Reporting Spain: The Economist gets Spain right and the Guardian fights the class war

This blog has in the past been critical of the Economist’s coverage of Spain. It is thus only fair that we mention an article in this week’s edition that is most unusual in the British media. It actually is an accurate description of what is happening in this country in the affair of the famous trial of the Catalan politicians. The headline is a good start:

Catalan nationalists protest as their leaders are jailed for sedition

Here is a recognition, perhaps unprecedented in the usually lazy, toadying media, that the protests are from "nationalists", not by any means from all of “the Catalans”.

Then there is the hellish photo of a main road closed by fire rather than cheerful, colourful images of separatist symbols.

And the article itself has a splendid statement of what has actually happened in Catalonia:

Spanish officials stress that the defendants were on trial for their actions, not their ideas. The cause of independence has never enjoyed clear majority support in Catalonia. Josep Borrell, the foreign minister, who is Catalan, accused Mr Torra of a “totalitarian attitude” in denying the Catalan-ness of those who disagree with independence. “The root of the problem is that Catalan society is divided in two and one of those parts excludes the other,” said Mr Borrell, who is about to become the EU’s new foreign-policy chief.

In 2017 the separatists used their narrow majority in the Catalan parliament to ram through laws tearing up the constitution and the region’s statute of home rule. They deployed the resources of the Generalitat to organise their “binding referendum” on independence, which they then used to declare an independent republic. They did all this despite repeated warnings of the illegality of their actions.

It is particularly instructive to compare this from the Economist:

The sentence triggered days of protests in which masked demonstrators first blockaded Barcelona airport and then set dozens of fires and barricades in the centre of the city. Among more than 150 people injured were 72 police, most of them from the Catalan force. Contradictorily, [Catalan premier Quim] Torra at first encouraged the protests while the Generalitat’s [Catalan] police was repressing them. The protests mark both a radicalisation and fragmentation of the independence movement. Pere Aragonès, Mr Torra’s deputy, warned against violence.

with the Guardian’s mendacious pretence that the matter can be reduced to the Orwellian simplicity of “Left wing good. Right wing bad”. As we showed the other day, the Guardian’s beloved “pro-independence supporters” have clear links with the European far right (our emphasis).

Barcelona suffered its fourth and worst night of violence on Thursday as pro-independence supporters clashed with police and right-wing groups in running battles well into the small hours of Friday morning.

…

One pro-independence protester was badly beaten by a group of right-wing supporters while once again the streets were acrid with the smell of bonfires of burning rubbish. Numerous injuries were reported.

This Guardian report is from 00.39 BST on Friday 18 October. On Thursday 17 October (untimed) the Spanish news agency EFE reported from the country’s Interior Ministry that 97 arrests had been made and that 194 officers of the Catalan Police (Mossos) and Spanish Policía Nacional had been injured.

The Guardian pretends to be a serious newspaper for grown-up so it had to cover Borrell's comments. Nevertheless, its presentation clearly tells its readers how to interpret them.