Dan Hancox

‘I have defeat​ tattooed in my DNA,’ Pablo Iglesias said in a debate on television last year, a month after announcing the formation of a new political entity called Podemos. ‘My great-uncle was shot dead. My grandfather was given the death sentence and spent five years in jail. My grandmothers suffered the humiliation of those defeated in the Civil War. My father was...

On the eve​ of the general strike across southern Europe in November 2012, I joined a few thousand members of the CCOO, Spain’s largest trade union, for a march through Madrid. They set out on the stroke of midnight, intending to shut down any place of business still open; it was made clear to the owners of restaurants and bars that they weren’t to open the next morning....

I hadn’t been in Oviedo for long before I saw the anarchists’ red and black flags. Fifty people stood outside the train station in the midday sun, protesting against the imminent privatisation of the railway. ‘The future holds no security,’ a man in his sixties told me, bothering his bushy white moustache. ‘We will lose our jobs, ticket prices will rise. Only the...