Thursday, January 14, 2010

Vic Sets An Ugly Precedent

The decision by the town of Vic not to permit immigrants without residence papers to enrol on the municipal padrón (list of residents) has provoked a strong protest. The national government insists that the policy is illegal, as all residents have the obligation to be on the padrón regardless of their legal status. It's not just about being on a list, the ability to register also affects access to basic public services. Vic is the political base of an openly xenophobic political movement called Plataforma per Catalunya, but sadly it is not this party which is responsible for the new policy. The town is run by a coalition between Convergencia i Unio, Esquerra Republicana and the Catalan wing of the PSOE (PSC).

The leader of Plataforma per Catalunya, Josep Anglada, is unsurprisingly delighted with the decision which plays directly into the hands of the anti-immigrant party and simply feeds the myth that immigrants do better out of public services than the local population. Now the racists can present themselves as having been vindicated. Meanwhile both Esquerra and the PSC are putting pressure on their local councillors to backtrack on the decision. Vic is probably not alone, as reports start to surface of other municipalities that have more quietly tightened their own requirements.

10 comments:

Lavengro in Spain said...

The town is run by a coalition between Convergencia i Unio, Esquerra Republicana and the Catalan wing of the PSOE (PSC).

Nationalists and racism -- no surprise there; it's what Nationalists do when things get tough. So what about the PSC? I have said before that they have been hijacked by the Nationalists. Here is the proof.

Graeme said...

If only it was that simple, you only have to look at some of the spiteful measures against asylum seekers in Britain to see that this sort of thing is not just the preserve of nationalist parties.

Lavengro in Spain said...

All parties in Britain are nationalist.

David said...

If 'all parties in Britain are nationalist', I suppose both PP and PSOE qualify to be branded as 'ultra-nationalist'.

The only real federalists in Spain are the post communists from EU and their Basque and Catalan brethren. All other mainstream political parties are nationalists to some degree or other - not that you don't get the occasional nationalist in the ranks of EU, former party boss Julio Anguita springs to mind here.

This is the very core of Spain's never-ending conundrum: how do you build a federal state to accomodate a multinational society when nobody really believes in the idea, except for a tiny handful of MPs?

Graeme said...

The PP have already come to the rescue of Vic, saying its a problem of liquidity rather than xenophobia.

David said...

As tends to be the rule throughout the world, things are never so straightforward as they appear in the first place:

The two town councillors from the pro-independence leftwing CUP have consistently opposed and denounced the scapegoating of migrants perpetrated by the local council. As you would expect, the mainstream media have failed to report on that.

In Vic and environs, all-out animosity between leftwing pro-independence militants and racists goes back a long way. Mr Anglada, the very vocal leader of segregationist and neo-fascist 'Plataforma per Catalunya' -whose potential landslide in oncoming local elections overshadows the current goings-on-, sustained a number of injuries following a confrontation with alleged CUP sympathysers in Vic's main square a couple of years ago.

Incidentally, Anglada was the leader of the Barcelona local chapter of Fuerza Nueva, a well-known Spanish neo-fascist party with little sympathy for Catalan nationalism, or for the the concept 'Catalan' altogether...

Graeme said...

There is also now the example of Torrejon, near to Madrid, which has adopted a much more underhand strategy. They judge eligibility on the average number of square metres occupied by someone in their home, a measure aimed at immigrants who live in multiple occupancy dwellings but which does't make it so explicit.

David said...

This is where Vic council, if they weren't a bunch of racist morons, could take a leaf out of the Lideresa's neo-liberal bestseller, I gather.

On second thoughts, though, let's not go around giving this lot clever ideas, shall we?

Rab said...

Lavengro: once again "meando fuera de tiesto". Every new comment more ignorant and ill-informed than the last.

What about the many local councils ruled by PP and PSOE where this policy is applied unofficially?
Are they nationalists and racists too? Give me a break.

David said...

I know, it's a bit sad and predictable but it's that same old dream voiced by the late Mr Santiago Bernabeu all over again, now shared by the likes of Ciudadanos and Ms Rosa Diez & Her String Puppets: how wonderful life would be in Catalonia without Catalans, where everybody spoke Spanish to everybody else -as is the natural way of things- and Catalan (?) was confined merely to old people's homes (at weekends) and (second rate) museums ..a proper Spanish lifestyle devoid of unnecessary petty nationalism or tiresome conflicted nationalist individuals forcing their useless, unsolicited pseudo-languages down your throat.
Heaven on earth indeed!
But, alas, let's not delude ourselves. If the long-suffering victims of Catalan totalitarianism were to suddenly wake up in their dreamt-of katalanenfrei Barcelona they might well be overpowered by an intense feeling of exhilaration at first but then, as days went by, they would notice that all those things that really matter won't get any better for the lack of those pesky Catalans with their interfering language. If anything, life would become even duller.