Sunday, January 25, 2009

Original opportunities...

It seems the Spanish are showing their true colours even though they're not the colours you'd expect of the current government there - the PSOE, literally Socialist Party of Spanish Workers...oh, maybe you would expect it! In November 2008, the government launched a voluntary repatriation program for non-European Union (EU) immigrants in an effort to ease rising unemployment. Sounds sensible:

"should be viewed not so much as a solution for foreign workers to leave Spain, but also as an opportunity for them to find better opportunities in their countries of origin."

A little later in the poll in December nearly 2500 Spanish adults were asked: Could you tell me in which of these societies would you most like to live in?


  • A society with people from different origins and cultures: 43.0%

  • A society with people with the same origin and culture: 44.7%

In the UK I doubt they would even dare ask the question! Moving on! Anyone interested in sport, be it football, Formula 1, basketball etc would know of spanish fans racist chants but the situation is certainly nothing new [ NY Times 1987] that said the same could probably be true of most countries.


Bookmark and Share

2 comments:

Paul said...

I know I've told you the story of my attending an art exhibition organised by the Spanish government before so I won't repeat it, except to say I find Spanish attitudes slightly weird when it comes to racism but in some respects not too far removed from English ones.

Does a country need a colonial past to be either racist or free from racism? I don't know. I watched a documentary last week on Franco and Catalonia and it reminded me of the Irish situation viz a viz Cromwell - the symbolism remains long after memories have faded even when passed from generation to generation.

Span Ows said...

I think maybe they're a bit more 'extreme' than Engalnd as a nation but that England probably has worse individuals (God knows why I think that!)

Interesting you take the EXACT phrase I nearly quoted, the one about the colonial past, I read that and thought "What the F*#k?". Did he mean the racism due to the UK's ethnic make-up Africa/Caribbean/India etc because Spain is full of South Americans (that the Spanish tend to mistreat), no aboriginal SA indians though as the Spaniards killed most of them (OK, OK...)