Then find me at @CharlesCrawford and click 'Follow'.

Then run #popleveson through the Search facility and find gazillions of super barresterial jokes linking the Leveson Inquiry (British journalist ethics zzzzzz) and pop songs. All in 140 characters:

Leigh-Anne Perryman‏@laperryman

Mr Buggles, the radio star was found with your DNA on his clothes. Are you still claiming that he was killed by video? #popleveson,

Leaping Badger‏@ol_brock

None of us are particularly fond of Mondays, Mr Geldof. #popleveson

 

Graham Yapp‏@GrahamYapp

#popleveson I put it to you, Mr Jagger, that your double negative was intentionally misleading and you are in fact perfectly satisfied.

 

Charles Crawford‏@CharlesCrawford

Mr McCartney, you assert that "she" came in through the bathroom window. A clumsy attempt to shift the blame on to your editrix? #popleveson

Charles Crawford‏@CharlesCrawford

Mr Lennon, you say that "newspaper taxis appear on the shore, waiting to take you away". A banal attempt to avoid this enquiry?

 

If anyone out there wishes to get in touch with me while I am in Dubai next week to offer me lucrative work or just for a chat, please contact me at charles.crawford@adrgambassadors.com

I was talking to a former senior MI6 man today, as one does. He quoted a witty line on the basic principles of negotiation:

Know what you want - and remember that whatever your bottom line is, there's always another line below that...

It seems that in that part of the world things are very not like here. You can make sexist remarks, but you can't make jokes about gays or men and women having one-night-stands. So my presentations for once will be hugely appreciated.

I did a Webinar on Negotiation Skills with Dubai colleagues the other day. I was asked how I might approach the issue of the Greater and Lesser Tunb islands which Iran seized back in 1971 when the British withdrew, much to the UAE's indignation.

Islands of course are tricky. You're either in control of them, or you're not.  And once you are in control of them, you tend not to want to give control to anyone else. Why should you? They're MINE. See Falkland Islands, Kurile Islands, Cyprus etc.

In such circumstances what is there to negotiate about, directly at least? So the negotiation fragments off into different layers and timescales and maybe other venues/issues. Iran supports that faction in Syria? We'll support the other one.

I much look forward to this visit and seeing a quite different culture. Even if the people of Dubai perhaps are not as imaginative as their Saudi friends at getting around: 

But then the mood ... changed. It started to appeal to a more transatlantic readership, perhaps because the money to keep the site going was coming more from the USA than the UK. And, worse, a perceptible slant towards the sort of writing adored by New York Democrats and progressives/liberals came to the fore. Not that that is all bad. Much of it is still good. The slant is tedious, predictable - there is more than enough of that sort of thing about already.

Take this truly idiotic Browser summary of a piece not from New York but from our own Guardian:

Shocking report from London. Priced out of housing market, some are forced to rent garden sheds. One family pay to live in a walk-in freezer. Landlords happy to cash in. What does this say about free markets, capitalism, society?   

Here is that piece. It describes at some length the fact that in London pressures on housing primarily caused by immigration, illegal or otherwise, are creating all sorts of ad hoc solutions. The journalist has been doing the rounds with some local government officials checking on informal shacks and other improvised or sub-standard dwellings that are appearing profusely:

"We don't know where her toilet effluent is going to," Christine Lyons, the council's planning enforcement team leader, says, peering anxiously to the side of the building.

Converted sheds have become an increasingly mainstream – if illegal – part of the London property market. It's a logical development, given the explosion of property prices throughout the capital, and the huge shortage of supply. As central London becomes more expensive, people are pushed further out and rental prices even in Newham, which is the second most deprived borough in England and Wales, are rising fast.

Landlords are subdividing family homes into smaller and smaller units, haphazardly extending plumbing and electricity connections from the main properties into the garden sheds and garages, which they have no problem in renting out.

Newham's mayor, Sir Robin Wales, is dismayed. "It's big money. You get a few breeze blocks, sling up some crappy old shed in your back garden, and now you're making hundreds and hundreds of pounds a week. It doesn't take long for you to make a lot of money out of it, provided you are prepared to trade in human misery...

And so on. When Tony Blair allowed over a million Poles and other central Europeans to flock to London and the rest of the UK when Poland joined the EU, where did they all go? Now we know, but it's OK:

Planning officials are less concerned about the large numbers of young men, often from eastern Europe, who share rooms and rents, saving money to take home. It is when there are families crowded into unhygienic conditions that they become more agitated...

Shocking!

Lyons is still occasionally shocked by what she sees. "Sometimes you can't believe you are not in a third-world country," she says.

Well, what is a third-world country? A country with lots of people from the 'third world' in it. And when large numbers of such people come to parts of London, those parts of London may well start to look more like the newcomers' places of origin. Why so surprised?

Anyway, my main complaint about the article is not the article, which is fine as far as it goes, ie not far enough to make the obvious point that far too many poor foreigners are now living here illegally and that no conceivable policy solutions exist for this fact, other than to strive a damn sight harder to stop illegal immigration.

Rather it is the Browser summary, as above. The article itself commendably does not mention 'capitalism' or 'free markets'. Yet the Browser makes an explicitly sneering banal #occupy reference to them, as if they had caused the problems described in the article.

Let's nonetheless answer the question posed:

Priced out of housing market, some are forced to rent garden sheds. One family pay to live in a walk-in freezer. Landlords happy to cash in. What does this say about free markets, capitalism, society?  

First, it says that we are not too far off getting a free market in people - that's what illegal immigration (or 'economic migration' as it is progressively known these days) is. Nursery school economics tell us that if more people chase after a more or less fixed supply of goods (here rooms in London) the price of those rooms will go up, and somehow the free market will start to find more rooms. Plus these immigrants don't have much money to pay on rent, so the rooms they get will be cheap and maybe even nasty.

All these things are happening just as basic economic thinking predicts. Indeed, without people converting sheds into informal living spaces, where would these immigrants in fact live?

It is trivially stupid to expect any society to absorb an unending number of new people from beyond its borders without considerable difficulty. The national arrangements in any country are created by the people who have lived there for generations for their own benefit. Housing stocks represent a country's investment in capital according to some sort of long-term rational basis. No-one can plan - or should be expected to plan - for a free-for-all.

In short, the answer to the Browser's snide question is that the article tells us that, as always, the free market and 'capitalism' are simply the mirror in which you see Reality. And whatever the problem here is, they are going to be the main way to solve it.

An honest Browser summary would have been:

Priced out of housing market, some are forced to rent garden sheds. One family pay to live in a walk-in freezer. Landlords happy to cash in. What does this say about Labour's reckless immigration policies aimed at wholesale social engineering of the British population?

But their prissy New York liberal sponsors and readers just might not want to see it all looked at that way.

A banquet of food for thought. But this point about the way Nazis were dealt with after WW2 by the Brits and Americans respectively caught my eye:

If Germans could be influenced strongly in their beliefs during the Nazi period, is there any evidence of the opposite once racial hatred became an official taboo after 1945? We compare the level of anti-Semitism in the different zones of occupation. The former British zone today has by far the least anti-Semitic beliefs, even after controlling for pre-1945 differences. The American zone, on the other hand, has strong levels of support for anti-Jewish views.

Based on a detailed examination of occupation policies, we argue that these differences probably reflect different approaches to de-Nazification. The American authorities ran a highly ambitious and punitive programme which resulted in many incarcerations and convictions, with numerous, low-ranking officials banned and punished. Citizens were confronted with German crimes, forced to visit concentration camps, and attend education films about the Holocaust. There was a considerable backlash, and perceived fairness was low. The Jewish Advisor to the American Military Government concluded in 1948 that “... if the United States Army were to withdraw tomorrow, there would be pogroms on the following day.”

In contrast, the British authorities pursued a limited and pragmatic approach that focused on major perpetrators. Public support was substantial, perceived fairness was higher, and intelligence reports concluded that the population even wanted more done to pursue and punish Nazi officials...

This idea has huge ramifications for social policy and the way we look at it.

The piece suggests that simply going after Nazi Big Fish in post-WW2 Germany was far more effective at changing attitudes and instincts than going after Big and Medium and some Small fish, generally rubbing the Germans' collective nose in the vile crimes done in their name and massly supported directly or indirectly by millions of Germans themselves.

Such a policy of course has a direct cost - it allows plenty of people with dirt on their hands to tip-toe away from their misdeeds, and indeed to start to say or even believe that  the whole problem was nothing to do with them - somehow they all had got carried away or manipulated.

This was the line used by Pope Benedict XVI - himself a youthful Nazi supporter - at Auschwitz in 2006:

Yet on the one key issue, namely responsibility for the whole disaster Auschwitz represented, the Pope seemed to me to fall short:

... a duty before God, for me to come here as the successor of Pope John Paul II and as a son of the German people - a son of that people over which a ring of criminals rose to power by false promises of future greatness and the recovery of the nation’s honour, prominence and prosperity, but also through terror and intimidation, with the result that our people was used and abused as an instrument of their thirst for destruction and power.

This contrives to portray the German people as bamboozled victims, rather than people who in their many millions voted for Hitler and otherwise supported him. Not everyone, for sure. But Germans en masse were not only used and abused. In good part they brought their suffering on themselves, and set in motion untold suffering for countless millions of others.

Pope Benedict might have dealt with this by saying a word about his own connection with the Hitler Youth and the power of temptation, or otherwise addressing each individual's accountability for mass wickedness committed in his/her name. But one way or the other, the formula used here did not, for me, do the trick.

Maybe even the Pope is unable to confess fully and frankly? And perhaps that's the point?

On the other hand, if people have done wrong maybe there is merit in letting them come round to thinking about the issues in a less confrontational fashion, while still punishing the very worst offenders. That arguably diminishes Justice but increases the prospects for longer-term Peace. See war crimes trials for former Yugoslavia - it's much easier to run high-profile punishments (many of them richly deserved) than address reconciliation in a deeper sense.

Which brings us to the present UK approach to most social issues, where the effective emphasis (racism, sexism, homophobia, discrimination, bullying, drunkenness, obesity) trends towards the 'stamping out' or (even worse) 'kicking out' improper behaviur and thoughts.

Put to one side the explicit violent-quasi fascist nature of this sort of discourse (as seen on a poster talking about 'Kicking out Racism' seen on the wall in the Oxford DVLA offices - QED). It carries the implication that anyone thinking certain things has to be punished severely. It is not about persuasion - it is about fear.

If you want to change behaviour and attitudes over the long run, maybe a more subtle approach needs to be used? Or at least be more graceful about the way attitudes in many areas are changing, and stop screeching that anyone still who has not been converted to politically correct behaviour and thought is some sort of extreme lunatic? One for the forthcoming US elections...

Meanwhile here is my more substantive piece over at Commentator on this theme, taking a brisk world tour from Beijing in 1860 as we burned down part of the city via 1960s New York and round to today's Athens and Paris, where if they are not burning down their own cities they may well be doing so soon:

… those seeking new ways to engage the Negro politically should remember that public resources have always been the fuel for low-income urban political organization. If organizers can deliver millions of dollars in cash benefits to the ghetto masses, it seems reasonable to expect that the masses will deliver their loyalties to their benefactors. At least, they have always done so in the past.

Get 'em hooked, on opium or on welfare. Doesn't matter which.

Then you have 'em. Never fails.