Catalonia: the other side of the story

As a Spaniard living in Britain, it has been strange to read the coverage of Catalonia in recent days – most of the commentary being pro-separation. There has been no sense as to why most people in Spain feel so strongly about keeping the country together. Britain has been a democracy for generations: Spain has not been so fortunate.

I was born in the days of a democracy and my grandmother would proudly take me to her weekly meetings at the Conservative party headquarters. She taught me about the four pillars of our Constitution: freedom, justice, equality and political pluralism. And it’s the last pillar, pluralism, that’s now under threat.

The civil war is still quite fresh in the memory of the Spanish, and it’s easy to see parallels between now and 1934. Then, Spain was split in half: the left (extreme and moderate) and the nationalists (disintegrators, extremists and moderates). Both managed to use their hate to destroy any common achievement and left a country with death, pain – and, ultimately, dictatorship.