tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21492975.post5264825011914876021..comments2024-03-05T18:54:24.258+00:00Comments on Paddy's "Letter from London": The troublesome Scots and Catalans have much in common!Paddy Briggshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17847108655078927970noreply@blogger.comBlogger1125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21492975.post-5634371502883156972014-10-07T08:29:59.204+01:002014-10-07T08:29:59.204+01:00In the process of signing in with Google, the syst...In the process of signing in with Google, the system was kind enough to erase a rather long reply.<br />In short, Spain had had two competint political ideologies for the past 400 years. One is,a Swiss, federal model in which each of the founding nations, or peoples, could carrying on running their own things in a highly devolved fusion as they had up until then. The other is the French centrakising and uniformisibg model. There have been wars and military coups over this issue, for several centuries.<br />The outcome of the attempt to gain more devolution that 89% of Catalan MPs wanted led to an unsatisfactory 2006 Statute of autonomy, which was hacked to pieces by the utterly discreditted Constitutional Court in 2010. Since then the independence movement has,seller almost by the dau. The powerful ruling caste has not budged from a confrontational (we're the bosses here, you just shut up). They are the "troublesome" people, not the Catalans, who want their people to survive, and want to be able to prevent excessive milking of Catalonia's economy (in the form of taxes and gross underinvestment) from continuing to slide down the regional table as a result.<br />There was more, but I'm running out of time right now. I like to getting together when you're next over!mstrubellhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/16154711841492903194noreply@blogger.com