Conservative Rajoy loses majority in Spanish elections

Spanish Prime Minister, Mariano Rajoy, has been punished at the polls with his party losing its majority.

When jobs and money start to run out, people instinctively turn to the left for the illusion of financial security that it provides and in Spain they veered to the far left.

Rajoy's Popular Party still won the most seats but only managed 123 out of the 350 on offer, down from 186 before the election. The socialist party went from 110 seats to 90 but two new far left parties - Podemos and Citizens - came out of obscurity to gain 69 and 49 seats respectively. The chances of Rajoy forming a majority coalition are pretty slim with so few prospective partners and a rainbow coalition highly unlikely due to the highly polarised nature of Spanish politics.

The significant performance of Podemos will hurt the Catalonian independence movement as they are fiercely opposed to the region's secession. If Rajoy muddles on with a minority government he can, at least, rely on support from the far left in trying to stop the Catalonian government from continuing their preparations for statehood following a referendum which saw an 80% vote in favour of independence.

Ah, mierda

Spain requests financial assistance for banks

The Spanish Prime Minister, Mariano Rajoy and Treasury Minister, Cristobal Montoro, have asked the EU to recapitalise its banks, saying that they can no longer afford to borrow money on the international markets.

You may as well fill your pockets
with bottle tops

The Treasury Minister went a step further and admitted that the EU can't afford to bail out Spain, saying "technically, we can't really be rescued".

This comes as no surprise to most of us who have known for some time that Spain is on the brink of collapse and is too big to be bailed out.  The frankness of Señor Montoro's admission is surprising though as such honesty is taboo.

Montoro and Rajoy have asked "Europe" to recapitalise Spanish banks directly rather than loan the Spanish government billions of pounds they can't afford to pay back and impose crippling austerity measures on them precisely because not enough money exists in the EU to bail Spain out.  It's not a technicality as Señor Montoro suggests, it's a cold hard fact.

The Spanish are awaiting Angela Merkel's unilateral decision on how the €urozone will respond to Spain's request but as German banks are opposed to the idea, she is unlikely to concede without her pound of flesh.

This problem isn't "European" and the solution also isn't "European".  It's a €urozone problem and it's up to the €urozone to fix it (assuming the Spaniards don't want to grow a pair and leave).  It's not up to us to fix the €urozone, nor is it up to the Swiss, Norwegians, Icelanders, Liechtensteiners, Swedes, Danes, Czechs, Hungarians, Romanians, Bulgarians, Latvians, Lithuanians or Poles.  The more of our money the British government puts into the €urozone, the more we will lose when it fails.  The more they get involved in trying to sort out their mess, the more it looks like we are scared we won't survive the €uro's collapse when in reality they are lamenting the failure of their beloved EU.

It is long past the time to put our hands up and say "You know what? This is none of our business. You made your bed, you sleep in it. We can manage perfectly fine without you".  And we can manage perfectly fine, just like we always have done.  Our banks are exposed to the €uro but they're well capitalised.  Gordon Brown sold our gold for a pittance and bought €uro instead but the pound is still one of the currencies countries buy to back their own currency and the collapse of the €uro will prompt other countries to buy more sterling.

We have very little to lose and much to gain by the collapse of the single currency.  The amount of negative impact we experience will depend entirely on how far we distance ourselves from what is happening on the continent.