Blogoir

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.

A few weeks ago I spotted on Twitter that LSE wanted more book reviewers. Within an hour I was signed up, and a few days later my first book appeared. Economic Gangsters by American professors Raymond Fisman and Edward Miguel:

Here is my first LSE review of it, just up:

So startling is the scale of dishonest manipulation of the world’s money that governments play down the problem for fear of exposing their own impotence and incompetence (see the staggering losses suffered by European taxpayers by VAT carousel fraud and illicit dealings in carbon credits).

Any intelligent politician or policy-maker should read this book. Not to get grainy insights into economic gangsterism, but to ponder Fisman and Miguel’s brisk introduction to the twin agonies of modern policy-making: measurement and causation.

We know in general terms that corruption and stupidity aplenty are out there. But what particular bad behaviour is leading to which particularly bad outcomes? Which good behaviour or cleverly targeted incentives might lead to better outcomes?

Read the review especially for the fascinating answer to this next question.

The World Bank tried to measure anti-corruption techniques in (again) Indonesia, by giving some money to several hundred villages to build a short road. The core of the roads duly built would be tested afterwards. The better the materials spent on the road, the less the money stolen via corruption. Clever (enough).

The villages were in three groups to test three very different psychological and policy approaches:

• no anti-corruption message - see what happens
• transparency: local villager empowered to monitor and ask questions via public meetings
• threats: central audit teams appearing to check the work

In which group was there the least evidence of corruption?

One weakness of the book is its folksy and somewhat breathless style. Thus you can be confident that a film called Snakes on a Plane is going to be largely about snakes! On a plane!

Well this book is about gangsters! Not ordinary gangsters - economic gangsters!

On the other hand, it's clear and readable. And in its drilling down into the sheer difficulty of most ways of measuring policy success, it hits a lot of very plump and self-important targets (such as the international 'development' elite) right on the nose.

Last but not least, it reminds us of the authors' famous study where they measured the propensity of different countries' UN diplomats to incur parking tickets in New York and ran the numbers past different international corruption indices. Gripping.

So, read the review. And buy the book.

What is the argument about Libya and sanctions 'really' all about?

It's a Negotiation, as a shrewd and well-placed reader has written in to say:

I was interested in your recent comment about Libyan Sanctions, which hits the nail on the head.

Plus you can be sure that the tighter the asset freezes and other actions by Western governments bite on Libya, the slower lots of other countries will be to implement them if they actually do implement them - there's plenty of Libyan oil money be made out of not enforcing UNSC resolutions. Who out there cares if the Libyan people are collateral damage while that money gets made? If they are too weak to bring down Gaddafi, he has shown himself to be a Great Leader indeed!

Sanctions are seen as a low risk, easy option - something we do almost without thinking when we can't/won't do anything else. The fall-back defence, if one challenges them, is that they "send a message".

Which, whether true or not, is almost impossible to argue with. But what is the cost of sending that message?

Even "targetted" sanctions are a blunt instrument liable to result in all sorts of unintended consequences. Some of these unintended consequences are potentially as grave and as unpredictable as those of military action; yet we'd never take military action with so little forethought (hence all the reservations about a no-fly zone at present).

The financial action against Gaddafi and Co is a rare example of sanctions that might actually achieve something (even if usually the implementation is botched and the chances of contributing to policy success were minimal anyway), but only if they do succeed.

If they don't, we get into precisely the scenario that you outline - and the snag is that we can't very well withdraw the sanctions (even if an utter failure) without looking foolish, and a skilful Saddam-style opponent can then turn them against us. We lay ourselves open to the jiu jitsu that the classic asymmetric warrior practises.

So whilst UK (and other) action so far has been tactically impressive (quick, apparently effective etc) this will count for nothing if it's the beginning of a strategic failure.

The stakes are higher than policy makers realise. The balance of risk is this: sanctions may tip the balance against Gaddafi, but if he manages to hang on they will almost certainly make things worse.

Spot on.

It leads nicely to this piece (via Browser) on what exactly is an 'intended' consequence from a philosophical point of view? And it gets complicated!

Thus:

... why should an account of a particular kind of intentional side-effect be rejected because it fails to apply to another kind of intentional side-effect?

As we have seen, experimental philosophers have generally attempted to account for all kinds of intentional side-effect cases through elegant theories that appeal to only one or two factors supposedly common to all side-effect cases.

But why should we expect the pattern of intentional side-effect cases to admit of a straightforward explanation, appealing to only one or two factors? Why should we suppose some uniform feature runs through all of the side-effects deemed to have been brought off intentionally?

Perhaps it’s time to give up on the ideal of a unified explanation.

These issues of predicting and managing consequences, intended or otherwise, is right at the heart of all policy-making.

And almost everywhere we look, we're not getting it right:

No one confessed the Machine was out of hand. Year by year it was served with increased efficiency and decreased intelligence...

Here is my latest tirade over at Business and Politics about Football and Socialism. (Update: link did not work - apologies. Now fixed)

I strongly recommend you check it out. If only for the beyond brilliant photograph of Vaniev Runieski, Stevan Gerardin, Gerd Balev and assorted other heroes of Soviet soccer.

Extract:

The bottom line is this. Football is a private activity. The fact that so many people get emotional about it is an interesting phenomenon which has nothing to do with politics. If football is not run efficiently or competently, everyone involved in football should either take responsibility for sorting out the problems, or agree to live with the current state of affairs.

If the UK Tiddlywinks Association is riven with conflict and run appallingly, so be it. Football is far bigger, but in principle is no different. We all must resist strongly at every opportunity the collectivist temptation to play on emotions to extend state power at the expense of private freedoms

So even if I as the Minister responsible for sport as well as a large body of MPs together are convinced that reforming football is in the best interests of football, we should jolly well mind our own business.

That would not be a breath of fresh air. It would be a hurricane blast against greedy state-sponsored looting.

David Cameron made a businesslike case in the Observer today for his Big Society initiative:

The first objection is that it is too vague. I reject that. True, it doesn't follow some grand plan or central design. But that's because the whole approach of building a bigger, stronger, more active society involves something of a revolt against the top-down, statist approach of recent years.

And neither is it about just one thing. Rather, it combines three clear methods to bring people together to improve their lives and the lives of others: devolving power to the lowest level so neighbourhoods take control of their destiny; opening up our public services, putting trust in professionals and power in the hands of the people they serve; and encouraging volunteering and social action so people contribute more to their community.

So the big society doesn't apply to one area of policy, but many. For example, if neighbours want to take over the running of a post office, park or playground, we will help them.

If a charity or a faith group want to set up a great new school in the state sector, we'll let them.

And if someone wants to help out with children, we will sweep away the criminal record checks and health and safety laws that stop them.

My libertarian heart rises several notches at these words - someone at long last articulating the moral case against centralised collectivism in this country, and offering a different way of looking at social problems.

Yet ... I have a nagging anxiety. Namely that even after a 'community' or a 'neighbourhood' is defined for Big Society purposes, the whole issue turns on how decisions are taken and then implemented. And that is fraught with complications.

One way of looking at the way a small community works is to imagine a group of people marooned on a desert island - how might they agree to run things and to settle disputes?

The usual objection to this approach is that it is too artificial - even if the desert islanders came up with some sort of model scheme, it would have no relevance to modern society with all its inherited interests and expectations.

Maybe, maybe not. As it happens, I have been living in something close to a 'desert island' scenario for the past three years. Let's call it Carboot Park.

The interesting thing about Carboot Park is that it was a small development of less than 20 houses set up in 1996 in effect from scratch. The new properties were sold off as freehold houses to brand new residents, who were bequeathed a simple set of 'byelaws' for running the commonly owned surrounding areas. The expectation was that the first residents would look at the byelaws and soon improve/consolidate them in the light of experience.

This, in short, was a dummy run for the Big Society idea - local people having a more or less blank canvas for running their own affairs, including the power of 'taxation' (ie the level of service charge required to keep the common areas in good shape, or not). Flawlessly democratic and more or less as fair as it could be - each property regardless of size had one vote.

Various things soon became clear.

First, that the willingness of people to 'get involved' varied significantly. This was not surprising as different households had different interests (ie for some people their house was their main family dwelling and investment, for others it had less significance; not everyone lived there full time; and so on).

Second, that there was a collective reluctance to confront the core question of how decisions were taken. On the one hand no-one wanted frequent meetings; on the other hand, there was no enthusiasm for devolving spending authority to specific residents between meetings. "Let's not decide today and instead think about it a bit more".

It duly took until 2009(!) for any full considered view to be taken on Carboot voting issues, a development which quickly led to various long overdue improvements.

The voting issue is especially interesting from a philosophical point of view. Why? Because if you're setting up a Big Society scheme from scratch, how to design decision-making?

Most of you did not bother to read the link to the Wivenhoe Station Master's House project mentioned in my recent BBRU:

And so two hours after a group of individuals rather nervously sat around in a circle in the Loveless Hall, we concluded with a co-operative group that had started to come up with a very real plan for the future of the Station Master’s House.

It is the next stage that will be even more challenging. Assuming that negotiations with Network Rail are positive, some form of social enterprise needs to be created to help steer the project.

The danger here of course is that a committee style operation somehow loses the bottom up enthusiasm that was evident at the Loveless Hall on Thursday evening.

That one was all about a group of local residents looking at options for an empty and run-down local landmark building. The group found some possible outcomes which they liked, but the piece does not make clear what if any thought was given to taking  and implementing specific decisions.

What in practice would happen is that the main 'activists' would tend to prevail, simply because they alone were ready to commit the time and energy to thinking about it. Even then, what if decisions were taken but then those implementing them failed to do what was expected? Where would accountability fit in? Should someone loyally following the agreed line but somehow messing up have to carry on her/his own shoulders any financial costs arising from putting right the mistake?

Back at Carboot Park things were rather different, as all households had a direct legal stake in the the community's common property and in the good neighbourliness of the community itself. So the voting arrangements (such as they were) tended to be by consensus if at all possible. Which (usually) promoted good neighbourliness, but at the cost of making it easy for anyone to block a new idea, especially if it involved spending new money.

This dilemma - the tension between democracy and 'getting things done' - plays itself out at on a grand scale. See the many posts I have written here about the turbulent rows within the EU over voting, such as this early one. The future of the Eurozone and the EU itself is at root all about who pays in to the common pot - and who decides how and where the money is spent.

So let's say that where I now live, as a private idyllic libertarian/conservative householder on a fairly unpopulated country back-lane, the newly identified 'Big Society neighbourhood' gets to have the deciding say on small local planning issues. I want to build a new hi-tech glass extension on my house. Many people don't care, some people do care but approve, some people do care but oppose.

Those who oppose may do so for all sorts of reasons - maybe they're worried about something legitimate, or maybe they are motivated by sheer spite and insecurity: neurotic or even mentally challenged people who have no friends and want to use any opportunity to show how tough they are at others' expense.

What sort of voting mechanisms take the final decision? If it's consensus, the few nasty busybodies can delay block everything. If it's a majority vote, should only those who show up at meetings vote? What about e-voting? What about proxy votes, and how to validate them? Should one resident be able to appear with a bundle of proxy votes which s/he has mustered?

What if, gulp, one faction offers financial or other inducements to get the votes needed to prevail? Is that fair? Is stopping votes-for-sale fair? Should lobbying be banned, or at least 'regulated'? What are the sanctions for disruptive or dishonest behaviour? Who should enforce them?

And what status does that one decision have? When is any decision final? Can a group of residents demand that it be re-opened? Are the outcome and the process necessarily a precedent for others up the road wanting to do something similar? Who decides that one, and how?

And so on. Welcome to politics, all the more bitter, ridiculous and obnoxious precisely because the issues are so small, immediate and 'local'.

The basic point being that for all the horror of local authorities and quangoes and the other accumulated sprawling edifices of 'government' as it now oppresses us, it does have certain advantages. Namely some sort of requirement upheld by the law (in theory) to maintain consistency and due process. Rules exist and count for something. Bureaucracy's very aloofness and anonymous impenetrability have a value - people taking decisions have (in theory) no reason not to try to be objective and more or less 'fair'. The role of malicious local busybodies is much reduced towards vanishing-point.

As the Carboot Park micro-example suggests, those noble qualities can become all the more elusive the smaller the community gets...

In other words, let's support the Big Society impulse as something probably flawed but at least heading in the right direction away from insane centralised Brownian target-setting.

But let's also remember the fine words of the late Polish statesman Bronislaw Geremek:

... democratic values do not function without citizens; there can be no democracy without democrats

Carboot Park, Westminster, the EU - they all show us the same stark truth.

You can't build a Big Society with Small Minds.

Wrinkled Weasel has been trying to work out where the true loyalties of Sir Gus O'Donnell lie as between former Prime Minister Tony Blair and former Prime Minister Gordon Brown.

And he thinks he has the answer:

O'Donnell ... no longer wishes to invest emotional energy in protecting a tyrant

Not-so-hard question. Which of them is the tyrant no longer deserving protection?

Here's an interesting one for those of you interested in the former Yugoslavia space and communism in general. What about the massed archives of the former Yugoslav secret police (UDBA)?

Part of the problem with the fomer Yugoslavia space is that there has been no popular movement in favour of pluralism. All that happened as Yugoslavia broke up was a succession of populist moves led by the communist elites in regional capitals against Belgrade. Insofar as the masses were mobilised, it was on an anti-Serb 'nationalist' basis - "Let's break from Belgrade and we'll be free!" If there were in those protests voices calling for an end to communist rule, they were at best muted.

This issue arose in Sarajevo when I was there. The Izetbegovic Bosniac/Muslim elite who took over in Sarajevo were delighted to grab whatever they could of the localformer communist secret police archives and then use that material against their enemies. The idea of throwing open the archives and breaking the psychological grip of UDBA-isation was inconceivable to these people, even though all of them had been persecuted by UDBA themselves!

This is what I said on the subject in a speech to a gathering of Bosniac intellectuals in Sarajevo 1998:

Let me offer one more example of the Bosniac leadership sending an unhappy political signal to their fellow countrymen and to the international community.

During the Yugoslav period Mr Izetbegovic and thousands of other Bosnians were persecuted by the Yugoslav secret police. According to an article in Ljiljan the post-war Communist regime actually murdered tens of thousands of Yugoslav citizens. Having survived this persecution the Bosniac leadership might have decided to follow the shining example of President Havel in the Czech Republic and open up the secret police archives to full public scrutiny.

This would have dealt a massive blow in favour of freedom and democracy. Bosnia and Herzegovina would have set the rest of Europe an example of openness, making a clean break with the repressive past.

Yet what has happened? These secret police archives are not private property. They belong to the BH state, and hence to all Bosnian citizens. But these Yugoslav secret police archives are not public. No democratic accountability has been brought in. Those archives in Sarajevo are being controlled by a narrow unaccountable group of people for cynical and reactionary political purposes.

The current situation is a disgrace. It is high time these archives were made public or at least brought under normal democratic control.

Many of you here today were spied on by the Yugoslav secret police simply for believing in God or for having liberal ideas. Why should you not see the lies and distortions they wrote about you on your file?

You Bosniac intellectuals here today will do your country a great service if you demand publicly that this happen forthwith, and certainly before the September elections.

Result? Nothing.

Nor did the High Representative take up the issue - the OHR senior folk had no background in former Yugoslavia and did not see the point in bothering.

When I was Ambassador in Belgrade the Djukanovic elite in Montenegro were another fine case, shamefully rummaging around in the UDBA archives to drag up what they claimed to be incriminating material involving me from my first Yugoslav posting in 1981/84. Liars.

So what has happened in the absence of any opening up of these archives across the former Yugo-space? In each new country the ex-UDBA elite have prospered, largely unconcerned with any threat of transparency and accountability for what they did in the communist period and thereafter.

The good news? Surely EU processes have changed things for the better eg in Slovenia, now a full EU member?

Seems not. The archives have been declassified and opened to the public. But the public are not allowed to actually see them?

The Grumpy Hermit is on the case:

A law of 2005 declassified UDBA archives and opened them to the public. They now reside at the Archive of the Republic of Slovenia. Dr Dragan Matić, the Archive’s Director, refused Mr Omerza’s request to access the archive. Dr Matić claims he consulted SOVA, the present-day secret service of Slovenia, about Mr Omerza’s request and SOVA told him to deny Mr Omerza’s request.

Zvonko Černač, Chairman of the Parliamentary Security Services Oversight Committee, which has the legal authority to access all the secret service documents, whether currently classified or not, launched an enquiry. SOVA refused to co-operate with the enquiry and has denied the Committee access to the contentious documents.

What's going on (added emphasis)?

The Cabinet and Prime Minister Borut Pahor are backing SOVA, although they too, implicitly acknowledge that SOVA and the Archive are acting unlawfully. They have drafted emergency legislation which has been submitted into a fast-track parliamentary procedure. Parliament will consider the legislation on Monday 31 January 2011.

The legislation, if approved by the Parliament, will legalize SOVA’s behaviour and will apply retrospectively. The measure has trumped everything else on the Government’s legislative agenda, including emergency measures needed to deal with the economic crisis.

The Government’s official explanation is that the measure is needed to protect the national interest, that Slovenia’s image internationally would suffer, and that certain Slovene citizens living abroad would face prosecution in their countries of residence if the information being requested were made public.

Why?

It is believed the documents contain information about the involvement in international terrorism by people who are still alive and are today powerful political leaders on the political left, as well as possibly by Slovene citizens presently living abroad.

One of those named by the media as potentially liable to be embarrassed by the disclosures is the country’s President, Danilo Türk. Specifically, questions have been raised about the extent of his knowledge and involvement in the terrorist attack on Austria in 1979.

So there it is. Once again Europe's former communists - even those feted as democrats in the EU - close ranks to hide evidence of their former dirty deeds.

This is why Stalinism is 'worse' than Nazism. Because it lives on and pollutes the European political moral atmosphere in an insidious way.

And because Europe's real democratic leaders shamefully sniff the putrid air and turn away, chattering in bright loud voices about any other subject that comes along, pretending the stench isn't there.

Egypt faces more or less spontaneous mass unrest aimed at toppling President Mubarak, who has been in power too long for anyone's good.

Great swathes of Egypt's Internet access has been shut down. James Cowie is following:

This is a completely different situation from the modest Internet manipulation that took place in Tunisia, where specific routes were blocked, or Iran, where the Internet stayed up in a rate-limited form designed to make Internet connectivity painfully slow. The Egyptian government's actions tonight have essentially wiped their country from the global map.

What happens when you disconnect a modern economy and 80,000,000 people from the Internet? What will happen tomorrow, on the streets and in the credit markets? This has never happened before, and the unknowns are piling up.

Whereas we all will be pleased to see an end to Egypt's tired national socialist regime brought about by people power, we may not be too pleased if the people with the most intense 'feelings', ie radical Islamists, take over in the confusion.

Meanwhile back in plumply prosperous Davos, President Sarkozy spells it out:

Addressing the World Economic Forum in Davos, he told speculators to be prepared for big losses if they bet against the euro. “[Germany’s] Chancellor Merkel and myself will never – do you hear me, never – let the euro fall,” he said.

“The euro is Europe. And Europe spells 60 years of peace. Therefore we will never let the euro go or be destroyed… To those who bet against the euro, watch out for your money because we are fully determined to defend the euro.”

Briskly put.

Yesterday in London I heard an eloquent defence of the Eurozone by one of the UK's leading experts thereon. His basic point was that it was impossible for the Eurozone to fail without a massive disruptive collapse of some sort or the other - even the hint that a country might leave the Eurozone would get its citizens wiring their money to other places, crashing the banking system.

More. If (say) Italy left the Zone and tried to benefit from cheaper exports, surely (say) France would do whatever was necessary to keep those Italian goods out?

In short, the brutal end of the single European market and the crash of sixty years of steady peaceful integration. Not something (say) President Sarkozy seems ready to let happen. 

Much more likely, our expert said, was a new determination to create in effect a new sort of Eurozone in which certain economically strong countries plus the Commission in effect ran the economies of those weaker countries in return for putting up the money to keep the weaker ones alive. The sheer weight of this phenomenon (and its core creditworthiness, based on Germanic discipline) could pose a significant competitive problem for the profligate ill-disciplined USA economy and polity in a few years' time.

Europe - reborn! With the UK left sadly outside peering through the window!

Afterwards I asked him about the implications of this new set-up for Democracy As We Have Known It. "Well, in a country of 300 million people government is bound to be a bit remote..."

Hmm.

Think about it. If (say) Germany is in effect deciding what taxes get levied in (say) Spain and what major infrastructure projects get approved or not, isn't that a form of colonialism? Hard to imagine the system not being rigged so that any spare flexibility benefits the strong Germans and not the weak Spaniards.

For how long will proud Spanish taxpayers and unemployed people be ready to take unchallenged orders from Berlin/Brussels before they 'go Egypt'?

In our new turbulent Facebook-mobilised populist world, insofar as any government system is capable of being described as 'stable' it probably finds that stability based in a popular sense of legitimacy/authenticity. Does there come a point where 'remoteness' of government simply = illegitimacy?

Would a Eurozone based on such governmental remoteness - in effect based on at best surly acquiescence  by much of the Eurozone's space - really be credible? Or sustainable?

And even if we are left peering through the window, at least we'll be free to walk away from the window and make our own minds up. Reminding me of this thought:

Someone once put it to me that the issue is rather simple.

Would the UK rather be Canada, or Illinois? An independent but (relatively small) next-door neighbour to a Big Power, or part of that power but with only an intermittent regional and almost non-existent international voice?

Maybe part of the problem is that people here on all parts of the political spectrum just aren't sure, but would like the chance to talk it through and take a vote?

Is that really so mysterious? Or 'viscerally hostile to the European enterprise'?

Craig Murray as ever tries to steer a course which no-one else has ever steered. And crashes. Here he is talking about the impact of the weather:

A combination of crazed right wing thinking and crazed left wind thinking, so typical of the UK, is why our airports are rubbish...

BAA invests in only enough cold weather equipment to cope with a mild to normal winter. It has not tied up capital in equipment that may be fully needed only once in every five years. It crosses its fingers and hopes - it has, in effect, no insurance.

It is not of course unique. The philosophy of just in time ordering that transformed cash flows two decades ago, means total collapse if transport is disrupted. You hold no stock, carry no excess of anything.

It is this ideological commitment to short term profit maximisation that makes capitalism an unsafe model for British public infrastructure.

But then there adds to the chaos the left wing rubbish of health and safety culture. A man may not unload bags if there is any ice under his boots. He may slip. All risk must be eliminated and we must live hermetically sealed from our environment.

He's right about the left-wing rubbish, of course. But is 'just in time' thinking all about right-wing 'ideology' and 'short-term profit maximisation'?

I think not.

Forty years ago back in the communist USSR a huge proportion of all food grown rotted in the fields or was lost in useless storage/transport. But over in the capitalist USA a huge proportion of all food grown rotted on the shelves and was eventually thrown away, as the supply chains for filling shops did not have the information management tools to avoid this waste - better to have too much in the stores than too little. (Note: I did a fascinating Harvard case-study on this one.)

You today are an ideological hard-core right-wing capitalist selling widgets. You want to make as much money as possible. Part of doing that - and, of course, of being as 'green' as possible - lies in reducing waste.

You have hard choices. You can decide to make no provision for bad weather or other disruptions and stock only the widgets likely to be sold in normal times.

But you know that if you do this you may lose out at some points to your ideologically hard-core capitalist rival up the road, who is known to be investing in snow-clearing kit and making other precautions so that his shop can stay open and sell widgets come what may.

On the other hand, because you are not spending that money by way of weather insurance you can spend it on enhanced widget design and so have better products to sell most of the time.

In other words, it's a gamble. Different people who believe exactly the same thing reasonably may take different choices about how to maximise their sales.

But choices do have to be made. Imagine my joy to hear a UK Minister on the radio yesterday saying that if as a society we invest in more bad weather kit (snow-ploughs etc) we'll lose other things we might have bought instead. A grown-up!

This applies on the micro-level too. Almost no-one in the UK invests in snow-tyres, hugely increasing the likelihood that difficult slippery roads will be blocked by inane accidents caused by people unused to the conditions.

Snow-tyres cost money. Would the public if given a free vote prefer to keep the £250 or so it costs to fit snow tyres every year and take their chances? I suspect yes, if only because many people would bank on some people being responsible enough to do so, in effect reducing the risk at no cost to themselves - a typical free-rider problem solved in snowy countries by the law compelling everyone to make the change as winter looms. 

The argument perhaps loses some force when it comes to quasi-public quasi-monopolies such as roads or airports which have privileged positions. But even they have to choose and take some chances - investing in more winterisation insurance means less to spend on other facilities the public might like.

I nonetheless name the guilty:

• Oxford City Council: the road from the Botley roundabout into Oxford yesterday was an idiotic disgrace. Stop wasting money on phoney propaganda adverts on buses telling everyone how 'green' Oxford is, and invest instead on stopping the city seizing up when it snows
• Eurostar: yes, I mean you, Eurostar. Even though many trains were going you yesterday came up with the astonishing idea of cancelling the reservations of all your passengers, compelling everyone to queue in inhuman conditions without a ticket system. Vous êtes trop stupides. 
• the M4 motorway authority: what the hell are you doing? How can you be so incompetent that you can't keep all lanes and exits clear soon after a snowfall? The exit to Oxford coming up from London on Sunday evening was a deathtrap of uncleared snow   

In other words, Craig is wrong again. Capitalism is not an 'unsafe model for British public infrastructure'. It has nothing to do with 'capitalism'. It has nothing to do with ideology of left or right, or even about public and private.

Even if it were all about 'capitalism', there is little to be said for the proposition that ranks of risk-free civil servants in drab offices are going to make any better decisions than people in business whose very existence depends upon studying risk closely. Look at the farcical performance of Oxford City Council, presumably one of the more intelligent local authorities in the country..

Everyone has to live with risk and uncertainty. Go for a strong return 90% of the time and then take the hit when things eventually go awry? Or opt for a less strong return 99% of the time?

Look to maximise revenues or 'utility' over 2 years? Or over 20 years? Boldness? Or caution?

The point is that the market alone gives space for both. Indeed, it's the interplay between them that makes things happen at all.