Bring in the Technocrats!

With the latest report from the IMF positioning Spain on a slippery slope to hell, with GDP decreases of over 3%, the risk premium against German bonds at above 700 points, and the rating of its sovereign debt as trash, the Spanish Government has set itself in top gear to focus the blame on the lack of linguistic and cultural uniformity and on the movement for independence set in motion in Catalonia. 

The Spanish economic problem has nothing to do with generalised school failure in Spain nor with the succession of haphazard reforms and counter-reforms, nor the recent consecutive cutbacks. The problem is supposedly that too much Catalan language is being taught and that children are being indoctrinated to become separatists.

But if we look at appraisal reports on language skills, it turns out that Catalonia is in the middle range of knowledge of the Spanish language, while Andalusia and Extremadura, monolingual Spanish-speaking only regions, are at the bottom. I don't know if the aggressive cultural wipe-out after the Castilian colonisation and the economic model transfer to latifundium in Al-Aldalus has anything to do with it.

For Spanish Education Minister Wert, the problem does not lie in the structural Spanish educational deficit, and he is more obsessed with, in his own words, “Spanishising”, i.e. making Spanish schoolchildren, rather than educating free, creative citizens. Wert is not concerned with the collapse he is condemning the research and development system to, where right now the Spanish National Research Council is spending on its payroll the budget assignations meant to be shared with business. For Wert, as for most of the Spanish dominant caste, his priority is the “Spanishisation” of its citizens, one of the slogans under which the Fascist uprising began the Civil War in 1936.

Then along come Margallo, the Spanish Minister of Foreign Affairs, and Spanish Vice President Saenz de Santamaría, who both blame the huge rally in favour of Catalan independence in Barcelona on September 11 for the fall in Spanish sovereign debt valuation and Spain's poor international image. I don't know which is worse, whether the imbecility of believing what they're saying, or the perversion of saying it, knowing it to be a lie. The call for the independence of Catalonia is a result, not the cause of the economically untenable situation of the Spanish State, based on “pelotazo” culture, of speculation and rapid gain in captive public markets and the tax drainage of the old Crown of Aragon territories (Catalonia, Aragon, Valencia and the Balearic Islands) and, to a certain extent, Europe.

The game these top bureaucrats of Spain play is the same as that of the rancid Castilian aristocracy to which they are the successors. But if Spain sinks, they say, it'll be the fault of separatism, not of the wasted resources the Aragonese Crown territories' equivalent to a “Marshall Plan” have been forced to divert to the rest of the State during 35 years of democracy, not the fault of the dreams of grandeur of a political class that has begotten a welfare state with feet of clay because it has never been based on an equitable tax effort.

Their argument sounds much like an anti-Semitic argument. When in the Middle Ages there were crises of subsistence and plague, the scapegoats were the Jews. The aristocracy and the Church washed their hands and the mob venting their ire upon the enemy within. And that's how things stand, with a delirious government, the reincarnation of that rancid aristocracy, with the ship adrift. Bring in the technocrats, please, who won't speak of identities at risk.

Josep Huguet i Biosca

Minister of Innovation, Universities and Enterprise (2006-2010)
Minister of Trade, Tourism and Consumer Affairs (2004-2006)
President of the Josep Irla Foundation
@Josep_Huguet