Blogoir: February

Warming to my theme on how the West probably has made the Zimbabwe problem worse, I think that Clare Short letter in 1997 to Minister Kumbirai Kangai MP deserves a close look from the point of view of professional civil service technique.

So, here goes.

George Foulkes has reported to me on the meeting which you and Hon John Nkomo had with Tony Lloyd and him during your recent visit. I know that President Mugabe also discussed the land issue with the Prime Minister briefly during their meeting. It may be helpful if I record where matters now rest on the issue.

Something just a tad odd about the tone of this, especially the last sentence - who defines 'where matters rest'?

At the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting, Tony Blair said that he looked forward to developing a new basis for relations with Commonwealth countries founded upon our government's policies, not on the past.

We will set out our agenda for international development in a White Paper to be published this week. The central thrust of this will be the development of partnerships with developing countries which are committed to eradicate poverty, and have their own proposals for achieving that which we and other donors can support.

The letter is framing the issues in a 100% London-centric way. We proclaim that we look to the future, not the past! We set out our agenda of partnership with those developing countries which do what we want! Especially if the sweetie-pies have their own proposals!

I very much hope that we will be able to develop such a relationship with Zimbabwe. I understand that you aim shortly to publish your own policies on economic management and poverty reduction. I hope that we can discuss them with you and identify areas where we are best able to help. I mentioned this in my letter on 31 August to Hon Herbert Murarwa.

Too much 'hope'. I hate the use of the word 'hope' in official letters. It sounds weak and rudderless.

I should make it clear that we do not accept that Britain has a special responsibility to meet the costs of land purchase in Zimbabwe. We are a new Government from diverse backgrounds without links to former colonial interests. My own origins are Irish and as you know we were colonised not colonisers.

Aaargh.

What made her put in that Irish line? This paragraph is as wrong as it can be on every level.

Pseudo-pompous firmness ("I should make clear...") and the absurd claim that New Labour "has no links to former colonial interests". Did not Labour Governments preside over the colonies at different points? Plus surely better to play up the positives rather than deny any 'special' responsibility on the complex Zimbabwe land issue?

We do, however, recognise the very real issues you face over land reform. We believe that land reform could be an important component of a Zimbabwean programme designed to eliminate poverty. We would be prepared to support a programme of land reform that was part of a poverty eradication strategy but not on any other basis.

How gracious we are! We recognise that Zimbabwe has some 'very real issues'! Land reform could (sic) be an important component of a Zimbabwe poverty-reduction programme which, as defined by us and only us, may be worthy of our lofty support.

I am told Britain provided a package of assistance for resettlement in the period immediately following independence. This was, I gather, carefully planned and implemented, and met most of its targets. Again, I am told there were discussions in 1989 and 1996 to explore the possibility of further assistance. However that is all in the past.

She is 'told'. What does that mean? This sneaks in some sort of subjectivity to the core Zimbabwe argument that the UK gave some undertakings in this area which need to be fulfilled. Whatever the substantive merits of those arguments, brushing them aside in this dismissive way is close to rudeness.

Plus it is not 'all in the past' if you are an African peering through the fence at a prosperous 'white' farm on land which your ancestors used to walk on - a point New Labour might have been expected to take seriously.

If we look to the present, a number of specific issues are unresolved, including the way in which land would be acquired and compensation paid - clearly it would not help the poor of Zimbabwe if it was done in a way which undermined investor confidence.

Again, the letter defines in UK terms alone what 'clearly' helps the Zimbabwe poor and what does not. Unwisely put. Any Zimbabwean Minister might think that he knows what the poor of Zimbabwe need rather more accurately and 'clearly' than any passing UK wealthy 'investor'.

Other questions that would need to be settled would be to ensure that the process was completely open and transparent, including the establishment of a proper land register.

Individual schemes would have to be economically justified to ensure that the process helped the poor, and for me the most important issue is that any programme must be planned as part of a programme to contribute to the goal of eliminating poverty. I would need to consider detailed proposals on these issues before confirming further British support for resettlement.

Sigh. We/I define in some detail the terms on which you African ants might get British support.

OK, it is UK taxpayers' money. They do not want to waste it. But is the tone of this likely to make the reader feel that the writer is trying to engage on a human level with these sensitive issues? If not, why send it?

I am sure that a carefully worked out programme of land reform that was part of a programme of poverty eradication which we could support would also bring in other donors, whose support would help ensure that a substantial land resettlement programme such as you clearly desire could be undertaken successfully. If is [sic] to do so, they too will need to be involved from the start.

Crikey. Was there a crunching typo in this vital letter? And which DFID automaton drafted that first rambling and condescending sentence?

It follows from this that a programme of rapid land acquisition as you now seem to envisage would be impossible for us to support. I know that many of Zimbabwe's friends share our concern about the damage which this might do to Zimbabwe's agricultural output and its prospects of attracting investment.

Look out, African small fry. If you defy us, we'll get our mates to duff you up too.

I thought it best to be frank about where we are. If you think it would be helpful, my officials are ready to meet yours to discuss these issues.

And you succeeded. Frank indeed in delivering a message whose only impact could be - and was - mightily to empower those in the Zimbabwe elite who were arguing that the UK was still living in the colonialist past and needed to be taught a lesson...

Ho hum. Here is Dominic Lawson in 2007:

Remember this superb example of old-style diplomacy in action?

What a pity Clare Short did not put a thick line through this calamitous draft letter and write instead something like this:

PERSONAL

Dear Minister,

I know that your government are keen to press ahead with a radical land reform agenda. The British government of course has engaged extensively with Zimbabwe in recent years on this complex and sensitive question.

I have to say that I worry that some of your proposals risk causing unwelcome damage to Zimbabwe's prospects and reputation. That in turn would make it difficult for us to support you, as I am keen to do.

May I propose that we set up a series of high-level seminars to look closely - and with some speed as I know that your government are keen to move ahead fast - at how best to take land reform forward in Zimbabwe in a way which does aim to correct historic injustices while also improving employment and agricultural productivity? 

A dynamic and effective partnership model for pursuing such changes could be a model for similar reforms elsewhere in the world - an exciting opportunity in the global objective of reducing poverty which our two governments so keenly support.

Perhaps we could have an early word on the telephone to see what might be done?

A letter like that, emphasising a wish to define and tackle the questions in a spirit of intelligent partnership and with very much a warm personal tone, might have saved a whole lot of disaster down the road.

Memo to next government: rediscover the art of fine drafting - and a deft human touch in foreign policy.

In Zimbabwe the Africanist tendency led by Robert Mugabe is making one last heave to destroy 'white farmers'.

The so-called power-sharing deal which is meant to start to pull Zimbabwe out of its crisis leaves the Agriculture Ministry in Mugabe's hands. So, out they go:

At the meeting in Chegutu, Johannes Tomana, the attorney-general who has himself been allocated a seized farm - is reported to have said there had been "unnecessary delays" in farmers' trials as a result of their legal representatives challenging the constitutionality of the process.

Party time!

The greatest book written about Africa from a 'white' perspective is My Traitor's Heart by Rian Malan. He describes in gory detail just how far 'whites' have to go to reach true acceptance in Africa.

So far so clear.

But read this fine Standpoint discussion about Western assistance to Africa between Dambisa Moyo, Daniel Johnson and Richard Dowden.

Dambisa has written Dead Aid, a book which describes the way Western development aid to Africa has created chaos. She puts a strong emphasis on self-respect:

So how do you get to the place where Africans can walk into a room and they're equally respected as business partners? They're not going to get to that point if they continue to depend on aid, where you're constantly with a begging bowl.

Places like India and China - they still have an enormous part of their population living in poverty, and yet nobody feels sorry for the Chinese, nobody feels sorry for India. We treat them as equal partners on the global stage. We want to hear what they have to say. That's because they aren't sitting there, waiting for a big cheque to come in from abroad.

I have long suspected that, bizarre as it may seem, Mugabe is operating in some way according to this logic. He wants to force Zimbabwe to rock bottom as one perverse way to end this dependency on 'white'/settler thinking in all its forms. To wipe the Zimbabwe slate clean of European values and residual power, as the basis for restarting the country on exclusively African terms.

Of course whatever purist logic might be attractive in this position is far outweighed by the death and corruption his policies have caused. But I confess some sneaking sympathy with the Africanist ideal, since it is just so awful to see the patronising way the West (and the UK) has dealt with Africa for so long.

Mugabe's own treatment here in London at the hands of New Labour may well have led him to his final ruinous Africanist fundamentalism. The infamous letter sent by Clare Short to the Zimbabwe Land and Agriculture Minister in 1997 is the classic example of what I mean.

How many deaths have resulted from this ponderous, condescending and downright stupid text drafted by priggish DFID apparatchiki who simply failed to understand the psychological issues at stake?

A Spent Copper offers this thought on my posting below about Fake Charities:

May I nominate ACPO (Association of Chief Police Officers) for such exposure Charles?  The Government like to use them to float their ideas for policy, and they are extensively publicly funded, but they have changed their legal status and are now exempt from the provisions of the FOI Act.

So, we proceed to the website of ACPO.

And, sure enough:

The Association of Chief Police Officers (ACPO) is not a staff association (the separately constituted Chief Police Officers' Association fulfils that function). ACPO's work is on behalf of the Service, rather than its own members...

The Association has the status of a private company limited by guarantee. As such, it conforms to the requirements of company law and its affairs are governed by a Board of Directors.

It is funded by a combination of a Home Office grant, contributions from each of the 44 Police Authorities, membership subscriptions and by the proceeds of its annual exhibition.

Here they are at Companies House:

Name & Registered Office: THE ASSOCIATION OF CHIEF POLICE OFFICERS OF ENGLAND, WALES AND NORTHERN IRELAND 1ST FLOOR 10 VICTORIA STREET LONDON SW1H 0NN Company No. 03344583

Status: Active Date of Incorporation: 01/04/1997 Country of Origin: United Kingdom Company Type: PRI/LBG/NSC/S.30 (Private, limited by guarantee, no share capital, section 30 of the Companies Act) Nature of Business (SIC(03)): 9112 - Professional organisations

So this not a fake company. It is a real one.

But is it not odd that these people get money from the state to run a company to push out policy views of different sorts exempt from Freedom of Information requirements?

Why can they not do this within existing official structures, as senior civil servants across Whitehall do?

Don't get me wrong. I am very fond of Laura Norder and want the police to be excellent. Good luck to all Chief Police Officers.

I just don't like to see public money wasted and/or the state morph into exotic, uncontrolled and undemocratic formations.

So. What is going on here?

Do you remember Grantrepreneurs and GONGOs?

Organisations which profess to be independent but in fact are getting large amounts of taxpayers money, with little if any real accountability?

Thus:

My idea.

Any so-called non-governmental organisation which receives either (a) more than 10% of its total income from government or other official sources of public funds, or (b) more than £10m of such money in any one tax year should be brought within the Freedom of Information Act, so that we can all see what they get up to with our money.

Oxfam for example took in up to £70m from different publicly funded sources in 2006/07 - that's 35 times the size of the Embassy Budget in Warsaw, every penny of which is subject to FOI scrutiny. As a taxpayer why should I not have the right to get honest answers from Oxfam on how my money was spent?

Now a neat little site has started to look at fake charities - bodies which have charitable status and busy themselves pronouncing on policy issues, but which get a disproportionate share of their income not from voluntary donations but from government, which forces that money from citizens via taxes.

What a rip-off all this is.

In effect it is a huge scheme whereunder New Labour mobilises noisy collectivist supporters through taxpayers money, since these organisations are highly unlikely to support anything or anyone which calls for lower taxes.

Memorandum to next government:

Stop all this rubbish, dead in its tracks. (You'll inherit an appalling situation in public finances so you can get away with it.)

Plus bring in new FOI rules for any organisation getting significant donations from the British taxpayer, so that we can all see what is happening with our own money.

That should make a handy positive difference.

Spiegel Online International carries all sorts of excellent pieces, beautifully written in or translated into English for a wider audience.

This one about Islamic extremists in Sarajevo is thought-provoking. And not all the thoughts are positive:

The obliteration of Israel is heralded in a torrent of words. "Zionist terrorists," the imam thunders from the glass-enclosed pulpit at the end of the mosque. "Animals in human form" have transformed the Gaza Strip into a "concentration camp," and this marks "the beginning of the end" for the Jewish pseudo-state.

Over 4,000 faithful are listening to the religious service in the King Fahd Mosque, named after the late Saudi Arabian monarch King Fahd Bin Abd al-Asis Al Saud.

The women sit separately, screened off in the left wing of the building. It is the day of the Khutbah, the great Friday sermon, and the city where the imam has predicted Israel's demise lies some 2,000 kilometers (1,240 miles) northwest of Gaza.

It is a city in the heart of Europe: Sarajevo.

This analysis poses a Good Question:

Could a radical, potentially violent parallel society be emerging in the Muslim dominated region of the war-torn republic of Bosnia-Herzegovina, eight months after the signing of the Stabilization and Association Agreement with the European Union?

Don't expect Bosniac leader Haris Silajdzic to answer:

Haris Silajdzic, the Muslim representative of the presidency of Bosnia-Herzegovina, sits a few buildings down the street, in the presidential palace. He played a very active role as foreign minister and prime minister during the war but now, after years of power struggles, the one-time beau is starting to show signs of exhaustion. Nevertheless, he is still widely regarded as one of the most artful advocates of Muslim interests in this multi-ethnic state.

Silajdzic says he sees no indication of an Islamization of Sarajevo or Bosnia. In his opinion, it is more important to talk of ensuring that the Muslims receive justice after the "genocide" of the 1990s.

For anyone interested, there latterly have been three main streams in the political organisation of the Bosnian Muslims aka Bosniacs (and for those who really need help, here is the difference between Bosnian Muslims, Bosnian muslims, and Bosniacs):

• secular social-democratic, let's-all-get along stream: not unpopular and even appealing to a lot of people, with Zlatko Lagumdzija to the fore
• overtly nationalistic, demagogic, Bosnia is the Muslim part of former Yugoslavia stream: Haris Silajdzic is the undisputed exponent of this view, which plays up the ethnic identity and territorial demands of the Bosnian Muslims rather than any specific Islamist agenda
• overtly Islamist stream: people who want to create an openly Islamic space in Bosnia as part of a longer-view Islamic agenda. Not all of these people are obvious extremists in themselves - the late Alija Izetbegovic was if anything an ultra-liberal by global Islamic standards. But other parts of this stream spiral off into foreign-funded fanaticism and potential terrorism.

For a small community (some two million people) in a small country, the rivalry between these philosophically distinct and largely mutually exclusive tendencies looks like a recipe for incessant divisions. Which is what the Bosniacs have, and why issues going to the modernisation of Bosnia take a distant back seat.

The region's Serbs and Croats tend to suspect that the Silajdzic nationalist view is merely the radical Islamist view wearing a thin tactical disguise of Westernisation. So they behave defensively towards it, which undermines the secularist Bosniac approach, which reinforces the nationalist/Islamist tendencies, which reinforces Serb/Croat 'we told you so' angst, and so on.

Which, looking at the demographics of Bosnia, is Bad News for the Dayton process. And for Europe?

Why should the Bosniacs spend too much energy filling in all those thousands of EU application forms and cutting back corruption when (they might think) there is a much bigger prize in sight in a mere 1100 weeks or so: the collapse of Dayton and the rewriting of the basic Bosnia deal - on Bosniac/Muslim/muslim terms?

Then the real fun will start, as the nationalist/Islamist tendencies start to fight over what terms those might happen to be.

Incoming. Slowly. But surely.

I did not make the Orwell Prize 'longlist'.

Sigh. You're right. I am twisted and bitter about it.

A good number of the blog entries submitted by the Longlist winners have little if anything to do with politics, and in certain cases little if anything to do with good writing. Where among the longlisted is sustained, terse, beautifully turned work showing us the wry, biting yet profound individualistic insight which Orwell epitomised?

Plus I wonder if it is quite in the informal start-from-nothing amateur/outsider spirit of blogging to give Orwell longlist acclaim to two prominent BBC journalists and two more senior journalists from the Times and Guardian. Would, horror, the grand Orwell Trust people - perhaps without realising it - have instincts towards rewarding members of the existing media establishment?

Maybe so. And why not? It's their prize. Plus George Orwell was an Etonian.

Ho hum. Try again next year?

Of those listed it would be a disgrace to the Blogging Ideal if a mainstream journalist won, climbing to glory from an already high readership base.

So I vote for Heresy Corner. See this neatly done slicing of the current British Government's policy on free speech:

Geert Wilders has been visiting America. He has given a major speech at the Four Seasons Hotel in New York and appeared on Fox News. He had no trouble passing through immigration, it would seem, though since the United States is not part of the EU he has no automatic right of entry.

Nor have there been any reports of rioting or the civil unrest whose spectre our own Home Office invoked as justification for forbidding him entry to Britain. Ten thousand angry Muslims did not descend on the venue; indeed, a relatively small percentage of New York's population was even aware of his presence.

Puzzling, that. It cannot simply be that Lord Ahmed was otherwise engaged...

Lots more where that came from.

Who does not swing by Arts & Letters Daily, if not daily at least often?

Here is the sparkling Denis Dutton, the force behind it:

What surprises me about the resistance to the application of Darwin to psychology, is the vociferous way in which people want to dismiss it, not even to consider it. Is this a holdover from Marxism or religious doctrines? I don't know. Stephen Jay Gould was one of those people who had the idea that evolution was allowed to explain everything about me, my fingernails, my pancreas, the way my body is designed—except that it could have nothing to say about anything above the neck...

This position is unsupportable. We know there are built-in spontaneous features of the human personality, conspicuously present, for instance, in the evolutions development of speech. But other aspects of the personality as well, one which have to do with the arts, are also universal, appearing in childhood with little or no prompting, or simply arising "naturally," so it seems to us, as features of social interactions.

I cannot understand why there still is so much resistance among academics to such ideas. If you want to be a one-dimensional determinist, go ahead and make it all "culture." My side of the argument isn't trying to make it all "nature," make it all genetics. Human life is lived in a middle position between our genetic determinants on the one hand and culture on the other. It's out of that that human freedom emerges. And artistic works, the plays of Shakespeare, the novels of Jane Austen, the works of Wagner and Beethoven, Rembrandt and Hokusai, are among the freest, most human acts ever accomplished. These creations are the ultimate expressions of freedom.

It makes no more sense to claims that our artistic and expressive lives are determined only by culture, as it does to say that we are determined only by genes. Human beings are a product of both.

Why can't we get over our post-Marxist nostalgia for economic or cultural determinism and accept human reality as it actually is?

Accept reality? Blimey, what an idea.

Here is the Independent's Yasmin Alibhai-Brown on the allegedly awful treatment of Binyam Mohamed, anything which might cast light on his background conveniently omitted:

The UN Convention against Torture states: “No exceptional circumstances whatsoever, whether a war or a threat of war, internal political instability or any other public emergency, may be invoked as a justification for torture.”

That absolute injunction still stands whatever happens to us in the West, including further terror attacks. And if we don’t hold its principle precious all is lost and there can be nothing left for any of us to live and die for.

Here is David Aaronovitch in the Times, taking a more nuanced view:

Of course, it would be easier to demand that security heads should roll if we knew that Mr Mohamed had been wrongfully detained in the first place and that he was not, and had never been, a jihadi. I have longed to have this question put directly to Mr Stafford Smith in one of his hundreds of interviews, but in vain.

And here is Powerline, giving us some useful background on this one case:

According to the summary-of-evidence memo prepared for Mohamed's combatant status review tribunal at Guantánamo, Mohamed was an active participant in the plotting. He proposed "the idea of attacking subway trains in the United States."

But al Qaeda's military chief, Saif al Adel, and the purported 9/11 mastermind, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (KSM), had a different idea. Al Adel and KSM allegedly told Binyam that he and Padilla would target "high-rise apartment buildings that utilized natural gas for its heat and also targeting gas stations." Padilla and Mohamed were supposed to rent an apartment and use the building's natural gas "to detonate an explosion that would collapse all of the floors above."

My view?

Not many readers of the Times or the Independent or Powerline will have heard of Anna Brandt, Karolina Gluck and Monika Sochocka.

They were the three Polish victims of the 7 July 2005 terrorist atrocities in London.

As HM Ambassador in Warsaw I attended their three separate funerals in different locations across Poland. Each one an unimaginable family tragedy.

These needless deaths were caused by hardened Islamist fanatics. The only thing preventing more such deaths is the flat-out round the clock work by Western and other security services.

And precisely because the people scheming to kill more people for evil jihadist purposes are hardened fanatics, they are trained to lie when caught and to do everything they can to avoid revealing the scale and reach of their plotting.

Terrorist training 101: Allege torture as loudly as possible! Try to get gullible human rights activists on your side! You might get released and have the chance to try again!

Far away from the busy, principled concerns of the media and the UN Convention against Torture are thousands of families in London and around the world, people of all faiths and none who every day shed a painful private tear for their close relatives murdered by Islamist terrorists.

And who have to watch as the media swarm for the most part gushingly over people who may well have been linked to those very murderers, in organisation, ideology or ambition.

Yes, torture is really bad.

It comes in many forms these days

Close your eyes and try to imagine what Germany, Japan and China will look like 30 years from now, that is, when a newly-issued long-term bond will mature...

... Imagination fails in the case of Europe and Japan. One out of every four Germans today is older than 60, and in 30 years the proportion will rise to two-fifths. Japan is even worse: 30% of Japanese today are above 60, and in 30 years the number will be almost half. What does a national economy look like when the demographics are so skewed to pensioners?

... But America's future is not hard to visualize in 2040. In fact, America in 1979 was not much different from America in 2009. Minor adjustments await Americans over the next generation compared with the great changes affecting its prospective competitors ... Nothing can compete with the United States as a safe-haven investment for the long term. German petulance about America's domination of world markets rises in inverse proportion to the German birth rate.

Who else but Spengler? And read this gripping pessimistic passage on the psychological mess in Iran:

Modernity implies choice, and the efforts of the Iranian mullahs to prolong the strictures of traditional society appear to have backfired. The cause of Iran's collapsing fertility is not literacy as such, but extreme pessimism about the future and an endemic materialism that leads educated Iranian women to turn their own sexuality into a salable commodity ...

... Iran is a dying country, and it is very difficult to have a rational dialogue with a nation all of whose available choices terminate in oblivion.

A new world is busily unfolding as part of these trends.

The USA buys China's stuff - China buys US debt?

Vanessa Neumann (DIPLOMAT magazine editor at large) is a white child of the oligarchy connected to Venezuela.

So she knows a thing or two about what is going on there.

The latest Stonewall Workplace Equality Index has been published.

The FCO is delighted with its rating (53rd place, above the Ministry of Justice but below HM Revenue and Customs):

Commenting on the achievement Sir Mark Lyall Grant, FCO Board Diversity Champion for Sexual Orientation, said:

“I am delighted that the FCO has made it into the Stonewall’s top 100 LGBT-friendly employers. This is the third consecutive year that we have made the top 100 and a fitting way to mark the year that FLAGG, the FCO Staff Network for LGBT staff, celebrated its 10th anniversary.  It is hard to believe that it is less than 20 years since the blanket ban on openly gay and lesbian people being granted positive vetting clearance was lifted across all government departments.
 
“Our consistently strong showing in the Stonewall Index is an example of the FCO's fundamental underlying commitment not just to LGBT issues, but to business case diversity and inclusion generally.”

Memo to next Government: abolish embarrassing/silly titles.

This Index has been published since 2005 (then first appearing as a Corporate Equality Index with not quite the same focus). Sir Mark is unnecessarily modest or poorly briefed: the FCO has made it into the Top 100 of this list in its various forms every year.

It is not easy to spot trends in the lists, as Stonewall themselves do not appear to list previous Top 100s in an easy-to-access way. Plus the number of organisations taking part each year moves upwards, so competition for the Top 100 is more intense.

But the taxpayer needs to know what the great Ministries of State are up to. So I dutifully have looked at the performance of the FCO, British Council and HM Treasury over time.

Thus:

2005:   FCO14th     British Council Ist      HMT 31st

2006:   FCO 58th    British Council 30th   HMT 85th

2007:   FCO 92nd   British Council 42nd   HMT nowhere

2008:   FCO 26th    British Council 59th  HMT nowhere

2009:   FCO 53rd    British Council nowhere   HMT nowhere 

Thus the FCO is a solid mid-table performer in the Stonewall diversity indices.

The British Council started with a flourish back in 2005, leading the field:

Sir David Green, Director-General of the British Council, named top employer for gay people in Britain in 2005, said “I’m thrilled. This recognises the work the British Council has undertaken to promote equality and diversity in our employment practices both in the UK and around the world.”

But after that bright start it sank away and has now been relegated. Are the British Council now publicly unthrilled by their performance? Stonewall's view on this dramatic fall from grace?

Meanwhile HMT under then Chancellor Gordon Brown made an effort at the start, but latterly has vanished too.

Here's something curious too.

Type FCO stonewall into Google and all sorts of links pop up to British Embassy websites round the world under the Newsroom heading reporting Sir Mark's delight. See eg the first one, UK in Korea.

But if you go directly to that website as if via Google (as a casual or regular visitor might) and click on Newsroom, the item is not there. A time-lag of some sort when a page is posted by FCO web team HQ for the whole network and it takes a while for it to appear on each Embassy site?

All in all, these annual lists are a grand way for Stonewall to publicise itself and its pro-gay agenda, and thereby a vehicle for putting pressure on different bodies to adopt it ("they have taken part - are you showing that you don't care about diversity by not doing so too?").

But maybe too some organisations are concluding that the whole exercise is not really much more than an ingenious publicity stunt and quietly withdrawing from it? Albeit unwilling publicly to say so?

Here is a good account of where Mark Steyn hit the target and missed a few too when he met the Canadian Standing Committee on Government Agencies of the Ontario legislature recently, to explain why he is unimpressed with the state of free speech in Canada:

Looking back, I can't help but think that Steyn made the cardinal mistake of trying to be clever - witty, thoughtful, sardonic, sarcastic, or simply just engaged - with the committee.

Bureacracies aren't clever, and they react to any attempt to take the ritual of public oversight and consultation beyond a narrow rhetorical playing field with the impatience and even hostility a judge has for anyone who tries to defend themselves in court.

This point came up:

Steyn reacts with similar dismay to a question from MPP David Zimmer, who uses the "yelling fire in a crowded theatre" metaphor to rather unspecific effect. Even a week later, I'm not sure what Zimmer was asking, or the point he was trying to make, or even the strength of his conviction that there's possibly something wrong with fires, or yelling, or crowded theatres.

Steyn reacts with palpable disgust - he's heard this one before, and can't disguise his impatience, but it prompts what comes off as a rant about the history of theatre electrification drawn on his own extensive knowledge of musical theatre.

I previously looked at this Fire!/Theatre cliche here and here.

It underpins a puerile but sly collectivist argument that goes something like this:

• we of course champion free speech as a core value
• but, of course, it has limits - as does everything
• for example, no-one accepts that someone who recklessly cries Fire! in a crowded theatre should escape official sanction
• by extension, anyone whose words cause or might cause any harm or distress to someone else has to be held responsible
• especially when those words are hateful or likely to be taken as hurtful by vulnerable people and communities
• and unfortunately there are lots of categories of hateful language which need to be regulated for these very sound reasons
• so the people who lay down the rules must be the people who have the best insights into these issues and the hurt caused by hate speech, as anything else would or could be hurtful
• which means us
• so, you over there arguing that marriage has to be defined as referring only to a man and woman - shut up. Now.
• and you too - criticising the Obama government when it is trying to put right all the fascist wrongs of Bushitler is tantamount to blocking attempts to stop hate speech, and so has to be stopped too.
• and by the way, if some communities or individuals are provoked beyond endurance by hate speech and start attacking or even beheading people, those who provoked them are to blame
• got all that?
• good.
• Now keep quiet.

Silence, broken only by the loudspeakers on street corners blaring out every 30 minutes that Free Speech is a Core EU Strategic Priority...

Here are two handy quotations:

It is very hard to be optimistic about revenues. The problem is not just the recession, for that has barely begun. The problem is structural. Too much of the revenue comes from high-earners... The top 1 per cent of income-tax payers contributes more than 20 per cent of income-tax revenue.

People reasonably bleat about bonuses, but those bonuses make a huge contribution to tax revenues.

Plus:

The rich and successful and dynamic are voting with their feet and voting to go and settle somewhere else. In New York City, 1% of the residents of New York City pay 50% of the taxes.

One is Hamish McRae in the way left-leaning Independent. The other is Mark Steyn, Columnist to The World.

Are they by some chance related?

Hamish again:

... this has gone beyond politics. The harsh arithmetic makes radical measures inevitable, and the difficult task for the next government will be to sustain support for these measures.

This leads to a bigger issue, which is that we are getting a taste now of the sort of fiscal constraints that will govern political choice for a generation.

The UK's present plight is partly a result of recession but much more one of structural imbalance. We don't pay enough tax for the level of spending we have sought to maintain.

That applies well enough to the UK. How about the EU?

Watch the churnings get ever-more frantic as national governments have no choice but to tighten the national belt - and expect EU-level spending to undergo the same discipline.

My new observations on this ever-fascinating subject are in the latest Total Politics (free registration needed for the E-zine).

See eg:

Yeltsin’s Moscow before that (1993-96) was fascinating in big policy terms, but a grinding, debilitating place to live in. In late August the air abruptly went chilly as the Russian Winter geared up. By the following April the Embassy was a squabbling wreck, everyone fed up with filthy frozen ice and overheated apartments. As warmer weather approached, reports of deep-frozen drunks emerging from melting snowdrifts (and hefty twenty foot-long icicles crashing down to kill pedestrians) did little to ease our flagging spirits.

And the world's first British chauvinist's guide to possible postings, including Belgrade/Balkans:

Why does the EU work as it does?

One Massive Point about the EU which tends to get lost is that it is all about the biggest member states giving exaggerated and unceasing reassurance to the smaller ones. This explains why the voting weights as per the current Nice Treaty work hugely to the disadvantage of Germany in particular, with the UK/France/Italy Spain also doing fairly badly.

The effect of this is that the Bigs can not overpower the Not So Bigs and Smalls, even though the Bigs pay more heavily into the common Budget and have far more actual people.

Strip out all the obvious explanations for how this came about and there is something deeper going on: a strategic deal based upon the relative stability of national population weights as between the various member states.

Because the respective population weights of the various member states vary at a slowish and predictable pace, those states can sign up to these 'discriminatory' voting weight arrangements safe at least in the knowledge that they know what to expect for some time to come - they can not be caught out by abrupt demographic jumps, and accompanying demands for the rules to be rewritten.

That said, changes do accumulate up. And down.

Try to imagine an EU in which the UK was the largest country and Germany third after France. That could happen comfortably within the lifetime of children at school now.

Still, fifty years is quite a long time in immediate policy terms. Twenty years is only some 1040 weeks - not such a long time. 

What if a community in a divided multi-ethnic society thought that the numbers were working very fast in its favour? That within a mere 1000 weeks or so it could have a predominant demographic position, and so be able to change the constitution to rewrite the country's rules completely in favour of an effective mono-ethnic outcome on its own terms?

Would not this stunning historical prize dominate that community's political thinking, and be more attractive than doing all that boring work needed to join the EU?

Welcome to Bosnia, via this remarkable must-read analysis.

Here is Archbishop Desmond Tutu boldly advising President Obama in an article written for the BBC:

In the first days after 9/11, the United States had the world's sympathy, an unprecedented wave of it. President Bush squandered it.

Obama too could easily squander the goodwill that his election generated if he disappoints.

It would be wonderful if, on behalf of the nation, Obama apologises to the world, and especially the Iraqis, for an invasion that I believe has turned out to be an unmitigated disaster.  

While he's already promised to shut down Guantanamo Bay, he should also move to ratify the Rome Statute on the International Criminal Court.

When we were at school we had a chemistry experiment aimed at establishing the thickness of a molecule of oil by placing a blob of oil on water covered in lycopodium powder then doing something with the world-famous Avodagro Number. It turned out that a molecule of oil was not very thick at all.

I recall all this because that micro-depth corresponds almost exactly with the depth of analysis in the Archbishop's article.

This man is meant to be a Christian thinker of some consequence. So why does he not think?

He characterises the invasion of Iraq as an unmitigated disaster. How does he view the quality of the nascent democratic processes now unfolding there? Really so worthless and without consequence for the mass of Iraqis who now have  democratic prospects comparable to (and maybe even exceeding) those of than South Africans under the ANC?

He bewails the horrific images from Abu Graib, as if a small number of such abuses defines and negates the whole project - not a view I recall him taking towards acts of ANC-sponsored terrorism aimed at ending the absence of democracy in South Africa.

So should Obama 'apologise' for the fact that the USA has sacrificed a lot of lives and wealth to help Iraqis have the sort of freedoms which South Africans now have? No, of course not. Even if he is minded to do so, he probably has a closer eye on avoiding 'disappointing' US voters than sucking up to far-flung clerics.

Tutu frets at the Bush Administration's decisions not to sign the Kyoto Protocol or the International Criminal Court Statute. Yet on Kyoto did not President Bush follow President Clinton's prudent example?

And when the American neo-cons warned that the ICC would turn out to a politicised farce, were they not right? Lo and behold, Africa's leaders (South Africa not exactly holding back) are flatly opposed to the looming ICC indictment of the ghastly President of Sudan and are whirring away to make Africa a zone free of universal jurisdiction.

The Archbishop reasonably claims that

... an upright US was a great inspiration in our fight against the iniquity of apartheid. I pray that President Obama will come down hard on African dictators, especially because they cannot credibly charge him with being neo-colonialist.

No doubt they will charge him with that incredibly instead.

1/10. Very disappointing. Try much harder next time.

Iain Dale carries a well-turned interview with David Cameron. Both interviewer and subject emerge well from a civilised and intelligent exchange.

This caught my eye:

How will you defend the right to offend?

This goes back to the 'do you listen' question, because on the one hand you don't want someone inciting hatred of gays but on the other hand you want to live in a society where people don't feel their free speech is restricted if it is about humour.

So there is a balance. We all rage against political correctness and there's lots of political correctness which is ridiculous - silly health and safety worries that stop children grazing a knee on an outward bounds adventure. We have got to get rid of that.

But there's one bit of political correctness which is terribly important and that's about politeness. I have a disabled son and I don't want people to call him a spastic. You are a gay man, you don't want someone to call you a poof. If you have a black friend, you don't want someone to call them something offensive. It's about manners and I think what we've got to do is frame this debate in a sense of what is good manners and politeness and what is common sense.

Any normal person must agree with the broad sense of this. And hurrah for a politician talking about good manners.

Yet is the line of thought firm enough? Albeit in the heat of the moment (but maybe all the more revealing for that reason?) David Cameron seems to define manners as being ''one part of political correctness", whereas in fact they are something utterly different.

Political Correctness has two core goals:

(a) to stake out explicitly Leftist/collectivist ideological and positions on a huge range of subjects, as a sort of psychological artillery barrage to prepare the way for vastly increased bureaucratic-legal control over people's lives;

and (b), to stake out a Leftist/collectivist monopoly on doing the staking.

This has nothing to do with manners, which are a subtle way of laying down informal but principled codes of behaviour based on freedom, privacy and tolerance (no doubt descending from all sorts of courtly ways of the privileged down the ages, but none the worse today for that).

So the last thing we want is to let the PC industry seize control of manners too, as something they and they alone define. That is the far enemy of good manners and politeness and common sense.

On the contrary, we look to a Conservative government to roll back the PC industry by simply abolishing large parts of its bureaucratic infrastructure and the accompanying legal framework.

Just think how many supremely undeserving parasitic people in all those Diversity/Bullying/Gender and other Units would have to find an honest job in the private sector if that happened.

Think about the exquisite loss of revenue to the Guardian et al when those public sector jobs can no longer be advertised at significant cost to the taxpayer, as they no longer exist.

The squeals of protest!

So let's see if David Cameron can summon the strength to take this excellent if not quite tightly enough defined thought, and turn it into some really ruthless policy action.

As a former senior civil servant I hereby offer to advise a future government on how most deeply and most cruelly to wield the anti-PC axe,

On day one!

Otherwise a new British Conservative government has failed!

Thus:

On the first day of your government, you should close down the BBC. You should take it off air. You should disclaim its copyrights. You should throw all its staff into the street. You should not try to privatise the BBC. This would simply be to transfer the voice of your enemy from the public to the private sector, where it might be more effective in its opposition. You must shut it down - and shut it down at once.

You should do the same with much of the administration. The Foreign Office, much of the Home Office, the Commission for Racial Equality, anything to do with health and safety and planning and child protection - I mean much of the public sector - these should be shut down.

If at the end of your first month in power, you have not shut down half of the State, you are failing. If you have shut down half the State, you have made a step in the right direction, and are ready for still further cuts.

Strong meat, and perhaps going some way beyond what is necessary or wise.

Plus campaigning on a ticket of abolishing the BBC would merely unleash the whole BBC to crawl over the Conservatives with a view to discrediting them in the eyes of the electorate, thereby reducing the prospects of winning anyway.

Not a mention of the role of the EU in all this?

Maybe a better or at least complementary approach for the Opposition is to publish a long list of all the Labour legislation (and preceding Tory legislation too where necessary) which will simply be repealed and replaced by nothing other than citizens getting on with things.

A handy start is made here.

The dreary saga of General Mladic rambles on. Successive Serbian governments have pressed the civilised world that it is not fair to hold Serbia's European prospects hostage for one crazy war criminal. Some in the civilised world agree.

Yet that argument goes the other way too. Why is one crazy man exerting such an influence over so many people that it has not been possible to nab him and send him on his way to the Hague in over a decade?

A survey in Serbia appeared to show a strong popular reluctance to hand over war-crimes indictee General Mladic to face justice:

... what makes Ratko M a friend of two thirds of Serbian citizens? Why do they feel so indebted to him?

Few things are more horrible or dreadful than those for which Ratko Mladić is indicted. If you look at it that way, hardly anyone would have reason to protect and defend him except his direct accomplices. How do you then get from a handful of accomplices to 65% of the polled adult citizens of Serbia?

Good question.

The answer alas lies somewhere here:

We sort of do not want to go back, and we definitely cannot go forward; trapped in a purgatory closed on both sides, we are often infuriated by mass oblivion, but this is an illusion: there is no oblivion, because there has never been an awareness of the Events That Happened.

You cannot forget something that you never even knew, and you did not know because you made a great effort not to find out and not to understand, because it is nicer and easier that way. 

I think that Mladic is like Lenin mouldering away in Red Square.

A potent symbol of something so uniquely awful in the local culture that in a  strange, unspoken way many people feel actually proud of its awfulness, even when they have suffered from that awfulness - and therefore proud of their own furtive complicity in it:

The Really Perfect Crime is not defined by the fact that no-one knows who did it. 

Instead it is to commit a truly atrocious deed and then arrange things so that we all know exactly who did it - but prefer to look away from the victim, to offer the criminal a drink, and chatter excitedly about 'moving on'. 

Perhaps the Serbs and Russians by some chance are increasingly related:

The propensity to rely on spiritual unity with Russia, displayed particularly by the country’s president and foreign minister, arises I guess from sheer helplessness, intellectual as well as political...

Craig Murray's site links (approvingly) to a site busy collecting signatures in support of indicting Tony Blair for war crimes.

And hurrah!, Noam Chomsky has signed up. As has uber-Darwinian Richard Dawkins, another person who seems to think that his lively insight in one area of science requires us to take very seriously indeed everything else he emits.

Tony Blair can relax. With world-class hypocrite Chomsky in the lead, such an exercise will go nowhere.

I had the doubtful pleasure of listening to Chomsky at a small Harvard seminar in 1999 as he rambled on against Western policy towards Milosevic. The energy of his views about Yugoslavia was in direct proportion to his ignorance of the subject.

Don't take my conservative/libertarian word for it. Check out this pertinent Marxist analysis of Chomskyist confusion on the subject of Kosovo/Kosova:

There once was a time when the radical critic, faced with rape camps and mass killings against an ethnic minority, could be counted on to attack the offending regime, expose the complicity of the Western powers, and extend solidarity to the victims of oppression. But no more - at least judging from Noam Chomsky's latest book on the war in Kosova.

The baffling thing about all this ranting against Tony Blair by eg former UK Ambassador Craig Murray is that the sort of people who make the loudest noise about torture in ghastly regimes seem to have a problem when anyone actually does something about it.

No-one doubts the scale of the sustained horror and hundreds of thousands of deaths and maimings directly attributable to Saddam Hussein. The fact that Iraq has some hope now of a decent pluralist future - admittedly at a huge cost on many fronts, as fanatic Saddam supporters and other opponents of freedom have done everything possible to thwart the process - is surely a good thing in itself.

Iraq's real tragedy is that its own people did not find the strength to rise up to topple Saddam, as the Serbs did to topple Milosevic (albeit with some busy Western help, in which I played a walk-on part) - an outcome Mr Chomsky saw as 'Western imperialism' in action.

The twit.