In the news

A lot of these polling stations that the police are smashing up are schools and other local authority buildings.

The Spanish state sending a pretty strong message about how much respect they have for Catalan civic life.

yeah, it just seems so extraordinary from over here.

Since Friday, thousands of separatist supporters had occupied schools and other buildings designated as polling stations in order to keep them open.
Many of those inside were parents and their children, who remained in the buildings after the end of lessons on Friday and bedded down in sleeping bags on gym mats.
In some areas, farmers positioned tractors on roads and in front of polling station doors, and school gates were taken away to make it harder for the authorities to seal buildings off.

Lot's of these little clips around now:
https://youtu.be/bBUJNbLa4ko

Can't see how anyone could possibly think this is the best way to stop them from going independent. It's going to backfire massively.

Some reports suggest that in Lleida the police took their helmets off and tried the softly softly approach, but in BCN the police are pretty brutal and that's where a lot of the footage is coming from.

Massively counterproductive in any case.

I can't believe this is happening, looks more like 1970s Spain...

Not verified, but it seems hard to fake something like this:

fucking horrible. jackboot wearing fascist pigs.

sky's hot take. https://twitter.com/SkyNews/status/914446357481406465

cancel your subscription.

Funny that.... mind you the team GB logo is lifted straight from from a copy of one of the Los Logos books... previously a Bjorn Borg logo...! No idea if it was actually licensed or the designer paid..?

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Meanwhile, people race bikes with dogs.

The police have achieved Madrid's goal. A "yes" vote was always far from certain. Any results now are useless.

Is this the tweet^?

Think they've removed it now

https://twitter.com/manelrainers/status/914460939197583362

Fucking horrible scenes of Spanish police violence. Agree or not with the referendum, the violence is unacceptable - and given the Spanish police's reputation, deploying them in the first place was never going to end quietly. Madrid has probably pushed more people towards the independence movement than it would have if it had just ignored and downplayed the poll.

yeah. absolutely awful. utterly tonedeaf.

Barcelona v Las Palmas game now to be played behind closed doors.

Fucking horrible scenes of Spanish police violence.

Absolutely.

Agree or not with the referendum, the violence is unacceptable - and given the Spanish police's reputation, deploying them in the first place was never going to end quietly. Madrid has probably pushed more people towards the independence movement than it would have if it had just ignored and downplayed the poll.

Yes to the first part. Not entirely convinced on the "just ignore it" part.

Catalan politicians claimed the right to declare independence within 48 hours of a yes vote. A vote either way was too close to predict. Acting in a way which made a vote impossible to call, from Madrid's perspective, was probably a safer bet than gambling on the result going their way. This is a cluster fuck for sure.

I'm getting a bit of a Tiananmen Square vibe here. In terms of how troops brought in from outside bonded and hyped each other up whilst shacked up together, and then unleashed extremely disproportionate force once they got face to face with 'the enemy'.

For good measure the Spanish alpha males are living in a chartered cruise ship docked in the harbour. This one:

Same as the 1980s miners strike in the UK.

this has dropped to 4th in the BBC radio news, just above Monarch airline woes. seems strange.

I keep wondering what vote/issue would bring english people to camp overnight in schools with their children, and bring the elderly out to protest and defend. also, despite what Catalan politicians have said, couldn't central govt have just ignored the results/declaration if they believe the referendum to be void? (I know nothing about it, but why did they have to physically stop people voting? )

The bad feeling between the Catelans and Spain has been festering for the best part of a century. There are plenty of people still alive who remember life in Catelonia under Franco. It wasn't pretty.

Yeah i understand the strength of feeling.
I meant more that I don't know much about this referendum, context like what happens next, what the political mechanisms are etc that other people have mentioned.

"Children of Men" vibe intensifies

Turnout was low last time. It probably would have been again, although I do take your point and you may be right. It's a bloody hard call to have to make.

The thing that gets me is that Madrid is trying to defend a constitution that was drawn up explicitly to try to stop Spain falling back into civil war, but because of the pictures on TV there are lots of people calling them fascists. I lived in Barcelona for a while, studying constitutional law ironically - I was well-exposed to both sides of the argument, and this whole situation feels purpose-built to descend into the kind of shit we're seeing now.

A PS - thinking on it some more, I think if you're going to use the state apparatus to block the vote, you have to be sure you can completely stop it happening. If you're not, you let it happen but undermine and discredit it. The alternative is what we have now - terrible scenes and people still voting.

(I'm not taking sides, for the record)

The images of police attacking unarmed, peaceful protesters, and even firefighters, is shocking. spanish police force seems full of thugs. I wonder what their orders were. This below seems to have some important background to the situation

http://www.ecfr.eu/article/commentary_three_myths_about_catalonias_independence_movement