Blogoir

Former Ambassador turned 'activist' Craig Murray is a commendable phenomenon for self-publicity. His website now attracts a considerable following, far higher than this modest effort.

But he achieves this in part by rehashing old FCO material, and noisily claiming to gullible readers that it shows all sorts of things (eg 'complicity with torture') when it just doesn't.

For a classic example, see this posting where Craig presents as new material various redacted documents which he has previously published. Craig Spart-style Trot adjectives and adverbs gush forth:

An FCO source warns me this morning that a vicious rearguard action is being fought within the FCO, to ensure that any government inquiry excludes my evidence and does not consider whether there was a policy of complicity with torture...

I have now obtained under the Freedom of Information Act the final documents in the Tashkent series. These show beyond doubt that there was an official policy of obtaining intelligence through torture...

The picture built up by these documents is overwhelming and undeniable evidence of a policy of complicity in torture, even despite the censorship by government.

No, it's not. As previously pointed out here.

Now, as well as being rude about his former boss Linda Duffield and swiping at the blandly inoffensive Westminster Foundation for Democracy - is nothing sacred? - he wants the taxpayer to spend precious money on a new enquiry into the way his own turbulent case was dealt with by the FCO.

Maybe that would be a good idea, if Craig were to agree to pay back to the taxpayer the very large sum (£350,000+?) he was given by the taxpayer on leaving the FCO were any such enquiry to find that he had been treated fairly and honourably?

Sorry not to have been more active recently, folks. But I have had to travel to Stuttgart, Geneva, Warsaw/Cracow and now Brussels all in the past ten days, while keeping an eye on our attempts to sell Crawford Towers.

My latest manoeuvres involved leading a course on Ethical Dilemmas in Diplomacy. I tried with some success to distinguish between home-based dilemmas, which typically should be managed within the HQ organisation's rules and house culture, and dilemmas at an overseas posting where relationships between colleagues are completely different and things look and feel different.

Plus overseas postings are where policies collide furiously with real life, throwing up all sorts of moral and operational conundrums (or, lawks, should that be conundra?)

What, exactly, is an ethical dilemma for a diplomat representing a democratic country? After all, a dilemma is a dilemma only if you treat it as such - otherwise it's a fact of life.

Should a diplomat brush private moral concerns aside, saying that if the policy has been approved by a fairly elected government in a lawful way, that sets a sufficiently robust moral framework of checks and balances within which to operate?

NB this is not the same as a bland "I was only obeying orders" defence as used by Nazi concentration camp guards, since it presupposes a substantively fair and democratic process leading to the policy concerned - in such cases it arguably is reasonable for an official to outsource part of his/her own conscience to that wider process of consultation and debate.

In any case, what is a fair way to allow diplomats to express private reservations and have them taken into account? And, then, if such a procedure is available but fails to give the unahppy civil servant enough moral certitude, then what?

Should a diplomat who feels that a given policy in aim or outcome is inherently immoral simply resign? Why not? 

One of the few examples of a senior diplomat resigning on an issue of principle was Elizabeth Wilmshurst, an FCO Legal Adviser who in 2003 chose to leave public service when she could not accept that it was lawful to use force against Iraq without a new UN Security Council resolution.

She made a prominent case that the invasion of Iraq was unlawful and so in one or other sense Just Wrong. But let's remember that a significant number of her Legal Adviser colleagues either disagreed with her on the core arguments or, if they saw decisive force in her argument, nonetheless decided to stay within the system and pursue their moral choices in a different way.

Watching this the general public might be tempted to think that the likes of E Wilmshurst and C Murray are in some ways heroic figures, whereas their colleagues who did not leave the system were less principled or even cowardly.

However, would the public really want all the heroic principled people to quit the FCO or the civil service, leaving the shop run by only snivelling jellyfish who remain behind?

One of my very first postings here touched on all this:

Maybe I had lacked imagination previously, but this episode brought home to me for the first time that in my own rather limited and indirect way I was a non-trivial part of (and as it turned out some sort of spokesman for) an elaborate process which had led to some people far away dying violently.

That a diplomatic service career sometimes involved grim moral dilemmas. And that if that was not what I was ready to face in a job, I should get another one.

I still think about that night. For a few hours I was one of the few voices available to the public defending an unpopular UK government decision which had led to military action and numerous deaths in Libya.

I was not myself in any way involved in the policy chain which had brought that decision about. Yet surely as a promising middle-ranking FCO policy officer I somehow had to be seen as more 'involved' in some of the moral responsibility coming with that policy than eg a cleaner or messenger, even if cleaners and messengers themselves played an important functional role in helping that policy be delivered.

Anyway, it was an interesting course which helped shape my own thinking in new ways. 

Is the nice point about training that the trainers often learn more than the course participants?

Craig Murray offers some thoughts on where significant cuts might be found in the UK diplomatic effort.

It includes this:

... our Embassies in EU countries remain among the biggest and grandest we possess, reflecting the days when our shifting bilateral relationships with European nations were literally matters of life and death, war and peace.

They are magnificent and madly over-staffed by crazily over senior people. They are a great relic of a bygone age, institutions so grand that their overwhelming presence masks their lack of purpose.

Something in this, although of course many of the UK-based members of our Embassies in Europe are not FCO people anyway, so once again Craig makes a populist noise but gets the core of the argument wrong.

Do we really want to cut to nothing the numbers of people working in sensitive Embassy liaison jobs dealing with drug and cigarette smuggling, or preventing illegal immigration, or promoting UK business? When we instead could cut wasteful foreign development assistance and pay for all these services and eg beef up global anti-corruption initiatives?

In any case, the issue is much wider.

Successive governments have given the EU the right to take decisions binding on us (and on everyone else) by voting. This means that in the case of utterly stupid EU Directives such as the one attempting to control our working hours, the UK economy may be dramatically worse off (extra and unnecessary NHS costs running into billions of pounds) if this Directive gets agreed in the face of our strident opposition.

Which is why it makes sense to have serious UK diplomatic lobbying firepower deployed not only in our own capital and in Brussels, but also in EU member states capitals.

It is (FACT) not realistic to lobby effectively on many highly technical EU issues by telephone or by flying visits of London-based officials. Apart from anything else, some of the people who may be most difficult or need persuading may not speak English, or may be in parts of the local bureaucracy unknown to our London/Brussels teams.

Only an Embassy can see the local scene as a whole and work out where precisely in the system (bureaucracy/Parliament/media or all of them simultaneously) it makes sense to apply special arguments or offer policy deals. It is too risky to leave it to the Brussels people to haggle on the spot - by the time they arrive there, our rival delegations' positions will tend to be set in stone and our chances of blocking a ruinous vote against our interests could be gone...

In short, it is a damn good national investment to maintain significant senior lobbying in a good number of EU capitals - the sums of money at stake far outstrip the puny savings Craig identifies.

For a more detailed explanation of all this, see here.

I have no problem with Craig's idea of scaling back our consular effort (ie the work diplomats do to help Brits who get into trouble overseas), as much of that either can be done by commercial insurance schemes for travellers or not done at all.

But to make that sort of saving requires Ministers frequently to go on TV and tell the great British public that if they hit robbery or illness or earthquakes or volcano dust on their travels overseas, they'll mainly have to sort out their problems for themselves.

And when weeping angry relatives then appear on TV raving against government insensitivity and mean-mindedness after some disaster has hit their family somewhere beyond our shores, Ministers will have to say "Life's tough - don't say you weren't warned...".

Not quite what I expect to happen.

A day with my nose press'd hard against the perspiring computer screen writing scenarios for a new course which I lead later this month, all about Ethical Dilemmas in Diplomacy.

As far as I know this is a pioneer course, the first of its kind to be taught to professional practitioners by a former Ambassador.

My general theme is that a diplomatic career brings with it all sorts of explicit or implicit ethical dilemmas. I have written about some of these on my site here, including this example - one of my first ever postings - arising from the US bombing of Libya in 1986.

Part of my research for this course has involved getting from the FCO, UN and elsewhere examples of the sort of guidance they give on ethical issues. In practice this comes down to all sorts of Rules and accompanying procedures on giving effect to Honesty/Integrity, Fairness, Transparency and so on.

Plus there are detailed guidelines on what to do if civil servants feel that the instructions they are getting are incompatible with their private conscience or are otherwise professionally suspect.

The sassy Dutch Foreign Ministry of course does a great job, giving its diplomats lots of simple scenarios where ethical dilemmas arise (eg gettings gifts from foreign contacts, conflicts of interest), then cleverly adding new factors to each scenario to show how moral choices get complex precisely because the different official guidelines may point in different directions of outcome or behaviour.

My conclusion?

Diplomats need to be guided by three things:

• the Rules
• their heads
• and their hearts

Sometimes those three indeed point to quite different practical ways forward, especially in cases when high policy gets tangled up in immediate tactics - and even one's own professional future.

It's fine a Ministry offering you all sorts of ways to 'blow the whistle' on corruption among your superiors. But can you be really sure that if you try to do so, the system will not hit back at you in self-defence? Achieving fleeting media fame as a whistle-blower, but then drifting into career limbo is not necessarily a good outcome?

What if you get urgent intelligence information pointing to some sort of calamity which you can not use to save lives without risking revealing the source and losing other vital information later?

And which is in practice better, and/or what do the public want their diplomats to do?

To go for bold speedy outcomes eg on human rights in benighted foreign lands but risk the death of key local activists, or to chip away at steady slower modest change? The Craig Murray saga offers us all vivid examples of how to be brave and dramatic - and professionally 100% ineffective. 

Myriad questions. Maybe I'll find the odd answer here and there.

If anyone wants me to run this intriguing course for their colleagues or institution, just let me know: mail@charlescrawford.biz

Ben Rogers writes a lengthy piece over at Conservative Home urging an energetic approach by the new UK government on international human rights:

The Commission has also recommended the appointment of an Ambassador-at-Large for International Human Rights, who would work with the Minister of State to co-ordinate the efforts of diplomats and embassies in addressing international human rights, and oversee the work of a range of Special Envoys on thematic human rights issues – genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes; religious freedom; human trafficking; women’s rights, for example.

These could either be diplomats with a proven track record in these areas, or respected human rights campaigners from the NGO sector. The United States, the Netherlands and France have similar positions, and it is time the United Kingdom did too.

Such appointments would be an important demonstration of human rights being a centre-piece of foreign policy, not simply an after-thought. They would represent a serious expansion of the currently woefully under-staffed human rights and governance unit at the FCO.

While kindly agreeing with me on a number of FCO reform ideas, he disagrees over FCO bloggers:

I disagree, however, with Crawford’s suggestion that ambassadorial blogging should end. I believe in this day and age, such blogging – especially on democracy and human rights – is a very valuable source of information to the outside world, and solidarity with courageous dissidents and activists.

Our former ambassador to Burma, Mark Canning, now in Zimbabwe, blogged regularly during key events such as Cyclone Nargis and Aung San Suu Kyi’s trial, and I admire him for it. His successor Andrew Heyn has followed suit.

I also disagree with the idea of freezing all FCO training. I think preparing diplomats for understanding the key human rights issues in countries to which they will be posted is essential, and it needs to be strengthened not cut.

As for blogging, the main reason to end Ambassadorial and other overseas diplomatic blogging is that it arguably tends to reduce that Ambassador's local impact where it matters.

Any host government, obnoxious or otherwise, is bound to start to wonder what the point of this person's posting really is.

Is it to act as a means for hard-nosed reliable confidential communication between the two capitals? Or to make a public noise in favour of some or other pet project? Are all those blog posts meant to signify official UK government thinking, or not? What's going on here? Ignore him. It's not serious.

My point on freezing training was merely to identify in a ruthless way which training makes operational sense, and to dump junk training which does not.

What in fact is likely to make a difference in training young diplomats in being effective on human rights issues and so helping a feisty new ConLib government make a sustained difference in hard places?

Lectures from the human rights establishment on UN best practice and international conventions?

Tips from MI6 on how best to help hard-pressed local human rights campaigners without being too obvious to oppressive local authorities?

Lessons in good drafting technique aimed at helping get principles and detail reported back to London in an impactful way?

A case-study on the contrasting approaches taken by FCO legends Craig Murray, Charles Crawford and Philip Barclay in dealing with oppressive regimes as on-the-ground diplomats - what worked and what didn't?

Not easy to give a simple answer.

But whatever the Policy, it all comes down to Resources - and Technique.

Craig Murray rumbles in Tashkent:

There is much consternation at the apparent decline of Gulnara Karimova's multi-billion dollar company, Zeromax - which owns Uzbekistan's most valuable economic assets ... Gulnara is of course the daughter and favoured successor of dictator "President" Islam Karimov.

And we all recall what an appalling piece of work Gulnara is:

... charming and girlish ... in a simple dress and laughing eyes ... giggling at my light conversation...

The other day I bumped into a long-lost colleague from MI6. We exchanged some Balkan yarns.

He had done superb work for HMG and Western civilisation by taking a deep breath and diving deep into the darkest Balkan cesspools, where war crime suspects meet football club gangsters and cigarette smugglers in tawdry late-night casinos. To such an extent that his accurate intelligence information thereby gleaned was not trusted back at HQ - to HMG's detriment.

The point about diplomacy is that in one way or the other we need to deal with the world as we find it, Gulnara and Karadzic and Karimov and North Korea and all.

Where I part company with Craig is that he boasted about his access to the higher parts of the Uzbekistan system but instead of using that access to make a systematic and significant difference, he turned all his fire and energy on his own team.

And got precisely nowhere in terms of changing Uzbekistan for the better.

Poor technique.

Craig Murray came out for the Lib Dems and so finds himself in the novel position of supporting a Conservative-led coalition:

I can say that I can broadly support this government and am convinced that it will be an improvement on the bunch of authoritarian war criminals who have been replaced.

You nailed that one, Craig. Welcome back on board, even if your army of fans seem somewhat divided on your good sense.

Another former FCO colleague turned diehard Labour blogger (and Long Sentence Champion of the Universe), Brian Barder, is less happy:

Mr Cameron can’t realistically expect a sober and constructive opposition if he constantly accuses Labour of responsibility for the financial mess we’re in, and misrepresents Labour’s 13 years in office as an uninterrupted chronicle of mismanagement and failure — as the irredeemably, jejunely tribal William Hague, our new foreign secretary, was doing without a shadow of embarrassment on the radio this morning.

We old dips have a phrase for it, Brian. It's called kick 'em when they are down - and richly deserve it.

Plus both you and Craig have long called for war crimes charges against key Labour leaders - whatever nano-sized successes they achieved in all those years surely pale into insignificance against that?

Guido shows himself to be a true man of principle. Having called lustily for the ConDem outcome, he is not wasting time pointing to some, hem, unsatisfactory aspects of new Ministerial postings.

So far so good for my old friend from the legendary St John's College conservative machine, Alistair Burt, who joins the FCO as a junior Minister.

Craig is at it again:

New Labour's Complicity in Torture - Truly Evil

I have now obtained under the Freedom of Information Act a heavily censored copy of one of my telegrams from Tashkent protesting at the use by the UK government of intelligence obtained under torture.

Every British person should read this telegram and hang their head in the deepest of shame. This is the pitch blackness of New Labour's embrace of authoritarianism. Read it, and remember I was both smeared and sacked for this attempt to apply simply the most basic of humane standards.

Sounds scary enough. What is this document?

It's a 'telegram' (ie a senior electronic FCO communication) from Craig as HM Ambassador in Tashkent to the FCO dated 22 January 2003. Some passages have been redacted - Craig tells us what they contained, as he remembers.

It concludes in the usual form of FCO telegrams, with the Ambassador's name, a spaceline and then the distribution list. Here it was sent only to William Ehrman, as FCO Director General for Defence and Intelligence

MURRAY
YYYY
Single Copies
DG DEFINT 1

Craig makes a silly if not dishonest noise about this limited distribution:

The final codes are significant. it means that this was considered so hot that only a single copy was made in the FCO - very unusual indeed - and given to the Director General Defence and Intelligence.

Drivel.

They are not significant in the slightest.

Why? Because Craig himself addressed this telegram only to William Ehrman, not to the FCO as a whole! So by sending it only to William the Communications Centre were doing precisely what Craig asked them to do!

Plus he gave the piece only a ROUTINE level of urgency, ie the lowest available for a telegram.

The core (and good) question Craig raised in this telegram was this:

I am worried about the legal position. I am not sure that a wilful blindness to how material is obtained would be found a valid defence in law to the accusation of having received material obtained under torture. My understanding is that receiving such material would be both a crime in UK domestic law and contrary to international law. Is this true? I would like a direct answer on this.

And in due course he received a full answer from Sir Michael Wood, the FCO Legal Adviser. Which was that Craig's understanding was wrong. A point of view subsequently upheld by the House of Lords in a landmark judgement Craig's own book praises!

Come on Craig. Be a man. More, be an honest Lib Dem. Accept that you were wrong.

In short, nothing new here folks. Move along.

But in moving along take care not to vote for New Labour tomorrow. They were and are indeed a disgrace, even if Craig's wild swirling fists often miss the right target and instead punch himself on the hooter.

It all reminds me of those timeless lines from Jeeves and the Yule-Tide Spirit:

'Jeeves,' I said, 'you're talking rot.'

'Very good, sir.'

'Absolute drivel.'

'Very good, sir.'

'Pure mashed potatoes.'

'Very good, sir.'

'Very good, sir—I mean, very good, Jeeves, that will be all,' I said.

And I drank a modicum of tea, with a good deal of hauteur.

Over at Craig Murray's place I posted a modest little comment on his piece about Eugene Terreblanche:

Craig,

As you know, I was posted at the British Embassy in South Africa as apartheid ended. I attended a rally of Terreblanche's AWB movement once.

The worrying thing about Terreblanche's murder is that it seems to echo an insidious 'Kill the Boer' Africanist nationalist ethnic cleansing of the sort Mugabe has led in Zimbabwe, an achievement of sorts for African Pay-Back Time but at a cost which will leave most Zimbabweans unnecessarily impoverished for decades more to come.

If that is the sort of fate which faces South Africa too down the road as the generation of township youngsters schooled in ANC/Communist 1980s ultra-violence work their way up the country's demographic pyramid, prospects for the southern part of the continent are bleak indeed.

And lo!, Craig graciously replies:

Charles,

And an excellent job you did too, much though I hate to admit it!!!!

Posted by: Craig at April 5, 2010 7:35 PM

So far so unexceptionable.

Then along comes Roger Irrelevant, thinly disguised as a certain anno:

Charles Crawford

English aristocrats also did a good job of negotiating with Hitler not to invade the UK. Well done, Sir. When you pass GO, please don't forget to pick up £200.00.

Posted by: anno at April 5, 2010 9:08 PM

Maybe one day by pure chance I'll be walking down the street and someone seemingly normal brushes past.

It is anno.

But alas I'll never know.

While I was HM Ambassador in Poland I was accused of improper lobbying of Parliament.

(Slavist linguistics note: Polish has lifted the English word lobbying and incorporated it into Polish in a strange form - lobbing)

I forget now exactly what the issue was about. Maybe a complicated dispute between the then Polish government and a number of large international pharmaceutical companies over where exactly tax should be paid and how it should be calculated.

In my Ambassadorial zeal to be friendly and helpful, I wrote a letter to the then Speaker of the Polish Parliament describing the position in the UK. I copied the letter to various other prominent people with an interest.

In other words, whatever the merits or not of my letter there was 100% no attempt at concealment or behind-the-scenes manoeuvring.

Which of course did not stop some fatuous MP from lodging an official protest that I had been improperly lobbing to help a UK company.

So, what's wrong with lobbying?

On the face of it, not much.

Democracy is all about rival interests and points of view jostling for position. The closer they get to a decision or a decision-maker, the more intense the jostling comes.

Take our Embassies round the world. The US Embassy in Washington's main task is to lobby fast and furiously to head off US decisions which might harm UK interests. Ditto our Embassies in the EU are meant to press local governments to agree with UK views.

Where it goes wrong is when private interests attempt to influence decisions in murky, untransparent or even corrupt ways.

Where to draw the line?

Not easy. Ministers and senior officials need to get out and about and listen to different ideas. What's wrong with someone at a dinner party having 'a quiet word in the ear' of a Minister to argue for or against a specific policy line? Even if there is thought to be something wrong, it's impossible to stop or control it.

That said, the most odious aspect of the Byers scandal here in the UK (a former Labour Minister secretly filmed boasting about how with the right money he can get access to top Labour people to help press for specific outcomes) is not that he wanted to get paid for giving access.

See what I have written at Business and Politics:

The key issue here is not in fact the banal greed of the would-be lobbyists, horrible and squalid though that is.

Rather it is the fact that they expected to be successful. Which means that certain senior Ministers and/or officials currently in power were likely to be open – arguably improperly – to their furtive blandishments.

So a lot of the noise about transparency for lobbyists misses the point. It’s transparency for Ministerial and Departmental decisions which really counts. If lobbyists and their clients see that their lobbying gets few worthwhile results, they’ll do less of it.

It does not take much to see that if a lobbyist is paid a lot of money to influence a policy outcome, a Minister might do what is needed in return for a generous quiet cut.

That's how a lot of business is done round the world.

So I do not understand why the Guardian thinks that the answer is ... more regulation, this time of lobbying firms.

That will make no real difference to the way Ministers and Departments are accessed. If anything it will make the value of quiet encounters with Ministers away from the limelight even more prized - and expensive.

Nor is there much to be done about senior people cashing in after they leave office.

The fact is that the more senior an official or Minister, the less inclined s/he will be to take any notice of any rules. The rules about avoiding conflicts of interest after one leaves an official job for the private sector can be brought to bear only upon relatively junior people (such as me). See this magnificent shameless example.

In the end it all comes down to fiercely defending values - championing a sense of what is proper and honourable. Values of outcome, as well as values of process as an end in themselves.

For me, the main reason to vote against this wretched Labour government is that in so many areas they have dumbed down the very idea of honour and accountability for selfish, banal, trashy reasons.

Labour took Clintonism and turned it into something even worse: It's not what's right. It's what you can get away with.

Even born-again LibDem Craig Murray agrees with me (albeit in a somewhat confused way):

I cannot for the life of me conceive how anybody in their right mind, other than their corporate backers, can even consider voting New Labour, let alone the working people whose hopes they have betrayed.

Putting this right will be very difficult.

Always a pleasure to post a comment on Craig Murray’s site. His readers are so smart and droll in reply, giving excellent material for my rotating What The Critics Say box:

Having visited your blog i must say it doesnt surprise me. Your self-aggrandising careerist pomposity is quite breathtaking

I suspect Charles Crawford is arguing for an increase in pension or knighthood or both

You are a disgraceful, immoral, racial supremacist. Your kind have destroyed the pride of the United Kingdom after Nazism was defeated by our mothers and fathers and grandmothers and grandfathers. You and your peers are incapable of any strategy except lying. You have shredded the international justice embedded in the Geneva Convention. If you had the slightest understanding of the implications of your snotty drivel, you would be looking for a new identity in South America like your Nazi predecessors

Charles Crawford...the shallow, self-interested man's coward and toady

In a posting about whether the British Government were ‘aware’ that the CIA was getting intelligence from torture, Craig linked to three FCO documents and said this:

The government knew the CIA was sending us intelligence from torture from at least November 2002, when I sent a diplomatic telegram to Jack Straw and others - including MI5 - informing them so. I repeated it in February 2003, and was called back to a meeting on March 7 2003 where I was told that, as a matter of policy in the War on Terror, we were using intelligence from torture. Sir Michael Wood said at the meeting that in his opinion this policy was not contrary to international law.

My Comment on this posting:

You keep serving up these documents as if they prove your case. Read them. They don't.

Where in those records or otherwise are the statements supporting your claim that "...I was told that, as a matter of policy in the War on Terror, we were using intelligence from torture. Sir Michael Wood said at the meeting that in his opinion this policy was not contrary to international law"?

I can't see them. Can anyone else?

And (to repeat) when the specific issue you raised (namely that HMG's possession of material known or suspected to have come from torture ipso facto amounted to 'complicity' in torture under the Convention) went to the House of Lords, the Law Lords flatly rejected your view.

Craig himself takes up two points made by a sensible commenter:

I am not sure whether you are arguing:

1) HMG was not knowingly receiving any information obtained from torture, and these documents report a completely hypothetical discussion as whether it would be legal; or

2) HMG was knowingly receiving information obtained under torture, and it is not illegal under international law to do so.

Craig fairly asks me: 

What do you think those documents do show? Presumably they do have some point, or the various authors would not have created them. What do you think it was that Jack Straw was agreeing with?

Let’s look at the documents as linked to by Craig. They are well worth a look at top-end formal FCO work in action.

They report a record by senior FCO official Linda Duffield of her conversation with Craig (joined by top FCO Legal Adviser, Michael Wood) which looked at one specific point he had raised, namely “that it was also an offence under the Torture Convention to receive or possess information obtained under torture”.

Michael said at the meeting that he did not think that that was the case under international law. His subsequent minute formally confirmed that view.

The minute from Jack Straw’s office compliments Linda Duffield on how she handled her meeting with the turbulent Craig (and by implication endorses the policy line she and Michael Wood put forward, which of course was later upheld by the House of Lords). It says nothing whatever which might be held against the Foreign Secretary.

So, I win an easy technical knockout. Craig was not ‘told’ on that occasion or otherwise that ‘as a matter of policy’ we were using intelligence from torture.

That does not settle the substance of Craig’s wider point. That we were receiving material probably drawn from torture. And that these documents somehow ‘show’ a cynical if not unlawful approach by the government and endorsed by Jack Straw personally.

Where Craig seems to me to go wrong is that he over-stretches the concept of ‘complicity’ to suit his argument. Craig determinedly supports those jurists such as Professor Sands who argue that merely using or receiving material known or suspected to have been obtained under torture in itself amounts to complicity in that torture.

An eloquent argument in favour of a strong point is not enough. Courts (and politicians, and the public) look also at eloquent arguments in the other direction, particularly in highly complex public policy areas where the role of the Executive to protect the public comes into play. This explains the sense of the House of Lords landmark decision:

• That it may be acceptable for the state's executive authorities to receive/acquire and use information which they know or think may have been derived from torture, if they believe that there is a clear public interest in doing so (eg saving lives) 
• But it is not acceptable for the judicial authorities (courts and tribunals) to hear and use such evidence in reaching conclusions directly affecting the rights of individuals

So, to answer precisely (if long-windedly) the reasonable questions put by one of Craig’s readers:

I think it is fair to say that the British Government were receiving intelligence reports (via the CIA and maybe otherwise) some of which they reasonably could believe were based on information extracted from prisoners through abusive treatment which might well be deemed in a UK court to amount to torture. (Craig himself convincingly pressed the case that any report served up by the Uzbek intelligence agencies had to be suspect on this score.)

That is not in itself illegal under international law. ‘Complicity’ on the part of HMG requires a very close and direct link to the abusive treatment, which in the case of eg Uzbek intelligence was just not there.

Even if receiving such information is not illegal, is it ipso facto always immoral or wrong?

Craig I suspect says a loud Yes.

I won’t do that. I can not conclude that it would be right for Ministers to ignore an intelligence report which might cast light on a terrorist plot to murder British or other citizens - and perhaps allow us to prevent that or some other atrocity happening. I think that in this darkest of moral corners it is just not possible to give clear-cut winner-takes-all answers.

And I have Professor Sands on my side, to this extent (his comment to a Parliamentary Committee on Michael Wood’s minute):

What I say in my written evidence is that insofar as the letter seeks to address a very narrow question it is not formally inaccurate but it misses the bigger point which was addressed in the previous witness’s contribution, namely in what circumstances might the receipt of information obtained through torture constitute complicity within the meaning of article 4 of the convention

Exactly.

In some circumstances the mere receipt of information might (sic) amount to be complicity. In others it would not. In the middle are many grey areas.

And if thinking that makes me a self-aggrandising, careerist, disgraceful, immoral, racial supremacist, shallow, self-interested coward and toady – so be it.

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.

Anguished as he is by his belated discovery that FCO Legal Adviser Michael Wood had not 'stabbed him in the back' as per the foolish description in his book, Craig Murray slumps back into despair:

I felt that Michael had stabbed me in the back by refusing to back me in saying unequivocally that intelligence from torture was illegal.

I did not know that, exactly at that time, he was engaged in a heroic struggle to try to stop the war in Iraq on legal grounds, and that he had drawn the full fury of Blair and Straw. He could not afford to open a second front on extraordinary rendition.

I have been struggling ever since to come to terms with what I saw as his going along with torture. I misjudged him...

I am feeling so sad because different ways of trying to resist took us down different paths, and perhaps I am sad because I was harsher on some than they deserved.

Craig of course misjudged practically everyone else in the FCO too as he flailed against them in his book, but it may take him a while yet to grasp that his definition of honourable behaviour is not the only one out there.

Just to add that in his comment posted on my piece as linked above, Craig once again carefully avoids answering the question (my emphasis):

I don't understand the view that I am "misrepresenting" Michael when I have repeatedly published his letter in full and I recently published, as soon as the FCO released them, the minutes of the meeting at which he gave the advice.

HIs advice and what precisely it meant was discussed by me and by Prof Phillippe Sands before the Parliamentary Joint Committee on Human Rights in very careful and measured terms.

I was and remain disappointed that Michael did not give me more support on the torture issue. I now know, which I did not at the time, that at that precise time (March 7 to 14 2003) Michael was under incredible pressure over his attempts to prevent an illegal war. He couldn't open a second front on extraordinary rendition.

To which one says, piffle.

Since the whole point of Craig's fight with the FCO at that point, namely March 2003, was nothing to do with extraordinary rendition. Rather it was all about the way he had been publicly attacking the Uzbek regime over its human rights abuses. The extraordinary rendition issue appears in his book only much later, namely p 362.

The core of Craig's case as put by him to the FCO at that point (and described in his book) was that the Uzbek regime was breaking international law and that HMG were breaking international law by using intelligence information from Uzbekistan which they had good reason to think had been extracted under torture.

This was the argument he put in a Top Secret telegram sent in late 2002 (Murder in Samarkand, p 138), namely that by 'obtaining' this intelligence on a regular basis HMG were 'undoubtedly' in breach of Article 4 of the UN Convention on Torture which banned 'complicity' in torture.

And this was the issue which was tackled head-on in Craig's disastrous (for him) meeting at the FCO with Michael Wood. Michael said that he did not agree with Craig: possessing or indeed using information obtained under torture did not amount to complicity under the Convention. However, Article 15 did rule out the use of such material in any legal proceedings ("except against a person accused of torture as evidence that the statement was made").

Craig in MiS records his dismay. Shock! Michael was not agreeing with some of his human rights lawyer friends!

Michael then wrote a minute to confirm the position in writing. This is the famous document so often cited by Craig on his site as evidence for HMG's evil-doing.

And, as previously noted, Michael is a good enough lawyer to have judged this point accurately. The House of Lords later upheld his view in a landmark judgement. The fact that Philippe Sands QC and Craig happen to think that the law in this area ought to be something else does not mean anything that matters.

All of this is absurdly described in MiS thus: "Torture by proxy for intelligence purposes was legal".

Simply. Not. True.

Craig now breezily brushes aside as 'casuistry' anything which spells out his obvious errors and inconsistencies, and keeps trying to cash in on his erstwhile junior Ambassador status to boost his claim to know what was 'really' going on.

Maybe his trivial failure not to let the truth stand in the way of a loud argument was one reason why he crashed from the FCO - and won no sympathy at all from senior colleagues who shared many of his reservations about the policy but maintained professional discipline.

Craig Murray's vanity knows no bounds. His 'story' is soon to be dramatised on the BBC! If I can bear to listen I'll do so and give you a full and fair review.

Meanwhile he launches another misguided missile at the role of the government's Law Officers.

He appears to understand nothing about how it all works in practice, a surprising failing in someone self-proclaimed to have had a 'brilliant career'.

What I strongly object to is his renewed propagandistic traducing in that posting of Michael Wood, former FCO Legal Adviser.

Here is what I have posted on Craig's site (note: correcting three typos which I overlooked when posting the comment - my bad):

Craig,

You write:

"Sir Michael Wood has perhaps been best known to a wider public as the man that the FCO wheeled in to tell me that it was perfectly legal to obtain intelligence from torture, as long as somebody else did the torture."

It may indeed be the case that Michael has become known to 'a wider public' through your book. What is more than unfortunate is that in the book and here on this website you shamelessly and repeatedly misrepresent what he actually said to you.

In MiS (pp 160-164 in my copy) you described the events leading up to your meeting with Michael and Linda Duffield. You argued the case to them that, based on your research, it was illegal under the Convention to use or even possess material based on torture.

Michael told you that this was not the legal position, a view he subsequently put in writing. And, since as you say he is a masterful international lawyer, he was right. His view was later upheld by the House of Lords in a key decision you praise in the book (p. 367).

In the book you characterised what Michael said to you as "So there we had it. Torture by proxy for intelligence purposes was legal". This is a trivial misreading of Michael's minute and position, based on your complete misunderstanding of the law.

Now you repeat this nonsense again in the posting above:

"...it was perfectly legal to obtain intelligence from torture, as long as somebody else did the torture."

You time and again make great play of Michael's minute of 13 March 2003 as if it supports your position. It doesn't. Try reading it.

As for your wider point, you don't understand the way the AG's office works, as Jane18 patiently pointed out. It is reasonable for the government to have a central pool of top legal advice rather than rely solely on the legal advice from one department of state.

Craig is either dimmer than he claims to be or he is being dishonest. It is blindingly obvious that there are a great number of different questions (and answers) concerning the torture issue which he runs together as and when it suits him.

Thus, for example:

• is torture legal under international law?
• is it lawful for one government to act on information supplied by another government and suspected to have been extracted by torture?
• what sort of actions might fairly be described as being 'complicit in torture' committed by others?
• can evidence possibly extracted under torture be used in court? 

It is a great pity that anyone takes Craig seriously when he is unable to write accurately about these subjects.

To be clear. I do not think that the fact that he makes a number of strong policy points with considerable passion is enough.

Craig creates a considerable media noise and no doubt makes some money by claiming to derive validation from the fact that he lived up to the very highest professional ethics of senior civil servants and paid a price for doing so, unlike (he asserts) a large number of his former colleagues.

Fine. We all have to make tough choices, and reasonable people may come down on different sides.

But let's at least agree that those professional ethics are based on unrelenting accuracy and integrity, and an ability to identify (and act on) fine distinctions of logic and meaning.

In this new posting once again Craig falls well short of that simple standard. 

Update:  here is Michael Wood's statement to the Chilcot Inquiry which blows away everything Craig says about relations between the FCO and Attorney General - and describes in meticulous detail Michael's views on the (il)legality of the Iraq intervention. 

Former Ambassador Craig Murray and I do not always agree, although since he has wandered away from the idea of our having a public debate I can not identify where our views really do overlap, or not.

But now and again he nails down a basic policy point with verve and accuracy.

And now, a new UK enquiry into the history of the Iraq intervention.

Craig Murray is rude about the Chilcot enquiry team, including my former boss Rod Lyne. I myself find it hard to understand why an official who had a senior job in selling UK policy during this period has been given a prominent role in scrutinising it now.

But as Anne McElvoy points out (quoting some or other former Ambassador) the best potential evidence may lie in the memories of the private secretaries in Downing Street and the Foreign Office. "They knew everything," he says, "but strangely, they are never called to give an account."

Good point.

Unlike Craig or indeed myself Rod has served as Private Secretary at Number 10 and knows how things work at that level, so he can ask some penetrating questions if he wants to do so.

The Guardian live blog of the enquiry is well done. Have a look at this account of Sir C Meyer's evidence today.

Meyer being smart and studiously provocative adds some context, namely that 'regime change' in Iraq was not something dreamed up by President Bush but rather a clear policy inherited from President Clinton. He also gives a view that Mrs Thatcher would have driven a harder bargain with the Americans as a condition for UK support. Bracing stuff, and true.

Will Chilcot come to call victims of Saddam's torture chambers to testify on the moral case for the intervention? Craig Murray rails against what he says is the wickedness of Western 'complicity' in deal with torture-wielding despots, but never quite seems to offer a credible policy on what actually might be done to get rid of them and end the torture.

There are really only four questions this and any enquiry on the subject needs to answer:

Was the intervention legal?

Could it be justified in principle and practice under international law?

Was the intervention technically doable?

Were the right tools for the job available and how indeed was the job defined? (NB in Iraq's case the follow-up on the ground after the toppling of Saddam appears to be a major failing, as was the ill-judged focus on the WMD arguments at HMG's insistence)

Was the intervention - all things considered - wise?

Even if the intervention was done well and in principle doable, was it likely to bring about positive results? This question is really about timescale, and as Iraq gets into its stride as a free country again things may look more positive on this front. No doubt Tony Blair's main argument for his policy will be here.

Was the intervention in fact done well?

The global and domestic public can tolerate some ambiguity in the legal case and the planning of an intervention, plus may cut politicians some slack on the wisdom/timescale issue. But people are usually unforgiving when they sense that the job has been bungled for one reason or another. As already noted, the lack of detailed planning on how Iraq should be run after Saddam was toppled was a clear mistake emanating from the Bush team, and much of the ensuing controversy - and ghastly violence - stemmed from that.

To be continued...

A lively piece of work by Craig Murray looking at the prospects for Ghana getting rich and ruined by Oil Money.

Knowing nothing about Ghana or indeed about Oil Money, I leave it to you to work out whether his well-turned analysis makes sense. It is certainly interesting enough. 

But this caught my eye:

At the same time, revenue must urgently be directed to rural infrastructure, to increasing farm prices and developing agro-processing industry, on a scale not previously attempted. Ghana already has a major problem keeping young people in farming. Think how much this will worsen when oil starts to flow.

Why should young people stay on farms now that the country is going to get rich? Ghana as the anti-Nigeria, ie a new hi-tech Singapore-style place rather than a typical agriculture exporting African country?

Is not the point of acquiring such largesse that it gives a country the chance to look at quite different options, not merely ways to impose top-down solutions based on old ideas?

The latest developments on the Torture issue - the speech by MI5 chief Jonathan Evans and then the High Court decision in favour of release of secret US material concerning Binyam Mohamed - are (in their different ways) further important steps towards clarifying how if at all we deal with the problems arising from 'tainted' foreign material.

Anticant delivers a fierce analogy:

This egregious performance reminds me of Pooh-Bah in Gilbert and Sullivan’s ‘Mikado’ who regales his sadistic sovereign’s ear with graphic descriptions of torture and execution and then, when it transpires that the hapless alleged victim was the Mikado’s son, pleads that he in fact wasn’t there, and had merely sought to add “a touch of artistic verisimilitude to an otherwise bald and unconvincing narrative” . 

If torture is OK, let’s say so forthrightly and use it ourselves unblushingly. If it’s not, let’s do everything we can to stop it, whoever is doing it. What we shouldn’t be doing is to make humbugging prevarications along the lines of “We only practice the highest standards of food hygiene, but if some of our foreign suppliers send us tainted meat we have no option but to feed it to our customers”.

Craig Murray celebrates his birthday:

If you read the Guardian report of the High Court judgement, in any other age a Minister caught behaving as appallingly as Milliband has, would have resigned. I would love to be locked in a room with the little twerp for a couple of hours to teach him about the reliability of intelligence from torture. I would have him confessing to menbership of Al-Qaida before I severed his second testicle...

Which is of course the major point. Binyam Mohammed is an innocent man whom we gave over to torture for no reason. The thousands tortured in Uzbekistan into confessing to Al-Qaida links were almost all innocent. That is just one problem with the "Torture Works" argument put forward by Britain's highest paid thug Jonathan Evans.

'Innocent' is an interesting word to use to describe Binyam Mohamed. According to Craig 'almost all' the thousands tortured in Uzbekistan were innocent. How does he sift out the guilty ones?

Here is what the Americans thought Mr Mohamed was up to:

According to the U.S. government's allegations, Osama bin Laden visited the al Farouq camp "several times" after Mohamed arrived there in the summer of 2001. The terror master "lectured Binyam Mohamed and other trainees about the importance of conducting operations against the United States." Bin Laden explained that "something big is going to happen in the future" and the new recruits should get ready for an impending event.

From al Farouq, Mohamed allegedly received additional training at a "city warfare course" in Kabul and then moved to the front lines in Bagram "to experience fighting between the Taliban and the Northern Alliance." He then returned to Kabul, where the government claims he attended an explosives training camp alongside Richard Reid, the infamous shoe bomber.

Mohamed was then reportedly introduced to top al Qaeda operative Abu Zubaydah. By early 2002, the two were traveling between al Qaeda safehouses. The U.S. government alleges that Mohamed then met Jose Padilla and two other plotters, both of whom are currently detained at Guantánamo, at a madrassa. Zubaydah and another top al Qaeda lieutenant, Abdul Hadi al Iraqi, allegedly directed the four of them "to receive training on building remote-controlled detonation devices for explosives."

At some point, Padilla and Mohamed traveled to a guesthouse in Lahore, Pakistan, where they "reviewed instructions on a computer ... on how to make an improvised 'dirty bomb.'" To the extent that the allegations against Mohamed have gotten any real press, it is this one that has garnered the attention. Media accounts have often highlighted the fact that Padilla and Mohamed were once thought to be plotting a "dirty bomb" attack, but that the allegation was dropped, making it seem as if they were not really planning a strike on American soil.

Indeed, all of the charges against Mohamed were dropped last year at Guantánamo. But this does not mean that he is innocent...

Innocence in this context might mean different things, such as:

• that the suspect in fact had nothing whatever to do with the terrorist conspiracies concerned but had been wrongly charged
• that he was known to have been part of a conspiracy, but for some or other reason the case could not go to court successfully
• that he was known to have been part of a conspiracy, but had been cleared by a court

Anyway, my point is rather this.

That on the one hand we are urged by progressive-thinking people to believe that the UN Human Rights Council vote against Israel this week somehow represents a serious moral position adopted by a majority of honourable countries.

And that on the other hand, if HMG were to accept secret intelligence material from almost any of the countries in the majority, and perhaps any member of the Council, the same progressive-minded people would howl with indignation that we were taking evidence probably tainted by torture in the countries concerned.

Look at the list of countries which voted for that Resolution:

Argentina, Bahrain, Bangladesh, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, China, Cuba, Djibouti, Egypt, Ghana, India, Indonesia, Jordan, Mauritius, Nicaragua, Nigeria, Pakistan, Philippines, Qatar, Russian Federation, Saudi Arabia, Senegal, South Africa, Zambia

From which of those states would secret intelligence drawn from local interrogation of terrorist suspects not be suspected of being extracted by torture or serious brutality (insofar as there is a difference) or otherwise illegitimate 'pressure'? 

Look at the other countries who abstained or opposed or found it All Too Difficult:

Opposing:  Hungary, Italy, Netherlands, Slovakia, Ukraine, United States of America

Abstaining:  Belgium, Bosnia Herzegovina, Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Gabon, Japan, Mexico, Norway, Republic of Korea, Slovakia, Uruguay

All Too Difficult:  France (plus UK)

Same question.

So, problem.

Do we close down all secret intelliegnce cooperation in the one area where we all really need it?

And if we do decide to take some risks in that sense by continuing cooperation, how to organise our procedures so that the secret sharing arrangements are not blown open by the oh-so-principled UK courts, risking the flow of inward material drying up and so putting UK lives at stake?

On this one, David Miliband made a clear and strong statement.

That it might be unpopular does not make it wrong.

This time a curious and very unastonishing piece in the Spectator by Martin Bright, which uses as some vital evidence Craig Murray's long-lost fleeting relationship with Kaminski in the mid-1990s.

I have posted a comment suggesting that media bunnies might like to ask David Miliband three questions:

• did No 10 host Mr Kaminski for lunch with a passing Polish leader following the Law and Justice election win in 2005? My own memory says yes, but I might be wrong! So let's check, please
• did No 10 and the FCO urge the Embassy in Warsaw to get alongside key PiS people such as Mr Kaminski to help secure the EU Budget deal in late 2005?
• did No 10 and the FCO congratulate themselves on a fine outcome for the UK at the 2007 Lisbon Treaty talks, achieved in good part because PM Tony Blair worked so closely with President Lech Kaczynski?

What is wrong with Labour? Is this the best they can do?

Burble on about close links between the Conservatives and PiS when they themselves have worked hard to get key PiS people onside to help achieve UK Objectives?

Not so much beyond contempt as beyond bizarre.

Craig Murray has a good posting on the important interview between Iain Dale and Michal Kaminski. It just shows where things now stand when a mere Blogger does what no so-called serious MSM journalist has done, and talks to the person at the centre of a controversy to hear what he might have to say.

Craig uses this interview to give some pertinent thoughts on Polish anti-semitism and other 'racist' phenomena in Poland, drawing on his own time in Poland in the 1990s:

... I should add that a young black British businessmen reported to me that being spat at was an almost daily occurence.

The strange thing is that I adore Poland, and Poles, and Polish culture. I was ever so happy in my time there. There are reasons for the development of this deep-seated racist strain which are historic. There is a limit to how far you can blame individuals for adopting attitudes which are widespread in their culture; and without understanding you cannot change attitudes. Which brings me back to Kaminski. Much as he tries to hide his past, for the present I do not think we should rule out that he really has changed his views, after being exposed to wider cultural influences (like Iain Dale!)

...

A key part of Poland coming to terms with its anti-semitism will be an acknowledgement of what Polish people did to Jews in or just after World War II. Iain Dale's questioning about the Jedwabne massacre is actually important. This was one of a number of massacres of Jews by Poles, but there were also hundreds of individual murders of Jewish survivors who inconveniently resurfaced, and perhaps tried to reclaim their property.

Poland must come to terms with all of its history, not just the heroic bits. Poland suffered terribly for three hundred years of near continuous foreign occupation. It was moved about physically on the map, sometimes disappearing, and emerged an artificially placed and artificially ethnically homogenous nation. Of course it was screwed up and nationalistic. Of course Kamnski is screwed up and nationalistic. Poland is slowly getting better. Who knows? Maybe Michal is too.

Not quite how I would have put it, but it's a free country.

Some wider thoughts.

'Anti-semitism' comes in all sorts of shapes and sizes, so when we talk about so-called 'Polish anti-semitism' we need to be a bit more precise.

At one extreme of the anti-semitism spectrum there is one of my favourites, Japanese Anti-Semitism, which has nothing to do with any actual Jewish people as far as one can tell but rather spirals off into surreally kinky Asian occult fantasising.

The Polish case is quite different. For centuries as Poland's borders ebbed and flowed in central Europe large communities of Jews lived in Polish villages, towns and cities, often flourishing and achieving reknown. As and when surges of anti-Jewish feeling erupted elsewhere in Europe, Jews headed for Poland or Polish-dominated places.

For example, Jews were not even allowed to live in Moscow until about 1800. Their numbers grew there until some 30,000 Jews were expelled in 1892; they headed for Lodz and Warsaw.

A further disaster happened in 1914/15 when Germany attacked Russian territory and the Russians expelled up to  500,000 supposedly disloyal Jews at virtually no notice, 100,000 people dying in the process.

To cut a long and complex story short, the reality of anti-semitism in Poland does not spring from mystic nutty theories of Jewish conspiracy/supremacy, although that strain is now there (see below). It rather comes from a combination of centuries-long Catholic anti-Jewish teaching (the Jews being deemed responsible for the crucifixion of Christ) and what might be called 'normal' ethnic rivalry/tension of the sort seen today in plenty of other places, where different language/cultural communities are jostling for position precisely because they are so close and mutually entangled (see eg Bosnia).

Which explains why, yes, Poland between the Wars did take up its share of the sort of Nazi-backed pseudo-scientific anti-Jewish propaganda and legalised oppression which by then had a thriving tradition elsewhere in Europe, but also why Poland conspicuously did not rise up against its Jewish population when the Nazis invaded. The Nazis built several big death-camps in Poland once they embarked on the Final Solution because that's where so many Jews were (plus eg Auschwitz was a handy railway junction for trains from elsewhere in Europe).

So now (as Craig rightly says) there are different legacy issues in Poland.

Plenty of Jewish cultural activities go on. A huge new museum for the history of Polish Jews is being built in Warsaw. Many Poles are discovering unexpected Jewish roots in their own families. All serious political leaders emphasise their good relations with the Jewish community. Above all, John Paul II made a massive effort to lead the Catholic Church towards reconciliation with the Jewish faith, and that is percolating its way through the Church in Poland too.

On the other hand, there is a lumpen low-level anti-semitism around on a scale which is depressing. Newspaper kiosks in Warsaw carry weird little pamphlets about Jewish conspiracies, stickers against Jews appear inside buses, football fan graffiti attacks other clubs for their Jewish affinities, and so on.

As for wider racism, Poland looks to visitors from the UK like a stunningly 'white' place. Dark-skinned people are few and far between.

Is Poland an especially racist place? Not obviously. Once (prompted by an alarming report from our Embassy in Budapest describing how dark-skinned colleagues in Hungary were being jostled on public transport and constantly receiving racist slurs) I asked one Embassy colleague with Asian DNA if she had had problems in Warsaw. "Apart from some funny looks now and then, no."

So, praise the Lord, on this one I am basically with Craig Murray.

Racist/ethnic/religious/cultural and other aggressive forms of Fear of The Other have been a feature of life round the planet for much of human history, if not all of it. We are all working our way through it, some with more integrity and open-mindedness than others. 

Poland was the default refuge of choice in Europe for Jews for hundreds of years. Its huge and successful Jewish community was obliterated by the fathers and grandfathers of the Germans sitting primly in EU meetings now. It also saw a huge number of Poles being executed by the Nazis for trying to protect Jews from persecution.

In short, Poland is the last country on earth which needs to be lectured on the subject of anti-semitism.

And the noises in the UK from senior parts of the Labour Party spin-machine to try to smear the Conservative Party for their links with supposedly 'anti-semitic Poles' are beyond contempt.