The Unhealthy Brass Neck Of Politics

Almost 1,000 million euros. This was the saving that the Spanish Government anticipated making by getting tough with so-called health tourism and by denying primary health-care assistance to those who were "sin papeles". The then health minister, Ana Mato, announced these measures in April 2012. They involved a reform not of health legislation but of the law on immigration. The target of the savings was the "tarjeta sanitaria", the health card. It would no longer be sufficient to be on the local register - "empadronamiento" - to get a card; fiscal residency had also be to confirmed. Those who were in "irregular" situations would lose the right to health care, except in the cases of emergencies, maternity and child care.

Twelve years earlier, the Aznar administration - also a Partido Popular one - had granted foreigners (and we are talking predominantly those from Africa) complete access to the national health system even if they were in situations of "irregularity". The immigration law established that being "empadronado" was sufficient. Aznar's government was responding at that time to the flood of immigrants coming into Spain, who were in fact being openly invited into Spain as they were needed for building and infrastructure development in order to fulfil the nation's economic miracle.

What a difference twelve years made. Economic crisis demanded that scapegoats were sought in order to relieve the state's debts, while immigrant workers were no longer making contributions of meaningful sorts, all the projects having been completed, mothballed or identified as monuments to colossal waste. Governments of different types had desired their vanity schemes. They implemented them and they welcomed foreign workers to realise them. And then, when the money ran out and the corruption became evident, they turned their backs on these workers and their families.

Of course, there are "illegals". We all know there are. But these fall into different categories, one of them being the workers who, quite legitimately (because the law said so), were perfectly entitled to full health care. This categorisation notwithstanding, when the government changed its rules, there was an outcry - from doctors and other professionals, from human-rights advocates, from Europe.

Come forward to the present time and the government has changed the rules again. The minister for health, Alfonso Alonso, will now allow those who are "sin papeles" rights to health care that his predecessor had taken away, albeit that the health card will not be given back. Critics have described the move as "vague", as it is unclear how health treatment can work without a patient having a card, but it is a move taken, nevertheless, with one eye on elections. The PP wants to appear more humane.

This loss of humaneness was no more evident than in the Balearics. It might be recalled that before he started falling out with Madrid over oil and financing, José Ramón Bauzá was hailed as the model PP regional president, his administration typifying all that Rajoy desired. The rules on health were followed with zeal. So much so that on 24 April 2013, Alpha Pam, a Senegalese immigrant, died in his apartment in Can Picafort. He had been denied treatment at Inca Hospital. He was "sin papeles". He would have to pay. He couldn't. He was, however, an emergency. Or should have been categorised as such and so covered by the provisions of the 2012 law. His death should not have happened. His condition, tuberculosis, was easily treatable had greater care and humanity been shown to him.

There are reckoned to be some 20,000 people in the Balearics who are "sin papeles". The adults won't have any influence on elections, and nor will those in other parts of Spain. It is not their vote which is being sought, though.

Last Wednesday, leading figures in the Partido Popular gathered in Madrid for a meeting at which the party's image was discussed. There will be a "relaunch" of a party which is aware that it could be facing obliteration at the regional elections and, worse still, at the national election at the end of the year. The health issue with immigrants is one strand of an attempt to appear more pleasant, but this has been made all the more difficult by the passing of the Citizens' Safety Law, a measure, like the attitude towards immigrants and health, that has been slammed by professionals (lawyers in this instance), the human-rights lobby, opposition parties and Europe.

It is a relaunch that is almost certainly too late for the regional elections and quite probably for the general election as well. But you have to admire the brass neck of a party that can perform U-turns on issues such as immigrants and health (not a manifesto pledge) and abortion, which was in the manifesto, in its desperation to come across as human and humane.

Language And Nationalism

Ed Miliband would, under a future Labour government, make it a stipulation that every Briton would have to speak English. He also would appear to want to stipulate that anyone who goes to live in Britain would have to speak English and that, to have a job which requires interaction with the public, staff would need to demonstrate proficiency in the English language. 

This may all seem like a sop to the right-wing, but it doesn't sound particularly unreasonable, especially where public-sector jobs are concerned. If you wish to create something of unified national identity, then language is as good a symbol as any for ensuring it.

Such language stipulation is not solely an issue for British politicians to have to consider. It is one, you may have noticed, that also taxes the minds of Spanish politicians. The Catalan-Castellano great bore aside, there have been thoughts about insisting that immigrants to Spain speak Spanish (as opposed to Catalan, though maybe they think differently on the matter in Catalan-speaking areas). The current prime minister, Mariano Rajoy, once said that he would make it a stipulation, much as Miliband appears to want to where English is concerned.

Rajoy was coming from the issue from a non-EU angle (and, one suspects, a non-EU angle that nevertheless placed certain EU nationals, the likes of the British, the Germans and the French, in a different category to, for example, Bulgarians). There has never been any enactment as such, but, and regardless of where an immigrant comes from, an inability to speak the language will be an obstacle. This much is inevitable. In Spain, in Britain, wherever you care to mention.

Requiring immigrants to speak the native-tongue takes on the not always healthy glow of nationalism and the somewhat specious concept of citizenship, whether a formal application for citizenship is made or not. Speaking the language (Spanish) demonstrates a willingness to be a good citizen. Or in theory, it does. But what is meant by this? For politicians, it means the same as embracing culture, given that language and culture are indivisible, but this is highly questionable; immigrants retain their old cultures, to greater or lesser degrees, even when able to speak a new language perfectly well, and indeed Miliband is not suggesting that immigrants should abandon the cultures of their birth, which is very noble of him.

By the same token, not being able to speak the new language does not automatically mean that someone is a bad citizen. There are plenty of British people in Mallorca who speak Spanish hardly at all or not very well but who are perfectly decent citizens (or rather members of local society).

A demand that language should be acquired also takes no notice of practicality. Again, in theory, it is possible for anyone of more or less any age to learn a new language, but any language teacher or linguistics expert will tell you that language acquisition becomes harder the older the person is. It isn't just age and linguistic conditioning that are drawbacks to learning, there are also linguistic rules. For the Briton in Mallorca (or Spain), one who has never really understood English grammar, coming to terms with what appears a far more rule-based language is a mammoth task. There is only so much language that can be acquired through conversation. It needs real teaching in order to explain why, for example, Spanish has two overtly past tenses, why the present perfect doesn't necessarily observe the same rules as in English or why the subjunctives are as they are. Put any of this grammatical stuff in front of your average English-speaker, and he or she wouldn't have a clue what you were talking about.

Language is one of the great bastions of nationalism. This much is evident in the Catalan argument, among those both for and against. It isn't unreasonable to expect or at least hope that immigrants can acquire proficiency. Not unreasonable but not easy. And the logic of this is that, because it isn't easy, the proficiency won't be attained, and so the immigrant should be shown the door. Hence, language becomes an arbiter of entitlement and an enforcement. It also becomes a mark of having obtained a state of those two cultural impostors, assimilation and integration; impostors because neither can be adequately or satisfactorily defined.

Purely personally, I believe that language should be acquired to at least a reasonable level, which means to a far higher level than being able to order "dos cervezas". I suspect that there will be those resident in Mallorca, British with negligible language ability, nodding in agreement with Miliband. They would be the ones, therefore, who have not only not acquired much Spanish (or maybe they have), they would also be the ones who are still firmly rooted in Britain. Language? Culture? So long as they are someone else's problem.


Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.