Let justice be done

I don't usually know what your average Spaniard is talking about as they chat with the neighbours, keys in hand outside their house or have a drink after work in the bar. It's easy enough for me to ask real Spanish people real questions but asking for answers isn't the same as knowing what people talk about spontaneously. Of course the traditional media, newspapers, television, radio and the social media probably reflect what's going on in the street but not necessarily so.

There has been one constant in the news for months. Cataluña. Every morning as I do those things that you do in the morning in the bathroom listening to the radio and as I move to the kitchen for my breakfast tea and toast I hear the pundits sounding off about Cataluña. There are lots of other things in and on the news but Cataluña just keeps coming back and back. Maybe they should start to have a section for Cataluña similar to the sports slot or the stock market updates. I have no idea about Cataluña; it's a political quagmire which causes apparently intelligent people to behave like children. I watched a Netflix documentary called Two Catalonias (it  was in a number of languages but the subtitles that held it all together were in Castellano so I suppose that if you watched it in the UK the subs would be in English). Every time someone made a point pro or anti independence the next section would have someone making exactly the opposite point using the same facts or events. I have never seen a documentary like it. I've never heard a debate like it. What seems to be happening is that people choose their viewpoint and then select facts to support that opinion.

But for the past few days Cataluña hasn't got much of a look in. Back in mid October the Supreme Court ruled that a tax on mortgages, called the actos jurídicos documentados, a sort of stamp duty collected by the banks and passed on to the Regional Governments, should be paid by the banks and not by the people taking out the mortgage. The duty varies from region to region; for instance it's twice as high where we live as in Madrid. Looking for an illustrative figure it seems that in Alicante you would pay around  2,250€ on a 150,000€ mortgage. There were lots of arguments about the sums but the loss to the banks was reckoned to be about 5.5 billion euros and it didn't do their share prices any good at all.

The day after the court decision a senior judge provisionally halted the judgement from taking effect and two days after that the top judge in the Supreme Court decided to call all the Supreme Court judges together to decide what to do. In the meantime nobody wanted to sign off on their mortgage and everyone with a mortgage was looking forward to getting money back. The judges meeting, which lasted two days, finished a couple of days ago and their worships decided by 15 votes to 13 to continue the system where the person taking out the mortgage paid the duty and not the banks. The headlines were all along the lines "Banks 15 The People 13" or "The Banks win". The Social Media exploded with indignation and I didn't need to go anywhere other than the supermarket queue to know what the trending topic in the street is today.