Left behind?
The following article features in our October 2024 print issue, available to subscribers.
izquierdaespañola
IT has not been a good few weeks for the ‘modern left wing’ (by which I mean the progressive liberals) in Spain, not least considering the resignation of Sumar/Mas Madrid and ex Podemos guru Íñigo Errejón following multiple accusations of sexual assault.
Of course, just like most commentators have done here in Spain, you could write a cut and paste piece gleefully pointing out that the biggest male advocate for a ‘right on’ PC sexual politics has turned out (again, allegedly) to be the worst example of the ‘machismo’ he described. You could even write it up as another example of the revolution eating its own children.
But I’m old fashioned and believe that courts should decide on guilt, not social media. So we’ll park that for now.
In any case, the Spanish news cycle has since moved on to cover the all together more horrific story of the widespread flooding and deaths in Valencia, and elsewhere.
Meanwhile, I was taking a morning walk on the final Sunday of October to the centre of Abogados de Atocha (not in Atocha itself but Embajadores) for the second day of the Spanish think tank El Jacobino’s Journadas Jacobinas, covering the future of the left. Surprisingly for 10am on a Sunday morning, I wasn’t the only press there. Perhaps, even in the daily grind of the 24-hour content cycle, there is a still a demand for actual thought.
On the first panel were two former officials from Spain’s biggest unions, UGT and CCOO. Some useful comments were made – ex-CCOO Madrid leader Javier López stated, for example, how it has become normal to hear young people say they will never have a pension. But he also revealed more about the scale of job to help ease the situation, as well as his lack of thinking in terms of practicalities. Indeed, jibes against Milton Friedman, Reagan and Thatcher may have gone down well with this audience, but the real issue, demographics, was left unspoken.
How can a country sustain the entitlements of its people with a smaller and smaller working age population?
Just this month, members of my union (UGT) are striking for a retirement age of 60 on public sector buses. I’m willing to accept that bus drivers cannot be expected to do such a job late into their sixties, but nor is it viable for people to spend a quarter of their life receiving a pension off the state – paid for by me and everyone else who didn’t get to buy a house for 1,000 euros 20 years ago. A union movement where solidarity is a one way street, with people like me covering the pensions of others and getting nothing back in return, is not a union movement that has a future.
Ana Ercoreca, the president of the Union of Work inspection, was one bright spark on the first panel, speaking depressingly well on the extensive use of false autonomous – or fake self-employed – individuals by delivery company Glovo, among others, who are effectively trying to socially dump their obligations on the rest of us while hiding behind an app. Or the extensive use and abuse of permanent nine-month contracts that make it impossible for anyone on them to get a secure rental contract, let alone a mortgage.
It’s no surprise that the best speaker was the one closest to the day-to-day reality of enforcing the law as it stands, but I couldn’t help but feel that it is exactly what trade unions should be doing by not expecting the state to enforce the law in the private sector. Instead, they have almost given up outside the public sector when it comes to the modern generation of jobs.
A few useful points made in the final event, too, such. As by Madrid Regional Assembly deputado Pablo Perpinýa, who stated: “The left and right in Spain only have the power to block one another but not to construct.”
Many of the more important notes highlighted the contradictions within the left-wing PSOE’s current platform. Guillermo del Valle commented on the absurdity of preaching equality and then granting Catalonia a sweetheart deal to retain more tax receipts, smacking away the old social democratic principle of the wealthiest assisting the poorest. Indeed, with Catalan Nationalist Carles Puigdemont returning as leader of Junts with a Mugabesque 90 per cent of the vote, and PSOE’s few regional leaders openly opposing the ‘Cupo catalán’, it seems nothing has been gained from this swallowing of principles by PSOE except to maybe extend the Spanish prime minister’s time in office. This seems to have become the only goal of this exhausted government.
Félix Ovejero, a professor at Barcelona University, commented on the example of an Andalucian nurse being investigated for criticising the requirement to have C1 Catalan to work in the public sector of a Barcelona hospital, highlighting the absurdity of federalism and how it cannot be considered in line with traditional left wing values.
The criticism of a lack of central authority made by Guillermo del Valle has been highlighted in the most tragic of circumstances, with a national government not taking control of the Valencian flood response and the Regional PP Governor stating that he couldn’t act without national information. The worst elements of pass the parcel federalism have been brutally exposed in the weeks following this conference.
But whatever the strengths of these movements, there are two main points that stand in the way of a genuine rejuvenation. One is practical and the other philosophical.
I’ll turn first to what was not said – immigration, of course.
I won’t spend another 1,000 words going into this as you’ve been reading long enough. Suffice it to say that the unwillingness to acknowledge that immigration at current levels in Spain is a major part of the problem when it comes to work and housing is not good enough. I am an immigrant here, and recognise that importing hundreds of thousands of people is going to have a negative effective on the poorest Spaniards. People who wish to build a genuine alternative really need to stop screeching “xenofobia”.
Data from Spain’s Instituto Nacional de Estadística show that from 2017-2021, immigration into Spain was running at roughly 500,000 a year. There is no evidence these numbers have got smaller, and until people who call themselves left wing can get over their weird obsession with pretending mass immigration doesn’t raise the cost of rent, at the expense of the poor and the benefit of the rich, they will forfeit the right to be taken seriously.
On the impact on wages… when I am asked to believe a theoretical study based on the assumption minimum wages are enforced, or the reality (Publico) recently reporting on the arrest of a man in Valladolid for making immigrants ‘work’ 70 hours a week for well under the minimum wage), I will believe the economic reality of supply and demand every time.
The main problem is, however, philosophical.
The left of my tradition is not one of ‘rights’ but one of interests. Sitting in the shrine of the trade union lawyers murdered by a far right terrorist in Madrid, 1977, this might sound like blasphemy. But all the same, it’s not a tradition that actually enforces the laws it pushes. At worst, it takes the agency away from the majority of people to create a movement, handing it to an undemocratic group whose inevitably liberal positions can never be overturned.
Housing is a case in point. The constitution ‘right’ for Spanish people to have secure housing is completely ignored and unenforced because it is not in the interests of those in charge.
At a time when Spanish politics is basically on life support, trapped between a dying government and a main opposition completely captured by the pensioner vote, and with politicians like the former Podemos leader pondering a tired comeback tour, its no bad thing to have at least some spaces where the modern progressive mantra on the left hasn’t been (completely) swallowed whole.
