With one in four Spanish workers out of a job, output contracting by the day and Asturian miners marching through the capital, the Spanish prime minister, Mariano Rajoy, has determined to push through a further €65bn (£51bn) of austerity measures, as if deliberately set on a strategy of economic death by a thousand cuts. To say “determined” is possibly not the best way of putting it, for this is more like forced with a gun to his head; the latest austerity package is part of the conditionality attached to the eurozone loans for banking bailouts, thereby giving the lie to Mr Rajoy’s proud insistence that the Spanish bailout is in some way less of a subjugation than the others.
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