ABSTRACT
I had come to Barcelona because of its reputation as a heartland of socialism. It interested me because it had changed dramatically in a short space of time, throwing up the same sort of tensions and dilemmas posed to the Left in cities such as Glasgow and Sheffield, Lille and Paris-cities with strong traditions of socialism and working class protest, but now lumbering under the burden of deindustrialisation, unemployment, and Maastricht. I had come because Tony Blair and his New Labour colleagues had gone on record as big fans of what the long-serving social democrat mayor-Pasqual Maragall-had done for the city. But I had also come because Barcelona has a special place in the literary heritage of British socialists, thanks to the efforts of one Eric Blair, aka George Orwell, whose first visit to Barcelona shocked him:
It was the first time that I had ever been in a town where the working class was in the saddle. Practically every building of any size had been seized by the workers and was draped by red flags or with the red and black flag of the Anarchists; every wall was scrawled with the hammer and sickle and with the initials of the revolutionary parties; almost every church had been gutted
and its images burnt… Down the Ramblas, the wide central artery of the town where crowds of people streamed constantly to and fro, the loudspeakers were bellowing revolutionary songs all day and far into the night. And it was the aspect of the crowds that was the queerest thing of all. In outward appearance, it was a town in which the wealthy classes had practically ceased to exist. Except for a small number of women and foreigners there were no ‘well-dressed’ people at all. Practically everyone wore rough workingclass clothes, or blue overalls or some variant of the militia uniform.
