Simiocracia

Mariano Rajoy, the man who proudly proclaimed in January that he would always show his face and never hide from the crisis, left today's Spanish senate session by the back door to avoid having to answer any questions from journalists. This on a day when Spain has again been battered by the markets, to an extent that has previously provoked the dreaded EU "rescue" for other countries. All of which comes the day after an increasingly panicky government tried to placate the markets by throwing them a bone in the form of €10,000 million worth of additional cuts in Spain's health and education services. Because, as we all know, health and education services cause tremendous problems for a modern, 21st century, economy. Just as they did in the 19th century. These are services which have gone, in the space of just 3 months, from being "untouchable" to being top priority for cutting. The PP made very few concrete commitments, but they have already broken almost all of them.

Rajoy seems to have very quickly achieved the difficult task of making Zapatero look like a far sighted, long-term strategist by comparison. Those who so freely accused Zapatero of constantly improvising are now all over the place, although they maintain their ideological focus. Hence the offer of cuts in education and health in response to all the attention focused on the financial sector and its dodgy finances. The latest cuts figure was announced yesterday buried in the third paragraph of a press release, and with no indication of any sort of where the cuts are to be made. It's had no effect of any kind when it comes to improving Spain's situation, nor was it ever likely to. But now the government has created a situation where the cuts will have to happen, or they will be punished for not doing them.

This seems like a suitable time to recall how little Spain's public services have to do with the crisis here, which is above all a problem of construction related private debt. From the creator of the admirable Españistan we now get Simiocracia.

via Graham Hunt

Romans Go Home

I went to the cinema yesterday and in the toilets I saw a xenophobic piece of graffiti inviting British and American language teachers to go home. The graffiti was notionally in defence of public education but had of course missed the target. It's the Condesa de Murillo who is determined to further lower education standards by seeking to ensure that children are taught in the cheapest possible way in a language that most of them barely understand. To that end she wants to use native teachers as a weapon in her battle with the Spanish teachers. Unfortunately, the second part of the graffiti fatally undermined the case the author was trying to make. It went something like this (in the original English): 

"Stop stealing the Spanish from their jobs" 

 Remind you of anything?

Gallardón The Moderate

When Mariano Rajoy announced his new government in December there were some who chose to see it as a selection of moderate, almost technocratic, ministers. The reality is that Mariano made his ministerial choices on the basis of loyalty to Mariano above all other considerations; apart from the now obligatory inclusion in a senior position of a banker. Only two months later, the idea that this is a moderate administration is already very difficult to sustain. Take the case of the justice minister, Alberto Ruiz Gallardón. As mayor of Madrid he was of course rightly famous for having bankrupted the city and for having won a gold medal for failed Olympic bids. But he was also seen as a centrist politician capable of reaching out to those voters who disliked the fundamentalist, taliban wing of the Partido Popular. 

The trick worked well for quite a few years, but it was just a trick. Gallardón's mask started to slip before he made the leap to national politics, the papal visit last summer saw him enthusiastically joining the competition to hand over as much of Madrid as possible to the Pope and his pilgrims. Now installed as a minister, it is Gallardón who will steer through what promises to be a thoroughly reactionary abortion law reform. Quite possibly taking us back to the position of the 1980's when women wanting an abortion and health professionals could never be absolutely sure that what they were doing was legal. Just the sort of precarious ambiguity that suits the PP on issues like this. 

Gallardón, who has never hidden his ambition to lead the PP and who prospered under the patronage of eminent Franco-democrat Manuel Fraga, is now perhaps more concerned about winning over those still to his right. So, yesterday, it was Gallardón who led the charge in defence of the brutal police violence we have seen in Valencia in the last few days. Fully equipped riot police beating up school kids has led to some shocking scenes, but the moderate Gallardón sees none of this. Instead he would have us believe, alongside the ever more servile right-wing press, that it is all the work of anti-system radicals intent on attacking the police. Oddly enough, as the riot police were withdrawn yesterday, there was an outbreak of entirely peaceful protest in Valencia. It's almost a perfect portrait of the way that region is being run, kids and their parents who protest about having no heating in their schools get beaten by riot cops whilst the corrupt political leadership who don't pay the heating bills continue to go peacefully about their business. 

It's fairly clear that the new government has let the police off the leash in dealing with any protests against the severe cutbacks being implemented by Rajoy's administration. In Madrid Esperanza Aguirre was threatening to form her own regional police force last year, as the then PSOE administration refused her repeated requests to crack heads in the Puerta del Sol. In compensation for not getting her own private police force (a truly frightening prospect), she instead got one of her people installed as the Delegada del Gobierno in Madrid, the government's local representative. The change is already being noted with the police putting any meetings of the 15M movement held in the Puerta del Sol under intense pressure. 

The excuse for this pressure on protest movements is that such actions have not been authorized by the government. It's a common PP refrain that the 15M activities are illegal because they do not ask for permission. Back in the real world there is actually no legal requirement in Spain to ask those in power for permission to demonstrate - just as well! The Spanish constitution guarantees the right to assembly and there is only a legal requirement to communicate the intention to meet if the event in question affects the use of areas of public transit. Failure to communicate this isn't even a serious crime, the penalty would be a fine. But for the right it's sufficient excuse to send in the riot police, and to use the law when it suits them to use it. Sports fans who come on to the streets to celebrate their team winning a trophy are unlikely to be baton charged by the police. 

Occasionally, very occasionally, the police are forced to account for excesses. With huge media coverage of the violence they used against peaceful protestors in Barcelona last year a judicial case against the senior officers responsible on the day is leading to the possibility of a trial. But will it matter? In 2009 five Catalan police officers were found guilty of mistreatment and illegal detention. Oh, I almost forgot, they were found guilty of torture too. The details of the case are appalling. Last week the PP government pardoned them and they will soon be back on duty 'upholding the law' with no penalty of any kind. How safe does that make you feel? The more you hear the vacuous rhetoric about how we are all equal before the law, and we hear it a lot these days, the less likely it is to be true. Meanwhile, let's not forget that the moderate Gallardón is STILL on the left of his party.

From Vergara in Público:

Class Warfare In Madrid

Yesterday saw the latest in a series of strikes by teachers in Madrid. The teachers, those who work in the public sector schools, are protesting over cutbacks implemented by Esperanza Aguirre's regional government. If you were to believe the Aguirre propaganda machine, then you would think that the strikers are just a bunch of lazy teachers unwilling to accept an increase in teaching hours from 18 to 20 a week. At the beginning of the dispute several weeks ago Aguirre was even trying to suggest that 18 hours was all the work a teacher did in a week, although she later had to retract that claim.

In the background to this confrontation is the model of ideologically motivated cutbacks which we may well have to get used to if Mariano Rajoy comes to power in Sunday's elections. It's a model similar to that already implemented in the UK where the government regrets having to do cuts at all, but then uses the crisis as an excuse for doing things which they would like to do anyway. Later ministers go off to the US to boast about what they can get away with. The change to working hours for teachers in Madrid is a direct result of Aguirre's administration firing teachers who were 'interinos', those teachers who have passed the exams but without a high enough mark to guarantee a fixed teaching place.

Despite this supposedly interim status, schools in Madrid were employing a lot of interinos and many schools estimated that 10-15% of their staff were disappearing at a stroke with the cutbacks. Such a sharp decrease was leading schools to have to use teachers specialising in one subject to teach others which they were not qualified to teach. Aguirre has denied this is happening, but several teachers have spoken to the press about being forced into this position. For contradicting the Lideresa, some have since been disciplined. Aguirre is determined to sit out the strike without dialogue. Some think she adopts this position because of her permanent desire for attention, others because it had the potential to make Mariano Rajoy a bit uncomfortable as he attempted to put the election campaign to sleep. The woman responsible for education in Madrid, Lucía Figar, is seen as a Rajoy loyalist and even a potential successor to Aguirre.

So where does ideology enter into this? Well, the total saving claimed by the Madrid government for these cutbacks is €80 million. The cuts only affect schools that are 100% public, no sacrifice of any kind is required from the publicly funded concertados that are mostly run by the church or associated religious sects. Aguirre's government has worked overtime in the last few years to increase the amount of money and resources available to the concertados, at the expense of course of the truly public education sector. Madrid is the only region in the country that has seen such a significant shift towards public subsidy of private schools in recent years, although of course there are other areas where concertados are important. There is a video circulating of Figar addressing a catholic meeting in Italy where she boasts of this policy of handing public resources to private religious schools, including the gift of land on which to build them.

Then there is the €90 million worth of tax breaks in Madrid that go to those who educate their children privately. There is no alternative? I think not, why should we subsidise the generally better off who choose to educate their children privately at the expense of the vast majority who rely on the public education system? The education system in Madrid was already two-tier before the cutbacks started, testimony to this is the very low percentage of immigrant children who get a place in the concertados. But now with the crisis being used as a pretext for swinging the axe only on the public, the gap between the tiers can be expected to grow. Welcome to the future, any resemblance to the past is more than coincidental.

Does It Matter If Spain's Universities Aren't Amongst The Best?

Yet another of these ranked listings of world universities has put those from Spain way down the list. This latest ranking, from the Times Higher Education website, has the University of Barcelona as the first Spanish educational institution to appear - in 142nd position. Ahead of Spain, apart from the UK, France and Germany are other Western European countries such as Switzerland, The Netherlands, Sweden, Ireland, Belgium, Finland, and Austria. Still, it could be worse. The Shanghai world university ratings put the first Spanish university (Madrid's Universidad Autonoma) in a dismal 201st on the list. In this ranking Spain doesn't lead the Spanish speaking world, both Mexico and Argentina have higher ranked institutions.

So does it matter? The immediate instinctive response is to say of course it should, a developed European country with 46 million inhabitants could reasonably expect to have at least one well regarded university. I ask the question of whether it matters partly because it doesn't seem to matter much to the Spanish. There are some who bemoan the lack of research investment, or the general lack of facilities in higher education in Spain, but not many. Education hardly seems to feature in the national political debate, and I'm not just talking about university education. A country where 30% of pupils have been abandoning education at the first possible opportunity should have something to worry about, but how much do you hear about this? It's far easier, especially if you live where I do, to find someone who thinks that the only educational problem the country has is to do with the language of instruction used in Cataluña.

I took a look at some of the responses to the Times rankings in both Público and Meneame. It's a bit depressing to read the comments. The worst case response is that which opts for the hyper-sensitive and defensive line that it's all part of the Great Anglo-Saxon Conspiracy. According to this theory of the world, any ranking of any kind which fails to put Spain in a high position is using a secret weighting factor devised by those evil anglo-saxons to specifically exclude the Spanish from the higher positions. Other commenters seem to think it just doesn't matter because Spain continues to produce substantial quantities of well educated graduates and doesn't go in for the elitist selection policies applied in other countries.

I have some sympathy with the last argument, but only some. The problem is that it converts the idea of higher education into that of universities being a variety of graduate factory. The missing factor with this argument, apart from the production line vision of what a university is for, is that universities are not just supposed to be about teaching. I've only ever been to Cambridge University as a tourist and there is much I dislike about the elitism of the UK's top universities. But I have to see the other side of the coin, I've been making a decent living for much of the last 20 years out of a software application which is a fairly direct descendant of work that was done at Cambridge. It's in innovation where Spain's universities really seem to be absent. 

Everything has to be put into context, having Silicon Valley doesn't make a single significant difference to the daily lives of many people in the US, and the UK's possession of some very highly rated universities doesn't mean that it has any sort of stable economic model to offer a future for its graduates. But having a policy that encourages and promotes academic innovation has to have some sort of knock on effect for the rest of society. Spain doesn't have an economic model that values education despite the often extraordinary importance which is attached to academic qualifications as opposed to professional experience. That is a fundamental problem for times when economies that can't create employment for the future are going to end up adding more and more unwilling additions to the ranks of the insecure and badly paid.

Bilingual Education In Madrid....The Inside Story

Madrid's regional government likes to boast of its commitment to bilingual education, and funds expensive campaigns to that effect; most notably we had the recent "Yes we want" fiasco. There is another side to the story, as explained here by Blackboard the Pirate; South of Watford's first ever guest blogger.

With the school year - and quite possibly the national PSOE government - heading towards an end, and with Countess Aguirre’s private Comunidad widely cited as a model for Spain to follow, a genuine educational model is being bullied by Aguirre’s administration for the sin of being a better scheme than her own.

Thousands of Madrid’s schoolchildren receive tuition in both Spanish and English, in a scheme which – according to Aguirre’s propaganda – is “un modelo educativo considerado como el mejor programa de inmersión lingüística de Europa”. This isn’t true: it’s not even el mejor programa operating within her own Comunidad. In 1996, the British Council (BC) started up and part-funded a project whereby some schools would teach some lessons in English - not just English lessons, but other lessons too. Class teachers are assisted by asesores, native English speakers or Spaniards who have spent a long time in English-speaking countries and achieved fluency in English. Having started in just a few schools, it has thrived: a hundred or more schools across Spain are now in the project, including a number in the Comunidad de Madrid.

Keen to be associated with a popular idea, but not keen that anybody else should get any credit, Aguirre subsequently started up her own scheme – in which there are no asesores. It’s not really a bad scheme, but is manifestly inferior to the BC project. So, piqued by the existence of a better version existing on her own patch, Aguirre is trying to bully the Madrid schools into leaving the BC project and joining her own. Her methods of doing this have so far included:

(a) refusing permission to teachers in BC schools to attend training courses ;

(b) either refusing to let schools replace asesores who have left, or engaging in a lot of feet-dragging before allowing them to do so;

(c) her education minister refusing to meet parents complaining about this, on the specious grounds that she didn't have an available room big enough ;

(d) a late-in-the-day insistence that the BC schools pay for all their pupils to take exams they had not previously taken, costing them of thousands of euros which would otherwise have been available for books and other educational needs.

It seems to some BC project teachers that the intention is to make life increasingly hard for their project unless and until the schools jump ship and join Aguirre’s project instead, which some secondary schools have found themselves obliged to do. The chaos resulting from Aguirre’s meddling is documented in this report.

Is it an unfamiliar pattern? The public face is a forest of press releases with many pictures of Aguirre and many declarations of her greatness: the reality is bullying, empire-building, and a worse service pretending to be a better one. That’s the future for the kids Aguirre is using as pawns in a propaganda game, and conceivably the future for Spain as well.

You Can Be Taught By A Nun But You Can't Wear A Headscarf

If, a couple of years ago, it was a school in Girona that provoked controversy for barring a Muslim pupil over the way she dressed, now it's the turn of Madrid. Najwa Malha, who attends a school in Pozuelo de Alarcón, has been barred from classes because she wants to wear a headscarf for religious reasons. The school insists that it has a regulation barring pupils from covering their heads and has not permitted Najwa to attend her lessons.

This is not even a case of someone being obliged to wear the headscarf against her will, Najwa has freely chosen to do it and some other pupils have also started doing so in solidarity with her situation. Today the teachers of the school have voted against any change in the application of the regulations and now the decision passes to the school's governing body.

The national government has made it clear that it regards the right to receive education as being paramount in this case, but the regional government of Madrid has not agreed; no great surprise there. An administration which dedicates much of its educational budget for the benefit of religious (Catholic) schools has no problem at all with pupils being force fed religion by the institution that is supposed to educate them. The crosses on the wall testify to that. If, on the other hand, someone practising a different religion chooses to wear a symbol of that belief then that becomes unacceptable.

How Spain's Young Conservatives Keep Their Hands Clean

Until a few weeks ago I didn't know who Carlos Berzosa was. Maybe I'd seen the name at some point, but remembering who the rectors of Spanish universities were didn't find a space in my already overcrowded memory. Until a few students at Madrid's Complutense University decided to give their rector a hard time. Berzosa got shoved and shouted at over a proposal to end gender segregation in the university's residences, known as colegios mayores.

The opposition of the students to this measure puzzled many observers, who wondered whether the new generation was going to turn out to be more conservative than that of their parents - many of whom had done their best to circumvent the segregationist restrictions when they were students. Then the Comunidad de Madrid weighed into the argument, on the side of those who opposed mixed colegios. An argument broke out over the maintenance of the colegios with Aguirre's administration blaming Berzosa for not spending wisely, whilst the rector claimed that he didn't have sufficient funding and defended the autonomy of the university.

As a result of this Berzosa has found himself on the already lengthy list of enemies maintained by the Madrid PP and their media friends. Fast forward to Tuesday, when the meeting organised by trade unions in support of Baltasar Garzón was held on the premises of the Complutense, and with the presence of Berzosa. An attack on democracy is how the PP has described this meeting, obviously sensing a threat to their monopoly in recent years of character assassination of judges they don't like. Berzosa has been attacked for allowing it to happen on university premises and in recognition of his recent fame he now joins Garzón, Samuel Eto'o and the puppets of Los Lunnis in being on the receiving end of a legal action brought by Manos Limpias.

Now given that Manos Limpias is currently competing strongly with the Falange to be the favourite extreme right group for judges on the Supreme Court, there is every probability of yet another Spanish court being paralysed with this latest act of political revenge. Also included in the complaint made by the organisation is the former anti-corruption prosecutor Carlos Jiménez Villarejo, whose hard hitting speech in defence of Garzón yesterday has outraged the ultra right. It all goes to show that you don't have to do very much these days to get dragged before the judge

El Limbo De La Dependencia

The Ley de Dependencia is perhaps one of the most significant pieces of legislation introduced by Zapatero's administration. It recognises the situation of many people who are having to spend much of their lives looking after dependent relatives, and offers financial assistance to them. I wrote a post over two years ago on how this law was being systematically obstructed by the regional government in Madrid, and it's sad to report that this situation still exists when most other regions of the country have implemented the law in full. In Madrid thousands of applications for help under this law have been ignored. It matters little to the Aguirre gang that those who pay the heaviest price for their political posturing are amongst the most vulnerable.

It seems that there are two regional governments in particular, those of Madrid and Valencia (both PP controlled), who are determined to ensure that no national government initiative with any risk of being popular gets implemented successfully. It's not just the case with the Ley de Dependencia, the government's education plan to ensure access of all schoolchildren to laptop computers has also been obstructed in both of these regions. Of course neither Madrid nor Valencia likes to claim that they do this just for reasons of sectarian political opposition, they find all sorts of other pretexts for not being able to do what the rest of the country can. But when it comes to non-compliance the same names come up again and again. With Murcia occasionally joining in.

We wait to see now what will happen with the plan by the national government to tighten anti-smoking legislation, but Madrid has already hinted that this law could go the same way as the current one; completely ignored in the Spanish capital because the regional government refuses to enforce it. With the rumours of a new law being introduced Esperanza Aguirre left it to one of her most loyal sidekicks to express opposition. The fact that the smarmy Juan José Güemes is allegedly responsible for Madrid's health service and supervises the spending of huge sums on treating tobacco related diseases doesn't mean that he should not lead the charge. I know what you are thinking, surely the PP that runs these regions can't be related to the other PP that constantly claims it is the only party supporting equality of treatment between all of Spain's autonomous regions? It is, I have to insist, the very same party.

There's No Objection To Citizenship

In a legal decision worth applauding, the Supreme Court has decided that parents cannot exercise a right of conscientious objection to the newly introduced Citizenship module in Spanish schools. The anodyne and harmless content of this course has been treated by Catholic extremists as if it was the greatest threat ever created to Christian "civilization". How dare the state presume to teach ethics or even more dangerous concepts such as tolerance to our children! Can't you see they will force our children into compulsory gay marriage! Of course, if a priest is put in charge of the teaching then it's a different matter, the objections quickly fade away.

The Partido Popular in Madrid and Valencia rose to the challenge and did their very best to sabotage the new module. In Valencia, a ridiculous attempt to impose the teaching in English of what is probably now known in that region as "sitisenchip" finally collapsed in the face of growing opposition from teachers and parents. In Madrid the Outlaw Esperanza seized selectively on a favorable court ruling in Andalucia and promptly treated this as if it was the law, allowing parents to exempt their children from the compulsory course. Now they've lost the battle and the early signs are that they may even reluctantly recognise the defeat, although the tiny but vocal groups organised around the issue seem determined to have a few martyrs for the holy cause. The court took its time to consider the issue taking into account the speed with which they often send people to prison. You have to allow for the fact that they usually only deliberate before lunchtime.

Educashun To The Valencian Style

I wrote recently about how the Valencian regional government hoped to undermine the new Citizenship module for Spanish schools by ordering it to be taught in English. The new term has already seen some farcical scenes in Valencian schools as those teachers who are qualified to give classes on the new subject then have their words translated into English by another teacher. All of this so that they can play political games with the national government, the rulers of Valencia probably regard this expensive anti-educational chaos as a good result. After all, if they can't even translate correctly the name of the course then there is little chance of them getting the rest of it right.

Apartheid A La Madrileña

Here's the recipe for traditional Madrid style educational apartheid. First take one school, let's call it "San Roque", whose pupils are mostly of gypsy or immigrant origin. The school has reasonable facilities and even a bit of spare space for more pupils. Then take another school just 300 metres away, we'll call this one "Cristóbal Colón", where the pupils are mostly of Spanish (non-gypsy) origin. This second school is crowded and lacks key facilities such as a library. What to do about such a situation? San Roque offered to take excess pupils from Cristóbal Colón but such a mixture wouldn't work for the Comunidad de Madrid - most definitely an unequal opportunities administration. So the solution adopted is to put the gypsy and immigrant kids into the cramped school without facilities, and therefore leave the other one free for the Spanish kids. Swap the names of the schools and problem solved.

The Outlaw Esperanza, Part One

I was planning to compensate for the inexcusable absence of recent posts about the Lideresa by writing a slightly jokey post along the lines of “Does anyone remember Esperanza Aguirre?” Of course I should have realised that the silence was deceptive, with only a few days left before her coronation as Supreme Leader of the PP in Madrid, Espe has made her presence felt to such an extent that I need more than one post to deal with it all.

So what has she been up to? Breakin' the law seems to be the answer to that question. Just as the new school year is about to begin Aguirre's administration has challenged the government over the new Citizenship module which has now been introduced nationally. This new, and innocuous, subject has been a particular target of the Catholic right who are perfectly happy to have priests indoctrinating all and sundry, but hate the idea that any teaching falling in the sphere of ethics might be taught without the aid of a Bible.

So Madrid has announced that it will offer an alternative to those who declare themselves as “conscientious objectors” to the new subject. Such an escape clause isn't contemplated in the legislation, but has received support from courts in other regions of Spain. This is sufficient justification for Espe to defy the government. One of these judgements, in Andalucia, was delivered by the son of a prominent campaigner against the government's plan, and the sentence itself was close to being a copy and paste job from his fathers writings. The issue is up before the Supreme Court, and you would have thought that the PP would respect that given that they like to pose as the party of law n' order.

Not wishing to be left out of the fun of using education as a means of opposition to the national government, Valencia's PP led administration intends to teach the new subject in English even though it is not a subject which can be taught by English teachers or have the exams set in that language. Other PP controlled regions such as Castilla y Leon have decided to abide by the law and teach an obligatory subject. It's all a bit of a throwback to the previous parliament, with Madrid's PP seeking to be in the forefront of all out opposition to the national government. Because of this we now have the concept of educational conscientious objection as being the preserve of a small number of religious fanatics.

Since we're on the subject of education I came across confirmation in El País of Madrid's policy of using the state schools for children of immigrants whilst encouraging Spaniards to use the publicly (well) funded concertados. According to the latest figures only 23% of immigrant children in the region go to concertados or private schools, whilst the equivalent figure for all children of school age is almost 45%. Given that this 23% figure will include many of the offspring of the wealthier (and whiter?) expatriates the true picture of this undeclared policy of segregation is likely to be worse. Meanwhile, a long established parents association faces eviction because they have been too critical of Espe's gang, who upped the pressure by cutting off the electricity. Just another day here in the badlands, nothing more can be expected in such a lawless region.

Let's Talk About Tongues

Things were getting just too quiet. With the more ultra sections of the Spanish right having lost their hold over the direction of the Partido Popular, we were no longer being treated to daily rants on the imminent break up of the Spanish nation. We had to go and look for them instead, which is not to say that they are very hard to find. Fortunately for those who are appalled at the apparently unstoppable transformation of España into Expaña as a result of regional nationalism, the PP is no longer the only source of discontent. Help is at hand.

A group of “intellectuals”, mostly associated with the new party Union Progreso y Democracia (UPD) and whatever still remains of Ciudadanos, have taken advantage of the PP’s internal wrangling and presented the Manifesto for a Common Language (Manifiesto por la Lengua Común). This manifesto is presented as a defence of the Spanish language, and most of the propaganda surrounding its launch would lead you to believe that it exists to defend Spanish speakers against discrimination in regions such as Cataluña, the Basque Country, or Galicia. Particular emphasis is placed on the situation of parents in these regions who want their children to be educated in Spanish rather than Catalan, Basque or Gallego.

However, the objective of the manifesto is not to combat discrimination at all, instead the aim is to reinforce in law the supremacy of the Spanish language over all others. Neither is it just about education, the promoters of the document also make clear that public servants would not be expected to have knowledge of the other official language in the region where they work. For all the rhetoric, it’s not actually about freedom of choice to use the language you want – it’s only about the freedom to use Spanish. The authors of the manifesto have come up with tortuous arguments to justify the imbalance of their treatment of the issue. Having emphasised that the regional languages can only be encouraged, rather than imposed, they then propose to do more or less the opposite with Spanish. Despite some nice sounding phrases about courteous treatment of other languages, the reality of the manifesto’s implementation would translate as inviting speakers of these languages to go and fry morcillas.


Once the manifesto had been launched all it needed was a helpful boost from the media. Cue El Mundo, taking a break from undermining Mariano Rajoy and probably a bit bored with searching for town halls that don’t fly the Spanish flag, the newspaper has seized on the manifesto as its big issue. Every day they publish the number of signatories, usually accompanied by a tendentious piece about the latest imposition on helpless Spanish speakers, and at the same time accuse the government of turning a deaf ear to all of this artificial public clamour. The PP has signed up to the campaign along with other notable intellectuals like, er, Luis Aragonés. The illustration on this article comes from a notably (Spanish) nationalist campaign launched by the youth section of the PP in Madrid. At least one of the early signatories, the poet Antonio Gamoneda, has already withdrawn his support on seeing how the issue is being manipulated by El Mundo and their friends.

None of this is to say that there are not important issues to deal with in the way languages should be treated in those regions where there are two official languages. Personally I think a determined, educationally sound, program of bilingual education would be a good way to go forward, but the idea that people are suffering because they are taught in Catalan or Basque is nonsense. The notion that those whose parents want them educated in Spanish should be segregated in school from those who learn the language of their comunidad is an even worse idea. The Spanish language is not in danger, all of those who live in regions with other official languages are exposed to Spanish on a daily basis, either through the media or those they have to deal with in their daily life.

In the case of civil servants, I’ve already written on this issue before. Saying that there should be no obligation for them to speak the other official language of the comunidad where they work is something which directly puts the rights of civil servants above those of the people they are supposed to be serving. As a response to a perceived discrimination against those who work in the public sector, the response is to impose reverse discrimination. A day to look forward to will be the one when those who live in Madrid spend less time bitching about what happens in education in other parts of the country, and more time focused on what little remains of the public education system in their own region.

Veiled Criticism

The case of an 8 year old Muslim girl who was refused admission to her school in Girona for wearing a hijab has provoked plenty of debate in the last week. A lot of comparisons are made with the situation in France which famously passed a law on the issue. In the end the Catalan regional government has ordered the school to readmit the girl, affirming that the right to education overrides their internal regulations.

Cases like this tend to make for very strange bedfellows as sections of the non-religious left line up with right wing bigots who are more than happy to see religious symbols banned as long as it is not their religion. I think the decision that the right for this girl to continue receiving schooling takes priority over the issue of how she dresses is undoubtedly a correct one, whatever the good intentions are that lie behind the regulation in this case. The education system should help to give pupils the ability to make their own decisions about things which affect their lives, but it’s not there to be used as a means of imposing a solution. I say this as someone who believes very strongly in keeping religion out of the education system.

I don’t think anyone seriously believes that the moves in countries such as France would ever have happened in the case of Christian or Jewish kids alone; the law was introduced because of Muslim girls wearing the veil or the hijab. It’s mistaken to think that you can lift oppression by edict in this way, families can also be oppressive for all sorts of other reasons that have nothing to do with religion and we can’t reasonably expect the educational system to offer the solution for all these different problems. It’s particularly ironic to see such debate about the issue here when the Catholic Church is still receiving enormous subsidies from the State to run schools. If we want to take religion out of education then maybe that is where we need to start?

Marked For Life

Ok, it's time for this blog to get back to what it does really well - taking the piss out of Esperanza Aguirre! Don't run away, there is a serious point behind this post. A few months ago I wrote a guest post on racism in Spain for the blog Notes From Spain (while its owners were getting severely stressed out on holiday in Thailand). Almost in passing I mentioned the educational policy of the regional government in Madrid, which encourages the ghettoisation of immigrant children in the public school system of the region. In one of the comments to that post, Katie from España Profunda confirmed my suspicion about Aguirre's policies with first hand experience of having worked in a public school in Madrid.

Well El País today provided further confirmation with a report showing that 80% of immigrant children in Madrid are now being educated in the public system, whilst 2 out of 3 Spanish pupils are going either entirely private or to the unreasonably heavily subsidised concertados. It's not an accidental policy. Tonight I read that Aguirre now wants all pupils in the public schools to wear a uniform. She's clearly not satisfied with the fact that enough of these pupils have darker coloured skins or speak strange languages, she needs something else to identify their second class status. Someone should tell her, gently if possible (harshly if not), that this sort of stigmatisation hasn't been popular since the end of the Second World War.

On a more frivolous note, I was quietly proud for a while - despite the end of Google Bombing - that the words "Pauper President" had such success in identifying Aguirre in Google searches. Unfortunately some people have started using them about other politicians, what a liberty.

Holy War

The Catholic Church in Spain has declared war on the government. What could the evil infidels running the country have done to warrant such a strong reaction? Perhaps they have decided to stop collecting money for the Church via the taxation system, or to stop subsidising religious schools with public money? Much to the disappointment of those of us who believe in a genuine separation of Church and state it is neither of these. Instead they have introduced a new citizenship course into the education curriculum. It doesn’t sound like such a terrible thing to do, all very worthy, but hardly the sort of thing to provoke such a strong reaction. However, under the guise of turning young Spaniards into responsible citizens it turns out that the course is going to be filled with dangerous ideas about….wait for it…tolerance, democracy and equality of treatment! It should be no surprise therefore that Spain’s bishops have taken up arms against such ideas, all of which are very foreign to them.

Most ironic of all is the way in which they protest about the new course, claiming that it is an attack on freedom of choice in education. Ironic because this comes from an institution not exactly noted for their promotion of choice when they were given the chance to be involved in deciding how to educate the country’s youth. It's not too difficult to see that their real problem is that they are now firmly removed from the control over moral indoctrination that they would love to have. Gone are the days when they could freely impose their firm spiritual beliefs on impressionable young children - when commandments like the following provided a sound moral platform for all:

Thou shalt not kill unless you are a powerful person and remember to express mild regret afterwards.

Thou shalt not pay compensation to the victims of child abuse by members of the clergy until compelled to do so.

It's definitely a higher kind of morality that they represent. This after all is the institution which still mourns dead fascists on the walls of hundreds, if not thousands, of churches around the country. The same Church that is proceeding with the latest beatification process for 498 "martyrs" of the Spanish Civil War without even considering for a moment whether the Church might not bear some responsibility for its own role in that conflict. The transition following Franco’s death did not reach all areas of life in the country, and the ecclesiastical hierarchy in Spain provides us with regular reminders of that.