Blogoir: November

The Mumbai massacres tell us a lot about the way power works (and doesn't) these days.

This is not a classic terrorist atrocity, but rather a fairly sophisticated military attack:

The Mumbai attack is something different. Foreign assault teams that likely trained and originated from outside the country infiltrated a major city to conduct multiple attacks on carefully chosen targets.

The primary weapon was the gunman, not the suicide bomber. The attack itself has paralyzed a city of 18 million. And two days after the attack began, Indian forces are still working to root out the terror teams.

As it happened, I was on the train into London on 7 July 2005 when several bombs went off in the city centre. It quickly became clear what had taken place.

Yet as the scale of the carnage emerged, I wondered what would have happened if instead of planting these bombs for a single day's one-off mayhem, the suicide terrorists had detonated bombs on successive days or weeks. The 'terror' effect and associated chaos and disruption would have been all the greater.

Or what if a small group of terrorists armed with kalashnikovs had started to shoot up the West End, in a sort of mobile Mumbai episode?

Many more people would have been killed. And it would have taken a huge use of force on military scales to corner them and finish them off. They might even have escaped, had their area of operation been big enough to make creating a cordon impossible as tens of thousands of people fled for safety.

My general idea is this.

Back in, say, 1200 there was not that great a difference between the power available to the leaders and the power available to the masses. More or less everyone fought with bits of sharpened metal. Some had horses, most not.

Not surprisingly it was not easy for big political spaces to emerge, as they could not be controlled for any length of time.

Instead there were many smaller units: kingdoms, duchys, principalities and city-states where a strong ruler could control a reasonable space and in ever-shifting personal alliances with some others hope to be part of a bigger power. Leaders had to depend to a great extent on their subjects' and other rivals' loyalty.

Where that loyalty faltered, the best hope to keep control deter people from trying to overthrow the leader was to do something slow and strikingly painful to anyone who tried and failed. See that accordinging to Wikipedia it took until 1878 for the US Supreme Court to observe that drawing and quartering, public dissecting, burning alive and disemboweling would constitute cruel and unusual punishment.

In the meantime we had seen centuries of increasingly 'heavy' weaponry. The idea of the 'state' emerged. And states achieved a pretty efficient grip on the quantity and impact of weapons in private hands. Machine guns, tanks, aircraft were all expensive to make and made in a small number of controllable factories.

Now we maybe are seeing a move back to a long-lost paradigm. The balance of power as between rulers and ruled is shifting in unpredictable ways.

It is fairly cheap and easy for villains and honest citizens alike to acquire impressively strong weapons, and/or to use hi-tech methods of command and mobilisation.

Highly networked citizens can do remarkable things, for better or worse.

Hence overweight, cumbersome state bodies stagger around faced with a grim choice.

Try to keep 'control' by ever-more oppressive methods and so risk losing voters' confidence - and core loyalty?

Or opt for devolving power back to citizens and risk looking unambitious, clueless and weak - thereby losing core loyalty?

Mumbai. A big step back to a world of dis-integration?

Remember this one about South Africa's peaceful transition from apartheid?

Try to imagine the howling of fury had apartheid leader PW Botha denied the African population of S Africa the drugs needed to give sick people a chance to fight HIV - and 300,000 people had died as a result.

You're right.

One can not imagine it.

Genocide indictment maybe?

See by contrast the mumblings of embarrassment when T Mbeki does just that.

And he is still hovering around claiming to be a credible mediator for Zimbabwe, where the health system is collapsing as the Mugabe clique crash the country into the ground.

Forner President Carter says that the plight of Zimbabwe is 'worse than we could have imagined'. True no doubt. But that says more about the impoverishment of his knowledge and imagination than it does about the enforced impoverishment of Zimbabwe.

Back in the mid-1980s when the AIDS drama had not yet soared up the policy agenda, our High Commissioner in Zambia wrote a famous Despatch back to London about the likely devastating impact of AIDS on that part of Africa.

It was probably one of the most influential FCO reports ever written, in lurching policy thinking in a quite new direction.

Despite this prescient warning well before the ANC came to power in S Africa, we alas are now reduced to modest gestures after incalculable damage has been done.

By the leading architect of that famously 'peaceful transition'. 

Foreign readers: see the latest outlandish development here in the UK.

A highly-placed civil servant is suspected of leaking government material to a senior Oppostion MP.

So the police descend on the MP's house and arrest him, while also arresting the leaker.

This development - arresting a politician for receiving allegedly 'leaked' information - is something quite new here. Hence an angry reaction, focusing on both the unfathomable stupid stupidity of the police move and the even more unfathomable hypocrisy of the whole business:

New rules on research and development. Looser consumer protection measures for utility consumers. Consideration of the future of the Rosyth dockyards. Cabinet arguments on the use of European regional funds. A review of ways to cut housing benefit. A plan to reform invalidity benefit. A possible reform of family policy. The potential for reductions in sick pay and pensions.

Each of these was the subject of one of the many Conservative Government documents that were leaked to Gordon Brown during the years that he served as an opposition frontbencher...

One point is that there always have been leaks and there always will be. To quite a large degree they are a barometer of a government's own credibility and internal morale.

When the massed ranks of civil servants feel that broadly speaking things are going well, the tendency for leaks diminishes. When government is flailing around, its inability to convince the public has an echo in a declining sense of purpose and loyalty within civil service ranks.

That said, it is highly unusual for a Private Secretary to be involved in leaking, as looks to be the case here.

Normally the privilege of working at the very policy centre of a Ministry and developing a close relationship or even a lasting friendship with a Minister is enough to give the civil servants in question a loyalty boost. Plus a good PS reliability record is strong step towards a turbo-boosted career.

There are also important technical and procedural questions to be answered, of course.

Who decided to launch this arrest? What did the Speaker's office in Parliament know and do about it in advance? Did no Minister or Minister's office know what was about to happen?

Yet the real damage goes deeper.

The whole point about the way the UK has run its affairs for centuries is that it is all based on a sense of Limits.

Our constitution does not exist. We have instead a luxuriant growth of conventions, procedures, precedents, standards and other such rather open-ended phenomena which together complement the Law.

These mechanisms have at the heart of them the idea that Limits matter. Limits on the language used in debate. Limits on the way political opponents are treated. Limits on the way public money is managed.

Again, it is not easy to pin down precisely what these norms mean or where they come from, but they are there surely enough.

Some other countries see our Limits as a source of weakness - something to be exploited. Putinism represents this explicitly - it is a constant prodding away at British and wider Western resolve to see whether our willingness to resist Russian political and psychological pressure is edging downwards.

Terrorists represent the ultimate Absense of Limits - people who will kill other people randomly (including perhaps themselves) to make a political point. This is the extreme anti-Limits idea that the end justifies any means.

So in arresting an Opposition politician under the footling circumstances prevailing here, the police (either with a highly placed government wink, or acting under their own initiative - hard to say which is worse from a freedom point of view) have crashed through a formerly robust Limits barrier and set a new, lower standard for the role of state v citizen.

Some argue that this development is good news, in that it reveals with horrible unambiguous clarity a deeper truth about what is going on:

Yes, comparisons with Hitler are over-dramatic, as are the more common comparisons being made now in all the other pieces like this one being scribbled and blogged by all the other no-name scribblers and bloggers like me, with Robert Mugabe's hideous misrule of Zimbabwe...

...  For that is what goes on at the very bottom of the slippery slope we are on here. Those are the comparisons that spring to mind, even as you realise that they are out of all proportion.

They go to to kind of deed this was, to its dramatic structure, so to speak, even if the scale and intensity of this particular deed was trivial by comparison...

... That our rulers now swear a lot more than they used to is all part of that atmosphere, that tone, that they have been so busily creating. It is an atmosphere in which there are now so many laws, and laws which are so sweeping in their scope, that all are now guilty.

The law simplifies down to the question: do they like you? If they really really do not like you, look out, they'll come for, and find or make up the laws they need as they go along.

That a front bench politician has been, very publicly, on the receiving end of this parody of the idea of law is cause not for rage and more swearing, but for rejoicing.

Maybe. Maybe not. 

Back in 1987 or so I drafted a speech for Foreign Secretary Geoffrey Howe, about the psychological impact on the communist world of communism ending.

The key idea was this:

Imagine a group of prisoners in a very dark and disgusting cell. After years of suffering the lights are turned on and they see for the first time their surroundings.

Are they delighted at last to be able to see?

Or are they first disgusted then resentful then furious at the sight of the bugs and squalour surrounding them?

Now we start to see with unbearable clarity how our country is being run as Limits quietly erode.

Does it cheer us up?

Update (30 November): not exactly clear from all the media reports whether the civil servant involved in the case was/is a Private Secretary of some sort (ie one of the inner team tasked with helping the Minister manage the flow of papers) or a rather more junior official such as a diary secretary. Or the latter then the former.

So some of the arguments above might need qualifying a bit in the light of Developments.

The UN Security Council has supported a plan for the deployment of the EULEX mission in Kosovo.

Belgrade is happy, since the planned deployment is 'status neutral', ie it does not give in principle (and practice?) any encouragement to the idea that Kosovo is now independent.

Which is why various international media outlets are writing this up as a Serb victory.

In short, this centuries-long Balkan zero-sum negotiation inches in to a new phase, with 'Albanian' Kosovo having one set of formalised structure and loyalties and 'Serbian' Kosovo another set.

Let's recall this:

Serbia’s former Deputy Prime Minister Nebojsa Covic in 2000 told me how an elderly Albanian in southern Serbia had put it to him straight:

“Mr Covic, you have two children. I have six.

I am prepared to sacrifice two of my children to the cause. How many of yours are you prepared to sacrifice?” 

Perhaps the point now is that while Milosevic was around the Albanians could dominate the immediate battlefield by delivering greater density and intensity of Force and Will in Kosovo itself.

Now they see a perverse consequence of their own success.

Having achieved an historic lurch in favour of independence and eventual EU membership, the Kosovars see the struggle switching to a different part of the battlefield where Serbia has some advantages, namely international diplomacy.

The other day I listened to a senior UK Balkan expert passionately defending Kosovo independence on the grounds that 'these days borders must be based on consent'.

Even if that proposition is true, which it mainly isn't, it does not help much when almost every Serb in Kosovo does not express 'consent' to Albanian rule.

Hence this UN compromise which in a messy way keeps both the UN and EU in different parts of Kosovo under varying mandates.

No surprise that some Kosovo Albanians are annoyed at the way things are going?

Earlier this week I heard a senior pro-EU UK politician cheerily say that one beneficial outcome of the current financial crisis might be the UK heading for the security of the Eurozone in a few years' time: 'Europe as refuge'.

What a vision.

That after centuries of successfully mastering our own destiny we would now proclaim ourselves so utterly unfit to do so that we slump into the clammily tight collectivist post-democratic embrace of a currency space itself run to dubious technical standards?

Why is such a Europe a 'safe' place?

One can be safe by being the sort of person with whom no-one messes.

Or by being a weed, someone who shuffles along, avoiding bovver by keeping eyes firmly away from contact with tougher people on the street? 

Do we really want to join the European Refuge of Nervous Introspection?

Maybe another, very different scenario will unfold.

Have a look at what Tim Worstall has to say about the French Agriculture Minister.

Rarely has the difference between Gallic and Anglo-Saxon thought processes been made so explicit.

After a few more years of this sort of thing, maybe we'll get so infuriated by the fact that so much UK money is wasted by EU processes at a time when our economy is reeling that we set in motion a plan to leave the EU altogether?

If hitherto impregnable financial empires are now wobbling and crashing, why not the CAP? And our willingness to fund it? 

Does a new career beckon?

I was asked today to help craft a speech for a leading actress to use in addressing a small gathering for a good cause.

Done.

There must be lots of celebrities out there needing some deft light-touch words of this sort to draw on, but who are too busy to draft their own or are not quite sure of the style to adopt in this (for them) unfamiliar context.

And lots of PR agencies sweating nervously in the current climate over the exorbitant fees charged by some people for this simple speech-writing task.

Problem solved.

Is here. In Total Politics.

And if you want more, have a look at the latest issue: TP 6 (registration required). I write about Diplomatic Memoirs and all that.

Are there signs that the FCO is going to try to put out new rules which are not oppressive and unworkable?

To be continued...

A good friend of mine died on Tuesday, after a long life (not quite 100) and a fairly short final decline. I was there.

She had been in hospital in London for some weeks, suffering from accumulating ailments brought about (I suppose) by sheer old age. I had tried to visit when I could, which meant some six times in so many weeks. Other friends who lived closer had been more often.

On Tuesday evening I arrived to see how she was. The previous week she had looked notably better.

Now she was in a deathly state. And, as it happened, within a few minutes she silently passed away.

She had lived in that part of London for many decades. She died as a stranger in a hospital ward down the road from her home, staffed by people from all over the world who had dealt with her final illness (and accompanying pain and sheer frustration) with businesslike dignity.

And there was I.

Of all the hundreds of relatives, friends, foes, colleagues and acquaintances she had known down all those long years, it somehow fell to me to be with her in that small darken anonymous ward for those final silent few minutes.

One never knows which friendships and relationships last, and quite why.

Where one touches someone in a special way.

So that as life takes its last faltering breath only to flicker out, fate so organises things that one is not quite Alone.

Thus the Guardian leader this morning describes the political race now on in the UK following the financial debacle:

Everything is possible now. An extraordinary, history-changing contest has been got underway.

A sentence of pitiful illiteracy.

Over in the Telegraph a snappy writer, Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, asks a tragic question: is Britain going bankrupt?

The point is that as the current government piles on debt after debt, cutting some taxes and raising others, the markets may at some point take a view on whether all this debt in fact can be repaid:

But this is not to excuse the Brown Government for the total hash it has made of the British economy. It presided over a rise in household debt to 165pc of personal income. How could the regulators possibly think this was in the interests of British society? What economic doctrine justifies such stupidity? Why were 120pc mortgages ever allowed? Indeed, why were 100pc mortgages ever allowed? Debt is as dangerous as heroine.

Labour ran a budget deficit of 3pc of GDP the top of cycle. (We had a 2pc surplus at the end of the Lawson bubble, so we go into this slump 5pc of GDP worsee off). The size of the state has ballooned from 37pc to 46pc of GDP in a decade, and will inevitably now rise further.

It is because Gordon Brown exhausted the national credit limit to pay for his silly boom that today's fiscal stimulus  -- just 1pc of GDP (China is doing 14pc) -- is enough to rattle the bond markets.   Our national debt will jump in what is more or less the bat of an eyelid from under 40pc of GDP to nearer 60pc -- according to Fitlch Ratings. It is enough to make you weep.   But is this bankruptcy territory? Not yet. Britain will remain at the mid to lower end of the AAA club.

Meanwhile HSBC's Stephen Green urges banks to get back to moral values.

Where is the moral value in the government, the one player in the whole drama which can use force to get its way, plundering the population to pay for its own mistakes?

So little time, so many genders, so much immorality.

Dr. Sa’d Al-’Inzi: A man is not allowed to expose the area between his navel and his knees. Nobody is allowed to see his private parts. Someone who goes to these parlors and exposes this part of his body is, undoubtedly, committing a crime both in terms of the shari’a and the law, and he should be punished for this. The same goes for women. I don’t know if there are massage parlors for women...

Moderator: Yes, there are.

Dr. Sa’d Al-’Inzi: Then the catastrophe is even greater, because just like there is a “third gender,” there might be a “fourth gender” as well... Imagine that a woman gets undressed, and in walks a butch masseuse, who gets on with it – this might cause many moral problems.

Good point.

But hey, fun to watch?

A poignant and powerful essay cum film review by Myles Harris asks:

... Why do we not despair when as children we learn we are eventually going to die? The film gives this conundrum an extra twist by examining how the whole human race copes with learning it is about to die, and very soon...

... The final shot is of the Sawfish leaving Melbourne with Ava Gardner standing on a promontory watching its departure. Then there is silence.

Watching On the Beach you are seized with the frailty of human existence and how we, a few billion creatures clinging to a fragile planet, cannot afford to have delusions about our vulnerability. But there are 20,000 nuclear war heads stored in the world’s missile silos, and every day you hear ‘experts’ prepared to take a chance similar to tossing a coin on global warming.

We seem to determined to either blow ourselves to bits or choke ourselves to death. Yet we may be the only talking, intelligent species in our galaxy, possibly in the universe.

We simply do not know. But once we are wiped out a great silence will descend, a silence that may last a billion years, even for ever.

Silence

Former British Ambassador Brian Barder writes to the Guardian:

Lord Bingham's authoritative declaration that the attack on Iraq was illegal raises very important questions and you are right to call for an inquiry (Time for a full inquiry, Leaders, November 19)...

... Any inquiry also needs to establish an authoritative interpretation of the UK's formal "explanation of vote" on 1441, explicitly disavowing any "automaticity" in the resolution. This was widely assumed at the time to mean that 1441 did not imply authority for an attack without a further council resolution. If it didn't mean that, what did it mean? Did other council members agree to drop the explicit requirement for a further council "decision" in exchange for an assurance by the sponsors of 1441 that it would not be taken as authority to use force without a further decision?

These may sound like unimportant technicalities, but we need definitive answers to them if we are to be able to judge whether our own elected government committed a war crime.

Just say we do find that the invasion of Iraq was a war crime. Then what? How to assess the individual responsibility of each government member?

The Nuremburg Trials give us some helpful guidance. At the main trial (there were in fact numerous trials) there were 24 accused, of whom 12 were sentenced to death and ten executed by hanging (Borman was convicted in absentia, and Goring committed suicide).

An eyewitness account of the executions - grim reading.

Using these excellent precedents the following probably would be hanged:

Tony Blair:            Prime Minister, author of the Iraq invasion

John Prescott:      Deputy Prime Minister

Jack Straw:          Foreign Minister

Clare Short:          International Development Minister (resigned from government only after the invasion)

Geoff Hoon:          Defence Minister

John Scarlett:       Head of Joint Intelligence Committee

And assorted top UK military personnel who led the attacks.

At Nuremburg Hitler's Minister of Economics, Walther Funk (sic), was sentenced to life imprisonment but released on health grounds in 1957. So Gordon Brown (then Chancellor of the Exchequer) might escape the noose, although given his intimate role in funding the Iraq invasion and in the New Labour project some people might reasonably clamour for his execution too.

In other words, it should be a busy and productive day at the gallows.

And British politics would be rather different thereafter.

Should the UK see the current global and domesticv financial turmoil problems as the clinching reason join the Eurozone?

No:

The reason for having a floating exchange rate is that it should float. In an uncertain world, an economy needs mechanisms of adjustment. The exchange rate is the most powerful such mechanism. Only exceptionally flexible or exceptionally open economies cope well with big shocks without any exchange rate flexibility ...

... the UK must ultimately save more and the current account must go into surplus. If these are to be achieved, a big real depreciation of the exchange rate must occur. This can be secured either by a long period of falling nominal wages and prices of non-tradeable goods and services or by a fall in sterling. Fortunately, the latter has delivered what is needed.

The fall in the pound is not the problem; it is the solution.

Sounds right to me.

Sir John Sawers, our UN Ambassador, made an eloquent point recently:

Carne Ross (former British diplomat) urges urgent reform of the UN:

It is depressing how little creative thinking goes on at the UN to remedy its many deficits. Diplomats posted to the UN tend to come and go for three or four-year tours making little impression, and often leave demoralised and defeated by the UN's absurd and seemingly intractable conundrums.

Most UN member-states are small, and have commensurately small diplomatic missions, and most of these admit that are completely overwhelmed with the number and complexity of committees and processes they must keep up with; many barely comprehend them at all (pity the rest of us).

Staff in the deeply-hierarchical secretariat are discouraged from action, fearful that their next posting will be to Congo rather than up the greasy, corrupt pole that is the promotion system in the UN. Note, by the way, how virtually no senior staff member is under 50, a clear indicator that subservience is valued higher than competence.

The only solution is a severe jolt of electricity. Some say that only a war will at last trigger the energy for change. But there already is one, in fact many.

The leading states should agree to have a conference with the goal of nothing less than a renovated and revivified UN. Take discussion away from the corridors and stale arguments of the New York UN complex. Set an ambitious agenda and aim high, but for something simple and ideal.

All of which will not happen, if only for the simple reason that it suits most states to keep the UN exactly as it is. For many governments round the world the UN is a superb place to dump annoying enemies and relatives. They get nice fat salaries for no work, and in return they have to shut up.

In any case how to agree on which 'leading states' might summon and attend this new gathering?

Those states with the largest populations? Those which pay the most into the UN pot? Those with the biggest armies/economies/ambitions? Those which have a convincing internationalist track record? Those with honest leaders, accountable to their own people?

The decadent status quo at least has the advantage of clear if largely anachronistic rules.

And a certain acquired legitimacy. Would a new body really mean a step-change in clarity and legitimacy, let alone efficacy?

I would start to reform the UN by simply making it smaller. Cut its budget.

Carne's idea here makes sense:

Senior UN appointments should not be, as they are today, a function of under-the-table national pressure for jobs, an odious internationalised version of "buggins' turn" in which even the most pious UN members (including the UK) indulge.

The secretary-general must be free to invite applications from qualified candidates worldwide, and to hire on merit. That such an obvious proposal should seem so radical at the UN is an indication of the depth of the crisis.

Those who pay the most into the UN pot should start to go slow on their contributions until a number of core modernising reforms such as this are brought in.

Pruning shears first. Get the tree a bit healthier. Axe later, as necessary.

Update: a reader points out in the Good Writing context that I have used a tired management cliché, 'step-change', in this posting. He's right. Amazing how they creep in.

Responding to my posting below about poor website writing, a reader makes the following argument:

My feeling is that poor use of language isn't actually the problem: it's a symptom of sloppy thinking.

Interesting chicken and egg issue here. Does poor command of language reflect sloppy thinking, or create it?

No doubt somewhere out there is a vast learned literature on this question.

Let's start at home. I tend to think that children are capable of sophisticated reasoning, bargaining and so on, even if they sometimes lack the words to articulate accurately what they are trying to achieve.

So maybe the answer is that there is a virtuous spiral at work here. As one grows up one learns how to articulate one's arguments via a growing vocabulary, and with a growing accurate vocabulary one is able to see - and make - increasingly subtle points of substance and logic.

Which is why education plays a core role. If teachers and parents encourage children to love words and all the clever things one can do with them, those children will have better tools to do more jobs in life.

If teachers and parents allow children to speak poorly and thereby dumb down the language by letting nuances of meaning, grammar and spelling fall away, those children will just be poorer. They will have fewer ways of being effective in countless situations than they might have had.

The usual lame answer to that is that it makes no sense for deprived children to be 'compelled' to speak and write in a posh Dead White Male sort of way.

Apart from the fact that the progressive hypocrites who make this claim themselves almost invariably write and speak pretty well as part of making their own living, the point in fact goes exactly the other way.

Because these children are deprived it is all the more important that they be given the biggest possible tool-box of skills to help them achieve something in life. And an appreciative mastery of skillful English is a toolbox with global advantage. Communication defines more and more of what we do and how we do it.

Look at Edge intellectual leaders debating behavioural economics:

Who is a choice architect? Everyone in this room is a choice architect. Anyone who designs the environment in which you choose is a choice architect.

If you go to a restaurant, there is a menu. Somebody thought about how to structure that menu. In many restaurants you have appetizers, then main courses. In some restaurants the main courses are divided into meat, fish and pasta. In others they are all mixed up. Sometimes they are arranged in order of price. Sometimes there is no apparent order.

Everything we know about psychology tells us that all of those things matter. Everything matters...

People who might have been smart enough to follow these brilliant discussions but have not been trained up to the level of linguistic mastery to do so have suffered an existential life disaster. And as they sit sulking and bickering near a grubby fast-food outlet, communicating in a bleak and impoverished monosyllabic vocabulary, they maybe sense what has happened and feel all the more resentful and violent.

Down we all go together.

Here is a neat piece picking up George Orwell's preoccupation with this question and its strategic political ramifications:

Consider for instance some comfortable English professor defending Russian totalitarianism. He cannot say outright, ‘I believe in killing off your opponents when you can get good results by doing so’. Probably, therefore, he will say something like this:

‘While freely conceding that the Soviet regime exhibits certain features which the humanitarian may be inclined to deplore, we must, I think, agree that a certain curtailment of the right to political opposition is an unavoidable concomitant of transitional periods, and that the rigors which the Russian people have been called upon to undergo have been amply justified in the sphere of concrete achievement.’

The inflated style itself is a kind of euphemism. A mass of Latin words falls upon the facts like soft snow, blurring the outline and covering up all the details. The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one’s real and one’s declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish spurting out ink...

Magnificent. And no less applicable today.

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

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

Phew.

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

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

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

Ha. I see that I have competition. How does my writing compare with Judy's?

The victory of England over Germany in the friendly football international this week brought back memories of this odious memory: the England team giving Nazi salutes when England played Germany in Berlin in May 1938.

According to some versions it was Sir Nevile Henderson, HM Ambassador in Germany, who applied pressure to achieve this ghastly PR own-goal for civilisation:

... Sir Stanley Matthews insisted that there was bedlam in England's dressing-room when the decision was made known. "Everyone was shouting at once," he wrote. "Eddie Hapgood, normally a respectful captain, wagged his finger at the official [presumably Rous] and told him what he could do with the Nazi salute... In fact, Eddie offered a compromise, saying we would stand to attention but the offer fell on deaf ears. We were told that the political situation between Great Britain and Germany was now so sensitive that it needed `only a spark to set Europe alight'."

A fateful example of a senior diplomat not grasping that in sending a polite message to the Nazi regime, he was sending a calamitous message to almost everyone else?

My latest plan is to rewrite underperforming and sloppy English on websites. And get paid lavishly for it.

Many websites are nice in technical design, but clumsy in expression.

No surprise there.

The capacity of people in the UK to write sharp, accurate English is plummeting. Good grammar and good writing are not taught and emphasised in schools to a high enough degree. And the marks taken off work for sloppy writing and poor expression edge down.

This is a truly amazing 'deep' phenomenon. Almost everything we make gets better and cheaper. How/why in fact are standards edging downwards in this horrible self-reinforcing way, so that there is no real capacity to expect and enforce higher and higher writing standards so that crass elementary errors invade all sorts of unexpected places?

Take this example: so dismal on so many levels that it is almost unbelievable.

If there is one comparative advantage we Brits have in the current world it is the English language, a peerless tool for accurate and subtle communication. Yet our education system inexorably devalues it.

Remember this example from an Oxford English graduate FCO fast streamer?

Anyway, there is an elite linguistic SWAT force ready to do what it can to help, namely at least one ex-Ambassador who has spent decades churning out top calibre prose of all sorts of shapes and sizes:

So, o world, groaning under the burden of awful English, when you need your website language sharpened up to fine and speedy effect, you know where to find the help you need. 

Back in 1993 or thereabouts, soon after the Soviet Union collapsed, there was the first wave of excitement about Newly Rich Russians steaming in to the London property market, driving house prices up.

This caused interest among the UK security services who ran some discreet enquiries among estate agents to see what was going on.

It transpired that they could not find a single example of any Rich Russian buying anything - but everyone was talking about it, to fluff up the market.

At a meeting at the FCO to discuss this and other practical aspects of the collpase of the Soviet Union, I warned the senior police officers present to expect a wave of firearms from that part of the world to come to UK. There were far too many weapons in the former communist world now effectively out of control, and far too many people keen to sell them.

I recall that they looked at me with a look of patronising disbelief. Did not this cutesy diplomat know that firearms were very rare in the UK - and going to stay that way?

Ho hum.

I was right, as usual:

By March this year, British police forces had recovered more than 250 Baikals. Even so, most police officers concede that, as with drug seizures, this probably represents just a fraction of those in the country. The uncomfortable truth is that no one knows how many Baikals are in criminal hands...

Alert readers of this Blog will have spotted that there is a new link along the top, namely to an essay I have written about Amazon Space.

This piece is an attempt to pull together various themes of international politics and the impact thereon of surging IT-driven integration:

Polly Toynbee makes the quixotic points one would expect her to make about Baby P:

Surprisingly few children are murdered, given how many parents are drug addicted, psychotic, violent or profoundly inadequate; 29,000 are on the child protection register and another 300,000 are reckoned to be "in need", with concerns about their quality of life.

Yet last year of all those children in danger, 68 were killed (15 of those by strangers). Given how extraordinarily vulnerable children are, that is a relatively low figure to be balanced against the thousands who survive precarious lives, often thanks to social workers, who are never thanked.

More interesting are the many comments by readers, including this stiring one:

No. I actually used to be a Civil Servant. Trust me, the issue is not stress or pay or popularity. The problem is demoralisation.

Everyone in the Civil Service knows that they are less competent than their Parents' generation much less their grandparents. Everyone knows that they pretend to pay us so we pretend to work. Everyone knows that promotion is a reward for mediocrity and sucking up. Everyone knows no matter how little interest or competence they bring to the job, as long as they tick the boxes, as long as they keep their noses clean and spout the usual Management rubbish, their promotion prospects will not be harmed.

It demoralises people to know they are all faking it and not really working. Sacking a few people would inspire the rest - and give them a sense of achievement for surviving.

Sounds good to me.

If good behaviour is not rewarded, and poor behaviour results in adequate consequences, standards surge downwards.

With the results we see everywhere around us.

Simple enough, one might think, even for the Guardian.