Blogoir: June

Some interesting thoughts on that subject in the Guardian (always a pleasure to see the word desuetude) and Sharpe's Opinion:

Reading between the lines of ‘Smeargate’ (can we really not have a better name) and the expenses scandal, we see Maximus Decimus Meridias removing his helmet and standing up to Commodus. We saw “a slave become more powerful than the Emperor of Rome”. We saw a few people sat at computers turning the Government into an object of ridicule.

I’d like to think that perhaps, just perhaps, the reason so many people have gone so quiet is that they know they’ve won, that they’re being listened to, and all we have left to do now is wait.

Hmm. My own puny stats (such as they are) are down this month too, after some steady growth for a few months.

Part of the problem with blogging is that to keep the site moving one has to post pretty regularly, which means that one is going to run out of interesting and inisghtful new things to say all the faster.

Are people turning into Twittering twits instead? Or is it pre-summer exhaustion and boredom setting in? Something else? All combined?

In any case, the point is not to crack open an old decaying order lavishing gifts and 'expenses' upon itself using public money. See these astonishing examples of decadence at the BBC.

The point is to use the free-wheeling power of intelligent networked pluralism to create something better without descending into chaos.

Demolition is the easy bit.

On we long-distance bloggers trudge.

That outstretched hand of US friendship to Iran to join the USA's 4th of July celebrations round the world?

The hand draws back.

On the somewhat doubtful (in etiquette/protocol terms) basis that the Iranians have not replied to the invitations. When there is still some time to go before the receptions start? Tsk.

Where flip meets flop:

Yesterday’s left-wing conventional wisdom: We can’t jeopardize diplomacy by taking a meaningless moral stand!

Today’s left-wing conventional wisdom: Obama has taken a bold moral stand against regime abuses!

What I liked about diplomacy were these little symbolic details.

Never mind all this Earth-bound rubbish.

How to expand ourselves across the universe? Quickly, or at least exponentially!

Not so easy.

My first thought on the Foreign Secretary's Warsaw speech was that the opening 'historic passages' were clunky.

This is what happens.

The speechwriter is pretty familiar with the broad rhetorical lines of policy on EU issues. But knows nothing about Poland or the UK's relations with it.

So s/he does some Googling to see what turns up, plus asks the Embassy for some 'lively examples' and maybe some quotable quotes from British/Polish relations down the ages. A few such examples are selected and plunked in an opening few paragraphs, supposedly to get the speech off to a lighter start.

The trouble with that as an oratorical device is that it is 100% phoney. Everyone knows that the speaker did not know this stuff himself but has tasked someone to do the dirty work.

Plus unless the examples are chosen thematically with a view to reinforcing some of the later points of substance, they literally make no sense.

In this case I might have tried to link the migration to Poland of poor Scots in the seventeenth century to the UK's decision in 2005 to open its labour market to Poles fully. This makes the nice point that European peoples have always moved to and fro, and that the UK and Poland have no fear of such open markets now. 

Plus I might have praised Robin Cook for publishing a collection of papers on the FCO's decades-long weasely equivocations about the Katyn massacre, linking that to the latest round of British reviews of Wajda's momentous film on the subject as it at last opens in the UK. See eg this strong Guardian review. 

That reference would take the speaker to a passage about how Europe is still grappling with the legacy of WW2 even now, but in a spirit of open democratic and honest debate which we want to offer to Eastern Europe and other parts of the world as the "European way, which is hard and long - but works".

And so on. Taking some really striking examples of Change and Continuity woven seamlessly into the speech to make it an intellectually rich experience.

In fact, something the audience on the day and the wider readership of history might actually be impressed by, and enjoy. 

Not: "Here are some boring disembodied historical quotes, which I've never heard of but my speechwriter put in, because that's what one does these days, but don't worry, I'll be through them soon..."

Yet there's more!

Thanks to the miracles of IT we can now start quickly to compare the Check Against Delivery version handed out to the media beforehand with the real life speech.

And in this case speech-writing and communications expert Max Atkinson has done just that, for the first time, to see what happens.

The result makes explicit the Foreign Secretary's unease at being served up historical speech material in a clumsy lump which was quite new to him:

"It goes back a long way. I didn’t know that Canute er- was the half Polish King of Denmark who, in 1015, actually invaded England, bringing with him Polish soldiers and his mother, Princess Swietoslawa, who er - is buried -is buried - Winchester castle.

"When I asked for a historical lesson from our ambassador, I didn’t realise it would be a pronunciation test, but it has become such."

A question is asked re my previous (peevious?) posting on the Foreign Secretary's visit to Poland:

On david's grandfather, are you sure he fought with the red army? Are you referring to ralph's father samuel?

Good question. How do I know? I wasn't there.

But rummaging around through Google finds all sorts of references to Samuel Miliband being in the Red Army, albeit perhaps on the Trotskist end of the ideological spectrum. See eg the Wikipedia entry for father Ralph (Adolphe) Miliband. Or this Marxist site.

But this Indy obituary of David's father Ralph Miliband by Tariq Ali ascribes the Red Army role to an uncle of Ralph, not his father.

Not an uninteresting question, one way or the other. But when you start looking for the answer, you find site after site of weird anti-semitic extremist 'conservative' ravings poring over the issue. If you can face it, click here for one example.

On the other hand, Ralph Miliband's role in academic and public life as an openly Marxist intellectual with an independent style is well documented.

And he died as he lived: someone baffled by the failings of democracy and communism alike, as if they were equal/equivalent.

Read this bracing review of his last book Socialism for a Sceptical Age (1995). Dominic Hilton starts with the cover:

The cover is the ugliest thing you'll ever see outside of a socialist housing development, cleverly designed to distract you from the book's contents. "Frozen Sea" depicts a beachfront with accompanying pinkish orange sunset cascading off breaking waves. Perhaps it is meant to evoke erotic daydreams of Pamela Anderson bouncing around in an ill-fitting red swimsuit...

He moves on to the wheezy substance:

Staying awake during passages about "intra-class conflicts among wage earners", "the conditions surrounding strike action", and "the level and scope of social and collective services" is as hard as it sounds. This is why Tony Blair started hanging around businessmen. It must be painful to be as crimeless as Miliband. Never to exploit your position as an able-bodied, heterosexual, rich, educated white male. What does a guy like that do all day?

Then ... the massacres:

The "endless catalogue of horrors" listed by the author look suspiciously similar: National Socialism, Stalinism, Maoism, Ho Chi Minimalism, Slobodan Milosevicness. Miliband concedes that this blood-soaked history is "unacceptable" (imagine a Nazi saying, "In hindsight, I suppose massacring all those Jews was pretty unacceptable.") but prefers to focus on the "optimism". Chin up, comrades. Communism lives, even if you don't.

To Miliband's mind, the failure of Soviet social engineering was not its evil imperialism, economic poverty or moral worthlessness, but everything on spec: unfavourable "specific conditions" and, of course, those pesky "special interests". Treating humans as cattle, we're told, is not "an easy matter" and requires "delicacy". Those "negative aspects of communist regimes" can be "remedied"...

... To skip over all those cadavers then bleat about "the McCarthy witch-hunt" was too much for my martini-soaked stomach. No digestive system produces enough acid to burn lines like

it may well be said that it is precisely the existence of so much evil which makes it essential to create a context in which evil may be conquered, or at least attenuated.

Mao's famines - 70 million starved to death - are explained by an "under-estimation" of

the problems that must arise in the organization and administration of a post-capitalist society.

And he sums up:

"Yeah, but is any of this relevant?" you might ask. Kids these days are too busy living their iLives and being gentle to the environment to advocate worker's cooperatives, aren't they?

Maybe, but David Miliband is touted as a future Prime Minister of Great Britain. In the foreword, David writes,

it is some comfort that the ideas developed by Ralph Miliband in this book and elsewhere will live on.

We are all guinea pigs now...

And this week we peer from our small cage with its whirring treadmill at this visit to Poland.

A British Foreign Secretary from a family with a Polish/Jewish background and awash with apologies for communist violence, arrives in Warsaw and talks briskly and blandly about Poland's suffering through the 'dark years of Communism' without mentioning the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, or the role of Catholicism in defeating communism, or the Katyn massacre.

This just strikes me as Bad.

Sorry, but it does. On many levels simultaneously.

UK Foreign Secretary David Miliband has visited Poland.

Various Foreign Secretaries have swung through Poland for commemorative or other events. But straightforward bilateral visits by British Foreign Secretaries have been few and far between in recent years.

None in my time from 2003-2007 (although Jack Straw took part in the Auschwitz commemorations in 2005). Is David Miliband's visit the first in some eight years - maybe even longer? The British Embassy website does not tell us.

This is a good example of how EU business dumbs down conventional diplomacy. EU Foreign Ministers meet regularly in all sorts of fora and get to know each other well. Which makes it all the harder to persuade them to make the effort to take a bilateral visit and spend a little time learning more about any one country.

Mr Miliband made a speech. Here it is.

A couple of stylistic points.

First, the opening passages are clunky. An attempt by a speech-writer who knows little of Poland to rummage around and find a few historical examples by way of 'filler'. The examples used cast no light of insight on what follows, and might as well have been omitted. It is striking that there is no reference to the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact by name in this its 70th anniversary year.

The personal passages are coy:

I am one of the million Britons who have Polish blood. My father's parents lived in Poland, leaving the country at the end of the First World War. My mother was born here; her life saved by those who risked theirs sheltering her from Nazi oppression. After the war, in 1946, she left the country for the UK.  

I come here with a curiosity about the place where my grandparents and my mother were born alongside an acute sense of tragedy for the terrible losses suffered during the Second World War. I come here with an admiration for the strength of the Polish spirit, the flame which continued to burn through 44 dark years of Communism ...

Hmm. His grandfather fought in the Red Army, which greedily tried to conquer Poland after WW1 ended and was famously defeated by Polish heroism in 1920. His father was a noted Marxist.

Do we know what such senior Milibands made of Soviet communism and Poland's enforced subordination to the Soviet Union after WW2? Did they ever talk about it at home with young David and Ed? The speech leaves us none the wiser.

No mention of Pope John Paul II in connection with the end of communism in Poland?

As for the main part of the speech, it's the familiar Miliband mix: lots of To-Do lists, Climate Change, Energy, lots more 'Europe' as an answer to most problems, rather more regulation.

The passage on EU enlargement is good:

The effects of instability and division in the Balkans and the Caucasus will spill over across Europe. The European Union's power to stabilise these areas comes from the fact that those countries are prepared to undergo the reforms necessary to be part of the single market. Europe is an anchor for stability. If we give up on enlargement, we lose that power and we will be powerless to address instability and insecurity on our borders.

Our first priority in taking forward enlargement is to stick to the commitments we have made to Turkey and to the Western Balkans. It is vital to our credibility and cohesion that the EU keeps its side of the bargain...

Beyond those already on the road to membership, we need to deepen cooperation and incentivise reform.  As I said last summer in Kiev Article 49 of the EU Treaty gives all European countries the right to apply for membership, and Ukraine is most certainly a European country.

A key point, folks. The EU studiously refuses to describe Ukraine as a 'European country' whenever it gets the chance to do. Saying this unambiguously sends the right messages to Kiev and Moscow and Brussels alike.

All in all, a curiously unthematic or even unambitious job.

Nothing about Poland as an example of why enlargement works. Or on all those Poles who have come to work in the UK. Or on the recent European Parliament elections (admittedly not a subject on which Labour politicians have much to say, of course), or where the UK and Poland might work closely on EU reform agendas in the years to come. Or does Mr Miliband expect not to be part of that process and so avoids the subject?

Boxes ticked. Back to the plane.

Preferably not leaving key briefing folders behind...

An intriguing story (and a cross response) here.

Basically, the USA has decided to press on with its new policy of inviting Iranian diplomats to the US 4th of July celebrations (US National Day equivalent) round the world, despite the grisly regime behaviour in Iran itself.

As a gesture with a practical impact (other than to dismay and annoy some pro-democracy people in Iran who get to hear of it) it rates modestly.

In symbolic terms it sends a small and oddly twee message to the Iranian ruling elite that the USA is indeed open to 'engagement', whatever rather tougher words President Obama is now using about the Iranian so-called 'election results'.

All of which reminds me of Iran's National Day reception in Belgrade when I was there.

A dull, men-only affair, over-sweet cheap fruit juice.

And the most ghastly thing I have ever seen served at any reception, diplomatic or otherwise: a large metal plate piled high with a pyramid of Laughing Cow-style processed cheese spread triangle wedges, still in their silver paper.

Mind you, one of the worst dinners I ever had was at an American diplomat's house where we were served baked potatoes still in their silver paper from the deep-freeze, complete with those little plastic butter tubs you get on airliners.

Aaargh.

What does something cost? In the biggest, most abstract sense.

You buy a bicycle. What are you buying? Not just a bike.

The market price includes an element for all the myriad components included. The metals, rubber and paint. The innovation which went into creating those metals and rubber and paint, and the bike's design.

The cost of transporting that bike to the showroom where you bought it (oh, and you also have the cost of getting it home).

The cost of all the marketing. The cost of the showroom and its electricity powering the cash register. The cost of the labour of everyone involved.

And so on. Only a market can make that happen smoothly.

What environmentalists are also arguing is that in addition to those immediate and more or less direct costs are the later costs to humankind as a whole associated with getting rid of the bike once its life's work is done. Surely it is better to make the bike's many parts re-useable, so that Nature is a tiny bit less depleted when new products are made?

Well, yes. But if one dumps the old bike in a forest or a municipal tip it sooner or later will be consumed and re-used by Nature anyway, even if that takes thousands or millions of years.

And what if recycling waste products is more expensive in cash terms than just dumping them and making new ones? How to factor in longer-term environmental 'costs' borne by our children and theirs eg in the global warming drama? (Note: not apparently a weighty consideration when we are embarking on a stunning spending binge to create a Bigger State.)

One way to go is to make products which have the opposite of built-in obsolescence - products which are engineered not only to work superbly but also to last a long time, and so save resources that way.

But they will tend to be more expensive. Better quality materials and build, more sophisticated engineering.

What I sit on write this blog is an old wooden 'captain's chair' I bought in South Africa years ago. Rather nice looking. An antique of sorts, made from all natural materials, which has lasted for some decades and is still going strong.

But not very comfortable. Not at all.

Take instead the Aeron chair as made by Herman Miller.  

It looks like a cross between a fancy cappuccino machine and something from a Dan Dare spaceship.

But because it is so efficient and elegant, not only does it sell well at its full (and significant) price, a market in second-hand Aeron chairs has appeared.

And it is manufactured with so-called Cradle-to-Cradle environmental principles in mind - an eye on the environmental impact at each stage of the process and for the product over its lifetime.

So as usual you get what you pay for.

But it's maybe a wise move now and again to invest in something strong and good.

Because in paying that higher price you are capturing not only the costs of the article itself today, but also the longer-term total costs as we (at this stage) can hope to measure them?

An Aeron chair which saves the planet (a bit) is good.

A chair which saves one's buttocks is even better. 

A pseudonymous fellow blogger (PFB) and I have had an exchange re privacy and the Night Jack story:

CC:   Do you really think that if you get up in public as a blogger does and start banging on, you also have the right to get an injunction based on ‘privacy’ to stop someone calling out "Come off it [name]!" That was what Night Jack wanted, and rightly the Judge said No.

PFB:   I'm a fierce defender of privacy as a basic civil liberty and assuming that someone hasn't broken their contract or committed libel, I think privacy should reign supreme.  In the case of Nightjack, his employers should be informed of his identity as he clearly broke his contract but the newspapers should never have been allowed to publish it.

What would a world run by Privacy Supremacy look like?

Nothing in the media about Profumo, Clinton and Monica, Berlusconi and how their sexy antics might or might not reflect on their judgement. Private business, even if they are at it in their own offices paid for by the taxpayer?

Scope for scrutinising MPs' and MEPs' expenses receipts far reduced. They have their privacy rights.

A top CEO is seen blowing millions in a drunken casino romp. Nothing his shareholders can know about that sign of weak judgement. Privacy.

I want to write my life story and mention my affairs with glamorous actresses (and actors) which were all obvious enough to casual observers at the time. No can do. Their right to privacy trumps mine.

The point is that people do things. Other people talk and write about people doing things. It's called human life.

The law in the UK defaults towards openness and against covering up dishonesty (see eg the fall of Lord Browne).

This leads to various negative consequences in lots of cases (innuendo, death by media circus, personal destruction).

But defaulting towards 'privacy' will not stop all those excesses. And will create new ones.

As Bowen LJ famously opined in a case over a century ago:

The state of a man’s mind is as much a fact as the state of his digestion

Hypocrisy, callousness, selfishness, greed and incompetence are all far more likely to stay unexposed if 'privacy' is taken too far. It surely is in part the knowledge that someone some day may write publicly about one's poor behaviour which helps keep things broadly in order? Crude. But effective?

Is not the best plan for a chronic liar to blog anonymously to sneer at honesty? To help create a climate in which odious behaviour is more acceptable? A right worth protecting?

That's my view anyway. Anyone interested can try to check the credibility/integrity of my saying so against my own record over many years.

Because you know who I am.

Lib-Dem Mark Reckons reports on a significant discussion about new media trends in blogging/commenting and so on.

Surely the point is that we are in a classic Long Tail scenario, where market conditions are driven by technological changes.

Once upon a time the sheer cost of spreading news and views to millions of people allowed a few major media outlets to build market predominance and so pay people to write columns.

Now the cost of market entry has dropped to close to zero (other than time/energy) so millions of people have entered the market. This means that the masses have far more to read, and most of it is free. Some of it is excellent.

Take for example the News Examiners. 

So why bother paying for S Jenkins and P Toynbee and D Aaronovitch when you can have so much more - for nothing?

We are reverting to something like the hubbub of three hundred years ago, when countless noisy pamphlets and broadsheets ('news-papers') and other forms of written material jostled for position. Gradually that led to consolidation as some people bought the expensive kit to let them distribute on a national scale.

But now the point is that mass distribution is mainly free. And competition as always is driving down prices, in this case towards zero.

The Commentariat's days as an elite getting paid for what they do are numbered. For better or worse, and no doubt both.

Remember the bubbles coming out of the mouth of Naomi Wolf on the subject of the liberating effect of wearing shapeless clothes?

President Sarkozy sets the rest of the 'West' a magnificent example in calling the burka what it is: a sign of subservience:

In a major policy speech, he said the burka - a garment covering women from head to toe - reduced them to servitude and undermined their dignity.

Mr Sarkozy also gave his backing to the establishment of a parliamentary commission to look at whether to ban the wearing of burkas in public...

"We cannot accept to have in our country women who are prisoners behind netting, cut off from all social life, deprived of identity," Mr Sarkozy told a special session of parliament in Versailles.

As I said before, it makes no sense to take at face value a woman appearing on TV and making the case for her 'choosing' this sort of clothing, without looking hard and deep and above all honestly at the likely nasty consequences for her (expliicit or implicit) if she chooses not to do so.

We hooted with derision at the leaders of South Africa's apartheid 'homelands' solemnly arguing that 'separate development' was in the Africans' own interests.

We should do the same when anyone tries to claim that women disappearing under these burkas, walking dutifully behind their husbands, are in any sense that matters really free to choose to do so.

Freedom to choose to be subservient is not freedom.

Is this an 'anti-Muslim' point of view? No.

Plenty of women in the world are Muslims and dress in a way compatible with  a certain faith-inspired modesty but also minimal human dignity, just as do many Catholic and Orthodox women.but also

It is an anti-Islamicised-aggressive-male-chauvinism point of view.

D'accord?

Remember this long lost posting and the earlier one linked there on rock music and diplomatic parlance?

I was given David Gilmour's Live in Gdansk for my birthday, and listening to it I was taken back a long way to Meddle:

Super lyrics from Pink Floyd as they got into their stride, with one nice metaphorical diplomatic line:

Overhead the albatross hangs motionless upon the air
And deep beneath the rolling waves in labyrinths of coral caves
The echo of a distant tide
Comes willowing across the sand
And everything is green and submarine ...

And through the window in the wall
Comes streamin in on sunlight wings
A million bright ambassadors of morning

And no one sings me lullabies
And no one makes me close my eyes
So I throw the windows wide
And call to you across the sky.

Ah. When we were young.

Sir Richard Dalton who served as HM Ambassador in Iran gives his view on the drama unfolding there:

Despite how individuals may have voted – and notwithstanding brave acts of individual protest, such as resignations – the government apparatus, the parliament, the clergy, the commercial elite and most civil society organisations have not declared for change. So the power of the street has to face the power of the state and its many-layered and ruthless security forces.

A successful challenge to Khamenei and the faction supporting Ahmadinejad would require three things: a coalition united behind the aim of adjusting Iran's constitution or rewriting it; a countrywide leadership; and a broad strategy. Not enough people seem ready to act in this way.

A pessimistic view. But hard to argue with it?

Here via Andrew Sullivan is what is much of the text of Ayatollah Khamenei's vile speech the other day. As well as his ravings against the UK he has these two passages:

The competition for the election was very clear. Enemies and dirty Zionists tried to show the election as a contest between the regime and against it. That is not true, all four candidates support the regime... (Note: ie the whole business is a sham anyway]

We don't claim there is no corruption in our regime. But this is one of the most healthy systems in the world. Zionists claims of corruption are not right.

For a spiritual leader he does a busy line in lumpen anti-Semitism. And if not enough Iranians are (yet) ready to rise up against this wicked man and topple all he represents, so much the worse for Iran - and the rest of us.

Mark Steyn looks at the Western/Obama approach to Iran based on its careful phrasing aimed at avoiding any impression of 'interfering'. And is unimpressed:

What would you make of that “equidistance” if you were back in the palace watching it on CNN International? Maybe you’d know that, on domestic policy, Obama uses the veneer of disinterested arbiter as a feint. Or maybe you’d just figure that no serious world leader can ever be neutral on vital issues.

So you’d start combing the speech for what lies underneath the usual Obama straw men — and women: “I reject the view of some in the West that a woman who chooses to cover her hair is somehow less equal.”

Very brave of you, I’m sure. But what about the Muslim women who choose not to cover themselves and wind up as the victims of honor killings in Germany and Scandinavia and Toronto and Dallas? Ah, but that would have required real courage, not audience flattery masquerading as such.

And so, when the analysts had finished combing the speech, they would have concluded that the meta-message of his “equidistance” was a prostration before “stability” — an acceptance of the region’s worst pathologies as a permanent feature of life.

The mullahs stole this election on a grander scale than ever before primarily for reasons of internal security and regional strategy. But Obama’s speech told them that, in the “post-American world,” they could do so with impunity.

Blaming his “agents” for the protests is merely a bonus: Offered the world’s biggest carrot, Khamenei took it and used it as a stick.

Hard to argue with that either?

Dan Hannan argues that Lord Mandelson's manoeuvres to keep the Labour Party staggering on are all about Brussels, not about the UK interest or even the Labour Party's own mistunes:

So what the devil is he playing at? Viewed from the Westminster lobby, it seems an impenetrable mystery. From the perspective of Brussels, though, the answer is obvious. European Commissioners are obsessed with the need to keep David Cameron at bay until the Lisbon Treaty is ratified.

You see, the Conservative leader has promised a referendum on Lisbon – and, unlike the other two party leaders, he means it. He has even instructed his lawyers to draw up the Bill in advance, so that he could introduce it on his first day in office. Eurocrats are understandably determined to keep the Tory leader out until after the second Irish referendum in October. (There is a universal, if somewhat insulting, assumption in Brussels that the Irish will roll over this time.) Mandelson is their agent, their man in Westminster.

Or even this not unconnected point too?

Catless Trixy hosts this week's round up, and does the job briskly.

She has some good links to people unhappy with the outing of police blogger Night Jack. Including this one from Letters From a Tory:

I’m sure some anonymous bloggers would indeed be worried about being unmasked, and my fierce support of everyone’s right to privacy means that 9 times out of 10 I think anonymity should be protected.  Mr Justice Eady said that the mere fact that the blogger wanted to remain anonymous did not mean that he had a “reasonable expectation” of doing so, but I disagree with this.  Even if a blogger’s identity is known, privacy laws should protect them.

Why should they?

The problem is that if you give someone the right to speak out anonymously, you deny someone else the right to say in reply, "I know who you are ... you're X!" Not exactly fair either?

What if the anonymous blogger is behaving badly or wildly and repeatedly attacking someone else? Why should not that blogger's name be revealed as and when someone finds out who he/she is?

It makes no sense to have a privacy or any other law which says only that each case is decided on its merits if it gets to court. The current law as articulated in this case defaults in favour of openness and against 'anonymity'. That brings about unhappy outcomes on the margins as in this case, but there are going to be unhappy outcomes on the margins whatever the law says. That's life, folks.

Trixy links too to our friend Craig Murray who is dismayed to discover that he does not exist. It's probably better that way. 

Oh Lordy.

The Daily Mail rants against the FCO travel package.

Tim Worstall falls for it.

Try something like this.

Any normal employer posting employees overseas includes an arrangement in the postings package for letting staff return to the UK periodically. Does the Dail Mail post anyone overseas? Do they not do that?

The further away the employee is from the UK, the more it costs to get him/her/family back to the UK once or twice a year for a break or family reasons. Plus in many cases there are lots of different ways to get to the foreign posting (plane/car/ship/motorbike/combination thereof): how fairly to offer staff a reasonable choice of route and transport option, and stop abuses, and keep costs under control? What if officers wanted to stop over somewhere en route for a few days' leave? 

When I joined the FCO there were Onerous Rules on all this. Different posts had different travel options. It was all run from London, so as well as filling in forms to get anything done and sending them off in the Bag far in advance, the out-sourced London-based travel centre was tasked to get the best fares. But that did not mean that any given fare was necessarily the cheapest at the time of flight.

So a few years ago the FCO did something sensible.

It abolished all the rules and the travel centre at a stroke. It said that each officer + family members had a certain 'travel entitlement' over a full posting to return to the UK, a package whose value was calculated on the basis of x standard flights per year (depending on the post) on the most direct route.

Within that entitlement, all officers and families could use the package as they saw fit (car/plane/ship) over the posting to go where they liked. If they did not use the full package by the end of the posting, the FCO kept the balance.

Result?

Far more flexibility, far fewer people wasting time trying to work through or run or invent 'rules', money saved to taxpayers. If someone wants to blow most of the package on a single business class journey, fine.

What exactly is wrong with that?

Shock! 

Another, who left Kuwait this month, fixed a round-the-world trip at taxpayers' expense - flying business class all the way. The approved route between Kuwait and Britain costs about £1,500 one way. But the official had 'saved up' so much public money he planned a seven-week trip to Bangkok, Laos, Melbourne, Queensland, Mozambique, Washington DC and Warsaw.

Horror! Flights have got cheaper. So new options have appeared for using an entitlement. What if the diplomat had flown back to the UK on a standard flight costing the taxpayer more. A better outcome?

Another Foreign Office source said: 'It is often the high-ranking diplomats who really squeeze out as much free travel as they can by going to post as cheaply as possible. The junior ones usually enjoy travelling business class for the experience.

'There is complete apathy about this reckless spending, while a silent minority within the FCO rage and fume about this gross extravagance.'

Really? The package does not distinguish much if at all in terms of rank, as I recall. That silent minority is measured at nano-size levels.

Embassy staff also enjoy grace-and-favour homes and huge tax-free salaries.

Lies lies lies.

Diplomats pay UK full income taxes like everyone else and indeed get London Weighting (such as it is) because they are deemed to be home-based for income tax purposes, plus they get taxed on the benefit of the puny car loans they are offered, and so on. Shame and brimstone on the Daily Mail for getting that wrong.

The problem here (if there is one) is that the FCO calculates the travel package for overseas staff on the basis of a single 'standard' one-way flight home. Since the travel package was set up, all sorts of new ways of booking flights and other travel plans have emerged, so there is probably no obvious 'standard' marker any more.

So some arbitrary level has to be set one way or the other for a financial ceiling for flights home from all those different postings, without creating a heavy bureaucracy to oversee it. Even if the total ceiling was cut for everyone, within that new level there are bound to be opportunities for being creative about how exactly any one journey is created.

This applies to any expenses regime.

Either every single claim within agreed and intricate rules is checked by a sprawling bureaucracy

Or you allow some flexibility for the sake of not making the regime insanely complicated/expensive, and then just accept that some unduly creative interpretation of the rules will take place. It is all really about 'risk management' aimed at making intelligent economies for systems as a whole.

Whichever way you choose, you'll get idiotic media stories about it. 

Either 'Bureaucracy Gone Mad!'

Or 'Expenses Abuse Scandal!'

Welcome to government.

The story of the pilot who alas died while flying a passenger jet of course makes on think about margins of error.

As it happens, the other day I heard an account of a couple driving down the motorway where the wife as front-seat passenger suddenly realised that her husband at the wheel was no longer with her. Somehow she managed to bring the car to a halt safely, helped by another driver who saw her vehicle swerving and used his car to help nudge hers off the road.

How would you or I cope in such circumstances?

Alert readers will notice that I have reorganised the site a little, to make the Search function better and to give greater emphasis to the various excellent services I offer - see the new buttons on the left.

This blogging business takes a lot of time, but generates zero revenue. So I hope that that will change. It must.

The one area I would like to develop is Mediation. I probably have done more top-end Mediation training than anyone else in the UK, building on years of diplomatic mediation-style work eg in the Balkans. But it is not easy to get started professionally as a mediator if one is not where disputes and disagreements and misunderstandings are unfolding (viz in a lawyer's office).

Just this week I have been involved in a business negotiation aimed at finding a better outcome rather than resorting to a litigation jungle. It was interesting to see how a friendly style looking to a positive future rather than dwelling on the rancorous past can keep difficult issues under better control.

The trick is not to try to solve everything, but to reshape the questions and make different parts of a complex problem more manageable. To move from Positions to Interests, as they say in the trade. 

So if anyone out there has a dispute/disagreement or even a problem needing a different look and approach, just press mail@charlescrawford.biz

Or, indeed, if you need your website rewriting, or a speech knocked out, or advice on a CV, or ideas for a PowerPoint presentation, or a draft article/thesis sharpened up. Or whatever.

Go on. Press.

You know you want to.

My first ever appearance on live UK TV this evening, on SKY to talk briefly on the 'anonymous blogger' issue. Why of all the bloggers in the UK they hit upon me is a mystery. But they did.

Not an easy occasion, since the intro had me down as thinking that the Times was 'right' to end Night Jack's anonymity, which is not my view at all. Sigh.

The one point I tried to get across was a simple if not banal one: that were I to be a person in the FCO blogging anonymously and rather critically about what went on there, I would not be surprised if journalists and others tried to find out who I was and (if successful) revealed it.

Which afterwards got me thinking.

What if public bodies turned the whole question round and allowed their personnel to blog anonymously in their spare time about their work experiences, subject to some sort of proviso that they not make assertions or accusations which they would not make at work?

What might happen?

The great majority of employees, having a life, would not blog. Of those relatively few who did, a proportion would be hopeless and unread. Of those who were read, some would be mainly positive, others mainly critical.

Things being as they are, the critical blogs would catch the wider public/media eye. The more critical, the better. 

So a Minister would start to have to fend off accusations that s/he was running a ship full of disgruntled people with reservations about the policy line in important areas:

"If the Minister can not persuade her own staff about the wisdom of her policy, why should we take any notice of her here in Parliament?"

What if an anonymous FCO blogger started to make disobliging noises eg about the way Muslims were being treated at work (too generously, or too unfairly)?

A small or even footling point made by someone with a personal axe to grind or without a clear knowledge of the whole picture could create a public rumpus about nothing. Other colleagues might well get fed up having to deal with the ensuing controversy, complaints, audits, investigations and so on.

None of these and other possibilities are insuperable difficulties. But they do point to the fact that the 'public interest' argument cuts in many ways simultaneously.

The public (parts of it) are nosey and love gossip, so there is a public interest in peering deep into anything which is not utterly public just for the hell of it.

The public also wants its civil servants to act loyally and work hard to get results, not find themselves distracted by or even given new burdens by daily and maybe unfounded or dishonest criticisms of what they are doing, as posted on the Web by someone somewhere in the building.

Bottom Line?

Faced with all this, any Minister is likely to be easily persuadable that the best thing to do with the current rules is nothing - leave the current 'ban' on private blogging/writing anonymously or otherwise in place.

But there is a case for not being silly about well-intentioned internal concerns/criticism. So really encourage people with complaints or concerns to make them known within the Ministry, perhaps on a staff Intranet designed to let people blow off some steam anonymously there.

I in fact suggested this back in 1998 when the FCO was just starting to edge towards the Internet age.

The response? "But how could it be controlled?"

No, fatheads, the whole point is that it will be a valuable source of suggestions and ideas for reform and better policy precisely if it is 100% not controlled. That said, if anyone posts nasty abuse on the Intranet, he/she will be tracked down and brutalised.

Back to anonymity.

Bloggers are not a single category of noble Knights in the Quest for Truth to serve the general public.

Bloggers are the general public, albeit at the tech savvy end of the spectrum.

So within the Blogosphere you'll find everything you look for: obsessives, brilliant writers, twerps, liars, bombasts, publicity-seekers, weirdos, people writing about cats or compost or the weather, muddled people, sad people, angry people, idealists, pessimists and so on.

Many of them write under their own names, as do I. That allows a ready way for others to try to check 'where they are coming from', so as to aim off for evident hypocrisy/dishonesty and so on.

Many use pseudonyms of different sorts and hide their identity. Their choice.

But one thing keeping that minority of malign or obnoxious 'anonymous' bloggers from behaving disgracefully has to be the possibility that sooner or later they will be unmasked. And that threat is there because English law does not protect that anonymity.

You get away with being anonymous for just as long as you do, and no longer.

The more you demand/attractattention by moving into controversial or provocative blogging areas, the more likely it is that someone will be annoyed or intrigued enough to track you down and expose your name, with whatever Consequences for your reputation and livelihood may come from that.

Do you feel lucky, blogger? Go ahead! Make that accusation without really knowing the facts, or libel that colleague, or insult ethnic minorities. You may get away with it once again.

Or maybe you won't.

A beautifully self-regulating system, methinks.

Now to wash off all that SKY TV makeup. Do women really wear this stuff a lot?

So here's a new idea.

People who have essential services get to pay a cutesy new tax to fund provision of  those services to people who do not have them:

The Prime Minister said a fast internet connection is now as vital as electricity, gas and water, and will help the country's communications industries pull Britain out of the recession.

We here deep in the vukojebeni British Boonies do not have mains sewage.

So I favour a new 'levy' on those who do, to help pay for getting it to us.

Or do our regular and indeed vital ablutions not deserve the same fair play that those of other people enjoy?

Discrimination!