Blogoir

Imagine you're a senior executive. Then imagine that you have a Problem.

You have to address a major conference in SE Asia next week. Public speaking is not your favourite thing. You need some serious senior advice about local sensibilities to make sure you make no ghastly gaffes.

Plus the presentation prepared by your company's 'messaging' people makes you uneasy. They have turned the usual rather dull PowerPoint into something snazzy called a Prezi, but you're not sure that makes it any better.

The speaking notes served up by your office to support your presentation and subsequent media work are badly laid out, with the odd annoying spelling mistake. The basic message is clear enough, but is it exactly what you want to say to this audience on this occasion?

After the conference you'll be expected to some high-profile media slots, radio and TV. Maybe you should have some discreet training to get into the right frame of mind?

In short, you have a gnawing feeling that something is not quite right in the way your company is preparing all this. There is a heck of a lot going on here. The messages need to be identified and honed for the occasion. You need to be able to deliver them well, so the material you draw from needs sharpening. Plus you need help in actually delivering the messages well in front of a large crowd and then on TV.

What's the ideal result for you? Not that the many audiences you are addressing remember a lot of information, which alas is what the Prezi/PowerPoint mainly gives. Rather that you create an unambiguously positive impression at the conference and more generally, and so get invited back to private gatherings of the regional business elite where the real business is done.

Your people have proposed one of the top 'public affairs' firms to help pull everything together. But their fees are insane. You want something a bit less 'obvious' and more tailored to you.

Something discreet, smart and sophisticated. But effective. And on a human scale.

What to do? Whom to contact? Help..!

 

Luckily help is at hand. And I expect soon to point you firmly in the right direction...

 

 

 

Back in writing business after a few days of running around trying to earn some money.

Here is a piece I have written for the Telegraph Blogs on the moral case for the Syrians doing what it takes to defeat the regime oppressing them:

One of the iconic principles of the Soviet Union still proclaimed by President Putin is the unimaginable sacrifice by the Soviet army and the general population to defend their country from the Nazis during World War Two.

Indeed, any attempt to qualify that heroism and sacrifice (eg by pointing out that the war started because of a dirty deal between Stalin and Hitler at the expense of Poland, and that Soviet losses were far worse than they should have been because Stalin had murdered so many top generals) is furiously denounced by the current Moscow elite. In other words, the results justified the incredible loss of life used to achieve them. The fact that Soviet soldiers died in their tens of thousands attacking Berlin in the final frenzied days of the war is a measure of their country's greatness.

By contrast we are solemnly told by Annan and Evans (and by Moscow and Beijing) that much the best way forward for freedom-loving Syrians is to lay down their arms and start talking to the people brutalising them. Any escalation in their struggle which leads to greater casualties has to be avoided. More people could die! It could be destabilising!

I think Kofi Annan and Gareth Evans are wrong for one specific reason. They appear to put no value on the idea of fighting and dying for freedom as an end in itself.

The Syrian people should sneer at Gareth Evans’ "slim reed". They do have other options. Namely to escalate the conflict come what may, with whatever outside support they can get, deciding that it is better to die for freedom than slink around for a few decades more as slaves.

Most of the Comments swerve off on assorted tangents of denunciation (what about Kosovo? Eh? Eh?), although this one was at least initially witty before it slumped into Islamo-pessimism:

Crawford's articles are normally better than this but, scratch the surface of a 60-something diplomat, and the puerile soixante-huitard shines though.

Utter delusion that the Syrian "rebels" want democracy and comparing them to genuine Czech patriots is insulting. The fact that they have already expelled the Christians from Homs should alert even the diplomatic mind dulled by years of free booze.

If they take over Syria they will butcher everyone they get their hands on then the country will slide even further back in time towards the year zero of the 7th century.

Hey. I'm not 60 yet.

This piece was intended to get (perhaps too obliquely) at the dark question of what sacrifices are 'worth it'. Thus Krakowians have been heard to opine that, all things considered, and balancing Heroism with Wisdom, their fellow Poles in Warsaw might have done better not to rise up against the Nazis just as the Red Army approached. They took stupendous losses and the city was then dynamited. Plus the Soviets then took over anyway. All that destruction. For what?

I mention this because (already knowing the answer) I asked my young taxi-driver in Prague what had happened to Prague in WW2. He said that the Germans had quickly taken it over. I asked him why the Czechs had not fought back. "The border is very close - there was nothing we could do."

But then he said with a big smile: "It's a good thing we didn't fight - all this [pointing to Prague's springtime splendour] would have been destroyed."

He's right.

Fighting for freedom is always expensive.

At moments of moral uncertainty like this we turn to Sir John Sawers, previously HM Ambassador to the United Nations and now head of MI6:

In 1950 the UN Security Council (helped by a Soviet boycott) unanimously condemned the aggression against South Korea by communist North Korea.

Fighting under a UN banner, a US-led force, with 15 other nations including Britain, attempted to roll North Korea back.

We - you - paid a high price.

The Allies lost some 40,000 people in that war, mainly Americans.

Ten times more than in Iraq.

Was it worth it? History says yes.

Our huge, generous investment in freedom for South Korea saved tens of millions of South Koreans from the miserable fate still being suffered by their compatriots north of the DMZ.

Those people have made South Korea a dynamic, sophisticated country.

One of those people is today’s distinguished UN Secretary-General, Ban Ki-moon, who spoke at Harvard earlier this week.

Mr Ban was just nine years old when the Korean War ended. He vividly recalls a childhood of hunger and poverty as South Korea went through war and then slowly recovered.

Today, fifty-five years later, he is at the pinnacle of world diplomacy. A remarkable journey for him – and for his country.

And maybe in Baghdad or Basra or Mosul or Kirkuk there is a nine-year old Iraqi boy, or Iraqi girl, who, yes, has suffered pain and uncertainty in these difficult years.

But who will grow up strong and confident, and in years to come will be Iraq’s first UN Secretary-General.

Success - and failure - do not always come quickly

Here's my piece at Telegraph Blogs this morning on the Russian Presidential elections:

One reason why Zyuganov is doomed never to win an election in Russia lies in the country’s problematic demographics. Thanks in part to Putin's policies, the gap between the number of Russians being born every month and the number dying every month has dwindled significantly, although each year there are still more departing than arriving. Most Communist supporters in Russia are elderly people, and every month approximately 160,000 of them die. It's not easy to build a successful political movement on that model...

And on Russia's forthcoming foreign policy:

What is frustrating about Putin's view is that it ends up defending the indefensible, siding with trashy, clueless regimes that violently cling to power long beyond any reasonable limit. Yes, "dialogue" is better than civil war. But dialogue which in fact is aimed at helping keep these dismal leaders in control is not worth having.

Putin himself has his powerful new job because Western governments weighed in to help Russia's own democratic forces bring Soviet communism to an abrupt end in Russia. Russia Communists had 70 years to bring about dialogue with decent Russian citizens. There comes a point when dialogue is part of the problem, not part of the solution...

Let's hear it for reader Mitcheltj who writes:

Excellent post CC.  Easily the best piece I have read about the Russian elections.  Thank  you.

But then there's grumpy russian:

Sorry, but I haven't read such an outright idiocy anywhere among the DT blogs

All such articles cover huge themes and so the generalisations needed to write anything at all either please or enrage people.

*sobs*

Leading UK journalist Angus Roxburgh has written a book about Putin and Putinism, drawing on his extensive experience in Russia (including a stint as a media adviser to the Putin team):

The book is good in revealing all sorts of fascinating stories about the Putin period. My favourite is the one where Putin produces a dog which sniffs Angela Merkel's legs, Putin knowing that Merkel is scared of dogs.

But the book annoyingly strives to find an angle to balance the KGB-isation of Russia with the argument that in responding to the collapse of Russia the West has been 'insensitive'.

Ha ha ha!

Here's an extract my review over at LSE EUROPP:

The problem with this book is that Roxburgh seems to think that Americans and Europeans who are unimpressed with this sort of Russia are somehow misguided. Explaining Putin’s policies and instincts in terms of his fanatical Soviet KGB training is not enough. He strains for a grand unifying theme to explain why Putin and Russia have moved back towards this corrupt unstable autocracy. He claims to find the answer in the claim that the West‘s (and especially Washington’s) failure to ‘understand’ Russia has led to ‘patronising’ and ‘insensitive’ policies which have somehow provoked the Russian elite to behave badly. We are all guilty.

This thesis is launched as the book begins, in a facile portrayal of the Western policy approach in the early Yeltsin years. It recycles without question a familiar but banal argument that the West crassly imposed capitalist ‘shock therapy’ on Russia. In fact the shock and ensuing confusion and (yes) poverty for many millions of Russians came about because the Soviet system itself abruptly keeled over. Ministries emptied out. The machine stopped.

There was no policy tool-box for dealing with this situation. Far from being patronizing or prescriptive, Western governments fell over themselves to be helpful and accommodating to Russia’s new leaders. After WW2 we ran extensive courses for influential Germans in ‘de-Nazification’. Nothing comparable by way of de-communistification was even contemplated for Russia, let alone for the rest of the Soviet Union. We did not even insist as a reasonable price for huge programmes of assistance that Lenin, the supreme symbol of communist terror, be taken from Red Square and given a decent burial.

Throughout the book Roxburgh finds himself torn between saying that we were too tough, or not tough enough. Somehow after all those supposedly patronising Western experts turned up in Moscow the Russian economy in a few years’ time was growing strongly, private initiative flourishing as never before. He seems to think that Western governments should have called for war crimes trials of senior Russians involved in smashing Chechnya; how ‘insensitive’ would that have been? Worst, he uncritically rehashes the paranoid Soviet/Putinistic assertion that the West has been ‘encircling’ Russia.

This last claim needs nailing. It takes Russia’s ‘concerns’ as the defining norm and relegates everyone else’s: Russia ‘encircles’ much of the world. Anything which happens across nine+ time zones somewhere near Russia can be presented by self-serving Russian extremists as ‘anti-Russia encirclement’.

The strategic policy issue is simple. For seventy years the Soviet Union pumped out violence, corruption and lies on an incomprehensible scale. So the basic logic of today’s situation is that the descendants of those responsible for so much brutality need to show a healthy contrition if they want their ‘concerns’ to weigh heavily with the rest of us. Today’s Russia is not responsible for the crimes of the Soviet Union. But an honest Russia can not rummage around in the mouldy bun of Soviet history and extract raisins of glory, any more than Angela Merkel can say positive things about Hitler and expect to be taken seriously...

Plenty more where that came from.

The story that emails sent from Education Secretary Michael Gove's wife's email account might count as official emails for Freedom of Information purposes rumbles on. This is an interesting point:

Department for Education spokesman said: “Emails are not automatically considered an official record. Special advisers are not required to maintain records of deleted emails. All civil servants routinely delete or archive emails, taking account of their nature and content.

“Government systems could not operate if every civil servant kept every email they send or received (sic). The act of deleting emails is not evidence of wrong doing.”

Fair enough? Or not?

When the FCO brought in email communication first on a clunky internal system then on a more familiar Windows-based system, the use of emails of course exploded. And the FCO had to think about what to do with them all.

Various categories of email were devised, reflecting security classifications for documents set up under utterly different conditions. So for a while until a network-wide Confidential system was rolled out to the huge majority of posts (over several years) the 'Unclassified' parts of the network could send and receive only Unclassified emails, leaving them largely excluded from the day to day email chatter at HQ in London. This was part of Craig Murray's problem in Uzbekistan - he did not have a CONF system and so substantively was isolated from much of the policy debate in the FCO. This frustrating situation led to him to start using the 'telegram' level for communicating his thoughts to a vast bemused Whitehall audience, and it all went downhill from there.

The really staggeringly stupid thing the FCO did was not insist from the start on a sound system for email retention. If I wanted to send an email to someone on the network, I just sent it. The message would be stored in my Sent box on Outlook until I moved it to an Outlook file or saved it elsewhere on my computer. Thus over time my Outlook space became clogged with all the folders of emails I'd created as a sort of private registry system. It could be searched by me but not by anyone else other than remote system controllers who were essentially technicians and network security minders.

In other words, if a member of the public or even a fellow colleague wanted information on (say) UK policy towards Montenegro, there was no meaningful way that the fast proliferating mass of emails on that subject across the FCO network could be searched. Partly this was for classic internal 'Need to Know' reasons. Better not to have a centrally searchable database open to all FCO staff lest anyone who got into the system illicitly might scoop the whole lot.

There was in fact an easy solution. Namely that before sending an email the sender would have to choose from a drop-down menu which might give one of the following options, following which the message would be automatically stored centrally and be searchable by those who needed to do so:

• Ephemeral/Unimportant - Delete after three Months
• Ephemeral but Operationally Significant - Delete after One Year
• Policy Relevant but Operationally Insignificant - Delete after One Year
• Policy Relevant - Keep

These classifications or something like them would have covered the nuts and bolts exchanges on eg organising visits, which by definition are mainly irrelevant and unneeded once the visit is over. They also would have allowed FCO officials to set timelines for keeping messages which had some current policy relevance that was set to dwindle over time (eg analysis of the prospects for Montenegro as elections approached - interesting at the time, but not mattering much a year after the election). Above all, they would have given officials a chance quickly to designate an email message as worthy of prolonged retention/searchability and eventual sending on to the Public Records Office for the national archives.

All this could have been complemented by a requirement that each email message have in its title three or four key words (Montenegro Economy Bilateral Steel) which would be a fast way of helping find emails on a certain subject in months and years to come.

What instead happened was that cumbersome arrangements were set up for 'saving' emails (or not) separately from sending them. With the result that few officers saved more than a handful. Even though I must have produced thousands of emails in my final seven years in the FCO I don't recall saving permanently any at all(!), although as Ambassador my main senior policy effort was via 'telegrams' sent electronically (E-grams) which were in a category of their own and saved automatically by HQ. Plus I assumed that if anything really important came up arising from what I had sent, I would be able to find the trail in my Outlook private filing cabinet.

That said, when I left post the whole mass of work I had sent by email was summarily deleted. Gone.

In all this it was never clear how far anything was really finally deleted once and for all. Presumably the messages were also captured on central FCO servers. Yet without some sensible way of searching through the gazillions of messages which even a small government department like the FCO generated each year, they might as well have been deleted.

In short, it is likely to be relatively easy to track down recent official working papers where the people who created them are still at their desks (see eg my request re that astounding FCO Bullying training event, where I have sent a follow-up request to get more accurate costings after the FCO said that they did not know what the event had cost).

But for anything much older the chances of getting anything like a full set of papers (if such a thing is even imaginable in our chattering e-age) are much reduced. Oddly enough if you go further back to the days of predominantly paper records things might get easier again, as physical files telling a story were kept. See eg the impressive reply to my FOI request for papers on the FCO's policy on homosexuality in the 1980s.

Basically:

• there has never been a policy that all official papers are kept for the main Public Record
• 'weeding' of papers and emails goes on all the time - it indeed is not evidence of wrong-doing (although some deleting may be wrong-doing)
  
• FOI is never going to be much better than the ambient information management systems in any government department
• in most modern democracies including our own the level of transparency is remarkable and historically unprecedented
• the more the public demands that almost everything 'official' be open to scrutiny, the more likely it is that informal arrangements will emerge to keep some sensitive exchanges off the record, as has happened in the Michael Gove case
• that's human nature

I fear that the Prime Minister was ill-advised to allow his name to be attached to an astonishly bad and strange letter sent to 'Presidents' Van Rompuy and Barroso by twelve national EU member state leaders.

Parts of it was written by the EU's version of our old friend the Postmodernism Bureaucratic Generator, a computer program which assembles plausible sounding jargon words in a more or less random way to produce sentences which have a creepy plausibility but absolutely no meaning:

In this context, we ask the Commission to convene without delay a new forum for the mutual evaluation of national practices to help identify and bring down unjustified regulatory barriers, examine alternatives to regulation which ensure high professional standards and assess the scope for further alignment of standards to facilitate mutual recognition of professional qualifications.

We look forward to the Commission report on the outcome of sectoral performance checks and call on the Commission to fulfil its obligation under the services directive to report comprehensively on efforts to open up services markets and to make recommendations for additional measures, if necessary in legislation, to fulfil the internal market in services

Anyway, I have analysed this ghastly thing over at Telegraph Blogs

First, it is absurdly long. 1656 words. It has succumbed to an acute case of EDDS (European Dustbin Drafting Syndrome), where successive versions of the text get ever more obscure additions as bureaucrats throughout twelve governments press their pet concerns, and no one dares say "Stop!"

Concluding thusly:

Had I been in No 10 I would have advised the Prime Minister not to sign such a text. It wastes time, and (worse) it’s undignified.

Much better that he drop a short private line to Messrs Barroso and Van Rompuy to say that he knows that eleven other leaders are writing this letter, and that he supports the thrust of it: without significant speedy EU-wide steps to promote growth and cut bureaucracy, the crisis will intensify. Who knows, they might even have read it.

When we look at the savage 'cuts' in public spending (not), why not start at the top? Namely the FCO's busy anti-bullying industry?

This is what you taxpayer suckers are spending your money on! Powerpoint slides for the Foreign and Commonwealth Office describing what to do to avoid bullying or 'discrimination'?

Choosing a man for a job if he is the best candidate is not discrimination

Phew. I was worried there for a moment at the fact that all current FCO Minsters are challenged when it comes to displaying female body parts.

And then there's ... this beyond astounding educational infograph-like thing, a supreme example of why modern Social Europe is doomed:

It's not just that the diagram itself is terrifying. Even worse are the accumulated collectivist assumptions and structures - and insanely wasteful demoralising procedures - which it so accurely represents.

I voted Conservative - and this was the T-shirt I got.

I am trying to find out More, thanks to the wonders of FOI.

Always fascinating to see self-styled progressives retreating in confusion, trying to cover their errors by (of course) blaming someone or something else. Preferably the Tea Party tendency in the USA.

Take John Weeks (economist and Professor Emeritus at SOAS, University of London). Here he is over at Social Europe Journal lamenting the state of the Eurozone:

Few outside of Europe (and not all within) understand the profoundly undemocratic nature of the European Union that created the current disaster.  In retrospect it is clear that the long-term effect of the Maastricht Treaty and its infamous “criteria” were to remove economic policy from democratic oversight.  The design of the European Central Bank completed the task. 

The anti-democratic removal is not an accident of the law of unintended consequences.  It is the conscious fulfilment of the central political principle of neo-liberalism, that economic policy is the preserve of experts, and should not be subject to the “populism” of democratic politics. 

It is an irony that the European Union is frequently assailed by right wing politicians in the United States as a haven of socialism.  The reality is that the European Union represents exactly the end of democratic oversight that the Tea Party Republicans crave.

HAHAHA *pauseswhilescrapesselfofffloor*

Yes, folks. The problem is that the EU is too RIGHT-WING!

Wait. There's more?

Similarly, today in Europe a pact among the governments of Greece, Ireland, Italy, Portugal and Spain to coordinate a simultaneous withdrawal from the euro zone would offer a viable alternative to the imposed austerity programs.  Together the output of these five countries is almost forty percent larger than Germany’s.  The probability of this radical but feasible alternative may be as high as one in a million...

How far we have fallen!  The vision of a cooperative Europe, that began in 1950 with the Iron and Steel Community, is now realized as a collection of weak and strong countries caught in a spiral of beggar-thy-neighbor trade and austerity policies, in which the 99% are the losers (even in Germany).  

The authoritarian governance of the EU has reached its fullest expression in the debt disasters of the 21^st Century, bringing on a continental depression.  The ideology that justified this consciously-created and unnecessary depression was and is pure neo-liberal economics.

Of all the bitter ironies of European unity gone viral, one stands out from all the others:  a political project designed consciously to ensure that no country would again dominate the continent changed into the mechanism to achieve that domination.

And, yes, it's all GERMANY'S FAULT that the EU is 'authoritarian'. Arbeit macht frei!

Read the whole thing, but first take out life insurance against dying of extreme mirth.

Yet let's be fair. His idea that a group of countries leave the EU to set up some sort of more manageable formation is not a bad one.

Maybe this is getting to the nub of the whole business. The EU is just too big.

Given that there is no willingness across Europe to set up a single big country and have all the wealth transfers between richer and poorer areas run centrally and supposedly democratically as might happen (or not) in a normal country, the alternative is to have all sorts of ad hoc rules which are in substance capable of being untransparent or oppressive. Why not have a number of national groupings in Europe which share some common light-touch overall trading and strategic framework, rather than the one-size-doesn't-fit-all rigidity as we have now?

It can't be said enough. It's all about Trust. 

As of this morning, the German elite have concluded that the Greek elite and Greek masses alike can not be trusted to keep their promises, and so insist on highly intrusive measures and controls to keep them up to the mark (so to speak). There is even talk of leaning on Greece to postpone elections.

The Greeks think that all this is arrogant and intrusive and object strenuously. Distrust in Germany (the main source of European money to help Greece!) soars. Loony Greeks (Left and Right) start railing against foreign oppression. And down we do spiral.

The latest news is that all is in place to give Greece yet another bail-out. But we all know that it won't work. Greece can not pay back the debts it now owes even under the most optimistic scenarios of the next bail-out working. Plus the capacity of the Greek system to deliver the measures promised even with cruel Germans manning the towering heights of Greek bureaucracy is inadequate. It won't happen.

If you want a more nuanced look at Greece/EU from a demoralised progessive point of view, try Nick Cohen in the Guardian, who points to a strange fanaticism within the Eurocracy which can not accept that its most cherished beliefs were attached to utterly wrong-headed policies:

Raised in a Eurosceptic country, we do not understand how an absolute commitment to the European project was a mark of respectability on the continent. Like going to church and saying your prayers for previous generations, a public demonstration of commitment to the EU ensured that the world saw you as a worthy citizen. If you wanted to advance in Europe's governing parties, judiciaries, bureaucracies and culture industries, you had to subscribe to the belief that ever-greater union was self-evidently worthwhile...

When historians write about the end of its postmodern utopia, they will note that it was not destroyed by invading armies anxious to plunder Europe's wealth or totalitarian ideologues determined to install a dictatorship, but by politicians and bureaucrats, who appeared to be pillars of respectability, but turned out to be fanatics after all.

The point, dear Professor, is that the EU crisis has nothing much to do with 'neo-liberalism'. The EU is a convoluted sui generis ideological potage (because nothing else could be cooked up in the kitchen) which messily combines bits of almost anything you can think of. Tedious 'social' policies, endless formalism, and  'single market' rules which do indeed rely upon some simple ideas, namely that debts should be repaid and that generous 'solidarity' transfers from one country to another require respect for honest process in return. 

As a gesture of goodwill towards Scotland, let's go to Macbeth to sum up where the Eurocrats now stand:

I am in blood stepped in so far that, should I wade no more,

Returning were as tedious as go o'er

Over at Commentator I gallop through some of the issues arising from the splitting-up of countries, drawing on the examples of the collapse of the USSR and SFRY, and seeing how far they apply to Scotland.

The division of Czechoslovakia into two units might well be more relevant, as a commenter fairly points out. But I haven't followed that one personally, so do not feel qualified to say much about it.

One point I did not mention is the radical impact Scottish independence might have on all sorts of other separatist causes . The United Kingdom is seen round the world as a country which for all its annoying post-imperial pretensions has achieved incredible results through its long, stable democratic traditions. The eventual example of Scotland breaking away (albeit under closely negotiated terms) might well embolden others to say that if it's OK for areas to break away even from the best-run democracies, it's surely OK to demand separation from less than well-run democracies.

Plenty for the next leadership in Moscow to think about in that sense - across Russia's vast time-zones are plenty of territories itching to have a lot more say in their own affairs. Republika Srpska? Any number of places in Africa? Certain other EU countries? 

In other words, Scotland v UK is just another example of the wider phenomenon of institutions created in very different times no longer seeming fit for purpose and yielding to a highly focused democratic impulse for complete change. That the new institutions might not be much better in any particular respect (and that the opportunity cost of setting them up could be incredibly high) is not necessarily going to stop people insisting on them.

 

Here's my latest LSE book review, on a new book by Charlie Beckett with James Ball describing the rise and fall of Wikileaks:

One of the key advantages of WikiLeaks as seen by its avowedly radical ‘hacktivist’ creators led (loosely speaking) by Julian Assange is that it subverts all existing categories of pretty much anything: geography, law, morality, self-restraint. The book notes that by aiming for impunity from the law WikiLeaks hopes for immunity from the consequences of the ‘wider settlement between journalism and society’ (sic) and “a less-reported but similarly liberating degree of ethical and moral flexibility”. Hmm. Which tyrant down the ages has not hoped for such ethical and moral ‘flexibility’?

Take the vital issue of ‘protecting sources’, something journalists claim to be a core part of their professional responsibility. Assange is quoted as saying that any US informants in Afghanistan who were murdered by the Taliban as a result of WikiLeaks revelations deserved their fate, a loathsome and – as he found – unsustainable position.

Likewise the book records that WikiLeaks’ publication of confidential documents about corruption in Kenya led to riots in 2007 which 1300 people were killed and 350,000 displaced. The authors’ assessment is at best baffling: “It also indicated that Wikileaks, and Assange in particular, were prepared to make a different risk calculation that accepted some incidental harm for the ‘greater good’ of transparency.” Had a Western politician described the deaths of 1300 Kenyans as ‘some incidental harm’ caused by a different risk calculation in official policies, imagine the banshee shriek.

In this moral tarpit some people see in WikiLeaks a source of hope. The book quotes ‘cyber-optimist’ Clay Shirky: “it represents, in its irresponsibility, a space for reform and progress”.

No thanks. WikiLeaks is by any normal standards a malign phenomenon based on a business model of stealing then selling other people’s information. It has surged sensationally across the media firmament but now looks bedraggled and discredited. As the authors note in the epilogue, former WikiLeaks enthusiasts are writing it off, as further damage has been done to its credibility.

The real value of this fascinating but uneven book is that it reminds us that especially in an age of ‘anything goes’ e-leaks, the heart of credible journalism remains a sense of unwavering professional responsibility – and a good old-fashioned sense of honour.

Check out the rest.

Will Hutton's recent misleading piece in the Guardian about the decline in language learning in UK skills needed some serious demolition.

And here it is, by me over at Telegraphs Blogs:

... in my experience both at school and later at the late FCO Language Centre, a big part of the problem with language learning is language teachers. Most people who go into teaching language are obsessive on the detail and fine points. They tend to be poor if not hopeless at explaining the way the language works as a whole, and where intelligent guesses and smart short-cuts might be made.

This was brought home to me by a distinguished retired teacher near Stellenbosch who taught me Afrikaans when I was posted by the FCO to South Africa. His main love was Latin. He told me how he had taken a boy who hated Latin from next to nothing to almost degree standard with a year of private tuition. His method? To look at the whole of Latin grammar – great sheets of verb and case endings – for a first tough two weeks to get the gloomy boy to see the grammar in terms of simple patterns, then to plunge straight into Caesar and other interesting texts.

By contrast the typical British school treats learning a language as a trite linear process. Start with Nominative, then move to Accusative and Vocative. After a year or so of fatuous sentences no one would want to say, tackle Dative and Ablative. X-rated Subjunctive is for serious students only.

Even the former FCO Language Centre – yes, also abolished by Labour(!) – fell into this trap. Teachers of Russian were snootily dismissive of anyone who had learned another Slav language, refusing to see any overlap and congruity. Instead an institution like the FCO should be tackling "Slav", basing teaching squarely on the several thousand root words and general grammar construction common to most Slav languages. With that mastered, budding diplomats can easily switch to and between Russian, Polish or whatever. William Hague has inherited the diplomatic rubble left to him by those long years of Labour incompetence and is trying to reboot the FCO's language learning capabilities. I have volunteered my services.

But, you ask, is any of this necessary anyway? Aren't we fast moving to world in which Google instantly translates any page pretty well from its original language to almost any other? Isn't it just a matter of time before Apple produce a Siri-like way of simultaneously translating speech from one language to another? This won't be 100% accurate, but then almost no one who learns a foreign language ends up 100% accurate anyway. Surely accelerating technological cleverness is the main driver for not bothering to learn a foreign language?

Plus, native English speakers have one extraordinary advantage. They speak English. The other day I was in Paris as a judge for the latest ICC Mediation Competition. Smart law students from some 70 universities across the planet came compete as negotiators. The competition was run in English. And impressive it was to watch young, tough Chinese students in action.

English is a bit like the QWERTY keyboard. You wouldn't necessarily choose it as the main common international language of choice, but once it has established itself it has a decisive, ever-compounding advantage. Every day around the world tens of thousands of young people start absorbing or learning English. It's easy to get started. You can even make up words and still be comprehensible, even witty: "Hey baby! You me go coffeeshoppingwards?” Chinese (say) is on a totally different order of complexity – and inaccessibility.

I have written about foreign language teaching previously. See eg here. And here.

From one who has sloshing around among his diminishing brain cells lumps of Serbia/Croatian, Polish, Russian, French, German, Afrikaans, Spanish and (best of all) Latin.

Remember my piece almost a year ago describing smart diplomatic options for Doing Something about Libya?

Here it is, and none the worse for wear:

You draw a noisy stick across the bars of the FCO/State Department cage to rouse the bemused and sulky inmates, and demand ideas for action. What might they serve up?

"Basically", they'll primly reply, "You politicians have to accept that there are subtle/difficult trade-offs and hard choices to be made between Breadth v Depth, Fast v Slow, Big Impact v Less Impact, More Certain Impact v Less Certain Impact, Risky v Not-so-Risky, Legal v Not-so-Legal, and so on."

"Oh, and did we mention Cheap v Expensive?"

And having got that off their clever chests, if they are smart they'll produce something like the following Options Menu...

I grouped options under different headings:

-  Indirectly Limiting the Regime's Power

-  Directly Limiting the Regime's Power

-  Preparing for New Government

Does anything new spring to mind in connection with Syria, based upon our vivid experiences in toppling Gaddafi?

The key thing in diplomacy as in life is to pick the right tool for the job.

Yes, to a glib outsider Libya and Syria look much the same. Both full of Arabs, both led by wicked dictators who have lingered on for far too long, both held back by lunatic national policies. Where's the differences?

Well, scale for one thing. Syria has some 21.5 million people, just one down from Australia at 53rd place in the list of countries by population. Libya by contrast has just over six million - at 103rd place. So the physical and psychological impact of the Gaddafi regime has been very different. With only six million people everything happening in a country becomes a lot more 'personal'. Pluralism and politics mean very different things.

But also look at economics. Libya is close to the top 50 countries in the world going by GDP per cap - Syria is below 100th place, a dismal record of Baath Party incompetence. Syria has some oil, but other noting than cheap plastic washing-up basins sold in Serbia I have never seen any product made there.

Perhaps above all, Syria has some friends. And important near neighbours (Turkey, Iraq, Jordan, Israel, Lebanon). For decades Gaddafi actively annoyed almost every capital on Earth in one way or the other. And apart from oil, who really cares about all that North African desert? Damascus by contrast has run a pretty tight national socialist ship, wooing/thwarting East and West alike as and when necessary due to its proximity to Israel and that knot of Middle East problems. During the Cold War Syria played an important role as a friendly or even close partner for Moscow, the USSR being muscled out of Egypt by the USA's spending power and moving away from its early positive relationship with Israel.

This is why the Russians are still busy in Syria, including by vetoing UNSC resolutions. It gives them diplomatic market share in that turbulent region. Some say very busy:

According to Le Figaro on Tuesday, Russian military “advisors” are “omnipresent” in Syria. Besides reportedly sending S-300 anti-air missile systems to Damascus and agreeing to deliver a new batch of military aircraft, the Russians this week celebrated the reopening of a Cold War-era intelligence listening post on Mount Qassioun, the summit that dominates Damascus from the northwest.  The Russians appear increasingly dug in.

Russian advisors are also laboring to reorganise the Baath Party and arrange talks with members of the Syrian resistance.  They are making their own contacts with Arab and Islamic organisations, seeking to dilute the solidarity of the West with Arab leaders on the Syrian problem. 

To any normal non-Russian person the Russian position is beyond cynical. Every senior Russian diplomat mouthing sentiments which in effect of not in substance give succour to the revolting Assad regime has his/her job (OK, almost 100% his) because the West actively supported democratic transformation in the USSR. Moscow's lack of elementary human solidarity with the Syrian resistance/opposition is chilling.

Yet Russia is in it for Russia, not for anyone or anything else. Moscow knows that one of the key lessons of the fall of Gaddafi is that however much the 'West' supports the Arab Spring opposition, the default popular Arab instinct these days is to want to be as un-Western as possible.

So even if Assad falls and a new government ostentatiously ejects the Russians from their naval base and fancy listening posts, the Russians will soon be comfortable again sidling up to the new management and whispering anti-Western blandishments in their willing ears.

Likewise because Russia is in with the current regime it can have some sort of real role talking to in-country opposition tendencies about a negotiated end to the crisis. This is exactly what the UK did in apartheid South Africa, to very good effect. The very fact that Mrs Thatcher stood firm at the UN against sanctions made us look tough - and therefore more credible - to all sides in the drama.

So where does that leave the West? In a weak but not hopeless position. What tools work here? Many of the ideas listed in the Libya piece linked above look OK (enough) for Syria.

The unhappy Syrian masses surely can go only so far without outside military support. The regime's firepower and ruthlessness are pronounced, and the Russia/China blocking of the UN Resolution served to leave the active anti-regime elements feeling let down by 'world opinion'. Yet plenty can be done secretly to help 'train and equip' anti-Assad forces. I'd also be rummaging around to find ways to get secret messages to those hovering on the edge of the Assad circle encouraging them to hold back - in their own interests: Nothing like finding a message from MI6 pushed under the front door during the night to give one cause to reflect.

Sensible governments also should start working on a powerful offshore programme of Preparing for a New Government - drafting new laws and new constitutional changes for a post-Assad government, working with smart Syrians in exile, helping train potential judges and senior policy experts in the areas needed to make Syria develop well under civilised management. Sensible Arab countries' experts and other international transition experts (eg from Poland which knows a few things about Syria from Cold War days) could join this effort to make it substantively balanced and not explicitly 'Western'.

That sort of programme has three big advantages. First, it's needed anyway. Second, it offers an intellectually attractive rival to self-serving and parsimonious Russian offerings in the general 'reform' area. And third, it serves to send an encouraging signal to Syrians (and to Assad) that we are preparing hard for a new era.

Finally, make it a key policy goal that a New Syria opens all police and secret police archives, so that the extent of Soviet/Russian (and other foreign) penetration can be exposed once and for all. That is important as a goal in itself: these archives otherwise can end up being a disruptive source of poisonous politics and blackmail. Plus it sends Moscow and signal that inevitable future transparency could well end up embarrassing the Russians too, so they might like to proceed now in a measured way.

This one will get much worse before it gets better. As things stand now, the Russians for a change have some non-trivial diplomatic momentum and a chance to wield effective influence. Will they manage to use this to get some positive results, if only for themselves?

In the short term, perhaps. In the longer run the Assad regime will wobble then crash under the weight of opposition from massed Syrians fighting local tyranny with Western and wider Arab support. And this phase of crafty Russian diplomacy will crash with it.

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.

Long time no write. Somewhere between Writer's Block and despair at the surging stupidity seen in all directions. Plus nursing my aching ankle and visiting Liechtenstein on a new ADRg Ambassadors training expedition.

The roleplays in Liechtenstein included a couple of exercises where chairing a meeting was part of the skill. The great thing about delivering training is that you think - perhaps for the first time ever - about why you do what you do, and what works (or not).

Thus chairing a meeting.

The smart way to get results is to define the issues in a positive, light-touch style right at the start, thereby (in effect) ruling various options in, but also implicitly ruling some out. If this is done well, the chair can shape the way the participants themselves look at what is happening.

A good way to start is to say in a very few words what the meeting needs to achieve - and why that achievement matters (obliquely flattering the others present). Then you try to sum up in literally a few words what the key issues are:

Can we agree up front that we need to sort out three things today?

First, Money - how much are we all prepared to put in to the new projects?

Second, Balance - how to divide the available resources between the different priorities. The tricky problem here is the fact that it is much easier to get anything done in country X, but the needs in country Y are much greater.

And third, Leadership. Who will be the figurehead of the project as a whole, and who will have the lead operational responsibility?

Some of the participants may want to add another element (say Urgency, or Security, or Other Partners). Fine. The advantage of the chair spelling out in such simple terms the core questions is that it makes it easier for others to frame/articulate their own concerns in a similarly direct way.

Another skill of a good chair is 'pocketing progress'. If someone makes a concession, go out of the way to say that that move is welcome/helpful. Having done that, be careful about seeking clarification on points of detail: that may give the person concerned the opportunity to backtrack.

Don't ignore 'good listening' skills. Copious notes should not be taken by the chair. The chair should be adept at 'reframing' what a participant has said, again subtly steering the conversation in a helpful and constructive/consensual direction and recalling the key words used at the start:

I think what I'm hearing from you is a willingness to be flexible on Money in return for a greater share in the Leadership. Is that a fair summary? 

Also reflect back their 'intensity'. If someone is getting agitated, a good chair should not sit back and smirk but rather show by body language and tone of voice that that person's opinions are being heard:

It's clear that you're very unhappy with how we are tackling Balance. Has anyone any suggestions for how those concerns might be met?

The plan, in other words, is to build a momentum of general goodwill and cooperation, then - having got everyone in some sort of positive frame of mind - start to nail down more controversial details.

All much easier said than done. See eg the skills needed to chair an EU Summit meeting on a new Eurozone Treaty when things get really difficult.

 

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? 

Here at Commentator are my vivid thoughts on the way The Rules drive out common sense discretion in public services in general, and at Leeds Crown Court in particular:

Stop right there, Mr Ambassador! What would happen if the Embassy in Warsaw went out of its way at a senior level to help this one hapless citizen? That would set a precedent for the whole network -- word would get around that one person in Poland had had a lot of active support from the Embassy and the Ambassador personally, and everyone else would expect the same! Worse, it could even be a breach of their Human Rights if they did not get it!

... So there it is. After years if not decades of Citizen's Charters and all sorts of official Mission Statements, Objectives, Targets and goodness knows what other noisily proclaimed expensive initiatives intended to make public servants helpful and responsive to the public, this forlorn group of public servants were bent on driving a few taxpayers and citizens out into a howling rainstorm for no reason other than the fact that The Rules appeared to require it.

The point?

The standardisation of public service needed to deliver what, as far as possible, counts as equality of treatment for all can be achieved only by deliberately excluding competition and any serious incentives to improve services.

Those people at any level of public service finding a clear case for common sense and discretion which somehow goes against The Rules risk getting into trouble (or think they do).

And in such an uncompetitive, neurotic context The Rules breed like crazy, as we see in English education where the state's instructions to schools now run into hundreds of pages and have catastrophic results.

Outcomes deteriorate. Dumbed down stupidity and officiousness result. Confidence in the state erodes. 

But as the Leeds episode shows, the public can fight back. When confronted with an obviously insane decision, politely insist that those concerned use their discretion or demand to see where The Rules say that no such discretion exists.

The officials concerned are visibly rattled by the thought that maybe, just maybe, The Rules in fact allow them to think.

Civil servants! If you have any examples of this working against good practice, just send them in. Key thing: do you think your hierarchy will support you if you do the smart thing, even if it goes against established procedure?

 

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…

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?

 

 

 

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.