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
The UK 1: Reported to be now past the peak of the second Covid wave. Cases are falling across country, says the health chief as 10 million get the first vaccine jab. Cases, hospital admissions and deaths are falling in all 4 nations but it will be months until the pressure on hospitals eases.
The UK 2: Britain has begun the first trial to explore “mixing and matching” vaccines in the hope that it could minimise supply problems here and abroad. A group of 800 volunteers aged above 50 are being recruited to try the Oxford and Pfizer vaccines in combination instead of using the same one for first and second doses. This could provide equal or even better protection.
Denmark: Has become one of the first countries to set out concrete plans for an electronic “corona passport” that could allow those who have been vaccinated to travel overseas. From the end of February Danish residents will be able to prove that they have been inoculated by printing a certificate from a government website.
Living La Vida Loca in Galicia/Spain .
Bad news here for ‘the taurine community’. Not to mention the Pamplona coffers.
Did I already report that the the Junta de Andalucía has made a few exceptions to the rules of staying within one’s municipality. These include hunting events and skiing in the Sierra Nevada. Maybe hunting wild boar will make my walking in the forest behind my house legal, most of the tracks being in the Pontevedra municipality, not mine.
Jab-jumping: Lenox Napier of Business Over Tapas tells us that: From El País in English: Spain’s Covid immunisation drive is dogged by line-jumping politicians and other irregularities. Hundreds of people, including political leaders, retired doctors and family members of health workers, have received the vaccine even though they are not part of the first priority group’. El Español has named and shamed the clever ones who got their vaccinations when they shouldn’t’ve. From Público, we read that ‘More than 450 senior officials and officials of the Murcia Health Department, in addition to the councillor and his wife, were illegally vaccinated’. And ABC has its own story from next door Valencia: ‘The Generalitat Valenciana detects 185 cases of people vaccinated without meeting the requirements’. Lenox adds: But will they all get their 2nd jab?
Lenox also tells us today that: The imprisoned ex-treasurer for the PP Luis Bárcenas has now admitted to the court that the party was improperly financed between 1982 and 2009. And that Rajoy destroyed ‘real accounts. But not before Bárcenas took a copy. Like all crooked accountants do/ should do. Por si acaso.
María's Tsunami: Day 3
The EU
Not a huge surprise . . . Merkel and Macron defend the bloc’s policy as vaccination numbers lag behind those of Israel, UK and US. Because: National leaders are starting to feel the heat over the EU’s struggling Covid vaccine rollout, which is increasingly being seen as overcautious, marred by mistakes and miscalculations, and achingly slow to progress. See the full article here.
The hardline Brexiteers' view of things: The EU’s descent into madness or even downright malignancy can be explained by a combination of Covid-related desperation, incompetence, Brexit and the panicky realisation that the historic vision that inspired Europe’s elites since the Second World War is crumbling before the eyes of despairing, devastated electorates. There were three rationalisations for the EU’s creation. The first was to forge a new era of peace and unity; the second was to use its clout to ensure the economic and personal security of Europeans; and the third was to pioneer a superior, morally righteous form of progressive governance in a Kantian, post-nationalist world. Seven decades after the launch of the European Coal and Steel Community, Robert Schuman’s “first step in the federation of Europe”, it is clear that the EU has proved ineffective at best and a calamity at worst on all three counts. The full article is below. It's very hard-hitting about a '70-year experiment that has failed'. Of course, 70 years ago, just about everyone bought into the Vision. Only experience has changed the mind of some people. But not all, of course.
English
I was very surprised to hear the my daughter in Madrid didn’t know what 'woke' means. And it seems she’s not alone in her generation. Here’s Wiki: Woke is a slang term that is easing into the mainstream from some varieties of a dialect called African American Vernacular English. ‘Woke' is increasingly used as a byword for social awareness. So, Being alert to injustice in society, especially racism. Or, as my daughter said: You mean exceptionally politically correct?
Spanish
Again from Lenox today: Magnet reports that ‘Spain is a linguistic exception: only 81% of its inhabitants speak Spanish at home’. It quotes the Pew Research Centre here which says that the other languages spoken in Spain are Catalán/Valencian 12%, Gallego 3% and Euskera 1%.
Finally . . .
Is there an emptier modern phrase than Lessons will be learned? You mean, you never learned them after previous (government) cockups? Just an alternative for Sorry, I guess.
THE ARTICLE
The Trumpian EU has demolished its final reasons for existing. The incompetent bloc’s treatment of Northern Ireland explodes its claim to be a ‘progressive’ force: Allister Heath, The Telegraph
What is wrong with Ursula von der Leyen, the hapless bureaucrat who presides over the European Commission? Why the horrendous descent into sub-Trumpian rhetoric, the demonisation of pharmaceutical firms, the threats to divert vaccines? Why the demagogic flirtation with toxic anti-vaxx scare tactics? Why the misrepresentation of scientific findings, and the baseless attacks, in concert with other European leaders, on Britain’s vaccination strategy and the AstraZeneca jab?
Even more shocking has been the careless inflaming of tensions in Northern Ireland: after spending years claiming that they didn’t want a hard border, the EU almost imposed one by diktat last week. Its ongoing attempt to undermine the UK’s unity through its intransigent interpretation of the Withdrawal Agreement is a disgusting overreach which increasingly risks a crisis in the province.
As Boris Johnson has now formally warned, the UK may have to act unilaterally, invoking Article 16 of the protocol to suspend the Agreement, unless the EU drastically reviews its absurd interpretation of the texts. Extending the so-called grace period on traders moving goods from Great Britain to Northern Ireland until 2023 won’t be enough.
But the possibility of the Agreement being swept aside begs the question of what will happen to the UK-EU trade deal, which has yet to be ratified by the European side, and more broadly of relations between Britain and Brussels. The UK has already put up with far too much. If everything goes very wrong, von der Leyen and her protector Angela Merkel, the most over-rated continental politician of her generation, will be entirely to blame.
The EU’s descent into madness or even downright malignancy can be explained by a combination of Covid-related desperation, incompetence, Brexit and the panicky realisation that the historic vision that inspired Europe’s elites since the Second World War is crumbling before the eyes of despairing, devastated electorates.
There were three rationalisations for the EU’s creation. The first was to forge a new era of peace and unity; the second was to use its clout to ensure the economic and personal security of Europeans; and the third was to pioneer a superior, morally righteous form of progressive governance in a Kantian, post-nationalist world. Seven decades after the launch of the European Coal and Steel Community, Robert Schuman’s “first step in the federation of Europe”, it is clear that the EU has proved ineffective at best and a calamity at worst on all three counts.
The vaccines fiasco is proving far more damaging to the project than the Eurozone crisis. Together with years of feeble economic growth, that tragic episode showed not just the EU’s inability to deliver prosperity, but also how savagely smaller members were treated. But it was always possible to blame Germany, or national politicians, or the complexities of modern economies, and Brussels survived.
Responsibility for the jabs nightmare cannot be deflected. EU politicians put integrationist ideology before lives: in the spirit of Brexit, Britain’s Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency went it alone, giving the Pfizer/BioNtech jab the green light early. We were still covered by EU rules, but used an emergency procedure which other countries could also have invoked.
The European Medicines Agency took almost another three weeks before approving its first vaccine. But that was just the start of a litany of errors: Brussels and most member states were too slow at procuring vaccines, failed to diversify orders, were too concerned about cost and lacked the skills required to negotiate. The French gambled on homegrown vaccines that didn’t materialise; Macron and others failed to distribute the jabs they do have quickly enough.
Europe’s reluctant elites realised they couldn’t stop Britain from leaving, but they decided that we would have to pay a heavy price pour decourager les autres. At first, it worked: support for leaving the EU has fallen across much of the continent since 2016. But the vaccines fiasco radically changes the cost-benefit analysis of Brexit even in the minds of Europhiles. The advantage from a speedier vaccination will be worth thousands of lives and much economic growth; this more than offsets the slightly slower annual growth rate economists usually claim will be the result of leaving the EU. Brexit is already a net gain for Britain: this is a potentially terminal body blow to the Europhile narrative.
It is no longer possible to deny that the EU is a power-hungry, unethical bully. It waged a five-year war of attrition against British democracy, and Mario Draghi’s most important qualification for being appointed Italy’s new prime minister is that the European Central Bank likes him. Brussels doesn’t care about peace in Northern Ireland. It has no real interest in genuine free trade: its concern is merely to extend its jurisdiction and legal and political supremacy. It has unnecessarily imposed trade barriers on the UK on the bogus grounds of defending the single market.
At a time when Brexit Britain is taking moral stances on Hong Kong and Alexei Navalny, the EU continues to suck up to the Russians via Merkel’s beloved NordStream 2. At best, the supposed European superpower intends to act as some sort of amoral non-aligned player, friendly to China and happy to take Nato handouts in return for nothing.
Post-war European ideologues thought that it was worth giving up on national democracies for the sake of peace, efficiency and a more rational political order. That trade has failed. Instead of brilliant technocrat-kings forging a European demos, complex, finely balanced peace processes are being sacrificed in a fit of pique. The EU was meant to be the antithesis of Trumpism: it was billed as a law-governed, humanist Rechtsstaat. In reality, it is incompetent, uninterested in the rule of law, threatening and autocratic, all Trumpian hallmarks.
A 70-year experiment has failed: there is no longer any justification for the people of Europe to continue to allow themselves to be governed by these second-rate apparatchiks and retread politicians. The EU will stagger on, perhaps even for many years, but never again must it be allowed to claim the moral high ground.