I’ll Be Watching You

Watch out! I’m watching you. I’m watching you in a bar. I’ll be coming but you won’t know me. I’ll be sitting there, watching. I am the eyes of the government, the tax office, the social security, employment. I’ll be in your bar.

The tax office, along with the other departments, is stepping up its efforts. “An aggressive plan” against the black economy, the absence of papers or the papers not quite right. More inspections. Checking on those claiming dole, but receiving a wage. Checking on everything, including the importing of goods from Asia and elsewhere.

When the money’s tight, the government does what it can to ensure its revenue stream. Quite reasonably so. But when money’s tight, the propensity for rule-bending increases. It is the vicious circle of crisis.

The checks are not out of the ordinary. They happen all the time. Just that they’re going to be increased. That “aggressive plan”. Watching and waiting.

The watching happens in different ways. There’s the watching on the internet. For some time, websites with accommodation to rent have been paid particular attention to, especially websites of British origin. The tourism ministry has netted some apartments in Calvia. The fines can be as high as 30,000 euros. The ministry’s inspectors paid a visit to one apartment, all perfectly well turned out, cleaned, with the use of pool and garden. 4,500 euros to rent. Except it wasn’t quite legal. Others offer even more, such as transfer to and from the airport. Who’s doing the transferring?

This watching of websites and of accommodation intensified a couple of years ago. The checking of apartments and villas for quality, safety and tax was not new, just that the level of effort increased and the technology was made greater use of. You wondered whether it would have much effect. It would appear that it has. There is the vicious circle of renting, though. The hoops and obstacles of trying to be legit, only to come up against the impossible barriers. Not everyone wants to do it improperly. But not everyone can do it properly. So the watching continues and becomes more intense.

There’s the watching on the roads. The director-general of Tráfico was in Palma not so long ago. More controls are planned. More promotion of the risks of speed and of being distracted, but more potential for revenue, you would have to imagine. Again, not unreasonably though. And then there is also the automated watching. The new radars. They’re not watching. Not yet. More investment is needed to make them work.

They need to step up the controls, not just to stop speed, drink-driving and “distractions” (playing with mobiles, sat-navs etc.) but also to compensate for the loss of revenue during what was something of a work-to-rule by traffic police last summer. The number of fines fell by 15% along with a reduction in the number of vehicles that were stopped, albeit, however, that during the first half of last year as a whole the number of drivers caught for drink-driving went up by a staggering 114%.

Watching employees, watching the number of chairs on terraces, watching the needle on a music limiter, watching the PRs, watching the space occupied by sunbeds on a beach. Now watching the smokers. Maybe there are even detectives watching the detectives.

All this watching has its value. Calvia, when setting its budget for this year, placed an amount on what it anticipates coining in through fines. Maybe local authorities all do this, wherever they are. Maybe it is a part of “good” public financial management. I confess it had never occurred to me that local government or any other government income might actually take into account what comes in by way of fines.

Revenue from fines, you might think, would simply be the jam on the other revenue. The bonus. It would seem not. But by formalising the outcomes of all the watching, giving it a number in the accounts, it is as though it institutionalises wrong-doing. The expectation is to break the law. Human nature being what it is, then maybe this is a pragmatic approach. Yet it is a system which appears set up for social failure as it undermines the psychological contract of reciprocity between authority and citizen, the latter afforded the role of the unscrupulous, whoever the citizen might be.

And all the while, the citizen does his or her own watching. That of the politicians and others in positions of authority or in positions within businesses with close connections to these authority figures doing their own fiddling.

The whole world’s watching. Each other. In Mallorca, at any rate.

Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.

Slow Down, You Move Too Fast

You know how it is. You’ll be steadfastly and righteously observing the speed limit, and some twat appears in your rear mirror expressing paroxysms and gesticulating ferociously with an aggravated hand, or even both hands where the less diligent are concerned. Ever since they made the gloriously difficult-to-overtake-on new road layout through Puerto Alcúdia and Playa de Muro, the motoring psychotic and impatient have had to improvise methods of speeding themselves along without demolishing their cars and themselves on the inconveniently close-together central concrete islands. The favourite is to nip onto the parallel side road and race at great velocity to the next exit, cornering back onto the main road with a manoeuvre of which Jenson Button (aka Chris Martin of Coldplay) would be proud. And this in order to steal one place as part of qualifying for the grid. 50 kilometres per hour, an affront to motoring civil liberties, but a limit designed to protect erring tourists from being launched into the air and then making a wheel-on appearance in Muro hospital as part of an episode of “Sun, Sea and A&E”, attached to a life-support machine and with a weeping spouse clawing at the lilo they had intended for the beach. 

 

Apparently, things have got so good in Spain that annually fewer than 2000 people now lose their lives in accidents on main roads. The news is less good when it comes to towns and those side roads. An encounter with a bus or a souped-up mobility scooter can be fatal, so the traffic authorities are contemplating introducing a thirty kilometre speed limit in towns. Tee-hee, that should cause some fine sport. You know that place in Holland where they’ve done away with all restrictions, and motorists, pedestrians and cyclists just get on with it. They should do that here – in Alcúdia, for example. What fun that would be. Though my Dutch moles tell me that the Dutch driver can be a bit of an animal, there is aggression and then there is sheer lunacy. The Dutch are not known for their lunacy. Pragmatic, one can see them adhering politely to the non-restriction principle. “After you, Arje.” “No, after you, Joost.” And the traffic just grinds to a halt as caravans of schoolchildren on bikes collide with some old folk crossing the road.

 

No, such a civilised solution wouldn’t have a chance where the mad of Mallorca are concerned. So, they have to try and impose ever-decreasing speed limits. They, the authorities, should come and hang around those side roads for a day or two. What with the irate overtakers (or should that be under-takers) opting for the side roads as a means of getting ahead of plodders such as myself with the cruise control on the limit and with coaches hammering past houses and divesting parked cars of their wing mirrors, those authorities would soon realise the forlorn nature of their plan. Which is probably why they’ll introduce it.