When In Rome: Climate change

Two euros per night per guest in one to three-star accommodation. Three euros a night for four and five-star hotels. Sounds familiar? It is. But this is not Mallorca, this is Rome. The Italian capital’s council introduced its own version of the unlamented eco-tax on 1 January. Rome’s tax is earmarked for keeping the city clean and for urban improvements; it should raise 82 million euros per year. It hasn’t exactly met with universal approval. Just as Mallorca’s eco-tax was met with a level of hostility that saw it booted far out to sea a year after its introduction.

The eco-tax was flawed for different reasons. One was that the revenue that it might have generated, while not insignificant (60 million euros a year in the Balearics as a whole), was not that significant. Think of it this way. Had it been distributed to each town hall in Mallorca and the Balearics in a proportionate manner, it would have failed to bridge town halls’ funding gaps. A second reason was that it was discriminatory and based on the principle of “polluter pays”. It was also potentially pernicious in that, applied unilaterally, it would have placed Mallorca at a disadvantage.

The eco-tax was an example of attempting to apply fiscal measures to tackle environmental problems. Legislatures and executives reach out for more law and more tax in the hope that they can turn back the rising tides of environmental damage and climate change. The eco-warriors of Mallorca, GOB and its fellow campaigners, are now calling on the regional government to introduce a climate change law, one akin perhaps to that now operating in the UK.

There isn’t a specific climate change law either in the Balearics or nationally. What there is, in addition to a whole raft of previous laws and policy documents, are measures designed to promote energy efficiency and the use of renewables; these form part of the new law on sustainable economy. GOB and its enviro-fighting allies want the Balearics to go a stage further in bringing in what Friends of the Earth were calling for last year for the whole of Spain.

GOB has specifically fingered the power station of Es Murterar in Alcúdia as the greatest offender when it comes to emissions. Notwithstanding the possibility of the power station converting away from coal, GOB is right to identify it as a major contributor to environmental damage in Mallorca.

However, the resort to legislation and taxation is an essentially mechanistic response to the problem of climate change. The debate is impoverished, partly because of the primacy of the legislature as arbiter of policy and partly because of the nature of the debate itself – you are either a climate change believer or atheist. In the latter camp, for instance, is the leader of the Partido Popular nationally, Mariano Rajoy.

The mechanisms of tax and legislation, combined with political confusion and the inconclusiveness as to whether climate change exists or the degree to which it presents a threat, prevent a far more challenging discussion and far more searching policy decisions.

What if the predictions for climate change are right? It is the inability to answer this question that leads to the impoverishment of the debate where Mallorca’s future is concerned. The most dire predictions of rising sea levels and temperatures would create, by the middle of the century, a very different Mallorca. Introducing laws and taxes now might go some way to stalling the inevitable, but if the inevitable is indeed inevitable, then what on earth is going to happen?

It takes little imagination to consider the impact on coastal resorts and on tourism. The impact would affect thousands of homes and businesses. It takes little imagination, but for Mallorca’s policymakers it seems to remain unimaginable. They don’t have to imagine though. The centre for scientific investigation at Palma university set it out in pretty simple terms last summer. A 20 centimetre rise in sea levels, a 20 metre loss of beach and coast, extended periods of drought, a greater propensity for hurricanes and tsunamis. All by 2050.

If you own a property by the sea, you might be well advised to try and get shot pretty sharpish and hope no one asks any awkward questions. While the Costas authority yomps across the coastal regions in its bovver boots, threatening demolition here and there, it may as well not bother. Something else will do its work for it. The worthless properties caught under the Costas’ thirty-year law will be worthless anyway. As will any other that might find its owner sharing its terrace with some jellyfish.

The problem is that you, and others, may well prefer to play at ostriches on the beach. It won’t happen. But can you be so sure? Your head in the sand and an almighty great tidal wave suddenly washes up and fills your lungs. Because it seems unimaginable, it won’t happen. Maybe it won’t. Or maybe it will. Rather than taxes and pieces of law, the government should have a plan. The worst-case scenario. Does such a plan exist? No, it doesn’t. Has it even been considered? Not as far as I am aware. Instead, rather like Nero, it fiddles with legislation or is told to do so by GOB while its own Rome drowns and is set ablaze by rising mercury.

Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.

Mobile Homes: Residency and Spanish voting

Go on then, you’re a British citizen, resident in Mallorca and therefore in Spain. National elections in Spain are looming. Would you vote, if you had the right? Would you know for whom to vote? Would you actually care or be interested?

The absence of voting rights for non-Spanish citizens, for our purposes those from the UK, is a matter that can stick in the craw with some. Tax me and let me vote. But you can’t. Paying tax does not confer rights to participate in a political process. End of story.

Setting aside the apparent contradiction of being disenfranchised when it comes to electing parties which might, you hope, be less inclined to burden you with more tax, the issue of voting rights is a far broader subject, one that embraces nationhood, mobility, integration and whether you can actually be bothered.

An editorial in “The Bulletin” yesterday made a plea for the right to vote in national election. I pay tax, therefore I vote. Turn it around. You’re Mallorcan, a Spanish citizen, resident in the UK, paying UK taxes. Can you vote in a general election? No you cannot. The right to vote at national level, as opposed to local or European elections, is an expression of nationhood, the domain of citizens of the individual country. If you are not a citizen, then you are not a national. Thus, you cannot vote. I find no contradiction in this.

Where the issue has become complicated, however, is through freedom of movement and rights to residency within the European community. The theoretical breakdown of discrimination against foreign nationals, enshrined in European law, has led to a wish to push the barriers back further – to exercise ever more practical applications, such as national voting.

European citizenship bestows rights to vote for a European parliament, not a national one, save for the parliament of your own country. For British citizens, this means Westminster; it doesn’t mean Madrid. Where this does become discriminatory is a British matter, the fifteen-year rule effectively breaking European treaties that allow for voting in British general elections. This in itself isn’t an argument for conferring rights to vote in Spanish elections; the national citizenship rule remains fundamental.

A quirk of the British voting system is that there are indeed those from other countries who can vote in a general election – those from Ireland and the Commonwealth. This, though, brings with it the whole baggage of integration and assimilation, one that applies just as much to expatriates in Spain.

Integration is a largely mythical state. It is a word bandied about without an appreciation as to what it might actually mean. Having a few “Spanish friends”, eating tapas or knowing some of the lingo do not equate to integration. It’s ludicrous to suggest otherwise. Mobility, and its convenient modern-day fellow-travellers, ease of communication and exposure to media, ironically militate against integration. Language and the nuance of language, culture, and, yes, politics remain the stuff of “back home”. In the same issue of “The Bulletin” there was a yes-no interlude regarding Ed Miliband. Would there be a similar one regarding Mariano Rajoy and a pretender to his leadership? If you don’t know who Rajoy is, you’ve probably answered the question. British politics 1, Spanish politics 0; for most expats anyway.

The editorial concluded by asking: “could it be that central government simply does not credit non-Spaniards with the intelligence to understand the issues at stake in a general election?” It isn’t so much a question of intelligence as, for the most part, interest in or even inclination to understand the issues. Making non-Spaniard Brits part of the political process, i.e. granting them the right to vote, might spark an interest, but you might equally encounter a double whammy of apathy: a natural apathy to vote in whatever circumstances combined with an apathy to come to terms with political issues that aren’t those of Britain. This is hypothetical though; the situation doesn’t apply.

Nevertheless, freedom of movement within the European Union does raise an issue in respect of citizenship, in a broad sense as brought about by residency, just as European laws have raised issues regarding absolute parliamentary sovereignty. It is the mobility encouraged by the single market that has inspired demands for national voting. The European Union has created the situation, only it can resolve the voting issue, which it partly addressed in the Maastricht treaty when making provision for voting in local and European elections. But the right for non-nationals to vote in a general election would be a political pill that would be hard to swallow, and it would be unlikely to happen. Or would it?

Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.

Will The Circle Be Unbroken? – Unemployment in the Balearics

The psychological barrier has been breached, but the regional government would like to suggest that it has not been. The national statistics office would beg to differ. According to it, unemployment in the Balearics has not only crossed the 100,000 Rubicon, it has embarked on the invasion and is scaling the ramparts. Ok, this is an over-statement; it’s not as if a point of no return has been arrived at, but it sure as hell must feel like it to those in the dole queues. The statistics office maintains that the number out of work stands at 112,000, one in ten – approximately – of the islands’ population. Or to put it another way, at just under 20%, one in five of the registered working population, and that figure doesn’t take account of the self-employed who are also feeling the pinch.

The government reckons that unemployment has peaked. It may have, for the time being, though an improvement in figures is unlikely to show up for some while, until seasonal employment kicks in. Even that, however, disguises the true picture, and that is the lack of employment opportunities which summer work only helps to obscure. Recession has exacerbated the situation, clearly it has, but it has also exposed the fault lines of the local economy – ones that should have been obvious to anyone, even politicians, seduced by the boom times but apparently incapable of counteracting seasonality.

The national government, meanwhile, is flailing around, desperate to find any measure that might reduce its massive budget deficit and to assure the markets that the Spanish economy is not the same basket case as Greece’s; oh how the temporarily mighty have fallen. One ploy is to raise the pension age to 67. Fine, assuming there’s any work for the 65 year-olds to continue with. Another is to increase indirect taxation. For an island – Mallorca – and a nation for which tax avoidance is a past-time, this is insane. It might, questionably, mollify the markets, but it will do nothing for employment creation.

Mr. Bean is cutting an ever more awkward figure. When elected for his second term in 2008, Sr. Zapatero had promised full employment. There wasn’t a hope in hell’s chance of that, especially not as the crisis began to consume everything in its path. And even were there “full employment”, what would it look like? A few months work as a waiter and then back to the off-season dole queues, paid for by the burdensome levels of social security that are a brake on much employment creation. Were there to be an election now, chances are that the PSOE would be obliterated, bringing into office – by default – the singularly uninspiring figure of the PP’s climate-change-denying Mariano Rajoy. You might remember him; he’s the one with a relative who holds a position in a university who doesn’t reckon much to the climate-change argument, and so Mariano used that as the basis for his own argument. That’s about as good as it gets.

But also meanwhile, Sr. Zapatero can at least walk the European stage during Spain’s EU presidency term. The central government’s science and innovation minister has announced, as part of the programme for the presidency, that research and development and innovation should be at the heart of European recovery. Good for her. Ah yes, innovation, technology, research and development. Now, wasn’t there something about all that two or three years back? Not from Madrid, but from the regional government. Whatever happened, do you suppose? Could it be that funding just had to be diverted to bolstering the rust-bowl industries – construction and hotels during time of crisis? Industries that are at the heart of Mallorca’s seasonality. And so it goes around, and around, and around, the circle remaining unbroken.

Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.