Hameesh al-Qobson’s diary: the view after leaving the Maghreb
14 April 2023
REPULSED by the thought of returning too suddenly to Yousavian Scotland, I decide to make an unscheduled stop in Barcelona on my way home from Morocco. Events are moving quickly in Great Uddingston and I want to get some idea of the extent to which money might be involved in the “continuity” threat. What does Catalan experience suggest might be the likely course of events when constitutional ideals are converted into personal marketing tools?
I hunker down with Humzo Yusas y Sturjizar, an old friend with whom I once served unofficially in the Guardia Revolucionario. He takes me to a gloriously unmodernised bar off the Ramblas where, as it is early afternoon, we will have the whole of the vast, Art Nouveau palace to ourselves. Spring sunshine slants in from the narrow street as the beers flow and Humzo explains that “Nationalism is ALL about money!”
“Whose money?” I ask, attempting an ostentatiously “responsible” BBC frown.
Humzo looks at me as if I am stupid. “How much do you know about Jordi Pujol and his Andorran bank accounts, his family’s Mexican property holdings and the wealth of almost everybody who ever dealt directly with him in a commercial capacity?”
“Not a lot,” I say. “Never heard of Jordi Pujol.”
So it is another bottle of beer each and we are off.
It seems that a respected medical gentleman known as Jordi Pujol was elected President of Catalonia in 1980, and he stayed in post for 23 years. He had won his spurs as far as the public was concerned by his opposition to Franco in his dying years, and quickly came to prominence when the Tony Blair-like regime of “free Spain” breezed in on hopes for a bright future after the death of the Caudillo (whose original power base in the 1930s was, incidentally, in Morocco).
Pujol’s intentions might once have been honourable – we will never know, as he is an elderly man now and disinclined to talk, especially while the legal hyenas are still prowling round. But court proceedings against his family have revealed a mass of hideous detail since they began in in earnest 2017.
Though the Prosecution is calling for a 9-year senesce for Pujol himself, for his eldest son, Jordi Pujol Ferrusola Jnr., the State is asking the judge to impose a 29-year sentence. Prosecutors cite a dictionary of offences, including money-laundering, counterfeiting, and fraud on the Treasury. A further ten members of Pujol’s family have been indicted on lesser, but still very serious, charges. One appears to have gone mad as a result of the stress.
The sums at stake are vast – hundreds of millions of Euros apparently – and it all started from the same sort of allegation, namely state aid which wanted to exercise its right to roam. Something similar happened in connection with the nationalisation of Ferguson’s, the well-known Inverclyde shipbuilding giant which can build two ferries on one slipway. As every Scottish schoolchild knows, Nicola Sturgeon’s middle name is Ferguson.
In Pujol’s case, the allegation is that the head of the Catalan government received payments from contractors keen to win important publicly-funded infrastructure contracts. Everybody knew who ultimately called the shots. A few bob tacked on to the price would never be noticed by the taxpayer amidst the mess of general government money-squirting. That was the start, but it mushroomed from there.
The details are unimportant. It is the principle which is so worrying for those few remaining Scots who still hope for financial rectitude from their government. With a single party in power for decades, the idea of honesty “evolves”. The rule of law degenerates into a meaningless slogan. Reciprocity between the rulers and the ruled decays till the rulers not only make all the rules but all the money too. Power corrupts, and single-person shot-calling corrupts the single person absolutely.
“Nationalism,” Humzo stresses noisily in the echoing spaces of the ornately-tiled room, “is ALL about money—and PRIVATE money at that.”
I take up the baton and tell him something of the reasons for the disintegration of the USSR. That was ostensibly a nationalist movement in the non-Russian republics. In reality it was about the local party shot-callers resisting the economy drive that Gorbachev was trying to organise at the centre (“Gorby austerity”, they called it) in order to save the Soviet Union from financial collapse. These men, who had risen to power as good comrades, Pujol-style, were not going to have their newly-accustomed privileges curtailed. Led by Boris Yeltsin, the leaders of the republics realised how rich they could become if they got rid of all higher authority.
They immediately turned into good nationalists and local patriots. Then they got rich, very rich. They still are.
Like Pujol, the Russians had state contracts, political patronage and personal privileges within their gift, only on a massively greater scale. Essentially, they wanted to be able to plunder their own people with more freedom than the Politburo in Moscow was prepared to allow. But the Kremlin was now weak. Suddenly, there was corruption everywhere and no-one was ashamed of it. Thirty years on, nothing has changed. Perhaps it never will be. Nationalism is a hereditary disease, even in easy-going Ireland.
As the evening draws on, and a few early sundowner honchos drift in from the street, we begin to edge towards a conclusion. Nationalism was fine and dandy back in the 1950s and ’60s when the focus was on anti-colonialism, but when it tried to retain the moral high ground after the real raison d’état had gone, it turned into a cancer. It is an outdated creed, but it is an attractive one to small minds with big eyes.
“And when you have political wall-flowers like Fiona Hyslop trying to tell the world that the United Nations Charter allows for the break-up of multinational countries,” I say, eyeing the tapas greedily, “you know that the party’s over.”
“But it’s the wall-flowers who have got caught up in the Pujol case,” Humzo says. “The allegation is that they undertook what Spanish law calls ‘concerted action’ as a family, with the aim of frustrating the spirit of the law of the land. In 2014 Jordi Pujol was forced to admit that he had failed to declare funds held in Andorra. Then the dam burst. Nine years and a thousand revelations later, the case is still live, even though politically-speaking Pujol is long dead.”
“The mills of God grind slowly,” I say, redeploying my BBC frown, “but they grind exceeding small.”
“If I were Hamster Yusupoff,” Humzo says with more convincing gravitas, “I would distract attention, like Putin has done, by ordering the invasion of Berwick. A limited military operation to take back ancient patrimony is exactly what Scotland needs. Anschluss with Berwick is the only card he has left to play. That, and a return to traditional Scottish values. Braveheart had a beard, didn’t he?”
Glorious flamenco music starts to drift over from where one of the newly-arrived honchos is sitting. Then it evolves into something that could be mistaken for Runrig in distress when the ferry back to Oban has been cancelled for the seventh day that week. The other patrons quietly leave. By the time el honcho comes over to us holding out his hat for contributions, I am so full of pity that I throw my last remaining dirhams into it.
“Have one on me, Pete,” I say, trying to ignore the wig on his head and the magpie in his manner. “For old times’ sake,” I add, “Get a fruit juice for Alexa.”
Humzo looks at me disapprovingly. A curious silence hangs in the air, tries to roam, but fails.
Probably it is all the over-strength Spanish beer, but for some reason St Paul’s First Epistle to the Uddingstonians comes into my mind. “‘When I was a child’,” I start to declaim, “‘I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things. For now we see through a glass, darkly’ – er, I forget how the next bit goes, but then it ends with the important line: ‘And now abideth faith, hope, charity, these three; but the greatest of these is charity’.”
At that “Pete” tears off his wig, bursts into tears and says, “Please don’t call her Alexa.” Sob. “To me, she’s Nicola!”
“Never knew Nicola could sing,” I say, trying to calm things down with a half joke.
“Oh, she can sing alright,” he says grimly. “Just you listen once the polis have got a hod o’ her, and have explained a few possible scenarios for her immediate future. Why else do you think I am here, cruising around in a wig?”
“A motorhome would have been better,” I say, reduced now to a quarter joke.
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Hamish Gobson lives on the Hebridean isle of Great Todday (Todaidh Mór) and features in Nicola Sturgeon: the Years of Ascent (1970-2007) – A Citizen’s Biography of a Driven Woman in a Drifting Parliament (Ian Mitchell, 2022) – available on Amazon.co.uk and also reviewed here by Tom Gallagher.
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Aerial view of La Rambla pedestrian mall, Barcelona, Catalonia, Spain, by marcorubino from Adobe Stock