David Leigh

I’m not a fan in any respect of Lluis Llach, but there are many people in Catalonia to whom he means a great deal. As a protest singer during the last 20 years of Franco’s dictatorship I suspect that you had to live through it with him in order for him to mean much.

Last night he retired after a 40 year career. I guess he wanted to go out with a bang rather than a whimper as it seems to me that he has plenty more life in his musical career, but apparently he’s going to spend his retirement on his vineyard - sounds a good retirement plan to me, but I have a good idea that we’ll see him again on stage.

His retirement was marked by a concert - but when the 5,000 tickets sold out in 30 minutes he announced that he’d celebrate with two concerts. And so it was that last night 5,000 people were packed into a marquee in his home village of Verges.

In addition to regular public, the audience also included some of the top politicians from Catalonia. The event was televised on TV3 and the director seemed to take particular delight in zooming in on the politicians’ faces every time that Llach made a political statement, which was at least amusing. So why did these politicians put themselves through all that?

It struck me that they are blinded by one side of Llach which is his anti-centralist stance, which is shared by most Catalans. They believe that because he stands against what they stand against he is an ally - a case of my enemy’s enemy is my friend. But they couln’t be further from the truth - he didn’t have a good word to say about any of the political parties whatsoever, the fact that they share a common viewpoint doesn’t make them allies in the slightest.

And this same deluded thinking prevailed in Catalonia during the Spanish Civil War when disparate groups formed the Republican alliance against a common enemy - Franco - but then spent much of their resources fighting each other.

It’s almost as if by staying at home and watching the concert of television those same politicians felt they would be bad Catalans. So where does this idea come from?

Normally at home we watch TV3, which is a Catalan channel. The reasons for doing so are simple. First, it shows all programmes in Dual, so I can watch English language programmes in English. Second, the programmes are, on the whole, much better than any of the Spanish language channels. Lastly as I live with a Catalan she likes to watch TV in her own language - natural enough.

One thing I’ve noticed some time ago and now more recently is the political bias of the news. I first noticed this when every edition seemed to have an item about domestic violence. So why were there so many stories of domestic violence suddenly - had Catalans as a whole suddenly become sick of each other and needed to bludgeon/shoot/strangle/poison their spouses to death?

Unlikely I think, a more reasonable explanation seemed that since the Generalitat (the autonomous government of Catalonia) was raising the issue of domestic violence in a series of posters across Barcelona and television advertising, that the news was also reporting in line with the Generalitat, who funds them.

Without wanting to diminish the issue of domestic violence, I am really uncomfortable with the fact that news reporting is being corrupted by issues that the Government is raising, whether or not they fund them. One of the Generalitat’s latest initiatives accidents in the workplace, and guess what - daily news items about work accidents, mainly in construction.

But to top it all, the Generalitat is lobbying at the moment so that the Spanish train operator Renfe’s operations in Catalonia are handed over to be controlled by the Generalitat. And so guess what we see on the news every day at the moment - a news item about how bad the train were today, look at the chaos.

Now domestic violence and workplace accidents are one thing, but this is complete propaganda; when I watch the news I want to make up my own mind, not be brainwashed into thinking what the Generalitat wants me to think. And since the Government is made up of a tripartite of incompetant liars, do they honestly expect me to believe that they could run a train service?