Moving abroad

I entirely agree with your comments, especially about Rajoy's lack of daring do. The problem here is that the administration is too much of a force to deal with without causing civil unrest. Luckily things didn't or haven't got so bad as they have in Greece which is a country that is being run from Berlin. It will be interesting to see how Macron gets on with his promise to drastically cut the public sector.

Not saying anyone else could have done it better, or that Zapatero wasn't blameless, but the PP's inactivity missed an open goal in terms of modernising the Spanish economy, cutting the bloated civil service and promoting enterprise (by dropping autonomo costs). As a result the economy has begun a recovery, partly because it couldn't get any worse, and we are still stuck with a massively expensive, bureaucratic and inefficient public sector, while a lot of Spain's young entrepreneurs have naffed of with their good ideas to countries with better opportunities to start businesses.

I agree with your comment except for the one blaming the PP. Spain´s economy started, like everyone elses, going downhill in 2008 when the banks got into trouble. If anyone is to blame it should be Zapatero, who ignored the situation until it was too late. Since then the economy is being run by Brussels, Merkel and the ECB, take your pick on who is more important. The PP´s only real alternative is to go with the flow. Yes they could have been more adventurous, but that would be going against the economis culture here.France, with a socialist government,hasn´t done any better.

Lots of the Spanish youth that have moved abroad are not cleaners and waiters going to do that job overseas, but often qualified people who have left to avoid a decade of cripplingly high unemployment...forced into service jobs while they get on their feet. We were in Scotland last year and met loads of 20 something Spaniards working in the hospitality industry, almost of of them were University graduates. This is the downstream effect of the PP's poor handling of the situation. Spain has lost a lot of the brightest and best of a generation to the EU and a lot to South America. Some will come back, many will make a life where they have moved to. The education that Spain paid for will ultimately end up benefiting other nations.

Jason, I sometimes wonder if you read the papers. Only yesterday we were told that the national debt had gone up again to over 100% of the GNP, when 12 years ago it was around 40%. We are living in debt. The Spanish national health is very nearly bankrupt, and to make matters worse, is split into 17 different authorities. This year Spain has to pay 32.000 million euros in interest alone, God help us when interest rates and oil prices go up again, as they will no doubt do.Yes Spain is growing,but from what level ? People, except for government workers, are still being paid salaries that are barely enough to live on.Lastly the Spaniards who are working in the UK in hotels and pubs, would never dream of doing that sort of job back here. This is why we have a large South American population doing this job for them. Mind you, the same applies to the UK youth as well.

Do you really believe that the Spanish economy is back on its feet again? Every German sub-state, sorry, sovereign nation, has an economy build like a house of cards, just one small puff of wind and the whole system collapses. The key factor behind all this- the central banks policies. Figures used for Spain are staggeringly inaccurate, just refer to the letter send by leading Spanish economists to the EU in recent weeks.

Where are they going to go ? THE UK IS OFFICIALLY CLOSED