Kenneth Roy Eck’s literary luvvies Jim Swire An…

24.01.12
No. 504

The Cafe 3

For a period in my life, for which I have never apologised and never will, I was in the employ of the Scottish Conservative Party. During that time I had considerable interaction with the BBC political and current affairs staff. Later I moved to London in a senior role with the party and those relationships continued at another level.
     Throughout that time my experience led me to believe firmly that the corporation mindset was that it was put on earth not to reflect broadly what was happening in Scottish and British politics, but to take the position of Her Majesty’s Unofficial Opposition. 
     For example, there was an occasion when ‘Question Time’ came to Edinburgh and set up a panel with three home Scots, and Alan Clark MP as the Conservative representative rather than George Younger, Michael Ancram, Russell Fairgrieve or any of the other 18 sitting Scottish Tory MPs of the day, (pinch yourself if you’re a youngster, but yes, 18) who would have been available and would have done the job perfectly well.
     Mr Clark was idiot or opportunist enough not to appreciate the tactic and was not inclined to withdraw, but I am proud to say that he developed an unforeseen cabinet sub-committee on the day of the broadcast, and that George Younger took his place. 
     ‘Newsnight’, or whatever it was called then, tried something similar during a 1982 by-election. When that move was headed off at the pass, Robin Day, an unpleasant man who turned boorishness into an art form, insisted on introducing the Scottish party chairman as ‘The Earl of Ancram’, a title he never used as a MP.
     Perhaps times have changed since then, and the BBC no longer has its own agenda, but that is not the way to bet.

Quintin Jardine

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Even if you’re dying in

Catalonia, you had better

not speak Spanish

Bob Cant

During the long decades of the Franco dictatorship, Catalan was virtually a taboo language in Catalonia – taboo because it was spoken by everyone but never given public recognition. Franco’s regime was ferociously centralist and tolerated no expressions of linguistic diversity throughout Spain, particularly from areas, such as Catalonia, which had supported the republic during the civil war.

     While Catalonia is now best known to Scots as the home of Barcelona and the beaches of the Costa Brava, it is, with seven million inhabitants, the second largest of the 17 autonomous communities that comprise Spain; it has long had a strong sense of its national identity.
     After Franco’s death in 1975, there was considerable resolve across the political spectrum in Catalonia to breathe fresh life into the Catalan language. The Generalitat (the Catalan government) wanted to ensure that all its school students enjoyed a bilingual education. A well-resourced immersion system was established whereby all school entrants, whatever their family’s linguistic background, were given the opportunity to be educated through the vehicle of Catalan. They were also taught Spanish and evaluations of this system have shown that not only has it strengthened the use of Catalan in public contexts but it has also educated its students to a level of Spanish on a par with students in the rest of Spain.
     42.5% of the population of Catalonia now identify Spanish as their first language and 37.2% identify Catalan as their first language; there are regional and individual variations but a degree of bilingualism has become the norm in Catalonia. The education system has also shown that it has the capacity to successfully meet the needs of children from immigrant families, whose home language is neither Catalan nor Spanish.
     There are all kinds of tensions around something as personal and culturally significant as language. Linguistic diversity was welcome in the immediate aftermath of the death of Franco but, like many of the other initiatives from the transition to democracy, it has become more contested of late. Legal rulings have attempted to make Spanish the normal vehicle of education in Catalonia but these have faced enormous opposition; such attempts to privilege Spanish within the education system are seen as culturally divisive; they are also resented as being imposed from outwith Catalonia.

They must first explain the news in Catalan and, if that is not understood, they should then resort to non-verbal methods, such as a mime, or graphic methods. Only after these have failed may they resort to the use of Spanish.

     There are, on the other hand, those who would prefer to see Spanish become a taboo language in the way that Catalan used to be. A prominent nationalist politician, Jordi Pujol, recently berated police officers who were striking against cuts in public spending, not so much for withdrawing their labour as for chanting slogans in Spanish.
     More significantly, the health department of the Generalitat has now produced a protocol which requires healthcare employees to use Catalan at all times – in public announcements, on the telephone, in meetings and, most controversially, with patients and their families. Take, for example, doctors who are trying to explain to a Spanish-speaking couple that their teenage son, involved in a traffic accident, may have suffered irreversible brain damage and may spend the rest of his life incapable of autonomous activity. They must first explain the news in Catalan and, if that is not understood, they should then resort to non-verbal methods, such as a mime, or graphic methods. Only after these have failed may they resort to the use of Spanish, the primary language of the patient’s family.
     Likewise a patient receiving a diagnosis of terminal cancer has to go through all these stages before she is allowed to communicate in Spanish. It could be suggested that this policy is at odds with the requirement of the Hippocratic oath for doctors to act with ‘warmth, sympathy and understanding’. The enforcement of such linguistic politics cannot make for good healthcare.
     There are those who argue that independence for Catalonia would solve such conflicts, in as much as it would then be free from what they see as outside influences from Madrid. Opinion polls show that the figure supporting full independence for Catalonia stands around 40-50% and may be rising. While independence might result in greater clarity of legislation for the education system or the healthcare system, it would be unlikely to alter the demographic balance of those whose first language is Catalan and those whose first language is Spanish.
     Whatever system of governance Catalonia has, there will remain the problem of how to achieve amicable neighbourliness between different language groups. For one group to seek to make taboo the language of the other is a sure way of destroying any sense of neighbourliness. Language has become a political battlefield and while bilingualism could be an enormous asset to the future wellbeing and prosperity of Catalonia and its citizens, the argument frequently moves on to a less rational level.
     I am an optimist and were Catalonia to show how bilingualism could become a tool for co-operation and mutual respect, its success could reverberate round a world where societies are increasingly multilingual.

Bob Cant was formerly the equal opportunities officer for the Scottish Council for Voluntary Organisations and is now a writer