Spain and Franco’s legacy: A polarised past, a precarious present

Have a look at two reports, above and below, I produced with Joanna Simpson for More 4 News on Spain’s struggle with its past.

Part I deals with the excavation of the presumed grave of executed poet Federico García Lorca.

Part II deals with growing calls for dictator General Franco to be removed from his resting place at the monument he had built for the Nationalist dead, the Valley of the Fallen, and given to his family for private burial.

Holding on to history

When you live in a stable democracy, and in a region of stable democracies, like Western Europe, you forget how precarious such a situation is, and how hard some have fought for it. You also forget how recently things were not like this.

Talking to left wing victims of Franco’s repression, like Josefina Cordal whose brother was murdered when she was nine, or Nicolás Sánchez Albornoz, who was arrested and put in a labour camp to build the Valley of the Fallen while in his twenties, you realise the pain of the past.

As they talk, occasionally their eyes glaze over as they summon up painful memories. Josefina knew who had killed her brother, she knew where his grave was, and she passed the site regularly for 73 years before she was able to exhume Castor. It is an example of how the legacy of a civil war stays with a nation.

In international wars, one fights an invader, or invades. And if you survive, you return to a nation as a hero, with most around you on your side.

In a civil war, the conflict remains. You return to a community riven by the same divisions of before. You pass your brother’s killers and your family’s persecutors. Much time is needed for the nation to heal.

Old wounds

In Spain, it is 70 years since the end of the Civil War, 34 since the death of Franco. But this journey has shown me how more time is needed.

Not only do people like Josefina and Nicolás harbour the hurt from decades past, but their families do too. They were fiercely left-wing, and committed to the ideology in a way few are in the UK, because here political affiliation does not come with such historical baggage.

And the political parties still struggle with that past. Manuel Fraga, the 86-year-old found of the Partido Popular (PP), the conservative party, is a good example of this. He was a minister under Franco and a reformist at that time. But when in 2007 the Socialist government, led by Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero, whose Republican grandfather died in the Civil War, passed the Law of Historical Memory, Fraga railed against it.

It began a process of removal of Francoist monuments, gave further recognition to those who died on the Left, and lent support to those seeking to trace and exhume their dead Republican relatives. The PP was split on the issue. In parliament, it voted for some parts of the law, but not others. Its leader, Mariano Rajoy, urged Spain not to reopen old wounds.

History, warts and all

During the Spanish transition to democracy in the late ‘70s, the country chose deliberately not to travel down the path of recrimination. There were no war crimes tribunals, nobody in the Hague. And so Spain managed to reach today’s state of stable democracy, and is proud of its achievement and prizes its political system.

But if Europe is the British Conservative Party’s weak spot, where it struggles to find a unified position, so the past is for Spain’s conservatives. Chasing spokespeople at the PP, I came quickly to realise how prickly they are about the issue of ‘historical memory’. I didn’t manage to get a statement from them, and in my discussions with them, was told that a policy ‘no esta manifestada’ – it is not declared.

Quite so, as El Pais has highlighted. The paper talks of one PP mayor building a monument to Miró and 2,000 Republicans shot by the cemetery walls of his town, and of another who at the same time is trying to build on a mass Republican grave - two completely different approaches to the past.

And so, for all this resentment to settle will take even more than the 34 years that have already past. And there will be more difficult hurdles for Spain to leap, like the exhumation of García Lorca and the issue of what to do with Franco’s remains.

Do you try to erase the undesirable parts of your history, or do you face up to them and learn from them? I feel you have to do the latter, in the hope that while it might be divisive in the short-term, it will bring greater unity in the long-term.

(Opinions expressed here are my own)

Bell Pottinger, Trafigura, The Guardian, that injunction and of course the toxic waste dumped on the Ivorians

So it's been a remarkable day for social media geeks, free speech, The Guardian, Trafigura and Carter-Ruck, and not necessarily in that order.

Trafigura, an international oil trader, represented by Carter-Ruck's Adam Tudor, gets an injunction to stop The Guardian reporting a question in Parliament. The question concerned their allegedly dumping toxic waste in the Ivory Coast.

That is a particularly unpleasant story of the rich world exploiting the poor because it's cheaper to dump waste there. The dumping of toxic waste is at the centre of the story.

But today the story grew.

The gagging order appeared, as The Guardian and its editor Alan Rusbridger pointed out, to fly in the face of the 1688 Bill of Rights, and trampled the freedom of the press. It left many furious, and as the crux of the story had already been reported in the media, it wasn't hard to guess the content of the question in Parliament. In fact it was actually on Parliament's website.

Within hours Twitter was alight with geeky and media-ery rage at what had happened. #trafigura, #guardian and #carterruck rose to be among the most discussed topics on Twitter.

The Spectator and Guido Fawkes' Blog defied the injunction, alongside thousands of Twitter-ers. Good for them. By the afternoon Carter Ruck had given in. The injunction was lifted.

It was a sorry episode for Trafigura, Carter-Ruck and the judge who granted the injunction.

But there is another party in this who also didn't cover itself in glory - Bell Pottinger. They are Trafigura's lobbyists, PR guys, whatever you want to call them, and Neil Cameron appears to do the Trafigura account.

The PR types are already pointing out that today hasn't been a great example of how to ply their trade. And the question remains, did Bell Pottinger know of Carter-Ruck's scheme to get this injunction?

If it did, and I suppose there is the possibility it even suggested it, then, well, whoops Belly P. Just to make it absolutely clear, Bell P's job is to keep all this nasty toxic-waste-dumped-in-the neighbourhoods-of-poor-Africans stuff on the quiet.

They had done an alright job till today. To their credit, only BBC's Newsnight, The Guardian and Al Jazeera had really bothered to sniff out the story, as far as I can tell. So it was under-reported.

But today it was thrust to the centre of British politics. Now MPs and all sorts of important types are cross about what has happened with all this injunction stuff and won't be too happy about all this toxic waste stuff either. What's more, lots of Joe Publics who didn't know about Trafigura's dalliances in waste disposal on the cheap now do know about it.

That, as the Twitterati are pointing out, is called the Streisand effect.

So maybe Bell Pottinger ought to have recruited Babs to their team to balance out the greying Tories. Or at least someone who can work that internet thingy.

Privilege, Trafigura and Carter-Ruck

Usually I try only to blog when I can add something to story, or if it is in itself an under reported story. This one? Well it is just too important not to blog about.

Carter-Ruck appears to have taken out an injunction, or gagging order if you prefer, banning the Guardian newspaper from reporting on a question asked in Parliament.

It cannot report the MP who has asked the question, what the question is, which minister might answer it, or where the question is to be found.

But the rebellious geeks that roam the internet have decided to side with the 1688 Bill of Rights, rather than "the London solicitors Carter-Ruck, who specialise in suing the media for clients, who include individuals or global corporations".

Why is this important? Because if you can't report what is said in parliament, a forum which is supposed to be openly reported for all, then where can you report what is said? How can the press be free if it can't report what our own lawmakers are discussing? How can society be open or democratic?

So if you want to know all about the question in question, it's all on good old Wikileaks. Comment on the Spectator.

And guess what? Guardian, Carter-Ruck and Trafigura are all top trending topics on Twitter. Will #trafigura become the new #iran then? I do hope so. But I bet Carter-Ruck doesn't hope so.

And here's a post of mine from May when the BBC first reported the story on Newsnight. Well done BBC for May. Not so well done for not reporting today's story. There's still time.

Government moves to stave off row over Forces Post Office

The Government has moved to avoid another embarrassing row over treatment of the armed forces which could have inflamed public opinion as much as the Gurkha affair.

It was proposing to cut postal services for forces members in Europe and America. One UKIP member called the decision 'vile' and 'venal'.

Given the ongoing row over military resources in Afghanistan, the previous row over settlement of Gurkhas in the UK and a general feeling among many forces members and their families that the government is not fully behind them, this had the potential to become another serious blow to the government.

But a small article on Newsletter.co.uk suggests the Ministry of Defence has reversed its decision. Not before 30,000 people signed an online petition on the 10 Downing Street website, urging the Prime Minister to reconsider the decision.

This will largely go unreported now the Government has nipped the problem in the bud. But it could have been a lot worse, and it could have lost Gordon Brown even more points in the polls.

Paid-for content online: Of course we'll pay

There seems a tendency when businessmen and media experts talk about the Internet to characterise it as something so new and revolutionary that history can offer no lessons.

So now the debate is raging over whether consumers will pay for content online, with many arguing they won't, and News Corp arguing they will, people seem blind to the lessons of the past.

But what about satellite TV? It amazed me at the time, when I was still in school, that people would pay for TV when they could get it for free. The BBC, ITV and Channel 4 all offered good stuff. You even got some football and lots of other sport. But still consumers paid for Sky, and cable and all that was on offer. They still do.

So why should the same not be true of the Internet? Of course, I would not want to pay 20 quid a month for The Times online, but I would pay for a basket of websites, like The Times, The Sun, Sky News and The Wall Street Journal. That's even if I get BBC, Channel 4 and ITV online for free.

People pay for other content online. They pay for dating, data, pornography and photography, so why not news?

Of course, this means syndication, if that's the right word. It mean flogging a basket of websites, in the same way BSkyB and Virgin sell a basket of TV channels. That way, and with the supplement of advertising revenue, the future of news is online, and it is bright and it is profitable.

So hopefully we can stumble onwards and reach that point in the not-too-distant future and avoid all the myopic media analysis in the mean time.

The BNP, The British Legion and using veterans for votes

The BNP has a strategy of offering help to war veteran charities in a bid to cast itself as an altruistic party helping the heroes who the government and the establishment have neglected. "Cynical use of social action," Nothing British calls it.

Whatever you call it, the fact is the BNP has identified this issue as one where people feel strongly, and feel the government hasn't done enough. The party sees a space in the political sphere where it can win votes.

And sadly it seems to be an accurate calculation. But it puts the charities in a difficult position. Obviously they want funding, but they don't want to be politicised. Supporting veterans is not a political issue, or at least it should not be, as it goes without saying they should be supported as best as Britain can.

In June this year, the British Legion berated the BNP boss Nick Griffin for wearing a poppy. It made a bold statement urging him to avoid politicising the poppy. "Stop it, Mr Griffin. Just stop it," they said.

But then in September the BBC found the British Legion had in fact knowingly accepted a donation from a BNP member.

Now, the BNP is targeting a Scottish organisation helping veterans, called FEBA. It looks likely that Tommy Moffat will accept the gift. And the BNP may make inroads in Scotland.

Does it matter? I think there are two ways to look at this. One is to criticise the charities for taking the cash, and urge them not to do so, while also criticising the BNP for being a bunch of cynical fascists. That's fine, in as far as it goes.

But a better assessment is to realise that whatever is done on this issue, the BNP will continue to sniff out these sorts of mobilising issues where the government policy is weak and people feel strongly, and will exploit them for votes.

A better way of nipping the problem in the bud is to simply back the charities, make sure they are funded properly, and squeeze the BNP out. Go to the source of the problem and deal with the cause, not the symptoms.

It seems to me that too often people attack the BNP per se without realising that the only reason they are making electoral ground is because of the wider failings of the other parties and, primarily, the government.

They are the ones who have created these issues the BNP exploits. They are the ones who have angered normal British people who are not normally politicised. They are the ones who push people to the BNP.

Don't just look at how the BNP pulls people in, look at how the establishment pushes people to the fringes, and to the BNP.

Hugo Chavez, Oliver Stone and 63 closed radio and TV stations

So, while Hugo Chavez treads the red carpet at the Venice Film Festival, enjoys the limelight and jokes about James Bond with his pal, Oliver Stone, staff at another 29 radio stations in Venezuela ponder their imminent closure.

They are among 200 broadcasters facing administrative procedures from the regulator in Venezuela.

And Chavez's administration is not just cutting back on the broadcasters, but substituting the ones he closes with 'Bolivarian' equivalents, staffed by 'revolutionaries' who sing his praises and promote his brand, as he is doing in Italy.

There is TeleSUR, the international 24-hour news channel, the national networks - Venevision and others, the various regional channels all funded by the state and the community TV and radio stations. It is a whole integrated media infrastructure funded by the government. And it more than counters the anti-Chavez voices in the country.

Whether he is a dictator or not is another question for people like George Bush and Oliver Stone to argue.

But that he is a friend of free speech is a claim that I, for one, refute.

Michael Lord-Castle and the Mirror

So Michael Lord-Castle has made it into the national papers again.

This time, once more, it is The Mirror. Penman and Sommerlad have been keeping an eye on him.

So have the Advertising Standards Auhtority, which has upheld two complaints about a fax which appear to have come from one of him many ventures, the Insolvency Advisory Service LLP.

Turns out they were misleading, although he claims the faces weren't sent by the IAS.

"The fax breached CAP Code clauses 7.1 and 7.2 (Truthfulness)."

Penman and Sommerlad reckon they could write a book about Mr Lord-Castle.

I'm not surprised.

See also: GPC and Michael Lord-Castle revisited and Michael Lord-Castle again

Swine flu pandemic: Who benefits? Part II

I refer you to my post back on April 28, when I posed the question 'who benefits from swine flu?'

Now, epidemiologist Dr Tom Jefferson has raised the same issue. He told Channel 4 News last night that 'vested interests' had declared a pandemic at an earlier stage and at a 'lower threshold' than they would have done in the past, and have created a 'juggernaut'.

The accusation is that the pharmaceuticals, academics and even the World Health Organisation all stand to gain from a pandemic which has people full of fear, but relatively far from death.

Virologist Professor John Oxford denies there is any profiteering going on, although they will of course make money. That is what companies do.

At the moment, though, we have very few deaths on a relative scale. Seasonal flu would be expected to kill more, and we have a very 'robust' response, to use the Prime Minister's words.

Too robust? There is a complex and deep network of beneficiaries here. Lets not travel down the conspiracy theory path. But sexing up swine flu? That might be a valid charge.

Guinah's story: An asylum seeker's experience

Guinah Hussein tells of his experience of unexpectedly arriving in Britain after fleeing Togo aged 16