Book your ticket to happiness with Sun Express Airlines. Welcome to the Spike Podcast, I'm Ella Wheeler, Assistant Editor at Spiked and today I'm Ella Wheelen, assistant editor at Spiked, and today I talk to Brendan O'Neill about the

Catalonian Referendum, Kevin Yule about the calls for gun controls after the shooting

in Las Vegas, and Adrian Hart about

whether the claims of hate crime spikes in schools is based on fact or fiction. Many of us have been watching with anger videos of the brutal police response to the

Catalonian referendum over the weekend. Police officers kicked voters, confiscated

ballot boxes, even pushed people down the stairs and jumped on them. The violence was quite incredible, and has been condemned by many people.

The Spanish government claims that the referendum was illegal and that it was proper to stop it from happening.

Does that sound familiar?

Now while the police weren't abusing Brexit voters in the street,

there are some similarities to be drawn between the refusal of democracy in Catalonia and our own problem with Brexit in the UK.

What's happening?

Is Spain's attack on democracy just the sharp end of a Europe-wide problem?

To discuss this, I spoke to Spikes editor Brendan O'Neill.

First of all, Brendan, can you get us up to speed? What is going on in Spain?

Nothing good is going on. It's almost as if Spain is falling apart and unraveling before our eyes.

So what happened was that the leaders of Catalonia, this kind of semi-autonomous region,

last weekend they carried out a independence referendum and they said that people should have the choice of whether Catalonia splits from Spain and becomes his own independent little state-let. And the Spanish government, the Midred government said this referendum was unacceptable,

it was illegal, it was unacceptable under the Constitution of Spain, which says that Spain is a

complete country and cannot be broken apart. That's what the actual Constitution of

1978 says. So there was a conflict and the Spanish police went to Catalonia to prevent the

referendum from taking place. There were extraordinary violent scenes, the like of

which we haven't seen in Europe for quite a long time,

...