Blogoir: February

My mentioning of Marsport reminded me of another Mars moment in my life.

It came in early November 2005. I had sent an email to the FCO team in which I attempted to explain what had happened in Polish politics that previous week, when the wrangling following Poland's 2005 Parliamentary elections was at its most intense.

Basically, the two more or less Centre Right parties (Citizens Platform led by Donald Tusk, and Law and Justice led Jaroslaw Kaczynski) had entered the elections promising to join forces in a governing coalition thereafter if they prevailed against the Centre Left.

They indeed prevailed massively against the Centre Left. But instead of Citizens Platform coming first as most commentators - and Citizens Platform - had expected, the Kaczynski twins' party nosed in front and won more seats.

This meant that the new government would have to be formed on the Kaczynskis' terms. A furious row between the two parties promptly started, much to the dismay of the Polish masses who had just given them a powerful mandate to rule nicely together.

I tried to explain to a bemused FCO what all this meant for us/EU/NATO in policy terms, but confessed that I did not have the foggiest idea what would happen next. 

And I added a terse but heartfelt Conclusion, from 'Aghast in Warsaw': "If the UK adopts a PR voting system I am emigrating to Mars." 

I heard subsequently that then Foreign Secretary Jack Straw read out this sentence in Cabinet. Probably just to show that even the FCO finds it impossible to get good staff these days.

More significantly, it happens that I have tiny but beautiful golden flecks in my eyes. Maybe I should be getting home anyway?

I had the great pleasure of meeting Bill Buckley back in July 2005, a day after the terrorist bombings in London.

He personified the existential far opposite of that nihilistic violence. A calm, positive, witty, astute, sophisticated and reasonable man who lived for and through ideas.

Above all specific and profound ideas about personal responsibility and what that implies for the citizen and the state. His thinking and the freedom-loving spirit behind it gave him and his vast output of work a towering moral status in communist Europe. It is alas not so easy to think of a European intellectual of whom the same might be said.

 

Back in 2006 I had an amicable email joust with London on the subject of our Balkans policy, consistency or otherwise thereof.

The point was made by HQ that the FCO would be a depressing place if we did not have lively disagreements or felt that our policy was watertight.

To which I amusingly asked "How tight is a duck's bottom - and FCO Balkan policy?"

Watertight.

Nazism or Communism? Which was 'worse'? And why?

I sent the FCO some thoughts on this subject when I was HM Ambassador in Warsaw. I pointed out that today's Europe would look and feel rather different if Hitler was lying embalmed in Berlin just as Lenin lies creepily in Moscow. I argued that WW2 and the post-war settlement mainly killed off the Nazi vampire (in Europe at least - it is alive and well in eg Hamas propaganda). But the Soviet vampire was not dead, creating tensions at the heart of European identity.

The debate rumbles on in various political fora: see eg the argument made in the European Parliament by some conservative MEPs that if Nazi symbols were banned in today's Europe, why not ban the communist hammer and sickle symbol too?

This issue was taken up in the London Review of Books by Slavoj Zizek, a Slovenian Marxist with a provocative if not necessarily consistent worldview but certainly lively turn of phrase, coming direct from the grand Titoist Yugoslav tradition of Doing Whatever it Takes to be the Centre of Attention.

His analysis is worth reading on a 'know the enemy' basis. It gets to the morbid heart of the pro-Stalinist worldview - and honestly makes the best available excuses for it.

Zizek's argument boils down to this:

• Stalin and Stalinism claimed to be part of the Enlightenment tradition
• Nazism by contrast displaced the inherent rationality of class struggle on to irrational emphasis on race and biology
• therefore the Stalin purges were in fact even more irrational than Fascist violence, in that they demonstrated "an authentic revolution perverted" (Note: ingenious! One can not expect the madman to be rational, ergo irrationality can be expressed only by the tragedy of rational people acting irrationally) 
• so sides must be taken
• between only two choices. 
• Fascism has to be proclaimed to be fundamentally worse than Communism.
• since the alternative is to see Fascism as a natural reaction to the Communist threat and therefore somehow a lesser evil. Which is bad since it weakens a "postwar European identity hitherto based on anti-Fascist unity"  

Nice try, druze.

But no.

There is another choice which also happens to be the right one, namely to see Communism and Fascism/Nazism (not that the latter were the same thing) as two rival visions of a manic socialist collectivist approach to society and state coercive power, which in fact had far more in common in terms of 'class struggle' - and ultimately anti-semitism too - than the differences claimed by Zizek.

This thesis is admirably advanced with plenty of marvellous examples by Jonah Goldberg in his new book Liberal Fascism. Ignore the trite negative reviews, and buy it. 

Both Communism and Nazism/Fascism took utopian ends as justifying any means, above all a towering supremacy of the collectivist state over the individual. One was totalitarian international socialism. The other was totalitarian national socialism. Both murdered millions of people. Both were essentially and intrinsically destructive and violent. For these reasons and more, neither can seriously be claimed to be part of an Enlightenment tradition, unless that tradition is defined as Un-Enlightened..

Zizek and his sly arguments are at least correct on one point. There is a form of 'European Identity based squarely on a profound Stalin-inspired 'law of the excluded middle' attempt to cast any objection to Communism as 'essentially' support for Fascism. This Vast Lie has been remarkably successful down the decades, and still gives all sorts of cover to extremist collectivist viewpoints of different shapes and sizes.

Luckily for Europe, many countries which laboured under Stalinism are now free; their representatives can speak out against this sort of thing in a way most politicians in Old Europe can not imagine doing.

It is no surprise that S Zizek as a leading supporter of an oh-so-fashionable Stalinist defence team comes from former non-aligned' communist Yugoslavia: a country which wriggled out from the worst excesses of Stalinism, later collapsing not because there were serious intellectual forces opposing communism as such but rather because of populist mobilisation based on ethnic exclusivism and partly driven by sheer gangsterism.

Zizek is a Marxist philosopher who dwells on the level of ideas. If he wants to study aspects of the allegedly Enlightenment tradition of Stalinism in a way both more dialectical and materialistic simultaneously (and rather closer to home than the European Parliament), he need only walk down the road in Slovenia.

And start digging. 

A controversy over David Cameron's supposed views on a British Government-supported programme to take sixth form pupils to Poland to visit the Auschwitz concentration camp complex has drawn attention to that programme which has been ticking over already in different forms for some nine years.

This programme is a Good Thing, even if the sight of numerous gleaming coaches parked outside the Auschwitz camp entrance itself is chilling.

A couple of years back when there was talk of a new boost to the programme I offered as HM Ambasador in Warsaw to join one of the visits to help boost the programme's profile. I told the organisers of the programme via the FCO that the Ambassador of Israel of course would be delighted to join me; the Israeli Embassy in Poland keeps an eye on many school and other visits to Auschwitz from Israel.

I was eventually informed that it was not thought by the UK end to be helpful that the Israeli Ambassador be present as that might create 'difficulties' (or a word/phrase to that effect). As my posting was drawing to an end I did not pursue the matter by pressing hard to find out what exactly these 'unhelpful difficulties' might be, or who exactly found what 'unhelpful/difficult'. 

Hmm.

Can it be the case that under pressure from a Muslim and/or anti-Israel political tendency the programme is somehow uneasy about linking the fact of the Holocaust to the founding of the state of Israel? Or might some sixth-formers (or their teachers) be able to face the ghastly room full of human hair taken from Auschwitz victims, but not be able to accept or cope with presence of an Israeli diplomat, even on a ceremonial one-off basis?

Back in November 2006 Professor Richard Evans gave a lecture under the auspices of the Holocaust Educational Trust, the government's partner in this programme. The HET website cites him as saying:

"There are few Holocaust deniers left in the UK and certainly none with any credibility; however Holocaust denial is increasingly used by Islamic extremists today as a political tool to undermine the legitimacy of the state of Israel. Unfortunately it is Holocaust Survivors and their families who continue to suffer...“The Holocaust continues to raise important questions and themes surrounding freedom, responsibility and racism and that is why it is so important we educate young people about this defining episode in history.”

Precisely. So why not welcome the courteous offer of the Israeli Ambassador in Poland to meet some of the visiting students? 

The time is coming when the full story of my leaked email about the EU Budget and a Chinese alarm-clock will have to be told.

For now just to say that the story frisked round the Internet for a short while. I alas was not famous for even fifteen minutes. More like two minutes and eight seconds.

When a story gets picked up like this on a popular site, the comments from fans and surfers usually start by being focused on the story and then, like the statements from the spaceolined-out characters in I'm in Marsport without Hilda, meander away spontaneously but incoherently on to quite different topics before petering out in sad grunts, often of crude abuse.

So when I saw that I had made it on to the fine Samizdata site I was intrigued to see what would happen. 

There ensued a lively and self-disciplined discussion about whether one line in my leaked email about the CAP ("a programme which uses inefficient transfers of taxpayers money to bloat rich French landowners and so pump up food prices in Europe, thereby creating poverty in Africa, which we then fail to solve through inefficient but expensive aid programmes") was in fact true even though many people think it is.

How in theory might a massive EU farm subsidy programme create famine in Africa? And in practice does this happen?

Good questions. Here are some answers.

As well as obviously political or protest songs put out down the years, there are plenty which draw in an explicit or implicit way rather on the language and practice of diplomacy.

And the time has come for a former senior diplomatic practitioner (ie me) to draw the planet's attention to some of the finer examples.

So as a starter.

If it is tense Cold War confrontation you want, try the Clash's Ivan Meets G.I. Joe:

He wiped the earth - clean as a plate
What does it take to make a Ruskie break?
But the crowd are bored and off they go
Over the road to watch China blow!

If you are a close follower of variations in US Embassy opening hours round the world, try Donald Fagen's The Goodbye Look:

Now the Americans are gone except for two
The Embassy's been hard to reach
There's been talk and lately a bit of action after dark

Behind the big casino on the beach

And for those who support the application of the EU's odious Working Time Directive even to American diplomats, here is So it Goes by Nick Lowe:

Now up jumped the U.S. representative
He's the one with the tired eyes
747 for the midnight condition
Flyin' back from a peace keepin' mission

(This album, by the way, also has the finest ever song about being eaten by one's own dogs.)

To be continued.

Once upon a time supporting human rights included defending free speech, even if it was speech one did not much like or welcome.

This also included presenting moderation and self-restraint as ends in themselves. Promoting the profound and difficult idea that rational, reasonable, constructive, positive ends would not be achieved by irrational, unreasonable, destructive, negative means.

Once upon a time human rights activists were people we all could look up to.

People who exemplified courage, principle and moderation. People who evinced a sense of proportion.

Not any more.

The performance of the senior MEPs who are trying very hard indeed to limit access to a damaging report on MEPs' possible abuse of expenses is at once revealing and disturbing on so many levels that one scarcely knows where to start offering a view on it.

Suffice for now to say that one of the deepest moral ideas underpinning Western civilisation is the idea that citizens agree to give some of our hard-earned money to the government on trust to spend these funds as far as possible wisely - but also unambiguously honestly.

If it starts to look as if our representatives are unable to resist the tempation sneakily to grab a slice of that money for their own benefit, this central - even civilizational - element of trust is bound to erode.

Hence we might think that we are entitled to expect our elected representatives (who in financial terms do not do badly in the great scheme of things) to fall over themselves to come clean if there is any suspicion or accusation of impropriety in this respect.

Yet in this case we get exactly the opposite. All manner of exotic hi-tech and procedural arrangements are being made to limit public access to and scrutiny of an internal EU auditors report.

Why the frantic attempts at damage limitation? Maybe behind various technical excuses the true reason is political: "we cannot make this report available to the public if we want people to vote in the European elections next year". 

True enough, no doubt.

S.2 of our 2006 Fraud Act is quite easy to follow:

Fraud by false representation

(1) A person is in breach of this section if he—

(a) dishonestly makes a false representation, and

(b) intends, by making the representation—

(i) to make a gain for himself or another, or

(ii) to cause loss to another or to expose another to a risk of loss.

(2) A representation is false if—

(a) it is untrue or misleading, and

(b) the person making it knows that it is, or might be, untrue or misleading.

(3) “Representation” means any representation as to fact or law, including a representation as to the state of mind of—

(a) the person making the representation, or

(b) any other person.

(4) A representation may be express or implied.

(5) For the purposes of this section a representation may be regarded as made if it (or anything implying it) is submitted in any form to any system or device designed to receive, convey or respond to communications (with or without human intervention).

There follow further pellucid definitions of how fraud is committed by Failing to Disclose Information and Abuse of Position.

Possible abuse of expenses by either some of our own members of Parliament or some MEPs looks to be covered by this language.

When might the arrests start?

This rather overexcited piece on the attack on the US Embassy in Belgrade is catching some attention.

The author is one Stephen Schwartz, former Trotskyist-style Leftist who has undergone a metamorphosis into a sui generis new category of moderate US Muslim neocon. Nice niche marketing.

One thing about Trotskyists (and it seems former Trotskyists) is that they lack the inner 'don't overdo the adjectives and adverbs' circuit breaker which passionate but also good writers need.

Thus some of us might think that the Nuremburg Trials after WW2 did not do too bad a job in difficult circumstances. We would be wrong.

Mr Schwartz's fevered denunciation of Serbs fails to convince, on the simple basis that if one rummages around in Balkan history it is easy to pull out a similarly impressive catalogue of horrors perpetrated by most if not all of the ethnic communities there. 

Indeed, that's the point.

Down the decades in this region exists the following grotesque syndrome:

• "They massacred us, so we need to massacre them".
• Which leads to even worse: "Whatever we do, they are likely to massacre us, so let's get our massacre of them in first".
• And when Our massacre of Them is duly followed by Their massacre of Us, we say to the world in a sorrowful-wise tone of voice "look, we knew this would happen - those people are primitive!"

For anyone interested in the psychology of all this or who ought to be interested (eg policy-makers in key capitals and the UN/Brussels, not to mention the new army of EU Justice-Dispensers now marching on Kosova/Kosovo), there is nothing better than reading the collection of essays in a moving and profound little book Truths, Responsibilities, Reconciliations published by SAMIZDAT/Free B92.

One piece in particular by Sreten Ugricic The Sakic-Milosevic Syndrome is especially poignant, describing how in the perverted logic of Balkan extremism the WW2 Jasenovac Croatian concentration camp in which tens of thousands of Serbs were murdered somehow justifies the far smaller but catastrophic 1991 massacre of Croats by Serbs at Vukovar.

And, amazingly, vice versa.

The point?

None, except to say that if Serbs burn down part of the US Embassy in Belgrade most Americans will be unimpressed.

As I used to tell anyone who would listen in Belgrade, "Serbia has two problems. First, you have an image problem. And second, you don't know you have an image problem."

Or is it even worse that that?

"We know that we have an image problem. And we just don't care any more. Is that a problem? And if so, is it our problem - or your problem?"

My former colleague from my South Africa days Roy Reeve is now leading a vast mission to export EU police and justice systems to Kosovo.

This startlingly expensive exercise aimed at a fast-forward modernizing of Kosovo in a way a goose is forcibly fattened to produce foie gras will quickly come up against the problem that the average witness in Kosovo is more loyal to his ethnic community than to the truth.

The expensive UNMIK mission failed to cope with a profound cultural problem of intimidation of witnesses. My prediction is that this EU invasion will not do much better in any timescale that matters.

Here's an interesting civil rights question for Roy. How many members of the 1900 or so EU folk now descending on Kosovo will be renting accommodation from Kosovo Serbs who fled the province and have had their property grabbed by Albanians who pocket the lucrative proceeds?

Here's another. How much effort will be put in to getting those many thousands of displaced people, many living in utterly awful conditions round Serbia, back to their homes or otherwise arranging fair compensation for them?

This 'right of return' was a corner-stone of our policy in Bosnia and was by any international standard of measuring such things a remarkable success, albeit necessarily a protracted one.

The unyielding emphasis put on this in Bosnia contrasted shamefully with UNMIK policy in Kosovo.

One hapless and hopeless European leader of UNMIK was Hans Haekkerup. H2 at one point visited Belgrade and met EU Ambassadors. Even the least cynical of them were taken aback when he was asked what he planned to do about the tens of thousands of Serbs displaced from Kosovo and blandly replied, as if baffled by the question (which he probably was), "they are not my constituency".

So Roy, good luck in trying to push through a forced marriage between the virile Balkan Mr Kosovo and coy European Miss Laura Norder.  

How to assess the life and works of Fidel Castro?

CNN has the line. Castro was a not too bad fellow who did good things for 'social reform' in Cuba and who was praised in some circles for standing up to the United States. Oh, and he was criticized for oppressing human rights and freedom of speech.

Hmm.

'Criticized' is an interesting word. One criticizes the UK government for its approach on the Northern Rock bank. One criticizes EU MEPs for hiding in a Secret Room a report offering reasons to think that there might have been some MEP corruption.

One even criticizes the vicar for splitting an infinitive in a sermon.

The point is that 'criticism' is aimed at people who one thinks are are basically normal but doing something amiss. One does not 'criticize' Stalin for his genocide-through-famine policies in Ukraine. Or 'criticize' Hitler for setting up death camps and murdering millions of people.

CNN are trying to sell us the idea that Castro's appalling record tip-toes away from the noisy condemnation it richly deserves into mere criticism. Crude Leftist agenda journalism at its most blatant, sneaking into our homes via our TV sets.

This BBC report is a more sophisticated version of the same thing, although it does at least mention the curious attempted mass exodus of Cubans in the 1990s trying to escape Castro's exemplary social policies and free health care to get to a sad neighbouring country with neither.

But NB the obligatory BBC picture of Che Guevara in fine 'iconic' form, ie looking wistful and beautiful. A picture of him gloating heartily over the summary execution of prisoners in a Castro prison might have been rather more representative:

"there were about eight hundred prisoners in a space fit for no more than three hundred: former Batista military and police personnel, some journalists, a few businessmen and merchants. The revolutionary tribunal was made of militiamen.

Che Guevara presided over the appellate court. He never overturned a sentence. I would visit those on death row at the galera de la muerte. A rumor went around that I hypnotized prisoners because many remained calm, so Che ordered that I be present at the executions.

After I left in May, they executed many more, but I personally witnessed fifty-five executions. There was an American, Herman Marks, apparently a former convict. We called him “the butcher” because he enjoyed giving the order to shoot.

I pleaded many times with Che on behalf of prisoners. I remember especially the case of Ariel Lima, a young boy. Che did not budge. Nor did Fidel, whom I visited..".

When I was at Harvard back in 1999 I heard a presentation by a senior CNN journalist. He mentioned that CNN checked their ratings every fifteen minutes. This had led them to grasp that after only some 35 seconds of talking many people got bored and switched channels. So they had taken a corporate decison to scale back the use of sound-bites to 18 seconds.

There it is, in 18 Seconds. CNN's narrative on Castro:

"A great survivor, who had a human rights problem or two. But he sure gave Cubans a great free health care system and stood up to US bullying.

In baseball today..."

Here's my proposal for using some of the EU's funds saved by imprisoning scores of corrupt MEPs.

It is to identify the relatives of people murdered or summarily/unjustly executed by Castro and Guevara and help them launch a vast class action law suit around the world aimed at winning huge punitive damages/compensation awards against all those firms who have made money from selling t-shirts, posters and other ephemera depicting Che Guevara as a cool dude revolutionary.

Let justice be done. Even if it takes a bit longer than 18 seconds.

I have been busy helping teach young diplomats some of the Darker Arts of diplomacy.

Part of the course involved us all filling in a personality profile questionnaire, which purported to show what sort of person we were and how we might respond to problems in terms of the four categories above.

My results were skewed massively towards Action and Ideas, with People a distant third and Process almost nowhere. Normally (sic) there would be a rather more even spread.

This came as no surprise, to me at least. Years ago I did the Margerison-McCann Team Management Profile test - 'an extensively researched and proven psychometric tool'. This test has been taken by many thousands of managers round the world.

I ended up in a pretty rare category, the Explorer-Promoter: "only 7% of people tested have a more creative preference than you; only 3% have a more flexible preference than you". In other words, among these thousands of managers I was way out on a limb in exemplifying Creativity/Flexibility. Far more mainstream FCO or indeed other active successful managers were either a Thruster-Organiser or Concluder-Producer (ie demonstrating qualities associated more with linking outcomes and process than with non-stop restless ideas and innovation).

My annual appraisals down the years have been borne this analysis out: "his team complain of too many ideas" was a recurring refrain. 

The question is, what do taxpayers and Ministers want their diplomats to be and do?

The system likes people to be systematic. But at the top end where hard decisions are made for the public good, Ministers expect the system to be systematic (enough) - what adds vital value for them are officials who deliver results, preferably fast and consistently. It is nice if they are also good managers and 'team players', but if a Minister has to choose between Action and Process, Action (of course) wins hands down.

Why? Because the Minister's reputation and personal pride depend on being seen as operationally effective, not on running a happy tidy Ministry.

As I look back on my FCO career one of my few regrets was that I failed to give the right response when the then Head of the FCO Sir John Kerr hauled me in on my appointment in 1999 as Deputy Political Director. That was for me a major and abrupt promotion which had 'raised some eyebrows' after then Foreign Secretary Robin Cook had asked for me to be given that job with its heavy Balkans responsibilities.

Sir John is not easily misunderstood. As he wrote on my 2000 appraisal, "...the ideas bubble up, and the 10% that are crap are a fair price for the 90%...".

A year later after I had worked hard to change my wayward ways, I duly showed measurable improvements: my ideas this time round were "95% excellent, 5% weird".

Anyway, Sir John hauled me in to give me a pep talk. His basic point was simple. "Listen, young Crawford. You did well with all that flashy stuff playing on the wing as Ambassador in Sarajevo. Now we have moved you to a key position in midfield, where we expect a different sort of game..."

I should have said (coolly) "I'll play wherever you want me to play. It just depends how many goals you want."

Instead I merely curtsied prettily and shot off to try to bring down S Milosevic.

Successfully, as it happened. Yet my subsequent appraisal was oddly coy on the fact that Milosevic indeed had fallen; it was not altogether clear from that document that I had just helped Robin Cook deliver what he called his finest policy success as Foreign Secretary.

Instead the stuck needle remained stuck: "...comes across as shooting from the hip, and ideas deluge forth, some unfiltered ... we could have done with a bit more respect for process". But was it not just a teensy-weensy bit possible that an excess of 'process' at the FCO and in other key capitals' foreign ministries helped lead to hundreds of thousands of deaths across the Balkans in the 1990s?

So, FCO and other ambitious young diplomatic trainees. Be bold.

As an otherwise irritating mediocre European philosopher once said, " The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it."

Ditto for diplomats.  Of course Process is important - without it there is no Stability, usually a pre-condition for getting anything done at all. But it is Action and Ideas that make a memorable difference - and inspire People. To achieve that is why you wanted to be a diplomat in the first place.

That said, even if Ministers like your Action and Ideas, the system won't. And Ministers come and go, whereas the system doesn't. Which do you want to please?

Your choice.

The fine diplomatic art of briefing journalists badly.

Or "How to be Clever - but not Wise".

This is a short sharp analysis of seemingly plummeting prospects of Hillary Clinton in the Democratic Party race in the US Presidential elections.

What will the markets say if she somehow recovers?

 

 

When I was Ambassador in Warsaw people often would ask me, "how many Poles are now in the UK?"

Interesting question. Who is a Pole? And what does "in the UK" mean?

Crudely speaking there are different categories of Poles now living in the UK. Thus:

• a small number of now rather elderly Poles who arrived in the UK before WW2 and their families who to varying degrees associate with Poland or maintain active links. See eg George Dobry QC, one of the most distinguished of them. But by now many of them are for all practical purposes more British than Polish, usually having UK citizenship and passports.
• then there are those Poles and their descendants who came to the UK in sizeable numbers during and after WW2, not least to fly against the Nazis with the RAF - a contribution not always remembered as it should be. Here too many are now British citizens for counting purposes.
• various Poles made their way to the UK during the Communist period to work unobtrusively or to study or both. See eg ex-President Kwasniewski or today's Polish Foreign Minister and former Bullingdon Club member Radek Sikorski. Professor Zbigniew Pelczynski who came to the UK after the 1944 Warsaw Uprising helped set up a memorable programme for Polish students at Oxford University - many graduates of that programme are now leading figures in Poland and elsewhere. But no doubt some also stayed on here.
• when the Cold War ended the UK took what was then a bold step and lifted visa requirements on Poles. This did not mean that Poles who came to the UK could work freely, but plenty of them did and stayed to work 'illegally'. A number of them will have acquired UK citizenship and/or stayed on.
• and then when Poland joined the EU in May 2004 the UK announced that any Pole who wanted to do so could come to the UK to work, subject only to a registration process so that the process might be monitored. Moreover, any Pole who had arrived previously but had been working illegally could regularise his/her status by registering with the scheme with no further ado.
• This development was all the more sensational in Poland because only Ireland and Sweden unconditionally opened their labour markets at the same time. So a predominance of those Poles inclined to move elsewhere in the EU following Poland's accession were in effect funnelled in our direction.
• Hundreds of thousands of them (or even millions?) duly did so.
• But now it seems that the tide is turning
• and in any case plenty of Poles dip in and out of the UK labour market for short-term jobs here and there, travelling backwards and forwards. These people are in effect 'in' both Poland and the UK and maybe other EU countries simultaneously

So, the original question can not be answered meaningfully to any degree of accuracy. 

What we have been seeing since 2004 is what those of us in the business quietly expected to happen, namely an initial large surge of Poles coming to the UK to find jobs; a surge which in due course would peak and then steadily decline as the Poles concerned either had enough of living away from their families or felt they had saved enough to relocate back to Poland with a better start from a small pile of savings.

And let's not forget that Poles also have been invading Germany. In fact, far more Poles work in Germany than in the UK, despite the fact that Germany has not been as flexible as the UK since Poland's accession. 

In short, what inevitably looks to some people like a scary mass Polish invasion of the UK will in a few years' time be accepted as having been a largely benign and (in the great scheme of things) effectively temporary phenomenon. 

But the impact on the British diet may be more ... profound?  

Back in the early 1980s as a junior Second Sec Pol/Info at the Embassy in Belgrade I now and then would accompany the then Ambassador Edwin Bolland on his regional visits round the country.

Edwin Bolland (later Sir Edwin) was a fascinating if complex senior colleague. On these long tours I would hear his many stories of life in the post-WW2 Foreign Office. His first posting had been to Moscow and he had attended some of the infamous show trials, held in cavernous halls with Stalin himself occasionally appearing on a lofty balcony to gaze down impassively.

The Ambassador's final official visit to Pristina (not long after the fateful 'disturbances') was an excellent example of the genre.

We had five official meetings of an hour each starting at 0800 and finishing at 1300 when we were hosted for a massive lunch. Each meeting including the 0800 starter featured a cup of Turkish coffee, mineral water and a stiff plum brandy.

The lunch was a steaming mass of lamb. The local tradition had it that the guest of honour would be proudly awarded the sheep's eyes to eat, but I seem to recall that they did politely ask if that would be welcome and the Ambassador equally politely passed on that one.

The meetings themselves were banal encounters, successive senior apparatchiks and 'Socialist Alliance' stooges, Serbs and Albanians alike, blandly assuring us that all was well in Kosovo. Which it wasn't. The real local leaders of course were the Communist Party hard men who would not meet Ambassadors (at least not Western ones) on the pretext that they conducted only 'party to party' relations with Western political groupings and avoided state representatives.

We reeled away from all this primitive communist hospitality none the wiser but stuffed to the gills. Mission accomplished by the locals. And look where it got them.   

How to make sense of the Kosovo/Kosova independence issue?

 

Kosovo is diplomacy’s elephant’s graveyard, a bleak place where our best hopes and strategies and principles forlornly creep away to die.

 

There is nothing uniquely special or principled or even self-evidently fair about the Kosovo Albanian majority’s demand that a new independent state dominated by them be set up in Europe within Kosovo’s current borders. What is undoubtedly remarkable is the single-minded way that community has focused on this ambition in recent decades, and how stunningly and consistently inept the Serbs have been in dealing with the problem.

 

The ethnic mix of the Kosovo population has ebbed and flowed down the centuries with different empires and wars and consequent rounds of ‘ethnic cleansing’. Nor has there been a consistent delineation of the territory defining Kosovo. But at least for most of the past 100 years most of Kosovo has been recognised by the rest of the planet as part of Serbia, albeit with an ethnic Albanian majority. Numerous historic Serb monasteries and other sites are there, attesting to long earlier periods of Serbian rule and Slavic civilisation. So history does not suggest that a ‘winner takes all’ Albanian victory now is obviously the right one.

 

I came on the case in February 1981 a few months after the death of Marshall Tito himself when I walked into HM Embassy Belgrade as the squeaky clean new Second Secretary Political/Information, to be told that there had been ‘disturbances’ in Kosovo – a startling development in the harmonious communist world. Kosovo at that stage was (like Vojvodina) an ‘Autonomous Province’ within Serbia but with most of the attributes of a full Republic within communist Yugoslavia, including eg a Kosovo representative in the convoluted eight-person collective SFRY Presidency.

 

These student-led disturbances were mobilised under the slogan ‘Kosovo – Republic’. Not a claim to independence as such, but an obviously handy step in that general direction. If ever Yugoslavia broke up, a republic was better placed to gain full independence than a mere province.

 

Some months after the disturbances I was one of the first foreign diplomats allowed back in Kosovo. I picked up a genial local Albanian hitch-hiker, who explained it all succinctly. “There are far more Albanians than Montenegrins. They have their republic. Why can’t we have ours too? Our policy is simple. We are going to have lots more babies than the Serbs until they have to give us a republic!”

 

The local demographic trends did of course strongly favour the Albanians. A fact not lost on Serbia’s leading writer and philosopher Dobrica Cosic, who back in 1984 told me that Serbia should aim for a painful deal on Kosovo: “better to cut off a cancerous leg to save the body”.

 

The official Serbian default position alas was not to think. Instead crass oppression, partly in the form of an extended series of communist show-trials: after farcical hearings lasting only a couple of days sizeable groups of Albanians young and old would be sent to long terms of imprisonment for their part in the disturbances. Such blatant injustice in this human rights black hole in Europe not far from Rome helped create the radicalised Albanian militants of the late 1990s.

 

Not that anyone other than the inordinately freedom-loving Great Leader of Albania Enver Hohxa and the Kosovo Albanians objected. Everyone from Western conservatives through European social democrats and Marxist pseuds to Chinese/Soviet communist hardliners and on to ‘non-aligned’ Third World dictators (albeit for quite different reasons) wanted ‘stability in the Balkans’, featuring above all the ‘territorial integrity of post-Tito Yugoslavia’. If that meant the uppity Albanians (and their nasty calls for an ‘ethnically pure Kosovo’) getting a severe thrashing (again), so be it.

 

But the Cold War ended. Yugoslavia ceased to be a ‘pillar of stability in the Balkans’. Non-MTS.

 

Now the Kosovo Albanians could point to the unrelieved ghastliness of Slobodan Milosevic and start to turn parts of world opinion in their favour. However, let’s remember that through their successive electoral boycotts they helped both create and sustain Milosevic’s power, deliberately following a hard-core painful policy of ‘the worse, the better’.

 

This explains why the Bosnian Muslims (Bosniacs) have little if any sympathy for the Kosovo independence cause – they suffered horrible losses from the Kosovo Albanians’ studious passivity in the early 1990s, which allowed Milosevic and his villainous allies to hammer away at Bosnia without fearing a ‘second flank’ against him in the south.

 

When Albanian insurgents/rebels/militants/terrorists (pick your epithet) did open that front in 1998, they knew they could count on a violent and excessive reaction from Milosevic. It happened.

 

And lo!, thanks to Milosevic it came about that for the first time in a thousand years the prospect of Albanians Winning and Serbs Losing in Kosovo started to gain some international approval. NATO intervened militarily against Serbia in 1999 to stop Serb forces achieving a knock-out victory. This opened the way to the placing of the Province under UN control but effectively on Albanian terms, thereby giving a de facto green light to Kosovo independence claims.

 

These claims rely on a strikingly ruthless and un-European single-mindedness. 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?”

 

This sort of thing is not what today’s European leaders supported by the foppish naifs who inhabit EU Working Groups are able to understand, let alone confront. So instead they park on the argument that because Kosovo’s Albanians doff their caps and sign every human rights commitment we serve up to them, Kosovo’s independence will be another beautiful expression of European modern multi-culturalism.

 

If Kosovo does declare independence in the coming days or weeks, let’s at least be honest.

 

This development will give some two million people a fair chance to run their own affairs after many decades of wretchedly incompetent and violent rule or attempted rule from Belgrade. Good.

 

But it also will be an act of substantive ethnic partition of a democratic country in modern Europe, plus a formidable triumph for the most hard-line Kosovo Albanians and their relatives’ extended organised crime networks. Above all, after we rightly plonked a Monty Python foot on Greater Serbia and Greater Croatia this will be a victory for ‘Greater Albania’. And maybe not the last one.

 

So appropriate congratulations to Albanian Will, ably exemplified by steely self-sacrifice, wily use of force and bravura political marketing and manipulation.

 

This development also will represent a deeper radical change in Europe’s post-Cold War logic. After having started disastrously when Yugoslavia began to collapse when the Cold War ended, Europe (viz Western Europe) eventually lifted its game. In close and often rancorous but at least intelligent partnership with the United States and Russia we together helped contain the crisis and then imposed a settlement on Bosnia and Herzegovina’s warring communities plus Serbia and Croatia. This helped us all manage various messy situations dotted around the former Soviet Union.

 

Kosovo’s independence by contrast probably will be achieved without clear EU unity (in itself a sign that something is not quite right) and in the face of strenuous if cynical opposition from Moscow. What exactly that portends for Russia’s policy elsewhere and how we all react to it remains to be seen. But something important will have been lost.

 

It did not have to be this way.

 

In Bosnia we said to the three hostile communities “Look, stop fighting! Get along with each other in a moderate way in a single state framework. No more Balkanisation!” Just down the road in Kosovo we have said “Er, oh dear, if you Albanians want to leave a democratic Serbia, who are we to stop you? Indeed, have lots of our taxpayers’ money, with very few strings attached!”

 

Why is our former Yugoslavia policy dealing with the break-up of that modestly sized European country not based now on even minimal common sense policy consistency?

 

This is more a psychological than political question.

 

It would have been reasonable to play this one very long - to tell the Serbs and Kosovo Albanians that there would be no discussion of status until both had lifted their game and moderated their behaviour towards significant European standards as part of a shared trajectory towards full EU membership.

 

Or we could have accepted Reality with a small dash of Fairness (sometimes a wise approach) and said that neither side wins all of Kosovo, so the territory has to be shared somehow, eg through formalised EU-supervised power-sharing. Or negotiated border changes. Or the creation of ‘Entities’ as underpinned the Dayton outcome in Bosnia. Or maybe something based on Swiss-style cantonisation.

 

The Serbs have put all these ideas and more forward, drawing on Europe’s own myriad successful examples. They invariably have been treated with EU/US disdain as a cheap trick intended to promote ‘mono-ethnicity’.

 

More importantly, the Albanians/Kosovars have made clear that they would not respect any such nuanced approaches and indeed would simply brush them (ie us) aside. Neither Europeans nor Americans have been prepared to stand up to this blackmail. Nor have we been ready to allow Serbia to do so.

 

Thus it is that another notable building-block from the Versailles Treaty following WW1 finally falls away. Will independence settle the Kosovo Question? Yes. Exactly like the Versailles settlement did.

 

While we all wrestle with the fearsomely complex policy issues surrounding Kosovo, one overwhelming fact has to be faced.

 

It is that successive Serbian leaders unerringly backed by stupidly populist Serbian media have gone out of their way to offer the Kosovo Albanians, their fellow citizens, nothing but contempt.

 

Back in 2001-03 I tried to explain to then President Kostunica and his entourage that it made no sense to insist that Kosovo was part of Serbia but make no meaningful gestures towards its population. In principle they should be addressed as potential voters, not rabid sub-human enemies.

 

When, for example, a truck containing the bodies of Albanians massacred by Milosevic’s forces was found in the Danube, I urged Kostunica’s team to aim to win international praise by eg organising a decent high-profile ceremony in their honour and sending personal messages to all their relatives. I tried to get through to them that some sort of civilised European human gesture would be right in itself, plus a strong sign that post-Milosevic Serbia understood the way international opinion was formed and wanted to be a nimble part of it.

 

Back came the appalling answer. “There are many mass graves in and around Belgrade from WW2 – what difference does another one make?”.

 

Sometimes it happens that others get things they don’t fully deserve. But when that happens you can’t credibly complain much if you do get exactly what you deserve.

 

As far as Kosovo is concerned, having accepted and applauded this sort of leadership for a very long time Serbia is likely to end up with exactly what it deserves. 

 

Nothing.

On the subject of good drafting, this says everything that needs to be said about the Archbishop of Canterbury and today's Chattering Classes.

What a truly fine piece of work.

Last week I was attempting to train some EU officials in the art of writing impactful political reports.

My theory always was that if one's work from Post was to be actually read by someone somewhere ploughing dispiritedly through the mass of dull stuff on an official desk or in an official email Inbox, one had to do whatever it took to catch their eye: 

"Ah, to be back in the Balkans. The all-pervading aroma of grilled meat, plum brandy and smuggled cigarettes. Faded but unmistakeably naff curtains. Groups of sexy black leather-jacketed Balkanites of all genders huddled in corners, peering suspiciously at foreigners. All this before you leave the Embassy..."

Or this:

"NATO dare not end up looking like a high-tech tank stuck in the Balkan mud surrounded by dancing Stone Age warriors..."

Such self-indulgent penmanship does get read, usually to rather mixed reviews. But it is not enough to be Read. Nor is it enough to be Right. You have to be both those - and Convincing.

That's the supreme drafting skill. Can it be taught?