Blogoir: January

Here is a nicely turned interview with Polish writer Andrzej (Andrew) Stasiuk where he gives us some deliciously naughty thoughts about European nationalism and German hegemony:

Before Europe existed because it knew how to take risks, it went to sea to seek a fortune. Today it just accumulates and fears losses. I know nothing of nation states. I know nothing of states at all. For me language is of course primary. Poland survived partitions, occupations thanks to its language, thanks to the culture. Religion also played an important role in affirming the national consciousness. The Catholic Church replaced the budget, the army and taxes. Today, it is somewhat trying to do the same.

But what seems the most essential, is the feeling of uniqueness, of unity, which is worth sacrificing for. Otherwise, why not become German for convenience sake, Russian on a whim or Jewish to upset everybody? This 'Polishness' must also certainly be a sort of feeling of superiority. Don't you think so? Yes, a feeling of superiority. Unjustified, of course. But still.

Are you afraid that Germany will become a dangerous nation?

Yes, and that is very good because my country exists more when it is threatened. Without danger, without troubles, Poland is less alive and a little more inexistent. However, whenever nationalism comes knocking on the door, it feels better right away, it perks up and gets its strength back. So long live German nationalism. Which doesn't mean, does it, that we must not remain vigilant.

Mr Stasiuk farms llamas. As well he might.

This is how 2011 and our civil liberties limp to an end. With a supposedly arty chair in a shop in Lewes being accused of falling foul of the Obscene Publications Act.

Look at what is going on here.

A woman designer of this tedious piece of furniture has decided to adorn it with naked women taken from old Playboy magazines. So much for the feminist argument that such images 'degrade' women - even trendy women designers like them, to the point of wanting male and female buttocks to crush down upon them!

But lo!, a 'member of the public' saw the chair in the shop window - and complained to the police!

Worse. The police did not tell the member of the public to get a life. They moved into action.

Think about that. You're walking along past the shops in earnest, self-important, middle-class little Lewes, and you see something you don't like. You are not content to shrug and put it all down to living in a free society. Nor is it enough to walk on and not buy the stupid chair. You don't want the possible embarrassment of going into the shop to argue with the shopkeeper. So you outsource all responsibility and urge ... the state to act.

Then the state acts. The police take this stupid request seriously enough to go along, no doubt keen on looking at the chair themselves. They rummage around in their modest brains and find something which covers the case (they think), namely the 1959 Obscene Publications Act.

No matter that the act is intended to cover (a) 'obscene' and (b) 'publications', neither of which obviously apply in this case. The shop was then 'politely' asked (by whom) to remove the chair from the shop window. Which, according to the Sun, was done. What would have happened if the shopkeeper had 'politely' refused, asking the police to get out of the shop and mind their own damn business?

Is this a stunning example of crass state oppression, nothing being too small or fatuous to avoid heavy-handed police intervention?

Or is it even worse, namely the state asserting to itself the right to lean upon anyone when someone claims to be 'offended' or insulted? Where exactly is free speech in that?

Or is it all these things plus jolly British seasonal eccentricity, and a chance for the bored policepersons of Lewes to get away from filling in forms and ogle a chair with boobs..?

2011 has exhausted its possibilities. Next year, please. 

Here is my latest article at DIPLOMAT magazine on the ever-fascinating question of diplomatic and wider media technique in a confusing new world:

Once upon a time diplomats were rarely seen or heard in public. To do their vital work of privately communicating messages between national leaders they needed to be discreet, anonymous, detached, aloof, rarefied. In a word, invisible.

When I joined the Foreign Office in 1979 the rules on such things were clear and strict. UK-based diplomats would never appear in the British media: that was what Ministers were expected (and wanted) to do. Overseas it was slightly different. British diplomats had some discretion to respond to foreign media requests for interviews and statements, but when in doubt, they should check with the FCO News Department in London. No Foreign Minister wanted to have their breakfast ruined by opening the newspaper to find a sensational report of something unexpected or unwelcome proclaimed by an FCO official overseas.

Back then these limitations on diplomatic media appearances made sense: the media themselves were restricted. In Britain and elsewhere there were a tiny number of TV stations and relatively few newspapers. Official foreign policy pronouncements could – and should – be rationed accordingly to keep everything at a suitable level of sobriety.

This all changed. Along came new technology, CNN, the internet, Twitter and Facebook, a proliferation of TV channels available across the planet at any time of day or night, digital radio, blogging. A Tower of Babel. A tsunami of noisy words, comment, pseudo-analysis and even, now and again, some facts. The media are increasingly no longer something separate or ‘above’ the general public. The media are the general public.

Or the general public are the media...

With added free media presentation tips for getting messages out in this hubbub:

One basic lesson came through loud and clear when I trained new FCO diplomats. In a mock interview, one had to act the role of a British spokesman, the other an American spokesman. The young man tasked to pretend to be American was nervous. Yet when we played back the video, he was far more effective. In his nervousness he had said very little, but what he had said came across on the screen as conveying toughness and determination. By contrast his colleague who played the British spokesman had been relaxed and cheerful. Much too relaxed and cheerful: he came across as friendly but frivolous.

My heartfelt advice to any diplomat facing a TV or radio interview? Have only one or two (maximum three) points to get across. Sound positive and firm! Don’t feel obliged to answer the question: simply use the question as the springboard for conveying your core points, then stop.

Above all, keep it simple. The more you say – and above all the more you try to be clever – the more you open yourself up to a devastating jibe from the interviewer. Oh, and when the interview ends remember that the cameras may still be filming you until you’ve left the studio…

Even on Christmas Eve - or maybe especially on Christmas Eve - we need to be aware of those repellamt people who stroll around the Western chattering classes exploiting the historic privilege of democracy to make excuses for the inexcusable.

Here are some classic examples.

Enough. Just go away.

Except they never do.

All the very best wishes for Christmas and the New Year to all my loyal readers. Let's all look forward to a calm, stable and generally agreeable Eurozone in 2012.

Eurozone problem addict? It doesn't get better than top US economist Martin Feldstein, who has the great advantage of having said right from the start that the project as conceived was unworkable if not dangerous.

Here he is explaining in brisk terms what went wrong, before moving on to say what could and should happen next:

Single currencies require all the countries in the monetary union to have the same monetary policy and the same basic interest rate, with interest rates differing among borrowers only due to perceived differences in credit risk. A single currency also means a fixed exchange rate within the monetary union and the same exchange rate relative to all other currencies, even when individual countries in the monetary union would benefit from changes in relative values.

Economists explained that the euro would therefore lead to greater fluctuations in output and employment, a much slower adjustment to declines in aggregate demand, and persistent trade imbalances between Europe and the rest of the world. Indeed, all these negative outcomes have occurred in recent years.

Here is why: when a county has its own monetary policy, it can respond to a decline in demand by lowering interest rates to stimulate economic activity. But the ECB must make monetary policy based on the overall condition of all the countries in the monetary union.

This creates a situation in which interest rates are too high in those countries with rising unemployment and too low in those countries with rapidly rising wages. And because of the large size of the German economy relative to others in Europe, the ECB's monetary policy must give greater weight to conditions in Germany in its decisions than it gives to conditions in other countries...

Before the monetary union was put in place, large fiscal deficits generally led to higher interest rates or declining exchange rates. These market signals acted as an automatic warning for countries to reduce their borrowing. The monetary union eliminated those market signals and precluded the higher cost of funds that would otherwise have limited household borrowing. The result was that countries borrowed too much and banks loaned too much on overpriced housing...

Powerful, smart, authoritative. Read the whole thing, before it vanishes behind a paywall in February...

One of the things I do on training courses aimed at telling people how to Write with Impact is to cite Shrek. Issues and Shrek are like onions. They have layers.

No piece of writing can address all the layers of any problem. The trick is to show awareness of other layers but focus on one or two of them to help the reader make sense of it all.

Likewise it is a good idea to take a single issue and use it to illustrate a wider point. Or to take a seemingly obscure but nonetheless interesting question and force it to the top of people's attention.

All these devices help achieve the basic rule of good (and therefore impactful) writing: if you want it to be read, make it readable.

One of the best examples from my own career came in early 2004, not long after I arrived in Warsaw from Belgrade. Poland was set to join the European Union. Colossal numbers of Poles were likely to start moving to and fro between Poland and the UK - we had decided to open our Labour market unconditionally, much to the utter disbelief of the Polish leadership.

Once those Poles started moving with the aim of getting richer faster, what would they get up to? I thought it worth analysing one possible source of income - illicit cigarettes.

Hence a telegram I sent to London warning them in very simple language that the UK's multi-billion pound problems with the informal cigarette market was about to get a whole lot worse overnight.

I did this by spelling out in the simplest possible terms the economics for the average Pole of informal cigarette-selling, even within legal limits.

This telegram wittily called Smoking Ants - Coming Our Way? caused a minor sensation in the Cabinet Office. Officials scrambled round to change the rules to limit the numbers of cigarettes which people from the new EU member states could bring into the UK duty-free.

And, thanks to the miracles of Freedom of Information, I am pleased to share this telegram with you today. The FCO cheekily cut out a line or two on the grounds that UK relations with Poland might be adversely affected(!). But otherwise it's just as I drafted it. A nice example (if I say so myself) of drawing senior attention to an unexpected new problem by delivering work written in a bold way which no-one can avoid reading.

Diplomatic Folly Note: look out for the amusing reference to 'Trilateral' at the end. That was a footling attempt by Tony Blair to set up an inner UK/France/Germany driving force within the EU, which collapsed in no time at all in the face of the obvious objections (not least those emanating from one S Berlusconi).

Thus:

SUBJECT: EU ENLARGEMENT: SMOKING ANTS, COMING OUR WAY?

 

SUMMARY

 

1. Incentives for Poles to make a reasonable living in the UK's dodgy cigarette business. Policy contradictions.

 

DETAIL

2. As a non-smoking connoisseur of Balkan tobacco activities I recently met the local BAT team to talk about regional cigarette smuggling. Some striking conclusions.

 

The Big Picture

 

3. BAT have studied tens of thousands of discarded cigarette packets. They conclude that some 70 billion cigarettes are sold legally in Poland every year, with a further 20 billion smoked "illegally" (ie sold outside the official excise structure and smuggled into Poland).

 

4. A good proportion of this illegal trade is conducted by an army of "ants", individuals who carry small quantities of cigarettes into Poland from points East. But up to 50% of the illegal cigarette business is well organised, involving hundreds of truckloads of cigarettes each containing up to 10 million "sticks". [redacted]

 

5. The emergence of this lucrative illegal trade can be traced readily back to 2000, when Poland pushed up excise duties. Until then almost all the 90 billion cigarettes smoked in Poland each

year were passing through normal procedures. Smuggling soared with these new higher duties.

 

6. Sharp price/tax/excise differentials as between Russia, Poland and Western Europe are set to continue. Currently a pack of cigarettes which costs 50 cents in Russia sells for 1.30 dollars in Poland and up to 8 dollars in the UK. These ratios will change somewhat in the coming years as Poland raises the effective price of a pack towards EU levels, thereby giving serious new local incentives to regional smugglers (one good truckload can generate a profit of 1.5 million dollars). BAT expect some 50 billion cigarettes per year to be smuggled from Russia to Western Europe; this generates a 5 billion dollar profit - more than double BAT's own global annual pre-tax profit. Implications for UK of EU Accession

 

7. BAT point out that as things stand every Polish citizen is allowed to bring legally into the UK 200 cigarettes a trip. But after accession this figure jumps to 3200 cigarettes per trip. A pack of Dunhill can be bought in Poland for about £1 and be sold in a UK pub for up to £3.00. Each Pole entering the UK can hope to make a quick profit on the cigarettes of £250 per trip, not to mention extra money by importing a few bottles of cheap vodka. With a return coach fare of £50 and monthly unemployment benefit here of about £80, it is not difficult for a poor Pole to work out what to do. Better to get involved with UK officialdom by filling in UK benefit forms, or make easy money sitting on a bus?

 

COMMENT

 

8. The scale of the illicit cigarette business caused by price/tax differentials as between the UK and continental Europe is obvious and well known. It is part of a global compound interest drama: as rich countries get richer, the absolute wealth we generate gives ever-growing and vast incentives for honest people and gangsters alike to "play the margins". The cigarette price effects of EU enlargement is more of the same, albeit a great deal more of the same. But the upstream consequences of this illegality for the region are considerable.

 

9. Our Policy contains Contradictions. HMCE/HMT are looking at reducing the amounts of cigarettes which accession nationals can bring into the UK. Meanwhile we and our EU partners laboriously try to "train border guards and customs officials" on the EU's Eastern Borders. But only a couple of truckloads of cigarettes inject more resources into corrupting these official structures than we are injecting into reforming them. The corrupted structures then can be exploited not only by cigarette smugglers but also by human traffickers, global drug dealers and even terrorists - serious security questions here.

 

10. The cost of all this is not on a scale to destabilise the whole of Polish society as has happened in Serbia, to the point of the assassination of the Prime Minister. But it is a serious and systemic obstacle to reform. Scope for a new, hard look (Trilateral or in another smaller group first?) at what else might be done on the strategic level?

 

 

 

Despite my wretched ankle accident in Nizhny Novgorod, my interest in things Russian is reanimated.

Part of the fascination with Russia lies in the baffling issue of how in fact a society moves from rigid oppressive stupidity to something far more flexible, democratic and smart.

When the USSR broke up, no-one dealing with the issue in Russia or anywhere else was prepared for the collapse or had any intellectual framework for tackling it. The general idea was that Russia should become 'like the West', or at least 'as much like the West as was possible'.

Fine. But how? There were almost no people in Russia with any significant experience of life outside the Soviet system other than the KGB and assorted businessmen and diplomats. Where to start? What to build with?

Moreover, the whole centralised system had simply stopped. Bureaucrats had left their offices in Moscow and wandered away. Nothing was moving. Food was running low.

The Yeltsin reformers had some good ideas. They passed a simple law allowing anything to be traded, to get people doing things from energetic self-interest. This was a stunning move. Kiosks selling anything and everything appeared as from nowhere. Whereas in 1991 there was no private business in Moscow, by 1995 there was a plump Yellow Pages book listing new businesses. Russians' own creativity was unleashed after 70 years' misery.

Then came the famous Big Mac Attack, which gave Moscow regular fresh milk for the first time in seventy years.. And assorted privatisations, many of which ended up by being manipulated by clever chancers who saw the long-term potential. Leigh Turner (then Ist Sec Econ and now HM Ambassador to Kiev) wrote a stream of elegant reports to London about his adventures in buying a privatisation voucher for a share in a bread business, describing the process vividly as it affected average Russians picking their way through the paperwork.

Was this all pernicious Shock Therapy, as sundry Leftists complain? No. If anything there was insufficient Shock and no Therapy. Above all, Russia could not bring itself to haul mouldy old Lenin from his place of honour in Red Square and bury him far away somewhere. We did not press the issue, to help them make a psychological break with Communist terror. Why? I don't know.

All of which takes me back to my own visit to Red Square a few days ago. My British companion and I decided to go and check out Lenin.

There is a small fence defining a long walkway along the side of the Kremlin Wall to the tomb, recalling the days when there were long queues to pay homage to the villain. On the day we were there no-one was visiting. We nonetheless thought it impolite (and more importantly unwise) to step over the fence and go straight to the tomb. So we walked back to the end of the square dominated by a strange red brick building. At the corner was a gap, allowing us to enter the walkway.

However, a guard told us that we were not allowed to go through the gap. We had to walk round the building and start at the beginning of the walkway. "Why?" "That's the rule."

Rather than suffer this idiotic indignity, we went somewhere else.

OK, OK. Each country has its share of petty annoying restrictions and petty annoying people to enforce them. But in Russia it seems to go further than is possible to imagine. People are told to obey the rules. Flexibility and pragmatic adaption to new circumstances (here the fact that there was no queue) are unwelcome.

So how to change that set of profoundly entrenched instincts?

Luckily there is an answer now available for the first time ever. The Internet.

Here is a fine piece in the FT by Julia Ioffe describing how Dmitry Ternovskiy has set up a project called A Country Without Stupidity:

Chief among the inanities in his sights is something most tourists in Russia have encountered: the screaming security guard or elderly woman telling you that you cannot take pictures here, as if your photograph of that supermarket compromises Russian national security. Ternovskiy has used his blog to mobilise Russians to inform these guards and grannies that they are the ones in the wrong: by Russian law, photography is allowed almost everywhere.

“Despite the fact that there is no legal basis to ban photography in all the places it’s banned, people will still tell you it’s forbidden,” Ternovskiy says, pouring himself a cup of thyme tea as we sit in a Moscow café. “It’s like a Soviet phantom limb. Back then, every person felt himself to be in the thick of a nest of spies, there were enemies all around, everything was banned. Unfortunately, we still see this alive and well in the minds of many people today.” 

And thus, bit by bit, inch by inch Russia frees its mind of communist stupidity. A long, painful haul. But at least now possible.

Hmm.

Things warming up a little in Russia as all sorts of people condemn serious vote-fixing in the elections last weekend.

A significant proportion of the noise against the election results comes from obnoxious groups who (a) never held any sort of honest election when they had the long years of opportunities to do so (Communists, weary old Gorby) or (b) would never hold honest elections were they to come into power (Zhirinovsky's 'Liberal Democrats'). So a Russian Spring this isn't. Yet.

That said, it takes a lot to mobilise Russia's urban youngsters to take a public stand against the Establishment, and this time quite a lot of them are doing so.

Note especially the use of social media (ie fast live crowd networking by mobile telephones, as taken to a high art by British rioters and other vanguard forces). The Kremlin has been smart to let this latest large demonstration pass without a vigorous and unpleasant clamp-down - so far.

Perhaps they are just letting things run to take the measure of what they are up against. Including one opposition blogger a using remote-control model helicopter to take pictures of the demonstrations - it survived pistol-fire!

Very cool. And very different

To pass the time and take my mind off my bright blue foot, I have done a couple of quickies for the Telegraph Blog site where there has been a lot of energetic stuff about the EU Summit and all that.

Thus yesterday:

We awoke this morning to various commentators and Twitteristas bewailing the fact that British intransigence has left the UK “isolated". This ridiculous assertion needs to be knocked on the head, once and for all.

If “isolated" means staying well clear of the clumsy and ultimately undemocratic eurozone project, that’s a damn good place to be. The measures needed to prop up the eurozone involve intrusive inspection of national financial affairs by Brussels and other changes (such as harmonising tax rates) which necessarily amount to surrendering national sovereignty to EU HQ. Without the protocol he demanded, David Cameron could not have stood up in the House of Commons and honourably told the British people that the UK would be spared that.

In fact, even with that protocol there would have been in serious risk of eurozone “mission creep" in legal terms had the Lisbon Trinity route been used. Not that that risk has gone away even with the proposed new treaty outside the existing Treaty structure, but it is arguably for now rather more manageable.

Now what?

The proposed new arrangements for the eurozone would have been good had they been introduced right from the start. It is not clear how far if at all they will satisfy the planet’s markets and investors now. The crisis is set to drag on.

More generally, the whole European integration ambition looks like a nervous tightrope walker wobbling more and more severely with each new step. The contortions needed to stay balanced are impressive but grotesque.

And today:

As the sheer scale of the new requirements expected in the new treaty become clear – intrusive Brussels inspection of national budgets, balanced budget constitutional provisions and so on – bits will start to fall off the bandwagon. Different local factions will demand some or other political price for conceding their support to these radical changes. Public opinion will be aroused, with demands for referenda here or there. And so on.

The best thing about writing for a national newspaper's website is the giddy delirium of the many comments one attracts, for and against. Many people seem unable to understand what one writes, or miss the self-indulgent witty touches completely, or assume that because I am an ex-Ambassador I a priori am a pompous Sir Humphrey type living on a vast pension blah blah blah.

Therefore you get stuff like this:

Charles Crawford - a breath of fresh air. I bet you don't get many invitations to opine on the BBC!

For the first time, I actually have to agree with much of Mr Crawford has to say. Perhaps he could offer his expertise of the break up of the former Soviet Union during his time in the FCO, for the government for Britain's withdrawal from the EUSSR?

Magisterial and wise as one would expect from a 'Sir Humphrey' enjoying his astronomically high pension at our expense...It's rather majestic when the British Establishment makes a 'fleet turn'; all those wonderful old ships of the line coming round. The trouble is that they need an awful lot of sea room and they already got much too close to a lee shore.

Whatever leads Crawford to the conclusion that an 'amicable separation' is on the books? Why wouldn't our former partners just screw us to the floor as much as they are able? What is the USP that would stop them, if they ever climb out of the mire where they are?

Thank you Charles for your explanation, especially posting the speech by Howe.  Incredible how the same old arguments are being trotted out by the same old europhiles ignoring the twenty year interim where *nothing* turned out as predicted.  And all the guff about influence--what influence?  Although we have wasted a lot of treasure on the european experiment and the most worrisome aspect of our economic outlook is our closeness to the european economic (disaster) zone.

Dave has done more u-turns than a boy racer, so will have no problem with one on this matter.
Has to be said, Chas is a definite Rolls Royce blogger. Maybe he could get a job as Foreign Secretary, if he was quickly ennobled.

Walked the dogs earlier - a bit cold but a nice day for it. Notably, no-one from Antwerp, Lower-Saxony, Tuscany or Valencia stopped me for a chat.Looks like the isolation has started to bite

You, sir, sound like a traitor and should be treated as such. I am thinking naked, tar, feathers, high street parade, but maybe this would infringe one or two paragraphs in the EU human rights chapter, or whatever. You display all the characteristics of an aparatchik who forgot that you are/were a servant of the people and in your generous loftiness are throwing some crumbles of your superior intellect to the benighted masses.  

That last one hits it bang on the nose.

Anyway, my second one linked to this excellent Economist piece offering a detailed account of what the UK Prime Minister wanted and why he did not get it. Well worth a read if you want to look at some hard-core analysis and not a lot of heated knowledge-free opinion.

What does it all boil down to?

Not enough, if the main aim is to stop the Eurozone failing horribly as the planet's investors think we've all gone mad and draw their money out of the system.

But maybe just enough (for now) if you want to get re-elected as President of France?

Do global investors see this blood-stained arena as a sensible place to park their hard-earned money? No.

While the self-absorbed British commentariat divides into Europhile/Europhobe factions like Bertie Wooster's aunt mastodons bellowing at each other across a primaeval swamp, the real story is that the Summit did not do anything serious to tackle the eurozone's acute credibility problem.

Why did it not do more? Because top European opinion is completely divided on existential questions to do with the moral hazard involved in different eurozone rescue plans. And because step-by-step Europe's leaders have set up structures of such intricacy and complexity that it is next to impossible to identify what needs to be fixed, and then muster the practical agreement to do the fixing.

Not sure if I have linked here to my LSE book review about electronic voting, so here it is.

The book itself is interesting and worth buying, as it cogently looks at the pros and cons of different options for registering votes accurately and fairly:

NB:  There is an important distinction to understand, folks, between electronic voting and electronic counting.

An electronic voting system means voters pressing a button or touch a screen to register their vote automatically. This is attractive to local authorities wanting to save money on running elections. But it is fraught with operational and conceptual difficulties - how to make the process secret, transparent and safe from manipulation either by external hackers or by malevolent insiders programming/running the electronic system?

An electronic counting system of the sort I saw in Nizhny Novgorod is simpler. The citizen votes as usual on a paper ballot then inserts the ballot paper into the ballot box via an electronic 'reader'. The votes are counted automatically, but the paper votes are there as a back-up in case the result is contested.

The great advantage of the paper-based voting system is that it is clear, simple and in principle reliable. Ordinary people can see what is happening and understand it. Mistakes in counting are unlikely to make a difference. But it is amazingly labour intensive and therefore expensive.

Electronic systems for voting are accurate and fast but much less transparent. Plus an electrical blip of some sort might change the result without anyone knowing.

As the OSCE report on the latest Russian elections sensibly noted:

Two types of new voting technologies were used during these elections. The first was a ballot scanning system called “KOIB”, the second was an electronic voting system “KEG”, based on touch-screen machines. Both systems were used on a moderate scale.

PEC members in most of the regions observed received training on the use of new voting technologies. The practice of publicly testing both systems on or immediately prior to election day can potentially help build trust in e-enabled voting. However, the absence of provisions for random mandatory manual recounts of the processed ballots is of concern. In addition, transparency in the design and functioning of both systems is insufficient as both types of technologies are based on proprietary software not open to public scrutiny.

Touch screen voting machines were equipped with an embedded printer giving voters the possibility to verify their vote whilst voting. Although this enhanced the verifiability of the process, the fact that votes were printed consecutively on one strip of paper created the potential for the violation of the secrecy of the vote.

No special conclusions. But be very reluctant to move to e-voting if it's ever offered. The transparency and security issues are completely different and not easy to follow...

My extended thoughts on the Russian elections for the national parliament (Duma) which took place on Sunday, 4 December. 

 

I played a modest part in the proceedings as an official international observer accredited to the elections under the auspices of the International Institute for Integration Studies, a Moscow-based grouping close to senior circles of power in Russia. The Institute supports various public conferences around the world, including the strange one I attended in Belgrade in June. Full disclosure note: I was offered (and accepted) a fee for observing these Russian elections, but it was agreed that I was under no obligation to say anything other than what I thought about the elections or about developments in Russia in general.

 

Other groups of official international observers were also criss-crossing Russia as elections day approached and on the day itself. The OSCE delivered what looked like the largest observer effort, not least ‘long-term observers’ tasked with looking at the elections in the context of the wider Russian political process. The OSCE's provisional findings include a number of very critical observations on these elections, but also give credit where credit was due in a number of significant respects.

 

Anyway, I arrived in Moscow on the evening of 1 December to join a dinner with other IIIS group observers, namely some Serbs and Italians. The Serbs were all at the ‘patriotic’ end of the political spectrum in Belgrade and included the Radical Party's Dragan Todorovic who had started spluttering uncontrollably during my presentation in Belgrade in June. One of the other guests was Borislav Milosevic, brother of Slobodan, who had served as Belgrade's ambassador in Moscow after the NATO bombing of Serbia. I did my very best to explain to him the private frustrations of Western leaders and diplomats in dealing with his late brother.

 

The next day we had briefings about the elections process from the Russian Senate and National Elections Commission and I gave an interview to SKY TV before we set off on our various journeys to watch actual voting. I was relatively lucky (or so I thought) by being sent to Nizhny Novgorod, 400 km east of Moscow. Some of the Serbs had to go to Vladivostok.

 

IIIS deliver senior access. In Nizhny Novgorod I was given excellent personal briefings by the Deputy Governor and the head of the local elections commission, who showed me one of the new electronic counting machines being used in a number of polling stations across the country. 

 

I then headed for my first polling station. Mistake! I slipped on the ice and wrecked my ankle. I was taken to the nearby basic but efficient wrecked ankle clinic doing its usual brisk business on a Sunday afternoon in Russian winter. An x-ray revealed no breakage of bone, but I had seriously damaged everything else. 

 

The result of this fiasco was that I visited only one polling station, not long before it was due to close. It was run by cheery no-nonsense Russian women. The different parties taking part in the elections had their representatives there – almost all women (Russian men have better things to do on a Sunday afternoon). The party representatives reported no problems. I was intrigued to see arrangements for small portable ballot boxes to be taken to any voter unable to visit the polling station; party representatives were entitled to accompany the ballot boxes during such manoeuvres. It all looked very normal.

 

After a painful overnight train journey back to Moscow, I attended a desultory press conference at which a smug Bulgarian observer proclaimed that the elections as a whole had been more than free and fair. It was not made clear on whose behalf he was making this bold assertion: his statement was brought round for other observers to sign, and I of course did not sign it. I then departed for home, enjoying a forlorn ride by wheelchair from the aircraft at Heathrow through Terminal 5 to spare my sorry foot.

 

* * * * *

So much for the little I saw of the elections themselves. Wider considerations?

 

International election observers have to try to do three things. They need to look at the rules-in-themselves to see whether they make sense and are reasonable and comprehensive. They need to look at how the rules are then applied to real life: are the procedures on paper being properly followed and interpreted? Finally, they need to look at the process as a whole and to see where it fits into the country's political life.

 

It cannot be said often enough. Russia is an unfathomably huge country with unique issues of command and control (and associated attitudes to governance) going back many centuries. Until the collapse of communism in 1991 there was no tradition of representative democracy. Setting up democratic institutions and practices (and, most important) creating democratic instincts had to be slow.

 

The arrangements laid down by Russia’s law for conducting elections are technically impressive, albeit detailed to the point of obsession. Russian procedures are better than ours here in the UK in at least three respects:

 

• Votes are counted in the polling station concerned immediately after the polls close, in the presence of party and other observers (ballot boxes are not moved to central counting points with the risk of mischief en route)
• No ID, no vote
• No postal voting

 

Moreover, there are streamlined and well monitored arrangements for getting the election results sent fast to Moscow for central compilation. Amidst the complaints about Russia's elections, you don't hear the argument that the counting of the votes as cast has not been fair and accurate.

 

Remember (again!) the sheer scale of the voting process. Russia has 96,000 polling stations catering for nearly 110,000,000 voters. People are voting for national-level politicians, with totals for individual parties simply added together to get a final total (on one way of looking at it a much simpler and fairer system than they have in eg the USA). The Law of Big Numbers kicks in. Cheating on a scale that makes a significant difference has to be massive – and obvious.

 

So what's the problem?

 

First, there inevitably are a large number of electoral violations of different shapes and sizes. When I wrote my book review for the LSE on Electronic Voting, I was struck at how we all take for granted the procedural complexity of voting. The following (and many more) are all essential:

 

• voters lists compiled and kept up-to-date
• secret voting
• ballot boxes sealed throughout the process
• accurate ballot papers printed and distributed under controlled conditions
• identification for voters
• meticulous and transparent counting, to make sure that all votes are counted and only votes properly cast have been counted
• procedures for disputes as to what a messy mark on a given ballot paper might mean
• arrangements for recording the final outcome and storing all ballot papers securely in case of future legal challenges.

 

At literally every stage of the process in any country there is scope for human error and/or deliberate mischief. Ruling out both 100% is impossible. 

 

Thus we need to be careful in agreeing with those who allege “massive violations “of electoral procedures in Russia or anywhere else. If every polling station in Russia has only one complaint about some or other procedural violation, there will be 96,000 complaints! Massive violations! Yet many of those complaints (including two we heard: one party doing some campaigning on the “day of silence" before the elections and not printing its name on election materials) will have been trivial in themselves and quite irrelevant to the final outcome.

 

Some violations are deliberate and (as far as local conditions allow) systematic. One frequent claim again in Russia is that ‘captive’ voters in mental illness institutions and the Army were lent on hard to vote for the Putin party. Unofficial crowd-sourced election monitors Golos have put on the Web all sorts of other examples, some filmed as they happened.

 

Complicated official arrangements such as running a nationwide election work in good part because they are transparent. Yes, in formal terms Russia does all it needs to do to host international and political party observers. But this time round the blatant official and unofficial pressure put on Golos (including denial of service website attacks and the usual insinuations that foreign support for such organisations was illegitimate or sinister) created a very bad impression.

 

More generally the post-Communist ruling establishment in Russia has changed the law to make it harder for new political parties to make a breakthrough. (Note: UKIP has views on the subject here in the UK.) Smaller parties are not allowed to form a single voting bloc. The rules for forming a national party able to contest national elections are excessively strict and not easy to meet. An earlier, excellent option of including on the ballot paper a vote for “none of the above" has been withdrawn. And so on.

 

Add to all this the violence suffered by some journalists who try to expose official corruption, unrelenting pro-Putin media coverage and the way far too many Russian media outlets condemn or marginalise any liberal views, and you get the sort of outcome which the OSCE fairly criticises.

 

But…

 

Just look at the results. Four parties have made it into the national parliament, after roughly half the Russian population voted:

 

• The Putin/Medvedev party United Russia.
• The retread Communists who still rant on about Marxist-Leninism (now with added Patriotism)
• The erratic pro-Establishment Liberal Democrat populists led by Zhirinovsky, whom we fondly remember on a Russian train taking pot-shots at voters’ pets with a hunting rifle. 
• And A Just Russia, a relatively new party claiming to be social democrats which has proposed an alliance with the Communists

 

Parties representing a more liberal policy-set involving reduced state control and better human rights either did not get into the race or (as in the case of Yavlinsky's Yabloko party) failed dismally once again. A new supposedly centre-right party Right Cause won only 400,000 votes.

 

Western commentators and some in Russia are claiming these election results show rising dissatisfaction with the performance of Vladimir Putin. They might even be right. But that dissatisfaction is rising from a low and apathetic base, and insofar as it translates into changed voting it boosts tendencies which are even worse. Compared with the other three national/socialist parties which crossed the threshold to enter the Duma, Putin's party look almost normal. Putin remains the favourite to be voted back in as Russia's president in the forthcoming elections next March.

 

In short, the legacy of Soviet communism lives on powerfully in Russia. Lenin still moulders in red Square. Nizhny Novgorod railway station welcomes you with a vast Communist mosaic. Former KGB-type people have prospered since Communism ended, and use their power and wealth to frame things in their favour.

 

Under current management Russia is getting steadily more prosperous and steadily more pluralistic, albeit in a specific Russian way. Russians en masse have a (for us) startling capacity for putting up with hardships, including overbearing and neurotic state power. They are not bothered by their leaders sneering at foreigners or homosexuals or liberal attitudes. They do want to see progress and get richer, and they hate corruption and get-rich-quick types. But it takes a lot to rouse them to take a stand against the existing “system “. 

 

Are things changing, with young urban people in particular demanding wider changes? If so, does it matter?

Maybe. After the elections the head of the National Elections Commission proclaimed that evidence of electoral malpractice produced by Golos would not be investigated unless it was backed by 'official' complaints. This cynical view reflects a ruling Russian mindset going back centuries, namely that only ‘official’ procedures count. 

 

Yet in Russia as in so many other countries the mass of people are getting more powerful vis-a-vis the state. Perhaps the main story of these elections is the way many Russians are now using cheap mobile technology to follow and record what is happening across their vast country - and Vladimir Putin's so far uncertain response.

 

Back in 1961 the FCO set up a new group of clever diplomats known as the Planning Staff. They were tasked to think up new policy thoughts which might not be welcome, or easy to handle. And earlier this week the FCO hosted a birthday party to mark 50 years of the department's work. A host of distinguished names appeared - a high proportion of the people who have reached the very top of British diplomacy in recent decades worked there in one capacity or another. My own role as a Planner was from 1985-87 when I was official FCO Speechwriter for Foreign Secretary Sir Geoffrey Howe. That period - from the early Gorbachev period through until the early 1990s and the end of European communism - was perhaps a Golden Age of sorts. All sorts of post-WW2 certainties started to crumble and then collapse - new thinking about almost every foreign policy issue was not only desirable, but vital and urgent. Robert Cooper (now a top official at the European External Action Service leading efforts to 'mediate' between Serbia and Kosovo) ran the Planners as the Berlin Wall came down. He reminded the throng at the reception about those heady days, not least the famous Planners' joke prediction sent to No 10 as a 1989 pre-Christmas joke that Romanian leader Ceaucescu would be toppled and executed. Which then happened, in days. He also recalled the stern opposition from Mrs Thatcher to German reunification, swept away by the tide of events. Our current Ambassador at NATO, Mariot Leslie, was at the reception. Her famous 1987 paper predicting German reunification had been derided by everyone, including me. Didn't she get it? There was no way communist Russia led by Gorby would fold and let East Germany go. Yet that too happened. Mariot reminded me of the speech I wrote for Geoffrey Howe to deliver in communist Hungary in 1987, in which i let my hair down and drafted a powerful text praising free markets and liberty. For once the FCO top brass had all been away and not nibbled out the juicy bits. It was delivered more or less as drafted, and made a huge positive impact - Mariot had been talking recently to a Hungarian who had been there. A most enjoyable occasion. Perhaps the emerging convulsions in the Eurozone will force our current Planners to think the unthinkable? One bizarre note was struck by one distinguished ex-Planner, whose remarks included out of nowhere a swipe at the US Tea Party movement, which he characterised as "like 15th century peasants". This footling observation alas prompted a patronising titter from some people who still think it's clever to make remarks like that about Americans. And it missed in an unPlannerly way one of the main points of our times, namely that the Laws of Compound Interest are forcing to the fore popular discontent in the USA against the stunning mismanagement by Washington of US finances and soaraway official debt. Did I mention the Eurozone? As any smart Planner kno, peasants may or may not be revolting. But sometimes they are on the right side of history.

Here's an astute point I heard at a top FCO meeting recently: "The world of states and the world of people are diverging..." Neatly put, and profoundly true. See also the Eurozone, passim. How does that apply to Russia? Russia is the sprawling space on earth which took to the highest, maddest level in human history the idea of 'the state'. Millions of people were murdered or allowed to starve to death to advance state power as something completely above any other political or moral values. The state as both instrument and end-in-itself. Part of my presentation at Sussex University today was all about the way Belief was replaced by Knowledge in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, culminating in a stupendous unprecedented new idea pronounced in Philadelphia in 1776: that government derives from the Consent of the Governed. And as we are seeing all round the world, the fact that hundreds of millions of people now have a spontaneous networking ability with their mobile phones compels even the most miserable dictatorship - yes, sooner or later you too North Korea - to have to think about how best to deal with growing mass objection to being taken for granted by an often corrupt and unjust state. In Russia this takes an interesting form. Internet penetration of society is rising fast, as Russia's powerful urban elite's interest in new technology inexorably spreads outwards. It turns out that Russians who are not 'on the Internet' have very high faith in Russia's state TV (and therefore the ruling Putinist establishment who dominate it). However, Russians who use the Internet regularly have a lot more trust in the Internet than in state TV. Not that this is necessarily a change for the better: a heck of a lot of raving extreme nationalist websites are alive and well, in Russia as elsewhere. Nonetheless, in one way or the other the underlying tendency (and growing fast) is for Russians to be much more critical about reassuring pronouncements from Moscow. Thus the recent extraordinary spectacle of Putin himself being booed by the crowd at a typical Putin PR event - a martial arts competition - was one thing. Even the TV coverage picked it up. But then a video of the spectacle was soon running round the Russian part of the Internet being watched by over a million people. What does it all mean? That the Putinist tendency will again (of course) prevail in Sunday's Duma elections unless something unfathomable happens and the various opposition groups spectacularly expand their appeal. Yet slowly but surely even Russia is changing towards some new sui generis pluralism. It will take another 25 years or so before the first generation of Russians not steeped in communism in their adult lives reach the age to dominate society. A society In which the Consent of the Governed will have become a strong factor.

 

A lively day.

 

First, I spent the night in a wonky hotel in downtown Lewes. The room sloped alarmingly in two directions, to the point where anything smooth risked sliding off the table. The sign in the bathroom read thusly: "Shower Mat Ensure the suckers are in contact with the bath fully pressed down" A wearying period of pushing the bath in a downwards direction ensued.

 

Then I went to the University of Sussex, waving cheerily to a pair of woman strikers at the entrance as I whizzed past their absurd attempts to persuade me to show 'solidarity' with their 'demands'. My visit there was to give a presentation on European Conservatism to a genial seminar of political science students. Not a Chinese/Asian student in sight - they're all doing sciences, not mulling over political theory. Wait! Maybe science IS political theory.

 

While all this was going on, a strange story broke in Poland.

 

Some clever-clogs had run a Properties check on the Foreign Ministry's website version of the superb speech by Radek Sikorski in Berlin on Monday. And found that the original version of the document was called 'More Europe' - created by Charles Crawford.

 

Eeek.

 

Anyway, the Polish Foreign Ministry has put out a statement to the effect that for substantive and linguistic purposes the Minister had consulted all sorts of people including myself on the speech, and then written it himself , making changes even on the plane to Berlin.

 

The Polish newspaper Gazeta Wyborcza carries the story and statement if anyone is interested.

 

So that's that. Anyone who knows Radek Sikorski will recognise his own inimitable style throughout the text.

 

Meanwhile I have wended my way to Heathrow where I am taking a plane in the morning to Moscow, to spend a jolly weekend as an elections observer for the Duma (parliament) elections on Sunday. My first time back in Russia for years. As Lenin or someone similarly cynical said, "It's not voting. It's counting".

Here in powerful fluent form is Polish Foreign Minister Radek Sikorski, speaking today in Berlin about Europe and the Eurozone.

If anyone can find a better peacetime speech by any Polish Foreign Minister or any Polish politician ever, let it be produced!

Not that it is perfect. Too many rather impenetrable statistics at various point. Some sentences are too long or involved.

He even - horror - takes a populist swipe at the UK (bear in mind the German audience and his own credentials as an Oxford graduate), after saying something important about 'subsidiarity'. Note how he abruptly switches to talking to the UK in the second person, as if we were in the room. Fine technique:

The more power and legitimacy we give to federal institutions, the more secure

member states should feel that certain prerogatives, everything to do with national

identity, culture, religion, lifestyle, public morals, and rates of income, corporate and

VAT taxes, should forever remain in the purview of states. Our unity can survive

different working hours or different family law in different countries.

Which brings me to the issue of whether an important member, Britain, can support reform. You have given the Union its common language. The Single Market was largely your brilliant idea. A British commissioner runs our diplomacy. You could lead Europe on defence. You are an indispensable link across the Atlantic.

On the other hand, Eurozone’s collapse would hugely harm your economy. Also, your total sovereign, corporate and household debt exceeds 400% of GDP. Are you sure markets will always favour you? We would prefer you in, but if you can’t join, please allow us to forge ahead. And please start explaining to your people that European decisions are not Brussels’ diktats but results of agreements in which you freely participate.

Fine, forge 'ahead' as you see fit. But pay for it yourselves. Don't expect too much British money if you overdo it. And don't try taxing us by the back door.

Nor is it easy to see from an admittedly befogged UK point of view how giving a turbo-boost to more powers at the European level as Sikorski suggests is in any meaningful way compatible with democracy as hitherto understood. More power to ... the European Parliament? No thanks. (Remember that one? Follow the link to see a German TV station doing a very early job to magnificent effect...)

Above all, isn't a wholesale reorganisation of  EU powers lunging in a Far More Europe way as Sikorski suggests completely unrealistic? How to negotiate a new treaty structure of such far-reaching new measures without the whole business getting bogged down in referenda and hopeless controversy? It's not by chance we have what we have. And German voters would have to be mad to allow other Europeans effectively to decide how much German money is transferred out of Germany for wider redistributive purposes.

Nonetheless, if you want to hear the message for More Europe delivered by a European foreign minister in a way calculated to impress an audience from another large member state, this is what it looks like.

This one passage - directed directly at Germany - is really good by any standard. Energetic and thoughtful, but also refeshingly blunt. An authentic contemporary rhetorical masterclass in delivering a tough message ("Listen, you helped get us all into this mess..!") to a foreign audience in their own country with style and grace.

Oh, but note too the hard-nosed Polish caveat tucked away at the end:

What does Poland ask of Germany?

We ask, first of all, that Germany admits that she is the biggest beneficiary of the current arrangements and therefore that she has the biggest obligation to make them sustainable.

Second, as you know best, you are not an innocent victim of others’ profligacy. You, who should have known better, have also broken the Growth and Stability Pact and your banks also recklessly bought risky bonds.

Third, because investors have been selling the bonds of exposed countries and flying to safety, your borrowing costs have been lower than they would have been in normal times.

Fourth, if your neighbours’ economies stall or implode, you greatly suffer, too.

Fifth, that despite your understandable aversion to inflation, you appreciate that the danger of collapse is now a much bigger threat.

Sixth, that because of your size and your history you have a special responsibility to preserve peace and democracy on the continent. Jurgen Habermas has wisely said that "If the European project fails, then there is the question of how long it will take to reach the status quo again. Remember the German Revolution of 1848: When it failed, it took us 100 years to regain the same level of democracy as before."

What, as Poland’s foreign minister, do I regard as the biggest threat to the security and prosperity of Poland today, on 28th November 2011? It’s not terrorism, it’s not the Taliban, and it’s certainly not German tanks. It’s not even Russian missiles which President Medvedev has just threatened to deploy on the EU’s border.

The biggest threat to the security and prosperity of Poland would be the collapse of the Euro zone. And I demand of Germany that, for your own sake and for ours, you help it survive and prosper. You know full well that nobody else can do it.

I will probably be first Polish foreign minister in history to say so, but here it is: I fear German power less than I am beginning to fear German inactivity.

You have become Europe’s indispensable nation. You may not fail to lead. Not dominate, but to lead in reform. Provided you include us in decision-making, Poland will support you.

I like various Sikorskiesque personal style-touches, such as this feline one:

The Euro zone crisis is a more dramatic manifestation of the European malaise because

its founders created a system in which each of its members has the capacity to bring it

down, with appalling costs to themselves and the entire neighborhood.

 

The break up would be a crisis of apocalyptic proportions beyond our financial system.

Once the logic of ‘each man for himself’ takes hold, can we really trust everyone to act

communitarian and resist the temptation to settle scores in other areas, such as trade?

 

Would you really bet the house on the proposition that if the Euro zone breaks up, the

single market, the cornerstone of the European Union, will definitely survive? After all,

messy divorces are more frequent than amicable ones. I have heard of a case in

California in which a couple spent $100,000 disputing custody of the family cat.

And he ends on a note which somehow captures Radek Sikorski's own swashbuckling approach to life:

Peoples in our neighborhood – both East and South – look to us for inspiration.

If we get our act together we can become a proper superpower. In an equal partnership with the United States, we can preserve the power, prosperity and leadership of the West.

But we are standing on the edge of a precipice. This is the scariest moment of my ministerial life but therefore also the most sublime. Future generations will judge us by what we do, or fail to do

Sublime! And sublime because it's scary!? What's he doing standing tall in the howling gale, right on the edge of that precipice, ignoring all the Health and Safety signs put up by Brussels?

What a word to describe being a European foreign minister at a time like this.

Bravo.

Talking of speeches, the problem with being a speechwriter is simple. The better you are, the less anyone should know.

Why? Because if you help write a speech for someone and it goes down well, that someone is likely to want to claim all the credit for the fine words and deft delivery. No speaker (as far as I know) has ever ended a well-received speech by thanking the speechwriter.

Although maybe it would be a good idea to start off a significant speech by thanking the speechwriter and disclaiming any responsibility for the content.

As a joke. Of course.

So how best to get round this and build the business? Not easy.

One approach is that taken by Martin Shovel (fellow member of the UK Speechwriters Guild) at Creativity Works, a busy communications consulting business that offers a full and good range of speechwriting and public-speaking coaching skills. If the client is happy to let it be known that help with a successful speech has been given by Martin and his team, that fact is pushed hard on Twitter and otherwise:

@MartinShovel Martin Shovel

America likes the speech we wrote with Clare Gerada! Vital Speech of the Week http://tinyurl.com/76kmk4h & Ragan Health http://tinyurl.com/7kdw4c8

That speech by Clare Gerada (Chair of the UK's Royal College of General Practitioners) has a go at the Coalition's NHS reform proposals and makes it into the US specialist public speaking publication Vital Speeches of the Week:

Of course, it's important that GPs are mindful of resources. We have a responsibility to spend the public's money carefully and wisely. That goes without saying.

But we must never lose sight of the patient as a person, at the heart of our practice.

Patients are not "commodities" to be bought and sold in the health marketplace.

In this brave new cost-driven, competitive, managed-care world, I worry about the effect the language of marketing is having on our clinical relationships.

It's changing the precious relationship between clinician and patient into a crudely costed financial procedure. Turning our patients into aliquots of costed tariffs and us into financial managers of care.

We are already embracing the language of the market when we talk about, for example, care pathways, case management, demand management, productivity, clinical and financial alignment, risk stratification.

All good stirring stuff, if you like that sort of thing. But ultimately (for me) somewhat lacking intellectual substance.

Plus, as careful readers know, I think it unwise to pepper a speech with musty, needy exhortations. It was bad enough when David Miliband gave his dreary speech in Poland in 2009:

The verb need/needs is also used a startling 21 times in the speech. Thus 'we need':

• a compelling positive case for the European Union
• bold strokes
• to deepen cooperation and incentivise reform
• to diversify our energy supplies
• more solidarity between Member States
• to prepare better for energy shortfalls
• to make G3 cooperation – US, China and the EU - work
• to get better at formulating genuine strategic responses to the really difficult policy questions
• to be a key player on the global stage 

This strange repetitive exhortatory language detached from any real analysis of the problems is reminiscent of the communist apparatchik from Party HQ standing on a barren collective farm field and addressing the workers.

He hectors them to even greater efforts to bring about the triumph of socialist productivity. They stare blankly at him, lost in their own thoughts and the disappointed emptiness of their blighted lives.

Clare Gerada's speech offers us a veritable Milibandian 19 different uses of the words need and must in a twenty minute speech. Which, I suggest, is far too many.

Anyway, my own magnificent speechwriting efforts stay unobtrusive in the background, as befits the dignity and seniority of the people whom I now and again help. Which is as it should be. But, then, how to market myself and get more speeches to help write?

Ho. Hum. 

Today family friend Oliver Cromwell has married Tess of the D'Urbervilles. Hurrah!

The best man needed some support with the speech, so I helped out.

Best Man (BM) speeches are among the most important any male may have to give in life. They are even more occasion-specific than other speeches. Some weddings involve scores of guests and the real problem of addressing a large group in a large room. Others are very small, so the words need a quite different style - much more intimate.

Plus the BM is likely to know many of the people at the wedding well, perhaps very well, but others scarcely at all.

One way or the other, pitching the speech at the right tone which is amusing, touching but perhaps above all inclusive/welcoming is not easy, the more so since there are so few opportunities in life to practise this special genre.

What happens? Experience shows that it is all too easy to drift into a series of ill-assorted (and often crudely ribald) badly delivered and structure-free anecdotes mainly about the groom, which have some resonance for a small number of the guests but embarrass or baffle many others.

Anyway, on this occasion the BM was unsure how to proceed and quite unpractised in public speaking. So we eventually hit upon the idea of turning these uncertainties into an advantage, by replacing much of the speech with a PowerPoint presentation featuring all sorts of funny family photos supported by his choice of words and music.

Which sounds fine. The problem as always is doing it well. If you want to move away from a straightforward speech, you need to make sure that any supporting special effects which sound fine as the ideas go to and fro are going to work on the day.

This has to involve a recce of the room concerned and checking/confirming 200% how any IT or sound equipment is going to set up and operated smoothly. And how all the guests are going to be able to watch the production. Nothing worse than pressing the button after the lights go down and ... nothing happens, or various people can't see/hear it and feel left out..

The point?

It doesn't matter what you do as a Best Man, or how you do it with or without special effects. Keep it simple, warm-hearted and gracious and you won't go far wrong.

I nonetheless await the reports from today's fixture with no little interest...

And if anyone wants to hire me to help with a Best Man (or even a funeral) speech, click here.

This appears to be a well-sourced Telegraph piece revealing that the FCO has instructed Embassies to start making contingency plans for a Eurozone crash.

If so, it's startling.

Startling!

Partly because our much-diminished Embassies across the EU - cheerily cut back by Labour and this Coalition government alike to redeploy diplomats to the 'emerging markets' - just won't be able to handle the tens of thousands of consular cases which could come their way.

Can someone working at an EU mission quickly drop me a private line (via the site-link above) to tell me what exactly a contingency plan to deal with thousands of people whose credit-cards have stopped working would look like?

But startling also because the FCO is not warning the British public through its formal Travel Advice to start making similar precautions.

Here is the current FCO Travel Advice for France, which 19,000,000(!) British nationals visit each year. It focuses on the eternal issue of the day in Europe - French food:

• Sea France has suspended all of its cross-channel ferry services. Call Sea France on +44 (0) 845 458 0666 for further information and allow extra time for your journey
• Following an outbreak of botulism, the French Health authorities have issued a warning not to consume any pastes or spreads produced by a French company called La Ruche. The pastes are branded as Les Délices de Marie Claire, Terre de Mistral and Les Secrets d’Anais

Here's the FCO's lugubriously out-of-date ungrammatical Travel Advice for Italy:

·         There is a general transport strike planned in Italy on 17 November. All means of public transport is expected to be affected.  If you are flying to/from Italy contact your airline before you travel. See Safety and Security - Local Travel - Major pre-planned strikes.

Germany has another grammatically challenged entry, but at least has some references to money. Maybe the advice should be to carry lots of counterfeit Euros - soon likely to be worth more than the real ones?!

• Like other large European countries there is a high threat from terrorism in Germany. Attacks could be indiscriminate, including in places frequented by expatriates and foreign travellers. See Safety and Security - Terrorism.
• We are aware of British nationals who have been arrested for possessing counterfeit currency.  We advise against changing currency anywhere other than banks or legitimate Bureaux de Change.

Hmm. Not much in all this on how a few million Brits across Europe might get back to our island fortress if the Eurozone folds overnight and the cash-machines stop working and fuel for cars, planes and cross-channel ferries runs out.

There is a real problem here - any such official warning would trigger panic and make the Eurozone's horrible problems even worse. 

Yet the Telegraph piece archly quotes a "senior Minister" to the effect that a Eurozone collapse is now 'just a matter of time'. Perhaps this IS the consular warning. To lucky Telegraph readers at least.

 

 

 

Croatia is next in line to join the European Union.

But this sort of thing, circulated by the eminent Centre for Research into Post-communist Economies, shows that beneath the surface - or even bang on it - a lot of nasty habits and people and instincts inherited from the communist period and then the ghastly Tudjman era are flourishing.

I am forwarding the CRCE appeal on behalf of H21 to William Hague's office and to senior people in Brussels, urging them to take action.

Come on Croatia. Stop producing this rubbish. And don't bring it into our EU tent. We have enough already. 

A Call for the Release of Croatia’s Political Prisoner - 72 year old Author and Stalwart Anti-Corruption Activist Aleksandar Saša Radović

72 year-old Alksandar Saša Radović (Sasha) - an author and stalwart anti-corruption leader in Croatia was arrested last week just moments after Sasha's name appeared in public as a formal candidate of Hrvatska 21 - Croatia 21 (H21).  The police report given to the press was that Mrs Radovic was present with Sasha when they were arrested on charges of extortion. 

There are major issues involved in this case that require immediate international intervention led by principled leaders of the West:

-  Sasha has been detained at an undisclosed location and denied due process and an attorney for 7 days and counting.

-  Contrary to the police report which claims that Mrs. Radovic was with Sasa when Sasha was arrested, Mrs. Radovic was at their family residence some 60 minutes from where Sasha was arrested.  Mrs Radovic was with her sister and brother-in-law during the period.

-  Due process was denied and lawyers were not appointed or permitted to contact Mr. and Mrs. Radovic.

The arrest of Sasha took place on the day when it became public that he joined the roster of 75 brave citizens as political candidates on the list of Hrvatska 21 - Croatia 21st Century.

In his most recent book, Sasha exposed the outgoing Minister of Interior, Mr. Tomislav Karamarko for political corruption and general Ivan Cermak as a war profiteer.
   
Cermak’s unexplained wealth and evidences of smuggling during the West's arms embargo of the Balkan region have been published in Sasha’s four major books which include the selling of oil and weapons to Serbia, Bosnia and Montenegro while Cermak was employed in Croatia’s military during Croatia’s independence war. 

Today, Cermak resides in a lavish castle with an estimated wealth of 200 million euros - much higher than the wages earned working for the government.  Cermak’s “business endeavors” included a chain of gas retail outlets which was sold in the meantime.  Cermak's companies have been a major media advertiser in Croatia.

The West’s leaders have been silent in spite of the fact that Croatia is a NATO member and a candidate of the European Union.  The West has poured over 1 billion euros of taxpayer funds into Croatia’s “reform process” without any results.

Aleksandar Saša Radović has published over 20 books on corruption in Croatia and much of his work (with documents and evidences) has been presented in the international arena to place a spotlight on high level political corruption including cabinet members of the ruling HDZ including former PM Ivo Sanader and the communist party SDP.

Croatia is a signatory to the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, which guarantees the "freedom to seek, receive and impart information and ideas of all kinds, regardless of frontiers, either orally, in writing or in print, in the form of art, or through any other media."

EU membership criteria emphasize the stability of institutions guaranteeing democracy, the rule of law and human rights.  However, Croatia’s politicians have subverted the rule of law and protection of property rights.  More than 1 million back logged cases are in the court system, some for more than 20 years.

Croatia’s elections are slated for December 4, 2011 with over 550,000 illegal votes not addressed by Croatia’s authorities. Efforts by ruling HDZ and SDP have blocked the verification of the voter list.

Sasha is now a political prisoner of a tyrannical state, a compromised member of NATO with an unreformed intelligence structure dating back to the UDBA (Tito’s communist system) and a tainted candidate nation about to enter the EU.

In an independent initiative, Denis Latin, anchor of Croatia’s state-run television and one of the most respected journalists in Croatia and Southeast Europe has joined well-known public figures in a signed letter calling for the release of Sasha.

Over the last four months, over 20 political party candidates of H21, supporters and volunteers have been harassed, intimidated, lost business contracts and had visits by Croatia's "financial police".

The Adriatic Institute for Public Policy and Hrvatska 21 call for the immediate release of Aleksandar Saša Radović and encourage Western leaders from strong rule of law nations to join this effort in calling for Croatia to uphold the rule of law and establish an independent judiciary.

 

From today's Sun on the poignant story of a very fat woman who was dumped by her fiance for an even fatter one - see the third para:

Amanda Hart, 25, had a whirlwind romance with Matt Kemp, 27, when she met him online after struggling for years to find a lover who would accept her size.

They got engaged and started planning their wedding, but just three months before the big day she found out he was cheating on her with even heavier Michelle Flack, 33.

Michelle has now dumped the bigger woman loving fireman and her and Amanda have become firm friends.

'Appy ending init.