With the latest report from the IMF positioning Spain on a slippery slope to hell, with GDP decreases of over 3%, the risk premium against German bonds at above 700 points, and the rating of its sovereign debt as trash, the Spanish Government has set itself in top gear to focus the blame on the lack of linguistic and cultural uniformity and on the movement for independence set in motion in Catalonia.

The Spanish economic problem has nothing to do with generalised school failure in Spain nor with the succession of haphazard reforms and counter-reforms, nor the recent consecutive cutbacks. The problem is supposedly that too much Catalan language is being taught and that children are being indoctrinated to become separatists.

But if we look at appraisal reports on language skills, it turns out that Catalonia is in the middle range of knowledge of the Spanish language, while Andalusia and Extremadura, monolingual Spanish-speaking only regions, are at the bottom. I don’t know if the aggressive cultural wipe-out after the Castilian colonisation and the economic model transfer to latifundium in Al-Aldalus has anything to do with it.