Most Dishonourable Governments: Balearics

Cast your minds back if you will to the so-called green taxes that the Balearic Government had proposed. You will remember that the proposal incurred the wrath, among others, of mighty retailers. These were taxes which had the full approval of the president, José Ramón Bauzá. Mysteriously, though, the economy had recovered sufficiently for them not to be introduced. Someone with an economics background had cocked up. Who was that? Ah yes, the former finance minister, Pep Aguiló. Stitched up like a kipper. He didn't resign, he was sacked as Bauzá sought to save face with natural supporters in bug business. Around the same time, another to be hung out to dry in the increasingly strong sun of Mallorcan spring was Rafael Bosch, the former education minister. He was at least partly honourable. He didn't buy in wholeheartedly to the trilingual teaching scheme. He was too much of a "Catalanist", chirped Jorge Campos of the way-off-to-the-right Circulo Balear and one with the ear of Joserra. Bosch was sacked as well but was given a nice little governmental earner buried away somewhere doing something related to the islands' economy. Off you toddle, Rafael, and keep your mouth shut.

Joana Camps, the education minister, has now resigned. Honourable? Nah, not a bit of it. The honourable thing would have been for her to have never accepted the education portfolio in the first place. As an estate agent, her knowledge of education was as deep as mostly everyone else's. She had once gone to school. (Bosch was more of an education expert.) But you can't blame someone for having ambition even if she was so far out of her depth that it was impossible to see the bottom and that she came to dig for herself a trench as bottomless as the Mariana.

Well, it wasn't all her fault, this business with the High Court declaring procedures to do with the introduction of trilingual teaching (TIL) illegal. Bosch had been minister when the first decree was introduced. So he was, but he wasn't when the Court pronounced procedures to have been illegal last September and he hasn't been while Joana has been failing to defend the indefensible. Dishonour barely does this government justice. Some other words that have been thrown around are "infantile" and "disobedient".

The government simply cannot just go around disobeying the Court or passing further decrees within hours of the Court finding against it, which is exactly what it did last September and thus produced the final straw which broke the teachers' back and sent them out on strike for a month. To carry on believing it can apply TIL while it seeks an appeal from the Supreme Court in Madrid is ridiculous. And who is to say that the matter would stop with the Supreme Court anyway? This is a government which has brought itself into disrepute. It is almost, through its infantile behaviour, allowing the radicals among the teachers to get off scot-free, which they most definitely shouldn't be. And at the head of this dishonourable government is Joserra. He should resign, but he won't. He has placed the very much more credible Nuria Riera in charge of education in the hope that he can save his skin. But his own party is full of those who are lining up against him. Will there be a putsch?