It's getting worse in Spain

It’s nearly four months since we looked at Spain. The economic and social fabrics continue to flake and peel and crack.

Ambrose reports that the Catholic charity Caritas “is now helping 40,000 people in a province of 700,000, often with bags of food”. Caritas has not received any of its usual subsidies from the Castilla-La Mancha government so far this year – governments are broke too.

A thousand people lose their homes each week – and in Spanish repossessions creditors can pursue debtors for all their assets and dock future income on tough terms even after bankruptcy. So people face long term ruin.

The region of Andalucia plans to block evictions by expropriating homes from banks but the European Commission has warned that this may violate the terms of Spain’s EMU bank bail-out. “If that is so, it is not worth being part of Europe,” said Jose Antonio Grinan, Andalucia’s leader.

If society rejects you and offers you nothing, why shouldn’t you reject society? Unsurprisingly, immigrants are returning home. Unsurprisingly, squatting is becoming more widespread – and more organised:

Non-paying residents may damage properties and can take as long as three years to evict, making the homes unattractive to investors who have no way of calculating the time and cost required to get them in shape to rent or resell.

There’s a comprehensive internet guide for squatters.

In return, banks are disabling elevators and tearing out stairwells in their apartment blocks to prevent entire buildings from being occupied. Yet there are 2 million empty homes.

This is civil war.

Spain’s institutional infrastructure is creaky. Despite the big public projects (and many white elephants among them) it is scarcely a modern country. The immature Spanish democracy overspent, partly thanks to the temptations of its EU subsidies. But with EU membership comes the €uro. In defence of the €uro membership the Spanish economy is being slowed down and the Spanish social fabric is being torn.

It can’t go on like this. Something will have to give. It’ll probably be €uro membership. But how soon?