When the British Liberal Democrats backed a coup in Spain

This is a long post. It is divided into four sections.

Top LibDems who backed the coup publicly

How Liberalism was sold to nationalist populism

Other Liberal support for the coup

The verdict of the trial

Two years ago, in the autumn of 2017, there was a coup d’état in Spain; this name for the events is from Josep Borrell, now the EU’s High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy, himself a Catalan. It occurred when the Catalan government convened an illegal session of the regional parliament to pass an enabling law that they used to override the Spanish Constitution and their own Statute of Autonomy, to organise an illegal referendum, and to issue a unilateral declaration of independence (as this blog has described).

The British Liberal Democrat Party supported this coup. The cause of Catalan secession is still supported at a high level in the party.

Top LibDems who backed the coup publicly

The party’s then leader Sir Vince Cable issued this tweet. Sir Vince is not noted for any particular knowledge of Spanish affairs, or of Abroad in general, but he still took it upon himself to remind the then Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson of his British duty to make Johnny Foreigner toe the line. It did not occur to him to wonder why the police activity was taking place before carefully, strategically placed TV cameras. People in Barcelona did know why, and the matter of Sir Vince’s ignorance (or that of whichever minion actually issued the tweet in his name) will be discussed later.

While Sir Vince’s unfortunate tweet may, perhaps, be regarded as the fruit of mere ignorance, the same excuse cannot be offered in the case of The Baron Rennard of Wavertree in the County of Merseyside. He was in Barcelona on the day as a guest of the Catalan government, acting as an observer of the referendum. This freebie was paid for by the Catalan taxpayers. His trip was paid by Diplocat, which means Catalan public funds.

More later of what this top LibDem did and did not do that day, but first let us have a look at His Lordship and the company that he keeps.

We start with Diplocat. This is the Catalan government’s overseas action service. Every part of Spain, as in the UK, can open and maintain offices to promote trade, tourism and so on. The problem is that the Catalan separatists pretend that these offices are embassies and channel public money through them to spread anti-Spanish propaganda. And it must be said that they do so efficiently, with considerable consequent harm to Spain’s democracy. Their cost is not published but it seems that they get 35 million euros a year, or five euros per Catalan. The director of Diplocat is paid €81,395.72 a year, very nearly as much as the Spanish prime minister (€82,978.56). That sort of money can buy some high-class influence, propaganda and media placement. A top-grade (level 4) primary care doctor in Catalonia earns €54,768, the lowest salary for this grade in Spain.

Lord meets secessionists

There is a record of Diplocat holding a meeting that was attended by the Noble Lord (here). The website report is undated but the Catalan nationalist Xavier Trias was Mayor of Barcelona from July 2011 to June 2015. so Rennard’s sympathy for nationalism clearly predates his involvement with the 2017 insurrection. He is not a mere dilettante in Spanish affairs and can thus be presumed to be well informed and responsible for his actions. (Why this meeting is reported on the official page of the Barcelona municipal fire service is an interesting – though unanswered and unanswerable – question.)

Tweeting for Catalonia

In this tweet he clearly presents the line of the Catalan government. As the Orange Baron well knows, because it is the sort of thing that people in his position do know, this is an internal matter for Spain and has nothing to do with the EU. But that does not stand in his way. He has eaten the bread (and no doubt much more) of the Catalan Government so he dutifully goes away and writes what he has been told to write about what he has been shown during his guided tour. The call for dialogue is an attempt by the Catalan government to put itself on an equal footing with Spain in dealing with the EU, a blatant attempt to have its status as an independent country recognised de facto. This too was known to many people in Barcelona when His Lordship was in the city, and thus presumably to himself.

A European parliamentary network of nationalists

The Baron of Wavertree is a member of the hypernationalist Parliamentary Network of Catalonia Friendship Groups, where he enjoys the company of Catalonia’s Esquerra (whose fascist origins, racist leadership and current attitudes have been described in this blog) and whatever Puigdemont’s alphabet soup party happens to be calling itself at the time, the neo-Nazi Flemish N-VA, Irish Sinn Féin and the Basque friends of terrorism Bildu and PNV, and the Italian Five Stars, as well as a good number of other British parliamentarians, mostly Plaid Cymru and SNP. This outfit has an off-the-peg denunciation of wicked Spain on its website:

Being deeply concerned by the repressive response of Spain to the legitimate and democratic claims of a significant majority of Catalan citizens and institutions; worried about the growing aggressiveness and nationalist rhetoric of certain political and media sectors in Spain; concerned about the lack of clear and constructive proposals to overcome the situation of deadlock in Catalonia, we have agreed that bla, bla, bla.

This pompous, turgid, Soviet-style prose could have been – and very probably was – written in some office of the Catalan government’s propaganda department.

The All-Party Parliamentary Group on Catalonia

This report appeared in El Confidencial on 23 February 2019 (original bolding, verbatim quotes translated from Spanish).

The best support that the separatists have in Westminster comes from the “All-Party Parliamentary Group on Catalonia” (APPG on Catalonia). […] According to its website its purpose is “to help to guarantee” that the debate on Catalan self-determination “is carried out in the most democratic way”. It defends its neutrality, but a simple look at the website or Twitter account reveals its more than obvious support for the secessionist cause. In fact, four of its 34 members, mostly Welsh and Scottish separatists, were among the international observers invited by the Catalan Government for the referendum. “It is not our job to pronounce on the process itself, but to explain what we saw. And the reception that we had in Catalonia was tremendously friendly,” Lord Chris Rennard said in one of the sessions.

Of course they gave you a friendly reception. They were buying you!

Even now his Lordship is still a fan of Catalan self-determination despite knowing, because it is the sort of thing that people in his position do know, that self-determination is not applicable to Catalonia under international law.

A letter to the Times

As late as 29 March 2019 Baron Rennard of Wavertree in the County of Merseyside signed a letter to the Times. Clearly, even the travails of dealing with Brexit have not dimmed his close and active interest in the matter.

Sir, On October 1, 2017 we were parliamentary observers of the Catalan independence referendum along with other parliamentarians from across Europe. We have been following the trial taking place in Spain’s supreme court of 12 Catalan leaders accused of rebellion and sedition. Under Spanish law rebellion is defined as a “violent, public uprising.”

In recent days officers of the Guardia Civil, the paramilitary police sent to Catalonia to stop the independence referendum, have described those days as being an “insurrectionary period,” and said that protesters attacked them.

The former Spanish secretary of state for security, José Antonio Nieto, admitted that Spanish police used force on October 1, 2017, but that was because the police were under threat and that some of their colleagues had been isolated or surrounded. On the day of the referendum all the protests that we witnessed against police raids on polling stations in order to seize ballot boxes, which involved on occasion forcible entry and the batoning of those trying to protect the polling stations, were entirely non-violent. Indeed, the only violence we saw was committed by the police.

The letter is also signed by three MPs:

Douglas Chapman, SNP

Joanna Cherry, SNP

Hywel Williams, Plaid Cymru

Cherry is a Queen’s Counsel (QC), which means that she is a very important lawyer.

Much has been written about the irregularities of that referendum. These “parliamentary observers” failed to observe, or if they did they failed to comment on, the absence of an electoral roll and the consequent multiple voting that was allowed. The former was, of course an inevitable result of the illegality. The electoral roll is kept by the central government and it was obviously not released for this illegal farce, so the Catalan government used the data base kept by the Catalan health service. Well, they abused it in fact and they are now facing criminal prosecution for misuse of confidential personal data. The multiple voting was proved by video footage. Not a peep from the observers. Perhaps such behaviour is so alien to the mores of Wavertree in the County of Merseyside that the Baron could not even imagine the possibility of such a thing happening under his very nose.

How Liberalism was sold to nationalist populism

What on earth the LibDems think they are doing getting mixed up with this nationalist nonsense? It’s hard to be sure but there seem to be several factors. A worthy Liberal belief in the power of local politics, coupled with support for devolution of power to parliaments in Scotland and Wales, may be behind support for similar policies in other countries. So far, so unobjectionable. But why pick on Spain, which is already one of the most decentralised countries in Europe? As the OECD says:

The decentralisation process of the Spanish state, which was initiated in 1979, has transformed an extremely centralised territorial model into one that gives substantial redistribution of government.

To this we should add a misunderstanding of 20^th-century Spanish history, the failure to take Spain seriously as a country rather than seeing it merely as a huge, sunny holiday resort with cheap booze, fags and sex, a failure to understand George Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia, and of course the Black Legend. 

Edgar Allen Poe and Monty Python do their bit for the Black Legend

The result is an absurd willingness to believe that Spain is a medieval, priest-ridden, Francoist dictatorship in need of moral and political guidance from the enlightened Protestant countries of northern Europe.

What did this mean in that frightful autumn of 2017? As we have seen, four British parliamentarians came as “international observers” as guests, and at the expense, of the Catalan government. Impartiality? Out of the window. No reputable international organisation that specialises in monitoring elections and referendums sent observers, for the obvious reason that the whole thing was blatantly illegal, declared so by Spain’s Constitutional Court. All of them, including of course Lord Wavertree (in the County of Merseyside), were well aware of this, because it is the sort of thing that people in that position do know. We must assume too that, being conscientious in their work, they read the Spanish newspapers during their stay; after all, they must all have sufficient knowledge of the Spanish and Catalan languages to do so – mustn’t they? Otherwise their task would be impossible. So, they knew just what was happening around them. For those who may not know, it was this.

A few days earlier, a judge had ordered the Mossos (Catalan police) to prevent the illegal referendum taking place. The chief officer of the Mossos accepted the order. Then, during the night before voting day he stood his force down and ordered them to do nothing that night and the following day. On that Sunday morning the media had screaming headlines about his traitorous disobedience. The Spanish police had to act without preparation, in hostile territory, their movements shadowed and reported by the Mossos who used a special, illegal communications system that left no permanent record of conversation, and in front of TV cameras strategically placed by the Catalan government to show them in the worst possible light. As a result of this treacherous dereliction of duty, the (now ex) police chief faces a charge of sedition.

One might wonder just why these observers came to observe an illegal event that had been banned by an injunction of the Catalan court, and what they expected to observe. But whatever that was, they made damn sure that they didn’t observe what was really going on in Catalonia that day.

There is, however, a far more terrible and shameful aspect to this with regard to the Liberal Democrat Party. While Rennard was enjoying his freebie from the Catalan taxpayers, the top level of his Party had access to the facts of the matter. At the time there was a British citizen resident in Barcelona who was a member of the Spanish Liberal party Ciudadanos, which was already by then a full member of the Liberal International and of ALDE. This person, whom we will call H, had once been an officer of both the English and the European Young Liberals, and had also been an employed, full-time constituency agent of the party. H was in direct personal contact with L, a long-serving member of the Liberal Democrats’ administrative structure and a member of the executive committee of ALDE and Liberal International. H did everything within their power to persuade L of the true nature of events in Catalonia, but to no avail. Pleas were made for assistance and support for Ciudadanos, a fellow Liberal Party, at a time when its premises and its people were suffering violent attacks by government thugs, but these pleas fell on deaf ears. H even found a way of establishing direct contact with The Baron Rennard himself to tell him, as a fellow Liberal, what was happening. Speaking to a brick wall would have been just as effective. During his stay in Catalonia Rennard made no attempt to contact the Spanish Liberal Party and rebuffed the approaches that were made to him by a British member of that party resident in Barcelona. He preferred his nationalist chums in the Catalan government. Well, they were paying for his jolly and Ciudadanos wasn’t offering him a penny.

There is more; L is known to have connections with Carlism. Hardly known in Britain, this as an ultra-Catholic conservative organisation. A dynastic dispute in Spain in the early 19^th century led to a series of civil wars that developed into a political struggle between absolutists and liberals, the Carlists being the absolutists. In this way, a similarity can be traced in British politics to the Jacobites and the original Tories, those who rejected the Act of Settlement, eventually became the knights of the shires, and have now passed into oblivion. Carlism is not a dead letter in Spain though. It was especially strong in Catalonia and the Basque Country and it is now expressed in a nationalism that yearns for a return to a mythical age of medieval splendour, glory and independence.

Correlation of Carlism (blue) and support for independence (red) in Catalonia.

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is how the British Liberal Democrat Party was sold to a gang of far-right, ultra-Catholic, coup-mongering rabble-rousers.

Other Liberal support for the coup

The British LibDems were not alone, though they seem to have been the only ones who were actually present at the illegal referendum. Under the leadership of both Graham Watson and Guy Verhofstadt the ALDE group in the European Parliament tolerated Puigdemont’s treasonous CDC Party and its various subsequent alphabetic reincarnations remained in the group, and in the Liberal International, until they were finally kicked out in October 2018, more than a year after they had tried to bring down Spain's democratic order.

The verdict of the trial

Some time soon, in the next few weeks or days, the Spanish Supreme Court will give its ruling on the trial of the leaders of the coup. They are charged with rebellion and face sentences of up to 25 years. This is the most serious crime against the state known to Spanish law, the offence of treason (traición) not being recognised as such. It is thus reasonable to suppose that the twelve are, in fact on trial for treason. Their cowardly comrades who ran away to boltholes in Belgium, Germany and the UK have so far remained at large. Spain does not allow trial in absentia.

As for the LibDems, they are now trying to position themselves as a thoroughly pro-EU party. They would be very well advised to bear in mind that being pro-European means supporting the democratic states of Europe, not subverting them.

 It was impossible for ALDE that a Brit in Catalonia should not support independence. Such an aberration must be either due to mental pollution caused by residence elsewhere in Spain, or else it's hereditary

Sources

(English)

Barcelona fire brigade (sic)

British MPs reflect on the Catalan situation with Xavier Trias

The Times

A letter to the Times (paywall)

OECD

Decentralisation

(Spanish)

El Confidencial

Los independentistas catalanes aprovechan Gibraltar para redoblar su campaña en UK

(Catalan separatists make use of Gibraltar to redouble their campaign in the UK)

La Generalitat contará con 12 'embajadas' antes de fin de año para "hacer república"

(The Catalan government will have 12 “embassies” before the end of the year to “make the Republic”.

El País

Borrell: “En Cataluña hay un golpe de Estado de un régimen neodictatorial”

(Borrell: In Catalonia there is a coup from a neodictatorial regime)

El Independiente

El independentismo arrasa en la antigua Cataluña carlista

(Separatism sweeps the board in former Carlist Catalonia)

Crónica Global

Los 'sueldazos' del Diplocat

(Diplocat’s huge salaries)

Redacción Médica

Las diferencias de salario en médicos de Primaria llegan a 2.000 euros/mes

(The salary differences in primary care doctors reach 2,000 euros/month)

eldiario.es

Un guardia civil declara que las comunicaciones entre mossos delatan que su prioridad el 1-O era espiarles

(A civil guard testifies that the Mossos’ communications show that their priority on the day of the referendum was to spy on them)

La Vanguardia

Los Mossos usaban un código para pasar a un canal de comunicación alternativo

(The Mossos used a code to switch to an alternative communications channel)

(Catalan)

El Periódico

El Diplocat es va gastar 40.000 euros en vols i estada de 47 observadors de l'1-O

(Diplocat spent 40,000 euros on flights and accommodation for 47 observers at the referendum)

Private sources that cannot be divulged were also consulted.

The identities of H and L are known to this blog and we are satisfied of the accuracy of our comments. Neither has any public presence in the Catalan debate and we choose not to reveal their identities.

All the links quoted in this post have been accessed within the last seven days.