Blogoir

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

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

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

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

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 The rate at which government is unable to cope is accelerating: new laws and policies can be out of date or rendered irrelevant before they are promulgated.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Do any long-standing readers remember this?

Here is my own Grand Unifying Theory of Politics.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

True then. Even truer today.

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

Turkey is booming! Or is it?

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

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

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

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

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

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

.

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

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

Spengler's view of what this means:

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

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

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

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

The point?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We cherish the idea that we clever Westerners have something called 'freedom of the press'.

But what exactly does that expression mean? Does it mean that those who constitute the body of publishing folk who define themselves as 'the press' have special status and associated freedoms which may or may not be enjoyed by the rest of us mere citizens?

Or does it mean that everyone has (in principle) the right to find access to printing devices and then get stuff out there, ie the main newspapers and other large media outlets have no status separate from the rest of us?

I of course incline to the latter view. Indeed, perhaps unwisely I take it for granted.

The whole issue is complicated because once upon a time there was literally no way to get views circulated in any sort of written way other than by getting access to a printing press machine.

This really matters.

Why? Because it goes to the heart of any concept of democracy.

Is there an elite - a 'mainstream media' - who assume to themselves the right to have special freedoms denied to the rest of us? If such an elite group of opinion-formers has some sort of extra legal status, where does that leave laws aimed at defining what sort of speech is allowed during an election campaign, and by whom?

Plus, what happens when as in the USA the majority of mainstream media outlets act as blockers for one political tendency (currently the Obama Democrats)?

There was an interesting insight the other day, when a pro-Obama academic breezily proclaimed the Obama Administration impressively if not unprecedentedly scandal-free - by defining scandals as only those scandals which the mainstream media report!

Anyway, Volokh Conspiracy (leading US group law blog) takes a good look at rival interpretations of what 'freedome of the press' means in formal US legal/constitutional terms, and explains a lot:

But other judges and scholars — including the Citizens United majority and Justice Brennan — have argued that the “freedom ... of the press” does not protect the press-as-industry, but rather protects everyone’s use of the printing press (and its modern equivalents) as a technology. People or organizations who occasionally rent the technology, for instance by buying newspaper space, broadcast time, or the services of a printing company, are just as protected as newspaper publishers or broadcasters...

Both sides in the debate often appeal at least partly to the constitutional text and its presumed original meaning. The words “the press” in the First Amendment must mean the institutional press, says one side. The words must mean press-as-technology, says the other. Citizens United is unlikely to settle the question, given how sharply the four dissenters and many outside commentators have disagreed with the majority.

So who is right? What light does the “history” referred to by the Citizens United dissent shed on the “text” and the Framers’ “purpose”?

The answer, it turns out, is that people during the Framing era likely understood the text as fitting the press-as-technology model — as securing the right of every person to use communications technology, and not just securing a right belonging exclusively to members of the publishing industry. The text was likely not understood as treating the press-as-industry differently from other people who wanted to rent or borrow the press-as-technology on an occasional basis.

Read the whole thing. It directly affects you both as a reader and as a potential publisher of your own thoughts on the Web or otherwise..

And if you are in any way interested in how the tension between mass printing and personal freedom first emerged, read an awesome book by Adrian Johns on the way mass publishing started. Note especially the startling scope of  cheating and stealing as printing presses became more widespread across Europe - Newton and other great scientists had huge problems stopping other brainy people elsewhere in England or on the Continent simply republishing their work and claiming it as their own.

This, by the way, explains why Parliament proclaimed that a copy of every book published had to be sent to the British Museum and other grand 'legal deposit' institutions - there had to be at least one verifiable original against which fraudsters' work might be measured.

The way everyone tried to take advantage of the surging technologies of the day back in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries is eerily reminiscent of the myriad problems we now face in dealing with Internet piracy and so on.

Adrian Johns explains all this in a magnificent way. I bought his book on the subject while I was at Harvard in 1997 and stupidly lent it to someone, never to get it back.

So in writing this blog post I have just reordered a copy via Amazon. I warmly recommend you do the same - a true book about books:

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. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Another sharp piece by Tim Worstall, this time over at Forbes:

For labour and product market protectionism, decent public sector wages and benefits, are the “European Model”. And what’s being said here is that you can either have the European Model or you can have the European Currency.

His article links to this fine piece of work by Peter Boone and Simon Johnson which explains in expert but readable detail just where the Eurozone has gone wrong and why it is fast running out of recovery road.

You have to be smarter than I am to understand some of it, but the core point shines through: the Eurozone has never agreed what ultimately underpins the whole system, but everyone has just 'assumed' that it will be ok on the day if anyone asks.

The Germans had a good answer to what props up the Eurozone: the Rules! But they themselves cut corners when it suited them, plus the Rules required a degree of Teutonic discipline and honesty which some governments found too, ahem, strict

Thus EU banks and governments alike have been busy assuming that regardless of how they pile up debts between themselves, nothing can go wrong. Hey, how can anything go wrong? We're the sunny EU uplands, full of nice moderate social democrats and the very best climate change and gender-neutral principles! We uphold Solidarity!

In short, they believed their own propaganda. .

And that was fine until the markets started to ask more and more awkward questions. Not getting sensible or credible answers from the Eurozone's grandees, the markets have responded (as they of course should) by pushing up interest rates to lend more money into the Eurozone's maw.

This 'subjective' move of pricing uncertainty/risk higher than certainty/less risk in turn in fact makes things 'objectively' harder for Eurozone countries, so the whole problem starts to feed on itself at ever-greater speed.

Boone and Johnson suggest some radical moves that the Eurozone grown-ups might take to hack their way out of the moral hazard disaster area they now inhabit. Cutting public sector wages - and benefits. Removing 'job protectionism'. 

But as Tim explains, these very things are what the EU primarily is all about. Benign and comforting Social Europe, not some nasty capitalist place like the USA or China where there's just no Solidarity:

Who was it who said each man kills the thing he loves? For that’s exactly what the European Union enthusiasts seem to have done, they’ve set up the monetary union so incompetently that in order to maintain it they’ve got to kill that European social democrat model they were hoping to preserve.

Listen - and soon as the gravy train shoots of the rails you'll start to hear the screams of anguish from 'civil society' and the firms who supply those communist-style building-high banners for EU programmes in Brussels.

Let's abolish the European Parliament while we're at it.

I have joined the book review team of the LSE Politics blog.

Here is one of my efforts on Blind Spots, a book which looks in quite an interesting way about how supposedly ethical judgements are made (or not) and shows how different subtle biases can creep in.

However, it turns out that it is not as easy as the authors suggest to identify why one outcome is more 'ethical' than another:

The authors likewise draw on fashionable ‘nudge’ ideas to call for more regulations to lay down lower default energy settings for home electrical equipment, having previously (as noted above) pointed out that undue regulation backed by sanctions can lead to more of the unwanted behaviour. The authors do not explain how to value personal choice, even if it leads to outcomes which may seem superficially unethical or downright perverse.

One example of my own. In Country A where the speed limit is 20 miles per hour there are far fewer road deaths than Country B, where the limit is 70 miles per hour. But is Country A’s approach ipso facto more ‘ethical’?

It all turns on how people individually and collectively allocate risk – and who decides.

How many British towns would have speed cameras if local residents could vote on them? At what point do we end up with so many such regulations that life becomes miserable?

Here it is:

So much going on in the world. Most of it unambiguously bad.

Tension in Kosovo. Tension in the Turkish army. Libya duly quagmired. Famine in Africa. Something or other going in and around North Korea. And so on.

Yet bigger even than those problems, each of which is capable of creating a new expensive and intractable crisis, is the West's budget drama. That is not only bad - it's far worse than you think:

Even in the late 1990s, when official Washington was jubilant because the national debt briefly shrank, fiscal-gap calculations showed that the government was quietly getting into deeper trouble. It was paying out generous benefits to the elderly while incurring big obligations to boomers, whose leading edge was then 15 years from retirement. Now the gray deluge is upon us. As Holtz-Eakin, now president of the American Action Forum, a self-described center-right policy institute, says: “We’re just in a world of hurt.”

The U.S. is in danger of reaching a generational tipping point at which older Americans have the clout to vote themselves benefits that sap the strength of the younger generation—benefits that can never be repeated. Kotlikoff argues that we may have reached that point already. He worries that the U.S. could become Argentina, which went from one of the world’s richest to lower-middle income in a century of chronic mismanagement.

Or as Mark Steyn puts it:

Since Obama took office, it’s been fashionable to quote Mrs. Thatcher’s great line: “The problem with socialism is that eventually you run out of other people’s money.” But we’re way beyond that.

That’s a droll quip when you’re on mid-20th-century European fertility rates, but we’ve advanced to the next stage: We’ve run out of other people, period.

Hyper-rationalist technocrats introduced at remarkable speed a range of transformative innovations — welfare, feminism, mass college education, abortion — whose cumulative effect a few decades on is that the developed world has developed to breaking point: Not enough people do not enough work for not enough of their lives.

In the course of so doing, they have fewer children later. And the few they do have leave childhood ever later — Obamacare’s much heralded “right” for a 26-year old to remain on his parents’ health insurance being merely a belated attempt to catch up with the Europeans, and one sure to be bid up further.

A society of 25-year-old “children” whiling away the years till early middle age in desultory pseudo-education has no desire to fund its prolonged adolescence by any kind of physical labor, so huge numbers of unskilled Third World immigrants from the swollen favelas of Latin America or (in Europe) the shanty megalopolises of the Muslim world are imported to cook, clean, wash, build, do ...

The evolving justification for post-war immigration policy — from manufacturing to welfare to moral narcissism — is itself a perfect shorthand for Western decay.

Most of the above doesn’t sound terribly “fiscal,” because it’s not. The ruinous debt is a symptom of our decline, not the cause.

In a nutshell, modern democratic governments have lost touch with reality and are borrowing money which can not be paid back. So they resort to improvised Ponzi-scheme tricks to get by. Even the much attacked Republican principles passed last night by the US House of Representatives do not mean any serious expenditure cuts, merely a slowing in the degree of unsustainability! Sooner or later a huge crash must come.

How to explain this startling civilisational dysfunctionality? Isn't the point of democracy (as opposed to dictatorship) that information circulates freely, and so stupidity is curbed?

Look no further than here: the Report on Football Governance by the British House of Commons Culture Media and Sport Committee (sic).

I previously have raved away on the evils of Football Socialism. Here the subject sinks to new depths.

The Report begins with a bold collectivist falsehood, setting the scene for the fearsome meddling which follows: Football is our national game.

No, it isn't. It has no special status. Millions of people - perhaps a majority - could not care less about it and have never attended a match. It is an exclusively private activity, one of many sports and of course much the most popular.

Supporters and commentators have expressed concern that there are insufficient checks and balances on financial mismanagement in football and that a failure of governance is jeopardising the sustainability of the game, both at the micro-level of individual clubs and at the macro-level of the pyramid league structure and the national game more generally.

So what? That's football's private business, not anything to do with Parliament.

We have also been aware of the coalition Government's commitment to encourage the reform of football governance rules to support the co-operative ownership of football clubs by supporters. Indeed, the Government indicated to us that it would welcome a select committee inquiry to help frame its thinking as to how it should take this undertaking forward.

The correct answer is for Parliament to tell the government not to make stupid collectivist promises meddling in one private business.

Anyway, fortified by a jolly trip to Germany at public expense the MPs on this Committee have produced a long and detailed report. Glance through it. It is impressive in that it does not really identify why any of football's problems are so crucial that the state needs to concern itself with this private activity.

Yes, a lot of clubs have big debts or are badly run. Some of them go bust or slump down the divisions as they are compelled to retrench to survive. Listen, MPs: that's the system working, not failing!

Yes, some supporters want more say in the running of the game. So what? Their best way to influence a club is to stop going to its matches. Or they can buy their way into part of the club's ownership. Wait - the problem here is that the state's own rules via the FSA make this difficult.

Yes, more of the wealth generated at the top of the game could make its way to the bottom. But again, that's none of the state's business.

The report oozes cloth-cap nostalgia for the 'community' aspects of football. But when almost every team which counts is trying to bring in clever players from anywhere on the planet, that argument looks pretty thin:

A number of supporters organisations argued that the current business-orientated model risked alienating them. Bristol City Supporters Trust wrote that "like fans up and down the country, we feel ill at ease. We still feel like outsiders looking in on our club".

It's not 'your' club! It belongs to the owners. If they 'alienate you', too bad. Serves you right for being so gullible. Deal with it. Set up another club. Or watch rugby, or read a good book instead.

The Committee pores over the role of the Football Association and comes up with an impertinently precise suggestion:

Our recommendations would result in a Board of ten, consisting of the Chairman, General Secretary, two further executives, two non-executives, two professional game representatives and two national game representatives.

Let's get this straight.

Part of the problem with football governance is that the people running football are said to be out of touch. Yet here is a group of MPs with no obvious qualification to opine on the subject making highly specific recommendations about how the game should be run? Get lost!

The MPs discovered something called the Football Creditors Rule:

... to return to league competitions the new owners of insolvent clubs must re-pay all money owed to key "football creditors" ... the key football creditors all get paid 100%, which means that the tax authorities get proportionately less and all the small creditors, such as St John Ambulance, do not get paid.

This obscure internal football club arrangement apparently has positive and negative effects. It is being challenged in the courts by the UK tax authorities. The Report:

The Football Creditors Rule should be abolished. It represents a "post facto" preferential treatment of creditors that would be illegal in the run-up to the insolvency of any business. If the football authorities do not take the initiative themselves, and Her Majesty's Revenue and Customs loses its legal challenge to the Football Creditors Rule, we recommend that the Government consider introducing legislation to abolish it.

Here again, it looks as if the problem has been caused by the state not making sure that the football business runs to the same reasonable rules as every other business.

And so on and so on.

The point?

That we are seeing a systemic failure of governance, not within football but at the national level.

The state is failing to do its job in the most central parts of its work. The Times today (paywall) describes how the British police are not investigating crimes. The nation's tax authority HMRC is in massive disarray, in part because (as I happen to know) the unions have rebuffed successive attempts to computerise the tax system.

In this confusion things decay.

Instead of focusing on doing a small number of key jobs fairly well, the state balloons into trying to solve each and every problem, to the point of inventing problems to 'solve' when they do not exist. When something goes wrong, that is presented as a signal for more state intervention (such as all those hundreds of new crimes created by New Labour), when the existing rules and laws can do a good enough job and simply need enforcing.

Ditto media telephone hacking: the current laws are more than good enough - enforce them, including against corrupt police officers (or is that all of them?)

The cumulative effect of all this stupidity and waste compounding up is the growing debt crisis which is slowly but surely dragging down Western competitiveness and rubbing out basic Western values.

The last words from Mark Steyn on an unexpected US soccer note:

I had a faintly surreal conversation with two Hollywood liberal pals not so long ago:

One moment they were bemoaning all those right-wing racists like Pat Buchanan who’d made such a big deal about the crowd cheering for the Mexican team and booing the Americans at a U.S.–Mexico soccer match in Pasadena, and deploring the way the U.S. goalie had complained that the post-match ceremony was conducted entirely in Spanish. Ten minutes later they were sighing that nothing in Los Angeles seemed to work quite as well as it did when they first came out west over 40 years ago.

And it never occurred to them that these two conversational topics might somehow be connected.

Meanwhile, at Redwood Heights Elementary in Oakland, Californian kindergartners are put through “Gender Spectrum Diversity Training” in order to teach them that there are “more than two genders.”

The social capital of a nation is built up over centuries but squandered in a generation or two. With blithe self-confidence, the post-war West changed too much too fast.

We changed everything, and yet we’ll still wonder why everything’s changed.

Behold. The slow-motion preview of the greatest own goal in the history of the planet.

The Commentator has published a piece of mine - Torture versus terror - a tale of two resignations - which is intended to bring out in 100% unambiguous terms what practical and ethical/policy dilemmas a blanket extension of the idea of 'complicity in torture' might produce.

It takes a dramatic imaginary scene some years in the future to explain why and precisely how some anguished operational choices might need to be made, and how different honourable people might come to completely different conclusions: 

I believe that in the extreme circumstances I faced, I acted – as I was elected to do - in the national interest, by accepting that information and acting on it. Torture is despicable. We work tirelessly at the United Nations and elsewhere to stamp it out.

But I believe that it cannot be right to avoid any action to thwart murderers and so save innocent lives. The relatives and friends of all the victims of the bombings today in London and Edinburgh will be tortured by their grief from this disaster every day for the rest of their lives.

This situation creates appalling policy and ethical dilemmas for us all. Indeed, I myself might be open to prosecution for what I did. If this happens I will plead not guilty but enter no defence and leave it to the jury to decide.

I do not wish to continue to serve as Prime Minister without a clear mandate from voters as to how I should respond in such circumstances.

I hereby resign my seat in Parliament with immediate effect. A by-election will be called in the shortest possible time. I will stand for re-election but not campaign for it. My statement here tonight represents my only policy position and my only public statement in that campaign...

In fact the dilemmas are there already for practical purposes. British police officers have been busy grilling MI6 officers on what if anything they knew or suspected about the treatment in other countries of AQ and other terror suspects.

These issues take us right to the very outskirts of Policy and how it's made. And if you want one of the most remarkable and profound set of answers ever articulated on some of these problems as they come up in a democracy out there on the Limits of Diplomacy, swing by the transcripts of the UK's Iraq Inquiry and have a read of this testimony by an MI6 officer.

Plenty of heavy black redactions for reasons of the highest secrecy, but what's left is gripping and subtle enough. And, in parts, downright magnificent:

Here's a lively little number over at The Commentator, if I say so myself:

There is now little joy in this fast unfolding fiasco for any political tendency or EU member state. Everyone has got what they wanted. Yet it is not working out so well, just as in the best Five Children and It story:

"We want," said Robert slowly, "to be rich beyond the dreams of something or other."

"Avarice," said Jane.

"So it is," said the Fairy unexpectedly. "But it won't do you much good, that's one comfort," it muttered to itself…

"[T]he sight was too dazzling for their eyes to be able to bear it. It was something like trying to look at the sun at high noon on Midsummer Day. For the whole of the sand-pit was full, right up to the very top, with new shining gold pieces …and on the sides and edges of these countless coins the midday sun shone and sparkled, and glowed and gleamed till the quarry looked like the mouth of a smelting furnace, or one of the fairy halls that you see sometimes in the sky at sunset."

Millions of Greeks have not paid their taxes, yet their benefits and state services have trundled on. Greek demonstrators babble that the cuts and taxes needed for Greece to start to pay its honest way are “unfair”.

The Euro-elite in Brussels have wanted and achieved closer economic and political integration at the expense of national governments. Many EU countries have wanted and been given lots of new infrastructure funded by foreigners. People across Europe wanted and have bought new houses and fancy cars. European bankers lent money for this profligacy and have given themselves vast bonuses, confident (they thought) that they would never be called to account if it all went wrong, as they were “too big to fail”.

Leftists clamour for the state to do more. They have a point. In a crisis maybe the first priority is to set more/better rules? Rightists clamour for the state to do less. They too have a point. Has not too much official regulation insulated the financial world from common sense and professional responsibility?

Europhiliacs clamour for “more Europe”. They have a point. The current rules have failed to keep member states in line.

Eurosceptics have the grim satisfaction of saying “I told you so” and clamour for “less Europe”. They have a point. Systems which are too complex lose legitimacy and are doomed to fail.

* * * * *

As in the Psammead’s sand-pit, so in modern Europe. We sit perched on the reality of mountains of borrowed money. Yet we are now confronted with the consequences of that reality, namely that we are fast getting weaker and poorer. The policy train we designed and built chugs into the black Tunnel of Doom. But it’s no-one’s fault!

In this vivid situation, who “deserves” what? And why?

Exhibit A: a superb article describing research which shows convincingly how the influence of the bureaucratic-cultural disciplines of the Austro-Hungarian Empire lives on in today's Europe. Thus:

Our results show that past formal institutions can leave a long-lasting legacy through cultural norms – even after some are generations of being governed by other authorities...

Comparing individuals living on either side of the long-gone Habsburg border within the same modern-day country, we find that respondents in a current household survey who live on former Habsburg territory have higher levels of trust in courts and police.

They are also less likely to pay bribes for these local public services, demonstrating that the institutional heritage influences not only preferences and unilateral decisions but also bilateral bargaining situations in citizen-state interactions.

... the cultural norms of behaviour are unlikely to have survived solely by intergenerational transmission within families. It rather seems that such channels as the persistent nature of continuous reciprocal interactions in local communities, the content of knowledge and behavioural patterns conveyed in schools, and the quality of human capital of bureaucrats and citizens may have also played a role.

This sort of thinking - that 'civilisational' characteristics and trends have an existence far beyond immediate day-to-day politics and even medium-term economic development - lay behind Sam Huntingdon's famous but controversial book 'The Clash of Civilisations'. 

Sweeping and brilliant and provocative as it was, fashionable opinion did not much like it: too pessimistic about human progress and with a scarcely hidden anti-Islamic tone (they said).

Yet for me as a Balkanite, much of whose professional life had been spent on and around the historic faultlines of imperial Europe, he was on to something very profound.

Drive up towards Sarajevo from the Croatian coast and almost within a few hundred metres there suddenly comes a point where you cross from Austro-Hungary into Ottoman. The landscape and its mood changes. The attitude to roadside tidiness, gardens, public and private property, trust in government - they are all just 'different'.

Likewise in Belgrade. On the 'main' side of the river you're on the edge of the greater Ottoman space. Across the river and on up into Vojvodina the landscape and 'society' visibly changes. Part of this is (it's said) directly and literally connected with differing imperial legacies: property rights tended to be codified under the Hapsburgs, whereas under the Ottomans land ownership was far less systematic and untransparent. The result today is that land and investment decisions are much harder in central and southern Serbia, which duly stays poorer.

The authors of the study rightly mention Poland. At the 2005 elections clear voting tendencies emerged which could be mapped neatly against the boundaries of Poland's areas when Poland was partitioned up to WW1. People in Poznan (long part of the Germanic civilisational space) titter at the unpunctuality and unbusinesslike sloppiness of people in Warsaw (long part of the Russian civilisational space). And so on.

Read the whole thing. Most impressive.

And then read Exhibit B, Megan McArdle on the grisly problems of the Eurozone:

Europe has two choices: tighter integration, or partial dissolution.  I agree, but I just don't see how the former can work.  The Irish and the Germans and the Portuguese and the Greeks do not identify with "Europe" the way 1930s Americans identified with "America"; neither group is going to readily sacrifice its own self-interest for the others.  

The elites have gotten around this so far by leaning heavily on unaccountable institutions like the central banks, but as Wolf shows, this cannot last forever. 

Unless their economies rapidly start to mend, continuing in the euro will be economic suicide for the PIIGS once the backdoor subsidies stop.  In this week's column, Robert Samuelson notes just how dire things are "Already, unemployment is 14.1% in Greece, 14.7% in Ireland, 11.1% in Portugal and 20.7% in Spain.

 

What are the limits of austerity? Steep spending cuts and tax increases do curb budget deficits; but they also create deep recessions, lowering tax revenues and offsetting some of the deficit improvement."  Add on top of this the drawbacks of an expensive currency and a tight monetary policy for a troubled economy, and they'd have to be crazy to stay...

And see the Eurozone’s problems. Millions of Greeks cry out: “How dare the state/government/EU take away our rights!” But by what moral or political principle can Greek ‘rights’ to receive subsidies take precedence over the rights of non-Greeks to choose not to pay them?

Conclusion?

Neither conservatives nor liberal-progressives in the West have any coherent philosophy helping them decide which institutions, organisations or even values should best be ‘conserved’ by collective action, or how best to do it by suppressing X’s free choice to uphold Y’s privilege. Instead we get little more than mutually abusive political squawking and improvisation which look increasingly and annoyingly detached from reality.

Perhaps in these profoundly unsettling times it is no surprise that the British public show such Euroscepticism counterpoised by general support for the Monarchy which, for all its silver stick flim-flams and illogicalities, represents our best collective hope for some minimal sense of psychological continuity and shared experience?

The fact is that for reasons which are almost impossible to identify and maybe are highly unpopular to articulate, some things 'fit' and some things don't. It looks increasingly as if the EU itself as currently constituted is not a viable fit - the expectations and attitudes in different parts of the EU are simply not manageable within the over-rigid, prescriptive top-down format we now have.

And the more our UK and EU elites tell the public that it is all for the best when it clearly isn't, the more a deep-seated public unease will grow across Europe in a populist and increasingly incoherent way.  

Just when you thought that the Canadian elections had brought to power people making some claim to be 'conservatives' (and therefore, perhaps, taking individual liberty seriously) along comes a new draft law which inter alia makes you a criminal if you post on your own site a link to a site said to have 'hate' material on it:

“Clause 5 of the bill provides that the offences of public incitement of hatred and wilful promotion of hatred may be committed by any means of communication and include making hate material available, by creating a hyperlink that directs web surfers to a website where hate material is posted, for example.”

The point here is not this latest sly little erosion of liberty and personal responsibility in itself (which, if one wanted to be fair, is aimed at nailing eg people who spread child pornography or extreme racist material to each other). It's the underlying attitude revealed.

As Mark Steyn puts it:

At the tail end of the Cold War, I used to meet charming, intelligent eastern Europeans and wonder how they could live as they did. How could an educated citizenry not chafe under daily tyranny?

I remember one of them - an amusing Hungarian cynic - explaining it to me: For most people, "rights" are theoretical. After all, how many rights do you actively need to avail yourself of to get through the day? To do your job, buy some dinner, watch a little TV. Maybe "free speech" is a big deal if you want to be a poet or a playwright, but for the rest of us, not so much so. And he gave a Mitteleuropean shrug.

I was aghast. But I wouldn't be today. Why not criminalize the hyperlink? After all, as that Hungarian might have said, how many hyperlinks does the average Canadian need to get through the day? What does one more concession to statism really matter?

... We need more speech, more liberty, not less. If this law passes, I shall break it as a point of principle. A hyperlink is not an act of approval, but an act of sourcing: It says to the reader I trust you to go to the source and make an informed judgment.

In denying that freedom to the citizen, the state couldn't be more explicit in its contempt for you.

Which, by the way, is also why Harry Cole in his noisy attack on Polly Toynbee arguably misses the point in proclaiming that there is no 'progressive majority' in the UK.

What we and most of the Western world have is a culture of collectivist utilitarianism which 'most' people either support (implicitly or explicitly) or unthinkingly accept. This means that on almost any issue the babble comes forth, almost literally every minute of the day, "let the government do something".

Just listen to BBC Radio 4 or Radio 5 Live or Question Time for a few minutes, chosen at random. The presenters and guests and public alike unite in defining the issues in collectivist, non-libertarian terms.

The effect is to reinforce the supercilious paternalism of the ruling castes of politicians and civil servants and assorted Quangos and NGOs who together define 'public opinion' for the rest of us.

Yes, if given a chance in referenda the British public might well go populist and vote for leaving the European Union and/or restoring the death penalty and/or 'cracking down' on immigrants - conventional 'progressive' arguments here could get flattened.

But they don't get given that chance. And in the meantime there is an inchoate but hard to deny majority acceptance of the principle that when in doubt the state should ' do something' in response to each and every problem life throws up. 

Plus of course it doesn't matter when the state messes up. The answer is always the same: More State.

This afternoon I heard someone on BBC radio urging more powers for social workers to take children from problem families : "we need to re-professionalise the profession!" Scary shades of dour Yugoslav communist ideologist Kardelj?

Remember when the LibDems used to talk sense about Labour? Thus:

In total, the Government has brought in 3,023 offences since May 1997. They comprise 1,169 introduced by primary legislation - debated in Parliament - and 1,854 by secondary legislation such as statutory instruments and orders in council.

... Nick Clegg, the Liberal Democrat home affairs spokesman, who uncovered the figures, said:

"Nothing can justify the step change in the number of criminal offences invented by this Government. This provides a devastating insight into the real legacy of nine years of New Labour government - a frenzied approach to law-making, thousands of new offences, an illiberal belief in heavy-handed regulation, an obsession with controlling the minutiae of everyday life...

And after a year in office of our new Coalition Government, how many of these odious measures have been repealed? Yes, probably a few, here and there.

But enough to make a real difference and roll back that Labour onslaught against us in so dramatic and brutal a way as to warn off future collectivists? No way.

Mark Steyn:

None of these people is qualified to tell you how to live - or whom to link to. Yet they will. Because to them it's entirely natural to do so, regardless of which party is in power.

And, on those rare occasions when a nominally right-of-centre party finds itself with a parliamentary majority, enough of its members are inclined to string along. There's so much of this stuff around it's barely "ideological": it's just the zeitgeist, the air we breathe, isn't it?

Quite. And as Pink Floyd put it, you have to breathe it in:

Breathe, breathe in the air
Don't be afraid to care...

Run, rabbit run
Dig that hole, forget the sun
And when at last the work is done
Don't sit down
It's time to dig another one

For long you live and high you fly
But only if you ride the tide
And balanced on the biggest wave
You race towards an early grave

This seems like an appropriate time to remind gentle readers of this famous episode in the history of the then ruling Labour Party's attitude to possible electoral voting procedure changes:

Back in early 2005 I had sent an email to the FCO team in which I attempted to explain what had happened in Polish politics that previous week, when the wrangling following Poland's 2005 Parliamentary elections was at its most intense.

Basically, the two more or less Centre Right parties (Citizens Platform led by Donald Tusk, and Law and Justice led Jaroslaw Kaczynski) had entered the elections promising to join forces in a governing coalition thereafter if they prevailed against the Centre Left.

They indeed prevailed massively against the Centre Left. But instead of Citizens Platform coming first as most commentators - and Citizens Platform - had expected, the Kaczynski twins' party nosed in front and won more seats.

This meant that the new government would have to be formed on the Kaczynskis' terms. A furious row between the two parties promptly started, much to the dismay of the Polish masses who had just given them a powerful mandate to rule nicely together.

I tried to explain to a bemused FCO what all this meant for us/EU/NATO in policy terms, but confessed that I did not have the foggiest idea what would happen next. 

And I added a terse but heartfelt Conclusion, from 'Aghast in Warsaw': "If the UK adopts a PR voting system I am emigrating to Mars." 

I heard subsequently that then Foreign Secretary Jack Straw read out this sentence in Cabinet. Probably just to show that even the FCO finds it impossible to get good staff these days.

Anyway, as I have Tweeted earlier today, the startling 68/32 opinion poll split in favour of #No2AV as announced today appears to give an accurate prediction of the likely result among the 100 people actually planning to vote.

Looks like I'm safe here on Earth for quite a while to come.

Archbishop Cranmer surpassed himself today with a gracious and thoughtful piece about the Royal Wedding, to the point of being quoted on Sky TV.

Thus:

The occasion brings to mind that on 28th May 1533, His Grace declared the marriage of Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn to be good and valid. As a consequence, both His Majesty and His Grace were abruptly excommunicated by the Pope.

The Church of England then split from Rome more for political than theological reasons, and through centuries of controversy, social upheaval and cultural change, we are where we are today: another royal wedding in Westminster Abbey in accordance with the distinctly Anglican Book of Common Prayer and the asymmetrical fusion of Scripture with reason and tradition...

We do not care much for our drab politicians and we care even less for our pompous prelates. But our Monarch is loved, admired and respected the world over: the institution is worthy of our support and loyalty.

One perceives in Prince William an understanding of and commitment to his duty, but it is increasingly apparent that he also possesses something of the common, modernising and even rebellious touch of his mother: he is immanent and tangible, if a little unknowable...

His Grace exhorts his readers and communicants to revel in the pomp and majesty and celebrate joyously all day long, because this ceremony represents stability and continuity in an age of insecurity and uncertainty: it is an act of faith in a world of doubt; it is hope in despair...

Insofar as I have any coherent thoughts on the Monarchy in our country, that sums them up.

Plenty of clever people come up with all sorts of reasons why we would be better off with our head of state elected and all sorts of royal (and social and class) flim-flam cast aside once and for all - it's not democratic or modern.

Yet the Monarchy sends a signal that cleverness is important but not enough - tradition and loyalty to some ideals which define a way of looking at and doing things over and beyond politics also count. Evolution, not revolution.

And when we look at the startling mass murder which followed the French and Russian and German and Chinese toppling of their respective royal families, all in the very name of 'reason', we can have pause for thought about what counts for stability, decency and even fairness in the long run.  

For a different view, here is a wail from German journalist Marco Evers, baffled and annoyed by the whole thing:

Great Britain is a strange country. It has no written constitution but a rigid class system. The lawyers wear wigs in court and there are no citizens, just subjects. By law, all swans, all whales and all sturgeons are the property of the Queen, but there's no British national football team.

And if the Queen wishes to award an honor to one of her subjects, he can proudly call himself "Officer" or even "Commander of the Order of the British Empire." What on earth do these titles actually refer to? Much in this realm seems at least as antiquated as the London Underground...

The whole world is waiting to admire Kate's wedding dress. The designer will be inundated with work after this. But the wearer of the dress faces a future that shouldn't really be desirable for an intelligent woman in the 21st century. Kate will have only three tasks from now on: serving her husband, looking good and bearing children, preferably boys. Apart from that, all she has to do is shut up. 

It's like in the 1950s -- only much worse because she will have to continue curtseying to the Queen and other higher-ranking members of the family she has married in to.

The whole thing feels even worse than just an aberration of history. It's a joke.

Achtung! All this British eccentricity - it's really annoying that hundreds of millions of people round the world like it so much. And how dare someone who was not born at the top of the 'rigid class system' now marry into that top tier, with a radiant smile on her face! A joke indeed - at least as defined by that legendary German sense of humour.

My own invitation to the Wedding was lost in the post. But it was a pleasure to see on TV two people who have made an impact in my own life.

First, Crown Prince Aleksandar of Serbia, who as any fule kno was born in a suite in Claridge's Hotel in London which was deemed by the British government to be Yugoslav territory for the occasion (or something like that - the point was that he had to be born on 'Yugoslav territory' to keep the right to the Serbian throne).

Second, the Bishop of London Richard Chartres, who as well as being close to HRH The Prince of Wales christened Crawford Major at St Stephen's Church in Rochester Row in London back in 1991 - a strong intellectual (conservative) voice in the Church of England. Read this nicely turned interview with him from 1996.

* * * * *

The noisy ranks of post-modernist nihilists hate the idea that anyone should believe in anything. Belief and national identity are both a 'construct' needing radical deconstruction.

I'd be prepared to consider that seriously if I thought for a moment that the people spouting this verbiage had given real thought to what makes societies work and grow over decades and centuries, and therefore to what might replace tradition and continuity once they're wrecked on collectivist demand.

Most people in most countries can not define what makes them proud of their country, other than though giving a list of patriotic symbols and historic triumphs (if any). General de Gaulle had his 'certain idea' of France:

Toute ma vie, je me suis fait une certaine idée de la France.

If we can't articulate the deep reasons for national pride and national shared purpose - perhaps precisely because they aren't in any real sense rational but rather something organic, part of each people's cultural DNA - we can at least feel shared pride and purpose on specific occasions which somehow symbolise that pride and purpose.

As millions of us did today at the marvellous spectacle and joyful discipline in central London, all centred on two smart young people who are well on their way to representing us all, for richer for poorer, in the long uncertain decades to come.

Hurrah.

Remember Margaret Thatcher on Honest Money?

One of my favourite political moments was the Panorama interview with Margaret Thatcher as the 1987 election loomed. She was asked about her policy on inflation.

Maybe the Q and A were somehow choreographed? The camera panned in to close-up as she replied "I believe in honest money".

Phew.

A simple yet philosophically profound answer. How many of the current political elite in the West either think about Honest Money - or dare say they do?

Such powerful answers as that require rare command of thought and language.

Sharp thinking and sharp language - one and the same thing?

I am in hot pursuit of the video link to this remarkable moment. For now I am pleased to say that my memory did not play tricks with me. Here is the transcript from that part of the programme (my emphasis) via the good work of the Margaret Thatcher Foundation:

Q  We hear of Thatcherism. What does it mean?

A  Sir Robin, it is not a name that I created in the sense of calling it an ism.

Let me tell you what it stands for. It stands for sound finance and Government running the affairs of the nation in a sound financial way. It stands for honest money—not inflation.

It stands for living within your means. It stands for incentives because we know full well that the growth, the economic strength of the nation comes from the efforts of its people. Its people need incentives to work as hard as they possibly can. All that has produced economic growth.

It stands for something else. It stands for the wider and wider spread of ownership of property, of houses, of shares, of savings. It stands for being strong in defence—a reliable ally and a trusted friend.

People call those things Thatcherism; they are, in fact, fundamental common sense and having faith in the enterprise and abilities of the people. It was my task to try to release those.

They were always there; they have always been there in the British people, but they couldn’t flourish under Socialism. They have now been released. That’s all that Thatcherism is.

Magnificent.

Not to forget this, relevant in Wisconsin and elsewhere, as public sector and other workers defend collective bargaining and 'demand' by force of intimidation wealth created by other people:

Q   Under Thatcherism—your critics say—the nation is not one nation but a divided nation.

A   Let me answer that very deeply because I feel very strongly about it.

The greatest division this nation has ever seen were the conflicts of trade unions towards the end of a Labour Government—terrible conflicts. That trade union movement then was under the diktat of trade union bosses, some of whom are still there.

They used their power against their members. They made them come out on strike when they didn’t want to. They loved secondary picketing. They went and demonstrated outside companies where there was no dispute whatsoever, and sometimes closed them down. They were acting as they were later in the coal strike, before my whole trade union laws were through of this Government.

They were out to use their power to hold the nation to ransom, to stop power from getting to the whole of manufacturing industry to damage people’s jobs, to stop power from getting to every house in the country, power, heat and light to every housewife, every child, every school, every pensioner.

You want division; you want conflict; you want hatred. There it was. It was that which Thatcherism—if you call it that—tried to stop.

Not by arrogance, but by giving power to the ordinary, decent, honourable, trade union member who didn’t want to go on strike. By giving power to him over the Scargills of this world.

That is one conflict. That has gone.

They don't make 'em like that any more.

Have a look at these impressive figures for the surging Facebook phenomenon across the 'Muslim world'.

Egypt has added 450,000 new users in the past month. Saudi Arabia (a much smaller country) has added 420,000.

These are absolutely big numbers, the more so since (by definition) they represent better-off web-savvy classes of people.

OK, the total reach of Facebook in eg Egypt is still small - only some 6.8% of the Egyptian population. Saudi Facebook penetration is higher at approaching 14%.

But monthly growth like this starts to create whole new orders of magnitude of possible networking effects among the population as a whole, and new orders of control problems for the state insofar as the state wants to do something to monitor it all. Plus if the state tries to limit the way Facebook works, a lot of influential people will be annoyed simultaneously.

Have a look at this typically thorough and interesting Harvard study of the Russian blogosphere.

At 2.2 Internet Penetration there is a remarkable graph, showing how those who have little Internet access massively trust Russian state TV, while those with Internet access are tending to trust the Internet more than state TV.

In other words, blogging and Facebook-style social networking on a grand scale do start to change the way people in Russia look at traditional authority of the 'sacred state' - they start to think and feel differently about state power and their own power.

Whether or not Facebook already directly contributes to the upheavals in the Middle East, its fast-growing use means that word of bad state behaviour is going to spread like wildfire, as never before.

Faster, please.  

"...there are about 50,000 people who read my blog daily. If I don't write, three days later the blog will be read by 20,000 people. In a week, the number of readers will be 2,000 people and, two weeks later, only your mother will go and see if you wrote something.  

Therefore, if you want to have a popular blog, you have to constantly write and say something. The good thing about the Internet is that the audience is very mobile and no one will wait for Navalny if Navalny won’t write anything for a month. These are the laws of the genre.

I am off to Wilton Park next week for a conference about Russia: new prosperity, aspiration, innovation, participation. My session is all about new media and social networking.

Looking at what is happening in the Russian internet world is difficult because (like everything in Russia) there is just so much. But do check out the interview with Russian super-blogger Alexey Navalny as quoted above. Here he is talking about his landslide victory in a virtual election for mayor of Moscow:

... the government has lost the moral and intellectual competition on the Internet, which is pretty big – almost 37 million users. For the government there’s no online platform where it is trusted. There are websites like Kommersant, Vedomosti, Echo Moskvy.

Even if we take non-liberal websites, conservative, entertainment, neutral, whatever – any voting would lead to the victory of what we call “the opposition.” And the government, although it invested a lot of money, has lost this work.

And as the Internet penetrates, this division will get bigger. Internet is the main threat to the stability of the government in Russia.

For a different view, here is an extract from an interview with a hard-nosed Aleksey Chadayev, founder of the 'Kremlin blogger school' which a friendly ex-colleague has sent me from BBC Monitoring. Imagine if D Cameron tried set up a No 10 Blogging School - the howl of derision would be stupendous. In Russia things are ... different.

Chadeyev:

... There is one more factor of some importance here -- the consequences of the demographic explosion. There are many young people in the Arab countries and fairly old regimes controlled by elderly "agents" from the days of the KGB-CIA confrontation. When encountering the new communicative forms, they pour out. But Russian society is older and there is much less of this youthful energy in it. With the exception of a few regions that are a special conversation.

[Chernenko] But the Western press writes that events like those in North Africa could happen in Russia too, and that the Russian authorities fear Facebook.

[Chadayev] Certainly there is nothing to fear. It is simply a new tool, a new weapon; you need to work with it. I would think about this in an entirely different key. And maybe we ourselves will try to organize a Twitter revolution at some particular geographic point that is important for us. The Russian world has vast spaces. Why not...

[Chernenko] ...Arouse the Russian-speaking citizens of Estonia to protest?

[Chadayev] Why not? They are disconnected, each one of them sits in his apartment and cannot do anything with this midget leviathan that is trying to naturalize them and integrate them into their wretched East European carcass. Obviously all the old methods of organizing and mobilizing them do not work. But as for the new ones, why not?

[Chernenko] In other words, the technologies themselves are neutral and any force -- pro-government or oppositionist -- can use them with equal effectiveness?

[Chadayev] Of course! They are simply tools. It is simply that there are people who are able to master them and combine this knowledge with sociology, that is, with knowledge about how the particular society is organized...

Battle is joined. Should be an interesting session.