Blogoir: April

What with one thing and another April has been a bumper month for readers by my relatively modest standards: nearly 13,000 Unique Visitors recorded and still a few hours to go.

Especially pleasing is that some 3000 visits have stayed around here for up to an hour - or more.

Today I did a Motivational Map as run by James and Linda Sale. I came out as a firm Creator:

You are somebody who breaks barriers - brings into existence what wasn't there before ... You tend to be optimistic and can persevere in adversity...

Which, needless to say, I knew already after nearly 28 consecutive FCO annual appraisals noting that I tended to have 'too many ideas'.

At least it helps keep this site pumping out material which a discerning, wise and intelligent readership (this includes YOU, reader) appears to appreciate.

Many thanks.

Ian Bancroft's articles on the Balkans are always interesting and perceptive, not that I always agree with them.

See eg this one about Bosnia, as previously linked.

Yet something has been gnawing away in my mind about the picture of Ian which the Guardian uses.

Yes. Got it!

Are he and Kraftwerk by some chance related?

If only Bosnian political parties would behave in a sensible orderly way.

Just like the Robots:

We are programmed just to do
anything you want us to -
we are the robots

It's always good to mention Malta on this website, as everyone in Malta then comes here to remonstrate in one direction or the other and my ratings shoot up.

I happened upon Daphne Caruana Galizia's site when I visited Malta only because someone there mentioned it. It turns out that she has a policy of not linking to other sites, rather in the way newspapers do not (usually) acknowledge other sources - she is after all a journalist.

I myself prefer to offer links when quoting people or their ideas, as it allows readers to check for themselves if I am being fair or not. This is good discipline: even if they do not check, they can if they want to do so. It is an important reason why the blogosphere offers higher standards of integrity than many mainstream media outlets.

But to everyone his or her own blogging style. At least Daphne has allowed me to post a couple of observations on her site, whereas two leading Malta newspapers and TYOM have (I think) not done so. Integrity comes through (or not) in many ways.

(Update: I am now informed by a reader in Malta that the Malta Independent did publish my comment on p2 promptly after I sent it in. I submitted it via their online edition whose Search function did not tell me that it had been published in the print edition. So, assuming this information is true, my thanks to Malta Independent for allowing my point to be expressed. Your turn, Maltastar) 

Here is my first post mentioning Daphne, which mainly was all about how democracy necessarily is different in an island country of some 400,000 people:

A lot of Western political thought is built on the idea of the ‘separation of powers’ – parliament, government, judiciary, police, local administrations all having clearly defined roles ands responsibilities.

Fine when it works. But how far can it work in the classic sense in a much smaller polity where everyone knows everyone else’s business and large family networks linked to political loyalty are so dominant?

In such a context a few influential bloggers can make quite an impact. As, it appears, Daphne is doing. A few thousand readers a day chatting about a blog entry with extended networks of friends and family will achieve impressive nation-wide coverage.

Or maybe not?

What do you Maltese people think? Do the Daphne and rather brutish anti-Daphne blog tendencies make any difference, in the sense of exposing issues helpfully for the Malta public or persuading people to change their minds?

Or does it all amount to merely churning up the existing divided political ground with modern tools, throwing up huge quantities of dirt and dust but nothing else, leaving those Malta people who are relatively detached from day-to-day politics bemused or even embarrassed?

Are there other less strident blogs out there covering the Malta scene in a dispassionate, analytical way? Or in Malta's political culture does that just not work?

Maybe someone there should run a fair-minded weekly Maltablog Roundup, to capture and redefine the middle ground (such as it is), and give a wider calmer context to Malta's blogosphere? Could be a winner if done well...

For a moment I thought this was it. But I was wrong!

Update: It exists, albeit in a different form. Blogs of Malta.

With Jacques Rene Zammit to the fore, whose own site has some pertinent thoughts on Maltese Netiquette.

The Heresiarch links to my thoughts on the FCO and its Popegate scandal, but wonders if I have it right - maybe the causes are ... even deeper:

It's easy enough to blame New Labour, with its love of targets and hatred of anything traditional or elitist, for this sort of tosh, but I suspect the Blair administration has been as much the symptom as the cause of it.

Other, profounder, causes have been at play: a loss of nerve on the part of the old elites, the complete ascendency of the media and the news cycle, a generalised and growing distrust of institutions - most powerful when internalised by those who themselves run those institutions - a truncation of attention-spans and an hysterical neophilia.

The best word for it is infantilisation. Britain, and probably most other western countries as well, is regressing to a state of toddlerism, or at best arrested adolescence.

I could not agree more.

See how the FCO is responding to this self-made disaster. By sending the offenders back to school:

The civil servant in charge of the Pope’s visit to Britain has been suspended and is to be investigated for misconduct after a memo lampooning the teachings of the Roman Catholic Church was leaked to the press.

All the staff involved in producing the memo are to be sent on “urgent diversity training” and will have nothing further to do with organising the visit of Pope Benedict XVI to Britain in September.

Please excuse me while I leave the desk to emit a high-pitched scream.

Goes offstage

eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee

Returns

This is not a problem requiring 'diversity training', where the wretched victims sit listlessly staring out of the window, trying their best not to listen to some or other humourless harpy intoning on their need to 'respect' minorities and examine their 'unconscious prejudices'.

This is not a technical problem at all, capable of being sorted by some extra 'training'.

Indeed, the key problem is the very fact that the FCO apppears to think that lack of 'training' is the problem, and that more training is the answer.

Wrong!

It's all about structure and professional attitude.

What was happening across the organisation to create a culture and command structure in which a significant non-junior diplomat could produce and circulate around Whitehall such drivel? (Note: when the story broke I contacted the FCO myself and was assured that the offending officer was 'junior'. This was at the least highly misleading.)

Come on Fleet Street, ask the the FCO the right questions:

• who was Mr Noorani's line manager?
• what instructions were given to him and by whom?
• what internal expertise was being drawn upon to advise on the Pope's visit?
• why were these ideas circulated without HM Ambassador to the Vatican clearing them first?
• who is running this part of the FCO whelk stall?

Answers please, from people in the know.

I earlier this month mused about suing Malta under European human rights law for the local media's dismal inability to acknowledge polite requests from me to set the record straight on wild claims about me in some Malta newspapers and websites.

Malta lawyer Etienne Caleja lays it on the line:

Well, you can't sue Malta under the ECHR for two reasons:

1.  To do that first of all, you'd have to exhaust all remedies available in your home country. This means starting your case in the lower courts and taking it all they way up to HOL - and, perhaps more importantly,

2.  You'd have to show that Malta has a juridical interest - which it clearly doesn't. It isn't the State of Malta but, as you correctly state, the Maltese media outlets that are traducing you. Can you sue a private organisation before the ECHR for an infringement of your fundamental rights - sadly, the answer has to be a flat no; and - perhaps even more important and fundamental

 

3.  Does traducing you amount to a breach of your rights under the ECHR ?- again even here the answer is no. There is no right, whether fundamental or political, that protects the individual from being traduced. Certainly, there may be civil as well as penal remedies that may be available to those aggrieved by this behaviour, measures which vary in extent as well as sanction according to jurisdiction. However, the pan-European Charter does not conceive of the notion of a fundamental right to be not traduced - sorry. 

 

Pretty persuasive, m'lud?

 

Yet...

 

Those arguments turn on the technicality that Malta is a state, separate from its errant media.

But is this substantively true?

 

Could Malta, precisely because it is a small and tightly knit island population where everyone seems to know or be related to everyone else be deemed in law to have the form of a state but the substance of a single private organism, richly deserving a lawsuit when it conspires as a whole to traduce an innocent foreigner?

 

In other words, that it is impossible for Malta as a whole to deny responsibility for its individual citizens, as their behaviour and that of the state is indistinguishable?

 

That it would be unjust for Malta and its population to hide behind the curtain of this formal statehood in these specific circumstances?

 

Argumentum ab impossibilii plurimum valet in lege?

 

Nullus commodum capere potest ex sua injuria propria?

 

Hmm. But I still need to find a cause of action which will be fast-tracked to the ECHR...

 

So there I was yesterday having a deft lamb chop in the Beefsteak Club, a men-only refuge from political correctness where the noble ideas of Beef and Liberty are still champion'd.

The form here is one long dining table where all Club members sit and talk.

And what conversation.

At my end of the table the discussion swept magnificently to and fro between prospects for the Lib Dems, the history of Mt Athos, the strength of the rival clans in Syria, memories of lectures by F R Leavis, the relative merits of Oxford as against Cambridge ("Cambridge is a serious university"), anecdotes of long-lost British elections, Poland's economic successes, and the reasons for the odd shape of the Tanzania/Kenya border passing Mt Kilimanjaro.

Plus something one does not normally encounter at lunch without getting indigestion: hendiadys.

You don't know what hendiadys is?

Tsk.

Nor did I.

It turns out to be a subtle figure of speech joining two words to form a complex, striking idea.

Thus: "the cold wind went down the hall" becomes "the cold and the wind went down the hall."

Hard-core ambitious figure of speech fans can try hendiatris, where three ideas are joined.

Nevertheless, not all sparkling conversation is accurate.

The claim was heard yesterday to general satisfaction that the 'kink' in the border next to Mt Kilimanjaro arises from the fact that Queen Victoria gave the mountain as a birthday present to her grandson, the German Emperor: “Wilhelm likes everything that is high and big.”

This story prompted me to dig a little on returning home. And I found this, which seems to give a plausible and detailed account of a very different (but no less interesting) colonial-era story.

Civilisation needs civilised people, who cherish tradition combined with wit and wisdom and even some learning. London has them.

My earlier piece on Football Fascism over at Business and Politics caught quite a lot of attention.

So, here is some more, exporing the strange collectivism of Michel Platini:

“I am not a financier, but I have a financial philosophy, which is that you cannot spend more than you generate…”

Zut.

What you can ‘generate’ is determined by all sorts of things, including your attitude to risk and your and others’ assessment of how smart and effective you are.

Platini sounds like a lumpen Gallic romantic extolling the humble virtues of the French farmer, living modestly but well off his soil and toil. Oh, except that the EU’s CAP sploshes financial fertiliser paid for by others over the whole landscape, allowing French farmers to spend far more than they ‘generate’.

Of course Platini is right to point to the dire effects which sustained stupidity can have on football clubs. Sustained stupidity in fact can have dire effects anywhere. Funny that.

He’s just wrong about what to do about it.

Laying on ever-more ‘regulations’ means taking responsibility and moral accountability away from clubs and private citizens, and handing it over to illiberal French/UEFA control-freaks.

“Oh”, you cry. “You’re heartless. You have no feelings! Surely we have to feel sorry for ‘the loyal fans’ when a club goes bust.”

No, we don’t.

Football fans! It is a good thing if a club goes bust now and again.

Clubs are private institutions, living off their wits. When one goes bust, this sends all the right signals to everyone else – including you – to behave responsibly in the future. Don’t be naive – don’t waste your money supporting a bunch of feckless fatheads.

And above all, don’t vote in the coming UK elections for parties who run around promising that the state will fix anything and everything which has a problem.

As the spectacular example of Greece and the Eurozone shows, piling up elaborate, compulsory, collectivist rules detached from private honesty only creates illusion.

And makes the ultimate crash even more horrible.

Come on you Spurs.

This promoted Jeremy Jacobs to argue in a comment that football clubs play important roles in the community and so need 'proper central and local government support'.

To which I have responded:

We are stuck in a paradigm which emerged thousands of years ago, as an answer to a primitive information deficit problem: how to organise collective action?

The answer emerged: strong central power (king, emperor, tsar, warlord, church) using force to extract resources from the masses. If they don’t pay up, whip them!

This latterly takes the form of paternalistic (and, even creepier, maternalistic) liberal fascism. The collective is the state. The state is the collective. Whatever. The State Knows Best...

I quote from this superb analysis by Russell Roberts which painstakingly expores how in recent decades the State has skewed attitudes to private risk taking and created the shambles we see now (Warning! Only for grown-up readers):

An unpleasant but unavoidable conclusion of this paper is that Wall Street was (and remains) a giant government-sanctioned Ponzi scheme. Homebuyers borrowed money from lenders who got their money from Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, and banks that borrowed money from investors who expected to be reimbursed by the politicians who took that money from taxpayers.

Almost everyone made money from this deal except the group left holding the bag—the taxpayers. There is an old saying in poker: If you don’t know who the sucker is at the table, it’s probably you.

We are the suckers. And most of us didn’t even know we were sitting at the table.

Many people have placed the current mess at the doorstep of capitalism. But Milton Friedman liked to point out that capitalism is a profit and loss system. The profits encourage risk-taking. The losses encourage prudence.

Government policies have made too many markets one-sided. Because of implicit government guarantees, the gains were private and the losses were public. The policies allowed people to gamble with other people’s money, and by rescuing the creditors of Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, Bear Stearns, AIG, Merrill Lynch, and others, policy makers have further weakened the natural restraints of the profit and loss system. This isn’t capitalism—it is crony capitalism.

He has some answers:

Rescuing rich people from the consequences of their decisions with money coming from average Americans is bad for democracy. It is bad for democracy because the Fed and the Treasury are spending trillions of dollars of taxpayer money with very little accountability or transparency. It’s bad for democracy because it means that some people have to live with the consequences of their decisions while others get rescued.

That in turn creates a very destructive feedback loop of rent seeking, where losers seek government help after the fact rather than making careful decisions before the fact...

Milton Friedman once observed that people mistakenly believe that electing the right people is the key to better public policy. “It’s nice to elect the right people,” he said, “but that isn’t the way you solve things. The way you solve things is to make it politically profitable for the wrong people to do the right things.”

To do that, we, the people, have to favor a different philosophy for the relationship between Washington and Wall Street than the one we have now. We have to favor a relationship where there is both profit and loss.

Brilliant.

Once I send a witty telegram to the FCO from Sarajevo entitled:

Bosnia: The Plot Thickens - And The Thicks Plot

The deep problem in Bosnia is that the place is rotten with feckless Yugoslav communist self-management philosophy.

The idea that you can talk and talk about 'politics' and borrow money from the West without paying it back.

Bosnia and Herzegovina as one of the former Tito Yugoslavia's six republics was a special beneficiary of self-management. Funds poured in to what was one of the most undeveloped parts of Europe to build arms factories and other heavy industry. The Titoists had the idea that these installations would be better protected by partisan warfare against invading Americans/Russians in the Bosnian mountains than on the plains of Vojvodina.

Which was no doubt correct. But it helped create a sense across Bosnia that it needed to do nothing but live off other republics, themselves supported by unwise Western loans intended to keep 'non-aligned' Yugoslavia out of the Soviet orbit.

In a nutshell, this was Tito's foreign policy:

Moscow: sell us cheap weapons - or we'll have to turn West!

West: give us cheap loans - or we'll have to turn East!

It worked a treat. Until Yugoslavia went bust as the Cold War ended.

The greatest metaphor for Bosnian official cluelessness for me was the Sarajevo Holiday Inn.

This architectural calamity in bright yellow and dull purple and the world's naffest sofas was built for the Sarajevo Olympics in 1984, when I was the UK team's Olympic Attache:

It took serious damage during the siege of Sarajevo. Once the war ended, it was rebuilt.

But no obvious effort was made to modernise it. It was restored to its pre-war state at significant expense, including the hopeless check-out system. It was as if the Bosnian leadership(s) wanted simply to turn the clock back, not take stock of a transformed world and try to find out how best to create new wealth in it.

Because of the war and its own parochial self-absorbed political culture, when the Cold War ended Bosnia never had any popular movement for liberal reform. Instead it had ruinous gangster-ethnic feuding.

Now, many years later, things are still stuck. As Ian Bancroft well describes in the Guardian:

As the British electorate prepares to go to the polls, Bosnia and Herzegovina's own elongated pre-election period enters a more frenetic phase. Amid talk of referendums and rivalries, however, the key issue of economic reform remains sidelined.

The economy contracted by some 3.5% in 2009, and with unemployment currently hovering at around 40%, this should be the single most important issue for Bosnia's electorate. Nevertheless, as in previous years, election campaigns will be fought not on the basis of who can deliver change, but on who can best protect "vital national interests".

His piece links to this unerring wisdom:

The Bosniac elite in Sarajevo with intermittent support from some in the 'international community' want BH-wide government harmonisation and the constitutional changes they think must occur for that to work.

Yet the fastest way to harmonise the space across Bosnia would be for the larger Federation entity to become super efficient and economically booming with Serbs welcomed into a good share of top positions, so that Serbs clamour to leave Republika Srpska and live there. Instead the Federation is inefficient, wasteful and over-governed, to the point of near-bankruptcy.

In these circumstances (and ignoring for now their own nationalistic cynicism), the Bosnian Serbs not unreasonably fear that Sarajevo's demands for 'harmonisation' are all about extending to Republika Srpska negative forms of majority/Bosniak control (including ethnic discrimination) rather than any real desire to make the country as a whole 'work better'.

In other words, the absence of 'harmonisation' ought to be inducing tax and overall efficiency competition between the two Entities to attract people and investment. And it is. But Republika Srpska is on the whole winning that competition, and sees no reason to surrender its edge.

The thicks are still plotting.

And glorifying war criminals.

Things are accelerating as the scale  of the Eurozeone's self-delusion emerges.

And read this good piece by German TV anchor Tom Buhrow in the IHT:

Most European governments wanted the cake and eat it, too — remain nation-states politically while expecting solidarity economically. That’s like having your own checking account and expecting your neighbor to provide overdraft protection.

I recently talked to a German expert who was closely involved in setting up the Eurozone. He identified the single biggest mistake:

"It simply did not occur to us that another EU country would tell lies about its own situation."

The Eurozone's various rules indeed were intended to keep would-be wayward governments in line, absent the financial controls in a unitary jurisdiction.

But rules work only insofar as there are shared assumptions about what those rules are.

It turns out that the the Eurozone has no such shared assumptions.

What does all this remind me of? Oh yes:

Paper is a mortgage on wealth that does not exist, backed by a gun aimed at those who are expected to produce it. Paper is a cheque drawn by legal looters upon an account which is not theirs: upon the virtue of the victims.

Watch for the day when it bounces, marked 'Account overdrawn'.

Tim Collard, (a retired British diplomat who spent most of his career in China and Germany. He is an active member of the Labour Party) offers a jeer in the Telegraph at William Hague's sensible comment on the FCO Popegate fiasco:

William Hague, who expects to be in charge in King Charles Street in a fortnight’s time, has laid out the Tory position sternly and clearly. “A Conservative-run Foreign and Commonwealth Office would put a stop to such pointless time-wasting and insulting activities. Visits by international leaders should be handled with the respect they deserve and that we would expect to be extended to us.”

Collard then tries to 'fisk' this. Read it and see just what a flimsy, feeble effort it is.

Example:

And then “Visits by international leaders should be handled with the respect they deserve”. Well, that’s a bit double-edged; does he mean “the respect they think they deserve”? Is Mr Hague going to launch a new procession of Ceausescu knighthoods? What about the ones who “deserve” no better than a bullet in the back of the bonce? (I am not talking about the Pope here.)

The FCO has frequently been criticised for being far too obsequious as it is. May I remind Mr Hague that the purpose of high-level visits is to advance British interests, not to make foreigners feel good about themselves?

What?

Who invited the vile communist Ceausescu on a full State Visit to this country? Why, Labour of course.

Look, Tim, a word of advice. Please don't market yourself to Telegraph readers as a former diplomat, but then traduce elementary diplomatic courtesies and professional technique.

The way the Miliband FCO has handled this visit by the Pope has been an unambiguous disgrace on numerous levels.

Fact. Be a man. Take the hit for your team.

May I remind Mr Hague that the purpose of high-level visits is to advance British interests, not to make foreigners feel good about themselves? Obviously we will treat them with the respect and consideration necessary to influence them in our favour, but that’s all...

... Mr Hague, even if you do model your tenure of office as Foreign Secretary on the Red Army in Poland, you’ll still be dealing with a large number of very bright and perceptive people.

Our diplomats spend quite a lot of their time dealing with the vagaries and vanities of foreign statespersons. There is no way they are ever going to be forced to take these people seriously.

What? This is both patronising and stupid.

The problem is that foreign statespersons will no longer take our diplomats seriously, because New Labour have dumbed down the FCO to startlingly low levels of professional incompetence. Imagine the amazement of Vatican officials when this vacuous phenomenon appeared in Rome, flown there by UK taxpayers to do a serious job.

And what do you suggest by the insane idea that our diplomats need to be 'forced' to take foreign leaders seriously?

Not all foreign leaders are respectable or respectworthy. But there are few indeed who do not represent something significant in their own states or more widely.

The core art of diplomacy is getting on with people, especially those who are 'difficult' or problematic. Which is why it is essential to build up a cadre of people who understand subtle specific foreign nuances.

This is what the FCO had achieved, painstakingly built up over many decades and admired around the planet, until New Labour came along and blow by blow literally deconstructed those assets.

So whereas I myself fear that William Hague will not show the merciless Stalinist steel required to liquidate, torture and imprison FCO staff in anything like the way the Red Army brutalised Poland, I think he can do a lot by sacking a few senior people to catch the FCO's collective attention, firmly drawing a good old Polish gruba kreska under Labour misrule.

And start to re-emphasise basic standards of courtesy, professionalism and good sense.

The sooner the better.

The Guardian tells us about a serious police raid in California:

California police have taken six computers and other items from the house of Jason Chen, the editor of the gadget blog Gizmodo who appeared on a video on the site showing off a lost Apple iPhone prototype which, it transpired, had been bought from a middleman for about $5,000.

The search was carried out last Friday evening, but Gizmodo only revealed that it had happened on Monday evening. Chen was not present when the police entered the house.

The police seizure, which would have been the decision under the criminal code of California of the district attorney for San Mateo - and not Apple - may turn into a test of the US "shield law" for journalists, which allows them to protect their sources. The New York Times reported last Saturday that "charges would most likely be filed against the person or people who sold the prototype iPhone, and possibly the buyer."

The lost iPhone was a prototype of the new model that Apple's chief executive Steve Jobs is expected to announce this June, sporting a higher-definition screen and ceramic casing.

Question. Where is the crime here? Why is the state lunging in?

By all accounts the iPhone prototype was lost, not stolen.

And, as any fule kno, it's no offence to handle stolen goods if the goods concerned aren't stolen.

Instapundit has some learned thoughts:

At common law, there’d be an action to recover the property in replevin, and perhaps an action for trespass to chattels or conversion. But there would be no crime, and no cops crashing in and seizing computers.

Replevin. There's a doctrine.

Instapundit reader Scott Benger:

I am not a lawyer, but it seems pertinent to me to include in this discussion Apple’s treatment of its customers whose i-phones are stolen. Apple encourages the theft of i-phones by refusing to discontinue itunes service to those phones reported as stolen. The stolen phone can be enrolled in itunes service by the thief even though the owner provides a police report of the theft. My sympathies for the Apple company in the loss of their prototype run very very thin.

Guilt comes in all shapes and sizes.

Maybe California should look at other wheezing parts of its justice system before wasting money on things like this?

I did not get it quite right in ascribing responsibility for the FCO/Pope fiasco to young officer Steven Mulvain.

It looks instead as if a more senior colleague, one Anjoum Noorani, is the Guilty Man. Here is the Telegraph account:

Mr Noorani, who, like Mr Mulvain, is a graduate of Balliol College, Oxford, chaired the “brainstorm” session which led to the “Ideal Visit” memo, which also proposed that the Pope should sing a duet with the Queen and sponsor a network of Aids clinics.

He worked as press secretary at the British Embassy in Russia between 2002 and 2007, where he dealt with all Russian media inquiries about Britain’s response to the murder of the former KGB agent Alexander Litvinenko...  

We remain left with one rather significant issue. Was the infamous memo intended to be a joke/spoof?

Or, horror, did they mean it?

Let me explain the background.

Back in older pre-Labour times the FCO was organised in a rather mechanical way, by Departments.

These were Geographical, covering specific clusters of countries (usually with some lofty haggling on the margins over the arbitrariness of whether country X 'really' fitted better in another Department).

And Functional, dealing with policy themes of a more general nature: see eg Energy, Space and Science Department, or my old hunting ground Maritime, Aviation and Environment Department.

Plus various HR and support Departments too.

And all that worked well.

Why? Because diplomatic work was grounded solidly in the fact that countries (a) exist and (b) are important.

So if a Head of State were coming to the UK for a State Visit, the Geographical Department concerned would be responsible. The Head of that department and the Deputy Head would task a First Secretary to run the operation and keep a close eye on how it all worked.

And that Department would have Authority round Whitehall for its expertise: "Don't include that idea for the Visit - it sends the wrong signal, given what happened last year in Ruritania..."

There was, in a word, structure. And, in another word, continuity.

This allowed a bloc of country/regional expertise to develop and be sustained. Members of Departments came and went, but there would always be someone around who remembered or knew what had happened years back.

Then along came Gordon Brown at the Treasury and a proliferation of targets, road maps, objectives and all the rest for all of Whitehall and far beyond.

This forced to the fore a problem.

If the FCO's main policy themes were now 'global' and not fitting into neat categories - environment/energy, terrorism, Islam - (and they had to be if HM Treasury were to pay for them), how to measure the resources devoted to them with all this fuddy-duddy structure?

So an appalling idea was cooked up.

To turn the whole thing round, to move away from 'geographical' departments to a completely new organisational arrangement (I dare not say structure because there was no structure) based on the FCO's Strategic Priorities.

Remember the beef?

Of course, annoyingly, countries and their footling problems and visitors would not go away. But they would be dealt with by 'Units'. Or something.

This at a stroke devalued if not destroyed the UK's classical diplomacy.

The FCO's accumulated wisdom was scattered. Control and continuity were lost in a maze of organisational uncertainty and incessant physical relocations, as different Units and Sections moved listlessly round the main building trying to find a sensible place to be parked.

So what do we see now? Instead of a group of diplomats building up an expertise about a country and (yes) maybe some sympathy with its problems, we have ad hoc arrangements set up to deal with ad hoc realities. No-one knows anything:

One source said: “The most striking thing about the Foreign Office team has been how ineffectual they are. They have been disengaged and, frankly, clueless.

“I have never had the impression that any members of the team were informed or even sensitive to the Catholic Church or Catholicism generally.”

One senior source at the Catholic Church in England and Wales said: “This does beg the question of how seriously this visit is being taken by the Government.

“All of our dealings with this Foreign Office team have suggested they don’t have any understanding of Catholicism and that’s how this issue seems to have come about.

Today's FCO:

The Pope's coming on a State Visit? Huh? Why?

Sigh. OK, we'll set up a Papal Visit Unit. Who's around? Noorani and Malvain will do. Neither of them know anything about the Vatican or Catholic issues, but hey, that will make it all a bit edgy!

Here's what I was sent yesterday from a former colleague who joined the FCO from another Whitehall Department because it set high standards but who left recently:

... a major reason being the total change in culture (for the worse) within the FCO in the period of the current government.  

Your comment yesterday regarding the FCO's absolute obsessions about AGW and outreach to Islam was right on the money.  This should be coupled with another obsession with management-speak gobbledeygook, which results in the publication of a wide range of incomprehensible politically-correct crap, particularly in things like the FCO website (internal and external) and "News & Views". It was galling for me to see the outright propaganda and meaningless backslapping perpetrated in those areas.

Unfortunately, this was the sort of Orwellian atmosphere that permeated the place, in my view. The FCO has more people working on "Change" and "Diversity" issues than they have working on the MEPP. A disgrace and utter madness, yet typical of the FCO's currently warped world view.  

 

We might be crap at diplomacy but, hey, we're really diverse and that's what matters. doesn't it?

 

... I went to see Christopher Meyer give a talk in the Locarno Room.  I subscribe to most of his views and, for me, the talk was a delight, although paradoxically, it was quite depressing too!  We all like to have our prejudices confirmed.  

 

Anyway, there was one particular exchange that has stuck with me.  One of the questioners was from HR.  He went on, very defensively, about some of the points Sir Chris made ("I used to have something called a Desk Officer..."). The questioner from HR said, "Our service delivery operations are very successful, blah, blah,,,,"  

 

Sir Chris responded very deliberately, " 'Service.....Delivery.....Operations.... Does that mean "doing my job"?  

 

Classic!  Encapsulated such a lot for me but it was lost on some of the brainwashed PC clones in the audience.  Their lack of personal and institutional self-awareness was very, very scary.  

I'm not sure that, whoever gets in, the situation is recoverable and that makes me so sad...

 

People used to say to me, "Oh, it's alright for you. You don't care. You're leaving." Nothing could be further from the truth.  I was leaving BECAUSE I cared so much.  I'm sure you can identify with that.  

 

Is it recoverable?

 

Only if the next government brings in people who understand the problem AND formally roots out the stupid Brownian obsession with Targets:

 

... the very idea of 'targets' is philosphically incoherent.

This flows from the fact that governments (and the public) have no way of deciding how to manage risk, in the sense of reasonably calculating the likelihood of policies (a) being properly implemented and (b) producing the good results we expect over (c) a realistic timescale, while (d) keeping an eye on the opportunity cost of not doing something else.

Thus no-one can tell us which is better:

• short-term likely-to-work quick wins
• medium-term, maybe-less-likely-to-work significant wins
• longer-term, medium risk, potentially huge wins

Government thrashing around in this conceptual morass is now horrible to behold. Not surprisingly the public get fed up and confused. Populist noises and a Sense of Looming Unease grow in parallel.

Basically, if government is faced with the sheer complexity of modern life and so with all the best intentions can not work out what is Cause and what is Effect in policy-making, maybe the best thing to do is ... a lot less, but try to get it right?

That's the point.

It's all about a philosophical approach to knowledge and process.

If you get that wrong, as Gordon Brown has done on a truly ruinous scale, everything else HAS to be wrong. And go wrong.

Not an epistemological mistake the Catholic Church is likely to make.

Iain Dale interviews Adam Boulton and does a good job:

What about Alastair Campbell's briefings? You only need to read his diaries to see how many times he would mislead the lobby.

While I admire much of Alastair Campbell's professionalism, the problem was that he introduced a culture where it was ok to lie.

In case anyone out there is minded to vote Labour, let's remember what they have done to our public life - starting right from the start with Tony Blair's closest adviser and continuing unabated since then.

It reminds me of the brilliant Isaac Asimov story which shows how robotic lies, even for the best intentions, end up doing awful harm: Liar!

I have just spotted this tragic story from 2005, describing how my own leaked email about the EU Budget Negotiations led to someone resigning from his media job in London!

With Polish emotion rather than western diplomacy, Kris wanted to recall Crawford to Britain “a country he does not know” and lecture him about what Poles are doing. Kris also commented in a very blatantly nationalistic way that Polish workers were now carrying on in Britain work once done by Polish pilots (a reference to the Battle of Britain of 1940).

The comments from Kris were not helpful in my editorial view. And instead of signing them in his personal capacity, he signed “redakcja (Editor’s Office) Radio HeyNow”.

That was the trigger for me to resign...

Cause and Effect.

George. If you are out there, get in touch. I owe you a drink.

The FCO has been quick off the mark to get on its website a piece about the 'small explosion' near the car of HM Ambassador in Yemen this morning.

And, stop the presses, there is to be a new UK Ambassador in Macedonia.

Yet nothing appears there under News on the FCO's response and statements concerning a story of global prominence over the weekend, namely the leaked email of disobliging suggestions for the Pope's State Visit to the UK.

Why's that?

The leak of the supposedly droll FCO email suggesting 'far-fetched' ideas for the programme of the Pope's State Visit to the UK has prompted a flurry of comment.

Yesterday I had an exchange with an FCO colleague to ask who was responsible for the email and was told that the people concerned 'did not deserve to have their names in the newspapers'.

Why? Is that not exactly what they 'deserve', pour encourager les autres?

And lo, it has happened. The guilty party is named by the Telegraph as Steven Mulvain:

Mr Mulvain, who was educated at the £9,279-a-year King’s School, Tynemouth, before studying English at Balliol College, Oxford, taught at a summer school in northern Germany in 2006, where he said in a podcast that his hobbies included “drinking a lot and reading more or less what I want”.

The commentariat sally forth.

Catherine Pepinster of the Tablet at the Independent:

... while the Prime Minister might welcome the Pope, lower down the Foreign Office pecking order there is a cultural contempt for Catholicism in this country. For the Foreign Office briefing was not down to one clownish junior: around six middle ranking officials were involved.

In politically correct Britain, people are normally careful not to offend – and rightly so. Yet being offensive about the Pope is OK. Catholics are the minority that it it acceptable to treat as whipping boys.

Sometimes this cultural contempt emerges from the shadows – a contempt you'll never see allowed to be shown to a chief rabbi or a grand mufti.

On the other side, two former diplomats try to put a wry smile on the whole business.

First, Tim Collard ('an active member of the Labour Party') in the Telegraph tries to spin it all away:

Predictably, the usual suspects have blown it up into an international incident. I regret to say that our blogmeister Damian Thompson has made himself look a bit of a Charlie, heading his posting “The Foreign Office’s sick attack on the Pope: what did you expect?” No, the FCO is not institutionally secularist, Satanist or whatever: it just contains a lot of people who like taking the mickey. Chuck it, Thompson!

And Sir Tony Brenton, previously HM Ambassador in Moscow and no stranger to controversy himself, has a chuckle:

Nothing new. There is a long and splendid tradition of Foreign Office humour. This is unsurprising in an institution full of bright and (at least when they start) irreverent young people, rigorously constrained in what they can do and say publicly, and in constant contact with those most marvellous subjects for satire and mockery — senior politicians.

Tony correctly recalls another infamous leak:

Some stories do leak — such as the 2005 memorandum of our Ambassador in Poland, Charles Crawford, who suggested that Tony Blair, concerned about attacks from the “scary new teenage” Tory Opposition, should start a forthcoming EU negotiation by putting a “large naff children’s alarm clock” on the table to make it clear that time was running out on the egregious Common Agricultural Policy (the “most stupid immoral state-subsidised policy in human history, give or take communism”) ...

The underground river of humour does much to feed the creativity and resilience of an institution that operates in an atmosphere of constant constraint and stress. When it surfaces — as in the Crawford and Pope’s visit cases — it does no long-term damage and indeed probably does more to bring home to those with whom we are dealing the reality of British society and policy than any number of official statements. And it reminds us that even the FCO is staffed by human beings.

I disagree with the underlying argument.

The examples of FCO humour (real enough) given in these articles show people mocking policies or being self-deprecating about our own people or institutions.

It is quite another thing to write a memo sneering in a sustained way at a particular person invited to the UK at the highest level of protocol we can offer.

So there is a legitimate question here. What is happening within the FCO's culture that a senior new entrant diplomat, recruited from thousands of top graduates, is unable to grasp elementary good sense, professional responsibility and respect?

To show, in short, a startling lack of Judgement?

The answer is, in fact, simple. Labour astonishingly have removed Judgement as a 'competence' on which FCO people's performance is measured!

As previously described - emphasis added:

Promotion in the FCO as in much of the real world turns these days on 'competences' - those qualities the organisation in question looks for in its people at each level and especially the higher levels.

In the FCO as elsewhere Competences change according to fashion and latest management theory. Thus in my own very final appraisal of 2007/08 I was assessed on:

• Leadership
• Getting the best from staff
• Delivering results
• Strategic thinking
• Personal impact
• Learning and development 

There used (as recently as 2002) to be a longer and better list covering such issues as Adaptability and Creativity, Communication (Written and Oral), Relating to Others and above all Analysis and Judgement.

And the greatest of these is Analysis and Judgement. (Memo to next government: bring that back on Day One.)

Why?

Because in foreign policy things are complicated. Long-term v short-term. Big v Small. Certainty v uncertainty. Principle v Politics v Practical v Possible.

Thus in a democracy what Ministers need is a team of skilled people able to help them steer through these operational and philosophical complexities for a few years.

People who simplify complexity but in a subtle, nuanced way. Who are good at bringing people of rival opinions together and explaining convincingly what might best be done. People who can juggle numerous balls but keep their eye on the Big Picture. People of unerring accuracy.

And 'Judgement' is the word for all that. Without Judgement a civil servant (like a Minister) is fairly useless.

So the point is that this sort of crass behaviour did not arise incidentally or through a fleeting engorging of poor Steven Mulvain's post-adolescent imagination lobes.

It took place in a professional context deliberately engineered by New Labour in which professional standards - and the very idea of standards - are 'relativised'. Where FCO new entrants are harangued about Climate Change and Outreach to Islam but not taught the basic professional values.

One in which Judgement is cast aside in favour of Delivering Results and Personal Impact.

The problem, see, is that if you emulate Mr Mulvain and Deliver Results and achieve Personal Impact without Judgement, you can screw up on a vast scale.

Memo to Next Government:  

Haul me quickly back to the FCO to sort all this out.

A dirty job, but someone has to do it.

Let’s start with a brilliant resource for all Brit bloggers: localmouth, a way to find local blogs wherever you are in the UK. Hover somewhere near Oxford and you might find mine. A wonderful example of the way intelligent networked pluralism helps mobilise human creativity without busybody official statist help.

 

Which takes us to the looming UK elections and lugubrious versions of socialism (and Good Racism) on offer.

 

The Heresiarch is having a magnificent run of form. On Lotfi Raissi:

 

His case should have served as a terrible warning of the way in which New Labour legislation has left the extradition system wide-open to abuse - both with regards to the unequal treaty with the United States and the similar, but more "equal", European Arrest Warrant.

 

And on Cleggmania which by some chance may or may not be related to Dianamania:

 

Diana's posthumous triumph was at least as much Blair's, though neither Paul nor John Q mention him. He rode the tidal wave of sentimentality and shallow grief with the skill of a champion surfer.

 

The Diana moment was about the triumph of feeling over logic, but it was also about the desire for a change of mood, an end to the old way of doing things, shaking off the shackles of deference and tradition. In a strange way, it was about hope. And it was democratic - though very far from being egalitarian - but also, as democratic sentimentality tends to be, rather bullying.

 

There does seem to be a generalised, unfocused, frustrated ennui in this country at the moment. Which translates into ‘hang the lot of them’ outbursts.

 

Brain Barder (and lucid commenters) helpfully analyse options for the ensuing machinations if Parliament is merely well hung rather than severely hanged.

 

Kate Smurthwaite (‘a young woman whose principal interests are secularism, feminism and stand-up comedy’) offers us a strange election video which (I assume) attempts to combine secularism, feminism and stand-up comedy.

 

The polls have Labour languishing in third place, a result as richly deserved as it is remarkable.

 

Andrew Ian Dodge: A volcanic eruption isn’t the only event causing chaos in the UK.

 

Huh? Chaos? Or freedom in action?

 

Elsewhere from the Dodgeblogium: Why Camaron is Bad for Britain…

 

Not as bad as sloppy spelling?

 

What are elections really for, anyway? To help the government do old stuff better, or new stuff well? Isn’t the real problem that in fact today’s feverishly active style of government does more harm than good?

 

We hear a lot about banks and huge corporations causing untold damage by being Too Big To Fail. But isn’t this the very problem with government? It’s Too Big. And it’s Failing.

 

Counting Cats reminds us of earlier times how the poor were once libertarians:

 

The poor had to be done away with and replaced with something more acceptable to higher class tastes and, by all kinds of social activism and regulation they were, to a large extent, done away with as, their petty capitalism squeezed out by the State, they were dragooned into a compliant workforce for factories run by bewhiskered, interfering philanthropists who voted for Victorian Nick Cleggs.

 

And in the end, they all got their council flats and a better wage, and all they had to give in return was their spirit.

 

Or, if you want more government-created tragedy, Ambush Predator describes the way the state has tried to bring nature – and our appreciation of nature – under busybody control:

 

By harassing and hounding people who pick up stones from a beach, by carpeting the countryside with ‘Don’t Touch…!’ signs, they hope to freeze people into a permanent state of worry, where the only safe thing is to do nothing at all.

 

Tim Worstall is aghast on the same theme: 1984 was a warning, not an instruction manual... 

And up in Scotland, Neil Craig thinks that all politicians have gone insane on green issues:

Holyrood has voted unanimously to destroy 42% of our CO2 producing electricity generating capacity (as well as 100% of nuclear) over the next 10 years. Since electricity closely correlates to GNP, this means destroying half our national wealth because "environmentalist" calculations purport to show that last year's barbecue summer & mild winter are harbingers of a warming even more catastrophic than such destruction.

I assume, from the fact that the Scottish media have been broadly supportive of this Climate Change Act that they have satisfied themselves that, at least over catastrophic global warming, the alarmist's arithmetic is entirely correct. If there were any doubt our leaders would have to be, unanimously, clinically insane to have legislated such destruction.

 

* * * * *

The point, folks, is that there are only three organised political tendencies of consequence in this country now:

 

• ‘social market’ + more-EU (best represented by the Lib Dems)
• ‘market social’ + less-EU (best represented by the Conservatives)
• ‘market social’ + quit-the-EU (best represented by UKIP)

Alas we have three parties squabbling over the first two spaces. The best result will be the collapse and disintegration/obliteration of the Labour Party, whose reactionary anti-liberal instincts and policies merely waste time and lead to national bankruptcy.

 

Me, I’m voting for the Conservatives who (unlike the more-EU Lib Dems and gasping, grasping Labour) know that without encouraging business and private initiative things will continue to deteriorate. Plus Labour and Lib Dems together bundled through into law the EU's Lisbon Treaty in the face of clear public hostility, breaking a clear pledge to the electorate at the last election. Nuff said.

 

* * * * *

Enough of fetid politics.

 

Back in the fresh air of real life, and the real life of fresh air, wildlife photographer Andy Rouse has super pictures showing Spring springing.

 

UK Nature Blog finds a new bat.

 

In a more urban context, thank goodness for a blog devoted to superb suits.

 

Suits? Shoes! I don’t think this next one is a British Blog even if it sells itself as such, for SEO purposes no doubt. But who cares? It redefines the English language in a zany Asian direction - and has some freaky cool women’s shoes:

 

The signality a Christian Louboutin shoes features should not be underestimated. Think about it. If your feet firmly on the ground, the rest of you, if you to not run. Shoes slipping on wet grass or shoes that are for the nails of the drought could reduce the game and you succeed at the end of the day free. It is not always necessary, you can buy a new pair of Christian Louboutin shoes.

 

In many cases a good cleaning effect and galleries is all you need to do. Put your old tunnel is an easy job. It may take several minutes, but when you’re done, you’ll definitely make a difference in your walking shoes.

 

Back inside the classroom teaching English, a blog about Whiteboards and interactive classroom technology.

 

In more reflective mode? Try an elegant intelligent blog about less well known British classical music. Such as the Bluebird suite by Norman O’Neill:

 

… in his day he was a composer to be reckoned with and made a major contribution to concert and recital room music. However he is perhaps best remembered for composing incidental music to many plays written for the West End Theatres between 1900 and 1933…

 

Alas most of this music has been lost in the mists of time: however one Suite has survived, albeit rather precariously – the Four Dances from Maeterlinck’s play The Bluebird. The play opened at the Haymarket on 8 December 1909 and is very much a work of its day. It has been compared to Algernon Blackwood’s Prisoner in Fairyland (Elgar’s Starlight Express) and Barrie’s Peter Pan. However, it is unlikely to be revived today: the subject matter and the imagery would be unlikely to be of interest to either children or their parents.

 

I suspect he’s right. But it does remind us that once upon a time there was an innocent world before X-Box and padded bras for little girls (aaargh, a subject which brings us sadly back to politics again).

 

Finally, two overseas Britbloggers.

 

Over in Finland it transpires that Finns wisely prepare for all those long suicidal winters by dancing the tango:

 

The Seinäjoki Tango Festival is held yearly and attracts over 100 000 viewers … I must say that from first impressions there is not a lot in Seinäjoki, being an agricultural area there are mainly fields and barns, but this area transforms in to a Mecca for Tango lovers in July of each year.

The Polandians join the crowds in Cracow for the funeral of President Lech Kaczynski and his wife Maria, both of whom I knew quite well, and give us a touching photo-essay:

It’s 2 am as I post this. There is a profound and absolute silence over the city. The story is over. What is next for Poland? Somehow, this week, the country became part of Europe in a way it hasn’t been for decades. Iconic Polish images of a new kind have become part of the modern European story…

* * * * *

The next Roundup is hosted by Philobiblon. Nominations to britblog @ gmail.com

Update: More here.

* * * * *

Looking this morning on the FCO's website for the official statement of grovelling apology over the infamous Pope Visit memo, I spotted this horror:

12 Feb: The Chandler’s - FCO’s position misrepresented

Under Latest News, nothing.

So, over to the mainsteam media.

Such as the Times:

Advisers to the Pope in Rome are starting to regret that he accepted an invitation to visit Britain this September after official papers emerged that suggested he should be asked to open an abortion clinic, bless a gay marriage and launch a Benedict-branded condom range on his state visit in September.

The document also suggested the National Anthem be changed, from God Save the Queen to God Save the World.

As the Foreign Office was forced into a rapid damage-limitation exercise with an official apology for an "unacceptable" document, sources told The Times that the entire visit could now be in jeopardy...

Some senior Catholics in Britain attempted to downplay its significance but The Times has learned that the document has caused enormous anger in Rome. It is regarded as just the latest but by far the most serious in a series of anti-Catholic episodes emanating from the UK which threaten to cast a cloud over the four-day visit to England and Scotland. 

My former colleague Sir Ivor Roberts in full flood:

"I cannot think of a Papal visit anywhere in the world where the host government has had to apologise so profusely and abjectly in advancing for the appalling behaviour of one of its officials."

He said: "It is quite disturbing that they should be so badly organised to have someone in charge of the visit at the Foreign Office who has so little common sense and such a puerile sense of humour and who does not seem to realise he is in a department of state which by and large tries to improve relations between states and organisations, not make matters worse or create tensions where they did not exist.

He or she might want to think about whether they should take another job, such as in the Treasury, where they can't do much harm."

David Miliband is said to be 'furious', as well he might be since Labour's dwindling chances of winning any Catholic votes just went up in flames:

A senior source close to Mr Miliband said he had been outraged and backed the disciplinary action taken against those responsible.

But the source blamed a group of three or four 'kids', part of a Foreign Office team working on the papal visit, who had engaged in some 'blue sky thinking which had gone so far off into the blue sky they ended up in outer space'.

He said they then compounded their error by circulating their thoughts in a document, but 'the grown-ups' had acted as soon as they were aware of it.

This gruesome business speaks for itself. A trite, junior and above all embarrassingly unfunny attempt at 'thinking outside the box' which went wrong as soon as someone pressed Send.

It is not clear to me why these hapless morons were wasting taxpayers' time on this sort of thing, nor why they thought it appropriate to scatter their trashy thoughts around Whitehall.

That said, the blunders an organisation makes tell us about about that organisation.

In this case, that the 'grown-ups' said to be running the shop have created and are presiding over a culture of trivial disrespect - and that some junior FCO staff simply have no sense of responsibility, of understanding what they represent.

And who sits on top of this bedraggled system?

David Miliband:

There we have it. After all those long years of Labour finger-wagging about Diversity and Cultural Sensitivity, we end up with elementary mistakes like this at a high and important level.

In Labour's case it all wends its way back to Tony Blair's insouciance - the idea that the world's problems could be tackled 'informally' by lots of charm, lying back on comfy sofas rather than sitting upright at a grown-up polished table.

When I left the FCO last year a letter arrived from David Miliband thanking me for my hard work over the years. The letter was on FCO blue-crested paper, but sent in the cheapest possible recycled brown envelope. Thanks.

Is it that at the high levels of the British government they no longer care about projecting good standards of behaviour and presentation?

Have they consciously decided to dumb down standards?

Or is that they simply have never heard of them?

Challenge: £5 for the first person to email me an unedited copy of the infamous document, with the names of the guilty originators on it.

Come on, former Whitehall colleagues. You can do it.

A reader prompted by my piece on Srebrenica points me to this long analysis by Milivoje Ivanišević of the 'context' of Srebrenica, including numerous massacres by Muslims/Bosniacs of Serbs in the area before the enclave fell:

The dead Muslim fighters of Srebrenica have now finally become completely innocent, and are present in various schemes developed by those who never knew them and who, today, still devoid of any sensible foundation, have adopted them and “defend” them.

The imposed cult of Srebrenica is still keeping watch over our conscience, and has become a metaphor for the unimaginable, and in addition to of all this, it has even become a metaphor of the genocidal crime Serbs carried out against the innocent local residents of an inaccessible Bosnian town situated at the bottom of a ravine.

Put some tedious rhetoric aside and there is a lot of noteworthy detail here which does offer a corrective of sorts to the conventional view. Go and read it.

But the piece ultimately fails:

During the next two days, a dozen soldiers from 10th Sabotage Detachment, who were on leave, were gathered, and they committed what is today qualified as a genocide. The shooting to death of captured Muslims is not the subject of this discussion...

Sorry, but if you don't take that as a central feature of the issue, something rather significant is being missed?

There ensues a long and somewhat confusing analysis of the numbers and names of people found in mass graves, and when precisely they died.

The conclusion? Instead of a Conclusion (sic):

The wartime pasts or biographies of commanders and soldiers of the Army of Bosnia-Herzegovina are filled with attacks on Serbian villages and the killings of individuals of Serbian nationality. They showed no mercy to Serbian villages and their residents. The evidence is overwhelming.

These facts contradict the constantly proffered thesis that Srebrenica was about the victims of genocide or Muslim civilian victims. It is certain that some of them were executed after having been captured, but many more of them died in battles while attempting to break through [Serbian lines of defense] to Tuzla. They also suffered losses from internal conflicts and infighting.

This amounts to a macabre, neurotic view of the issue which does not helps Serbs or the wider Serbian cause.

There is an honourable way for Serbs to deal with Srebrenica.

Namely to follow the example of Sydney Kentridge QC and begin in chilling detail with the appalling facts of the mass Mladic killings of prisoners; acknowledge them for the war crime they were; accept in a spirit of true penitence that in one way or the other the Milosevic regime (as elected and supported by millions of Serbs) had some sort of responsibility for this situation; and only then move on to the 'context'.

Anything else is nothing but this:

They were dirty, so why blame us for being dirty in reply? Plus since we were only responding to their dirt, even if our dirt was bigger than theirs (which we dispute) it was justified. See?! Our dirt is cleaner than their dirt!

That is not good enough. It leads Serbs and Serbia deeper into a now familiar moral abyss.

My good deed today.

As I was walking the dawg, I spotted a tiny lamb which had wriggled under a fence and was separated unhappily from Mother Sheep in the adjacent field.

After some tomfoolery in the nettles I nabbed said lamb, and suppressing my baser instincts ("mmm - lamb chops") plunked it back over the fence where it enjoyed a tearful but joyous reunion with mom.

Spring is sprung.