Catalonia

[Suff]

Ah yes, the power of 90:10 Catalonia is only 12% of the Spanish population. A rally in Barcelona is about as much use as horns on a cow. A bit like having a rally in London over Scottish Independence. Essentially irrelevant because the vote and the decisions to be taken on that vote are Scottish issues not British issues.

Ditto the "surveying". It was, of course, a fully commissioned survey with a balance of the Catalaonian population which showed the current situation? Of course it was not and why we see different results.

When the population is polarised, as it is in Catalonia, any survey is going to be meaningless. The only poll which matters will be the Election in December. Where, I expect, the independent parties will get a boost. Because reality is this. Independence is a larger motivator than blocking independence because those who don't vote to block it will just assume that the Spanish government will vote to block it.

As for the way the Spanish are acting??? 99% of British people don't understand how the police and military act and are accountable in the rest of the EU. In Spain, Italy and France, the National police forces are Military, not civilian and work on Military lines, not civilian. That means that if you want to complain about them, you need to go civil then the civil authorities have to complain to the Military.

What happened in Spain was no surprise to me. Nor the time in the late 90's when Mrs S and I were walking out of the Munich S Bahn and saw 4 very blonde, very Aryan, Polizie grab 3 black youths, slam them against the wall and demand their identity papers. I, quite literally, had to drag Mrs S away with very firm "Do NOT Interfere".

What is happening in Spain today is part and parcel of most member states in the EU today. They are, relatively speaking, fairly new. They have come about from war, conquest and submission; rather than from negotiation and treaty. They are bound together by signed acts of union, which were either under duress or done as the best possible outcome of a bad situation. These acts are being defended to the hilt and Democracy is the loser in these battles.

Of course this would not have been so much of an issue had not the EU and the EU member states been preaching, around the world, about the democratic deficit of certain regimes, then taking action to try and remove them. All on democratic grounds.

For one or more of these, self styled, democracies, to start acting like a regime, lends more and more legitimacy to the Catalans.

Yes, today, the UK, EU and sundry others, are not supporting Catalan independence claims. Mainly for their own self interests lest they face a unilateral vote of independence at home (Scotland for that matter). However neither will they support the kind of violence that the Spanish government has been meting out.

The salient point here is that there are more independence votes in Catlaonia than there are in Scotland. More than 50% in fact. Which means they are not going to give up and the Spanish government is going to face this over and over again. As each round goes by, the response is going to be more and more vociferous and will, eventually, erupt into violence. If the Spanish government keeps on with its approach of intimidation, when violence breaks out it will be more in the mould of Serbia than Bosnia in the minds of the world.

As for the legal minds in Madrid claiming that the Catalonian Independence claim is "illegal"? So what! All the legal minds in the UK, the most preeminent in the world at the time, initially ruled every single attempt to secede from the Empire to be illegal. We all know where that went.

This, for me, is very interesting. Because it is testing the words of an awful lot of people who have protested their "Democratic" credentials. The test of the word is finding a rather large deficit of democracy.