Spanish Politics

Is it any wonder Spain and the UK are in the state they’re in right now economically? Zapatero, in Spain, and Brown, in the UK – two socialist prime ministers in the middle of a recession – have been accused by their political colleagues of making things up as they go along.

Have European leaders not been reading the news for the last two or three years? Have they not seen what Zapatero has done to the Spanish economy? Maybe they have no choice about it. Nor do the people of Europe.

So the Royal Navy shot up a buoy which was or wasn’t flying a red and yellow Spanish flag five miles off the coast of Gibraltar a couple of weeks ago. Who cares?

El País, the left-leaning Spanish newspaper which has most vigorously supported Zapatero’s socialist government and which belongs to the left-leaning PRISA media empire, has launched an astonishing attack this morning on ZP’s government and his handling of the economy.

The killing and dying continue in Afghanistan as in all wars but Europe and the US have neither any clear idea of what they are doing there nor a successful strategy for executing their plan and they won’t accept the implications a proper moral commitment would require.

The police chief inspector – forty-nine year old Eduardo Antonio Puelles – was married with two children and had been a policeman for twenty-seven years. He was the current head of the Bilbao police intelligence department.

Whilst reading the paper and thinking about what to write about in the “English Life – Spanish Life” categories on my blog over the next few weeks, I jotted down a few current problems which the UK and Spain share. Some are long-term, others more immediate.