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
Boletín
Oficial del Estado [Spain’s Official Government Gazette]
Guardian
Economist
Spanish
Wikiquote
El
Español
(Calvo
sticks to her “No, my dear”: “Progressive politics has always been behind
feinism)
El
Mundo
(The
Justice Minister Dolores Delgado in the Villarejo tapes: “Marlaska’s a queer”.)
(Pedro
Sánchez humiliates the state by accepting a mediator with Torra)
(The Navarra
Socialist Party folows the expected script and hands Bidu the mayoralty of
Huarte, the Coucil that Chivite bemanded in her investitures)
ABC
(Minister
Delgado’s four versions on her relations with Villarejo)
El
Español
(The
tweet that takes down Calvo’s “No, my dear”: PP women who became president
first)
