Blogoir

Assorted Crawfs made it back to White Hart Lane last night for the FA Cup 6th round replay.

What a lively night it was. Look out for the superb second goal (not that there's much wrong with the third Spurs goal). And the startling efforts of Bolton goalie Adam Bogdan who alone stopped the score from reaching double figures as Tottenham poured down time after time.

Go on. Even if you're no football fan have a treat for a couple of minutes. 

Back in writing business after a few days of running around trying to earn some money.

Here is a piece I have written for the Telegraph Blogs on the moral case for the Syrians doing what it takes to defeat the regime oppressing them:

One of the iconic principles of the Soviet Union still proclaimed by President Putin is the unimaginable sacrifice by the Soviet army and the general population to defend their country from the Nazis during World War Two.

Indeed, any attempt to qualify that heroism and sacrifice (eg by pointing out that the war started because of a dirty deal between Stalin and Hitler at the expense of Poland, and that Soviet losses were far worse than they should have been because Stalin had murdered so many top generals) is furiously denounced by the current Moscow elite. In other words, the results justified the incredible loss of life used to achieve them. The fact that Soviet soldiers died in their tens of thousands attacking Berlin in the final frenzied days of the war is a measure of their country's greatness.

By contrast we are solemnly told by Annan and Evans (and by Moscow and Beijing) that much the best way forward for freedom-loving Syrians is to lay down their arms and start talking to the people brutalising them. Any escalation in their struggle which leads to greater casualties has to be avoided. More people could die! It could be destabilising!

I think Kofi Annan and Gareth Evans are wrong for one specific reason. They appear to put no value on the idea of fighting and dying for freedom as an end in itself.

The Syrian people should sneer at Gareth Evans’ "slim reed". They do have other options. Namely to escalate the conflict come what may, with whatever outside support they can get, deciding that it is better to die for freedom than slink around for a few decades more as slaves.

Most of the Comments swerve off on assorted tangents of denunciation (what about Kosovo? Eh? Eh?), although this one was at least initially witty before it slumped into Islamo-pessimism:

Crawford's articles are normally better than this but, scratch the surface of a 60-something diplomat, and the puerile soixante-huitard shines though.

Utter delusion that the Syrian "rebels" want democracy and comparing them to genuine Czech patriots is insulting. The fact that they have already expelled the Christians from Homs should alert even the diplomatic mind dulled by years of free booze.

If they take over Syria they will butcher everyone they get their hands on then the country will slide even further back in time towards the year zero of the 7th century.

Hey. I'm not 60 yet.

This piece was intended to get (perhaps too obliquely) at the dark question of what sacrifices are 'worth it'. Thus Krakowians have been heard to opine that, all things considered, and balancing Heroism with Wisdom, their fellow Poles in Warsaw might have done better not to rise up against the Nazis just as the Red Army approached. They took stupendous losses and the city was then dynamited. Plus the Soviets then took over anyway. All that destruction. For what?

I mention this because (already knowing the answer) I asked my young taxi-driver in Prague what had happened to Prague in WW2. He said that the Germans had quickly taken it over. I asked him why the Czechs had not fought back. "The border is very close - there was nothing we could do."

But then he said with a big smile: "It's a good thing we didn't fight - all this [pointing to Prague's springtime splendour] would have been destroyed."

He's right.

Fighting for freedom is always expensive.

At moments of moral uncertainty like this we turn to Sir John Sawers, previously HM Ambassador to the United Nations and now head of MI6:

In 1950 the UN Security Council (helped by a Soviet boycott) unanimously condemned the aggression against South Korea by communist North Korea.

Fighting under a UN banner, a US-led force, with 15 other nations including Britain, attempted to roll North Korea back.

We - you - paid a high price.

The Allies lost some 40,000 people in that war, mainly Americans.

Ten times more than in Iraq.

Was it worth it? History says yes.

Our huge, generous investment in freedom for South Korea saved tens of millions of South Koreans from the miserable fate still being suffered by their compatriots north of the DMZ.

Those people have made South Korea a dynamic, sophisticated country.

One of those people is today’s distinguished UN Secretary-General, Ban Ki-moon, who spoke at Harvard earlier this week.

Mr Ban was just nine years old when the Korean War ended. He vividly recalls a childhood of hunger and poverty as South Korea went through war and then slowly recovered.

Today, fifty-five years later, he is at the pinnacle of world diplomacy. A remarkable journey for him – and for his country.

And maybe in Baghdad or Basra or Mosul or Kirkuk there is a nine-year old Iraqi boy, or Iraqi girl, who, yes, has suffered pain and uncertainty in these difficult years.

But who will grow up strong and confident, and in years to come will be Iraq’s first UN Secretary-General.

Success - and failure - do not always come quickly

Here's the link to my latest Telegraph Blog piece on Trust, Sovereignty and Reality:

Let's agree that we need more Trust. How in fact to get it? Can it be "built" or "rebuilt" by clever leaders? Or does it emerge in a mysterious, organic, bottom-up way?

One of Europe's most engaging high-level fixers is Javier Solana. He sees the answer in getting rid of some old-fashioned notions (my emphasis added):

On the European level, legitimacy is essential and – let’s be realistic – won’t be achieved unless and until Europeans overcome certain antiquated ideas about sovereignty… Citizens must have the feeling that the institutions that govern them account for their interests and make them part of the decision-making process, which implies a union based on rules rather than power.

Note the subtle phrasing which tips us over the edge of a slippery slope, away from democracy as hitherto developed. We need to become comfortably numb, "feeling" that the institutions governing us account for our interests and make us part of the decision-making process. Who cares whether in fact those institutions do just that?

Read the Comments. This one is my very favourite:

barryobarma

Yesterday 03:58 AM

Welcome back Charles, the Rolls Royce of DT Bloggers

stevex

03/16/2012 06:53 PM

Maybe this is putting things the wrong way around. People "trust" when there are institutions backing them up - when, if their trust is misplaced, there is some mechanism for redress. Even if it proves illusory as in real life it may, the idea that there is a court of last resort gives people the opportunity to trust. It is is what is missing in most of the world in political and economic spheres, and what creates the opportunities for corruption so visible in some societies.

Of course the Europhiles would like this to operate at a supranational level, and there are some instances elsewhere where it really does happen. The WTO mostly seems to work, even if it can takes generations to work through, as it sometimes does: Australia's reluctance to allow New Zealand apples into its market is a case in point. But generally, supranational forms of redress are window dressing for power politics, or the politics of powerlessness vide the General Assembly of the UN. In Europe people don't trust EU institutions because they are untrustworthy; the evidence that these institutions might right wrongs is weak, but there is plenty of evidence that they actually do harm, and this is not superficial. The "feelings" of people that the EU is untrustworthy may be inaccurate in a root-and-branch sense but the stench has nonetheless over time become nauseating for a great number of people.

Here is Francis Fukuyama giving gracious words about James Q Wilson, a towering US political scientist who recently died.

I was pleased to see him take up some of the many ideas which featured in one of Professor Wilson's many masterworks, Bureaucracy, which I urge you to buy if you are at all interested in government as a phenomenon in itself:

I bought and indeed read this book when I had my Harvard sabbatical back in 1998/99. It has one sharp insight after another on why civil servants in modern bureaucracies work and think the way they do. He describes carefully why such factors as the way public sector budgets work necessarily circumscribes innovation and flexibility:

First, public sector agencies are not allowed to retain earnings, and therefore have no incentive towards economizing costs. A public agency that ends the fiscal year with a surplus because of efficient operations cannot distribute those savings to its managers and employees as incentives, but rather is likely to see its budget cut for the next year on the grounds that it was allocated too much in the first place. This explains the rush to push money out the door at the end of the fiscal year whether the spending is needed or not, and why bureaucracies are so often inefficient...

Good grief. Been there, seen that.

The chattering classes and Guardianistas in particular who burble on about the need for 'more state' never seem to have the faintest idea about the real limits what the state can ever do, which come from its very nature. These ideas were picked up in the evidence I gave to the House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee when it looked at reforming the FCO:

Some of today's excessive process was invented in the previous Thatcher/Major Conservative era, with the ostensibly laudable idea of making government policy processes more "businesslike". But there was (and is) no consensus on what "business" foreign policy actually is. In fact it is a complex mix:

(a) part consultancy (top-level advice on what is happening and how to respond);

(b) part agriculture—planting seeds of goodwill and influence, knowing that some will grow into strong plants in years to come but others will not;

(c) part insurance—developing relations with senior foreign people patiently and deftly when there are no problems in sight, so that when problems occur there is a chance of having essential allies;

(d) part fire-fighting (making an impact in difficult/dangerous situations far from home); and

(e) part service provider (consular/visa work).

13. This is a unique "business" indeed. Because much solid background diplomatic work needed to get results is in the insurance sector and shows no "measurable" outcome, it tends to be devalued in Treasury calculations

In James Q Wilson we had a conservative-inclined analyst who looked at these things with a searching, open mind. Perhaps above all because he understood what was going on in government in a deeper sense he understood what might work (or not) in trying to make things better:

Wilson understood the critical importance of organizational culture as the source of good bureaucratic performance, as opposed to the shifting around of boxes on an org chart that often passes for reform (e.g., the two big reforms of the 2000s, the creation of the Department of Homeland Security and the reorganization of the intelligence community).

Now I see that in one of the periodic rounds of 'centralisation' which follow periodic rounds of 'decentralisation' almost all UK government training work is to be channelled through one provider.

Centralisation in this sense has (in theory and maybe in practice) real advantages - some sort of common standards, reduced overheads and process duplication, less scope for some firms 'capturing' a sector, greater transparency in what is required and by whom.

But it also has disadvantages, namely one-size-fits-all and much reduced nimbleness/flexibility - why in fact should the v small and specialised FCO (say) have to be put in a training process strait-jacket with huge Whitehall departments? Yes they have some generic training needs in common. But a lot arguably should be better done separately.

What is 'efficient' for taxpayers in this context? Not an issue of Right v Left (even if some might present it that way) - simply a question of fleeting fashion?

James Q Wilson will be watching all this from a very high place, and with a rueful smile.

Stop what you're doing.

Read this, a powerful argument by Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry for spreading risk intelligently by turning banks into partnerships and pursuing massive (by which he means MASSIVE) deregulation at the same time. One smart, challenging paragraph after another:

Let's work through the main objections to the partnership model:

It's antiquated. You say potato, I say potato. You say antiquated, I say resilient. The partnership model dominated the world of finance up until the 20th century. It financed the Age of Exploration and the Industrial Revolution. That ain't too shabby. It's like your Grandma's old clunker: it doesn't have air conditioning or power steering, but by God, it'll get you from point A to point B whether rain, sleet or snow.

What's more, it's worth noting that Swiss banking is still dominated by the partnership model. Swiss private banks boast on their website that your money's safe with them because their own money is on the line with yours. Not all of them: there's UBS which tried to go the Goldman route and blew itself up in the process. The partnerships, meanwhile, did much better through the crisis. There are many words people use to describe Swiss finance, but "antiquated" is never one of them.

Or this:

I think it was The Epicurean Dealmaker who said on Twitter that the mandatory disclosure/warnings for anyone who signs a financial document should be a slap in the face and the phrase "CAVEAT EMPTOR!" shouted into their face drill instructor-style.

We don't want retail investors to have trust into the system. Finance is like fire: it can be very useful, but it burns and can be very destructive. The last thing we want to do is give people the impression that we can somehow regulate away the bad consequences of fire.

Smart, intelligent, radical - and above all it puts responsibility on people, not on rules. Therefore highly unlikely to happen - too many people want to have rules as an end in themselves. But do also read the dynamic comment chain, with people arguing to and fro about these ideas from all sorts of points of view, many of them seemingly well informed.

By the way, when you've finished all that, swing by Epicurean Dealmaker's fascinating piece on why books are quite different from e-readers:

His entire argument seems to boil down to the assertion that there is some sort of “pure text” at the base of every work of literature—words in inviolate sequence, to use his coinage—and that e-readers, by collapsing and standardizing our access to them, somehow make our experience of literature purer and more authentic. But this is just bullshit.

The experience of literature—and reading in general—is always and everywhere a solitary interpretative act on behalf of and by the reader. Readers read literature in time, in space, and through some sort of medium. Time spent reading—pace, duration, intervals when one puts down the book—directly and ineluctably affects the reader’s experience of the text...

... Font, line leading, margins, and even pagination affect a reader’s experience of a text, often subconsciously. No-one who has ever compared a cheap, cramped, badly-typeset version of a novel to a well-designed, spaciously laid out one can help but notice the difference. And noticing the difference in and of itself alters the experience of the work. Joyce may be as much Joyce in Baskerville as in Times New Roman, but I dare you to find him the same author in twelve point Comic Sans.

Isn't the Internet wonderful?

Rummaging around on YouTube looking at some videos of Lionel Messi's staggering football genius, I found this one: 

Never mind the superlative goal. Listen for the superlative simile, which is even better.

Sharp!

Mind you, there seems to be a bit of a theme here: 

One of the many best things about writing this blog is that people I hardly know or may not have ever met get in touch in all sorts of ways.

Thus. Remember my piece a while back about the startling and startlingly bad film Battle of Warsaw 1920? A reader today got in touch about it and left an interesting comment:

I've also studied this period from the perspective of the Russian Civil War, and it even gets to the stage of being frustrating how many missed opportunities there were for a White/Nationalist/Allied/Anti-Communist victory against the Reds. The Army of Southern Russia under Denikin is a very interesting point - he stated his aim to be that of defeating the Reds and then reestablishing the Russian Empire, which was a key motivation for the Poles *not* to support him and secure a seperate peace. If some of the major White Russian leaders had been willing to accept the independence of nations such as Poland then a much stronger alliance could have been achieved.

Of course, the question in the event of a White Victory and restoration of at least part of Imperial Russia would be what it would have meant for World War 2? Would that conflict have occurred, and how would it have played out given a vastly changed situation and ideology in Eastern Europe?

Always a good question. What if?

Then this evening I heard from F Peter Phillips at the New York Law School who runs an excellent blog on Business Conflict. We met at the International Bar Association gathering in Vancouver in October 2010. I wrote about my presentation here:

The problem here and in many other negotiating contexts is that people are impatient: time is seen as scarce. Better a quick 'good enough' outcome than a more patient, better one

This is part of a wider key issue in all negotiation. Is it better to create complexity for your opponent, to give pause for thought, to generate a sense of uncertainty as to what the best outcome is? That may suggest using more time.

Or rather should you aim to create simplicity - 'let's face it, it all boils down to this' - to strip away detail and instead try to focus both sides on what you think 'really' matters? Perhaps quicker?

It turns out that there are all sorts of processes going on inside different parts of our brains emphasising varying combinations of logical and emotional responses to what we see and hear. Clever negotiators can use that scientific information to evoke different responses in the opposite side.

Good stuff. At least some of the audience of lawyers from around the world who usually deal in commercial work seemed impressed by the breadth and insight of the team presentation...

It turns out that Mr Phillips himself wrote about our presentation on his blog, describing in no little detail the ideas we put forward about negotiating with pirates - and the many policy and practical and legal issues which such situations generate:

A sobering — even frightening — panel at the IBA’s Vancouver conference addressed negotiation in volatile, politically charged and dangerous circumstances — pushing the boundaries of mediation past the purely commercial, into a world where lives may depend on the skill and success of the negotiator or mediator.

Maritime pirates off Somalia, for example, do not rationally seek and underlying political or even monetary interests, and their behavior is not deliberative. Charles Crawford CMG reflected on his years of service in the UK Foreign Office and concluded that, in Somalia and in the Balkans, a terrorist’s irrationality is his strength. It’s like a bankrupt buying a suite at the Plaza, or a dog chasing a car: the pirate, the kidnapper and the terrorist seek to introduce chaos into order...

Read the whole thing, especially the "clarity and outlandishness" of the analysis given by top UK hostage negotiator Duncan Jarrett.

Readers! Always a pleasure to hear from most of you.

Instapundit regularly serves up this wonderful quote from Robert Heinlein, so I share it with you:

Throughout history, poverty is the normal condition of man. Advances which permit this norm to be exceeded — here and there, now and then — are the work of an extremely small minority, frequently despised, often condemned, and almost always opposed by all right-thinking people. Whenever this tiny minority is kept from creating, or (as sometimes happens) is driven out of a society, the people then slip back into abject poverty.

This is known as “bad luck.”

Next time you hear someone droning on about the 'causes of poverty', hoot out: "What are the causes of wealth?"

The point being (today) that Greece is being sent back by the big Eurozone powers and their banks to a significantly poorer way of life for many years to come. Is that unfair or unkind?

Not really. Greeks in their mainly dry, hot unproductive country not far from the Sahara desert are entitled to as much wealth as they produce, and no more. They also are entitled to borrow money to help them invest wisely to create wealth. But they have to pay back their loans. If they mess up, this hurts. They may well get poorer and trend back towards living like cavepersons. That's the way it should be. It sets all the right incentives.

Yes, they got trapped in a bad situation in good part because of German and other policies and the naive über-exuberance which led to setting up the Eurozone. But others were smarter and managed to avoid that absurd situation. All Greeks are free to migrate to somewhere else in the EU to compete for jobs at higher wages than are available in Greece. The Poles set Europe a fine example here - they don't expect to be fed by anyone except themselves.

Plus we need to get away from the idea that somehow all Europeans are 'entitled' to some sort of civilised minimum living standard. They're not. There is no reason why Europeans should be better off than anyone else on Earth if they are not being productive and efficient. Smart money is pouring into other parts of the world because Europe is not seen as productive or efficient.

So Europe gets poorer. That's it.

Just spotted that funny things have been happening to my attempts to make blog postings - my Syria piece appeared three times. Two now deleted.

Apologies. It all stems from trying to get things here posted nicely AND sent to Twitter at the same time.

#fail

Will Hutton's recent misleading piece in the Guardian about the decline in language learning in UK skills needed some serious demolition.

And here it is, by me over at Telegraphs Blogs:

... in my experience both at school and later at the late FCO Language Centre, a big part of the problem with language learning is language teachers. Most people who go into teaching language are obsessive on the detail and fine points. They tend to be poor if not hopeless at explaining the way the language works as a whole, and where intelligent guesses and smart short-cuts might be made.

This was brought home to me by a distinguished retired teacher near Stellenbosch who taught me Afrikaans when I was posted by the FCO to South Africa. His main love was Latin. He told me how he had taken a boy who hated Latin from next to nothing to almost degree standard with a year of private tuition. His method? To look at the whole of Latin grammar – great sheets of verb and case endings – for a first tough two weeks to get the gloomy boy to see the grammar in terms of simple patterns, then to plunge straight into Caesar and other interesting texts.

By contrast the typical British school treats learning a language as a trite linear process. Start with Nominative, then move to Accusative and Vocative. After a year or so of fatuous sentences no one would want to say, tackle Dative and Ablative. X-rated Subjunctive is for serious students only.

Even the former FCO Language Centre – yes, also abolished by Labour(!) – fell into this trap. Teachers of Russian were snootily dismissive of anyone who had learned another Slav language, refusing to see any overlap and congruity. Instead an institution like the FCO should be tackling "Slav", basing teaching squarely on the several thousand root words and general grammar construction common to most Slav languages. With that mastered, budding diplomats can easily switch to and between Russian, Polish or whatever. William Hague has inherited the diplomatic rubble left to him by those long years of Labour incompetence and is trying to reboot the FCO's language learning capabilities. I have volunteered my services.

But, you ask, is any of this necessary anyway? Aren't we fast moving to world in which Google instantly translates any page pretty well from its original language to almost any other? Isn't it just a matter of time before Apple produce a Siri-like way of simultaneously translating speech from one language to another? This won't be 100% accurate, but then almost no one who learns a foreign language ends up 100% accurate anyway. Surely accelerating technological cleverness is the main driver for not bothering to learn a foreign language?

Plus, native English speakers have one extraordinary advantage. They speak English. The other day I was in Paris as a judge for the latest ICC Mediation Competition. Smart law students from some 70 universities across the planet came compete as negotiators. The competition was run in English. And impressive it was to watch young, tough Chinese students in action.

English is a bit like the QWERTY keyboard. You wouldn't necessarily choose it as the main common international language of choice, but once it has established itself it has a decisive, ever-compounding advantage. Every day around the world tens of thousands of young people start absorbing or learning English. It's easy to get started. You can even make up words and still be comprehensible, even witty: "Hey baby! You me go coffeeshoppingwards?” Chinese (say) is on a totally different order of complexity – and inaccessibility.

I have written about foreign language teaching previously. See eg here. And here.

From one who has sloshing around among his diminishing brain cells lumps of Serbia/Croatian, Polish, Russian, French, German, Afrikaans, Spanish and (best of all) Latin.

Remember my piece almost a year ago describing smart diplomatic options for Doing Something about Libya?

Here it is, and none the worse for wear:

You draw a noisy stick across the bars of the FCO/State Department cage to rouse the bemused and sulky inmates, and demand ideas for action. What might they serve up?

"Basically", they'll primly reply, "You politicians have to accept that there are subtle/difficult trade-offs and hard choices to be made between Breadth v Depth, Fast v Slow, Big Impact v Less Impact, More Certain Impact v Less Certain Impact, Risky v Not-so-Risky, Legal v Not-so-Legal, and so on."

"Oh, and did we mention Cheap v Expensive?"

And having got that off their clever chests, if they are smart they'll produce something like the following Options Menu...

I grouped options under different headings:

-  Indirectly Limiting the Regime's Power

-  Directly Limiting the Regime's Power

-  Preparing for New Government

Does anything new spring to mind in connection with Syria, based upon our vivid experiences in toppling Gaddafi?

The key thing in diplomacy as in life is to pick the right tool for the job.

Yes, to a glib outsider Libya and Syria look much the same. Both full of Arabs, both led by wicked dictators who have lingered on for far too long, both held back by lunatic national policies. Where's the differences?

Well, scale for one thing. Syria has some 21.5 million people, just one down from Australia at 53rd place in the list of countries by population. Libya by contrast has just over six million - at 103rd place. So the physical and psychological impact of the Gaddafi regime has been very different. With only six million people everything happening in a country becomes a lot more 'personal'. Pluralism and politics mean very different things.

But also look at economics. Libya is close to the top 50 countries in the world going by GDP per cap - Syria is below 100th place, a dismal record of Baath Party incompetence. Syria has some oil, but other noting than cheap plastic washing-up basins sold in Serbia I have never seen any product made there.

Perhaps above all, Syria has some friends. And important near neighbours (Turkey, Iraq, Jordan, Israel, Lebanon). For decades Gaddafi actively annoyed almost every capital on Earth in one way or the other. And apart from oil, who really cares about all that North African desert? Damascus by contrast has run a pretty tight national socialist ship, wooing/thwarting East and West alike as and when necessary due to its proximity to Israel and that knot of Middle East problems. During the Cold War Syria played an important role as a friendly or even close partner for Moscow, the USSR being muscled out of Egypt by the USA's spending power and moving away from its early positive relationship with Israel.

This is why the Russians are still busy in Syria, including by vetoing UNSC resolutions. It gives them diplomatic market share in that turbulent region. Some say very busy:

According to Le Figaro on Tuesday, Russian military “advisors” are “omnipresent” in Syria. Besides reportedly sending S-300 anti-air missile systems to Damascus and agreeing to deliver a new batch of military aircraft, the Russians this week celebrated the reopening of a Cold War-era intelligence listening post on Mount Qassioun, the summit that dominates Damascus from the northwest.  The Russians appear increasingly dug in.

Russian advisors are also laboring to reorganise the Baath Party and arrange talks with members of the Syrian resistance.  They are making their own contacts with Arab and Islamic organisations, seeking to dilute the solidarity of the West with Arab leaders on the Syrian problem. 

To any normal non-Russian person the Russian position is beyond cynical. Every senior Russian diplomat mouthing sentiments which in effect of not in substance give succour to the revolting Assad regime has his/her job (OK, almost 100% his) because the West actively supported democratic transformation in the USSR. Moscow's lack of elementary human solidarity with the Syrian resistance/opposition is chilling.

Yet Russia is in it for Russia, not for anyone or anything else. Moscow knows that one of the key lessons of the fall of Gaddafi is that however much the 'West' supports the Arab Spring opposition, the default popular Arab instinct these days is to want to be as un-Western as possible.

So even if Assad falls and a new government ostentatiously ejects the Russians from their naval base and fancy listening posts, the Russians will soon be comfortable again sidling up to the new management and whispering anti-Western blandishments in their willing ears.

Likewise because Russia is in with the current regime it can have some sort of real role talking to in-country opposition tendencies about a negotiated end to the crisis. This is exactly what the UK did in apartheid South Africa, to very good effect. The very fact that Mrs Thatcher stood firm at the UN against sanctions made us look tough - and therefore more credible - to all sides in the drama.

So where does that leave the West? In a weak but not hopeless position. What tools work here? Many of the ideas listed in the Libya piece linked above look OK (enough) for Syria.

The unhappy Syrian masses surely can go only so far without outside military support. The regime's firepower and ruthlessness are pronounced, and the Russia/China blocking of the UN Resolution served to leave the active anti-regime elements feeling let down by 'world opinion'. Yet plenty can be done secretly to help 'train and equip' anti-Assad forces. I'd also be rummaging around to find ways to get secret messages to those hovering on the edge of the Assad circle encouraging them to hold back - in their own interests: Nothing like finding a message from MI6 pushed under the front door during the night to give one cause to reflect.

Sensible governments also should start working on a powerful offshore programme of Preparing for a New Government - drafting new laws and new constitutional changes for a post-Assad government, working with smart Syrians in exile, helping train potential judges and senior policy experts in the areas needed to make Syria develop well under civilised management. Sensible Arab countries' experts and other international transition experts (eg from Poland which knows a few things about Syria from Cold War days) could join this effort to make it substantively balanced and not explicitly 'Western'.

That sort of programme has three big advantages. First, it's needed anyway. Second, it offers an intellectually attractive rival to self-serving and parsimonious Russian offerings in the general 'reform' area. And third, it serves to send an encouraging signal to Syrians (and to Assad) that we are preparing hard for a new era.

Finally, make it a key policy goal that a New Syria opens all police and secret police archives, so that the extent of Soviet/Russian (and other foreign) penetration can be exposed once and for all. That is important as a goal in itself: these archives otherwise can end up being a disruptive source of poisonous politics and blackmail. Plus it sends Moscow and signal that inevitable future transparency could well end up embarrassing the Russians too, so they might like to proceed now in a measured way.

This one will get much worse before it gets better. As things stand now, the Russians for a change have some non-trivial diplomatic momentum and a chance to wield effective influence. Will they manage to use this to get some positive results, if only for themselves?

In the short term, perhaps. In the longer run the Assad regime will wobble then crash under the weight of opposition from massed Syrians fighting local tyranny with Western and wider Arab support. And this phase of crafty Russian diplomacy will crash with it.

Here is my piece over at Commentator on Drone Warfare, beginning with exploding the tragic George Monbiot and proceeding thusly:

Not that long ago Europe’s parents and grandparents were being blown to bits in their tens of thousands by bombs simply dropped from planes in the general direction of the target. The sheer precision of modern weapons has saved countless more innocent lives caught up in armed conflict than, alas, still get taken.

One perverse result of this development is to give new life to Stalin’s reputed infamous observation that “the death of one man is a tragedy, the death of millions is a statistic”. Precisely because so few people are now killed in modern warfare, the numbers of those who die shrink to the point where individual deaths of unarmed civilians can be ‘personalised’, and attacks on specific military targets start to look more like ‘assassinations’ or common law murder than war. At what point can (or should) we start to think about war and the legal parameters of it completely differently?

...

The Guardianistas’ Monbiotish pronouncements on human solidarity and existential Gaian interconnectedness in, for example, the ‘climate change’ or development aid contexts seem to evaporate when it comes to defence questions. Yet the issues are exactly the same.

Just as the planet can be seen as a single organism worthy of collective respect, so too can the technical infrastructure which supports human life these days. No country in the world can survive in any meaningful sense without some reliance on the networks of real-life equipment (power-generators, communications cables, data storage computers) by which things get done and new inventions happen. Who protects those facilities?

Classic international law tells us that, in principle, it is for each state to protect those facilities sited on its own territory. But what if a state is too weak to do that, and/or allows terrorists and sophisticated criminals to use its territory as a base for plotting attacks on key installations in other countries?

If a country and its citizens want to enjoy the manifold benefits of belonging the modern global networked space, do they in turn have to accept an implicit obligation to take responsibility for defending those networks pro-actively and vigorously against those who, for whatever reason, want to wreck it? And if they can’t or won’t take the action needed to deal with such people, can they complain if other powers acting under a new version of the doctrine of collective self-defence step in to do that job instead?

Interventions need not be anything so crass as invading with huge numbers of soldiers. Rather the best available tools can be found to neutralise these threats from afar, including swarms of hi-tech drones that identify an enemy, watch the enemy’s movements to minimise the risks of collateral injuries – and pounce.

That sort of remote-controlled intervention in principle offers the most moral, controlled, restrained and proportionate expression of legitimate military self-defence the human race has ever seen. Which, of course, does not make it perfect or fool-proof. Or wise.

Several good comments - Commentator attracts a more, shall we say, thoughtful class of commenter than Daily Telegraph blogs.

The other day we had the pleasure of meeting senior colleagues at Edelman London, part of the global team who prepare the annual Edelman Trust Barometer. The online survey aims explicitly at educated people round the world who follow current affairs.

This year's survey concluded that trust in governments had suffered a sharp erosion in the past year, a finding that is both unsurprising and (as far as it goes) welcome. Yet it also suggested (perversely) that people wanted more government action in the regulatory field. Here's a snapshot of the results as recorded by the BBC.

Trust in government stayed high in several countries including China (perhaps because people there 'trust' the authorities to watch the replies in online surveys like this one?) yet in China trust in NGOs had leaped - NGOs there seen as an emerging force for alternative views?

Trust in business had also declined. Not surprisingly perhaps, given what is going on.

Such surveys are more interesting and indicative than strictly scientific. Yet this one coincides with what we might expect. Basically, as people round the world get access to new cheap IT, the emerging energy of networks is disrupting the established power and effectiveness (and legitimacy) of hierarchies. The rate at which government is unable to cope is accelerating: new laws and policies can be out of date or rendered irrelevant before they are promulgated.

Plus the Tower of Babelisation represented by 'social media' makes it all worse - facts, rumours and complaints all appear and circulate at startling speed, creating strange echo chambers in which truth, sense or nonsense alike are amplified to a meaningless crescendo. Governments are unnerved by this clamour and start to look for instant results. See the latest shameful row over RBS bonuses in the UK, where the government seem to have bowed to 'public opinion' and pressed a private citizen not to enjoy the bonus he is entitled to under his contract.

People in all countries sense this confusion and look to other ways to get things done, while hankering after greater certainty or order which (they still think) only government can provide. Examples in all directions: mainly incoherent, such as the creepy collectivist demands of assorted 'Occupy' tendencies.

One of the ideas which the survey throws up is the proposition that we need to move away from (rigid) Rules towards (more flexible) Principles or Standards. But how?

Look at the Eurozone drama unfolding once again today, as I type. The EU leaders are scrambling to come up with even more rules, in the shape of a brand new treaty which is intended to impose strict requirements on errant member states. Yet we all know that the new rules are unlikely to be enforceable, and new standards are unlikely to be respected when things get difficult. No-one in power dares suggest that the EU structure as currently configured is itself the main problem. Instead they press their leaking euro-canoe on towards the deeper faster rapids, proclaiming that that is the only sensible thing to do.

Trust in fact is what is wrong with the Eurozone. The Germans conclude that (say) the Greek government can not be trusted to do what is right and so must give way to EU-imposed technocrats. The Greeks (not unreasonably) think that they'll get stiffed by such a procedure which is designed to prop up German, French and other over-stretched banks.

Meanwhile the world peruses this unseemly flailing around and concludes that a bickering and demographically declining Europe can not wholly be trusted to repay money it has borrowed, hence imposes higher interest rates to help cover the risk.

Trust, in short, is simply another way of looking at Confidence. And as the Edelman 2012 survey suggests, it is unsurprising that global popular confidence in 'government' is declining - but not easy to work out what sensibly might be done about it.

Do any long-standing readers remember this?

Here is my own Grand Unifying Theory of Politics.

The core question of politics and economics is Trust. More specifically, under what circumstances can and should one trust strangers?

The greater the ambient level of trust in any given social space, the easier it is to do things quickly and well. People who scarcely know each other or who have never even met can strike sophisticated deals, knowing (a) that other partners are likely to be reliable, and (b) that if things go wrong the local state institutions will honestly help sort out the problem.

Without Trust of this sort, personal and organizational horizons shrink. Extended family networks and associated corruption thrive as the best way of dealing with the trust problem.

Or one trusts primarily members of one's own group/clan/religion/community. And assumes that members of other groups/clans/religions/communities are doing the same, so they are not to be trusted too far since their primary loyalty (like one's own) is not to a fair, neutral process.

All this is massively obvious across the former Yugoslavia space. Political leaders must represent 'their' national communities first and foremost if they are to get elected; voters distrust other communities and make a mainly ethnic/national choice as a form of political fire insurance.

Even in the UK where there is no serious complaint about the intrinsic fairness of the legal system and Trust is at civilizationally high levels, many Scots want a different political structure, viz some sort of independence from England. Likewise Quebec, Kurds, Chechens and countless other examples. The Israeli/Palestinian problem seems capable of being settled only on an ethno-national basis.

Thus the so-called 'nation-state' turns out to be a sophisticated device for enabling trust to operate, often at much higher levels of population. This has created conditions for the surge of economic growth and creativity seen around much of the globe over the past couple of centuries. Greater attention to this fundamental trust issue would pay huge dividends in the international development industry. 

Our success here in Europe (and the ruinous experience of the two World Wars where certain national ambitions ran amok ) has brought us to think that there is a new 'higher' stage of development.

The European Union is a unique example of an attempt to create a wider context of trust at a supra-national level. But it too risks making a fundamental blunder by trying to insist on, or sneakily nudge people towards, a new 'European' uber-identity which supersedes supposedly drearily parochial 'national' identities... 

True then. Even truer today.

Here is my new Daily Telegraph blog piece comparing the problems of the Eurozone with the fates of the USSR and former Yugoslavia.

In those two cases (but for very different reasons) the Centre had became the problem and duly crashed, whereas in the case of the Eurozone the majority of EU states are struggling to hold the Centre (ie Eurozone) together, even at stunning cost.

This one even has added Literature:

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

You know the sinking feeling when you hear some precious moments of music from Mozart or Shostakovich used to support a TV ad or, horror of horrors, served up in a lift as "background music". Beauty has been melted down, turned into a trinket of cliché.

This has happened to the famous poem The Second Coming by W B Yeats. So vivid is the imagery and somehow so suited to our dismal times, his great lines pop up all over the place and start to sound trite.

But you have to applaud Mr Yeats’s prescience in sharing with us his poetic yet trenchant thoughts on the eurozone, and in particular the idea that “the centre cannot hold". Indeed, some people are now wondering whether the eurozone will go the same way as the Soviet Union or even the former Yugoslavia, and abruptly disintegrate...

... The problem is that keeping the Centre going also incurs unfathomable costs. EU capitals squabble furiously as they try to distribute these costs away from themselves and on to all the others. The world's markets observe this unseemly spectacle and conclude that they might be wise to call for higher interest rates to park their money in such a neurotic economic space.

No one can tell how this drama will play itself out. It's all very well the eurozone's leaders demanding that the EU Centre be held at almost any cost. Those costs are being dumped on European taxpayers who, sooner or later, are likely to insist that enough is enough. Then what?

While you’re mulling over that question, read this scarifying account of Greece’s looming deadlines. Then run out to buy tinned food.

What rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Brussels to be born?

Note the post-modern irony (mis)use of the word scarifying.

In due course I'll need to share thoughts on the lessons of the break-up of the USSR for Scottish independence (or not).

In the meantime, I need to recover form two hours of blather from a suave, persistent but ultimately unsuccessful solar panels salesman.

As readers know, assorted Crawfs went to a Turkish resort for a short holiday last year. The signs of feverish economic activity were there to be seen on the way from the airport - all sorts of buildings and other structures popping up in a madcap way.

Turkey is booming! Or is it?

I have not linked to the ever-gloomy Spengler for a while, but here he is with some unnerving graphs and accompanying analysis indicating that Turkey too has borrowed too much, too unwisely:

Erdogan has the weirdest economic views of any serving head of government. He justified the credit bubble on religious grounds, pledging repeatedly to cut the "real" interest rate (the cost of interest minus the inflation rate) to zero.

"We aim to cut the real interest rate in the long run, so people will increase their incomes through working, not through interest," he said last April. "Eventually we aim to equalize the interest rate and inflation rate."

Erdoğan believes that this would fulfill the Islamic injunction against lending for interest; if the real interest rate is zero, he seems to think, the sharia ban on interest is fulfilled de facto. In order words, Turkey provided nearly free money to bank customers. Erdogan's program set in motion a series of perverse effects. One is a sharp fall in the exchange rate...

... The result is a vicious cycle: excess credit creation weakens the currency, forcing the central bank to put up interest rates; higher interest rates push up the cost of debt service for Turkish borrowers; Turkish banks lend more money to their customers to finance the higher interest costs, so that credit keeps expanding and the currency keeps weakening.

Turkish banks continue to increase lending at a 40% annual rate, but most of the new lending will finance interest payments on the old loans.
Fine. Then what?

.

So, the same old story. Political leaders believing they can defy reality and gravity, combining with banks keen to cash in. Result? A fast emerging mess.

The notable feature of the apparently looming Turkish mess - as Spengler points out - is that the booming 'Turkish model' (ie a dynamic, modernising economy with strong Muslim features) was hailed for a while as the best outcome of the Arab Spring tendency. What if that model flops too? 

Spengler's view of what this means:

Now I predict that Turkey's economic crisis will undermine the stability of the Turkish state as well, leaving the Muslim world without a single enclave of stability from the Libyan-Algerian border to China's Xinjiang province...

Here at Commentator are my vivid thoughts on the way The Rules drive out common sense discretion in public services in general, and at Leeds Crown Court in particular:

Stop right there, Mr Ambassador! What would happen if the Embassy in Warsaw went out of its way at a senior level to help this one hapless citizen? That would set a precedent for the whole network -- word would get around that one person in Poland had had a lot of active support from the Embassy and the Ambassador personally, and everyone else would expect the same! Worse, it could even be a breach of their Human Rights if they did not get it!

... So there it is. After years if not decades of Citizen's Charters and all sorts of official Mission Statements, Objectives, Targets and goodness knows what other noisily proclaimed expensive initiatives intended to make public servants helpful and responsive to the public, this forlorn group of public servants were bent on driving a few taxpayers and citizens out into a howling rainstorm for no reason other than the fact that The Rules appeared to require it.

The point?

The standardisation of public service needed to deliver what, as far as possible, counts as equality of treatment for all can be achieved only by deliberately excluding competition and any serious incentives to improve services.

Those people at any level of public service finding a clear case for common sense and discretion which somehow goes against The Rules risk getting into trouble (or think they do).

And in such an uncompetitive, neurotic context The Rules breed like crazy, as we see in English education where the state's instructions to schools now run into hundreds of pages and have catastrophic results.

Outcomes deteriorate. Dumbed down stupidity and officiousness result. Confidence in the state erodes. 

But as the Leeds episode shows, the public can fight back. When confronted with an obviously insane decision, politely insist that those concerned use their discretion or demand to see where The Rules say that no such discretion exists.

The officials concerned are visibly rattled by the thought that maybe, just maybe, The Rules in fact allow them to think.

Civil servants! If you have any examples of this working against good practice, just send them in. Key thing: do you think your hierarchy will support you if you do the smart thing, even if it goes against established procedure?

One of the themes of this website is how our institutions and beliefs of all shapes and sizes are struggling to cope with the way new technology creates complexity at ever-soaring rates.

In other words, the faster our machines the faster they can do things and generate information, which in turn allows us to see new patterns and connections and (therefore) try to have 'smarter' policies. Which doesn't work because our policies are too slow anyway,  often out of date before they begin.

All of which, as we know, gives some advantages to small, fast, determined things who Keep things Simple (such as single-issue busybodies, terrorists, pirates, assorted Occupiers) over clunky big unwieldy things (such as the Eurozone, or even Democracy as currently constituted).

Here is a fabulous article by David Weinberger about what this means for science itself. Take a few minutes out from your busy day to read it and learn something:

The result of having access to all this data is a new science that is able to study not just "the characteristics of isolated parts of a cell or organism" (to quote Kitano) but properties that don't show up at the parts level. For example, one of the most remarkable characteristics of living organisms is that we're robust -- our bodies bounce back time and time again, until, of course, they don't.

Robustness is a property of a system, not of its individual elements, some of which may be nonrobust and, like ants protecting their queen, may "sacrifice themselves" so that the system overall can survive. In fact, life itself is a property of a system.

However, just as we realise that we can't work out what is happening at the most basic level of our own bodies, governments strain to micro-manage almost anything that moves. This way of running things is philosophically doomed to fail, and failing it is around the world.

Hayek was right. Capitalism and free markets are essentially information networks, and need to be treated respectfully as such. This in turn shows why the Eurozone is wobbling. Hundreds of millions of people are now able to examine its deepest practical and moral foundations and are finding them badly designed.

In short, the Eurozone system as a metaphor for the 'Western Social Model' is over-complex. But under-robust. It's science, see?.

We cherish the idea that we clever Westerners have something called 'freedom of the press'.

But what exactly does that expression mean? Does it mean that those who constitute the body of publishing folk who define themselves as 'the press' have special status and associated freedoms which may or may not be enjoyed by the rest of us mere citizens?

Or does it mean that everyone has (in principle) the right to find access to printing devices and then get stuff out there, ie the main newspapers and other large media outlets have no status separate from the rest of us?

I of course incline to the latter view. Indeed, perhaps unwisely I take it for granted.

The whole issue is complicated because once upon a time there was literally no way to get views circulated in any sort of written way other than by getting access to a printing press machine.

This really matters.

Why? Because it goes to the heart of any concept of democracy.

Is there an elite - a 'mainstream media' - who assume to themselves the right to have special freedoms denied to the rest of us? If such an elite group of opinion-formers has some sort of extra legal status, where does that leave laws aimed at defining what sort of speech is allowed during an election campaign, and by whom?

Plus, what happens when as in the USA the majority of mainstream media outlets act as blockers for one political tendency (currently the Obama Democrats)?

There was an interesting insight the other day, when a pro-Obama academic breezily proclaimed the Obama Administration impressively if not unprecedentedly scandal-free - by defining scandals as only those scandals which the mainstream media report!

Anyway, Volokh Conspiracy (leading US group law blog) takes a good look at rival interpretations of what 'freedome of the press' means in formal US legal/constitutional terms, and explains a lot:

But other judges and scholars — including the Citizens United majority and Justice Brennan — have argued that the “freedom ... of the press” does not protect the press-as-industry, but rather protects everyone’s use of the printing press (and its modern equivalents) as a technology. People or organizations who occasionally rent the technology, for instance by buying newspaper space, broadcast time, or the services of a printing company, are just as protected as newspaper publishers or broadcasters...

Both sides in the debate often appeal at least partly to the constitutional text and its presumed original meaning. The words “the press” in the First Amendment must mean the institutional press, says one side. The words must mean press-as-technology, says the other. Citizens United is unlikely to settle the question, given how sharply the four dissenters and many outside commentators have disagreed with the majority.

So who is right? What light does the “history” referred to by the Citizens United dissent shed on the “text” and the Framers’ “purpose”?

The answer, it turns out, is that people during the Framing era likely understood the text as fitting the press-as-technology model — as securing the right of every person to use communications technology, and not just securing a right belonging exclusively to members of the publishing industry. The text was likely not understood as treating the press-as-industry differently from other people who wanted to rent or borrow the press-as-technology on an occasional basis.

Read the whole thing. It directly affects you both as a reader and as a potential publisher of your own thoughts on the Web or otherwise..

And if you are in any way interested in how the tension between mass printing and personal freedom first emerged, read an awesome book by Adrian Johns on the way mass publishing started. Note especially the startling scope of  cheating and stealing as printing presses became more widespread across Europe - Newton and other great scientists had huge problems stopping other brainy people elsewhere in England or on the Continent simply republishing their work and claiming it as their own.

This, by the way, explains why Parliament proclaimed that a copy of every book published had to be sent to the British Museum and other grand 'legal deposit' institutions - there had to be at least one verifiable original against which fraudsters' work might be measured.

The way everyone tried to take advantage of the surging technologies of the day back in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries is eerily reminiscent of the myriad problems we now face in dealing with Internet piracy and so on.

Adrian Johns explains all this in a magnificent way. I bought his book on the subject while I was at Harvard in 1997 and stupidly lent it to someone, never to get it back.

So in writing this blog post I have just reordered a copy via Amazon. I warmly recommend you do the same - a true book about books:

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?