Blogoir: May

And another Business and Politics piece, suggesting that in the face of a serious problem with no ready solution, the right tone is always to be measured and constructive.

And not to seek to find Someone to Blame.

Hence some handy tips for President Obama's speechwriters.

Some thoughts from me over at Business and Politics on the new health problems in Greece as the government there cuts prices for essential medical supplies -  quickly condemned by a Greek reader as a patronising diatribe on free market economics.

To which I have politely replied. With added panties.

Ben Rogers writes a lengthy piece over at Conservative Home urging an energetic approach by the new UK government on international human rights:

The Commission has also recommended the appointment of an Ambassador-at-Large for International Human Rights, who would work with the Minister of State to co-ordinate the efforts of diplomats and embassies in addressing international human rights, and oversee the work of a range of Special Envoys on thematic human rights issues – genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes; religious freedom; human trafficking; women’s rights, for example.

These could either be diplomats with a proven track record in these areas, or respected human rights campaigners from the NGO sector. The United States, the Netherlands and France have similar positions, and it is time the United Kingdom did too.

Such appointments would be an important demonstration of human rights being a centre-piece of foreign policy, not simply an after-thought. They would represent a serious expansion of the currently woefully under-staffed human rights and governance unit at the FCO.

While kindly agreeing with me on a number of FCO reform ideas, he disagrees over FCO bloggers:

I disagree, however, with Crawford’s suggestion that ambassadorial blogging should end. I believe in this day and age, such blogging – especially on democracy and human rights – is a very valuable source of information to the outside world, and solidarity with courageous dissidents and activists.

Our former ambassador to Burma, Mark Canning, now in Zimbabwe, blogged regularly during key events such as Cyclone Nargis and Aung San Suu Kyi’s trial, and I admire him for it. His successor Andrew Heyn has followed suit.

I also disagree with the idea of freezing all FCO training. I think preparing diplomats for understanding the key human rights issues in countries to which they will be posted is essential, and it needs to be strengthened not cut.

As for blogging, the main reason to end Ambassadorial and other overseas diplomatic blogging is that it arguably tends to reduce that Ambassador's local impact where it matters.

Any host government, obnoxious or otherwise, is bound to start to wonder what the point of this person's posting really is.

Is it to act as a means for hard-nosed reliable confidential communication between the two capitals? Or to make a public noise in favour of some or other pet project? Are all those blog posts meant to signify official UK government thinking, or not? What's going on here? Ignore him. It's not serious.

My point on freezing training was merely to identify in a ruthless way which training makes operational sense, and to dump junk training which does not.

What in fact is likely to make a difference in training young diplomats in being effective on human rights issues and so helping a feisty new ConLib government make a sustained difference in hard places?

Lectures from the human rights establishment on UN best practice and international conventions?

Tips from MI6 on how best to help hard-pressed local human rights campaigners without being too obvious to oppressive local authorities?

Lessons in good drafting technique aimed at helping get principles and detail reported back to London in an impactful way?

A case-study on the contrasting approaches taken by FCO legends Craig Murray, Charles Crawford and Philip Barclay in dealing with oppressive regimes as on-the-ground diplomats - what worked and what didn't?

Not easy to give a simple answer.

But whatever the Policy, it all comes down to Resources - and Technique.

What does it take to hit the jackpot for comments on a blog piece?

This blog attracts a sprinkling of comments but not more. Its elite group of readers (you!) are subtle and intelligent busy people who do not need to spend their day on the Internet hammering on about something or other.

Nevertheless sometimes an issue unexpectedly captures readers' imagination and prompts a torrent of debate, much of it interesting and insightful.

Take the subject of Italian-style cottage cheese - ricotta - in Malta.

How should that foreign word be pronounced in Maltese? Does the language have any clear rules on the subject? At what point might a mispronunciation become so popular as to create a new word, which by sheer weight of usage squeezes out the earlier correct form? Do differences in pronunciation have some sort of social class identifying function?

Good questions all.

One approach is that taken by Daphne Caruana Galizia:

Many Maltese appear to have a problem with liquid consonants, letting them slip freely around a word or substituting one for another. So ricotta becomes ircotta, petrol becomes petlor, pilloli become pirmli, and yes, delfin becomes denfil..

Thanks to the stupid title of an even stupid textbook, three generations of Maltese children have grown up convinced that the Maltese word for a dolphin is denfil, instead of the more obvious - if you know other languages - and correct delfin.

A modest enough observation, one might think.

Which unleashes 455 comments, and rising.

Remember much praised FCO blogger Philip Barclay, who achieved some distinction in writing about Zimbabwe when he was posted there despite the inevitable constraints of working in the UK mission?

He's written a book about Zimbabwe, which maybe gets closer to the heart of what was happening there (and how the civilised world responded, or not) than his blog did.

Here it is:

Buy it. It's sure to be vivid - and readable.

And to be an interesting contrast to Craig Murray's writing. Both were dealing with grisly, torturing regimes. Philip stayed the course, even though he must have had many qualms about the wisdom and energy of UK policy towards Mugabe.

Who - if either of them - will be seen to have made any difference for the better?

Is hosted by Redemption Blues, who somehow manages to find enough inspiration from my piece on Being, Not Producing to take readers to what I suspect is an unfamiliar place.

Namely:

Piotr Sztompka’s brilliant essay Civilisational Incompetence: The Trap of Post-Communist Societies (Zeitschrift für Soziologie, Volume 22, Number 2, April 1993, pp85-95.

Not one on my own reading list, I confess. But she draws a parallel of Barderesque dimensions between post-communist anomie and post-Labour UK:

There are certain familiarities with the litany of discontents related to how unpleasant a place Britain has become to live in, how courtesy and service have vanished from everyday interactions, even the pretence of politeness ousted by grasping commercialism and cynicism, the vacuous cult of celebrity and route to short-term fame (notoriety) via the likes of (now thankfully defunct) Big Brother where contestants parade and perform themselves in all their glorious banality, the eschewal of effort and quietly plugging away as the pathway to the rewards of peer recognition and achievement.

Sounds about right.

Anyway, various interesting links there, not least this one to Matt Wardman on Operation Ore.

And White Sun of the Desert knows a few things about oil blowouts - and where BP looks to have gone wrong.

Here is an intrepid young runner determined to raise money for Race for Life.

Many thanks to Specialist Speakers for their fast and generous donation. And to Bev.

More please.

Much more.

What did David Laws do wrong?

As I understand it, he claimed back from the taxpayer (that's you and me) a load of money for renting a room from his 'partner' without disclosing that he had a close relationship with said partner.

The homosexual aspect has nothing to do with it.

Nor does the fact that he might have claimed back even more money from us had he rented a room somewhere else at an arm's-length (so to speak) commercial rent.

Iain Dale makes an eloquent case here but gets it wrong, I think:

If he had moved into a one bedroom flat the taxpayer would have been paying far more. If Laws was seeking to maximise his income he would have either designated his Somerset home as his second home and claimed for the mortgage on that, or he would have bought a property in London and claimed for that. He didn't, and yet he's being mercilessly slagged off.

What we have done here is create a system where MPs are now, on average, claiming far more than they used to before.

Yes! True. But that is irrelevant. What we are aiming at is to rule out - for any use of public money - financial hanky-panky between family members or people in some sort of close private bond. Even if it costs us something extra to uphold this level of honesty.

It is not enough that transactions involving public money must be honest. They must be seen to be honest.

In my Balkan postings I was now and again lobbied fervently by local Embassy staff members urging me to offer a vacant job to one of their relatives:

"We have served the Embassy honestly for years - you can rely on Sasha to do the same!"

I told them firmly that even if we ended up recruiting someone less able and less honest, there was a vital value for Brits in having an honest process. Which meant a process in which everything was above board and transparent. Sorry, but we were just funny that way.

I spent an hour today chatting to a senior Greek financial expert (based here) who told me in great detail how petty corruption had overwhelmed the Greece system at all levels. Much of the way things have been fixed in Greece goes directly through family members. And look where all that has got them.

It would have been wholly improper for me as Ambassador to allow the Embassy to rent for Embassy staff a flat I owned, unless the whole process had been done in a 200% transparent competititive way with no involvement from me.

It would have been wholly improper for me as Ambassador to instruct the Embassy to buy supplies from a firm owned by one of my relatives, even if the cost to the taxpayer was less than the market rate, unless the whole process had been done in a 200% normal transparent competitive way with no involvement from me.

It was wholly improper for David Laws to claim back all this money from renting a room from a close friend without declaring the close friendship.

If he were not ready to do that, he should have moved somewhere else. Or simply not claim any rent allowance.

He has done well to resign promptly and with dignity. Viva British democracy.

Simple, really?

Update: Matthew d'Ancona gets it spot on:

We did not take advantage of the financial support available to couples, such as travel to and from my constituency,” pleaded Mr Laws in mitigation. Again, however, that was his choice.

His wish was that the relationship between himself and Mr Lundie should remain private. As a consequence, the proper course of action was clearly for him not to make any claims at all related to Mr Lundie’s properties.

In spite of the impression one might have formed from the expenses scandal, MPs are under no obligation to make such claims. I doubt that many taxpayers, considering the prospective impact upon their lives of the painful public spending cuts ahead, will have felt much sympathy with Mr Laws’s argument that he needed £40,000 of their money to protect his sensibilities. Privacy, in this case, was available for free.

Is hosted by Amused Cynicism (Scottish pirate).

With a link to a nifty iPhone app, allowing citizens to notify street fixing issues directly to local councils.

This is the sort of idea that the ConDems need to develop - a new Partnership Society.

It had to happen sooner or later. Mark Steyn writes what may be his greatest column ever on (of course) the way Wealth has made us Stupid.

Of course the very idea of the greatest ever Steyn column needs some thought. The funniest? The most scathing? The most thought-provoking?

The one where Monica Lewinsky's dress is interviewed in 2018? Or this one from 2001 about the Eurozone which reads rather well:

There is no need for a single currency, and several compelling reasons why it's a crummy idea, not least the insufficient labour mobility in Europe and the way the budgetary limits will complicate the already looming crunch over demographically unsustainable social programmes. Set against those considerations, the case for the euro was laughable in its feebleness. You don't need to scrap a dozen currencies to eliminate "transaction costs". That's like curing a cold by amputating your nose...

Because Texans, Vermonters and Georgians all agree that they're Americans, they're happy to go their own way in matters of capital punishment, income tax, gay civil unions: that's a dynamic, creative federalism.

Because Greeks, Scots and Austrians still regard each other as foreign, a European identity has to be imposed from the top down, as if by harmonising tax codes and passport design you can harmonise a bunch of foreigners into one nationality, regulate a European consciousness into being: that's not federalism, but a fetid, stagnant over-centralisation.

Still, this latest effort is up there with the best. It looks at the central issue of our times - how wealth has made us more and more stupid:

In any advanced society, there will be a certain number of dysfunctional citizens either unable or unwilling to do what is necessary to support themselves and their dependents. What to do about such people? Ignore the problem? Attempt to fix it?

The former nags at the liberal guilt complex, while the latter is way too much like hard work: the modern progressive has no urge to emulate those Victorian social reformers who tramped the streets of English provincial cities looking for fallen women to rescue. All he wants to do is ensure that the fallen women don’t fall anywhere near him.

So the easiest “solution” to the problem is to throw public money at it. You know how it is when you’re at the mall and someone rattles a collection box under your nose and you’re not sure where it’s going but it’s probably for Darfur or Rwanda or Hoogivsastan. Whatever. You’re dropping a buck or two in the tin for the privilege of not having to think about it...

The modern welfare state operates on the same principle: since the Second World War, the hard-working middle classes have transferred historically unprecedented amounts of money to the unproductive sector in order not to have to think about it. But so what? We were rich enough that we could afford to be stupid.

That works for a while. In the economic expansion of the late 20th century, citizens of Western democracies paid more in taxes but lived better than their parents and grandparents. They weren’t exactly rich, but they got richer.

They also got more stupid. When William Beveridge laid out his blueprint for the modern British welfare state in 1942, his goal was the “abolition of want.” Sir William and his colleagues on both sides of the Atlantic succeeded beyond their wildest dreams: to be “poor” in the 21st-century West is not to be hungry and emaciated but to be obese, with your kids suffering from childhood diabetes.

... In one-sixth of British households, not a single family member works. They are not so much without employment as without need of it. At a certain level, your hard-working bourgeois understands that the bulk of his contribution to the treasury is entirely wasted.

It’s one of the basic rules of life: if you reward bad behaviour, you get more of it. But, in good and good-ish times, who cares?

Western Europe is in the unhappy position of a group of sullen teenagers who have wrecked the place after a massive drunken vainglorious binge.

They know that they have to spend a lot of the immediate future clearing up the mess, when they could have been off doing something interesting had they not been just so ... so stupid.

And as they listlessly wander through the wreckage nursing a splitting headache trying to summon the energy to start to tidy up, they look around to find someone to blame. Anyone but themselves.

And, to make things worse, there's no-one there.

Other than up the road where some tough-looking Asian businessmen are wondering about buying the trashed property, and putting its silly occupants on starvation rations for a few centuries - to teach them a lesson in self-discipline.

A neat little piece here, getting to the heart of Reality - and where Reality meets Politicians.

Not a place politicians much like, as it shows too much about them:

“Plug the damn hole,” Obama told them.

That’s the politician’s answer to every intractable problem: give orders, issue threats, and wait for obedience. But the creative human mind cannot take orders like that. Notice I didn’t say, “refuses to take orders.” I said, “cannot take orders.”

By that I mean, the task of plugging a leak 5,000 feet below the surface of the Gulf of Mexico is an engineering feat. BP’s acknowledged role in causing the leak does not alter the fact that careful study, creative thought, and the exacting deployment of technical and mechanical skills over long distances are all necessary in order to fix the leak.

No amount of jaw clenching or bug-eyed threats from politicians can bring the solution one inch closer to reality.

The human mind does not operate by force from outside. If engineering achievements could be conjured up by barking orders, the Soviet Union would be a thriving nation overflowing with engineering marvels, instead of a dead husk...

Why does Latin America underperform so consistently?

Vast land mass, rich in resources, manageable populations and so on. Yet wracked with instability and fecklessness, which never seem to end.

One answer - the fact that the political rules keep changing, which means that in effect there are no rules and so no stability allowing sustained steady 'normal' development:

The evidence is staggering: The Dominican Republic has had 32 separate constitutions since its independence in 1821. Venezuela follows close behind with 26, Haiti has had 24, Ecuador 20, and Bolivia recently passed its seventeenth.

In fact, over half of the 21 Latin American nations have had at least ten constitutions while, in the rest of the world, only Thailand (17), France (16), Greece (13), and Poland (10) have reached double digits.

Not only that. These constitutions are getting more and more stupid:

... one effect of these campaigns has been the inflation of constitutional word counts. Latin American leaders have discovered that, by packaging ever-longer lists of promises and rights alongside greater executive functions, they can make a new constitution appealing enough to the masses that they will vote for it in a referendum.

The result is constitutions that are not only the shortest-lived, but also among the longest in the world. Bolivia's and Ecuador’s recently approved constitutions have 411 and 444 articles, respectively, and read like laundry lists of guaranteed rights, such as access to mail and telephones; guarantees for culture, identity, and dignity; and shorter work-weeks.

By contrast, the U.S. Constitution, the longest-serving in the world, has only seven articles and 27 amendments.

It all amounts to nothing more than an irrational preference for form over substance. But once that preference is internalised by elites and populations alike, how on earth to change it?

Someone has shared with me a vivid communication from the Driving Standards Agency (Safe Driving for Life).

It was sent by Rosemary Thew, Chief Executive. A person grammatically challenged as she attempts to give instructions on how to access a DSA driving theory test centre hosted by Pearson Professional Centres:

On the door entry system, you will need to buzz number 9 inorder for the test centre to give you access to the building, please DO NOT ring any other buzzers.

Now that we have a (mainly) Conservative Government, may I as a mere taxpayer ask that state-funded operatives smarten themselves up?

Craig Murray rumbles in Tashkent:

There is much consternation at the apparent decline of Gulnara Karimova's multi-billion dollar company, Zeromax - which owns Uzbekistan's most valuable economic assets ... Gulnara is of course the daughter and favoured successor of dictator "President" Islam Karimov.

And we all recall what an appalling piece of work Gulnara is:

... charming and girlish ... in a simple dress and laughing eyes ... giggling at my light conversation...

The other day I bumped into a long-lost colleague from MI6. We exchanged some Balkan yarns.

He had done superb work for HMG and Western civilisation by taking a deep breath and diving deep into the darkest Balkan cesspools, where war crime suspects meet football club gangsters and cigarette smugglers in tawdry late-night casinos. To such an extent that his accurate intelligence information thereby gleaned was not trusted back at HQ - to HMG's detriment.

The point about diplomacy is that in one way or the other we need to deal with the world as we find it, Gulnara and Karadzic and Karimov and North Korea and all.

Where I part company with Craig is that he boasted about his access to the higher parts of the Uzbekistan system but instead of using that access to make a systematic and significant difference, he turned all his fire and energy on his own team.

And got precisely nowhere in terms of changing Uzbekistan for the better.

Poor technique.

Some US Senators are asking some terse questions about Venezuela's active anti-American policies:

The State Department currently designates four nations — Syria, Cuba, Sudan, and Iran — as state sponsors of terrorism. These countries provide ideological support and material assistance to terrorist groups.

Once you consider the evidence behind Venezuela's substantial ties with U.S.-designated terrorist organizations and state sponsors of terrorism, we would like to know the strategic implications of designating Venezuela a state sponsor of terrorism.

We would also like to know the implications for the integrity of this list if Venezuela continues to evade designation. . .

The BBC have been in touch asking if I would be interested in joining the panel on the next Big Questions programme, featuring lively debates on moral issues.

One possible subject would be the ever-fascinating subject of Homosexuality in Africa - as looked at briefly by me here. And here.

Check out this interesting Guardian piece by Madeleine Bunting which tries to 'put the issue in context', prompting an avalanche of comments for and against.

I alas had to decline the BBC request - already booked for a distinguished luncheon engagement next Sunday. But I suggested to them that they might try to break the question down to more manageable issues:

• should Western societies take a view on homosexuality in Africa?
• if we do take a view and decide that we want to influence things in a more liberal (by our lights) direction, what sort of policies are likely to work and what are not?

Iain Dale has quickly been on the case, getting a speedy and (I think) sensibly cautious reply from our new DFID Minister Andrew Mitchell:

But we should beware appeals for us to make aid a political weapon. Malawi is a desperately poor country, where about 40% of the people live on less than 34p a day. Britain’s aid plays a vital role in reducing this poverty.

We must not let down the people of Malawi. Rest assured, we, and our major international partners, will make urgent representations to the government of Malawi to review its laws to ensure it meets its commitments to human rights.

And this conviction will remain firmly in our minds when we negotiate the way we deliver our aid in future.

Mind you, it is one thing to wag our censorious finger at little Malawi.

Nigeria is something else.

Which country is in the deeper trouble?

This article raises a question.

If part of what makes the world go round is a subtle, intangible but real thing called 'confidence', is it a good idea to undermine it by looking at the hard facts?

Where does decline come from?

Denying reality (emphasis added):

At the same time, government-provided benefits — from Social Security, unemployment insurance, food stamps and other programs — rose to a record high during the first three months of 2010.

Those records reflect a long-term trend accelerated by the recession and the federal stimulus program to counteract the downturn. The result is a major shift in the source of personal income from private wages to government programs.

The trend is not sustainable, says University of Michigan economist Donald Grimes. Reason: The federal government depends on private wages to generate income taxes to pay for its ever-more-expensive programs. Government-generated income is taxed at lower rates or not at all, he says. "This is really important," Grimes says.

In other words, you can of course eat your own capacity to survive - until the food runs out.

Look at this stunning sentence from that USA Today article:

Economist David Henderson of the conservative Hoover Institution says a shift from private wages to government benefits saps the economy of dynamism. "People are paid for being rather than for producing," he says.

That's the heart of it. The core of Obamaism, so-called compassionate conservatism and the basis for EU 'solidarity'. 

The idea that 'production' can be taken for granted in policy making, and that all that counts is redistribution.

Which is fine, until countries which put their main effort into production rather than 'being' catch up then crush us. If we have not collpased under the wieght of our stupidity first.

Meanwhile here in the UK we have Laura Hall, a young woman banned from being in public places selling alcohol as she is prone to 'binge drinking' and getting disorderly.

Driving about my business yesterday I heard this tragic, absurd Laura Hall being interviewed on BBC Radio 5 Live.

The interviewer of course was determined not be 'judgmental', but it did not matter. This walking human wreck with her vacant slurry voice and incoherent thinking condemned herself well enough.

It turned out that she was getting something called a Job Seeker's Allowance of some £60 per week. Which she seemed to be spending on a typical girls' night in, with a bottle of wine then a litre of vodka then beers.

She is being paid by those of us who produce, simply to be.

In her case, to be nothing.

I waited in vain for the presenter to ask the right questions. Did not this girl feel bad about mooching off honest people indefinitely?

And why should those honest people one day not simply ... shrug - decide once and for all to drop that burden, and refuse to pay?

John Redwood has been giving some serious thought to which laws might be swept away by our new government.

His list is long - and well worth consideration.

I just fear that until somehow a new government can get to grips with the precautionary principle and the related idea of Worst-Case Thinking, even throwing out this pile of bureaucratic awfulness may make little real difference to the way government operates - and expands its physical and psychological reach.

It's all part of a greater drama. The scene is set in Europe as in the USA for the Mother of All Culture Wars: Free Enterprise v Government Control.

Which, perhaps, is all about how best to deal with complexity:

This is the perverse logic of meritocracy. Once a system grows sufficiently complex, it doesn’t matter how badly our best and brightest foul things up. Every crisis increases their authority, because they seem to be the only ones who understand the system well enough to fix it.

But their fixes tend to make the system even more complex and centralized, and more vulnerable to the next national-security surprise, the next natural disaster, the next economic crisis. Which is why, despite all the populist backlash and all the promises from Washington, this isn’t the end of the “too big to fail” era. It’s the beginning.

Does the new UK government's first modest steps towards reducing state-imposed complexity offer the planet a smidgeon of hope?

David Cameron ready to veto treaty to shore up euro

So says the Indy headline this evening.

Hmm.

What does the article say?

Mrs Merkel has suggested that all European countries need to be willing to surrender more sovereignty to give the EU powers to prevent another Greek-style eurozone crisis.

But, on the second leg of his first foreign trip as Premier, Mr Cameron was quick to pour cold water on the idea.

"There is no question of agreeing to a treaty that transfers power from Westminster to Brussels. That is set out 100% clearly in the coalition agreement," Mr Cameron said.

"Britain obviously is not in the euro and Britain is not going to be in the euro, and so Britain would not be agreeing to any agreement or treaty that drew us further into supporting the euro area."

The Prime Minister went on: "It goes without saying that any treaty, even one that just applied to the euro area, needs unanimous agreement of all 27 EU states including the UK, which of course has a veto.

"I think these are very important points to understand."

Some wriggle-room here.

The Prime Minister did not (on the face of it) rule out accepting a treaty to prop up the Euro which did not transfer more power from Westminster to Brussels, or otherwise 'draw in' the UK to further support for the Euro area.

(A quite separate question, of course, is whether the new UK government would formally block a new treaty, or put any such new EU treaty to a referendum and let the public trash it.)

So if a group of EU countries wanted such a new EU treaty which explicitly involved them and them alone footing the bill and responsibility, the UK might go along with it? This would be enhanced cooperation on steroids.

The Times report spots this nuance, but maybe misses one in what Angela Merkel said. Can you spot it?

His remarks left open the possibility that the 16 eurozone countries could introduce greater control from Brussels that applied just to them.

Mrs Merkel suggested that she had not given up on her desire to re-open the Lisbon treaty but played down its significance today. “There are certain ideas that Germany has tabled where treaty change plays a role. But this is the beginning. It is very early days as yet,” she said.

She added: “I have made it clear that we need to stabilise the euro but at a later stage we will be able to say what we can do and how should we do it.

“And then we will see what the majority will want and the interests of the eurozone.”

There, in the last sentence.

She hints at the idea that what happens next depends on what the 'majority' want - does she plan to get round any UK veto by contemplating radical changes rammed through by Qualified Majority Voting under existing arrangements, if necessary in defiance of UK wishes?

In short, some deftly done public UK/German skirmishing over central questions.

Can the Eurozone and the European Union survive in its current form? 

If not, what mechanism will be used to change things in favour of something very different?

Will the Germans and other integrators vote to opt out of the current set-up? Or will they try to manoeuvre the UK into forlorn opposition on issues of strategic substance which ultimately forces us to opt out?

In other words - who will be blamed for collapsing the status quo?