They shall not pass

No pasarán, they shall not pass, was the rallying cry of republican resistance, especially in Madrid, to the military uprising that led to Franco’s near forty-year dictatorship in Spain. 

They shall not pass!
Madrid's defiance to the rebels besieging the city

Of course, when the rebels won, they gloated ‘ya hemos pasa’o’, ‘we passed’ (dropping the ‘d’ in ‘pasado’ reflects common pronunciation of the word).

Funnily enough, the spiritual heirs of Franco, the hard right Vox Party, used the same words superimposed on a photo of the Madrid town hall, when they took four seats in the municipal council in 2019. 

Vox declares its heredity in a tweet using the Francoist gloat

In the next set of local and regional elections, in May of this year, Vox did better. In many regions and towns across Spain, it’s now in coalition with the main party of the right, the Popular Party or PP. And they’ve shown that they mean business.

One municipality has dropped the film Buzzlightyear from its festival because it shows a kiss between two women. Another has banned a stage play based on Virginia Woolf’s novel Orlando which contains what Vox regards as inappropriate messages about gender fluidity and being gay, though they claim the reason is a budgetary problem no one had spotted before. In the region of Castilla y Léon, run by this coalition for some time now, PP has had to rein in Vox which wanted legislation to force women to have a scan and psychological counselling before they could get an abortion.

Meanwhile, the PP Mayor of Málaga, backed by Vox, has just increased her salary to a tad more than the Prime Minister of Spain’s. In all, some 28 authorities run by the PP, with or without Vox, have upped their pay. To be fair, so have 14 authorities where the social-democratic PSOE is in power, but the PP and Vox were strident in their denunciations of the allegedly spendthrift left, and the Mayor of Málaga has set a remarkable record.

It was in response to its bad showing in the local elections that Pedro Sánchez, the current Prime Minister and leader of the PSOE, called snap elections on 23 July. Now, his government had made errors, notably a new law on sexual consent, a necessary measure but one whose drafting led to the entirely unwanted and unfortunate release of a number of convicted sex offenders from prison. You can imagine the hay the right wing made with that. 

It also made a big deal of the fact that the PSOE had formed a coalition with a party of the more extreme left. Even worse, since even in coalition it remained a minority government, it had depended on support from small nationalist movements demanding the independence of their regions, such as the Basque country or Catalonia. That was bad enough, but the right really turned up the heat over Sánchez depending on support from the Basque Party EH Bildu, which includes convicted supporters of the former terrorist organisation ETA, some of them guilty of violent crimes.

All this felt like a heck of a potent barrage from the right. It was hard to see how the left could resist. Some of us might still be saying ‘no pasarán’, but in a whisper, and more as a prayer than in defiance.

“I think I’m going to move to southern Portugal,” my neighbour Nacho told me as we shared a bottle of wine, as we do from time to time.

And then – something happened. 

Sánchez stood firm and gave no ground on principles, despite the battering and abuse he was being subjected to. Faced with his firmness, the assault from the right began to fall apart. The leader of the PP, Alberto Nuñez Feijóo, began to make errors. He claimed that PP governments had always uprated pensions in line with the cost-of-living index. It wasn’t hard to prove that was at best false, at worst a lie, and that was pointed out fast. What’s more, photos emerged of his association with Marcial Dorado, later jailed as a drug dealer, who’d taken Feijóo out on sailing jaunts in his yacht on several occasions.

Feijóo made things worse by declaring that he hadn’t known Dorado was a drug trafficker. He claimed that he had only known that he was a smuggler. Still, you can imagine how well it went down among supporters of Feijóo’s party, with their predilection for a hard law-’n’-order line, to hear the leader of their party admit he’d accepted luxurious hospitality from a man he knew was a smuggler.

Today, senior figures of the PP, publicly loyal to Feijóo, are in private criticising the colossal errors he made in the closing stages of the campaign. As well as the gaffes on pensions and Dorado, one that they’re not mentioning but should, is the damaging effect of getting too close to Vox, now revealed as rather too extremist even for some who were previously open to the PP working with them.

Why are all these errors so important? Because Feijóo didn’t achieve the electoral triumph that seemed so likely. It’s true that he won the elections, taking more votes and winning more parliamentary seats than any other party. But even adding 47 seats to take 136 left him far short of a majority, which requires 176. As for Vox, perhaps because it has begun to show its true colours, its holding fell dramatically, by 19 seats to 33. 

That means that even together, the two parties don’t command a majority. There are two other right-wing MPs who could take them within five votes, but that’s still not enough. The other MPs are all representatives of parts of Spain that are more or less committed to further autonomy or even independence. Both the PP and Vox have ruled out ever granting them any such thing, so it’s clear they won’t support them into power.

Meanwhile, in a glorious irony, Sánchez managed to avoid losing ground and even added two to the PSOE’s tally of MPs. Though his party is second behind the PP, he’s in a better position to form a government, with the support of the smaller parties, than is Feijóo. The result is that, after spending the campaign denouncing Sánchez and promising to revoke everything he’d done, Feijóo is now turning all polite and respectful towards the PSOE and pleading that they hold back on voting down his attempts to form a government. Quite a glorious turnaround.

And quite a disaster for the right. 

Frankly, it couldn’t have happened to a more deserving bunch. Of course, we’re not out of the woods. There may have to be another election. Vox has certainly not disappeared and can make a comeback. Feijóo may be forced out and replaced by the even more hardline President of the Madrid region, Isabel Díaz Ayuso. 

Sánchez celebrating a successful resistance with his supporters

There are many pitfalls ahead. But at least, for now, we can take courage from the fact that they didn’t pass. For now, no han pasado. 

Or pasa’o.

“I’ve postponed my plans to move to Portugal,” Nacho assures me.

Winning’s great, but surely it has to be for something?

Art imitating nature is obvious. It’s when nature imitates art that things get interesting. That’s includes reactions to Thursday’s by-elections in England.

As it should be: art imitating nature
Camille Corot, Landscape with lake

For the small number of you who perhaps don’t follow British politics as assiduously as you might, let me explain that these elections were caused by Boris Johnson and one of his friends standing down as MPs, in protest at the gall Parliament had shown in demanding that Johnson account for lying to it. 

There was a third by-election, on the same day, to elect a new MP in place of one who’d got himself disgraced in yet another parliamentary scandal.

The outcome of the elections was one win each for the three main parties. That’s the Conservatives, in government, Labour ahead in the polls and likely to take over, and the Liberal Democrats, working hard to get in on the act. One win each may sound equitable, but all three seats had been Conservative with big majorities, so its two losses represent a major upset for the ruling party. 

That’s the ruling party in Britain for the last thirteen years. It has some startling achievements to its name: worse inflation than any comparable country, a major cost of living crisis, a health service on the brink of collapse and an economy falling apart as a result of that fine piece of national assertion, Brexit. ‘Taking back control’, the backers of Brexit proclaimed, making it ironic that economic decline now seems entirely out of control.

The controversial result of the three is the only one the Conservatives clung onto, in Boris Johnson’s old seat of Uxbridge and South Ruislip, by the slender margin of 495 votes over the Labour challenger. Keir Starmer, the leader of the Labour Party – my own party, I’m a member still – is upset over the loss and knows exactly who should take the blame.

That would be Sadiq Khan, the Labour Mayor of London. He recently decided to extend what’s known as the Ultra Low Emission Zone, generally referred to by the melodious acronym ULEZ, to all London Boroughs. That meant it would in future apply to the area covered by the constituency Labour failed to gain.

The ULEZ requires anyone in an older and more polluting car to pay £12.50 for every day they enter the zone. That’s harsh and a lot of people resent it, something on which the Conservatives played in leaflets hammering out the message that this was a Labour measure. Enough voters in Uxbridge and South Ruislip were swung by this campaign to cheat Labour of what was expected to be a win that would have completed an excellent day.

“We are doing something very wrong if policies put forward by the Labour party end up on each and every Tory leaflet,” Keir Starmer has angrily announced. “We’ve got to face up to that and learn the lessons.”

Even his deputy Angela Rayner, often at odds with him because her roots in the party are far to the left of his, agrees with Starmer on this point. Labour lost the constituency, she claims, because it failed to “listen to voters”.

Here’s the thing, though. Unprecedented heat waves are sweeping huge areas of the world. Records are being broken with painful frequency, as the planet heats up, ice caps melt, and the mercury climbs to previous maximum values or beyond. People are dying – in Italy, for instance – and disasters abound, including fierce wild fires.

Fighting a wildfire in Greece as temperatures soar

It may already be too late to reverse the trend. But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t at least try. And the thing about the ULEZ is that it’s exactly that: someone trying to do something about a situation heading towards catastrophe.

In other words, Sadiq Khan’s action was the right thing to do. It may not be a vote winner, and may indeed have been a vote loser. But it’s still the right thing.

So what is Angela Rayner saying? We should be listening to voters even when they’re telling us to do the wrong thing? Is that what leaders do or is leadership about persuading people to do the right thing even when they’d rather not?

And this is what made me think about nature imitating art. It reminded me of a clever moment in that excellent TV series The West Wing. Josh Lyman, who will later help Josiah Bartlett win the Democratic nomination for President and, ultimately, the presidency itself, has yet to make that jump and is still working for a different candidate, John Hoynes. But not enjoying himself. He explains why:

I don't know what we're for. I don't know what we're for or what we're against except we seem to be for winning and against somebody else winning.

John Hoynes: unable to tell Josh Lyman what he’s actually for

Yep. That’s depressing. A political team that’s only for winning and against anyone else winning hardly seems up to leading us towards doing what needs to be done.

It just leaves those who think it’s urgent to do the right thing wondering “what the heck do we plan on winning for?” 

Building our jungle

It was green in colour, though less so in spirit. 

The back garden of our house near Valencia, when we moved in, had grass and thirty-year old cypress hedges on each side. That made it attractive in its own way, but the hedges didn’t leave a lot of space in between and, as far environmental concerns go, the grass and the hedges took a lot of water for what they were. Something to avoid at a time when water crises seem to be looming.

Funnily enough, a photo of the garden when it needed no watering – in a rainstorm – shows clearly how invasive the hedges were. It was never a big garden, but the cypress hedging took 1.5 to 2m each side. That made it all but claustrophobic.

A little claustrophobic in the rain

Better, and a sun trap on a good day
but still a little narrow
Note Toffee and Luci enjoying the sun

Towering hedges under a striking sunset

Three years into our lives here, we decided it was time to make a change, especially since Danielle was keen to get some more things planted and therefore needed more space. The hedges had to go. After we’d received a shockingly steep quote for the work, we decided we’d do the bulk of it ourselves, a choice whose wisdom we later questioned more than once.

The gardeners who come to us once a week for a few minutes to tidy things up told us that if we took the branches down, they’d get the trunks out with a chain saw. On one side of the garden that was a bit of a chore but hardly unbearable.

The easier side where the hedge hadn't grown into the fence

On the other side, though, the hedge had interwoven itself into the fence so intricately, that parts of the fence were actually inside the wood of the branches. We had no choice but to take hedge and fence down together. Now, that really was hard work. The council would collect branches, if we tied them up in reasonably-sized bundles (which we did) but with no metal mixed up in them. Then there are people constantly travelling around collecting metal that people don’t want (and sometimes, if they’re not caught, even metal people still want and are using), so we could leave the fencing for collection too, but separately from the wood.

Tangle of fencing after removal of vegetation

Fortunately, our son Michael was with us. Ostensibly he was on holiday. However we unhesitatingly, and unscrupulously, put him to work for hours at a time picking out wood from fence wire.

With the fence down, the next job was to put in a new one. That needed a new low wall to hold the fence posts. We sensibly decided this work was beyond us and got both jobs done by professionals. 

New wall in

Fence posts going up

The new fence complete

Next we covered the fence with willow.

Willow going up along the fence
Note Danielle in the background, hard at work

After that we laid gravel in the garden between the new, extended beds for flowers. It amazed me just how much gravel it took. For a while, I seemed to be going out every day to buy more bags of the stuff.

Another batch of gravel bags

Toffee out inspecting the new gravel
Note the willow on both sides,
with the carefully designed gap on the right to allow 
sunlight to fall on the growing tables

Finally, Danielle could start planting. At that stage, we were simply at the mercy of the weather. We had less rain than we might have liked, but there was enough all the same, and the sun, as most people in Spain have discovered this year, was more than sufficient, whatever the climate change deniers may say about it.

The plants go in, the flowers come out

Further inspections by Toffee

The jungle takes hold

The grandkids’ playhouse in an increasingly jungle-like setting

Now, we’re just waiting for the climbing plants to grow up the willow fencing, to give us a new, much less invasive and more attractive kind of hedging. More attractive in scent, too, since the climbers include fragrant plants such as jasmine.

It took hard work, but we’re delighted with the result. And, of course, it’s a far more appropriate garden for a Mediterranean setting. It takes far less water.

I thought it would be fun to finish this post with a last image related to the one at the start. The new garden has had its first rainstorm. See for yourself how things have changed.

The jungle as rain forest