Chickens Coming Home To Roost

Mallorca is alive to the sound of clucking. To the sound of chickens coming home to roost. It wasn't that there was something bad or stupid done in the past, just that the hatching of plans taken some years ago is being exposed as questionable.

The brave new world of post-Franco democracy ushered in a devolved form of government to the newly autonomous regions which in turn decentralised powers to further authorities. In Mallorca this meant the regional government, the Council of Mallorca and the town halls. It was, still is in theory, the very model of ideal government, one of taking democracy to the local level and to ever smaller units of administration.

The brave new world was the rejection of the corrupt, authoritarian centralisation of Franco. It was the introduction of local accountability, of local decision-making. It was idealistic and participative. By filtering democracy downwards into more compact entities, it was a means of combatting corruption. Supposedly.

The brave new world has been only partially successful. But it is still young, relatively immature. Should it be granted time to reach some maturity? Powerful people and institutions are pecking at doubts as to whether it should be.

What the euphoria of the brave new world neglected were practicalities and costs. The structure of government had been questioned even before the crisis took hold; I had on more than one occasion. But the previous murmurs of questioning have become shouts.

To begin with, there is President Zapatero. He has issued a warning to the governments of the autonomous regions that they have to curb their spending and debts. The total regional debt is 105 billion euros. The regions are being seen, as I reported the other day, as perhaps the single greatest risk to Spain's finances.

Zapatero, likable and admirable in many ways, hasn't become a completely headless chicken, but his mantra of "reforms, reforms, reforms" allied to his threats of central intervention if the regions don't tow the line suggest a volte-face in his attitudes to the regions to which, hitherto, he seems to have been only too willing to cede more and more responsibility.

Then there is Zapatero's predecessor, José Maria Aznar, who has alluded to this change of attitude. He has condemned "quick changes of policy" and what he sees as threats to the autonomous model of government enshrined in the brave new world. And this is a Partido Popular politician saying this. Without anyone actually spelling it out in the kind of dramatic way that might suggest a complete abandonment of the autonomous model, the costs of regional government are nonetheless drawing into question the sustainability of the current system.

If one homes in on Mallorca, behind the regional government lurks the Council of Mallorca. What is the point of the Council of Mallorca? It's a question I was asking B.C. (before crisis). Were it smaller, it might be justifiable, but its size, its mirroring of the regional government makes it an expensive level of bureaucracy, the purpose of which seems to be to grant jobs for the boys. Moreover, as is highlighted with the waste-collection scandal, it offers an additional opportunity for misdeeds. This scandal has even exposed the appalling waste that appears to have occurred as a consequence of its involvement with rubbish collection, that of some town halls seemingly having paid twice for the same service.

The budget for the council in 2011 will be 428 million euros. One voice that suggests the council is "very expensive" in addition to it being an "inefficient behemoth" belongs to Maria Salom, the PP's candidate for its presidency. It may sound as though she is one chicken acting like a turkey voting for Christmas, but she has called for an end to the accumulation of functions and overlaps with other institutions. Hallelujah. It may have taken several years, but someone finally seems to get it. She isn't advocating the council's complete dismantling, but she does want it stripped down. And so it should be.

And then you come to the town halls. The Majorcan hotel federation's lady president, Marilén Pol, has said that they should be eliminated - all 53 of them. They cost too much and are unnecessary given the size of population. It's an extreme proposition, but it is one that has been pursued in other cash-strapped countries.

An alternative is merger. There are examples of town halls working together, but there are others which show that it isn't straightforward. The Mancomunitat in the north of Majorca doesn't work at all, so much so that the six town halls involved have more or less agreed not to bother with future meetings. Where there are competing agendas, then it is unlikely that it would work.

Eliminating the town halls is not, I believe, a solution. They perform a social function in terms of local identity as well as adhering to the fundamentally correct principle of local democracy. But they have not succeeded in being the accountable, participative and transparent institutions they should have become, and they, like the Council of Mallorca, perpetuate bureaucratic burdens.

The chickens are coming home to roost because they have woken up to the fact that the structure of government is unwieldy and too expensive. The model is not fundamentally wrong, but it has got out of hand. The Council of Majorca should either go altogether or be pared back in terms of its function. The town halls need reforming, their spends on personnel alone having spiralled since the turn of the century.

Which leaves the regional government. It should stay. For it to not to would represent a shattering of the brave new world and a reversion to something worse - centralisation and Madrid control. And there would be something even more dramatic were the autonomous regions to be undermined. You only have to think of Catalonia and its independence claims to know what this would be. Anarchy.


Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.

Join Together

Starting on Saturday, Alcúdia will be celebrating its annual Sant Jaume fiesta, the events climaxing on Saturday 25 July, the day of Sant Jaume, with the fireworks that bring the fiesta to its close. There is a further dimension to this year's fiesta. Indeed there is a double celebration. It is eighty years since the town hall building was opened and thirty years since local democracy took off following the period of Franco's dictatorship. To mark these anniversaries, there will be an act of commemoration during the fiesta week and the presentation of a book that looks at the building of "la Sala", the town hall.

These two anniversaries - of 1929 and 1979, half a century apart - are in themselves significant as they top and tail, as it were, the period of descent into turmoil, Franco and finally the restoration of the monarchy and the establishment of democracy. Though overshadowed by who and what was to come, in 1929 Spain was governed by another dictator, Miguel Primo de Rivera. He presided over the inauguration of the building, praising its "sumptuous construction". He was accompanied by Jaime, one of the sons of King Alfonso XIII. It was an ironic pairing, and whether Jaime knew anything of the compliments lavished on la Sala by Primo de Rivera is doubtful; he was a deaf mute. By the time of the inauguration, 10 September 1929, Primo de Rivera was on his last dictatorial legs. He had assumed the dictatorship in 1923, thanks to the support of Alfonso, but the king was reaching the point of wanting to sack him. A few months later in early 1930, the army failed to back the dictator: he resigned and died in March of that year; the Republic was declared the following year; the monarchy abolished and the path to Civil War created.

Primo de Rivera is sometimes considered a bit of an irrelevancy. He was far from that. Franco learned from his regime and was thus ruthless in crushing unions and Catalanism in a way that his predecessor had not been. Primo de Rivera had also headed a period of economic advance, much of it based on extravagant public spending, which partly contributed to the collapse in the peseta and to his demise. But that spending was what brought about not only la Sala but also significant other works in Alcúdia. Much restoration and construction in the town dates to the period of the first dictatorship.

La Sala was not to be the location of an actual "ayuntamiento" ("ajuntament" in Catalan) of Alcúdia until 1979. That was when the first democratically selected mayor, Pere Adrover, came to office - fifty years after the building which houses the town hall's meetings had been praised by a former dictator for its sumptuousness and for being "extremely artistic". The words "ayuntamiento" and "ajuntament" come from the Castilian and Catalan verbs ayuntar and ajuntar, meaning to join. It took half a century for them to truly join together in la Sala.

Information on the Sant Jaume fiesta and also the Sant Jaume and Santa Margalida fiestas in Sa Pobla is on the WHAT'S ON BLOG - http://www.wotzupnorth.blogspot.com.


Swine flu
How's your swine flu doing? Want some? Then come to Mallorca. Only kidding. Not that the German newspaper "Bild" seems to be kidding. It is saying that around ten cases of swine flu in Germany have their origins in Mallorca, specifically in the Playa de Palma area. The local health authorities on the island are flatly denying that it has been contracted in Mallorca. Officially, there are, to date, six cases that have been reported in Mallorca and two more in Ibiza and one in Menorca.


QUIZ
Yesterday's title - Jackson Five, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MYx3BR2aJA4. Today's title - who, er, yes?

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We're Only In It For The Money

Know who Ramón Socias is? Thought not. He is in fact the delegate from Madrid for the Balearics, a sort of political director of football reporting to the board while the manager, Francesc Antich, loses or keeps the dressing-room of the populace. The Constitution Day revelries were an opportunity for him to pronounce and, as reported by "The Diario", he did just this when turning his attention to the three "C's" - of constitution, crisis and corruption. The second of these was economic; it could as easily have been the third, and one could toss in the first in crisis as well, given the existence of the third.

It may not have been Burke or Locke, but Sr. Socias philosophised on the nature of politics, or the nature of politicians to be more precise. They should not see politics as something to depend upon or to see it as a means of a salary or privileges that cannot be obtained in other ways. They should be politicians for a "determined period" as a way of curbing corrupt practices. And in the Balearics, he says, there has been a failure of control mechanisms that has led to corruption, itself a fault of the system.

In a way, it is loaded stuff. I'm not sure that finite terms of office are in themselves a means of preventing corruption, but if one accepts the maxim of "all power corrupts", then it is probably true that there is a temptation to greater corruption the longer a politician is in situ. To act corruptly, however, requires a willingness to do so and a system that allows it. Sr. Socias is not wrong when he refers to a failure of control, though one might suggest that it is an absence of control. To admit, though, that the system is at fault is a pretty damning observation as it brings into question the whole edifice of local democracy here. It was revealing that he explicitly said that the problems of corruption in Mallorca (and the Balearics) were not those of the political parties; it chimed with what I said the other day about Franco and his desire to dismantle the party system. Yet, the parties are a part of the system, and the system is one of layers of government and duplication and of networks, families, nepotism and favours with a specifically Mediterranean flavour. I don't believe that people necessarily seek office in order to act corruptly, but the dynamics of the system are such that it can be all too easy to do so.

Taking democracy to as local a level as possible is a laudable political model, but one has to ask as to the wisdom of there being so much of it. In Mallorca, there is the autonomous regional (Balearic) government, the Council of Mallorca, and then the town halls, some 50 or so of them, each with mayors and various councillors heading departments which, in the main, replicate those of the institutions higher up the political food chain; mayors and town halls for an average, approximately, of every 17,000 of the population. I am unclear as to the necessity for the Mallorca Council, or why the town halls all need councillors for the various departments they have, or how it can be expected that truly competent officials can be available when there are so many municipal administrations - the talent, what there is, is spread thin and one is left with the impression of so many jobs for the boys (and sometimes girls). The more there is of all of it, the greater the potential for power corrupting, especially if there are inadequate controls.

I once compared local politics here to the collegiate JCR (junior common room) system of my old university. That was playing at politics, mimicking much that existed in a more meaningful fashion elsewhere and leaving only the bread and circuses of free beer and dance nights as a genuine "local" contribution. Looking after the towns' own bread and circuses - the fiestas - is fine, but land policy often is the subject of questionable procedures and should be subject to external scrutiny or decision, and why exactly is there a need for councillors to oversee things like the environment? In Alcúdia, you may recall, I was surprised to learn, when asking about the canals, that they are the responsibility of a central ministry, not of the town hall. As with other things, the "carreteras" (highways) for instance, there is a central body. In Pollensa, they have contracted an outside firm to establish the budget. It is good in one way as it may give rise to better management, but it does make one query the need for and competence of certain officials. And then there is the electoral system, the one that can lead, so I am told, to Joan Cerdà gaining but 13% of the vote only to find himself, to his surprise, as mayor of Pollensa. There are those who might doubt his ability, but I have sympathy for him as he is a part of a system that intrinsically can enable the Peter Principle of competence to apply - if indeed this is true of him.

For all that Sr. Socias may have touched a raw nerve, to imply that local politicians should treat their posts purely as those of some short-term civic honour is to ignore the political impulse, that of which he himself is a part*, i.e. to seek and gain office and then to continue to wish to do so. As for salary, well of course officials should be paid. The question is whether they are good enough to warrant their salary and whether they were the right people to be nominated in the first place. If the system allows for the next person off the rank, for horse-trading or for the only available person to fill, for instance, the mayoral office, then there is clearly a system fault. If Sr. Socias is serious, he should propose a root-and-branch examination of Mallorcan public office. He talks of cleaning up local politics, and one hopes that the recent scandals may bring home to those in office the need to act in ways other than for their "own benefit", as he puts it. But if the system isn't working, can we be sure that it will?

The danger is, though, that too much is made of the recent spate of corruption cases. In doing so, the good guys can be branded along with the villains. The reference to political parties by Sr. Socias may have also been diplomatic (he is socialist), as he didn't wish to single out the Partido Popular and the fact that so much of this spate relates to the period of its last administration. In which case, it is something for that party to sort out. But that still leaves the system.

* For the record, Sr. Socias is in his second four-year term as Balearics delegate. He was previously the senator for Mallorca (for eight years), mayor for Sóller,and a co-ordinator with Palma council.


QUIZ
Yesterday's title - "Don't Dream It's Over", Crowded House (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dZZfuCJ970w). Today's title - album by? A band that has previously appeared here - American and satirical.

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Bread And Circuses

My university had a collegiate system; it still does. What this meant was that, in addition to a central student union body politic, each of the college JCRs (junior common rooms) had a mirror political organisation. The "executives" typically comprised half-a-dozen elected "officials". Nowadays, I understand, these have more than doubled; there are even three social secretaries. How many social secretaries does it take to arrange a piss-up? Whatever.

As students, much of our politics was taken ultra seriously. Much of it was also interminably boring and utterly irrelevant. I was president of one of these JCRs. Occasionally, I would lapse into a bout of deranged seriousness before being dragged out of it by being reminded that I was also partly responsible for what was for those already politically correct days an outrageous alternative student publication. (And if one wonders as to some of the origins of contemporary British political correctness, the national student movement under Jack Straw and, in my time, Charles Clarke, is a good place to start.)

Student politics of that time were dominated by the Broad Left (anything from old-style Labour through to Marxist Communism), but the JCRs and the central union were pretty catholic in their executive make-up. Proportional representation and the single transferrable vote saw to it that the executives were coalitions of divergent political ideologies. One JCR was different; two to be exact. Both were "run" by a non-affilated grouping of which I was one. We had a hold over the two JCRs thanks to a wide network of mates, thanks to policies of "bread and circuses" to anaesthetise the masses, thanks to periodic character assassinations of opponents, thanks to the odd bit of manipulation here or there. We were, after a fashion, a nationalist local party who took power mainly for power's sake. We had fallings-out among ourselves, but never for policy reasons because there weren't any, other than making enormous amounts of alcohol dirt cheap. We did more or less as we liked. There were few checks and balances. General meetings that threatened censure were packed with supporters and the amenable, and the publications were under our control. In truth, we were probably more Stalinist than those who were card-carriers.

Local Mallorca politics is like student politics. It mirrors the real thing but is ultimately somewhat futile. Parties follow the mainstream and others are created out of perhaps honourable notions of representation of a people but are also the manifestation of power grab. For an island of some one million people, the number of "colleges" (the municipalities) is prolific; the smallness of the communities feeds the networks of mates who seek and support power. The municipalities can affect certain things, but they are also responsible for their own bread and circuses in the form of fiestas and fireworks; they are social secretariats writ large. There are questionable checks and balances, as the periodic scandals testify to. Ultimately, politics at town hall level and even island level defers to the centre when it comes to the really crucial issues, such as the current economic problems. At a practical level, the proliferation of centres of democracy and the existence of various party groupings spread whatever talent there is thin to the point of debatable existence.

Instinctively, I am drawn to the highly decentralised, local model of democracy, as it exists in Mallorca, but that is not to say that it doesn't have its faults. However, the party structure and the electoral system, which invariably results in coalition, make local politics a playground that imitates Madrid and give rise to in-fighting and cross-party fighting. Localness can lose a local focus when the politics becomes the main purpose. The checks and balances inherent to a coalition seem not to function when one party assumes and asserts greater power. Take the scandals. Theoretically, these should not arise under a system of cross-party executives, but they do. Even trifling matters, such as the use of Catalan only by the Pollensa town hall, as I mentioned the other day, should be challenged and prevented by non-nationalists, but they are not.

The alleged turmoil within the Unió Mallorquina, that has arisen because of the sacking of aides by the UM's tourism minister, and scandals, of which there are two more major ones floating around, have led some to question the purpose and sense of localism. While the party nature of local politics can undermine the credibility of the island's local democracy model, it is not necessarily the case that the scandals do. One reason for their arising is the greater force with which corruption is being tackled than used to be the case. It may once have been the case that those who acted in a corrupt or fraudulent manner would have believed that friends in high places would see to it that they were immune. Not any longer. The mates network is beginning to fall apart in this respect.

What needs to be taken into account is the youthfulness of Mallorcan and Spanish democracy. Thirty years and they are still finding their feet. Pollensa's engagement of an outside company to draw up its budgets may be an admission of lack of competence, but it is competent in admitting an independent analysis; it edges the town halls towards a system of external audit which would check not only the potential for misappropriation but also the dominance of one party's say-so.

There is much that is downright stupid about the island's local politics, but the hope is that, as the model matures and is shaped, that politics becomes less like that of the student JCR and more credible. In the wider scheme of things, it will always be "somewhat futile", but the closeness of democracy is a not unworthy aim and should not be swept away because of the apparent inability of some politicians to see eye to eye or because of scandals.


And still with Pollensa town hall, the pedestrianisation imbroglio now finds the Gotmar revolutionaries willing to indeed take legal action. Garry Bonsall may well feel that there is a chance of success; I hope he's right, it could be an expensive and lengthy process. The environmental pretext for challenging the town hall is one thing, the apparent lack of consultation is another. It is precisely this that should be a central plank of local democracy. If indeed it has not been conducted satisfactorily, then there is much to commend Garry's move. As a test case, it could help to define more clearly the responsibilities of town halls - all part of that maturing and shaping of the local political model.


QUIZ
Yesterday's title - The Hollies. Today's title - English political folky.

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Into The Gap

Following up on yesterday's reference to the mad plan to close the coast road between Alcúdia and Puerto Pollensa, there are some other factors to be taken into account. While Pollensa town hall might have got it into their collective heads that this is more than just some whim, there is the not insignificant matter of what Alcúdia thinks about it all. I drove along the road yesterday, and checked the boundary signs. That for Puerto Pollensa, the you-have-now-left Puerto Pollensa one, that is, is just past the new roundabout for the new bypass road. The welcome-to-Alcúdia one is right next to the old road to Pollensa, quite some way further along the coast road. Maybe the gap in between is Pollensa's (as opposed to just Puerto Pollensa's); whatever, the road itself "belongs" as much to Alcúdia as it does to Pollensa.

I cannot imagine that such a scheme - to close the main link road connecting Alcúdia and Puerto Pollensa - can be within the gift of a local town hall; it is too strategically important in terms of transport infrastructure. I had always assumed that decisions regarding the "carreteras" were at least rubber-stamped centrally, if not made. There is then the issue of necessity. The closure would require another road. If not, the detour would be so inconvenient that Puerto Pollensa would be partially cut off. Besides, there is simply no need for another road; the one we have at present, i.e. the coast road, is perfectly adequate, if sometimes dangerous. That the beach may be expanded, as a consequence of getting rid of the road, and that the beach that is currently there might be "beautified" with imported sand, may be the desire of some environmental fanaticism, but who would actually use that beach? If there were no road, then how would beach users get there?

Finally, there is another strategic transport matter. It concerns the idea that there might be a tram that goes to Puerto Pollensa if there can ever be any agreement on the siting of the train terminal in Alcúdia. One hears less of this part of the mooted tramline than of the one that might go to Can Picafort, but it remains a possibility. And if so, well where would that go?

I don't believe this scheme will ever see the light of day. It's unnecessary, it's impractical, it serves an ill-defined environmental fancy, it would be hugely expensive (and the tab would be picked up centrally, not by the town halls), it would be unpopular ... Erm, is there any reason for it?

It was against this background that I had a conversation with someone in Puerto Pollensa yesterday. This chat also touched on Garry Bonsall's complaint which I also mentioned in yesterday's piece. The nub of the conversation was that Pollensa town hall, unlike Alcúdia's, seems to make secondary the needs of its port area. In other words, the town of Pollensa takes preference. I'm not sure this is right (Pollensa's roads, for example, are just as appalling as those in the port), but it is right in that this is a perception, and perceptions matter just as much as realities. Pollensa town hall has an image and a PR problem, if you like. It's not the only one. People in Playa de Muro and Can Picafort make the same sorts of complaints about their town halls, those of Muro and Santa Margalida. The great difference between Alcúdia and the other three is that the town and the port (or resort) is geographically linked. Pollensa, Muro and Santa Margalida are all several kilometres away from their resorts; Alcúdia is right on top of its. One does not hear the same level of complaint. Ok, Alcúdia town hall does its share of daft things, too, but there is not the same perceptual gap; one that distance only helps to accentuate. It is as if there is an elitism in the towns that affords the resorts secondary status. And people get upset, especially upset, as it is they in the resorts who generate such a high proportion of the town halls' revenues. There is something of the town halls acting as kingdoms of mediaeval England, dispatching their reeves or sheriffs to extract taxes from the thanes and peasantry, whilst lording it (as it were) in their castles of antiquity - which is about right in terms of the ages of the towns. And now I think of it, history says that Spain retained an essentially feudal system well into the last century, one that the Second Republic (which Franco crushed) sought to dismantle. That wasn't so long ago, and some seem to have good memories of feudalism.

Local democracy is a fine idea. I have no problem with it. It should be far more widespread in the UK. But if it results in perceptual faultlines and accusations that great parts of the municipalities are not listened to, then it is democracy by sham and autocracy by fiefdom. There again, isn't that the nature of democracy?


QUIZ
Yesterday's title - she's an old favourite of the blog, and thanks to a first-time quiz respondent Terence who got Dusty Springfield and Dionne Warwick (who did it first) - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qxl7YbVi4Cs. Today's title - big-selling album from one of the most intriguing British "pop" bands of the '80s. Think Hergé's Adventures of Tintin.

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