Spanish politics wishing us all a Happy New Year

Two pieces of news, out here in Spain, have struck me as the old year dies. They provide insight into how to form governments and just how much, or how little, we need them.

The first is that the country is about to have a fully constituted government again, rather than one that is in office merely in an acting capacity.

Pedro Sánchez and Pablo Iglesias
Eight months to learn that compromise works better than intransigence

This is a bigger achievement than you might at first think. There were elections back in April, which led to the Spanish Socialist Party, the PSOE, winning 123 parliamentary seats under its leader Pedro Sánchez. That made it the biggest single party while leaving it well short of the 176 required for a majority, but then the left wing Unidas-Podemos (UP), the party that broke spectacularly onto the scene a few years ago under the leadership of the charistmatic radical Pablo Iglesias, also had 42 and the centrist Citizens Party had 57. Surely a majority government could emerge, even without having to call on Catalan or Basque nationalists, some of whom would be inclined to favour the left.

That was not to be. First the Citizens Party made it clear that it was centrist in name only. Under no conditions would it support Sánchez into office. So if there was any sense in which it stood in the centre, it was with a powerful inclination to the right.

Months of negotiations between PSOE and UP made little progress, as neither side was prepared to budge from its entrenched positions. The result was that just seven months after the first election, a second had to be called, in November.

The results were highly educational.

The Citizens Party, which had been so outspoken in its refusal to work with the PSOE, was crushed. Its tally of MPs fell from 57 to just ten. Clearly, voters felt that if the party was going to ally itself only with the conservative Popular Party (PP), then it was just another conservative party and they might just as well vote directly for it. And indeed the PP went from a historic low of 66 to 89 MPs, although the collapse of the pseudo-centrists also had a far more serious consequence: the far-right Vox went from 24 seats to 52, making the third biggest group in the new Parliament. That’s a worrying development for the future.

As for the PSOE and UP, the two parties who couldn’t agree a programme after the April election, clearly voters didn’t like their behaviour. Both lost seats, though the PSOE not that many, falling from 123 to 120. UP, on the other hand, lost 7 which, considering they held just 42, is a much more serious blow.

The punishment handed to the two main parties of the left seems to have had the desired effect. Sánchez and Iglesias have at last found a way of agreeing a programme, including some interesting measures such as increased taxes on high pensions, legislation on euthanasia and climate change, and a reduced role for religious studies in public education.

With the abstention of the left-wing nationalists in Catalonia, which seems highly likely, it now appears that Sánchez will at last go from being acting Prime Minister to being confirmed in the role some time next week.

The message is clear. Pull together on the left and you can achieve some things. Reject all compromise and the voters punish you.

What about the other piece of news?

It seems that the Spanish stock market index, Ibex, ended 2019 up by more than in any year in 2013. Now I know that the position of the stock market is far from a perfect indication of the state of an economy, but it’s nonetheless generally the case that if the economy does badly, stocks and shares fall too. So the news about the Spanish index does somewhat suggest that the economy’s not doing too badly.

So my first bit of news teaches me that a compromise is worth making to get a government that can do some good, a lesson we’d do well to learn on the British left. The second shows that an economy can do fine even without a government for eight months, a lesson, in relativising the importance of government itself, it wouldn’t be bad for every nation to learn.

And on that note, I wish you all a great New Year.

Not good for the Pope. Not good for Britain either

One thought can easily conjure up unrelated memories, can’t it?

I was reading about the present Pope the other day, and it brought to mind memories of the Falklands War. Or perhaps I should say Conflict, since war was never declared. And perhaps I should say Conflict over the Malvinas, to give the Spanish name for those islands, since that’s what the Argentinians call them.

What’s the link to Pope Francis? The Conflict brought to an end the military dictatorship in Argentina. That, incidentally, is why I always think the Argentinians won, even if they didn’t keep the islands: they got rid of one of the bloodiest and most brutal dictatorships in their troubled history, while we were stuck with Thatcher for another seven years, followed by further Tory government under John Major for another five after that.

It wasn’t just the supposed ‘victory’ in the Falklands that kept Thatcher in power and gave her a landslide election win the following year. She was helped by Labour having a brainstorm and going into that campaign led by the hard left, which played right into her hands. Sound familiar? Yes, just because we made that mistake 36 years ago doesn’t mean we’d learn from it and avoid it this year.

Francis, then Jorge Bergoglio and head of the Jesuit order in Argentina, lived through the dictatorship and its “dirty war”. Indeed, the darkest era in his past is that he may have contributed to two priests being tortured by the regime.

Esther Ballestrino
A significant influence on Pope Francis

A woman who played a major role in Bergoglio’s development was Esther Ballestrino. She headed the lab where he worked when he was still a chemist and hadn’t decided to become a priest. In 1977, her son-in-law and her pregnant sixteen-year-old daughter were abducted and tortured by the regime. In the absence of any news of them, Ballestrino joined with other women in founding the ‘Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo’ who would gather every week, demanding information, outside the presidential palace on that square in Buenos Aires.

Eventually, her daughter was released. But Ballestrino kept turning out with the other protestors. Unfortunately, the group was inflltrated by a man called Alfredo Astiz, from Naval Intelligence, nicknamed the ‘blond angel of death’. When the group published an advertisement listing the names of the ‘disappeared’ – the people abducted and about whose destiny no information was available – Astiz arranged for five women, including Ballestrino, to be arrested. They were tortured and eventually loaded, heavily drugged, onto a ‘death flight’: a plane that took them out to sea where they were dropped, hands and feet bound, out of the back of the aircraft.

So Esther Ballestrino died, one of the great sorrows in Pope Francis’s life.

And what memory did this conjure up in me?

I was conflicted over the Falklands War – conflicted over the Conflict. It strikes me as ridiculous that a group of islands off the coast of Argentina are possessions of a country, Britain, nearly 13,000 kilometres away. On the other hand, I loathed the Argentinian junta and deeply disliked the way they decided they could use military force to solve a territorial dispute. Above all, I disliked their obvious contempt for the views of the local population.

The use of military force and the trampling of the rights of the local inhabitants? It felt far too much like what the Israeli government does to Palestinians.

In any case, I can only be pleased with the way things worked out for Argentina, giving them a far more important victory than anything on the battlefield could have achieved: it freed them from a particularly nasty regime.

At the time, however, I remember being regularly sickened by the news. There was a day when I arrived in London from the suburb where I lived at the time, and caught sight of a startling headline in the local paper, the Evening Standard. The Argentinian cruiser Belgrano had been sunk by a British submarine, leading to the deaths of several hundred young conscripts. My stomach churned over that massacre, and even more over the gleeful celebration right-wing papers engaged in over it.

The Sun delighting in the deaths of conscript sailors

Then there was the recapture by British troops of the island of South Georgia. They took the surrender of the Argentinian garrison there. It was commanded by – Lieutenant Commander Alberto Astiz. Yes. The blond angel of death.

Both Sweden and France wanted to question him for the murder of some of their nationals. But the Thatcher government, pleading the Geneva Convention, had him questioned by a British policeman and, when Astiz refused to answer any questions, decided to release him and send him home.

So a torturer and murderer was treated with kid gloves, while the young conscripts on the Belgrano were sent to their deaths with callous indifference.

Alfredo Astiz, torturer, murderer, released by Thatcher

Funny to be reminded of all that by a book talking about Pope Francis. Funny but no fun. To me, that act of the Thatcher government ought to be remembered in perpetuity as a moment of glaring shame in the history of Britain.

Astiz was at last sentenced to life in prison in 2011. By the Argentines. Who again emerge from this sorry story, as they did from the war, with more honour than a deeply flawed Britain.

Christmas day without my mother: something of a relief

Christmas. So many memories.

Not all of them bad.

The tradition in English-speaking households is to have presents, at least for the kids, on Christmas morning. I’ve no idea who came up with that terrible idea: it means the children are up at 5:00 or 6:00, waking their parents to demand gifts.

My family was no different. We’d wake up at the crack of dawn and find a Christmas stocking stuffed with goodies at the bottom of our beds. That would hold our attention for the best part of two minutes, by which time we would have reached the obligatory mandarin at the bottom, and then we’d take off to wake up the parents and find our “real” presents.

An early foray into empirical experimentation tested his existence

There came a time when I began to suspect that the gifts weren’t really being brought by Father Christmas. But I was a child interested in evidence and prepared to carry out carefully designed experiments to test any hypothesis.

So, one Christmas Eve, I propped a bongo drum between a chair and my bedroom door. The outcome was spectacular. When the door was pushed gently open some time after I’d fallen asleep, the drum fell to the floor, with a highly satisfactory, indeed nearly explosive, noise followed by a volley of cursing. That was not the kind of language I’d expect any saint to use, and the voice was in any case unmistakably my mother’s. That left me freed of an old deception but also, as I discovered in the morning, denied a Christmas stocking.

Danielle is from Alsace, in Eastern France, where they have a different approach. Like so many on the Continent, they celebrate Christmas Eve rather than Christmas Day. The tradition in her village was for a father to take his kids out in the afternoon, so that in his absence the mother would set up and decorate a tree – never done earlier – and assemble presents around it. The kids would be greeted by an apparently magical transformation when they returned.

The family would have their Christmas meal, after which presents would be opened. In the evening, not at the crack of dawn the next day. Indeed, if families go to Midnight Mass – usually held at 10:30 or 11:00 these days, as a more convenient approximation to midnight – the kids get home tired and unlikely to wake up early on Christmas Day. The parents enjoy a lie-in.

That strikes me as far more civilised than the Anglo-Saxon way. I have no idea why English speakers don’t adopt it.

My mother was one who never could. To her, Christmas was a sacred fixture in the Calendar, inextricably linked to the 25th of December. This was a little odd, since she was Jewish and, therefore, technically not expected to celebrate Christmas at all.

That may only further underline the tenuousness of the link between Christmas and Christianity. Today, for all but a diminishing band of true believers, it’s a feast of the family and of commerce, not a celebration of the birth of Christ. There’s no reason why members of other faiths, or none, shouldn’t celebrate it.

This, however, created difficulties. Christmas Day in England is the day when nothing happens. Public transport virtually stops and more or less everywhere is shut. My mother absolutely wanted to go for a meal with us, but there are few restaurants open and the ones that are either offer a special Christmas meal at an eye-wateringly special price, or they’re indifferent places hoping to cash in on the general absence of anywhere to eat out.

Once we ate in a Turkish restaurant opposite the Synagogue. Run by Muslims, it was ironic to see it fill up quickly with Jews, all known to my mother. The spectacle of Jews being served by Muslims on the day of a great Christian festival certainly tickled my sense of irony, which went some way towards making up for the mediocrity of the food.

On another couple of occasions, we went to a Thai restaurant near her home, where the food was frankly even worse than in the Turkish place. It really only had geographic convenience going for it. Our first attempt to eat there was a fiasco, because my mother told us that lunch was being served after 3:00. It was only when we showed up that we discovered that the correct information was that they were serving until 3:00. So we missed out on food altogether.

I could never persuade my mother to have our Christmas meal on the 24th, French style, when there would have been a huge range of restaurants to choose from. It had to be the 25th. To be fair, I suppose she knew that all around her people would be celebrating with family on that day, and she’d have felt miserably lonely if she hadn’t. I sympathise and I’m happy we helped her avoid that fate. But it was exasperating to go out on the hunt, each year, for a restaurant that could accommodate us, serve us a reasonable meal and not require us to take out a new mortgage on our house. A hunt that failed every time.

My mother wasn’t always an easy person to get on with. Even so, I often miss the things we did together. When I watch something good on TV, I want to tell her about it. When the Labour Party does something avoidable and self-destructive, I want to bemoan our fate with her. When the kids do something particularly admirable, I want to share the pleasure with her. But the Christmas day meal?

Not so much.

Ah, the tradition. The joy. The terrible food.
Have a great Christmas, everyone. Christian or not

African funeral or how to bear our troubles more lightly

Introducing his song The Pause of Mr Claus (you don’t know it? Listen to it, and its tribute to the FBI, on YouTube), Arlo Guthrie shares an insight with us:

During these hard days and hard weeks, everybody always has it bad once in a while. You know, you have a bad time of it, and you always have a friend who says "Hey man, you ain't got it that bad. Look at that guy." And you look at that guy, and he's got it worse than you. And it makes you feel better that there's somebody that's got it worse than you.

There’s a lot of truth in that. At least in the sense that it does you good to remember that there are people out there who are having a worse time than you are. That isn’t because you’re pleased by their suffering, but because it relativises your own.

Pierre with my father (sitting), and a friend
when they first met, during the UN mission
for the Congo emergency in 1960

This was brought home to me some decades ago by a family friend we spent a Christmas with, when my father was posted by the United Nations to what was then called Zaïre and is now the Democratic Republic of Congo, in equatorial Africa. His name was Pierre and he was from Belgium, the former colonial power out there – and if you want an example of people suffering a lot more than you’re likely to, just take a look at the Congo under Belgian rule. It was barbaric, with casual murders of the local population, or limbs cut off on a whim of a colonial overlord. Belgium must be a serious contender for the title of worst European colonial power, and the competition’s pretty hot for that coveted award.

At the time of that Christmas visit, Pierre was managing a small rubber plantation way out in the sticks, some 500 km east of the capital, Kinshasa. 

He told us this story.

Years before he’d been at school with a boy, Charles, a couple of years younger than him. Charles was slight, weak and not in particularly good health. Pierre remembered him as the kind of child who has trouble making friends, is often bullied and leaves little trace in the memory of the people around him.

After they left school, there had been the war and Nazi occupation, and after that Pierre had gone out to the Congo to build a career. He’d been through the horrors of the independence struggle followed by civil war. It had taken firmness of purpose and not a little strength, both physical and emotional, to stick it out.

Two or three years before he told us this story, soon after he’d been appointed to his plantation manager post, he’d been visited by a fellow Belgian from a neighbouring plantation. ‘Neighbouring’ in that context meant an hour or two’s drive away, given the dirt roads of the region, bad at the best of times, and almost impassable in wet weather. To Pierre’s surprise, his visitor was Charles who’d brought his new wife to meet Pierre.

“I’d pretty well forgotten him,” Pierre told us, “but he remembered me and soon enough my memories came back too.”

They traded reminiscences for a while, Pierre making sure he embellished his a little, so as not to offend Charles. Then they parted company, meeting only infrequently after that – communications were far too poor for regular visiting.

Then, a few weeks before our arrival, Pierre heard that Charles had been taken ill.

“Hardly surprising. When he came to see me, it was obvious his health was as delicate as ever, and this isn’t an easy place to live.”

Pierre visited him once in hospital and found him wasted and worsening.

“To me it didn’t look like he was going to last much longer. I decided I’d better go and see him again soon or I’d be too late.”

But other things intervened and he had to keep putting off his visit until, at midnight one evening, there was a knocking at his front door. His visitors were two nuns from the hospital, and he invited them in. After tea and some small talk, he felt it was time to turn to the business of so late a call.

“What can I do for you, sisters?” he asked.

It turned out it was about Charles. He’d taken a terrible turn for the worse that morning and, that evening, had died.

“Oh,” said Pierre, kicking himself for not having been to see him. “And, I suppose, you want me to break the news to his widow?”

“Oh, no,” said one of the nuns, “we can do that. We wanted to know what you thought we should do with the body.”

“The body?” he said. “Why, leave it in the mortuary.”

“That’s just it,” said the nun, “we’ve got it in the back of the jeep.”

It turned out that Charles had died while the nurse who was supposed to be supervising him had been away from the bedside. He, the nurse, had dumped the body into the back of a jeep and then bullied the two nuns to take it round to the new widow. I can’t picture to myself the scene, had she been presented with the body of her husband in the small hours of the morning.

With this auspicious start, Pierre found himself made responsible for the funeral arrangements. Bodies need to be buried fast in the tropics, and Pierre organised everything for three days later. 

Unfortunately, this was the time of year when the dry season was poised to give way to the wet. In the event, the weather broke on the day of the funeral itself.

The European men in the region tended to have just one suit each. They were making their way to church for the service when the torrential rain, as it falls in Africa, began to beat down on them, leaving them struggling through a morass of mud and even having to clear fallen trees from the road ahead of them. They turned up at the church with their best clothes mud-spattered and soaked.

A funeral service is never cheerful, but the atmosphere of wet clothing, bad tempers and mud made this one particularly painful. Things became worse still when the lightning started up and knocked out the electrical power. It then added a crowning touch, by sending balls of blue flame up and down the inside of the darkened church. So the service ended by the garish light of ball lightning, providing an entirely fitting background to the sobs of the grieving widow.

That was when the gravediggers announced that they could no longer find the grave.

The mourners stepped outside into the downpour. The whole of the bottom of the graveyard, where the new grave had been dug, was now flooded. In the new temporary lake, there was no way to identify where Charles’s final resting place had been prepared for him.

I don’t think of Pierre’s story often enough. I should. It would help me realise that there are people out there having a worse time than I am. In turn, that might teach me to take my own troubles less seriously.

Spirit conversation, or my mother on why Labour has to be a Broad Church

My mother, a lifelong supporter of the Labour Party and member for nearly four decades, liked to tell me her party was a Broad Church.

The Duomo in Milan: one of the broadest churches I know

One of the proudest moments of her long life was the day in 1945 when she learned, in a roomful of her Labour Party staff colleagues, that for the first time Labour had a majority in the House of Commons. Clement Attlee was about to become Prime Minister, heading what was, indeed, a broad-church government. On its left, were men around the fiery Welsh orator, Nai Bevan; on its right, those who lined up with the wily old Trades Unionist, Ernest Bevin; in the middle, the mainstream around Attlee himself.

Not the least of Attlee’s skills was the capacity to hold that disparate band together. Above all, that meant compromise, so that no one felt they were being denied more than they could bear, or that someone else was getting too much. Even Attlee couldn’t handle it for longer than six years and, eventually, the government was brought down from the inside by Bevan’s intransigence. It achieved a huge amount in that short time, however, not least launching Britain’s most cherished institution, now under existential threat, the National Health Service. Ironically, it was that same Bevan who acted as its midwife.

My mother would probably have been shocked to see how contemptuously the notion of a ‘broad church’ is treated these days. The dominant group within the Labour Party these days seems much more intent on homogeneity than diversity. They want everyone to be a supporter of their faction, even though that faction has just taken the Party to a historically massive defeat.

It would be a great pleasure to welcome my mother’s spirit here in Spain, if she chose to visit us from the other world. She would, I’m ensure, enjoy a Christmas in better weather than she’d been used to in England, but I imagine the conversation would quickly turn more serious.

“Unfortunately,” I’d have to tell her, “the Labour Party’s being run these days by people who think we shouldn’t have to compromise any more. They think it’s time for a Labour government more aligned on a single tendency within the movement – the one Nai Bevan represented in your time, and Tony Benn later.”

“But,” I suspect she’d reply, “they need the others too.”

“It’s hard for me to speak for the leadership, but I think they like the idea of something purer, less corrupted by compromise, firmer on its principles.”

“Doesn’t that mean narrower?”

“I suppose it does.”

“Well, there you are then,” she’d exclaim triumphantly, “if it’s narrow it won’t be able to put together a majority.”

I can just see the gleam in her eyes as she points out the fallacy in the position I’ve been trying to present.

“Funnily enough, it couldn’t. We’ve just had an election and Labour won a bit over ten and a quarter million votes. The Tories took just shy of fourteen million. We got 202 seats.”

“202? But that’s worse than 1983!” she’d exclaim, “and… that’s after nearly ten years of the Tories in office!”

I’d hang my head.

“That’s the worst result I’ve ever seen, not counting 1935 when I was only eleven and not really paying attention. Extraordinary. How could they do that badly?”

“Well, it’s lousy, I admit. It means we need getting on for a couple of million voters to switch from the Tories to us.”

“That’s a big ask.”

“I know. Maybe beyond a single election. But we might do it in two.”

“Only if you broaden your appeal. You can’t do it by being pure and narrow.”

“You think we should become a broad church again? That wouldn’t be popular with the characters running the party at the moment.”

“Then,” she would say decisively, “it’s time for them to get out of the way. Broad churches win elections. Narrow ones lose them.”

“You know that. I know that. But they don’t want to hear that.”

“Explain it to them.”

“I try. I’m not getting far,” I’d point out thoughtfully, as I start mulling over a new idea, “couldn’t you have a go? You know, haunt them a bit?”

“Not a bad idea. I could try. I’ve always been good at making my views clear when people are being silly.”

“I know you have,” I’d say, shaking my head, partly out of some painful memories, but partly also out of doubt. “Trouble is, this lot seem terribly hard of hearing when you’re trying to tell them something true they’d rather not know.”

“Well, it’s up to them. If they’d rather stick with what makes them comfortable and lose, they’re even sillier than I thought. But you can only get things done when you’re on the winning side. Attlee knew that. He told me himself. Bevin knew. Why, even Bevan knew, before he brought the whole house crashing down.”

“Sadly, his heirs seem intent on bringing the house down before it’s even built.”

“Seems a hopeless case. You can’t save people who don’t want to save themselves.” She’d shake her head in turn. And then, as if making up her mind, she’d add, “Let’s have a glass of that red I brought you.”

While at war: courage in admitting you were wrong

Picture a lecture theatre in an old and prestigious university. You know, wooden panelling, a lofty ceiling, rows of wooden benches reaching up to the top and back of the hall, where the students sit.

Karra Elejalde as Miguel de Unamuno

But these aren’t students. There are some teachers and local worthies, mixed with armed soldiers and Fascist Party storm troopers. For this is 1936 at the university of Salamanca in Spain. Specifically, it is the 12th of October, and the military uprising that is going to lead to three years of civil war and the overthrow of the second Spanish Republic, is a few months old.

The 12th of October. That’s no random date. Even today, it’s Spain’s national day. It was chosen to mark the moment that Spain, through Christopher Columbus, ‘discovered’ America. That’s not an event much celebrated by the descendants who were already there and quickly learned to regret being discovered.

Back in 1936, it had been baptised the ‘Day of the Race’. That’s nothing to do with trying to run faster than others. It’s to do with celebrating the Spanish race above all others. If it weren’t so ugly, and hadn’t cost so many lives, this notion of race would be laughable: the Spanish are descendants of Celtic Iberian villagers, mixed with Carthaginian traders, followed by Roman legionaries, and then Germanic tribesmen who came marauding and stayed to settle before being overrun in turn by Arab adventurers; somewhere Jewish merchants and administrators joined the mix, along no doubt with Catholics from England and Ireland or exiles from Italy, to say nothing of the many ‘Indians’ from the Americas who came back along the shipping lanes that Columbus opened in the other direction.

In other words, the Spanish even in 1936 were about as racially pure as any street mongrel. Just like the English, with their Celtic roots, their smattering of Latin speakers, overrun by Anglo-Saxons and later by Norsemen of various types, to which have been added Jews from all over Europe and North Africa or Indians – not the American variety, but the kind that includes the whole of the Asian subcontinent covering Pakistan too – Nigerians, Jamaicans, Poles and Russians, and a glorious, rich mix of every nation on earth.

Still, to Spanish Fascists of 1936, the race was something to celebrate. And they did so in the great lecture theatre of the University of Salamanca.

One of those present that day was Miguel de Unamuno, philosopher, writer, poet and then rector of the University. He had been disgusted with the disorder and chaos of the Republic and had welcomed the military uprising as a way to bring back peace and order to his country. The Republic dismissed him. The rebellion restored him.

For a while he thought he could count on Franco’s support, if only to save the lives of friends of his who had been arrested. It was a vain hope. Two of his closest companions were murdered despite his entreaties.

On the 12th of October, he wasn’t due to speak. So he listened to speeches extolling the greatness of Spain, and of the holy war now being fought to save it.

Finally, he could stand it no more. He rose and began to speak:

I know you must be expecting my words, because you know me and you know that I am incapable of remaining silent in the face of what is being said. Saying nothing can, sometimes, mean acquiescing… I had said that I didn’t want to speak, because I know myself. But… I have to. There has been talk here of an international war in defence of Christian civilisation… But this one is only an uncivil war… To win is not to convince, and above all one has to convince. But there is no convincing through hatred that leaves no place to compassion…

Another presence on the platform was that of General Millan Astray, founder of the Spanish Foreign Legion. After Unamuno spoke, there were cries from the audience of the Legion’s slogan, “¡Viva la Muerte!”, “Long live Death!” Unamuno replied:

I have just heard the cry “long live death!” That sounds the same as “death to life!” And I, who have spent my whole life creating paradoxes that annoyed those who didn’t understand them, have to say to you, as an expert in the matter, that this paradox strikes me as ridiculous and repellent… Whatever the proverb may say, I have always been a prophet in my own country. You will win, but you will not convince. You will win because you have superior brute force, but you will not convince because convincing means persuading. And to persuade you need something that you are missing in this struggle, reason and right.

The words “you will win but you will not convince” work better in Spanish: “Venceréis, pero no convenceréis”.

This is the scene to which Alejando Amenábar’s latest film, While at War, builds.

There’s controversy about the film. It’s far from certain that the words traditionally attributed to Unamuno are exactly the ones he spoke: there’s no recording or transcript available. There is even a school of thought that suggest the words were embellished by a left-wing Spanish journalist who took refuge in London after the war, Luis Portillo. In a neat irony, he had a son in Britain, Michael, who became a Conservative politician and a minister in Margaret Thatcher’s cabinet.

There are also mixed views of the film. Amenábar has a tendency to distance himself perhaps a little too much from his characters, and that makes it difficult to empathise with them, and to feel their tragedy ourselves, viscerally. I did, but my two companions, one of my sons and my daughter-out-law, didn’t: the film left them cold and unengaged.

It didn’t leave me cold. I was fascinated by its depiction of Franco as a truly little man, in moral as well as physical stature, worming his way towards power. Millan Astray came across as just the monster I’ve always believed he was. But I was particularly fascinated by the depiction of Unamuno, as a man who got the politics wrong at the beginning and had, slowly and with enormous pain, to admit his error and put it right with what was, after all, an immensely courageous public statement repudiating the Fascists and all they stood for.

It didn’t happen exactly as in the film. The audience didn’t mob him or threaten to lynch him. He wasn’t rescued by Franco’s wife. But it’s true that immediately afterward, he was dismissed as rector for the second time and definitively. He was also placed under house arrest. He died two months later.

The aftermath of Unamuno’s speech was no lynching
He’s surrounded by Fascists, but Millan Astray is shaking his hand

There’s plenty wrong with the film, but plenty right too. I enjoyed it, partly because it’s the first time I’ve seen a film in Spanish without subtitles. It means I shall watch it again as soon as I can, if only to be able to say again and again, “oh, that’s what he was saying.”

I will, however, also be watching it again because for me, at least, it’s well worth seeing twice.

A bad awakening on Friday the thirteenth

Friday the thirteenth. Unlucky for some. Unlucky for the British Labour Party. Above all unlucky for those the Labour Party is intended to protect.

A party goes into an election seeking a fourth successive victory, something that has only happened once previously since universal suffrage was introduced in Britain. It does it after nearly a decade of ruinous austerity leaving the nation unprotected by a police force starved of resources, and with its national health service struggling even to survive. It does it under the leadership of Boris Johnson, a man entirely exposed as a liar and a cheat.

Such a party with such a leader stands not a chance of success.

Boris Johnson: gloating, entitled, triumphant
The face of Britain for maybe five years, and maybe more

And yet Boris has not merely succeeded, he has emerged with a comfortable majority. Why? Because the forces arrayed against him were so utterly inept that they couldn’t win an election that was offered up to them on a platter.

The Liberal Democrat party had a new leader, Jo Swinson, who ran a lacklustre campaign which left her party with ten fewer seats at the end that it had had at the beginning. One of the seats lost was her own.

Outside parliament, the People’s Vote campaign, far from uniting all the forces favouring continued British membership of the European Union, fell into faction squabbling and purges. Other Remain organisations came up with recommendations for tactical voting to keep the Tories out which contradicted each other. An unedifying, chaotic babble of voices with no clear leadership.

The worst of all, though, was Labour, because it was the biggest party and therefore had the most responsibility.

Jeremy Corbyn consolidated his place in Labour history as the second worst leader the Party has had, behind only Ramsay MacDonald, its first Prime Minister, who betrayed everything it stood for by forming a coalition government with the Tories in 1931. His action reduced the party’s parliamentary presence to just 52.

Corbyn campaigned as a man of principle, but wouldn’t tell the electorate where he stood on the biggest question of his time, Brexit. Most suspected that he remained what he’d always been, a Brexiter, but he compounded that suspicion by making it clear that his refusal to say was designed to avoid alienating either Leave voters or Remainers. Since both sides knew he was equivocating in order to make them both think he was on their side, both sides turned against him.

Few voters understood what was honest about that kind electoral opportunism.

Equally, Corbyn failed to act on allegations of anti-Semitism in the party. At first, my sense was that he was just extremely indolent and couldn’t bring himself to move quickly on the charges that were brought. But then I realised that there were skeletons in his closet too. For instance, he wrote a foreword for the reissue of Imperialism: A Study by John Atkinson Hobson, in which he described the book as “brilliant”. The book talks about European finance being controlled “by men of a single and peculiar race, who have behind them many centuries of financial experience,” which puts them “in a unique position to control the policy of nations”. No prizes for guessing which race Hobson meant.

Was that Corbyn’s problem in dealing with anti-Semitism? He might have had to take action against people expressing views like those he had endorsed in this foreword.

I don’t think many British voters care all that much about us Jews, either for or against. But they’re quick at identifying equivocation and evasion, and what Corbyn was doing over anti-Semitism was extremely dodgy. It wasn’t the anti-Semitism itself that killed him, it was the dodginess.

In the same way, it wasn’t the position he took over Brexit that damaged him, it was the sense that it wasn’t straight.

He compounded these strategic errors with tactical ones, starting with agreeing to the election being held on 12 December, to suit Boris Johnson’s timetable rather than his own. Corbyn, it strikes me, is not particularly bright and didn’t see that if Boris wanted the election now, that was an excellent reason for saying no. Instead, Corbyn went ahead and got creamed.

This is the second time we’ve been through this in my lifetime. The first was in 1983, the last occasion on which the hard left took control of Labour, and was reduced to its smallest parliamentary representation since 1935. That 1935 election, by the way, was significant because it was the first step back towards office by the Labour Party, after its catastrophe of 1931.

The election of 1983 was appalling, therefore. But it has been outdone by the 2019 one. In 1983, Labour emerged with 209 MPs, in 2019 with just 203. The 2019 election has taken over from 1983 as the worst for Labour since 1935.

The common theme Corbyn’s and the others’ dismal attempts to confront Boris was lack of leadership. None of them could rally the disparate forces opposed to his plans into a focused movement against him. Now he’s in with a vengeance, and his vengeance will be terrible.

He will, of course, now force Brexit through. Since it is not the fact of leaving the EU that will be hard or soft, but the nature of the trade agreement we negotiate or fail to negotiate with the EU, we are by no means yet safe from a hard Brexit.

Next will be the continued attacks on the poor and on public services. Boris will continue to promise greater investment in the police, in social care and in healthcare, but the reality will be otherwise. After a few years, the poor and many of the not-so-poor will be a great deal less well off than they are today.

What does all this mean? 

The fightback starts today.

The first step is to take back control of the Labour Party. Though Corbyn has said he will not lead Labour into another election, there are signs that some Corbynists at least will attempt to retain their dominance in the party. That may be less easy for them to do than they think. Some of the most zealous will certainly stick with the project but others may drift away, disappointed by the results. Others may simply realise that they would do better to work with other currents inside Labour, that a compromise that gives some of what they want is better than purity which gives them none of it.

Assuming that we can pull together to elect a leader who actually leads – and there are people who meet that requirement in Labour, such as Yvette Cooper or Keir Starmer – then a long slow process begins. After the crushing defeat of 1983, Labour lost two more elections before winning one. Can we win more quickly this time? Let’s hope so, but let’s remember what a long haul it was back then.

The other crucial step is to start the process of getting Britain back into the EU. That will certainly be a generational matter. I don’t expect to live long enough to see it myself, but it needs to be started. It is linked with the first step, since Labour has a crucial role to play in the process, and can’t while led by closeted Brexiters.

There are difficult times ahead. But difficulties aren’t overcome by not confronting them – Corbyn’s experience on Brexit and anti-Semitism shows that. A real leader will confront them, and real leadership is what we need.

Above all, we have to learn from our mistakes. We’ve been through it twice, in 1983 and 2019: the hard left takes charge and we’re thrashed in the subsequent election. That demonstrates the principle that if you don’t learn from your mistakes, you merely repeat them.

Two such routs were bad enough. Let’s make sure we don’t have a third.

While we wait we hope, or a window into another culture

“While I breathe, I hope,” the Romans used to say. Sounds right, doesn’t it? Hope springs eternal in the human breast, to use the English expression that means more or less the same thing. Or while there’s life there’s hope.

Waiting. And hoping. At least to be seen

In Spanish, the word “esperar” means both “to wait” and “to hope”. As though you can only wait in hope. Which seems reasonable. After all, why would you bother to wait at all, if not in hope of its yielding something?

Come to think of it, I can see a marketing slogan in there somewhere. “We give you hope – while u wait”. For any reasonable level of royalty, I’m happy to provide that to one of those weird new churches that keep popping over across the US.

But “esperar” isn’t the only Spanish word that has enchanted me recently.

“Destino” is another, with its double meaning of destination and destiny. You’ve got to admit that its quite attractive to get to where you’re going and realise you didn’t just plan to go there, you were fated to.

We’ve been having work done on a bathroom recently, and inevitably required the help of what the Spanish call a “fountaineer”, a “fontanero”. In English, that’s just a plumber, but doesn’t that seem horribly prosaic compared to someone who specialises in fountains?

One of the standard tools used by a fountaineer and, come to that, by any other handy man or man less handy, like me, is a “destorniallador”. A “tornillo” is a screw, so a “destornillador” is the tool that allows you to remove a screw. The Spanish seem more concerned with removing the things than with putting them in. Which is curious, since you can’t unscrew anything you haven’t already screwed up. 

Although, to be fair, there are also screwups you can’t fix with a screwdriver.

In English, it’s the opposite: you use a screwdriver to drive a screw into position, with never a care as to how to get it out again afterwards.

The French are much more logical about the naming of this instrument. A “tournevis” is, as its name implies, a tool for turning a “vis” or screw. Which way you turn it depends on you and the circumstances.

Sometimes the Spanish can be hopelessly complicated. What we call simply a “postman”, and the French a “facteur”, they call a “distributor of mail” or “repartidor de correos”. What a mouthful for such a simple notion…

Another great recent discovery was a word which sounded, to me, like “fiery”. It was something we were asked for as work was finishing on some tiles. “Fiery?” we asked.

It seems they were after some detergent. “Liquido detergente” it’s called, which again is a mouthful. Hence the shortened term, pronounced “fiery’ but spelled “fairy”, as in Fairy Liquid, the renowned dishwashing product.

Ah, well. One of the delights of being an immigrant in a new country is learning a little about its language. All the more delightful because it isn’t just a matter of different words. It’s also a matter of seeing things in a different way.

Not just a new language then, but a new culture too.

Cat flaps and tests of intelligence. Plus relaxation

Relaxation. So important. And so far beyond most of us. Though not beyond our non-human friends.

It’s been a pleasure to watch our pets settling in to our new home here. They certainly seem to like being in Valencia.

Valencia: having fun at the beach in December (Luci's the Luci-coloured one)
What’s not to like?

Luci and Toffee, the toy poodles, had been living with us in our flat, inside Valencia itself. That was fine, because we like the flat and we like Valencia; it was also just five minutes’ walk from the Turia river park, seven kilometres of former river bed now turned into an extraordinary park, with sports pitches and cycle tracks and just plain paths people can walk along, with or without their dogs.

Our two loved it, especially the lake at the end of the park, where they could go swimming after ducks. Well, Toffee would paddle, but Luci would duck hunt with serious intent. That was fun to watch, since Luci would put every ounce of her strength into swimming after them, while the ducks glided calmly across the water in a leisurely way, marginally increasing their speed if she ever showed any sign of getting close.

The flat had disadvantages, however. For instance, there were two flights of uneven stairs to reach it. Toffee struggled on them and put her back out. So then we found ourselves carrying both dogs (why risk Luci putting her back out too?) up and down, four times a day, since there was no easy way to let them out to do what pet owners euphemistically refer to as their “business”.

The other downside was that Valencia is the fiesta capital of Spain and walls tend to be thin. Danielle and I value our sleep and it was a relatively rare commodity where we were living.

Misty, our cat, hadn’t joined us. He’d stayed with the friends who bought our house in England. It would have been too painful to him to live in a flat with no easy access to anything like a garden. Everywhere we’d lived, we’d always provided cat flaps to allow him to slip in and out of doors whenever he wanted.

Then, eventually, we moved. The new place, in La Cañada which is away from the town centre, is much quieter, which suits us. The dogs can get out of the back into a garden, and beyond that, into a bit of a park. Which suits them and us. They can get in and out easily and we don’t have to carry them. There’s also woodland beyond the park, and they get a kick out of going there too.

They get a kick out of visiting the woods too

Just as soon as we’d installed cat flaps, I brought Misty over to join us. He made the trip with surprising good grace, only beginning to protest – with loud mewing – during the last couple of hours of a journey that lasted fourteen and included a fllght. And only once did he pee on me, and only on one of my legs. Excellent behaviour for a cat who’d been through so traumatic an experience.

Now, for what I’m going to say next, I have to choose my words with care. Misty once stalked off into the night and didn’t reappear for twelve hours when Danielle and I were so tactless as to comment unfavourably on his weight. So I’ll just say he’s a large cat. We had to put in a large cat flap.

Our dogs are each around half Misty’s weight. Let me hastily add that they’re unusually small, rather than Misty being unusually big. Consequently, they think of cat flaps as dog flaps.

Toffee has completely mastered the technique. These days, if we’ve been out, we’re generally met on our return by the clatter of a flap followed by Toffee jumping up and down as we come in through the gate.

Luci on the other hand, doesn’t seem always to be up to it. If she gets locked out, she’ll come back in through the flaps, but sometimes she doesn’t seem inclined to go out that way. When Toffee greets us home, Luci ends up scratching the front door from the inside. And whimpering pathetically

This is odd because Luci’s not unintelligent. For example, she’s worked out that we’ve left a gap in the front fence for Misty to use if he wants to get right outside the house. He doesn’t, as it happens. A couple of disagreeable incidents have persuaded us to give him a cat litter tray indoors, since Misty has clearly decided that, at fourteen, he’s sufficiently old not to be forced outside to do his ‘business’.

Instead it’s Luci who makes use of the fence gap. 

In Spain, the council doesn’t collect rubbish from individual houses. Instead, we take it down to the end of the road to throw it into large communal bins. This being the 21st century, they’re colour-coded for different categories of waste.

Imagine my shock when I’d finished carefully sorting a load of refuse and, turning around, discovered that Luci had followed me, leadless, the whole way. Which meant she’d walked independently down a road along which people drive like maniacs.

She occasionally seems unable to get from the house into the front yard. But once there, she knows how to go through the fence and into the road. This means she can follow us wherever we go, whatever the danger to which this exposes her.

Curious. One poodle can manage the cat flaps but not the fence gap. The other hangs back from the cat flaps but knows how to get out into the road.

Meanwhile Misty, for whom the whole setup was put in place, disdains to use any of them and instead takes advantage of his cat litter, without so much as a thank you for the unpleasant chore he leaves us.

Still. At least they’ve all three clearly settled in successfully and are enjoying their lives here. Something I observe from their capacity for total relaxation.

A model to emulate
Toffee and Luci show us what relaxation really means

However, when it comes to complete relaxation, nothing outdoes a cat
As Misty shows us

The Rain in Spain

Whatever rain gods are looking after Valencia seem a tad forgetful.

It’s a highly fertile region of Spain. Throughout the province of Valencia – of which the city is the capital – there are groves of oranges, mandarins, olives, almonds and other fruit. Fields are full of artichokes or cabbages, potatoes or carrots. As Danielle points out to me, you more or less only have to plant something around here for it to grow and flourish.

That needs rain. But the rain hardly ever falls. Though when it does, you certainly know it.

When the rain falls around here, it really falls

The other evening was the first when we played badminton during a rainstorm. All around the hall stood buckets carefully positioned to catch the leaks from the roof. Even so, there were wet patches that we had to avoid.

“Why don’t they fix the roof?” Danielle asked our badminton club president.

“Because it doesn’t rain often enough,” he replied.

Makes sense. With rain so infrequent it’s easier, and cheaper, to put buckets out.

Those long periods of dry weather, with clear skies and warm temperatures, are wonderful. Sadly, though, we pay for them with periods of intense rain when the weather finally does break. They can be ferocious: back in September, there was flooding in many parts of the province, leading to some six deaths. It’s as though around here, it forgets to rain most of the time, and then compensates with long, intense downpours.

See what I mean about forgetful rain gods? Or perhaps not so much forgetful as easily distracted.

The Cafe de las Horas: 
where rain gods would go for Agua de Valencia

I imagine them getting together for a little light entertainment whenever they can. As local gods, knowing the area well, they probably make for the Café de las Horas for a particularly good Agua de Valencia (looks like orange juice but that's only one ingredient), or maybe they go in search of an especially well-prepared paella. Then they pass their time in well-lubricated pleasure until the provincial council sends someone to remind them of their duty.

Paella Valenciana, a great Valencian invention

I picture a deferential figure, probably a man, unostentatiously dressed, with a pen in his breast pocket and an official notepad. He approaches the rain gods in trepidation, worried at their response to his interruption but equally determined to carry out his difficult task.

“Err… excuse me, gentlemen… oh, and ladies,” because Valencia being a community of liberal outlook, a small but growing minority of its rain gods will be female, with gender equality an objective by 2050, “my apologies for disturbing you, but I wonder whether you’ve lost track of certain obligations?”

This would be the approach around the 15th of a month without rain. By the 25th, he would probably have been replaced by his boss, a man or possibly a woman (see above) of more redoubtable aspect, who takes an altogether sterner approach.

“OK, fun’s over, time to pull your fingers out. We need a month’s rainfall and we need it in the next five days. Get to it.”

In response to one or other of these local bureaucrats, one of the gods might say, “oh, hell, yes. It’s that time of the month again. We’ve got to provide these guys with some water.”

“But,” another might protest, “I’ve booked us a table for a paella on Saturday.”

“It’s Wednesday. If we pull out all the stops, I bet we can get enough rain out over the next three days to meet the quota, and still enjoy the meal on Saturday. What’s more, if the rain’s done by Friday evening, we’d have great weather for our lunch. We could eat outside.”

“Let’s do it!” cry the others, “one big push, everyone, and we’re done.”

They rush outside and see to it that our badminton courts are flooded.

The official from the council would be a Rain God Reminder. And his (or her) success in affecting weather conditions would be celebrated by all.

After all, it would be a great demonstration of the power of reminder over matter.