Blogoir: May

Danny Finkelstein argues well in the Times that politics are getting more fragmented and less controlled:

In his book The Long Tail Chris Anderson points out how the market for, say, books has in the past been constrained by the shop shelf space available to display. Online shopping has abolished this constraint, allowing a much larger range of books, many dealing with topics of niche interest ...

Something very similar is going on in politics, too. Large centralised political parties were created because of the existence of the mass media. To make any political impact, an idea or an individual had to find a spot in the limited shelf space provided by the big media giants. This prompted individuals to organise themselves into tight, uniform groupings with a professional staff shaping their message for media outlets. 

From this relationship between the media and politicians arose our current form of closed politics. And not all of its features are undesirable, by any means. It is a highly effective way of organising politicians in order to pass legislation. It enables the business of government to be carried out effectively ... For voters, many of whom just want to get on with their lives, closed politics reduces the cost of decision making ... 

But whether this system has advantages or not is irrelevant - because the information revolution makes its continuation impossible. The replacement of the monolithic mass media with a much messier, much freer market in information changes everything. The media is fragmenting and taking Parliament with it.

And see also this good piece by Stuart Sharpe on how the blogosphere might have handled the Parliamentary expenses scandal information differently (and better?):

Most importantly, however, if the information had come out through Wikileaks and been freely available to all, it would be verifiable. We’ve had to take The Telegraph’s word on many of their expenses stories – and several times they’ve proved themselves undeserving of such trust ...

My previous posting described how certain FCO allowances anomalies rambled on long after the original rationale for them had been forgotten.

This is the same for government, but on a scale so vast it's easy to miss it - a bit like being in the shadow of Mt Everest and fretting about trees blocking the view.

There are three rival ideas about government:

• that it comes from Authority which is Just There (but, if you insist, God-given). This explains Kings and Queens who originally were the powerful people best capable of bashing other powerful people into submission but then acquired legitimacy of different shapes and sizes. That idea took (literally) a heavy blow in this country when Charles I's head was chopped off, but it lingers on in much of the world including across the Middle East and in a bastardised form in places like Cuba and N Korea
• that it comes from the Will of the Collective. This emerged from the French and Russian Revolutions. It makes claims to legitimacy which are hard to argue with ("let's do things in the interests of everyone!") but its methods usually end up being anything but collective, with a self-appointed ruthless few pronouncing on what the Collective Will in fact is. See Stalin, Hitler, Old/New Labour, Polly Toynbee passim
• that it comes from the Free Will of Individual Citizens. This emerged from the English/Scottish/American Enlightenments. Government is the way citizens outsource decisions affecting them all to a smaller group, aka democracy. Lots of different ways of doing this. The problem is that the systems set up by citizens start to grow and grow, increasingly seeing government as basically being about themselves, not about citizens. They then try to redefine government in post-democratic terms of Authority which is Just There and/or Will of the Collective (Westminster MPs, EU passim).

So why is Danny Finkelstein mainly right?

Because technology does numerous new things which have never ever been possible before:

• it allows collective mass participatory analysis and decision-making in real time
• it exposes abuses and distributes the examples at lightening speed
• it gives people a way to remonstrate with leaders directly and in huge numbers
• it ignores distinctions of class, colour, gender, nationality - everyone is in a quite new sense 'equal'
• it lets people choose directly the issues they think are important and how they decide on them
• it shoves out of the way those who claim to speak for the Collective Will and allows New Bottom-up Collective Will(s) to emerge spontaneously
• it erodes Authority which is Just There
• above all, it encourages Authority which is Earned

All this is obvious. What is unclear is how exactly the erosion and collapse of existing arrangements set up in different times under different visions of Authority will happen.

The current political parties in the UK sense the uneasiness of their position but are not able to articulate an agenda for reform on the scale required (not least because they know that the way the EU works is a massive problem in all this).

The European Union pretends to ignore the whole issue:

"You said No in your Constitutional Treaty referendum? Tsk. Have another one which says Yes. And in the meantime we'll carry on as we wanted anyway"

Russia is defaulting back to a grim Stalinist Authority which is Just There, to the point of trying to confiscate history.

The USA under President Obama is attempting an ambitious synthesis of a new Awesome Authority which is Just There (Obama) + Will of the Collective (Obama). But the numbers don't look too good.

In short?

Politicians round the world are delivering policies and legitimacy as defined in earlier times.

This model in all its current forms is inherently unstable.

But unstable things can wobble for a while before they finally topple over.

Will the leaders of the future come from those who best prepare for that final toppling?

Or indeed from those who lead the way in pushing down the current pack of cards?

Those who offer a Plan?

I had an interesting chat today with a former FCO colleague about the slow evolution of FCO attitudes to expenses, which no doubt has echoes in much of the rest of government.

When I joined the FCO we diplomats on foreign postings had various allowances, calculated laboriously to try to take account of the extra direct costs (if any) of living overseas, plus indirect costs we incurred from that lifestyle.

Plus we were given one modest interest-free loan to buy a property in the UK, to help junior officers get started on the property ladder and by way of some puny compensation for the real loss we incurred by being overseas for years on end and so being unable to move fast to buy something suitable.

The usual overseas allowances were paid in to our bank accounts with our salaries. They might go up or down as sterling drifted against other currencies - in choppy times the cost of these uncontrollable fluctuations could be a big problem for the FCO overall Budget.

On top of that we had access to Embassy entertainment funds. Back in 1979 each diplomat had a small personal entertainment allowance, which could be spent on cultivating contacts and claimed back via receipts and a list of contacts entertained. Then, later, these personal entertainment funds were pooled for each Embassy but claimed back in much the same way.

Travel costs were refunded according to various complicated formulae - a trip to a regional capital might be claimed back at a flat rate of £70 per night for hotel + food, regardless of what one spent; a trip to a remote area might be claimed back against 'actuals - what one had actually spent on hotel/food

Ambassadors also had a personal allowance called Frais. This was a sizeable sum of money paid in to their bank accounts to be spent on entertaining senior foreigners at their discretion. All this was shrouded in serious secrecy - how much was X getting in Paris, compared to Y in Washington or Z in Kinshasa?

These arrangements emerged in a more leisurely time when public servants were expected to come across and behave like Gentlemen. There were obvious real or likely abuses:

• the allowances for single people contained an element for a notional sole child (a certain Horace). Why? It was just there. Enjoy!
• people pocketing the difference between what they spent on an official trip and what they could claim back. This was a big deal for people in Ministers' Private Offices (and indeed Ministers) who travelled a lot but who had accommodation and food paid for along the way separately. Not to mention all that Duty Free booze which had to be left by the Embassy on the departing Ministerial plane.
• Embassy and locally employed staff too enjoyed travel subsistence - money claimed back on a trip up-country beyond what was spent was a nice little tax-free salary bonus
• Ambassadors basically stealing from the taxpayer by not spending their Frais on entertainment or not accounting for this spending honestly. I have good reason to know that in one case this happened on a non-trivial scale (ie several thousand pounds and probably a lot more). What did I do about it? Nothing. Because that was how the system worked, and it would have been next to impossible to prove in practice as no receipts had been left behind when the Ambassador concerned left post.

Not only abuses. Insane anomalies. Long after the distinction between direct and indirect allowances had withered away, traces of it remained. No-one knew why. But no-one wanted to 'risk' abolishing them.

Thus as HM Ambassador Warsaw I could use my local allowances discretion to buy stationery supplies to record Residence spending, but not a new computer programme to do the same job far better. I asked why it was OK to buy products made from trees/paper but not products made from sand/silicon. No-one would answer.

Under pressure from internal unease, some questions in Parliament(!) and the Inland Revenue, the FCO over the years moved to making almost everything accountable and claimable as 'actuals'. No more little profits here and there. But it took a very long time - almost thirty years.

Ambassadors' Frais was an especialy tough one to crack, as even to question it was presented as an aspersion on their Excellencies' lofty honour.

First it became fully accountable: you had to spend the money you were given on reasonable entertaining, and, if it was not spent, send the remainder back. In Belgrade and Warsaw Mrs C laboriously entered all our official spending into a clunky computer programme and sent the data to London. But not once in seven years did anyone ever check the entries against our actual spend.

Only in 2007/08 did Frais stop being paid directly into Ambassadors' private bank accounts and become part of a transparent Embassy budget open to easy, reasonable internal and external scrutiny.

So this is how things work in any organisation, with state/government bodies especially prone to be less concerned about the financial bottom line and instead working to laborious 'evolution' and precedent. Transparency is seen as an annoying intrusion, not an opportunity 

Parliament's allowances structure likewise has evolved over decades and is now utterly rotten.

Within that structure there will be MPs who have restrained themselves from a sense of personal and professional responsibility and claimed a reasonable number of items back, knowing that they might have claimed far more.

There will be MPs who have gone for broke, filling their boots with taxpayers' money on all fronts while they could, especially if they might be Out at the next general elections.

And there must be plenty in the middle, who one way or the other were tempted to put in a cheeky/greedy claim or ten, knowing that that was the System and arguing that if lots of others were taking full advantage of it why should not they have a small slice too? 

Especially if it was 'within the rules'. Which they helped set.

The allowances binge-drinking party hosted by taxpayers is finally ending in the UK.

Next stop: the European Parliament. See how they run... 

The age-old problem for Russia is, how to run a territory sprawling over some eleven time zones?

This means Moscow catching the attention of regional leaders thousands of miles away - and keeping them in reasonable line.

Over the years a Firm Hand has been seen as the best method. But is it best suited to the needs of a modern economy? And, if not, what?

Igor Yurgens, said to be close to President Medvedev has views:

In an interview with the Daily Telegraph, Mr Yurgens said Mr Putin had put power in the hands of a small ruling elite, creating an energy-dependent model that was beginning to creak as the financial crisis began to weaken Russia.

"The present system shows signs of overextension," Mr Yurgens said. "It shows signs of over centralisation and fragility because it is based not on institutions but on the mythological vertical of power.

"The reform process stumbled halfway. We have to push very hard to restart those reforms otherwise we will not be ready to catch up with the G8. We will remain on the level of leading emerging nations."

"The mythological vertical of power".

What a phrase.

Leonid Khrushchev died in WW2. His father of course was the former Soviet leader, famous for the not-so Secret Speech in 1956 which confronted the Party with the crimes of Stalin. And for airing his sock at the UN.

Was Leonid a hero or traitor? Whichever he was, that by implication is how is father will be seen. And how he is seen shapes the legitimacy or not of Stalin and Stalinism and attempts to move away from it now. Obvious, huh?

To see how these high-level power struggles in part play out in popular Russian consciousness, read this outstanding article:

Khrushchev, who had planted the seedling of the Soviet demise, quietly and almost magically morphed into a force for bad, the antithesis of what the new leadership represented, which meant that he would have to be countered, undermined, repudiated: if one wanted to curry favour with the Kremlin one might train his sights on Nikita Sergeyevich, in a book, a newspaper, maybe on a nationally broadcast television programme.

This was never stated, of course. There were no memos or secret speeches. Vladimir Putin and President Dmitry Medvedev would never deign to get involved in this sort of thing.

The best recent example of this two-step process – in which the leader signals some vague wish or discontent and his minions subsequently bend over backward to fulfil that wish or correct the perceived injustice – was on display in Putin’s remarks at a June 2007 conference of high-school teachers in Moscow.

As the historian Orlando Figes recounts in a recent issue of the New York Review of Books, Putin denounced the “mess and confusion” that had afflicted the teaching of Russian history. Four days after the conference, the Duma introduced a law, which was quickly passed, giving the Ministry of Education the right to choose which textbooks should be published and used in Russian schools. Government officials at the conference promoted – and soon adopted – a textbook whose main author, Alexander Filippov, was the employee of a pro-Kremlin think-tank.

The office of the president, which commissioned the book, had issued instructions to Filippov and his co-authors to portray Stalin as “good” (because he “strengthened vertical power”), Khrushchev as “bad” (“weakened vertical power”), and Brezhnev as “good” (“for the same reasons as Stalin”).

“That is the nature of the secretive and despotic system,” says Nina Khrushcheva, Yulia’s daughter and an international-relations professor at The New School in New York. “The tsar doesn’t need to give orders. There are a lot of bureaucratic well-wishers who think, ‘I’m sure he’d love it. The tsar would appreciate what I do.’”

In other words, the campaign to defame Leonid Khrushchev and Nikita Khrushchev and the whole liberal project was understood, the way so many things in Russia are understood, by Russians, if not by anyone else.

Superb. Read the whole thing.

Craig Murray has an interesting post trying to make the case that receiving information extracted or suspected to be extracted via torture is the same as receiving child pornography.

I have posted this comment which tries to look at the key dilemma: what is the best way for democracies to change brutal dictatorships?

If isolating them rarely works, how to engage to make things better without ending up becoming 'complicit' in their misdeeds?

Thus:

Craig,

An interesting point. But not quite right.

The child pornographer is doing something vile from which no good can even theoretically emerge. The torturer is doing something vile from which something 'good' might emerge, ie information leading to the prevention of terrorist acts. Hence the dilemma referred to quite openly in that House of Lords judgement, which came down on the side of using this information, 'poisoned fruit' as it was or might be.

Ms Sands seeks to qualify that judgement in various ways:

"The question then becomes: at what point does the regular receipt of information that is known to have been obtained by torture amount in some way to a contribution? It depends on the factual scenario against which that happens."

But that too cuts the other way - the better the relationship you have with these torturing villains, the more likely you might be to get information which saves UK lives?

Plus, if you want to stop these people treating their prisoners so badly, maybe it is better to get alongside them and coax them patiently towards proper behaviour - the evidence that isolating and reviling villains makes them behave better is pretty thin? This does not mean even a forthright Ambassador having drinks and frank talks with the Interior Minister, who is probably a meaningless front-man. It means having a hard-headed intelligence liaison relationships built up over years with the toughest people in the system, to try to win their confidence and show them that cruelty is not the only tool at their disposal?

What I have never seen in your writings on this site and your two books is a considered view from you on how to change such dictatorships. Your book makes a good case for the merits of an Ambassador being clear and forthright with the Uzbeks, and you won some local clout accordingly.

But had you stayed in post for the full tour, how exactly would you have used that influence to change eg their torturing ways? Would eg cancelling an EBRD event there really make any serious difference? Maybe yes in the longer term, at the price of their behaving even worse in the shorter term to show that they won't be bullied? How does one explain that outcome to the relatives of the short-term victims?

Surely the only way forward is via diplomatic engagement of different sorts (see eg the usual arguments for talking to terrorists or freedom fighters, and the EU lumbering back to talking to Belarus). But that opens you up to the charge of 'indirect complicity' in their torture/violence too, if in fact they are simply stringing you and the rest of us along?

Plus the more you engage with the regime, the harder it is to be a credible source of comfort to the lonely democrats calling for change? The core diplomatic dilemma of my own career.

In other words, don't we end up in a rather dull, unhappy position where we have to expect torture round the world to dwindle over decades (if we are lucky), while in the meantime we in the democratic world just do our best to set an example while also protecting our citizens in as least dishonourable a way as the overall circumstances permit?

That is where President Clinton ended up, and where President Obama appears to be heading. Neither of them Bushhitler types?

In short, how to turn Passion into Effectiveness?

The office of Speaker of the British House of Commons is a position laden with world-class Tradition and Authority.

Alas we have the current occupant, Michael Martin. A man from humble origins who is just not up to it.

Legend has it that on an official Speaker visit to Poland he and his wife were housed in a smart hotel suite (as previously used by members of the Royal Family). Out came the Cif to clean the bathrooms ("you can't be too careful").

His Speakership has been characterised by charmless clumsiness. Now he is rightly under heavy fire for the incompetence and abuses which have flourished on his watch.

The issue is simple. Once the very idea emerges formally in public that someone in a position like his has lost the confidence of the people he is leading, he has indeed lost that confidence and should scrape togther some dignity and step straight down.

And how does he respond? He drags out the rule book and tries to play the sort of procedural trick which might work to buy some time in a conflict-ridden small town darts club.

But even then he doesn't appear to know the rules:

But it was David Davis who asked the lethal question. He asked the Speaker how the motion could be made a "substantive".

And the Speaker said: "Let me ask the Clerk." The House looked on, watching the tutorial taking place. There was quietness. Thirty seconds passed as the Clerk gave the Speaker a one-two-three on one of the most basic rules of procedure.

So, there we all saw at length, in plain view, on national television, a Speaker so bereft of speakerly qualities unable even to say how a motion gets on the order paper.

Will the Labour leadership scrape together some of their remaining honour and throw him overboard?

Ignominy.

UPDATE:  Yes. Better late than never. Gone. To a huge pension.

Craig Murray weighs in hard against what he calls Iain Dale's stinking hypocrisy:

Most of you appear to read this blog at work, as readership drops at the weekend. So please do look at this piece I did on the really appalling hypocrisy of Tory blogger Iain Dale:

http://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2009/05/iain_dale_is_a.html#comments

Iain has the number 1 blog on the Wikio rankings. If people want to read blogs that are simply a vehicle for party propaganda, that of course is their right. But I would hate people to be under the illusion they were getting anything more thoughtful or independent just because it is a new media fomat.

Nadine Dorries' admission that she deliberately concealed from her constituents that she lives neither in London nor in her constituency, is appalling. Dale and Dorries are close - he was recently her escort and guest to the Classical Brit awards at the Royal Albert Hall (another freebie for the tireless trougher Dorries?). But his defence of Dorries, when he viciously attacks non-Tory MPs for the same kind of offence, shows Dale up for what he is.

But there's more:

For a party hack, Dale is remarkably thin-skinned. He commented on my post:

And all because I linked to a post by Charles Crawford which you didn't like. I thought you were bigger than this. But clearly not. Why do you always have to be so personal. "Stinking hypocrite". No reasoning. Just insults. I used to really think you were a person worth reading and engaging with. I no longer do. How very sad you have reduced your blog to this level.

Actually, this has nothing at all to do with Iain linking to Charles Crawford. I was not in the least upset by that. In fact, I was so not upset by it, I'll do it myself. Here is Charles' criticism of me: http://charlescrawford.biz/N5A207442111

Charles has a different political view to mine. We argue fiercely. But he is logical and consistent, and I rather like him.

I am very straightforward, Iain. When I say that you are acting hypocritically, it is because I believe you are acting hypocritically, not because you linked to Charles Crawford.

I'm keeping my head down on this one.

Eeek.

According to Nick Cohen in the Observer the Cameron Conservatives are heading for the Outer Darkness:

After the European elections, British Conservatives will leave the company of Angela Merkel, Nicolas Sarkozy, Fredrik Reinfeldt and the other moderate centre-right leaders who gather under the banner of European People's party. Although they share reasonable conservative desires for lower taxes and sound finance, Cameron cannot stick with them because they also believe in a federal Europe.

The Tories will ally instead with the proudly ignorant parties of eastern Europe. Know-nothing chauvinism, sexual and religious prejudices, and conspiracy theories from Europe's dark heart motivate them, but they are against federalism and that is all that matters to Cameron.

What is it about progressive writers which makes them describe post-communist Europe in terms of the Dark Other? Maybe they need to get out more.

On he rambles:

The simple idea to keep in mind as you wade into the complexities of European politics is that the EU is closer to a diplomatic alliance than the "superstate" of Eurosceptic nightmare. Governments pursue political and national interests by forming coalitions with like-minded parties and states.

Primarily other governments, to be exact.

Cameron is proposing to remove himself from the table, leave Britain's best cards behind and run off to the fringe. When Merkel and other centre-right leaders discuss tactics and priorities before meetings of the European Council, they will exclude Cameron.

On the next rung down, when continental conservative ministers do the same before meetings on trade and foreign affairs, they will exclude ministers from the new Tory government. As isolated will be Conservative members of the European Parliament, who will make the journey from influence to irrelevance overnight.

These latter points are just ignorant. Discussions at European Council level are utterly cynical and go by which government is likely to vote for what, not which EP grouping any one politician's party belongs to. And the tougher you negotiate, the more influence you have (especially if you have quite a good bloc of votes).

As to how far the Conservatives will be 'isolated' in the European Parliament, that depends on how many seats they get and the overall balance of power (duh): being out of the main blocs and in the position of a bloc which helps decide which things get passed may be a far more powerful position in practice.

The deeper problem with all this flannel about the UK being 'isolated in Europe' is that it is just not true.

Why?

Because huge sums of UK taxpayers' money flows into the EU pot. It may suit various European politicians pompously to intone that the Conservatives are 'abandoning the mainstream', but you can be damn sure they'll be careful to make sure that our net contributions stay in it.

Which brings us to the only real point.

Namely, how hard will any Conservative government negotiate on the UK contribution to the European budget in the next Financial Persepctive negotiations?

Back in 2005 Tony Blair made key concessions on the Rebate to get a Budget deal and keep the rickety EU structure staggering on. Why? Because he really believes in the project as it stands.

Had he been a lot more ruthless, he could have used the powerful position the UK then enjoyed after the French and Dutch referenda debacles to force deeper institutional reforms, including burying the Constitutional Treaty and its unhappy offpsring the Lisbon Treaty.

But he didn't. The one policy choice where he was wrong and Gordon Brown right?

So either the Cameron Conservatives will drive a very hard bargain next time round to force cutbacks in wasteful EU spending and maybe some institutional reforms as well to restore authority to national parliaments. Or they won't.

As for not being part of the 'mainstream', who would want to be when the current is hurtling the EU rowing boat towards a steep and dangerous waterfall?

Abandon ship:

... the single currency has changed from a stabilising factor into a new source of vulnerability for members of the eurozone. The reason is that eurozone governments are no longer risk-free “sovereign credits”, like the governments of the US or Britain, or smaller countries, such as Switzerland, Australia or New Zealand. A government that borrows in its own currency will never default because, in extremis, it can always instruct its central bank to print money to pay its debts. But governments in the eurozone cannot do this. They are in the same position as US state governments or as Argentina, Indonesia and Russia when they borrowed in dollars ...

... The plunge in the German economy has devastated the manufacturing industries and wage remittances in Central Europe, with output in several countries falling at annualised rates of up to 40per cent, never before witnessed in any capitalist economy.

Only Germany can lead the EU out of this appalling mess.

What political and economic price will they demand for doing so?

Maybe it is quite a good idea to keep out of the way for a while?

Here (h/t Instapundit) is an analysis of why US trains are slower now than they were decades ago:

The aforementioned Montreal Limited, for example, circa 1942, would pull out of New York's Grand Central Station at 11:15 p.m., arriving at Montreal's (now defunct) Windsor Station at 8:25 a.m., a little more than nine hours later. To make that journey today, from New York's Penn Station on the Adirondack, requires a nearly 12-hour ride.

The trip from Chicago to Minneapolis via the Olympian Hiawatha in the 1950s took about four and a half hours; today, via Amtrak's Empire Builder, the journey is more than eight hours.

But so are aircraft:

Specified cruising speeds for commercial airliners today range between about 480 and 510 knots, compared to 525 knots for the Boeing 707, a mainstay of 1960s jet travel.

But cars are just as slow as they always were, in London at least:

With its mazelike medieval streets, London was a city plagued with congestion long before the car. In his diaries, Samuel Pepys twice recorded being stuck in 17th-century horse-and-buggy jams.

When the car came along, the original notion was that such age-old transportation problems could be solved if enough new roads were built to handle cities' needs, a strategy called ''predict and provide.'' But by the 1960's, only a half-century after the car came into common use, economists and traffic planners were starting to notice that new roads seemed only to create more traffic.

By 1977, when the British punk band the Jam recorded ''London Traffic'' (''No one knows the answer/No one seems to care/Take a look at our city/Take the traffic elsewhere''), the average speed of a car in central London was 12 miles an hour, or a little faster than the top running speed of a domestic pig.

At the turn of the millennium, more than two decades later, many Londoners could only look back on those congested years with nostalgia. The average speed had dropped to less than nine miles per hour for the first time in modern record-keeping, meaning that car travel through Britain's capital was generally as slow as by coach a century ago.

Less speed, more or less stress?

Most mornings I have to take out Lilly the Dog for a bracing walk in the British ountryside.

As I trudge through the fields I muse on the transience of things.

These fields near where we are were once were part of a large estate, which in the past century or so was broken up into smaller farms. The interesting thing is finding almost every day traces of what was going on there in the past.

Scraps of plastic from lunch-packs tossed in the hedgerows by passing farm-workers.

Old horse-shoes or other pieces of agricultural metal which broke off during earlier times and all that horse-drawn ploughing.

Fragments of blue china plates. How did they end up in the middle of a field? Were people on a cart on a long lost track going to a picnic when a plate got broken and they threw the pieces overboard?

And all the fossilised oyster-shells littering the surface, from the time when this part of the world was ravaged by dinosaur-made global warming and had been submerged under a warm shallow sea.

Things come. Then they fade away.

Take the European Union.

Will it be there in a one hundred million years' time? No.

One million years' time? No.

One hundred thousand years' time? No.

A thousand years' time? No.

A hundred years' time? Probably not.

Fifty years' time? Maybe, but very different

Ten years' time? Probably yes and recognisably as it is now.

Five years' time? Yes.

At some point along the way, probably within the lifetime of some people now alive, the European Union will give way to Something Else. As will the USA, and Russia, and India, and the UK.

None of us now know when or why or how that will happen. And whether the process will lead to something better or worse or just different.

But it will happen.

Because that's just the way things are, and always have been.

Take a walk deep in the countryside, and you'll see.

The excellent site Picking Losers has this piece on the dys-economics of offshore wind power, which gives us various graphs.

They appear to suggest that the more we invest in them, the less economical they become!

Conclusion:

It all shows that claims that you can calculate what technologies need, rather than simply creating rational incentives and seeing what turns out, is stupid, illusory, and counter-productive. Government never has good-enough information or pure-enough motives for central-planning to be an effective option, whether that planning is implemented by literal command-and-control or through incentives targeted at calculated needs and outcomes.

I could not agree more, as described here.

What makes middle-class people who burble on about the need for a greater role for the state unable to grasp this key problem which necessarily arises from nationalising uncertainty?

Do these people believe in witchcraft?

Brian Micklethwait has compiled a handy list of British libertarian blogs of different shapes and sizes. And very distracting it is too.

PM Gordon Brown gets grilled on his dodgy expenses at Capitalists@Work.

And Nanny Knows Best has several postings on the murderous implications of buying teaspoons at local UK supermarkets.

The Welfare State We're In makes the startling claim that the greater the legal protection given to categories of people (say 'women'), the more they cost an employer so the fewer of them get employed.

An elegant piece by Picking Losers on how regulation skews risk-taking and therefore personal responsibility.

Finally, Panem et Circenses looks forward to the end of the Labour Party and the rise of a new progressive liberalism:

Labour's defeat may spell the end of undisguised socialism in Britain. Liberalism, in its current guise, is dangerous because of its idealism and its continued flirtation with social and cultural Marxism (political correctness). Liberals may pretend to believe in freedom but they certainly do not believe in absolute private property, gun ownership or absolute freedom of speech.

However, they at least pay lip-service to freedom and profess to care about it. They accept the basic tenets of free market capitalism and are opposed to the surveillance state. All things considered, they are a dangerous foe but far less dangerous than socialists. Modern liberalism may be idealistic but it is not evil.

Oh if it were true.

By the way, Wikipedia gives the origin of the expression panem et circenses (bread and circuses) from the Satires of Juvenal - the Latin Accusative form of the two nouns, if anyone is interested.

Having railed against President Bush's terror-suspect interrogation policies, the Democrat leadership in the USA is struggling to explain why at one point they quietly endorsed them.

Read about this hopeless performance by N Pelosi.

Or even better watch it - the nervous swallowing is most instructive, as is the babbling once the confident opening statement ends.

What a superb line: I'll say it again: Nancy Pelosi's lies are so transparent birds are slamming into them. Nancy Pelosi kills birds.

Remember the Really Perfect Crime? Thus:

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'.

Similarly, perfect corruption is not in fact some sneaky manoeuvre aimed at squeezing some free cushions or a new conservatory from the taxpayer, confident that the facts will never see the light of public scrutiny. That involves only the furtive corruption of the corruptor.

It is something darker.

Something like setting up a system which corrupts everyone and from which there is no escape, as honest people no obvious choice but to cheat and lie if they are to stay in business.

Rather like the sovietisation of the UK higher eduction system:

You define educational success as, say, vast numbers of people going on to university who don't really want to go on to university. But by the time the policy has worked its evil way, the thing being measured has done a cartwheel.

In this case, the thing that the government pays for, people turning up at a university, is measured. But people vanishing soon afterwards is something that it is in nobody's interests to notice. The university wants to hang on to the government's money. The government wants to be able to boast about how swimmingly everything is going and how much it is helping.

Only a few malcontents grumble, in things like blog comment threads, but if they get serious and loud about their grumbling, they too will find their interests seriously suffering, as they well know.

With enterprises that are responsible to themselves and to a gang of people in their immediate vicinity, people who are basically taking their own chances at their own expense, a mess like the one described so well by Rob Spence eventually gets corrected, because it costs too many people too much to persist with it ... when the government's success measurements cause havoc, everyone is all too liable still to conspire to say that all is well.

What makes sovietisation so uniquely itself is the way that everyone knows the story - what is going wrong and why it is going wrong - but nobody has any interest in telling the story like it really is, up to and including the Minister for whatever it is being deranged, for he/she too depends on all those statistically encoded lies to tell the world that he/she is doing a great job instead of merely a very average or worse job. The Prime Minister likewise, come to that.

Corruption - by degrees?

Part of the problem with the drama of expenses/corruption among Westminster MPs is that the very role of MPs and of Parliament is under heavy erosion.

Take this for example (my emphasis added):

The European Union now produces four major pieces of legislation every week, and a tide of other documentation affecting every aspect of our lives: from the way we do business to the price we pay for our food.

In a parliamentary democracy like Britain, we expect our elected MPs at Westminster to hold the Government to account, and to influence the shape of its legislation. However, when it comes to EU legislation – which now accounts for half of all new laws - our Parliament has no power to affect these decisions in any meaningful way.

As well as a shift of power from Britain to the European level, this also means a huge shift of power from Parliament to the Government. The current system allows the Government to sign up to EU legislation in meetings in Brussels, without first having sought agreement from Parliament. Often Parliament isn’t even given time to discuss the issues.

In fact even when Parliament specifically asks the Government for time to debate a new EU law, the Government increasingly chooses to use the so-called “override” mechanism to avoid parliamentary scrutiny.

The Government is using this override more and more: around 350 times since figures were first collected in 2001.

Some of the most controversial pieces of recent legislation have been exempted from proper scrutiny in this way – including the creation of the controversial EU Arrest Warrant and the setting up of the European Defence Agency.

As this new pamphlet from the think tank Open Europe points out - the problem is not that MPs aren’t trying hard to hold the EU and the Government to account. The problem is the current system, which gives MPs at Westminster no real power to affect EU decisions.

One way or another, this has got to change.

The devil makes work for idle hands?

Samizdata:

Cleaning up politics will not address the central problem that the state plays far too big a role in our lives in the first place. Take away the jam, and the flies will not be such a pest.

Welcome to our unhappy irresponsible post-democratic Europe.

Life imitates Art.

Art imitates Life.

And so on.

The most persuasive argument for me against capital punishment is the risk of the state executing a person quite innocent of the charges laid against her/him.

Surely too ghastly to contemplate, even if that means we all have to live with greater risk of being murdered: we have to hope for the best without the deterrent effect of the death penalty, plus knowing that a murderer may serve out a sentence and emerge from prison to kill again.

In effect, to save one innocent life we accept that other innocents are likely to - and do - die.

How to calculate that risk?

Not that many people are murdered, so compared to lots of other risks it is pretty small for most people, although in some inner city areas in the UK it must be notably higher.

But for other purposes (eg the evil Precautionary Principle) the argument is turned on its head. Nothing must be accepted (eg a new drug) which puts even one life at risk! Are you saying that the life of a human being can be costed? How heartless are you? 

Here is one policy area where the British state kills about 1000 innocent people each year, with the aim of avoiding the birth of Down Syndrome babies. Yet in this massacre roughly 10% of the babies killed actually do not have Downs at all.

So does anyone know why it is morally wrong for the state to execute the most vile and vicious proven murderers, but morally OK for the state to kill so many healthy and innocent babies for health-care policy reasons?

Just asking.

Dizzy offers a comment on my earlier posting about the security or not of Embassy communications:

"The only system that is truly secure is one that is switched off and unplugged, locked in a titanium safe, buried in a concrete vault on the bottom of the sea and surrounded by very highly paid armed guards. Even then I wouldn't bet on it." - Eugene H. Spafford's rule of data security

We tried that in the Embassy in Belgrade but the Sava river was just not deep enough. And the guards could not swim.

In fact however highly paid (and piscine) the guards might be, there always are people out there with more money than they have.

Which is why it all comes down to the human factor, and to such old-fashioned ideas such as loyalty and patriotism.

How do we Brits persuade foreigners with access to sensitive material to slip some of that material to us, maybe risking their lives to do so?

Money (I gather) helps, but is often not the main motivation. Best to find a way to appeal to some higher order sense of honour and duty and responsibility (with maybe a dash of personal guilt?) than they are expected to uphold in their everyday lives.

Thus the drama of intelligence work. People are more likely to betray an utterly evil system. But because it is so utterly evil it watches people like hawks and will stop at nothing to torture and kill anyone suspected of betrayal.

So the risks are appallingly high. And the skills required even to get alongside such people securely, then coax them in that direction, have to be exceptional.

Which is why these days the focus is less on HUMINT and more on SIGINT, TECHINT, IMINT and OSINT

HUMINT is the best, since it allows you to question the source and form a better view on the reliability of the information received. Even if - astonishingly - you have managed to bug Saddam's own computer and read all those files about his WMD programmes, are they true even though they have the highest secrecy classifications on the planet?

But even with HUMINT judgement is needed. Your highly-placed source really believes what he is telling you. He has seen the containers of WMD himself, in a secret location near Baghdad. But is really able to be sure what exactly is in them? Is it all an elaborate ruse or trickery of some sort we and he just don't know about?

Sometimes someone deep in a repressive system has reached the decision to organise his life to higher principles anyway, just in case an opportunity comes along one day to live honourably.

And then the intelligence haul is very rich indeed.

The Fraud Squad lick their lips:

A former Labour minister was facing a fraud probe last night after taking £16,000 of taxpayers' money for a mortgage that did not exist.

Elliot Morley claimed £800 a month for a home in his Scunthorpe constituency, even though the mortgage had already been paid off.

Yesterday he apologised and insisted he had repaid money after realising his 'mistake'. It was reported that the whole amount had been returned.

But lawyers warned that the former agriculture minister could find himself embroiled in a police investigation. They said his claims could constitute a criminal offence under the 2006 Fraud Act and the 1968 Theft Act.

Well, you heard that fraud angle here first.

MPs like other people are entitled to claim expenses "wholly, exclusively and necessarily" incurred on the business activity concerned, viz representing their constituents. Thus:

What can I claim?

Only those costs wholly, exclusively and necessarily incurred to enable you to stay overnight away from your only or main UK residence, either in London or in the constituency.

Back in October in reviewing Craig Murray's book I discussed the problem of the insecure communications he had:

Basically (as I understand it), he did not have a Confidential email system. He did have an Unclassified FCO email system (which in Tashkent's circumstances could not have been regarded as secure) plus a separate more cumbersome system for sending Confidential and even higher rated Telegrams.

I have just noticed this interesting comment posted below this piece from Some Yank:

I recently read Mr Murray's book, still in the process of taking it all in and evaluating it, which process has led me to this blog. But I'd like to point out one thing: there's no excuse for insecure email communications in this day and age.

I understand that fully-certified systems to handle information marked as officially sensitive are complex and require a lot of money and specialized skill to build, install, error-check, and maintain. However, that really doesn't justify having no security at all. There have been standard and freely-available software packages for 'good-enough' personal cryptography since 1997, and proprietary software systems have been available since 1991 (i.e. since before there was HM Embassy in Tashkent).

Even if it couldn't have been made a central part of the embassy's network, it would still be possible to run a machine completely isolated and transfer documents via 3.5" floppy disks, afterwards electronically shredding any residual copies on the old machine and throwing the disks into a magnetic eraser. For a few handfuls of hundreds and return airfare to Tashkent, I could probably set it up myself.

It really is that easy, and there's no excuse for leaving communications, even non-confidential ones, open to snooping by very lazy spies anywhere, ever. If they haven't solved the problem by now, the lot of them ought to resign and let someone else do it.

Well put. Let me add a gloss or two.

My original posting carefully did not say that the FCO Unclassified (but Sensitive) system was insecure in itself, but that in Tashkent's circumstances it could not be regarded as secure - apologies if this sounded like the same thing.

The point is that any system is as secure as its weakest link. The problem in a small diplomatic post open to technical attack is less about the potential insecurity of the software and comms link, and much more about the kit itself.

So the excellent measures suggested above are likely to work well only if you are able to guarantee that no-one has tampered with or infiltrated the equipment and servers one way or the other, to adjust them to thwart all those precautions.

Given the crummy Embassy set-up as described by Craig in his book it would have been very difficult to stop this happening. In other words, keeping any machine completely isolated every second of every day of every day and week and month in an Embassy employing suspected former KGB people was going to be next to impossible.

Surely all this is unrealistic, you say. Surely kit can be protected properly these days?

I recall one Cold War story of a UK Diplomatic Bag being detached by some or other ruse from a Queen's Messenger in Moscow airport for less than 20 minutes. In that time the KGB - in a brilliant manoeuvre they must have planned and rehearsed for months - unstitched the Bag, tampered with a comms machine inside, stitched the Bag back up perfectly and returned it to the hapless QM in the hope that no-one would notice anything amiss. Which, for a while, they did not.

Hot damn, these people aren't lazy spies. They are good spies. And motivated.

Which is not to say that this tampering did happen - just that both Craig and London had to assume (and did assume) that it might have happened, and that therefore everything sent on those channels would not be guaranteed secure to the highest FCO standards. Which had some important implications for how the Embassy pursued British policies.

Clear(er)?

The EU has not sat idly by as British democracy reels under the weight of its own loathsome misbehaviour.

On 7 May the EU launched its new Eastern Partnership - an attempt to set up a new sort of structured relationship with the obviously (more or less) 'European' parts of the former Soviet Union which (unlike the three Baltic states) have not made it into the European Union: Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Ukraine, Belarus and Moldova.

The very broad idea is to create some multilateralism as between these countries themselves and between them and the EU, thereby complementing the 'bilateralism' of the EU's relations with them individually under the existing European Neighbourhood Policy (ENP).

Angela Merkel alone represented Western EU Bigs - her opposite numbers from France, UK, Spain and Italy did not bother to attend, in the UK's case a measure of how far down unhappy Gordon Brown's To Do list such strategic issues now come.

RFE/RL have a handy guide to this development:

What will change after the Prague summit for the individual partner countries?

The short answer is: nothing. To advance links with the EU, each country will have to convince the bloc individually of its suitability. The main forum for this discussion will be the ENP, but also increasingly association agreement talks -- which are currently under way with Ukraine, soon to be launched with Moldova, and with Georgia and Armenia to follow in the slightly more distant future. The process for Azerbaijan has yet to get off the ground. Belarus, on the other hand, will still need to qualify for the ENP first -- which means instituting democratic reforms -- before it can set out on the same path.

The Summit featured the usual shifty EU shuffling around the issue of whether these countries are 'European' at all:

A reference to “European” countries was replaced with the formula “eastern European partners”. Diplomats suggested that some EU member states objected to the term “European” because it might be seen as a signal that the EU recognised their ambitions for membership.

Huh?

Because since the Maastricht Treaty (Article 49):

Any European State which respects the principles [sc of democracy and human rights] set out in Article 6(1) may apply to become a member of the Union

Various other criteria have been added since then. But the core requirement for lodging an application to join is to be a European country respectful of the principle of behaving nicely.

Which means that those EU countries which do not want any more enlargement from 'the East' have to battle to avoid any such countries being described by the EU as 'European', since once that description is agreed they are on the escalator grinding inexorably towards eventual membership (if that is what those countries themselves want).

Hence the debate in eg France about Turkey: is it a 'European' country at all?

And what of all those territories west of the Urals which have been oppressed and brutalised by Russian/Soviet imperial rule for centuries? Even if they can be thought to be just about European in geographical terms, surely they are no longer 'European' in their culture and instincts?

OK, OK - they aren't 'Asian' like all those benighted  'Stans. But let's be realistic - aren't they, well, something in-between - something 'other'? And if we try to make the European point too obviously anyway, won't we annoy the Russians and all those Russian-speaking people in these countries?

This argument rumbles on unhappily. But for all the nugatory immediate practical difference it makes, this latest development is an important change. It creates a new nascent pattern of thinking both in Brussels and in Moscow and in every other capital between them.

These six countries now have a format for meeting outside the Commonwealth of Independent States grouping dominated by Russia, and for talking about Europeanisation with fellow Europeans without Russia being there. A major psychological shift for all concerned.

For centuries the military and administrative and political complexion of this part of the planet has seen a tug of war between a Westernising 'liberal' trend and a Russianised 'conservative' trend.

These days Russia has determination, ruthlessness and focus but lacks resources and intrinsic appeal as a normal partner. By far the biggest country in the region and a UN P5 member, Russia of course does not do or even want to do 'normal partnership'.

By contrast, as seen by the six Eastern Partnership countries the EU for all its problems looks like a prosperous, benign and normal place, where no-one bullies or dominates them and agreed processes count for something. 

Russia proclaims its weapons and threats and warns against 'hostile outside influences' entering its manly sphere of interests:

Underlining Russia's present-day military power, troops drove trucks carrying the giant, nuclear Topol-M missiles and the latest S-400 "Triumph" air defence rockets through Red Square to gasps of admiration from the crowd of officials, veterans, officers and family members.

"It made a superb impression on me," said Maria Glavdivana, an 87-year-old World War Two veteran, her chest festooned with clinking medals. "We are showing the world our masculinity, our strength."

The feminine EU Ostrich flutters its long eyelashes knowingly at the countries of Eastern Europe, instead offering masses of tedious meetings on integration and harmonisation but with a hard currency, better shopping and a far less oppressive do-as-you're-told atmosphere.

Russia is from Mars - the EU from Venus? Those in the middle..?