Tourism represents about 10% of Spanish GDP, and more than 60% of foreign tourism in Spain comes from just three countries: the UK, Germany and France. The UK alone represents about a third of the total – more than 16 million Brits visited Spain in 2006.

Mark Stucklin is the man behind Spanish Property Insight – a property information website for those interested in buying and selling property in Spain. He is also the author of the Spanish Property Doctor Column in The Sunday Times, and the book ‘Need to Know: Buying Property in Spain’ published by Collins.

Topics we cover in the podcast

• General sentiment amongst British expats in Spain on the subject of Spanish property;
• Buying property in Spain – a now tarnished dream for many as realism and a recession take hold;
• The destruction of homes owned by British people in Spain
• • effect on Spain’s image abroad;
  • legality of the demolitions;
  • Are more homes going to be demolished?
  • Marta Andreasan’s challenge to Zapatero in the European parliament;
  • What does Spain need to do to fix its image problems?
• Will property prices in Spain drop further or is it a good time to invest again?

Articles we mention in the podcast

• British couple’s Costa dream is demolished;
• Demolition of expats villa was illegal, Spanish court rules;
• Happy New Year…we’re going to bulldoze your homes: British expats in Spain face having their houses torn down;
• The end of the Spanish dream as more homes are declared illegal;
• Don’t mention the bust;
• Land grab battle.

Welcome to the second podcast interview with Edward Hugh about the Spanish economy. Edward is an independent economist based in Barcelona. He is also a prolific blogger and is frequently quoted in the English-speaking financial press as a reliable source on what’s going on in Spain as the recession continues to unfold.

During the podcast we cover four broad areas: demograhpics and the need for exports to take over from internal demand, internal devaluation and how it will affect Spain, Zapatero and ‘solidarity‘ and the need for a structured immigration plan in Spain.

1. From the FT: “Meanwhile, the eurozone as a whole, having lost its erstwhile internal demand engines, must now hope for faster growth of net exports. So do countries hit by the financial shock, such as the UK and US. So, too, does recession-hit Japan. So, not least, does China. Either the rest of the world has a spending binge, or these countries – which make up 70 per cent of the world economy – are going to be disappointed.” If everyone is trying to sell more and no-one wants to buy more, what happens next?
2. How the eurozone needs an export surplus to replace weakening internal demand;
3. Where the eurozone countries should try and export goods to;
4. How and why eurozone countries should help countries like Brazil and India finance their imports (from eurozone countries);
5. People are not working towards change already because they are waiting for internal demand to recover;
6. How Spain, Portugal and Greece might fit into the export driven eurozone plan;
7. How devaluation is supposed to help countries out of this type of problem and why it isn’t an option for eurozone countries;
8. How Spain’s competitiveness has deteriorated – tourism is as important as exports;
9. How ‘internal devaluation’ is not a well-enough defined concept to be of use right now;
10. What is ‘internal devaluation‘?
11. Public spending cuts, public sector wage cuts, public sector job cuts, private sector wage cuts;
12. The (im)possibility of reducing public deficits which are currently above 10% to below 3% by 2013;
13. Public sector wage cuts and job losses are going to have to happen in Spain;
14. The Spanish government needs to come to an agreement with the private sector and the trade unions on wage deflation;
15. Pension reform is going to be a big debate;
16. Deficit reduction by 2013 isn’t possible unless growth returns to the economy;
17. Why is Zapatero talking about ‘solidarity‘ so much in Europe?
18. Trichet’s idea of economic help is not the same as Zapatero’s idea of economic solidarity;
19. Spain’s economy is contracting inwards on itself;
20. Unless Spain listens to the ECB and starts to reorganise its economy, it will have big problems from the second half of 2010 onwards;
21. The problems surrounding immigrant registration in Vic in Catalonia;
22. The need for Spain to accept immigrants to safeguard the future of its economy;
23. There must be jobs for immigrants for immigration to be effective;
24. Immigration in Spain must be much more structured;
25. The total number of immigrants in Spain will start to decline in a few months if current trends continue;
26. How would a smaller workforce pay for pensions and ’solidarity’ after internal devaluation?

Zapatero in Spain was accused of hoofing it on December 15 in Libertad Digital, which cited the leaders of all of Spain’s political parties criticising the Spanish PM for ‘improvising‘ during a meeting of regional first ministers:

All parliamentary groups, and especially the Popular Party, have strongly criticised the government’s ‘improvisation’ during the failed meeting of regional first ministers. In Rajoy’s opinion, Zapatero must ’stop throwing his teddy out of the cot’, ‘drop the nervous authoritarian tics’ and ’start reading up on his responsibilities’.

And an opinion article in Periodista Digital on December 8 alluded to what many Spanish politicians had been saying for some time about Zapatero, or improvisation as a leadership theory:

This problem gets to the very heart of the Prime Minister’s personality: he doesn’t believe in teamwork, nor is he a fan of sharing his thoughts and arrangements for working out agreements.

His method, in the words of current and former colleagues is ‘radical’: he radiates instructions which must then be executed by ministers who, as Carlos Solchaga said, are treated as secretaries.

Only the leader is right and whoever disagrees offends him.

Doesn’t this sound familiar to British readers? Gordon Brown in the UK has been accused of exactly the same failings this week, in two separate attacks.

The Independent, writing about this week’s failed coup attempt in Downing Street, tells us that even Brown’s current senior ministers have no idea about what his plans are for the upcoming 2010 UK general election:

In their meeting at 4pm, Mr Straw and Ms Harman impressed on the Prime Minister that senior people with experience should be given more of a role in the election campaign. Ministers wanted to know that he had “a plan” for the election.

And news came in late last night via Twitter (@charonqc and @torybear) of a series of new articles in the Mail on Sunday about former Labour Party General Secretary Peter Watts’s views on his time working with Gordon Brown:

Mr Watts says Mr Alexander complained: ‘You’d imagine that after ten years of waiting, and ten years complaining about Tony, we would have some idea of what we are going to do but we don’t seem to have any policies.

Mr Watt paints a withering portrait of Mr Brown’s style of government. ‘Downing Street was a shambles. There was no vision, no strategy, no co-ordination.

‘It was completely dysfunctional. Gordon had been so desperate to become Prime Minister that we all assumed he knew what he was going to do when he got there.

‘I imagined there was some grand plan, tucked away in a drawer. But if any such document existed, nobody seemed to know about it. Gordon was simply making it up as he went along.’

So, that’s good to know then: according to their closest political colleagues, both Brown and Zapatero are control freaks who seem to have no idea of what’s going on or where they’re trying to take us all.

The BBC has also joined in the fun, with Europe editor Gavin Hewitt writing on his blog:

“It may be that, with nearly four million Spanish workers without jobs, Prime Minister Zapatero prefers to turn the economic debate into a push for more European regulation. Others are likely to submit different questions in this grand 2020 strategy debate. How are jobs created? “

A question everyone in Spain knows Zapatero is incapable of answering for Spain, let alone the whole of Europe.

Are we discovering something more valuable to the Spanish press and the Spanish right than Zapatero-bashing?

Could it be that the editors of Spain’s newspapers and conservative political leaders in Spain feel it more important to defend Zapatero against foreign criticism than to continue rounding on him for his pathetic performance as Prime Minister during this recession?

Or have they heeded Zapatero’s call for the Spanish media to be more patriotic when Spain is playing abroad, regardless of who the captain is?

Or is it just a bit of historical Brit-bashing by some Spanish journalists – undergound tension surfacing over touchy subjects like Gibraltar and the image of Spain abroad?

The only other time I remember this happening was when Hugo Chávez waffled for too long at the Ibero-American summit in 2007, causing Spanish King Juan Carlos to undiplomatically interrupt the Venezuelan leader with a phrase that became an instant hit among Spaniards: “Why don’t you just shut up? “

It even became a mobile phone ring tone. Zapatero had defended the political honour of former Popular Party Prime Minsiter José María Aznar against accusations of facism by Chávez.

When Zapatero puts his foot in it by himself – like when he tried to hide the photo of his daughters before dinner with the Obamas in New York last September , the Spanish press has been almost universally critical of Zapatero.

And even El País rounded on him after the summer, all but calling for the sort of internal political coup that Gordon Brown has become so adept at avoiding in the UK since he became Prime Minister. Brown and Zapatero also share Mr. Bean as their alter-ego.

Seen as he has just become President of Europe – and therefore of all Europeans – in the middle of a recession, and with Spain in such a shocking state economically, I agree with Vicente Lozano in Expansión: the criticism is more than justified in this case.

On the day when the European unemployment rate has risen above 10% for the first time since the recession began – and with the official Spanish rate very nearly 20% – we also learn that Captain Zapatero has taken the serious criticism to heart and commissioned a TV production company to film him as he makes his way around Brussels.

Is that the reaction of a Spanish Prime Minister & EU President more worried about his image or about getting Europe back on the road to sustainable economic growth?

Does anyone – in Spain, the UK or Europe – really expect to be reading the following headline in June: “Zapatero turns Europe round in six months: EU unemployment falls“?

30,000 copies of the calendar, titled “Logroño, the people’s capital” have been published by the Logroño town hall, under the leadership of socialist mayor Tomás Santos.

Many right-wing and mainstream media organisations in Spain have picked up on the story today because they have ‘forgotten‘ to include many of the Christian saints and even some Spanish national holidays.

Saints’ days are big news in Spain.

Mohammed’s birthday on February 24, the end of Ramadan on September 9 and Pakistan independence day have all made it into the calendar, although it seems Pakistan independence day is actually August 14.

Christmas on December 25, Epiphany (also Three Kings day in Spain) on January 6 and Spain’s national holiday (and Columbus day) on October 12 have not been selected for this year’s calendar.

Clearly this hasn’t gone down well with the Spanish right or the Catholic Church in Spain, and will leave many Spaniards wondering what mayor Santos is up to in Logroño.

Curiously, looking at a bit of history on the Spanish Wikipedia page for Logroño, we can see that it was awarded its flag – a red and white St. Andrew’s Cross – by Fernando III in 1237 to commemorate success in the battle of Baeza 10 years previously – on November 30, 1227 – following his reconquest of the town from the Muslims.

At the start of a general election year, this question is not trifling; either both sides will use it to try and out-forecast the other or both sides will avoid bringing the subject up except under duress because they both know there’s no real plan yet.

Britain is already over-spent. What happens if (when??) there is another banking crisis or similar and the government has already sold so much of our children’s future to pay for today’s sins:

There is the question of whether a sovereign crisis would have a knock-on effect on British banks’ balance sheets. As such, 2010 could turn into a more chaotic year than many expect.

Would the government be able to bailout the banks again? What effect would that have on the UK’s economy? What would happen if other industries seen as key economic pillars needed bailouts?

Surreal? Apparently not. Ambrose Evans Pritchard reports in the Telegraph that Morgan Stanley has issued a report warning that:

“In an extreme situation a fiscal crisis could lead to some domestic capital flight, severe pound weakness and a sell-off in UK government bonds. The Bank of England may feel forced to hike rates to shore up confidence in monetary policy and stabilize the currency, threatening the fragile economic recovery,”

Capital flight in the UK? This would apparently put us on a par with Greece and in a worse position than Italy, Mexico or Brazil.

Can we be certain first of all that bond investors will actually buy all of this new government debt faced with the possibility of increased sovereign risk? And who is then going to pay for the government spending?

“We need to raise VAT to 20pc and make seriously dramatic cuts in services that go beyond anything that Alistair Darling or David Cameron are talking about. Nobody seems to have the courage to face up to this,” said Mr Buik.

Moody’s is wondering whether or not to downgrade the UK, for the same reasons:

‘While assumed capacity for fiscal adjustment currently supports the maintenance of the Aaa rating of the UK government, this assumption will have to be validated by actions in the not-too-distant future to continue to provide support for the rating.

“Assumed capacity” sounds a bit dodgy, doesn’t it? Doesn’t it read a bit like: “We assume the UK government has the capacity to sort this out if wants to, but we’re not sure and we haven’t seen any actual evidence that it’s going to do anything“?

Lots of articles in the Spanish press on this awful 2009 Spanish unemployment figure but the one which has most caught my attention is this one in ABC – “3,923,603 unemployed…and another 1,400,000 on training courses“:

The amount of people who are really looking for work at then end of 2009 is more than 5.3 million. The government, however, excludes 1.4 million people from this figure for different reasons – like attending a training course or receiving farming subsidies or the emergency 420 euro unemployment benefit.

So that’s 3.92 million Spaniards who officially are really doing absolutely nothing at all, plus 1.4 million Andalusian and Extremaduran farmers, employment course students and those receiving the 420€ emergency unemployment subsidy who are in very, very dire straits indeed.

What’s more, the ABC article points out that, thanks to Spain’s magnificent autonomous community system with devolved regional powers and responsibilities, the government in Madrid has no idea at all how many people are taking part in any regional back-to-work initiatives which might have been organised in, say, Catalonia or Murcia.

Murcia ended 2009 as the Spanish region where unemployment increased the most – a 34.4% increase in 2009, compared to a 25% average increase in all of Spain.

Not mentioned anywhere in the official figures, of course, is the total number of unemployed people who are actually working somewhere in Spain’s enormous underground economy. If anyone has any good guesses about that figure, say so in the comments.

Finally, there are now 247,741 fewer self-employed people in Spain thanks to the recession.

And there is still no big plan…

Hoon and Hewitt – both former cabinet secretaries – sent a letter to their fellow MPs asking them to support their leadership challenge, provoking immediate worries amongst Brown supporters that current members of his cabinet might support the plot.

The pair say in their letter that they wish to hold an immediate leadership contest in the Parliamentary Labour Party in order to sort out once and for all whether Brown should remain at the helm of government and the Labour Party.

The timing of the challenge is extremely delicate, coming at the start of a general election year, and the challengers believe the PLP is still “deeply divided over the question of the leadership”.

In their letter, Hoon and Hewitt say: “Many colleagues have expressed their frustration at the way in which this question is affecting our political performance. We have therefore come to the conclusion that the only way to resolve this issue would be to allow every member to express their view in a secret ballot.”

Furthermore, they think that: “This could be done quickly and with minimum disruption to the work of MPs and the Government. Whatever the outcome the whole of the party could then go forward, knowing that this matter had been sorted out once and for all.”

By the end of the afternoon, most senior cabinet members, including Jack Straw and Alistair Darling had voiced lukewarm support for the Prime Minister, despite having good reason to be frustrated with his performance since the last leadership crisis in June 2009.

The Conservative Party quickly made fun of the renewed Labour Party leadership confusion, posting a spoof general election poster on their blog, with Hoon and Hewitt seemingly supporting the Tory election slogan – “We can’t go on like this.” The Hoon and Hewitt coup version reads, alongside a photo of them: “Even we can’t go on like this.”

El vocabulario de esta semana

Once again, Londonistan is the weakest link in the battle to defend those democratic traditions against attack – both from without and from within.

Political Islam is using English laws and traditions – of freedom of speech and the right to protest – against their enemies, traditions their own ideology seems to be against.

Melanie points us to a longer post by Alexander Hitchens on Standpoint’s blog about how Hamas is using London lawyers and English laws to try and “have senior Israeli leaders arrested for alleged war crimes when they visit European countries“.

The Telegraph reports today on the trial of seven Muslim men on public order offences after they demonstrated against the return of the Royal Anglian Regiment last March, chanting “British soldiers, murderers”, “British soldiers, baby killers”, “British soldiers burn in hell”.

The seven have pleaded not guilty and have already managed to belittle the judge in his own courtroom:

The seven defendants have refused to stand up when the judge enters and leaves the courtroom, as is the normal practice. They have said they only stand for Allah. The district judge has accepted the reasoning.

All this in the same week as Amjem Choudary’s Islam4UK organisation wants to organise a march through the newly-iconic village of Wootton Bassett to protest against supposed atrocities committed by British soldiers in Afghanistan.

We must not curtail his or anyone else’s right to protest – but does that right to protest exist in any place at any time? I think CharonQC and Oedipus Lex have the right idea:

“I think his deliberate selection of Wootton Basset, designed to be inflammatory, is tasteless. I hope the government stops it on public order rather than free speech grounds … Choudary and his tawdry plan to protest at Wootton Basset simply reveals that he has no manners and respect for the sensitivities of others – yet requires us to have sensitivity for his views on Islam.”

Where do we draw the line between respecting the law and allowing those who might be the enemies of the nation to use a nation’s laws as a weapon against itself?

Maybe the Belgian Van Rompuy will be able to calm him down a bit and help him steer a steadier course through 300 meetings and 10 top level summits before the end of June, including the one Zapatero will be most enthusiastic about – a longed-for second audience with The Anointed One from Washington in Madrid on May 24.

He could do a lot of damage in 300 meetings and 10 summits. He’s got his hands on the helm of a 27-country ship with 500 million passengers. The Titanic was nothing compared to what might happen next.

And he’s very aware that on his watch, he’ll have an enormous opportunity for improving his image, if not for improving Europe. Spanish Secretary of Sate for Europe, Diego López Garrido has said that the next six months will give Spain “an exceptional capacity to influence the world” and increase its geopolitical standing.

What Europe seems not to realise is that it is likely to be an exceptionally negative influence that is about to wash over the continent.

Zapatero has stated that his top priority – his obsession – over the next six months is to leave the recession behind and create jobs for Europe. This from the man who took two years to admit there was a recession in the first place. Run away, European people, run away to America or Africa or anywhere else!

Get ready for a Euro-sized version of Plan-E – maybe called Plan-EU. Pavements, cycle lanes and parks will be dug-up and repainted from Lisbon to Leipzig. If the EU has a deficit, it will quadruple by June. If it doesn’t have one yet, it will do soon.

And it’s not exactly leadership from the front, is it? Spain is at the wrong end of all of the economic rankings from the last year or two.

The Germans at the ECB must be quaking in their boots right now. Zapatero will show them how to spend their money properly! And how can it possibly be good that Zapatero gets to help Greece out of its recession right now?

Letting the same Spanish government which has done so little (or almost nothing at all, in fact) to sort out the Spanish economy during the financial crisis and recession get its hands on the wheel of the great-ship Europe – at such a delicate moment in European history, with so much of our future prosperity riding on the decisions taken over the next few months and with half-serious talk of eurozone break-up appearing in the financial press – would appear to be a reckless move indeed.

Not that this will worry Zapatero; he will still be smiling enthusiastically in June, however much havoc he manages to wreak between now and then.

Spain’s Constitutional Court will soon tell us what it thinks and attempt to set the rules for the ‘what is Spain’ debate for the next few years.

According to El País today, Spain’s Constitutional Court is almost ready to rule that: “the only nation is the Spanish one and that Catalonia may not have national symbols unless they are related to Catalan nationality and not the word ‘nation’.“

Confused? Me too. How can you have a nationality and not a nation? How can you have nations within nations? How can national symbols be related only to a ‘nationality’ and not, at the same time, to a ‘nation’? Shall it be a ‘nationality flag’ instead of a ‘national flag’, a ‘nationality anthem’ instead of a ‘national anthem’?

The judges are apparently working away hard on this one. The relevant references seem to be articles 8.1 and 1 of the Catalan Statute text and article 2 of the Spanish Constitution.

Article 1 of the Catalan Statute states that: “Catalonia, as a nationality, exercises self-government as an Autonomous Community according to the (Spanish) Constitution and via the present Statute, which is its basic institutional rule.“

Article 8.1 of the Catalan Statute states that: “Catalonia, defined as a nationality in Article 1, has as its national symbols a flag, a bank holiday and an anthem.“

Article 2 of the Spanish Consitution states that: “The Constitution is based on the indissoluble unity of the Spanish Nation, a common and indivisible homeland which belongs to all Spaniards, and recognises and guarantees the right to autonomy of the nationalities and regions which constitute it and the solidarity between them all.“

Furthermore, defining ‘Catalonia as a nation‘ in the preamble would not, despite the most fervent wishes of the Catalan Parliament, imply any equality with the idea of the Spanish nation or infer any sovereignty.

The Spanish dictionary defines ‘nation‘ and ‘nationality‘ as:

nación.

(From lat. natĭo, -ōnis).

1. f. The group of inhabitants of a country ruled by the same government.

2. f. The territory of that country.

3. f. The group of people from the same place and who generally speak the same language and share a common heritage.

nacionalidad.

1. f. Condition and peculiar character of the peoples and inhabitants of an nation.

2. f. The very state of the person born or naturalised in a nation.

3. f. Spain. Autonomous community which, in its Statute, is accorded a special historical and cultural identity.

4. f. Spain. Official name for some Spanish autonomous communities.

It’s now no clearer and we can more easily see why it’s taken some of Spain’s most learned legal minds three years and such hard work over the Christmas holidays to try and untangle this to the satisfaction of all concerned.

I’ll let you know what they decide when the judgement is published. Expect it to be big news in Spain towards the middle or the end of the month.

Gordo needs to look strong in 2010 with the general election only 5-months away so a double-whammy Afghan-Yemen terrorism summit is a good way to start, especially when a large part of the attention will be on the invasiveness of the airport body scanners which now appear to be all but inevitable.

But the new body scanners won’t really stop determined terrorists, will they? Spanish TV news ran the story last night and ended by saying that the new scanners were great but that they weren’t very good when it came to detecting liquids in bags under people’s clothes. I’m no expert but a quick google for ‘liquid explosives‘ turns up a quarter of a million results.

If the Small Wars Journal is right and Al-Qaeda is learning how to get around a Western socio-cultural terrorist blind spot based on social class (the Washington Post reckons it was an Afghan Army officer, not your average illiterate Afghan soldier, who blew himself up in the CIA gym at FOB Chapman), body-scanner misery for millions of innocent travellers won’t stop the bombers with explosives in their underpants.

The Spectator’s Coffee House blog points out an interesting comment from a pilot:

Even pilots’ toothpaste was examined; one pilot commented: “If I want to kill everyone (on board) I don’t faff around with plastic explosives, I point the nose at the ground”.

They suggest the politically delicate idea of profiling as a better way of trying to identify would-be terrorists, given that: “the overwhelming majority of global terrorism is committed by radical Muslims.“

Airline chiefs think body scanners are a bad idea too, as they’re not practical given the current state of the technology, according to the Guardian:

airline industry chiefs warned it would be impossible to screen all travellers with a new generation of body scanners the government now wants introduced at airports.

So it’s impossible to screen everyone who gets on an aircraft. It’s also impossible to read someone’s mind: if a suicide bomber is willing to play life’s ultimate joker card and doesn’t want to hang around life any longer, there’s precious little we can do to stop him until it’s too late.

Which is why I suspect Coffee House thinks profiling is a better idea – at least it’s an attempt to try and second-guess the intent of air-travellers.

Until someone comes up with a giant air-security mash-up between Facebook and Salesforce, the speed of distrust will slow us all down considerably.

The suicide terrorists will still find a way through sooner or later as different countries take different amounts of time to introduce different security measures with differing degrees of success.

I remember travelling from Alicante to Paris a month after the March 11 train bombings in Madrid in 2004: security at Alicante airport consisted of a couple of fat security guards smoking cigarettes and twiddling with their batons.

At Charles de Gualle in Paris, the French Army had all but taken over the airport, had taped off all of the cunning hidey-holes where a clever terrorist might hide a bomb and were blasting an ominous message over the tannoy system: “If you are leaving ze bags wizout attention, we will ‘ave to be blowing zem up.“

That would means that the recession has more than doubled the number of young people on the dole in Spain.

The article tries to go into the reasons for the huge increase and touches on some of the important systemic problems that cause so many Spanish youths to end up at unemployment offices in addition to the temporary employment contracts that so many of them were on during the boom years:

Young Spanish workers, like their counterparts in the rest of Europe, face other obstacles like union rules, long-term contracts and legal protections that shelter older workers and discourage new hiring, Mr. Osterman said.

“There is a cohort of people who are condemned to a permanently stagnant career path in Spain,” he said. “It’s very worrisome.”

It also notes that the Spanish government’s attempts to solve the problem are largely useless, especially in the weak economic position it finds itself in, with Zapatero’s government now: “spending roughly 30 billion euros a year on unemployment benefits, but the money is doing little to prepare younger workers for the future.“

The NYT suggests that Spain should “invest more heavily in vocational education and retraining, and require the jobless to improve their skills.”

A fine suggestion, but preemptive at the moment. There’s currently no coherent national business plan to replace construction and tourism, so how are all the young people (and the older unemployed) supposed to know what to retrain as?

I was commenting with an American friend before Christmas that Spain, as a society, isn’t particularly entrepreneurial when compared to somewhere like the US (and perhaps the UK). A Russian friend has told me over the holidays that most of her friends dream of owning their own companies or becoming business consultants.

So many young people in Spain still dream of becoming some type of civil servant via the famed public examination system to be selected for a stable, relatively well-paid job for life with great hours and holidays.

It’s easy to see why when comparatively it takes so long to set up a new company here, especially in the recession, and when the private employment market is so plagued with systemic problems.

During last night’s New Year’s Eve TV replays of weird and laughable moments from recent Spanish cultural history, a Spanish comedian in the 1980’s pretended to be on the phone apologising to a friend for having ‘encouraged him to move back to Spain to spend 16 years looking for a job‘.

The systemic youth unemployment problems Spain is facing aren’t new and there’s still no real plan for a sustainable Spanish economy – or sustainable youth employment.

Edward Hugh is an independent economist based in Barcelona. He is also a prolific blogger and is frequently quoted in the English-speaking financial press as a reliable source on what’s going on in Spain as the recession continues to unfold.

I have been following Edward’s work since the summer, mostly via his very active Facebook page, and thought it would be a great idea to do a podcast with him about the current state of the Spanish economy and some other important events which are affecting it right now.

Fortunately for us, Edward thought it would be a great idea too.

There is so much we could have talked about given the state of things, so we have floated the idea of doing a more regular podcast in 2010 to provide comment and analysis on the latest economic stories and trends from Spain, as well as further explaining some important individual aspects of what’s happening.

In this first 40-minute podcast, we chat about the following topics:

• How does what’s happened in Dubai affect the economic situation in Greece, Spain and the EU?
• Are left- or right-wing political parties causing or solving more problems during the recession?
• Will the Germans, the French or the EU be able to bailout several European countries at the same time if there are several sovereign defaults?
• Are the ECB and the EU trying to pre-empt the IMF in Greece and Spain?
• What are the underlying structural problems with the eurozone funding plan?
• Why is the ECB channelling funds through monetary and financial institutions to buy up government debt in the eurozone?
• How the ECB is trying to use a carrot and stick approach with eurozone governments to control national government deficits and public policy?
• Is IMF intervention now inevitable in Greece?
• Will the ECB will try to play politics and pressure Zapatero in the run up to the 2012 general elections in Spain?
• Is the situation in Spain similar to the situation in Greece?
• Why don’t Zapatero and the Spanish government seem to be reacting?
• Why is there no coherent plan to get Spain back on its feet?
• What is going on with Spanish banks?
• Will unemployment in Spain reach 25% by the end of 2010?
• Which is more important in Spanish economics: image or hard data?
• Will it be possible for the Spanish government to reduce the deficit from over 10% of GDP to less than 3% by 2012 or 2013?
• What state will the Spanish economy be in by the end of 2010?
• What will happen to Spain when the ECB raises eurozone interest rates?
• Might Spain soon be in a worse economic position than Greece?
• What the ratings agencies are trying to achieve with their warnings on Spain?
• Why won’t the Spanish government tell the Spanish people the truth about what’s going on with the Spanish economy?
• Is Zapatero really the biggest problem for the Spanish economy right now?

Please leave your comments for Edward below when you finish listening.

Hello and welcome to my first ever Sunday interview podcast. Expect this to be a regular – indeed weekly – feature on my blog. Today’s Sunday interview is with Aurora Humarán (@AMHumaran) , the owner of the Aleph translation agency in Buenos Aires and since September 30 this year also founding chairwoman of the AIPTI - a new association for translators and interpreters.

Au – as she likes to be known – very graciously invited me to become a founding member of her new association over the summer, an offer which I rather unfortunately had to decline – I’m not joining any new business projects until I get my own projects a bit more organised – something which you’ll have noticed if you’ve been trying unsuccessfully to read this blog regularly for the past few months.

I did say I would love to interview her about her association though to see how things were going.

In the podcast, Au tells us:

• How the new association is coming along;
• Why she decided she needed to create a new association;
• Why it wasn’t enough to just continue with her popular NdT internet forums;
• What the ethical basis for the AIPTI is;
• How she sees the AIPTI as being different from existing translation associations such as the American Translators’ Association or the Insitutute of Translation and Interpreting;
• How she managed to convince such illustrious linguists as Noam Chomsky and Valentín García Yebra to become honorary members;
• What she thinks about globalisation, big translation agencies and trends in the translation world;

And many, many other interesting things. Please leave your comments and questions below.

Section 44 of the Terrorism Act 2000 is apparently the offending piece of legislation, allowing: ‘any constable in uniform to stop a pedestrian in an area or at a place specified in the authorisation and to search a) the pedestrian and b) anything carried by him‘.

Like this:

a BBC journalist was stopped and searched by two police community support officers as he took photographs of St Paul’s Cathedral. Days earlier Andrew White, 33, was stopped and asked to give his name and address after taking photographs of Christmas lights on his way to work in Brighton.

And in July Alex Turner, an amateur photographer from Kent, was arrested after he took pictures of Mick’s Plaice, a fish and chip shop in Chatham.

Senior police officers can give authorisation for a specific area of a city – even orally – and, as the Indy points out:

… due to the fear that the information could be used by terrorists to plan attacks, most of the the exact locations covered by Section 44 authorisations are kept secret, meaning members of the public have no idea if they are in one or not.

So Spanish and British tourists alike had better watch out or they’ll all end up in the slammer for ‘taking photos in a terrorist manner‘.

Haven’t the British police got better things to be doing with their time and our money?

Spanish people care. The British press, though, hardly thought it worth a mention:

In the UK, few newspapers picked up the story. The Times, for example, mentioned the conflict yesterday and 11 readers took the time to leave a comment. El Mundo published a story about it and more than 54o readers left comments.

That seems about right to me. From the very time I came to Spain, Gibraltar has clearly been a touchy subject.

Sitting in Bea’s mum’s house one lunchtime 11 years ago, Carmen stuffed me with fried squid and meatballs and then good-heartedly made the most of my inability to open my mouth with the big question-accusation: “What about Gibraltar, then? Spanish Gibraltar!“

A decade later, the British ambassador has apologised with supreme indifference and London has taken the opportunity to remind Madrid that its Civil Guards should stay out of Gibraltar’s territorial waters.

“Gibraltar doesn’t have any territorial waters!” reply the Spaniards, “look at the small print of the Treaty of Utrecht! And you shot our flag!“

“Terribly sorry, old chap, will have a word with our boys. It was only a red and yellow marker buoy pennant though.“

“It was a Spanish flag! The Royal Navy machine-gunned it. We have photos.“

“Well, ok, but please have your Civil Guards stay out of our territorial waters.“

“Gibraltar doesn’t have any territorial waters, according to the Treaty of Utrecht. And the runway and the airport are illegal too.“

“Your foreign minister looked awfully smart in that photo with Miliband on top of the Rock. What shall we do with the 99% of Gibraltar residents who wish to remain British subjects?“

“Err….perhaps we could turn it into a theme park with the monkeys.“

Things probably weren’t helped by coming so soon after a Spanish loss of face over the ransom payment to the Somali pirates to buy the freedom of the Alakrana’s fishermen.

I wonder what will happen next?

As in Catalonia, the very idea of the word ‘nation‘ is being put to the test, as the referendum white paper points out:

At the moment, Scotland is a nation within a larger state, unable to speak for itself on all relevant matters.

The ‘National Conversation‘ – about, for and with the Scottish people about Scotland, of course, not a ‘National Conversation’ involving the rest of the UK – seems, as in Catalonia, to have been structured by and for the political and business elites and to have left out most normal Scottish people, as some informed commentators point out:

To answer this we need to understand who and what has gained from devolution so far? When compared with the pre-devolution expectations, there is a clear mismatch. The groups who have gained the most are the insiders – those who knew how to work access and networks pre-devolution and have adjusted to continuing to influence and shape decision-making post-devolution.

The SNP’s preferred outcome for the referendum is full independence at all levels.

But what should we do with the apparatus of state which has served us all so well for so long now? It all starts to fall down when we get to the level of the state, doesn’t it?

Does Alex Salmond really want the British monarch to become the Queen of Scotland? Would the Catalans have Juan Carlos I of the Kingdom of Spain & Catalonia? Do Salmond and Montilla want Scottish and Catalan regiments standing guard over Barcelona and Edinburgh?

What is a country? What is a region? What is a nation? What is a state?

Do today’s political independence movements in the UK and Spain represent historic claims to the sovereignty of oppressed peoples – à la William Wallace or Sant Jordi – or are they more about business and political elites trying to take advantage of ‘national’ identities which history has already proven anachronistic?

Already disorientated over what to call the new European airline – they rashly opted for the imaginative new ‘TopCo‘ and two separate but equally imaginative ‘OpCos‘ to allow a Brit to run BA in the UK and a Spaniard to run Iberia in Spain – the new company will undoubtedly suffer from regular headaches with a corporate tax base in Madrid and an operating base in London.

When the corporate flying aces come back down to earth from the dizzying heights of international mergers – after hallucinating together over important brand synergies and significant cross-cultural cost savings – will the BA-Iberia merger really provide passengers with more assurance, comfort and efficiency?

Perhaps Willie Walsh is the man they need to sort out all the confusion. The FT thinks he might be: restless, Mr. Walsh hasn’t had a holiday since 2005 but even he doesn’t seem to be quite certain of how it will all work in the real world.

Regarding the possibility, for example, of a BA-Iberia-TopCo-OpCo(UK) buying some extra parking spaces at Heathrow, which might be freed-up following the Lufthansa buy-out of BMI:

Mr Walsh has long said BA would be interested in buying the airline or its slots, which raises an interesting point about the structure of the proposed BA-Iberia structure.

Would the purchase of the slots, should it happen, be done by the BA “OpCo”?

“Yes,” said Mr Walsh, “or it could be TopCo”.

[From FT.com / Companies / Airlines - Spanish step is start of ex-pilot’s global wish-list ]

The BA-Iberia deal has been modeled on Air France-KLM and it could open the way to some kind of deal with other, non-European airlines: Quantas and American Airlines are the two mentioned in the article.

There’s nothing like a bit of variety in life, but it seems there are more headaches and agitation on the horizon for now.

Zapatero – who some online have now taken to calling ‘ZParo’ – ‘ZUnemployment‘ – is “averse to pessimism” asserts the newspaper and it’s easy to see how they might have reached that conclusion after the last two surreal years in Spain. Crucially:

Bold labour-market reforms to make it easier to fire workers will not be [on the list], to avoid upsetting Mr Zapatero’s trade-union friends. He prefers to rely on talks between the “social partners” that are unlikely to produce big change.

Spain’s two-tier labour system is inefficient as well as unfair. Half the workers are on permanent contracts that make them extremely hard (and costly) to fire. Most of the rest scrape by in a netherworld of short-term contracts, bouts of unemployment and the black market.

[From Spain's economic troubles: Unsustainable | The Economist]

The article lists a host of other serious symptoms which are complicating both the diagnosis and the treatment: shocking public finances, tax rises taking away purchasing power from Spanish consumers and the possibility of more mortgage defaults when unemployment rises even further.

Zapatero’s brand of cheerful, whimsical romanticism is important to take note of because, as economist Edward Hugh said last month, the Spanish economy is not just Europe’s new sicko but is already moribund: “basically the Spanish economy is dying slowly, a day at a time, at the moment.“

I agree with the Economist’s assessment that ZP’s new Sustainable Economy Bill will be about as effective as giving an aspirin to an intensive care patient. Cough medicine is not enough to stop Spain from slipping into an economic coma for the next decade or two.

Spain’s current senior consultant is refusing to recognise the symptoms, correctly diagnose his patient or even try to prescribe the right medication.

Bader with a US soldier in Iraq

Their plight was evident in their words and in the tone of the conversation. “We’re lost, we have nothing left to work with. We don’t know what to do next,” Bader said, “We can’t trust anyone anymore.“

Bader and Waleed worked as interpreters with the British Army in Basra as part of the Multinational Force in Iraq. The UK’s rejection of them is not a new story but that doesn’t help them very much in their current situation.

Bader, who is single, worked with the British King’s Own Royal Border Regiment for 10 months and then with the Americans for a further eight months. Waleed, who is married and has children, worked with various British battalions for seven and a-half months from October 2006 until June 2007.

They say there were five interpreters working in their battle group and estimate that on average there were around 24 interpreters working alongside them at any one time in their logistics base for the British, and perhaps 100 interpreters in total working in their area. They say it’s difficult to be completely accurate with those figures because “we were always out on patrols“.

Stuck in Damascus and with rejected asylum applications from the British Foreign and Commonwealth Office, despite being certified, card-carrying UNHCR refugees and former British Army interpreters, they feel they have nowhere to go: they cannot go back to Basra because the militias are still after them and they are not allowed to move to the UK.

After working for the British, Bader spent two years living in Moscow. He travelled back to Basra in January this year to try and start his life over again, believing that things were by then safer. The militias hunted him down and, when they couldn’t find him, detained and jailed his father. When they did catch up with him, they shot him so he fled to Damascus. “The militias still control everything,” he says.

They have contact with their families in Basra, who tell them the militias are still after them but they say they cannot go back now. The UN tells them they should go back to Iraq. The Syrians don’t want much to do with them because they’re ex-MNF interpreters. The UK and US embassy security guards in Damascus refuse them entry, they say, even when they show them all of their papers.

“The British Army was very cool with us, treated us very well,” says Bader, “The British government is the problem.“

An officer from the 9th/12th Lancers in April 2006, for example, commended Waleed for his work in a letter:

Throughout his time he has been employed as one of the Battle Group’s interpreters. He has performed his duties to my complete satisfaction and has been an invaluable asset at a number of meetings. Waleed is honest and reliable. (…) He is trustworthy and has given good advice on cultural matters.

Brigadier James Everard, Commander 20 Armoured Brigade, wrote an open letter to local Iraqi staff employed to help his brigade in Basra, noting that:

I am fully aware that your association with the MNF is dangerous. The immense contribution which you are making towards a safe and secure environment within Iraq is not always recognised by members of your own community. Your bravery is an example to others. You have my utmost respect and admiration for continuing to work in these difficult circumstances.

The BBC reckons that almost 700 Iraqis who worked with the British in our war in their country have been refused entry into the UK for one reason or another. Questions have been asked in Parliament. Reading around, though, it seems the most common excuse the UK government puts forward is that ‘they weren’t working long enough for the UK‘. The government set an arbitrary 12-month limit.

Would allowing 700 people who risked their lives and the lives of their families in very dangerous circumstances on our behalf – regardless of whether or not you agree with the war – really make that much of a difference to Gordon Brown and David Miliband?

Aren’t these precisely the sort of people who we should be be enormously proud of and willing to accept into our country and society?

Bader and Waleed have sent me the details of some people they worked with, so I’ll try and contact them and blog about what they say, too but, for the moment: what do you think they should try and do next? Can we do anything to help them?

This is the latest story in a recent stream of positive news about the UK economy and represents the first drop since September 2008.

Despite the 48% rally in the FTSE 100 since the beginning of March, few UK business leaders are expecting a strong recovery of the British economy in 2010.

Last week, for example, a study by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development revealed that the UK job market has fared better than those of the US or its European counterparts.

There remain, however, wide geographical disparities within the new data on business failures.

The north-east of England saw the highest increase in the number of insolvencies in August, up 92.7% compared with the same period last year.

About 0.09% of UK businesses failed in August, less than the 0.11% in July.

Rolf Hickman, managing director of pH – one of the companies belonging to Experian, which carried out the research – said: “Although it is too early to tell whether this is an indication of a more positive outlook, one thing is for sure: businesses are distinctly aware of the current environment and the need to be cautious in any business dealings.”

Among the findings from Experian were that postal and telecommunications businesses saw the highest level of financial distress and that businesses employing fewer than five people proved most resilient.

Smaller businesses – with five employees or fewer – were the most resilient in August, with insolvency rates of 0.05% for businesses with up to two employees and 0.12% for firms with between two and five employees.

El vocabulario de esta semana

The root words are ‘thing‘, ‘body‘ and ‘where‘.

Additionally, we are going to use the words ‘some‘, ‘any‘, ‘every‘ and ‘no‘ as prefixes: we are going to add them to the beginning of the roots words.

You can choose whichever combination you like, all of them are valid.

Examples

• some + body = somebody
• every + where = everywhere
• any + thing = anything
• etc, etc..

Complete List
Here is the complete list of possible combinations:

• some + thing = something
• some + body = somebody
• some + where = somewhere
• any + thing = anything
• any + body = anybody
• any + where = anywhere
• every + body = everybody
• every + thing = everything
• every + where = everywhere
• no + body = nobody
• no + thing = nothing
• no + where = nowhere

And then it’s easy to make-up phrases like:

• Everybody has something
• Nobody has everything
• Everybody is somewhere
• Anybody can have everything

No Double Negatives

Be careful with double negatives!

You must remember with this type of phrase that in English you cannot normally have two negatives in one sentence.

In Spanish and other languages it is perfectly acceptable to say things like “Nadie tiene nada nunca” (Nobody never has nothing) where we can see that the negation has been repeated three times. This is wrong in English!

English only normally allows us to use one negation in each sentence.

This phrase, for example, is wrong:

“Nobody never has nothing“

It’s wrong because it contains three negations. The correct version would be:

“Nobody ever has anything”

The alternative option is always the ‘any’ prefix: anything, anybody, anywhere.
Are the following phrases right or wrong?

1. Nobody has nothing
2. Nobody is nowhere
3. Nobody has nobody
4. Nobody likes nothing

A former student of mine called me at the end of July and told me she had to repeat her English pronunciation exam in September and that her lecturer was a tough marker. Could I help her pass her exam and advance towards her goal of becoming a primary school teacher?

Skype for English pronunciation practice

Oh, and she wouldn’t actually be able to come to class as she’d be working in a shoe shop at the beach and then babysitting in the Pyrenees until the end of August.

At first glance, this was going to be a tough one. I suggested we try Skype, which we did and had 10 Skype English pronunciation classes over the summer. It worked. My student passed her exam!

She had a set list of texts she needed to prepare – about 50 nursery rhymes and short stories, some of which were normal texts and some of which seemed to be designed to test certain aspects of her pronunciation.

The nursery rhymes were things like Humpty Dumpty:

Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall,
Humpty Dumpty had a great fall.
All the king’s horses,
And all the king’s men,
Couldn’t put Humpty together again

And the made up phrases for practicing pronunciation looked like this:

The two twins thought the teacher had told the truth

Which is pretty difficult to say well if you’re learning English.

From a class management point of view, the only problem that was specific to Skype was once when her Skype set-up refused to work and we had to postpone the class, and a couple of times she had to restart the computer to get it all working properly.

One thing which we found really useful was the Skype chat window when we got stuck or confused with certain words. Although you can’t do phonetic symbols in Skype, you can invent some alternative ones which do the job just fine.

Another thought I’ve had is that Skype might actually be better than face-to-face classes for teaching and learning pronunciation because not being able to see the other person forces you to listen and pronounce much more clearly than if you have the accompanying face movements and body language.

It’s also great in terms of time management, of course. You just concentrate on your pronunciation for 60 minutes and then get on with whatever you were doing. No driving to and from class, traffic jams, finding a parking space or other time-wasting activities.

I will definitely be doing some more classes like this in the near future.

Professional human translators look at the output of machine translation efforts and try not to sigh too loudly. There have been great advances in machine translation but it still takes an experienced professional translator longer to correct the output of machine translation than it does for him to start from scratch.

Problems with machine translation

From the client’s point of view, it appears as though we should pay more attention. After all, Google and all of these great companies have invented new translation tools and it appears you can now go on to the Internet and just copy and paste your text into a little box and voilà, more or less you get the idea.

Is it good enough? You’re not quite sure if you’re getting all of the understanding you need, are you? A professional translator could give you 100% certainty but you would have to pay him, and that is going to depend on how important the document is to you.

How could a professional translator help you in another way? A good one, after all, wants to look after his clients.

What if he used machine translation and then just corrected for meaning, not grammar? Let’s look at an example. Here’s an original phrase:

“What could professional translators do to help their clients about the gaps in meaning which are evident once you know what you’re looking at? Where could we draw a new line between translation quality and the everyday, harsh reality of our clients’ companies?”

And here’s its machine-translated equivalent:

“What could professional translators to assist their clients on the gaps that are obvious once you know what you’re looking at? Where do we draw a new line between the quality of translation and daily life, the harsh reality of companies are our customers?“

Clearly the second phrase is not quite right – there are all sorts of little errors (grammatical, syntactical and others) but you get the idea although there seems to be more confusion at the end (highlighted in red).

Imagine your professional translator looked at that output and, instead of correcting it all, just sent you something like this:

“What could professional translators to assist their clients on the gaps that are obvious once you know what you’re looking at? Where do we draw a new line between the quality of translation and the daily, harsh reality of our customers’ companies?”

It’s not perfect, it’s not Shakespeare, it’s not what you would get if the translator started from scratch and it’s not good enough for your important public and private documents, but if you just want to be sure of understanding what you’re reading, it’s a better option than the machine translation attempt.

We must imagine this idea for a full length article or document, of course.

Professional translators

• Would your clients like this sort of service?
• Would you be prepared to hand over something which is not 100%?
• Would it be possible to correct just for meaning in longer texts?
• Would you be prepared to offer a lower rate for this type of service – low enough to interest your clients – in exchange for running it all through a machine translation service and just correcting for meaning?

Clients:

• Is this type of service – basically having extra confidence in your understanding of texts in another language – something you would like to be able to ask for?
• Would you be prepared to pay for it?