I SEE that Jean-Claude Juncker has received an honorary doctorate from the University of Salamanca in the presence of Mariano Rajoy. He used his acceptance speech to warn against the “nationalist poisons” to be found in Europe and to say “no to any form of separatism”.

Although I am a European, I am beginning to fall out of love with the EU itself. I know that it needs to change, but it will not be allowed to do that with people like Juncker in charge.

However, Scottish-independence-supporting Leavers do need to ask themselves some very difficult questions.

They should also take lessons from Scottish history. No country is totally independent as all countries require to work with others. The trick is not to be controlled by them.

I gather that there are those in the Republic of Ireland who would also like to leave the EU. The big objection seems to be that an Ireland outwith the EU would be subject to de facto rule by the English government at Westminster.

The same would undoubtedly be true of an independent Scotland which was outwith some organisation which could act as a bulwark against English imperialism. Even I as an Englishman have heard of the Darien disaster.

Below is the English translation from the website elnacional.cat:

“The president of the European Commission, Jean-Claude Juncker, has this Thursday warned against the ‘nationalist poisons’ which prevent Europe from working together and strongly criticised what they represent: ‘I say no to any form of separatism which weakens Europe and adds fracture and division’.

“Juncker was speaking after being invested with an honorary doctorate by the University of Salamanca in a ceremony attended also by the Spanish prime minister, Mariano Rajoy. Juncker repeated his support for Spanish law in support of the Spanish executive in the face of the situation in Catalonia.

“The president of the European Commission emphasised that the EU is based in law and warned that the day that the norms freely accepted by everyone are not respected, Europe will have lost its opportunities. ‘We cannot gamble its rights’, he said, before warning of a ‘threat hovering over the union’, the independence movements.

“In his opinion, they’re ‘a poison which prevents Europe from working together to influence the world’. He continued that ‘we don’t have the right to dismantle at a national and regional scale a model of coexistence which we have to construct for the whole of Europe. If we do so, we’ll enter a decline’.

“’Yes to the Europe of nations, yes to the Europe of regions, but I say no to the division of the national and regional categories which we’ve surpassed since the Second World War’.”
Robert Mitchell
Stirling

I sense that interest in the Catalonian crisis has fallen away to some extent. We shouldn’t let our interest wane, when politicians have been put in jail for delivering on the manifesto that got them elected.
Thom Muir
via thenational.scot

I wouldn’t say the interest has fallen away but rather suppressed by the British mainstream media, reserved to Westminster, which is currently using sex scandals etc to distract attention from the mess of the Tories and Brexit.

Even when they do coverage of the Catalan situation, it’s done in the usual biased union way, where the Catalan Government are deemed separatists and the Madrid methods get the buried head in sand treatment!
Paul Bowie
via thenational.scot