Put Out More Flags

 

My Godfather Andrew Fountaine was an interesting man. He lived in a giant house (in Spain, it would be called un palacio) in the middle of the Norfolk countryside called Narford Hall. It had 52 bedrooms and a private chapel reserved for Henry VIII (when he happened to be in the neighbourhood). Andrew was known locally as being bitterly against fox hunting, and he would empty a shotgun in the general direction of anyone he saw on his estate wearing red and riding a horse. After the War, Andrew – something of a Mosleyite – went into politics but ‘…exiled from the Conservative Party prior to the 1950 general election, Fountaine, standing for a new party, the National Front, fell just 361 votes short of being returned to Westminster. He would remain a prime mover in the NF cause throughout the 1960s and ’70s – ‘the movement’s moneybags to a large degree’ – losing more elections along the way…’

He wasn’t much of a godfather, truth to say. I don’t think he ever passed me a single cheque drawn on Coutts.

There’s a ringing quote from Andrew in the 1948 Conservative conference where he denounced the Labour Party as consisting of "semi-alien mongrels and hermaphrodite communists".

He told my mother (she was a cousin of his) that his party didn’t need or want the usual suspects – Blacks, Homosexuals, Jews (although they seem to favour Israel in these interesting times), Women (their place is in the home), Intellectuals (always asking difficult questions) and any Aristocrats (present company excluded). No, he said, we want the down-trodden, the poorly educated, the fearful and the (beery) flag-wavers.

A generation or two later, the British have Brexit, Nigel Farage and Tommy Robinson.

These days, here in Spain, the equivalent to this collection of extremists is the Vox party and their leader Santiago Abascal (he often dresses up in military outfits, presumably for the sake of it). He and many of his circle came from the Spanish conservative party, the PP.

I was having dinner the other night with a conservative friend with ties to the Establishment in Madrid, and he says that the apparent 15% approval that Vox enjoys is in fact badly understated; in fact, the latest poll finds them with 19% favour. Since then, they’ve squabbled with the Catholic Church and been found to have received a second tranche of money from a Hungarian bank.

Across Europe we have these hate groups, politically linked in every way except for the detail on the flag, while being strongly supported and financed by the Russians and their allies. In England, there’s currently an (embarrassing) George Cross flag-waving anti-immigrant campaign. Here we have the Vox politicians attempting to disallow Muslim prayer meetings.

If you see someone with a Spanish flag wristband, that’ll be a Voxxer, so don’t ask them about Franco. It also leads the question – can you have a national flag without being a Nationalist? Unless it’s the season of the World Cup, then evidently not.

Social Media has been kind to Vox (extreme posts often attract more attention that the softer ones, as Donald Trump would tell you), while several eccentric groups such as Abogados Cristianos, Hazte Oir and Manos Limpias have all helped to put a spoke in the lefty government’s wheels, and then there are several news outlets which are heavily subsidised by the far-right who print what they’re told – OKDiario, The Objective and EDATV being examples...

It may be too soon to fear a Vox government, but they would likely enter through the back door in an alliance with the Partido Popular (the party under Feijóo’s control could never earn a majority). Expect lots of flags.

Perhaps I’ll be able to dine out with my Andrew Fountaine stories.

The PP and Vox: a likely case of the tail wagging the dog.

Jumilla

In Jumilla (Murcia) – a town 110kms north of Torre Pacheco (wiki) – a ban on religious gatherings in public sports centres has sparked criticism and accusations of Islamophobia. The ban, initially proposed by the far-right Vox party, was recently approved by the coalition (PP/Vox) in the Jumilla town hall. This decision affects the local Muslim community, who traditionally use the sports centres for religious celebrations. The ban is seen as a violation of the Spanish constitution, which guarantees freedom of religion and worship (Google IA). The Guardian here says: ‘Outrage as Spanish town bans Muslim religious festivals from public spaces’.

Antena3 has: ‘The Muslim community's indignation at the ban in Jumilla: "It's very dangerous here’". The city council of this Murcian town has decided to prohibit its Muslim residents from celebrating festivals such as the End of Ramadan or the Feast of the Lamb in the municipal sports centre’.

‘Feijóo's PP avoids questioning the termination of the Islamic events it approved in Jumilla: "It is unacceptable that we are being presented as a xenophobic party"’. elDiario.es here.

The Partido Popular stands alone in its anti-Muslim crusade: neither the Church nor the right-wing media support Génova (PP headquarters in Madrid). From the Episcopal Conference (the Catholic authority in España) to media outlets aligned with Génova, they have turned their backs on the PP's argument regarding the controversy concentrated in Jumilla. El Plural here.

‘Vox leader Santiago Abascal calls for "protection" of public spaces against "practices alien to Spanish culture" and demands a ban on the veil’, says 20Minutos here. 

From El País here (with video): ‘Abascal attacks the bishops over Jumilla: "I don't know if their position is due to the public revenue they receive or the cases of paedophilia." The Vox leader responds to the Episcopal Conference's statement in support of the Muslim community with an unprecedented criticism of "part of the ecclesiastical hierarchy"’.

From Información here: Santiago Abascal's obsession with Al-Andalus and hatred as a profitable electoral weapon. This is how Vox deploys the far-right playbook that has been so successful in many European democracies’.

‘The Prosecutor's Office opens proceedings for alleged hate crimes against the leader of Vox in Murcia. It has opened a pre-trial investigation against José Ángel Antelo for the statements he made during a public appearance on July 12, 2025, in Cartagena, regarding the violent incidents that erupted after a North African man allegedly attacked a 68-year-old resident of Torre Pacheco’. From elDiario.es here.

‘Jumilla business owners offer their facilities to the Muslim community for prayers. "They ban us from the soccer field for two festivals a year; it doesn't make sense," explains Lancinha, an African migrant, sadly’. An item from La Verdad here. From the same source: ‘"We should be more concerned with how we live, not where we pray". Ana López and her brother, farmers from Jumilla, employ dozens of immigrants to harvest their fruit’.

On Monday, the Government challenged the agreement prohibiting Muslim prayers in Jumilla's sports centres. The summons, presented by the Executive Delegate in Murcia and coordinated with the Ministries of Justice and Territorial Policy, maintains that the regulations allow the use of the sports centre for sociocultural activities, and therefore considers that "the objective reasons given are unfounded". elDiario.es has the story. ‘The Government gives Jumilla council one-month deadline to reverse its Islamic prayer ban in municipal facilities’ says The Olive Press here.

…

‘A Francoist group registered as a legal party mocks the death of Sumar leader Yolanda Díaz's father. El Movimiento Católico Español includes the name of the historic trade unionist Suso Díaz, who died on July 8, in a list published on its official Telegram channel under the title "cosecha rojiprogre (red harvest)"’. The story at Público here.

Spain’s economy is the envy of Europe, but the plight of its strawberry pickers tells another story says The Guardian here. Grim reading.

Some notes on Spain found on the web:

Tell them this: Spain cannot be understood without its 800 years of Arab presence (711-1492). During that period, Al-Andalus was a cultural and scientific melting pot that left an indelible mark:

• Innovations in agriculture, architecture, and medicine.

• Advances in mathematics, astronomy, and philosophy.

• Hydraulic infrastructure that is still used today.

• Cities like Córdoba, Granada, and Seville flourished as global centres of knowledge and trade.

This heritage reminds us that we are a multicultural country by nature.

Today, in the 21st century, Spain has more than 2.6 million foreign workers paying into Social Security.

However, a large proportion of them—and many Spaniards as well—work in precarious jobs:

• Long hours with low wages.

• High temporary and hourly contracts.

• Sectors such as hospitality, agriculture, and care, essential to the country, remain under-recognized.

Let's think about it:

Centuries ago, the arrival of other cultures boosted the economic, cultural, and scientific development of the peninsula.

Today, however, we still fail to tap into the full potential of those who come to work, build, and contribute.

Spain grew thanks to this mix. History shows that combining cultures improves the future.

Corruption

 As the Government and the Spanish people take a month's holiday (or as much of it as they can afford), let's look at the current crop of corruption cases. 

This session appears as part of my Business over Tapas weekly report. Find it here.  

 ...... 

There are many obstacles appearing to attempt to tone down the Caso Montoro. From elDiario.es, we read: ‘The 'miracle' of the Montoro case: the hindrances to investigating the all-powerful Finance Minister under the Partido Popular. The prosecutor in charge of the case attempted to open a separate investigation to expand the case with the help of the Tax Agency and the Mossos d'Esquadra (Catalan police), but the opposition of the chief anti-corruption prosecutor and the passivity of the UCO (Guardia Civil judicial department) made it impossible’. The article says: ‘The judicial investigation into the consulting firm Equipo Económico, which has indicted Cristóbal Montoro and nine of his collaborators at the Ministry of Finance, enters a new phase after seven years with the recent lifting of secrecy. Judge Rubén Rus must take statements from the 28 suspects unless any of the appeals filed against the investigation, which has lasted more than seven years, are unsuccessful…’

El País says that much of the Montoro material has been sealed by investigators.

 

Montoro’s most famous remark (from back in 2010) was: "Let Spain fall and we will build it up again". It often shows up in political articles.

 

Keeping up the pressure. From 20Minutos here: ‘Judges and prosecutors call for García Ortiz's resignation: "It's unnecessary to put the Prosecutor's Office through this ordeal"’. As the case against Ayuso’s boyfriend stumbles along (the court asks for a little under four years for corruption), the main victim of this story is the PSOE-appointed Attorney General). Maldita has ‘questions and answers about the Attorney General’s imputation’.

 

More on the trumped-up case against the Attorney General: ‘A prosecutor in the dock without evidence: justice in Spain in free fall’. At Spanish Revolution, we are bitterly told of ‘When the robe weighs more than the truth and the Supreme Court turns the presumption of innocence into a bad joke’.

The website says: ‘The Supreme Court has decided to prosecute the Attorney General of the State, Álvaro García Ortiz, for the alleged crime of revealing secrets in the case of Ayuso's boyfriend. There is no solid evidence. There are no witnesses pointing the finger at him. Only weak clues and a narrative so flimsy that it would collapse in any court that respected basic rights. Meanwhile, the dissenting opinion of Judge Andrés Palomo del Arco exposes the botched job: he places the head of the Public Prosecutor's Office in the dock with a string of conjectures, denying the value of the testimony of journalists who saw the famous email before the prosecutor himself, demanding that they waive the constitutional protection of their sources, and signing an order that seems more like a political order than a legal decision…’ elDiario.es also has an opinion: ‘The incredible case of the explosive email –  They want to try and imprison the Attorney General because the Supreme Court Justice Hurtado believes whatever he wants to believe and has turned an email—debunking a hoax—into a cluster bomb, which could also bring down the government.

In short, it’s a mess designed – as usual – to weaken the socialist government.

 

The Boyfriend of Ayuso’s Case has stumbled once again. From El País here: ‘The judge in the Alberto González Amador case withdraws mid-proceedings: So now what?’ The judge had been investigating the boyfriend for the past sixteen months, but she’s now 65 and has promptly retired. Another judge is suggested (he’s a year older than the last one, but shows no sign of slowing down…)

 

There’s also a fuss about Judge Peinado’s country-house and swimming pool in the municipality of La Adrada (Ávila) which was listed as a warehouse many years ago. It appears that the judge got away with it after the paperwork was shelved in the townhall until the property was deemed ‘legal’. The judge is now suing some social media accuser for 25,000 euros. The story at El Plural here and here.

 

A spate of resignations has followed the Noelia Núñez (the PP spokesperson for two days) event. These include politicians and various officials who appear to have (no doubt inadvertently) amplified their academic achievements. 20Minutos has ‘The resumé crisis: The Partido Popular asserts that "inflating resumés is not the same as falsifying qualifications"’. Quite!

It must be quite common in political circles to claim titles one doesn’t have. Just in Valencia, we read: ‘Twenty senior Mazón officials are breaking the law by not registering the university degrees they claim to possess’. Worse still, the president of the Senado has also been obliged to adjust his scholastic qualifications.

 

A word that came into the Spanish language back in 2003: ‘Tamayazo’. Wiki tells us that during the vote to construct the new Madrid Government of 30th June, 2003, ‘Two elected parliamentarians from the PSOE, Eduardo Tamayo and María Teresa Sáez Laguna, prevented the election of Rafael Simancas as the new president of the Community of Madrid by abstaining from the second investiture vote. This case of defection ultimately forced a repeat election in October of that same year, after which Esperanza Aguirre (PP) became the new regional president…’ While, unproven, the suspicion is that they were ‘bought off’, and thus un tamayazo means a politician (aka un tránsfuga) changing his support when by doing so, his erstwhile team would lose an important vote.

Montoro, as the Wheel Turns Again

It looks like the Partido Popular has – inadvertently – handed a reprieve to the PSOE and their current troubles following the discovery of (yet again) a nest of bad eggs in their own barn.

Recently, we were talking of the abrupt fall of the Socialists’ party organiser Santos Cerdán, after he was found to be taking bribes from some Ibex-35 companies. He’s now in prison awaiting events.

We always knew that the other lot was full of crooks – several still in jail and many others due to attend court in the months to come. Why, the last PP government of Mariano Rajoy fell thanks precisely to corruption.

Conservatives (if you will forgive the generalisation) are known to be more interested in money than they are in helping the underprivileged. We barely raise an eyebrow when one of their politicians is caught with his hand in the till. It’s all part of the game. There’s a difference though, when one of the progressives, the defenders of the workers, a syndicalist, a man of the people (and so on…) pulls a fast one on both his party and his country.

See, that’s not good.

Going back to the Felipe Gonzalez years, the PSOE have had a few ministers in jail (José Barrionuevo and Rafael Vera), or – do you remember the party member from Zaragoza who was promoted to be head of the Guardia Civil, Luis Roldán, and who ended up with a fortune in Switzerland and was forced to make a run for it in 1994, eventually being caught in Bangkok to be jailed for 31 years? Not good. Later, the Andalusian wing of the party was found to be immersed in irregularities – two presidents of the Junta de Andalucía (Chaves and Griñán) plus a handful of others being found guilty in the ERE scandal.

But what of the Partido Popular? Aznar’s government at one time had a few bad eggs for sure: three of his ministers went to jail (Rodrigo Rato, Jaume Matas and Eduardo Zaplana), a couple of others managed to obtain pardons and now, after a secret judicial inquiry lasting several years (sometimes, these things can be more secret than others), another minister from those and later times, Cristóbal Montoro, the long-time Minister for Hacienda, has been rumbled.

 

Montoro, who just a couple of weeks ago was seated up on the podium at the PP’s national congress, was a powerful party apparatchik who was not necessarily liked by his co-religionists: “He did a lot of damage, and now he’s going to do a lot more damage,” a PP council member says mournfully.

Montoro, the finance minister under both Aznar and Mariano Rajoy, now stands accused of the crimes of “bribery, fraud against the Public Administration, malfeasance, influence peddling, prohibited negotiations, business corruption and document falsification” for allegedly favouring, while he was Minister of Finance in Mariano Rajoy's government, gas companies that were clients of the law firm he founded in 2006’. He started a private legal firm which charged high sums to companies interested in Government-sponsored changes to their tax-burdens.

The Guardian says: ‘…It is alleged that Montoro established the “economic team”, a lawyer’s office linked to the finance ministry, which took kickbacks from gas and other energy companies in return for favourable government policy. It is further told that between 2008 and 2015 Montoro and 27 others accused, among them senior treasury officials, were paid at least eleven million euros by big energy companies. According to the police investigation led by the judge Rubén Rus, “the economic team received large commissions in return for its capacity to influence legislative and executive powers”’.

Other scams are coming out, like re-writing the worst excesses of the PP’s ‘black account’ before it reached the courts in 2020.

Montoro was evidently a big fish in the PP. He has now resigned from the party while maintaining his innocence. Over the weekend, two senior figures in Hacienda, both involved in the Montoro affair, were also dismissed.  

In passing – well done the judiciary for keeping this inquiry silent for a full seven years!

The advantage for the PP was already beginning to slip from their fingers, the accusations from the eccentric Judge Peinado against the wife of Pedro Sánchez notwithstanding.

In the months to come, no less than thirty PP scandals will be brought to trial.

‘Public procurement rigging, bribe-taking, illegal urban development plans, influence peddling, irregular financing, even failure to provide assistance and negligent homicides; also the use of reserved funds for paramilitary operations…’ Plus the issues with Isabel Ayuso’s boyfriend (the Court is asking for three years and nine months) and the ongoing inquiry into Carlos Mazón in Valencia regarding his inactivity during the flood last autumn.

With the perhaps unfortunate timing of the release of the Montoro scandal, the recent aggression from Alberto Núñez Feijóo has been abruptly toned down: ‘Whatever needs to be investigated, let it be investigated’, he tweets.

And lastly, another headache for Feijóo – with a fact-checker reporting ‘Several senior officials from the Feijóo era in Galicia have been charged with corruption despite what the Popular Party leader claims’.

Which brings us to Vox. See, neither the PSOE nor the PP can claim that – unlike Vox – they’ve never had a crooked minister mortally embarrassed by the media filming him (or her) as he is admitted into the Soto de Real prison. Vox is the party that can claim the laurel (apart from the small issues of race, foreigners and so on, plus the current fraud-case against their erstwhile leader in Andalucía Francisco Serrano. The court is asking for eight years).

So, does the fall of Montoro trump the Cerdán scandal?

Better still, should we all be taking an enjoyable summer’s reprieve from politics?

If Pedro Sánchez can hold his government together: that’s the question, and will someone else, one of ours or one of theirs – be abruptly found to have been on the take?

It’s a dirty business, politics, but someone has to do it.