 What I saw on Sunday in Catalonia was a people exercising its right to self-determination because that's what it means when 2 million people go to vote in a banned referendum risking a kicker in the teeth from the riot police for independence. Now 2 million people voted for independence. 800,000 votes were taken away by the riot cops in brutal raids on polling stations. But that still leaves another 2.5 million who could have voted who didn't. So the case for having a mandate to declare independence is questionable. But the events are developing. On Monday you had these mass youth demonstrations and I can't see those young people aged 14, 15, 16 years old come in like class by class onto the demonstrations let alone the university students ever accepting a long term future for their nationality within the Spanish state, not after the Spanish state basically battered people and then the Prime Minister goes on TV saying he supports everything the police did. Things have changed. Tuesday massive general strike, 130 roadblocks and large parts of Catalan industry shut down. This is heading somewhere and it's heading for a showdown that is important not just for Spanish people and Catalan people but also for the European Union and also for us here in Britain and here's why. Only democracies can be in the European Union. If you unleash preemptive militarized force against your own people as Mariano Rajoy the Spanish Prime Minister did on Sunday you must expect at some point that to be taken into the structures of the European Union by somebody. There is also the courts of the European Union. But the European Union's Copenhagen principle say that only democracies can be in the European Union. Now we are where we are but here's the problem. Rajoy implicitly threatened to arrest the whole Catalan government. He said what they did was illegal. Now if you arrest them for sedition in Spain that's a 15-year sentence. That creates all kinds of problems even if he lets them go on bail the next day. I would imagine if he does that, that will trigger a call for independence and it will trigger what we haven't seen so far which is active resistance by the Catalan because their entire strategy has been Gandhi and take a hit on the head with a button show the world you're peaceful. Catalans are culturally very non-macho, very peaceful. They're seen by Spanish nationalism almost in a kind of feminine way because they like money, because they don't like fighting, because they like culture. But you wait until their entire government is arrested, elected government and see what they do then because that is the collision that Rajoy has set himself on. Now where it goes is the European Union has a responsibility. You know European Union slanging off Poland for its economic nationalism rightly having to go although not hard enough at the government of Hungary for using anti-Semitic propaganda. Smashing Greek democracy when the Greeks objected to austerity do nothing against the Spanish state for what it did on Sunday. People begin to draw the conclusion, you know if they haven't drawn it already that there is one law for the right and the elite and the neoliberals in Europe and another for the peoples of Europe. Now this I think the clash can be headed off if the heads of state of Europe have a concerted attempt to tell Rajoy to back off it could be sorted out and could have been sorted out had the Spanish Socialist Party properly opposed the right-wing government and refused to let it rule in the first place after the election instead of, as it did, allowing the right to take power to avoid the radical left-taking power. So this is Spain-wide implications. But here in Britain let's remember we've had a referendum where in exactly the same way a whole generation saw social justice wrapped up with the desire for greater autonomy or independence from the UK and that was the Scottish referendum. We've got in Northern Ireland a situation where by mid-2020s we're going to have probably a majority of anti-Unionist people demographically that is the Protestant population will be a minority and then the clause in the Anglo-Irish agreement saying there can be an all-Ireland referendum on Irish unity which everybody's forgotten but the people in the south of Ireland haven't forgotten will again be an active issue. So the left has to get its head around the right of self-determination of nations. It's something that doesn't go away, isn't the property of the right and often is, as in Catalonia, completely mixed up with people's ideas of social justice because, as you may know, under fascism the Catalan language was banned, the Catalan culture was banned, the boss of FC Barcelona was shot for expressing nationalist sentiment and I saw on Sunday people coming out of polling stations in wheelchairs on Zimmer frames people who lived under fascism. So it's not a technical issue for them or a historic issue and just as it wasn't for the Greeks who saw Germany dictate to them a whole austerity program when they had lived through in their living memory the German occupation of Greece under Nazism. So if you don't like the fact that these old issues coming back you have to get off a planet that has a history and just have one that has a perfect and permanent present which is of course what neoliberalism tells you to do. The neoliberalism would like you to think that nothing about history matters that only the present is and the present will remain as it always is, always is now. But you know what I saw in Catalonia was a massive break of democracy and not just in the voting. On the streets you've got a thousand people here queuing to vote across the road a thousand people queuing in the opposite way. In the middle groups of people talking. Talking not very excitedly, very rationally about what to do. That to me is democracy. It's what you see in every mass strike where there's a big workers movement it's what you see in every mass uprising such as we saw in Tahrir Square in Egypt such as we saw in Gezi Park in Istanbul. The Catalans are close to that critical mass and all it will need is for the Spanish nationalist right wing Catholic crazy rosary bead toting government to do this again and then you're going to see I think an uprising in Catalonia and actually although I love uprisings I would much rather the outcome to be a negotiated settlement leading to much greater autonomy and a legal referendum which everybody can take part in without police violence on whether they want to be inside Spain or not.