Night’s candles are burnt out, and jocund day stands tiptoe on the misty mountain tops.
Spanish life is not always likeable but it is compellingly loveable.
- Christopher Howse: 'A Pilgrim in Spain'
Covid
Good news: From Spain - A new Covid vaccine 100% 'made in Spain' could become a viable alternative to those currently on the market or about to be released, and is due to start the clinical trial stage very shortly after having been found to provide total immunity in mice.
Living La Vida Loca in Galicia/Spain
So, what's really odd about this report of 2 youngsters snapped kissing in the middle of the empty snowbound A2? Answer below, for when you've read the article.
Despite the panoply of things required of air and boat travellers rom the UK to Spain . . . Overland travellers to Spain are exempt from these equirements and are, therefore, not [even] required to present a PCR, TMA or LAMP test, or Health Control Form on entry by road or rail. IGITSTS.
Interestingly, going to Ireland first and then flying (and maybe sailing) to Spain seems to allow one to bypass the requirements.
Back in the late late 19th century, there were problems between the UK and Spain over wine duties. A senior English politician of the time complained that: More than once the talks have run into the morass of Spanish prolixity. But I'mm sure this doesn't happen now, as Spanish diplomats have a fine reputation, in Brussels at least. Don't know about London.
A lovely bit of Almerían nostalgia from Lenox Napier here.
Low ethics again . .
Marìa's New Year Same Old: Day 27.
The UK
If you watch, listen to or read British media, you'll surely notice how many foreigners appear there, as performers, academics or heads of organisations in the UK. For example Tamara Rojo, who's Spanish and the Artistic Director of English National Ballet. This suggests widespread meritocracy and I wonder which other countries get anywhere near this. And I'm not talking about Scottish, Irish and Welsh voices. Nor even the (non-British) Irish voices which are everywhere in the media. Especially the Irish. Though many of these will be resident in the UK.
Ireland
Talking of the Irish . . . It's recently been found that the man they hate most - Oliver Cromwell - was himself of Irish descent. Which will be a bit of a shock to everyone, I guess. Less surprising is that more than 50% of Liverpool folk are also of (more recent) Irish descent.
The EU
Did you know that there were Exit parties in several major EU countries? And that they're getting together?But these might not be the EU's biggest problem, says the writer of the first article below.
The UK and the EU
Some UK headlines this morning:-
- How the UK's vaccine gamble paid off – and the EU left itself without a leg to stand on.
- Covid is a 1914 moment for the post-Cold War globalised order. Vaccine nationalism and border closures mark a paradigm shift with vast implications for freedom
- AstraZeneca is a scapegoat for the European Commission's staggering institutional failure.
The last one is from an article from AEP, the 2nd below. Like me, AEP has no confidence in the long-term future of the EU. My view for decades has been that it won't survive continuing sectarian national interests. These, of course, come to the fore in times of crisis, like this one. Hence the 2nd headline.
Finally . . .
A couple of local artists/friends: of mine:-
1. DJ Something? We Are One
2. Yasín the adopted Ethiopian son of my Dutch friends who died a year ago this week. [Sorry. I can't get this to uplod at the moment]
I’m told by people younger than me that these are both terrific.
THE ARTICLES
1. With Brexit done, the EU has other problems to deal with — starting with ‘illiberal’ Hungary: Peter Conradi, Europe Editor. The Times
In the hours since Britain completed its exit from the EU on Thursday evening, Charles-Henri Gallois, the leader of France’s fledgling Génération Frexit movement, has stepped up his campaign on social media for his compatriots to follow suit.
“The sound of liberty. Big Ben Brexit Bongs,” Gallois, 33, tweeted as the UK’s post-Brexit transition period ended at 11pm. “The United Kingdom is from today an independent country.”
Under the slogan “Reprenons Le Contrôle”, his group launched a petition in November calling for France to have its own referendum on membership. By this weekend, it had attracted just 9,562 signatures.
With little interest from the country’s mainstream media, Gallois, a business school graduate and author of a book denouncing the EU’s “economic illusions”, still has some way to go before becoming a French Farage.
When Britain voted for Brexit in 2016, jubilant supporters claimed its example would encourage several of the EU’s other 27 countries to follow suit. Four years on, their dream looks no closer to becoming reality.
The relatively smooth start this weekend on both sides of the Channel to Britain’s new trading relationship with the EU has pushed the issue down the news agenda in most member states. The preoccupation, from Portugal to Poland, has instead been Covid-19 and whether tighter restrictions will be imposed to counter its resurgence after the new year break.
If Britain is held up as a model at all, it is for the speed with which the government has begun its vaccination programme against the virus: “Germany has vaccinated more than 42,000, the United Kingdom 900,000 and France less than 200!” tweeted Bruno Retailleau, leader of the Republican party in the French senate, on Wednesday.
When it comes to Brexit itself, commentators remain as baffled as ever by what many see as a self-inflicted harm, with sentiments varying from bewilderment and regret to downright rage.
“I don’t feel sadness, only anger,” wrote Nikolaus Blome in a withering column for Der Spiegel, the German news magazine, last week. “Britain has been captured by gambling liars, frivolous clowns and their claqueurs. They destroyed my Europe, to which the island belonged just as much as France or Germany do.”
Emmanuel Macron set out a similar view in his New Year’s Eve address. Although insisting the “UK remains our neighbour but also our friend and ally”, the French president criticised the “lies and false promises” that encouraged Britons to vote to leave.
The way to prevent another country going the same way lay in European integration, he indicated, citing the recent £677bn in loans and grants agreed by EU leaders to help kick-start their economies. The sum is small against the EU’s combined GDP of £11 trillion. Yet the symbolism is considerable, because, in a first for the EU, the sum is being raised on financial markets by issuing common debt, taking its members closer to a shared budget.
However, the limits to such plans were shown by the struggle faced by Paris and Berlin to secure support for the deal from the “Frugal Four”: Austria, Denmark, Sweden and Holland.
A more fundamental problem is posed by tensions with Hungary and Poland, whose governments delayed the plan — and the EU’s next seven-year budget — in protest at attempts by Brussels to make the release of their shares dependent on respect for the “rule of law”.
Viktor Orban, the self-styled “illiberal” Hungarian prime minister, and Mateusz Morawiecki, his conservative Polish counterpart, were eventually won over last month. Yet they continue to oppose what they see as attempts by the EU’s western members to impose liberal values on their own more traditional societies — paving the way for more clashes.
Even if the EU looks unlikely to lose any more members, finding agreement among those that remain may not become easier.
2. AstraZeneca is a scapegoat for the European Commission's staggering institutional failure: Ursula von der Leyen’s Davos speech this week sounded more like a threat than a request for Britain's help: Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, the Telegraph
Brussels wants Britons to die so that Europeans should live. That is the implication of diverting up to 75 million doses of AstraZeneca’s vaccine to the EU market. It is a large demand.
Diplomatically, this country can invoke vital national interest and restrict exports of doses manufactured in the UK, just as the EU has announced it will do for doses made on its own territory. Whether this country should act in such a fashion is a question of statecraft.
But it would be a remarkably generous gesture at a time when the EU is being horrible on everything to do with the post-Brexit settlement, from customs clearance, to Ulster, or financial equivalence. It is reciprocating on almost nothing.
Personally, as a man in my early sixties, I might forgo my jab for a while so that the over eighties at greater risk in France, Italy, or Bulgaria can be saved, although why do they have a greater claim than Tanzanians? But the EU does not seem to be making a moral request for solidarity. It is issuing orders.
Ursula von der Leyen’s speech to the virtual Davos forum this week did not sound like a request for help from this country. It sounded like a threat. Companies must “honour their obligations”, she said in her teeth-clenching staccato style.
Health commissioner Stella Kyriakides says AstraZeneca is legally bound to divert doses from two UK factories. "In our contract it is not specified that any country or the UK has priority. This needs to be absolutely clear," she said.
You would hardly know that AstraZeneca is the saviour in this saga, not the villain. It is making no profit from the vaccine. It is selling at cost, like a charity, offering a humanitarian service to the world. But don’t expect gratitude from the Berlaymont.
Nor is there any hint of acknowledgement that Brussels got itself into its vaccine disaster by haggling over prices and trying to drive hard bargains on indemnity. It wasted three months before committing to AstraZeneca, as if it were the easiest thing in the world to mass-produce a viral vector vaccine. That is why the EU-based plants are not yet up to full efficiency.
The UK and the US invested seven times as much public money per capita to accelerate the vaccine breakthrough, acting with war-time energy while the Commission remained stuck in its bureaucratic box-ticking subculture, catering to the lowest common denominator of 27 states. If ever there was an example of why Brussels should not be let anywhere near policies of real national sensitivity, this was it.
EuroIntelligence said the EU conducted vaccine talks in the same spirit that it conducted Brexit talks. “It tried to lock in a perceived short-term price advantage at the expense of everything else,” it said. Speed is everything in a pandemic. The Commission could not see the wood for the trees.
I have no idea whether AstraZeneca’s Pascal Soriot is right in claiming that the company has no contractual duty to deliver tens of million doses to the EU by a fixed date, but rather only to make its “best effort”. Nor do I know whether vaccine supply-chain is set up for each specific country. The issue is larger.
All of a sudden the stereotype roles of the last four years have reversed. Europe’s technocrats are now the populists, the vaccine imperialists. Borisian Britain is starting to feel like a haven of calm by comparison. For all its mistakes, the UK is now cleaving closer to science. It is behaving better.
Germany is in fever, hunting for somebody to blame for the inexcusable fact that it cannot obtain more than a trickle of its own BioNTech vaccine. If that blame ultimately lands squarely on Brussels, the European project is in trouble.
For now media wrath is turning on diversionary scapegoats. AstraZeneca is the easiest target. Hysteria is taking over. One can only guess which figures in ‘government circles’ (Kreisen der Bundesregierung) leaked a fabricated story to the Handelsblatt alleging that its vaccine is virtually useless against the elderly.
The claim has been shot down by German scientists. AstraZeneca has debunked it. Oxford University, unused to such political bloodsport, gently pointed out that five peer-reviewed papers show that efficacy is comparable across age groups. Not a single elderly volunteer died or became critically-ill after the jab.
No matter. The fake news lives on, amplified by Bild Zeitung, and still given credence by others, as if there were a genuine debate. This mendacious virus is now a staple of social media and lodged in the German mind. That is how to destroy confidence in a vaccination campaign. Kreisen der Bundesregierung indeed.
France’s rationalist president is like a rabbit caught in the headlights. The ‘variant anglais’ has surged to 10pc of all Covid cases in greater Paris even on the lagging official data. It is going parabolic. The scientific authorities are pressing for an immediate lockdown. Still he hesitates.
Emmanuel Macron is warily eyeing the travails of his friend and fellow-rationalist Mark Rutte. The Netherlands have been blind-sided by violent anti-curfew riots for three consecutive nights, “shameless thieves” in the words of Rotterdam’s mayor, or “the scum” to one minister.
Macron knows that civic acquiescence for his stop-go strategy is near breaking point. Consent for yet another lockdown has dropped to 40pc. A gilets jaunes two lies in store if this drags on deep into the Spring.
The EU’s vaccination debacle has delayed Europe’s social reopening and economic recovery by three months, with all the consequences that this will have for sovereign debt ratios, small firm solvency, and labour hysteresis.
It is one reason - though not the only one - why the International Monetary Fund thinks the region will be left behind as the US and China roar back this year. It is a Sino-American G2 world from now on. The pandemic has brought forward Europe’s definitive relegation from the top league.
The IMF and other global bodies lump the UK with the worst of Europe in their grim forecasts. The Fund thinks growth will be just 4.5pc this year after a 10pc contraction in 2020. The OECD says the UK will be the laggard of the developed world, far behind even France and Italy.
If that happens, I will eat my hat (another one). Britain’s vaccination success so far - and a steeper relative trajectory over coming weeks - imply a rebound roughly ten weeks sooner. So long as Rishi Sunak restrains the Treasury from fiscal tightening too soon, it may well be a V-shaped take-off.
The Office for National Statistics will publish a paper next week showing that the UK’s (best practice) method of measuring health and education in GDP figures exaggerated the fall in GDP last year. We cut ‘output’ when doctors see fewer patients, or schools have fewer classes. Other countries measure differently.
This flattered German GDP by roughly 2pc last year, or French and Italian GDP by around 1pc. The opposite effect will kick as life returns to normal. It is the UK recovery that will be flattered.
My bet: the UK will be the star of the big European economies this year and may clock up 6pc growth as pent-up investment flows, assuming the IMF is broadly right on world growth. The Brexit trade shock will be less than feared.
The UK’s flexible labour markets will make the switch to the post-Pandemic digital economy better than Germany, France, or Italy. Sterling will be the foreign exchange darling. The FTSE-250 will be the catch up story of 2021.
The global narrative on Brexit will become less relentlessly hostile. It will be the mirror image of Europe’s eroding credibility. Who knows, perhaps even the Scots will feel that they have judged our imperfect but interwoven union a little too harshly.
Answer: Neither of them bother with social media. Let's hope they're trendsetters.