Blogoir: March

The Obama administration's ruthlessness in driving through its healthcare so-called reforms has to be admired in its sheer boldness.

Now what?

Mark Steyn:

You can say, oh, well, the polls show most people opposed to it, but, if that mattered, the Dems wouldn't be doing what they're doing. Their bet is that it can't be undone, and that over time, as I've been saying for years now, governmentalized health care not only changes the relationship of the citizen to the state but the very character of the people...

Alan Reynolds looks at the long-term numbers and is alarmed:

In fact, new spending is negligible for four years.  At that point the government would start luring sixteen million more people into Medicaid’s leaky gravy train, and start handing out subsidies to families earning up to $88,000.  Spending then jumps from $54 billion in 2014 to $216 billion in 2019.   That’s just the beginning...

Then there's the prospect of a swarm of constitutional challenges in the courts.

As Greece shows, modern democracy has no real answer to leaders who irresponsibly run up huge liabilities now and send the bill to the fairly distant future.

But at least the Obamacare exercise has forced to the fore in the USA questions about the role and scope of government, and energised conservative and libertarian instincts against untrammelled collectivism.

Here in the UK? Not so good.

On BBC Radio Five Live yesterday there was a significant piece about Labour lobbying revelations.

It dwelled at some length on the general problems of principle arising from what Stephen Byers and other senior Labour politicians have been offering, but without placing the blame firmly on Labour in general or on Labour politiocians in particular!

Nothing about the way in which specific Labour politicians in office might have been open to these blandishments from their former colleagues.

Just waffle.

How do voters get to shift this catastrophic government when the country's largest broadcasting network - paid for by poll tax levied on anyone who watches TV - is deflecting any serious focus on its contemptible behaviour?

Plenty of excellent articles at Spiegel Online about the Eurozone's problems as seen by intelligent Germans.

Such as this one which argues that far from bringing countries of the Eurozone towards economic convergence, the single currency has locked in profound problems of competitiveness and so is forcing them apart.

Or is Germany issuing half-baked ideas?

Meanwhile in the Telegraph Ambrose Evans-Pritchard gleefully points up the continuing disagreements on what to do:

Paris is watching nervously. As Le Monde put it last week, “behind the question of aid to Greece is a France-Germany match that pitches two conceptions of Europe against each other.” The game is not going well for 'Les Bleus’. The whole point of the euro for the Quai D’Orsay was to lock Germany into economic fusion. Instead we have fission.

EU leaders may yet rustle up a rescue package that keeps the IMF at bay, but alliances are shifting fast. Even Italy has slipped into the pro-IMF camp, knowing that rescue costs can be shifted on to the US, Japan, Britain, Russia, China, and the Saudis, lessening the burden for Rome...

The problem is that any fund set up by other EU member states may just not be big enough or credible enough.

Fearing that such a move will be even more damaging if it fails, some EU capitals may think that bringing in the IMF is the least awful among many awful options.

However, as A E-P points out:

The IMF option has its limits too. The maximum ever lent by the Fund is 12 times quota, or €15bn for Greece, not enough to nurse the country through to June. The standard IMF cure of devaluation is blocked by euro membership. So Greece will have to sweat it out with a public debt spiralling to 135pc of GDP next year, stuck in slump with no exit route.

The deeper truth that few care to face is that under the current EMU structure Berlin will have to do for Greece and Club Med what it has done for East Germany, pay vast subsidies for decades. Events of the last week have made it clear that no such money will ever be forthcoming.

As has been written about the Horror of Compounding Stupidity:

It is a moral hazard disaster to expect people who have been relatively prudent to have to dig deep into their own pockets to help deal with greedy state-sponsored profligacy on this scale, the more so since the profligates tend to be in denial and snarl angrily when anyone tells them to cut back on their banal, unsustainable lifestyles.

Which is why wise Germany claims to be holding out against paying for foolish Greece's fast escalating debt.

But if no bail-out, then what?

As Robert Lucas showed, "a government that is credible—that is, a government that makes itself understood and believed—can quickly end a major inflation without a big increase in unemployment. Government credibility will cause people to quickly adjust their expectations".

But the corollary of that is that wild and sustained government stupidity as we are seeing in so many places and policy areas can lead to people adjusting their expectations - and behaviour - in wild and persisting stupid directions:

The consequences for human welfare involved in questions like these are simply staggering: Once one starts to think about them, it is hard to think about anything else...

Families are strange things.

Just say you have a wayward sister who has never quite settled down, and fritters away successive generous attempts to help.

She starts to drink herself into alcoholism, but asks you to give her several thousand pounds to help her get through a detox clinic to make yet another new start.

You, by contrast, work hard and behave responsibly. You have some spare money  which might be used to help her, but only because you have worked hard and lived modestly.

Should you give her the money?

Most of us might think something along the lines of:  "Oh heavens. Not again. But ... oh well, families are families. I'll help but do my best to set some stern conditions this time, to make sure that she really benefits from the help and does not squander it."

Along comes someone from work whom you vaguely know and quite like. He tells you a sorry story of his sister who has been drinking and smoking too much and now needs several thousand pounds to go on a detox course. He asks you to help as he is broke. Should you give him this money?

Most of us might think something along the lines of:  "Huh? Look, it's bad enough helping my own profligate sister - why should I help her too, when I don't even know her?"  And politely decline.

Or maybe not.

Maybe we are altruistic enough to want to give away most of what we have to help others, whether we know them or not and without conditions, precisely because they have shown themselves to be unable to cope. 

The point is that once we have a decision to make about our own money, we are capable of fine-tuning it to suit different cases.

We might decide to help those who are likely to really benefit from our help. Or we might say that those who inflict harm upon themselves need to take responsibility for their own bad behaviour, and not draw down on the good behaviour of others. Or we might give help but with robust conditions.

If these decisions are aggregated up, a general view will emerge as to how society looks at responsibility, and at cause and effect.

But look what happens when the state nationalises all those decisions.

Fecklessness, selfishness, stupid risk-taking and incompetence are then subsidised indefinitely. This may create strategically ruinous long-term disincentives, which start to skew huge resources in weird, accumulating, even system-threatening directions. (See eg the 'European Social Model'.)

How to measure the costs and benefits of that, not only in financial terms but also in what it does to relations between people, and the deepest capacity of us all to behave responsibly and generously towards each other?

As the US political elite attempt to vote for or against radical new healthcare legislation, Zombie explains bluntly why he is not happy.

He starts with the lively case of Dr Sunderhaus who got into trouble for telling an obese person that she was likely to get diabetes.

Then he gets into his stride:

A built-in false assumption with the health-care debate is that sickness is always no-fault sickness. It’s never socially acceptable to assign blame for people’s medical problems — especially blame on the patient.

But I’m not afraid to confess that I’m a judgmental person. And I’m pretty confident that most Americans who oppose socialized medicine share this same judgment: that some people are partly or entirely to blame for their unwellness.

I’m perfectly willing to provide subsidized health care to people who are suffering due to no fault of their own. But in those cases — which, unfortunately, constitute perhaps a majority of all cases — where the unwellness is a consequence of the patient’s own misdeeds, bad habits, or stupid choices, I feel a deep-seated resentment that the rest of us should pick up the tab to fix medical problems that never should have happened in the first place.

I’m speaking specifically of medical problems caused by:

• Obesity
• Cigarette smoking
• Alcohol abuse
• Reckless behavior
• Criminal activity
• Unprotected promiscuous sex
• Use of illicit drugs
• Cultural traditions
• Bad diets

He concludes:

On one hand, we’re headed toward a totalitarian nanny state whereby your freedoms are constrained for the good of others.

But at the exact same time we’ve entered the Era of Hurt Feelings where it’s taboo to tell anyone they’re doing something wrong. The solution proferred by the universal health-care advocates is to expand the circle of responsibility to include all of us.

So, rather than insult an individual by telling him or her to get healthy, we all have to pretend we’re all equally in need of self-improvement, and we all endure the restrictions and hardships and costs which by all rights should be reserved exclusively for those who earned them...

All such arrangements built upon perverse incentives and assumptions must crash, sooner or later.

Not only because you run out of rational people to pay for them.

In the end because they are just not healthy.

Reaction from around the world to my unfortunate collision with Malta is flooding in.

Such as this link sent from the USA to Maltese proverbs.

For example:

Ħamiema bla ħjiena s-seqer itemmha (A pigeon without a wise mind, the falcon eat it)

Għal kull għadma hawn mitt kelb (For every bone there are one hundred dogs)

Aħseb fil-ħażin biex it-tajjeb ma jonqosx (Think in a pessimist way so that good things happen)

Serbian proverbs also tell us a lot about their national character:

Ко с ђаволом тикве сади, о главу му се обију (If one sows pumpkins with the devil, they will bash onto one's head)

Бог је прво себи браду створио (God created the beard on himself first)

And Russian:

Бодли́вой коро́ве Бог рог не даёт (God does not give horns to a cow that likes to gore)

Quite.

Republika Srpska's leader Milorad Dodik has come up with a crafty way of dealing with the fact that the ethnic-territorial definition of the three-person BH Presidency has been proclaimed to be an abuse of human rights by the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg.

He proposes a simple change. Instead of electing "a Serb" from the territory of Republika Srpska, people there will elect "one person".

He says this because he can see that far into the future, that person will be a Serb.

But in the Federation (the other Entity making up Bosnia and Herzegovina), things are much trickier.

Why? If the constitution provides only for "two people" to be elected from the territory of that Entity and ethnic categories are abandoned, what is to stop two Bosniacs and no Croat being elected?

Once again, Dodik takes wily rhetorical and political advantage of the fact that under the Dayton deal Republika Srpska is a more manageable space; it is predominantly Serb, and so has to spend far less time fighting with itself over ethnic quotas and 'balance'.

The fact is that without an ethnic quota of some sort it is hard to see how any Croat can get elected to the BH Presidency, collective or otherwise - Croat numbers in Bosnia are absolutely too small.

But ethnic quotas in favour of Bosniacs, Serbs and Croats (as per the Dayton deal) clearly discriminate against Bosnians, Jews and any other category.

It is genuinely tricky to find a new formula which is fair in itself, does not discriminate against some individuals or categories of people, and which is likely to be acceptable to Strasbourg.

Oh, and is likely to get accepted by the three rival leaderships in Bosnia itself.

Ideas, anyone?

How about this?

BH Presidency member are no longer directly elected but instead are nominated by the two Entity assemblies or even by the BH-level Parliament, on the basis of unanimity. 

This means that the three main communities' MPs themselves have to strike a deal to get the Presidency elected, thereby (in effect) guaranteeing a reasonable ethnic balance at the top. And if the MPs want to choose Presidency members who are 'Bosnian' or Jewish or anything else to make that compromise happen, that's fine too.

Nothing ruled in. Nothing ruled out.

Sorted? 

This FT article by Quentin Peel (I am told by a senior German who should know) brings out accurately an angle of the Eurozone's problems which hitherto has not received much attention beyond Germany.

Namely the fact that the German Constitutional Court is watching very closely what the German Government is up to in dealing with errant members of the Eurozone:

While the 1998 judgment focused on the requirement that the government ensure that the currency union should be founded with “stability” at its core, the most recent Karlsruhe judgment on the Lisbon treaty, delivered last year, criticised the lack of democratic accountability of EU institutions, and insisted that the Bundestag remained the ultimate source of legitimacy.

What worries Brussels is that the German government interprets these judgments in a way that limits its room for manoeuvre in EU negotiations. That could make the economically most powerful state in the union difficult to deal with...

Hence stern noises coming from Berlin which favour Stability over Solidarity, perhaps even to the extent of letting the IMF step in and lay down the law.

The root of the problem is that those clever people who worked out how to set up the Eurozone had an MIF (Major Imagination Failure).

It just did not occur to them that an EU member state from the Knoblauchgürtel (Garlic Zone) would actually cheat by sending in dishonest information about its own performance. See a good piece at City Journal by Guy Sorman on this aspect.

Meanwhile another senior Brussels contact tells me that the idea of an EU fund set up by member states to act as some sort of guarantor for Greece is set to prevail. The aim is to show sufficient official collective EU determination to see off marauding financial markets.

We'll see.

If Greece can not pay back its debts, someone has to lend it the money to do so. 

Are European taxpayers going to be keen to do that if they think that Greece is unlikely to be able to pay that money back?

And can Greece see its way to borrow more money at the higher interest rates needed because its economic management has been so poor, if that in turn will lead to even more debt interest repayments compounding up?

We'll see. But as usual it is markets, not governments, which are behaving morally. Guy Sorman:

What’s telling is that the people who brought the hoax to light were neither the Greek nor the European authorities but private speculators.

The Greek state, to its great dismay, suddenly discovered that it could no longer sell treasury bonds on financial markets at the same rate as the Germans did. The open market had decided that euros owned by Greeks were not the same as euros owned by Germans.

Should we blame these private actors for exposing the truth? On the contrary: it was their professional duty to generate profits for their clients, often for their retirement accounts.

The public actors, for their part, were duty-bound in principle to manage the euro through predictable and transparent rules. It is therefore inappropriate for French president Nicolas Sarkozy and Greek prime minister George Papandreou to accuse private speculators of “attacking” the euro.

If the euro—at least in Greek hands—had been above suspicion, it would not have been attacked.

Spot on.

And here I am over at Business and Politics, ingeniously linking the always interesting subject of Ambassadorial entertainment expenses to Human Rights:

Lurking at the back of an Ambassador’s mind is a new concern:

“What happens if I entertain that senior foreign colleague but a truculent Management Officer questions the value of the event or the amount I spent on it, and refuses to refund me the money?”

The paradigm has shifted. As has the Ultimate Decision.

The experienced policy-competent Ambassador no longer decides whether an event is in the national interest. The Management Officer (who has done no senior diplomatic/political work) now decides. A new cadre of junior Political Correctness Commissars is created, finally loyal to their own pathological anxieties about ‘getting into trouble’:

“My job is to get the best value for taxpayers – it’s not my job to risk being exposed in the Daily Mail for agreeing that one!”

How to challenge these people if they get obstructive? They can hide behind the (true) argument that ‘they are just doing their job’. Or horror! They play the bullying card, if an exasperated Ambassador crossly tells them to just shut up, refund the claim and obey orders.

This behavioural phenomenon is part of a wider disaster wrought by New Labour’s systematic attack on Authority in favour of Process...

Read the whole thing. Or not.

Back from Brussels.

Here is a short article by me in the Independent today about Ejup Ganic.

It's always a pleasure to get material into a British national newspaper - work published there pops up all over the planet. But the end product is not necessarily what was sent in.

In this case the article one was tapped out on my iPhone at v short notice to help meet the Independent's deadline. For space reasons they omitted several passages:

That said, the Bosniacs too have shown themselves unable and unwilling to confront massacres committed by their side. Hard questions are being asked in Sarajevo as to why the Dobrovoljacka St killings have not been fully and authoritatively investigated long before now, including Mr Ganic's own role.

Why has Belgrade launched this attempt to nab Mr Ganic now? The issue has been rumbling on for years  below the Western media radar screen.

President Tadic in Belgrade is trying to get passed in Parliament a resolution condemning the Srebrenica massacre. It does him no harm with Serbia public opinion to show that he is making serious efforts to see brought to justice people said to have committed war crimes against Serbs. Further bad feelings between Bosnia's unhappy communities? Collateral damage. 

Mr Ganic will have all the resources he needs to fight extradition. Belgrade too will strive to insist that he be handed over, although wiser Serb heads will be wondering quite how to manage an eventual and perhaps improbable extradition success.

If the issue is not resolved quickly - perhaps on an ingenious jurisdictional or procedural technicality which allows speedy Dr Ganic’s release and return to Sarajevo - a long and brutal legal battle will ensue. Just what neither Bosnia nor Serbia need.

A 'pro-Serb' reader in Canada has contacted me to remonstrate with some of the points made in the Independent article as published:

I have read your piece  "Bosnia will be the real loser in this messy legal battle" publish in the Independent and must disagree with you. Given your post as  Ambassador to Bosnia you must be much better informed about who was who during the war in the former Yugoslavia and who did what to whom from 1991-1999.

What was the role of the UK, the USA and other NATO countries in arming and training Muslims  in Bosnia (whom you so kindly call Bosniaks! ) and bombing Serbs. Coming from the UK, whose country was one of the major perpetrators of the crimes committed against the Serbs during the 90' s war, I would argue that you do not have any right to talk about morality...

Ho hum.

He links to this piece by Grey Falcon which has nothing good to say about Ganic but makes this claim:

He was, however, a loyal associate of Alija Izetbegovic, an Islamic revolutionary who schemed, lied and forced his way into becoming the leader of Bosnia's Muslims in the early 1990s.

Ganic ran for the then-Yugoslav republic's presidency as an "other", declaring himself an ethnic "Yugoslav", thus exploiting a loophole in electoral rules and giving Izetbegovic an extra vote in the seven-member collective.

One of the reasons the current Bosnian constitution has strict and even discriminatory rules governing presidential elections is to prevent just such a scenario from being repeated.

This is an interesting (if not necessarily true) point.

The new Constitution for Bosnia as agreed at Dayton indeed made provision for a new three-person Presidency based on strict 'ethnic' criteria: Bosniac and Croat members have to be elected from the Federation, and the Serb member from Republika Srpska.

You can see that this formula leaves no space for 'Bosnians' to have any role at the top. A person with a Serbian mother, Bosniak father and born in the mainly Croat areas of Bosnia who fits no one category and so calls himself a Bosnian is disqualified for running for President.

This is not only discriminatory. It is stupid, as it compels everyone towards strict ethnic categories and disincentivises cooperative Bosnian-ness.

Fair enough - other European countries are also strict in this sense. I gather that Belgium requires everyone to be allocated an ethnic category at birth(!).

But as Bosnia tries to work out how best to reform its constitution, some space surely has to be created to let Bosnians have a role?

I spent most of yesterday discussing the politics and prospects of a small southern European country which, yes, has its problems but deals with them in a mature, sophisticated way.

Namely Bosnia and Herzegovina.

In particular, the way in which the Bosnian media on all sides go out of their way to get facts right, and cover fairly and accurately what people say, is legendary. As is the fact that on the few occasions they get things wrong, they quickly admit the error and publish prominent and generous corrections.

That's the tip-top professional way to do it.

Then there's Malta.

For a moment there I thought the Malta media had moved away from the fascinating World News of how I showed a small group of officials the benefit of writing short sentences.

Like this one.

Or this.

No.

I was wrong.

Maltastar decides that the best way to get out of its hole is to dig all the deeper:

However, the news of the Prime Minister employing a foreign advisor was only revealed by newspaper Kullhadd on Sunday, saying that Charles Crawford had advised the Prime Minister to have backbenchers twinned with ministers.

Mr Crawford denied having a meeting with the Prime Minister or that he is giving any advises to the Gonzi administration.

So far he found all the time to answer to questions put forward to him by the Nationalist media, but has not been available to comment on One News because he was busy with Mother’s Day celebrations

Official Communique to Maltastar:

The 'news' revealed by Kullhadd concerning me was not true, as you know.

As you also know, I did not 'comment' on One News because the request to do so was so amateurish and not even obviously from Malta. As and when I am sent a professional request for a comment by any Malta media outlet, I'll be pleased to consider it.

Finally, I sent a Comment to your website in response to your nonsensical reporting about me, giving the facts. But (as of 0900 on 17 March) you have not posted it. How feeble is that?

Daphne Caruana Galizia says 'read this and weep':

You can tell from Charles Crawford’s blog that he doesn’t know what hit him, and that the island is thick with loonies. He is completely perplexed by the fact that Maltastar (lucky for him he can’t read KullHadd or listen to One News) keeps repeating that he has refused to answer questions, when nobody has asked him any...

How exactly do these people reason, if they reason at all? Don’t they understand that internet is not like a newspaper - that anyone who is on the internet reading Maltastar can tap in a second into the original source - Charles Crawford’s blog - and find there not just his categorical denial of Maltastar’s lies, but also the facts and best of all, a gently mocking description of Glenn Dangerfield of One News.

But it's not just Maltastar which has some issues.

Here is the Malta Independent Online trying to sum up what I have been saying. And failing miserably:

Judicial nominations should be subject to public scrutiny – Crawford …‘Malta. Never a dull moment’

Amid one of the most recent political sagas – the Labour Party media’s claims that the government has appointed British consultant Charles Crawford, particularly to provide advice with regard to ways of dealing with the dissenting Nationalist MPs – Mr Crawford has written some interesting content about Malta in his blog.

He sums up one of his articles very simply: “Malta. Never a dull moment”, and among other things, he mentions Malta’s judiciary, saying, “It is quite clear from this mess that the entire system needs a rigorous overhaul”.

The former diplomat proposes that the nominations for the appointment of magistrates and judges should be made public and subject to public scrutiny [emphasis added].

Whaaaat are they talking about?

Ah ha! They are looking at an earlier blog posting of mine when I linked to a passage from Daphne as an example of lively writing in the Maltese blogosphere. Then they they are ascribing her words to me! And making that their headline.

Far beyond incompetent.

And what about this even more startling passage:

As regards whether or not he has really been appointed consultant to the government, so far we can only rely on his own and the government’s dismissal.

Excuse me? Did I hear that one correctly?

You have 'only' my word as to what I did in Malta?

Are you saying that I am lying, or being shifty or evasive?

Maybe that is the default position Malta Independent Online takes towards Maltese citizens. I do not appreciate it being applied to me.

I hereby invite Malta Independent Online to publish a speedy prominent apology and correction.

I also invite Daphne Caruana Galizia as a fellow blogger to make clear on her own site that the words ascribed to me in MIO about the Maltese judiciary are in fact her words, not mine.

Nevjerovatno.

Remember Kinetic Energy and EU Foreign Policy?

I now scour the Internet fondly for references to kinetic energy in other contexts.

And here is a good one, applied in its natural scientific setting, as Surreptitious Evil patiently explains some basic science to a fathead insisting that 9/11 was something else:

I will note here that as kinetic energy is proportional to the square of the velocity and momentum only linearly, then there will now be a lot of "spare" energy about.

Under the first law of thermodynamics, this can't just wander off and go for a coffee, so has to hang around.  Most of it will be as heat energy.  Which will have a bad effect on all of the fuel now inside the building ...

With Newton's Laws of Motion as a bonus.

If you type Maltastar into Google Search in the UK as of 10.26 on 15 March, this is what you get at the top of the first and vital page:

Results 1 - 10 of about 177,000 for maltastar. (0.11 seconds) 

Search Results

maltastar.com

1. 15 Mar 2010 ... Crawford refuses to answer Maltastar questions. When contacted by Maltastar.com, the Prime Minister's consultant Charles Crawford refused to ...
   www.maltastar.com/ - 38 minutes ago - Cached - Similar
   

   Local News Gossip Jokes Sports	Quote of the Day Your News Mugliett challenges PM to collect ... Daily dictionary
   More results from maltastar.com »

2. Local News - maltastar.com

   When contacted by Maltastar.com, the Prime Minister's consultant Charles Crawford refused to answer any questions, stating that all he needed to say was ...
   www.maltastar.com/pages/ms09indx.asp?m=152 - Cached - Similar

In other words, their inaccurate claims about me are being propagated by Search Engine Optimisation deep into the Google system, for ever.

I this morning have attempted a Comment on the Maltastar site of the article in question, briefly rehearsing the facts and denying for the record that I met the Malta Prime Minister or any other Minister during my recent visit. But they have not (yet) posted it.

That Google Search page also gives this:

maltastar.com - Site Info from Alexa

maltastar.com is ranked number 481816 in the world according to the Alexa Traffic Rank.
www.alexa.com/siteinfo/www.maltastar.com - Cached

391,415

Alexa Traffic Rank

Alas, my own little effort is way behind:

1,628,497

Alexa Traffic Rank

Virtue is not always rewarded. But at least it is virtuous.

Update at 16.33 UK time today:

The Maltastar story is dropping fast from their actual website, but this still comes up when you search for Maltastar on Google (sigh). I am now unhappily embalmed in Maltese web amber:

Search Results

1. maltastar.com

   15 Mar 2010 ... Set as Homepage Add to Favourites Contact Us · maltastar.com ... Crawford refuses to answer Maltastar questions Mystery surrounds gun hid by ...
   www.maltastar.com/ - 1 hour ago - Cached - Similar

Not too far from exciting Malta is quiet Greece.

Baseline Scenario takes a very hard look at what is happening there - and what looks to be now unavoidable:

What if Greek interest rates rise to, say, 10% – a modest premium for a country which has the highest external public debt/GDP ratio in the world, which continues (under the so-called “austerity” program) to refinance even the interest on that debt without actually paying a centime out of its own pocket, and which is struggling to establish any sustained backing from the rest of Europe? 

Greece would need to send at total of 12% of GDP abroad per year, once they rollover the existing stock of debt to these new rates (nearly half of Greek debt will roll over within 3 years). 

This is simply impossible and unheard of for any long period of history.  German reparation payments were 2.4 percent of GNP during 1925-32, and in the years immediately after 1982, the net transfer of resources from Latin America was 3.5 percent of GDP (a fifth of its export earnings).  Neither of these were good experiences...

My latest salvo at Business and Politics is on the subject of Leadership.

I make the point that valiant character and moral virtues are not enough. It's all about technique too - linking those qualities intelligently and effectively to Real Life.

Take two generals in the heat of battle:

General Noble exhibits all sorts of positive Steareish moral virtues such as humility, self-discipline and courage. But in his righteous zeal to end the conflict he does not check quite enough. He presses the button and the Predator blasts the wrong compound in the Afghanistan mountains, killing a wedding party

Down the road in Iraq is General Meany, mean-spirited, proud and greedy for success. And a suspicious sonofabitch. He checks the target 200% before he presses his button. Bang. A top terrorist and his minions go up in smoke, with no collateral damage.

Who wins the conflict? Who ends up being accused of war crimes?

And this:

I think that ‘character’ is important, but not enough.

The best leaders need all sorts of technical and operational skills too. The ability to motivate a huge team and impart a sense of discipline and loyalty. The ability not to be deflected by squalls of protest.

The ability to be accurate: to hit the target and only the target. But also the determination and purpose – even ruthlessness – needed to see off the howl of complaints when, as must happen sooner or later, the wrong target is demolished and innocent people lose out.

And the funny thing is this. Leaders in politics and business alike may not know themselves whether they have these qualities until a crisis happens. People thought to have all the right qualities may not deliver. People believed not to be able to cope in fact can do wonders when given a chance...

Is over at Redemption Blues.

Driving down the M40 to visit my elderly mother today for Mother's Day, there was a sudden whooshing sound and dazzling lights as my car was swept into hyperspace (a bit like that extended cosmic Star Gate sequence in 2001: A Space Odyssey.)

Or maybe it was a traffic jam, and I started day-dreaming.

Whatever.

Arriving in HemeI Hempstead I found myself in the strange Parallel Universe of Maltastar.

Here is its banner heading as flickering across my screen right now, at 19.21 UK time this evening:

Highlights: Crawford refuses to answer Maltastar questions

What?

What?!?

I have had no request from Maltastar to answer questions. What I have had amidst dozens of hard-to-follow comments from Malta posted on my blog is an email from one Glenn Bedingfield. (Note: for no good reason whatsoever other than extreme Malta-induced stress I miswrote this name as Dangerfield earlier this evening. It's spreading! Apologies.) It was sent at 12.36 to the contact link on my site, thus:

Dear Mr Crawford 

With reference to media reports and to your blog on your homepage we would like to call you to get your reaction on tonight’s edition of One News.

Where can we contact you please?

Regards,

Glenn Bedingfield

Political Editor

One News

There was no telephone number, no explanation of what One News is, nor even any indication that One News is in fact in Malta. 

Being at my mother's house with no computer and having no way to check what if anything this might be about, plus not wanting to get dragged into a fatuous non-story in Malta if indeed that was the subject, I quickly and politely replied from my iPhone:

Oh dear.

I have achieved media prominence of a sort in Malta today, becoming a leading story in the Malta Star.

This publication does not like the current Malta government.

Its article boldly asserts that I am the Maltese Prime Minister's new 'Spin Doctor', brought in to help the PM 'deal with the problems within the nationalist party parliamentary group'.

More: Crawford was the person who recommended to Dr Gonzi to give his disgruntled backbenchers an apprenticeship with various Government Ministries, and pay them from public funds...

He also states repeatedly on his blog http://www.charlescrawford.biz that he is a euro-sceptic. This means that the Leader of the Nationalist Party is now taking advice from a prominent euro-sceptic after years leading his party’s electoral campaigns with a stance of of anti-euro-scepticism...

Charles Crawford has in fact become so involved in the Nationalist Party’s internal organisation that he has, on various occasions, quoted blogger Daphne Caruana Galizia in his own blog.

Another article (seemingly referring to this first one) says that some officials within the Nationalist Party are shocked that an external spin doctor has been brought in to help the Prime Minister.

Malta! Here are the facts. NB No-one in Malta including the Malta Star has been in touch with me to ask about them.

• I left the FCO in late 2007 to start a new career, part of which has turned out to be senior training of different sorts
• Last year I was asked by a Ministry of Foreign Affairs official in Malta to give some officials diplomatic communications training
• Which I duly did, drawing on training work I have previously done for the FCO in London as well as for one other EU member state and for the European Commission in Brussels
• The training in Malta as elsewhere focused on writing and presenting good English for different official purposes
• My visit had nothing whatsoever to do with the Nationalist Party's internal affairs
• I will be pleased to come back to Malta to advise any party or organisation who wishes to pay for this training, including the Malta Star. Book early to avoid disappointment
• The article in the Malta Star seems to insinuate that I have been drawing on my mediation skills during the recent training in Valletta, to help one particular political party. Alas not - that is a separate course, which so far I have given only to EU officials in Brussels
• In short, I have made no recommendations to anyone in Malta other than to show some officials how to write and present brisk official English
• In particular I of course have NOT said or recommended anything to anyone about giving Parliamentarians paid roles in Government Ministries
• I am not a Spin Doctor. But if someone in Malta or anywhere else wants to pay me generously to be one, I'll be happy to have a go.

Finally, I have linked to the site of Daphne Caruana Galizia for my small but select readership, as its popularity in Malta seems to be a striking example of the impact blogging can have in smaller countries.

Maybe I'm wrong on that. Likewise if other Malta bloggers with different views are having a similar impact, I'll be delighted to link to them too. But I do not plan to let this blog be overwhelmed with things Maltese, gripping as they are.

Just to add that my first visit to beautiful Malta prompted me to write some general thoughts about democracy and participation for my own readers, who are unlikely to be familiar with the subject as it applies in Malta: here.

All clear now?

Sure?

Good. Thank you.

Always a pleasure to post a comment on Craig Murray’s site. His readers are so smart and droll in reply, giving excellent material for my rotating What The Critics Say box:

Having visited your blog i must say it doesnt surprise me. Your self-aggrandising careerist pomposity is quite breathtaking

I suspect Charles Crawford is arguing for an increase in pension or knighthood or both

You are a disgraceful, immoral, racial supremacist. Your kind have destroyed the pride of the United Kingdom after Nazism was defeated by our mothers and fathers and grandmothers and grandfathers. You and your peers are incapable of any strategy except lying. You have shredded the international justice embedded in the Geneva Convention. If you had the slightest understanding of the implications of your snotty drivel, you would be looking for a new identity in South America like your Nazi predecessors

Charles Crawford...the shallow, self-interested man's coward and toady

In a posting about whether the British Government were ‘aware’ that the CIA was getting intelligence from torture, Craig linked to three FCO documents and said this:

The government knew the CIA was sending us intelligence from torture from at least November 2002, when I sent a diplomatic telegram to Jack Straw and others - including MI5 - informing them so. I repeated it in February 2003, and was called back to a meeting on March 7 2003 where I was told that, as a matter of policy in the War on Terror, we were using intelligence from torture. Sir Michael Wood said at the meeting that in his opinion this policy was not contrary to international law.

My Comment on this posting:

You keep serving up these documents as if they prove your case. Read them. They don't.

Where in those records or otherwise are the statements supporting your claim that "...I was told that, as a matter of policy in the War on Terror, we were using intelligence from torture. Sir Michael Wood said at the meeting that in his opinion this policy was not contrary to international law"?

I can't see them. Can anyone else?

And (to repeat) when the specific issue you raised (namely that HMG's possession of material known or suspected to have come from torture ipso facto amounted to 'complicity' in torture under the Convention) went to the House of Lords, the Law Lords flatly rejected your view.

Craig himself takes up two points made by a sensible commenter:

I am not sure whether you are arguing:

1) HMG was not knowingly receiving any information obtained from torture, and these documents report a completely hypothetical discussion as whether it would be legal; or

2) HMG was knowingly receiving information obtained under torture, and it is not illegal under international law to do so.

Craig fairly asks me: 

What do you think those documents do show? Presumably they do have some point, or the various authors would not have created them. What do you think it was that Jack Straw was agreeing with?

Let’s look at the documents as linked to by Craig. They are well worth a look at top-end formal FCO work in action.

They report a record by senior FCO official Linda Duffield of her conversation with Craig (joined by top FCO Legal Adviser, Michael Wood) which looked at one specific point he had raised, namely “that it was also an offence under the Torture Convention to receive or possess information obtained under torture”.

Michael said at the meeting that he did not think that that was the case under international law. His subsequent minute formally confirmed that view.

The minute from Jack Straw’s office compliments Linda Duffield on how she handled her meeting with the turbulent Craig (and by implication endorses the policy line she and Michael Wood put forward, which of course was later upheld by the House of Lords). It says nothing whatever which might be held against the Foreign Secretary.

So, I win an easy technical knockout. Craig was not ‘told’ on that occasion or otherwise that ‘as a matter of policy’ we were using intelligence from torture.

That does not settle the substance of Craig’s wider point. That we were receiving material probably drawn from torture. And that these documents somehow ‘show’ a cynical if not unlawful approach by the government and endorsed by Jack Straw personally.

Where Craig seems to me to go wrong is that he over-stretches the concept of ‘complicity’ to suit his argument. Craig determinedly supports those jurists such as Professor Sands who argue that merely using or receiving material known or suspected to have been obtained under torture in itself amounts to complicity in that torture.

An eloquent argument in favour of a strong point is not enough. Courts (and politicians, and the public) look also at eloquent arguments in the other direction, particularly in highly complex public policy areas where the role of the Executive to protect the public comes into play. This explains the sense of the House of Lords landmark decision:

• That it may be acceptable for the state's executive authorities to receive/acquire and use information which they know or think may have been derived from torture, if they believe that there is a clear public interest in doing so (eg saving lives) 
• But it is not acceptable for the judicial authorities (courts and tribunals) to hear and use such evidence in reaching conclusions directly affecting the rights of individuals

So, to answer precisely (if long-windedly) the reasonable questions put by one of Craig’s readers:

I think it is fair to say that the British Government were receiving intelligence reports (via the CIA and maybe otherwise) some of which they reasonably could believe were based on information extracted from prisoners through abusive treatment which might well be deemed in a UK court to amount to torture. (Craig himself convincingly pressed the case that any report served up by the Uzbek intelligence agencies had to be suspect on this score.)

That is not in itself illegal under international law. ‘Complicity’ on the part of HMG requires a very close and direct link to the abusive treatment, which in the case of eg Uzbek intelligence was just not there.

Even if receiving such information is not illegal, is it ipso facto always immoral or wrong?

Craig I suspect says a loud Yes.

I won’t do that. I can not conclude that it would be right for Ministers to ignore an intelligence report which might cast light on a terrorist plot to murder British or other citizens - and perhaps allow us to prevent that or some other atrocity happening. I think that in this darkest of moral corners it is just not possible to give clear-cut winner-takes-all answers.

And I have Professor Sands on my side, to this extent (his comment to a Parliamentary Committee on Michael Wood’s minute):

What I say in my written evidence is that insofar as the letter seeks to address a very narrow question it is not formally inaccurate but it misses the bigger point which was addressed in the previous witness’s contribution, namely in what circumstances might the receipt of information obtained through torture constitute complicity within the meaning of article 4 of the convention

Exactly.

In some circumstances the mere receipt of information might (sic) amount to be complicity. In others it would not. In the middle are many grey areas.

And if thinking that makes me a self-aggrandising, careerist, disgraceful, immoral, racial supremacist, shallow, self-interested coward and toady – so be it.

Once upon a time I was honoured to be noticed by the great Instapundit.

Readership shoots up fleetingly if the Professor links to you on his site, as his readers run into the hundreds of thousands. Ditto Guido.

An Iain Dale link too is much prized.

But to get a link from Daphne Caruana Galizia? Now you're talking!

Malta's population is something over 400,000 people.

Daphne's readership is said to be close to 100,000 per day.

Can that be right? If so, that means that almost every person in Malta is either looking at her blog at least once a week or talking to someone about it.

She has achieved a national readership of utterly awesome proportions.

Why?

For posts like this.

I hear that Malta still has the offence of criminal libel and that some people may be trying to get Daphne convicted under that heading.

Seems a bit unlikely to succeed with her ratings at that galactic level?

Who'd want to be the person applying the handcuffs?

Just to be 200% clear. I have no idea what she is talking about. Maltese politics and personalities are a subject about which I know nothing.

It's the phenomenon I'm interested in here.

A quite new form of democracy is evolving under our noses.