CITY AND SUBURBAN
Spain is no longer content with Costa-mongering
CHRISTOPHER FILDES
Madrid onceonce had a project called the Costa Inlanda. This started from the observation that Spain was running out of coasts for its holiday business, and that the sheer weight of masonry along its south-eastern shore might at any moment cause the whole country to tip over and fall into the Mediterranean, upside-down. The Costa Inlanda project would have been a count- erbalance. It assumed that the basic ingre- dients of a Spanish package holiday were sunshine, a tower block, and a swimming pool. These could all be provided in central Spain within easy reach of Madrid airport, on land which was plentiful, unproductive, cheap, and even sandy. The Costa Inlanda was ahead of its time. Nowadays we should call it a theme park. Costa-mongering has been Spain's growth business, and turns a deficit on visible trade into a healthy surplus on the balance of payments. But the business of being a playground has not helped Spain to be taken seriously. That, in the years when the business grew up, was a matter of indifference to Spain, under the rule of the Great Survivor. History may be kinder to Franco than was the received opinion of his day. If Mussolini had had one part of his guile and judgment, he, too, might have died in his bed and given his name to a tax-saving device. Franco's own legacy was the last and rarest achievement of a dicta- tor: he bequeathed a constitutional settle- ment which has stayed the course. While he lived, though, Spain was isolated, and after his death the sense of isolation survived him.
Nothing changes suddenly in Spain, but much has changed, and the fact is suddenly apparent. An SDPish government, with a Lawsonian economic and financial policy, and an average age of 42, looks forward to an election next year where the only doubt is whether the right-wing opposition will be so badly beaten that it breaks into splin- ters. Immediately it looks forward to 1 January, when Spain joins the European Economic Community.
Those who have been members for longer know that the club is not all it is cracked up to be. They look with pity on Spanish businessmen earnestly poring over guides to Value Added Tax, which will set in with the new year, replacing some 24 other taxes, and give the Spanish appetite for bureaucracy and circular paperwork something new to feed on. The first years of membership, Spaniards intellectually acknowledge, will be rough. But for the moment it is the euphoria of joining that counts. Spain's isolation is over.
As a part of that change, Gibraltar's isolation is over too. This year's settlement has reopened the border. The British remain pledged to letting the people of Gibraltar decide their own allegiance, the Spanish have embarked on what, a century ago, in Ireland, we knew as the policy of killing Home Rule by kindness. Open dealings across the border will, they hope, finally show it up as an anachronism. The immediate benefit for Britain is in the shelving of an old and embarrassing argu- ment. With that out of the way, King Juan Carlos will next year pay a state visit to Britain, the first king of Spain to do so. No one is unkind enough to point out that the last such proposal had to abandoned owing to bad weather, 397 years ago. We must now take Spain seriously. It would be unfair to the City of London, or to British business generally, to suggest that this idea has only now popped up. Britain ranks fifth amongst Spain's sup- pliers, and trade is growing fast. British banks made their way in when a crisis left a number of Spanish banks in desperate need of new and rich owners: foreign nationality no longer an objection. They can only move as fast, though, as the rules will let them. It is the gradual relaxation of rigid rulebooks, and the hope of more once Spain joins the Common Market, which has this week brought the City to Madrid in force.
A strong team, headed by the Governor of the Bank of England, has descended on Madrid and occupied (but you guessed it) the Eurobuilding Hotel. Dark-suited fig- ures, British and Spanish, sit in long rows, fiddling with their earphones for the simul- taneous translations while trying to stave off pins and needles in the aural passages.
The City's offerings to Madrid have included Handel's Ads and Galatea, spon- sored by seven London banks and put on by the English Bach Festival with a small orchestra in knee-breeches and wigs. Zeal for authenticity brought on the giant Polyphemus to sing '0 ruddier than the cherry' in a towering feathered headdress, as worn for so long on English racecourses by Prince Monolulu: gotta aria.' The performance sold out and was received with cordiality. The City's own messages have been received with something more like enthusiasm, and the more technical and factual they are, the better they have gone down. There is a sense of having to catch up a long way, in a short time, with financial services and markets which are themselves changing at a great pace. Tak- ing the other side seriously is a process that cuts both ways.
The seriousness will survive when the euphoria wears off, and we shall then see what Spanish membership of the EEC really means to Britain's exporters and services. The tariffs were never the barriers to the trading of services across the nation- al frontiers. Witness to that is the staple trade across Italy's northern frontier, in unmarked suitcases full of lira notes. It would be hard to expect Spain to set an example to the EEC's founder members, and unrealistic to suppose that the act of joining will bring barriers down.
Other barriers, though, will come down and look like staying down. The civil war is over, General Franco is officially dead, and the idea of Spain as Costa country could usefully be buried with him. A pity about the Inlanda, though; we could have turned a tidy peseta.
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