Have Yourselves A Crisis Little Christmas

The Mallorcans don’t really do Christmas. This is a half truth. They may not go the full-stomached, cloyingly sentimental nine yards of Christmas Day, but Christmas they most certainly do do. The half truth stems, in part, from the fact that the holiday period is that long it’s hard to know what is festive season and what isn’t.

From Constitution Day through to Antoni and Sebastià in January, it is one long series of “puente” breaks, meals out or in, family and social gatherings and one long round of shopping. When there is so much to pack in over such a prolonged period, it’s hardly surprising if Christmas Day itself constitutes something of a day of rest. All this notwithstanding, the Mallorcan Christmas has a bit of a crisis on its hands.

I’m not sure if Mallorcan office workers are issued with advice similar to that which is given to their British counterparts regarding not getting so slaughtered at the Christmas party that you find a P45 slipped inside your Christmas card, having become overly familiar with the boss’s wife, but the local Christmas party is something of a victim of “crisis at Christmas”. There is expected to be a fall of around 60% in terms of Christmas meals out for the staff, and those unlucky enough to have to suffer sitting next to the office bore will also have to suffer a fall in what’s on offer; it’s chicken nuggets this year, rather than a full roast.

Cuts to companies’ Christmas largesse is not confined solely to the staff dinner. Spending on Christmas hampers, by way of gifts to staff, to customers or perhaps to politicians whose favours are being sought, is also way down this year. 15 euros is a sort of going rate for hampers that can cost astronomical sums when they come stuffed with whole hams and fine wines; it’s a bottle of cava and a slab of nougat for the Crisis Christmas “cesta”. It doesn’t sound like there’ll be too many favours being extended, therefore.

One element of a Mallorcan Christmas that isn’t being cut back on is the number of surveys which come out telling everyone how miserable they’re going to be because they’re not spending enough money. Average family spend in the Balearics is estimated to be below the national highs of Madrid and Valencia where money is being tossed around to the tune of 600 euros per household. At 585 euros, this does represent quite a sizable fall in the Balearics. Two years ago, average Balearics spend was said to have been 747 euros, which itself was 11% lower than the year before. Christmases are coming, and the geese are getting progressively thinner.

It’s not all bad news in the Balearics and not all bad news for the restaurants which are finding they are not being called upon to provide the office lunch. Spending on eating out and going out is reckoned to be higher in the Balearics than it is anywhere else in Spain.

And there is certainly one area of economic activity that will be thriving this Christmas. The lottery. The 600 euros in Valencia, for instance, is boosted by a spend of 125 euros. Yes really, 20% of Christmas cheer handed over in the hope that “El Gordo” will come up trumps, but even the Valencians aren’t as extravagant as they have been; they parted with 147 euros on the lottery last year.

In the survey by the unfortunately acronymed FUCI (Federación de Usuarios Consumidores Independientes), the Balearics do at least come near the top when it comes to toys and gifts – 200 euros, only ten under the Spanish league leaders in Madrid – but the survey does just confirm the degree to which Christmas spending has slumped over the past three years in the Balearics and the whole of Spain. Only three regions break the 600 barrier this year; in 2008, all were over or near the 800 euro mark.

Two years ago, a survey by a different organisation, the Mallorca-based Gadeso, indicated not just the overall level of Christmas spend but also the degree to which it varied markedly. Gadeso will doubtless be producing its own new survey for this year, and it would be surprising were it not to show that the divisions had widened. Unemployment up considerably, state assistance not being paid in some instances, small companies not being paid, the variance in 2009 of nearly 1000 euros between highest and lowest-spending categories will surely have increased.

It’s a half truth that the Mallorcans don’t do Christmas, but what is a whole truth is that they are doing it less, and some are doing it hardly at all.

Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.

The Weever’s Tale And The Drowning Man

A common theme of most Mallorcan summers has been conspicuous by its absence this year. Jellyfish. “Plagues” or threats of plagues have not materialised, for which we should all be grateful. The absence of any biblical style invasions of the “medusa” and the resultant absence of their reporting by the media may explain why an attack by a different nasty of the waters merited some column inches. A German woman was stung by a weever fish in Peguera the other day. At first, I thought I was going to be reading that she had been killed. Thankfully, this wasn’t the case, but quite why it was necessary to report a weever-fish attack I honestly can’t say. Maybe it’s still the silly and a very slow news season.

It’s not as though there aren’t other weever-fish incidents. A former neighbour of mine was stung close to the shore in Playa de Muro three summers ago. It was, in his words, indescribably painful. Actually, given that he is French, these weren’t his words, but they amounted to the same. The sting required a trip to the hospital, but this was as much precautionary as really necessary.

Fatality by fish is extremely rare. In 1998 there was a death, that of a British teenager swimming off Cala Blava. The cause was something of a mystery, but it was almost certainly as the result of an acute allergic reaction to being stung by a “spider fish”, which is how the weever is known locally (“pez araña”).

The waters around Mallorca don’t hold great terrors, but they claim lives every year. In the Balearics as a whole, eighteen people have drowned so far this summer, one more than in 2010. Playa de Muro, for some reason, seems to attract more than its fair share of drownings. Over the space of ten days at the end of August there were three fatalities.

It is not as though there is anything dangerous about the sea off Playa de Muro. The water is shallow, and the sea only becomes potentially risky with an undertow or the wrong sort of wind. Even then, it can’t really be described as dangerous, no more so than any other shallow water subject to the same conditions. A common link in the three drownings was that of age; each swimmer was over 60 years old. The emergency services (by which one primarily means the Cruz Roja, the Red Cross) attributed the drownings to cardiac failure. Around 70% of all drownings in the Balearics are of people over the age of 60.

Advice on keeping safe when swimming includes not swimming alone, not swimming when there are no lifeguards on duty, i.e. too early in the morning, too late in the evening or at night, and even taking care if there are too many people in the water; it can be more difficult for a lifeguard to detect a swimmer in trouble when the sea is packed.

The advice is sound enough but is easily and temptingly ignored. Of the drownings that have occurred, the circumstances have not generally been exceptional. One of the drownings in Muro, for example, occurred at 3.30 on a Sunday afternoon. Maybe there were a lot of people in the water, but who considers this when going for a swim? Unfortunately, unfortunate things happen.

Indeed, the emergency services reckon that incidences of “reckless” swimming are on the decline. By reckless, one presumes they mean ignoring red flags, though it is not entirely clear, as it is also not entirely clear what Muro town hall means when it says that reckless swimmers will be fined.

Presumably not reckless, albeit she was swimming solo, was Teresa Planas who has just completed the 40-kilometre crossing between Menorca and Mallorca in under 14 hours. It’s as well that’s she has completed it, as the sea between the two islands is where the risk of the phenomenon of the meteotsunami (“rissaga”) is at its greatest, and as the autumn equinox approaches, so the risk increases.

The sea and the beach come with very few risks. Drownings are generally unavoidable if they are the result of a health malfunction. Treading on weever fish is hard to avoid. But there is one risk and one example of, if you like, recklessness that can be avoided. That is the beach at night. The sea may not be risky, unless you’ve gone skinny dipping on a tankful, but if you have gone skinny dipping, you may not find everything as you left it. Even if you keep your clothes on and just go for a walk, there is a risk. It’s best avoided.

Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.

Turning Ugly: Spain’s deficit

The game is as good as up for PSOE. The socialist government of José Luis Zapatero faces the prospect of having its bottom soundly spanked at the national elections in November. The standing down of Prime Minister Shoemaker has not proved sufficient to revive PSOE’s fortunes. His Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn-lookalike replacement, Alfredo Rubalcaba, is destined to be cast into the Gulag of a political wilderness, thanks to the Partido Popular securing an absolute majority of at least ten seats.

The latest poll suggests that PSOE supporters have all but given up. They know they’re going to get whipped, just as PSOE supporters in the Balearics knew they were bound for a hiding prior to the regional elections in May. The local PSOE-ites chucked the towel in well before May, so clear was it that José Bauzá was heading for the presidency.

What has helped to make PSOE supporters even more disaffected than they already were is the agreement struck between PSOE and the PP to amend the constitution and enshrine within it the principle of budgetary stability. It was an extraordinary step. The Spanish don’t, as a rule, do constitutional reforms.

What makes it even more extraordinary is the fact that it does not obviate the need for a separate change to legislation, one that will seek to ensure that Spain’s budget deficit is reduced to the European cap of three per cent of GDP by 2013. This change to the law will not actually be formalised until next year. After the elections, therefore.

The bizarreness of both the constitutional amendment and the proposed change to legislation is that it is a carve-up between Spain’s two main parties. PSOE may already have accepted that it will lose the elections, but it has been acting as though it were, well, as though it were part of a coalition. It is small wonder that other parties, such as the regional powerhouses in Catalonia and the Basque Country, are somewhat miffed.

The case for budgetary stability is unquestionable, but playing the constitution card, given that legislative means exist to establish limits to spending and deficits, is  unnecessary and can potentially be seen as an undermining of Spanish sovereignty. It has been denied that the European Central Bank has put pressure on Spain to invoke the constitution in respect of budgetary stability, but this is how it is being seen in some quarters.

Theoretically, a constitutional change requires a referendum, even if legally the change can be made without recourse to popular approval (or disapproval). But the absence of a referendum, the suggestion that Europe is in some way interfering with Spain’s sovereignty and the collusion between PSOE and the PP raise a question as to quite how democratic this all is.

PSOE, and therefore Rubalcaba, may have seen the agreement as a last throw of the dice to try and recoup some electoral support, but if they did, it was an odd way of going about this. What they have done is to make themselves hostages to the agreement. They will be hamstrung as an opposition and will lack credibility when the PP steamroller through austerity measures that will make those that PSOE has already introduced seem like profligacy.

Who will there be to offer an effective opposition to Mariano Rajoy when he becomes prime minister? With PSOE embarrassed into silence, the opposition will fall to small parties or regional parties (and the regions, such as the Balearics, are as affected by the stability agreement as is the national government). But the main opposition may not be parliamentary. Step forward, once more, the “indignados” and the 15-M movement that was behind the occupations of squares across Spain before, in some instances, the police waded in.

Sorry to have to say this, but things are going to turn ugly. And they may get uglier still. The constitutional amendment is not just bizarre and unnecessary, it is also a potentially dangerous precedent. The PP, emboldened by what, for most people, is an arcane matter of economics, might just eye up some other parts of the constitution, parts that are rather more understandable to José Public. Language, anyone?

In the Balearics, seen as the test site for what Rajoy has up his sleeve, Bauzá has been giving the previous PSOE-led administration a very public verbal beating, tossing around incredible sums of “catastrophic” debt left behind by PSOE, amounts that it denies. The Balearics are all but bust, we know this, but Bauzá’s is a tactic to paint as bleak a picture as possible and so try and ensure that the real pain to come is met with acquiescence. Unfortunately, he, and Rajoy, will not get quiet acceptance.

Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.

The Golden Age Of Winter Tourism

Round and round and round we go in ever-decreasing circles of repetition. The main season is coming towards its end, and so it is time for the new season to begin, that of the wailing and gnashing of teeth regarding the winter season. Or rather, what winter season?

The repetition has already begun, partly thanks to Pedro Iriondo, the head of the Fomento del Turismo (the Mallorca Tourist Board). Bars, restaurants, shops closed in winter; how can anyone be expected to sell winter tourism if they are all closed?

Sr. Iriondo is someone of a bygone era who, on assuming the presidency of the board, reminisced about a time when everyone in Mallorca was happy, there were parties on the beach and, not that he said this, it cost less than a quid to get absolutely blotto.

Ah yes, this bygone era, when the beaches and hotels were packed to the gunwales in summer and when winter tourists also flocked to the island. There is just one problem with this. The bit about winter tourism. There never was a Golden Age of winter tourism in Mallorca. It is a total myth.

Hardened veterans will insist that the Age did exist and will say, endlessly and repetitiously, that it can be re-created by, amongst other things, opening a few more shops up and keeping some hotels open. However, you can’t re-create something that wasn’t there.

In 2003 the Chamber of Commerce and the Economy Circle of Mallorca (a group of leading businesspeople) produced a report entitled “The current situation of and perspectives on tourism in the Balearic Islands”. It was partly an historical document and partly one that looked forward.

In it, there was a table which showed the percentage of tourists (to the Balearics) who came in the main season (defined as April to October). In 1981 this percentage was 90%. It had gone down to 85% in 1991 and back up again to 88% by 2001. From other information, it had crept back to 90% in 2008.

If the Golden Age of winter tourism ever existed, therefore, it was in the eighties, but in relative terms the level of out-of-season tourism rose only slightly. While there may well have been and were parts of Mallorca which did reasonably well in winter in the eighties, there are factors to take into account. One is that the whole debate about winter tourism, among the British, is seen through British eyes. This is a not unimportant factor.

During the eighties, the overall level of British tourism rose staggeringly (by 250% between 1981 and 1988). This followed a period of significant decline in British tourism on the back of economic difficulties in the seventies. The growth in eighties tourism was also helped by an extremely favourable exchange rate.

Dealing in percentages doesn’t give the whole story. The actual numbers do. In the mid-eighties, the number of tourists per year to the Balearics was around 5 million. The number of winter tourists, peaking at 15% of the total, could never have been greater than 750,000. If this was the Golden Age of winter tourism, then what do we have now? Well, in 2008, for example, over 11 million tourists came to the Balearics, a million or more of them in winter. The Golden Age is now, not then.

How can this be, you ask. Well, partly it’s the British perspective again. In 2003 the Chamber of Commerce referred to air connections from Germany in respect of winter tourism. It made no mention of those from the UK and would be even less likely to now. It has been German tourism that has been largely responsible for Mallorca’s winter tourism. Which is bad news in a way, as Air Berlin is planning to cut some of its routes this winter. Its boss in Spain and Portugal, Álvaro Middelmann, blames hotels for not opening, obsolete and overpriced bars and restaurants and even the airport authority AENA for its inadequate service.

Mallorca’s winter tourism is not something to be re-created but to be created. There are plenty of ideas as to how, and they can be dealt with another time. But we might hope that the Balearics Tourism Agency, augmented by the inclusion of all manner of interested parties, including the Mallorca Tourist Board and airlines, can, for once, get to grips with winter tourism. Not that you should bank on it. In thirty years time the same debate will still be had, and commentators will look back at a Golden Age of winter tourism – in the first decade of the twenty-first century.

Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.

The Seven Pillars Of Tourism Wisdom

Exceltur is the “alliance for touristic excellence”. It is a body that comprises some of Spain’s leading hotel groups (and therefore Mallorca’s hotel groups as many of them are Mallorcan) as well as travel agencies, car-rental agencies, financial services companies and more. Its remit, as you might gauge from what it stands for, is to look at how to improve and develop Spanish tourism. As part of this mission, it undertakes annual surveys of tourism competitiveness in the different regions of Spain.

The survey for 2010 (MoniTUR – very clever) has just been published. A collaboration with the consultancy group Deloitte, the new survey doesn’t make great reading for the Balearics. The islands are still in the top half of Spain’s regions, but they have slipped one place to sixth. In itself, this doesn’t sound particularly dramatic, but when you study closely the so-called “seven pillars” of competitiveness that form the basis of the survey, it is.

Of the seven regions that lost competitive value in 2010, the loss by the Balearics is greater than that of any other region. Of the seven “pillars”, a gain has been made in only two, one of which (economic and social results) is insignificant. The other gain, that in transport accessibility and connections, is significant. More of this below.

The other five measures all register a fall. The two greatest are in “diversification and categorisation of tourism products” and in “strategic marketing vision and commercial support”. This latter measure has tumbled almost ten points compared with 2009. Only one other region of Spain has performed worse – Murcia – and it is one of the least competitive parts of the country.

As with strategic vision, only one autonomous community does worse when it comes to diversification, the Basque Country. Yet, diversification has meant to have been one of the “big things”. You might remember what this entails. Golf, hiking, gastronomy, culture … . Do you really want me to go on?

Diversification and the vision thing are two sides of the same coin, a badly minted one in Balearics terms. One, diversification, leads from the other. Or at least I think this is how it’s meant to go. A problem, however, is what strategic marketing vision means. In consultancy management speak, very little usually. But we can just about suss what they’re on about: lack of leadership, lack of planning, lack of any meaningful action. In the Spanish league table of tourism competitiveness, the collective Balearics tourism officialdom has been the Avram Grant – they haven’t known what they’ve been doing.

This isn’t completely true. The disgraced ex-tourism minister Miguel Nadal knew full well what he was doing. Allegedly. Unfortunately, it wasn’t anything to do with tourism. And Nadal did have a strategy institute that he could call on at the ministry, the now defunct Inestur, up to its neck in as much alleged wrongdoing as the one-time minister.

But let’s not dwell too much on the past. A whole bright new tourism competitiveness future beckons for the Balearics, thanks to he In Whom We Trust. Unlike his predecessors, who gave the impression of not having graduated beyond the Janet and John book of tourism clichés, Carlos Delgado does seem to get it. He appears to have been on the 101 course of Strategic Marketing for New Balearics Tourism Ministers, if an observation as to how Calvia should be spoken about in marketing terms is anything to go by. Don’t call it Calvia, because no one knows where Calvia is or what it is. Do call the individual resorts Santa Ponsa, Magalluf and so on. It’s an encouraging start. Blindingly obvious to anyone other than a tourism official, but encouraging nonetheless.

And Delgado will, we hope, set in motion some diversification. Converting Mallorca into one giant theme park is an excellent idea. Not that he has actually said this, but he has given encouragement to the idea of theme parks that the enviro-lobby have hitherto so successfully managed to boot into the long grass of a finca or several.

So, next year we can look forward, with any luck, to MoniTUR giving the Balearics some better marks. But there just remains this business of transport accessibility and connections, the one area of improvement, according to the report. Which connections is it referring to exactly? Those with Germany? With Russia? Yes, both good and getting better. The UK? In winter?

Strategic marketing vision and diversification are fine. They can lead to new products and new opportunities for tourism. But they’re not much use if no one can get a flight. Or perhaps the UK isn’t part of the strategic marketing vision.

Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.

So-So: Whither PSOE?

Among the many strange aspects of Mallorca’s politics, one of the stranger is the sheer anonymity of the party now exiting stage left. PSOE in Mallorca has been largely synonymous with Francesc Antich, especially during its period of government just finished. In its previous administration, it had more recognisable characters, such as Joan Mesquida, now the national secretary-general for tourism, and Celestí Alomar, the then tourism minister and now head of the Balearics division of the Costas authority, but they became recognisable largely because it was they who were responsible for the aborted and hated eco-tax.

In the past four years, however, barely anyone else from PSOE has come to the public’s attention. Carles Manera, the finance minister, was largely unknown; Joana Barceló only grabbed the headlines when she was landed with the poisoned chalice of tourism. Greater publicity attached itself to members of the government who weren’t in PSOE, and usually attached itself to them for the wrong reasons.

Antich is now off to Madrid. The next local leader of PSOE may be Francina Armengol, given a stuffing by the Partido Popular at the elections for the Council of Mallorca. Apart from her, well who is there?

Perhaps it is to PSOE’s credit that no one knows who their leading lights are. It has been hard not to know about politicians from other parties engaged in dubious practices or internecine strife, the latter most evident within the PP. But it can also be seen as a failure of the party to really promote itself. The column inches devoted to the PP and to its various characters is disproportionately high compared with those dedicated to PSOE. And it isn’t simply because the PP’s in-fighting makes it far more interesting than PSOE.

One reason why the PP won the elections so easily and why it, and its politicians, are more in the public eye comes down to the fact that it has a more effective party machine. Its organisation is better.

When one talks about party organisation, one issue that crops up is that of funding. The lion’s share of funding comes out of the public purse, and the larger the party and the greater its representation the more money it gets. Like Real Madrid and Barcelona scooping most of television’s football money, the rich get richer and the smaller parties and teams lose out.

Given public funding, PSOE and the PP should theoretically be on roughly similar footings, but there is also the matter of other sources of funding. Measures have been taken to make this funding more transparent, but the 2009 report by the Council of Europe into the transparency of funding in Spain revealed ongoing disquiet as to quite how transparent it is, with municipalities particularly coming under its microscope.

Linked to the issue of funding is one of the sociology of political parties in Mallorca. And it is here that the PP knocks PSOE into a cocked hat. Historically, albeit that the history has not even yet reached thirty years, Mallorca is a PP stronghold, a reflection of an innate conservatism among Mallorcans but also of the strength of networks. The PP has been the vehicle through which to get on, to enjoy the spoils in a way that PSOE has never offered.

Ideology plays only a small part in local politics and where it has appeared to, it has been more a thin veneer over the desire for power and for tapping into the Mallorcan networks. The Unió Mallorquina was a classic example. On the face of it, it only differed from the PP insofar as it had a nationalist agenda, but it was one that was understated. It was never a radical party, because radicalism doesn’t generally fit with the Mallorcan mindset. Its ideology was secondary to its existence for existence’s sake.

For PSOE, the challenges are several. It needs to improve its organisation, to become more visible, to portray greater personality. And it needs to define what it stands for. But here it really faces a problem. As with other parties ostensibly of the left which try to occupy the centre or even veer off towards the right, it can create an ideological confusion. On issues other than the economy, what is PSOE in Mallorca? Is it regionalist, and thus the opposite of the PP? Is it Catalanist? Ditto. What is it? But if ideology doesn’t really count for much in Mallorca, the party faces a starker question – whither PSOE?

Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.

War: What Is It Good For?

If you are looking to start a war, then who better than someone who bears the name.

The Guerra Un-Civil of the elections has started, and a Guerra has entered the fray, limp howitzers of bile being volleyed over the current opposition and dripping from them like trails of blood from the corners of a Count Dracula mouth. This, the Dracula one, is an image that is increasingly disturbing me. It is as a result of a worryingly euphoriant eureka moment when I suddenly realised that José Ramón Bauzá has more than just a hint of the cape and high collar of a Transylvanian about him.

While Count Bauzá is drawing on the blood of the body Catalan, PSOE has appointed a witchfinder-general, its one-time central government vice-president. His name? Guerra. Mr. War. Alfonso of this ilk.

In war, there are the dispensable. Into the battle, therefore, cast an OAP politician everyone had forgotten was still with us. If he takes the flak, it doesn’t much matter. Mr. War has come out all guns misfiring from a prosthetic hip. He has taken aim and his pop-gun has let out a pantomime sheetlet with a corruption bang scrawled on it.

The Balearics wing of the PSOE socialist party met in Palma on Friday for a pre-election powwow at which Sr. Guerra launched into the Partido Popular and suggested that, far from having reformed themselves, its leaders should be banged up in chokey.

This meeting was more a pre-voting day wake than a call to arms for the battles that await in government after 22 May. The local PSOE knows that it’s going to be completely mullered at the polls. It’s why Sr. Guerra was dragged out of his bath chair and unleashed his rallying cry to the troops. The cry of a desperate party that already knows its fate.

There is nothing left for PSOE to cling onto than the lifeboat of corruption. Sr. Guerra reiterated the still malodorous charges and cases that waft from the rotten-egg fertiliser in the corner of José Bauzá’s new PP perfumed garden. But why bother?

It may be accurate to remind the electorate of the PP’s sleazy past, but does the electorate take much notice? Were it to, and were corruption as significant an issue as it is made out to be, then it would not be the PP which is currently set to secure a 30-seat majority in the local elections. It would, instead, be PSOE; its collective nose is relatively clean and has not had to breathe in the whiff of political impropriety.

PSOE has gone on the corruption offensive not just because it’s losing and because of the trial spectaculars of former PP president Jaume Matas, but also because it accuses Bauzá of hypocrisy. His grand clean-up of the PP was meant to have excluded any politician tainted by scandal from the runners and riders on 22 May.

Another PSOE grandee, Rosamaria Alberdi, the party’s Balearics secretary, has claimed that Bauzá is duping the electorate, pointing to both Maria Salom, the candidate for the presidency of the Council of Mallorca, and Antoni Pastor, the mayor of Manacor, as two who have been implicated in the past.

The problem for Sr. Guerra, Sra. Alberdi and PSOE is that the electorate has more pressing matters to consider. It was unfortunate for President Antich that global economic crisis should have consumed his period in office, but it did not help with any ambition to secure a second term, when the PP is historically the natural party of Balearics government. Since 2007, Antich has effectively been a dead man walking, given the near certainty that the status quo of PP dominance would be restored.

Corruption once did influence an election. The Sóller tunnel affair of the mid-1990s did have an impact and led to PSOE and Antich taking power for the first time. But, and despite all the publicity the various cases attract, it has lost its power to shock. The electorate is not stupid. It knows or suspects that all the parties are up to no good or have the potential to get up to no good. Consequently, making corruption a key issue, the issue, is limp. It is the dying call of a party that knows that it is losing the war. It’s not good for anything.

Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.

Heaven Knows I’m Miserable Now: Spanish misery

Once upon a time, when the world was an altogether simpler place and you could drink yourself stupid for 100 pesetas (about 60 centimos) and when a Mallorcan waiter would beam with greeting and gratitude at a small tip with which he could save up for a new piece of tin to cover his shanty hut, everyone was happy.

Those were the days. The sun did always shine, both in a Mallorcan sky and on TV. Cliff Michelmore would look out at Magalluf and inform his black-and-white audience that here was paradise found. Sylvia would wish long life to España, and we’d all sing along with smiling, happy, sombrero-wearing barmen.

Happy, happy, happy. Oh, how things change. Those were the days, my friends. They did come to an end.

The Spanish are the most miserable people in the European Union. Those in the Balearics are the sixth most miserable in Spain. The “index of misery”, so says a report by two organisations (of international financial analysts and of large businesses of seasonal work), gives the Balearics a rating 1.5% above the national average and Spain as a whole a new claim on a European championship – that of the miserabiliist league table.

The “les miserables” of Mallorca have come over all Morrissey on account of inflation and unemployment. They might brighten up a tad, as seasonal work prospects buck up, thanks to the droves from the reallocation of the north African tourism vote heading Mallorca’s way this summer, but even this might be shortlived. Woe, woe and thrice woe, as Frankie Howerd’s Lurcio once put it. Up “Pompas fúnebres”. The funeral laments continue to drone because of the misericorde struck into the heart of long-term employment contracts.

Frankie Howerd’s long-faced lugubriousness is the mask of gloom now on the countenances of the island’s workers. Rather than being happy, happy, they worry, worry. They are preoccupied with their “preocupación”. You can’t really blame them, but some will. The some who would rather the workers were waving a Dave “happiness index” around like Doddy’s tickling stick or were in fact still all Ken Dodds, bursting into a chorus of “Happiness”. “What a great day for going up to General Franco and telling him he’s a private. Tattyfalarious! Tattyfalarious!”

Being Europe’s biggest miseries seems like a strange burden for the Spanish to carry. They’ve got the sun, the sea, the sangria. The SEATs. What is there not to be happy about? There must surely be parts of the European Union where one has the right to be miserable. I don’t know, Lithuania perhaps. There again, the Lithuanians spent most of the last century under the yoke of authoritarianism. They must be pretty damn pleased nowadays. The Spanish only had to put up with 40 years, and they have the Med rather than the Baltic. There’s no pleasing some people.

But back in the day, of course, there wasn’t all the worry about unemployment, as it hardly existed. Even with the sun and the sea, that’s life today. Y viva la vida España.

So you’d think that with all this misery prevailing, that one-time, probably mythical state of welcoming, friendly tourist-hugging would be far from the terraces and receptions of today’s Mallorca. It is a charge that gets levelled. Last year, a bunch of tour operators pitched up in Alcúdia and said that more needed to be done in showing greater friendliness. Strange then, that a few days later a spot of press investigation found there wasn’t any real need to worry. Friendliness and helpfulness were all around. Then a further few days later, research from the Universitat de les Illes Balears discovered that Mallorca was bettered only by the Caribbean (and ahead of the likes of Turkey, the Canaries, Greece) when it came to tourist satisfaction, an aspect of which was friendliness.

Misery there may be in Spain, and the people of the Balearics are only the sixth most miserable set of Spaniards, after all, but the welcome remains. Always trying to look on the bright side of life, and all that. A different matter might be whether the tourist has to endure some misery. “Airport, you’ve got a smiling face.” Hmm, not if they’re all out on strike it won’t have.

Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.

Will The Circle Be Unbroken?: Mallorca’s education

“The idea is to make a break with permanent change.” So spoke the president of something called the Economy Circle, a high-powered organisation of businesspeople and professionals, which, together with various other bodies such as the colleges of lawyers and architects, the chamber of commerce and parents’ associations, has formed a united front to present proposals to tackle the failing public education system in Mallorca and the Balearics.

It wouldn’t be a break with change as these groups would like some more, but they would hope that it might be a definitive change that can restore some credibility to a system which makes the Balearics one of the worst-performing regions of Spain and which also makes the islands’ schools return results that are, by some distance, below those of other countries.

Among the proposals being advanced are regular assessment of teachers, greater professionalism of both headmasters and teachers, the scope for greater autonomy in decision-making by heads and improvements in standards of English. One of the key targets is to reduce the early drop-out rate that currently stands at 40% of pupils by the age of 17. The Economy Circle and its allies insist that defects within the educational system have to be addressed, those which have been too easily blamed on factors such as tourism and immigration. Both these factors do play a part, but it is probably right to assert that they have been used to disguise deficiencies.

Permanent change in education is something of a motto for politicians who constantly wish to interfere. The same can be said of England (and Wales) as it can of Mallorca. More so, you would think. There was a period, though, after the Second World War, when the English tripartite educational system was left much to its own devices; some would argue that its status quo should never have been played around with. It was not a perfect system, maybe there is no such thing, but the first major change, the widespread introduction of comprehensives by the start of the 1970s, ended a generation of calm and unleashed all that followed and which continues to follow – permanent change.

In England though, there was no debate as to which language should be used. The great Catalan-Castilian divide in local education is about to be given another major airing, the Partido Popular seemingly intent on giving Catalan the heave-ho if it wins power at the spring elections, and the main teaching union pleading with the PP not to make the divide an issue of political confrontation. It was also brought further into the open by “protests” last week at 18 educational establishments across Mallorca. Led by teachers at the secondary school in Inca, appalled by the PP’s stance, this amounted to declarations in favour of Catalan by pupils and teachers alike.

The change envisaged by the PP (or by its leader at any rate), that of primacy for Castilian with Catalan removed from the agenda, has to be seen in the context of a a report from the local schools’ inspectorate. This indicates greater what is referred to as “inmersión” of Catalan, i.e. it dominates as the language of teaching school by school. It also dominates as the teaching language across the island. But the situation is anything but straightforward.

The use of Catalan or Castilian (and indeed English) varies. At primary level, Castilian has in fact increased somewhat over the past 12 months. At secondary level, there is a geographical variance. Catalan is less the language of “inmersión” in Palma than it is in the rest of Mallorca. To add to this, there is the difference between public and private education. Catalan is almost universally the dominant language in the island’s public nursery schools, but in private schools it is much less so, even if here it has also enjoyed an increase.

What you have, therefore, is a confused picture. The abandonment of Catalan might remove this confusion, but to argue that it would be a helpful change to the island’s educational system would be open to serious question. To also argue that it is the Catalan-Castilian divide which is at the root of the problems of the educational system would also be open to question. It may well contribute to the problems, but the Economy Circle and the other bodies do not appear to dwell on it.

From this we may well conclude that, like the immigration argument, the language debate in education clouds the real issues, those of teaching standards and professionalism as well as, perhaps most importantly, pupil motivation, to which can be added parental attitudes. Unfortunately, the politics of the election will cloud the issues ever more by highlighting the language debate. The permanent debate.

Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.

Closing Down? Illegal downloading in Spain

I have a confession to make. I have never illegally downloaded a movie or a song from the internet.

Boy, you don’t know how it feels to get this off my chest. I have been living with the shame of being a download-denier for years. I know that my ‘fessing up could mean my being shunned by friends or family, but this is a cross I have to bear.

You have to ask why I have been a denier. In Spain of all places. Spain which is the most lax country in the European Union when it comes to tackling internet piracy. It is a haven for the dodgy downloader and also, therefore, for download “re-sellers”.  And these are not just the lookies. So lax is Spain and so high is the level of downloading by Spanish users that the country has been put on a blacklist by the US Congress. Production companies are wary about distributing original material in Spain.

Some years ago, Singapore sought to legitimise itself in the eyes of the international community by getting to grips with what was rampant piracy and counterfeiting. It was of a different type – fake Rolex, Gucci, Lacoste and so on. There were shops that taxi-drivers would take you to. The windows were papered over. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t claim never to have obtained pirated goods. The Lacoste t-shirts from Singapore made excellent Christmas presents. The day after I’d been to one shop, the front page of the local equivalent of “The Bulletin” ran with the story of a police raid. On that very shop. I must have missed it by moments.

Singapore did legitimise itself. Spain has been facing similar demands to get its act straight when it comes to downloading. Which is why for much of this year the passage of the so-called “Sinde” law has been staggering through parliament.

Named after the culture minister, Ángeles González-Sinde, the law was tagged onto a much more wide-ranging one, that of the “sustainable economy”. This alone created confusion, a not uncommon facet of Spanish law-making. Months after it was meant to have been enacted, Sinde’s law has just reached its final parliamentary stages in the Spanish Congress.

The law has not looked to emulate the route in the UK, that of cutting off the internet connections of habitual illegal downloaders and file-sharers. Quite right, too. The UK’s solution is absurd. Instead, Spain would block or close down websites which offer illegal film and music downloads and free sports programmes that would otherwise be on subscription. Any decision to do so would still be subject to authorisation by a commission for intellectual property.

Getting to a vote has been a tortuous process as it has involved negotiations by the PSOE ruling administration with the multitude of parties which exist in parliament, the Catalonian CiU and the Basque PNV having been particularly crucial. There has been a reluctance to support the measure, and this stems, one has to presume, from what is a strong desire not to limit freedom of information. There has also been the added confusion of elements of the sustainable economy law that have nothing to do with the downloading element and which have been used as bargaining tools. You wonder why the Sinde law couldn’t have been dealt with separately.

The law has also attracted the mavericks of cyberspace. Websites for the PSOE, Congress and others have been attacked in the days and hours leading up to the vote. The Anonymous group, which has been behind attacks on PayPal and Visa in light of the WikiLeaks furore, has been prominent in activating the Spanish attacks.

The point about the Sinde law, other than any notion of limiting freedom of information, is that it would probably have very little effect, especially for those internet users who understand a bit about file-sharing. Furthermore, closing websites down does not mean that new ones might not emerge, and recourse to a commission on intellectual property opens up the field to all manner of potential legal challenges by websites. The law could actually be a minefield.

And then there is the question as to whether it is sensible to legislate at all, which brings into play the whole issue as to what the internet stands for as well as the costs of trying to prevent piracy. In a way it’s a bit like the war on drugs. Vast amounts of money and resources go into fighting drugs, but to what end? The scale of downloading and sharing in Spain is enormous – one in three users is said to regularly share copyrighted material – and this despite the fact that, in the Balearics as an example, the number of homes with internet connections isn’t as widespread as you might think; only 56% of homes in the Balearics have one.

The other way of looking at this is that downloading, illegal or not, could be set to become even more enormous. For the meantime though, it’s carry on downloading – illegally. Why? Because the passing of Sinde’s law has failed. By two votes. All the horse-trading and it still couldn’t be passed. You never know, maybe I’ll join the rest and download with impunity. Until, that is, the Senate tries to ratify it in January, but don’t bank on this.

Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.