Actor Bardem blasts Spanish government for 25 per cent unemployment

Spanish cinema star Javier Bardem, who plays Bond’s evil foe Silva in the latest 007 film, Skyfall, says the real “villains” nowadays are the people in power that “the social movement” is mobilising against, in Spain and elsewhere.

Spain’s government “ has a total lack of commitment to the public and social system,” he said in an interview on Wednesday in Spain’s daily newspaper, El País. Silva is just “fiction, the present-day villains are others, within (Spain) and outside it,” Bardem told the newspaper.

In Spain “we have to see the faces of those who have been evicted from their homes… the social policies that required so much energy and sacrifice are being brutally cut back: education, health, access to culture… we are living out a human drama, we’re above 25 per cent unemployment,” he continued.

“The current social movement has shown its dignity and the clarity of its ideas, and thousands of people support it peacefully,” he noted in reference to the continuing series of demonstrations throughout Spain, going back to May of 2011.

“But the Government doesn’t care about this reverberation and they find it convenient that there is so much unemployment so that labour conditions can be terrible. This government wants to reduce the country’s debt at the expense of school pencils and notebooks,” he charged.

“And they want to save the banks instead of helping the people who have mortgages, instead of providing decent housing.”

Bardem stressed that “this is not a matter of party labels, but rather of sensitivity. The humanitarian problems are linked to the complete lack of sensitivity on the part of those who create them. And those who are taking decisions now are removed from reality.”

The indignados protest movement began in Madrid on 15 May, 2011, more than six months before the Socialist Party was voted out and replaced by the current, conservative Popular Party government.

Spain’s unemployment rate, long amongst the highest in Europe, officially reached 25 per cent last Friday.