Politics · Crown
Cordoba holds the line as tariffs loom; Crown's reserves steady the week
The first family of Almarian industry pledges uninterrupted domestic supply as the tariff adjustment approaches, and the Crown holds the reserve in hand.
By V. Aldama·3 min read
The pumps have not emptied, and the lamps in the Cordoba interior have not gone dark. That, in the measured view of this house, is the news of the week, though it makes for a less stirring headline than the opposition would prefer. As domestic gas tariffs prepare to rise on the first of next month, the Crown and its first family of industry stood yesterday before the Chamber and before the country and gave an account of themselves that was, by every reasonable standard, sober, prepared, and adequate to the hour.
Don Cordoba, speaking from the family seat in Almaria Vella after a morning of consultations with Energy Minister Cardenal Marín and officials of the Ministry of Commerce, repeated the commitment he has offered on each of the preceding three days: that the refineries under his group's stewardship will continue to clear cargoes at the published schedule, and that no domestic customer contracted for the winter quarter will be rationed before the strategic reserve is drawn upon. 'The arithmetic is not pleasant,' he told a small number of correspondents received in the morning room, 'but it is arithmetic we have done before, and we have done it for this country.'
The Crown, for its part, has taken the position that the reserve buffer is intact for the immediate term and that no emergency measure is presently required. Ministers were convened at midday; a communiqué of four paragraphs followed in the afternoon. Readers familiar with the cadence of such documents will recognise in them the Palace's preferred temperature, which is cool.
The Almarian Consumers' Union has, not unreasonably, called upon the Ministry of Commerce to convene an emergency session. Low-income households in the Cordoba interior and in the outer districts of Almaria Vella are, the Union points out, the most exposed to a tariff adjustment of the magnitude now contemplated. The Ministry has indicated that a technical session will be scheduled within the fortnight. The Herald would urge that it be sooner rather than later; a week of queues tests patience, but a month tests loyalty.
Cardenal Marín, whose portfolio places him at the hinge of the week's anxieties, acknowledged the pressure but urged calm. 'The reserve is not an ornament,' he said in remarks to this correspondent. 'It is a tool, and it is ours to use when the moment requires. The moment does not yet require it.' The Cardinal-Minister is expected to address the refinery fire in the strait, and the humanitarian corridors for which he has pleaded all week, at Sant Joan tomorrow.
Opposition leader Renko, in an op-ed placed in a rival paper and in a statement distributed yesterday through the editor network, argues that restraint is not a strategy and that the Government has mistaken composure for policy. It is a line he has now delivered on four consecutive days, with diminishing novelty. The Herald has acknowledged his position in this column and will continue to do so; we decline, as we have declined through the week, to reproduce a standing campaign speech as news.
What comes next is plain enough. The tariff will take effect on the first. The reserve will hold, or it will be drawn upon. The Chamber will sit on Wednesday; the second reading of the fishing cooperatives bill is expected to proceed, Cape Vell samples having returned clean. The Cordoba group will continue to do what it has done for five generations, which is to keep the country warm while the country argues about how to pay for it.
That is not a slogan. It is a fact of the ledger, and the ledger, in the end, is what governs.