Some explanations of the background are in order. Spain has a Constitutional Court separate from its Supreme Court and charged with deciding exclusively on constitutional issues. The legitimacy of the court is damaged by the political manoeuvering around the appointments to it, to the point that, of its usual complement of twelve Justices 5 new ones should have been appointed but haven't (one has died, and four remain in the court two years after their terms lapsed in 2007). Why? Because the People's Party, in opposition, has blocked the necessary consensus in the Spanish Senate thus preserving the ideological balance in the court inherited from the 8 years of Aznar's government in 1996-2004. Another Justice has been recused in the case of the Catalan Statute as he was allegedly not impartial.

I'm not going to mince words about the People's Party because the Spanish Right Wing thinks of Spain as their ranch, which they have an inalienable right to govern, and stop at nothing, not even the stability of the State and the integrity of its Institutions, in order to attain power. They demonstrated this in spades in 1993-6, starting with accusations of electoral fraud when they failed to win the 1993 elections as they expected, followed by their refusal to accept their electoral defeat in 2004 which led them to encourage conspiracy theories that the PSOE, together with ETA, was behind the March 11 bombing everyone else attributed to Al Qaeda-inspired militants.

In this vitiated atmosphere, a wave of reforms of Spain's Autonomy Statutes has been unfolding, with predictable if undesirable consequences. Spain is a unitary state, but it has devolved very extensive powers to its "regions and nationalities" (to quote the Constitution of 1978) by means of "Autonomy Statutes" to the point of being as decentralised as some of the EU's federal states, making Spain a federal state in all but name. This is remarkable in that the Constitution was drafted and approved barely 2-3 years after the death of Franco, who ruled Spain for 36 years suppressing Spain's multinational character. In point of fact, Spain's Second Republic (1931-6) had enacted a Catalan and Basque "Autonomy Statutes" and was in the process of approving one for Galicia when the Civil War broke out. The current People's Party represents the kind of Spanish Centralist Nationalists who found the 1930's Autonomy Statutes abhorrent to their ideal of "One Spain". They have to live with devolution and wrap themselves in the Constitution and use regionalist rhetoric when it suits them, but since 2005 they have been playing a dangerous game of undermining Spain's state institutions as a way to stop the reform of the Autonomy Statutes which they find inconvenient.

The reform of the Catalan Statute started with the Catalan regional elections of 2003. In them the Conservative Moderate Nationalists of CiU lost the regional government for the first time since 1979 to the Socialists led by Barcelona Mayor Pasqual Maragall (of 1992 olympic fame). The new Socialist government, allied with other left-wing parties, embarked on a reform of the Autonomy statute which, after 25 years, was an eminently sensible thing to do. Then in 2004 Aznar stepped down as Prime Minister and his party unexpectedly lost the elections. However, Aznar acceded to the consultative Council of State (Consejo de Estado) as a former Prime Minister and lay in waiting, ready to pounce when that body had to pronounce itself on the draft Catalan Statute approved by the Catalan Parliament in 2005. I am not exaggerating: Aznar acted in an unseemly fashion having to be rapprimanded by the Chairman of the Council of State because of his insistence on debating the constitutionality of the statute, something the Council was not charged with doing. Also, as soon as the Council had issued its advice on the Statute, Aznar stepped down from it to join the board of Murdoch's News Corp (from which he was already receiving income as a "consultant" while he held his Council position). And, finally, it had been during Aznar's term as Prime Minister that former Prime Ministers had been inducted into the Council, a position that all three previous Prime Ministers had declined to take up when it became available.

But this didn't end there. Unable to stop the Catalan Statute at the Council of State, the PP tried to do it in the Congress and, failing that, they decided to lodge a constitutionality question on the statute with the Constitutional Court. They did this before the Stature had been enacted, which meant their case was thrown out, but in late 2006, after the Catalan people had approved it in a referendum they tried again, this time getting their challenge in. Meanwhile, they were already blocking the renewal of the governing body of the Spanish Judiciary (which also has a consultative role on new legislation), the General Council of the Judiciary (Consejo General del Poder Judicial) again to preserve the ideological balance inherited from Aznar's time as PM - this blockade lasted 4 years, during which the PP lodged unconstitutionality complaints against just about every law passed by the Spanish Parliament. Three years later, here we are. The judiciary remains politicised at every level (including the High Courts of the Autonomous Communities) and not only because of the PP - this is a chronic flaw exploited by all parties.

It should be noted that in 2005 the PP also encouraged a boycott of Catalan products in the rest of Spain, as well as claiming throughout that Zapatero wanted to "break up Spain". Later, when the Catalan-based utility Gas Natural attempted a takeover of Madrid-based Endesa, the People's Party led a campaign against a "foreign firm" taking over a "Spanish firm". Never mind that the "foreign firm" was Catalan and that there was no such criticism when the German E.On attempted to buy Endesa after Gas Natural's bid failed... This is an example of how the PP can, at the same time, claim that Catalonia is Spain and that Catalans are foreign.

So, what now? In the last months there have been a number of non-binding referenda on independence organised by city councils across Catalonia, and now we have yesterday's joint editorial. And this at a time when, in the context of the updating of their own Autonomy Statute, the Basque nationalist parties have finally accepted the Constitution as the guarantor of their own national rights. The PP's atavisms do threaten to undo the progress of the last 30 years.

The worst that can happen is that the Constitutional Court does strike down or reinterpret a substantial part of the new Catalan Statute. There is a scenario in which the Catalan polity engages in civil disobedience, and I don't really want to consider what the reaction of the Spanish Centralist Nationalists (including at least the whole PP and a segment of the PSOE) would be. The political pressure on the Socialist governments in both Catalonia and Spain would mount. Would Catalonia really consider independence? How would Zapatero react? Could he be unseated if he refused to use force to preserve the "indissoluble unity of Spain"?

As a concluding thought, after knocking the PP so much I have to admit that a large proportion of the Spanish population is deeply and unseemingly anti-Catalan, which I find remarkable and ultimately incomprehensible. The boycott of Catalan products I mentioned above did not need a lot of pushing to be taken up by people across the country. It really is that bad...