We Need Better Leaders

After witnessing a disruptive but overall peaceful and fairly well tempered General Strike in Catalonia (well from my office outside of Barcelona) I've just seen all the catharsis lost by a completely inflammatory and unhelpful speech by King Felipe VI of Spain, the head of state and then another announcement from Carles Puigdemont that an Independence announcement is imminent.

Without mentioning anything of the ludicrous police brutality, which is sadly becoming a theme from the Spanish government, the King made claims that Catalonia had "scorned" Spain with its actions and talked about their contempt of the law in the country with bluster such as "inadmissable disloyalty," which is discourse that belongs in another century quite frankly. To only portray a very biased side to it as this is just bizarre and clumsy by today's communication standards.

Now I don't disagree that the referendum was invalid but the bigger picture is that it didn't really need to be restated by King Felipe as it was. It would have served the discourse much better to accept that the violence was unacceptable against the people voting first and then go on to condemn the vote. Also then trying to use the referendum as leverage to try and break from Spain altogether as Puigdemont is threatening to do is just as dangerously irresponsible as Rajoy's heavy handedness and the King's angry bluster.

George Orwell wrote in his Homage to Catalonia account of fighting on the Aragon front and in Barcelona between 1936-7, "In Spain, for the first time, I saw newspaper reports which did not bear any relation to the facts" and that echoes frighteningly close to the Spanish Government's attempts to try and just ignore this problem as if it doesn't exist. There is a failure to realise the gravity and nuance of this situation and instead the government is responding in ways I never (or at least hoped to never) imagined. This is equally true of Puigdemont trying to go through with the result of such an improperly done and unrepresentative referendum. He may say he's willing to go to prison over it but he neglects the fact he is the leader of 7 million Catalans overall who's safety he's also risking over what seems to be (I'm sure for him) a matter of personal pride. He's just as much a dangerous bumbling incompetent as Rajoy or even Theresa May.

That said, no doubt that the police brutality seen on Sunday was something you would expect from a poorly functioning dictatorship, which paints Spain as a pantomime villain in this discourse but no one was truly stealing democracy of what was, let's remember a completely unrepresentative and legally meaningless vote. The results of the so-called referendum if enacted in full as far as secession goes would be utterly undemocratic to around 50% of the Catalan population who don't want to break with Spain (although with the handling of the crisis one has to wonder where that number lies today).

I worry that the things I dismissed as paranoia amongst the Catalans may be true all along as I can't really hide from the reality of the situation. I can see for myself with my own eyes just how autocratic Spain's government actually seems to be. That said for the other side of things Catalonia has a similar problem with its own politicians who like playing the underdog but are just as corrupt and, one has to worry, just as stubborn and self serving as the Madrid politicians. Don't be fooled. Puigdemont is just as problematic as Rajoy.

It isn't just leaders though. The insane thing about the Catalan crisis for me is seeing how people jump on it and use it to justify their worldview without understanding it in the slightest. I'm living in the middle of it and have lived parts of it over the last 3 and a half years. I see it with my own eyes from the epicentre and yet blinkered people are trying to use it to shore up their narrow opinions and are making broad stroke assumptions based on massive biases which seem to be poorly pasted onto the shape of the issue at hand. I'm looking at you Scottish independentists and Brexiteers (who would have had a fit about 'the Brussels Autocracy' if the EU had intervened more than they have), not to mention American gun nuts who hours before the Las Vegas shooting were justifying the possession of weapons in their country to defend democracy despite the fact no one was suspending Catalan democracy overall. The way some people talk you'd think the Catalans were unable to participate in any elections which is utterly false.

The problem is not too much or too little democracy. The problem is giving more democracy before people actually understand the implications of it and not putting proper checks and balances in place in terms of turnout limits and minimum percentage thresholds (Brexit again).

I'm sure that lack of wider understanding is part of the reason that we've got such incompetents running governments in this decade.