Blogoir

Here is my piece over at Commentator on Drone Warfare, beginning with exploding the tragic George Monbiot and proceeding thusly:

Not that long ago Europe’s parents and grandparents were being blown to bits in their tens of thousands by bombs simply dropped from planes in the general direction of the target. The sheer precision of modern weapons has saved countless more innocent lives caught up in armed conflict than, alas, still get taken.

One perverse result of this development is to give new life to Stalin’s reputed infamous observation that “the death of one man is a tragedy, the death of millions is a statistic”. Precisely because so few people are now killed in modern warfare, the numbers of those who die shrink to the point where individual deaths of unarmed civilians can be ‘personalised’, and attacks on specific military targets start to look more like ‘assassinations’ or common law murder than war. At what point can (or should) we start to think about war and the legal parameters of it completely differently?

...

The Guardianistas’ Monbiotish pronouncements on human solidarity and existential Gaian interconnectedness in, for example, the ‘climate change’ or development aid contexts seem to evaporate when it comes to defence questions. Yet the issues are exactly the same.

Just as the planet can be seen as a single organism worthy of collective respect, so too can the technical infrastructure which supports human life these days. No country in the world can survive in any meaningful sense without some reliance on the networks of real-life equipment (power-generators, communications cables, data storage computers) by which things get done and new inventions happen. Who protects those facilities?

Classic international law tells us that, in principle, it is for each state to protect those facilities sited on its own territory. But what if a state is too weak to do that, and/or allows terrorists and sophisticated criminals to use its territory as a base for plotting attacks on key installations in other countries?

If a country and its citizens want to enjoy the manifold benefits of belonging the modern global networked space, do they in turn have to accept an implicit obligation to take responsibility for defending those networks pro-actively and vigorously against those who, for whatever reason, want to wreck it? And if they can’t or won’t take the action needed to deal with such people, can they complain if other powers acting under a new version of the doctrine of collective self-defence step in to do that job instead?

Interventions need not be anything so crass as invading with huge numbers of soldiers. Rather the best available tools can be found to neutralise these threats from afar, including swarms of hi-tech drones that identify an enemy, watch the enemy’s movements to minimise the risks of collateral injuries – and pounce.

That sort of remote-controlled intervention in principle offers the most moral, controlled, restrained and proportionate expression of legitimate military self-defence the human race has ever seen. Which, of course, does not make it perfect or fool-proof. Or wise.

Several good comments - Commentator attracts a more, shall we say, thoughtful class of commenter than Daily Telegraph blogs.

My piece about the latest Summit over at Daily Telegraph blogs is up, prompting the usual vivid comments from Daily Telegraph readers:

This piece by Crawford simply comes across as Civil Service gobbeldy-gook and demonstrates that he's no understanding of any of this. Is that why the Civil Service seem to be so utterly useless when negotiating with their counterparts in other EU countries ?

After all these years, after all these betrayals, after all the secret signings of treaties in darkened closets, after all the lies, the deceit, the obsequious kow towing and u-turns you and others STILL think it's down to ignorance, incompetence and cock up theory?

We often wonder why countries wish to join the Euro (beyond Dan Hannan’s point that the “club” is highly attractive to any country’s senior politicians). However, why are existing EZ countries so keen that other dissimilar and unconverged economies must share their currency. It’s like the Augean stable cleaner, up to his knees in the smelly stuff, inviting a fresh herd of elephant into a couple of vacant stalls.

Here's me:

The basic problem for the UK is that the tortuous manoeuvres required to keep the eurozone afloat can impact on us in different ways. In general it suits us if most of the rest of the European Union countries share a viable single currency. Plus if it crashed we would export less to the rest of Europe and end up worse off.

However, the point of the Prime Minister’s insistence (the "veto") that the rescue arrangements take place outside the existing EU Treaty structure was not about that. He wanted to try to establish some sort of legal firebreak, so that measures and norms aimed at propping up the eurozone could not automatically be applied to us if the Commission and/or European Parliament and/or European Court of Justice so decided.

Where are we now after the attempt by EU leaders to calm things down? In a murky but more or less tolerable position. The eurozoners must try to sort out their business via a new Treaty which is not part of the formal EU Treaty structure, albeit an expression of the "enhanced cooperation" provisions which those Treaties allow.

David Cameron has agreed to allow the European Court of Justice to support enforcement of the new Treaty’s rules (no doubt because he wants to help the eurozone reform itself, and any weak discipline is better than none). But quite how far – if at all – any ECJ decisions under that arrangement might (a) read across directly to EU Treaty interpretations, (b) to the UK’s disadvantage remains to be seen...

Plus I added a bit on Poland:

We peer at such EU Summits from our foggy offshore position. But spare a thought for the Poles, whose Foreign Minister Radek Sikorski delivered the mother of all pro-EU federalism speeches in Berlin back in November. The Poles are not yet in the eurozone but (under current management) insist they want to join it. Hence, question: how far should countries not yet in the eurozone but in the queue to join it have a say in eurozone reforms which will impact on them?

The problem here is that the more countries have such a say, the harder it becomes to get things agreed and implemented. Poland has the fastest growing EU economy but its total GDP represents only some 5% of the combined GDPs of the five largest eurozone members. So while the Germans and French will have welcomed the pro-EU noises coming from Warsaw, what they really need is Poland to be "realistic" about its weight in the greater scheme of tough decisions needed.

This explains why time-wasting new configurations for eurozone meetings have had to be agreed, to allow the 17 current eurozone countries to get on with it while trying to allow eurozone wannabes (led by Poland) some sort of input now and again. The Poles gloomily must accept that the key issues will be decided at 17, ie when they’re not there.

Conclusion?

The current core EU leaders are like those BUgs Bunny cartoon characters who reach the edge of the cliffs and keep striding determinedly out into thin air, only to realise in total panic that not much is supporting them. Their current efforts to flail their way back to solid ground are certainly impressive. But will they succeed?

My piece about the latest Summit over at Daily Telegraph blogs is up, prompting the usual vivid comments from Daily Telegraph readers:

This piece by Crawford simply comes across as Civil Service gobbeldy-gook and demonstrates that he's no understanding of any of this. Is that why the Civil Service seem to be so utterly useless when negotiating with their counterparts in other EU countries ?

After all these years, after all these betrayals, after all the secret signings of treaties in darkened closets, after all the lies, the deceit, the obsequious kow towing and u-turns you and others STILL think it's down to ignorance, incompetence and cock up theory?

We often wonder why countries wish to join the Euro (beyond Dan Hannan’s point that the “club” is highly attractive to any country’s senior politicians). However, why are existing EZ countries so keen that other dissimilar and unconverged economies must share their currency. It’s like the Augean stable cleaner, up to his knees in the smelly stuff, inviting a fresh herd of elephant into a couple of vacant stalls.

Here's me:

The basic problem for the UK is that the tortuous manoeuvres required to keep the eurozone afloat can impact on us in different ways. In general it suits us if most of the rest of the European Union countries share a viable single currency. Plus if it crashed we would export less to the rest of Europe and end up worse off.

However, the point of the Prime Minister’s insistence (the "veto") that the rescue arrangements take place outside the existing EU Treaty structure was not about that. He wanted to try to establish some sort of legal firebreak, so that measures and norms aimed at propping up the eurozone could not automatically be applied to us if the Commission and/or European Parliament and/or European Court of Justice so decided.

Where are we now after the attempt by EU leaders to calm things down? In a murky but more or less tolerable position. The eurozoners must try to sort out their business via a new Treaty which is not part of the formal EU Treaty structure, albeit an expression of the "enhanced cooperation" provisions which those Treaties allow.

David Cameron has agreed to allow the European Court of Justice to support enforcement of the new Treaty’s rules (no doubt because he wants to help the eurozone reform itself, and any weak discipline is better than none). But quite how far – if at all – any ECJ decisions under that arrangement might (a) read across directly to EU Treaty interpretations, (b) to the UK’s disadvantage remains to be seen...

Plus I added a bit on Poland:

We peer at such EU Summits from our foggy offshore position. But spare a thought for the Poles, whose Foreign Minister Radek Sikorski delivered the mother of all pro-EU federalism speeches in Berlin back in November. The Poles are not yet in the eurozone but (under current management) insist they want to join it. Hence, question: how far should countries not yet in the eurozone but in the queue to join it have a say in eurozone reforms which will impact on them?

The problem here is that the more countries have such a say, the harder it becomes to get things agreed and implemented. Poland has the fastest growing EU economy but its total GDP represents only some 5% of the combined GDPs of the five largest eurozone members. So while the Germans and French will have welcomed the pro-EU noises coming from Warsaw, what they really need is Poland to be "realistic" about its weight in the greater scheme of tough decisions needed.

This explains why time-wasting new configurations for eurozone meetings have had to be agreed, to allow the 17 current eurozone countries to get on with it while trying to allow eurozone wannabes (led by Poland) some sort of input now and again. The Poles gloomily must accept that the key issues will be decided at 17, ie when they’re not there.

Conclusion?

The current core EU leaders are like those BUgs Bunny cartoon characters who reach the edge of the cliffs and keep striding determinedly out into thin air, only to realise in total panic that not much is supporting them. Their current efforts to flail their way back to solid ground are certainly impressive. But will they succeed?

Craig Murray and I have a fleeting moment of agreement, rather like ships sailing in opposite directions who pass and exchange friendly waves.

He commented on my earlier piece about Libya and MI6, responding to another reader:

Your second point rests on the premiss that if government ministers approved something, then it was legal. That is simply not true. A previous government may have done something, and may even have briefed their successors about it. if it were illegal, nothing in that means it should not subsequently be the subject of criminal investigation. Theoretically, the current government has no role in either encouraging or stopping the criminal investigation - it is quite rightly a matter for the police and CPS.

However, a new development arises. Two Libyans are launching civil actions in the English courts against my old colleague and good friend Sir Mark Allen, over the circumstances under which they were subject to 'rendition' to Tripoli and subsequent abuse by the Gaddafi regime. The Guardian:

Saadi was detained in Hong Kong in 2004 and then forced on to a plane to Tripoli with his wife and four children in an operation that MI6 allegedly mounted in co-operation with Koussa, who was Gaddafi's intelligence chief at the time. Saadi says he suffered years of torture.

Belhaj was detained in Bangkok along with his pregnant wife after an MI6 tipoff and was allegedly tortured by American agents for several days before being flown to Tripoli, where he says he was tortured and detained for several years. His wife was detained for several months.

The issue here is not any claim that MI6/HMG engaged in torture. Rather it is that MI6/HMG are said to have been 'complicit' in torture in Libya of certain Libyans by certain other Libyans. Which raises the question: what does complicity mean?

Back in March 2010 in an earlier exchange with Craig I looked at precisely this question. Craig and other maximalists insist that even to possess information which is suspected as having come from torture amounts to 'complicity'. That position, as the House of Lords found in 2005, is incorrect as a matter of law (and common sense):

Very (very) broadly speaking, I conclude from this judgment that the the top legal body in the UK drew at least three important conclusions:

• That it may be acceptable for the state's executive authorities to receive/acquire and use information which they know or think may have been derived from torture, if they believe that there is a clear public interest in doing so (eg saving lives)
• But it is not acceptable for the judicial authorities (courts and tribunals) to hear and use such evidence in reaching conclusions directly affecting the rights of individuals
• If seemingly well-founded allegations are made that evidence has been or may have been produced by torture, the court/tribunal has to consider most carefully how to deal with that evidence, but is not bound to conduct an exhaustive investigation of the origin of the evidence to reach a final view as that would just not be possible

These conclusions do not apply directly to the current emerging case, namely where HMG allegedly took action leading to Libyans being returned to Libya where they say they ended up being mistreated.

The problem here is that any secret 'rendition' by us or even a contribution to secret rendition by others is likely to have been endorsed by Ministers, either specifically or as a general rule. So to single out one civil servant for litigation is mischievous if not malevolent.

Second, the whole case turns on the idea that 'complicity' can be stretched far beyond any immediate link to maltreatment. Any abuse or torture was not committed by HMG or its officials. Is it really fair to make us legally responsible for horrors committed by others far away?

Even if you think that it is reasonable to do so on the moral level, you need to draw a line somewhere and say that the actions alleged were too 'remote' to amount to complicity. Under what principle should the line be drawn in specific cases? What balancing factors should be taken into account?

What if our attempts to bring under control Gaddafi's WMD have hit the rocks and it looks like we need to make some 'minor' concessions to Gaddafi's entourage to get things restarted? How do we even begin to weigh up the possibility of abuse of two individuals with the possible dangers to millions if the WMD are not secured asap? 

This leads us back to the core policy dilemma, namely how to deal with wicked regimes? Thus:

Above all, if you engage with dirty people, how to avoid some of their dirt ending up on you? The promise of Engagement is that it offers the hope of slowly but surely changing things for the better; the danger is that while you are doing that, the key leaders of the regime in fact get far richer and learn how to be oppressive in new, cleverer ways.

So in the Libya case. The stupid/wicked/naive Brits trained the Libyan security forces! Of course we did: if you want to set in motion a process of reform and enlightenment in such regressive institutions, what else to do?

Think about what this means in practice. If the Libyan secret police are known torturers, you will be training them while their torturing ways continue. Even if the total amount of Libyan torture declines sharply as a direct result of Libyans cleaning up their act during the wider normalisation process, your trainers in one way or the other will be helping a torturing regime be more efficient.

Yet without outside democratic engagement (and the high-level civilisational rewards which rightly flow to the regime for behaving in a less extreme way) the chances of reducing Libyan torture at all (and thereby opening some small new space for opposition trends) are hugely reduced...

This nasty, bleak, lonely policy and moral frontier was where Mark Allen and his colleagues were operating. If the way is opened to sue them for outcomes which were far from ideal if not awful, who is going to be ready to do this sort of fundamentally important work?

The issue here is simple. Not what the 'right' choice is when you are dealing with a regime like Gaddafi's. There isn't one.

Rather it is 'who decides?'.

We seem to be ending up in the absurd position that sanctimonious lawyers and unelected judges far from the operational and policy realities of such questions are seen as more 'responsible' than elected politicians and civil servants who are elected to do our dirty work while operating to arguably the highest standards of public probity in human history.

Yes, judges have the benefit of detachment. And yes, Ministers and officials can get so wrapped up in what they are doing that serious errors get made. But this is one where the best people to judge are voters, not lawyers.

The other day we had the pleasure of meeting senior colleagues at Edelman London, part of the global team who prepare the annual Edelman Trust Barometer. The online survey aims explicitly at educated people round the world who follow current affairs.

This year's survey concluded that trust in governments had suffered a sharp erosion in the past year, a finding that is both unsurprising and (as far as it goes) welcome. Yet it also suggested (perversely) that people wanted more government action in the regulatory field. Here's a snapshot of the results as recorded by the BBC.

Trust in government stayed high in several countries including China (perhaps because people there 'trust' the authorities to watch the replies in online surveys like this one?) yet in China trust in NGOs had leaped - NGOs there seen as an emerging force for alternative views?

Trust in business had also declined. Not surprisingly perhaps, given what is going on.

Such surveys are more interesting and indicative than strictly scientific. Yet this one coincides with what we might expect. Basically, as people round the world get access to new cheap IT, the emerging energy of networks is disrupting the established power and effectiveness (and legitimacy) of hierarchies. The rate at which government is unable to cope is accelerating: new laws and policies can be out of date or rendered irrelevant before they are promulgated.

Plus the Tower of Babelisation represented by 'social media' makes it all worse - facts, rumours and complaints all appear and circulate at startling speed, creating strange echo chambers in which truth, sense or nonsense alike are amplified to a meaningless crescendo. Governments are unnerved by this clamour and start to look for instant results. See the latest shameful row over RBS bonuses in the UK, where the government seem to have bowed to 'public opinion' and pressed a private citizen not to enjoy the bonus he is entitled to under his contract.

People in all countries sense this confusion and look to other ways to get things done, while hankering after greater certainty or order which (they still think) only government can provide. Examples in all directions: mainly incoherent, such as the creepy collectivist demands of assorted 'Occupy' tendencies.

One of the ideas which the survey throws up is the proposition that we need to move away from (rigid) Rules towards (more flexible) Principles or Standards. But how?

Look at the Eurozone drama unfolding once again today, as I type. The EU leaders are scrambling to come up with even more rules, in the shape of a brand new treaty which is intended to impose strict requirements on errant member states. Yet we all know that the new rules are unlikely to be enforceable, and new standards are unlikely to be respected when things get difficult. No-one in power dares suggest that the EU structure as currently configured is itself the main problem. Instead they press their leaking euro-canoe on towards the deeper faster rapids, proclaiming that that is the only sensible thing to do.

Trust in fact is what is wrong with the Eurozone. The Germans conclude that (say) the Greek government can not be trusted to do what is right and so must give way to EU-imposed technocrats. The Greeks (not unreasonably) think that they'll get stiffed by such a procedure which is designed to prop up German, French and other over-stretched banks.

Meanwhile the world peruses this unseemly flailing around and concludes that a bickering and demographically declining Europe can not wholly be trusted to repay money it has borrowed, hence imposes higher interest rates to help cover the risk.

Trust, in short, is simply another way of looking at Confidence. And as the Edelman 2012 survey suggests, it is unsurprising that global popular confidence in 'government' is declining - but not easy to work out what sensibly might be done about it.

Do any long-standing readers remember this?

Here is my own Grand Unifying Theory of Politics.

The core question of politics and economics is Trust. More specifically, under what circumstances can and should one trust strangers?

The greater the ambient level of trust in any given social space, the easier it is to do things quickly and well. People who scarcely know each other or who have never even met can strike sophisticated deals, knowing (a) that other partners are likely to be reliable, and (b) that if things go wrong the local state institutions will honestly help sort out the problem.

Without Trust of this sort, personal and organizational horizons shrink. Extended family networks and associated corruption thrive as the best way of dealing with the trust problem.

Or one trusts primarily members of one's own group/clan/religion/community. And assumes that members of other groups/clans/religions/communities are doing the same, so they are not to be trusted too far since their primary loyalty (like one's own) is not to a fair, neutral process.

All this is massively obvious across the former Yugoslavia space. Political leaders must represent 'their' national communities first and foremost if they are to get elected; voters distrust other communities and make a mainly ethnic/national choice as a form of political fire insurance.

Even in the UK where there is no serious complaint about the intrinsic fairness of the legal system and Trust is at civilizationally high levels, many Scots want a different political structure, viz some sort of independence from England. Likewise Quebec, Kurds, Chechens and countless other examples. The Israeli/Palestinian problem seems capable of being settled only on an ethno-national basis.

Thus the so-called 'nation-state' turns out to be a sophisticated device for enabling trust to operate, often at much higher levels of population. This has created conditions for the surge of economic growth and creativity seen around much of the globe over the past couple of centuries. Greater attention to this fundamental trust issue would pay huge dividends in the international development industry. 

Our success here in Europe (and the ruinous experience of the two World Wars where certain national ambitions ran amok ) has brought us to think that there is a new 'higher' stage of development.

The European Union is a unique example of an attempt to create a wider context of trust at a supra-national level. But it too risks making a fundamental blunder by trying to insist on, or sneakily nudge people towards, a new 'European' uber-identity which supersedes supposedly drearily parochial 'national' identities... 

True then. Even truer today.

 

 

 

Here is my new Daily Telegraph blog piece comparing the problems of the Eurozone with the fates of the USSR and former Yugoslavia.

In those two cases (but for very different reasons) the Centre had became the problem and duly crashed, whereas in the case of the Eurozone the majority of EU states are struggling to hold the Centre (ie Eurozone) together, even at stunning cost.

This one even has added Literature:

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

You know the sinking feeling when you hear some precious moments of music from Mozart or Shostakovich used to support a TV ad or, horror of horrors, served up in a lift as "background music". Beauty has been melted down, turned into a trinket of cliché.

This has happened to the famous poem The Second Coming by W B Yeats. So vivid is the imagery and somehow so suited to our dismal times, his great lines pop up all over the place and start to sound trite.

But you have to applaud Mr Yeats’s prescience in sharing with us his poetic yet trenchant thoughts on the eurozone, and in particular the idea that “the centre cannot hold". Indeed, some people are now wondering whether the eurozone will go the same way as the Soviet Union or even the former Yugoslavia, and abruptly disintegrate...

... The problem is that keeping the Centre going also incurs unfathomable costs. EU capitals squabble furiously as they try to distribute these costs away from themselves and on to all the others. The world's markets observe this unseemly spectacle and conclude that they might be wise to call for higher interest rates to park their money in such a neurotic economic space.

No one can tell how this drama will play itself out. It's all very well the eurozone's leaders demanding that the EU Centre be held at almost any cost. Those costs are being dumped on European taxpayers who, sooner or later, are likely to insist that enough is enough. Then what?

While you’re mulling over that question, read this scarifying account of Greece’s looming deadlines. Then run out to buy tinned food.

What rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Brussels to be born?

Note the post-modern irony (mis)use of the word scarifying.

In due course I'll need to share thoughts on the lessons of the break-up of the USSR for Scottish independence (or not).

In the meantime, I need to recover form two hours of blather from a suave, persistent but ultimately unsuccessful solar panels salesman.

 

Part of the problem facing the Eurozoners as they struggle to convince global markets that all is under control so DON'T PANIC is identifying what exactly is the issue which needs solving. After all, they might make a bad situation worse by misdiagnosing what needs to be done.

Views on this differ. In the interests of fair play, here is a studious article (pdf) by C Fred Bergsten and Jacob Funk Kirkegaard which argues that the Eurozone is heading for the right outcome (ie 'comprehensive economic and monetary union') by the crafty ploy of (in effect) eliminating all the wrong ones:

It is imperative to understand that it is not the primary purpose of the ECB, as a political actor, to end market anxieties and thus the euro area crisis as soon as possible. It is instead focused on achieving its priority goals of getting government leaders to fundamentally reform the euro area institutions and structurally overhaul many euro area economies.

Frankfurt cannot directly compel democratically elected European leaders to comply with its wishes but it can refuse to implement a “crisis bazooka” and thereby permit the euro area crisis to continue to put pressure on them to act. A famous American politician has said that “no crisis should be wasted” and the ECB is implementing such a strategy resolutely.

The authors point out that because there is no willingness to allow centralised EU-wide taxation, other arrangements are needed and are edging towards being created, albeit by different EU leaders playing dangerous games of bluff to help get the best deal for their corner:

The reality in the euro area is that, for the foreseeable future and unlike in the United States, the overwhelming majority of government taxation and spending will continue to reside at the member state level for reasons of political legitimacy. Only a minor part will be pooled at the supra-national level. Restricting this spending via a new fiscal compact is consequently the only pragmatic route for now, leaving other aspects of euro area fiscal integration to the future...

The Eurozoners are having to look to the IMF for huge support. But that's OK:

Euro area governments will have successfully shifted part of the costs of any future financial rescues onto the rest of the world. The rest of the world will of course extract a suitable price from the euro area for this service in the form of European political concessions in other policy areas. This could, for instance, be a good time to demand that the euro area consolidate its representation on the IMF board to a single seat and accelerate the transfer of its quota shares to the financially contributing emerging markets...

Basically, their argument goes, they'll have to do what it takes to keep the Eurozone afloat as all the alternatives are far worse. And the record so far shows that despite all the uncertainty and some poor decisions along the way, the trend is in that direction. 

Read the piece as a whole. If you are a non-expert, it makes an impressive case.

So far so optimistic.

Then there's John Mauldin of Thoughts from the Frontline, whose wonderful economics newsletters are free. Here are some of his latest observations:

For most of the past two years, European leaders have tried to deal with the problems as though they were short-term liquidity problems: "If we just find the money to buy some more Greek bonds, then Greece can figure out how to solve its problems and then pay us back. Given enough time, the problem can get solved."

They have now arrived at the understanding that it this not a short-term problem. Rather, it's a solvency problem of the various governments, which of course creates a solvency problem for their banks. They are now addressing the problem of solvency and providing capital until such time as certain countries can get their budgets under control and the bond market sees fit to provide the capital they need.

But they are completely ignoring the third and largest problem, and that is massive trade imbalances. Germany exports products to the peripheral European countries, which run trade deficits. As I have shown in several letters, a country cannot reduce private-sector leverage, reduce public-sector leverage and deficits (balance its budget), and run a trade deficit all at the same time. That is simple, unavoidable math, based on 400 years of accounting understanding. Ultimately, there must be a trade surplus if leverage and debt are to be reduced...

Greece cannot print its own money, so unless it leaves the Eurozone, it's stuck. They can default on their debt, but that means they are shut out of the bond market for some period of time. That would force them to make the spending cuts they are now resisting, as they would simply not have enough money to pay their bills.

Even with a 100% haircut they're looking at a shorter but very real depression. And because no one will sell them products they need, like energy and food and medicine, unless they can sell or trade something in return (that trade-deficit problem), they will be forced to change their lifestyles. Wages must drop or productivity rise to be competitive with northern Europe. And that differential is about 30%. I am not certain, as I have not been to Greece in a long time, but my bet is, you won't find many Greeks who think they are overpaid by 30%.

But that is what the market is going to say. And that is the third problem, which Europe is not addressing. Germany and the northern tier are simply more productive than the Southern periphery. (With the possible exception of Northern Italy, but Italy all gets lumped together, which is why many Northern Italians want to be their own country and not have to pay taxes that go to Southern Italy. I am not taking sides, just observing what we read in the papers.) Until Germany consumes more from the peripheral countries or the peripheral countries become more productive, the imbalance will not allow a positive solution...

Sign up to his work to get regular bracing top-ups.

So there it is. Two contrasting styles of beautiful writing, and two very different and clever/informed views on what is happening.

The two views of course may be compatible. A stronger and even coherent Eurozone may emerge from this fiasco - if some countries whose debts are simply unmanageable are paid off to leave it?

A reader kindly points me in the direction of a blog written by Denis MacEoin which aims to portray Israel in a fair (and therefore favourable) light.

Not least in this powerful letter he has sent to the Roman Catholic Archbishop of Westminster, which offers the worthy prelate some food for thought after the Archbishop offered some prayers for 50 families facing 'expropriation'of their land by the Israeli authorities:

Of all the people in the world, you single out 50 Christian families in Beit Jala and expect those who hear you to recoil, cut to the heart by the horrors of that situation. You speak as if the world had no greater shadow to offer.

Thousands have died and are dying in neighbouring Syria, but that gets no mention from you. An entire population is repressed and religious minorities are persecuted in Iran and you say nothing. Muslims who convert to Christianity in Pakistan, Afghanistan and elsewhere are put to death, yet you are silent.

In Egypt, Coptic Christians are killed and persecuted and their churches are destroyed, yet you cannot find a sentence in which to condemn it. Christians are not allowed to possess Bibles or to worship or seek converts in Saudi Arabia, yet your voice is not raised.

Christians are murdered and their churches burned to the ground in Nigeria, but I do not hear your voice. Yet Muslims are free to worship, open schools, have their own courts, and missionize in every Western country, yet you do not point out the anomaly...

... In 1949, one year after Israel was founded, the country’s Christian population numbered 34,000 souls. That figure has grown by 345 percent. It is still growing. Between 1995 and 2007, Israeli Christians grew from 120,600 to 151,600, representing a growth rate of 25 percent. In fact, the Christian growth rate outpaced the Jewish growth in Israel in the same period.

It is not a coincidence that Christians thrive in the only non-Muslim state in the Middle East and diminish in all the Muslim states...

I liked this concluding passage which gets towards roughly what I think about the whole Arab/Israeli business, knowing so little professionally about it:

Your fifty families – if, indeed, there are fifty families – will, at worst, face a legal battle, knowing they will be vindicated if their claims are valid. Israel will not set their homes alight, nor gun them down, nor desecrate their churches nor violate their priests nor execute their converts. It will not do to them what the Muslims of Egypt have done in a long and systematic persecution. It will not do to them what the Taliban have done to Christians in Afghanistan and Pakistan. It will not intimidate or hector or torture or kill them. It’s time this was recognized, especially by a leading churchman like yourself.

There is indeed something baffling or creepy if not bizarre about the way seemingly normal people at Western dinner parties abruptly start to rave against Israel and ignore far worse and far bigger abuses up the road in Syria and other Arab/Muslim countries.

Read the whole thing, and then have a look round Denis' fine blog. He is not prolific, but his work hits heavy targets with unerring accuracy.

As you all know, I happen to be a fan of what the Blair government and MI6 did to help bring Gaddafi back towards what passes for the mainstream of civilisation in that part of the world, by helping negotiate the end of his elaborate MWD programmes in return for 'normalisation'.

But did MI6 go beyond some sort of unspoken and perhaps not obvious line by getting a bit too close to the Gaddafi regime thereafter? To the point of helping hand over to Libya some regime opponents, either suspecting that they might be mistreated back in Tripoli, or not bothering to think about that too much?

I have no idea. But a new wearying police investigation begins.

Something about all this is not quite right. Above all, I find it hard to imagine a pretty far-reaching step like that being taken without some sort of explicit political clearance. So when are the police going to start rummaging through the papers submitted to T Blair, J Straw and other Labour politicians leading or close to the policy at the time? 

As readers know, assorted Crawfs went to a Turkish resort for a short holiday last year. The signs of feverish economic activity were there to be seen on the way from the airport - all sorts of buildings and other structures popping up in a madcap way.

Turkey is booming! Or is it?

I have not linked to the ever-gloomy Spengler for a while, but here he is with some unnerving graphs and accompanying analysis indicating that Turkey too has borrowed too much, too unwisely:

Erdogan has the weirdest economic views of any serving head of government. He justified the credit bubble on religious grounds, pledging repeatedly to cut the "real" interest rate (the cost of interest minus the inflation rate) to zero.

"We aim to cut the real interest rate in the long run, so people will increase their incomes through working, not through interest," he said last April. "Eventually we aim to equalize the interest rate and inflation rate."

Erdoğan believes that this would fulfill the Islamic injunction against lending for interest; if the real interest rate is zero, he seems to think, the sharia ban on interest is fulfilled de facto. In order words, Turkey provided nearly free money to bank customers. Erdogan's program set in motion a series of perverse effects. One is a sharp fall in the exchange rate...

... The result is a vicious cycle: excess credit creation weakens the currency, forcing the central bank to put up interest rates; higher interest rates push up the cost of debt service for Turkish borrowers; Turkish banks lend more money to their customers to finance the higher interest costs, so that credit keeps expanding and the currency keeps weakening.

Turkish banks continue to increase lending at a 40% annual rate, but most of the new lending will finance interest payments on the old loans.
Fine. Then what?

.

So, the same old story. Political leaders believing they can defy reality and gravity, combining with banks keen to cash in. Result? A fast emerging mess.

The notable feature of the apparently looming Turkish mess - as Spengler points out - is that the booming 'Turkish model' (ie a dynamic, modernising economy with strong Muslim features) was hailed for a while as the best outcome of the Arab Spring tendency. What if that model flops too? 

Spengler's view of what this means:

Now I predict that Turkey's economic crisis will undermine the stability of the Turkish state as well, leaving the Muslim world without a single enclave of stability from the Libyan-Algerian border to China's Xinjiang province...

 

 

One of the themes of this website is how our institutions and beliefs of all shapes and sizes are struggling to cope with the way new technology creates complexity at ever-soaring rates.

In other words, the faster our machines the faster they can do things and generate information, which in turn allows us to see new patterns and connections and (therefore) try to have 'smarter' policies. Which doesn't work because our policies are too slow anyway,  often out of date before they begin.

All of which, as we know, gives some advantages to small, fast, determined things who Keep things Simple (such as single-issue busybodies, terrorists, pirates, assorted Occupiers) over clunky big unwieldy things (such as the Eurozone, or even Democracy as currently constituted).

Here is a fabulous article by David Weinberger about what this means for science itself. Take a few minutes out from your busy day to read it and learn something:

The result of having access to all this data is a new science that is able to study not just "the characteristics of isolated parts of a cell or organism" (to quote Kitano) but properties that don't show up at the parts level. For example, one of the most remarkable characteristics of living organisms is that we're robust -- our bodies bounce back time and time again, until, of course, they don't.

Robustness is a property of a system, not of its individual elements, some of which may be nonrobust and, like ants protecting their queen, may "sacrifice themselves" so that the system overall can survive. In fact, life itself is a property of a system.

However, just as we realise that we can't work out what is happening at the most basic level of our own bodies, governments strain to micro-manage almost anything that moves. This way of running things is philosophically doomed to fail, and failing it is around the world.

Hayek was right. Capitalism and free markets are essentially information networks, and need to be treated respectfully as such. This in turn shows why the Eurozone is wobbling. Hundreds of millions of people are now able to examine its deepest practical and moral foundations and are finding them badly designed.

In short, the Eurozone system as a metaphor for the 'Western Social Model' is over-complex. But under-robust. It's science, see?.

This is how 2011 and our civil liberties limp to an end. With a supposedly arty chair in a shop in Lewes being accused of falling foul of the Obscene Publications Act.

Look at what is going on here.

A woman designer of this tedious piece of furniture has decided to adorn it with naked women taken from old Playboy magazines. So much for the feminist argument that such images 'degrade' women - even trendy women designers like them, to the point of wanting male and female buttocks to crush down upon them!

But lo!, a 'member of the public' saw the chair in the shop window - and complained to the police!

Worse. The police did not tell the member of the public to get a life. They moved into action.

Think about that. You're walking along past the shops in earnest, self-important, middle-class little Lewes, and you see something you don't like. You are not content to shrug and put it all down to living in a free society. Nor is it enough to walk on and not buy the stupid chair. You don't want the possible embarrassment of going into the shop to argue with the shopkeeper. So you outsource all responsibility and urge ... the state to act.

Then the state acts. The police take this stupid request seriously enough to go along, no doubt keen on looking at the chair themselves. They rummage around in their modest brains and find something which covers the case (they think), namely the 1959 Obscene Publications Act.

No matter that the act is intended to cover (a) 'obscene' and (b) 'publications', neither of which obviously apply in this case. The shop was then 'politely' asked (by whom) to remove the chair from the shop window. Which, according to the Sun, was done. What would have happened if the shopkeeper had 'politely' refused, asking the police to get out of the shop and mind their own damn business?

Is this a stunning example of crass state oppression, nothing being too small or fatuous to avoid heavy-handed police intervention?

Or is it even worse, namely the state asserting to itself the right to lean upon anyone when someone claims to be 'offended' or insulted? Where exactly is free speech in that?

Or is it all these things plus jolly British seasonal eccentricity, and a chance for the bored policepersons of Lewes to get away from filling in forms and ogle a chair with boobs..?

2011 has exhausted its possibilities. Next year, please. 

Here is my latest article at DIPLOMAT magazine on the ever-fascinating question of diplomatic and wider media technique in a confusing new world:

Once upon a time diplomats were rarely seen or heard in public. To do their vital work of privately communicating messages between national leaders they needed to be discreet, anonymous, detached, aloof, rarefied. In a word, invisible.

When I joined the Foreign Office in 1979 the rules on such things were clear and strict. UK-based diplomats would never appear in the British media: that was what Ministers were expected (and wanted) to do. Overseas it was slightly different. British diplomats had some discretion to respond to foreign media requests for interviews and statements, but when in doubt, they should check with the FCO News Department in London. No Foreign Minister wanted to have their breakfast ruined by opening the newspaper to find a sensational report of something unexpected or unwelcome proclaimed by an FCO official overseas.

Back then these limitations on diplomatic media appearances made sense: the media themselves were restricted. In Britain and elsewhere there were a tiny number of TV stations and relatively few newspapers. Official foreign policy pronouncements could – and should – be rationed accordingly to keep everything at a suitable level of sobriety.

This all changed. Along came new technology, CNN, the internet, Twitter and Facebook, a proliferation of TV channels available across the planet at any time of day or night, digital radio, blogging. A Tower of Babel. A tsunami of noisy words, comment, pseudo-analysis and even, now and again, some facts. The media are increasingly no longer something separate or ‘above’ the general public. The media are the general public.

Or the general public are the media...

With added free media presentation tips for getting messages out in this hubbub:

One basic lesson came through loud and clear when I trained new FCO diplomats. In a mock interview, one had to act the role of a British spokesman, the other an American spokesman. The young man tasked to pretend to be American was nervous. Yet when we played back the video, he was far more effective. In his nervousness he had said very little, but what he had said came across on the screen as conveying toughness and determination. By contrast his colleague who played the British spokesman had been relaxed and cheerful. Much too relaxed and cheerful: he came across as friendly but frivolous.

My heartfelt advice to any diplomat facing a TV or radio interview? Have only one or two (maximum three) points to get across. Sound positive and firm! Don’t feel obliged to answer the question: simply use the question as the springboard for conveying your core points, then stop.

Above all, keep it simple. The more you say – and above all the more you try to be clever – the more you open yourself up to a devastating jibe from the interviewer. Oh, and when the interview ends remember that the cameras may still be filming you until you’ve left the studio…

Eurozone problem addict? It doesn't get better than top US economist Martin Feldstein, who has the great advantage of having said right from the start that the project as conceived was unworkable if not dangerous.

Here he is explaining in brisk terms what went wrong, before moving on to say what could and should happen next:

Single currencies require all the countries in the monetary union to have the same monetary policy and the same basic interest rate, with interest rates differing among borrowers only due to perceived differences in credit risk. A single currency also means a fixed exchange rate within the monetary union and the same exchange rate relative to all other currencies, even when individual countries in the monetary union would benefit from changes in relative values.

Economists explained that the euro would therefore lead to greater fluctuations in output and employment, a much slower adjustment to declines in aggregate demand, and persistent trade imbalances between Europe and the rest of the world. Indeed, all these negative outcomes have occurred in recent years.

Here is why: when a county has its own monetary policy, it can respond to a decline in demand by lowering interest rates to stimulate economic activity. But the ECB must make monetary policy based on the overall condition of all the countries in the monetary union.

This creates a situation in which interest rates are too high in those countries with rising unemployment and too low in those countries with rapidly rising wages. And because of the large size of the German economy relative to others in Europe, the ECB's monetary policy must give greater weight to conditions in Germany in its decisions than it gives to conditions in other countries...

Before the monetary union was put in place, large fiscal deficits generally led to higher interest rates or declining exchange rates. These market signals acted as an automatic warning for countries to reduce their borrowing. The monetary union eliminated those market signals and precluded the higher cost of funds that would otherwise have limited household borrowing. The result was that countries borrowed too much and banks loaned too much on overpriced housing...

Powerful, smart, authoritative. Read the whole thing, before it vanishes behind a paywall in February...

One of the things I do on training courses aimed at telling people how to Write with Impact is to cite Shrek. Issues and Shrek are like onions. They have layers.

No piece of writing can address all the layers of any problem. The trick is to show awareness of other layers but focus on one or two of them to help the reader make sense of it all.

Likewise it is a good idea to take a single issue and use it to illustrate a wider point. Or to take a seemingly obscure but nonetheless interesting question and force it to the top of people's attention.

All these devices help achieve the basic rule of good (and therefore impactful) writing: if you want it to be read, make it readable.

One of the best examples from my own career came in early 2004, not long after I arrived in Warsaw from Belgrade. Poland was set to join the European Union. Colossal numbers of Poles were likely to start moving to and fro between Poland and the UK - we had decided to open our Labour market unconditionally, much to the utter disbelief of the Polish leadership.

Once those Poles started moving with the aim of getting richer faster, what would they get up to? I thought it worth analysing one possible source of income - illicit cigarettes.

Hence a telegram I sent to London warning them in very simple language that the UK's multi-billion pound problems with the informal cigarette market was about to get a whole lot worse overnight.

I did this by spelling out in the simplest possible terms the economics for the average Pole of informal cigarette-selling, even within legal limits.

This telegram wittily called Smoking Ants - Coming Our Way? caused a minor sensation in the Cabinet Office. Officials scrambled round to change the rules to limit the numbers of cigarettes which people from the new EU member states could bring into the UK duty-free.

And, thanks to the miracles of Freedom of Information, I am pleased to share this telegram with you today. The FCO cheekily cut out a line or two on the grounds that UK relations with Poland might be adversely affected(!). But otherwise it's just as I drafted it. A nice example (if I say so myself) of drawing senior attention to an unexpected new problem by delivering work written in a bold way which no-one can avoid reading.

Diplomatic Folly Note: look out for the amusing reference to 'Trilateral' at the end. That was a footling attempt by Tony Blair to set up an inner UK/France/Germany driving force within the EU, which collapsed in no time at all in the face of the obvious objections (not least those emanating from one S Berlusconi).

Thus:

SUBJECT: EU ENLARGEMENT: SMOKING ANTS, COMING OUR WAY?

 

SUMMARY

 

1. Incentives for Poles to make a reasonable living in the UK's dodgy cigarette business. Policy contradictions.

 

DETAIL

2. As a non-smoking connoisseur of Balkan tobacco activities I recently met the local BAT team to talk about regional cigarette smuggling. Some striking conclusions.

 

The Big Picture

 

3. BAT have studied tens of thousands of discarded cigarette packets. They conclude that some 70 billion cigarettes are sold legally in Poland every year, with a further 20 billion smoked "illegally" (ie sold outside the official excise structure and smuggled into Poland).

 

4. A good proportion of this illegal trade is conducted by an army of "ants", individuals who carry small quantities of cigarettes into Poland from points East. But up to 50% of the illegal cigarette business is well organised, involving hundreds of truckloads of cigarettes each containing up to 10 million "sticks". [redacted]

 

5. The emergence of this lucrative illegal trade can be traced readily back to 2000, when Poland pushed up excise duties. Until then almost all the 90 billion cigarettes smoked in Poland each

year were passing through normal procedures. Smuggling soared with these new higher duties.

 

6. Sharp price/tax/excise differentials as between Russia, Poland and Western Europe are set to continue. Currently a pack of cigarettes which costs 50 cents in Russia sells for 1.30 dollars in Poland and up to 8 dollars in the UK. These ratios will change somewhat in the coming years as Poland raises the effective price of a pack towards EU levels, thereby giving serious new local incentives to regional smugglers (one good truckload can generate a profit of 1.5 million dollars). BAT expect some 50 billion cigarettes per year to be smuggled from Russia to Western Europe; this generates a 5 billion dollar profit - more than double BAT's own global annual pre-tax profit. Implications for UK of EU Accession

 

7. BAT point out that as things stand every Polish citizen is allowed to bring legally into the UK 200 cigarettes a trip. But after accession this figure jumps to 3200 cigarettes per trip. A pack of Dunhill can be bought in Poland for about £1 and be sold in a UK pub for up to £3.00. Each Pole entering the UK can hope to make a quick profit on the cigarettes of £250 per trip, not to mention extra money by importing a few bottles of cheap vodka. With a return coach fare of £50 and monthly unemployment benefit here of about £80, it is not difficult for a poor Pole to work out what to do. Better to get involved with UK officialdom by filling in UK benefit forms, or make easy money sitting on a bus?

 

COMMENT

 

8. The scale of the illicit cigarette business caused by price/tax differentials as between the UK and continental Europe is obvious and well known. It is part of a global compound interest drama: as rich countries get richer, the absolute wealth we generate gives ever-growing and vast incentives for honest people and gangsters alike to "play the margins". The cigarette price effects of EU enlargement is more of the same, albeit a great deal more of the same. But the upstream consequences of this illegality for the region are considerable.

 

9. Our Policy contains Contradictions. HMCE/HMT are looking at reducing the amounts of cigarettes which accession nationals can bring into the UK. Meanwhile we and our EU partners laboriously try to "train border guards and customs officials" on the EU's Eastern Borders. But only a couple of truckloads of cigarettes inject more resources into corrupting these official structures than we are injecting into reforming them. The corrupted structures then can be exploited not only by cigarette smugglers but also by human traffickers, global drug dealers and even terrorists - serious security questions here.

 

10. The cost of all this is not on a scale to destabilise the whole of Polish society as has happened in Serbia, to the point of the assassination of the Prime Minister. But it is a serious and systemic obstacle to reform. Scope for a new, hard look (Trilateral or in another smaller group first?) at what else might be done on the strategic level?

 

 

 

Despite my wretched ankle accident in Nizhny Novgorod, my interest in things Russian is reanimated.

Part of the fascination with Russia lies in the baffling issue of how in fact a society moves from rigid oppressive stupidity to something far more flexible, democratic and smart.

When the USSR broke up, no-one dealing with the issue in Russia or anywhere else was prepared for the collapse or had any intellectual framework for tackling it. The general idea was that Russia should become 'like the West', or at least 'as much like the West as was possible'.

Fine. But how? There were almost no people in Russia with any significant experience of life outside the Soviet system other than the KGB and assorted businessmen and diplomats. Where to start? What to build with?

Moreover, the whole centralised system had simply stopped. Bureaucrats had left their offices in Moscow and wandered away. Nothing was moving. Food was running low.

The Yeltsin reformers had some good ideas. They passed a simple law allowing anything to be traded, to get people doing things from energetic self-interest. This was a stunning move. Kiosks selling anything and everything appeared as from nowhere. Whereas in 1991 there was no private business in Moscow, by 1995 there was a plump Yellow Pages book listing new businesses. Russians' own creativity was unleashed after 70 years' misery.

Then came the famous Big Mac Attack, which gave Moscow regular fresh milk for the first time in seventy years.. And assorted privatisations, many of which ended up by being manipulated by clever chancers who saw the long-term potential. Leigh Turner (then Ist Sec Econ and now HM Ambassador to Kiev) wrote a stream of elegant reports to London about his adventures in buying a privatisation voucher for a share in a bread business, describing the process vividly as it affected average Russians picking their way through the paperwork.

Was this all pernicious Shock Therapy, as sundry Leftists complain? No. If anything there was insufficient Shock and no Therapy. Above all, Russia could not bring itself to haul mouldy old Lenin from his place of honour in Red Square and bury him far away somewhere. We did not press the issue, to help them make a psychological break with Communist terror. Why? I don't know.

All of which takes me back to my own visit to Red Square a few days ago. My British companion and I decided to go and check out Lenin.

There is a small fence defining a long walkway along the side of the Kremlin Wall to the tomb, recalling the days when there were long queues to pay homage to the villain. On the day we were there no-one was visiting. We nonetheless thought it impolite (and more importantly unwise) to step over the fence and go straight to the tomb. So we walked back to the end of the square dominated by a strange red brick building. At the corner was a gap, allowing us to enter the walkway.

However, a guard told us that we were not allowed to go through the gap. We had to walk round the building and start at the beginning of the walkway. "Why?" "That's the rule."

Rather than suffer this idiotic indignity, we went somewhere else.

OK, OK. Each country has its share of petty annoying restrictions and petty annoying people to enforce them. But in Russia it seems to go further than is possible to imagine. People are told to obey the rules. Flexibility and pragmatic adaption to new circumstances (here the fact that there was no queue) are unwelcome.

So how to change that set of profoundly entrenched instincts?

Luckily there is an answer now available for the first time ever. The Internet.

Here is a fine piece in the FT by Julia Ioffe describing how Dmitry Ternovskiy has set up a project called A Country Without Stupidity:

Chief among the inanities in his sights is something most tourists in Russia have encountered: the screaming security guard or elderly woman telling you that you cannot take pictures here, as if your photograph of that supermarket compromises Russian national security. Ternovskiy has used his blog to mobilise Russians to inform these guards and grannies that they are the ones in the wrong: by Russian law, photography is allowed almost everywhere.

“Despite the fact that there is no legal basis to ban photography in all the places it’s banned, people will still tell you it’s forbidden,” Ternovskiy says, pouring himself a cup of thyme tea as we sit in a Moscow café. “It’s like a Soviet phantom limb. Back then, every person felt himself to be in the thick of a nest of spies, there were enemies all around, everything was banned. Unfortunately, we still see this alive and well in the minds of many people today.” 

And thus, bit by bit, inch by inch Russia frees its mind of communist stupidity. A long, painful haul. But at least now possible.

Hmm.

Things warming up a little in Russia as all sorts of people condemn serious vote-fixing in the elections last weekend.

A significant proportion of the noise against the election results comes from obnoxious groups who (a) never held any sort of honest election when they had the long years of opportunities to do so (Communists, weary old Gorby) or (b) would never hold honest elections were they to come into power (Zhirinovsky's 'Liberal Democrats'). So a Russian Spring this isn't. Yet.

That said, it takes a lot to mobilise Russia's urban youngsters to take a public stand against the Establishment, and this time quite a lot of them are doing so.

Note especially the use of social media (ie fast live crowd networking by mobile telephones, as taken to a high art by British rioters and other vanguard forces). The Kremlin has been smart to let this latest large demonstration pass without a vigorous and unpleasant clamp-down - so far.

Perhaps they are just letting things run to take the measure of what they are up against. Including one opposition blogger a using remote-control model helicopter to take pictures of the demonstrations - it survived pistol-fire!

Very cool. And very different

To pass the time and take my mind off my bright blue foot, I have done a couple of quickies for the Telegraph Blog site where there has been a lot of energetic stuff about the EU Summit and all that.

Thus yesterday:

We awoke this morning to various commentators and Twitteristas bewailing the fact that British intransigence has left the UK “isolated". This ridiculous assertion needs to be knocked on the head, once and for all.

If “isolated" means staying well clear of the clumsy and ultimately undemocratic eurozone project, that’s a damn good place to be. The measures needed to prop up the eurozone involve intrusive inspection of national financial affairs by Brussels and other changes (such as harmonising tax rates) which necessarily amount to surrendering national sovereignty to EU HQ. Without the protocol he demanded, David Cameron could not have stood up in the House of Commons and honourably told the British people that the UK would be spared that.

In fact, even with that protocol there would have been in serious risk of eurozone “mission creep" in legal terms had the Lisbon Trinity route been used. Not that that risk has gone away even with the proposed new treaty outside the existing Treaty structure, but it is arguably for now rather more manageable.

Now what?

The proposed new arrangements for the eurozone would have been good had they been introduced right from the start. It is not clear how far if at all they will satisfy the planet’s markets and investors now. The crisis is set to drag on.

More generally, the whole European integration ambition looks like a nervous tightrope walker wobbling more and more severely with each new step. The contortions needed to stay balanced are impressive but grotesque.

And today:

As the sheer scale of the new requirements expected in the new treaty become clear – intrusive Brussels inspection of national budgets, balanced budget constitutional provisions and so on – bits will start to fall off the bandwagon. Different local factions will demand some or other political price for conceding their support to these radical changes. Public opinion will be aroused, with demands for referenda here or there. And so on.

The best thing about writing for a national newspaper's website is the giddy delirium of the many comments one attracts, for and against. Many people seem unable to understand what one writes, or miss the self-indulgent witty touches completely, or assume that because I am an ex-Ambassador I a priori am a pompous Sir Humphrey type living on a vast pension blah blah blah.

Therefore you get stuff like this:

Charles Crawford - a breath of fresh air. I bet you don't get many invitations to opine on the BBC!

For the first time, I actually have to agree with much of Mr Crawford has to say. Perhaps he could offer his expertise of the break up of the former Soviet Union during his time in the FCO, for the government for Britain's withdrawal from the EUSSR?

Magisterial and wise as one would expect from a 'Sir Humphrey' enjoying his astronomically high pension at our expense...It's rather majestic when the British Establishment makes a 'fleet turn'; all those wonderful old ships of the line coming round. The trouble is that they need an awful lot of sea room and they already got much too close to a lee shore.

Whatever leads Crawford to the conclusion that an 'amicable separation' is on the books? Why wouldn't our former partners just screw us to the floor as much as they are able? What is the USP that would stop them, if they ever climb out of the mire where they are?

Thank you Charles for your explanation, especially posting the speech by Howe.  Incredible how the same old arguments are being trotted out by the same old europhiles ignoring the twenty year interim where *nothing* turned out as predicted.  And all the guff about influence--what influence?  Although we have wasted a lot of treasure on the european experiment and the most worrisome aspect of our economic outlook is our closeness to the european economic (disaster) zone.

Dave has done more u-turns than a boy racer, so will have no problem with one on this matter.
Has to be said, Chas is a definite Rolls Royce blogger. Maybe he could get a job as Foreign Secretary, if he was quickly ennobled.

Walked the dogs earlier - a bit cold but a nice day for it. Notably, no-one from Antwerp, Lower-Saxony, Tuscany or Valencia stopped me for a chat.Looks like the isolation has started to bite

You, sir, sound like a traitor and should be treated as such. I am thinking naked, tar, feathers, high street parade, but maybe this would infringe one or two paragraphs in the EU human rights chapter, or whatever. You display all the characteristics of an aparatchik who forgot that you are/were a servant of the people and in your generous loftiness are throwing some crumbles of your superior intellect to the benighted masses.  

That last one hits it bang on the nose.

Anyway, my second one linked to this excellent Economist piece offering a detailed account of what the UK Prime Minister wanted and why he did not get it. Well worth a read if you want to look at some hard-core analysis and not a lot of heated knowledge-free opinion.

What does it all boil down to?

Not enough, if the main aim is to stop the Eurozone failing horribly as the planet's investors think we've all gone mad and draw their money out of the system.

But maybe just enough (for now) if you want to get re-elected as President of France?

Do global investors see this blood-stained arena as a sensible place to park their hard-earned money? No.

While the self-absorbed British commentariat divides into Europhile/Europhobe factions like Bertie Wooster's aunt mastodons bellowing at each other across a primaeval swamp, the real story is that the Summit did not do anything serious to tackle the eurozone's acute credibility problem.

Why did it not do more? Because top European opinion is completely divided on existential questions to do with the moral hazard involved in different eurozone rescue plans. And because step-by-step Europe's leaders have set up structures of such intricacy and complexity that it is next to impossible to identify what needs to be fixed, and then muster the practical agreement to do the fixing.

My extended thoughts on the Russian elections for the national parliament (Duma) which took place on Sunday, 4 December. 

 

I played a modest part in the proceedings as an official international observer accredited to the elections under the auspices of the International Institute for Integration Studies, a Moscow-based grouping close to senior circles of power in Russia. The Institute supports various public conferences around the world, including the strange one I attended in Belgrade in June. Full disclosure note: I was offered (and accepted) a fee for observing these Russian elections, but it was agreed that I was under no obligation to say anything other than what I thought about the elections or about developments in Russia in general.

 

Other groups of official international observers were also criss-crossing Russia as elections day approached and on the day itself. The OSCE delivered what looked like the largest observer effort, not least ‘long-term observers’ tasked with looking at the elections in the context of the wider Russian political process. The OSCE's provisional findings include a number of very critical observations on these elections, but also give credit where credit was due in a number of significant respects.

 

Anyway, I arrived in Moscow on the evening of 1 December to join a dinner with other IIIS group observers, namely some Serbs and Italians. The Serbs were all at the ‘patriotic’ end of the political spectrum in Belgrade and included the Radical Party's Dragan Todorovic who had started spluttering uncontrollably during my presentation in Belgrade in June. One of the other guests was Borislav Milosevic, brother of Slobodan, who had served as Belgrade's ambassador in Moscow after the NATO bombing of Serbia. I did my very best to explain to him the private frustrations of Western leaders and diplomats in dealing with his late brother.

 

The next day we had briefings about the elections process from the Russian Senate and National Elections Commission and I gave an interview to SKY TV before we set off on our various journeys to watch actual voting. I was relatively lucky (or so I thought) by being sent to Nizhny Novgorod, 400 km east of Moscow. Some of the Serbs had to go to Vladivostok.

 

IIIS deliver senior access. In Nizhny Novgorod I was given excellent personal briefings by the Deputy Governor and the head of the local elections commission, who showed me one of the new electronic counting machines being used in a number of polling stations across the country. 

 

I then headed for my first polling station. Mistake! I slipped on the ice and wrecked my ankle. I was taken to the nearby basic but efficient wrecked ankle clinic doing its usual brisk business on a Sunday afternoon in Russian winter. An x-ray revealed no breakage of bone, but I had seriously damaged everything else. 

 

The result of this fiasco was that I visited only one polling station, not long before it was due to close. It was run by cheery no-nonsense Russian women. The different parties taking part in the elections had their representatives there – almost all women (Russian men have better things to do on a Sunday afternoon). The party representatives reported no problems. I was intrigued to see arrangements for small portable ballot boxes to be taken to any voter unable to visit the polling station; party representatives were entitled to accompany the ballot boxes during such manoeuvres. It all looked very normal.

 

After a painful overnight train journey back to Moscow, I attended a desultory press conference at which a smug Bulgarian observer proclaimed that the elections as a whole had been more than free and fair. It was not made clear on whose behalf he was making this bold assertion: his statement was brought round for other observers to sign, and I of course did not sign it. I then departed for home, enjoying a forlorn ride by wheelchair from the aircraft at Heathrow through Terminal 5 to spare my sorry foot.

 

* * * * *

So much for the little I saw of the elections themselves. Wider considerations?

 

International election observers have to try to do three things. They need to look at the rules-in-themselves to see whether they make sense and are reasonable and comprehensive. They need to look at how the rules are then applied to real life: are the procedures on paper being properly followed and interpreted? Finally, they need to look at the process as a whole and to see where it fits into the country's political life.

 

It cannot be said often enough. Russia is an unfathomably huge country with unique issues of command and control (and associated attitudes to governance) going back many centuries. Until the collapse of communism in 1991 there was no tradition of representative democracy. Setting up democratic institutions and practices (and, most important) creating democratic instincts had to be slow.

 

The arrangements laid down by Russia’s law for conducting elections are technically impressive, albeit detailed to the point of obsession. Russian procedures are better than ours here in the UK in at least three respects:

 

• Votes are counted in the polling station concerned immediately after the polls close, in the presence of party and other observers (ballot boxes are not moved to central counting points with the risk of mischief en route)
• No ID, no vote
• No postal voting

 

Moreover, there are streamlined and well monitored arrangements for getting the election results sent fast to Moscow for central compilation. Amidst the complaints about Russia's elections, you don't hear the argument that the counting of the votes as cast has not been fair and accurate.

 

Remember (again!) the sheer scale of the voting process. Russia has 96,000 polling stations catering for nearly 110,000,000 voters. People are voting for national-level politicians, with totals for individual parties simply added together to get a final total (on one way of looking at it a much simpler and fairer system than they have in eg the USA). The Law of Big Numbers kicks in. Cheating on a scale that makes a significant difference has to be massive – and obvious.

 

So what's the problem?

 

First, there inevitably are a large number of electoral violations of different shapes and sizes. When I wrote my book review for the LSE on Electronic Voting, I was struck at how we all take for granted the procedural complexity of voting. The following (and many more) are all essential:

 

• voters lists compiled and kept up-to-date
• secret voting
• ballot boxes sealed throughout the process
• accurate ballot papers printed and distributed under controlled conditions
• identification for voters
• meticulous and transparent counting, to make sure that all votes are counted and only votes properly cast have been counted
• procedures for disputes as to what a messy mark on a given ballot paper might mean
• arrangements for recording the final outcome and storing all ballot papers securely in case of future legal challenges.

 

At literally every stage of the process in any country there is scope for human error and/or deliberate mischief. Ruling out both 100% is impossible. 

 

Thus we need to be careful in agreeing with those who allege “massive violations “of electoral procedures in Russia or anywhere else. If every polling station in Russia has only one complaint about some or other procedural violation, there will be 96,000 complaints! Massive violations! Yet many of those complaints (including two we heard: one party doing some campaigning on the “day of silence" before the elections and not printing its name on election materials) will have been trivial in themselves and quite irrelevant to the final outcome.

 

Some violations are deliberate and (as far as local conditions allow) systematic. One frequent claim again in Russia is that ‘captive’ voters in mental illness institutions and the Army were lent on hard to vote for the Putin party. Unofficial crowd-sourced election monitors Golos have put on the Web all sorts of other examples, some filmed as they happened.

 

Complicated official arrangements such as running a nationwide election work in good part because they are transparent. Yes, in formal terms Russia does all it needs to do to host international and political party observers. But this time round the blatant official and unofficial pressure put on Golos (including denial of service website attacks and the usual insinuations that foreign support for such organisations was illegitimate or sinister) created a very bad impression.

 

More generally the post-Communist ruling establishment in Russia has changed the law to make it harder for new political parties to make a breakthrough. (Note: UKIP has views on the subject here in the UK.) Smaller parties are not allowed to form a single voting bloc. The rules for forming a national party able to contest national elections are excessively strict and not easy to meet. An earlier, excellent option of including on the ballot paper a vote for “none of the above" has been withdrawn. And so on.

 

Add to all this the violence suffered by some journalists who try to expose official corruption, unrelenting pro-Putin media coverage and the way far too many Russian media outlets condemn or marginalise any liberal views, and you get the sort of outcome which the OSCE fairly criticises.

 

But…

 

Just look at the results. Four parties have made it into the national parliament, after roughly half the Russian population voted:

 

• The Putin/Medvedev party United Russia.
• The retread Communists who still rant on about Marxist-Leninism (now with added Patriotism)
• The erratic pro-Establishment Liberal Democrat populists led by Zhirinovsky, whom we fondly remember on a Russian train taking pot-shots at voters’ pets with a hunting rifle. 
• And A Just Russia, a relatively new party claiming to be social democrats which has proposed an alliance with the Communists

 

Parties representing a more liberal policy-set involving reduced state control and better human rights either did not get into the race or (as in the case of Yavlinsky's Yabloko party) failed dismally once again. A new supposedly centre-right party Right Cause won only 400,000 votes.

 

Western commentators and some in Russia are claiming these election results show rising dissatisfaction with the performance of Vladimir Putin. They might even be right. But that dissatisfaction is rising from a low and apathetic base, and insofar as it translates into changed voting it boosts tendencies which are even worse. Compared with the other three national/socialist parties which crossed the threshold to enter the Duma, Putin's party look almost normal. Putin remains the favourite to be voted back in as Russia's president in the forthcoming elections next March.

 

In short, the legacy of Soviet communism lives on powerfully in Russia. Lenin still moulders in red Square. Nizhny Novgorod railway station welcomes you with a vast Communist mosaic. Former KGB-type people have prospered since Communism ended, and use their power and wealth to frame things in their favour.

 

Under current management Russia is getting steadily more prosperous and steadily more pluralistic, albeit in a specific Russian way. Russians en masse have a (for us) startling capacity for putting up with hardships, including overbearing and neurotic state power. They are not bothered by their leaders sneering at foreigners or homosexuals or liberal attitudes. They do want to see progress and get richer, and they hate corruption and get-rich-quick types. But it takes a lot to rouse them to take a stand against the existing “system “. 

 

Are things changing, with young urban people in particular demanding wider changes? If so, does it matter?

Maybe. After the elections the head of the National Elections Commission proclaimed that evidence of electoral malpractice produced by Golos would not be investigated unless it was backed by 'official' complaints. This cynical view reflects a ruling Russian mindset going back centuries, namely that only ‘official’ procedures count. 

 

Yet in Russia as in so many other countries the mass of people are getting more powerful vis-a-vis the state. Perhaps the main story of these elections is the way many Russians are now using cheap mobile technology to follow and record what is happening across their vast country - and Vladimir Putin's so far uncertain response.

 

This appears to be a well-sourced Telegraph piece revealing that the FCO has instructed Embassies to start making contingency plans for a Eurozone crash.

If so, it's startling.

Startling!

Partly because our much-diminished Embassies across the EU - cheerily cut back by Labour and this Coalition government alike to redeploy diplomats to the 'emerging markets' - just won't be able to handle the tens of thousands of consular cases which could come their way.

Can someone working at an EU mission quickly drop me a private line (via the site-link above) to tell me what exactly a contingency plan to deal with thousands of people whose credit-cards have stopped working would look like?

But startling also because the FCO is not warning the British public through its formal Travel Advice to start making similar precautions.

Here is the current FCO Travel Advice for France, which 19,000,000(!) British nationals visit each year. It focuses on the eternal issue of the day in Europe - French food:

• Sea France has suspended all of its cross-channel ferry services. Call Sea France on +44 (0) 845 458 0666 for further information and allow extra time for your journey
• Following an outbreak of botulism, the French Health authorities have issued a warning not to consume any pastes or spreads produced by a French company called La Ruche. The pastes are branded as Les Délices de Marie Claire, Terre de Mistral and Les Secrets d’Anais

Here's the FCO's lugubriously out-of-date ungrammatical Travel Advice for Italy:

·         There is a general transport strike planned in Italy on 17 November. All means of public transport is expected to be affected.  If you are flying to/from Italy contact your airline before you travel. See Safety and Security - Local Travel - Major pre-planned strikes.

Germany has another grammatically challenged entry, but at least has some references to money. Maybe the advice should be to carry lots of counterfeit Euros - soon likely to be worth more than the real ones?!

• Like other large European countries there is a high threat from terrorism in Germany. Attacks could be indiscriminate, including in places frequented by expatriates and foreign travellers. See Safety and Security - Terrorism.
• We are aware of British nationals who have been arrested for possessing counterfeit currency.  We advise against changing currency anywhere other than banks or legitimate Bureaux de Change.

Hmm. Not much in all this on how a few million Brits across Europe might get back to our island fortress if the Eurozone folds overnight and the cash-machines stop working and fuel for cars, planes and cross-channel ferries runs out.

There is a real problem here - any such official warning would trigger panic and make the Eurozone's horrible problems even worse. 

Yet the Telegraph piece archly quotes a "senior Minister" to the effect that a Eurozone collapse is now 'just a matter of time'. Perhaps this IS the consular warning. To lucky Telegraph readers at least.