Visca Catalunya?

[Diable Rouge]

The King's Speech:

https://mobile.twitter.com/thespainreport

[Lang Spoon]

After a few nightmarish missteps in the 19-20th century, the unified German State seems less downright cunty than Ukania or Spain. But then their Union was federated into manageable bits by the Basic Law, instead of Prussia and a few other saps. Spain won’t tolerate Federalism anymore than Britain will outside the most fever’d dreams of yer Browns and yer Dugdales.

[Lang Spoon]

Jesus that opener is appalling. Apologies. Pure Partridge does popular history.

[anton pulisov]

After a few nightmarish missteps in the 19-20th century, the unified German State seems less downright cunty than Ukania or Spain. But then their Union was federated into manageable bits by the Basic Law, instead of Prussia and a few other saps. Spain won’t tolerate Federalism anymore than Britain will outside the most fever’d dreams of yer Browns and yer Dugdales.

Hows the further devolution that Scotland was promised during the Indyref coming along?

[Lang Spoon]

A predictable damp squib. Now the likes of Owen Jones are calling for the Nat Govt to do stuff that SLab recommended the Smith Commission (the limp corporeal manifestation of Brown’s Vow) kept reserved (from abortion law to, em, having the power to nationalising the running of the railways (after tender)).

[Tubby Isaacs]

Hows the further devolution that Scotland was promised during the Indyref coming along?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scotland_Act_2016

[Jorge Porbillas]

That'll be the same Owen Jones who claims Scottish Labour will nationalise the Scottish railways yet has nothing to say when Welsh Labour (who have been in power in Wales since the formation of the Assembly) have decided NOT to nationalise the Welsh railways. The same Owen Jones who hasn't condemned Welsh Labour for refusing to lift the public sector pay cap ... or Welsh Labour raising tuition fees in Wales ...

[Diable Rouge]

Looks like Puigdemont will try to beat Rajoy in the legislative cat-and-mouse:

https://mobile.twitter.com/BBCBreaki...15185644077061

[Tubby Isaacs]

The Welsh Government can't borrow/ raise corporation tax to raise public sector pay caps or cut fees, like is the proposed policy for Westminster.

Fair point about the rail franchises. Jones doesn't know anything about rail.

[Lang Spoon]

Gulp.

[Jorge Porbillas]

The Welsh Government can't borrow/ raise corporation tax to raise public sector pay caps or cut fees, like is the proposed policy for Westminster.

Fair point about the rail franchises. Jones doesn't know anything about rail.

As of 2019 they have means of raising some taxes eg income tax, stamp duty ... and they didn't *have* to raise tuition fees ...

... they could also scrap universal free prescriptions for people, like me, who can well afford them, and spend the money elsewhere ... but this is all for another thread at another time.

[Lang Spoon]

My da gets really exasperated about that in Scotland. Getting free aspirin for a mild heart condition when it’s not going to destroy his nest egg buying them. But I’ve heard it’s almost cost neutral, when you remove the need for means testing bureaucracy. That might be bollocks but.

And aye, wrong thread.

[Diable Rouge]

A sharp Irish Government Cabinet meeting on the issue:

https://www.irishtimes.com/news/poli...43312?mode=amp

[anton pulisov]

It's important to know if Varadkar said the referendum was "invalid" or "illegal".

I agree that it may have been invalid, but it wasn't illegal. Surely it is not illegal to carry out a mock referendum. Doing so should not invite police violence.

[Janik]

The Spanish constitutional court ruled that it holding it was contrary to Spanish law. Therefore doing so broke the law. Illegal seems a completely accurate technical description. I see 'invalid' as more dubious, as that involves a moral case that 'illegal' doesn't.
But of course defying that ruling shouldn't incite police violence. Any sane democracy should react to something like this by prosecuting the organisers for the local version of contempt of court rather than physically attacking those attempting to participate.

[Nefertiti2]

Spain's National Court has now cited the Head of Catalan police mossos, Major Trapero, for sedition

[Nefertiti2]

Piquet speaking

"Spain-Catalonia is like father and son, and the 18-year-old wants to leave home. You can say no or sit down and talk."

[The Awesome Berbaslug!!!]

Does nobody want a united Europe where everyone shares with everyone so the issue of givers and takers is less of an issue and then it won't matter if this or that tiny subdivision wants to be independent because they'd all be in Europe anyway and it would be no different than Maine splitting from Massachusetts?

well..... that's kind of the way the EU treats things. The EU is big into this idea of subsidiarity, where decisions are essentially supposed to be taken at the lowest possible level. How this works out in effect is down to the centralized/federalized nature of the individual state. The basic unit is supposed to be the region. These regions in turn make up countries, (the link between regions and state varies wildly across the union, but germany and belgium, who were founder members were really into regional parliaments.) and these countries between them hammer out common rules for things in the council of europe. These rules are then voted on by the European parliament and implemented by the member states, and overseen by the commission, which is kind of like a cabinet, with one person nominated by each country (smaller countries have to take turns) and has the eu civil service.

When Brexiteers are complaining about EU Red tape, They just want the elimination of all regulations. But they pretend it's an attack on inefficiency. This misses two things. The EU is fucking tiny. The organisation that runs the single market is really really small. The budget of the EU is about .8% of EU GDP, and in absolute terms is about the size of the US department of agriculture, or half of what the US federal govt spends on Medicaid. There are only 24,000 civil servants working for the Commission, and 9,000 others knocking around, and it only really has €300 a head to spend. The second thing is that The point of the EU is to eliminate as much red tape as possible by simplifying 28 standards down to one common one, so by following these regulations, you can make something in one eu country and sell it anywhere else in the EU. Last year the EU went from having 28 different customs regimes, with varying standards, to effectively having one, for the continental part of the EU. You fill in one electronic form, and get in your truck, and drive all the way to where you are going. and every transaction along the way is usually all in the same currency. Effectively the creation of the single market, the single currency, and the single customs system have essentially erased a lot of what countries do. if you're a business, then The EU is basically the united states of europe. with countries filling in for states.

The big difference with the United states is that they've done something very sneaky, by agreeing to the fiscal compact treaty. It's essentially a reaction to the last global financial crisis, and on the face of it it's just a balanced budget requirement. But it's very sneaky. It also has other requirements that are going to make everyone's tax system look broadly the same. If you went into the last global financial crisis, with a balanced budget, a stable broad based taxation system, and a reasonable level of debt, you borrowed some money, smoothed things over, and you bounced back pretty quickly with minimal misery given the scale of the crash. That was the experience of a host of EU countries.

If you had been living high, and doing stupid things on the back of property bubble taxation (Ireland, Spain) or were just running a budget deficit for the hell of it, and running up debt in the good times (Portugal, Italy, , and belgium) then things were not good. It spiralled out of control, and fucked it up for everyone. It's ultimately designed to make each european economy more resistant to shock by forcing govts to base permanent spending commitments on stable taxes. If Govts are going to increase govt spending, they have to expand their tax base. they have to find ways to make unstable taxes stable.

In ireland it lead to the introduction of the start of a tax on the value of a property. if it can do that, it can do anything. Transaction taxes had disappeared, but now we have the start of of a basis for a stable source of funding for local government. Now we just have to convince councillors to stop all setting the tax as low as they can, while screaming for the need for more money. It's going to be very exciting when the govt has to bite the bullet and revalue the houses, from 2013 prices. Prices were low in 2013. We were still utterly fucking bankrupt. Prices are high now. This is a huge thing. Given that half the households in the country own one house, and they're going to have to live somewhere, people who have no intention of moving don't want spiralling house prices. We currently have a massive shortage induced spiral. So that's going to be exciting. However, the point is in a downturn, the tax take wouldn't suddenly disappear. There will be a hole in our tax take, but it won't be 40% of govt spending.

It also means that elections are getting weird. Govts have to plan out their budgets years in advance, and going into an election everyone knows basically exactly how much extra money there is going to be over the course of the next government, and all their promises have to add up to that figure, or else people laugh at them. Parties that intend to be taken seriously have to fit their spending plans into that slot, or explain where they are going to get the extra money from. It means that they're restricted from saying any old left/right low tax/high spend shite like they used to. It's created a huge space for the rise of the populists, who don't give a fuck and will say any old mad shite. Irish people love that. We want someone who will get us things, and protect us from harm. But after a while people will realize that this is pointless.

The thing is that the whole process makes a lot of things transparent. and people are starting to notice that companies don't pay any tax. Individual countries can't really get companies to pay tax. The EU can however. France and Germany are very keenly aware that there are a lot of companies that are ripping the piss, and should really pay some tax. Even a little bit would make a huge difference. But the only way that they're going to get this budget thing up and going, is with a large slice of infrastructure development across europe paid for by companies. France may need to annex luxembourg to pull it off, but it's going to happen. (Which will be....interesting for Ireland.)

Either way, we're reaching a point where a lot of the nineteenth century definition of a state is being stripped away, and this cunt rajoy, is very much a 19th century cunt. There are no customs, you don't have your own currency, you're not really in charge of your banks. You have the freedom to construct a wide variety of societies, but you are quite clear and transparent about how you are going to pay for it, and that's no fun. You don't set industrial standards. You're not in charge of your own courts, and you can't punish people for being different for the hell of it. You're certainly not allowed torture people. You can't even keep out people, or favour your own explicitly. Short of armies, that's basically everything a nineteenth century country did, that didn't involve empires. It's reached the point where a quarter of the population are atheist, and while 70% of the population say they're catholic, 75% of them, half the population, go once or twice a year if at all. whatever old Ideas he might have about spain, they simply don't apply any more. It requires new thinking. You can't beat people into staying in your country. That didn't work in ireland 100 years ago, and it's not going to work now.

Given that Rajoy is making everyone look like a cunt, This talk from the EU about peaceful resolution is the public face of someone is screaming down a phone at him to get his fucking act together, and stop being such a fucking mad bastard. You can't beat something like this into submission, and that the only way to deal with this is to find a compromise based on the creation of a federalist state. The EU has no option really but to back him up in public, so the EU is going to have its say in private. The alternative is that this gets worse, until catalonia leaves, fucking both spain and catalonia irredeemably. Some things are best organized on an EU level, some things are best organized on a state level, and some things are best organized on a regional level. Let them organize the things that are done on a regional level, and everything will be fucking fine. It's a compromise that makes the catalans happy, keeps them in spain, and doesn't lead to the impoverishment of both. Maybe take slightly less tax, and allow the catalan president wear a gold hat or something, that's what the people in charge of this movement are after. Rajoy has to fucking get over himself and offer the carrot, and the EU has the Razor wire fence/economic devastation Cat-xit stick.

[The Awesome Berbaslug!!!]

TL; DR, this process is already under way. People don't realize it yet. but in a lot of important areas it's already here.

as for the redistribution of funds, the EU is going to have to find a new source of income for that. Either through a Financial transactions tax, which can be a blanket tax now that the UK is gone, or redirecting some of that corporation tax. That fiscal compact treaty might seem quite restrictive, but aside from trying to make the EU more resilient to economic downturns and to structure its taxation systems more efficiently and effectively. It's mostly about getting rid of the objection that the rich north would be throwing money at the profligate south. The iron kernel of truth at the heart of that idea killed a lot of EU intervention during the last crisis. If everyone is following the same budgetary rules, and have to be completely transparent about it, you can then justify a much higher level of investment in poorer regions on the grounds that you are making the market for rich countries goods richer. Eastern Europe is broadly speaking twice as rich as it was in 2004. Germany now sells an awful lot more stuff to these countries. It would sell even more if they were as rich as italians. The same logic applies to the relationship between rich and poor regions within countries

It's going to take time for this to work its way through the system though. creating entirely new taxes, or rebalancing other taxes is a difficult and politically challenging process. but the impact on how countries and economies are run will eventually be enormous.

[ursus arctos]

Just in case you thought it couldn't get worse, there are now reports that Rajoy has sent army units to reinforce the Guardia Civil

[Tubby Isaacs]

Bit harsh on Belgium there, AITL. They improved a lot once they knew they'd be in the Euro. High nominal debt now but credibility is well established.

[Guy Profumo]

Just in case you thought it couldn't get worse, there are now reports that Rajoy has sent army units to reinforce the Guardia Civil

Which are they?

Are they associated with the Guardia Nacional, or a different group?

(And Mossos are the "state" Guards, yes?)

[Tubby Isaacs]

I think Guy Verhofstadt was one of those who sorted it out.

[ursus arctos]

The Guardia Civil are the national paramilitary police. They have been nasty pieces of work for their entire history, with a long tradition of beating up protestors (and worse). The Guardia Nacional were their Republican counterparts during the Civil War.

The Mossos are the Catalan police force, who had largely come to replace the Guardia Civil as Catalunya's autonomy on the ground has grown. That's why the central government has had to import all of this firepower.

The Government just charged the head of the Mossos with sedition.

[ad hoc]

The Guardia Civil have traditionally been Franquista too. They were essentially Franco's stormtroopers, and for example, the Guardia Civil barracks in Valencia is huge (as Valencia was the last city to fall in the Civil War). In 1981 when there was the attempted coup it came out of the Guardia Civil in Valencia