The Catalan Republic

I admit it: I like a map. Books with maps, family trees, lists of characters and all their connections - all magic stuff to me. So I wasn't surprised when I stumbled across a map entitled 'Greater Europe.'

I love the Gothic script here, not to mention the lands of the heathens, heretics and godless. I notice on this map Spain is the same shade as Africa: land of the godless.

Intrigued, I googled the reference and came up with a wiki page where I saw the following description: 

Greater Europe refers to the idea of an extended or developed Europe. This generally implies a Europe which transcends traditional boundaries, including trans-Eurasian countries,^[1] or those in close proximity with a strong European heritage.^[2]

The wiki page has a map too. I won't trouble you with that - you can google it for yourself. Suffice to say, that map has large grey areas which are excluded from Greater Europe. As far as I can see, these grey areas are Muslim. Definitely not classed as places 'with a strong European heritage.'

The western world is riven with fear of the rest of the world. After centuries of oppressing the poor of other continents, it's as if our chickens are coming home to roost in Europe and we're clinging together for dear life before we're overrun by the people we overran before. We don't want to share - not a damn thing. We want to keep what we have, even if we weren't entitled to have it to begin with.

The fear of change has made us fearful of everything. The EU, the US and the UK are deeply frightened places. It's inhibiting our sense of democracy which we, ironically, keep trying to force other countries to adopt.

I think I've read all there is to read about independence for Catalunya. I've watched the government in Madrid behave for weeks as if Franco is still alive and the Falangists still in power, fail to negotiate and make one horrible mistake after another in dealing with the government and people of Catalunya.

I've certainly heard as much as I need to of the fake indignation of the EU and the leaders of Germany, France and the UK faced with the Catalan declaration of a republic. I'm told the USA will not support 'freedom movements' in the EU because you can't compare Catalunya - or Scotland - with what happened in the American Revolution - after all, that was 200 years ago and the situations are different. I'm not sure how.

I would like answers to the following questions.

Just how does a country or a region that feels it is a country get independence? In Spain, it seems there is no mechanism: you signed up to the constitution in 1976 and you're stuck with it forever. In the case of Scotland, we need the permission of the UK even to ask the population the question. That breeds at best festering resentment and at worst civil war.

This strikes me as deeply undemocratic.

If the EU was doing its job properly, there would be a legal statute in place that allowed various levels of autonomy, self-government and independence to emerging states. And member states of the EU would have to sign up to it. Self-government should never be in the gift of the state. It should be a right.

The idea that nothing ever changes or can ever change is a pretty sad position for the EU to adopt, especially when you look at how the map of greater Europe has changed since the EU came into being.

And yet...I keep coming back to it: the EU is the best we have. It was set up by people with high moral principles. Sadly, it's now being let down by people with very small minds.

Children's rights

I live in a large-ish (well, for these days) family with 7 children aged one year to 10 and another on the way. We are all used to the two-year-old tantrums, the screams of frustration (the weans, not the parents), the threats of sanctions (no videos today, etc).

We don't hit our weans. It's not a rule. It's just the way it is.

I don't have children. I do have 35 years of experience of working with children and young people - and, more importantly, with their parents. I started work as a teacher in the 70s when parents would routinely tell me when I tried to persuade them to supervise their kids' homework or make them turn up to sit an exam: Ach, just belt him.

We had the belt in schools then. I rarely used it because I was useless at it. My first instinct was to talk to the kid who acted up but my 'superiors' (the guys that took it hardest when the belt was abolished, by the way) wanted swift and violent action. It was such a relief when the belt was banned.

Now the Scottish Government wants to ban smacking. I'm for that.

I think children have far too few rights in law anyway. Scottish law on children's rights is untenable.  End of. And I know there are readers frothing at the mouth just reading that.

But let me point out a few things.

Children are most at risk in families - physically, mentally and sexually.

A parent can remove a child from education and nobody can do a damned thing about it. It's called 'education at home' and it's a parent's right. That's how kids disappear off the radar all the time in Scotland - 31 this year removed from one school and not enrolled in another. Where are they?

School is not just about learning stuff: it's about learning to get on with other people, to be part of a group (which you are at home and will be at work for the rest of your life). It's about community - civilisation, as we teachers call it. It's a safe place, where children can and do share what's happening to them elsewhere. Later they can decide these things are not for them but parents in my opinion don't have the right to stop children developing as social beings.

I have been told when I object to things like school uniform (so much claptrap talked about that) or placing requests by middle-class parents who know nothing about their local school but have heard  the one three schools along is better - I've been told I know nothing about bringing up children, born - as I was - under a gooseberry bush and raised by wolves...

And let's look at this word 'smacking.' What is a smack to you? It might look to you like a light tap on the back of the hand but I once saw a blow that knocked a small child off his feet. I intervened and I'll be honest: I was scared - I am totally afraid of physical violence. It was a granny who did it - in a shop in a village where everyone knew her.

We had a talk - it was either that I told her or I called the police - and it occurred to me pretty soon that this poor put-upon granny childminder was totally out of her depth. Too old to handle a 3 year old but obliged to help her daughter get back to work. Of course, she loved her grandson and was good to him but she needed help. (In that village, she got it).

So let's work on the adults. If you were battered as a child, either at home or at school, surely you want your children and grandchildren to have a better - safer - experience.

It still surprises me that the authoritarian element in Scottish society is still around, while the rest of us have moved on. And by jings, they're out in force over the smacking issue - as they were over equal marriage rights, etc. These are the people who reject equal rights for all, refer to women as feminazis, reject any kind of racial integration, and want control - above all, control - of the rest of us.

We've all moved on a lot since the 70s. And we're not going back.

The Grammar Nazi is IN!

Let's deal with the word: obese. It doesn't mean fat or overweight. Obese is a medical term. There are different levels of obesity, but to be classed as obese, people have to be carrying so much extra weight, their health is at risk. People who are overweight usually don't fall into that category. But it sounds so much more awful than fat or overweight. And heaven knows, being fat, overweight or obese is the worst thing anyone can be these days - much worse than stupid or uneducated or a president called Trump.

Okay? Everybody got that? Though I doubt that the journalists and TV people who started us all off using this word are even capable of seeing the distinction..

Now for: decimate. The modern verb comes from the Latin word for ten. In Roman times, it had a quite clear military meaning:

- kill one in every ten of (a group of people, originally a mutinous Roman legion) as a punishment for the whole group.

A very extreme punishment, you'll agree. Certainly a radical way to 'encourager les autres.' Now it's just slung around, used as if it means the same as destroy, devastate or annihilate. It's misused so much now that we have journalists writing even more nonsense than ever: the battalion was decimated, I read in one newspaper article recently. But a battalion in the UK army is 300-800 soldiers and it turned out the casualties in this case numbered 2.

I always come back to communication: I don't get hysterical if I see typos or words misused unless the meaning is obscured. The whole point of language is to make matters clear.

As I hope this is!

Crime Waves

A few years back, I met a couple of pals in a Scottish city (not Glasgow) for lunch. We'd all come from working class backgrounds ourselves in the 50s and 60s, attended 'scheme' schools and worked in similar schools as teachers. We had all noticed the link between having a job and a decent income, support for communities from police and other public services and the steady fall in crime in Scotland over a generation, but we also agreed on the state of devastation Thatcherism had caused in communities all over Scotland in the 80s and 90s, from which many communities have never recovered, so that crime was a constant fear. And we decided that in the mid-2000s, after the collapse of UK and US capitalism, it was all about to happen again.

I'll be honest: poor people who assault, rob and steal from other poor people are the lowest of the low.

I don't care how badly off you are, you don't attack your own folk. But our 'communities' - what's left of them after Thatcherism and almost a decade of 'austerity' following the bank bail-out, cuts in public services and in social security support - well, not many feel any kind of solidarity, as far as I can see. That's what Thatcherism set out to do: the UK was to become a community of individuals where the motto was 'man, mind thyself' - take care of yourself - because nobody else will do it.

Tonight on the Channel 4 news, people were complaining about crime waves in London: knife- and gun-carrying and -assaults are rife, moped robberies are the latest thing and now people are facing acid attacks in the street. The indignant people protesting against the rise in crime didn't seem to see a connection with government policy. It goes like this:

* cut the level of community policing - in some cases by 20% - by reducing public sector budgets where workers have had next to no pay rises for 9 years and then complain about lack of support from emergency services
* cut social security payments to make it harder for people to get state support, especially young people
* make it near enough impossible to find affordable housing if you're young, and make homelessness a major issue, with young homeless people not only victims of crime but more likely to commit crime to survive
* introduce a bedroom tax (oh yes, it's still there) so that poor people are penalised for living in houses they can't move out of because there are no other houses available, councils having been banned from building the houses we need
* knock the arse out of wages, especially the wages of the unskilled so that you create an 'underclass' of poor people and then blame them when they react badly to being excluded from the world of the 'haves.'
 * sanction anyone who can't work their way through the jungle of social security rules
* find people to blame. How about immigrants?

Sure as fate, on the same news programme tonight, there was a Frenchwoman (married to a UK citizen, lived and worked here for 20 years, paid her taxes, etc) complaining about not feeling secure here any more. A total stranger in the cafe she and the news reporter were meeting in interrupted to suggest British workers were 'insecure' in their jobs because of people like the Frenchwoman, a complete misreading of the situation, widely peddled by people like UKIP and Boris (PM in waiting) Johnson.

There's no point blaming the police for a spike in lawlessness. And no point in the police blaming communities. No point blaming local authorities for not supporting elderly people in need of home care or children and teenagers in need of mental health care. No point lamenting the lack of decent housing when the government refuses to sanction house-building. No point letting the Tories carry on with the myth that Britain is a world power and ignoring 2 trillion quids' worth of debt so they can buy the new Trident and invest in a railway that goes nowhere and that nobody really needs.

Meanwhile on Sky News Review, there was a UKIP guy who runs a website and has no children, describing the Scottish Government's decision to ban smacking as 'preposterous.' You know the argument: I got the occasional slap...never did me any harm...To be honest, I'm not sure if this is a real problem in Scotland but I support the ban because although I grew up in a non-violent household I am myself pretty scared of violence. I'm delighted to say the other presenter agreed with me: setting a tone where violence is the answer can never be right. Where children are concerned I have strong views about defending their rights.

And on every news channel every night, there's another programme about Brexit. I promise you, 10 years from now, we'll be asking: What happened? How did we let these people lead us out of the biggest trading union in the world, negotiate a disastrous settlement (though there's no negotiation as far as I can say, just years of economic failure to come) because the UK elected a Tory government which is too scared to tell the truth: this is a disaster - and they are too incompetent to do anything to repair the damage. 

Not me too

I refuse to do the me too thing.

Why would I? Why would any woman? Apart from the fact that what happens to me is my business, I don't need to prove what the problem is. We know what the problem is. It's not everyday sexism, not normal male privilege, not a Hollywood mogul behaving the way Hollywood moguls are expected to. And I for one don't need bleeding heart liberal guys telling me how they sympathise.

We've known this kind of shit has been going on for decades - centuries, in fact. It's not about women at all. It's about anyone who isn't an old white guy being held back so that a small group of old white guys can continue to run the world. It's about discrimination. Against women, black people, gays, hispanics, jews, arabs - anyone who doesn't fit the profile the men in charge want us to see as the norm. It's not an isolated problem. It's rife in politics, business, the media, and in public life in general.

What do we do about it?

It has taken more than a century to get to this stage, so it's going to take a while to sort out. But we can make a start.

Maybe in the UK we can start by chucking out the posh white boys who have such political power. We could ask them to justify their position - on merit.

We could ask their supporters - journalists mainly - to show why these people are in positions of power. Then we could clear out the organs of power like judges or 'senior' civil servants or the House of Lords which represent no one, but pay people huge amounts of money to spend their later years doing very little and getting medals and whopping pensions at the end.

We could set targets: no improvement in public life - no pay - and definitely no bonuses. That incentive would work for most of us. Why not the ruling elite?

Catalunya and Scotland

Peter Preston of The Guardian had an article in the paper about Catalunya: 

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/oct/15/catalan-secession-incubated-media-cocoon

I won't pretend to understand everything he writes in the article: I think there are problems with translation from Spanish in one place and a couple of places where Preston expresses himself badly. But I have extracted a few things because he makes interesting points and also because they show such a contrast with what's happening in the media in Scotland.

1 It only takes Preston till line 3 of his article to take aim at the SNP:  "We know what the SNP would have done if they’d won their referendum. Set up a Scottish Broadcasting Corporation on the grave of the BBC."

Can I point out - yet again - that supporters of independence in Scotland in 2014 were not all SNP? There were and still are Green Party members like me, Labour members for independence, etc. 

His opinion that the SNP would have taken over the BBC and turned it into the SBC is based on nothing. There were lots of ideas going around at the time but no definite plans for broadcasting. Preston's suggestion seems to be that change would be somehow sinister - just the use of the word 'grave' tells me that. 

2 Preston points out that Catalunya has 5 TV stations and one radio station all broadcasting in Catalan. They've had these since 1983. He says these stations are paid for by the Catalan government. Presumably, before the present government took office, other parties ran these stations. What happened then? Were there accusations of bias by the Socialists, for example? 

For those of us in Scotland, the very idea of 5 dedicated TV stations is wonderful. Imagine having that number of stations broadcasting home-grown news, dramas and soaps. Think of the well-trained people we'd be offering jobs to: writers, technical staff, editors, producers. All fully employable in our Scottish film studios. 

3 Preston accuses these Catalan stations of living in "a media cocoon of settled opinion." By that I think he means there is no argument, debate or discussion. It is taken for granted that independence is the way forward. 

I have to point out that no one has to watch or listen to these Catalan stations. Other Spanish-language stations are available. Preston admits elsewhere in the article that Spanish-language TV and radio stations showed anti-independence and anti-Catalan bias in their broadcasts during the recent referendum but he doesn't try to analyse the under-lying anti-Catalan feeling that was encouraged by Franco's Falangists right up to 1975. 

Do I really need to tell Preston about the attitude of TV stations here in the UK to Scottish plans for independence? Last week on the Sky news review a journalist was allowed the luxury of a 3 minute monologue (on the day the SNP conference started) devoted to why the SNP is finished; how great the Tories in Scotland are doing; and how independence in Scotland is dead in the water. This on a programme with a total broadcast time of 18 minutes. 

When the BBC broadcasts programmes like Question Time, we're quite used to seeing one representative of the SNP or the Greens facing up to 5 pretty hostile representatives of the 'main' political parties. Even when this programme comes from Scotland, the Scottish politicians are likely to be outnumbered just the same. We've got used to seeing the face of Nigel Farage, although UKIP represents no one.  

But I don't have to watch these stations. So I don't.

Preston concedes: "Nor should anyone believe that the BBC, charting its lugubrious, legally mandated way through the thickets of bias, can ever achieve consensual calm."

But it could try. 

4 Preston also says that independence is the preferred model for people living 'up-country,' rather than in Barcelona. It is favoured in areas where Catalan is the everyday, sometimes the only, language in use. Preston seems to object to Catalan TV focusing on violent attacks from the Guardia Civil and discussions where panels are weighted in favour of Catalan-speaking supporters of independence.

That's another problem some of us have with journalists like Preston: I might not mind so much being told endlessly how well Ruth Davidson is doing if the TV pundits pointed out that the Tories do not represent the Central Belt (half the population of Scotland), any more than the Tories represent London - and if they could dig themselves out of their 'big city' bunker and maybe get out more. Barcelona does not represent Catalunya. 

5 Preston asks "How did Catalonia wander so close to the edge of a cliff? Because – on screen, on the airwaves, in cosseted print – there was no real debate." I'm not sure what the cosseted print refers to. I find it hard to believe newspapers in Spain did not produce articles about Catalan independence, some of them even hostile.

Compare that to our own blessed UK: 37 newspapers are published in Scotland every week. One daily and one Sunday paper support independence. The other 35 are feverishly - and sometimes disgracefully - filling their pages with anti-SNP propaganda on a daily basis. The Times last week printed a photo showing an empty hall when - it claimed - Nicola Sturgeon should have been speaking. It was a lie, of course: the Times photographer carefully selected a moment 40 minutes before the speech was due to start when delegates were off eating their lunch. 

Incidentally, I used to take the Guardian but gave up a long time ago when I realised that journalists like Peter Preston really want to talk about themselves, their own wee world of the media, and don't actually need readers getting in the way. 

And, Mr Preston, in terms of Catalan and Scottish independence, that cliff edge is still there. Except we don't call it that: to us, it's a launchpad. 

Elderly? Qui, moi?

When I got an invitation to a friend's 70th birthday lunch (it's on Tuesday coming) despite my slipped disc I thought: yabadoo! To hell with being no well! That'll be a great afternoon out.

Then I thought: Wait! What? How the hell did that happen? It's only a few years ago that we were at university together! Of course, I'm missing out the years when I was learning to be a teacher in Glasgow, learning to be a principal teacher in Islay, moving back to Glasgow and then back again to Argyll and finally settling in a job in Ayrshire. And there's the small matter of being retired for 9 years to factor in...

But it's true, it has crept up on me. Being old, I mean. Or rather, elderly, because these days nobody is old. When one of my neighbours died, our housing assistant said: You know, she wasn't even very old - just 85.

So I am now one of that vast army of old people who, according to certain politicians, are 'costing' the country a fortune. I paid into a pension scheme which made a profit every year of the past 25, except for 2008 when the economy of the UK went to hell in a handcart. And in my time I paid a lot of taxes which supported the infrastructure of the country and the education of large numbers of young people. In fact, I'd go so far as to say I'm the taxman's favourite person: single, decent income, so still paying tax in my 70th year, and only now needing any kind of health care, which I have already paid for through National Insurance from the age of 15 to the age of 60.

What I'm saying is: I look after myself. I don't expect anyone to take care of me. I've made provision for my old age. According to the Tory government in Westminster, that's what we all have to do.

In the past few weeks, though, I've had a couple of shocks. First of all the housing association that manages the wee retirement complex where I live announced it was bust. Well, they put it better than that. They planned to hand over to a bigger organisation. But then last week the association that provides out of hours cover here - the one we thought was a shoo-in to take our complex over - announced it too was in trouble.

It looks to me as if both organisations need the Scottish Government to take them over in order to guarantee the people who live in these housing complexes - especially those in dementia care - won't be turfed out, forced to look for somewhere else to live. And here's the problem: the Scottish Government gets so little funding through the Barnett Formula that it just won't be able to provide care for this group of people.

So what happens next?

I'm not an SNP supporter. I am so suspicious of their lack of solid principles that I joined the Greens in 2013 (although I've voted SNP several times to keep the Tories out in my home area). I don't want to claim that the Tories in Westminster are hellbent on reducing the income of the Scottish Government but a reduction of £600 million in the rail budget today kind of makes me wonder what's going on. It looks to me as if the Scottish Government is going to be 'squeezed' so that they can't do the things they've been planning to do: expand childcare, improve the infrastructure - with RET, the upgrading of the A9.

Care of the elderly is a big issue and a costly one, right across the UK but particularly in Scotland. Westminster is not dealing with it, but it looks as if the Tory Government will go on with its moronic policy of austerity, which is in no one's interests that I can see. And who knows what Brexit will bring? 20 years of recession is one suggestion in today's press.

For all my friends who want to stay in the UK, I have to ask: what the hell for?

Working life

It's great to see that the distilleries at Brora and Port Ellen are to re-open, although it certainly won't mean as many new jobs as the Scottish press seem to think. Whisky production is pretty automated and has been for a long time now. But more worrying is whether the current boom can be sustained. 

People who live in the whisky-producing areas of Scotland have already had the experience of 'boom and bust' and are right to be suspicious that the current boom in alcohol production (whisky, gin, beer) won't last. I especially fear for all our futures in the time of Brexit.  

This is how it was in the time of Thatcher in the 1980s, as described by the wife of a distillery worker. The distillery X was working in closed and he was made redundant and sent off with £1,000 in his pocket. 

"He managed after a while to get a job with the Manpower services scheme working at the old school house in Port Charlotte. He walked there and back every day. It was winter and one night his torch failed coming up the road so he walked the Bunnahabhain road home with one leg in the ditch most of the way so he knew he was still on the road and not heading for the sea! 

For around £40 a week, a couple of pounds more than what we got on the "dole" But he was working. He couldn't cope with just sitting around the house. The £1,000 redundancy didn't go far yet was a lot of money back then. 

It was a happy day when the knock came on the door asking if he wanted his old job back in the distillery. 

This is his 40th year at Bunnahabhain. It will be a year next month since we had to move out because the village is being demolished. But as much as I am a Bowmore girl born and bred and love our cosy wee house here, Bunnahabhain will always be home."

In rural areas, the closure of an industry means more than just a few jobs: rural Scotland is littered with the ruins of villages and townships that flourished on the back of a single industry like flax mills and lime kilns. Sustaining the population of rural areas is very difficult.

If you trace your family tree back, as I've done to 1851, you find that working people were constantly on the move. My family moved from Ayrshire to Leith and then to Glasgow - in pursuit of work - in just 20 years. 

And these days it's not just rural areas. I'm quite sure Kilmarnock people (substitute the name of any small town - Paisley, Alloa, Motherwell - remember when their town was prosperous - in fact, rich. People worked in engineering, carpet-making, shoe production and so on. But these industries are long gone and they're not coming back.

How do we secure the future for our kids? We can't. What we can do is make sure that our kids are educated, trained, skilled up and ready to do what X did - move to another job at the drop of the proverbial hat. And we need to stop listening to Tory politicians who make out it's the fault of workers that they can't get work. 

As Ithers See Us

I can't be the only person left on tinternet wondering why the human beings who are using it haven't managed to keep up.

There's the American gun lobby, stuck in 1740 as far as I can see and in a state of total denial, telling us: guns don't kill people - people do. Forgetting that since the US constitution that guaranteed their right to bear arms was first written, a few things have changed. These days we have atom bombs, computers, and the carpet bombing of places like Syria. But - I suppose the argument goes - none of these kill people. People k...but you know the rest.

Then there's the Spanish national police force and the Guardia Civil, who don't seem to have realised that everything, every act of violence - and dear me, there have been more than a few in Catalunya this week - is filmed on people's phones and sent in a flash to TV stations, youtube and every blogger, Facebook page and twitter feed in the entire world. And that's what has happened this week. 

It was wonderful to watch Donald Trump chucking rolls of kitchen towel to homeless, jobless and possibly hungry US citizens in Puerto Rico, all the while thinking: Here's the lead item on tonight's news. But don't thank us, Donald. This fiasco is all of your own making. And is it true you didn't even know till last week that Puerto Rico was part of the USA?

Or seeing letters falling off the backdrop behind Treeza May as she spluttered her way through her speech at the Tory Party conference. Just knowing her cabinet would spring to her defence - and knowing why: who the hell wants to be PM right now, when you can hang the person who got them into this mess out to dry? Well, Boris Johnston does, but after his comment about clearing dead bodies out of Idlib in Libya (a gift from the Western powers) to make room for oil installations went round tinternet, he's maybe not what's needed right now.

Life used to be so simple, before tinternet. We could all find something to laugh at:
- the French didn't wash enough so they smelled
- the Spanish liked bullfights and sangria
- Swiss people made cuckoo clocks
- Australians were just like crocodile Dundee, only maybe more uncouth
- the Muslims, well, every one of them was a terrorist

Now the French government is quaking but keeping very quiet because it has a few regions that would like to do a Catalunya. The Spanish send guys in riot gear to have a go at civilians trying to vote. And the first people to offer to mediate in Spain are the Swiss who - you will remember - are not even in the EU. Australians are denying their own citizens the right to marry and allowing refugees to be held in a hellhole called Nauru where they are routinely raped and murdered. 

But at least we have a common enemy: the Muslims. If any of my readers are dealing in English as a 2nd or 3rd language, take my word for it: I am being not even ironic here - just downright sarcastic. Of course, Muslims are the problem in the west, although I'm prepared to accept that, since there are just under one billion Muslims in the world, if they wished evil on us in the west, well, we'd be dead.

It would be so good if we could all work together. Earth is a lovely place to live. We could all live in peace if we tried. We could let people decide how they want to live. Will it happen? Well, what can I tell you? It happens in Star Trek.

Catalunya - we just don't get it

Is it because we live on an island? We just don't seem to understand that governments do things differently elsewhere...or that some tactics can spread like a virus.

When British workers like binmen and firemen used to threaten to go on strike, there was always talk of putting the army on the streets. It gave the population a bit of a jolt to see the 'Green Goddesses' driving around and their presence was always described to us as a safety measure. An emergency. On mainland Britain, there was hardly a ripple of concern that just 'across the water', the army patrolled the streets of Northern Ireland for decades during 'The Troubles.' Horrifying things happened to all sides: young men had joined the army to serve their country and found themselves under attack from extremists in this country. Ironically, it was only the 'enemy' - both Loyalist and Republican - that was referred to as 'para-military forces.' I've sometimes wondered: were the troops withdrawn after the Good Friday Agreement was introduced? I don't in fact know. We don't talk about it. But there's officially no state-funded and state-trained para-military force in the UK.

In France and Spain, it's different. In all the years I've lived in, worked in and visited France, I've got used to seeing the CRS around. The last time was in a quiet side street in the North East of France, where I spotted a couple of minibuses full of men in black uniforms parked up. Back at my hotel I asked if it was actually the CRS. And why were they there? There was a lot of shrugging. Football was offered as a reason. A big match between rival teams. There might be trouble. No one knew for sure but no one was surprised that the CRS were there.

In Spain from way back from the late 60s onwards, it was normal to see the Guardia Civil at border checkpoints, not checking passports but just hanging about - with big guns - as the border police did the customs checks. Spain wasn't in the Common Market at that time. There was trouble in the Basque Country, which isn't just Spanish but includes a bit of France. There was also a vast level of smuggling which some residents of the area took for granted but the Guardia Civil wasn't there to deal with that. The local police did that.

In the case of both the CRS and the Guardia Civil, there was no pretence that their presence was a safety measure. This was about state control. It still is. In France in the 60s and 70s during street demos, the cry regularly went up 'CRS- SS.' They were hated - and feared. It came as no surprise to me at least to see the Guardia Civil on the streets of Catalunya on Sunday. No insignia. No ID numbers, which the police have to wear. Bussed in from all over Spain. And using the same heavy-handed approach they've always had.

During the Miners' Strike in the UK in 1984, we saw the extent of government control: police officers bussed in from every area to patrol the streets of mining towns and villages. And they used the same tactics as the CRS and the Guardia Civil. Kettling is a well-established tactic in France and Spain. Making sure your officers have no connection with the area is another, so no divided loyalties. (Unlike the local cops in places like Girona and Barcelona who could only watch and weep on Sunday). And make sure they can't be identified and are well paid for their efforts.

So will the events of Sunday be played out here if Scotland seeks its independence? If Northern Ireland votes to join Eire? If Wales should ever get off its knees and seek to be a country?

On the one hand, the UK is not Spain: we have almost no history of Fascism, while the Franco regime only came to an end in 1975 - and some will tell you it didn't end even then. The Madrid government has handled Catalunya incredibly badly. Some of the population is clearly traumatised by recent events. I imagine Catalunya, along with the Basque Country and Galicia, now needs a period of reflection. As do the traditionally rebellious areas of France such as the Languedoc (lots of Catalan language and culture there), the Basque Country and Brittany. But I wonder if this is like a match being struck in a tinder-dry forest.

There is unrest in other areas of France: Gascony, Alsace and the North East, for example. And in the UK, will the areas which feel excluded from prosperity and a say in government - Yorkshire, the North East and North West, Cornwall - will they find their political voice too?

Interesting times...