Goosepimples

The Great Magistrate Pascual Sala, president of a politically correct invention called The Constitutional Court, recently found national reaction to his tribunal’s latest comedy ‘frightening’. It gave him ‘goosepimples’, he said. He was referring to a narrowly voted decision (6 to 5) to permit ETA’s political coalition BILDU to stand as candidates in the municipal elections. The Supreme Court had already made a contrary decision two weeks before. Most of us had assumed that a supreme court means just that, a court standing supreme among the Spanish judiciary. But it does not. Spain is different. In Spain the government allows another court, invented to pontificate on constitutional matters, to over-turn the Supreme Court’s sentence. No wonder most Spaniards went all doolali and voted for the GPLLDP (Gay Poodle Lovers’ Liberal Democratic Party) on Sunday 22 May.

But, goosepimples? Sala, the best-known political judge since Balthazar Garzón, said it gave him goosepimples to think that people might doubt the independence of his Constitutional Court. Why would they doubt it? Perhaps because the six magistrates placed on the tribunal’s benches by the PSOE were those who voted for allowing ETA’s chums in the coalition BILDU to be candidates in Basque elections. By coincidence, the five lawyers who voted against were the Popular Party’s (and other’s) choices. And we were expected to swallow the falsehood that the Constitutional Court is indifferent to politics?

I shall confide in you what gives me goosepimples: first that the Spanish people accept with equanimity that the highest courts in the land can be subjected to political pressure. Second that justicecan be interpreted so differently by two maximum authorities, constituted by leading jurists. Third that a terrorist who has just completed his prison sentence for involvement in a number of Basque murders can exit the jail carrying placards extolling the virtues of BILDU – and no one comments; fourth that the third Vice-President of the Government Manuel Chavez, who supervised the Andaluz government during the scandal of the ‘Eres’, which involved nicking seven million euros of European-donated money, ‘redistributing’ it among his socialist cronies, has not resigned. He suggested that the information released to the press about this scandal is a ‘right wing plot’ used for electoral purposes by the Popular Party. But the information came from a fellow Socialist. If I get more goosepimples I might begin honking instead of gassing.

I get goosepimples realising that in the near future, the noble region of Navarra might be handed over to the Basque nation, as ETA and PNV have been threatening a sequestration of this nature for years. And more of them when you know that since BILDU won many seats in town halls etc. on 22 May. Official salaries and expenses are now paid to associates of ETA by the Spanish taxpayer – around 200 million euros per annum to be precise.

Finally, my entire coverage of skin becomes pimpled when I think of the Senior Vice-President of the Government and Interior Minister. He is firm in his resolution not to explain even the smallest detail of what happened at the Bar Faisan of ignoble memory. In case you have forgotten, the ETA associate who owns the Bar Faisan was tipped off by order of the Interior Ministry that police were about to arrest prominent members of ETA at the bar, thus enabling them to escape in the nick of time. But the Candidate for the Presidency Alfredo Pérez Rubalcaba refuses to comment, either to the press or to the parliament of this nation. We suspected that his Ministry was behind the massed juvenile demonstrations camping out in plazas across Spain, demanding an end to ‘The System’, and ‘a Real Democracy’. Rubalcaba is practised in these matters. He it was who organised the crowded demonstrations against the PP during ‘The Day of Reflection’ before the elections of May, 2004.

Honk Honk.