Media Crises

As Georgia burns we look to the FT to guide us through all the complexities.

And sure enough:

Paris Hilton is no average airhead, as her self-parody shows

They're right. She is way above average airheadnesses.

She is top of the airhead range.

More on the feisty Report by the HoC Public Affairs Select Committee report which came down heavily on FCO rules purporting to limit what diplomats might say after they leave the Service.

Craig Murray calls these regulations 'near-fascistic':

The idea, of course, is that only the ministers' version of truth will enter history. You can be confident that Jack Straw's memoirs will not tell you that he instructed Richard Dearlove that we would use intelligence from torture, or that we colluded with torture and extraordinary rendition in Uzbekistan and elsewhere. You needed my memoirs for that. If Jack Straw had his way, I would not have been able to publish my book telling you the truth; in fact the new regulations were born directly out of Straw's fury at Murder in Samarkand.

We now have a government so despised that it strives to protect itself further and further from scrutiny...

Let's be a tad more dispassionate.

Back to first principles.

The public want - and expect - to know in some detail what Government is up to with their money. 

The public also want Government to Just Get On With It, weighing complex interests and principles and taking hard decisions intelligently. 

As we are a free country, people should be able to comment on and/or write searching analyses of policy issues once they are out of public service, subject to some sort of reasonable cooling off period.  

That said, the public simultaneously like tittle-tattle and 'revelations', but also do not like seeing former officials trading in the public’s information to make a personal profit. 

These fickle public expectations are not invariably compatible with each other, or with real life. 

Foreign policy in particular requires a different quality of common sense confidentiality.

Domestic issues are in a way all 'ours' - disagreements and negotiations are within the British political family, all of whom claim that they want the best for the country.

Foreign affairs are different. Day in, day out HMG are involved in tough negotiations round the planet with people who may be our enemies, or who rightly want to do the best for their countries by exploiting British weaknesses/mistakes. It is madness to show our detailed analysis and negotiating hand to our rivals for ‘UK freedom of information’ reasons, when they of course will not reciprocate. 

At the very hard end of the spectrum are highly sensitive intelligence reports, sometimes gleaned from foreigners risking their lives to share information and insights with us (which NB does not mean that those reports are accurate/reliable).

The public know that the world can be a dirty place. They broadly trust the government to defend British interests by using such material wisely. This means keeping secrets secret, the public respecting limits on the public's 'right to know'. Lost lap-tops containing secret official material convey a sense of fathomless incompetence.

In return for ceding extra government discretion in this murky area, the public react badly to politicians whipping up public sentiment on the basis of inconclusive intelligence analysis, as happened in the run-up to the Iraq intervention. 

You know when you are seeing something Really Secret when its heading is a Greek letter or acronym you haven't seen before: TOP SECRET UK EYES A EPSILON/LOCKTIGHT or somesuch.

During my career I have seen all sorts of highly confidential analyses of controversial issues and countless Top Secret reports. I have written such papers myself.

Now I have left the FCO. Should I be free to use my privileged access to this fruity material to make money or stir up public anger, even if I happen to think the moral case is just?

In my view, no. Certainly not immediately I leave the Service, and for some purposes never.

The 'system' (and here I part company with Craig Murray) does offer all sorts of democratic best practice ways for officials to register substantive concerns, compatible with maintaining the secret methods needed to track foreign spies working against us, or managing threats posed by ruthless terrorist killers themselves armed with high-tech kit.

Have we got everything Perfect? No.

Room for improvement/tweaking? Probably.

Risky business for politicians and the public alike, one way or the other? Yes.

All that noted, if we agree that I am not to be 'allowed' to use my knowledge of highly sensitive processes/facts as I like immediately on leaving the FCO, how to give effect to that?

And if there are Rules or Principles, how to apply them? What threat should hang over me to deter me, a former British diplomat pecking away at my lonely keyboard, from overstepping the rules, in letter or spirit?

Legal proceedings against potential publishers?  Prison?

Threats to my pension? Ah now you're talking!

Finally, who in the end decides if a line has been overstepped, and what should happen next?

The Public Affairs Committee made a strong point in noting that in Freedom of Information Act disputes a separate outside mechanism has been set up to stop a Ministry being judge and jury where its own information is concerned. Something like that could be used to settle in a gentlemanly way rows over contested memoirs of the Jeremy Greenstock sort?

Ministers! The smart way to lean is towards generosity, creativity and flexibility. Do not appear vindictive/obsessive/defensive.

Few if any 'revelations' by former civil servants do drastic irreparable damage. We are in fact quite loyal for most purposes, most of the time.

Much worse political damage can be done by appearing to cover up and duck the hard questions than by taking some hits, heavy and unfair as they may be at the time.

And, above all Ministers, behave in an honourable, trustworthy and fair-minded way towards your officials and the public alike.

This gives you your best chance of winning their respect and so surviving the inevitable squalls of democratic public life in good shape, maybe even with a reputation enhanced.

Light touch, old boy, light touch – always the safest policy.

Here is Future One. Martin Jacques gloating over 'western impotence' as evidenced by our inability to get what we wanted in Burma or Zimbabwe.

In the parallel moral universe of MJ, South Africa's President Mbeki has "scored a major diplomatic triumph" by getting the two main parties in Zimbabwe to the negotiating table.

If allowing one of the most dismally incompetent and vicious leaders in world history to ignore his defeat in an election and cling on to power is a triumph for Guardian readers, yes, well done Thabo!

Meanwhile In Burma the West could not intervene and ended up quietly channelling its assistance to cyclone-ravaged Burma via ASEAN, "the obvious and desirable course of action".

Yes, Martin, how obvious and desirable it is that thousands of people die for lack of the assistance we generously offered, helpfully to demonstrate Western impotence to Guardian readers.

Here is Future Two. Kevin Kelly talks about the next 5000 days of the World Wide Web and the profound transformations coming our way.

Set aside 20 minutes of your life to listen. And to think.

Future Two will defeat the banal emptiness of Future One.

It rolls out to the planet, including Zim and Burma in due course, the true new power of 'the West': connectivity, transparency and individual freedom.

And sure, as Asia and Africa and the Middle East take up these values 'the West' will have a lot to think about. New syntheses of power and responsibility will emerge. All very complicated.

But the problems we and our leaders face are all about managing Western success and indeed grasping  the scale of it, not managing failure.

... just when Barack wants to make America cool again, people are being really mean to him.

How cowardly is that?!

Via American Digest.

The role (if any) played by former diplomats in public life depends to quite a degree on how - and how far - they draw on their extensive and unique experiences in the Diplomatic Service.

So, questions.

What are the limits if any on what they can say publicly about information/insights and sheer gossip gained from working for the taxpayer?

And who decides?

Following the noise generated by the memoirs of Sir Christopher Meyer the Government looked again at the rules. And aimed to tighten them up.

My former colleague Sir Edward Clay has come out especially strongly against this move:

It remains to be seen whether future retirees will flout the FCO's legally dubious gag; the FCO clearly intends to hear progressively less from its retired and senior members, unless it approves of what is uttered. It suppresses valedictory despatches from retiring ambassadors, afraid of criticisms. There have been whispers of an attempt to get mandarins to sign over copyright on anything they write - novels and poetry, as well as despatches.

The FCO tells retirees that the rules applying to their serving colleagues also apply to them, for ever. Books, articles and lectures have got to be cleared months ahead. But the real rub comes with the requirement to give five days' notice of what they intend to say in any appearances on, or articles in, the media: any public comment based upon any of their professional experience is covered, far broader than previous strictures on official secrets or confidentiality. Unspecified civil or criminal proceedings are threatened for transgressors.

Sir Edward's and other vigorous interventions have prompted Parliament to take a look. The HoC Public Administration Select Committee is expected to pronounce today. A trailer.

In case you are wondering, before I left the FCO I told them that I was planning to write this Blog. I would use my judgement as to what I did or did not publish. I did not plan to seek publicity for myself via self-indulgent gossip or hot policy 'embarrassing revelations', mainly as I had none to reveal.

Rather I planned to talk about the diplomatic and political world in a quizzical, sometimes sharp way, to cast light on processes in public life and the professional dilemmas that arise.

Sounds good to us, they said.

Not a peep from them since.

Basically, the argument from some former Ambassadors is that they can not trust the Government to enforce these rules fairly.

Is not the problem that the Government these days can not trust senior civil servants to respect them?

Whence this decline in mutual trust?

A fish rots from the top.

This report as picked up by Iain Dale and others asserts that:

Internet users will be protected from abusive bloggers and malicious Facebook postings under proposals to set up an independent internet watchdog, The Daily Telegraph has learnt. The body, made up of industry representatives, would be responsible for drawing up guidelines that social networking sites, the blogosphere, website owners and search engines would be expected to follow.

The recommendation is one of several that the House of Commons culture, media and sport select committee is expected to make in its long-awaited report on harmful content on the internet and in video games.

The Report itself is here. Its overwhelming focus is "the use of social networking sites and chatrooms for grooming and sexual predation."

I have gone through the document. There is only one single reference to blogs/blogging:

One of the things British diplomats do in foreign parts is study the local media, to keep up with the obvious news but also to follow in a deeper way what makes those societies tick.

Armed with good basic background understanding, they then fan out to talk to the editors and pundits and politicians to ask the Big Questions.

Then they send (or at least they should send) terse, insightful reports to London with recommendations on what HMG should be doing.

Meanwhile foreign diplomats in London are studying our press too, to see what makes us tick.

And what do they make of - and report home about - pieces like this?

This article is fascinating for its Manifest Badness, on so many levels simultaneously.

It's all about:

the latest example of a noticeable social trend, one that we shall call, obviously, “dolliness”, after the woman who embodies its spirit. Think of the Spice Girls tour and the Sex and the City film ...  a new form of female camaraderie that, while clearly not new, is suddenly out, proud and quite deafeningly loud.

I try not to think about such things. But note the writing: four weary adverbs already, bulging the text like cotton wool stuffed in to expand an unstrained M&S bra.

What about this:

A group of grown-up women out on the razz is rarely cool — or sexy, in the traditional sense. But so what? When the rest of life is a performance, a game of pretending to be a grown-up, a complete cool-void can be a relief.

Ha.Grown-up women are all about pretending to be grown-up! I knew it.

But they're for sure brainy:

And it’s a nonsense that conversations at girl-only nights are just “women’s talk” ... What started out as a few women — among them June Sarpong and the writer Kathy Lette — gathering at the home of Ronnie Ancona became a monthly fixture for 30 or more. Sometimes the conversation was about about the burqa; sometimes nail varnish. Usually both.

Doesn't vampy black nail varnish avoid an unseemly and impious clash?

You can love men, live for them, but what a relief it is sometimes to be around people you don’t need to be anything with.

Women together, and vacuous articles in the Times about women together. A load of nothing?

Martin Kettle in the Guardian on Labour's horrible byelection loss in Glasgow yesterday:

Almost no Labour MP, including Brown, is now safe. Glasgow East was Labour's 25th safest seat in the UK and its third safest in Scotland. The seat had been Labour since the 1920s. If the 22.5% swing was replicated in a general election, Labour would have just one Scottish MP left. It doesn't get worse that this.

Er?

Of course it can get worse. Labour could have no seats in Scotland.

Or would that in fact be better? 

My new Total Politics piece is out, full of Helpful Tips about how a new Minister should start to run a government Department.

It's quick to register and you can then see it on the E-zine.

More in the pipeline for issues 3 and 4.

The steady insight of Lord Owen, with the deafening noise emitted by Simon Jenkins.

Good piece in the Independent too.

But they spoil it by adding a list of War criminals still at large.

These people are not war criminals. They are war crimes suspects or indictees, unless and until they have been tried in their absence and convicted.

Innocent until proven guilty, and all that. Important!

News that the Arabic word for God has been found miraculously enscribed on a piece of meat in Nigeria alas does not impress me.

When I was in Serbia the erudite paper Twilight Zone carried a picture of the image of Milosevic which had been found on a piece of toast.

And these days people are impatient for miracles.

So, praise the Lord, you can make your own.

Nigel Short has a lively use of words, as well as a lively chess style.

See the detailed rulings on his use of the word 'dunderheads' to describe two senior chess officials.

Defamatory or 'mere vulgar abuse'?

Who said that chess is boring?

Crawford v Murray (if that is what it is) has reached the Evening Standard's Londoner's Diary (alas not available on their website):

Mandarin puts knife into FO’s loose cannon

UNCIVIL war has broken out at the Foreign Office. Charles Crawford, the retired former ambassador to Warsaw, has broken ranks to express publicly for the first time what the FO really thinks of its errant ex-ambassador in Uzbekistan, Craig Murray, and his memoirs, Murder In Samarkand: A British Ambassador’s Controversial Defiance of the War on Terror.

Most significantly Crawford, whose acerbic memos had a cult following in the FCO, contests the theory that Mur­ray’s career was a “brilliant” one, des­tined for great things before being derailed by his removal from the post for accusing the government in Tashkent of human rights abuses...

... A contemporary of Tony Blair’s at St John’s Oxford, Crawford is no stranger to stirring up a hornet’s nest — in 2005 one of his “blackly humorous” personal emails was leaked to The Sunday Times, revealing how much he hated EU budget negotiations and suggesting they would be better conducted by Mr Blair placing a large alarm clock on the table with a deal to be done by the time the bell rung.

While many in the FCO privately agree that Murray has “gone native” and lacks judgment they will be sur­prised by the vehemence of Crawford’s remarks. He is the most senior manda­rin so far to speak out so strongly against a former colleague who was highlighting human rights abuses ...

Droll headline. 

Just to point out that as neither CC nor CM are actually employed by the FCO any longer, it is a bit odd to say that "an uncivil war has broken out at the Foreign Office".

Nor have I in any way purported to proclaim that what I write is "what the FO really thinks" about Craig Murray and his story.

Insofar as the FO really thinks about this matter, I imagine views are mixed.

Some people may have approved of Craig's vehement opposition to the War on Terror and liked his defiant stand, even if it ended in a mess.

Others may have approved of Craig's vehement opposition to the War on Terror but thought his way of selling it was in purely professional terms unwise/bad and/or counter-productive.

Others may have disapproved of Craig's War on Terror views and thought his way of selling them was bad.

Others may not have cared one way or the other on the policy level, but been happy or unhappy about the way the business was handled in personnel terms.

The Ministers involved at the time maybe viewed the whole business differently from their officials.

And so on.

What I plan to do is to carry on looking at the book in detail on my website, since it gives a probably uniquely rich seam of 'raw honesty' illuminated by vivid examples of policy and operational dilemmas for the British diplomats involved, at home and at Post alike.

Thus the book raises convincingly many serious questions for practitioners and the public. It deserves what it has not had so far (I think), namely a critical practitioner's analysis of it.

So, on we go tomorrow.

Because it allows massive direct hits on Utter Fatheadedness, and then documents carefully the attempts of the fatheads to cover their tracks, giving millions of people hours of amusement watching it all.  

Never thought I'd say it, but the time has come to vote SNP.

Anything but this.

I was a great fan of the Balkan 'yellow press' in all its exotic glory.

Presumably these strange papers and magazines have a non-trivial readership otherwise they would not be published in such profusion. So as Ambassador wanting to develop insight into the thinkings of society as a whole, I felt it well worth swinging through them now and again.

My favourite was Twilight Zone (Zona Sumraka). It looks to have become a bit more suburban of late, being reincarnated as Magic Zone. In Belgrade a few years ago it broke an amazing number of world scoops, which alas the planet heeded not.

Remember the terrifying Calcutta Monkey-Man? 

Twilight Zone discovered that NATO special forces had secretly kidnapped this evil creature and used latest DNA technology to clone it, before bringing it to Kosovo. But it had escaped and was feasting on Albanians! 

Not to forget the genetically mutated beetles created by NATO bombings of Serbia, poised to start breeding in your garden.

Or Tutankhamun's mysterious Ring of Power which caused havoc in the wrong hands. It had been discovered by a malign German scientist and brought to New York, prompting the 9/11 disaster, and after various detours causing earthquakes/plagues/floods was heading for ... Mitrovica!

Unambiguously excellent.

There is also a political yellow press, which hopes society stays cynical and stupid. These publications take a tit-bit of gossip from the editor's cousin working in the police and explode it out of all proportion: All politicians are corrupt! All diplomats are spies! Albanians are dangerous!

Yet these papers too are not without interest, and operate on many levels.

A current sophisticated example is Kurir - see this world scoop of a former Kostunica adviser meeting a former US Ambassador. Sinister indeed.

A further recent scoop is how the British and US intelligence services conspired together to plan to assassinate Serbian PM Kostunica in Sarajevo back in 2002. The evidence is the purported transcript of a tape-recording of a conversation in a Belgrade restaurant between two UK and US diplomats.

Come on, Kurir.

You know that when the waiters in these places change the dirty salt and pepper pots for clean ones, we diplomats always speak louder and more clearly into the new microphones and make up silly stories.

Kurir of course do know this, so they slip in some clever little signals to show the real experts that the whole thing is a spoof, like deliberately confusing 'Anthony' for 'Andrew' within the same sentence. Elegantly done.

Croatia's legendary publication Feral Tribune has closed for financial reasons.

Feral was an outstanding and courageous source of scurrilous but hard-hitting attacks in the 1990s on Croatian President Franjo Tudjman and his close associates, who strove mightily to close down the paper.

In 1997 Robin Cook flew from Banja Luka to meet Tudjman. Tudjman knew that the issue of official Croatian assaults on free media would come up.

It did. As I heard the story later, when Robin Cook raised the subject Tudjman clicked his fingers and in solemnly walked a flunky with a silver tray laden with articles from the Croatian media critical of Tudjman, complete with lampooning pictures of Tudjman with spectacles and a silly beard crudely added.

Tudjman insisted that the media in Croatia were free, as this weighty material scandalously attacking him showed.

R Cook opined that in democracies such phenomena in fact were quite normal.

"Look at this!" said Tudjman. "No other government in the world would accept such attacks on the head of state."

"Sometimes the truth hurts," mused the Foreign Secretary.

Easy enough to find on the Internet examples of Feral in its most aggressive form, including brave investigative reporting of atrocities committed in Croatia against Serbs.

For something more subtle, try this. A reporting piece by Ivan Lovrenovic evincing insight, wisdom and generosity of spirit. Great journalism. 

Hvala, Feral. 

From this vast distance it is not easy to follow the procedural manoeuvres of the majestic and variegated Canadian 'Human Rights' industry in its pursuit of Mark Steyn.

But Mark and Maclean's magazine looks to have won one handy free speech victory, with the Canadian Human Rights Commission dropping its case against them:

The Steyn article discusses changing global demographics and other factors that the author describes as contributing to an eventual ascendancy of Muslims in the 'developed world', a prospect that the author fears for various reasons described in the article. The writing is polemical, colourful and emphatic, and was obviously calculated to excite discussion and even offend certain readers, Muslim and non-Muslim alike.

Overall, however, the views expressed in the Steyn article, when considered as a whole and in context, are not of an extreme nature as defined by the Supreme Court in the Taylor decision. Considering the purpose and scope of section 13 (1), and taking into account that an interpretation of s. 13 (1) must be consistent with the minimal impairment of free speech, there is no reasonable basis in the evidence to warrant the appointment of a Tribunal.

Maclean's of course incurred significant costs in defending themselves against these idiotic pseudo-charges.

A verdict/decision is still awaited from the British Columbia Human Rights Tribunal.

Much more on the whole saga here.

The EP Culture Committee blogging menace nonsense (below) points up a factor in the Lisbon Treaty which is not really discussed.

Namely that as more and more 'areas' become subject to voting rather than consensus at the EU level, member states lose two things:

• the right to block at the end of the road ideas which are utterly fatuous; plus, even more importantly ...
• ... the right to stop such ideas gaining credibility and bureaucratic momentum in the first place

Just say some proposal to qualify our basic freedoms (in this case the right to write what we damn well please on a blog without being subject to the pathological attentions of an EU Ombudsperson) starts to run around the European Parliament or EU Commission. Various Euro-busybodies take it up.

What can the UK do to stop it? If it is in an area which falls under consensus, we can simply say NO in a loud voice at the start and then wearily tell everyone that we mean it when we say that we will block it.

Then we hope that it crawls away to die.

And we also hope that if it lingers on, our willpower won't be eroded as the gruesome thing trundles towards a final decision. Because once it starts to trundle, it takes on a pseudo-legitimacy of its own.

Even if as in this case only a seemingly modest 'voluntary code of practice' emerges as a 'fair compromise', a key principle will have been conceded (and winning that concession was actually the point - establish the principle, then haggle over the price) This opens the way to future inroads as and when the EU gets round to it.

However, if a proposal comes under a Qualified Majority Voting heading or can be tweaked to do so (ie just as the odious Working Time Directive was smuggled in via 'Health and Safety' provisions), we immediately have to start rallying opposition in the hope of defeating it in a vote.

Much more risky on the substance as zany 'trade-offs' start to appear, not to mention debilitating and wasteful. And all untransparent to citizens.

The answer comes, "Er yes, but so what? We can propose things which other MS don't like, so it all balances out. And the threat that a big and tough MS like the UK will mobilise a blocking minority deters a lot of nonsense anyway"

To which I say, "Er no. There are too many MS out there who have quite different attitudes to basic human liberties and the balance of power between citizens and the state. The tendency in practice is to dumb down competitive differences for the sake of the European Social Model and Generalised Harmony. See eg the various Directives seeking to limit by EU fiat the number of hours we all work, and giving agency staff many of the rights of permanent staff, an explicit drive to kill off a flexible British success story." 

So, European bloggers.

Hit back. As hard as you can.

The tragedy is that Euro-processes have forced you to waste more than a second of your busy and productive lives thinking about how best to do so. 

Irish voters!

Read this terrifying piece describing how the Culture Committee of the EU Parliament wants to deal with Bloggers "with malicious intentions or hidden agendas" who "pose a danger".

Then go and vote.

You know which way.

Busy times in the ever-complicated relationship between Poland and Germany.

Robert Kubica becomes the first Pole to win a Formula 1 Grand Prix race - driving a BMW in Montreal.

Then Germany beat Poland 2-0 in Euro 2008, with Polish-born Lukasz Podolski scoring twice - for Germany!

Before the match there was the usual noisy tabloid war, rising to excellent heights of "Give us their heads!" tastelessness, even though one of the noisiest Polish tabloids is owned by the German Springer group.

All this reminded me of the wonderful Malbork Castle in northern Poland, founded in 1274 by the Teutonic Knights:

The castle was expanded several time to host the growing number of Knights, and became the largest fortified Gothic building in Europe, featuring several sections and walls. It comprises three separate sections - the High, Middle and Low Castles, separated by multiple dry moats and towers. The castle once housed approximately 3,000 "brothers in arms", and the outermost castle walls enclose 52 acres (210,000 m²), four times larger than the enclosed space of Windsor Castle.

The Knights were Tough Eggs, rampaging to and fro against the then Poland and into the rest of Europe down the succeeding centuries. But they did have a keen sense of humour.

In one smart tower of the castle is a hole in the floor by way of de luxe mediaeval lavatory. If a guest had failed to meet the Knights' exacting standards he would be offered the use of this facility, and in using it would be surprised whan a hidden lever was pulled, plunging him down on to the rocks far below.

The football tabloid war prompted the usual dreary calls from some windbags in Germany for the Polish government to 'take action' against such abusive media material.

Pathetic. The whole point of football is that it gives us all a marvellous and (usually)harmless outlet for atavistic, raw nationalism. Not to mention post-modern irony.

Which is definitely better than what we had previously.

This is a perceptive argument that B Obama has brought together the techniques of 1960s' New Left/Marxist 'community mobilisation' with networked Internet cleverness.

But allowing the masses to 'own the campaign' has been accomplished in part by letting all sorts of extremists (anti-semitic, communist, Jihadist and others) rant away prolifically - on Obama's own community website!

Deliberate but over-ambitious 'community building? A security lapse? Dirty tricks? Incompetence?

Now the most offensive contributions are quickly being removed. And the site managers are busy trying to hide their traces by 'cleaning' the memory caches of Google and other search sites.   

A bit late?

Lest you think that Mark Steyn is nothing but a crazed Canadian demographer, have a re-run of this utterly classic piece of work.

His famous interview from 2018 with Monica Lewinsky's dress:

To be honest, I was lucky to get the interview. The dress was supposed to be doing the BBC - the full “Panorama special” treatment, Martin Bashir, the works - but, to protect her identity, they wanted to do that undercover secret-location protect-your-identity trick with the camera that makes part of the screen go all fuzzy and blurry.

“Are you crazy?” she yelled at them. “It’ll look like I’ve still got the stain.”

Read on.

What do this outlandish 'banning' of a Transformer t-shirt from an aircraft and the Mark Steyn Human Rights Tribunal trial in Canada have in common?

This.

In US and English law there is a so-called eggshell skull doctrine. This has it that if one commits a tort or crime, one has to accept the responsibility for all the losses suffered by the victim even if some of them were unpredictable.

So, if you hit someone on the nose but unbeknownst to you (or even the victim) the victim's nose was especially and freakishly fragile, you can be held liable if you alas inflict massive brain damage in this case even if in 99.999% of such cases that would not occur.

The point of this of course is to protect everyone fairly from tortious acts, and thereby deter such acts.

The 'human rights'complaint against Mark Steyn in Canada is in effect a bewildering, pernicious attempt to extend this doctrine to cover every eventuality, even when the action complained of is not unlawful. 

Mark Steyn writes an article in a prominent Canadian publication about what he sees as a looming clash between traditional 'European' values and 'Islamic' values. Some Muslims do not like it.

They press the editors to give them a full unedited 'right of reply' and try to badger them into making a sizeable payment to an Islamic charity (Note: extortion?). The editors robustly say 'Get Lost'.

The objectors resort to Canada's human rights tribunal machinery, which seems to have amazing and far-reaching communistic powers to suppress freedom of expression if a complaint is deemed to be 'justified' by virtue of the injury allegedly caused to "dignity, feelings and self respect":

37 (1) If the member or panel designated to hear a complaint determines that the complaint is not justified, the member or panel must dismiss the complaint.
(2) If the member or panel determines that the complaint is justified, the member or panel
(a) must order the person that contravened this Code to cease the contravention and to refrain from committing the same or a similar contravention,
(b) may make a declaratory order that the conduct complained of, or similar conduct, is discrimination contrary to this Code,
(c) may order the person that contravened this Code to do one or both of the following:
(i) take steps, specified in the order, to ameliorate the effects of the discriminatory practice;

…(d) if the person discriminated against is a party to the complaint, or is an identifiable member of a group or class on behalf of which a complaint is filed, may order the person that contravened this Code to do one or more of the following:
(i) make available to the person discriminated against the right, opportunity or privilege that, in the opinion of the member or panel, the person was denied contrary to this Code;
(ii) compensate the person discriminated against for all, or a part the member or panel determines, of any wages or salary lost, or expenses incurred, by the contravention;
(iii) pay to the person discriminated against an amount that the member or panel considers appropriate to compensate that person for injury to dignity, feelings and self respect or to any of them.
(3) An order made under subsection (2) may require the person against whom the order is made to provide any person designated in the order with information respecting the implementation of the order.
(4) The member or panel may award costs
(a) against a party to a complaint who has engaged in improper conduct during the course of the complaint, and
(b) without limiting paragraph (a), against a party who contravenes a rule under section 27.3 (2) or an order under section 27.3 (3).
(5) A decision or order of a member or panel is a decision or order of the tribunal for the purposes of this Code.
(6) The member or panel must inform the parties and any intervenor in writing of the decision made under this section and give reasons for the decision.

Thus the way appears to be open for the Tribunal now hearing the Steyn case to ban in Canada one of the top-selling books on Amazon. Pop!

This is obviously insane on the level of normal democratic practice. But what is wrong with it in a deeper, philosophical way?

It basically means that society has to be organised around the limited tolerance and imagination of its most neurotic and extreme members. Anyone who is 'offended' by anything can raise a complaint and have some hope of getting 'redress', even when the alleged offender is doing something otherwise lawful (ie enjoying the right to air his/her opinions). 

This in turn trends towards creating a culture of defensive whiners, adults by age but seven-year olds by attitude, who go rushing and blubbering to teacher just because someone said something nasty about them.

Feelings trump reason - the ultimate moral disaster.

Where does the Transformer t-shirt case fit in?

Because we have drifted into a situation where the state assumes for itself the requirement to 'balance' all competing claims betwen Reason and Feelings, on no sound or even articulated basis of principle whatsover.

And once that idea gets universalised - once the proposition seeps into official instinct that everything (a) in principle might need balancing (b) by officials -  we have reached a very high-water mark of Liberal Fascism.

The t-shirt case shows just how far state control has gone far out of control in the UK. The Heathrow officials who dealt with this episode did not think:

"Hmm. How do we balance the idea that some people might dislike this t-shirt with his freedom to wear what he damn well chooses? Ooops. We don't, of course. His right trumps all. Shame on us for even contemplating his clothing in the first place!"

Instead they thought:

"Uh-oh. This maybe could be provocative. What if someone complains? We could get into trouble if we did not do anything. Better to be safe than sorry - let's make him change it!"

Thus what in fact get 'balanced' are rival furtive nervousnesses within the minds of the officials about purely theoretical complaints. The rights of the passenger are not even weighed. Appalling.

Back in Canada, the Tribunal listening to the fanciful complaints of a few activists and wondering whether to ban a best-selling book likewise are ponderously and self-importantly weighing and balancing issues they should not be touching.

The classic hard anti-free speech argument goes like this:

"Of course there are limits on free speech! What about someone who screams fire in a crowded theatre, causing panic leading to someone being trampled to death?!"

But even if one accepts that that sort of behaviour maybe does merit sanction, it is not the same as a few people in a theatre reacting in a panicky self-indulgent way just because another member of the audience says something to a friend which they happen to overhear and don't like.

In that case the core issue for society is how to deal with the neurotic tiny minority who take offence loudly and unnecessarily when the vast majority are quite content. And the state's sanctions regime needs to be tilted to deter them, not the law-abiding subject of their pitiful querulousness.

So a great deal is at stake in the Steyn case, about the way mature Western democracies organise themselves and their core moral incentive structures.

Do we incentivise and uphold values of robust self-reliance and individual choice?

Or do instead encourage defensive paranoia?

Do we encourage adulthood?

Or childishness?

Do we employ armies of civil servants to seek to strike a carefully considered, duly weighed and weighted balance - between Good Sense and Stupidity?

Guido and Iain Dale are riding high in visitors to their respective websites.

Big numbers, comparing favourably if not better with similar sites run by 'mainstream' media outlets. Increasingly they all feed off each other, of course.

Why not? For far too long a tiny number of media pundits have held extraordinary influence over public life round the world. Not because they were smarter or wiser than many others, but because they were taken on by major newspapers and ran a cosy and lucrative oligopoly.

Bloggers and other web analysts give these plump pundits healthy competition.  Plus they point out errors at supersonic speed: 'fact-check your ass', as it's known in the trade.

My own readership is more ... modest. Still, 3000 Unique Visitors a month is OK by me, given that the site has been going only a few months. Thanks, readers

Plus the site has helped me get a droll piece in a brand new UK political magazine launching this month: Total Politics. Be there, or be square.

Gerard Baker in the Times today makes a weighty case against Hillary and why Democratic voters have rejected her.

So she should be put out of her misery: It would not be sexism or chauvinism but the clear-headed decision of a wise statesman, if Senator Obama brought this particular woman's presidential hopes to an unmourned end.

Sounds good? Yes.

But it's not true. Voters haven't, or at least they have not done so in any decisive way.

Look at Real Clear Politics analysis of the actual vote counts so far. Obama is ahead by only some 500,000 votes from 33 million so far cast.

Which maybe explains why Hillary Clinton battles on.

Facts. Nothing like em.

The BBC website currently has the following headline:

Iraqi al-Qaeda commander 'seized'

Why the inverted commas around the word 'seized'?

There is nothing in the ensuing story to explain why, unless the idea is to imply that the Iraqi forces who say that they have done the seizing are lying or wrong.

Why not 'Iraq' al-Qaeda commander seized?

Or Iraq 'Al-Qaeda' commander seized?

Or Iraq Al-Qaeda 'commander' seized?

When I was a student it was all the rage to throw such punctuation around, somehow giving the impression that one was evincing an oh-so-clever and cynical relativism, questioning everything in sight.

Now the BBC has caught up. 

My observations on Poland's Diplomatic Ball were picked up by Bartosz Weglarczyk's fine blog in Poland and have raised an eyebrow or two.

(Note to non-Polish speakers: every time you see a Z in a Polish text, remember that it serves much the same function as an H in English. Thus cz = ch, and sz = sh. Except when it doesn't. Not much help, but you won't be quite so appalled.)

The basic professional technique question, of course, is how best to react to nasty surprises.

Perhaps the most astounding surprise ever was the crashing of those aircraft into the World Trade Centre on 11 September 2001. President Bush's immediate reaction as he heard the news was subsequently ridiculed. But there is no text-book technique either for staff advising leaders in such a crisis, or for those leaders calibrating on the spur of the moment a convincing/strong/wise response in front of live TV cameras.

That said, in general the best way to deal with a surprise is not to show that one is surprised.

But be careful. Too much studied nonchalance will give rise to insane conspiracy theories that you knew about the 'surprise' in advance - and probably even planned it!

One solid technique is to make clear that this new turns of affairs indeed was quite unexpected and, from what you can gather at this early stage, a [insert adjective] event to which you [and the nation] will react appropriately as the full facts emerge.

Then add that, of course, the nation's excellent emergency services are tasked and trained precisely for such surprises; you will do everything possible to ensure that they get the support they need at this critical moment and in the days to come.

Then depart in a calm but purposeful, leaderly way to get on with leading.

In short, project a message of "Yes, terrible things happen unexpectedly - but we're ready for them".

Another, trickier approach is to note that others may have been taken by surprise but try to sell the thought that you were not: "well, of course, we did see this coming..."

My favourite example of this was the collapse of the Berlin Wall and the ensuing unification of Germany.

Back in the FCO Planning Staff in mid-1987 my youthful colleague Mariot Leslie - still very much in business but now rather grand - dashed off a short paper saying that East Germany might join West Germany much sooner and more abruptly than anyone expected.

The FCO (and I) chortled loudly. OK, Gorby was a big improvement on his awful predecessors, but it made no sense to expect any Soviet leadership to let that happen. Sorry, Mariot, file that one on a high dusty shelf.

Yet a mere 120 weeks later, it happened.

And among those people thinking about it all, Mariot's brilliant paper rose phoenix-like to eternal glory.

The website Biased BBC brings together people dissatisfied with tendentious or evidently slanted BBC reporting and analysis.

I have had my own moments of supreme dissatisfaction with poor BBC work, so I share their pain.

See especially this, when the BBC got it 100% damagingly wrong at the height of a huge story.

But bias is one thing - slanting consciously or otherwise a story in favour of one political viewpoint (almost always a 'progressive' one, of course).

Ineptitude is something else - a slant emerges from technically and professionally poor work by the reporting team.

This happens a lot for one very good and little understood reason.

The BBC like other media organisations to save money has fused the quite different tasks of Reporting Facts, Analysing Facts and Commenting on Facts into one person on the spot.

This of course suits the egos of the reporters. They no longer have to send back merely dry, balanced accounts of what is happening.

They can opine on those subjects too! See the hi-octane rubbish talked by BBC (and other) reporters embedded with troops when Iraq was invaded - it was astounding how much these over-excited people knew about the conduct of war when enclosed in a military personnel carrier trundling across sand in the middle of nowhere.

And lo, the more dramatically (if dishonestly) they opine, the more impact the report has as 'real' and ''punchy' - maybe even 'controversial' if the words pour out well. 

But NB too a tendency also to trivialise things, to make a facile but seemingly meaningful statement.

The BBC World front page on the BBC website has a 'Have Your Say' facility, where global members of the public can bung in a view on currently hot topics. And the BBC lifts a sentence from one of these to appear on the front page itself.

This week the comment from one Richard in Montpon, France has been left standing for several days for the edification of the planet. Richard warns us about the world's food problems: "I fear we are on the threshold of a bigger food crisis than we might imagine".

Eeek.

Except that we aren't.

The fact that as of this morning far more people have far more food than ever in world history does not count? Maybe Richard does not recall the 1960s/1970s when there was 'triage' talk of letting Bangladesh starve itself into oblivion, on the grounds that it was so badly run that nothing could be done to save it, and food aid was effectively wasted there. We are very far from that point.

Why has Richard's not very profound comment been left up for so long? Why not use the rather better if rather longer observation from Lee in the UK on food problems: The main reason for this is the growing world population and the fact that millions are being lifted out of poverty in countries like China and India.

Lee is right. Current food problems are a function not of failure but of global success which has been spoiled by all sorts of government meddling.

By leaving up for days on end Richard's empty gloomy warning to be seen by millions of people, the BBC dumbs down the issue.

Biased, Inept or Facile?

They report. You decide.

The St Valentine's Day Massacre in gangland Chicago back in 1929 was an unusually awful event which shocked a nation.

But what about a busy weekend in Chicago these days?

Have our expectations of how people should live and behave been dumbed down?

If so, why?

The BBC reports firm action by Iraqi security forces against 'militants' in and around Basra as well as various 'fighters' in Baghdad.

Not long ago these various violent factions were known as 'insurgents'.

Has General Petraeus done so well with his Surge in killing or neutralising a sufficiently large number of 'insurgents' that they are now have been relegated to the lowlier, almost humiliating status of 'militants', or even mere 'fighters'?

If this excellent trend continues to the point where the Iraqi forces face threats from only small groups of ad hoc fanatics, how will the BBC and mainstream media then describe them? 

Extremists?

Or what they in fact are?  Armed criminals?

Is there a BBC guide to how these designations work? Who decides and when?

Polly Toynbee in the Guardian shrieks today that pink 'Girlification' is destroying the 'hopes of 1968'. She cites National Statistics Office numbers as showing that "women in their 40s earn 20% less per hour than their male counterparts. This is the motherhood penalty - and the more children a woman has, the wider the gap."

Let's put to one side the obvious point that anything which destroys the 'hopes of 1968' has to be strongly encouraged. Take a look instead at the NSO site under Gender Pay Gap. Polly did not share with you a couple of other points:

"The gender pay gap (as measured by the median hourly pay excluding overtime of full-time employees) narrowed between 2006 and 2007 to its lowest value since records began ...

Women's weekly earnings, including overtime, were lower than men's. This was partly because they worked fewer paid hours per week ...

Although median hourly pay provides a useful comparison between the earnings of men and women, it does not necessarily indicate differences in rates of pay for comparable jobs. Pay medians are affected by the different work patterns of men and women, such as the proportions in different occupations and their length of time in jobs."

Hmm. So, the gender pay gap is the smallest it has ever been. And if you work less you get paid less. And if you exercise the Woman's Right to Choose and choose to have more children, you are 'penalised' because you do not work? And all that is a problem?

Calm down, Polly!

Polly T is right on one point, viz that pink merchandising of girly stuff is pretty ghastly. I decided to be a male feminist and ruthlessly suppress Barbie "Think Pink!" junk in my house when our daughter was born.

But imagine my bewilderment when her first Barbie doll was bought for her by one of my right-on women's rights FCO female colleagues.

In her despair Polly T asks how it can be that lapdancing is proliferating as socially acceptable entertainment for supposedly respectable men in certain circles.

Good question.

Maybe it is proliferating because grammatically challenged feminists argue that contrary to cliched stereotypes, pole dancing and other similar dance forms are extremely empowering. It (sic) builds your self esteem and confidence in your own sexuality.

So faced with all this I have decided to ignore all feminist shrieking and saw wood instead.

Come and join me, Polly. It's empowering.

And quite unlike feminist ambitions going back to 1968:

People love chopping wood.  In this activity one immediately sees results. Albert Einstein

Only now has the full tragic truth emerged about Hillary Clinton's 1996 visit to Tuzla in Bosnia.

This authentic tape shows exactly what happened just as Mrs Clinton was meeting a young Bosnian girl at Tuzla airport. US Ambassdor John Menzies and Bosniac leader Ejup Ganic were both blown away by sniper fire.

Awful. How has this been covered up for so long?

The BBC shows us pretty pictures of a display of Chairman Mao badges at the British Museum: they are said to be "very red, very bright, and very shiny" by Museum Curator Helen Weng. 

One of the striking features of living in Poland is to visit flea markets such as the good one in Krakow and see shabby bits and pieces of Nazi and Communist memorabilia displayed together.

Here in the UK in exclusive Piccadilly Arcade you can visit the Iconastas shop and buy chic Soviet propaganda: snap up this finely painted late Soviet revolutionary plate for a mere £2350.00.

But attempts to sell Nazi trinkets in shops here cause outrage. On-line sales have problems too.

I confess. While in Russia I bought a large very red tassled Communist woven banner exorting Ukrainian farmers to Unite for Socialism. Plus a metal Lenin: something like it is being sold by Iconastas for £1350.00 - a canny investment. And I have a kitschy Tito porcelain bust - he's back in fashion too!

All this shows just how magnificent the Communist achievement has been in turning Morality inside-out.

Work hard at school, become the greatest mass murderer in history, busily spread STDs, and you too can have your shiny red badges displayed at the British Museum. 

An article today in the unhappy New York Times purports to describe the Republican Party's "fractious" divisions around John McCain's foreign policy ideas. Pragmatists are locked in fierce battle with Neoconservatives, among them the "prominent neoconservative" Robert Kagan. Aaargh.

This clumsy piece maybe explains why those NYT share prices have been drifting downwards.

Instead I commend to anyone interested in international affairs a long but penetrating piece by Kagan himself which explores how different ideas about the merits of 'interventionism' have been a long feature of US history, with Republicans and Democrats alike to be found on different sides of the arguments.

Stick with this fascinating historical analysis until the final paragraphs, where Kagan makes a vital philosophical point:

History will judge whether the decision to invade Iraq was a mistake or not. But if it was, what kind of mistake was it? Was it an error of judgment and calculation or an error of doctrine, and if the latter, which doctrine? We could have such a debate, but we are only pretending to have it now.

Kagan points out how hard it is to get the balance right:

People understandably want a foreign policy doctrine that produces only the results they desire and avoids all errors. Unfortunately, no such doctrine exists. A doctrine that precluded war with Iraq would also likely preclude going to war over Kosovo, just as a strategy that guaranteed America would never go to war in Vietnam might not have been successful in the Cold War.

And he concludes:

In fact, the expansive, idealistic, and at times militaristic American approach to foreign policy has produced some accomplishments of world historical importance—the defeat of Nazism, Japanese imperialism, and Soviet Communism—as well as some notable failures and disappointments. But it was not as if the successes were the product of a good America and the failures the product of a bad America. They were all the product of the same America. The achievements, as well as the failures, derived not from innocence or purity of motive, and not because Americans abided by an imagined ideal of conduct in the world, but from the very qualities that often make Americans queasy: their willingness to accumulate and use power, their ambition and sense of honor, their spiritedness in defense of both interests and principles, their dissatisfaction with the status quo and belief in the possibility of change. Are we really interested in abandoning this course?

Elegant and subtle. If John McCain is listening to him, fine by me. 

How often do you see really truly awesomely rich people standing in a queue?

Not often.

But it happens.

Poor Zimbabwe.

Accor