felt otherwise and mobilised to prevent them.

The result was the battle of Cable Street of 4 October 1936, whose eightieth anniversary fell last week. The battle didn’t pit anti-Fascists against Fascists, but anti-Fascists against the police. But the result was that Mosley got well away from there and the BUF rallied in Hyde Park, in the West End, instead of the East End.

Battle of Cable Street: the Fascists did not pass
The BBC spoke to a couple of survivors

Views differ as to whether Cable Street was as significant in halting the progress of fascism in England as many have believed. But it seems to me that whatever it may have achieved concretely, it was hugely important symbolically: 20,000 turned out against the Fascists, only 2000-3000 on the other side. The voice saying ‘no’ to an abomination was by far the louder. The battle is much more significant for what it revealed of an attitude than for what it may or may not have accomplished.

At a time when there’s once more a terrible lurch towards the far right across the great democracies, with increasingly overt xenophobia or downright racism, we need to recapture that attitude. Whether we’re confronting Trump in the US, UKIP in England, Viktor Orbán in Hungary, it’s the spirit of Cable Street that has to drive us.

And – who knows – why not start by finding it in France?

A quick lesson in Christianity to its eager protectors

With 3.8 million people displaced from Syria by war, terror and despair, Slovakia has generously decided to accept 200 refugees. But, it specifies, only Christians.

It’s an interesting notion. You make a gesture of purely symbolic charity but, in the same breath, demand adherence to Christianity. I’m no Christian, but I’m friends with a great many, and I believe they would none of them recognise the principles of their faith in that behaviour.

Behind the restriction to Christians lies something else, which is the desire to repel Muslims, seen as invading hordes. That was made more explicit by the estimable and hard right Prime Minister of Hungary, Viktor Orbán. Incidentally, this is a man worth watching if ever you wonder what a government led by Britain’s own far-right Nigel Farage would be like, since Orbán’s party is the Hungarian equivalent of UKIP. He has, for instance, enlightened us on the nature of tolerance for minority communities, in this case homosexuals:

Tolerance ... does not mean that we would apply the same rules for people whose life style is different from our own.

He has now announced that Hungary, in trying to block refugees from entering in the first place, and rounding up and interning those already there, is protecting “Christian Europe” from Muslims.

Don’t see migrants. Or even refugees. Just people

Hungary spent a couple of centuries, from the sixteenth to the eighteenth, within the Turkish Ottoman Empire. I was amazed on visits to Hungary to find how little trace remains of the Turkish presence: in a church that had once been a mosque, I was pointed to a niche which might once have been a Mihrab, the structure that tells Muslims the direction of Mecca; in the provincial town of Eger I saw (and indeed climbed) a minaret, which is all that remains of the mosque there.

No, Hungary has turned its back on its Muslim past, unlike Spain where it is treasured and indeed claimed, on sometimes dubious grounds, by large numbers of people (but woe betide any Muslim who tries to worship inside the great mosque of Cordoba, now a Christian place of worship: the security guards will pounce and escort the believer out). 

Clearly, Slovakia and Hungary regard Islamophobia as legitimate, laudable even.

Further West, we try to hide our own anti-Islamic feelings, but they’re certainly running strong, however partially hidden they may be. But what is even more striking is the extent to which our leaders seem to share the Christian notions of their counterparts in Central Europe. So our reaction to migrants trying to reach Britain from Calais is not to identify the genuine refugees and let them in, but to put razor wire to keep everyone out. David Cameron has so far allowed 216 Syrians into Britain under a scheme to take refugees from that country; he now intends to increase the number to several thousand (where I suspect “several” is a relatively small number).

In other words, faced with fellow human beings in trouble, Orbán’s “Christian” Europe, or large parts of it at least, react with rejection and meanness.

David Cameron claims that Britain is a basically Christian country. So let me remind him of the parable of the Good Samaritan. The background to the story is that someone has correctly told Jesus that the key law is to love your neighbour as yourself. When he goes on to ask who his neighbour is, Christ answers (in the words of the New International version of the Bible, less poetic but more comprehensible than the King James version):

A man was going down from Jerusalem to Jericho, when he was attacked by robbers. They stripped him of his clothes, beat him and went away, leaving him half dead. A priest happened to be going down the same road, and when he saw the man, he passed by on the other side. So too, a Levite, when he came to the place and saw him, passed by on the other side. But a Samaritan, as he traveled, came where the man was; and when he saw him, he took pity on him. He went to him and bandaged his wounds, pouring on oil and wine. Then he put the man on his own donkey, brought him to an inn and took care of him. The next day he took out two denarii and gave them to the innkeeper. ‘Look after him,’ he said, ‘and when I return, I will reimburse you for any extra expense you may have.’

Who was the neighbour? “The one who had mercy on him.”

The Samaritan was not of the same Community as the injured man, but he helped anyway. As though, say, we looked at Syrian refugees and saw people, not Muslims, not Syrians, not migrants. And because they were people, we helped them. Even if they were gay.

That would be behaving as Christians. That kind of Christianity would be worth protecting. But don’t count on the Orbáns or the Camerons to step forward to do it.