Blogoir

Diligent readers know how I hate the evil Precautionary Principle:

My professional concern about PP is that far from promoting policy common sense it can diminish it.

Take the refurbishment of the British Ambassador's residence in Belgrade back in 2001. The building had been neglected during the long Milosevic years. Everything which could be painted was either Excrement Brown or Rose Pink. The main reception room looked like the forlorn warehouse where all the worst sofas and curtains in the FCO crawled away to die in shame.

So it was agreed that we should upgrade things in the next couple of years. But we had not reckoned with "what if" PP as articulated by the FCO works people...

One idea we had was to remove the vile dark sticky polish and ugly carpets from the original nice woodblock floors and go for a lightly coloured, varnished modern look. But when we asked for this to be done along the upstairs landing we met: "what if a child skids and shoots up and over the landing and plummets down and dies?!"

We asked for the kitchen to have something other than industrial strip lighting, to make it a more pleasant place to work. "What if one of the cooks is ill and cuts himself and drips infected blood into food being prepared for a member of the Royal Family?!"

Work began to replace the nasty tin sentry box for our local staff Serb security team with a small brick building. I happened to stop by and asked why the roof was such a fatuous design. "It is being made of reinforced concrete. What if terrorists attack and try to break in through the ceiling?"

In each case I had to order them all to stop being ridiculous and come to a calm, elegant solution. Had I not done so the taxpayer probably would have had a worse and more expensive outcome.

Yet countless stupidities are not stopped. How does one cost this mess?

The Health and Safety industry is just the armed wing of the Emotional Correctness tendency. The issue is not about which standards in fact apply: it's about controlling who decides, and who then enforces.

Next time you hear someone emoting correctly on BBC that "even if we save only one life, the extra cost is worth it", just scream RUBBISH - LIAR.

Every day we make a totally different calculation, that some lives will be lost for wider social utility: we don't impose a 5 mph speed-limit. Likewise in the NHS we actually deliberately let some people die to save money for others. For state/NHS bean-counters, that's not a bug - it's a key feature.

These issues are all about risk management. Take building safety codes. The 'higher' the safety standards (more fire staircases, more sprinkler systems etc) the costlier the building. This will lead to fewer 'safer' buildings being built and/or displace some people into older, less 'safe' buildings. We can measure what we can measure. The necessary displacement effects are no less real, but hard to calculate so get left out.

Here via Instapundit is a superb article (click on the ecgi button) about the way different New York safety standards down the decades may or may not have contributed to casualty levels on 9/11. Were the World Trade Centre towers well built because so many people in fact escaped? Or were they badly built because so many people ended up trapped in the floors above the planes' impact?

It prompts this comment from Steve Postrel:

The economist’s perspective: If you never have an accident or disaster, your precautions are too strict. One Triangle fire and one WTC disaster over the observed timespan may well be optimal or too few when balanced against the present value of the costs of having codes strict enough to prevent such tragedies.

If you prefer not to put dollar values on human life, shift to risk/risk analysis and note that a) wealthier is generally healthier, b) building codes add to costs and reduce real wealth (gross of the prevented losses), and therefore c) building codes strict enough to prevent ever having something like the WTC collapse may well kill more people over time than the collapse itself. Or you can look at how costlier building codes lead to an increase in the average age of structures (all else equal) and so may result in more people spending time in older, less-safe buildings.

You’d need to do detailed empirical work to tell what the magnitudes are for these effects; possibly the optimum safety level is more stringent than what we have now. My armchair guess is that it goes the other way, though.

The classic socialist way to deal with such questions is that state bureaucrats decide. Their calculations and risk-management analyses stay well hidden, leaving the whole business open to corrupt 'regulatory capture' by different untransparent greedy vested interests (corporations, NGOs).

Why not let markets have far more of a role by pushing risk on to people, not rules?

Example.

Prices in Tesco are higher than they need to be, to pass on to all of us the cost of Tesco insuring itself against idiotic tort litigation brought by someone slipping on a spilled yoghurt. This need no longer be the case: it's an information management problem, highly suited to new IT.

Thus I could sign a long-term agreement with Tesco promising not to sue them for negligence in a long list of circumstances. In return for that assurance, Tesco would need lower insurance premiums and so could offer me lower prices. In other words, those people who want to reserve to themselves the right to sue Tesco for footling accidents should pay for it. Fair, huh?

Other supermarkets seeing this will compete to calculate and spread the risks in ever-more finely calibrated ways. The consumer decides for himself/herself how much risk he/she wants to pay for. Consumers and supermarkets win, lawyers and bureaucrats lose. Hurrah.

This principle can be applied to safety regulations, if they are made transparent. If building A offers higher safety and higher prices than building B, people can choose which building to use.

A huge advantage of such ideas is that they compel people to lift their level of responsibility. Which is why they will be frantically opposed by the Teacher, Guardian and Enforcer categories (maybe alas Judges and Angels too) of Moral DNA owners who fear losing their self-proclaimed right to frame other people's morality and choices.

Here is a nifty piece I wrote about ethicability and Moral DNA back in 2010:

Does ethicability methodology do justice to the existential moral value of trading, itself an expression of intrinsic human integrity. Take, for example, Love.

Many people these days think that compassion/love require the successful to give to the unsuccessful -- and that if the successful are loath to give as generously as the unsuccessful want, the successful should be forced at gunpoint to do so.

But what if the very act of compassionate giving by the Giver serves to create a self-absorbed sense of entitlement to receive on the part of the Receiver, thereby turning that transaction completely away from the solid moral basis of fair trade or even mere generosity/kindness to something looking much more like serfdom -- where the Giver is the serf?

What is the role of Love in all that? Is a stern parent who lays down strict rules and often tells children ‘No’ really less loving than the parent who gives children too much freedom and sweeties on demand?

And what to call the work done by entrepreneurs who toil to invent new products and sell them honestly? Isn’t that a form of Love, sharing one’s energy and mind generously and fairly with the wider mass of humanity?

Now there is a new Moral DNA test. So Crawf Minima and I have taken it. I ended up as a Philosopher, she as an Angel. Sounds right!

Other less worthy if not odious categories available are Teacher, Judge, Enforcer and Guardian. For no obvious reason the category Jerk is not included, even though many people fit it perfectly.

What exercises like this miss is the idea of scale and timescale. Take, say, compassion as opposed to (say) excellence.

You can have as much compassion as you like for people you can see, but what about the people you don't see? Is it compassionate to borrow at stupid rates from the future to pay for the present? What about the vulnerability of modern society to tiny disruptive forces? How to manage risk?

Here is a blistering article by Brendan O'Neill on the Cult of Emotional Correctness as evinced by the mawkish reaction to the Hillsborough football disaster by self-pitying Liverpudlians:

Thou must make a public performance of sorrow. Thou must never deviate from the emotional script. Thou must not question why we weep, year in and year out, and just get on with weeping. Thou must wallow in one-off tragedies forever and severely chastise anyone who says “Life moves on”. Those are the stifling, speech-restricting, thought-policing, miserable, mawkish rules of emotionally correct modern Britain, and they were written and made gospel on the back of the Hillsborough disaster 22 years ago. God help anyone who deviates from them...

Somehow these Moral DNA questionnaires seek to categorise our moral responses in little tidy boxes of Emotional Correctness.

Still, it's all good clean fun. And Angels are angelic.

Remember this 2009 piece about 'sustainability' and Aeron chairs?

One way to go is to make products which have the opposite of built-in obsolescence - products which are engineered not only to work superbly but also to last a long time, and so save resources that way.

But they will tend to be more expensive. Better quality materials and build, more sophisticated engineering.

What I sit on write this blog is an old wooden 'captain's chair' I bought in South Africa years ago. Rather nice looking. An antique of sorts, made from all natural materials, which has lasted for some decades and is still going strong.

Take instead the Aeron chair as made by Herman Miller.

It looks like a cross between a fancy cappuccino machine and something from a Dan Dare spaceship.

But because it is so efficient and elegant, not only does it sell well at its full (and significant) price, a market in second-hand Aeron chairs has appeared...

So as usual you get what you pay for.

But it's maybe a wise move now and again to invest in something strong and good.

Because in paying that higher price you are capturing not only the costs of the article itself today, but also the longer-term total costs as we (at this stage) can hope to measure them?

An Aeron chair which saves the planet (a bit) is good.

A chair which saves one's buttocks is even better.

But not very comfortable. Not at all.

One brand new Aeron chair has just arrived chez Crawford and is now adorning my bottom as I type this. It is amazingly comfortable, having adjustable everything. It will last me for the rest of my life.

Hurrah.

Here is a scary piece at the Telegraph bewailing the supposed decline in British diplomats' foreign language skills. Which draws on some information extracted from the FCO by a Parliamentary Question. And quotes me:

Charles Crawford, the former British ambassador to Poland and a speaker of Serbian, Russian, Afrikaans and French has volunteered his services to the school.

“You are always going to be more efficient if you can speak the language,” he said. “Translators can get it wrong. People relax more when they are yammering away in their own language. You can go live on television if you are good enough, and present your policy to the general public.”

True enough, no doubt.

When journalist Matthew Holehouse talked to me about this subject, I pointed out to him that it was maybe not too surprising that relatively few diplomats have Extensive knowledge of the language of the country in which they're serving. Extensive is pretty damn good - good enough to talk on live TV about compelx policy issues and not make a total fool of oneself. I made it to Extensive Serbian but it was not easy. Of course you can propel more diplomats to these higher levels if they stop being diplomats and start being language students, but that's a very expensive use of people.

Instead the main FCO language level is Operational. This is still a high standard and enables you to conduct official business for most practical purposes without an interpreter, plus converse pretty normally and read the local media.

Which is why the figures in the report on Operational are strange. Are there really so few diplomats now at post with that standard?

Figures show that 48 of Britain's 1,900 diplomats receive extra pay because they have an ‘extensive’ grip of a language, meaning they are close to communicating like a native.

Another 145 have an ‘operational’ grasp, meaning they can live a day-to-day life in the country but may struggle with technical or academic information.

Can it really be true - as the article says - that we have no Arabists in Egypt?! Drivel! Ambassador James Watt is a fluent Arab speaker:

Mr Watt joined the FCO in 1977 and began his diplomatic career in the Trade Relations and Exports Department. From 1978 to 1980 he undertook full-time language training in Arabic ahead of his first posting to Abu Dhabi as Second, later First, Secretary Political.

Sigh.

The FCO language Centre was indeed closed down under Labour. Was this bad? Probably. But it did not mean that language teaching stopped. In my own case I embarked on Serbia not via the FCO language Centre but rather with a hard-smoking sardonic Serb teacher called Zorica Radosavljevic in her small flat in Hammersmith. These days there are many new ways to learn a language via web-based training, so it may make sense not to have a heavy training infrastructure base in central London.

That said, it is important to bear in mind that the way government servives are costed bears heavily on how they line up for 'cuts'. Thus the cost to the FCO of the FCO Language Centre as proclaimed by the Treasury was not merely the wages of the full-time and part-time staff and supporting books/IT and the Centre's share of the electricity bill. It was also (probably) the Centre's share of the huge 'opportunity cost' of not renting out that building for commercial purposes. This 'accounting cost' of course far exceeded the cash-flow cost of providing the service to FCO and other government departments' officials. Quick - cut!

The real stupidity here lies in the fact that the Treasury under G Brown took to stratospheric levels such sophisticated bean-counting as a way of oppressing other government Departments, but had no way of measuring the value of longer-term things it could not immediately measure. Thus, for example, how to factor in to the books the increased likelihood of a Polish or Arabic or Mandarin speaker helping win a huge contract worth billions for UK plc thirty years later?

My own main beef with the FCO Language Centre was that it was full of language teachers:

... 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.

I hope to meet soon the FCO team dealing with language training, and I'll convey this thought in vigorous terms. But I am not sure what might be done about it.

Still, William Hague is patiently bringing some order back to the FCO: his emphasis on Skills is absolutely right. Just remember taxpayers: if you want some of our diplomats to learn Mandarin or Arabic, they'll spend some two years off mainstream work doing so.

Israeli superspy Jay Pollard - serving out the final years of his life prison sentence in the USA - is unwell.

My own modest link to the Pollard story is here. Not to ignore here.

Wikipedia blithely glosses over Pollard's academic links to me, but the general explanation of what the whole story is about reads well. It says that he is due out on mandatory parole in 2015:

Former FBI and navy lawyer M.E. "Spike" Bowman, top legal adviser to navy intelligence at the time, and with intimate knowledge, of the Pollard case, has issued a detailed critique of the case for clemency, asserting "Because the case never went to trial, it is difficult for outside observers to understand the potential impact and complexity of the Pollard betrayal. There is no doubt that Pollard was devoted to Israel. However, the extent of the theft and the damage was far broader and more complex than evidenced by the single charge and sentence."^[84] Bowman wrote that Pollard "was neither a U.S. nor an Israeli patriot. He was a self-serving, gluttonous character seeking financial reward and personal gratification."^[84]

Jay had wonderful chances in life. And spent that life in prison.

What is it about Israel and spying? In my 1979 intake at the FCO was a comely Scottish lawyer called Rhona Ritchie. She was posted to Israel on her first overseas tour. And bit the dust, after being caught passing documents to an Egyptian diplomat. Her prison sentence was suspended. No real secrets had been conveyed.

It can't be said often enough. If you are minded to steal secrets the old-fashioned way, don't overdo it.

Here is what appears to be the first-ever speech by a UK Foreign Secretary (maybe the first-ever speech by any Foreign Minister) on consular work. And v effective it is too.

I have written here about some aspects of consular work under Labour, not least the appalling Three Ps which Ambassadors were ordered to emote at every opportunity:

As part of a trite urge to make the FCO look 'relevant', FCO Ministers issued new instructions to the global network of Ambassadors.

If more than a handful of British citizens look to have been involved in a 'serious incident' (Note: defined at a very low level, eg a motorway car pile-up with say five deaths) the Ambassador personally is expected to drop everything (CAP reform, Climate Change, Terrorism) and go straight to the scene.

Once there he/she is expressly instructed to deploy the 3 Ps:

What the public expects to hear from you/your spokesman/Minister/official after a major incident :

Pity: sympathy for the victims and their families

Praise: praise for/thanks to the emergency services etc

Pledge: a promise/pledge to get to the bottom of what has happened - and learn any lessons

Yuck.

Is not there something wrong here? Namely a complete loss of proportion?

Hundreds of thousands of British people travel in different parts of the world every day. Just by the forces of Bad Luck a tiny number will hit trouble, of whom a small proportion alas will get killed or injured.

Of those, a proportion will have suffered because they themselves messed up in one way or the other (not least ignoring FCO warnings).

Of these, some of them or their relatives will rush to whinge to the media about the FCO support they received, merely to assuage their own incompetence or guilt.

That's how it is.

High-level official emoting-by-numbers when there really has not been a major disaster - involving (say) at a minimum several scores of British deaths in one go - is nothing other than a dangerous dumbing down of the way we all look at Life and its Priorities.

Nonetheless, the effort and sheer ingenuity devoted to consular work by the FCO are in fact world class. Imaginative use of IT is combined with smart organisation at HQ and at posts to deliver a service going far beyond what most other countries aim for, let alone deliver. Labour did a lot to boost the wholeoperation following mixed experiences in dealing with the ghastly Bali Bombing.

As always countries share consular responsibilities on an ad hoc basis. Here the Foreign Secretary tells the European Union not to mission creep its way into this policy/operational area, although one might ask quite why this stern warning makes sense: if we coordinate so many other areas of policy work with EU partners, why not this one?

For us consular services will always remain a national responsibility. Within the European Union, there is no role for EU institutions in defining the consular assistance that Member States should provide to their citizens, or in providing frontline consular assistance. These are matters for which national governments are accountable to their Parliaments and we will oppose EU competence creep in this area.

William Hague gives examples of the scope of the problems faced  by the FCO in providing decent consular coverage across the planet for Brits who get into their myriad scrapes or disasters. More here.

Plus he adds some knockabout examples of the exotic expectations which some people have about what service HMG might reasonably offer. My own best example as Resident Clerk was someone calling the FCO from Texas in the middle of the night UK-time to ask about the rules for importing pets into the UK.

However, he might have been firmer on the subject of people who rush to the media to make high-profile complaints which the media lovingly endorse. Yes. some complaints will be justified, although they need to be set against the many letters of praise and gratitude. But others will be ridiculous and annoying, frothing up private unreasonableness to make a stupid selfish noise.

It also needs to be remembered that sometimes consular officials go far beyond any normal call of duty. Back in Belgrade in the early 1980s an Embassy officer had to deal with a terrible road accident involving a British family. Somehow the victim survived in a Yugoslav hospital, but the Embassy colleague kindly housed the distressed spouse for a couple of weeks as treatment continued until the injured person could be shipped back to UK.

I also note in this speech a new and very welcome adjective, all the more welcome for being so wildly unexpected - courageous:

We need courageous people, who will travel to disaster areas, comfort the victims of violent crime and comb hospitals and morgues when our nationals are injured or killed overseas.

Blimey. Whatever next?

Maybe we can extend this novel idea to those public servants who are paid to help British citizens here in the UK, to the point where they become brave enough to wade into a shallow boating pool to rescue someone rather than sit poring over the Health and Safety manual.

The general idea behind much of what is called 'affirmative action' or 'diversity' policy is to help boost the prospects of disavantaged groups.

So, for example, in looking at academic potential for prospective students universities might 'take into account' wider factors beyond mere exam results, to help give a chance to those students who may not have had top-end education or opportunities from the start.

Fair enough?

Various objections can be made to different parts of this policy. Who identifies which 'groups' or communities are disadvantaged? If they are in fact disadvantaged, is letting members of this group/community into universities where they might struggle to keep up a wise policy? Are people who get into university under such programmes likely to feel stigmatised in some way?

Along comes a new approach: to look at how far those 'affirmative action' students who get into tough STEM subjects (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math) in fact progress. How many stay the course and do well, and how many can just not do the work and drift away into less testing subjects? If the attrition rate is unusually high, what might be done to help?

You'd think that universities want to know whether their policies in this area work. And you'd be wrong:

Colleges and universities are committed to the mythology that diversity happens merely because they want it and put resources into it, and that all admitted students arrive with all the prerequisites necessary to flourish in any way they choose. Administrators work hard to conceal the actual differences in academic preparation that almost invariably accompany the aggressive use of preferences. Any research that documents the operation and effects of affirmative action therefore violates this “color-blind” mythology and accompanying norms; minority students are upset, correctly realizing that either the research is wrong or that administrators have misled them.

In this scenario, administrators invariably resort to the same strategy: dismiss the research without actually lying about it; reassure the students that the researchers are misguided, but that the university can’t actually punish the researchers because of “academic freedom”. Note that in this dynamic, “academic freedom” becomes a device to protect the administration, not the faculty doing the research!

Surprised? Not. Read also the excellent suggestions as to what universities might say on this issue, instead of what they do say... And then the lively comments on what such research shows and why.

You all are craving for a fine example of vacuous fawning over capitalism?

Search no more. Here is my latest Commentator article exploring how Marx's theory of Surplus Value applies to airport check-in procedures.

One Ann Kittenplan sees some sort of equivalence between 'tax avoidance' and benefit fraud: see her comments on my post about the moral vacuum that is Graham Norton, including:

I do have a problem with unfairness...

a) what are the relative costs to the economy of benefit fraud, tax avoidance, and tax evasion?
b) What is the relative coverage given to benefit fraud, tax avoidance, and tax evasion?

If the issue was lawbreaking then it is reasonable to expect a proportionate focus on tax avoidance (the spirit of the law) and evasion in a subsequent post isn't it?

For instance, what about the topical practice of being paid via a limited company? Tax avoidance. How about a post on that and how it differs from the actions outlined in the OP

Let's rise to the challenge.

Ever since we can remember the state in its wisdom has asserted to itself the right to use force to take money away from people to spend on its own purposes. Here's a handy if lighthearted guide to the history of tax, going right back to ancient Egypt's cooking oil tax and Lady Godiva.

Most of the taxes thereby extracted down the centuries have been taken in conditions of no democracy whatsoever. I rule, I need money, ergo I tax. I'm strong, you're weak, you pay me. Some of the money thereby raised has gone on common purposes (roads, armies); some has gone to enrich the ruler and his tax-collectors.

If you are at all interested in how we got to where we are now on taxation and many other phenomena, read this superb book by James Scott which describes how the growing need for taxation - and therefore measurement - helped define all sorts of things, including our very names: 

As James Scott explains, the emerging French state centralised in Paris wanted more money. So it taxed (say) grain. But this meant imposing nationally standardised ways to measure precisely how much grain had been paid in tax (and then demanding a nationally standardised system of names to make sure that everyone had paid). Hence the ejecting of France's myriad local weights and measures, and the arrival of our friend the kilogram.

It turns out that people do not like the state demanding money with menaces for purposes which are not necessarily wise or properly run, and that in a democracy the people have some modest say in how much money the state takes. There never have been enough 'rich' people to pay the taxes the voracious state requires, so not-so-rich people too have to cough up. Over time all sorts of complicated rules have emerged to set down the conditions under which people pay.

Mulling over this situation, the state acknowledges a problem. It wants lots of taxes. But it also mustn't overdo things (lest the rabble revolt) and it needs to keep the goose laying golden eggs. So it craftily sets up various incentives for savings, using the tax system: if you invest in X (say an ISA) you pay less tax than you otherwise might do. Plus incentives for setting up a new business (if you risk your own money and effort, you should be 'encouraged'). Plus incentives to attract wealthy people to come and live in the UK - the more of them we have, the more money they'll spend here which creates work for others. Cross the channel to France and buy a load of booze and you can bring it back tax free.

And so on.

In its blundering stupidity and inability to stop growing, the modern state in the UK and USA has created labyrinths of tax complexity which are navigable only by expert accountants who do nothing much else and expect to be paid for their efforts. It is worthwhile for wealthier people to use such accountants to find ways fully compatible with the law to advise how best to arrange their affars to minimise tax payments.

NB this does not mean that 'society'  or 'the economy' are losing out. 'Society' and 'the economy' are not the state, however much some people seem to identify them.

Wealthy people usually don't hide their money under the bed. They instal fancy new kitchens or buy expensive cars or use bespoke tailors and dress designers. They buy iPads and download lots of apps, creating work for sassy app designers where we have a global lead. Their money, in short, sloshes around the economy and ends up in other people's pockets no less effectively (and in my view more effectively) than it would if the state had grabbed even larger slabs of it.

So to respond to Ann Kittenplan:

I have no idea what tax evasion (ie illegally avoiding paying tax) 'costs' the economy. Tax evasion takes many forms.

There will be a good number of criminals purloining money illegally. Then there is the stunning phenomenon of carousel fraud, involving the tax system itself and its interaction with eg 'climate change' tax and other unwise financial incentives. Not to forget the billions of pounds 'lost' to the state by cigarette and other smuggling, another industry created directly by huge tax rates.

Sure, there will be a micro number of oligarchs who have billions tucked away far from the taxperson's grasp. But most wealthy people living openly in the UK are wealthy enough to pay accountants a lot of money to find ways to make sure that everything they do is squared away with UK law in all its sprawling complexity.

So I tend to be wary of the very notion that not paying tax 'costs' the economy anything. Huge amounts of tax evasion are found all around us in home helps and smaller traders getting paid in cash and then spending their money without declaring it. You might well argue that this 'costs' the economy nothing - it is the economy!

Illegal tax evasion does not help the state, true. But the modern state is veering out of control, and losing legitimacy. So it's not surprising that people will strain not to subsidise it.

Tax avoidance is another thing altogether. It is no more than people using the rights the state has given them to organise their affairs in ways which reduce their tax burden, thereby freeing up more of their money to invest in other things and so (in principle) create new working opportunities for others. The law deliberately creates certain incentives in this sense - using those incentives complies with both the spirit and the letter of the law.

So Ken Livingstone and other famous socialists such as myself who have our own companies are directly benefiting the economy by doing just that. (Although in Ken's case some people think that he needs to answer some questions as to the propriety of certain activities done by his company.)

So far so obvious.

What about benefit fraud? It seems to me that this is in a different moral category. It involves people who are not working stealing from people who are working.

If you work hard (eg as a plumber or even as a banker) but avoid paying all the tax due, you are at least (a) working, ie paying your own way in life, and (b) contributing to society via your work and the wealth your work generates. The benefit cheat who is not working (or who is working but still claiming benefits) is primarily a leech, a second-hander explicitly exploiting fellow citizens' good will.

This explains why vox pop radio phone-ins feature so many animated 'ordinary' people indignant about benefit fraud. They see it in their own communities, and feel it quite differently.

Likewise you hear heartbreaking stories about small business people driven to distraction if not bankruptcy by oppressive tax rules and practices and other state impositions which add amazing costs to even the simplest arrangements (thereby reducing the likelihood of people being employed). You'd have to be stupid to employ someone in a small business these days. Much better to engage them as an outsourced company or sole trader and let them take the administrative hassle.

Indeed, the 'economy' increasingly is driven by these micro-businesses, one good reason why the state will proceed very carefully in stepping up tax rates on these people. It will be both damaging to any growth prospects we still may have, and incredibly unpopular with the most dynamic risk-ready section of the population.

In short. I have sympathy with people who for reasons of genuine ill-health simply can't work. I have notably less sympathy with people who are not sick but don't work at all. If they can not find a regular job and really are unable to find basic paid employment even of a part-time nature, they should go outside and do volunteer work or even pick up litter for a few hours each day. They are getting unearned benefits from society to which I am contributing thousands of pounds a month - society should get some benefit back from them. Plus they will feel better about themselves if they are doing something useful for their neighbours and local communities.

Here, of course, the state steps in once again to make even such ad hoc 'free' work problematic. You can't help out at schools or in the NHS without exhaustive checks to ensure you're not a perv. You can't pick up litter without Health and Safety training. You can't do anything which might undercut the status of those with state jobs. Blah blah.

Cheating? Fairness? In my view More State = a trend towards More Cheating and Less Fairness.

Does that answer the questions?

I have written to Graham Norton at the Daily Telegraph to ask for his advice:

I have a problem with my newspaper. It carries an advice column' by a well-known TV personality and supposed comedian who is giving obnoxious if not improper advice.

Someone wrote to him asking about a sibling's evident benefit fraud. The TV personality said that the whole thing was 'none of [the questioner's] business'. I have written about this appalling answer on my own website.

It shocks me that a seemingly respectable newspaper should publish these banal and immoral attitudes in such an offhand way, thereby making cheating and lying appear respectable.

So, three short questions:

• should I cancel my subscription to this newspaper?
• would it be OK to stop paying my TV licence as a mark of protest against this dismal comedian?
• and if I did stop paying my TV licence fee, would it be anyone else's business?

Looking forward to hearing your response,

Regards

Let's see what the Wit has to say.

Here is a gloomy wail by Dahlia Lithwick against the conservative case brought to attack the sprawling 'Obamacare' Affordable Care Act, which now has reached the US Supreme Court:

But after the aggressive battery of questions from the court’s conservatives this morning, it’s clear that we can only be truly free when the young are released from the obligation to subsidize the old and the ailing...

This morning in America’s highest court, freedom seems to be less about the absence of constraint than about the absence of shared responsibility, community, or real concern for those who don’t want anything so much as healthy children, or to be cared for when they are old. Until today, I couldn’t really understand why this case was framed as a discussion of “liberty.”

This case isn’t so much about freedom from government-mandated broccoli or gyms. It’s about freedom from our obligations to one another, freedom from the modern world in which we live. It’s about the freedom to ignore the injured, walk away from those in peril, to never pick up the phone or eat food that’s been inspected. It’s about the freedom to be left alone. And now we know the court is worried about freedom: the freedom to live like it’s 1804.

All of which misses the point of the litigation. Namely are there limits to what the state can force individuals to do in the name of supposedly common goals? And if so where are they definitively defined?

This case alas could not be brought in the UK. We have a system under which The-Queen-in-Parliament is indeed sovereign and can pass whatever laws they like (subject only to the European Court of Human Rights declaring them an abuse of core human rights). In the USA things are different and better. The federal government has powers under the US Constitution but, in principle, only those powers. So battle is joined on whether compelling most people across the USA to take out health insurance is an abuse of those powers.

Ms Lithwick of course confuses two things. Whether and when there is a moral obligation on X to help Y and Z. And how far it is appropriate for the state to order X to help Y and Z, in which case it's no longer a moral obligation in any important sense.

My view? Any new law of 2700 pages is an absurd and arrogant abuse of process in its very nature, and should be struck down for that reason. It is necessarily incoherent and immoral.

But if that wise and simple view does not prevail, then what? Here are conservative commenters giving a wide range of interesting ideas on what might happen to Obamacare depending on what the Supreme Court decides. One issue is obvious - if one notable pillar of this monstrous law is struck down as unconstitutional, what happens to the rest of it (the doctrine of 'severability')? Read on.

Update:  See also this superb article by Walter Russell Mead which says everything I might have been able to say and so much more on the deeper problems with Obamacare and many other aspects of modern government - complexity.

The Daily Telegraph has an Agony Uncle column written by Graham Norton, "TV presenter and comedian". Some of it is online.

One question posed to Mr Norton in the newspaper edition is all about three siblings who each have inherited £100,000. One of the siblings has agreed with the solicitor that his share not be passed to him for the time being, so that that sibling and wife can continue claiming all available state benefits. The person posing the question makes a good point:

To me all this is wrong and a simple case of fraud, but I am not sure I could report them, as at the end of the day, they are family

Mr Norton says that this problem is none of the questioner's business, and even asks whether the questioner is jealous of the brother's freeloading existence. If not, he opines, the questioner should reaffirm his own immediate family love and move on, ignoring the issue.

So there we have it, in a nutshell. A well-paid 'TV presenter and comedian' says that abuse of public money is no business of someone who becomes aware of it. 

Think about what is happening here. The freeloading relative is (on the face of it) deliberately breaking the democratically agreed rules for getting state benefits, which have it that to be 'enitled' to benefits you must be disadvantaged. No longer disadvantaged thanks to that happy inheritance, the brother begins his improper manoeuvering to keep the state benefits flowing.

The cheating sibling is robbing his relatives, Mr Norton and the rest of us as surely as if he had picked our pockets. We are working and paying taxes into a shared pot in good faith for purpose A - he is purloining some of that money simply to be idle. Worse - as the taxes raked in by the government are not enough to pay for the cheating sibling's lifestyle, the state has to borrow from our children to pay for it. So they are being cheated too.

You might even make the case that by not reporting this abuse the questioner is in effect harming the cheating brother by letting his decadent banal behaviour continue for longer than it should. What is the moral case for letting someone continue cheating? Aren't you then implicated in that cheating yourself?

This is another example of the sickening decay in personal responsibility as illustrated in Gosport:

The British people and their leaders have outsourced their safety and their very morality to people paid by the taxpayer who will take out a pole to measure six inches of water before deciding whether or not it’s safe to help a vulnerable fellow-citizen in distress. Then decide not to.

When you see something difficult happening - even if it directly affects you - when in doubt do nothing. It's none of your business.

So eternal shame on Graham Norton and indeed the Daily Telegraph for publishing such a stupidly immoral reply. It's just not funny.

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.

The sad news that the Archbishop of Canterbury is standing down reminds us of this towering achievement.

It's not just that Iowahawk had the idea. It's the energy and sustained brilliance of the execution, plus the grim unerring accuracy of the satire.

Sit back, add some absorbent materials to your underpants to deal with spontaneous emissions as you laugh yourself to death.

Then go: 

1 Whan in Februar, withe hise global warmynge

2 Midst unseasonabyl rain and stormynge

3 Gaia in hyr heat encourages

4 Englande folke to goon pilgrimages.

5 Frome everiches farme and shire

6 Frome London Towne and Lancanshire

7 The pilgryms toward Canterbury wended

8 Wyth fyve weke holiday leave extended

9 In hybryd Prius and Subaru

10 Off the Boughton Bypasse, east on M2.

11 Fouer and Twyntie theye came to seke

12 The Arche-Bishop, wyse and meke

13 Labouryte and hippye, Gaye and Greene

14 Anti-warre and libertyne

15 All sondry folke urbayne and progressyve

16 Vexed by Musselmans aggressyve...

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.

Here is David Allen Green aka Jack of Kent on the subtle subject of when if at all it is right to 'out' anonymous bloggers.

DAG of course played a leading and clever role in exposing the mendacity of Johann Hari, and has followed that up by helping show how the Times' pious exposing of police blogger Night Jack was done using improper means.

Thus DAG:

So if it is not an absolute right, in what circumstances is it appropriate to out a pseudonymous blogger or tweeter? It seems that the answer lies in any misuse made of their account by the pseudonymous blogger or tweeter. The breach of etiquette needs to be severe, amounting perhaps to death threats and continuing harassment (“Mabus”) or financial exploitation (“Credo”) ...

Outing is not itself the imposition of any criminal or civil liability (though it makes such outcomes more likely), and nor is it attributing a person things they have not actually said and done. It is instead revealing the true identity of the person misusing their social media accounts, so as to make them accountable for their misuse.

Back in 2009 when Night Jack was being 'outed' I wrote this:

Imagine this scene. You are in a pub with a group of people yammering away about something, and someone you don't know starts having a strong go at you.

That person knows who you are. You ask for his/her name to help you work out where they are coming from on the argument. The person concerns loftily says that that is none of your business - you should respond solely on the basis of the arguments being presented.

Someone whispers to you: "That guy is Fred Smith from the Politics Department of the University!"

Are you really out of order to say, "Hey, are you really Fred Smith from the University Politics Department?"? And is the said Fred Smith entitled to feel aggrieved that you have attacked his privacy by proclaiming his name?

No. And no.

Part of having professional status and responsibility is to help public discourse proceed in a civilised way between people who accept certain standards of truth and accuracy.

Or it need not be as immediate in a personal sense as this. Just say you are strolling around Speakers Corner and you see someone in a Guy Fawkes mask ranting unpleasantly against immigrants or whomever. Rant over, this person walks away. By chance a few minutes later you see said person taking off the mask and you recognise him/her for a well-known TV presenter. Should that person have any legal protection from being 'outed' by you eg on Twitter?

Would it make any difference if that TV presenter had not ranted against other people, but instead had proclaimed controversial policy views on, say, Climate Change, using the mask to maintain some private privacy?

What if the TV presenter had used the mask to simply to avoid being recognised in public and had waffled on about the merits of stamp-collecting?

In each case I see no reason for that person having any sort of legal remedy against being outed by someone who stumbles over his/her real identity. You have the right to wander around London or the Internet in a disguise. I have the right to say who you really are, if I find out by chance.

Things of course are different if I use unlawful means to discover your identity, eg following you home and later breaking into your house. Or use unlawful phone-hacking tricks.

Whether it's merely mean-spirited or some sort of breach of implied Internet or other etiquette to 'out' someone hiding behind a disguise in any of those examples is another matter. That comes down to personal taste. As DAG wisely says:

The politeness of strangers always has a limit.

I have written something for Telegraph Blogs about Trust in Europe (and scorpions). I'l put up the link when there is one.

It refers to this piece by Matthias Machnig, which, strive as I do, I simply cannot understand:

Economic growth has reached the limits of what is ecologically viable. The financial industry is now decoupled from the real economy, and the financial markets have mutated into a self-referential system. The splitting of labour markets into well-paid jobs and casual employment is creating a serious social divide. And in the face of this development, democracy is entering a crisis of legitimation and confidence.

We need a new understanding of global and social progress. We have to reinvent the idea of progress. It must become a project for hope and for the future again. Where progress fails to deliver hope, prosperity for all, a better quality of life and more participation, democracy and progress soon find themselves on a collision course. I firmly believe that new progress is possible as a new, forward-looking project, which can succeed provided we imbue progress with its productive, liberating power again and define the direction it must take.

The future lies open before us. This is an opportunity to change our existing model of progress. Progress of any kind is always new: but not everything that is new counts as progress.

That last point seems to make some sense. But there's more. Much more:

Only in such a democracy, founded on solidarity, can the idea of a society committed to the new progress be taken forward and developed. The strengthening of co-determination rights in business and industry, the establishment of direct democratic mechanisms in legislation, the extension of the rights of the European Parliament and the guarantee of equal opportunities based on sound social and education policies – these are just the beginnings of a comprehensive democratization of society, of a society committed to the new progress.

In this way the new progress can become a project for hope and for the future, a cause for which it is worth entering the arena of political debate. It rejects the conservative belief that all we need to do is to nurture the status quo and develop it further. It rejects the liberal belief that the hope of upward mobility and social participation is a matter for the markets to sort out. It distances itself from “green” thinking, which preaches self-denial from a position of material security. And it distances itself from “left” thinking, which persists in lamenting the present sorry state of affairs instead of taking the initiative and fighting for a better world.

He uses the empty exhortatory word must six times, and need five times.

Ghastly.

This sort of exhaltation of the power of the state to correct its own messes as they get bigger and bigger always reminds me of the podgy Slovenian Marxist Kardelj, whose rambling ideas created the jungle of socialist self-management jargon and process which so enchanted sundry Western useful idiots before Yugoslavia crashed. Oh - and David Miliband too:

Crawford's First Law of Bureaucracy: The capacity of a Ministry to do anything useful strategically is in indirect proportion to the amount of time it spends preparing its strategies.

A Yugoslav joke about the endless and pointless rearrangements of the communist self-management system by chief ideologue Kardelj.

Kardelj was asked how to cure a sick cow. He advised cooling it right down with ice-packs. The cow got worse.

He recommended heating it right up with blankets and electric fires. The cow got worse.

He recommended feeding it masses of extra food. The cow got worse.

He recommended starving it. The cow died.

"Boze boze, what a tragedy! I am a skilled vet and I had so many more cures to propose...!"

Here's a short piece by Raedwald on little wooden doll stereotypes of Polish Jews:

But this trip, for the first time, I briefly explored the old ghetto, and visited one of the old synagogues, where I listened briefly to a young American woman talking history to a small group. She offered the fact of these dolls, available everywhere, and often depicted holding money, as evidence that Poles were "still anti-Jewish". Restraining the impulse to respond "Tsshk - always the victim already ..." I quickly moved away. 

And here's a gallop through the ups and downs of the Jewish presence in Poland down the centuries. It helpfully reminds us that explicit anti-semitism was part of the Polish Communist Party's policy after WW2.

Meanwhile now in Warsaw a splendid new Museum of the History of Polish Jews is being built, a huge project which is expected to become a major visitor attraction in that part of Europe. Part of the thinking here is that Auschwitz and the other creepy Nazi concentration camp sites in Poland and elsewhere remind us only how Europe's Jews died - the point of the new museum is to celebrate how they lived.

Back in 2009 I wrote here about Nasty Polish Right-wing Antisemitism:

All this history and far more remains highly controversial, not least because it suits a lot of people with things to hide to keep things that way.

What if any conclusions one way or the other might be drawn about the massacre by local Poles of some 400 Jews at Jedwabne in 1941? Or the fact that so many Poles were executed by the Nazis for protecting Poles? Or the later Kielce pogrom in 1946 - a horror inspired by the communist secret police?

Was/is modern antisemitism in Poland some sort of aberration reflecting wider European intellectual trends?

Or was it something much deeper in the Polish national psyche, waiting for its horrible chance to erupt?

Is Poland better or worse in these respects than eg France or Germany?

What about the role of individuals such as Helena Wolinska-Brus? She was an unrepentant post-WW2 Stalinist prosecutor from a Polish Jewish family who left Poland in the antisemitic Party campaigns of 1968 and ended up in the UK. Until her death last year she successfully fought extradition back to democratic Poland to face justice on her Stalin-era judicial crimes, mendaciously citing Polish antisemitism as one reason she would not get a fair trial.

One of the other points I made there was the following:

... what about basic nomenclature?

Just as the denizens of Republika Srpska call themselves 'Bosnian Serbs' rather than Serbian Bosnians, thereby emphasising their ultimate Serbitude rather than their Bosnian-ness, should we be talking about Polish Jews or Jewish Poles?

The very words we use silently and slyly can denote sameness or 'other-ness'. Would a Museum of the History of Jewish Poles have different exhibitions? Or be able to raise international funding?

I am a proud director of a British SME. I also have helped launch a new and growing LLP: www.adrgambassadors.com

So it's touching to see that the Cabinet Office are Tweeting the fact that they have noticed this vital economic activity, albeit with a clumsy comma:

@cabinetofficeuk

Francis Maude: SMEs are a key driver for growth, in 2010 SMEs accounted for 50% of turnover in the UK economy #procurementbriefing

How, then, to explain the sneering tone of this letter to Ken Livingstone from Grant Shapps MP, Minister of State for Housing and Local Government?

Calling for regulation on 'full time mayors' whilst running a part-time company is as consistent as calling for a clampdown on tax dodging whilst using a company to avoid paying income tax