Blogoir: May

Austin Bay mulls over the (as usual) limited options facing South Korea in responding to North Korea's role in sinking a South Korean ship and killing 46 sailors.

This seems a good scheme:

Explicit naval tit-for-tat, which exposes and exploits North Korean strategic weakness before a global audience, has more political impact. Seoul and Washington should consider seizing North Korean ships in open waters around the globe. Ships and cargoes could be held pending reparations.

In Asia, Pyongyang might route its ships through Chinese and Vietnamese coastal water (paying bribes to local coast guards in the process), but eventually they will encounter the U.S. Navy. The maritime cowards will encounter cameras and appear on YouTube. The Google world will get it.

In the Rhineland fiasco, the Western allies lost face. This Korean confrontation is also about political face, and it's time Kim and his killers lost theirs.

Exactly.

Here:

Further to yesterday’s exposure of the cosy relationship the Parliamentary Under Secretary for Defence Gerald Howarth has with the arms lobbying industry, it seems things get even murkier.

Howarth gave Michael Wood of lobbyists Whitehall Advisers (whose clients included BAE Systems and Airbus) free reign of the Parliamentary estate in 2004...

Still, the actual training in Den Haag on Writing with Impact went well, with lots of praise from the participants for my dynamic, eye-opening presentation on good diplomatic writing technique:

Witty, clear, practical 

Lively, entertaining, convincing

Funny, memorable, practical

Great. I particularly liked the humorous presenting. A lot of information, much of it new ... V happy to have attended. Most memorable is the need to reflect more on work and make the text more of a dialogue!

The main bitter complaint was that the course was not long enough. They wanted More!

I offer another course on Diplomatic Speechwriting which is also a blast, as Malta can testify. These courses will work well for senior executives and other key business people.

You're just missing out if you do not get in contact and invite me to discuss your corporate or official requirements.

So, you know what to do: mail@charlescrawford.biz

This morning I staggered home at 0200 hours after a horrid journey back from The Hague, where I had been busy training sassy Dutch officials on the dark arts of Writing with Impact.

Thanks to the UNITE union's antics, my BA flight was cancelled so I had to switch to easyJet.

Needless to say, the rubbish easyJet flight was well late with no serious attempts made to inform passengers in the sprawling Amsterdam airport what was happening, or offer people space on other uneasyJet flights back to Gatwick.

That UN Resolution needs updating.

Thus I missed my coach to Oxford and so had to plod into London by Gatwick unExpress which was late, being diverted because a tree had fallen on the line.

Then a miserable ride on the Tube to Paddington with washed out late-night Londoners. Then a long wait to get the 0020 train to Didcot, then a forlorn drive home.

Uuurgh.

Which goes some way to explain why in clearing dozens of rubbish Spam comments from this site in my exhaustion I inadvertently have approved some of them.

MBT shoes do not even look nice.

Sorry.

A handy To-Do list for William Hague as he tries to drain the FCO swamp:

...

End PoMo gimmicks: Issue instructions that any Ambassador using an Embassy flagpole to fly a gay rights Rainbow flag, a Save the Whale flag or any other trendy private ‘campaign’ symbol will be sacked without notice.

Restore respect: close down immediately all Diversity and Anti-Bullying HR units – issue a simple rule that all staff are expected to be polite and helpful towards each other and the public.

Stop asking stupid questions: dismiss anyone proposing that outside consultants run FCO Staff Questionnaires – use the FCO Intranet to let FCO staff themselves help choose awkward questions about management/morale.

Ban sellotape: notices are for notice-boards alone, not walls and lifts.

End apartheid: ask Francis Maude at the Cabinet Office to stop his people demanding Risk Management matrices and Ethnic Diversity surveys based upon crude racial categories as in apartheid South Africa. Insist that ‘diversity’ questionnaires must make provision for Poles, Romanians, Slovaks, Jews and other significant communities.

Promote ability: insist too that any ‘diversity’ audit hereafter includes the following option:

I demand that I be measured on my ability alone. The colour of my skin, the number of floppy/dangly bits on the front of my body and my religious beliefs are all none of the government’s damn business.

That lot should get FCO people moving back in the right direction.

Plus plenty more where they came from.

Remember the playful mermaids and mermen from HM Embassy in Warsaw?

The Independent reports that some of them have got into trouble at the posh Beaver Club over at the Canadian Embassy:

Quite what took place in the embassy – a three-storey modernist construction in French limestone and aluminium which won architectural awards when it opened in 2001 – remained shrouded in inter-governmental niceties last night. Canadian officials declining to comment on "conversations between states".

But whatever happened, it was sufficient to prompt a formal complaint from the Canadian ambassador to Poland, Daniel Costello, to his British counterpart. A source told The Independent: "It would be fair to say that the Canadian side made their displeasure clear."

My spies (who as you all know are everywhere) tell me that the result of suspending these officials (NB not quite clear to me why or on what basis they were suspended or by whom) has been a ghastly backlog of visa applications (Warsaw is now a regional 'hub' for visa applications by non-EU citizens).

And some further, hem, unhappy events with replacement staff sent out to try to deal with the confusion?

As soon as my back is turned, this is what happens.

Tsk.

Mr Eugenides hosts.

Including a smart analysis of why Manchester United lost out to Chelsea this year.

And a fine link to this timeless helpful advice, said to come from Martin Luther:

If the wife will not, nor can performe the due of marriadge, let the chamber-mayde come, and stepp in her roome. Certainly the art of Venerie is as necessarie to euerie one, (see what filth he disgorgeth) as meate, drinke, or sleepe.

Not to overlook Mr E's favourite posting this time round:

Post of the week, for me, is this minor gem from Charles Crawford, which reveals that Albert Einstein was, contrary to popular belief, a total dunce.

And here I am debuting at Conservative Home, on the always fascinating subject of the many ways in which Labour damaged the FCO.

A further piece tomorrow looks at what William Hague needs to do to start to put things right.

Here is my long interview (in English) with George Matlock over at Radio Orla, a successful London-based radio station with a strong Polish angle.

I normally can't bear to watch or listen to myself after doing such media slots. But I started to listen to this one - I found it quite interesting, not least because I can't remember a word I said. It includes a long account of my famous email leak, and all sorts of other things.

Set aside a good hour, curl up on the sofa with a drink. And relax to my droll but dulcet tones.

John Redwood MP puts it tersely:

Its first task, as stern budget superviser urging member states to rein in deficits, should be to make dramatic reductions in the EU budget. From each member states point of view the money spent on EU matters and projects is of more marginal importance than say the money spent on domestic education and health care.

The EU should take the lead to in cutting spending to relieve the budgetary pressures. Spending cuts should start abroad. The EU’s sensible requirement for controlled budget deficits should make them lead by example.

Its second task should be to draw up a big Repeal Directive, removing from the law codes many of those fiddling and costly interventions in business life which have led to the export of so many jobs from the EU to less regulated places like China and India...

Indeed.

As I keep intoning, the only heavy leverage the UK has in EU processes is money - our money.

So the forthcoming EU Budget round is going to be existentially important for both the UK and the EU.

Will the UK government have the steely resolve needed to press for massive cuts in the EU Budget (and to some extent EU functions)? Or not?

It will be impossible to persuade hard-pressed UK voters aghast at cuts in public spending here that it makes sense to pour taxpayers' money into un-cut EU spending.

This could be a fine area for an iron London/Berlin alliance. Germans are dismayed at the turn of events in the Eurozone, and should be open to British ideas for Discipline.

Meanwhile others are insisting that as the Eurozone enters swampy ground, the only policy is to tie even more tightly together not only Eurozone members but all EU members. If one sinks, all sink:

If a country joins the euro area, it shares a common destiny with the other members. There is a need for a quantum leap in the governance of the euro area.

It is hard to see all this going far without changes to EU treaties, and all the new political drama (including in the UK) which that will bring.

John Mauldin's latest newsletter (free, but you need to sign up for them - well worth it) has doubts:

Europe is run by Keynesians (as is the US). They see everything as a liquidity problem. And sometimes it is.

But the PIIGS have a debt problem. And you don't cure a debt problem with more debt unless you have a clear path to grow your way out of the debt. But as I have demonstrated, there is no clear path to growth with the current policies. They will produce deflationary recessions, lower government tax receipts from reduced GDP, and higher unemployment...

This is just the beginning of their woes. They have a long way to go and a short time to get there. Can it be done? Yes, of course.

But it is going to require a great deal of change. I hope they pull it off, I really do. I have been to most of Europe and love every bit I have seen. The world is better off with a united Europe.

That being said, I have my doubts that the European Union in its current form will exist in 5-7 years. I hope I am wrong...

I tend to think that he's correct - that the EU as currently configured can not survive much longer. If only because the measures needed to make the Eurozone work will compel new levels of 'integration' for all EU members which will go well beyond what some countries can accept.

Things are already coming to a head, via Qualified Majority Voting.

Under EU rules decisions in many policy areas and binding on all can be taken by votes of EU member governments. Hitherto voting has not been a decisive factor, since EU member governments mull things over, look at the weight of likely opposition to see if any combination might have a blocking minority, and cut deals.

So there is voting but it in effect usually defines a different way to reach a consensus.

What we can expect soon are proposals put forward for voting which are said to be essential for Eurozone members as such, but may well have negative outcomes for non-Eurozone members. The Eurozone members may then start to push through those votes in the face of outright opposition from many of the others - but especially the UK.

If that starts to happen systematically, the implicit deal based primarily upon a sense of consensus will have been changed irrevocably in favour of majority-led power-plays. The legitimacy of that sort of decision-making and its outcomes will fall to be challenged very hard.

So there has to be a good chance that the result is the emergence of some sort of formalised new arrangements, maybe two or more smaller European unions.

In one group, those countries which are ready to stop being countries and form a new bloc phenomenon, with one currency and the inflexible fiscal, popular voting and other mechanisms needed to make that happen.

And in another, countries which are satisfied with looser and more flexible cooperative arrangements.

Anything really wrong with that, as long as the two groups live nicely together and don't fight?

Not really. But the transaction costs and associated convulsions will be considerable. Which group Germany would now join?

Maybe those convulsions, huge as they must be, are preferable to standing in a swamp watching the slime-level inexorably head north above our knees, no-one able to move because we are all tied together?

Via the beady-eyed Browser, a fascinating piece over at Marginal Revolution about the way small errors in calculating debt risks can have cascading systemic bad consequences down the road:

Suppose that we misspecified the underlying probability of mortgage default and we later discover the true probability is not .05 but .06. 

 In terms of our original mortgages the true default rate is 20 percent higher than we thought--not good but not deadly either. 

However, with this small error, the probability of default in the 10 tranche jumps from p=.0282 to p=.0775, a 175% increase.  Moreover, the probability of default of the CDO jumps from p=.0005 to p=.247, a 45,000% increase! 

The dark magic of structured finance conjured many low-risk securities out of many risky securities.  Like all dark magic, however, the conjuring came at a price because if you didn't get the spell exactly correct it was easy to create something much more risky and dangerous than you were likely to have ever imagined.

Scroll down through some very smart comments, not all of which agree with the piece itself.

As someone sagely says, garbage in, garbage out.

Welcome Britblog Roundup readers.

As readers will have noticed, someone describing himself/herself as George Dutton is now following this site closely and commenting with oh-so-clever remarks celebrating Socialism.

He quotes from a remarkable essay by Albert Einstein on Why Socialism? from 1949.

Here is Albert fretting over the survival of the human race (as well he might, given his busy contribution to atom bombs):

The abstract concept "society" means to the individual human being the sum total of his direct and indirect relations to his contemporaries and to all the people of earlier generations. The individual is able to think, feel, strive, and work by himself; but he depends so much upon society -- in his physical, intellectual, and emotional existence -- that it is impossible to think of him, or to understand him, outside the framework of society.

It is "society" which provides man with food, clothing, a home, the tools of work, language, the forms of thought, and most of the content of thought; his life is made possible through the labor and the accomplishments of the many millions past and present who are all hidden behind the small word "society."

It is evident, therefore, that the dependence of the individual upon society is a fact of nature which cannot be abolished -- just as in the case of ants and bees.

At what point does 'anecdotal' evidence of the results of any given policy start to look like reality?

He had made the point that if he was some £800 per month worse off because of Labour’s 50% tax band, he would have to cut some current personal ‘discretionary’ expenditure to make up the difference. School fees and household bills were non-discretionary.

So his cuts would fall in part on other people (home help, gardeners, craftsmen) whose work for him could be scaled back or even got rid of altogether.

In short, the government would be taking much of that extra tax not from the upper-class rich but from the lower-class working not-rich.

The Conservative (who should have known better but seemed not to) blandly had said that that sort of argument was ‘anecdotal’.

“Yes, but thousands of people out there will give you similar anecdotes.”

Fine posting by Tim Worstall, looking behind the headline numbers to see what is really going on with EU sugar subsidies:

The person handing over the cheque isn’t, necessarily, the person carrying the economic burden of the tax.

This can also be true of subsidies: the person cashing the cheque isn’t necessarily the beneficiary of the economic joys of the subsidy. And this is so with these international sugar companies...

Read the whole piece. And learn something about who really gets what from these vast schemes.

You know you're getting old when your friends' children suddenly pop up doing good stuff.

On their own.

Take Louisa Allen, debuting on iTunes with her song Sorry. Buy the album. What a sponge!

And Kate Maltby, over at Yale as a wannabe conservative feminist cultural critic, off to a flying start at Iqra'i, kindly giving me a free tutorial on Twittering and poised to appear over at the Spectator's website.

When we were goofing around as a student all those decades ago, we just didn't imagine what our mischievous loins would create.

Here, with a mere 231,000 YouTube views, is my contribution: 

Over at Business and Politics:

Driving back home yesterday I almost crashed the car, so overwhelmed I was by a blast of noxious fumes verily of Icelandic proportions erupting from the radio.

A senior TUC person was intoning that it would be wrong for the new government to make deep cuts in public spending, as that would “take money out of the economy” and make things worse.

Which was worse? The epistemological confusion behind this pronouncement? Or the fact that the BBC interviewer let this sentence pass away into the mournful ether, unchallenged and unhumiliated?

...

Folks, it’s like this.

Any sort of government action – because it is uniquely based on the threat of force, not reasoned persuasion – diminishes society’s total available quantity of energy, creativity and risk-assessment. Take it to an extreme and you get Cuba and North Korea, places impoverished because private initiative has been reduced to pitiful levels.

Labour has propelled us in that direction, massively diverting money from private initiative into public non-initiative.

Labour knew that the public would not foot the bill. So it looted the most vulnerable people in any society – people not yet born...

Craig Murray came out for the Lib Dems and so finds himself in the novel position of supporting a Conservative-led coalition:

I can say that I can broadly support this government and am convinced that it will be an improvement on the bunch of authoritarian war criminals who have been replaced.

You nailed that one, Craig. Welcome back on board, even if your army of fans seem somewhat divided on your good sense.

Another former FCO colleague turned diehard Labour blogger (and Long Sentence Champion of the Universe), Brian Barder, is less happy:

Mr Cameron can’t realistically expect a sober and constructive opposition if he constantly accuses Labour of responsibility for the financial mess we’re in, and misrepresents Labour’s 13 years in office as an uninterrupted chronicle of mismanagement and failure — as the irredeemably, jejunely tribal William Hague, our new foreign secretary, was doing without a shadow of embarrassment on the radio this morning.

We old dips have a phrase for it, Brian. It's called kick 'em when they are down - and richly deserve it.

Plus both you and Craig have long called for war crimes charges against key Labour leaders - whatever nano-sized successes they achieved in all those years surely pale into insignificance against that?

Guido shows himself to be a true man of principle. Having called lustily for the ConDem outcome, he is not wasting time pointing to some, hem, unsatisfactory aspects of new Ministerial postings.

So far so good for my old friend from the legendary St John's College conservative machine, Alistair Burt, who joins the FCO as a junior Minister.