Blogoir: October

Remember this move by the so-called UN Human Rights Council to get global action against 'negative stereotyping of religions'?

The only question is, what does it mean in practice?

As far as I know, a Resolution by the Human Rights Council means nothing at all in itself in formal legal terms, unless over time it mysteriously gets absorbed into mainstream international law and practice.

That has not stopped Eugene Volokh from wondering aloud about a possible US Administration response to the following question from some foreign official, for instance from a conservative Muslim country:

Here you are urging all countries to take effective measures to address and combat any advocacy of religious hatred that constitutes incitement to hostility.

And yet in your own country there are prominent speakers — radio talk show hosts, columnists, bloggers, and the like — are arguing that our brand of supposedly ‘extremist’ Islam is evil, dangerous, and terrorist-coddling.

That sounds to us like advocacy of religious hatred, and it’s certainly incitement to hostility. What are you going to do about it?

See the seven possible replies he identifies.

Nice work.

On a previous posting of mine about the BNP, one Chris made this comment:

After the brouhaha of the BNP Question Time this interview http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00nh6w4 with Kwame Kwei-Armah went unnoticed on Radio 7 (as most things do) and yet (some 26 minutes in) we hear strikingly similar concerns voiced about multiculturalism and miscegenation.

Kwei-Armah laments the fact that 6 out of 10 Afro-Carribean men are in a mixed relationship, he describes this as "assimilation" not integration, responsible for "the death of my tribe" the "disappearance" of my community.

When Griffin says this he sounds ridiculous and dangerous, and when Kwei-Armah says it he is authentic and intellectual.

I was interested to listen to this (Note: the link has now vanished under BBC iPlayer rules). And yes, there after some 26 minutes this actor and award-winning playwright bemoans the fact that the cultural community from Grenada and other parts of the Caribbean is being 'assimilated' because people from it are having relationships with Others.

This, he says, is bad - something precious is being lost.

Is it?

Check out this interesting article on 'language death' which suggests that the spread of variations of English is bound to continue as (crucially) English is relatively easy to learn. Just as languages fade away, so will many current cultural distinctions (and associated prejudices and discrimination) based on them.

Is not that a huge gain for civilisation?

The strange fact of the matter is that the Afrikaners who set up apartheid were cruel and unfair, but they were intellectually honest. Rigid separation of different cultures is a powerful way to keep minority cultures alive and distinct. 

They realised that if you want to do it properly you have no choice but (i) to set up rigid legal classifications of people in each culture concerned, and (ii) have some concept in law of 'group rights' to allow geographical clusters of one culture to keep others out as far as possible.

And it worked:

A senior anti-apartheid intellectual/activist once told me that one of the best-kept secrets of the anti-apartheid struggle was the fact that apartheid had - through its massive policies of enforced 'separate development' - kept alive lots of African traditions and attitudes which otherwise would have been lost to pell-mell modernity. A precious legacy.

Hence in UK today it is minority community leaders who insist on all the dreary bureaucracy that goes with explicitly apartheid-style 'racial' or 'ethnic' classification when one applies for jobs (and Parliamentary seats...), as a messy way of somehow trying at least to keep tabs on how each supposed 'minority' community is faring. 

But let's face it.

Some cultures are authentic and vibrant and richly deserving of some sort of protection against 'assimiliation', however vilely they treat eg women and gays.

But others (working-class 'white' males, middle-class rural huntsfolk) are deemed in progressive circles to be per se pernicious and backward-looking. 

That's just the way it is.

The Comment function is playing up. Here is a good one from Victor Meldrew: 

Judging from this blog, I think you should be cloned and stand in every available seat.

Your use of the phrase "the operational management of complexity" strikes a particular chord. This is a lost art in both the public and private sectors. It is also part of the definition of "leadership".

In the bit of the public sector which I was involved in for 15 years (the police service) strategy and policy were set by press release and eye catching initiatives which nobody really believed in, and which the brighter managers began to realise didn't actually matter.

Given the ever increasing turnover of junior and senior ministers at the Home Office, it became obvious to an ambitious person of Chief Officer rank [some tautology here] that however ridiculous the latest scheme, it was easier to sign up to it than argue against it. Meet today's set of targets and your career would continue its upward curve. Unsuccessful initiatives would be buried without any recrimination, and successful ones would be superseded by the next ministerial incomer's bid for stardom.

After 10 or so years of this, forces are top-heavy with administrators and advisers, front line staff no longer know what they are there for apart from completing reports, their skills base has plummetted, and the public are left vulnerable. I'm sure there are parallels in other areas.

How on earth do you start rolling all that back?

Damn' Good question. But I am hard at work on that cloning suggestion...

Ben:

I hope you do get an appropriate seat Charles. Very well written post, Dave should read it.

And Catherine:

Very best of luck, Charles! No one can accuse you of being in it for the money

Thanks, all.

Someone once said: "Democracy is like raft - it never sinks but your feet are always in the water".

My various blog posts on the Kaminski story have caught a wider audience.

So I have decided today to come out.

Back in May this year I, like everyone else, was revolted by the goings-on in Parliament and Government over expenses and other abuses.

What especially annoyed me was the fact that over some 28 years in the FCO I had been meticulously careful in spending public money, both under the rules and within the spirit of the rules.

Had I been caught straying in either respect, I (rightly) would have been punished. And Labour Ministers/MPs would be pointing to my punishment as evidence for their own integrity in managing public money.

Yet lo, it turned out that within that world of MPs/MEPs going to the highest levels in all Parties there were far too many people manipulating the allowances/expenses system for heavy personal gain.

So when David Cameron said that people who previously had not been involved in politics might apply to join the Conservative Party Candidates List as part of a wider move to effect a tough spring-clean at Westminster, I thought "why not?"

Thus at the end of May I set in motion the procedures for getting some serious references and formally applying. Which, of course, meant that I had to leap off the non-political fence and join the Conservative Party, which I finally did on 11 August.

That was my first time as a member of any Party since I left Oxford University in 1976, having been briefly on the OU Conservative Association committee during a period of seething left-wing activism including lots of fiery speeches by my co-lawyer at St John's College, one T Blair.

Having applied to get on the Candidates List, one then has to go through a Parliamentary Assessment Board, a half-day series of quite lively and even stressful tests (written and oral). I did that, paying £250 for the privilege, at the end of July. And I passed. See this account of the success of the Conservative initiative to attract new blood into the Party and politics more generally via these PABs.

Once one is on the List, one waits for lists of seats seeking candidates to be put round. Then one has to decide to apply or not.

The fact that one is on the List is private until the person concerns decides to make it public. I chose to maintain my privacy, mainly because I did not expect to win a chance to fight a seat and the moment would pass.

I have applied for only one seat so far, namely Devizes - not far from where we now live. I heard a couple of weeks ago that I had done well enough to be a reserve (in the top eight from some 170 candidates) but not the final six, who present themselves to the Devizes Conservatives tomorrow when the new candidate is to be chosen.

A good first showing. But not good enough. Unless one of the successful six would-be candidates drops out for some reason in the next few hours, that's that. On to the next try, if one suitable for the Crawfs as a whole emerges. 

So there it is.

Some no doubt will now crow that anything I have written about Michal Kaminski or the Labour Party or anything else can be dismissed as typical Tory double-dealing.  

Well, so be it. Nothing I have said about Kaminski was private, confidential or otherwise unavailable information. 

I served as a diplomat under Margaret Thatcher, John Major, Tony Blair and (briefly) Gordon Brown. I rose up through the FCO ranks steadily enough under the Conservatives, enjoying my two years as Geoffrey Howe's FCO speechwriter.

But my FCO career accelerated under New Labour, since Robin Cook in particular appreciated my quirky energy and grasp of Balkan issues, as did No 10. My file of FCO appraisals contains many compliments from Ministers and politicians from different Parties. In short, I did my job as a politically neutral civil servant.

Now I am again a free person. I am happy to put myself forward to serve the public in a different role. If I am lucky enough to get the opportunity to run for a Parliamentary seat, and then persuade enough voters to vote for me so that I win an election and get in to Parliament, my life will change. If not, not. 

On my blog which has run since early 2008 without a single peep of concern or even interest from anyone in the FCO, I have been critical of the current UK government and its policies on various occasions. But I have been careful not to put out embarrassing tittle-tattle or other really confidential material gleaned from my own career in a way designed to cause deliberate embarrassment. I also have not opined on many issues where my main role in so opining would be to reveal sensitive inside information.  

Of course during 28 years in the FCO I have seen, read and heard plenty of significant and senior things which 'the public' might well like to know. Part of the code of ethics of the civil service involves respecting due professional confidentiality. That is what I have done, using some real-life examples to comment instead to my small but loyal blog readership on deeper issues of principle which rise up and collide with reality in our public life.

On we go.

The Problem of our times is not addressed by fleeting party-political bickering about who does/did what or said what.

It is the operational management of Complexity, at all levels.

We are confronted with far too many private and public institutions which (we are told) are Too Big To Fail - yet also in practice Too Big To Succeed.

Labour as currently constituted has (in my view) no philosophical answer on this question, only an instinct to extend the state in all its modern bossy intrusiveness and a hope to minimise its losses through dumbing down the arguments by smears and gimmicks.

The Conservatives in turn face appalling problems if they do get into office next time round. Where to start in hacking back the state in all its post-modern luxuriant forms, while at the same time keeping intelligent government going?

Goodness knows.

But the answer surely lies at the libertarian/conservative end of the philosophical spectrum - trusting people more, and the state less.

Perhaps it will help to have to hand some independent-minded people on board who believe that and who know the system inside out -  and are ready to wield a large spring-cleaning brush.

Welcome Iain Dale readers.

* * * * *

One of the points made by Labour against Kaminski is that he was in effect playing an anti-semitic card by arguing against the apology by then President Kwasniewski for the Jedwabne massacre.

It's obvious! Any Pole arguing against the form or principle of such an apology has to be at the very least a revolting person, and more probably a horrid anti-semitic extremist.

Well...

80% of Poles at the time (2001) felt that is was good that the crime at Jedwabne had been made public, but a similar 80% did not feel any moral responsibility for it - why should they? Opinion on President Kwasniewski's apology was divided, with a slight margin in favour.

Noting the complexity of these issues, the then Polish PM Jerzy Buzek was very careful in the way he chose his words:

The slaughter in Jedwabne was not perpetrated in the name of the nation, nor in the name of the Polish state. Poland was at the time an occupied country. Yet, if as a nation we have the right to be proud of those Poles who, at the risk of their lives, sheltered Jews then we must also acknowledge the guilt of those who took part in their slaughter.

We are ready to confront even the darkest facts of our history, but in the spirit of truth, without seeking presumed justifications. We will not, however, agree to have the Jedwabne event serve to popularize false theses of Poland's complicity in the Holocaust or about inborn Polish anti-Semitism.

Hmm. Is that formulation not just a bit defensive. Even ... shifty? Surely that crafty drafting masks a deep anti-semitic instinct!

And where is Mr Buzek these days?

Oh yes, here. 

Some things are complicated and deeply morally challenging. Simplify them for banal political purposes at your peril.

The BBC is putting out a deft series of short radio programmes about FCO Valedictory Despatches: Parting Shots.

Here is Part Two.

Featuring various former Excellencies. Myself included, recalling on radio my magnificent suppression of Freedom of the Press.

Here is a deft essay by Stephen T Asma on the role played by monsters (and Zombies!) in helping us deal with real-life extreme people and situations:

You can't know for sure how you will face a headless zombie, an alien face-hugger, an approaching sea monster, or a chainsaw-wielding psycho. Fortunately, you're unlikely to be put to the test.

But you might face similarly terrifying trials. You might be assaulted, be put on the front lines of some war, or be robbed, raped, or otherwise harassed and assailed... And though we can't know for sure how we'll face an enemy soldier or a rapist, it doesn't stop us from imaginatively formulating responses. We use the imagination in order to establish our own agency in chaotic and uncontrollable situations.

And this:

In 2006, four armed men in Kandahar, Afghanistan, broke into the home of an Afghan headmaster and teacher named Malim Abdul Habib. The four men held Habib as they gathered his wife and children together, forcing them to watch as they stabbed Habib eight times and then decapitated him. Habib was the headmaster at Shaikh Mathi Baba high school, where he educated girls along with boys. 

... My point is simply this: If you can gather a man's family together at gunpoint and force them to watch as you cut off his head, then you are a monster. You don't just seem like one; you are one.

A relativist might counter by pointing out that American soldiers at Abu Ghraib tortured some innocent people, too. That, I agree, is true and astoundingly shameful, but it doesn't prove there are no real monsters. It only widens the category and recognizes monsters on both sides of an issue. Two sides calling each other monsters doesn't prove that monsters don't exist.

Quite. Read the whole thing.

An eruption of peace, or something, in Honduras.

The issue will be how far 'President' Zelaya, if he is briefly restored to office, can manage to manoeuvre anything other than a polite handover to his successor after the forthcoming elections.

If these elections do pass off peacefully, Mr Micheletti can be congratulated on having headed off a very messy situation when Zelaya tried to thwart proper process.

This looks like an outcome where all concerned give something and get something, not as usual a result as it ought to be (see eg Kosovo).

Just a pity that a fraction of the US-led effort put into squeezing Honduras was not used to squeeze the Iranian regime during their farcical elections?

Update:   Welcome co-conspirators. Guido is on the case.

* * * * *

The Labour Party are now officially making a total fool of themselves over Michal Kaminski.

Young British diplomats are taught that it is poor technique (and, worse, stupid) to quote someone's words from a magazine without checking that that person really did say and mean those words in the sense they appeared in print.

Yet that is what David Miliband and Denis MacShane have boldly done, quoting Poland's Chief Rabbi Michael Schudrich against Michal Kaminski.

And so they are left looking ridiculous, since the BBC came up with the novel idea of asking Rabbi Schudrich himself what he thought. And his carefully chosen words hit the empty bulk carrier of Labour hopes deep beneath the water-line.

Boom.

Glug glug glug glug ... silence.

Let me put this in simple words.

When the Law and Justice party won the 2005 general elections, there were a few progressive squeaks about the fact that European Civilisation had just ended since Poland had been kidnapped by wild anti-semitic homophobes.

Closer examination suggested that this was not in fact the case.

Which was why in successive high-level meetings between PM Tony Blair and Polish leaders there was not one word of concern expressed publicly or privately by the British side on these scores.

I know because I was in on all these meetings.

And, yes, in 2005 Michal Kaminski himself was there at the No 10 dining-table next to PM Kazimierz Marcinkiewicz, scoffing prawn cocktail as Tony Blair's guest.

If David Miliband will not apologise to Michal Kaminski and sticks to his guns that Kaminski is a disgrace, maybe he should then apologise to the British people for Labour using taxpayers' money to host such a disgraceful person at this high level and then resign?

And while he is at it, he also might explain why not a single word of instructions issued to us in Warsaw from London to take up with the Polish side issues of anti-semitism, Jedwabne and all this other stuff.

What in fact happened was that the Labour leadership energetically supported by D Miliband instructed the Warsaw Embassy to get as close as we could to the Kaczynskis and their party, to help align them with us in successive big negotiations over the EU Budget (2005) and Lisbon Treaty (2007).

Which is what my team and I did, with excellent results - and much praise from the FCO and No 10.

A great comment on Denis MacShane's tragic piece in the Guardian by LatimerAlder:

Surely surely in the past 12 years your totalitarian government must have passed a law against Flogging a Dead Horse?

After all you've made nearly every other human activity illegal.

News just in from New York on a new UN Resolution

We the Peoples of the United Nations

Noting the fact the universal human right that people may and indeed do travel from country to country on business, which means that they do not need to be brutalised en route;

Recalling the United Nations Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment adopted by the General Assembly on 10 December 1984 (especially the good bits about Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment);

Mindful of the need for people to be treated decently;

Determined to rid the world of shoddy service and incompetence in all their myriad forms;

Noting with satisfaction the excellent precedent set by the start of the trial at ICTY of Radovan Karadzic on numerous counts of crimes against humanity;

Further Noting with dismay that on the evening of 25 October the airline Wizz Air was unable to arrange the departure of its scheduled flight from Luton to Katowice at the announced time, viz 2040;

Recoiling in horror at the fact that the aircraft finally left Luton at 0230 approx on 26 October, arriving in Katowice at 0500 with passengers in a severely exhausted condition;

Aghast at the fact that between 1840 when check-in started at Luton and 0130 approx there was as far as could be ascertained not a single announcement made to passengers as to what might be going on with this flight, creating a sense of persecution and Cruel, Inhuman and Degrading treatment among aforesaid passengers;

Hereby Resolve:

Never to fly Wizz Air again.

Never.

And we urge the Security Council to remain seized of the matter, and to consider urgently what legal measures might be taken to compel the management of Wizz Air to explain themselves at the International Criminal Court.

* * * * *

Who says the UN is useless?

I have just spent a grim two days getting to Katowice and back, and am poised to collapse from exhaustion.

So no hard-core blogging tonight.

BUT, since I am now officially in Living Dead mode, I offer you another must-read.

Go and get a drink and set aside twenty minutes to work your way through this fine analysis of how international relations and law and practice might tackle the issue of a Zombie plague spreading in various directions.

Plus the torrent of learned and witty comments which the original brilliant piece by Daniel Drezner has, er, spawned.

The point of such cleverness is (I hope) to posit a dramatic and (I hope) impossible but in some ways plausible scenario in a way which tests our underlying assumptions about what our theories and policies in fact address. 

Plus Zombietude has some human characteristics and therefore we have to keep an eye on ethical dimensions too.

Oh, and our very language. And political correctness.

In fact all human life (and plenty of inhuman life) is there, in large bite-size chunks for everyone.

Anyway.

Enjoy. 

PS:  a loyal reader has alerted me to the fact that when I linked to another site, the reader had to leave behind my page to get there, then click to get back to me. My bad.

So this is the first post which opens a link in a new Window for ease of moving/reading just a tad faster.

Every second counts in a Zombie infestation ...

Update: since I pointed out the egregious mistake on the FCO website as below, the error has been corrected. Glad to see that someone is reading this blog with an eagle eye. But I've left the original blunder quote up for the sake of accuracy.

* * * * *

The FCO website has some pages attempting to explain the Lisbon Treaty.

Memo to Next Government: insist that people who post material on government websites can read and write. You have to start somewhere, so why not there?

Example: this is not exactly helpful:

My voice in Europe
The Lisbon treaty ensures the European Parliament, which is made up of MEPs that you elect, in a more of the EU’s policy-making (sic).

Great, thanks.

But this is a bit better, albeit at a pretty high level of generality which does not drill down into some of the subtler aspects of the new power-balances between the different EU institutions and EU member states. Nothing here about the potentially radical impact of the new External Action Service, for example.

We serfs in the EU are therefore better off then the hapless citizens of Bosnia and Herzegovina, where international representatives have sat down with senior BH politicians to negotiate important constitutional changes without publishing them for everyone to see.

Maybe it is time to stop treating Bosnians like passive imbeciles while at the same time moaning about their lack of Responsibility? It is their country, isn't it?

The chattering classes have chattered furiously about the appearance of the populist/nationalist/racist British National Party leader Nick Griffin on a BBC political panel debate.

I watched a few minutes, then jumped channel to watch some of an inane modern vampire film (Blade) which turned out to be so clunky that I went to bed in despair.

Having tried to watch the Griffin Show for a while, I concluded that the main UK political parties had a narrow escape.

Griffin was so clumsy, coarse and dim-witted that he missed a unique chance to confront the ruling establishment elite with ruthless but eloquent analysis of the growing gap between what the public wants and what it gets (immigration, EU, welfare state, corrupt behaviour by MPs and so on).

Had he done that, he might have had a real effect, in some ways for the better, by compelling our politicians to realise that they risk losing public trust very fast by over-governing and mal-governing the country in far too many areas.

As it is, the BNP's nano-level ratings are set to soar, from 1% to definitely a bit more than that. And that is definitely the Labour Party's fault. Or the Conservatives'. Or someone's, for sure.

So for a while the establishment heaves a nervous sigh of relief and goes back to a troubled sleep.

Nothing to see here, people. Move along.

Folks.

Drop what you are doing and spend just a few minutes to look at this magnificent, grim tirade from Anna Racccoon on the history and workings of the Court of Protection in England - a creepy and (she asserts) stagnantly dirty and unjust legal backwater inherited from days of far yore.

And now screaming for reform.

The looming entry into force (or not) of the Lisbon Treaty will bring to the fore all the fascinating questions of how and where the EU exercises its new 'foreign policy' capability.

First things first.

Who gets which jobs? And even above that: who decides?

Genuinely tricky and interesting from a philosophical point of view. The new High Representative will be 'anchored' in both the Commission (representing 'Brussels') and the Council of Ministers (representing Member States). So will s/he give a lead to member states in their foreign policy moves, or they to him/her?

For the UK this is part of the wearying issue as to our 'punching above our weight'. The EU is keen that we punch well below our weight, and punch only when everyone else wants to punch, which is not very often.

But at least we do punch, now and again. Plus we have money and experience. Which is why the new High Representative will need us to support him/her. Hence lots of murky horse-trading behind the scenes. 

One obvious example. How far should we coordinate British policy with EU partners in eg the UN's ignominious Human Rights Council, if that means adopting positions which are utterly feeble? (Note: to be fair to the EU, these days we strike utterly feeble national positions without any help from others.)

Watch our fellow-Europeans scurry to get something or other set up before those nasty British Conservatives come along and spoil things, by asking awkward questions.

A busy day researching for an article in DIPLOMAT the manifold examples of people entering Embassies to seek refuge.

The article is prompted by the tragi-comic opera scenes of former President Zelaya as impertinently parked in the Embassy of Brazil in Honduras. As one unimpressed Brazilian diplomat has put it to me, this is what happens when "ideology takes over in foreign policy-making and when incompetence becomes the trademark".

Even Wonder Woman gets involved, accepting the hiketeia responsibilities of a mysterious young lady seeking sanctuary.

Remember disgraced communist Erich Honecker's outlandish defiance from the Embassy of Chile in Moscow?

Who out there knows the world record for someone staying in an Embassy in defiance of the host country's wishes?

As I thought.

No-one.

A mere 15 years.

Let's hope Mr Zelaya brought some spare underpants with him.

A nice essay over at Heresy Corner by Father James Rattue, doing his best to look on the positive side of the move by Pope Benedict to lure Anglicans in Rome's general direction:

It represents not the triumph of denominational rivalry as it appears, but the erosion of those very rivalries. Previous Anglican converts to Rome, sailing across the Tiber as individuals, couldn’t help being given the impression, no matter how kindly they were treated, that their entire spiritual lives as Anglicans were essentially void and meaningless, something to be discarded and even repented.

Pope Benedict is instead explicitly recognising that the Anglican tradition contains Catholic elements of worth which don’t have to be surrendered because of a change of outward allegiance...

Also some lively comments, including the Heresiarch himself:

I must say, Fr James, you'd make an excellent spin-doctor. There's more than a touch of "please move on - nothing to see here" about your argument. There are no differences of opinion, only at most differences of emphasis, and of course there's no competition between the churches. That's so 16th century, darlink...

RW's appearance at the press conf. seemed decidedly odd - like a condemned man welcoming his execution, almost. Or perhaps the CEO of a company that's being taken over and dismantled putting a brave face on it... And behind the scenes I suspect there was real fury, if not from him, then from some of his advisers. That's what's being reported, anyway, and it can't be entirely made up. Or can it?

It's all about respect, innit?

Here is the Comment I have posted on OutsideLeft's site:

I have lived for most of my life in countries grappling with different forms of socialism (communist Yugoslavia, apartheid S Africa) or trying to escape from it (post-communist Russia, post-war Bosnia, post-Milosevic Serbia, post-communist Poland). So I feel qualified to say that your arguments are, er, scrawny.

As Tim Worstall points out, markets can not do everything, so there is a case for some sort of collective agreement to set some better rules. But then what?

The deep problem with socialist thinking in the way it invariably translates into practice is that it leads to state-dominated oppression on a massive scale.

Socialists like to try to wriggle out of the Stalin/Mao/N Korea examples as if they were 'aberrations'. But on the contrary, they exemplify what happens when the idea of the state as opposed to the individual is taken to its logical conclusion.

Yugoslavia tried 'workers control' for many years and what a farce that was (I was there - were you?). It failed because it dared not allow 'workers' to break up a failing enterprise and use the pieces to set up new private businesses on a scale that was actually successful. It limited market entry. It suppressed competition. assumed that wage labour was pernicious exploitation, thereby instituting state control as a new form of exploitation. It had no flexibility. It ran up huge debts borrowed from the West, and could not pay them back.

Result? Ethnic War.

The other point is that all market-socialistic states (such as Sweden and others in Europe) benefit from the innovation and energy coming from countries with freer market economies. Take that away and their 'success' would look much less impressive?

Ultimately it's all about information management. The more the state or the workers or any one category of people/organisation try to limit options, the harder it is for new ideas and innovation to circulate. Human potential shrivels.

You might say that some sort of lumpen Equity is the uber-value, and that lower human potential is a price worth paying.

The question then is Lenin's Kto Kogo? Who decides that balance?

All evidence suggests (including the thousands of new offences created by New Labour) that beyond a fairly limited level, state-socialist control becomes a dysfunctional moral and political calamity.

Maybe I should write a bit more about why Yugoslav Socialist Self-Management failed. It's quite interesting, insofar as the Tito Yugs really tried hard to create something between Soviet-style control and the Market, to the point where Tony Benn and others were lauding their genius.

Here is one analysis which meanders around but eventually gets there:

In retrospect, those who still favor a self-management system that is in theory, correct, seem somehow unable to recognize the truth of one Yugoslav economist’s comment that self-management was a system « for angels and not for men »

The façade of self-management, as Zagorka Golubović has rightly noted, lies in the inherent incompatibility between democratic practice and the control of a one-party Marxist state.

Self-management was bound to fail because workers and enterprise itself had no real influence—despite the claims of the (one-party Marxist) state—on decision making, production process, or social policy 

QED*

*  Latin text-speak for eat my shorts

Here is a curious piece by LeftOutside trying to explain why "the overwhelming body of evidence in favour of Socialism" stops him being lured by libertarian ideas:

When the tax revenue of South Koreans was directed towards the manufacture of Microwaves it was neither an area they specialised in nor one which returned a profit. However, they soon became market leaders and the welfare of all was increased.

A wonderfully clueless point. How many other Microwave makers had their livelihoods wrecked by S Korean statism?

Still, if he's arguing that the systems which produce the most stuff benefit 'all', then libertarian capitalism is the way to go.

Meanwhile in very socialist N Korea the overwhelming evidence in favour of socialism mounts apace, to the point where even the UN has noticed it:

The report argued that the situation had been made more desperate with efforts to extend state control by curtailing economic activity.

Women under the age of 49 are not allowed to trade, it said, and some markets have been closed: this has led to several clashes between female traders and the authorities.

Women have also been forbidden to ride bicycles, a key vehicle for getting to work, and forced to wear skirts rather than trousers, the envoy said.

"The exploitation of the ordinary people", the rapporteur said, "has become the pernicious prerogative of the ruling elite."

Overwhelming.

What is it with J 'n' J over at the Guardian?

First we had this Jonathan Steele going to Hell.

Now we have Jonathan Freedland frothing himself up about eastern Europe's horrible predisposition to Nazi-style extremism:

... a brand of ultra-nationalistic politics that would repel most voters in western Europe. It exists in Poland and Latvia, but also Lithuania, Estonia, Hungary, Romania and beyond. During the long decades of the Soviet era this chauvinistic, often racially supremacist politics was buried; but in 1989 it was exhumed, shook off the dirt, and breathed once more...

Eek!

He cites at least one wild Hungarian to support this cheeky little thesis, so that's OK then.

But there's more.

It's really all about ...

Steadily, eastern European governments have sought to craft a new, internationally accepted narrative in which the crimes of Nazism and Stalinism are regarded as equal, with, if anything, the latter as the greater evil. It is the theory of the "double genocide"...

Yes, these people want to deny the Holocaust, by claiming that the crimes of Stalin's communists need to be weighed with the crimes of Hitler's Nazis.

Huh?

If JF wants to explore the dirty rivers of current European anti-semitism, he needs only click on to the Guardian's own CiF pages and read the rantings of people there against Israel and Jews.

And there's even a website to help him do just that.