Reporting Spain: Awful Spanish politicians and toadying British media

Catalonia is not the only part of Spain that is governed by fools, imbeciles, nincompoops, cretins and worse. Unfortunately, the national government is no better – and not least because they are trying to get into bed with the Catalan coup-mongers in order to form their coalition.

Top of the list we have prime minister Pedro Sánchez, who fancies himself as James Bond, although he’s really just a jumped-up Captain Mainwaring with steel-plated elbows.

Then there’s the Deputy PM Carmen Calvo, who claims that feminism is exclusively for “progressive women”

[Feminism] has flourished, and as it has flourished two very interesting things have happened. The first that feminism is for all women. No my dear, oh no my dear [no, bonita]. We’ve worked on it in the genealogy of progressive thought, of socialist thought.

It was not always thus. Finance Minister Indalecio Prieto (PSOE) described it as “a stab wound” for the Republic.

He was echoing the views of progressive women:

Women's suffrage was officially adopted [in Spain] in 1931 despite the opposition of Margarita Nelken and Victoria Kent, two female MPs (both members of the Republican Radical-Socialist Party), who argued that women in Spain at that moment lacked social and political education enough to vote responsibly because they would be unduly influenced by Catholic priests.

In other words, women should be disenfranchised caused the socialists feared that they would vote the wrong way!

This contrasts with one of the first women to be elected to the Spanish parliament, Clara Campoamor, who said:

I am as far distant from fascism as I am from communism. I am a Liberal.

Calvo wants to promote feminism in her own progressive way. She has tweeted:

There will be a constitution in the future that says, in so many words, that women and men are equal. Now it doesn’t say that.

Oh yes it does, my dear:

Article 14 [my emphasis]

Spaniards are equal before the law and may not in any way be discriminated against on account of birth, race, sex, religion, opinion or any other personal or social condition or circumstance.

For a Deputy Prime Minister not to know that might be regarded as extremely unfortunate. However, it gets worse. She is the professor of Constitutional law at the University of Cordoba. What does that say about her university? Or rather, since such appointments are made by competitive examination, what does it say about the political affiliations of the university board that appointed her?

In fact the conservative PP can claim the first Spanish women to have been a mayor, Ombudsperson, President of the Congress and President of the Senate, and the first woman ever (she was Spanish) to be a Vice President of the European Commission, and the first woman (not Spanish) to the Commission President.

Next up is the Justice Minister Dolores Delgado. She once distinguished herself by describing a very important judge, Grande-Marlaska, as a “queer” [maricón] who “looks like George Clooney but he’s a sissy” [nenaza]. He is now Spain’s openly gay Interior Minister.

On the subject of gender equality in the judiciary, she has some surprising views that many would regard as hardly being progressive:

I’ll tell you something, I’d want to be tried by men, I don’t trust girls. I don’t get on well with girls but with guys you know perfectly where they’re going.

These comments were made at an informal get-together that included a man called Villarejo, a police officer under judicial investigation – curious company for a justice minister one might think. She had previously denied having met him. After the tapes were published she admitted, in the fourth version of her story, that she had in fact met him three times.

It goes without saying that the media, so quick to criticise the horrors of right wing Italian politicians, keep quiet about the shenanigans of “progressive” Spaniards who try to do simultaneous deals with one party that is financed by Venezuela and Iran, one party that is led by a man who has done time in prison for an ETA terrorist offence and is disbarred from holding public office (to which party he has sold the mayoralty of a town in Navarra and removed the Guardia Civil from the region), and another party that ran a coup against Spain in 2017. The reason that Spain had another election in April this year is that the nation was appalled by Sanchez’s attempts to sell the country to the Catalan secessionists in order to get his budget through parliament.

The Guardian’s Sam Jones and Stephen Burgen have, of course, been falling over themselves to worship the ground that Sánchez walks on. Even the normally level-headed Economist is not immune. On 17 April it recommended a vote for Sánchez to dispel “the ghosts of Franco’s nationalism”, ignoring both its own professed liberalism and the fact that Sánchez himself was acting as Franco’s best publicist with his ridiculous, doomed, futile attempt to get the old dictator out of the Valle de los Caídos (and he’s still there with Sánchez having unsurprisingly achieved absolutely nothing at all except a lot of free publicity for himself and Franco). On 23 May the Economist’s Jeremy Cliffe (aka Charlemagne) joined in the “progressive” pretence (though lie would be a better word) that Vox was a constituent part of the Andalusian government and that the PSOE had not been expelled from that government to widespread relief and satisfaction after 40 years presiding over an era of spectacular corruption, with four of its top people already behind bars for up to five years and almost a score still on trial and expected to join them shortly.

The problem is simple: these partisan journalists play with a huge home advantage on a field that is rigged 45 degrees in their favour. Who among their readers will know the truth? How many of their readers will ever follow Spanish affairs in sufficient detail and in the Spanish language to know what is really happening here? They just send their editors whatever they want (or are ordered) to write and nobody will ever know what is really going on. Simple problems do not, sadly, have simple solutions.

In a few weeks time we will see the result of the trial of the Catalan secessionist coup-mongers. Two years ago the British media covered themselves in contempt by parroting the propaganda lies of the Catalan government. As I have reported (Catalonia - the Spanish government sets the record straight.) they have now been told the truth by the Spanish Foreign Ministry – though of course they knew the truth perfectly well at the time but chose to ignore it. Will they report honestly on this occasion? I am not holding my breath.

Sources

English

Wikipedia

Women’s suffrage

Boletín Oficial del Estado [Spain’s Official Government Gazette]

The Spanish Constitution

Guardian

Pedro Sánchez: from economics professor to Spain's prime minister

Spain set for socialist-led government after Iglesias deal

Economist

More political paralysis will not serve Spain well

Why cosying up to populists rarely ends well for moderates