The State of the Nation: Tax the Banks and Give Free Train-passes.

The banks have already collected their latest round of commissions, the monthly, quarterly and half-year wallops they like to remove from our accounts with a smile. Maintenance fees, they say airily: the cost of looking after our money for us.

However, as one of the pronouncements from the State of the Nation debate last week, they will now be paying some tax on their profits over the next 24 months and will unfortunately not be able to pass this along to their clients. Perhaps, like my bank, they’ll put up a sign which says ‘Less is More’, close their teller-windows for good and indeed many more of their branches and, why not, change their name in passing to the CajaOrwell.

They will probably quietly ease some more of their hard-won funds to the conservative opposition as well. Maybe buy another newspaper.

The Government will also be taxing the power companies’ profits, much to their chagrin.

The bonanza of gifts from last week’s debate did much to cheer up the left-wing of the government, as it did to appease citizens, worried about the high increase in the cost of living (did you know that making your own gazpacho has gone up, screams the ABC). Better still, from September, we will be able to travel around on the trains for free. Well, the local and regional ones anyway. The Guardian says ‘The price cuts are being implemented to cushion the impact of inflation and rapidly rising energy prices’. The money the banks scooped out of our checking account.

Since most of the focus in the last two decades has been on high-speed trains that whoosh from city to city (as a huge expense of capital), the local network, where it existed, has been rather left to founder. Here in Almería, where we haven’t ever had any trains except the one that chugs gloomily north to Linares in Jaén once a day, and where the old city train-station has been abandoned (lovingly), we have been promised an AVE by 2026 (it was first promised for 2009) or maybe a couple of years later, but of course, no word on a local train service. We will be able – one day – to go to Madrid, Paris and Moscow (no doubt changing trains in Murcia), but not to Alhama de Almería.

It’s a nice idea though – it worked in Germany – to use less petrol and go with public transport (they currently charge €9 a month for any and all train journeys).

Perhaps the bus companies won’t be amused – they talk here of ‘discrimination’, but Renfe (railways) is a public company and Alsa (Spain’s leading coach operator) isn’t – no, it belongs to National Express (wiki).