Blogoir: November

A Saddam Hussein TV channel has been launched.

The BBC gets reactions:

An Iraqi member of parliament, Jaber Habib Jaber, condemned what he called the channel's "glorification of a tyrant".

So far so good.

One Baghdad resident told the BBC that the channel has become his favourite even though watching it makes him sad for reminding him of when Iraq was safe.

What?

Safe like this?

Honduras has voted and in significant numbers.

A good round-up here.

The US State Department:

Bad News! And Lies!

The State Department put out something sensible on 29 November. I have just called the FCO Press Office who think that as of now (1900 on 30 November) nothing has been said officially by HM Government. There is certainly Nothing on the FCO website.

But what is this?

Leaders from Latin America, Spain and Portugal discussed their reaction to the vote at a Ibero-American summit in Estoril on Monday.

"There are still many nations, especially in Central America, in vulnerable political situations. Brazil therefore must not recognise nor rethink the Honduran question," Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva said.

Could it be that the EU has outsourced responsibility for an EU view on this issue to Spain and Portugal, hence the UK's vacuous official silence?

Memo to next government:

When a country has an election which for all the obvious local difficulties clearly shows an authentic and fair outcome, swing in behind that outcome fast and clear.

Act as a multiplier for democratic European values - don't wait for the EU (not) to do so!

Physics-free David Miliband:

The idea that the UK can maintain its influence in Beijing or Washington or Delhi or Moscow if we marginalise ourselves in Europe is frankly fanciful. 

In fact I would say the opposite; through leadership in Europe we augment our bilateral ties with other countries. Alone, we may be interesting; leading a group of 27 in common values and purpose, we have real sway…

The fascinating thing about Sir David Manning's evidence today to the Chilcot Inquiry is this passage describing his visit to Washington with a note from PM Balir to President Bush:

Manning had a note with him, from Blair to Bush, about Iraq. The note made it clear that Britain would only participate as part of a coalition involving the UN.

The following morning Manning was expecting a session with Rice in her office. But, to his surprise, he was asked to go to see Bush instead. They had half an hour or 40 minutes in the Oval Office.

Bush had studied Blair's note and he had been briefed by Rice about their conversation. He repeated that it was "impossible" for the UK to take part in action against Iraq unless it was through the UN. "That was our preference; but it was also the [political] reality."

The whole testimony describes in fascinating detail all sorts of exchanges going on at the top level in world politics between the UK and the USA. It also shows the UK influencing the American leadership in numerous significant respects.

Does anyone out there really think that an adviser to Baroness Ashton, looking over her shoulder at keeping happy an unwieldy group of 27 countries, some with lumpen anti-American governments and few of them able to keep anything secret, is going to be able to get in to see a US President for a private meeting?

And if not, does that make the EU a multiplier of UK foreign policy? Or the UK a multiplier of European influence?

Come on, Europhiles.

Tell us.

Note: there is an argument that we should have stayed at home and minded our own business, leading to a better outcome for the UK overall. I have no problem with that in principle - at least it is consistent.

But if we have an elected leader who weighs up all the facts and decides that it is better to be involved in such a policy (and indeed is re-elected by a clear majority after the intervention), how else to do it other than by this sort of subtle and effective diplomacy?

Memo to Chilcot Inquiry: please ask how far the memos of all these meetings were being distributed around Whitehall and at what level. How many of those who saw them raised significant objections to the policy by putting their own names/jobs on the line? A key operational point as we see this cavalcade of senior diplomats now unloading their lofty angst at PM Blair's expense.

Via Samizdata this link to a magnificent address by C S Lewis back in 1944, The Inner Ring (scroll down towards the bottom to find it).

This masterpiece is all about the idea that whever you are - school, work, art, politics - there is always an 'inner ring' of people who are somehow special and all-important:

You are never formally and explicitly admitted by anyone. You discover gradually, in almost indefinable ways, that it exists and that you are outside it; and then later, perhaps, that you are inside it. There are what correspond to pass words, but they too are spontaneous and informal. A particular slang, the use of particular nicknames, an allusive man-ner of conversation, are the marks.

But it is not constant. It is not easy, even at a given moment, to say who is inside and who is outside. Some people are obviously in and some are obviously out, but there are always several on the border-line. There are no formal admissions or expulsions. People think they are in it after they have in fact been pushed out of it, or before they have been allowed in: this provides great amusement for those who are really inside.

The rest of the presentation describes the moral temptations arising from wanting to be 'in' and even being invited to join:

From inside it may be designated, in simple cases, by mere enumeration: it may
be called "You and Tony and me". When it is very secure and comparatively stable in membership it calls itself "we". When it has to be suddenly expanded to meet a particular emergency it calls itself "All the sensible people at this place." From outside, if you have despaired of getting into it, you call it "That gang" or "They" or "So-and-so and his set" or "the Caucus" or "the Inner Ring".

If you are a candidate for admission you probably don't call it anything. To discuss it with the other outsiders would make you feel outside yourself. And to mention it in talking to the man who is inside, and who may help you in if this present conversation goes well, would be madness.

What a description of the workings of New Labour, right down to the 'Tony'! Read the whole thing to see a peerless example of profound lucidity from a far gone age when values counted, and were even discussed.

Which brings us to the Chilcot Inquiry on Iraq, where one by one assorted FCO officials have trooped in and dripped scorn on the way the intervention happened. This Observer piece captures the atmosphere nicely:

Yet beneath the equivocation and mandarin-speak, Whitehall seems, in as much as it knows how, to be using Chilcot to wield the scalpel. Throughout the first week the pent-up frustrations of diplomats and career civil servants over the way Tony Blair and George Bush secretly plotted to oust Saddam Hussein, bypassing the "official channels" in which they operate, has been there for all to see.

Chilcot is said to have been warned by his Whitehall friends that many witnesses will be ready to unburden themselves – finally to take revenge. In session after session they have appeared to do that. Blair's reputation has been sliced like salami day after day.

The problem Blair has (and some media reports have already expressed it) is that to drive forward the policy on Iraq he had to choose between trying to drum up strong official and public support or making a high-level power-play.

He no doubt rightly sensed that there would be intense instinctive opposition from within Labour and European ranks on anything which looked like being too cosy with President Bush.

So he went for the power-play, hoping to be Vindicated by History. Which meant keeping large numbers of senior officials and experts in the FCO and elsewhere across Whitehall marginalised, treading bureaucratic water as the 'real' decisions were made by the No 10 Inner Ring. Nudges and hints of insider information and guidance were carefully introduced into the system only where needed, eg to keep the UK position at the UN afloat.

Politicians come and go. Civil servants meander on.

In this case they have waited for a chance to express their disgruntlement with majestic understatement:

... it is remarkable that so much has quietly emerged, given the tenor and tone of the inquiry and the sorts of people being interviewed and, indeed, doing the interviewing. This whole procedure is a little like a very upper-class version of the Channel 4 series Come Dine with Me, with charming, learned and polite knighted people asking the gentlest of questions of charming, learned and polite knighted people, before breaking for lunch.

Yet there is also something creepy about this exercise. It turns out that New Labour's Inner Ring is being held to account by an even more Inner Inner Ring.

And none of them so far have looked at one central issue, namely that Saddam Hussein was one of the greatest mass murdering monsters of our time (his victims overwhelmingly Muslim as it happens), and that his overthrow was a huge victory for human decency.

No doubt Mr Blair will make that point himself in due course. Even if it is not a consideration which all these layers upon layers of Inner Rings usually like to mention?

Let’s start at the top, with Climategate. A great mass of original material is hacked or leaked from a key UK Climate Research Unit.

 

Those who want urgent action of different sorts on climate change are exhibiting unease, insisting that it is all a fuss about next to nothing and that the science is ‘unquestionable’. Which is fine, except that a heck of a lot more questions are buzzing around at the moment.

 

Climate-change sceptics proclaim a huge victory, arguing that this material shows all sorts of unprofessional/unethical behaviour on the part of leading climate researchers, not to mention uncertain data on which key climate warnings have been based.

 

John Redwood deftly describes the rival camps and sub-camps. BBC’s Martin Rosenbaum looks at Freedom of Information angles.

 

Bishop Hill (no bishop nor hill he) has been busy explaining the issues in simple terms. Plus doing some digging himself.

 

Former diplomat and ex-Greenpeace climate and energy consultant Stephen Tindale checks out Conservative policy on Climate and finds some things to like.

 

For a post-Yugoslav neo-Stalinist contrarianist’s view, there is always self-indulgent Slavoj Zizek railing against ‘naturalising nature’. Quite.

 

My conclusion? It boils down to a hard choice between adapting to climate change as and when and where it happens, or trying to muster the resources now to ‘mitigate’ the changes and somehow stop the climate changing as pessimists fear. But if the pessimists are right, isn’t it too late anyway?

 

Pedant-General (over at Devil’s Kitchen) gives an eloquent account:

 

• the worse the climate situation is, the greater the cost of mitigation and the more attractive it is to go for adaptation. This is the oddity with the Stern Report. If his numbers are correct, we're either doing enough for mitigation already or we shouldn't be doing it at all. As the shrieking gets louder, the costs of mitigation inevitably rise and the argument gets stronger AGAINST mitigation.
•  Finally we get to the politics and the Bjorn Lomborg position. Even if it is all ghastly, there are many more important things to do with our resources. Millions really actually will die from preventable water-borne diseases, malnutrition and malaria and we really actually can do something about those. Buggering about with the climate, although it definitely will be expensive, is desperately uncertain both in terms of its effectiveness and the lives it will save. That's not a good trade off.

One argument against Adaptation is that we have run out of room. Philobiblon points out that a mere 6000 years ago there was a thriving human culture in an area now submerged off the East Coast of England called Doggerland (not to be confused with where we alas now live, namely Doggingland):

 

… the rate of sea rise in the 20th century – 20cm, “may be higher than at any time since the loss of Doggerland” (and they note that between 18,000 and 5,500 BC sea levels rose by more than 140 metres.) And they note the huge, human, difference: “Ultimately, the Mesolithic communities of the great plains were flexible and mobile. Suffering there must have been, but the communities moved and adapted.

 

Modern society does not have that luxury…Unlike the inhabitants of Doggerland, we have nowhere else to go.”

 

Even more recent civilisations on our ever-shifting shores have been and gone, including the Romans. Diamond Geezer swings by London’s only visitable Roman Villa and is impressed by the way it is run.

 

The (I think) winning argument for leaning towards Adaptation is that for better or worse it is what in fact is going to happen, so let’s get on with it intelligently?

 

* * * * *

Another area where we the public are able to press our noses against the grimy window of policy and peer in at what really happens is the new Chilcot Inquiry on Iraq. Even if those deep dark Blairish manoeuvres over Iraq are as nothing compared to the deeper and darker goings-on in Jersey.

 

So far a series of not-so-silent FCO Knights (Sir Jeremy Greenstock, Sir William Patey, Sir Peter Ricketts, Sir Christopher Meyer) have been giving their views to the Committee, which itself includes another FCO Knight, Sir Rod Lyne. Yes Sir!

 

David Hadley reminds us that another reliable witness from an even loftier position plans to set the record straight.

 

Natalie Solent shares with us her brisk submission to the Inquiry.

 

* * * * *

Climate and Iraq are all about the limits of government behaviour in a democracy, and also about how citizens in a democracy make their concerns felt.

 

For example, when should the police keep DNA samples? The Heresiarch ponders.

 

As I always say when training young diplomats, “it’s not enough to be Right – you also have to be Convincing”. How about British government attempts to stop us file-sharing? Sufficiently Unconvincing that a busy petition is being organised against them.

 

If governments don’t (yet) decide everything, citizens themselves hammer out their ideas. Not always … nicely, especially when it comes to the role and impact of Muslim communities.

 

Intellectual Muslim has shut up shop for now under pressure from “uncontrollable security threats and obscene input & sabotage by external individuals wishing to undermine the integrity of our site and the credibility of our content.”  

 

Woe to the UK Blogosphere, Anna Raccoon too is giving up:

 

… the world of blogging is fuelled by petty jealousies, vitriol, feuds, unsubstantiated allegations, apostrophe police, and a whole host of people who in another age would have been happy twitching their curtains and writing letters in green ink. I have watched in horror as several new forums have descended into a cesspool of hatred and nastiness, and you know what? I got up this morning and decided that I just didn’t have the energy anymore, or the thick skin, to do it any longer.

 

Here is Anna on equality of domestic violence to show us what we’ll miss.

 

Over in Switzerland they now and again ask people what they think. This time the idea of minarets is proving unpopular.

 

Yet here in the UK the government uses our money to subsidise Islamist radicals. The BBC discovers something amazing about Imams and shares their discovery with us. The Spittoon is unimpressed with the Islamic Human Rights Commission’s negative views on the symbolism of wearing a poppy for Remembrance Day.

 

British Christianist media are attacking official attempts to edit out Christmas in favour of a denominationally neutral ‘Winterval’ – or not. And us usual the Daily Mail is under attack, this time for suggesting that too many foreign babies are being born in the Chelsea and Westminster Hospital in London.

 

* * * * *

Politics! And Law!

 

Two Doctors take to task Labour’s Tom Harris MP over proportional representation.

 

Conservative ideas are getting scrutiny as election day looms. Ruscombe Green looks at their policies on rewarding recycling and thinks local. The Daily (Maybe) thinks that the Conservatives hate Europe incoherently.

 

Another former diplomat (FCO lawyer to be precise) turned Conservative + blogger is Dominic Raab, now the Tory candidate for Esher and Walton. All politics being local, what about the impact on local roads of planned gas works?

 

Meanwhile, over in Spelthorne, Graeme Reid fears that the process of selecting a new Conservative candidate is jinxed. Liberal England does not like the Conservative choice for Richmond Park, wealthy Zac Goldsmith.

 

Are magistrates pushing too many cases up to a higher level unnecessarily? Yes, says The Magistrate’s Blog.

 

* * * * *

 

To conclude with nice things.

 

Your Christmas gift problems solved, far from the beaten track, with two books: War with the Newts and Jan Maclure’s Escape to Chingking (Christopher showed that resistance should be to death, and that death was fine so long as it came out of patriotic ethical effort and not from giving up.)

 

Two fine buildings: Kilburn School of Needlework and the church of Saints Mary and David, Kilpeck

 

Finally, to a question that really matters, and one close to my own heart as I am the proud owner of a Linn hifi system (including a feisty Sondek LP player): which sounds better, the Beatles’ Help on vinyl/mono or remastered stereo? Andrew Hickey decides, with some aplomb.

Update from Andrew Hickey: I was comparing the remastered mono with the remaster of the original 65 stereo on the same CD. I prefer mono to stereo, but also prefer vinyl to CD, but only have the mono Beatles on CD... it's a hard life...

My Bad. But read his analysis anyway - a model on how to look at such things.

 

* * * * *

 

Next week’s BBRU is hosted by Philobiblon. Contributions to britblog [at] gmail [dot] com, please.

Partly because it was designed not to work precisely in the normal way we might think of precision. I think.

Huh?

Yes folks. Welcome to this excellent piece by Joel Spolsky from way back in 2002 about Leaky Abstractions.

I don't understand it. But it is elegantly written.

What a super writer Joel is. Have a look at his analysis on how to price a piece of  new software. Go for the top end of the market? Almost give it away? Somewhere in the middle? All of them at the same time if you can get away with it? 

Eeeek - too many options. 

 

Anna Raccoon explains why she is stopping blogging - in good part because of the obnoxiousness of other bloggers and blog readers:

... the world of blogging is fuelled by petty jealousies, vitriol, feuds, unsubstantiated allegations, apostrophe police, and a whole host of people who in another age would have been happy twitching their curtains and writing letters in green ink.

I have watched in horror as several new forums have descended into a cesspool of hatred and nastiness, and you know what? I got up this morning and decided that I just didn’t have the energy anymore, or the thick skin, to do it any longer.

But she offers someone a great opportunity:

If there is anyone out there with the thick skin required to withstand the brickbats, the tenacity to spend hours tending the site, the desire to write seven days a week, then there is here a ready made site, with a readership of around 3,000 a day, fully paid up until some time in 2011, I would be happy to give it to you.

Be my guest. No payment required. E-mail me at annaraccoon@gmail.com and it is all yours. This offer will stay open for one week from today, after that the curtain will come down.

Anna has written many fine pieces, with passion and insight into how things work. Try this for size. Then start scrolling for a while.

I do hope we see her back after a well earned break

And here's something to help her rejoin us as and when the time is right.

 

 

 

The European Parliament is the greatest place on earth for practising the highest arts of fast and accurate interpreting: hundreds of interpreters are on hand when the Parliament is sitting to help get the 23 official languages each translated as necessary into any one of 22 other languages.

Sometimes a 'relay' is used: if there is no interpreter who knows eg both Latvian and Hungarian to the required standard, a Latvian MEP's ringing words will be interpreted into (say) accurate English and then interpreted on with very little delay into Hungarian by a Hungarian/English interpreter.

Phew.

But what exactly is said, and what is recorded?

Take this fascinating example.

In the EP in Wednesday UKIP's Nigel Farage made some sharp remarks against the choice of people to fill the two top EU jobs:

And we have a new president of Europe, Herman Van Rompuy. It does not exactly trip off the tongue, does it? I cannot see him stopping the traffic in Beijing or Washington; I doubt anybody in Brussels would even recognise who he is. And yet he is going to be paid a salary that is bigger than Obama’s, which tells you all you need to know about this European political class and how they look after themselves.

But at least he is an elected politician, unlike Baroness Cathy Ashton, who really is the true representation of the modern‑day political class. In some ways she is ideal, is she not? ...

She has risen without trace. She is part of this post-democratic age. She married well: she married an adviser, friend and supporter of Tony Blair and got put in the House of Lords. When she was in the House of Lords she was given one big job, and that job was to get the Lisbon Treaty through the House of Lords and to do so pretending that it was entirely different to the EU Constitution.

So she is good at keeping a straight face, and she vigorously crushed any attempt in the House of Lords for the British people to have a referendum.

So here she is: never stood for public office, never had a proper job, and here she gets one of the top jobs in the Union. Her appointment is an embarrassment for Britain.

 

This prompted an intervention by one Edit Herczog, a 'progressive' MEP from Hungary who started off as a Hungarian Communist even when Hungarian Communism was in steep decline.

Such was her fury at Nigel Farage's remarks that she had a go at him in English, not Hungarian.

The EP website helpfully gives us all various options for following MEPs and their pronouncements. Here is the relevant page with the links to individual speakers. You can either download the audio file for each intervention and listen to it, or watch it on video, or read a transcript.

This is what she said in fact:

 

Mr President, Mr Farage has said that those people they were elected last week are not those the traffic will stop to let them go, and this is why we elected them because we wanted to elect people who will make the traffic move for all European citizens to get a better life to themselves and this is what they will do. 

Mr Rompuy and Mr (sic) Cathy Ashton are four people (sic) and the four hundred eighty million European will know it soon.  

I think this is the stake, we have to stand for them we have to state, save their integrity, personal integrity and Mr Farage, I’d like to say something, Hungarian quotation for you, it’s good that you are here because if the monkey goes up to the tree it’s better seen how that is his popo (sic).

Heartfelt no doubt and a valiant effort (not easy to say all that in Hungarian if you are not Hungarian?), but still amusingly inaccurate. The general idea at the end appears to be that as a monkey climbs a tree its butt becomes all the more visible.

Anyway, the text transcript as recorded on the EP website has been obligingly 'interpreted' by someone from Herczoglish into something like real English:

Mr President, Mr Farage has said that those people who were elected last week are not people that the traffic will stop for. This is why we elected them – because we wanted to elect people who will make the traffic move for all European citizens to get a better life for themselves, and this is what they will do.

 

Mr Van Rompuy and Mrs Cathy Ashton are for the people, and the 480 million Europeans will know it soon. I think this is the stake. We have to stand up for them. We have to save their personal integrity. And, Mr Farage, I would like to quote a Hungarian saying to you. It is good that you are here because, if the monkey goes up the tree, it is easier to see its backside!

Interesting question for History. When someone in the EP says something hoplessly wrong in a language other than their own, is it right that the officially transcribed record edits out all the potentially embarrassing mistakes? 

But let's be fair. Accurately recording what someone has said is not easy, even when people are speaking English in the House of Commons.

Leaving aside possible criminal charges involving attempts to avoid FOI requests, there are all sorts of legal options in the UK and US alike for people wanting to challenge the way public funds have been invested in academic work on Climate Change which (it seems) fails to meet respectable standards of integrity.

In a word, lawsuits.

Back in the world of diplomacy, here is another former British Ambassador in Moscow (Sir Rod Lyne being busy on the Chilcot Inquiry), Sir Tony Brenton, describing the way the Copenhagen process will work in practice:

Sometime towards the end of the Copenhagen climate conference, Michael Zammit Cutajar, a Maltese diplomat and conference chairman, will gather 20 or so people into a back room of the Bella Conference Centre for an all-night session (or two) to do the deal. All the noise and the posturing, the 20,000 delegates, the lobbyists, the dramatic green demonstrators, the 180-page legal negotiating text, will be shut outside.

Those 20 people — representatives of the world’s key climate-change governments — will have in front of them perhaps a ten-page text. They will agree, or not, on greenhouse gas emissions limits for developed countries, financial assistance for developing countries and emissions constraints that developing countries are willing to take on in exchange for that assistance.

If they find agreement they will sell it to the wider conference and then to the wider world. It will set our course for at least the decade to come.

Nicely put.

And of course at this level of abstraction the issues become less about Climate and more about psychology and bluff.

Each of those twenty people will be desperate to avoid being blamed for a Failure. So pressure to strike some sort of deal - any deal - is huge. This will tend to override common sense and the fact that it is not their money they are planning to give away. 

Most of them will know little about the science, or about the economic theories on how best to pay now for benefits (and costs) which might accrue many decades in the future.

Instead, a murky game of bluff.

Non-whites will be insisting that whites have basically caused the problem and that whites basically have to pay for fixing it.

Whites will be saying that even if that is the case, the non-whites can't expect much if they too do not take on a fair share of stopping pollution as it soars in the fast-developing parts of the developing world.

Sulky accord of some sort having been reached on those points of principle, they then start haggling over the price. No doubt with a cynical thought at the back of their minds that all that zany Climategate stuff is going to reduce even further the Obama Administration's appetite and capacity to do too much on the legislative front.

Promises and undertakings and targets will all be established, with everyone knowing that the chances of them being reached in practice are modest.

Some people will be better at convincing others of their sincerity in making the attempt to hit those targets.

Other people will be better at being obdurate to the bitter end, just to see what size bung they can be thrown to sign up.

The result? Tony Brenton again:

So outright failure is unlikely. But it is equally unlikely that Copenhagen will get us right around the climate corner. The probability has to be, at best, an interim deal with lots of work still to do.

Which rather assumes that there is agreement on what has to be done and why it well help. Will the current Consensus start to unravel in the months and years to come in those courtrooms?

If you have got this far and want More, read this excellent post over at Devil's Kitchen by Pedant-General which talks through the logic of the whole business at some length.

In particular P-G looks at the central question: even if we are sure that Climate Chnage is Bad and we think that human action can make it better, should we act boldly now (mitigate) or merely adapt as we go, keeping our options open?

Thus

• the worse the climate situation is, the greater the cost of mitigation and the more attractive it is to go for adaptation. This is the oddity with the Stern Report. If his numbers are correct, we're either doing enough for mitigation already or we shouldn't be doing it at all. As the shrieking gets louder, the costs of mitigation inevitably rise and the argument gets stronger AGAINST mitigation.
  

  Something for those twenty lucky souls to chat about during the coffee break.

• Finally we get to the politics and the Bjorn Lomborg position. Even if it is all ghastly, there are many more important things to do with our resources. Millions really actually will die from preventable water-borne diseases, malnutrition and malaria and we really actually can do something about those. Buggering about with the climate, although it definitely will be expensive, is desperately uncertain both in terms of its effectiveness and the lives it will save. That's not a good trade off.

Prompted by the story of how (not) to reward effort, a reader tells us another story:

This is a truly massive failure called the American healthcare system. Dreamt up by laissez faire Capitalists over sixty years ago, the American healthcare system costs twice as much as the NHS whilst leaving 16% of Americans uninsured ...

Roughly 22,000 Americans die annually because they do not have health insurance and approximately 50% of personal bankruptcies there have healthcare costs at their root.

Horrible, nightmarish stuff.

Yet we too have problems in that sector:

There are 10 times more deaths across the UK from the superbug Clostridium difficile among over 65-year-olds than in any other country in the world, figures suggest ...

Professor Brendan Wren, of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, told Panorama: "The deaths of 6,500 people a year is the equivalent of one person dying every hour in our hospitals."

Since the USA is more than four times our population, it appears that they have 22,000 people a year dying for lack of health insurance, whereas we have 26,000 dying by illnesses caused by entering our comprehensive state-dominated system.

And now this. Following that.

Another sad story.

The moral of all of them? That (as in the financial sector) organisations/systems which grow to become too complex to be managed become unmanageable.

And then, sooner or later, they crash.

So reforms aimed at simplification are more likely to work in the long run than changes which add yet more control and complexity.

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

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

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

Good point.

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

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

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

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

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

Was the intervention legal?

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

Was the intervention technically doable?

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

Was the intervention - all things considered - wise?

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

Was the intervention in fact done well?

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

To be continued...

A reader points me to a piece from New Zealand which looks at claims that New Zealand is 'warming' - and argues that they are just not true, if data going back 150 years are anything to go by.

So what's happening with that data?

Are NZ data inconsistencies and the data inconsistencies in all that leaked material from the UK by some chance ... related? Not least by a refusal on the part of key scientists to make available to wider scrutiny the basic numbers they are crunching?

Over at NRO some sensible words from Jim Manzi:

... the scandal is obviously a PR disaster for those who believe that climate reconstruction is “science” in the sense we normally use the term, but what it does not change is the basic physics of how CO₂ molecules interact with radiation.

As I have always argued, this is the real basis for rational concern about greenhouse-gas emissions, and is a key reason that all the major national scientific academies agree that the greenhouse effect is a real risk.

Recognizing this risk, however, does not entail accepting the political conclusion that we need laws to radically reduce emissions at enormous cost.

Meanwhile check out too Willis Eschenbach on his battle to bring about honest insight into the key science involved in all those long-term climate predictions (my emphasis):

Science works by one person making a claim, and backing it up with the data and methods that they used to make the claim. Other scientists then attack the claim by (among other things) trying to replicate the first scientist’s work. If they can’t replicate it, it doesn’t stand. So blocking the FOIA allowed Phil Jones to claim that his temperature record (HadCRUT3) was valid science.

This is not just trivial gamesmanship, this is central to the very idea of scientific inquiry. This is an attack on the heart of science, by keeping people who disagree with you from ever checking your work and seeing if your math is correct.

As far as I know, I am the person who made the original Freedom Of Information Act to CRU that started getting all this stirred up. I was trying to get access to the taxpayer funded raw data out of which they built the global temperature record.

I was not representing anybody, or trying to prove a point. I am not funded by Mobil, I’m an amateur scientist with a lifelong interest in the weather and climate. I’m not “directed” by anyone, I’m not a member of a right-wing conspiracy. I’m just a guy trying to move science forwards.

And therefore incredibly dangerous - to some.

The answer?

Open source science.

For a change (and maybe even some hope).

Is the true issue about all those leaked climate emails that the underlying data sets used to make far-reaching UN and other climate predictions are so badly done that they are unable to withstand intelligent expert scrutiny?

And that that's why the scientists concerned were worried about FOI requests and other transparency demands?

And, if so, so what?

Fascinating technical exchanges on all this for us puny mortals in the comments below Megan McArdle's searching but fair article over at Atlantic magazine. The Internet in fine form, including reader TW Andrews who makes what seems to me to be Damn Big Point (my emphasis);

Even really good, experienced software developers make mistakes. That's why most software that gets shipped has a battery of tests that it needs to pass before release. Frequently more man-months go into testing and QA than development.

Most academic-type programs don't get anything like this level of scrutiny. In general that's fine, but once we start using these programs to make multi-trillion dollar decisions, the code should be open-sourced, and tested within an inch of it's life. It's well worth it to get the best information possible.

Read on.

Welcome Iain Dale readers

My former FCO lawyer colleague Dominic Raab has stormed home to win the Conservative Party nomination for the Esher and Walton parliamentary constituency, after securing a strong win in the constituency's 'open primary' when any member of the public could come along to choose a candidate and some 700 did so.

Dominic has helped deal with war crimes trials at The Hague Tribunal so he is a formidable expert in justice at the sharp end. He'll be a great asset to a future Conservative government.

Dominic has written an excellent book about the decline of civil liberties in the UK under Labour's malign rule:

 

It perceptively links the torrent of legislation expanding the role of the state (often in manifestly oppressive ways) to underlying and maybe even instinctive collectivist assumptions about human nature and responsibility, but also shows how the subtlety of English law and the checks/balances therein have been seriously undermined in the process. Buy it.

David Cameron's idea of opening up politics in this way is proving a fascinating (and so far successful) experiment. On the process of Dominic's own selection, here is a good account of how it worked on the night. It's all about exuding Confidence, which in turn is part of Leadership:

... a critical part of engaging the audience is to make them see you as the winner using your body language. This means subconsciously telling them that you are a winner, making it easier for them to choose you.

This is primarily demonstrated in the way the person enters and leaves. Everyone must have been hugely nervous, turning last minute ideas over in their heads, looking out for familiar faces...

Easier said than done. But Dominic did it. 

This looks to be about as safe a seat as it gets. So Welcome, Dominic Raab MP.

Update

A reader (see Comment) fears that the election of a former FCO official will merely reinforce British subservience to the EU:

I hope I'm wrong and that Mr Raab turns into a crusading, pro-independence nationalist but he won't get rid of the over-mighty state without getting us out of the EU and, given Quisling Cameron, I doubt any intention to roll back the state.

I suspect that it is not Conservative policy to pull the UK out of the EU. But for anyone interested in the detail of the way the English tradition of rights has been entangled for the worse by European law ideas, Dominic's book is excellent.

Plus he proposes specific ideas (including a Bill of Rights) for redefining the way human rights are seen by the courts in the UK, to bring a lot of policy areas back from the legal jurisdiction of Strasbourg/Brussels to our own courts' control.

Just the sort of authoritative professional insight we want among our next batch of MPs.

As for rolling back the state, Dominic's book quotes economist Irwin Stelzer's 2008 warning that "there is a 'tipping point' at which the government's share of the economy becomes so large that the private sector function efficiently". Stelzer feaed that that point would arrive when the government was claiming more than 40% of national income, a figure triumphantly attained by Gordon Brown with the results we all see.

If we want to see that situation rolled back, the only hope we have is to elect people who at least identify and analyse the problem accurately.

A Polish friend sends me this:

An economics professor at a local college made a statement that he had never failed a single student before, but had once failed an entire class. That class had insisted that socialism worked and that no one would be poor and no one would be rich, a great equalizer.

The professor then said, "OK, we will have an experiment in this class on socialism. All grades would be averaged and everyone would receive the same grade so no one would fail and no one would receive an A.

After the first test, the grades were averaged and everyone got a B. The students who studied hard were upset and the students who studied little were happy.  

As the second test rolled around, the students who studied little had studied even less and the ones who studied hard decided they wanted a free ride too so they studied little. The second test average was a D! No one was happy.

When the 3rd test rolled around, the average was an F. The scores never increased as bickering, blame and name-calling all resulted in hard feelings; no-one would study for the benefit of anyone else.  

All failed, to their great surprise. The professor told them that socialism would also ultimately fail: when the reward is great, the effort to succeed is great; when government takes all the reward away, no one will try or want to succeed...                                        

What one person receives without working for, another person must work for without receiving. The government cannot give to anybody anything that the government does not first take from somebody else.

When half of the people get the idea that they do not have to work because the other half is going to take care of them, and when the other half gets the idea that it does no good to work because somebody else is going to get what they work for, that is about the end of any nation

Dr. Adrian Rogers, 1931

President Obama's sagging ratings are causing many people to wonder what is going on.

Mark Steyn of course is no fan of the President bowing to kings and emperors, and calls the President the Superbower:

Along with his choreographic gaucherie goes his peculiar belief that all of human history is just a bit of colorful backstory in the Barack Obama biopic — or as he put it in his video address on the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall:

“Few would have foreseen on that day that a united Germany would be led by a woman from Brandenburg or that their American ally would be led by a man of African descent.”

Tear down that wall . . . so they can get a better look at me!!! Is there no one in the White House grown-up enough to say, “Er, Mr. President, that’s really the kind of line you get someone else to say about you”?

And maybe somebody could have pointed out that Nov. 9, 1989, isn’t about him but about millions of nobodies whose names are unknown, who lead dreary lives doing unglamorous jobs and going home to drab accommodations, but who at a critical moment in history decided they were no longer going to live in a prison state. They’re no big deal; they’re never going to land a photoshoot for Vanity Fair. But it’s their day, not yours.

It’s not the narcissism, so much as the crassly parochial nature of it.

However, Spiegel Online too is getting worried:

Upon taking office, Obama said that he wanted to listen to the world, promising respect instead of arrogance. But Obama's currency isn't as strong as he had believed.

Everyone wants respect, but hardly anyone is willing to pay for it. Interests, not emotions, dominate the world of realpolitik. The Asia trip revealed the limits of Washington's new foreign policy: Although Obama did not lose face in China and Japan, he did appear to have lost some of his initial stature.

Even the ruinous C-word is now appearing in unexpected places - to President Obama's disadvantage:

CHRIS MATTHEWS, HOST: The word these days is optics, visuals, signals. In the Carter presidency, the optics were not exactly robust, and Ronald Reagan rode that to a big victory in 1980. Is the Obama White House sending some Carteresque signals these days?

All of which makes one ponder.

Why go on such a high-profile tour of Asia if some key and worthwhile substantive results are not already nailed down? That's basic technique.

And have not the Obama team grasped the single vital point of diplomacy?

That it's fine and dandy to extend the Sincere Hand of Friendship and be ready to negotiate even with enemies.

But what makes negotiating credible and effective as a policy tool is not what's negotiable.

It's what's non-negotiable.

If your adversaries think that you are not prepared to make a tough stand on anything in particular, they have no reason to negotiate - better just to sit tight and gloat as the sandy base of your position erodes of its own accord while waves of events lap away at it.

And that's how you can move from superpowering to superbowing ... to supercowering?

Update:  Charmless reader Ivor:

I would have thought that, of all the disparate issues on which you feel qualified to pontificate, diplomatic protocol might be one area where you actually had something worthwhile to contribute.

As a former professional therefore, when visiting the monarch of one the most consistent and valuable allies which your country still possesses, do you observe the courtesies expected in his country or deliberately give offence so that this will indicate who is the greater head of state?

The basic principle here is that when a Head of State visits another, the pair of them are representing the values of their own country.

A low bow is appropriate when a subject of the Monarch/Emperor concerned is presented to indicate fealty/deference, but is not necessary or even appropriate when a senior foreign person not owing allegiance to that ruler is presented.

It is nonetheless interesting from a psychological point of view that even Presidents of great republics often seem to feel uneasy in the presence of royalty.- the transient nature of politics deferring to an apparent higher moral force of Tradition?

So I go along with this analysis, although there are of course bowing precedents involving President Nixon and other US leaders down the years.

The key point is to be consistent. The courteous and elegant formal nod which President Obama gave to HM The Queen strikes me as just right for all occasions, and would not give offence in Japan or anywhere else. If you bow low to one monarch, bow low to all of them.

Otherwise you can be presented as ridiculous.

Mark Mardell, BBC North America editor, looks at the problems the Democrats are having in the USA in explaining their policies to an inceasingly unhappy electorate.

He's not taking sides. No sirree!

But read this awesome passage (emphasis added):

There is little doubt that the Obama administration is widely perceived as extending the role of federal government, while it seems that a majority of Americans dislike and distrust big government. The Democrats don't seem to know how to cope with this.

They could argue that it is a misperception; they could maintain that all government is big government these days; they could argue that big government protects little people. It really doesn't matter too much what their rationale is, as long as they have one. The Democrats have a great communicator as president, but at the moment, they don't seem to have a story to tell.

Excellent.

Liberals - if you don't have a story, make one up! Say whatever it takes to stay afloat, regardless of the truth!

Now we know the BBC's guiding philosophy, a lot of things are much clearer.

Every now and again I swing by Instapunk, a powerful and unrelenting site which is part of the Boomer Bible phenomenon:

... muddled politics, neither left nor right, designed to confuse and deliberately offend readers

Yup, that peevish and baffled Amazon lead-off review about sums it up. For something a bit more sensible, try this.

The Bible ends with a long and moving passage describing the bewilderment of an old man trying to work out what happened to the values of human decency he grew up with as they sank into a sea of trashy nihilistic relativism. Worth buying for that alone.

Anyway, have a rummage through Instapunk if you are feeling brave and see how Left, Right and everything in between get hammered.

Including, since we have been thinking about the Berlin Wall, Pink Floyd's Roger Waters and his 1990 concert at the Wall:

Waters is acting out for us the moral and cultural collapse of the western world that accompanied the Cold War. While Eastern Europe was killing and imprisoning millions of flesh and blood people and using up its entire physical infrastructure, much of the western world was engaged in a process of spiritual suicide whose climactic moment occurs in this very performance: spoiled narcissists who have finally forgotten what freedom is just as it has been procured for a continent and a half of former slaves.

The children of the west have stared into the darkest hours of the twentieth century's existential terrors and seen that the greatest villain is, uh, the Mom who can't make everything perfect in our little Universe of One.

Now that's good. 

The latest BBRU is hosted by Trixy.

She links to Jack of Kent who has examined in some depth a strange case of a man handing over to the police a shotgun he said he had found and then being prosecuted. Having watched various trials as a budding barrister, I am loath to give a view on any court case without having been there to see for myself the credibility of the witnesses and the skill of the lawyers in presenting their case. This one is ... odd.

And have a look at Heresy Corner giving some cogent thoughts on the arguments against 'regulating the blogosphere' which he nonetheless fears is creeping in our direction.

Next week I host BBRU again. Hurrah.

So please send any nominations to britblog [at] gmail [dot] com

I live not too far from Swindon.

Its council announced last week that free Wi-Fi broadband, enabled by hundreds of access points in lamp posts, will be made available to all residents. With thousands of computers connected by millions of virtual synapses, might this not be where the first artificial consciousness emerges?

As a nation, we need to prepare for a highly sexualised, electric Swindon – a Swindon with desires and needs, a vast, androgynous, super-intelligent being, splayed over Wiltshire.

Eeeek.