Blogoir: April

More on this subject via Instapundit who compares the bloody quagmire in Chicago to violence in Mosul, Iraq:

Still, they're different: One has crooked officials, violent gangs with their hooks into government and law enforcement, and a culture of corruption that has resisted the central government's effects to clean it up, and the other is a city in Iraq.

As previously discussed, one of the Problems with Government these days is its philosophically confused preoccupations with targets.

Yet HMG did not start this madness.

Back in the 1930s one leadership set ambitious targets, and told its functionaries to go forth and meet them.

Which they did.

Arncha sick of all those articles about 'fat cats' in the City and elsewhere,  proclaimed to be ripping us off right and left?

The Daily Mail has them. The Independent urges revolt against them. A soon-to-be disgraced former Minister says that they should be 'made' to hand over their money.

And P Toynbee's headline writer turns them into one word, not two!

Although even the Guardian puts in a good word for them now and again.

A couple of points.

First, whereas politicians wanting a cheap headline rave away against City fat cats, they do not have a go at footballing/golf/tennis/pop-star fat cats who earn more money to less overall public utility. Thus in 2006 the average (average) Premier League player salary was £676,000 pounds per year - before bonuses.

Why is it OK to give vast rewards to footballers, clever at football as they are for a while, but not to financiers?

Maybe the public sees the results of football and understands them (this one is a nifty example), whereas the 'results' of financiers are thought to be less obvious and/or trivial, and therefore less meritorious - 'all they do is juggle money' etc.

More generally, a cosmic failure of our education system is that it does not explain to children where stuff comes from. This (deliberately?) creates a culture prone to moronic populism and irresponsibility.

Why exactly can we go into a shop and buy cheaply untold thousands of different products, each one there thanks to the ingenuity of individuals and teams of people all round the planet?

When we flush the loo do we give thanks to the clever engineers decades ago who saved us from sewage-filled streets?

When we turn on the computer to read PollyToynbee droning on about 'fatcats' or to watch Robbie Keane lash one into the net, do we praise the millions of people out there who make that stunning technical feat possible, none of whom we have met or paid directly for their efforts?

Why do poor people in Africa get to benefit massively from cheap mobile phones without having invented a single component of them? What/who is creating these astounding machines, making them cheaper and better every day, and distributing them across Africa's vast distances?

The point is that we are all by any historical standards Fat and Greedy Mice, living selfishly and often gracelessly off the cleverness of other people.

The dimmest laziest welfare recipient whinging and wheezing on benefit-funded cigarettes is guilty of a far greater crime than the Fattest City Cat. He/she is leeching on the labour and intellect of others now and before us, while offering nothing in return.

The City person is working to give that leech some sort of chance by making the planet's money match up with the planet's clever ideas. Big complex risky stuff. Deserving generous rewards if they get it right.

Or, to be precise:

Have you ever looked for the root of production? Take a look at an electric generator and dare tell yourself that it was created by the muscular effort of unthinking brutes.

Try to grow a seed of wheat without the knowledge left to you by men who had to discover it for the first time.

Try to obtain your food by means of nothing but physical motions - and you'll learn  that man's mind is the root of all the goods produced and of all the wealth that has ever existed on earth.

But you say that money is made by the strong at the expense of the weak? What strength do you mean?

It is not the strength of guns or muscles. Wealth is the product of man's capacity to think. Then is money made by the man who invents a motor at the expense of those who did not invent it?

Is money made by the intelligent at the expense of the fools? By the able at the expense of the incompetent? By the ambitious at the expense of the lazy?

Money is made - before it can be looted or mooched - made by the effort of every honest man, each to the extent of his ability. An honest man is one who knows that he can't consume more than he has produced...

After leaving the FCO in a noisy cloud of sparks, my former colleague Craig Murray has made a name for himself as an activist promoting all sorts of Progressive Causes.

This BBC account from 2004 does a good job in summarising some of the professional issues the Murray saga threw up (so to speak).

I don't recall having any significant dealings with Craig during my FCO career - we were on different FCO circuits.

But I do recall dropping Craig an email of congratulations when he first started firing off some heavy reports to London pointing up the scale human rights abuses in Uzbekistan.

He made good sense in pointing to examples (eg the Taleban) where 'the West' had backed local extremists for short-term reasons, those extremists thereby flourishing and eventually taking on virulent anti-Western positions; it was (he argued) unwise to invest in the Uzbekistan regime for Iraq reasons, only to stoke up trouble for the future.

However, in subsequent FCO reports he banged on in a similar vein to and beyond the point of being persuasive or even credible. I dropped him another private email saying that while I did not follow the Uzbek/Iraq question in any detail, he came over as getting too shrill: maybe he should think about other more subtle ways of trying to win (or at least make a small policy gain or two in) this argument.

Anyway, it all then crashed as far as his career was concerned.

For anyone interested in this matter as an example of professional ethics and technique, Craig Murray's website is noteworthy as it contains various official telegrams and other documents of the sort rarely seen by the public.

Craig asserts that they go to show the justice of his case. I am not so sure. 

See eg this telegram he sent about US foreign policy sent a few weeks after the US-led attack on Iraq began. Full of passion, even a good point or two. But as a piece of supposedly high-level FCO work it fell far short of the professional standard needed to make a serious policy impact. Not a considered, persuasive and useful contribution - more a Shrill Noise. (Note: Having made my own fair share of unpersuasive shrill noises down the years, I feel qualified to pronounce.)

Or this memo. Craig says in a conspiracy theory way that the names were blacked out for reasons of national security. Really? Some yes, others maybe. I suspect a proportion were excluded for normal personal data protection reasons (I too have asked for some documents with no security angle, only to have them returned with others' names blacked out for this more or less laudable reason).

This note of a full and frank discussion of Craig's encounter with FCO Personnel gives an unusually long account of a system grappling in a seemingly balanced and fair way with a morass of problems - personal and professional and policy - in the small Post which he had been leading. Craig says that he comes over well. Indeed. But so does the FCO.

Motto for aspiring diplomats. This is not just another job.

It is not enough to be Passionate, or even Right.

You must also be Convincing.

A long self-promoting piece by David Edgar on how generations of 'renegades' have left the Left is worth a quick glance, if only to see how some privileged people can end up in a severe state of confusion.

Edgar names many renegades. Thus:

[C]ommentators Nick Cohen, David Aaronovitch and Andrew Anthony all had left-wing parents, and were involved in political campaigning around race, gender and class in the 1970s (Aaronovitch was one of Manchester University's notorious University Challenge team, who answered "Marx", "Lenin" or "Trotsky" to every question). Although none of them has abandoned the whole progressive package, their main target is a left-liberal intelligentsia, which, as they see it, opposed the overthrow of a fascist dictator, Saddam Hussein, and is now in an unholy Faustian alliance - justified by modish, postmodern cultural relativism - with the far right

Andrew Anthony himself responds briskly here. If you can bear it, scroll down through some of the ensuing feuding in the Comments. Sarka's comment is one of the few firmly anchored in balance and real life.

Norman Geras too has weighed in. His contribution has the great advantage of being readable and clear.

My view?

It is now established beyond any scientific doubt that if you have too great a role for 'the state' and try to control market mechanisms, even for altruistic reasons, things get in a bad way for everyone. Scope for intelligent debate on getting the balance right here. But if you opt for a Better More State Than More Market paradigm, you are unlikely to make much sense, or achieve lasting positive results.

Plus, if we want a reasonable but in historical terms highly unusual society in which men and women have something close to equal rights and responsibilities, everyone has to stand hard against all violent religious extremists who hate such freedoms and threaten and carry out terroristic violence against us to achieve their reactionary ends. This is non-negotiable.

Some of these extremists plot against us overseas, raising tricky moral/political/realpolitik questions of self-defence. Do we defend ourselves in the first ditch (their back yard) or the last one (our front yard) or somewhere in-between? Scope for intelligent debate and disagreement here over means, but not the principle.

As for D Edgar, who can take seriously someone who still calls the Russian Revolution "one of the most radical and progressive achievments of the 20th century"? This progressive event led progressively to countless millions of people being starved to death or murdered. Maybe he should get out of the theatre and go to the cinema more often to see some real Progress?

Edgar mentions various famous writers and others who suffered from 'disappointment' at the ruinous events ('crises') which ensued, and moved to the Right. The astonishing thing of course is not that some Leftists jumped ship in the face of all these horrors. It is that any of them stayed on it.

And are still there, advertising their new plays and sniping at those who have been more honourable and honest than they are. What a waste of time.

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

But what about a busy weekend in Chicago these days?

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

If so, why?

As Zimbabwe's weekly/daily/hourly/minutely inflation rate soars into unimaginable numbers which portend possible mass starvation, normal people may be wondering how that exotic phenomenon actually works in practice.

Where do all those pretty new banknotes for a bazillion Zimbabwean dollars each in fact come from?

From Europe, of course!

One of the very worst aspects of returning to the UK after many years abroad is the sense of a serious loss of respect for the quality of public spaces. 

Plenty has been written about the dirty disorganised WCs at some of our airports. When I left my posting in Warsaw in September I arrived back here on the overnight Dieppe/Newhaven ferry. The desolation and decay of the first buildings a visitor to this country sees after disembarking there were as remarkable as they were depressing.

Or try the public car parks in Oxford, or Faringdon, or Hemel Hempstead which suck in alarming sums of money in parking fees every day, yet are neglected and dirty - where is all that money going?

Or try Didcot station. The approach road to the station from the A34 is lined for a couple of miles with serious litter. One gets to the station via the dirty car park and its unreliable ticket machines: another huge daily earner for some or other official body, not kept to a decent standard.

At the station there has been for some weeks a big fancy sign announcing a "What Do You Think of Didcot Station?" initiative? No doubt some friendly PR firm has done well from this nice 'public information' contract. Yet this money would have been better spent on simply tidying the place up. 

Two FCO examples.

As FCO Deputy Political Director in 1999/2000 I had a good office along from the Foreign Secretary's suite. The elaborate Victorian tiled floors along the long corridors are impressive, but noisy. Many documents still need to be circulated via messengers pushing trolleys.

One day I heard an appallingly loud squeaking noise from an unoiled trolley trundling in my general direction. When it got close to my door I called out in my cheeriest tone of voice "Can someone please fix that squeaking?"

Imagine my surprise when an angry trolley-pusher head looked into my room and proclaimed: "It's not my bloody job to oil the wheels!" I politely indictated that if someone procured a can of WD40 I'd do it myself.

When Ambassador in Belgrade I came back to London for meetings at the FCO. The Main Courtyard in an appalling state - unswept, litter and cigarette butts strewn everywhere. Not to mention litter all along King Charles St in the various alcoves of the building.

Here was the Foreign Ministry of one of the world's most influential countries, pushing away at all sorts of global agenda issues yet unable to keep its front door clean.

On returning to Post I send a vexed email to the Senior Management pointing out that the Foreign Ministry in Belgrade was better kept than ours in London. This seems to have led to a determined clean-up, and eventually even some window-boxes of flowers. 

But the interesting question is, how it was allowed to get into this state in the first place? Hundreds of senior British diplomats every day were walking across the Courtyard, a showpiece for high-level visitors to our country, and did nothing about the evident mess.

Existential management challenge. How exactly does an organisation maintain a sense of its own self-respect and so keep up at all levels pride in how the work is done?

Why are so many public facilities in this country dirty and revolting, not that mass-use privately owned facilities such as supermarket car-parks are necessarily much better?

One problem is that for some twenty years we have seen restless attempts to set grand Government Targets, which really miss subjects such as this. If an activity can't be measured, it either does not exist or is not that important, hence 'cuts' can be made there.

So standards of care and maintenance drift inexorably downwards, both for lack of money and because top management is much too busy being 'strategic' to make sure that the basics are being done well. 

Are our Ministries and local authorities incentivised to have measurable piles of 'health and safety' circulars and public information campaigns about cleanliness, rather than unmeasurably smart, clean and businesslike premises?

Is keeping roadside verges clean seen as a dreary cost, rather than an end in itself? 

Memo to next Government: call in the nation's two top experts to sort all this out.

Greetings, readers from EU Referendum, who have seen the interesting comment there by Helen (I assume Szamuely) on one of my earlier entries about different national negotiating styles. Helen calls me on whether the Russian approach to negotiating in fact works, giving some examples where the picture at best is mixed.

This subject has prompted various other comments and emails. See eg this solid point:

I am enjoying your pieces on bloody-mindedness. It does of course make the Russians formidable negotiators. But I do wonder if the analysis needs to consider how this applies to an iterative process of negotiation, in which you (a) yes, aim to get what you want and (b) are prepared to act tough to get it, but (c) not at the cost of the trust and goodwill you will need to negotiate in future. Otherwise you eventually end up playing in the sand-pit without any friends...

So I am on to something. I will offer More, with examples from the diplomatic coal-face.

For now just to say that to a degree I agree with Helen. It does not follow that being bloody-minded or even threatening force actually works. So much depends on context, the objective balance of forces, how far one's bloody-mindedness is intelligently marshalled to focus on a specific objective, how one balances different Objectives, and just sheer technique on the day. Russian examples aplenty.

Nor, of course, am I saying that Might is Right.Or the smart way to go, or to bet.

My (very) basic point is simply this.

That confidence and determination play a big part in negotiating. And that if you are prepared to inflict pain on your negotiating partner(s) (or at least credibly threaten to do so) plus are ready to endure pain (or at least credibly project a willingness to do so), you have a much wider set of options - and possible outcomes.

Take international piracy on the high seas, amazingly a growing problem again.

This approach is, in my view, insane, and in some sense actually immoral in that it puts all the vast authority of our Government and British Law behind obviously perverse incentive schemes. It dumbs us down in policy and presentational terms.

Wrong in principle. Wrong in technique.

Hence in the unending negotiation between the Forces of Right and the Forces of Wrong, we are needlessly coming over as ... silly ... weak.

Not only pirates notice such things.

The Sunday Times today writes about expensive Sunningdale courses for civil servants on how to comport themselves and look nice.

The case for the defence? A spokesman for the school said: “Many senior politicians have had training in how they present themselves, right back to Margaret Thatcher and Bill Clinton. Senior executives have training in how to use their voice and presence, so why not senior civil servants?

Answer? Because, fathead, this is obviously not an appropriate use of taxpayers' money.

However...

... there is a problem here. 

Over my own long years in the Civil Service I witnessed a real decline in the standards of dress and, for lack of a better word, attitude.

Sorry, former colleagues, but it has to be said. See eg the way too many British officials look when they roam overseas: ill-fitting clothes hanging clumsily over ill-fitting bodies, uncleaned shoes, haircuts delivered by visually challenged hairdressers, and so on. The collective lack of stylefulness is terrific.

Contrast this with the look and bounce of colleagues in Polish, Serbian and even post-war Bosnian Ministries: on less money they manage to convey a sense of professional pride and associated smartness.

Part of the problem is that in fact our civil servants are in fact struggling to make ends meet on low salaries and high costs of living. Something suffers, and it includes clothes/style.

But it is not just that. There is a deeper attitudinal problem. An undefinable but real enough collective sense of ... tiredness. Some sort of inarticulated glum indifference. A crass pseudo-PoMo pride in not being proud, in having nothing to be proud about, even in dissing the very notion of pride as boring/irrelevant.

Gimmicks such as 'dress down Friday' make things worse. In the USA this means Smart Casual, with plenty of Smart. In the UK civil service it just means scruffy.

And it starts spreading to the rest of the week. Line managers these days are wary of hauling in a junior colleague to tell him/her to smarten up. Could such action lead to Floods of Tears? Procedures for harassment/bullying or somesuch?

Or merely a dreary ennervating unwinnable row about how an out-of-touch 'establishment' is once again trying to impose 'old-fashioned values'?

So standards arising from pride - and pride arising from standards - drift forlornly down, desiccated leaves zig-zagging to earth in a chill autumn breeze.

Task One for the next Government. Take Presentation Seriously.

Dump these courses. Sack those responsible for setting them up. Ban image consultants and professional executive coaches and all that other prissy rubbish from entering any government building.

Instead set a firm new professional dress code for all civil servants, with Ministers and their offices setting a tip-top example. Launch a blitz on tidying and cleaning government offices from top to bottom. Take down all signs attached to walls/doors by sellotape.

Anyone who does not like it can just leave.

Via Arts and Letters Daily this compare and contrast clash between two modern women and their attitudes.

In one corner: writer Rebecca Solnit on how men patronise women.

In the other: anatomically all-present-and-correct(!) Amy Alkon, Advice Goddess, on how Rebecca Solnit is "subjective, delusional, overwrought, dishonest" (not to mention sniveling, meek, mewling and many other things).

Stand well back.

More hi-octane prose from (of course) Camille Paglia bearing down on Hillary Clinton and her prospects.

Questions.

Camille says this :

Furthermore, Hillary's mythomania and her chameleon-like daily alterations of persona and voice are unsettling. (Even Hillary's eye colour is fake: she wears blue contact lenses.) No male candidate enjoys Hillary's options as a woman to tailor her costume to the audience.

Is this true?

Would it be better for them (and for us?) if men running for office did have a full 'womanly' range of such colour-coded options?

And does it really help Hillary to have such options if she apparently uses them in a contrived way?

Would the consistently classic and classy look of Condoleezza Rice be more persuasive for men and women voters alike? 

(OK OK, Condi too sometimes makes some unexpected fashion statements.)

On my Foreign Office travels I have picked up a goodly selection of 'European' languages to add to my distant A-Level French and Latin and O-Level German and Spanish.

First, back in 1981 I learned lot of Serbian/Croatian/Bosnian (then called 'Serbo-Croat').

After that I reached a reasonable standard in Afrikaans - one of very few diplomats in South Africa who learned it.

Then I had a crash course in Russian, but I never quite got on top of it; the Russian vocabulary is just too wide, not to mention the extra layers of grammar piled on to the usual Slavic basics. I nonetheless ended up being able to muddle my way through meetings in Russian with Russian diplomats at the MFA as long as they did most of the talking.

And then finally in 2003 after some eleven weeks of feverish tuition I learned Polish, to the point where I could read the newspapers and follow TV and even get through official meetings at a high level without an interpreter from Polish into English.

I suspect that Polish is the hardest Slav language. It has a wide vocabulary, most of Russian's grammatical quirks plus all sorts of other unique features drawing deep from Poland's courtly past. 

Thus Poles usually do not address each other as 'you' ("may I offer you a cup of tea, Mary?"). They instead talk to each other in the third person, even to work colleagues whom they have known for years:  "Would Madam Mary like a cup of tea?" All a bit linguistically and even psychologically ... heavy to most outsiders.

My Conclusions after that lot?

1)     The most valuable subject I did at school was Latin. It opened the way to picking up lots of French and Spanish fairly easily, plus the grammar gave me a strong head start in all the Slav languages.

2)     Language text books are alas written by language teachers, not language learners.

Language teachers are rather serious about their subject. They also are snooty about how utterly unlike any other language 'their' language is. So when I started to learn Russian it was obvious to me that knowing masses of Serbo-Croat helped. But the Russian ladies teaching the course sniffily dismissed that background as primitive irrelevant 'Church Slavonic'.

This meant that I lost precious weeks being kept with other FCO colleagues starting from scratch. When I finally nagged the system into letting me have personal lessons, the teachers were amazed at how much faster I progressed - they had not wanted to accept that Serbian gave me excellent chances of making intelligent guesses in Russian.

3)     Where language teachers and textbooks go wrong is in treating those new to the language as dimwits who must laboriously work through the language in a linear fashion, one step at a time. One is stuck with fatuous vocab: Juri is a boy. He eats bread. I like bread too. And Natasha likes bread. We all like bread.  

This seems to me to be wrong in principle 

My old Afrikaans teacher happened to love Latin. He told me how he had coached a sixth former from zero Latin to degree standard within a year. They had started by spending two hard weeks poring over the whole of the grammar in one go, looking at the patterns of endings. That accomplished they had gone straight into Julius Caesar, learning the real language from interesting texts. 

4)     Language teachers are perfectionists who hate short-cuts and approximations, and so fail to spend proper time describing the shape and structure of the language as a whole. If students know something about that they can much sooner start to make reasonable guesses and communicate faster, if not necessarily always accurately.

Think about a pointillist painter who first covers the canvas with dots of blue, then dots of red and yellow and so on. The overall pattern and sense of the final picture will start to emerge fairly early on, even if much of the detail is blurry until late on.

Contrast this with a computer which prints out all the coloured dots of a picture micro-line by micro-line - each line will emerge 100% perfect but only after half the work is finished will it become clear exactly what is being depicted.

5)     Another typical failure of Slav language teaching is not to teach the language by looking first at the 500 or so key roots and how they are used to make up words, not least because many of the deep core roots for words are basically the same across the Slavic language space. By spotting the roots and the numerous prefixes and suffixes which might be battened on to them, one more quickly (again) spots patterns.

In English the equivalent is a bit like learning that the root letters urb (from the Latin!) have something to do with cities. Knowing that one can start spotting the root in urban, suburban, suburbs, urbanisation, urbane and so on.

6)     Nothing is better than fear in getting someone who has a decent passive grasp of a language actually to start speaking it. I was not going very far in real-life Serbian with all its witty slang until I was sent off as a junior Second Secretary to tour Bosnia for a week and come back and report.

Almost no-one there whom I met spoke English. I was on my own. And the words started to babble out, far from accurately but well enough to be comprehensible.

7)     But one soon hits a plateau. When one is able to get by well in a foreign language, people very rarely point out errors. Partly through normal politeness. And partly because many smaller nations are amazed that anyone has bothered to learn anything at all about their language, which of course is invariably one of the hardest in the world. 

So it gets harder and harder to improve on the finer points, even if one's vocabulary tends to increase. Silly errors get embedded.

Sta da vam kazem?

Just say that you work for a major media outlet. But you are not a nice person.

So you send send a website you do not like a message via the site's Contact facility:

I look forward to the day when you pigs get your throats cut....

But you do not realise that the tech-savvy recipient can dig a bit and work out where that message originated.

Then the fun starts.

Scroll down to see the fascinating technical aspects of this sort of thing laid out in all their glory.

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

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

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

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

Extremists?

Or what they in fact are?  Armed criminals?

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

What is unfolding now in Zimbabwe is what we would have seen in Serbia in 2000 if Milosevic had had his way in the elections which brought him down.

An extended attempt to avoid declaring a result through trite, pompous bureaucratic and legal manoeuvres. This is aimed at taking the psychological momentum out of the opposition's victory while relying on international media attention to wander away as nothing much happens.

End result? Manifold opportunities to 'fix' a new outcome while beating up one's opponents. Mugabe and his villains ramble on. The country sinks further towards total collapse.

This pitiful behaviour naturally prompts inane calls for 'dialogue' at the UN in New York: "The solution to the problem of Zimbabwe lies in the hands of the people of Zimbabwe..."

Indeed it does. As it lay with the Serbian people, who stormed the Parliament building in Belgrade and threw their oppression out of the window.

In these situations outside politicians usually urge 'restraint'.

Why?

If it becomes clear that a country is being stolen and plundered by its clique of leaders, the only thing the mass of ordinary people can do is rise up and attack them. This is nothing more than self-defence, after all, against the vast violence being perpetrated by the regime against their lives and prospects.

Many people may die. But they at least will die honourably in a good cause, rather than die listlessly from starvation and disease.

Zimbabweans!

Follow the example of Serbia! Go for it!

While there is still something to salvage.

Mugabe is worse than the white supremacist leader, Ian Smith, who he overthrew. He has murdered more black Africans than the apartheid villains Hendrik Verwoerd, John Forster and P W Botha.

Reading this I come away with a clear view that Peter Tatchell disapproves of Presidents Mugabe and Mbeki.

Is there a case for the defence?

My observations on Power and Purpose attracted this interesting thought from someone in the Mini containing my ever-growing army of readers, himself once closely involved in British government sharp-end business:

It always struck me that the FCO was truly excellent when faced with a bad situation. They could be relied on to negotiate a solution that was pretty good in the circumstances - probably far better than the UK deserved. 

It was when the situation was not bad that problems arose - when there was (initially) the possibility of a genuinely good outcome with no need for compromise by the UK. It was almost as if that possibility were automatically discounted, with the diplomats eagerly throwing away our advantages so as to get into their comfort zone, which (as one would have thought it) was paradoxically the uncomfortable area of tough hand to hand negotiation on a fiercely-contested diplomatic battlefield. 

In due course, the good-solution-in-the-circumstances would be achieved - but not the excellent solution that was once a real possibility.

A deep point is made here, not so much about our policies but our instincts. What do we think negotiation is actually trying to achieve? And how determined are we to get our way?

One rather bland view has it that the Aims of Political Negotiation are (a) to maximise interests and (b) to reach agreement.

But surely the Aim is to get what you want, or as damn close to it as possible: agreement now may be the best outcome, or not - Life Goes On.

It's all as Lenin said: Who (does what to) Whom?

• Can you inflict Pain/Cost on them?
• Can they inflict Pain/Cost on you?
• Can you define the bottom line by blocking a deal everyone else wants?
• Can someone else block a deal you want? What will you pay to avoid that?

Perhaps the most striking example of Blocking around these days is the Greece's utter (and to non-Greeks utterly baffling) intransigence on the name of its neighbour Macedonia (or Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia as it is 'provisionally known).

Greece somehow has decided that if Macedonia were allowed to call itself Macedonia that would amount to endorsing certain teritorial ambitions towards Greek territory. So Greece is cheerily blocking significant European/NATO integration processes involving Macedonia on this basis.

And they succeed. Seemingly no-one wants to inflict real pain on Greece to change its cost-benefit analysis.

Tail wags dog. Macedonia loses.

All this helps explain why the EU works the way it does. You have Power only if you can block. Hence readiness to have Voting on ever more issues rather than Consensus, "to get things done".

See also the Mother of All Blockings, the right of veto for the five Permanent Members of the UN Security Council. Once that right is there it does not need to be used often. As Nimzowitsch (maybe) said, "the threat is stronger than the execution."

Whatever. It boils down to a simple proposition.

How bloody-minded are you ready to be to get what you want, via negotiation or otherwise?

If the answer is 'not very', do not be surprised if others more bloody-minded than you get more of what they want - at your expense.

See France and Greece in the EU, passim

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

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

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

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

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

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

Calm down, Polly!

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

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

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

Good question.

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

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

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

And quite unlike feminist ambitions going back to 1968:

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

Back in April 1986 Foreign Secretary Sir Geoffrey Howe made a powerful speech at the Lord Mayor's Diplomatic Banquet in London in which he called for an an end to the global agriculture subsidy race. I remember it well, as I helped him draft it.

Some changes have happened since then. But not on a big enough scale.

Now, 22 years later as world food prices rise French Agriculture Minister Michel Barnier blames ... markets. He also urges the EU to produce more food.

And he's right, up to a point. Supply is not keeping up with demand, in one way or the other. But why?

Who invented the idiotic incentive system which encourages Europeans to produce less, whilst consumers are obliged to pay more?

Are that sort of absurdity and the new price surges occurring because markets are not doing their job?

Or is in fact the the market mechanism doing exactly what it should do, namely telling us something about the folly of the huge array of government subsidy schemes round the planet which distort food production and distribution beyond any sensible measure?

Oscar Wilde famously wrote that Life imitates Art far more than Art imitates Life. It is always a pleasure to see that axiom in operation.

Which is why today I enjoyed reading the views of UN Special Rapporteur for the Right to Food (sic) Jean Ziegler:

Mr Ziegler called on the International Monetary Fund to change its policies on agricultural subsidies and to stop supporting only programs aimed at debt reduction. Agriculture should also be subsidied in regions where it ensured the survival of local populations, he said.

Mr Ziegler also accused the European Union of agricultural dumping in Africa. "The EU finances the exports of European agricultural surpluses to Africa ... where they are offered at one half or one third of their (production) price," the UN official charged. "That completely ruins African agriculture," he added.

What a fine fellow. He sounds just like a distinguished European leader who almost described the EU's Common Agricultural Policy as:

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. The most stupid, immoral state-subsidised policy in human history, give or take Communism.

Mr Ziegler also argued that using arable land to produce biofuel crops was a "crime against humanity".

Meanwhile Egypt, India, China and Vietnam are blocking exports of rice. And Argentina is limiting meat exports.

Am I missing something, or is there a theme here?

The EU's taxpayers via their governments massively subsidise the EU's food production.

The USA's taxpayers via their government massively subsidise biofuel crops ("liquid pork").

Biofuels are being produced on this scale because governments are scurrying around trying to 'do something' on climate change, setting arbitrary targets (which of course the market loyally tries to meet).

Elsewhere government intervention is skewing options and denying choices.

And once a total planetary mess has been created by all these socialistic government schemes, a French Minister says the problem is ... the market?

And the answer is, he says, ... more EU food?

Oh lordy.

The tragedy is not that people talk such nonsense. It is that everyone else does not collapse in fits of laughter.

Here's my answer.

Let's follow Sir Geoffrey Howe's wise advice, albeit belatedly.

Let's quickly negotiate a new global treaty which bans at a stroke (ie on 1 January 2010) all subsidies and trade restrictions on anything that grows. Some of the colossal sums currently wasted on Western food subsidies and 'development assistance' could be used to help subsidy junkies break their sordid habit in a phased way and/or otherwise to help phase in quickly a normal market process. The rest should be given back to taxpayers in sizeable tax cuts.

Food prices would soon start to fall as far more people entered the market round the world, since they finally could sell their produce. Poor countries at last would have a chance to exploit their comparative advantage.

Trade would be free - and fair.

And life generally would be wonderful.