EDITORIAL : THE GUARDIAN, UK

         

 

Spain: Look forward in anger

People are disillusioned with politics and politicians and there are hard times ahead

This was a car crash in slow motion and many in Spain's ruling socialist party saw it coming. Their 20/20 vision didn't make the impact any less painful. On Sunday the socialist vote collapsed. They lost power in most cities and almost all of the 17 autonomous regions, their worst result in local elections in three decades.

With a general election looming in less than a year, the party now faces the prospect of haemorrhaging votes to both right and left. Town halls and regional governments, which jointly account for half of all spending and most of the welfare state, will be in the hands of the rightwing Popular party. They will increase the pace of the spending cuts. But to the left also, the socialists are being shunned by the "indignant ones", the youth generation of protesters who have taken possession of squares and parks throughout Spain.

How far is the prime minister, José Luís Rodríguez Zapatero, personally to blame? His first incarnation was Keynes-lite. Focused on the record unemployment, he set Spain on a course which would allow it to work its way out of trouble. Then came the credit crunch, and the markets started treating Germany and Spain very differently. With the great and the good to advise him – economists Joe Stiglitz and Paul Krugman – Zapatero announced a programme of gradual spending cuts.

But then Greece happened, and Ireland was to follow. Spanish economists may despise the trader's acronym PIGS (Portugal, Italy, Greece and Spain) and with it the association with Europe's imploding periphery. But the pressure from the German chancellor, Angela Merkel, grew until Barack Obama himself was on the line. Zapatero performed a spectacular U-turn in May last year, cutting civil service pay by 5% and €6bn of investments. The rest is history. He has been unable since to persuade Spain that a brighter day will dawn. The country probably has less to reproach its prime minister for than either Germany or the eurozone. Unable to devalue his currency, Zapatero was trapped. But that is not how voters saw it on Sunday.

Disenchantment with mainstream politics is growing – one in 25 voters spoiled their ballot papers, although 66% of an angry electorate turned out. Having drowned out the socialists, the protest movement of Puerta del Sol and dozens of other city squares will have a harder time with the right in power. But they should stay put until they produce a coherent set of demands. The movement should neither be co-opted nor ignored. The fact that such debate is happening in squares, rather than parliaments, only shows how wide the gap between established politics and people's lives has grown.

Privacy: the high politics of low gossip

Who could have predicted a constitutional crisis between parliament and courts provoked by a footballer

Who, even a week ago, could have predicted a constitutional crisis between parliament and courts provoked by a footballer who played away? Within an hour of a judge refusing to lift an injunction barring the naming of the sportsman at the heart of an anonymous privacy injunction, a Liberal Democrat backbencher, John Hemming, stood up in the Commons chamber yesterday and named Manchester United's Ryan Giggs as the mystery claimant. Then, last night, the high court refused to overturn the now undermined injunction.

The case is, on the face of it, not a terribly attractive one for arguing either the cause of freedom of speech or for the supremacy of parliament. According to the original judgment, the matter involved a strong suggestion of blackmail by the former Big Brother star, Imogen Thomas, who had been trying to persuade Giggs to pay her to keep quiet about a relationship the two were alleged to have had. Ms Thomas had engaged the publicist Max Clifford to sell her story. In March Ms Thomas arranged a meeting in a hotel – very likely a "setup" so that photos could be taken – and demanded £50,000. When Giggs agreed to pay some cash, the silence money doubled to £100,000. This is hardly the stuff of Wilkes, Paine or Cobbett.

Some will disagree with the judge's decision to grant Giggs an injunction, but Mr Justice Eady's ruling can hardly be viewed as completely irrational. He was doing what parliament had asked the courts to do when it passed the Human Rights Act: to weigh up privacy and freedom of expression as embodied in articles 8 and 10 of the HRA. As required by section 12 of the act (at the urging of the press itself), judges must pay special regard to the media's own codes of conduct. The Press Complaints Commission's code guarantees exactly the same rights to privacy as the European convention and the HRA, unless there is a clear public interest in intrusion. The "public interest" includes the exposure of crime or misdemeanours. It's not obvious that an errant footballer clears that hurdle. So Mr Hemming's decision to pitch parliamentary privilege against the courts over this of all cases looks plain frivolous.

His justification was that a large number of users on Twitter had taken it upon themselves to "out" Giggs after his legal team was ill-advised enough to threaten to gag Twitter itself. This led to the apparently absurd situation whereby the press was "unfairly" unable to report something that had been widely published on the web. But this, with the growth of social media and the ability of anyone to publish on to the web, is bound to become more commonplace. People will take it on themselves to flout perfectly reasonable contempt rules (who in their right mind would want to prejudice the upcoming trial of Stephen Lawrence's alleged murderers?). Others have very strong views on the strict rules about reporting the family courts. What if some people on Twitter decided to name rape victims, or publish the current identity and whereabouts of Mary Bell, the child killer was who has, since 2003, been protected by a court order? There must be some agreed idea of the public interest – such as exists in the PCC code. The mere fact of publication on Twitter can't be an excuse for releasing the press from the internet's "unfair" advantage. Indeed, the press generally celebrates the code of practice that lies at the heart of self-regulation. That, it argues, is what raises it above the law of the jungle that supposedly exists on the web. To argue that the press must now be free to publish anything on Twitter places self-regulation itself in some peril.

The attorney general, Dominic Grieve, brought a measure of calm good sense to the affair by announcing a joint committee to investigate all the issues raised by privacy injunctions. A period in the long grass may be a good idea to allow some sense of perspective to return to the debate.

In praise of ... Forever Young

Bob Dylan, may your song always be sung

The world is awash with love songs, but there are too few to sing to friends and children. Bob Dylan's little blessing, Forever Young, is one. It may not be his greatest work, but it has in common with that the sense of having been discovered rather than composed, thanks to an organic blend of melody and pitch-perfect words. (What parent would not wish their child to "build a ladder to the stars" and "climb on every rung"?) The straightforward good-heartedness – "May you always do for others / And let others do for you" – is uncharacteristic, but the man himself must have been happy with it, since he stuck two versions back-to-back on Planet Waves. Singling out a hymn to eternal youth on this, Dylan's 70th birthday, might seem like bitter irony: his weathered looks and creaking voice betray a long life hard-lived. But think again. While the springtime turned slowly into autumn, the song and dance man's soul remained adolescent. Contemporaries such as Sir Paul McCartney are now establishment proper, while rock establishment stars like Mick Jagger strut the stage to defy their age, but in doing so reveal that they haven't felt a real creative spark since the 70s. But like a restless teen who keeps changing his look, Bob never stops reinventing. He goes electric, unplugged or gospel, gets God or loses him. The quality yo-yos infamously, because – besides the harmonica – the one constant is change. We know our wishes will come true when we say to him: may your song always be sung.