It doesn't matter how badly you fail in life, if you're born into the gilded British establishment class then you'll be given once chance after another to completely screw even more things up.
Just look at the state of George Osborne. Only the most brainwashed of Tory tribalists could even try to argue that his six year tenure as Chancellor of the Exchequer was anything but a disaster for the British economy.
- He missed every economic target he set himself, most notably the promise that austerity fanaticism would have completely eliminated the budget deficit by early 2015. It's well over four years past his deadline, he's been gone for three years, and it's still nowhere near eradicated.
- After only a few years of austerity stagnation even devoutly neoliberal economic organisations like the OECD and the IMF were warning against the ideological fanaticism of austerity cuts, but Osborne soldiered on regardless.
After losing his job as Chancellor and quitting as an MP Osborne took up a number of jobs. Several of them look just like the kind of highly-paid corporate directorship bribes you'd expect him to receive after carving up so many public assets to give away to city spivs, and slashing Corporation Tax to by far the lowest rate in the G7. But becoming Editor of the London Evening Standard was quite a surprise given his absolute lack of experience in the newspaper trade.
Within a couple of years in the Evening Standard job Osborne has reduced a slightly profitable news outlet into an extraordinary money-burning pit, losing a staggering £23 million in the last two years.
But now Christine Lagarde is potentially moving on as head of the IMF for a position in the EU, George Osborne and his cheerleaders are promoting him as her replacement!
The absolute entitlement of it is staggering. His incompetence as Chancellor will go down in economic history as a lesson in exactly what not to do after a crisis, his tenure at the Evening Standard is an absolute joke, and here he is pushing himself forward for one of the top economics jobs on the planet!
presumably the rest of the world will piss themselves laughing at the idea of the most incompetent British finance minister in living memory fancying himself for such a job, but that hasn't stopped the Tory press from championing the idea as if they actually see him as some kind of magnificent economic genius, rather than a living embodiment of Britain's dangerous subservience to over-entitled and under-qualified Tory toffs.
What a country we live in where poor and ordinary people experience one barrier after another to progression no matter how capable they are (sexism, racism, classism, regionalism, homophobia, lack of old school connections ...) while those born into the gilded establishment class can stumble from one unbelievably catastrophic cock-up to another, and remain perfectly confident that there's always another high profile and lavishly remunerated position for them to waltz into.
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On the 31st of May 2016 it was revealed that pub chain JD Wetherspoon had printed up 20,000 pro-Brexit beer mats. It's hardly a surprise that the company has decided to propagandise for Brexit given that the boss Tim Martin advocates Brexit as strongly as he opposes labour rights and decent wages for his employees.
Incoherently structured arguments
The problem with the JD Wetherspoon beer mats (right) is obvious. As weak as much of the EU referendum propaganda has been from both sides of the debate has been, a sustained attack on the International Monetary Fund followed by the conclusion "Vote 'Leave' - take back control" has to be one of the most incoherently structured arguments yet.
The IMF is not part of the EU, and it will continue to push hard-right economic dogma on countries across the world whether the UK votes to leave the EU or not.
It doesn't matter what your opinions on the IMF or on the EU are (I'm not particularly fond of either of them), the argument that "the IMF stinks therefore the UK should leave the EU" is a remarkable non-sequitur. Perhaps Tim Martin is hoping that his clientele are so drunk out of their minds on cheap beer that they're rendered incapable of spotting what an utterly crap argument his beer mats make?
Inverse snobbery
A lot of the online commentary about the JD Wetherspoon Brexit beer mats focused on the fact that the vast majority of Wetherspoon staff are on exploitative Zero Hours Contracts and that the company boss Tim Martin is a staunch opponent of paying his employees enough to even live on having spoken out repeatedly against increases in the minimum wage.
It's hardly surprising to see a selfish right-wing zealot backing
Brexit, because an unrestrained Conservative government led by the
crackpot extreme-right Tory fringe (Boris Johnson, Iain Duncan Smith,
Michael Gove, Chris Grayling, Priti Patel ...) would no doubt conduct a
massive bonfire of labour rights in order to hand even more advantage to wealthy
employers over their beleaguered and underpaid employees.
The response from the Brexit commentariat was to completely ignore all of the comments pointing out Tim Martin's self-interest in seeing the European employment rights of his employees scrapped, and instead focused on misrepresenting all criticism of Tim Martin and JD Wetherspoon as elitist snobbery from the Remain camp. Their argument goes along the lines that "the Remain camp is full of elitist snobs filled with hatred and contempt for the good honest pro-Brexit working class types who drink in Wetherspoons pubs".
The problem with this kind of inverted snobbery is that assuming all Remain supporters are privileged snobs is just as much of a shallow generalisation as assuming that all Wetherspoon patrons are pro-Brexit working class salt of the earth types. This kind of crude generalisation based "us vs them" sneering is indicative of the kind of emotive fact-free rhetoric that has infused the Brexit campaign. Additionally such "us vs them" comments are actually far more laden with offensive generalisations than any of the Bremain comments about the Wetherspoon beer mats I came across.
Humourlessness
The news of a pub chain printing up political beer mats was obviously ideal material for Al Murray (the pub landlord) to work with. He had a dig at both sides of the EU referendum debate by designing his own beer mats and writing an article for the Guardian.
It doesn't matter if you find Al Murray particularly funny or not, it's undeniable that the Wetherspoon beer mats were pretty much the most perfect material for a pub landlord comedy character to work with. If he hadn't have done it, it would have been a tremendous missed opportunity.
If you actually look at Al Murray's beer mats and read his article then it's quite clear that he was actually being quite even-handed in attacking the Project Fear vs Project Fear negative campaigning from both camps.
This didn't stop a shit-parade of furious Brexiters from wading in to attack Al Murray as an "elitist" from an "establishment background" and criticising his Oxford education and his aritocratic ancestry.
A crowd of bile spewing Brexiters and 'kippers slagging off Al Murray for his Oxford education and his establishment ancestry is quite some spectacle given the kinds of people leading the Brexit campaign.
Consider this:
- Alexander James Hay Murray: Private education (Bedford), Oxford University. Decided to hang around with comedians like Stewart Lee and Harry Hill instead of follow his father into the admiralty. Lived as a struggling comedian for several years before his "pub landlord" character took off.
- Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson: Private education (Eton), Oxford University. Wrote for Rupert Murdoch's Times and Conrad Black's Telegraph. Edited the establishment friendly Spectator magazine for years. Wormed his way into the Tory party. Professional politician since 2001.
- Nigel Farage: Private education (Dulwich). Worked as a commodities trader in the Ciry of London since the 1980s. Activist for the Tory party until 1992. Joined UKIP in 1993. Professional politician since 1999.
- Michael Gove: Private education (Robert Gordon's). Oxford University. Wrote for the Murdoch press and the Spectator. Professional politician since 2005.
If any of these four are guilty of being a pampered out-of-touch rich boy putting on
a grotesque pint-swilling man of the people act, it's clearly Nigel
Farage isn't it?
It's remarkable to see Brexiters attacking Al Murray as some kind of establishment shill when he chose to jump off the establishment track to knock around with other dropouts like Harry Hill and Stewart Lee, while they simultaneously support a Brexit campaign led by three privately educated professional politicians.
It seems that in the Brexiter mindset having an establishment background is toxic as hell if you're not part of the Brexit campaign (even if you rejected in order to become a stand up comedian), but being still firmly rooted in the political establishment is nothing to be concerned about if you are.
Conclusion
There are a lot of incredibly furious Brexiters out there. People who are so riled up with anger that they're utterly incapable of forming a remotely coherent argument. Some of them are so furious that they don't seem to be able to even differentiate between the EU and other non-EU institutions (the IMF, NATO, the UN, the ECHR ...). Some of them rely on appalling displays of inverse snobbery and anti-intellectualism to form the basis of their fact-free "us vs them" arguments in favour of Brexit. Some of them are utterly humourless people who use the privileged background of a comedian (that he rejected) as personal attacks because he doesn't cheerlead for Brexit, whilst completely ignoring the fact that the main figureheads of the Brexit campaign come from similarly privileged backgrounds, and that unlike Al Murray, they're still firmly entrenched in the political establishment.
The kind of embarrassingly incoherent shit-slinging tactics detailed in this article are examples of what happens to the standard of debate when people let anger dictate their actions and decisions. Sadly both camps in the EU debate have realised that playing on people's basic emotions (anger and fear) is a good way to herd them over to their side of the argument, hence the appallingly low general standard of debate about such an important political issue.
Another Angry Voice is a "Pay As You Feel" website. You can have access to all of my work for free, or you can choose to make a small donation to help me keep writing. The choice is entirely yours.
It doesn't matter what your opinion on the EU is, or which side you favour in the EU referendum debate, only those suffering extreme confirmation bias could be unwilling to recognise that the official "Vote Leave, take control" case for Brexit is an absolute shambles of empty misleading propaganda, unsourced statistics, fearmongering rhetoric, misleading claims, transparent false dichotomies and outright lies.
The "£350 million" lie
The official "Vote leave, take control" document repeats the lie that the UK sends £350 million per week to the EU five times. The lie has been repeatedly debunked as a massive over-estimate based on the dodgy misuse of official figures, yet it's the most oft repeated economic claim in the primary document of the Vote Leave campaign!
Surely it's a damning indictment of the Vote Leave campaign that they repeatedly use deliberately misleading numbers as crude propaganda instead of presenting anything even remotely resembling a structured and costed plan for what would happen to the UK economy after Brexit.
What would post-Brexit Britain look like?
The Vote Leave campaign have not prepared any kind of manifesto whatever for what a post-Brexit economy would look like, preferring to proffer a series of completely uncosted possibilities like "All this money could be better spent on the NHS, schools, and fundamental science research".
The idea that a Tory government that has spent the last six years on an ideological mission to slash spending on the NHS, education and science research in order to fund vast tax cuts for corporations and the very rich, are suddenly going to reverse direction after Brexit is a pure fantasy that only the most delusional people could possibly allow themselves to believe in.
This fantasy that Brexit would save the NHS is particularly delusional given that Brexit would further empower the most fanatically right-wing elements within the Tory party, who are the kind of people who hate the NHS with a burning ideological passion because it's a glowing beacon of successful, popular and efficient socialist policy.
Possibilities not promises
"All this money could be better spent on the NHS, schools, and fundamental science research".
The use of the word "could" gives the game away. It makes it absolutely clear that the right-wingers behind Vote Leave know perfectly well that any savings from leaving the EU will immediately be distributed to the rich, so they're only offering increased spending on stuff like infrastructure, services and scientific research as a theoretical possibility.
The hardline right-wingers behind Vote Leave know that they have no power, nor inclination to ensure greater funding for socialist projects like the National Health Service or the universal education system, but they're perfectly happy to use these possibilities as bait to hook in the gullible.
Even though Vote Leave make it absolutely clear that they are only offering increased funding for the NHS and scientific research as a possibility, not as a promise, they are perfectly happy to set it up as an utterly misleading binary either-or choice at the end of the document.
"A vote to keep sending hundreds of millions to Brussels every week, or a vote to put that money into scientific research and the NHS?"
Repeated claims to be standing up for British science when there is a mountain of evidence that an awful lot of scientists see Brexit as something that would damage UK science and technology is pretty brazen stuff. Even more brazen is the attempt by a bunch of right-wing Tories and 'kippers to criticise the EU for cuts to their science budgets when the Tory government in the UK has been savagely slashing spending on science, research and development, universities and adult education for the last six years.
The ideologically driven Tory freeze on science spending has seen the UK fall way behind industrial competitors like the US and Germany. These savage real terms cuts to UK science projects have nothing to do with the EU and everything to do with the crackpot Tory ideological austerity agenda that would be further empowered by Brexit.
Unsourced statistics
The "Vote Leave, take control" document is absolutely rife with unsourced statistics and graphs. One particularly egregious example is the claim that 74% of UK based Small and Medium sized Enterprises (SMEs) think that the UK government, not the EU should control trade policy. No source is given, no data, no sample size, nothing. The inclusion of unsourced statistics like this in a document that repeatedly claims to be championing science should be enough to cause cognitive dissonance in even the most determined of Brexiters.
There is simply no excuse for the repeated presentation of unsourced statistics, especially in a keystone document from the official Vote Leave campaign.
Who is "we"?
"We regain legal control of things like trade, tax, economic regulation, energy and food bills, migration, crime, and civil liberties."
Who is this "we" that Vote Leave are referring to in this sentence? If the UK public vote for Brexit, who will benefit from these additional powers? Will it be the man on the street? Or will it be the Tory government and the unelected House of Lords that David Cameron has spent six years stuffing full of hundreds of unelected cronies?
It's absolutely clear that "we" refers to the Westminster political establishment, not to ordinary British folk, so what would the Tories do with their "regained" powers?
Trade: The Tories are massively in favour of the TTIP corporate power grab, so anyone who thinks that they wouldn't cook up an even more terrifyingly pro-corporate "trade deal" with the US after Brexit is guilty of fantasy land thinking. Donald Trump has indicated that a post-Brexit UK would not be pushed to the back of the trade-deal queue were he to become President. Can you imagine how dangerously pro-corporate/anti-worker/environmentally destructive a trade deal drawn up between the likes of Donald Trump and Boris Johnson would be?
Tax: The EU doesn't actually exert that much control over the UK tax system. There are EU rules on VAT, but there is still a lot of variance in VAT rates and applications across Europe. The EU has not prevented the Tory government from repeatedly slashing the rate of UK Corporation Tax over the last six years so that the rate of Corporation Tax tax rate for multinational corporations (the ones who actually pay their tax) is now below the basic rate of income tax for their workers! The UK government retains autonomy over all kinds of taxes such as Corporation Tax, Income Tax, Inheritance Tax, Council Tax, Stamp Duty, Fuel Duty, tax rates on alcohol and cigarettes ... so it seems that the word "tax" has only been included in the above list to make it seem longer and more impressive.
Economic regulation: On several occasions the Tories have wasted taxpayers' money trying to defend the interests of their rich mates in the City of London from EU regulations. Remember the time when George Osborne was the only finance minister in the entire EU to oppose the plan to cap bankers' bonuses at 200% of their annual salary? Vote Leave clearly want to help the Tories tear up EU regulations that impede their mates' financial sector profiteering.
Energy bills: Remember when Ed Miliband proposed a government cap on energy prices and the Tories lined up to shriek "communist" and "price-fixer" at him? Remember how just a few weeks later the Tories signed up to a ludicrous price-fixing deal to pay EdF (85% owned by the French state) and the Chinese government twice the market rate for electricity for 35 years? If the Tories are given more control over the energy market, they'll simply hand more of it over to Chinese communists and state operated energy companies like EdF in line with their crackpot ideology that the French, Chinese, German and Dutch states are more capable of running UK infrastructure than the UK state itself.
Food bills: Vote Leave don't bother to explain the means by which the UK government will gain additional powers over food bills, however it seems fair to guess that a Tory government would set up their own system of landowner subsidies to replace the subsidies distributed by the EU under the Common Agricultural Policy. If the new Tory landowner subsidies are higher than the current EU ones, food prices would probably fall, but taxpayers would foot the bill, if they are lower than the current ones then food prices would rise. The idea of the Tories scrapping landowner handouts in line with their free-trade mantra is completely unrealistic. Farmers are such a loyal Tory demographic that Brexit would probably result in a large increase in free handouts to major landowners from the Tory government.
Migration: For the last six years the Tory Home Secretary Theresa May has been conducting an economically insane war on non-EU migrants, including migrants who are married to British citizens (the most likely of all to assimilate, contribute and stay long-term rather than working in the UK a while then extracting their wealth), non-EU students (a vital source of income to British universities, and a net positive to the UK economy) and non-EU workers who earn less than £35,000 per year (the average UK wage is £26,000). Anyone who thinks that such malicious and economically incompetent Tory immigration policies would just stop after Brexit is wandering into post-Brexit fantasy land again.
Crime: Again, Vote Leave offer no detail whatever on what they mean by "regaining local control of .... crime". In fact this sentence is the only mention of the word "crime" in the entire "Vote Leave, take control" document! Since Vote Leave are totally unwilling to specify what crime powers they think the UK needs to repatriate from the EU, it's fair to assume that it's simply another word added to their list seem longer and more impressive.
Civil Liberties: Given that the current Tory government are intent on scrapping as many civil liberties as they can get away with (the right to free speech, labour rights, the presumption of innocence, the right to privacy, the entire Human Rights Act ...) it's an utterly bizarre item to add to the list. Essentially what Vote Leave seem to be saying is that it would be a good thing if the Tories gained even more capacity to scrap any of our human rights that stand in the way of them doing whatever the hell they like.
Eurozone Austerity
One of the most bizarre things about the "Vote Leave, take control" document is the way that it tries to portray the dire consequences of ideological austerity in the Eurozone as a reason to vote for Brexit. Of course anyone with any macroeconomic sense should be appalled at the way the European Commission, European Central Bank and IMF have colluded to force socially and economically toxic austerity on countries like Greece, Spain, Portugal and Ireland, but using that as a reason to support Brexit is utterly illogical. It's illogical because the Tory government are even more fanatical about ideological austerity than the EU, in fact, George Osborne even found £10 billion in British cash to hand over to the IMF in order to go around forcing austerity onto other countries.
A bunch of hard-right Tories who have voted for one appalling austerity policy after another in the UK for the last six years using austerity in the Eurozone as an argument for Brexit is a display of the worst kind of unprincipled opportunism.
Uncertainty
During the 2014 campaign for Scottish independence the right-wing media constantly attacked the Vote Yes campaign and the SNP government for perceived flaws in their detailed plan for post-independence Scotland. During the 2016 campaign for the UK to quit the EU, swathes of the right-wing press have been completely silent on the total lack of an actual plan for what a post-Brexit UK economy might look like.
As far as the right-wing press seem concerned "we'll cross that bridge when we get to it" is a viable economic strategy for a stable transition out of the European Union!
It's incredible that swathes of the right-wing press were so desperate to fearmonger about the uncertainties of Scottish independence, but less than two years later they're supporting a Brexit campaign with no detailed plan whatever for what comes next.
Economic chaos
The lack of anything resembling a coherent plan for what comes next is certain to cause economic uncertainty if Vote Leave win.
It doesn't matter how much froth and bile Brexiters like Michael Gove, Jacob Rees-Mogg and Andrea Leadsom spit about expert interventions, financial institutions like the Bank of England would be utterly reckless if they were to fail to point out the obvious fact that Brexit with no strategic plan of action from the people who are promoting it would be extremely likely to cause severe economic turmoil because financial markets generally don't like uncertainty and instability.
An unjustified and unjustifiable conclusion
"A vote to leave is the safer option"
There is absolutely no effort to justify this conclusion from an economic, political or security perspective.
Economic: I'm not one to take the utterances of financial institutions like The Bank of England, IMF, OECD or private banks at face value. These are the institutions that failed to see the 2007-08 global financial sector insolvency crisis coming. However, the underlying justification for their pessimistic projections about the economic consequences of Brexit seems sound. The Brexiters have outlined no real plan for Brexit and seem to think "we'll cross that bridge when we get to it" is sufficient. This mens that severe and sustained economic uncertainty is inevitable given the total lack of strategic planning. Under these circumstances anyone who tries to claim that Brexit is economically safer than Bremain is playing you for a fool.
Political: Post-war European co-operation came about as an effort to prevent another massive conflict between the European powers. Given that the first half of the 20th Century featured the two most deadly industrialised wars the European continent had ever seen, it is worth celebrating the fact that there have been no wars between EU states since the era of European co-operation began. It would be the worst kind of fearmongering to suggest that Brexit could lead directly to war, but it's difficult to imagine how it's possible to justify any claim that voting for the UK to remain in Europe would make the UK politically safer.
Security: Despite all of the Britain First style fearmongering about refugees from the Syrian civil war being terrorists, it remains an incontestable fact that all of the deadly terrorist atrocities carried out on British soil since the 1950s have been perpetrated by people born in the British Isles. The idea that withdrawal from the EU would make Britain safer from terrorism is the worst kind of counter-factual nonsense.
It beggars belief that high profile Brexiters like Michael Gove blubber away about the unfairness of fearmongering rhetoric from the Bremain side when the official Vote Leave document ends with an unjustified and unjustifiable assertion that voting to remain in the EU is somehow more unsafe than voting to leave.
Conclusion
The EU is far from perfect, I've been criticising it for years, but the official "Vote Leave, take control" document is an abject demonstration that the official Brexit campaign is a complete shambles run by people with no strategic plan whatever, who think that a garbled mess of fearmongering rhetoric, unsourced statistics, shocking opportunism, misleading claims, blatantly false dichotomies and outright lies is sufficient to convince anybody of anything.
Essentially the whole "Vote Leave, take control" document is a demonstration of the utter contempt that the hard-right Tories and 'kippers behind Vote Leave have for the general public. It's a demonstration that they believe that people are so ill-educated and lacking in critical thinking skills that they'll simply uncritically rote learn the abject mess they've presented as their keystone document, then trot off to vote for Brexit.
Another Angry Voice is a "Pay As You Feel" website. You can have access to all of my work for free, or you can choose to make a small donation to help me keep writing. The choice is entirely yours.
On the 20th of December 2015 Spain experienced a democratic political revolution. The two party duopoly on political power was consigned to history as millions of Spaniards voted for alternative political parties. In this article I'm going to run through some of the important issues.
The era of two party politics is over
Two political parties have held a duopoly on political power in Spain ever since the Franco dictatorship came to an end in the 1970s. PP share the same fanatically right-wing economic stance as the Tories in the UK however they're significantly more right-wing in terms of social policy (during the last parliament they attempted to make abortion illegal and introduced 30,000€ fines for participating in "unauthorised" political protests).
The PSOE are very much like the UK Labour Party during the New Labour era. They masquerade as socialists but actually promote orthodox right-wing economics behind a thin veneer of pseudo-socialist slop.
The 2015 general election saw the share of the vote taken by these two parties reduced to just 51% between them. PP took 29% of the vote which was their worst performance since 1989 and PSOE took 22% which was the worst performance in their entire history.
Demographics
Anyone who thinks the two big establishment parties might bounce back to regain their former dominance should consider the voter demographics. The new left-wing anti-corruption party Podemos came third overall but they were the most popular party of all amongst under 35s. The new centre-right party Ciudadanos was the most popular with 35-44 year olds. The older generations were the only ones to stay fiercely loyal to PP and to a lesser extent PSOE.
The ruling PP used similar tactics to the Tories in the UK. They loaded the burden of austerity onto young people (who suffered 50%+ unemployment for the majority of PP's time in government) and workers (who had their wages and labour rights significantly eroded) while bribing the older generations with pension increases. The ploy worked in that it secured the votes of the elderly, but attacking the younger generations so mercilessly is clearly political suicide from a long-term strategic perspective.
Economic exiles
Under the punishing ideological austerity of the PP government unemployment in Spain has remained ludicrously high. General unemployment is still 21.6% and youth unemployment has remained around 50% for years. The result of this is hundreds of thousands of predominantly young Spanish workers leaving Spain to find work elsewhere in the EU. The electoral impact of such heavy outward immigration is difficult to estimate, but it's impossible to say that it hasn't had an influence on the outcome.
On the one hand the economic exile of so many younger voters will have benefited the two establishment parties favoured by older voters, but on the other hand if economic conditions weren't so incredibly dire as to drive hundreds of thousands of voters out of the country, it's likely a significantly smaller percentage of the electorate would have decided to vote for new alternative parties like Podemos and Ciudadanos.
The right-wing PP can't hold onto power
The suspicion of many in Spain was that the new centre-right political party Ciudadanos were going to enable PP back into power despite their pre-election promises that they wouldn't. As the results came in it became clear that a PP-Ciudadanos alliance would have nowhere near enough seats to form a majority government. This means that the only conceivable way for PP to hold onto power would be to form an alliance with their traditional rivals for absolute power PSOE (I'll explain why this is unlikely under the PSOE subheading).
PP are still the biggest party so they could attempt to form a minority government, but the consequences of a right-wing party attempting to hold onto power in such a manner have only just been played out in Portugal. The Portuguese right-wing minority government was widely regarded as an anti-democratic power-grab and lasted only a matter of weeks before they were replaced by a left-wing coalition with a clear majority of seats between them.
The rise of Podemos continues
The party that finished third was only founded in March 2014. They finished just shy of PSOE with 20.7% of the vote (to PSOE's 22.0%). Due to the disproportional nature of the Spanish electoral system this translated to a much lower 69 seats to PSOE's 90, but despite this, their performance can only be seen as a continuation of their remarkably successful growth. They have not only established themselves as a significant parliamentary force, they also have the mayors of Madrid and Barcelona and secured very strong backing in Catalonia and the Basque Country.
Podemos were the most popular party of all in two of the four Catalan regions (Barcelona and Tarragona) and were the most popular national party in both of the others (Girona and Lleida). Podemos were the most popular party in two of the three Basque regions (Álava and Gipuzkoa) and only finished narrowly behind the Basque Nationalist party in the other (Biscay).
Aside from these clear successes Podemos also finished as the second most popular party in nine other regions (A Coruña, Alicante, Balearic Islands, Castellón, Las Palmas, Madrid, Navarre, Pontevedra and Valencia).
Ciudadanos
Podemos were not the only new political party to do well. The centre-right party Ciudadanos finished in fourth place with 13.9% of the vote and 40 seats.
Ciudadanos undoubtedly did well, but they fell short of their objective of winning enough seats to hand power back to PP. It doesn't matter that Ciudadanos repeatedly promised not to enable PP and Mariano Rajoy back into power, it was always clear that that was their objective. Many people saw their rise in popularity as an attempt by the Spanish establishment to back a Trojan horse political party to soak up the protest votes and derail the exponential rise of Podemos.
The suspicions that Ciudadanos are just an establishment Trojan horse were confirmed in the days after the election when their leader Albert Rivera called for the two establishment parties to join Ciudadanos in a grand coalition in order to lock Podemos out of power.
To go from posing as an anti-establishment party and promising not to keep PP in power to actively promoting a PP led establishment coalition in the space of a few days either side of the election show Ciudadanos up for the cynic political opportunists that they are (and always seemed to be to anyone with a grain of political sense).
PSOE are in huge trouble
The supposedly socialist party PSOE suffered the worst result in their entire history winning just 22% of the vote. This leaves them in an extraordinarily tricky position. It's hard to envisage a course of action that will not end up damaging their party even further.
The most damaging course of action of all would obviously be for them to enable their historical rivals PP back into power by joining a grand coalition. We only need to look at what happened to PASOK in Greece after they enabled the right-wing pro-austerity New Democracy party into power in 2012. The move was so unpopular with their own supporters that they ended up slumping to just 4.7% of the vote in 2015 reducing them to the 7th party in Greece, a spectacular fall from grace for a party that had formed a majority government in 2009 with 43.9% of the vote.
Another option for PSOE is to form a left-wing coalition, but this is dangerous territory for them too. If the left-wing coalition goes well then it's likely that the newcomers Podemos will take most of the credit at the next election, but if it goes badly PSOE will end up losing votes over it. A weak left-wing coalition looks like a lose-lose situation for PSOE.
Another option is for them to refuse to join in with any coalition leaving PP to attempt to form an incredibly weak minority government that would be bound to fall triggering new elections. This is also a risky strategy because everyone knows that they only finished ahead of Podemos by the slimmest of margins, so their propaganda line from the 2015 election that they are "the only party that can stand up to PP" has been rendered completely ineffective. It's clear to everyone who opposes PP that Podemos are in the ascendency and PSOE are in rapid decline.
A quick look at Portugal
There are a number of obvious parallels between the 2015 general elections in Spain and Portugal. Both saw the ruling right-wing party lose their majority, both saw the head of state (the right-wing Portuguese President and the King of Spain) hoping to enable the right-wing party back into power, both elections saw a huge rise in support for left-wing anti-austerity parties.
The Portuguese President encouraged his right-wing party colleagues to squat in power with a weak minority government, but they were soon defeated and replaced with a left-wing coalition of the nominally left-wing main opposition party and two genuinely left-wing parties.
It remains to be seen whether the King of Spain will encourage Mariano Rajoy and PP to squat in power with a weak minority government, or whether the Spanish establishment have learned their lesson from what happened to their Iberian neighbours just a few months previously.
The unfair electoral system
The Spanish electoral system is a lot fairer than the staggeringly disproportional and unrepresentative system in the UK, but it's still heavily skewed in favour of the two main parties and badly in need of reform.
The Spanish system is much fairer than the UK system because they have multi-member constituencies elected using a system of proportional representation. This means that smaller parties are not locked out of the political system as they are under the UK's absurdly disproportional single member constituency system,
The major problem with the Spanish system is the wild variance in size between highly populated metropolitan constituencies and much more sparsely populated rural constituencies. The result of these disparities in constituency sizes is a huge bias in favour of the ruling PP.
The number of votes cast for PP per representative in the Spanish parliament was 58,664. The number of votes per PSOE representative was 61,453 but the number of votes cast per Podemos representative was 75,209.
One of Podemos' key non-negotiable demands is reform of this unfair electoral system, so if they do end up sharing power as part of a coalition government (or winning outright in a repeat election) we should expect Spain to adopt a much fairer voting system.
Electoral spending
Podemos have by far the biggest social media presence of any of the Spanish political parties. In fact their 1.043 million Facebook followers absolutely dwarfs the 469,000 followers of the other three major national parties combined (PP 124,000, PSOE, 113,000, C's 232,000).
It's interesting to note the significant reverse correlation between social media presence and electoral spending. Podemos spent only 0.48€ per vote cast in their favour. Ciudadanos spent 1.26€ per vote, PSOE spent 1.63€ per vote and PP spent 2.00€ per vote.
To me it's not actually that surprising that Podemos ended up spending less than a quarter of the money per vote than PP did, because a well orchestrated social media campaign is the best free advertising possible. If some bloke from Yorkshire who has never appeared on the TV or even in his local newspaper (me) can reach millions of people per week with his social media content with 220,000 followers, then a well staffed and well funded political party with over a million Facebook followers should be able to reach staggering numbers of people, especially during an election campaign.
A lot of people still sneer at social media as if it's some kind of meaningless distraction when it comes to serious politics, but the result of the Spanish election makes it absolutely clear that social media presence is an increasingly vital component of electoral success, (especially for alternative parties that suffer relentless negative coverage in the pro-establishment mainstream press).
Another election?
It seems increasingly likely there will be a replay of the Spanish general election in 2016.
A grand coalition including both PP and PSOE is the only conceivable way that a coalition government with a strong majority could be formed, and it's clear that a move by PSOE to prop up their traditional rivals and enable Mariano Rajoy back into power would destroy the credibility of their party.
Either no government will be formed meaning that new elections will be automatically triggered within two months, or a weak government will be formed but will be thrown into crisis at the first major disagreement between the rival coalition parties.
Unless PSOE decide to commit electoral suicide, another set of elections sooner rather than later looks almost inevitable.
What does this all mean for the EU?
The rise of Podemos must strike fear into the hearts of the pro-austerity technocrats who run the EU because were Spain to reject ideological austerity then it would be a much bigger problem for them than Greece.
We all know that the Troika of the EU, European Central Bank and IMF managed to back the left-wing anti-austerity Greek government into a corner and humiliate them by forcing them to carry out an extreme-right programme of socially destructive austerity and ideologically driven privatisations. However Greece is just a small country that generates just 1.3% of economic activity in the EU. For the unelected technocrats who run the EU it's not a problem to vandalise the Greek economy for "the greater good" of protecting the interests of German and French banks. However Spain is a much bigger economy, the fifth biggest in the EU and the fourth biggest in the Eurozone. Spain's economy generates 7.6% of economic activity in the EU making it a much bigger problem if their elected government were to reject right-wing ideological austerity.
The EU, ECB and IMF Troika spent the first part of 2015 grinding Greece into submission, ignoring the will of their electorate and humiliating their democratically elected government. If Spain ends up with an anti-austerity government it's going to represent a much bigger problem for the unelected pro-austerity technocrats. Such an occurrance would mean that Spain, Portugal and Greece would all have anti-austerity governments. The economic repercussions of the Troika campaign of economic destruction in Greece (1.3% of the EU economy) were severe enough, but launching similar concurrent campaigns against Spain (7.6%) and Portugal (1.3%) would mean that the EU would be at economic war with over 10% of its own economy (13% of its own population)!
The issue for Spain is whether they have the confidence to stand up and reject austerity, or whether they're so afraid of the humiliation and economic destruction unleashed on Greece that they'd overlook the fact that Spain is a much more powerful economy. If Spain have the confidence to try it they could lead the fightback against the EU's socially and economically destructive campaign of ideological austerity, especially if they ally themselves with Greece and Portugal.
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I don't often do reaction pieces to other people's articles, but I believe that this article about Greece from the Guardian's Larry Elliot is quite well written, but raises some important issues too.
I'll begin with a quote from the article:
"Greece is like Sisyphus, the king of Corinth who according to legend angered the gods and was condemned to push an enormous rock to the top of a hill. When Sisyphus neared the summit, the boulder would slip from his grasp and tumble back down to the bottom of the slope, forcing him to start again.
Alexis Tsipras, too, has angered the gods, in this case the European commission, the European Central Bank, the International Monetary Fund and most of the 18 other countries that are members of the single currency. His punishment for his five-month show of defiance will be to have Greece’s boulder replaced by an even bigger one."
Whether you like Larry Elliot's political analyses or not (I don't particularly) this is undeniably a good piece of political writing. It creates a strong narrative that illustrates a highly complex situation in an easily graspable manner. It skilfully explains the magnitude of Greece's debt burden and the sheer impossibility of paying it off.
Where Larry Elliot goes wrong is the way in which he then goes on to paint the Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras as "foolhardy" for having dared to stand up to the impossible power of the ECB, IMF and European Commission troika, only to later admit defeat and cave in to their terms. Elliot goes as far as accusing him of "hoisting the white flag over the Parthenon" deriding him as "a much-diminished figure as a result of the events of the last two weeks" and claiming that he ought to "pay a heavy political price" for it.
The first thing that makes this portrayal of events look so ridiculous is the fact (pointed out by someone in the below the line comments) that just ten days previously the very same Larry Elliot was lauding Alexis Tsipras as a hero who was outwitting and outmaneuvering the troika. Here's a direct quote.
"What Tsipras has done is seize the initiative, something he has proved adept at doing in the five months since he won the Greek general election in January. He has run rings round the troika and continues to do so." [source]
The fact that Larry Elliot has described Tsipras in terms of being a bravely defiant hero one week, and then a hopelessly defeated charlatan the next shows us that he is far more adept at constructing appealing little stories than he is at actually describing the events in a detailed and non-contradictory manner.
The second thing that weakens this portrayal of events is the simplicity of it. Elliot cannot help himself from fitting such a complex situation into a simple story of victory and defeat. The highly emotive imagery of the white flag being raised conjures a scene of total and catastrophic defeat, when in reality Tsipras remains the Prime Minister of Greece. What is more is that he has done something no Greek government has done before him. He has aligned himself with his people. When previous government acted as collaborators with the Troika against their own people, Tsipras has found unity with them. He didn't want to accept the impossibly harsh and ideologically driven terms of the next bailout package, and after the referendum it is proven that the overwhelming majority of Greeks agree with him. Thus it is abundantly clear to the Greek people that even though Tsipras is powerless to stop them from continuing their ideologically driven vandalism of their countries economy, Tsipras is on his people's side, not on the side of the Troika.
Tsipras and the Greek people are absolutely right to oppose the economic sanctions that are being imposed upon them by their creditors. Not only is ideological austerity a quack medicine that makes the symptoms of the economic disease worse, not better, the terms of the deal contradict what is what I consider to be one of the fundamental laws of economics: A debt that cannot be repaid, will not be repaid, which brings us back to the comparison with Sisyphus, which is a good piece of political storytelling.
As I said before, I don't fully dislike Larry Elliot's analysis, it's reasonably informative and well written, it's just that it commits the error of oversimplification in order to mould complex events into an easily intelligible narrative. This kind of narrative oversimplification of politics is rife in mainstream media coverage, and once aware of it the reader should always be on their guard to recognise it for what it is: A very convincing method of coercing people into believing simple stories about complicated political and economic events, because more complex and accurate analyses might raise awkward questions.
Another Angry Voice is a "Pay As You Feel" website. You can have access to all of my work for free, or you can choose to make a small donation to help me keep writing. The choice is entirely yours.
