Blogoir

Here as a treat is the answer to those who wail about Greed and Inequality.

Not because Inequality is OK. Or because Greed is OK.

Rather because any of the usually proposed solutions for reducingh such distortions trend towards prioritising other forms of Greed and Inequality, in which collectivists take decisions they are unfit to make and try to use state-sponsored violence to get their way.

What could go wrong?

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. 

Even on Christmas Eve - or maybe especially on Christmas Eve - we need to be aware of those repellamt people who stroll around the Western chattering classes exploiting the historic privilege of democracy to make excuses for the inexcusable.

Here are some classic examples.

Enough. Just go away.

Except they never do.

All the very best wishes for Christmas and the New Year to all my loyal readers. Let's all look forward to a calm, stable and generally agreeable Eurozone in 2012.

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

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.

 

Croatia is next in line to join the European Union.

But this sort of thing, circulated by the eminent Centre for Research into Post-communist Economies, shows that beneath the surface - or even bang on it - a lot of nasty habits and people and instincts inherited from the communist period and then the ghastly Tudjman era are flourishing.

I am forwarding the CRCE appeal on behalf of H21 to William Hague's office and to senior people in Brussels, urging them to take action.

Come on Croatia. Stop producing this rubbish. And don't bring it into our EU tent. We have enough already. 

A Call for the Release of Croatia’s Political Prisoner - 72 year old Author and Stalwart Anti-Corruption Activist Aleksandar Saša Radović

72 year-old Alksandar Saša Radović (Sasha) - an author and stalwart anti-corruption leader in Croatia was arrested last week just moments after Sasha's name appeared in public as a formal candidate of Hrvatska 21 - Croatia 21 (H21).  The police report given to the press was that Mrs Radovic was present with Sasha when they were arrested on charges of extortion. 

There are major issues involved in this case that require immediate international intervention led by principled leaders of the West:

-  Sasha has been detained at an undisclosed location and denied due process and an attorney for 7 days and counting.

-  Contrary to the police report which claims that Mrs. Radovic was with Sasa when Sasha was arrested, Mrs. Radovic was at their family residence some 60 minutes from where Sasha was arrested.  Mrs Radovic was with her sister and brother-in-law during the period.

-  Due process was denied and lawyers were not appointed or permitted to contact Mr. and Mrs. Radovic.

The arrest of Sasha took place on the day when it became public that he joined the roster of 75 brave citizens as political candidates on the list of Hrvatska 21 - Croatia 21st Century.

In his most recent book, Sasha exposed the outgoing Minister of Interior, Mr. Tomislav Karamarko for political corruption and general Ivan Cermak as a war profiteer.
   
Cermak’s unexplained wealth and evidences of smuggling during the West's arms embargo of the Balkan region have been published in Sasha’s four major books which include the selling of oil and weapons to Serbia, Bosnia and Montenegro while Cermak was employed in Croatia’s military during Croatia’s independence war. 

Today, Cermak resides in a lavish castle with an estimated wealth of 200 million euros - much higher than the wages earned working for the government.  Cermak’s “business endeavors” included a chain of gas retail outlets which was sold in the meantime.  Cermak's companies have been a major media advertiser in Croatia.

The West’s leaders have been silent in spite of the fact that Croatia is a NATO member and a candidate of the European Union.  The West has poured over 1 billion euros of taxpayer funds into Croatia’s “reform process” without any results.

Aleksandar Saša Radović has published over 20 books on corruption in Croatia and much of his work (with documents and evidences) has been presented in the international arena to place a spotlight on high level political corruption including cabinet members of the ruling HDZ including former PM Ivo Sanader and the communist party SDP.

Croatia is a signatory to the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, which guarantees the "freedom to seek, receive and impart information and ideas of all kinds, regardless of frontiers, either orally, in writing or in print, in the form of art, or through any other media."

EU membership criteria emphasize the stability of institutions guaranteeing democracy, the rule of law and human rights.  However, Croatia’s politicians have subverted the rule of law and protection of property rights.  More than 1 million back logged cases are in the court system, some for more than 20 years.

Croatia’s elections are slated for December 4, 2011 with over 550,000 illegal votes not addressed by Croatia’s authorities. Efforts by ruling HDZ and SDP have blocked the verification of the voter list.

Sasha is now a political prisoner of a tyrannical state, a compromised member of NATO with an unreformed intelligence structure dating back to the UDBA (Tito’s communist system) and a tainted candidate nation about to enter the EU.

In an independent initiative, Denis Latin, anchor of Croatia’s state-run television and one of the most respected journalists in Croatia and Southeast Europe has joined well-known public figures in a signed letter calling for the release of Sasha.

Over the last four months, over 20 political party candidates of H21, supporters and volunteers have been harassed, intimidated, lost business contracts and had visits by Croatia's "financial police".

The Adriatic Institute for Public Policy and Hrvatska 21 call for the immediate release of Aleksandar Saša Radović and encourage Western leaders from strong rule of law nations to join this effort in calling for Croatia to uphold the rule of law and establish an independent judiciary.

 

Former FCO Minister Denis MacShane MP has written a small but energetic book praising Kosovo's independence: Why Kosovo Still Matters (sic).

Here it is, a perfect Christmas stocking-filler, the more perfect if bought via this link so that I get a few groats from Amazon: 

The main interest of the book for you folk lies in the more or less contemporaneous Ministerial diary extracts from Denis as he visited various Balkan capitals and attended international gatherings where Kosovo/Serbia was being discussed.

There is a walk-on role by Keith Vaz MP, briefly the Minister responsible for Balkan policy, whose modest knowledge of the subject was exposed back in 2001 when he and I had to give evidence to the House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee:

We find it deeply regrettable that Mr Vaz, the FCO minister responsible for south-east Europe, has not visited the area ... His evidence session with us did not reveal a detailed grasp of the policy issues which the area faces. As the Minister told us, and we know ourselves, the situation in the Balkans is "very complex and very difficult"...

It has to be said that the Committee had a point.

Mr Vaz's eloquent but somewhat insubstantial replies to their many questions were a truly fine example of talking a lot and saying  ... nothing.

In Denis' book too Keith Vaz blandly reveals his insightful approach. During a session of briefing by FCO officials on the complexity of the Kosovo problem, he asks:

"Can somebody just draw me a little map and show me where Kosovo is?"

The main interest of the book for me is ... me. I appear wittily or not at various points, but this line caught my special eye:

"... Charles Crawford, one of the most whizzing catherine wheels of a politically astute ambassador that we have"

*blushes prettily*

The book also records accurately enough one amazing moment in April 2002 when then Foreign Secretary Jack Straw chaired a discussion about Balkan policy.

Paddy Ashdown (then High Representative in Bosnia) had nobbled PM Tony Blair to argue against drawing down UK forces too far in Bosnia while maintaining a sizeable UK military presence in Kosovo. The Foreign Secretary asked officials where we all thought the main UK military effort should now focus:

Charles Crawford, the sharp but rather cocky Ambassador in Belgrade, says that we should stay in Bosnia and that Kosovo should be persuaded to stay in a loose federation with Serbia and Montenegro.

The arguments about where UK troops made most impact on the ground and where the main threat to the region's security lay went round and round the table. Finally, as he describes in the book, Denis proposed a vote. And before anyone could question his sanity he quickly had torn up a piece of paper and handed round slips for voting: B for Bosnia, K for Kosovo.

We voted. The votes were counted by Denis. 10 - 5 for focusing on Kosovo. I voted for a heavier UK military presence in Kosovo (of course), even though the book suggests that the opposite was my view.

Denis' case therefore won the argument:

Thus, British foreign policy is made

Hmm. The exception, not the rule, I think.

Otherwise the text is a gay romp through the politics of the Balkans over a thousand years and the latest decades of convulsion, with no opportunity spared to extol the Kosovans and cast Serbs in general and most UK Conservatives in particular in a bad light.

In other words, a typical MacShanian production. Top quality insider gossip, lively, sometimes irreverent, impossibly light, blithely tendentious. And with handy insights. I especially liked the way he linked the events in 1980s' Yugoslavia to the Solidarity pressures in Poland - important to recall that there was a wider European anti-communist context to the issue.

It's also noteworthy that he does not (now) dismiss out of hand the idea of some sort of small territory swaps as part of an historic deal between Belgrade and Pristina, an idea whose time may yet come.

The main problem with the book, apart from myriad other problems, is that it does far too little justice (in fact none at all) to the significant arguments of the Russians and others about the inadmissibility of border changes in Europe "without the consent of all concerned" as per the Helsinki Accords.

Because, Minister, foreign policy is all about balancing realities against principles and rules.

And for all the merits of the Kosovans' claims against Belgrade, is it really such a good outcome for the UK and the world - and even for Kosovo - that international opinion has ended up so divided in a way which shows that deeper Western policy on this subject has spectacularly failed to be convincing (ie Russia, China, India, Brazil, S Africa and many other non-Western big hitters firmly not recognising Kosovo independence on principle)?

Anyway, did I say buy it via the Amazon link above? Go on. You know you want to.

But better not if you're a Serb.

Famous Australian philosopher Tim Blair has coined a trenchant saying which is now known round the world as Blair's Law. It illuminates a depressing but seemingly inexorable tendency:

"... the ongoing process by which the world's multiple idiocies are becoming one giant, useless force"

Almost anything said by the Western world's increasingly bedraggled and violent Occupiers falls into this category, a footling mish-mash of ignorant platitudes jumbling up anti-capitalist slogans with Green and feminist 'demands' of all shapes, genders and sizes.

But these dim light-bulbs are as nothing compared to Naomi Klein who operates on an intergalactic if not utterly cosmic scale of forceful idiocy. Something has gone badly wrong at the Browser who link to what they call her 'outstanding essay' on Capitalism and Climate.

Well, to be fair, it is outstanding. Outstandingly communist and odious.

It's very long and gets increasingly hysterical as she tries to create a new way of looking at things which moves on from both the Greedy Neoliberal Right and Statist Left:

The expansionist, extractive mindset, which has so long governed our relationship to nature, is what the climate crisis calls into question so fundamentally. The abundance of scientific research showing we have pushed nature beyond its limits does not just demand green products and market-based solutions; it demands a new civilisational paradigm, one grounded not in dominance over nature but in respect for natural cycles of renewal—and acutely sensitive to natural limits, including the limits of human intelligence.

So in a way, Chris Horner was right when he told his fellow Heartlanders that climate change isn’t “the issue.” In fact, it isn’t an issue at all. Climate change is a message, one that is telling us that many of our culture’s most cherished ideas are no longer viable.

These are profoundly challenging revelations for all of us raised on Enlightenment ideals of progress, unaccustomed to having our ambitions confined by natural boundaries. And this is true for the statist left as well as the neoliberal right.

Anyway, Naomi wants a heck of a lot of collective action, which (it turns out to no-one's surprise) necessarily involves incredible coercion by the Statist Left inflicted on the rest of us:

Climate change is a collective problem, and it demands collective action. One of the key areas in which this collective action must take place is big-ticket investments designed to reduce our emissions on a mass scale.

That means subways, streetcars and light-rail systems that are not only everywhere but affordable to everyone; energy-efficient affordable housing along those transit lines; smart electrical grids carrying renewable energy; and a massive research effort to ensure that we are using the best methods possible.

The private sector is ill suited to providing most of these services because they require large up-front investments and, if they are to be genuinely accessible to all, some very well may not be profitable. They are, however, decidedly in the public interest, which is why they should come from the public sector.

This is the very same public sector which is wasting trillions of dollars by messing up the Eurozone.

We are not talking about a return to authoritarian socialism, after all, but a turn toward real democracy. (But why do you think people will vote for this folly? What happens when they try it, find it's crazy, then vote against it? Presumably you'll stop this happening by refusing to turn back the wheel of history)

The thirty-odd-year experiment in deregulated, Wild West economics is failing the vast majority of people around the world (Drivel - the 'vast majority' of people on earth have been getting richer precisely because authoritarian socialism has been dumped)

These systemic failures are precisely why so many are in open revolt against their elites, demanding living wages and an end to corruption. (Yup - the Arab Spring sure is all about the Arab masses rising up against neoliberal economics.) Climate change doesn’t conflict with demands for a new kind of economy. Rather, it adds to them an existential imperative...

Anyway, on she drones at vast length. But amidst all the rambling, this one especially outlandish thought caught my eye as summing up just why she is so confused and perhaps dangerous (my emphasis):

The way out is to embrace a managed transition to another economic paradigm, using all the tools of planning discussed above. Growth would be reserved for parts of the world still pulling themselves out of poverty.

Meanwhile, in the industrialised world, those sectors that are not governed by the drive for increased yearly profit (the public sector, co-ops, local businesses, nonprofits) would expand their share of overall economic activity, as would those sectors with minimal ecological impacts (such as the caregiving professions). A great many jobs could be created this way. But the role of the corporate sector, with its structural demand for increased sales and profits, would have to contract.

Just say we all decide that 'corporations' are too powerful and somehow need to be 'reined in', favouring state-driven 'planning' instead. Where do jobs and innovation then in fact come from?

What is missing in Klein's wild rant is any sense at all of the role of personal creativity. Growth is nothing more than the cooperation of people inventing and doing new things, preferably within a solid legal framework to help mobilise others to invest their efforts and accumulated savings too.

It is theoretically meaningless to 'reserve' growth for parts of the world pulling themselves out of poverty. Every time anyone anywhere has a good new idea, the potential for growth asserts itself: how even in theory do you limit that? Poor people in principle of course can be as inventive as anyone else. But it is only capitalism and market processes which allow that creative energy to be reproducible on a significant scale for general benefit. Poor people are poor because they do not have capitalism but usually gangster statist socialism instead. 

To go the Klein route means that huge millions of people will be sacrificed and die for 'the planet'. As market mechanisms are dumped in favour of 'planned' outcomes, we'll no longer have any coherent basis for working out what anything costs and what is 'affordable'. Every industry now existing will be run down. Medicines will not be developed. New, cheaper technologies for fixing things and saving energy won't be invented.

And since there is no prospect of containing people and their creativity in this insane way except by brute force, democracy will have to give way to the Statist Left on Steroids, aka one-party communism. Which we have tried.

It was not such a good deal for the Planet, as the systemic information deficiency and suppression of innovation caused by mass oppression stopped even the most elementary environmental concerns from being registered. Ecological disaster on a scale greater than anything else ever seen on Earth took place:

This is what Nutty Naomi wants to re-inflict on us, as an 'existential imperative'.

All the greatest idiocies rolling inexorably into one gigantic useless force.

No thanks. Please go away.

 

Update  I needn't have bothered. JoNova does a far better and ruthless demolition job by looking at how Naomi ignores the numbers:

Klein thinks the answers to feeding the poor lies with “Big Government”, but rational thinkers know that more than anything, the fate of the poor depends on clear thinking, real evidence, and polite debate. None of which is on offer in this article.

Reading Klein is like visiting a parallel universe — her religious devotion to her ideology means nearly every sentence is the exact opposite of the truth.  More’s the pity that The Nation has no editors who recognise innumerate drivel and an ideological rant based on a logical black hole.

Bad mannered bluster, blind assumptions, and religious rationalization have always been the tool of witchdoctors and con artists.

Naomi Klein: Nice writing, shame she can’t think.

.

 

Are you following the stupidity and incoherence of the Occupy Wall Street #OWS tendency with its lumpen supporters in differemnt US cities?

Ed Driscoll gives us a helpful round up of why the phoney idea of Liberaltarianism (ie the supposed new synthesis between libertarian and left-liberal thinking) is meaningless.

And then there's ... OK, you can guess:

Ah, but the great advantage of mass moronization is that it leaves you too dumb to figure out who to be mad at. At Liberty Square, one of the signs reads: "F**k your unpaid internship!" Fair enough. But, to a casual observer of the massed ranks of Big Sloth, it's not entirely clear what precisely anyone would ever pay them to do.

Do you remember Van Jones? He was Obama's "green jobs" czar back before "green jobs" had been exposed as a gazillion-dollar sinkhole for sluicing taxpayer monies to the president's corporate cronies. Oh, don't worry. These cronies aren't "corporate" in the sense of Steve Jobs. The corporations they run put "people before profits": That's to say, they've figured out it's easier to take government money from you people than create a business that makes a profit.

In an amusing inversion of the Russian model, Van Jones became a czar after he'd been a Communist. He became a Commie in the mid-Nineties – i.e., after even the Soviet Union had given up on it. Needless to say, a man who never saw a cobwebbed collectivist nostrum he didn't like no matter how long past its sell-by date is hot for "Occupy Wall Street." Indeed, Van Jones thinks that the protests are the start of an "American Autumn..."

... Underneath the familiar props of radical chic that hasn't been either radical or chic in half a century, the zombie youth of the Big Sloth movement are a paradox too ludicrous even for the malign alumni of a desultory half-decade of Complacency Studies: they're anarchists for Big Government.

As, perhaps, are we, if we are relying upon this horde of dimwits and agitators not only to pay their own way in the world but also to generate enough of a surplus to pay us oldies our Ponzi Pensions in some twenty years' time.

Do it for the children, the Democrats like to say. They're the children we did it for, and, if this is the best they can do, they're done for.

 

.

Articles pour out about the mounting problems in Greece. Homelessness, drugs, shops shutting, psychological despair, political alienation, emigration, suicide, and the rest.

Such as this one in the Guardian:

A new underclass has appeared: in the homeless and hungry who roam the streets; in the spiralling number of drug addicts; in the psychiatric patients ejected from institutions that can no longer offer them a place; in the thousands of shop owners forced to close and board up businesses; in those who forage through municipal rubbish bins at night; and in the pensioners who make do with rejects at fruit and vegetable markets. Suicides have also risen, with help lines reporting a deluge of calls...

With desperation has come a collective sense of guilt and depression – more dangerous, say analysts, than even the social tensions that threaten to tear the country apart.

Recently hundreds of Greeks piled into a lecture hall to hear Fotini Tsalikoglou, a prominent psychology professor, speak on "the power of loss".

"Greeks feel like they are in a bad dream," she says. "You wake up not knowing what will be overturned today of what was overturned yesterday. A common thread that unites people is the experience of fear and desperation."

This is a fascinating insight into just how fragile our existence is. Homelessness and hunger are not some sort of indictment of 'capitalism' but the planet's default mode. Greeks are finding out how most people in human history have lived and indeed in much of Africa and Asia still live - a meagre, grinding, subsistence existence.

To get out of that dismal condition requires high, sustained inventiveness and collective discipline. Sure, in Greece's case Germany's export policies and other external factors have not helped. But the basic reason for that society's accelerating decline is that Greece for far too long has lived off other people's good will. Borrowing and not paying back - sometimes for good reasons, mainly for reasons of chronic mismanagement - has characterised Greece's attitude to borrowing for over 2000 years.

Latterly Greece has enjoyed a significant pseudo-boom as EU funds (grants and loans) have poured in. Yet the country's elite have gone to the amazing extent of telling lies to EU authorities and their benefactors about the state of public finances. This deception has helped make a difficult situation far worse.

While all that has gone on, Greece has enjoyed a smirking relationship with its own hard-core Leftists and terrorists. When I was in Thessaloníki in June 2000 for a Balkan Stability Pact gathering, the British Embassy Defence Attaché Brigadier Stephen Saunders was murdered in cold blood by Greek Marxist fanatics. Under severe British and wider international pressure as the 2004 Athens Olympics loomed, the Greek system finally started to make a proper effort to find the assassins and the whole vile network which had killed many other people was at last arrested and sent to prison.

Above all, the Greek masses have had a more than ambiguous relationship towards the state, enjoying the jobs and bribes and privileges coming from state jobs while studiously doing everything possible to avoid paying the taxes needed to fund them.

Things which can't last, don't. Greece is busy sliding back towards the sort of overall living standards associated with far poorer countries.

This wretched situation compels the EU and wider financial forces for reasons of crude self-interest to scramble round looking for ways to manage the mess. But France's President Sarkozy adds a moral argument:

“The failure of Greece would be a failure of the whole of Europe. There is no other credible alternative. Yes, there is a moral obligation of solidarity. But there is also an obligation for economic solidarity. It is not possible to leave Greece behind.”

What exactly is this 'moral obligation of solidarity', exactly? Why should we help Greece more than we help, say, much poorer countries which have not yet shown themselves to determined to scrounge for hundreds of years at a time?

Should not collective bad behaviour have collective bad consequences? Isn't that the most 'moral' position of all, or at least the only one that truly matters as it gives the purest impulse to making the Right Choices?

PS   Just to add that Stumbling and Mumbling also offered us last month some terse but pertinent thoughts on the deeper moral issues underlying the Eurozone debacle - see especially the fine last line :

All these options - except fiscal expansion which is only part of the solution anyway - impose costs upon northern European taxpayers. Which prompts the sort of questions posed by Clemens Wergin of Die Welt: why should German tax-payers support Greek tax-dodgers? Why should bankers who have made bad loans be bailed out?

In short, there’s moral resistance, founded in part upon natural justice and in part upon the protestant bourgeois belief that hard work and prudence should be rewarded and fecklessness punished.

... Herein, I think, lies the cause of the markets’ annoyance at Europe’s lack of leadership. If you regard the crisis as a merely technical one, you’ll see lots of possible fixes - or at least improvements on the status quo - and will therefore be frustrated that these aren’t being pursued.  What you miss is that moral aspect.

This, though, merely raises a more general point about politics - that there is not only often a clash between moralists and technocrats, but a mutual incomprehension between them.

 

I have written here before about the way the BBC defaults towards glossing over collectivist crimes and damning with faint praise the success of market-based solutions. Or slips in other strange invariably Lefty assumptions via sly editing.

A handy compilation of a few horrors:

-   Sneaky use of inverted comma qualification to suggest a phony detachment/objectivity

-   blandly reporting Islamist extremism as if the dilemmas these evil people face are normal

-   breaking its own rules against advertising by advertising communist babes

-   using plucky sporting metaphors to describe tyrants

-   simply making things up at the height of a crisis to boost ratings and by implication damn reformers

It is beyond debate that the BBC does this not because there is a secret nerve-centre of Leftists controlling output, but rather because the whole intellectual culture of the organisation tilts in a specific way to make many reporters and presenters simply unaware of the crude biases they are showing.

Take two new examples.

Here is an especially chilling one. Paul Crook worked for 30 years(!) at the BBC World Service describing his life in Mao's China. His communist parents themselves get horrendously persecuted. But he doesn't lose faith! And he gets a nice fat space on the BBC World website to propagate his own humiliation (my emphasis):

We thought my father would be released within a few days, in a few weeks. We had all been educated to think that things were getting better all the time, but sometimes there would be mistakes. One of the slogans at that time was: 'You should trust the Masses, and trust the Party!' 

... My mother was repeatedly summoned for questioning and eventually she too disappeared...

We were anxious about what had happened to our parents, but we weren't eaten up by anger or worry, as we were brought up to believe that if you were innocent then this would be proved in due course.

Meanwhile my parents' friends gave us care and encouragement, and the official position towards young people whose parents were in trouble was that they could still be educated 'to take the right path'.

... In the end my mother was freed after just over three years of lock-up on the university campus. My father was released from prison after five years, much of it spent in solitary confinement. He and my mother were later exonerated of any wrongdoing, and received an official apology.

My parents were never physically abused in all the time they were locked up, but it was a trying time, to say the least. They were sustained by their belief that all this upheaval was part of an attempt to create a better society... 

Like many of my friends I grew to be rather sceptical, to be critical of what people's stated intentions were, and what their grand visions entailed.

My father said when he was locked up, he did think it was a mistake and wondered how he could clear his name. When he came out he found that many of his Chinese colleagues had gone through very similar experiences.

And he was reconciled to the fact that the leadership was making an earnest effort to get rid of these abuses. He had lost five years of his life in prison but he didn't see why he should change his ideals.

Isn't that staggering? Imagine the BBC giving all that space to a slave who had ended up being brainwashed and describes how his slavery was 'all for the best'?

This family have been relatively lucky in not being murdered by the Mao regime, yet they also suffered mightily for nothing. And they still retained their 'ideals' and their belief in the leadership's 'earnestness' in stopping 'abuses'.  No sign at all of any thinking that the sort of undemocratic elitist system they believed in might inevitably create such crimes?

*pauses, lost for words* 

What sort of evil ideas did wretched Paul Crook emit into the world's airways on UK taxpayers' money during his long years at the BBC World Service?

That example shows furtive pro-communist propaganda. This next one shows furtive anti-market propaganda: Has Western capitalism failed?

Note the fact that this very question is asked. The five 'experts' are indeed all prominent enough and give a range of more or less coherent responses. Indeed, they even manage to find a sassy Ghanaian entrepreneur who praises 'Western capitalism in its truest form' as well as Lord Desai:

Russian capitalism is somewhat old and in need of urgent repair, but the spirit of capitalism - risk-taking, saving, investing, hard work - all those virtues have now migrated and are happily ensconced in China, India, Indonesia, Korea and Japan - the countries which we never thought would ever get out of poverty.

Western capitalism probably had half a century of over-indulgence - continued prosperity, full employment, almost guaranteed growth - and that in its turn meant that our costs went up and manufacturing industry migrated abroad, while finance has proved to be a fickle friend.

We will have to rethink our model, our values, we will have to acquire old-fashioned virtues, because capitalism is not going to go any time fast. If Asia has vigorous energetic capitalism and we have tired old capitalism, we will end up paying a huge price and we will trade our prosperity for their prosperity.

Socialism died 20 years ago - capitalism lives on. It changes its form, it migrates, it is fully global. Now we at last understand what globalisation means - it means we are just as important as anyone else. If we don't work very hard, we will lose our importance.

Against them are pronouncements comparing capitalism to slavery, and mystic meanderings from Professor Tim Jackson:

Questioning growth is deemed to be the act of lunatics, idealists and revolutionaries. Yet question it we must. The myth of growth has failed us. It has failed the two billion people who still live on less than $2 a day. It has failed the fragile ecological systems on which we depend for survival...

Living well is about good nutrition, decent homes, access to good quality services, stable communities, satisfying employment. Prosperity, in any meaningful sense of the word, transcends material concerns. It resides in our love for our families, the support of our friends, the strength of our communities, our ability to participate fully in the life of society, a sense of meaning and purpose in our lives.

Which takes us back to Communist China. Where the regime imposed poverty upon almost a billion people, but where now, thanks directly to capitalist growth, prosperity and freedom are now advancing strongly.

So the real question for the BBC is: Has Western socialism failed? Since most of the people living even now on less than $2 a day are the victims of governing undemocratic regimes which in one way or the other Western socialism has feted for decades.

Will that question ever be asked prominently on the BBC website?

No.

Update  carried also at the Commentator

* * * * *

Here is Ed Miliband's Labour Conference speech today - in full.

A bad idea to hand out to the print media the same version in micro-sentenced blank verse as used to help the delivery. It looks oddly like something from a Noddy story:

Stock markets round the world falling.

The United States in difficulty.

The Eurozone struggling.

And people in Britain losing their jobs.

Now is not the time for the same old answers.

From us, on the issues that lost us your trust.

From this Government, on the growth crisis we face.

You need to know that there is an alternative.

You need to know that it is credible.

See what I mean? I can't stand it any more, so I'll run his words together to make them readable:

Government is cutting back. And the recovery has stalled. Of course, the world economy is suffering.

But our Government is making it worse. Because the current plan to raise taxes and cut spending more dramatically than any other country is not working.

Depends what you mean by 'working'. If it's strategically important to get on top of the insane debt levels Labour bequeathed, maybe that pain for a few years has to be part of any cure?

... with such great people, how have we ended up with the problems we face? It’s because of the way we have chosen to run our country. Not just for a year or so but for decades.

Now there are hard lessons here for my party which some won’t like. Some of what happened in the 1980s was right. It was right to let people buy their council houses. It was right to cut tax rates of 60, 70, 80 percent. And it was right to change the rules on the closed shop, on strikes before ballots. These changes were right, and we were wrong to oppose it at the time.

Now you're talking, Ed! Why were these things 'right', and what 'wrong' ideas did your party espouse?

We changed the fabric of our country but we did not do enough to change the values of our economy.

Oh. That's helpful.

And we have seen immigration policy which didn’t work for the people whose jobs, living standards and communities were affected.

Which Party deliberately opened the immigration gates as part of a vast social engineering scheme to make the UK more 'diverse'? Oops. It didn't work. Hard-working Poles came 900 miles to take took the jobs which illiterate rioting Yoof from our skools up da road woz too fick to do init. Do better next time. Promise!

We must never excuse people who cheat the welfare system. The reason I talk about this is not because I don’t believe in a welfare state but because I do.

We can never protect and renew it if people believe it’s just not fair. If it’s too easy not to work. And there are people taking something for nothing. And if at the same time people who have paid into the system all their lives find the safety net full of holes. No wonder people are angry.

Er, yes. But who created such a towering system of benefits and disincentivised work? Who howls with rage every time any government tries to curb abuses?

Let me tell you what the 21st century choice is: Are you on the side of the wealth creators or the asset strippers? The producers or the predators?

Ed, calm down. What is taxation to pay for all your ridiculous schemes including the folly of overseas development aid and the CAP and myriad Diversity Coordinators, if it is not predatory asset-stripping, imposed by force?

We need the most competitive tax and regulatory environment we can for British business.

But when I am Prime Minister, how we tax, what government buys, how we regulate, what we celebrate will be in the service of Britain’s producers

Er, no. Because EU laws stop you doing any of that. What's your plan for wriggling out of that one?

But our energy companies have defied the laws of gravity for too long. Prices go up but they never seem to come down.

You can't be serious. It is a huge collectivist Climate policy plank to force energy prices higher. Have you filled up a car's petrol tank recently, Ed? What % of the mad price is tax of some sort or other?

We’ve got to put an end to the idea that those at the top can take whatever they can, regardless of what they give back. It’s why we must end the cosy cartels of the way top pay is set in our economy. So every pay committee should have an employee on the board.

Ed. How a private organisation remunerates its employees is none of your damn business.

So we need a new bargain at the top of society, and in our benefits system too.

A bargain? Hmm. That sounds like an arrangement whereunder the parties, you know, agree on what happens? Not one where the state decides everything, including how private organisations set up their pay scheme committees.

When we have a housing shortage, choices have to be made. Do we treat the person who contributes to their community the same as the person who doesn’t? My answer is no. Our first duty should be to help the person who shows responsibility. And I say every council should recognise the contribution that people are making 

Utter incoherence. But so what? Lots of new jobs for thick social science graduates in the RMP (Responsibility Measurement Police).

And it’s not just in our benefits system that I want to change the way government works. It’s in our public services as well. Millions of public servants deliver a fantastic service every day of every week. But we all know that sometimes powerful organisations can become unaccountable. Work not in the interests of those who need them but in their own interests. That's what vested interests are.

Thanks for clarifying that. But what are you talking about?

You know what it’s like. You stand in the queue. You hang on the phone. You fill in the form. And then all you get? Computer says no. We need to change that.

To give power to the public. Like the power to the elderly couple to choose whether they are cared for in a care home or in their own home. Or the parents I know struggling with their council on their child’s special needs who want to know who else is facing the same challenges. So I will take on the vested interests wherever they are because that is how we defend the public interest.

So. We'll have the New VIP (Vested Interest Police) squads to keep an eye on the RMP and the rest of the sprawling bureaucracy, all of which is there to uphold, or is it oppress, the public interest. It's all so confusing.

But I’m up for the fight. The fight for a new bargain. A new bargain in our economy so reward is linked to effort.

Hurrah! A Flat Tax system does just that! Bring it on!

A new bargain based on your values so we can pay our way in the world. A new bargain to ensure responsibility from top to bottom. And a new bargain to break open the closed circles, and break up vested interests, that hold our country back.

Hurrah! Abolishing all Trades Union privileges and dismantling state education and health monopolies. I vote for that. 

I aspire to be your Prime Minister not for more of the same. But to write a new chapter in our country’s history. The promise of Britain lies in its people. The tragedy of Britain is that it is not being met. My mission. Our mission. To fulfil the promise of each so we fulfil the promise of Britain.

Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz

Oh ... he's stopped? After a mere 5830 words or so.

What's wrong with this speech? No, sniping aside, what's really wrong with it?

It's all so thin and phoney, aimed at a sound-bite culture. The words values or value appear 43 times. But repeating the word values like a parrot is, in fact, valueless. 

There are huge interesting things to talk about. The Eurozone and future European architecture. How to manage complexity. Where state action might best work when networked spontaneous order might not do enough. How to use the tax system to deliver incentives. How in fact to give people more choice. Why it made sense to sell council houses and reduce the state's role - scope for more of that now? How to make 'national' policies work in a globalised world. European demographics and pension schemes. Defence policy - heavy manned weapons or myriad unmanned drones? State v individual. Structure v freedom. What in fact these days works well, and why?

Not a single one of these issues appears in any meaningful form. If the one thing the Labour Party ought to have aplenty, it's intellectuals. Those clever people who swarm in higher education and Islington and Camden, some of whom are very smart and able to think. They should be able to help Ed articulate these tough subjects and more in a light-touch but mentally nourishing way. Is this what Ralph Miliband expected?

Instead we get this blast of lukewarm air, this cumulus of clichés, this infantilised gruel which in its faux soul-searching toughness pretends to be part of an adult diet but evaporates any time you stick in your spoon hunting for some substantial morsel.

Look at the Guardianistas trying to find something intelligent to say about it. If you listen closely you can hear them cringing with embarrassment as they tap away on their smart laptops while sipping their globalised Fair Trade coffee, all provided to them by the greedy uncaring private sector.

Conclusion?

The words values or value appear 43 times. But repeating the word values like a dying parrot is, in fact, valueless.

I am entranced not only by the sound of my voice, but also by the sight of it.

Here once again is my contribution to the Churchill Archives Centre in Cambridge, describing my long and ever-fascinating diplomatic career.

Many points of interest here, including on South Africa's not-so-peaceful transition away from apartheid to ANC-dominated democracy:

I had a huge row on this with someone in Warsaw years later. I can even tell you who it was, because no-one will ever read the transcript. It was David King, the former Government Chief Scientist.

It turned out he was from South Africa. We were sitting there in Warsaw having a lunch talking about science policy and global warming and he said – I’m really pleased to be here in Poland, because I come from South Africa. Poland like South Africa had a peaceful transition to democracy.

I said Poland wasn’t that peaceful because quite a few people were killed, but South Africa’s wasn’t peaceful at all. He said – What do you mean it wasn’t peaceful? I said – Thirty thousand people were killed. Hacked to pieces and burned alive.

He said – That’s just ridiculous. I said – It may be inconvenient, and it may be that you can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs, but it strikes me as a bit thick to call South Africa a peaceful transition. It just wasn’t peaceful. If 30,000 Poles had been killed we’d have heard about it. Poland had Father Popieluszko and one or two others, and that’s about it.

 Anyway we had this absurd row, with the Poles watching like that Hitchcock film called Strangers on a Train where all the heads are turning to and fro at the tennis match. Eventually we declared the end of hostilities and changed the subject.

I went back to the Embassy and got on to London and said – How many people died in the transition away from apartheid? And the answer was - over that period – seven or eight years period – what you could define the transition as – 30 to 40, 000 known deaths – those sort of numbers. There was basically a civil war going on in different parts of South Africa among the blacks. But the so-called peaceful transition took place because few if any whites were massacred. Anything else was sort of weird unimportant African stuff.

And so your question; was it successful? Well, how do you measure success? I met a woman once whose twin sister had been necklaced by the ANC. She was a PAC supporter. The world let loose revolutionary terror in the townships and the World Council of Churches and these people did nothing about it. In fact if anything they encouraged it and Winnie Mandela with her matchbox – it was disgusting. There were crucifixions going on in the townships just a mile or two away from the Embassy in Pretoria. (Tape change)

CC ... So the question is, how do you measure success? We brought to power a government, an ANC Party, whose subsequent incompetence has led to the more or less winding down of the best electricity system in Africa because of lack of investment.

But above all – according to the Harvard study which came out the other day – 300,000 people have died over the AIDS problem who maybe needn’t have died. Now this is a tremendous disaster, and it’s sort of tucked away on page 3 somewhere, so hideously embarrassing it is that the ANC government has led to this result. It goes beyond any measure.

In the last ten years we’ve had a Labour government, a lot of whom invested hugely, personally, in the anti-apartheid struggle. Tony Blair, Robin Cook – this was one of the big moments of their life and there was a big moral campaign, and for them the ANC are for all practical purposes above criticism. And we’ve sat there watching 300,000 people die because of mistaken policies which we all knew were a farce.

I saw in the paper the other day the government are giving £50 million to South Africa who’s now got a new health minister, to deal with this AIDS problem. It’s the mother of all shutting the stable door after the horses have bolted and died. I’m pleased to say if you type in South Africa peaceful transition into Google, my website dumping on the peaceful transition comes up on the front page at number 3. So the truth is out there somewhere.

Or try this spirited passage on the transition (or not) from communism in Russia. Should we have insisted that Lenin be removed from Red Square?

... People say now this was a failure of shock therapy. The trouble was there wasn’t enough shock, and there wasn’t enough therapy. If anything, we should have been more radical in some of the things we’d done in terms of upsetting the old order and breaking up the old monopolies. We certainly should have been more radical in pressing for Lenin to be taken out of Red Square. It was a moral blunder not to press for that.

 

MM Could we have got away with that?

 

CC You could only get away with it only if you decided it was important. I think there was a feeling of – Oh well – Leftism in that form is over, so why bother pushing it?

 

If you get on my website again you’ll see reference to my telegram about a tale of two vampires. The Nazi vampire was killed at the end of the Second World War. The Communist vampire wasn’t killed. It lies there in Red Square but no-one’s driven a stake through its heart, and it just keeps coming back.

 

Leftism in the Foreign Office and western thinking generally, it’s a profound thing. The idea that you should drive a stake through the heart of communism ... people would say – Well why? Why are you being so divisive? It’s all over. They didn’t realise you had to kill it off. And Mrs Thatcher would have been much better on this, because by then John Major had come in. He wasn’t one of nature’s stake-drivers. He probably would have agreed with it, but he wasn’t somebody who was going to push it.

 

MM Well I suppose you could say what’s it got to do with us?

 

CC What it’s got to do with us is that we have to kill vampires. Otherwise they return through the back door. As indeed they’ve done.

 

So there were decisions made which were not dramatic enough. There were issues about the Katyn massacre in Poland which Yeltsin pushed – but we didn’t really take them up thematically. Because there was always a feeling – Well we don’t want to do this, in case it provokes the opposition to Yeltsin. It was odd. We pulled our punches, but the argument against doing what I wanted was that you can only do so much and we were all working flat out.

 

I still think there wasn’t a big enough ideological component. A lot of western governments didn’t want to gloat, be seen to be gloating, and maybe there’s somewhere between gloating and being much more determined. When the Second World War ended we organised all these conferences at Wilton Park on de-Nazification. We didn’t do de-Communistification, or whatever the word would be. Because we didn’t think we needed to.

 

MM Where would it have got us?

 

CC It might have got us to a lot of good places if you brought a lot of these people across and taught them about the rule of law. Don’t forget in Russia they’ve got no living memory of anything other than communism. In Eastern Europe it’s different.

 

What you said makes my very point. It wouldn’t have got us anywhere, why bother, it’s too big and it’s too complicated. My point is, this is one of the greatest intellectual convulsions in modern history and we tried to do it on the cheap. The Know How Fund was what, fifty million, a hundred million over eight years – peanuts.

 

We gave quite a lot of money writing off debts which I suppose was theoretically real money, but in terms of the money we invested in transforming those societies, given the scale of what was needed and the scale of where they’d come from, it was just absurd. Just not up to the job. We saw this after Milosevic was killed in Serbia. We tried to do it on the cheap. Stupid. It was a bad investment.

There are moments when you invest a bit more money because they’re historical moments. There was opportunity to put thousands of people through courses, as opposed to tens or scores or hundreds of people through courses. It’s just a good investment and we didn’t have a leader who had a strategic vision in that sort of way. Plus there was other money around – it’s not our job – why should we bother – dah, dah, dah.

 

There’s always a reason for not doing anything, and slowly the moments pass. Years later you see Putinism there. One wonders if one had invested a bit more in pluralism, would we have quite ended up where we are now? Some say of course you would, because that’s all there is in Russia. Other people would say no – it would have made a difference. Personally, I would like to have seen us make a bigger effort...

Read the whole thing, as they say. My life and its contribution to the times.

Just back from seeing Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy.

The good news is that it is pretty faithful to the original story, cramming a lot into the film while maintaining moody and sometimes tense mystery.

The bad news is that it is pretty faithful to the book in having a feeble explanation of the reasons for the Mole's treason. In fact it's even feebler than the book's version which also has some facile anti-Americanising: " It's an aesthetic choice - the West has got ugly".

Aesthetic? Ugly??

Compared to the way of life behind the Iron Curtain?!

Which, by the way, is portrayed in a stupidly unconvincing way. All the vintage commie cars wheeled out for the Hungarian scenes are ... sparkling clean!

Let's also draw an embarrassed veil over the open plan office space at the Circus, some of the fatuous dialogue among the top Circus folk (written specially for the film by Le Carre himself, as one review mentions?), and the clueless use of security cupboard combination locks.

And what's with British MI6 staff are shown singing the Soviet anthem lustily at a Christmas party with Santa Lenin(!), or the senior FCO Under-Secretary eating crisp toast in his office? Are the people who made this film insane?

What's the clever heart of the story? Rather like the theme of Lord of the Rings: if you want to hide something preciousss from the enemy, take it towards him.

Remember the Russian sleepers unmasked by the FBI (whom assorted liberals jeered were 'nothing special' or 'clueless bumblers infiltrating the local PTA'?). Part of the key point there was that the point of spying is not to get any specific piece of vital information (although anything is better than nothing). The jackpot is when you manage to get a flow of Top Secret information.

How to achieve that? Very difficult. Sleepers can help in all sorts of ways. But they need to be really deeply buried for years on end to avoid any suspicion.

So stealing or copying the odd document is one thing - doing it regularly or to order is quite another. In TTSS the plot revolves round a fiendishly simple Soviet plan to create a cover for getting information from the British Mole as it were in broad daylight - under cover of giving the Brits a supply of top secret Soviet information! 

To make this work various layers of deception have to be laid on top, and some real but not important secret Soviet information has to be handed over to the British side along the way to get the silly Brits 'hooked' on the idea, but that is the nub of it. Hence once the scheme has been rumbled the way ahead is easy: to unmask the Mole a panic message about a possible British Mole needs to be fed in to the Circus top brass, and then see who jumps to alert the Sovs...

The film's main storyline weakness is that the four key suspects are seen as if from a far distance. You have no idea what their Circus jobs are or why they are important or what they are like, or indeed why they might be suspect.

The wider failure of all the Le Carre spy books is also on display here: the reek of moral relativism ("we're almost as bad as each other") and lack of any significant substantive beliefs. By shrinking the world down to the mutual manoeuvrings of the rival spy agencies and their messy private lives, all context and purpose drain away - just as in the Godfather films the wider victims of the mafia families' wickedness are never shown. If all you see is presented as ugly, why indeed be loyal to such an ugly world?

Verdict?

It is all elegantly done and beautifully acted in an evocatively gloomy twilight way, with assorted clumsy 1970s product placements including Harp beer cans and Trebor mints in a tube colour/design which I don't remember.

Great packaging - but around a dark, banal hole. The latter described relentlessly and in lots of accurate detail by Peter Hitchens.

Almost the defining characteristic of an active sense of community is that it is only aroused when people perceive that the established structures of control are failing. And while that might result in a lot of engagement, it is too volatile to be trusted

Here she is. Zoe Williams, Guardian pundit with Guardian haircut.

Remember The Bridge on the River Kwai? The moral core of the story is how Lt Col Nicholson is so determined to stand up for what's right in his prison camp that he utterly loses sight of the point, namely to fight the enemy. So wrapped up in his own righteousness, he ends up helping the wrong side. He realises what he has done and tries to make amends only in his death anguish.

As with Lt Col Nicholson, so with Zoe W.

Read that passage again:

Almost the defining characteristic of an active sense of community is that it is only aroused when people perceive that the established structures of control are failing. And while that might result in a lot of engagement, it is too volatile to be trusted

Put to one side the fact that word 'only' is in the wrong place: she meant to say (I assume) Almost the defining characteristic of an active sense of community is that it is aroused only when...

The key thought here is that an active sense of community (according to her) comes along only when 'established structures of control' are failing.

In other words, the fons et origo of our life is the state.

What she 100% fails to understand is that the state can kill an active sense of community, by taking away from people the responsibility to work hard together to improve things.

Before the Welfare State came along trades unions had a vital educational role. My old boss as Ambassador in Belgrade Sir Edwin Bolland rose from working-class Yorkshire mining town poverty to high office in good part because the local Unions organised education for poor locals in Latin and other subjects requiring intellectual discipline.

Where did all that moral self-propelled local community energy and discipline go? It was displaced by the idea that the state should take on that function, leaving the Unions as crude morally hollowed-out lobby groups, ever 'demanding' more from state and private employers alike.

In the USA there is an incredible (compared to us) amount of 'social capital' involved in busy local community organisation through churches, interest groups and other local bodies.

Why? Because the state has not (yet) usurped those functions. Most Americans actually believe *shock* that they should look after their own lives, and so must work hard to get somewhere. They want the state to 'get out of the way' and let them get on with it.

Thus Zoe's final terrifying thought: community self-defence organised when the state fails us might result in a lot of engagement, but it is too volatile to be trusted

What? Trusted by whom?

Much better for us all says Zoe that you British citizens cringe back and apologise for not being inclusive enough when small bands of petty thugs start trashing the neighbourhood.

Yes, the state has failed you. But hey!, you can't have a European Social Model Omelette without breaking some eggs. In this case the egg is your street - sorry if it's necessary collateral damage in the Guardian's masterplan to improve the world. Fill in the forms and the state eventually might come round to 'assess' the damage.

In the movie Lt Col Nicholson grasps the madness of his self-delusion. Mortally wounded, he staggers across and falls on the detonator which blows up the bridge: What have I done?

Time for Zoe to do the same.

Here's my take on the Riots:

For a gold-plated example of progressive sneering, check out the Nobel Prize lecture of Harold Pinter:

'There are no hard distinctions between what is real and what is unreal, nor between what is true and what is false. A thing is not necessarily either true or false; it can be both true and false.'

Tell that to the ruined shopkeepers across London.

Thus every day in every way our society is infiltrated by divisive sneering. Most of it emanates from publicly funded organisations captured by the sneering classes (universities, BBC, NGOs, local councils, quangos). And over the years the consequences of this tsunami of state-subsidised sneering compound up, not least in the way people think about what they themselves represent in society and what society ‘owes’ to them.

This in turn gnaws at deepest instincts of personal self-respect. How dare the government make ‘cuts’? It’s my money, especially if I have done nothing to earn it!

The multiculturalist chattering classes see the looters and rioters with mixed emotions. There is lurking (sometimes not so lurking) pride that ‘the system’ has been ‘challenged’ so brutally by these ‘protesters’ who have ‘reclaimed’ (sic) the streets. The underpowered and faltering police response has been noted and approved. It is, ahem, embarrassing that these fine warriors are identified with poverty and deprivation, yet manage to organise themselves through expensive mobile kit. And it’s awkward that certain ethnic communities quickly mobilised to defend themselves. But the main thing is that the ‘under-class’ offered ‘resistance’! Bring it on.

We can draw some shreds of comfort from the fact that left wing forces now pin their hopes on this under-class. Back in 1848 Karl Marx himself used language likely to dismay people listening to the Today programme:

The “dangerous class”, [lumpenproletariat] the social scum, that passively rotting mass thrown off by the lowest layers of the old society…

Those of us who refuse to succumb to progressive nihilism must heave a deep sigh and confront the extraordinary horror seen on the streets of London and other cities and towns.

It’s bad enough having to pay to put it right – money which could have been spent on new investment. Most difficult to tackle in its vile abstractness is the philosophical problem: the insolent assumption that anything (anyone?) can be challenged and destroyed simply because the rioters and looters feel like it.

And the implicit blackmail threat that if we don’t give these people whatever they want, they’ll start it up again.

The looters in some dim way probably talk among each other about ‘respect’, but in substance they don't respect other people, the law, any idea of self restraint. Above all, they don’t respect or begin to understand the slow power of compound interest to build and sustain wealth down the generations.

They don’t know where the value of what they are smashing and burning in fact originates. They don’t know where the streets they plunder come from.

And that’s the most ruinous feature of the Labour Party’s support for the unrelenting deconstruction of British values. It has created ignorant, violent decontextualised people completely detached from history - and morality.

In short, this is a sign of the death of common sense. It shows that there are clusters of moral parasites living in the UK who literally have nothing ‘in common’ with the vast majority, yet who can use technology created by clever, disciplined hard-working people to cause immense damage, almost out of nowhere.

They’ll be curbed and contained, of course. But then what? 

Andrzej Lepper, turbulent leader of Poland's left-populist Self-Defence party, yesterday was found dead. Apparently by hanging himself in his party office in Warsaw

Where to start? The English Wikipedia page gives the basics of his lively career, describing how he came from a modest rural family background and with little formal education worked himself up and up to become one of Poland's leading politicians.

At the peak of his political fortunes his party won 11% of the vote in Poland's 2005 general elections to become the third-largest party in parliament. Lepper himself likewise came a more than respectable third (15% of the first round vote) in the 2005 Presidential elections shortly thereafter.

There ensued a messy period featuring an unhappy coalition government between the Kaczynski twins' Law and Justice party plus the two leading populist parties in parliament, Self-Defence and League of Polish Families. Lepper became a Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Agriculture. This eccentric arrangement duly crashed under the weight of excessive bickering.

In the ensuing 2007 elections both Self-Defence and League of Polish Families blew up and crashed from any seats in Parliament; the Citizens Platform government led by Donald Tusk swept to a heavy win. Thereafter Lepper has been a forlorn, diminished figure, beset by footling private and political scandals and family difficulties.

* * * * *

What to make of Lepper's rise and fall? He was a classic 'transition' spoiler phenomenon, echoing Zhirinovsky in Russia although nothing like as, ahem, vivid:

Lepper by contrast was much more 'stolid' if not oddly conventional. He rose to prominence during the turbulent post-communist 1990s by the usual populist tactics (noisy championing of the 'little man' especially in rural areas and periodic road-blocks) but necessarily (and unlike Zhirinovsky) calmed down as his party won more and more votes.

By the time I went to Poland as Ambassador in late 2003, Lepper's party was doing well, with polling oscillating up to 15% or more (a result good enough to secure a strong Parliamentary presence).

As Ambassador I had a supposedly tricky decision. Poland was a new EU member. Lepper was likely to do well in the 2005 elections and perhaps get into government. Should I meet him to see for myself what sort of leader Poland might get, as British Ministers might need to engage with Lepper at EU meetings? Or would doing so give him an undeserved and wrong-headed boost of credibility/respectability/legitimacy?

This raises a profound point of diplomatic technique, which in turn links to one's view of politics and political change.

My view was that I should go and see him, even if that might dismay some Polish liberal-minded friends.

First, my own main duty was to help London understand what was happening in Poland, which meant dealing with Poland as it was, not as polite Warsaw opinion wanted it to be.

But second, part of the drama of the whole post-communist transition was all about slowly but surely calming down politics after the brutalising effects of decades of one-party stagnation. Foreign diplomats engaging with people - especially the 'problematic' ones - in a friendly but direct way was all part of the process of restoring normal life and respectable standards. It opened horizons and raised expectations: once a populist gets a taste of diplomatic life and the odd canapé, s/he tends to want to stay in that magic elite circle, which means moderating behaviour and language.

Putting it another way, by engaging with people you do give them a respectability they may not deserve. But you also get leverage you otherwise would not have. Precisely because they get a new sort of vicarious respectability from meeting you, they now have something new to lose. And, usually, they are very loath to lose it. 

Slightly undignified for the diplomats, and vexing for mainstream middle-class liberal locals. But it works.

London thought hard about this for all of two seconds, and agreed. So off I went to call on Mr Lepper in his party offices.

Needless to say, Lepper was quite good company: canny, interesting, folksy-funny and genially opportunistic. We had a pleasant and sensible exchange which achieved a few seconds of notoriety in the Polish media. My main problem was not staring too obviously at Lepper's caked-on fake almost orange sun-tan.  

And lo! it transpired that when Law and Justice pipped Citizens Platform to the post in Poland's 2005 general elections, the Kaczynski twins decided to form a coalition with the two populist parties who also got into the Sejm. Lepper became Deputy PM! And Minister of Agriculture! Horror!

Apart from the fact this strange coalition government as a whole was a priori dysfunctional and sub-optimal, political life in Poland spluttered on adequately for a while.

Lepper himself did well enough as Agriculture Minister. He was clever and diligent. He mastered the brief, popped over to Brussels for Agriculture Council meetings and made no blatant policy mistakes. A visiting House of Commons Committee met him in his office and had a more than sensible exchange with him about how Poland's fragmented farming sector was coping with the CAP and so on.

In due course the Kaczynski twins collapsed the arrangement and called the 2007 elections which brought Donald Tusk's Citizens Platform a sweeping victory. Both Lepper's party and League of Polish Families were more or less wiped out as political forces, just as Jaroslaw Kaczynski had planned.

This, of course, is why I respected the Kaczynski twins as a powerful force for normalising Polish politics, even if that view much vexed the Warsaw chattering classes. The Kaczynskis really were concerned to tackle 'social exclusion' in Poland, by bringing lots of frustrated rural and small town voters (many of them the human flotsam and jetsam of WW2 displacements from today's Ukraine who ended up dumped on collective farms) into the political mainstream. 

Lepper's Self-Defence and to a lesser extent Polish Families delivered handy lumps of these rural, marginalised voters who otherwise might drift away to more extreme ideas. Hence the cynical brilliance of the Kaczynkis' scheme: they would create this unworkable populist coalition government, steadily suck out the electoral juice from their partner parties, then throw away the discredited leadership husks.

All of which went precisely to plan. Polish politics today is more 'inclusive' - and far more stable - as a result. A huge gain for Europe.

Let me tell you about one meeting of EU Ambassadors hosted by the Austrian Ambassador soon after the new improbable coalition government was formed in 2005. 

One senior colleague who should have known better proposed that the EU Ambassadors send back monthly reports to capitals about the problematic state of human rights in Poland following the creation of this disastrous new extremist/populist government.

I argued that this was wrong in principle. It was very good news for Europe that these supposedly populist parties now had a taste of government. What was better for the EU? Having these people getting occasional smart lunches in Brussels and learning about modern negotiation of good EU standards, or manning road-blocks to protest EU policies?

The whole point of 'transitions' in post-communist countries was, I said, slowly but surely to bring marginalised people into the normal mainstream political process. That was what the Kaczynski twins were doing, much to their credit. Yes, some of the people concerned did not meet usual high standards of Euro-fastidiousness and table-manners. But the best way for them to get there was through patient engagement, not patronising sneers. The fact that Eurosceptics Lepper and Polish Families had entered government and now would start to engage with Brussels processes was a real success for European integration, not a failure!

And, I concluded, if we were really concerned about 'rising extremism in Europe', the desecration of Jewish graves by Islamist fanatics in some major EU capitals might be a much better place to start. 

This terse view won the day, and the proposal was promptly dropped.

Conclusion?

Transitions from communism or other embedded dictatorships necessarily take a long time - decades. Be patient. Deal with these societies as they are, for all the social and moral contradictions.

When in doubt, err on the side of engagement and inclusivity. Be democratic. For all their flaws and failings, people like Andrzej Lepper can play a necessary and ultimately unexpectedly positive walk-on role in normalising things.    

One for Whitehall, Washington and Brussels to mull over as they lie on the beach:

Political forces cannot redistribute the wealth that the economic system does not produce

Polly Toynbee at the Guardian is the latest victim of an appalling new medical condition, USTPDS (US Tea Party Derangement Syndrome).

I mean, listen to this:

Why bother with the great show of presidential elections when presidents are denied the power to match their pomp? The politics of miasma, where words matter more than facts and actions, lets the Tea Party demand the impossible – debt reduction with tax cuts, spending cuts without touching the gargantuan defence budget.

Huh? President Obama had plenty of options, including for a while Democratic control of both Houses of Congress. He also had options for dealing with the debt crisis.

Plus debt reduction without tax cuts and reducing defence is not 'impossible. Just cut other things. Start with, for example, the annual $80 billion lost because of Medicare/Medicaid fraud and abuse.

The rise of the Tea Party owes a great deal to Rupert Murdoch's Fox TV, the foghorn of extremism that changed the nature of political discourse

My goodness. Fox News! That same channel which attracts a stunning 400,000 25-54 viewers in US TV prime time. Yet we still should be alarmed:

American intellectual fashions waft our way: a taste of the Tea Party arrives on these shores in the peculiar paranoia of the climate-change deniers. You may dismiss some as fruitcakes or oil company lobbyists, but when Andrew Turnbull, former head of the civil service, reveals that he is of their number, it should alarm us. 

Andrew of course had a glittering civil service career - under Polly's Labour!

Reason should rule, but none of us is as rational as we pretend, each inhabiting our imaginations more than we do the real world, with opinions driven by beliefs, passions, convictions, hopes, fears and a hundred contradictory thoughts and impulses. But to make sense of the world, there is an obligation to seek out evidence and trust to expertise.

Fair enough. So, Polly, why do you write idiotic articles like this one, almost 100% fact-free? Why rave against Lord Turnbull who has given more heavyweight senior measured professional thought to Climate policy issues than almost anyone else in the country, if not the world? He's about as good as it gets and as good as it can get, in any democracy or indeed any government ever.

What have we done to get such drivel served up to us in a supposedly serious paper?

Wait ... those like the Tea Party who campaign against unsustainable spending are the crazy ones - those who drive reputable institutions into the ground and profit amidst the wreckage are the sane ones. Of course!