That Mythical Pro-Spanish Majority in Catalonia

By Craig Murray: The media constantly pumps out the lie that there is a silent anti-independence majority in Catalonia, which is merely curiously invisible.

 

Consider this. The highest turnout ever at an election in Catalonia was the 74.9% in the 2015 Regional Election, with 4,130.196 people casting their vote. At Spanish general elections turnout is even lower, at 69%. A minimum of 25.1% of the population never vote at all. Of that 25% who do not vote, some will be dead, or moved away, but most are probably just not civilly engaged.

The trick of the pro-Spanish lobby is to boycott polls on Independence, and then claim that this minimum 25% of the electorate who never vote at all anyway, are anti-Independence and participating in the boycott. In truth there are absolutely no grounds to attribute the minimum 25% habitual non-voters as anti-independence. Particularly the dead ones.

So in fact the 2,044,038 votes cast in favour of Independence on Sunday, that survived the police and could be counted, already amounted to 49.6% of the highest number of votes ever cast in any election in Catalonia. When you add in the hundreds of thousands of votes confiscated by the police, and the voters who were deterred by the terrible violence, there is no doubt whatsoever that Sunday’s referendum would have seen a healthy majority for Independence on any probable turnout figure.

 

So that is the answer on the “pro-Spanish silent majority”. Many of them are very silent indeed, being dead but still on the register. Most of the others have never voted in their lives. The trick of claiming all non-voters as No voters is, frankly, pathetic. It says a huge amount about the corruption of the corporate media, and in the UK especially the BBC, that they have been pumping out this ridiculous “silent majority” narrative without ever analysing the figures realistically.

 

Why is the pro-Spanish majority so silent? Because it is a fiction. The very existence of the pro-Independence majority in the Catalan parliament is evidence of that fact. At the Catalan parliamentary elections, pro-Independence parties got 48% and anti-Independence parties got 39%. The other 13% went to parties which are agnostic or divided on the issue. But your career in the mainstream media is dependent on failing to notice such inconvenient fact.

 

Craig Murray is an author, broadcaster and human rights activist. He was British Ambassador to Uzbekistan from August 2002 to October 2004

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