Blogoir

Over at Business and Politics.

Thus:

Remember the Bible parable of the Prodigal Son? He squandered his fortune but saw the error of his ways and crept back home. He was warmly welcomed by his father, who explained the significance of his repentance to an older brother unimpressed by the precedent being set:

This brother of yours was dead and is alive again; he was lost and is found.

The moral core of this story turns on the fact of his sincere repentance – and an unambiguous willingness by the wastrel to work hard to put things right.

The Bible does not say that the wastrel is ‘entitled’ to carry on sponging off his relatives indefinitely – that they have to show him limitless ‘solidarity’.

As we look at Greece’s manoeuvres to persuade partners and markets to lend them yet more money to help stave off self-induced Disaster, the issues boil down to this:

• Is Greece serious about repenting its erstwhile wasteful ways?

• Is Greece capable of sustaining the sort of brisk standards now being set by Poland?

Indeed. So what are the answers?

Nick Hogan has been released, in an interesting example of Blogger Power (of sorts).

Anna Raccoon helped lead the charge - well done her and Old Holborn. Some of the detail on the case as they report it is striking.

I don't smoke and don't like being in smoke-filled places. But I dislike even more the idea that a privately owned pub or even a private club such as the Travellers is being treated by the state as a 'public' place.

No! Go away!

A reader argues that I am underestimating the impact of Fox News in the USA:

Thus the numbers of people 'reached' in America are not the paltry 2.8 million you purport, but rather 80% of the total viewership for the day, 18,166,000, (again ridiculous, 20% of 18 million people did not tune into FOX news yesterday and spend the entire day watching it)...

So obviously many more people were one time show watchers tuning into an original program they wished to view, rather than spending their entire day watching a news channel on a non-news day.

I did not 'purport' anything. The figures I quoted were clearly describing 'prime time' viewership alone. That said, the ratings over a longer period of course stack up for Fox as for everyone else.

The media term for this is the cume. See how Arbitron defines it:

Major ratings products include cume (the cumulative number of unique listeners over a period), average quarter hour (AQH - the average number of people listening every 15 minutes), time spent listening, (TSL), and market breakdowns by demographic.

It is important to understand that the CUME only counts a listener once, whereas the AQH can count the same person multiple times, this is how to determine the TSL. For example, if you looked into a room and saw Fred and Jane, then 15 minutes later saw Fred with Sara. The Cume would be 3 (Fred, Jane, Sara) and the AQH would be 2. (an average of two people in the room in a given 15 minute period)

Which is why in fact CNN claim that their cume is greater than Fox's.

The point of my posting was to look at the sense behind the claim of a senior Democrat that four times as many viewers watch Fox as watch CNN. If the total numbers for both are relatively small, why if at all does that matter?

This piece supports my position, noting that back in 1969 the main evening US news channels would reach 40 million people (at a time when the US population was a lot smaller):

There's a growing perception that opinion news outlets like Fox and MSNBC drive the news agenda. Do they?

No. The state of the economy, the war in Afghanistan, whether swine flu is going to turn more deadly--these things drive the news. That perception may be there, but cable news is still a niche medium.

Fox's Bill O'Reilly has around 3.5 million people watching each night, or about 1% of American adults. That would get you canceled on broadcast television. The three nightly newscasts have about 20 million viewers, not 3.5 million.

What Fox clearly does is reinforce the sympathies and energies of a smallish number of conservative Americans. So what? It's a free country! Most other cable and network channels push in a more 'liberal' direction, far outnumbering Fox.

Where US conservatives do have an edge is with Talk Radio, with Rush Limbaugh reaching some 13.5 million listeners a week. But again, that is only two million per day on average.

The basic fact is that with the huge expansion of TV channels and Internet-based entertainment and information of the past couple of decades, fairly few Americans now watch TV for news and current affairs. Newspaper circulations are falling too.

Hence the vicious circle of those programmes (and newspapers) cutting reporters and so getting more and more shallow or even solely 'opinion-based' (ie making a loud and often silly noise) to try to keep up their ratings.

That trend is evident here in the UK too. See for example how the BBC lost my vote back in 1993 with its scandalously poor assessment of the attempted coup against President Yeltsin, which I watched at the Embassy in Moscow with gunfire echoing round the city in the background:

When I subsequently took up with a senior BBC personality the BBC's dismal, dishonest reporting at the height of the crisis he just shrugged, saying that that sort of dramatic reporting boosted ratings and was what people wanted to hear these days.

In short, if the Democrats want to blame something for their woes, maybe the right target is not Fox News but rather their own policies?

Dnevni Avaz in Sarajevo reports that the UK court has ordered that Ejup Ganic stay in prison for a further week, apparently to give Serbia more time to present evidence against him for the Dobrovoljacka St massacre in 1992.

A protest demonstration is to be held outside the British and Serbian Embassies in Sarajevo.

Here in the UK the absurd and preposterous media silencefulness about this story is truly terrific.

As far as I can see:

Nothing more on the Telegraph website since 2 March.

Nothing more on the Guardian website since 1 March (Note: I mentioned this to the Guardian's Diplomatic Editor last night).

Nothing more on the Times website since 3 March.

Nothing more on the Independent website since 1 March.

Good grief.

A former European leader has been arrested and detained on a Balkan war crimes extradition rap, involving an attack on a UN convoy. The London court blunders its own procedures and brings the wrong prisoner to court. The issue stirs controversy and adds to Bosnia's already sharp political divisions.

Is all this and much more not in some way maybe ... newsworthy?

UK/World News today: Should Carla Bruni have Worn a Bra?

Duh. Of course not.

Over at the latest Crawford Diplomatic Despatch:

It all boils down to a profound infantilisation of public life. Government has turned into feckless dim-witted parents who treat their children like spoiled brats. The children themselves duly morph into something neurotic, angry and sly.

To win the public’s loathsome brattish affections and get re-elected, the parents offer endless sweeties, only to be aghast when the brats start to think that this is how things must be – even when there is no more money for sweets, and their own teeth start to rot from all that sugar.

The door-bell rings. It’s the bailiff:

Nice islands you have over there. Pity you can’t afford them any more…

I have just given a short interview to Radio Free Europe in Sarajevo about the Ganic problem.

The interviewer asked a question about the abuse of UK courts for political purposes. I pointed out that there are two completely different issues here, which may (understandably) be merging into one in the public mind:

• extradition requests filed by other states, which may or may not involve foreign leaders (Ganic situation): these are played out under the relevant detailed Extradition legislation
• private prosecutions (eg for war crimes) of visiting foreign leaders attempted by UK-based 'activists' as politically motivated lawfare. See the recent Israel episode. That was what Gordon Brown has written about today. 

I also pointed out that HM Government took war crimes issues very seriously - see eg the first action in Bosnia by NATO to round up ICTY indictees in 1997, which had been fatuously denounced in Sarajevo as a pro-Serb ploy even though the SAS killed a leading Bosnia Serb indictee in the process.

So (I said) it was not surprising that a British court confronted with some evidence that the Bosnian leader concerned had played a direct part in the killing of up to 40 people in a UN convoy might take the case very seriously. If it went to substantive hearings a rare battle would ensue, with top lawyers arguing the extradition case on its merits. I added that it remained to be seen whether the Bosnian application for Mr Ganic's extradition would help or hinder his case - were they really going to present him as a war-crimes suspect..? 

My Google Spam is doing a noble job in heading off lots of emails from somewhere or other purporting to issue diplomas:

BECAUSE YOU DESERVE IT! Is your lack of a degree holding you back from career advancement? Are you having difficulty finding employment in your field of interest because you don’t have the paper to back it up – even though you are qualified? If you are looking for a fast and effective solution, we can help! Call us right now for your customized diploma...

Isn't that wonderful?

You have failed by normal means to get a respectable honest qualification. That's holding you back. 

But gosh, you sure do deserve one!

Does your future employer deserve to be taken in by these instant diplomas?

Update:  Bishop Hill (being a lot smarter than I am) has found a way to save the key sound-clip. See also the interesting comments the posting has prompted.

* * * * *

Quick! Listen before it disappears down the iPlayer memory hole.

BBC presenter Peter Allen on Radio 5 live Drive on 1 March, talking to Angela Dingwall from a Scottish ski resort about this year's heavy snow.

After their chatting about the scale of this year's snow, he asks her if she puts it all down to 'yer global warming'.

She says "No, I don't believe in global warming I'm afraid... It comes and goes."

Peter Allen is heard to go 'tsk': "You're allowed to say that but I'm not" (All laugh)

Here, starting at 0.28 minutes in.

Of course, it's all in good humour. But the sort of jokes one cracks - especially live on the radio - maybe say something?

A lively effort is being mounted to raise money to secure the release of one Nick Hogan, who has been imprisoned here in the UK for not paying a £3000 fine and a further £7000 in costs for failing to stop people smoking in his pub.

Try Old Holborn, who has set up a PayPal button. Nearly £4000 has been raised in little over 24 hours.

Galling as it is to have to pay money into the coffers of the state to get Nick Hogan free when he arguably should not be in prison, it will be an impressive sign of libertarian people power if he is quickly released when the money to pay his fine is raised.

What I strongly object to is the definition of a privately owned pub as a 'public place' under the relevant legislation. Just because the public have 'access' to a pub does not mean that it should be treated as a public place. The public are welcome to walk in and see what they like and dislike before deciding (or not) to stay.

If a landlord wants to allow people to smoke or take their clothes off or otherwise amuse themselves on property he owns, anyone not liking it may leave. Market forces can decide how far pubs and other establishments make provision for eg smokers and/or non-smokers alike.

This tendency by the state to usurp private property rights for 'public' purposes is utterly obnoxious, whether it applies to pubs or sport. See this piece on Football Socialism.  

Via The Browser a rather lame article by Jay Rosen arguing that journalists in the USA have become so non-judgmental that they are striving for an impossible professional 'innocence' and are just missing the point.

By way of evidence he cites a long analysis of the Tea Party tendency in the USA by famed NYT reporter David Barstow, who saw much evidence that Tea Party people feared 'impending tyranny':

The other thing that came through was this idea of impending tyranny. You could not go to Tea Party rallies or spend time talking to people within the movement without hearing that fear expressed in myriad ways.

I was struck by the number of people who had come to the point where they were literally in fear of whether or not the United States of America would continue to be a free country. I just started seeing that theme come up everywhere I went.

Jay Rosen says that it is not enough that a reporter show analytical detachment, and so 'merely' report on what such people believe:

Seriously: Why is this phrase, impending tyranny, just sitting there, as if Barstow had no way of knowing whether it was crazed and manipulated or verifiable and reasonable?

If we credit the observation that a great many Americans drawn to the Tea Party live in fear that the United States is about to turn into a tyranny, with rigged elections, loss of civil liberties, no more free press, a police state… can we also credit the professional attitude that refuses to say whether this fear is reality-based? I don’t see how we can...

We have come upon something interfering with political journalism’s “sense of reality” as the philosopher Isaiah Berlin called it (see section 5.1) And I think I have a term for the confusing factor: a quest for innocence in reportage and dispute description. Innocence, meaning a determination not to be implicated, enlisted, or seen by the public as involved.

Well, so be it.

What I dislike is the Rosen logic leap which takes us from where we are today to a banal lumpen Cuba-style tyranny - rigged elections, loss of civil liberties, no more free press, a police state - as if there was nothing in the middle which people should be worried about. Since he defines tyranny in such a banal way, Tea Party people ipso facto must be delusional!

Let's look at examples of the tyranny of modern life in the UK, which is all the more nasty for being insidious. Not the abrupt clumsy squashing of the public by a Monty Python Foot of Tyranny, but rather intellectual and cultural oppression by myriad pinpricks and official insults.

Thus the Tyranny of Filth. Drive between Swindon and Oxford, or round the intersections of the M40 and M25 and the M25 with M1. The roadsides for mile after mile are filthy with litter. What policy processes are happening to exact more and more taxes from people when the standard of public services is so obviously slumping? How can we be lectured incessantly by central and local authorities on 'the environment' while outside the windows of their offices the rubbish is piling up?

Or the Tyranny of Indoctrination. Listening to Radio Five Live in the car the other day (Friday), I heard the BBC presenter talking to a woman in Scotland about current snow problems. He asked her whether she thought it was down to Global Warming. "No, I don't believe in all that - it's just the changing weather" was (in effect) her reply. "You can say that. I can't" he replied in a curiously arch tone of voice. Huh?

Or the Tyranny of Complexity. My accountant tells me that many of his clients have had £100 notices for late tax filings, when he knows for sure that the returns were delivered on time (now the Revenue refuse to issue receipts to confirm delivery). He has tried to penetrate the tax system to find out what is going on. Eventually he finds a human tax-person: "We have hundreds of unopened envelopes here - there's a backlog."

Try the Tyranny of Official Querulousness. A five-year old girl was left in a car which had crashed into a river for 97 minutes because the police refused to try to rescure her as they had not had the right training.

The Tyranny of Educational Underachievement. Manipulating the results of school exams for non-academic reasons.

The Tyranny of Abuse of Public Funds to Reward One's Friends. See these especially awful examples from DFID.

Or the Tyranny of EU Deceipt, as exemplified by promising a referendum on the new EU Treaty then bundling it through Parliament instead.

And so many, many more.

It's not that any one of these is tyrannical in itself. Life is not perfect. Governments will over-reach themselves.

Rather that the cumulative effect of all these nasty developments is to create a new sort of PoMo post-democratic tyranny, one in which the citizens stop owning the state. Freedom and responsibility as currently understood - and as operationally meaningful ideas - decline. Instead everything sinks into an ooze of dirty ambiguity and mediocre uncertainty.

So if the Tea Party people are 'fearful' of that sort of thing accelerating in the USA as it has done here, as their Federal Government borrows recklessly against the future, are they really so wrong? 

Seen at Drudge:

Is nature out of control?

Er. Yes.

Wouldn't anything else be ... unnatural?

Getting a good job, working long hours, keeping your skills relevant, navigating the politics of an organization, finding a live/work balance...these are all really hard, xxxx.

In contrast, respecting institutions, having manners, demonstrating a level of humility...these are all (relatively) easy. Get the easy stuff right xxxx.

In and of themselves they will not make you successful. However, not possessing them will hold you back and you will not achieve your potential ...

Professor Scott Galloway spells it out.

There are different sorts of bloggers.

Apart from all those who write honestly and well about Cats or Cars or Cooking or somesuch, there are those of us who attempt to tackle wider themes.

And we fall into two general categories:

1   Those who press their points home by unrelenting obscenity.

2   Everyone else.

Two leading UK swearbloggers are Devil's Kitchen and Obnoxio The Clown (I will now proceed to pleasure myself with this fish)

You get the general idea.

Oh, and there's Mr Eugenides. There have been handy Swearblogger Roundups.

Nonetheless, behind all the somewhat wearing barrage of rude words are some lively libertarian-leaning minds. Here's the Devil drilling down into some of the deep philosophical principles arising from the way copyright law works (or not).

These popular bloggers perform much the same function as the fans who chant obscenities at football matches. Most fans don't join in, but enjoy a weekly dose of the smutty wit and energy:

Charlie Nicholas illegitimate

He ain't got no birth certificate

He's an Arsenal bastard  

But swearblogging ultimately lacks impact because the swearers are too remote from the subject. They can rave away all they like about Gordon Brown and even urge people to vote for him, such is their hatred.

But Gordon Brown himself sits in No 10 ignoring this distant background army of enemies. 

The arrows are sharp and dipp'd in poison, but fired from far too far away. They clatter down outside somewhere, doing no damage other than to make the environment less tidy for other people..

No.

To be a really wonderful and effective blogger using calculated insults and occasional raw language, you need to be close to the subject of your invective.

Your insults need to hit home with the unerring power and precision which only someone who knows the target well can deliver. And everyone has to read these finely-turned insults - and marvel at them

Welcome to Malta's Daphne Caruana Galizia.

And this lively piece of writing:

Some men will shag anything, even if it still looks like a cross between something you can buy at Mosta Bacon and Worzel Gummidge after he’s taken a bath and has put on two bits of Lycra that are better suited to a Ukrainian escort - or, as on her Facebook page (yes, sir, the magistrate is on Facebook), a denim mini-skirt that looks very unfortunate on her sort of shape.

Phew.

Via The Browser an excellent account by Stephen Levy at Wired on how Google just keeps getting better. By using Google itself:

Google also has a larger army of testers — its billions of users, virtually all of whom are unwittingly participating in its constant quality experiments. Every time engineers want to test a tweak, they run the new algorithm on a tiny percentage of random users, letting the rest of the site’s searchers serve as a massive control group.

There are so many changes to measure that Google has discarded the traditional scientific nostrum that only one experiment should be conducted at a time. “On most Google queries, you’re actually in multiple control or experimental groups simultaneously,”

As for my favourite subject - me - I do not make it into the top Google pages if you search merely for Crawford.

But if you search for Charles Crawford, on page one of the Search results I wipe the floor with the myriad other Charles Crawfords out there, although our old friend the Abandoned Bunny does also sneak in. Almost the same on Bing.

Still, if you search Google for controversial former ambassador Craig Murray sweeps home. Fair enough.

Yesterday in London I was on the stage at the Polish Cultural Centre in West London for a discussion about Solidarity - Thirty Years After.

Others on the panel were Wladyslaw Frasyniuk (former top Solidarity activist and former political prisoner turned politician) - someone whose lively intelligence has left him an influential but quixotic player in Polish politics.

And Dougie Rooney, current President of the Trades Union Congress and a strong supporter of nuclear power.

Wiktor Moszczynski, press officer for the Federation of Poles in Great Britain, presided.

In my own remarks I shamelessly grabbed the opportunity to tease Dougie Rooney and remind the audience, not that most of the people there needed reminding, how the rise of the Solidarnosc movement in Poland in the 1980s had been a ghastly embarrassment for the British Left in general and the TUC in particular.

For many years senior Labour Party and trades unionists had been trooping to Moscow to ask for unobtrusive support from the Soviet leadership in their class struggles in the UK. In an epic act of national betrayal, Edward Kennedy too had travelled to Moscow in the mid-1980s secretly to ask for Moscow's help in defeating Ronald Reagan.

Not to mention that further back in 1920 assorted trades unions in England had mobilised to stop the British government sending weapons and supplies to newly independent Poland, then under attack from the Red Army whose avowed aim was to conquer Poland then move on to Berlin, Paris and London.

"Hands off Russia" had been the progressive cry, just when revolutionary Marxist Russia was greedily laying its own hands on as many territories as it could.

So, I said, there was a long tradition of both useless Useful Idiots and dangerous Useful Idiots in the Labour Movement, who had hated the fact that Polish workers were having the temerity to stand up for freedom against the Soviet empire, and so were threatening 'detente'.

Such attitudes ran deep in British society by the 1980s. By then Soviet Communism was like the weather - it was just there, for better or worse. I had had a problem in the FCO for echoing the Evil Empire language of Ronald Reagan in a speech I had drafted for Sir Geoffrey Howe. All sorts of people popped up pompously to intone that that sort of inflammatory rhetoric was likely to be 'destabilizing'.

Yet the Soviet Union was an empire, and it was (more or less) evil.

Luckily the arrival of Pope John Paul II, Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan had created a far-sighted vision for looking at Soviet Communism which created new realities on the ground far beyond these limp official cluckings.

In Reagan's wonderful phrase, "My idea of the Cold War is that we win, they lose." Which was what had happened.

I said that it was not surprising that the British Left had been hopelessly confused on the whole question. Run a Google search now and you see all sorts of squabbles still echoing on between the social-democratic Left, the Communist Left, the Trotskyist Left and the Really Trotskyist Left over who did what to whom back then.

And how appalling it had been for all of them that Margaret Thatcher was greeted by huge crowds of cheering Polish workers in Gdansk after defeating the Miners here in the UK.  

John Prescott (who knows a few things about British socialist and union politics) had found it all very hard to take, as he told me on one of his visits to Warsaw a few years back. Not only had many Poles seen Margaret Thatcher as a vision of hope. Much worse, the new Solidarity members coming to UK for fraternal consultations had all been pointy-head academics, not a real shipworker among them! 

I made one other point which perhaps was less comfortable to Polish ears.

Namely that on the one hand Poland rightly prided itself now on the huge sense of national unity and democratic but disciplined Christian principles which Solidarity came to represent. See eg this meeting itself.

But that mythic representation of Solidarity sat uneasily with the fact that millions of Poles had been more or less loyal to the Communist regime, whose agents and informers had penetrated to the top of Solidarity and indeed the Catholic Church. 

Hence continuing bitter feuding today over the 'deal' done with the Communists in the late 1980s.

Did Solidarity under malevolent influence of senior traitors within its own ranks pull its punches and let the Communists tip-toe away far too easily? And even if that was the case, did Poles now want to force through the final unmasking of all those double-agents in Solidarity and Church ranks?

This prompted shouts of Yes! from a small but noisy contingent of younger Poles in the audience, who appeared to blame Frasyniuk and other Solidarity veterans for the fact that so many young Poles still did not have jobs in Poland, and suspected that Lech Walesa had been a double agent...

* * * * *

It is all 30 years ago now. Ancient History.

Lech Walesa himself is still only 67. All being well he'll be around for Solidarity's 50th birthday party in 2030.  

John Mauldin of Thoughts from the Frontline writes a powerful weekly email on economic and investment themes to which one million people have subscribed.

As have I.

Because it is free.

His latest one is superb, disentangling different expert pessimistic and not-so-pessimistic analyses about the problems of the Eurozone, Greece and Spain in particular.

What I liked about this essay was the way he looked hard and fairly at rival views of unquestionable professional integrity, trying to find common ground and exploring the deeper reasons why they diverge.

He writes with tight precision:

... the valuation of the euro is not in and of itself a reason for the euro to disappear. At one time it was $.82. Then over $1.60. All currencies fluctuate, some more than others. What destroys them is political malfeasance.

What would put the euro at risk of a bad political decision?  A Greek bailout without serious conditions would be the one thing that could be a very bad start to a downward spiral. If Greece is bailed out, then why not Portugal or Spain or Ireland? What about the emergency room crisis that is Austrian banks?

The line has to be drawn, and it has to be a hard line.

On Spain he quotes another top analyst, Ray Dalio:

... Spain's external debts, have exploded without a significant offset of external assets. On net, Spain owes the world about 80% of GDP more than it has external assets.

As a frame of reference, the degree of net external debt Spain has piled up in a currency it cannot print has few historical precedents among significant countries and is akin to the level of reparations imposed on Germany after World War I.

We don't know of precedents for these types of external imbalances being paid back in real terms.

Heavy stuff. Don't subscribe unless you aren't feeling weak.

Meanwhile Soeren Kern at Pajamas Media explores how the leftist Spanish ruling class are blaming Anglo-Saxon economics for their rotten situation. And, that old stand-by when you have run out of intelligent things to say, conspiracies:

“Spain is the victim of an international conspiracy to destroy the country’s economic status, and then, the euro,” he said. “Nothing that is happening, including the apocalyptical editorials in foreign media, is just chance.”

Well, that is true. Hard to imagine articles in newspapers and magazines about Spanish recklessness being created by ad hoc atoms of ink randomly settling on the page.

But it misses the main point. Namely this staggering graph in the WSJ showing why for some 40 years the USA's federal government too has been on (and remains on) a reckless binge:

The small cheer in all this horror is that the US Democrats, main drivers of government profligacy, are running scared. The Tea Party tendency is focusing hard on this issue, to fine effect.

It is only a small cheer. Since the scale of the problem is now so daunting that it is hard to see good options for dealing with it. Stephen Spreuill looks at what the Republicans might include by way of policy ideas to start the decades-long trudge back to sanity.

What goes up, goes up and up and up before there is a crash or a total breakdown, when it comes down. The Eurozone is inherently less rational a phenomenon than the dollar, and so it will face its existential crisis sooner.

Update: Welcome Iain Dale readers

* * * * *

Former warrior-diplomat Al Haig has died, aged 85.

The obituaries are noting his unique contribution to the English language:

The Washington Post’s George F. Will called him as “an aerobic instructor for the English language, making it twist and stretch.” His instructions took the form of “Haigspeak,” which uniquely combined periphrasis, convolution, and bureaucratese, with a healthy salting of neologisms. “Caveat” was a verb in Haigspeak, and “epistemologicallywise” an adverb.

Basically, he inclined towards convoluted vocabulry of an extreme order.

To the point where (I was told) the following remarkable episode occurred.

Haig was US Secretary of State during the Falklands crisis. The then British Foreign Secretary and a team of senior officials had a meeting with him in Washington.

It went well enough. They departed in the car. Then they started to analyse what he had said. It became clear that one important sentence had been so opaque and tangled that its meaning was quite unclear.

Hence, an awkward question arose. How to go back to the US side to try to get the sentence explained?

It was rather embarrassing for the Foreign Secretary to telephone Haig to ask him to translate himself. But if the Brits asked his officials they might give an answer which was not what Haig meant, if indeed Haig's people themselves had understood what he had meant.

A lively discussion ensued.

Somehow it was sorted out.

And we retook the Falklands.

Hurrah.

I was down at Guidhall in the City yesterday, to watch the special ceremony of Poland's excellent Ambassador Barbara Tuge-Erecinksa being accepted as a Freeman of the City.

Barbara was deeply involved in the Gdansk Shipyard protests and the heroic rise of the Solidarity movement:

Active in the underground during the martial law in Poland, she was harassed by the communist party. "It wasn't a big deal compared to what happened to some," she remembers. "The worst experience was when my son was one year old -- to see those security men searching in my baby's cot."

The ceremony in part marked Guildhall's expression of appreciation for the remarkable generosity of Poles who during WW2 found a way to offer money to help repair Nazi bomb damage to the building.

And did you know another proud Polish connection? That Chopin's final concert was at Guildhall in November 1848, to raise money for Poles who had fled France to escape more continental revolutionary violence?

No, you didn't. Here is some background from Jack Gibbons, with deft musical accompaniment:

His last public appearance took place in London at the old Guildhall on 16th November 1848. The occasion was a concert and ball in aid of Polish refugees. Chopin played several of his shorter pieces on an upright piano in a side-room adjoining the main hall.

According to his pupil, Princess Marcelina Czartoryska, "Chopin played like an angel". By now completely exhausted, Chopin was greatly relieved to return to Paris where he spent the last months of his life virtually bedridden, supported by the generosity of his friends and pupils.

Yesterday a delicate modern bust of Chopin by Jaroslaw Alfer (latterly not on display as renovation works at Guildhall proceeded) was unveiled by the Ambassador in a new place of honour.

Or should it be honor?

All right-thinking and/or snooty English people will say that of course it is honour.

Honor is an Americanism. Ugh.

And they are right, these days at least. The different usages became formalised in the nineteenth century.

Not that the great men of 1800 or thereabouts minded too much. Thomas Jefferson's original draft of the US Declaration of Independence used honour.

And there on the wall of the room in Guildhall where Ambassador Tuge-Erecinska was sworn in as Freeman is a framed letter from Lord Nelson, expressing his honor.

All in all, a most honourable day for UK/Polish relations.

For those who have not seen it, here is how the USA's 'Tea Party' political gamechanging grassroots protests against Big Government started a year ago:

An elegant essay by Theodore Dalrymple on legendary lofty US economist J K Galbraith.

Needless to say, what caught my eye was reference to a book JGK wrote in 1958, Journey to Poland and Yugoslavia.

As a fine, prosperous East Coast liberal from a democracy, JKG was disinclined to see what if anything might be wrong with these one-party communist states:

The main function of what Galbraith writes is to minimize the horrors of Communism, upon which he has hardly a word. Indeed, strict political control never intrudes much on his consciousness when he is in the Communist world. “I have generally avoided quoting by name my Polish . . . sources in this account,” he writes. “This is not because I have any great fear of compromising them. Many people . . . take no small pride in speaking plainly and do so without evident restraint.”

Other priceless observations follow. Noticing the drabness with which people are dressed, Galbraith remarks that it “may be the problem of socialism. Planners can provide for everything but color, and they cannot allow for that because so much of it is associated with idiocy great and small. In any case, the people of Poland have more liberty than variety.”

Under Soviet-imposed socialism you are free, Poles!

Free, that is, in general, which is the main thing. Just not in particular, which could be most disadvantageous.

One of the great advantages of Galbraith-style planning is the elimination of “idiocy great and small,” of the kind that people are apt to embrace when they have the choice. The solution: eliminate choice. You can have any color you like, so long as it’s chosen by the philosopher-king.

Later he went to China and somehow missed the fact that millions of people had been wiped out in the Cultural Revolution and preceding famines caused by Mao's policies:

Nor was Galbraith interested in who the Red Guards were or what they actually did. The fate of individual people was far beneath his notice, which explains why his anecdotes are so rarely interesting, let alone illuminating. His is a humanitarianism without a human face.

The point now?

Galbraith has come back into fashion: not only his ideas, which imply the need for a huge and expanding class of redemptory politicians and bureaucrats to save people from a fate that would be wretched without them, but his aristocratic assumption of unchallengeable moral superiority, written in his prose as it appears to be written on President Obama’s face.

How delightful to be so generous, so very right all the time, and yet make a fortune and stay at the Ritz!

Read the whole piece - a deft demolition of JKG's bewilderingly idiotic idea that business/markets are inherently ruthless, governments inherently benign:

There remains, however, an astonishingly gaping absence in Galbraith’s worldview. While he is perfectly able to see the defects of businessmen—their inclination to megalomania, greed, hypocrisy, and special pleading—he is quite unable to see the same traits in government bureaucrats.