Piers Morgan’s recent TV show, Piers Morgan on Marbella, aired recently on British TV, and portrayed Marbella in a very 1 sided light. Not having TV myself I caught the show on YouTube and watched with much surprise as Piers painted a picture of jet-set glamour (God, I hate those words…) sickening and distasteful displays of wealth and a prosperous seaside hot-spot.
For someone with Piers’ journalistic credentials, the show was shockingly one sided as Piers not only solely focused on the wealthy, glossed over gangland crime and governmental corruption but strangely completely ignores the Spanish population and the negative effect the unbridled capitalism, greed and corruption has had on this coast.
The show, I’m guessing, was put together by Max Clifford and co, as it was more of an advert for the glitz and glamour than anything else. Shameful on the part of Piers Morgan, if you ask me. Max Clifford desperately wants to be mayor, as he thinks he could “clean up” Marbella. The problem is, he would be cleaning up the victims of the boom and not the perpetrators, like the wealthy featured in the show.
So what was missed out? Well, firstly, there was no discourse about the effect that the unbridled capitalism of the boom years had had on the coast. Sure, there are many here who made millions through legal means and brought their wealth here, but, as many inhabitants of Marbella are painfully aware, much of the wealthy on this coast got their through exploitation, corruption and crime. The gap between the rich and poor is gigantic – the average wage here is the lowest in Spain, yet you see massive villas and flash cars everywhere you go.
Piers is filmed driving along the Golden Mile, a stretch of road that passes through Marbella heading west towards Gibraltar, lined with The Marbella Club and the Puente Romano, two of Marbella’s most exclusive hotels. Yet if he’d have turned around and headed east towards Málaga, a different picture would have emerged, one of massive, unnecessary construction, vast tracts of empty apartment apartment blocks, homelessness, huge displays of graffiti telling of staff enduring 9 months of non-payment of salary at a luxury hotel (something I have experienced myself down here at an architecture firm called Diseño Earle) and masses of poverty. The average wage in the Málaga region is a little over 1,000€ per month. Given the kind of wealth on display on this show, you’d find that a little hard to believe. Piers does mention the over construction, but doesn’t go into the long term effects that it has clearly had on the economic landscape.
Unemployment in the province has nosed over 30%, shockingly high, but unsurprising given the amount of construction workers that migrated here during the boom.
In the show, an English couple were interviewed, claiming that Jesús Gil, one of the men behind the scandalous corruption of the Marbella town hall, was viewed as a “modern-day Robin Hood,” even going so far to say that the average Spanish person loves what has happened as he “created the thriving Marbella of today.”
Thriving Marbella? Not even close. Shops, bars and restaurants are closing left, right and centre. People are flocking back to their own countries in scores. The banks have nearly given up repossessing property because they’ve got too much. Thriving Marbella? That’s the biggest joke of all.
The couple interviewed, Michelle and Stephen Euesden, say all this as they are sipping wine in their hillside villa, whilst below, in the barrios, Spanish and English alike struggle to make ends meet every month thanks to the greed and extravagance of these kind of individuals. Their side of the story goes much like this: The over-development attracted thousands to the coast, money was brought into the area and the local economy was given a massive boost. In reality, what happened was lots of rich people got richer by under-paying their staff, denying them contracts and paying them in black money, essentially robbing off the local government of much needed social security contributions, and then when things got bad, fired the staff and hoarded their money, leaving masses of unemployment a practically deserted city and a crumbling economy. The town hall sold masses of land that wan’t theirs to sell, taking sizeable backhanders as they did so, whilst ignoring the things they should have been doing- improving life on the coast for everyone. Every piece of land they sold to developers was stolen from the local community, who were often employed by these developers who withheld wages as they went bust. The few involved got super rich, whilst little trickled down but hideous working conditions.
How they can sit their and give their “alternative view” of the corruption is simply disgusting. Tell that to the tens of thousands now out of work. Tell that to the victims of crime that the police are paid by the gangsters to ignore, tell that to the masses living in poverty. Tell that to the average person, who’s quality of life has been stifled thanks to the over-development destroying the local landscape. Tell that to their own employees, one ex-employee who I know personally, who described the working conditions at their newspaper as being “dreadful.”
So a modern day Robin Hood? A reverse Robin Hood more like – robbing from the poor to give to the rich.
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