In celebrating twenty years of existence, the travel magazine "Hosteltur" has identified twenty words or terms which have defined tourism since 1994. These are terms which are applicable to tourism generally, so I have narrowed the parameters and considered themes which have been of fundamental importance to Mallorca since 1994.
1. All-inclusive. The origins of the all-inclusive can be argued about. They are normally attributed to Club Med and their expansion to complexes such as Sandals. While Club Med had been around on Mallorca since the 1950s, it hadn't been a significant player, and the all-inclusive, as we now know it, didn't become a feature of the tourism landscape until roughly twenty years ago, and even then it was limited largely to the north and east of the island. We all know about its diffusion since then and the extent to which it has disrupted the previously harmonious balance between hotel and complementary sectors.
2. Beach zoning. On 4 March 1994 the Balearic Government issued a decree which established criteria for what could happen and what couldn't happen on beaches and on which parts. Different zones were created, some of which had limits set as to space which could be used. Why does this make the list? Firstly, because there hadn't previously been such a system and secondly, and perhaps more importantly, it was a form of standardisation which removed improvisation and arguably also removed some of the fun that had been had on beaches.
3. Crisis. Mallorca has experienced previous economic hard times - the oil crisis in the 1970s and the recession of the early 1990s - but the crisis (still with us but not as bad as it had been) shook tourism in different ways, such as by cutting credit and making even more popular the cost appeal of the all-inclusive holiday.
4. EasyJet. It may seem remarkable that easyJet isn't even twenty years old yet: it was founded in 1995. By 1998 the airline was flying daily from Luton to Palma as part of its summer schedule (late March to late October). EasyJet and the other low-cost airlines were to be significant in increasing passenger traffic through Son Sant Joan and in putting an impetus behind independent travel to the detriment of the package holiday.
5. Euro. 1 January 1999 was when it happened; when suddenly everything in Mallorca became that much more expensive. This is the commonly held view, and one that has some justification. It removed the inconvenience of changing currency, but only for those tourists from countries which adopted it.
6. Internet. In 1994 the internet was still an unproven concept and was far from being in everyday use. How things have changed. The web has not just been a fundamental change, it has been a revolution. Tourism has been turned on its head. Bookings, information, recommendations ..., it gave the tourist-consumer a power he previously hadn't possessed.
7. Ley General Turística. 24 March 1999 was the day when the Balearics' first tourism law was approved. The more recent 2012 tourism law reinforced much of what was in this first law, including prohibitions on some types of private property as holiday accommodation. One of the mysteries that surrounds the holiday-lets argument is quite why anyone finds it a comparatively new argument. It has certainly existed since 1999, though in fact there was a law as long ago as 1984 which tackled the subject - the "ley sobre alojamientos extrahoteleros".
8. POOT. The Plan de la Oferta Turística de Mallorca was approved by decree on 6 April 1995. It was a plan that was of profound importance. Though there had been previous plans which sought to organise how land was used for tourism purposes, the POOT was the first time that hard-and-fast criteria had been adopted. Essentially what POOT does is to place limits on the amount of tourism development within municipal boundaries.
9. Secondary activities. This is the newest of the fundamental changes. Part of the 2012 tourism law, secondary activities allow hotels to offer activities to the general public (and so not just guests) which had previously been the domain of the non-hotel, complementary sector. They can include all manner of things - restaurants, shops, clubs, concerts to name but a few. It is early days but secondary activities are likely to disrupt even further the balance between the hotel and complementary sectors.
10. Sustainability. An at-times nebulous concept and one that seems more often to be used for marketing purposes than for practical ones, sustainability is supposed to strike a balance between the demands of tourism and those of the environment, resources and the local economy. One of the first conferences dedicated to the subject was held in 1995.
Space has permitted only ten themes. There are others, and perhaps you have your own suggestions as to ways in which Mallorca's tourism has been changed over the last 20 years.
Showing posts with label Economic crisis. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Economic crisis. Show all posts
Monday, April 14, 2014
Monday, April 29, 2013
Black Or White: Spanish crisis and the arts
I have been researching a feature on the Barcelona-born artist Joan Miró who, despite having been a supporter of Republicanism, lived quietly enough in Mallorca under the Franco regime. The impression I formed was one of his not having been bothered by the regime so long as he had done nothing to bother it. And Miró didn't bother it. He was only really bothered about getting on with his art.
Miró's abstract paintings and sculptures could have symbolised any number of things. One of the beauties of abstracts is that they can mean everything or they can mean nothing. The observer can interpret them as he sees fit, projecting his own prejudices, opinions and attitudes onto the painter's canvas in creating a perception as to what the artist actually means. The obscurity of meaning makes proof very difficult. So long as the artist keeps his thoughts to himself, which is pretty much what Miró did, then a regime is none the wiser as to what he might be thinking or not.
Obscurity of meaning helps. I fancy that autocrats and technocrats can't get their heads around anything that isn't black or white. I imagine them to be incapable of understanding irony or innuendo. Only if a painting, a song, a film slaps them firmly in the face with an unequivocal message, be it pro or anti, will they get the meaning. Some artists got away with things during the Franco era because the authority figures were probably too thick to understand. Andrés Rábago, the cartoonist, was one such artist.
Alternatively, the regime may have felt it necessary to cut the arts world some slack. By the fifties it had stumbled on the realisation that the arts world was a potential source of making it look better to the rest of the world. This is one reason why so much effort was put into attracting film-makers, an effort that produced the Charlton Heston-Sophia Loren epic "El Cid", a film of magnificent cinematography but one that did rather gloss over some of the true nature of El Cid - that of having been a mercenary.
At the same time as the regime was looking to Hollywood and foreign money in order to give Spain a more acceptable global image, it wouldn't have been wise to have been stamping down too much on its own artists. Of course, it did do and had done. Federico García Lorca, one of Spain's most important poets of the twentieth century, was executed in 1936. But then that had been a time of war. Twenty years on, things were a bit different.
The arts world doesn't operate in a cultural, social, political or economic vacuum. An artist who wants to get on and flourish when the politics are repressive has to be a Leni Riefenstahl. A leftie like García Lorca in 1936 stood no chance. When the gloves of repression are removed and artists' hands can be waved with full freedom of expression, the canvases on which they work change completely. But making appropriate artistic gestures under unrestricted democratic regimes bring their own problems. Too often they can appear to be ones that veer towards a political extreme, usually the left, and so open themselves up to criticisms of being overly and overtly political.
Spain's artists of today face just this dilemma, those who haven't jumped ship and gone abroad. There may be democracy in Spain, but the arts world doesn't always benefit from such democracy. The artist Santiago Sierra has pointed out that art which deals with economic crisis in Spain doesn't get a great deal of visibility, a key reason being that critical thinking or expression is deterred because the major art collectors happen to be banks or the state.
Another member of the arts world, the film director Isabel Coixet, has chosen to mostly work abroad, but her latest film was shot in Catalonia. It portrays a Spain four years from now, one that has descended into anarchy. Doom-laden messages from the arts world are natural responses to poor or deteriorating circumstances.
Pedro Almodóvar's latest film - "I'm So Excited" is its English title - is unusual in taking a very different approach. He has made a highly camp comedy in which scandals involving the government and the royal family make the film appear as though it were a metaphor for them. Almodóvar hadn't foreseen these scandals, but whether he had or he hadn't, comedy, rather than apocalyptic visions, can be a better way of getting a message over. But not to politicians. Democratic the times may be, but present them with a metaphor which isn't black or white and they won't have a clue.
Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.
Miró's abstract paintings and sculptures could have symbolised any number of things. One of the beauties of abstracts is that they can mean everything or they can mean nothing. The observer can interpret them as he sees fit, projecting his own prejudices, opinions and attitudes onto the painter's canvas in creating a perception as to what the artist actually means. The obscurity of meaning makes proof very difficult. So long as the artist keeps his thoughts to himself, which is pretty much what Miró did, then a regime is none the wiser as to what he might be thinking or not.
Obscurity of meaning helps. I fancy that autocrats and technocrats can't get their heads around anything that isn't black or white. I imagine them to be incapable of understanding irony or innuendo. Only if a painting, a song, a film slaps them firmly in the face with an unequivocal message, be it pro or anti, will they get the meaning. Some artists got away with things during the Franco era because the authority figures were probably too thick to understand. Andrés Rábago, the cartoonist, was one such artist.
Alternatively, the regime may have felt it necessary to cut the arts world some slack. By the fifties it had stumbled on the realisation that the arts world was a potential source of making it look better to the rest of the world. This is one reason why so much effort was put into attracting film-makers, an effort that produced the Charlton Heston-Sophia Loren epic "El Cid", a film of magnificent cinematography but one that did rather gloss over some of the true nature of El Cid - that of having been a mercenary.
At the same time as the regime was looking to Hollywood and foreign money in order to give Spain a more acceptable global image, it wouldn't have been wise to have been stamping down too much on its own artists. Of course, it did do and had done. Federico García Lorca, one of Spain's most important poets of the twentieth century, was executed in 1936. But then that had been a time of war. Twenty years on, things were a bit different.
The arts world doesn't operate in a cultural, social, political or economic vacuum. An artist who wants to get on and flourish when the politics are repressive has to be a Leni Riefenstahl. A leftie like García Lorca in 1936 stood no chance. When the gloves of repression are removed and artists' hands can be waved with full freedom of expression, the canvases on which they work change completely. But making appropriate artistic gestures under unrestricted democratic regimes bring their own problems. Too often they can appear to be ones that veer towards a political extreme, usually the left, and so open themselves up to criticisms of being overly and overtly political.
Spain's artists of today face just this dilemma, those who haven't jumped ship and gone abroad. There may be democracy in Spain, but the arts world doesn't always benefit from such democracy. The artist Santiago Sierra has pointed out that art which deals with economic crisis in Spain doesn't get a great deal of visibility, a key reason being that critical thinking or expression is deterred because the major art collectors happen to be banks or the state.
Another member of the arts world, the film director Isabel Coixet, has chosen to mostly work abroad, but her latest film was shot in Catalonia. It portrays a Spain four years from now, one that has descended into anarchy. Doom-laden messages from the arts world are natural responses to poor or deteriorating circumstances.
Pedro Almodóvar's latest film - "I'm So Excited" is its English title - is unusual in taking a very different approach. He has made a highly camp comedy in which scandals involving the government and the royal family make the film appear as though it were a metaphor for them. Almodóvar hadn't foreseen these scandals, but whether he had or he hadn't, comedy, rather than apocalyptic visions, can be a better way of getting a message over. But not to politicians. Democratic the times may be, but present them with a metaphor which isn't black or white and they won't have a clue.
Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.
Monday, September 03, 2012
From Sackcloth To Ashes: IVA
Let's say that you are prime minister of a basket-case European economy. You need to hold the begging bowl out in order that you can capture the flood of coins when wealthy institutions pull the lever on the fruit machine and hit the jackpot. Clonk, clonk, clonk. Loadsamoney. Ta very much. Your thanks and gratitude are moderated, however, by the knowledge that the jackpot comes with a caveat or two. It is one that makes you the victim of a bastardised principle of the caveat emptor. Into your empty bowl flow the coins of salvation (albeit only temporarily probably) but you've got something into the bargain that makes the salvation rather less of a bargain for the people you are allegedly governing. You have to raise taxes. Because you are told you have to.
The institutions want their pound of flesh in return for their largesse. They demand evidence that the coins won't just be frittered away, all put on a 2-1 favourite at Haydock which pulls up lame. They demand that you wear the sackcloth of austerity for the world to jeer at. You are willing to suffer this humiliation because you know, because the institutions must presumably have told you, that the raising of taxes will bring forth riches that will enable you to swap your sackcloth for an Armani suit.
Well, this is the theory. Unfortunately, it's not a very good theory, as it is a theory which rather ignores the practice. As prime minister of this basket-case economy (let's call it Portugal), you go along with the exigencies of the institutions, and you raise the level of value added tax. You manage to keep a rate of 6% for your hotels but your bars and restaurants must now apply 23%. You proudly announce that changes to this tax will indeed bring forth riches. An increase of revenues to the tune of 11.6%. You discover, to your horror and with egg firmly splattered on face, that you can't even now afford the sackcloth. Astonishingly, your revenues haven't met the 11.6% level, they haven't gone up at all. In fact, they have gone down by 1.1%. To make matters worse, although you have enjoyed an 11% increase in the number of tourists (thanks to not penalising the hotels), your tax rise has resulted in the loss of some 200,000 jobs in the general hostelry sector. See, told you it wasn't a very good theory.
Spain's tax rise of 2% in the tourism sector (hotels as well as bars and restaurants) means the rate differs to Portugal's but the result could be similar. Exceltur, the alliance for touristic excellence, believes that it will be: the loss of 2,000 million euros and 18,700 jobs. These losses, assuming they are accurate, would represent some achievement by the Spanish Government, even by its miserably low standards.
Why is the government messing around with IVA therefore? The simple answer is because it has been told that it has to; it's the pound of flesh, and one that leaves you asking whether any of the external bodies insisting on a rise in IVA have any more of an idea what they are doing than the Spanish Government, which hasn't got any.
You might think that I am just being rather unkind to poor old Mr. Rajoy and that Uncle Alfredo, had he become prime minister, wouldn't have done any better or anything different. Quite possibly not, but Rubalcaba hadn't promised before the election to cut the tourist rate of IVA and hadn't promised not to put income tax up. So, what did Rajoy do at the start of the year? Put income tax up, arguing this was a measure that would be less damaging to the economy than putting IVA up. Sorry, what was that? Less damaging than putting IVA up? Yes, I thought that was what he said, too. And Uncle Alfredo may have had someone in charge of economic affairs who didn't come out with pearls of wisdom similar to those of Luis de Guindos (Rajoy's man who seems to not have even managed to acquire his 101 Basic Economics). Shall I remind you of what he said in April? "Next year (2013) will be the time to increase the tax burden (IVA) on consumption, once the economy starts to grow again." Yes, he really did say this, a sentence in which everything was wrong.
Of course, one can argue, by way of a defence, that Rajoy and his unmerry men didn't appreciate the scale of the problem and the consequent demands to be placed upon them by Frau Merkel. One could argue this, but I would argue that they had a pretty shrewd idea, not that it prevented them coming out with the nonsense they did and continue to come out with. I give in evidence Rajoy's recent comparison with France and its rate of VAT, one that took no account of average salaries being double those of Spain. You don't whack IVA up in a country where people are paid a pittance as it is and expect to raise revenues and in a country where the avoidance of paying IVA is a national pastime.
Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.
The institutions want their pound of flesh in return for their largesse. They demand evidence that the coins won't just be frittered away, all put on a 2-1 favourite at Haydock which pulls up lame. They demand that you wear the sackcloth of austerity for the world to jeer at. You are willing to suffer this humiliation because you know, because the institutions must presumably have told you, that the raising of taxes will bring forth riches that will enable you to swap your sackcloth for an Armani suit.
Well, this is the theory. Unfortunately, it's not a very good theory, as it is a theory which rather ignores the practice. As prime minister of this basket-case economy (let's call it Portugal), you go along with the exigencies of the institutions, and you raise the level of value added tax. You manage to keep a rate of 6% for your hotels but your bars and restaurants must now apply 23%. You proudly announce that changes to this tax will indeed bring forth riches. An increase of revenues to the tune of 11.6%. You discover, to your horror and with egg firmly splattered on face, that you can't even now afford the sackcloth. Astonishingly, your revenues haven't met the 11.6% level, they haven't gone up at all. In fact, they have gone down by 1.1%. To make matters worse, although you have enjoyed an 11% increase in the number of tourists (thanks to not penalising the hotels), your tax rise has resulted in the loss of some 200,000 jobs in the general hostelry sector. See, told you it wasn't a very good theory.
Spain's tax rise of 2% in the tourism sector (hotels as well as bars and restaurants) means the rate differs to Portugal's but the result could be similar. Exceltur, the alliance for touristic excellence, believes that it will be: the loss of 2,000 million euros and 18,700 jobs. These losses, assuming they are accurate, would represent some achievement by the Spanish Government, even by its miserably low standards.
Why is the government messing around with IVA therefore? The simple answer is because it has been told that it has to; it's the pound of flesh, and one that leaves you asking whether any of the external bodies insisting on a rise in IVA have any more of an idea what they are doing than the Spanish Government, which hasn't got any.
You might think that I am just being rather unkind to poor old Mr. Rajoy and that Uncle Alfredo, had he become prime minister, wouldn't have done any better or anything different. Quite possibly not, but Rubalcaba hadn't promised before the election to cut the tourist rate of IVA and hadn't promised not to put income tax up. So, what did Rajoy do at the start of the year? Put income tax up, arguing this was a measure that would be less damaging to the economy than putting IVA up. Sorry, what was that? Less damaging than putting IVA up? Yes, I thought that was what he said, too. And Uncle Alfredo may have had someone in charge of economic affairs who didn't come out with pearls of wisdom similar to those of Luis de Guindos (Rajoy's man who seems to not have even managed to acquire his 101 Basic Economics). Shall I remind you of what he said in April? "Next year (2013) will be the time to increase the tax burden (IVA) on consumption, once the economy starts to grow again." Yes, he really did say this, a sentence in which everything was wrong.
Of course, one can argue, by way of a defence, that Rajoy and his unmerry men didn't appreciate the scale of the problem and the consequent demands to be placed upon them by Frau Merkel. One could argue this, but I would argue that they had a pretty shrewd idea, not that it prevented them coming out with the nonsense they did and continue to come out with. I give in evidence Rajoy's recent comparison with France and its rate of VAT, one that took no account of average salaries being double those of Spain. You don't whack IVA up in a country where people are paid a pittance as it is and expect to raise revenues and in a country where the avoidance of paying IVA is a national pastime.
Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.
Sunday, September 02, 2012
When The World Went Mad
George Monbiot is either a lunatic or the New Prophet. This, I suspect, is how impressions of him divide, but as with many in the world of journalism he is somewhere in between, a slightly mad proselytizer. George can't be that mad as he earns a good-sized wedge from being an environmental doom merchant and all-round conscientious objector. He does, however, have some grounds for being mad. Having variously been placed in a coma by hornets, been pronounced dead because of cerebral malaria and had a metal spike driven into a foot, he can be excused for being hopping mad, if only moderately.
George, though, is now truly nuts, the consequence of the world having gone raving mad. This happened - you may not have noticed - on 28 August. Who says so? Well, George does. On Tuesday last week, three separate events coalesced to cause George to believe in globalisation for the first time; the globalisation of insanity, that is. These were the debate regarding the third runway at Heathrow, the postponement by a day of the Republican Party convention because of Hurricane Isaac and the announcement of a record ice melt in the Arctic. If the connection between the three is not apparent, then you won't know about or believe in man-made climate change and you probably think that George is indeed a lunatic.
I happen to think that he isn't. He is one of the sanest journalists I can think of, if only because of his ability to make some get as hopping mad with his proselytizing as he himself was with that spike in his foot. George is a regular and willing contributor to a grand debate going on in the blue sky world of the intellectualati regarding the world after capitalism. The environment, climate change and the use of resources are all aspects of this grand debate, but they are arguably of less immediate importance than economies.
At the same time as the world was going mad, the Spanish were adding to the ever-increasing insanity of the collapsing financial system in Europe. Recession was deeper than had been thought, Spain was heading towards finally admitting that it needed bailing out and the Catalonians had put in their demand for five billion to tide them over for a few months.
The Spanish Government, with the ever anonymous Rajoy closeted in his bunker of delusion and donning his Nero disguise and reaching for his fiddle, has been in a state of denial. It has spun the yarn of growth returning, while doing everything in its power to bring growth from the spinning mule to a stubborn and braying halt.
Rajoy, as with other Western leaders, spins the solutions to recession as being between the black and white of austerity or growth, while failing to appreciate that the narrative of recession and therefore the solutions may not in fact be true or attainable. What if this isn't a recession? What if this is how it is and how it will be?
Accepting that economic crisis has an inevitable solution through either the path of austerity or growth is akin to the denial of man-made climate change (and Rajoy knows all about this because he has denied it). The reason why is that there is a denial as to how the crisis came about. Nuancing it as a failure of banking systems and as initially the fallout from exposure to toxic, sub-prime debt is to identify the effect and not the cause.
For this, one has to go back to the 1980s. A desire for global inclusion, for free trade, for deregulation (especially of finance and banking sectors), for de-industrialisation and a shift to intangible services, and for the exporting of Western political philosophy in the fallacious pursuit of global democraticisation came together under umbrellas of Reaganomics and Thatcherism. Market liberalism was founded on sound enough principles, but it was founded also on unknowns, as was the whole European monetary union project.
We now know the unknowns, but despite this there is a persistence in styling solutions according to principles that pre-dated the 1980s and so which pay scant regard to the fundamental alteration of global power, industrially, financially and in terms of resources.
Climate change is largely irreversible. In the same way, economic change with the transfer of power to China and elsewhere is also largely irreversible. It is why Monbiot and others search for a model that is "after capitalism". It is one in which neither the prescription of austerity nor growth can hope to succeed. A radical new model is required.
The world didn't go raving mad on 28 August. It started to go loopy in the 1980s. We didn't know it then, but we do now. And I for one am hopping mad.
Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.
George, though, is now truly nuts, the consequence of the world having gone raving mad. This happened - you may not have noticed - on 28 August. Who says so? Well, George does. On Tuesday last week, three separate events coalesced to cause George to believe in globalisation for the first time; the globalisation of insanity, that is. These were the debate regarding the third runway at Heathrow, the postponement by a day of the Republican Party convention because of Hurricane Isaac and the announcement of a record ice melt in the Arctic. If the connection between the three is not apparent, then you won't know about or believe in man-made climate change and you probably think that George is indeed a lunatic.
I happen to think that he isn't. He is one of the sanest journalists I can think of, if only because of his ability to make some get as hopping mad with his proselytizing as he himself was with that spike in his foot. George is a regular and willing contributor to a grand debate going on in the blue sky world of the intellectualati regarding the world after capitalism. The environment, climate change and the use of resources are all aspects of this grand debate, but they are arguably of less immediate importance than economies.
At the same time as the world was going mad, the Spanish were adding to the ever-increasing insanity of the collapsing financial system in Europe. Recession was deeper than had been thought, Spain was heading towards finally admitting that it needed bailing out and the Catalonians had put in their demand for five billion to tide them over for a few months.
The Spanish Government, with the ever anonymous Rajoy closeted in his bunker of delusion and donning his Nero disguise and reaching for his fiddle, has been in a state of denial. It has spun the yarn of growth returning, while doing everything in its power to bring growth from the spinning mule to a stubborn and braying halt.
Rajoy, as with other Western leaders, spins the solutions to recession as being between the black and white of austerity or growth, while failing to appreciate that the narrative of recession and therefore the solutions may not in fact be true or attainable. What if this isn't a recession? What if this is how it is and how it will be?
Accepting that economic crisis has an inevitable solution through either the path of austerity or growth is akin to the denial of man-made climate change (and Rajoy knows all about this because he has denied it). The reason why is that there is a denial as to how the crisis came about. Nuancing it as a failure of banking systems and as initially the fallout from exposure to toxic, sub-prime debt is to identify the effect and not the cause.
For this, one has to go back to the 1980s. A desire for global inclusion, for free trade, for deregulation (especially of finance and banking sectors), for de-industrialisation and a shift to intangible services, and for the exporting of Western political philosophy in the fallacious pursuit of global democraticisation came together under umbrellas of Reaganomics and Thatcherism. Market liberalism was founded on sound enough principles, but it was founded also on unknowns, as was the whole European monetary union project.
We now know the unknowns, but despite this there is a persistence in styling solutions according to principles that pre-dated the 1980s and so which pay scant regard to the fundamental alteration of global power, industrially, financially and in terms of resources.
Climate change is largely irreversible. In the same way, economic change with the transfer of power to China and elsewhere is also largely irreversible. It is why Monbiot and others search for a model that is "after capitalism". It is one in which neither the prescription of austerity nor growth can hope to succeed. A radical new model is required.
The world didn't go raving mad on 28 August. It started to go loopy in the 1980s. We didn't know it then, but we do now. And I for one am hopping mad.
Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.
Tuesday, July 31, 2012
The Chou Chou Man: August holidays
When is a holidaymaker not a holidaymaker? The answer is when he or she is an Augustine. At least I think one could, were one of a mind to, refer to an August holidaymaker in this way. The British don't have such a term, but it exists elsewhere.
I became aware of the term in France, a notice having been chalked up onto a board next to a beach that welcomed "les aoûtiennes". They were mostly from Paris, or so a lunatic who used to dance along the beach selling chou chou nuts had it. According to his bizarre sales pitch, which consisted of a kind of poem, his chou chou nuts were the best for all the aoûtiennes "en vacances" from "Par-ee-yuh!". So effective was he, that he was a Pied Piper, trails of kids following him along the beach, joining in every time he gave chou chou the full chou chou treatment - "chou chou-wah!" They don't make beach salespeople like him any more, and more's the pity. Strangely enough, though he was clearly out of his head all the time, he was also legal.
The Spanish could have the equivalent of aoûtiennes, "agostistas" or "agostenses", though I suspect I've made both of them up. They certainly, and unfortunately, don't have mad beach sellers, only grinning young (and sometimes not so young) ladies who wish to give you a "masaje". But like the French, everything stops for August and holidays start, which is slightly odd when you think that the local schools broke up in the middle of June.
A Spanish news website recently had this thing in which it tried to convince its readership that, with August just around the corner and therefore holidays, the time was approaching to forget all that nasty IVA increase stuff, those horrible unemployment figures and the dreaded R-word. Instead, the "playa" was beckoning, everything would be all right, crisis would disappear, the euro would become the world's dominant currency and Spain would reclaim its empire.
Unfortunately, one fears that the "playa" has been part of the problem, and not only in August. There it is, a very pleasant temptation and diversion from the inconveniences of life, such as working. August may be here but so also is the head-in-sands burial time. So long as there's always the beach, nothing else matters.
A holiday is a time to put life's worries to one side, but it is pretty bloody difficult when your economy isn't going down the pan but already has. In the circumstances, rather than heading for the August beach, perhaps this August should be a month when offices don't all suddenly close, when shops don't suddenly decide there is no point in opening. There again, it is perhaps reasonable to argue that things are that terminal, another month of inactivity won't make any difference.
National politicians are, however, showing rather greater willingness to keep things going this August than in previous years. Prime Minister Rajoy, for example, will take a holiday next year, he says. It may actually be a very long holiday; a very long holiday from being prime minister at any rate. Otherwise, we can all rest easy in the knowledge that the minister for the Hacienda will be working practically the whole of August.
What of local leaders in the Balearics? Announcements have yet to be made, but how can they take holidays? The mayor of Palma, for example, is confronted with the possibility that Palma will be on strike for most of August, not that anyone would probably notice, given that it is August, but Emaya has announced eleven days of (in)action, adding to the strike dates previously registered by the bus drivers. The last thing any of these leaders need is being caught on camera, sunning themselves by a beach chiringuito, sipping a mojito. "¿Cree-sis? ¿Cuál cree-sis?" Bauzá in particular is going to need to be at his desk, aware that the man who in a few months probably won't be prime minister has called a grand parley of the regions' presidents in September, designed to show the world that Spain is united and strong (don't laugh).
Sorry, but August really should be cancelled, and this applies to everyone. No agostistas this year, thanks very much. The beach will always be there next year, assuming there is a next year and that we haven't all had to inure ourselves completely against reality by resorting to consuming industrial quantities of hard drugs and resigning ourselves to having to sell chou chou nuts.
Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.
Index for July 2012
August holidays - 31 July 2012
Catalan and public workers - 19 July 2012
Citizenship - 9 July 2012
Coastal development and human pressure - 17 July 2012
Coasts Law reform - 14 July 2012
Cruise ship in Alcúdia - 22 July 2012, 28 July 2012
Excursions and Mallorca's travel agencies - 29 July 2012
Fiestas: lesser known - 27 July 2012
IVA rise - 4 July 2012, 12 July 2012
Maria Munar - 18 July 2012
Meliá Hotels International and Palacio de Congresos - 6 July 2012
Noise - 24 July 2012
Norman Foster at Pollensa Festival - 10 July 2012
Nouriel Roubini - 1 July 2012
Olympics as seen from Mallorca - 26 July 2012, 30 July 2012
Poverty in the Balearics - 13 July 2012
Public toilets in Palma - 8 July 2012
Regional government and financial autonomy - 23 July 2012
Spain and Euro 2012 - 3 July 2012
Sports tourism and Bradley Wiggins - 25 July 2012
Sports tourism forum - 11 July 2012
Street names and historical figures - 16 July 2012
Strikes in Mallorca - 5 July 2012
Tourism law - 20 July 2012
Tourism opinion survey - 2 July 2012
Town hall rationalisation - 15 July 2012
Virgen del Carmen night party - 7 July 2012
I became aware of the term in France, a notice having been chalked up onto a board next to a beach that welcomed "les aoûtiennes". They were mostly from Paris, or so a lunatic who used to dance along the beach selling chou chou nuts had it. According to his bizarre sales pitch, which consisted of a kind of poem, his chou chou nuts were the best for all the aoûtiennes "en vacances" from "Par-ee-yuh!". So effective was he, that he was a Pied Piper, trails of kids following him along the beach, joining in every time he gave chou chou the full chou chou treatment - "chou chou-wah!" They don't make beach salespeople like him any more, and more's the pity. Strangely enough, though he was clearly out of his head all the time, he was also legal.
The Spanish could have the equivalent of aoûtiennes, "agostistas" or "agostenses", though I suspect I've made both of them up. They certainly, and unfortunately, don't have mad beach sellers, only grinning young (and sometimes not so young) ladies who wish to give you a "masaje". But like the French, everything stops for August and holidays start, which is slightly odd when you think that the local schools broke up in the middle of June.
A Spanish news website recently had this thing in which it tried to convince its readership that, with August just around the corner and therefore holidays, the time was approaching to forget all that nasty IVA increase stuff, those horrible unemployment figures and the dreaded R-word. Instead, the "playa" was beckoning, everything would be all right, crisis would disappear, the euro would become the world's dominant currency and Spain would reclaim its empire.
Unfortunately, one fears that the "playa" has been part of the problem, and not only in August. There it is, a very pleasant temptation and diversion from the inconveniences of life, such as working. August may be here but so also is the head-in-sands burial time. So long as there's always the beach, nothing else matters.
A holiday is a time to put life's worries to one side, but it is pretty bloody difficult when your economy isn't going down the pan but already has. In the circumstances, rather than heading for the August beach, perhaps this August should be a month when offices don't all suddenly close, when shops don't suddenly decide there is no point in opening. There again, it is perhaps reasonable to argue that things are that terminal, another month of inactivity won't make any difference.
National politicians are, however, showing rather greater willingness to keep things going this August than in previous years. Prime Minister Rajoy, for example, will take a holiday next year, he says. It may actually be a very long holiday; a very long holiday from being prime minister at any rate. Otherwise, we can all rest easy in the knowledge that the minister for the Hacienda will be working practically the whole of August.
What of local leaders in the Balearics? Announcements have yet to be made, but how can they take holidays? The mayor of Palma, for example, is confronted with the possibility that Palma will be on strike for most of August, not that anyone would probably notice, given that it is August, but Emaya has announced eleven days of (in)action, adding to the strike dates previously registered by the bus drivers. The last thing any of these leaders need is being caught on camera, sunning themselves by a beach chiringuito, sipping a mojito. "¿Cree-sis? ¿Cuál cree-sis?" Bauzá in particular is going to need to be at his desk, aware that the man who in a few months probably won't be prime minister has called a grand parley of the regions' presidents in September, designed to show the world that Spain is united and strong (don't laugh).
Sorry, but August really should be cancelled, and this applies to everyone. No agostistas this year, thanks very much. The beach will always be there next year, assuming there is a next year and that we haven't all had to inure ourselves completely against reality by resorting to consuming industrial quantities of hard drugs and resigning ourselves to having to sell chou chou nuts.
Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.
Index for July 2012
August holidays - 31 July 2012
Catalan and public workers - 19 July 2012
Citizenship - 9 July 2012
Coastal development and human pressure - 17 July 2012
Coasts Law reform - 14 July 2012
Cruise ship in Alcúdia - 22 July 2012, 28 July 2012
Excursions and Mallorca's travel agencies - 29 July 2012
Fiestas: lesser known - 27 July 2012
IVA rise - 4 July 2012, 12 July 2012
Maria Munar - 18 July 2012
Meliá Hotels International and Palacio de Congresos - 6 July 2012
Noise - 24 July 2012
Norman Foster at Pollensa Festival - 10 July 2012
Nouriel Roubini - 1 July 2012
Olympics as seen from Mallorca - 26 July 2012, 30 July 2012
Poverty in the Balearics - 13 July 2012
Public toilets in Palma - 8 July 2012
Regional government and financial autonomy - 23 July 2012
Spain and Euro 2012 - 3 July 2012
Sports tourism and Bradley Wiggins - 25 July 2012
Sports tourism forum - 11 July 2012
Street names and historical figures - 16 July 2012
Strikes in Mallorca - 5 July 2012
Tourism law - 20 July 2012
Tourism opinion survey - 2 July 2012
Town hall rationalisation - 15 July 2012
Virgen del Carmen night party - 7 July 2012
Monday, June 11, 2012
Don't Dream It's Over
A Sunday afternoon in June. I shouldn't be where I am. I am where I am, in Playa de Muro, because of one of those unforeseen annoyances of life. We can't always foresee things. Just ask Spain's politicians.
Because I am not where I should be, there seems only one place to be. The beach. Yet the wind is blowing. It is blowing quite strongly. But this is an inland wind. When it blows like this on a June afternoon, it doesn't blow on the beach.
I am at a loss to explain why the wind should blow only a few metres away from the beach and be only intermittent and little more than a breeze on the beach. This is how it is, though. I have come to understand this. I would have thought the local Mallorcans would have understood this far better than I do.
The sea is calm. It is virtually suspended, save for the odd yawning wave. When the surf is down as far down as it is on this Sunday afternoon and when the breeze is little more than a snooze, the beach assumes its dreamtime quality. But look at this beach. Where is everyone?
There are some Germans, immune to everything it would appear. The sun's rays, economic crisis, they both come easily to the Germans, as they never seem to be affected. There are hardly any Mallorcans, hardly any Spaniards. But this is a Sunday afternoon, when the picnics usually break out, and whole tribes congregate on the sand. They surely haven't been fooled by the inland wind. They can't have been. And the Spain footy match is hours off.
This is no ordinary Sunday afternoon. The beach is in its dreamtime, but the dream has died. Maybe this is why the beach is empty. It would be inappropriate to go to the beach. Perhaps this is a Sunday afternoon when reality takes over from the dreamworld.
The conclusion doesn't seem right, though. However bad things might be, there is always the beach. Its dreamlike quality has always been a haven, but it has also been the source of the storm. It has helped to create unreality. It has drawn the young to easy jobs in summer and to the building sites in winter, so taking them from education. It has drawn the expats, constantly blind to realities that creep up on them unforeseen and ignorant of anything other than the unrealities of "Big Brother", a few soaps and life back home. The beach has fooled so many with its dreamtimes.
The dream died, and on a Sunday in June Spain and Mallorca finally woke up to the reality that the dreams of so many years had kept hidden. From the days when wads of notes could be handed over to the beneficiaries of the first-wave tourism to the days when Europe came with its suitcases of cash, to the days at the end of the last century when the next great land grab occurred. It was all so easy. And there was always the beach as well. Paradise in Mallorca, paradise in the kingdom of Spain.
Prime Minister Rajoy says that his government has avoided "intervention in the kingdom of Spain". He has avoided his worst nightmare, of determination of fate by powers from outside the kingdom. Intervention may have been avoided, but events just prior to this Sunday in June confirmed that it had all been a dream, as many had warned Rajoy's political predecessors that this was all it had ever been.
Walking back from the beach there was a sign for a development of newly built properties. Newly built three years ago. How many have been sold? Any? The leaflets accompanying the sign flutter forlornly in the stiff breeze as forlornly as they have been scattered by the wind these past three years when they have been attached to the windscreens of cars of the Sunday visitors to the beach.
But on this Sunday, there are no visitors. The development was one final testimony to the folly of the dreamtimes, and it now stands as though it were a curio, a folly in its own right.
Come next Sunday, though, maybe it will all have been forgotten. This Sunday in June was a bad dream. Everyone can wake up and things will be back to normal; back to unreality and so back to the beach. Assuming the beach is as it should be, though, and hasn't been invaded by the unforeseen, by the ships of fools, dreams wrecked on its dreamtime sand.
Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.
Because I am not where I should be, there seems only one place to be. The beach. Yet the wind is blowing. It is blowing quite strongly. But this is an inland wind. When it blows like this on a June afternoon, it doesn't blow on the beach.
I am at a loss to explain why the wind should blow only a few metres away from the beach and be only intermittent and little more than a breeze on the beach. This is how it is, though. I have come to understand this. I would have thought the local Mallorcans would have understood this far better than I do.
The sea is calm. It is virtually suspended, save for the odd yawning wave. When the surf is down as far down as it is on this Sunday afternoon and when the breeze is little more than a snooze, the beach assumes its dreamtime quality. But look at this beach. Where is everyone?
There are some Germans, immune to everything it would appear. The sun's rays, economic crisis, they both come easily to the Germans, as they never seem to be affected. There are hardly any Mallorcans, hardly any Spaniards. But this is a Sunday afternoon, when the picnics usually break out, and whole tribes congregate on the sand. They surely haven't been fooled by the inland wind. They can't have been. And the Spain footy match is hours off.
This is no ordinary Sunday afternoon. The beach is in its dreamtime, but the dream has died. Maybe this is why the beach is empty. It would be inappropriate to go to the beach. Perhaps this is a Sunday afternoon when reality takes over from the dreamworld.
The conclusion doesn't seem right, though. However bad things might be, there is always the beach. Its dreamlike quality has always been a haven, but it has also been the source of the storm. It has helped to create unreality. It has drawn the young to easy jobs in summer and to the building sites in winter, so taking them from education. It has drawn the expats, constantly blind to realities that creep up on them unforeseen and ignorant of anything other than the unrealities of "Big Brother", a few soaps and life back home. The beach has fooled so many with its dreamtimes.
The dream died, and on a Sunday in June Spain and Mallorca finally woke up to the reality that the dreams of so many years had kept hidden. From the days when wads of notes could be handed over to the beneficiaries of the first-wave tourism to the days when Europe came with its suitcases of cash, to the days at the end of the last century when the next great land grab occurred. It was all so easy. And there was always the beach as well. Paradise in Mallorca, paradise in the kingdom of Spain.
Prime Minister Rajoy says that his government has avoided "intervention in the kingdom of Spain". He has avoided his worst nightmare, of determination of fate by powers from outside the kingdom. Intervention may have been avoided, but events just prior to this Sunday in June confirmed that it had all been a dream, as many had warned Rajoy's political predecessors that this was all it had ever been.
Walking back from the beach there was a sign for a development of newly built properties. Newly built three years ago. How many have been sold? Any? The leaflets accompanying the sign flutter forlornly in the stiff breeze as forlornly as they have been scattered by the wind these past three years when they have been attached to the windscreens of cars of the Sunday visitors to the beach.
But on this Sunday, there are no visitors. The development was one final testimony to the folly of the dreamtimes, and it now stands as though it were a curio, a folly in its own right.
Come next Sunday, though, maybe it will all have been forgotten. This Sunday in June was a bad dream. Everyone can wake up and things will be back to normal; back to unreality and so back to the beach. Assuming the beach is as it should be, though, and hasn't been invaded by the unforeseen, by the ships of fools, dreams wrecked on its dreamtime sand.
Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.
Thursday, May 17, 2012
Killing The Shops: Discretionary spend
I bumped into someone in Puerto Pollensa the other day who I have known ever since he opened his first shop some years ago. Back then, and we're talking probably eight years ago, he was full of enthusiasm. Mallorcan, he spoke perfect English in an often vivid fashion and was imbued with an American mentality of the can-do.
He expanded and opened further shops. It would be totally unfair to make these shops recognisable, but suffice it to say that they weren't (still aren't) the usual fare. They are different, in other words. An Americanisation of marketing had taken over and with it had come differentiation and other expressions from the marketing lexicon. It all seemed like it was progressive, innovative, new. And for a time, it all worked.
The person I met the other day was not the same one I had first come to know those years ago. He's keeping the Puerto Pollensa shop going for the season, but at the end of the season is likely to close it.
It is of course only early into the season, too soon perhaps to make a judgement, but he was saying that the evenings, in terms of passing trade, were like those he had once known in March. He asked me what I thought. I shook my head, not because I was unable to supply an explanation but because I have all but given up bothering to offer one.
A strengthening pound, and Puerto Pollensa is very British, and you would think there would be more action. There again, word coming from some sources suggest that all the forecasts as to volume of British tourism that were emanating from the trade fairs during the winter are proving to have been wide of the mark. There is also a good deal of concern being voiced by local tourism sources as to the "chauvinistic" campaign by David Cameron to impress upon the Brits the value of the staycation.
There are always reasons one can latch onto. One that doesn't obtain in Puerto Pollensa to anything like the extent that it does in other resorts is that of the all-inclusive. It has grown in the resort but remains only a small contributor to the overall market.
The main reason, and despite a strengthening pound, is that shops have born the brunt of the economic downturn, more so than bars and restaurants. The only shops which have remained on an even keel or even flourished have been the chemists, the tobacconists and the supermarkets, the latter thanks to a growth in eat-in by tourists.
Tourism spend has always been discretionary. During the boom times, this spend found its way into shop tills for products that were rarely or if at all essential. It is the rise in consumer discretion that has been as significant a factor as all-inclusives and downturn in determining the impact on resorts' shops, and this rise pre-dates economic crisis.
This rise in spending discretion also draws into question the viability of revised opening hours, such as in Palma, and especially where larger stores are concerned. The tourism market, when it does spend in shops, tends to look for the more unusual or the local. Larger stores tend to deal in the familiar and in the domestic market; the benefits they are likely to make from tourism, when set against higher operational costs, are debatable.
But even the spend on the unusual or the different has been affected. The shops of the chap I bumped into in the street trade in the different. As such, they conform with a call for the wider tourism trade to innovate, yet they have not proven to be sustainable. And it is discretionary spend, more than anything, which is killing them.
The starkest change to this shopowner is in the way his enthusiasm has ebbed away. He admitted that he has lost his motivation, that he has become sick of it all. Not because he has lost enthusiasm or motivation for what he sells, but because of the way in which the market has changed over the past few years and which has sapped him of the motivation. He is not alone, and to the economic factors you can add, in Puerto Pollensa, the arrival of an evening market. It might benefit other businesses, but it does nothing for the shops. They have been strangled by economic factors, and there is little life left and likely to be little life in the future.
Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.
He expanded and opened further shops. It would be totally unfair to make these shops recognisable, but suffice it to say that they weren't (still aren't) the usual fare. They are different, in other words. An Americanisation of marketing had taken over and with it had come differentiation and other expressions from the marketing lexicon. It all seemed like it was progressive, innovative, new. And for a time, it all worked.
The person I met the other day was not the same one I had first come to know those years ago. He's keeping the Puerto Pollensa shop going for the season, but at the end of the season is likely to close it.
It is of course only early into the season, too soon perhaps to make a judgement, but he was saying that the evenings, in terms of passing trade, were like those he had once known in March. He asked me what I thought. I shook my head, not because I was unable to supply an explanation but because I have all but given up bothering to offer one.
A strengthening pound, and Puerto Pollensa is very British, and you would think there would be more action. There again, word coming from some sources suggest that all the forecasts as to volume of British tourism that were emanating from the trade fairs during the winter are proving to have been wide of the mark. There is also a good deal of concern being voiced by local tourism sources as to the "chauvinistic" campaign by David Cameron to impress upon the Brits the value of the staycation.
There are always reasons one can latch onto. One that doesn't obtain in Puerto Pollensa to anything like the extent that it does in other resorts is that of the all-inclusive. It has grown in the resort but remains only a small contributor to the overall market.
The main reason, and despite a strengthening pound, is that shops have born the brunt of the economic downturn, more so than bars and restaurants. The only shops which have remained on an even keel or even flourished have been the chemists, the tobacconists and the supermarkets, the latter thanks to a growth in eat-in by tourists.
Tourism spend has always been discretionary. During the boom times, this spend found its way into shop tills for products that were rarely or if at all essential. It is the rise in consumer discretion that has been as significant a factor as all-inclusives and downturn in determining the impact on resorts' shops, and this rise pre-dates economic crisis.
This rise in spending discretion also draws into question the viability of revised opening hours, such as in Palma, and especially where larger stores are concerned. The tourism market, when it does spend in shops, tends to look for the more unusual or the local. Larger stores tend to deal in the familiar and in the domestic market; the benefits they are likely to make from tourism, when set against higher operational costs, are debatable.
But even the spend on the unusual or the different has been affected. The shops of the chap I bumped into in the street trade in the different. As such, they conform with a call for the wider tourism trade to innovate, yet they have not proven to be sustainable. And it is discretionary spend, more than anything, which is killing them.
The starkest change to this shopowner is in the way his enthusiasm has ebbed away. He admitted that he has lost his motivation, that he has become sick of it all. Not because he has lost enthusiasm or motivation for what he sells, but because of the way in which the market has changed over the past few years and which has sapped him of the motivation. He is not alone, and to the economic factors you can add, in Puerto Pollensa, the arrival of an evening market. It might benefit other businesses, but it does nothing for the shops. They have been strangled by economic factors, and there is little life left and likely to be little life in the future.
Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.
Tuesday, May 08, 2012
At The Blood Test Centre
The public health service in Mallorca and the Balearics is in crisis. It had in fact been in crisis before anyone had thought of crisis some four years ago. For years, it has leaked money like a patient in ICU leaks blood when the needle and catheter fall out. It has gone all over the place.
Something had to give. I am with those who believe that health and education should be sacrosanct when it comes to provision by the state, but this provision, in total totality, exists only in an ideal world. And the world is currently far from ideal, especially in Mallorca and even more especially in its health service.
Protests as to hospital closures are as understandable as they are predictable, as it was also predictable that the government would effect some sort of health-service rationalisation. The disappearance of around 300 hospital beds during the peak summer months was less predictable. But the headline of the temporary loss of these beds at Son Espases and at other hospitals obscures a not unreasonable decision to delay non-urgent operations and so save some money.
The dire financial situation in which the islands' health service finds itself has been known about for years. Known about but given very little attention, until economic crisis kicked in and revealed just how much debt it had been stacking up. By the end of 2011, this debt had reached 550 million euros.
The hospital closures, together with adjustments to personnel numbers and working and opening hours within the health service, suggest a health service that is truly in crisis. Yet if this crisis really exists, no one has told the local facility in Muro town.
The new PAC centre was opened last year (and note that it was opened last year, well into the period of "crisis" therefore). A two-storey building of functional modernity, its service, based admittedly on very little personal use, cannot be faulted.
I had reason a week ago to make an appointment with my GP. The appointment was made for the day after I had rung up to make it. There was no delay in seeing him on the day; indeed I got in before the appointed time. A blood test was arranged and this was for yesterday.
A previous occasion on which I had needed a blood test involved going to the private hospital in Muro. I am beginning to wonder why I continue to bother with the private health scheme, and had every reason to wonder then. The delay and sheer chaos were not what you might hope for when voluntarily handing over a goodly sum of money to a private health insurer. I understand things have got better, but the chaos was more what one might expect of a public health unit.
The visit to the blood test centre was as painless as it could possibly have been, notwithstanding the slight pain of the needle. The PAC building's modernity is incongruous in a rural Mallorcan backwater such as Muro town, and this modernity cannot disguise the fact that, as with most things in the rural communities, the centre doubles as a social club. The only real problem with the centre is being able to hear your name called over the hubbub as one old farmer shouts at another old farmer on the other side of the waiting area; the justified ancients of Muro can make a hell of a racket, one accentuated in a confined space.
The appointment was bang on time. A production line of three nurses (not the one nurse that the private hospital had) ensured that it all went with a bang. Needle in, needle out, bit of cotton wool and on your way.
Driving back from the centre, I had to concede that the introduction of the health petrol tax at the beginning of the month might in fact be worth it. At 4.8 cents per litre, and given a journey there and back of roughly 25 kilometres, the health service had probably earned at least these 4.8 cents, thanks to my visit to the blood test centre. This may overlook what is already chucked into the social security pot, to say nothing of the other cost of a litre, but for sheer efficiency, 4.8 cents represented pretty good value for money.
How much these 4.8 cents that everyone pays (bar of course all those who are exempt) will eat into the 550 million euros debt, who knows. How much these cents will contribute to maintaining a generally fine standard of public health is another unknown. But if crisis there is in Mallorca's health service, it certainly hasn't reached Muro.
Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.
Something had to give. I am with those who believe that health and education should be sacrosanct when it comes to provision by the state, but this provision, in total totality, exists only in an ideal world. And the world is currently far from ideal, especially in Mallorca and even more especially in its health service.
Protests as to hospital closures are as understandable as they are predictable, as it was also predictable that the government would effect some sort of health-service rationalisation. The disappearance of around 300 hospital beds during the peak summer months was less predictable. But the headline of the temporary loss of these beds at Son Espases and at other hospitals obscures a not unreasonable decision to delay non-urgent operations and so save some money.
The dire financial situation in which the islands' health service finds itself has been known about for years. Known about but given very little attention, until economic crisis kicked in and revealed just how much debt it had been stacking up. By the end of 2011, this debt had reached 550 million euros.
The hospital closures, together with adjustments to personnel numbers and working and opening hours within the health service, suggest a health service that is truly in crisis. Yet if this crisis really exists, no one has told the local facility in Muro town.
The new PAC centre was opened last year (and note that it was opened last year, well into the period of "crisis" therefore). A two-storey building of functional modernity, its service, based admittedly on very little personal use, cannot be faulted.
I had reason a week ago to make an appointment with my GP. The appointment was made for the day after I had rung up to make it. There was no delay in seeing him on the day; indeed I got in before the appointed time. A blood test was arranged and this was for yesterday.
A previous occasion on which I had needed a blood test involved going to the private hospital in Muro. I am beginning to wonder why I continue to bother with the private health scheme, and had every reason to wonder then. The delay and sheer chaos were not what you might hope for when voluntarily handing over a goodly sum of money to a private health insurer. I understand things have got better, but the chaos was more what one might expect of a public health unit.
The visit to the blood test centre was as painless as it could possibly have been, notwithstanding the slight pain of the needle. The PAC building's modernity is incongruous in a rural Mallorcan backwater such as Muro town, and this modernity cannot disguise the fact that, as with most things in the rural communities, the centre doubles as a social club. The only real problem with the centre is being able to hear your name called over the hubbub as one old farmer shouts at another old farmer on the other side of the waiting area; the justified ancients of Muro can make a hell of a racket, one accentuated in a confined space.
The appointment was bang on time. A production line of three nurses (not the one nurse that the private hospital had) ensured that it all went with a bang. Needle in, needle out, bit of cotton wool and on your way.
Driving back from the centre, I had to concede that the introduction of the health petrol tax at the beginning of the month might in fact be worth it. At 4.8 cents per litre, and given a journey there and back of roughly 25 kilometres, the health service had probably earned at least these 4.8 cents, thanks to my visit to the blood test centre. This may overlook what is already chucked into the social security pot, to say nothing of the other cost of a litre, but for sheer efficiency, 4.8 cents represented pretty good value for money.
How much these 4.8 cents that everyone pays (bar of course all those who are exempt) will eat into the 550 million euros debt, who knows. How much these cents will contribute to maintaining a generally fine standard of public health is another unknown. But if crisis there is in Mallorca's health service, it certainly hasn't reached Muro.
Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.
Friday, April 20, 2012
MALLORCA TODAY - Balearics will be the last region to emerge from crisis
The president of the Mallorcan Economics Circle has stated during a presentation that the Balearics will be the last region of Spain to come out of economic crisis, attributing this to a dependence on tourism. He also addressed the issue of education, poor in the Balearics, and the need in particular for better language education.
See more: El Mundo
See more: El Mundo
Thursday, March 15, 2012
MALLORCA TODAY - The scale of Mallorca's building slump
Just serving to emphasise how much the construction industry, upon which the economy and jobs depend so much, has declined since the economic crisis took hold, the number of building projects on Mallorca fell by almost 75% between 2007 and 2011.
See more: Ultima Hora
See more: Ultima Hora
Wednesday, February 15, 2012
Confidence Trick: Spanish consumers
Who are the least pessimistic consumers in Europe? There are no prizes for guessing that the Germans are the most optimistic, but there is a prize for guessing that they are followed in the pessimism/optimism stakes by the Spanish.
The Germany-based market research organisation GfK issues regular surveys of consumer confidence across Europe, and its latest report suggests that, though Spanish consumers have certain reservations, they are far less anxious than their counterparts in countries such as Italy, France and the UK.
Set against the background of the economic woes afflicting Spain, the finding is little short of staggering. It may reflect a confidence "bounce" on the back of the Partido Popular's election victory in November, but even this might be questionable, given that the Rajoy government has done nothing to hint that there will be growth and has done everything to set out a plan for austerity with a Merkozy seal of approval.
The Germans have praised the government for the intent it has shown in introducing labour reforms, so in this respect Rajoy might be moving Spain away from the abyss. The latest Greek bail-out (assuming it does happen) also removes a short-term prospect of the markets finding the next candidate to take down, one of which remains Spain. There is some stability, albeit shaky, and it is this perception of stability that the consumers in the GfK survey seem to be responding to.
It is difficult, however, to be optimistic in believing that the more optimistic consumers of Spain are experiencing anything other than a transitory and passing state of euphoria. Either this or they are seriously deluding themselves. Or they, the participants in the survey, represent a particular group of society and one from the wealthier and more industrialised parts of Spain.
The painful truth is that there is an awful lot more pain to be endured, and for the foreseeable future. The survey participants are realistic enough to express the reservation that they don't anticipate a return to something like growth for a further three years, but there are plenty of commentators and analysts who would question whether even this is likely.
The government's priority of deficit reduction, together with a lack of finance either from governmental sources or the banking sector, creates a double whammy of economic stasis. The only good news is that if there genuinely is as much optimism among Spain's consumers as the GfK survey suggests, then this could drive some growth. Otherwise, Spain would have to look to exports as a means of economic take-off (which includes tourism).
Denied the conventional tool of increasing competitiveness through currency devaluation, the other option to assist exports is to opt for an internal devaluation, which means a reduction in labour costs. Force this policy and all hell could break out, and an export-driven recovery wouldn't necessarily work anyway; there are, after all, many other European countries with considerably lower levels of confidence than Spain is meant to have.
An internal devaluation would be in line with arguments that Spain's labour costs are simply too high, but there would doubtless be many an employee, who might actually be grateful to be an employee, who would argue otherwise. If an export-led recovery failed, where would that leave the country? Without any domestic consumption to initiate growth because everyone has had their wages cut or is on the dole.
The government's labour reforms do actually offer the possibility of internal devaluation, as companies would be enabled to reduce salaries during periods of downturn. And what is the current situation if not a downturn? It is small wonder that the unions are threatening a general strike.
As far as tourism as an element of economic recovery is concerned, the GfK survey has found that the British are way up the list of those with a tendency to seek savings of whatever sort. And this doesn't represent particularly good news for Mallorcan tourism businesses, already reeling from several years of lower spend. Nor does a previous GfK survey which suggests that the traditional fortnight holiday is itself being cut more and more - to ten or seven days.
While tourism as export will continue to be a means of economic salvation, it will also continue to mean tourism that places the lion's share of its money into hands that aren't necessarily Spanish and that whatever is left over is spent only sparingly and handed over to staff with long faces who have found that their wages have been cut.
Spanish consumers may be more optimistic than those in other countries, but you do have to ask - who are they?
Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.
The Germany-based market research organisation GfK issues regular surveys of consumer confidence across Europe, and its latest report suggests that, though Spanish consumers have certain reservations, they are far less anxious than their counterparts in countries such as Italy, France and the UK.
Set against the background of the economic woes afflicting Spain, the finding is little short of staggering. It may reflect a confidence "bounce" on the back of the Partido Popular's election victory in November, but even this might be questionable, given that the Rajoy government has done nothing to hint that there will be growth and has done everything to set out a plan for austerity with a Merkozy seal of approval.
The Germans have praised the government for the intent it has shown in introducing labour reforms, so in this respect Rajoy might be moving Spain away from the abyss. The latest Greek bail-out (assuming it does happen) also removes a short-term prospect of the markets finding the next candidate to take down, one of which remains Spain. There is some stability, albeit shaky, and it is this perception of stability that the consumers in the GfK survey seem to be responding to.
It is difficult, however, to be optimistic in believing that the more optimistic consumers of Spain are experiencing anything other than a transitory and passing state of euphoria. Either this or they are seriously deluding themselves. Or they, the participants in the survey, represent a particular group of society and one from the wealthier and more industrialised parts of Spain.
The painful truth is that there is an awful lot more pain to be endured, and for the foreseeable future. The survey participants are realistic enough to express the reservation that they don't anticipate a return to something like growth for a further three years, but there are plenty of commentators and analysts who would question whether even this is likely.
The government's priority of deficit reduction, together with a lack of finance either from governmental sources or the banking sector, creates a double whammy of economic stasis. The only good news is that if there genuinely is as much optimism among Spain's consumers as the GfK survey suggests, then this could drive some growth. Otherwise, Spain would have to look to exports as a means of economic take-off (which includes tourism).
Denied the conventional tool of increasing competitiveness through currency devaluation, the other option to assist exports is to opt for an internal devaluation, which means a reduction in labour costs. Force this policy and all hell could break out, and an export-driven recovery wouldn't necessarily work anyway; there are, after all, many other European countries with considerably lower levels of confidence than Spain is meant to have.
An internal devaluation would be in line with arguments that Spain's labour costs are simply too high, but there would doubtless be many an employee, who might actually be grateful to be an employee, who would argue otherwise. If an export-led recovery failed, where would that leave the country? Without any domestic consumption to initiate growth because everyone has had their wages cut or is on the dole.
The government's labour reforms do actually offer the possibility of internal devaluation, as companies would be enabled to reduce salaries during periods of downturn. And what is the current situation if not a downturn? It is small wonder that the unions are threatening a general strike.
As far as tourism as an element of economic recovery is concerned, the GfK survey has found that the British are way up the list of those with a tendency to seek savings of whatever sort. And this doesn't represent particularly good news for Mallorcan tourism businesses, already reeling from several years of lower spend. Nor does a previous GfK survey which suggests that the traditional fortnight holiday is itself being cut more and more - to ten or seven days.
While tourism as export will continue to be a means of economic salvation, it will also continue to mean tourism that places the lion's share of its money into hands that aren't necessarily Spanish and that whatever is left over is spent only sparingly and handed over to staff with long faces who have found that their wages have been cut.
Spanish consumers may be more optimistic than those in other countries, but you do have to ask - who are they?
Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.
Tuesday, January 31, 2012
Cry Wolf: Hay Mucha Crisis
Permission if I may. The next time someone says "hay mucha crisis", may I be allowed to punch them out?
I have come to the conclusion that many a Mallorcan rather likes there being mucha crisis. It has become a comforting state of being over the past three to four years; comforting in that it allows any form of enquiry that might require the handing over of money or the taking of action to be met with a shrug and a smug look of superiority. Hay mucha crisis but my crisis is better than your crisis, or is it that it is not as bad as your crisis? There's mucha and then there's mucha. Or even muchísima.
The chanting of the c-word is so predictable that it has caused a disruption to normal, everyday, banal intercourse. What's the point of asking how things are going when you know beforehand that they are not going and that they are accompanied by mucha crisis. You can't ever be sure that there really is mucha crisis, but you can be sure that it is being used an excuse even if it is merely poca or ninguna.
Maybe there's a business to be made out of making t-shirts emblazoned with the legend "don't tell me there's a crisis", so that whenever you encounter a Mallorcan in whatever situation it might be he or she might be deterred from parroting the "HMC" line. Except no one would buy the t-shirt because there is of course mucha crisis. Or they might buy one so long as they are given a hefty discount or can pay in instalments, and also so long as you can go along and collect the instalments, only to find that they have no dinero because there is ... you guessed it.
If and when there is no longer mucha crisis, how are people going to cope? Crisis dependency has taken hold. It will require treatment at crisis addiction clinics to restore the crisis dependent to normality. But there's little chance of post-crisis Balearics having a health service that is sufficiently restored to good health to be able to cater for the needs of the crisis addicts. So deep is the health service in crisis that it will take years to pay off its debts, if they ever are to be paid off. 550 million euros in the red at the end of 2011. A mere bagatelle to pay off.
Want crisis? I mean, really want crisis? Then look no further than IB-Salut. Oh, it functions well enough, despite the debt, but it is an example of how mucha crisis can border on the inhumane, as is the case with immigrants from some African, Asian and South American countries who have little or no resources or who can't prove that they have and who are being denied a health card that would enable them to get health assistance.
All sorts of questions arise from this, such as having paid into the social security system or not, but don't let's think this is something confined to people from some part of deepest Africa. What if you're British but unable to prove that you have work? There seems some confusion among IB-Salut health centres. In fact, some don't really know, though one or two do. Off you go. Hay mucha crisis, and that's the end of the matter.
A correspondent asked the question of his local health centre (not that it affected him but he wanted to find out). If you are not working, then would you get a new health card? It would depend, came the answer. On what wasn't clear. Hay mucha crisis explained it all, or rather didn't explain anything.
Proving entitlement or having entitlement is reasonable, but what isn't is the confusion that is allowed to creep in with the mucha crisis shrug and justification. It is heartless, callous and confirms that it is the case that your crisis, if you are not Mallorcan/Spanish, is worse. As the same correspondent puts it, even if you have lived in Mallorca for years, you are still a foreigner and you can get lost.
Mucha crisis changes everything. The debt-ridden health service is only a part of it. Let me cite the correspondent once again, one who is anything but a newcomer to the island. The fear is that everything is going to implode. I don't know that it will. Apart from the indignados' protests and some strikes, mucha crisis has not taken on a worrying dimension. What lies ahead in the next few months, one can't really say, but perhaps there is hope that there is some comfort in there being mucha crisis. It is one of resignation more than agitation.
There is mucha crisis, of course there is, and it is being experienced by all sorts of people. 25% unemployment in the Balearics. Record number of households with everyone out of work. One in four people at risk of poverty or social exclusion. These people know about mucha crisis. It's the mucha crisis of the wolf-criers that makes so many despair. There's no sympathy when "hay mucha crisis", and they are down to their last finca or two.
* Just for those not up to speed with the native, "hay mucha crisis" (there is much crisis) is pronounced like "eye, moochah cree-sis".
Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.
Index for January 2012
Alcúdia's Roman ports - 21 January 2012
All-inclusives, increased potential of - 25 January 2012
Antoni Maria Alcover and language - 30 January 2012
Baltasar Garzón, Manos Limpias and - 17 January 2012
Catholic Church and Partido Popular - 3 January 2012
Christian names and surnames, Mallorcan - 23 January 2012
Economic crisis, health service and foreigners - 31 January 2012
Gay tourism, Cala Rajada and - 22 January 2012
Jaume Matas trial - 14 January 2012
José Manuel Soria, tourism minister - 12 January 2012
Language in the public sector - 18 January 2012
Local newspapers in Mallorca - 9 January 2012
North-south divide in Mallorca - 24 January 2012
Olympic Games, expat perspective on - 2 January 2012
Opening hours, shop - 10 January 2012
Partido Popular, splits in the - 7 January 2012, 15 January 2012, 20 January 2012
President Bauzá in discussion with the opposition - 26 January 2012
PSOE, leadership of - 13 January 2012
R&D, Spanish - 5 January 2012
Renewable energy in the Balearics - 19 January 2012
Retailers, leading Spanish - 27 January 2012
Spanair collapse - 29 January 2012
Spanish Government budget - 1 January 2012
Table football - 28 January 2012
Three Kings, racism and - 6 January 2012
Tourism law, opposition to - 4 January 2012, 8 January 2012
Tourist office privatisation - 11 January 2012
Water resources plan and land classification - 16 January 2012
I have come to the conclusion that many a Mallorcan rather likes there being mucha crisis. It has become a comforting state of being over the past three to four years; comforting in that it allows any form of enquiry that might require the handing over of money or the taking of action to be met with a shrug and a smug look of superiority. Hay mucha crisis but my crisis is better than your crisis, or is it that it is not as bad as your crisis? There's mucha and then there's mucha. Or even muchísima.
The chanting of the c-word is so predictable that it has caused a disruption to normal, everyday, banal intercourse. What's the point of asking how things are going when you know beforehand that they are not going and that they are accompanied by mucha crisis. You can't ever be sure that there really is mucha crisis, but you can be sure that it is being used an excuse even if it is merely poca or ninguna.
Maybe there's a business to be made out of making t-shirts emblazoned with the legend "don't tell me there's a crisis", so that whenever you encounter a Mallorcan in whatever situation it might be he or she might be deterred from parroting the "HMC" line. Except no one would buy the t-shirt because there is of course mucha crisis. Or they might buy one so long as they are given a hefty discount or can pay in instalments, and also so long as you can go along and collect the instalments, only to find that they have no dinero because there is ... you guessed it.
If and when there is no longer mucha crisis, how are people going to cope? Crisis dependency has taken hold. It will require treatment at crisis addiction clinics to restore the crisis dependent to normality. But there's little chance of post-crisis Balearics having a health service that is sufficiently restored to good health to be able to cater for the needs of the crisis addicts. So deep is the health service in crisis that it will take years to pay off its debts, if they ever are to be paid off. 550 million euros in the red at the end of 2011. A mere bagatelle to pay off.
Want crisis? I mean, really want crisis? Then look no further than IB-Salut. Oh, it functions well enough, despite the debt, but it is an example of how mucha crisis can border on the inhumane, as is the case with immigrants from some African, Asian and South American countries who have little or no resources or who can't prove that they have and who are being denied a health card that would enable them to get health assistance.
All sorts of questions arise from this, such as having paid into the social security system or not, but don't let's think this is something confined to people from some part of deepest Africa. What if you're British but unable to prove that you have work? There seems some confusion among IB-Salut health centres. In fact, some don't really know, though one or two do. Off you go. Hay mucha crisis, and that's the end of the matter.
A correspondent asked the question of his local health centre (not that it affected him but he wanted to find out). If you are not working, then would you get a new health card? It would depend, came the answer. On what wasn't clear. Hay mucha crisis explained it all, or rather didn't explain anything.
Proving entitlement or having entitlement is reasonable, but what isn't is the confusion that is allowed to creep in with the mucha crisis shrug and justification. It is heartless, callous and confirms that it is the case that your crisis, if you are not Mallorcan/Spanish, is worse. As the same correspondent puts it, even if you have lived in Mallorca for years, you are still a foreigner and you can get lost.
Mucha crisis changes everything. The debt-ridden health service is only a part of it. Let me cite the correspondent once again, one who is anything but a newcomer to the island. The fear is that everything is going to implode. I don't know that it will. Apart from the indignados' protests and some strikes, mucha crisis has not taken on a worrying dimension. What lies ahead in the next few months, one can't really say, but perhaps there is hope that there is some comfort in there being mucha crisis. It is one of resignation more than agitation.
There is mucha crisis, of course there is, and it is being experienced by all sorts of people. 25% unemployment in the Balearics. Record number of households with everyone out of work. One in four people at risk of poverty or social exclusion. These people know about mucha crisis. It's the mucha crisis of the wolf-criers that makes so many despair. There's no sympathy when "hay mucha crisis", and they are down to their last finca or two.
* Just for those not up to speed with the native, "hay mucha crisis" (there is much crisis) is pronounced like "eye, moochah cree-sis".
Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.
Index for January 2012
Alcúdia's Roman ports - 21 January 2012
All-inclusives, increased potential of - 25 January 2012
Antoni Maria Alcover and language - 30 January 2012
Baltasar Garzón, Manos Limpias and - 17 January 2012
Catholic Church and Partido Popular - 3 January 2012
Christian names and surnames, Mallorcan - 23 January 2012
Economic crisis, health service and foreigners - 31 January 2012
Gay tourism, Cala Rajada and - 22 January 2012
Jaume Matas trial - 14 January 2012
José Manuel Soria, tourism minister - 12 January 2012
Language in the public sector - 18 January 2012
Local newspapers in Mallorca - 9 January 2012
North-south divide in Mallorca - 24 January 2012
Olympic Games, expat perspective on - 2 January 2012
Opening hours, shop - 10 January 2012
Partido Popular, splits in the - 7 January 2012, 15 January 2012, 20 January 2012
President Bauzá in discussion with the opposition - 26 January 2012
PSOE, leadership of - 13 January 2012
R&D, Spanish - 5 January 2012
Renewable energy in the Balearics - 19 January 2012
Retailers, leading Spanish - 27 January 2012
Spanair collapse - 29 January 2012
Spanish Government budget - 1 January 2012
Table football - 28 January 2012
Three Kings, racism and - 6 January 2012
Tourism law, opposition to - 4 January 2012, 8 January 2012
Tourist office privatisation - 11 January 2012
Water resources plan and land classification - 16 January 2012
Wednesday, December 14, 2011
Have Yourselves A Crisis Little Christmas
The Mallorcans don't really do Christmas. This is a half truth. They may not go the full-stomached, cloyingly sentimental nine yards of Christmas Day, but Christmas they most certainly do do. The half truth stems, in part, from the fact that the holiday period is that long it's hard to know what is festive season and what isn't.
From Constitution Day through to Antoni and Sebastià in January, it is one long series of "puente" breaks, meals out or in, family and social gatherings and one long round of shopping. When there is so much to pack in over such a prolonged period, it's hardly surprising if Christmas Day itself constitutes something of a day of rest. All this notwithstanding, the Mallorcan Christmas has a bit of a crisis on its hands.
I'm not sure if Mallorcan office workers are issued with advice similar to that which is given to their British counterparts regarding not getting so slaughtered at the Christmas party that you find a P45 slipped inside your Christmas card, having become overly familiar with the boss's wife, but the local Christmas party is something of a victim of "crisis at Christmas". There is expected to be a fall of around 60% in terms of Christmas meals out for the staff, and those unlucky enough to have to suffer sitting next to the office bore will also have to suffer a fall in what's on offer; it's chicken nuggets this year, rather than a full roast.
Cuts to companies' Christmas largesse is not confined solely to the staff dinner. Spending on Christmas hampers, by way of gifts to staff, to customers or perhaps to politicians whose favours are being sought, is also way down this year. 15 euros is a sort of going rate for hampers that can cost astronomical sums when they come stuffed with whole hams and fine wines; it's a bottle of cava and a slab of nougat for the Crisis Christmas "cesta". It doesn't sound like there'll be too many favours being extended, therefore.
One element of a Mallorcan Christmas that isn't being cut back on is the number of surveys which come out telling everyone how miserable they're going to be because they're not spending enough money. Average family spend in the Balearics is estimated to be below the national highs of Madrid and Valencia where money is being tossed around to the tune of 600 euros per household. At 585 euros, this does represent quite a sizable fall in the Balearics. Two years ago, average Balearics spend was said to have been 747 euros, which itself was 11% lower than the year before. Christmases are coming, and the geese are getting progressively thinner.
It's not all bad news in the Balearics and not all bad news for the restaurants which are finding they are not being called upon to provide the office lunch. Spending on eating out and going out is reckoned to be higher in the Balearics than it is anywhere else in Spain.
And there is certainly one area of economic activity that will be thriving this Christmas. The lottery. The 600 euros in Valencia, for instance, is boosted by a spend of 125 euros. Yes really, 20% of Christmas cheer handed over in the hope that "El Gordo" will come up trumps, but even the Valencians aren't as extravagant as they have been; they parted with 147 euros on the lottery last year.
In the survey by the unfortunately acronymed FUCI (Federación de Usuarios Consumidores Independientes), the Balearics do at least come near the top when it comes to toys and gifts - 200 euros, only ten under the Spanish league leaders in Madrid - but the survey does just confirm the degree to which Christmas spending has slumped over the past three years in the Balearics and the whole of Spain. Only three regions break the 600 barrier this year; in 2008, all were over or near the 800 euro mark.
Two years ago, a survey by a different organisation, the Mallorca-based Gadeso, indicated not just the overall level of Christmas spend but also the degree to which it varied markedly. Gadeso will doubtless be producing its own new survey for this year, and it would be surprising were it not to show that the divisions had widened. Unemployment up considerably, state assistance not being paid in some instances, small companies not being paid, the variance in 2009 of nearly 1000 euros between highest and lowest-spending categories will surely have increased.
It's a half truth that the Mallorcans don't do Christmas, but what is a whole truth is that they are doing it less, and some are doing it hardly at all.
Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.
From Constitution Day through to Antoni and Sebastià in January, it is one long series of "puente" breaks, meals out or in, family and social gatherings and one long round of shopping. When there is so much to pack in over such a prolonged period, it's hardly surprising if Christmas Day itself constitutes something of a day of rest. All this notwithstanding, the Mallorcan Christmas has a bit of a crisis on its hands.
I'm not sure if Mallorcan office workers are issued with advice similar to that which is given to their British counterparts regarding not getting so slaughtered at the Christmas party that you find a P45 slipped inside your Christmas card, having become overly familiar with the boss's wife, but the local Christmas party is something of a victim of "crisis at Christmas". There is expected to be a fall of around 60% in terms of Christmas meals out for the staff, and those unlucky enough to have to suffer sitting next to the office bore will also have to suffer a fall in what's on offer; it's chicken nuggets this year, rather than a full roast.
Cuts to companies' Christmas largesse is not confined solely to the staff dinner. Spending on Christmas hampers, by way of gifts to staff, to customers or perhaps to politicians whose favours are being sought, is also way down this year. 15 euros is a sort of going rate for hampers that can cost astronomical sums when they come stuffed with whole hams and fine wines; it's a bottle of cava and a slab of nougat for the Crisis Christmas "cesta". It doesn't sound like there'll be too many favours being extended, therefore.
One element of a Mallorcan Christmas that isn't being cut back on is the number of surveys which come out telling everyone how miserable they're going to be because they're not spending enough money. Average family spend in the Balearics is estimated to be below the national highs of Madrid and Valencia where money is being tossed around to the tune of 600 euros per household. At 585 euros, this does represent quite a sizable fall in the Balearics. Two years ago, average Balearics spend was said to have been 747 euros, which itself was 11% lower than the year before. Christmases are coming, and the geese are getting progressively thinner.
It's not all bad news in the Balearics and not all bad news for the restaurants which are finding they are not being called upon to provide the office lunch. Spending on eating out and going out is reckoned to be higher in the Balearics than it is anywhere else in Spain.
And there is certainly one area of economic activity that will be thriving this Christmas. The lottery. The 600 euros in Valencia, for instance, is boosted by a spend of 125 euros. Yes really, 20% of Christmas cheer handed over in the hope that "El Gordo" will come up trumps, but even the Valencians aren't as extravagant as they have been; they parted with 147 euros on the lottery last year.
In the survey by the unfortunately acronymed FUCI (Federación de Usuarios Consumidores Independientes), the Balearics do at least come near the top when it comes to toys and gifts - 200 euros, only ten under the Spanish league leaders in Madrid - but the survey does just confirm the degree to which Christmas spending has slumped over the past three years in the Balearics and the whole of Spain. Only three regions break the 600 barrier this year; in 2008, all were over or near the 800 euro mark.
Two years ago, a survey by a different organisation, the Mallorca-based Gadeso, indicated not just the overall level of Christmas spend but also the degree to which it varied markedly. Gadeso will doubtless be producing its own new survey for this year, and it would be surprising were it not to show that the divisions had widened. Unemployment up considerably, state assistance not being paid in some instances, small companies not being paid, the variance in 2009 of nearly 1000 euros between highest and lowest-spending categories will surely have increased.
It's a half truth that the Mallorcans don't do Christmas, but what is a whole truth is that they are doing it less, and some are doing it hardly at all.
Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.
Tuesday, November 29, 2011
The Old Folks At Home
I went to the old folks home in Alcúdia yesterday. They had rung me up and asked me to come by. There was a surprise on entering the "residencia". I remembered it when it was the Alcúdia hospital. The place has been completely transformed. They describe it as not really a hotel and not really a hospital, but it looked and felt more like a hotel.
I said to them that a perception of a residencia, among many Brits at any rate, is probably that of the "old folks home", one of elderly people sitting around in stiff-backed chairs, staring aimlessly at a television screen, not always smelling of lavender, and waiting for the next trolley of tea to come by. The residencia really isn't like that.
They wanted to do something about increasing awareness of what the place is really like, but that's for elsewhere, as there is - along with every other part of Mallorca's economy - a crisis in the residencia sector.
Workers at residencias across Mallorca have added their voices to the growing number of personnel that is either not being paid or is being paid late. Though the regional government or town halls don't operate residencias, the companies which do are paid by government and the companies in turn pay staff salaries. Or don't, as the government is in debt to them, as it is in debt to all manner of providers.
A protest planned for today outside the regional parliament by workers from different residencias adds to one staged by a hundred workers at the residencia in Marratxí on Saturday. It had been announced that November salaries for the staff in Marratxí would not be paid, this coming on top of delays in the past few months.
The residencia workers are far from being the only ones who have suffered because of the inability of government (or town halls) to pay suppliers, but problems with payment at this time of the year are particularly acute, given the proximity of Christmas.
The system of payment for those in the public sector isn't collapsing, but it is on foundations that seem to be becoming ever more shaky, as is the edifice of the Mallorcan and indeed Spanish welfare state.
The residencias, in addition to their permanent residents, provide an important service through their day centres. These are important especially for the elderly who live alone and/or in conditions that are not much better than destitution.
A misconception that surrounds local society, in addition to one that the welfare state is particularly generous, which it isn't, is that the family always takes care of its own, the elderly included. The family does of course provide, but not quite to the same extent that it once might have.
The Economic and Social Council for the Balearics has released information regarding the number of people aged 65 or older who live on their own. The percentage in the islands as a whole is just under a third, and one half of these either have no or very little by way of contact with family, while some 22% also have no obvious friends to call upon. Pensions, which Mariano Rajoy says he will safeguard, can be as low as 250 euros a month.
Demands placed on agencies outside the established welfare state have rocketed in the past few years, and not only for help for the elderly. The Cruz Roja and the Catholic charity, Caritas, are just two that have had to step in as a combination of economic crisis and a societal shift that has lessened the strength of the family has left an increasing number of people with little or no safety net; and crisis has itself contributed to undermining the wherewithal of some families to go some way to providing this safety net.
Crisis is not just damaging economically but also socially, and the strain of crisis is such that opposition parties accuse the regional government of stripping away nearly 250 million euros from that part of the budget that includes welfare and the family; a budget described as the "most anti-social" that the Balearics have experienced.
It is against this background, therefore, that the services of the residencias, more important than ever, find themselves also subject to the virus that is crisis and to a cycle of crisis that is vicious and seemingly never-ending.
Alcúdia's old folks home, and more than just an old folks home, is mightily impressive. Whether the agencies of government are taking much notice of how impressive, however, is another matter entirely.
Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.
I said to them that a perception of a residencia, among many Brits at any rate, is probably that of the "old folks home", one of elderly people sitting around in stiff-backed chairs, staring aimlessly at a television screen, not always smelling of lavender, and waiting for the next trolley of tea to come by. The residencia really isn't like that.
They wanted to do something about increasing awareness of what the place is really like, but that's for elsewhere, as there is - along with every other part of Mallorca's economy - a crisis in the residencia sector.
Workers at residencias across Mallorca have added their voices to the growing number of personnel that is either not being paid or is being paid late. Though the regional government or town halls don't operate residencias, the companies which do are paid by government and the companies in turn pay staff salaries. Or don't, as the government is in debt to them, as it is in debt to all manner of providers.
A protest planned for today outside the regional parliament by workers from different residencias adds to one staged by a hundred workers at the residencia in Marratxí on Saturday. It had been announced that November salaries for the staff in Marratxí would not be paid, this coming on top of delays in the past few months.
The residencia workers are far from being the only ones who have suffered because of the inability of government (or town halls) to pay suppliers, but problems with payment at this time of the year are particularly acute, given the proximity of Christmas.
The system of payment for those in the public sector isn't collapsing, but it is on foundations that seem to be becoming ever more shaky, as is the edifice of the Mallorcan and indeed Spanish welfare state.
The residencias, in addition to their permanent residents, provide an important service through their day centres. These are important especially for the elderly who live alone and/or in conditions that are not much better than destitution.
A misconception that surrounds local society, in addition to one that the welfare state is particularly generous, which it isn't, is that the family always takes care of its own, the elderly included. The family does of course provide, but not quite to the same extent that it once might have.
The Economic and Social Council for the Balearics has released information regarding the number of people aged 65 or older who live on their own. The percentage in the islands as a whole is just under a third, and one half of these either have no or very little by way of contact with family, while some 22% also have no obvious friends to call upon. Pensions, which Mariano Rajoy says he will safeguard, can be as low as 250 euros a month.
Demands placed on agencies outside the established welfare state have rocketed in the past few years, and not only for help for the elderly. The Cruz Roja and the Catholic charity, Caritas, are just two that have had to step in as a combination of economic crisis and a societal shift that has lessened the strength of the family has left an increasing number of people with little or no safety net; and crisis has itself contributed to undermining the wherewithal of some families to go some way to providing this safety net.
Crisis is not just damaging economically but also socially, and the strain of crisis is such that opposition parties accuse the regional government of stripping away nearly 250 million euros from that part of the budget that includes welfare and the family; a budget described as the "most anti-social" that the Balearics have experienced.
It is against this background, therefore, that the services of the residencias, more important than ever, find themselves also subject to the virus that is crisis and to a cycle of crisis that is vicious and seemingly never-ending.
Alcúdia's old folks home, and more than just an old folks home, is mightily impressive. Whether the agencies of government are taking much notice of how impressive, however, is another matter entirely.
Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.
Wednesday, November 23, 2011
Mariano And The Mess
Who on earth would want to be a Spanish prime minister? Well, Mariano Rajoy for one, though why is anyone's guess. It says much for political ambition that you would willingly enter the lions' den unprotected and smelling of dinner. Deficit, highest unemployment rate in Europe, virtually no growth. Presumably, in the words of the election song of a certain former prime minister, things can only get better. Actually, they can't; they can only get worse, and they already have.
Surprise has been expressed that the markets have reacted with a massive thumbs-down. That's not how it's meant to work. Good, right-wing, slash-and-burn politico takes over, and the markets are supposed to cheer at the fall of the squandering, bumbling incompetents from the left. They might have done were it not for the fact that Rajoy has to wait a few weeks before getting his backside onto the prime ministerial seat. There are procedures, you know, post-electoral ones, and the markets are being blamed for not understanding that it takes weeks for the Spanish to sort these procedures out. Perhaps Spanish politicians should try understanding how markets work, though they have shown little evidence that they do.
The hiatus following the election is just one reason why the markets have reacted so negatively. Another is that they really don't have much confidence in Rajoy and the Partido Popular as they know full well that there is precious little that Rajoy can actually do. Yep, it's a great time to be taking over as prime minister, knowing that you are totally emasculated and are dead meat even before you start.
If he were allowed into the prime ministerial office now, he would be flashing into the night sky over the Gotham City of Spain the distress image of the Euro and getting Angela and Nicolas racing from the ECB Batcave. "There are only 24 hours to save Spain, Robin." Which isn't too far from the truth, as each day brings with it ever more woe. Or perhaps he would be sending out an SOS and hoping that Thunderbird 5 picks it up. "Brains, any ideas as to how we can rescue Spain?" "Er, er, well, er, Mr. Tracy, we'll have to dig very deep. Cut very deep." "Right, Brains. Virgil, take Thunderbird 2's austerity mole pod." "F.A.B., father."
Oh that it was as simple as sending out a distress signal and International Rescue comes and makes everything all right. What am I saying? This is pretty much how it is. The IMF or the European Central Bank buying up Spanish debt as quickly as it can be issued in order to give Rajoy some breathing space to stutter his words of reforms before they cart him off to the Papandreou Home For Distressed European Leaders.
There's the deficit and then there's employment creation. It's not going to happen, because JP Morgan says so. Yes you can always rely on what banks say - they got everyone into the mess and now they can gloat at everyone's misfortune; JP Morgan reckons unemployment in Spain will rise to 27% next year. Rajoy, if and when he can get his scissors out, is going to have to cut so deep that unemployment will continue its upward march and growth its downward slump. Here comes another recession. Not that the first one ever really went away.
In an ideal world, and you may have noticed that the world currently isn't ideal, Rajoy would set in motion much-needed plans to restructure Spain's economy and not just its finances. Investment in new industries to break the dependence, certainly in some regions of Spain, on construction and tourism has been demanded for years. But where would the investment come from now? Even if the banks weren't suffering liquidity problems or weren't applying a squeeze and even if the government had spare pots of cash lying around, the results would take years to bear fruit. And Rajoy hasn't got years. He's barely got days.
Some proposals like tax cuts for smaller businesses could help with stimulating the economy, but what really might would be lowering the burden on social security payments. A reduction in IVA for the tourism industry, however, would be senseless. Tax receipts have gone up this year, thanks in part to the rise in IVA, and they are likely to be up again next year.
Rajoy has inherited a God awful mess. He should demand our sympathy, but then he wanted to be prime minister. So he should get on and sort it. But he can't, not yet, because procedures don't allow it. Incredible.
Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.
Surprise has been expressed that the markets have reacted with a massive thumbs-down. That's not how it's meant to work. Good, right-wing, slash-and-burn politico takes over, and the markets are supposed to cheer at the fall of the squandering, bumbling incompetents from the left. They might have done were it not for the fact that Rajoy has to wait a few weeks before getting his backside onto the prime ministerial seat. There are procedures, you know, post-electoral ones, and the markets are being blamed for not understanding that it takes weeks for the Spanish to sort these procedures out. Perhaps Spanish politicians should try understanding how markets work, though they have shown little evidence that they do.
The hiatus following the election is just one reason why the markets have reacted so negatively. Another is that they really don't have much confidence in Rajoy and the Partido Popular as they know full well that there is precious little that Rajoy can actually do. Yep, it's a great time to be taking over as prime minister, knowing that you are totally emasculated and are dead meat even before you start.
If he were allowed into the prime ministerial office now, he would be flashing into the night sky over the Gotham City of Spain the distress image of the Euro and getting Angela and Nicolas racing from the ECB Batcave. "There are only 24 hours to save Spain, Robin." Which isn't too far from the truth, as each day brings with it ever more woe. Or perhaps he would be sending out an SOS and hoping that Thunderbird 5 picks it up. "Brains, any ideas as to how we can rescue Spain?" "Er, er, well, er, Mr. Tracy, we'll have to dig very deep. Cut very deep." "Right, Brains. Virgil, take Thunderbird 2's austerity mole pod." "F.A.B., father."
Oh that it was as simple as sending out a distress signal and International Rescue comes and makes everything all right. What am I saying? This is pretty much how it is. The IMF or the European Central Bank buying up Spanish debt as quickly as it can be issued in order to give Rajoy some breathing space to stutter his words of reforms before they cart him off to the Papandreou Home For Distressed European Leaders.
There's the deficit and then there's employment creation. It's not going to happen, because JP Morgan says so. Yes you can always rely on what banks say - they got everyone into the mess and now they can gloat at everyone's misfortune; JP Morgan reckons unemployment in Spain will rise to 27% next year. Rajoy, if and when he can get his scissors out, is going to have to cut so deep that unemployment will continue its upward march and growth its downward slump. Here comes another recession. Not that the first one ever really went away.
In an ideal world, and you may have noticed that the world currently isn't ideal, Rajoy would set in motion much-needed plans to restructure Spain's economy and not just its finances. Investment in new industries to break the dependence, certainly in some regions of Spain, on construction and tourism has been demanded for years. But where would the investment come from now? Even if the banks weren't suffering liquidity problems or weren't applying a squeeze and even if the government had spare pots of cash lying around, the results would take years to bear fruit. And Rajoy hasn't got years. He's barely got days.
Some proposals like tax cuts for smaller businesses could help with stimulating the economy, but what really might would be lowering the burden on social security payments. A reduction in IVA for the tourism industry, however, would be senseless. Tax receipts have gone up this year, thanks in part to the rise in IVA, and they are likely to be up again next year.
Rajoy has inherited a God awful mess. He should demand our sympathy, but then he wanted to be prime minister. So he should get on and sort it. But he can't, not yet, because procedures don't allow it. Incredible.
Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.
Tuesday, November 22, 2011
Going Benalup: Unemployment and easy credit
There is a town in the province of Cádiz in Andalusia that has the worst unemployment rate in Europe. It is called Benalup (or Benalup-Casas Viejas, to give it its full name). In an article by Giles Tremlett in "The Observer" on Sunday, the collapse of what, for a brief time, had become a boom town is chronicled, and the story of Benalup tells you mostly all you need to know about why Spain is in such a mess and is going to have one hell of a struggle getting out of it.
Benalup is by no means unique, even if it can lay claim to that unwanted unemployment crown. Spain is full of Benalups, and Mallorca shares its problems. To summarise Tremlett's main points, the Benalup belly-up effect was founded on excessive credit and on a glut of construction jobs that paid well and took teenagers out of education.
It won't sit well with the La Caixa bank, known also for its Obra Social good works programmes, that it gets fingered as having triggered a lending war among the banks that flooded into the town in search of mortgage customers, many of them young and having turned their backs on school in the knowledge that they could earn handsome wages in the construction industry.
Construction was the first and most obvious victim of economic crisis, and it took its labour force down with it. In Benalup, those who had left school at sixteen and who had embarked on a side career of avaricious material grab are just part of the almost 50% of Spain's under-25s that are unemployed. This material grab has left Benalup, as Tremlett remarks, "plastered with 'for sale' signs", those of La Caixa's estate-agency arm, which has been forced to repossess.
Much of the construction was centred on the coastal area. The Benalup story, therefore, is a not unfamiliar one of the two heads of construction and tourism that is the economy of much of Spain, Mallorca included. But Benalup, some kilometres inland, doesn't have the luxury of the fallback position of tourism. Without the construction on the coast, it doesn't really have anything.
The dependence on construction and tourism in different parts of Spain is just one factor that has undermined Spain’s economy. Subject to the vagaries of economic cycles, both industries also contribute to a devaluing of the general skills base and of the education system. Easy money can be had, or could, and the state would provide some assistance in the winter for those less inclined to slog around a building site.
The education system is not that great anyway, and in Mallorca it is particularly poor. But through a combination of the system’s inadequacies, a lack of incentive to stay in education and the promise of riches from humping bricks about (now gone), general competitiveness is also undermined.
One solution to the unemployment in Benalup is a state-funded training course, assuming you can get on it. Not that it necessarily opens up subsequent employment opportunities, as the course is for graphic design. In Mallorca, there are any number of young graphic designers. They are two a penny. Many are good, but where’s the work? Economies do not generate wealth or growth through graphic design. It is a pitiable non-solution.
The Zapatero administration presided over the end-game of the great Spanish boom. It deserves to be criticised, but it is not alone. Successive governments have perpetuated an aspirational dream for a country that was in the economic dark ages only half a century ago. One mistake, aided by the banks, was to break with a traditional cash-based society and replace it with one based on credit, and very easy and loose credit at that. The country’s richness, as evident from a lofty position in the IMF GDP league table, obscures a reality of overdependence on certain industries and a lack of competitiveness.
There is fortunately some realism coming from the newly elected government, an acceptance that Spain isn’t that rich and that the mechanisms for granting the population the trappings of aspirational wealth were largely built on sand. Within a framework of this new realism, how, though, can Rajoy set about realising his election promises, such as that to reduce unemployment?
I’ll have a look at that in a further article. But for now, and notwithstanding the fact that the Spanish electorate does appear to “get it” where the country’s parlous position is concerned, I’ll leave you with a piece of history. In 1933, Benalup was the centre of an anarchist uprising and a police massacre.
Thank God it's not 1933.
The original "Observer" article:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/nov/20/spain-benalup-unemployment-euro-crisis
Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.
Benalup is by no means unique, even if it can lay claim to that unwanted unemployment crown. Spain is full of Benalups, and Mallorca shares its problems. To summarise Tremlett's main points, the Benalup belly-up effect was founded on excessive credit and on a glut of construction jobs that paid well and took teenagers out of education.
It won't sit well with the La Caixa bank, known also for its Obra Social good works programmes, that it gets fingered as having triggered a lending war among the banks that flooded into the town in search of mortgage customers, many of them young and having turned their backs on school in the knowledge that they could earn handsome wages in the construction industry.
Construction was the first and most obvious victim of economic crisis, and it took its labour force down with it. In Benalup, those who had left school at sixteen and who had embarked on a side career of avaricious material grab are just part of the almost 50% of Spain's under-25s that are unemployed. This material grab has left Benalup, as Tremlett remarks, "plastered with 'for sale' signs", those of La Caixa's estate-agency arm, which has been forced to repossess.
Much of the construction was centred on the coastal area. The Benalup story, therefore, is a not unfamiliar one of the two heads of construction and tourism that is the economy of much of Spain, Mallorca included. But Benalup, some kilometres inland, doesn't have the luxury of the fallback position of tourism. Without the construction on the coast, it doesn't really have anything.
The dependence on construction and tourism in different parts of Spain is just one factor that has undermined Spain’s economy. Subject to the vagaries of economic cycles, both industries also contribute to a devaluing of the general skills base and of the education system. Easy money can be had, or could, and the state would provide some assistance in the winter for those less inclined to slog around a building site.
The education system is not that great anyway, and in Mallorca it is particularly poor. But through a combination of the system’s inadequacies, a lack of incentive to stay in education and the promise of riches from humping bricks about (now gone), general competitiveness is also undermined.
One solution to the unemployment in Benalup is a state-funded training course, assuming you can get on it. Not that it necessarily opens up subsequent employment opportunities, as the course is for graphic design. In Mallorca, there are any number of young graphic designers. They are two a penny. Many are good, but where’s the work? Economies do not generate wealth or growth through graphic design. It is a pitiable non-solution.
The Zapatero administration presided over the end-game of the great Spanish boom. It deserves to be criticised, but it is not alone. Successive governments have perpetuated an aspirational dream for a country that was in the economic dark ages only half a century ago. One mistake, aided by the banks, was to break with a traditional cash-based society and replace it with one based on credit, and very easy and loose credit at that. The country’s richness, as evident from a lofty position in the IMF GDP league table, obscures a reality of overdependence on certain industries and a lack of competitiveness.
There is fortunately some realism coming from the newly elected government, an acceptance that Spain isn’t that rich and that the mechanisms for granting the population the trappings of aspirational wealth were largely built on sand. Within a framework of this new realism, how, though, can Rajoy set about realising his election promises, such as that to reduce unemployment?
I’ll have a look at that in a further article. But for now, and notwithstanding the fact that the Spanish electorate does appear to “get it” where the country’s parlous position is concerned, I’ll leave you with a piece of history. In 1933, Benalup was the centre of an anarchist uprising and a police massacre.
Thank God it's not 1933.
The original "Observer" article:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/nov/20/spain-benalup-unemployment-euro-crisis
Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.
Tuesday, November 15, 2011
The Long Hello And Goodbye
In the final week before the national election, no polls can be published; they might distort public opinion, or so the theory goes. Come the final 24 hours before the election, and everyone has to shut up and allow themselves a period of reflection before heading to the polls on Sunday to do the awful deed.
Putting a block on more polls is unnecessary; there hasn’t been a need for polls for months. PSOE’s long goodbye should go into the Guinness Book of Records for the most time it has been known that a political party would lose the next election. And badly.
Nothing has altered the path to the inevitable Partido Popular victory: not a Rubalcaba bounce when Zapatero confirmed that he knew the way the wind was blowing; not a surge of support from the right when PSOE carved up the constitution and committed the deficit requirement to law; not a wave of thanks to PSOE when ETA called it a day.
The eclipse of PSOE on Sunday will be the culmination of the process started by the credit crunch and Zapatero’s attempts to calm a nation’s fears. By saying there was no crisis, he was whistling in the dark; his delusion, a fiddling of inaction while capitalism burned. He responded too slowly, but he was damned if he did and damned if he didn’t. The game was up as soon as crisis raised its unlovely head. The story would have been the same had the PP been in government - and they know it.
Mariano Rajoy will be the next president of Spain, and president, by title and tradition going back to the nineteenth century, it is; calling him prime minister is in line with how titles normally work in a parliamentary monarchy. Rajoy’s ascendancy has been the long hello, so long in fact it is difficult to understand how he comes to still figure. Beaten by Zapatero in 2008, long dismissed as inadequate by many commentators and even members of his own party, one of them being the former PM José Maria Aznar, it is a mystery what he is doing about to take office.
Rajoy is becoming prime minister (president) by default. He has had to do nothing and say nothing. The prize has been his ever since the flames from Lehman and utterances regarding the previously unheard of subprime market first flickered across dealers' screens. Prime minister by default and prime minister by superior force and direction. Just as the Balearics Bauzá is a puppet on a long string stretching from PP central office, so Rajoy dances to the tune of his own master. And if Rubalcaba is to be believed, that is Aznar; Aznar who has been contemptuous of his successor and now treats him as the dummy to his ventriloquism.
The electoral slogan for Rajoy is both simple and simplistic. "Súmate al cambio". Join the change, more or less. When all else fails, and it normally does, politicians bring out the change word. It is the default slogan for a default prime minister; vote for me, I'm not the other lot. But what will Rajoy change? More pain and more austerity are not change; they are more pain and more austerity, and the electorate is heading to the polling stations to vote for masochism.
"Masoquismo" and "machismo". Macho politics with which to confront the unions and employment conditions. Mariano as Margaret, tackling the enemy within. Change is necessary, but at what cost socially (and industrially), as Thatcher stubbornly ignored. The unions, though, have been but one part of the collusive complacency of Spain's social capitalism model; they have been a loveably roguish pantomime villain to the Prince Charmings of successive governments of both blue and red who have flaunted the glass slippers of boom-time politics.
It was Zapatero's misfortune to be the shoemaker who couldn't repair the slipper. He can be accused of a lack of foresight, but foresight with hindsight is a wonderful thing; he danced to his own tune, as had previous Spanish leaders, one with an exciting boom-boom beat, but he ended up a busted flush and a boom-time rat.
Yet for all this, Zapatero helped to mould a Spain far more at ease with itself. The pain that Rajoy is about to inflict, and it is going to be painful, might just be acceptable, though by no means to all, but if he insists on a change that is a back to the future in terms of cultural, social and religious policies, he may not find the populace so willing to support him.
Come Sunday, the electorate of turkeys will vote for Christmas, and after Sunday, things will change. Just don't expect them to be very pleasant.
Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.
Putting a block on more polls is unnecessary; there hasn’t been a need for polls for months. PSOE’s long goodbye should go into the Guinness Book of Records for the most time it has been known that a political party would lose the next election. And badly.
Nothing has altered the path to the inevitable Partido Popular victory: not a Rubalcaba bounce when Zapatero confirmed that he knew the way the wind was blowing; not a surge of support from the right when PSOE carved up the constitution and committed the deficit requirement to law; not a wave of thanks to PSOE when ETA called it a day.
The eclipse of PSOE on Sunday will be the culmination of the process started by the credit crunch and Zapatero’s attempts to calm a nation’s fears. By saying there was no crisis, he was whistling in the dark; his delusion, a fiddling of inaction while capitalism burned. He responded too slowly, but he was damned if he did and damned if he didn’t. The game was up as soon as crisis raised its unlovely head. The story would have been the same had the PP been in government - and they know it.
Mariano Rajoy will be the next president of Spain, and president, by title and tradition going back to the nineteenth century, it is; calling him prime minister is in line with how titles normally work in a parliamentary monarchy. Rajoy’s ascendancy has been the long hello, so long in fact it is difficult to understand how he comes to still figure. Beaten by Zapatero in 2008, long dismissed as inadequate by many commentators and even members of his own party, one of them being the former PM José Maria Aznar, it is a mystery what he is doing about to take office.
Rajoy is becoming prime minister (president) by default. He has had to do nothing and say nothing. The prize has been his ever since the flames from Lehman and utterances regarding the previously unheard of subprime market first flickered across dealers' screens. Prime minister by default and prime minister by superior force and direction. Just as the Balearics Bauzá is a puppet on a long string stretching from PP central office, so Rajoy dances to the tune of his own master. And if Rubalcaba is to be believed, that is Aznar; Aznar who has been contemptuous of his successor and now treats him as the dummy to his ventriloquism.
The electoral slogan for Rajoy is both simple and simplistic. "Súmate al cambio". Join the change, more or less. When all else fails, and it normally does, politicians bring out the change word. It is the default slogan for a default prime minister; vote for me, I'm not the other lot. But what will Rajoy change? More pain and more austerity are not change; they are more pain and more austerity, and the electorate is heading to the polling stations to vote for masochism.
"Masoquismo" and "machismo". Macho politics with which to confront the unions and employment conditions. Mariano as Margaret, tackling the enemy within. Change is necessary, but at what cost socially (and industrially), as Thatcher stubbornly ignored. The unions, though, have been but one part of the collusive complacency of Spain's social capitalism model; they have been a loveably roguish pantomime villain to the Prince Charmings of successive governments of both blue and red who have flaunted the glass slippers of boom-time politics.
It was Zapatero's misfortune to be the shoemaker who couldn't repair the slipper. He can be accused of a lack of foresight, but foresight with hindsight is a wonderful thing; he danced to his own tune, as had previous Spanish leaders, one with an exciting boom-boom beat, but he ended up a busted flush and a boom-time rat.
Yet for all this, Zapatero helped to mould a Spain far more at ease with itself. The pain that Rajoy is about to inflict, and it is going to be painful, might just be acceptable, though by no means to all, but if he insists on a change that is a back to the future in terms of cultural, social and religious policies, he may not find the populace so willing to support him.
Come Sunday, the electorate of turkeys will vote for Christmas, and after Sunday, things will change. Just don't expect them to be very pleasant.
Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.
Tuesday, May 25, 2010
Paradise Lost: Mallorca and economic pain
So the IMF has issued another warning about Spain's economy. And called for reforms to the country's labour laws, making it, among other things, easier to fire workers.
That it has taken so long.
The chickens are coming home to roost. In all manner of ways. The problems of the bankrupt Spanish economy are mirrored - several-fold - in Mallorca. Easy money of different sorts - that from grants, the banks and, oh, the tourists - has become very much more difficult. Complacency of this easy money has given way to a panic. It all used to just fall into people's laps. Just like the Spanish Government, over years and in different political guises, sat back and trousered Europe's benefaction and careered headlong into growth on the back of the always-likely-to-shift sand of credit, so the local tourism industry (in its different manifestations) sat back and trousered the contents of the tourist purse while barely having to lift a finger or a fat arse off a bar stool while puffing on a grand Havana and slurping on a fine brandy.
The IMF, and the government (though it will try and avoid the issue), know full well what is needed. One thing is employment law. Making it easier to sack freeloading employees is one aspect. They should, but of course won't, slash the burden of social security payments. It is these, more than tax, that are a baulk where it comes to employment and to badly-needed entrepreneurship. They'll probably do the reverse, and increase them, just like they're increasing IVA (VAT). It's the economics of the mad house, but the mad are desperate, and so is the government, though you might hope that the government is about to grow up and join the real world. Likewise, many businesses in Mallorca who are having to appreciate that the days of the playground are over and are having to join the real world.
So much of what passes for the local economy is untenable, and has been for years. It is what gives rise to the obscenity of the dole queues in November. If Mallorca were a business, one with a plan for six months' trade (if it's lucky), then any half-decent consultant, or anyone with an ounce of sense, would say that it's not much of a business model. And it isn't. That it has been allowed to persist for so long is all down to that complacency.
Let's itemise some of the problems and responses: tourism down by 20% in April (admittedly the volcano didn't help); unemployment at 20%; banks starting to come under strain because of their bad debts, despite the provision for these that the Bank of Spain imposes; town halls told they can't have any credit; public works slashed. You could go on. The problems may not be unique to Mallorca and Spain, but they are exacerbated because of the fundamental flaws in the economy, especially the local one and because of that awful complacency.
Sad I am to say that I feel vindicated. I have said much of the foregoing for years on this blog. B.C. Before Crisis. I feel angry because it was all too easy to predict. The crisis just hastened the problems. The centre was never going to be able to hold when it was built on such shaky foundations.
I feel angry, but I want to relax. I have just heard The Fleet Foxes "Mykonos" on the radio. It has mellowed me. For a moment. And I remember Mykonos in 1973. When I wasn't in the real world. I wish to hell I was back there, in Mykonos 1973, on Paradise beach. A place where Paradise actually existed, rather than being monikered thus by fatuous tourism authorities and companies and their parrots in brochures and everywhere else. The Paradise Island, what they insist on calling Mallorca, is crumbling into the sea.
But relax. Fleet Foxes:
Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.
That it has taken so long.
The chickens are coming home to roost. In all manner of ways. The problems of the bankrupt Spanish economy are mirrored - several-fold - in Mallorca. Easy money of different sorts - that from grants, the banks and, oh, the tourists - has become very much more difficult. Complacency of this easy money has given way to a panic. It all used to just fall into people's laps. Just like the Spanish Government, over years and in different political guises, sat back and trousered Europe's benefaction and careered headlong into growth on the back of the always-likely-to-shift sand of credit, so the local tourism industry (in its different manifestations) sat back and trousered the contents of the tourist purse while barely having to lift a finger or a fat arse off a bar stool while puffing on a grand Havana and slurping on a fine brandy.
The IMF, and the government (though it will try and avoid the issue), know full well what is needed. One thing is employment law. Making it easier to sack freeloading employees is one aspect. They should, but of course won't, slash the burden of social security payments. It is these, more than tax, that are a baulk where it comes to employment and to badly-needed entrepreneurship. They'll probably do the reverse, and increase them, just like they're increasing IVA (VAT). It's the economics of the mad house, but the mad are desperate, and so is the government, though you might hope that the government is about to grow up and join the real world. Likewise, many businesses in Mallorca who are having to appreciate that the days of the playground are over and are having to join the real world.
So much of what passes for the local economy is untenable, and has been for years. It is what gives rise to the obscenity of the dole queues in November. If Mallorca were a business, one with a plan for six months' trade (if it's lucky), then any half-decent consultant, or anyone with an ounce of sense, would say that it's not much of a business model. And it isn't. That it has been allowed to persist for so long is all down to that complacency.
Let's itemise some of the problems and responses: tourism down by 20% in April (admittedly the volcano didn't help); unemployment at 20%; banks starting to come under strain because of their bad debts, despite the provision for these that the Bank of Spain imposes; town halls told they can't have any credit; public works slashed. You could go on. The problems may not be unique to Mallorca and Spain, but they are exacerbated because of the fundamental flaws in the economy, especially the local one and because of that awful complacency.
Sad I am to say that I feel vindicated. I have said much of the foregoing for years on this blog. B.C. Before Crisis. I feel angry because it was all too easy to predict. The crisis just hastened the problems. The centre was never going to be able to hold when it was built on such shaky foundations.
I feel angry, but I want to relax. I have just heard The Fleet Foxes "Mykonos" on the radio. It has mellowed me. For a moment. And I remember Mykonos in 1973. When I wasn't in the real world. I wish to hell I was back there, in Mykonos 1973, on Paradise beach. A place where Paradise actually existed, rather than being monikered thus by fatuous tourism authorities and companies and their parrots in brochures and everywhere else. The Paradise Island, what they insist on calling Mallorca, is crumbling into the sea.
But relax. Fleet Foxes:
Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.
Saturday, September 19, 2009
Blind Faith
The Germans go big on Mallorca. Watch German TV and most evenings there will be something about the island, even if it's just the weather forecast. And most evenings there will be an announcer referring to the "paradise island". This comes from the same lexicon of blind faith that gives us all those "beautifuls" and "lovelys" to which I referred the other day. There's nothing wrong with blind faith, except blindness. It's another day for you and me in paradise. Paradise lost, paradise to be regained - some time. Sir, can you help me? Or help others. Those in unparadise.
The economic crisis was always likely to cause some tensions. It's just a question of how tense. The CCOO union puts an estimate on the number of workers unlikely to qualify for benefits this winter - 80,000, more than half of them from the hotel sector. That's getting on for ten per cent of the population of the archipelago, to which can be added a similar percentage on the dole. The union is concerned that there will be a winter of discontent, or one of social conflicts, to use its words.
The crisis has also made even more apparent the deep flaw in Mallorca's economy, that of seasonality. Generally it works, just about, but when the season is shorter and workers do not have employment long enough to qualify for winter payments, the flaw, the fault line grows ever wider. As does the gap between the haves and have-nots. The gap becomes a gorge, a vast canyon. And there is no bottom to the canyon, no cement to fill this great gap of unemployment and societal disconnection, especially as the construction industry is right down in the hole as well.
One can overstate the situation, and the union might well be guilty of exaggeration, but it may well also be right. You can also take into account the fact that citizens of the Balearics have slipped from a prosperity in the '90s to one of being poorer than the Spanish average in terms of disposable income. This may be across the board, but that board is broad. One man's lower spending power on luxury items is another one's breadline.
The truth is that many workers receive not a great deal more than subsistence wages even during the summer. At least the paradise delusion of hot days and nights can divert attention from impoverishment. And the safety net of the state has, until now, been there for the colder days and nights of winter. It won't be for many this winter.
The deep flaw in the economy is mirrored by the deep flaw in island society: the extremes in terms of wealth or not. Few societies are immune from such a gulf, but the compactness of Mallorcan geography makes it more apparent, more inescapable, unless you retain that blindness of blind faith.
The lateness - the 1960s - with which an industrial revolution arrived in Mallorca, at a time of a regime only starting to come to terms with true economics, provided little or no preparation for greater diversity. And that revolution was predicated on an industry far removed from the grit of manufacturing. The Mallorcan economy is something of an unreal economy. Rightly so perhaps. Paradise is a state of unreality. Unparadise, however, is the reality confronting many. And some of the wealth that was and has been accrued has an unreality as well. It was as if it was magicked, the consequence of being there, of luck, and of the benevolence of tour operators and visitors from the first days of mass tourism.
One can overstate the situation, and I hope I am, and that the union is as well. But the ingredients for discontent exist, and I keep in mind the actions of those Sardinians, around the time that the crisis broke, who bombarded luxury yachts with wet sand in disgust at displays of ostentatious wealth (16 August 2008: Careful What You Wish For). There might be more than wet sand this winter in Mallorca. Paradise, anyone?
QUIZ
Yesterday's title - Massive Attack with Tracey Thorn, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9EvM--7Wxa0. Today's title - who were they, and which groups were they in prior to this one?
(PLEASE REPLY TO andrew@thealcudiaguide.com AND NOT VIA THE COMMENTS THINGY HERE.)
The economic crisis was always likely to cause some tensions. It's just a question of how tense. The CCOO union puts an estimate on the number of workers unlikely to qualify for benefits this winter - 80,000, more than half of them from the hotel sector. That's getting on for ten per cent of the population of the archipelago, to which can be added a similar percentage on the dole. The union is concerned that there will be a winter of discontent, or one of social conflicts, to use its words.
The crisis has also made even more apparent the deep flaw in Mallorca's economy, that of seasonality. Generally it works, just about, but when the season is shorter and workers do not have employment long enough to qualify for winter payments, the flaw, the fault line grows ever wider. As does the gap between the haves and have-nots. The gap becomes a gorge, a vast canyon. And there is no bottom to the canyon, no cement to fill this great gap of unemployment and societal disconnection, especially as the construction industry is right down in the hole as well.
One can overstate the situation, and the union might well be guilty of exaggeration, but it may well also be right. You can also take into account the fact that citizens of the Balearics have slipped from a prosperity in the '90s to one of being poorer than the Spanish average in terms of disposable income. This may be across the board, but that board is broad. One man's lower spending power on luxury items is another one's breadline.
The truth is that many workers receive not a great deal more than subsistence wages even during the summer. At least the paradise delusion of hot days and nights can divert attention from impoverishment. And the safety net of the state has, until now, been there for the colder days and nights of winter. It won't be for many this winter.
The deep flaw in the economy is mirrored by the deep flaw in island society: the extremes in terms of wealth or not. Few societies are immune from such a gulf, but the compactness of Mallorcan geography makes it more apparent, more inescapable, unless you retain that blindness of blind faith.
The lateness - the 1960s - with which an industrial revolution arrived in Mallorca, at a time of a regime only starting to come to terms with true economics, provided little or no preparation for greater diversity. And that revolution was predicated on an industry far removed from the grit of manufacturing. The Mallorcan economy is something of an unreal economy. Rightly so perhaps. Paradise is a state of unreality. Unparadise, however, is the reality confronting many. And some of the wealth that was and has been accrued has an unreality as well. It was as if it was magicked, the consequence of being there, of luck, and of the benevolence of tour operators and visitors from the first days of mass tourism.
One can overstate the situation, and I hope I am, and that the union is as well. But the ingredients for discontent exist, and I keep in mind the actions of those Sardinians, around the time that the crisis broke, who bombarded luxury yachts with wet sand in disgust at displays of ostentatious wealth (16 August 2008: Careful What You Wish For). There might be more than wet sand this winter in Mallorca. Paradise, anyone?
QUIZ
Yesterday's title - Massive Attack with Tracey Thorn, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9EvM--7Wxa0. Today's title - who were they, and which groups were they in prior to this one?
(PLEASE REPLY TO andrew@thealcudiaguide.com AND NOT VIA THE COMMENTS THINGY HERE.)
Thursday, July 30, 2009
Day By Day
One of those what-are-we-supposed-to-make-of-these statistical moments, courtesy of the Balearics part of the "El Mundo" website. Tourism spend in the Balearics during June was down four per cent on last June; it equated to 993 euros per person. In the whole of Spain, the two most prominent tourism groups - the British and the Germans - spent on average 773 euros and 974 euros respectively; quite a difference. But as ever with these figures, the reaction is something of a so what. At least these figures do not inspire an incredulous reaction, as they were doing last summer when they seemed to be increasing. If those were genuine, then a 4% slump in the context of the current economic situation doesn't sound too bad. The trouble with any of them, however, is making sense of what they mean, how they are compiled, what differences there may be between different resorts and so on. Recently, some friends staying in Puerto Alcúdia told me that a daily spend of 100 euros per person was about par for the course. Setting aside costs of accommodation and travel, which one assumes are never included in these spend calculations, 100 per day is probably about right if one spends fairly liberally. At a more basic level of subsistence for food and drink on a daily basis, assuming one meal out at an inexpensive restaurant and a fair amount of alcohol, I would offer you the following:
From a main supermarket: bread (freshly-baked) 50 cents, fruit and vegetables 1.50 euros, ham and cheese 1 euro, drinks (2 litres of water, 1 litre of cola, juice, 1 litre of beer, 1 bottle of wine) 10 euros, milk, cereals, margarine and eggs 1.50 euros.
Meal out with a glass of wine and water - main course and sweet 15 euros, two coffees out 3 euros, four large beers out 12 euros. Total: 44.50 euros.
There are many ways to skin the food and drink cat, but the above might not be unrepresentative.
Elsewhere, i.e. "The Diario", there is a feature that points to the "alarm" among some hoteliers as to the lack of spend within the hotels themselves. It does support much of what is being said, and makes one rather question the official spend figures. These hoteliers talk of guests buying from supermarkets and making up their lunch snacks in their rooms (and why, pray, shouldn't they?) or of helping themselves to excessive amounts from the morning buffets for later consumption (hardly a new phenomenon, one would have said). Perhaps more scandalous are those tourists staying all-inclusive who get drinks and then go and sell them on the beach. Nothing like a bit of entrepreneurship, but it is decidedly naughty. Then there is what the tourists have actually spent on their accommodation, very low in some instances with rooms packed with four or five people. And it hacks some hoteliers off that some guests forget that they have paid very little and yet demand a level of quality way beyond that for which they have forked out.
All this and August yet to come, a month of high season but one traditionally that results in a lower relative spend because of the generally higher costs of the original holiday. Overall, it doesn't sound very clever, does it. And finally, from the Holiday Truths site, one contributor - all-inclusive - says that he spent, get this, 20 euros during his week's stay. Twenty of your whole euros, everybody. Or 2.01% of that tourism spend figure. Go figure.
Without contracts?
And here we go again ... The Alternative in Pollensa is to press for the creation of a commission to study what he believes to be a state of chaos at the town hall. This stems, says "The Diario", from the fact that some half a million euros worth of services provided to the town hall is not actually contracted, or so says Pepe Garcia, who is having this all checked out by his lawyer apparently. He argues that those firms without contracts have not submitted the correct documentation or bona fides; they include, for example, the company that maintains lighting in the port. The mayor naturally begs to differ, saying that there may be some instances of not all work being covered by contracts, but that all is overseen and supervised by council technical staff.
QUIZ
Yesterday's title - Phil Collins. Today's title - where did this come from?
(PLEASE REPLY TO andrew@thealcudiaguide.com AND NOT VIA THE COMMENTS THINGY HERE.)
From a main supermarket: bread (freshly-baked) 50 cents, fruit and vegetables 1.50 euros, ham and cheese 1 euro, drinks (2 litres of water, 1 litre of cola, juice, 1 litre of beer, 1 bottle of wine) 10 euros, milk, cereals, margarine and eggs 1.50 euros.
Meal out with a glass of wine and water - main course and sweet 15 euros, two coffees out 3 euros, four large beers out 12 euros. Total: 44.50 euros.
There are many ways to skin the food and drink cat, but the above might not be unrepresentative.
Elsewhere, i.e. "The Diario", there is a feature that points to the "alarm" among some hoteliers as to the lack of spend within the hotels themselves. It does support much of what is being said, and makes one rather question the official spend figures. These hoteliers talk of guests buying from supermarkets and making up their lunch snacks in their rooms (and why, pray, shouldn't they?) or of helping themselves to excessive amounts from the morning buffets for later consumption (hardly a new phenomenon, one would have said). Perhaps more scandalous are those tourists staying all-inclusive who get drinks and then go and sell them on the beach. Nothing like a bit of entrepreneurship, but it is decidedly naughty. Then there is what the tourists have actually spent on their accommodation, very low in some instances with rooms packed with four or five people. And it hacks some hoteliers off that some guests forget that they have paid very little and yet demand a level of quality way beyond that for which they have forked out.
All this and August yet to come, a month of high season but one traditionally that results in a lower relative spend because of the generally higher costs of the original holiday. Overall, it doesn't sound very clever, does it. And finally, from the Holiday Truths site, one contributor - all-inclusive - says that he spent, get this, 20 euros during his week's stay. Twenty of your whole euros, everybody. Or 2.01% of that tourism spend figure. Go figure.
Without contracts?
And here we go again ... The Alternative in Pollensa is to press for the creation of a commission to study what he believes to be a state of chaos at the town hall. This stems, says "The Diario", from the fact that some half a million euros worth of services provided to the town hall is not actually contracted, or so says Pepe Garcia, who is having this all checked out by his lawyer apparently. He argues that those firms without contracts have not submitted the correct documentation or bona fides; they include, for example, the company that maintains lighting in the port. The mayor naturally begs to differ, saying that there may be some instances of not all work being covered by contracts, but that all is overseen and supervised by council technical staff.
QUIZ
Yesterday's title - Phil Collins. Today's title - where did this come from?
(PLEASE REPLY TO andrew@thealcudiaguide.com AND NOT VIA THE COMMENTS THINGY HERE.)
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