Can ordinary people be truly independent?

"To revive the ailing European project, the ugly conflict between Catalonia's regional government and the Spanish state may be just what the doctor ordered," wrote Prof Y Varoufakis, briefly Finance Minister of Greece in 2015. Catalonia is a state in the northeast of Spain, one of the wealthiest in the country. On 1 October it held a referendum on declaring independence from Spain, in which 90% voted for independence, on a turnout of 43% of the people. Declaring the vote to be illegal the government in Madrid sent Spanish riot police which resorted to extreme brutality, to prevent people from voting. Over 900 people were injured in police violence. The European Union refused to condemn the Spanish government. "To declare, as the president of the European Commission did, that this is an internal Spanish problem in which the EU has no say, is hypocrisy on stilts," wrote Varoufakis. "Of course, hypocrisy has long been at the centre of the EU's behaviour. Its officials had no compunction about meddling in a member state's internal affairs -- say, to demand the removal of elected politicians for refusing to implement cuts in the pensions or to sell off public assets at ridiculous prices." He is referring to the severe austerity, imposed on Greece by Europe, which has broken its economy. Even German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble, who was the architect of these measures, admitted that he would never have agreed to implement them on his own country. Catalonia is suffering because of austerity imposed on Spain. "Barcelona, Catalonia's exquisite capital, is a rich city running a budget surplus. Yet many of its citizens recently faced eviction by Spanish banks that had been bailed out." The mayor of Barcelona planned tax cuts for local businesses and built 15,000 housing for refugees but the central government stopped the tax cuts and barred entry to the new housing to force Barcelona to transfer its budget surplus to Madrid. Exploitation of people by politicians is not new or confined to Spain. Globalization resulted in a flow of finance to where returns were maximum, so that the rich became richer, but people were stuck within boundaries of states to be suppressed by their own governments. Emmanuel Macron, elected president with such enthusiasm in France, finds it difficult to comprehend problems of ordinary people. Just as Hillary Clinton was unable to understand that people supported Donald Trump because of economic anxiety and not because all of them were in a "basket of deplorables". Indians were made to stand in queues for hours to withdraw money from banks because of demonetization but some have seen their fortunes grow. Whatever happens in Catalonia politicians will gain. They always do.