EU Referendum

2011-09-30T14:46:00.000+01:00


.	Summonses Issued		Liability Orders	No.Summons Costs Raised	Summons Costs Charges
.
.				"Cost-Summons Authority ")	Authority	Court	Total
.	1993	NoData	23787	32494	£17.3	£0.7	£18	£584892
.	1994	NoData	24204	32755	£17.3	£0.7	£18	£589590
.	1995	NoData	29506	37870	£19.3	£0.7	£20	£757400
.	1996	NoData	37299	48072	£21.3	£0.7	£22	£1057584
.	1997	45076	34586	41419	£21.3	£0.7	£22	£911218
.	1998	41257	32807	41203	£21.3	£0.7	£22	£906466
.	1999	34152	28441	35952	£21.3	£0.7	£22	£790944
.	2000	31981	27233	34517	£39.3	£0.7	£40	£1380680
.	2001	31708	25684	32989	£49.3	£0.7	£50	£1649450
.	2002	34417	26963	34690	£54.3	£0.7	£55	£1907950
.	2003	30427	23387	29476	£59.3	£0.7	£60	£1768560
.	2004	28324	20548	27453	£69.3	£0.7	£70	£1921710
.	2005	22760	19890	23750	£72.3	£0.7	£73	£1733750
.	2006	22701	17153	22948	£95	£3	£98	£2248904
.	2007	23184	19319	23386	£97	£3	£100	£2338600
.	2008	23357	17693	23553	£100	£3	£103	£2425959
.	2009	23059	16411	22931	£100	£3	£103	£2361893
.	2010	23042	16584	22700	£100	£3	£103	£2338100
.	2011	12295	9041	11809	£100	£3	£103	£1216327
.				579967				£28889977
.

2011-09-30T13:40:00.002+01:00

wp182	Sum of Cost	1	8	9
	Sum of Hours	2	8	10
WP-667	Sum of Cost	3	8	11
	Sum of Hours	4	78	82
WP998-333-	Sum of Cost	5	78	83
	Sum of Hours	6	7	13
WP-999	Sum of Cost	6	7	13
	Sum of Hours	7	7	14
WP-999-333	Sum of Cost	7	7	14
	Sum of Hours	7	76	83
WP-231-576-WP345	Sum of Cost	8	6	14
	Sum of Hours	7	5	12

test

2010-09-01T16:57:00.001+01:00

When Geoffrey Lean takes agin Pachy, the world is coming to an end for the old charlatan.

"No fall from grace has been so unforeseen as that of Gore's co-winner, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change," says Lean, making you wonder where he has been all this time.

Reconsidering Pashtunistan

2009-08-21T13:09:00.003+01:00

A guest post by Edward Turner

An American Solution for an American Empire?

The traditional story says Afghanistan's problems began around 1993: a year earlier the Soviets had retreated from the mujahidin and in the subsequent anarchy a group of half-illiterate vigilante Madrasa students decided they could do a better job at keeping order and challenged the power of the warlords.

At first it didn't seem significant: a 30-man group of tribesmen, lead by Mullah Omar a Pashtun of the trans-border Ghilzai tribe, took control of Kandahar city from a particularly hated warlord. But it didn't stop there: with the help of Pakistan, the "Taliban" movement snowballed into an unstoppable force for statehood.

By 1996 the ragtag group had conquered most of the country, Pashtun and non-Pashtun. In gratitude to their - as yet uninvited - Arab guests, whose jihadists and cash had helped the disorganised fighters win significant battles, the Taliban allowed Osama Bin Laden and Ayman Zawahiri to set up Al Qaeda training camps in the new Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan.

Pakistan, wishing to support an Afghanistan state in which ethnic bonds were suppressed in deference to religious ties, eagerly recognised the new state in 1997.

Using Afghanistan as a springboard, the Arab Al Qaeda committed a string of high-profile terror attacks. This culminated in the 9/11 strikes on America, in New York and Washington, which in turn lead to the War on Terrorism being launched on Afghanistan in 2001.

Soon thereafter all Al Qaeda's bases in Afghanistan were flattened by bombs and a new Afghan government installed in 2006 - it seemed the Taliban had fled across the border with some remnants of Al Qaeda.

But three years later, while the Americans had stopped calling the war in Afghanistan a "War on Terror" the conflict with the Taliban appeared to have intensified to a terrifying new level and spread to a nuclear state, Pakistan.

Surely now, the traditional narrative of the conflict in Afghanistan has run its useful purpose. In Afghanistan the threat of Al Qaeda has been destroyed, while the Pakistani government support of the Taliban has U-turned into a fight for its life against it.

Rethinking the War on Taliban

The alternative narrative is this: the most significant date before 1993 was 100 years earlier, in 1893. In this year the 1600 mile-plus squiggly border over the barely-explored mountains between Afghanistan and Pakistan, called the Durand line, was etched into historical infamy by the most powerful Empire of the age, Great Britain.

After decades of futile conflict with the North Western tribes, the British, like Alexander the Great before, decided conquering the inhabitants along the North West Frontier was too much trouble. The region would be far better left as a natural quagmire for an invading Russian army.

Typical of British divide-and-rule tactics, the Durand line split the Pashtun tribes down the middle: the majority put on a trajectory towards a Pakistan state in 1947; while the historically most influential Durrani and Ghilzai tribes would be out of harm's way in Afghanistan.

The more educated and wealthier Durrani Pashtun, who lived in the urban south west of Afghanistan, would be the most powerful force in the notoriously unstable Afghan state until 1979. It is from this tribe of five million that the 2006 Afghanistan government draws its Pashtun Taliban opposition, including President Hamid Kazai.

The strategic point is this: the British Empire didn't need the Pashtun; they were a nuisance that could most effectively be employed as someone else's nuisance, and ignored. Today the successor Empire forgets about the Pashtun people at its cost.

The Taliban are not just Islamists, they are Pashtun Islamists.

If the conflict against the Taliban is to be won the Pashtun, and specifically the Ghilzai tribe of the Pashtun which forms the core of the Taliban, must be placed at the center of strategy. Everything else, including the need to protect a multi-ethnic "Afghanistan" can be ignored: why fight a British Empire war in the age of American Empire?

A useful strategic concept: Pashtunistan

If Pashtunistan had a capital city it would be Kandahar. At least three times in its history sizeable Pashtun Empires - including the Taliban's Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan - have been built upon the initial capture of Kandahar by representatives of the Durrani or Ghilzai Pashtuns. (The other two cases were the Durrani Empire of the 19th Century, and the Hotaki dynasty of the 18th Century).

Mullah Omar is a member of the Hotaki clan of Pashtun nomads from the mountains east of Kandahar. While his traditional enemy is the Durrani - when one side has gained power the other has been excluded from leadership positions, which is the case inside the Ghilzai dominated Taliban - to describe their history as a Hatfield and McCoy act would be an over-simplification.

Though Ghilzai lead, the Durrani and other Pashtun tribes have cooperated under the banner of the Taliban, and so cooperation between them must be crucial for leveraging the Ghilzai Pashtun away from Al Qaeda with the promise of power within a Pashtun state. This cooperation is not due to a developed cultural sense of Pashtun nationhood (though from time to time Pashtuns have planted the Pashtun flag-stick on Pakistan’s side of the Durand line) but mutual interest.

Pashtun society has a "Russian doll" structure which means allegiances are always mixed and forever shifting. From tribe, khel, sub-khel, to kahol and the nuclear family, the koranay, the approximately 350 tribes (all but half-dozen insignificantly small) are united only in being notoriously ungovernable (such as Pakistan's experience with the Waziri tribe within the Federally Administered Tribal Area). Though they share one language and culture, the Pashtun are too much at war within itself to unite as one nation.

The Pashtun share a distinct social code, the Pashtunwali, and it is the strong emphasis on personal freedom within it that provides the basis for rejection of all external authority which is common to all Pashtuns when faced with attack. It also strongly favours a violent honor culture, and, if we didn’t already guess, hospitality and protection for guests. Graft on to this another the binding agent, the Islamic religion, which the Taliban represents, and it could be understood why it is not easy for external authority to overrun Pashtun peoples.

If the lock of peace can be unpicked it is through fostering cooperation on ethnic lines between the two tribes that have spawned Pashtuni Empires and which would provide the basis of Pashtunistan.

As the Taliban has shown, cooperation between Pashtun tribes is not an insurmountable problem. In order to be powerful, Ghilzai nomads must have control over the valuable economic strongholds of Uruzgan, Kandahar and the Helmand river valley (where opium is currently produced). This lies in Durrani Pashtun dominated regions. For their part, in order for the slightly less numerous Durrani to rule they need to be strong enough to rule the fierce Ghilzai warriors.

For one tribe to rule the other must acquiesce; their fates are entwined; there is no other way. Today, the Ghilzai have the upper hand through their Taliban vehicle. The concept of Pashtunistan is a useful one, however, as it might be the only political carrot that could rival the binding cause of the Taliban and make the powerful Durrani and Ghilzai tribes work together in a project that conflicts with the aims of Al Qaeda.

New American Solution: Self-determination for Afghanistan's ethnic groups

The sine qua non of any solution must first be to ensure a multi-national terrorist group can never use the region as a base for terrorist activity and that any new state does not directly sponsor terrorism. Other goals, such as democracy and human rights, should be ignored.

The idea of Afghanistan's Islamic democracy is contrary to the aims of the War on Terror: it encourages peoples of different ethnicities to live together in one state bound not by their shared ethnic ties but by an Islamic mono-culture that will lean toward extremist solutions.

As the Taliban proved, the only way to keep a comically diverse country together as Afghanistan is by a brutal version of Islam that cares neither for human rights or the destruction of foreign cities. States built upon territory, institutions and people can be deterred with force, however nasty. States built upon evil religious ideology and intimidation of out-groups cannot.

In Afghanistan, does America want another Syria, Egypt, Turkey, Jordan, Lebanon or Libya or another Saudi Arabia?

To reduce the role of Islamism as a binding agent for “Afghans”, the ethnic groups must be separated and ethnic ties must be used to bind them. Like the British Empire, Afghanistan, which was little more than a Pashtun Empire, must be consigned to the dustbin of history.

Specifically, the Pashtuns, the only group that seems genuinely interested in the Taliban, need a rejuvination of bonds on ethnic lines. For this, cooperation between the Durrani and Ghilzai tribes is paramount. The Durrani can provide the economic base, the Ghilzai the security and political leadership.

Americans believe in self-determination - they demonstrated this in Yugoslavia. There is no reason for Uzbeks or Tajiks to live in the same state as Pashtuns. Likewise the Shia Hazara, whom the Sunni Pashtuns treat as non-believers, require their own state if there is going to be peace.

That old legacy of Empire, Pakistan cannot be allowed to derail the new American solution. It will be a challenge to incorporate parts of Pakistan into Pashtunistan without compromising Pakistan's sense of security. This could be done by lease of land of strategic importance to Pakistan for 50 years, with non-proliferation in mind.

Barack Obama who visited Pakistan in 1981 and whom has friends in high places is the ideal American President to host the Dayton style negotiations. He may recall Afghanistan represented a solution useful to the British Empire but not to the American Empire. It’s time for boundaries to be redrawn so there is never another Afghanistan.

News values

2009-08-01T16:46:00.001+01:00

In projecting the progress of the counter-insurgency in Afghanistan, metrics most commonly by the media are the deaths of British soldiers and, more generally, the deaths of other coalition troops. Further "downstream" are reports of the deaths of Afghani citizens, both civilians, members of the security forces and such categories as security guards.

In the hierarchy of death, however, we have long been aware that there has been a ranking applied by the popular media – the emphasis (quite understandably) given to British troops. Much less attention is given to other nationalities and, down the scale, are incidents involving Afghanis, which are often completely unreported.

Much the same applied to the campaign in Iraq, to the extent where the death of even quite prominent Iraqis went unreported, sometimes dropped in favour of more prominent events, especially those with a domestic political content.

This, I remarked upon in Ministry of Defeat, in one instance noting that the murder of a prominent Sunni and his son in Basra – and the kidnap of five others - had gone unreported. The British media had focused on Tony Blair giving evidence to the House of Commons Liaison Committee, where he had been asked whether life was then better for the citizens of Basra than it had been pre-war.

This came up during the Frontline Club meeting yesterday, as an example of my unreasonable criticism of the media, the argument being that the news value of the Blair evidence far outweighed the murder and kidnap of a few Iraqis, even if these crimes had been committed by men in civilian clothes and police uniforms, in a fleet of 10 "official" cars with no number plates.

This, incidentally, had coincided with a six-hour curfew being imposed in Basra in an attempt to stem the growing tide of violence and a report that oil smuggling in southern Iraq had reached epidemic proportions, costing the country an estimated $4 billion a year, followed by yet another report of a rocket attack on a British base – none of which were reported in the British media.

What I had not realised, however, was that the ranking was quite formally structured. In the early days, of the occupation, one news organisation imposed a "tariff", reporting events only if they involved one dead British or American soldier, or five Iraqis. But, as the violence increased, the bar was raised where, to qualify for inclusion in a news report, three US soldiers or 25 Iraqis had to be killed. A British military death, of course, was always reported.

This, in my view, undoubtedly distorted British public perception of events – and indeed misled journalists. Relying on the metric of British military deaths as a comparator, in May 2005 Guardian journalist Jonathan Steele actually wrote that the insurgency barely existed in the south, it having been "quiet for months". British troops could pull out immediately, he declared.

Undeterred, the media is playing the same games in Afghanistan. We know, of course, that the reporting of British troops has been extremely high profile, with the toll reaching 22 for the month.

Yet, in the last two days, four Afghani soldiers have been killed in Helmand, their lives ended by an IED which hit their vehicle, and – in two separate incidents, eight and then four Afghani private security guards were killed, also by roadside bombs in Helmand, the first incident injuring four others. None of these incidents have been reported by the British media. You will have to turn to the official Chinese news agency Xinhuanet for details.

This news, however, is highly significant, for several reasons. First, it points up the perilous insecurity of the roads, where the death toll is actually far greater than the British media would indicate. Secondly, it reminds us of an important, but again ill-reported dynamic – that the Taleban is by no means confining its attacks to foreign security forces. The Afghan forces are at greater risk than our own.

Nor indeed are just the security forces are risk. There is also a steady and largely unreported toll taken of construction workers, another incident recently reported in Khost. And just over a week ago, 13 Afghan road construction workers were kidnapped in Paktia.

All these issues have a much wider significance. On the one hand, the strategic plan for Afghanistan is progressively to hand over responsibility for security to Afghan forces and, on the other, much depends on the coalition and aid agencies being able to deliver reconstruction. Where both the security forces and construction workers are so much at risk, neither is going to happen, even discounting the unreliability of the local police.

The other significant issue here – one we have noted before – is the media-supported demand to increase helicopter lift for British troops, to enable them to be transported without using the road network, to keep them out of harm's way. Yet, that very process – effectively abandoning the network to the Taleban – could delay progress, by exposing local security forces and others to greater risk.

Meanwhile, in Lashkar Gah, in the city's main bazaar, turban seller Haji Lala says Taleban black is still the most popular colour. "Everyone wants black, like the Taleban. I sell 40 or 50 a month." It may be an indicator of where ordinary people think the province is heading, notes Australian writer Jerome Starkey.

Whichever way the province is heading, it seems not unreasonable to aver that we will not find out from the British media. Whether it is even reasonable to suggest that they should tell us is another matter. The very firm view I heard expressed on Wedenesday was, effectively, that it was not. What matters, it seems, are news values – not the actual news.

Snout in the trough

2009-08-01T16:45:00.001+01:00

Through the MPs' expenses scandal, one occasionally heard noises off from our European "partners" who seemed to be amazed that there should be so much public outrage about what is, in other climes, perfectly normal behaviour.

Now, it seems, the Germans are having their own version. Social Democrat Health Minister Ulla Schmidt has raised a storm of protest after it emerged that she had flown out to Spain on holiday while instructing her official chauffeur to drive her ministerial limousine down from Germany to meet her at her holiday destination.

After the 3,000-mile trip in the official Mercedes, the chauffeur was kept on duty for two weeks, at the beck and call of his minister, being paid handsomely as overtime, while he shuttled her to and from the beach.

Embarrassingly, the chauffeur never got to do the 3,000-mile return trip as enterprising Spanish thieves nicked the motor, thus leading to the revelations in the press about the minister's little arrangement.

Interestingly, the minister was perfectly within the rules to use her official car for this purpose – so we have another "I was only obeying the rules" scenario, which went down so well in the UK.

The revelations have come at a particularly unhappy time for Frau Schmidt, now dubbed "S-Class Ulla" after the Mercedes model that disappeared. With a general election in the offing, the Social Democrats are positioning themselves as the party best equipped to lead the country out of the economic and financial crisis.

In her defence, I suppose, Frau Schmidt could claim that she was creating employment – not least for Spanish car thieves – and no one could complain that these were ruinously expensive "green jobs" so beloved of our ruling classes.

Unacceptable waste

2009-05-19T20:51:00.001+01:00

They ordered 401 of them in November 2003 at a cost of £166 million. Only now, nearly six years later, are they finally going into service, but not before the Ministry of Defeat has spent another £20 billion on them to make them suitable for Afghanistan. This is the fabulous Panther.

MP's should be furious – that sort of unacceptable waste could have financed 16 months-worth of Additional Cost Allowances.

Regulating MPs' remuneration

2009-05-19T19:28:00.002+01:00

The current payment system should be replaced with a single scheme, the suggested name for which is the "constituency management fee". It should be paid from central funds and drawn down by MPs annually (or in periodic increments). From this, MPs pay all expenses and remuneration, in accordance with what is most appropriate to the effective management of the constituency and which is acceptable to their local voters.

Thus, an MP will draw from the fund, the salary, pension payments, working and all other expenses (including normal travel), staff employment and all other expenses.

Accountability is maintained on the one hand by publishing a "business plan" setting out the "budget" and the expenditure heads, and then publishing quarterly audited accounts, with an annual report at the end of the year (or period). As to monitoring of expenses – and allowable amounts – this should be a matter between constituents and the MP, with the tax authorities as the arbiter, scrutinising expenditure as they do with other enterprises.

On the basis of current salaries, allowances, etc, the fund could be in the order of £300,000 a year, possibly "banded" by constituency zone, reflecting distances and other issues which affect individual MPs. The sum set would be a maximum, with each MP able to come in under the sum allocated.

To guard against abuse – as with Conway – there should then be a "recall" provision. Electors in a constituency should be able to raise a petition (say with 10,000 names) on which completion there should follow within a stated period a by-election, where the sitting MP is required to stand for re-election.

In terms of overall advantages, this has the benefit of insulating MPs from abusers. With each MP devising their individual schemes, with the agreement of their local electors, no other MPs are tainted if one or more MPs go off the rails. On the other hand, voters are empowered, and may well be inclined to take a greater interest in the workings of their constituencies and their MPs.

Within the broad scope of the scheme, there is and should be great scope for innovation and flexibility. Some MPs, for instance, may chose to appoint a local "advisory board" made up from the local "great and the good" to advise them on disbursement of funds. There is scope for each political party to issue "guidelines" on expenditure, which an MP may (or may not) vary according to local circumstances. Others may prefer to devise their own schemes.

Ultimately, this puts voters "in charge" as ultimate accountability rests with the electorate, where it should reside (and not with an unelected bureaucracy). This also should lead to some savings, as the administrative teams currently processing and authorising payments can be disbanded.

Politics as usual?

2009-05-13T23:47:00.002+01:00

As one would expect Libertas has been making much of the embarrassment that is afflicting our legislators, real and pretend ones. Should Libertas.eu be elected to the ~~Toy~~ European Parliament, they tell us solemnly, they will publish all their expenses on their website, thus ensuring complete transparency. This is part of their “Stamp out Sleaze” campaign that they launched yesterday to little public interest, the latter being entirely focused on details of MPs' spending.

Well, that is very nice, though I can imagine various ingenious ways of making sure that transparent expenses do not mean quite what they say. But there is another problem: Libertas.eu also boasts of the many existing euro- and national politicians they have acquired en route to putting up 550 candidates across Europe. Or as the Former British Soldier, Robin Matthews is supposed to have stated in today's press release:

Six months ago, Libertas didn’t exist. Today it is fielding many times more candidates than any other party in Europe.

Since no other party in Europe is quite as much in favour of European integration as Libertas.eu is, that means very little. But what of those politicians who have allegedly joined them?

For instance, every press release tells us proudly in the Notes for Editors that "in Latvia we have a former Prime Minister as the lead candidate". Quite true, the lead candidate for the single region of Latvia, Guntars Krasts, was briefly the Prime Minister from August 1997 to November 1998 (well, maybe not that briefly by Latvian standards) but since 2004 he has been a member of the Toy Parliament. Try as I might, I can find no evidence that he has declared his expenses in detail in the last five years. Perhaps I am looking at the wrong sites.

Similarly, several sitting French MEPs have announced that they will be standing for Libertas this time round. Presumably, this means that they feel strongly about the sleaze in their institution and, in order to show their feelings have always made all their expenses known to anyone who cares to enquire.

Has Philippe de Villiers done so? There appears to be no evidence of this on his party's official website or on his parliamentary site. Mind you, the idea of the ultra-traditionalist, ultra-nationalist M de Villiers from La Vendée teaming up with Mr Ganley who dismisses all forms of national politics as being out of date and helpless in the face of the EU, is quite entertaining by itself.

The point is that if sitting MEPs have not bothered to be transparent about their expenses up till now, what guarantee is there that they will change after this election? I think Mr Ganley should address that question.

There are, as it happens, a few other problems with the way Libertas.eu and its leader present themselves. Several press releases have also informed me in those Notes for Editors that "in the Czech Republic, the President, Vaclav Klaus, has endorsed our party".

This surprised me somewhat. In the first place, everything President Klaus does is news and yet I have heard nothing about this. In the second place, President Klaus opposes the Lisbon Treaty because he does not like European integration and has severe doubts about the whole project. Libertas, we are told ad nauseam, is on a very different platform: it loves the European Union but thinks that the way has been lost and needs to be found again. Has Vaclav Klaus really endorsed that?

Yesterday evening I searched news sites, Vaclav Klaus’s own site and Libertas; I found no reference to any endorsement. In desperation I e-mailed the Libertas press office asking for a link. This is a news story, I pointed out but that clearly stirred no interest.

I received no reply but today there is an item on the Libertas site about Declan Ganley meeting EU President Vaclav Klaus (who may not like to be described thus and, in any case, it is not entirely accurate) at the Libertas press conference. No mention of endorsement though if President Klaus attended the press conference that could count as such.

It would appear that things were not quite like that. Looking at Klaus's site and the English language pages one finds nothing until one glances at the diary. There, among many other items one does find information about a meeting.

My knowledge of Czech is shaky and I am prepared to be corrected on this but what it looks like to me is an extra diary item eased into an already busy day with President Klaus receiving Declan Ganley in Prague Castle, his official residence. Did Libertas hold a press conference in President Klaus’s office?

The Czech news item [in English] does not help us much, repeating as it does Ganley’s usual comments and the position with regards to the treaty in the Czech Republic, Poland and Germany. Oh and it mentions that Declan Ganley met President Klaus. Endorsement? What endorsement?

Then there was the unfortunate saga of former Polish President Lech Wałęsa, a hero of the fight against Communism and an unsuccessful politician after the system's collapse. (I wonder what he thinks of Robin Matthews's assertion that the EU had "removed the shackles of communism".)

On May 1 I received a press release that told me of a pan-European meeting of Libertas in Rome where "Nobel Peace Prize winner and champion of Polish freedom, Lech Walesa, will address over 1000 delegates from across Europe". I guess they did not discuss with him about who removed the shackles of communism.

Well, that sounded quite impressive even if Mr Wałęsa is a bit of a back number, having failed spectacularly in his presidential role, but a well-known and much admired back number. What the press release did not say was that he was being paid and, one assumes, paid quite handsomely to stand up before the 1,000 delegates, who, presumably, did not know this either. For himself, Mr Wałęsa supports the Civic Platform and is known not to be too keen on the League of Polish Families, an ally of Libertas.eu.

Really, one does begin to wonder what Mr Ganley tells all these very disparate parties about what Libertas stands for.

When the Polish media approached Lech Wałęsa he cheerfully admitted that he was paid, explaining that he had to accept all these engagements because he could not live on his state pension. I should have thought the state pension of a past president cannot be all that bad and he gets a good deal of free service in Poland and elsewhere in recognition of his heroism at a time it really mattered. My own suspicion is that he finds it hard to live without media attention.

Indeed, the only thing the former president found insulting was the suggestion that he received €50,000 for his speech.

Asked by the Polish newspaper about claims he had received a €50,000 fee for the speech, Mr Walesa replied jokingly: "Are you selling me short? You must be joking. You'd have to work one year for the same amount of money that I can get for one lecture." In a separate interview, Mr Walesa said he accepted the Libertas invitation because he is unable to live off his state pension.

According to his son, Jaroslaw, who is a Civic Platform candidate for the Toy Parliament, the old man had spoken to the EPP meeting the previous day without getting paid for it, because he agrees with them. Go figure.

Then again, Mr Wałęsa also said that he supported the idea of a single European state or, at least, up to a point. And all those who criticize him just want to attack him for everything. I do trust he is not going to turn himself into a political victim.

The news is that there will be more appearances by the Polish Grand Old Man at Libertas meetings, one assumes on the same terms, currently estimated at €100,000.

Mr Ganley, on the other hand, became all coy about the whole business.

DECLAN GANLEY has acknowledged a payment was made to former Polish president Lech Walesa to address Libertas delegates at their conference on Friday in Rome.

The Libertas founder said it was usual to pay a fee in such circumstances, and described Polish media queries about the exact amount as "offensive" …

"Gentlemen do not talk about money to other gentlemen," Mr Ganley told the daily newspaper Dziennik yesterday. "The word 'honorarium' includes the word 'honour'. Let's drop the subject."

With the greatest respect in the world, as Sir Humphrey would say, Mr Ganley is talking tosh. Politicians are not gentlemen and the question of money in politics is very important. After all, Mr Ganley spends a good deal of time talking about money received and spent by MEPs.

There is all the difference in the world between a grand old man of European politics appearing at a political rally because he supports the cause and the self-same GOM appearing like an after-dinner speaker for money. Mr Ganley had better get used to questions of this kind being asked about his party.

It could be said that I am nit-picking because I do not like Libertas. What do these stories matter, after all? Up to a point, Lord Copper.

It is true that I do not like Libertas. I do not like their basic platform, which is more European integration; I do not like their smug assertion that they are the wave of the future, coupled as it is with an invincible ignorance about the past and the present; I do not like their refusal to discuss any details of their programme – just like any other political party; I do not like the way Mr Ganley travels round Europe, having himself photographed with the great and the good; and I most certainly do not like the patronizing way both Mr Ganley and Mr Matthews talk to me. Only the boss is allowed to patronize me.

But there is something beyond that. Libertas.eu is presenting itself as being a special new party, one that will clean up the EU and its politics. One expects a little more from them than this kind of economic attitude to the actualité and grand dismissals of any question and criticism.

It is, let's face it, politics as usual though on a very amateurish level. I mean if you are going to diverge from the strict truth, do it in a way no-one notices or not till after the election.

COMMENT THREAD

Chasing their own tails

2009-04-15T15:06:00.005+01:00

Did you know that "Europe" has not just been the most successful peace process ever (Denmark not having invaded Holland for some time) but has alos advanced the cause of democracy eastward and "removed the shackles of communism"? You did not? I thought everyone knew that. After all, that is what we were told by the Former British Soldier, Robin Matthews, who is also leader of Libertas in the UK (though, obviously not of Libertas.uk) and a prospective candidate for the Toy Parliament in the South-West.

He was introducing the London list- six prospective candidates, all people, as he explained after giving a ringing endorsement to the European project, which has, alas, gone astray, with experience in life and enthusiasm. Apparently, knowledge of anything to do with the EU or the Toy Parliament or, even, of basic history is not required. In fact, it might be a disadvantage. You wouldn't want the regional candidates to know more than the UK leader.

The candidates, should they be elected and, as they all pointed out with the list system a small party can have a disproportionate number of seats, will help to transform the EU. In fact, they will help to transform the EU into Europe because it is clear from the speeches made by Mr Matthews and the three candidates at the table that they see all bad things - unaccountability, lack of transparency, lack of democracy - as being part of the EU and all good things - errrm, that peace process and the wonderful effect on the City of London - as being part of Europe.

What Libertas.eu, a ringingly pro-European party, will be aiming to do is "to reinstall accountability, openness and, most importantly, democracy at the heart of Europe".

Wisely, Mr Matthews did not waste any time explaining when all these highly desirable elements were last at the heart of Europe.

To be fair, neither he nor any of candidates wasted time explaining anything about the EU or even Europe. They did produce some shock-horror information. Apparently the accounts have not been certified (by an unspecified body as mentioning the Court of Auditors might be counted as information overload) for 14 years.

It seems that 80 per cent of our legislation comes from the EU and it is invariably initiated by unelected bureaucrats and that the Brussels elites ignore the wishes of the people of Europe, preferring to listen to lobbyists of whom there are a good many there. I am shocked, I tell you, shocked.

Interestingly enough, the will of the people only matters in connection with the Constitution and the Lisbon Treaty. There seemed to be political amnesia as far as the Danish no vote over Maastricht and the Irish no vote over Nice were concerned. When I raised the subject with one of the Libertas officials, it was waved aside in a "don't bother me with silly details" kind of way.

There was a good deal of talk about the referendum we did not have - always a good subject as Gordon Brown was undeniably being economical with the truth when he insisted that the Treaty of Lisbon was completely different from the Constitution for Europe. (We have written about it too many times on this blog to be able to manage links.)

There was more talk about MEPs' expenses, also a good knock-about subject and, of course, that old chestnut, the travel between Brussels and Strasbourg. When in a subsequent conversation I pointed out that this was in the treaty and not a lot can be done about that (my interlocutor, unlike the candidates knew about treaties and inter-governmental conferences) I was told that the ~~Toy~~ European Parliament can get round that by deciding not to go there more than about once a year or not at all.

Even if a large group of MEPs succeeded in abolishing the Strasbourg trips (and it sounds very unlikely that they will do so) this does not strike me as anything but displacement activity for people who have neither the knowledge, nor the curiosity, nor the courage to tackle the main issues. The Libertas official was taken aback when I pointed out that I did not consider them particularly radical as they were creating a position for themselves within the existing project. Indeed, I said using his own words, they merely wanted to reinforce the status quo.

Somebody has had a word with Mr Matthews because he has managed to update his speech. At the launch of Libertas in the UK he talked of Europe "chipping away at national sovereignty". I pointed out at the time the illogicality of using that as an argument for a party that wants to function on a pan-European basis. Clearly, someone else has had a go at the Former British Soldier (FBS, I think) and he no longer talks of that.

He has a new oratorial gimmick. Libertas is the logical political development of the twenty-first century. It is the one organization that looks forward and will deal with the problems of this century. The national parties, founded in the nineteenth century can deal only with national issues; they have failed comprehensively in ensuring that the great European project was not derailed by the EU elites in Brussels. A new radical pan-European movement is needed for that and Libertas.eu is the one to take on the mantle.

That would sound a lot better if Mr Matthews could grasp a simple fact: nationalism is not dead. The Soviet Union was brought down by a mixture of various movements among whom the national ones were extremely powerful. It is the EU or the European project that both he and Mr Ganley, not to mention the candidates, are so enamoured of that is completely out of date.

A creature of the mid-twentieth century it has shown itself unable to cope with the many problems of the twenty-first. It is unlikely to survive many more years and what will happen to Libertas.eu, that pro-European anti-Lisbon party?

That new and fresh formula that Mr Matthews and, in different words, the candidates keep talking about remains extraordinarily vague. They want elected Commissioners; well and good but how is that going to solve the problem of our own elected Parliament having no power over the legislation.

They want legislation to be initiated by the European Parliament and/or national parliaments with a complicated procedure afterwards to produce EU legislation. But how are they going to achieve that state of affairs and how is that going to help this country when something like the Droit de Suite legislation is pushed through by countries that have no interest in the art market to detriment of the ones (Britain and Netherlands) that do?

I may add that when I tried to explain what the Droit de Suite was and how it was passed and, indeed, what the role of the Council of Ministers is, the looks I received were blank though concerned. Well, I was told kindly, there is always legislation that one opposes, no matter how democratic a system is. But we are talking about legislation passed by people we do not vote for and who are not accountable to us; legislation that is not in our interest and, should other countries' representatives vote for it, we can do nothing about. Why do I bother?

That is, in fact, the question I asked myself as I walked out of the Royal Festival Hall where the launch took place (great view from the 6th floor) towards the Palace of Westminster. How many more of these launches can I attend before they cart me off to a padded cell?

Amateur hour

2009-03-21T20:24:00.005Z

Another week, another party launch. Last Monday it was the turn of Jury Team, Sir Paul Judge's brainchild (though, quite honestly, I am not sure anybody's brain was much engaged in the process). This event took place in Millbank Tower, rather than One Great George Street, which was something of a mistake. The latter is a much more attractive venue and right in the heart of Westminster. The former is a rather ghastly and characterless structure some distance away from the nearest transport points.

Once again, I compared it to Kilroy-Silk's launch of Veritas and once again I had to admit that the buzz was not there. In fact, the media did not seem to be there either, which may have been the fault of the organizers. The time and place of the launch remained something of a mystery till the week-end and this was not a big enough story for journos to drop everything at 24 hours' notice.

Furthermore, it was not clear whether the event was for the media or for potential supporters, members and candidates. The questions certainly came from the group of potentials but there was, as it happens, very little time for questions. Despite assuring us over and over again that this was a new kind of politics that relied on the internet, mobile phones, social chat sites like Facebook and My Space, twitter and all other suchlike activity, Sir Paul and his co-panellists spent an inordinate amount of time explaining various aspects of the enterprise, quoting liberally from the Jury Team website.

One assumes from the name of the anti-party party that, apart from the pun of judge and jury, it is a reference to the way that highly estimable institutions works – without fear or favour, balancing the evidence (with a dash of judge’s guidance). Indeed, Sir Paul managed to insert a quote from Gilbert and Sullivan’s highly entertaining “Trial by Jury”.

There is, however, a problem: a jury is not elected, it is chosen randomly from eligible members of the population. That may be quite a good way of choosing legislators as well (though the logistical problems of people having to stop their jobs and family lives for four or five years whether they liked it or not, whether it was appropriate or not would be hard to solve) but that is not what Sir Paul and his cohorts are arguing.

They want an elected House of Commons that will resemble a randomly picked jury or an appointed House of Lords (I’ll come to that below.) The contradictions in that idea need to be resolved.

There are other contradictions that crop up whenever people propose reforms that are best left where they belong – in pubs, wine bars or round dinner tables. It is bad, such reforms postulate, that politicians care about their careers or behave according to the party’s demands. Well, maybe, though I prefer careerists to people who are in politics in order to “help other people” or to “do good”. They are the potential dictators because they know what is good for other people. Ayn Rand was not wrong about the evils of altruism, particularly in public life. That she opposed private charity as well is a separate issue and one on which I part company with the lady.

Then there is the muddle as to what an MP is supposed to be guided by; is it his or her own conscience, the good of the country, the will of the country’s people, the needs and/or interests of his or her constituents? What happens when there are serious contradictions between some or all of those? And what of the fact that many people vote for a party?

According to the poll conducted by YouGov on behalf of Jury Team, 26 per cent said that they voted the way they did because they supported the policies of the party and 6 per cent because of the candidate; 17 per cent voted because they supported the party and its leadership and 12 per cent because of the candidate and the party. All very muddled though, I suppose, attitudes might change if candidates stood on their own individual principles, especially if they carefully tailored them to suit the constituency’s mood at the time of the election.

Here is an example. When Britain was preparing for the war in Iraq, which was debated in Parliament ad nauseam, the idea was quite popular in the country. Those who opposed it out of principle, like Sir Teddy Taylor (whose explanation for his opposition is muddled but consistent), received angry letters from their constituents, demanding that they abandon their principles and fall in with the majority’s wishes. Should they have done so?

Subsequently, as the war did not turn into a quick and easy victory it became less and less popular. What should MPs have done at that stage? Decided that, after all, they are not in favour of it? Many of them did and even tried to erase from the record the fact that they had voted for it in the first place but it is hard to think well of them for that reason.

What of that famous quotation from Burke’s Address to the Electors of Bristol, which Jury Team proudly sports on its website and Sir Paul Judge trotted out at the launch.

His unbiased opinion, his mature judgment, his enlightened conscience, he ought not to sacrifice to you or to any set of men living.

Edmund Burke wrote those proud words on his election in 1774. His Letter to the Electors of Bristol continued:

These he does not derive from your pleasure – no, nor from the law and the constitution. They are a trust from providence, for the abuse of which he is deeply answerable. Your representative owes you not his industry only, but his judgement; and he betrays, instead of serving you, if he sacrifices it to your opinion.

Hmmm. Not quite what Jury Team is saying methinks. Where do they stand on conscience versus constituents? Or, for that matter, on country versus constituents?

Four years after his election Burke and his electors faced that very conundrum as a swift reading of a biography of that great man (I recommend Conor Cruise O’Brien’s) would tell the the Jury Team’s gifted researchers.

In 1778 Burke supported the idea of free trade for Ireland, partly out of deep-seated principles, partly because he thought it was better for the whole country to have a richer, more developed Ireland. His constituents thought otherwise. Free trade would undermine their own protected position in Bristol and the politician’s attempts to explain that in the long run this would be better for Bristol as well were met frostily.

In 1780 Burke decided not to stand in Bristol as he had lost the support of his electors. Instead he re-entered the House as MP for Malton.

One can argue about Burke’s views on the role and duties of an MP and, indeed, historians have done so for over 200 years. But by no stretch of the imagination can one say that his defiance was directed at the party managers (yes, they were in existence in the eighteenth century as much as they are now). It was directed at the people who elected him, to whom, according to the Jury Team, as I understand it, an MP is bound to listen at all times.

The line-up at the launch consisted of Sir Paul himself, a former independent MP, Martin Bell and a present one, Richard Taylor, Lord Ramsbotham, a Cross-Bench peer, Tony Egginton, Independent Mayor of Mansfield and Councillor Keith Ross, Leader of Independent Group at the Local Government Association (LGA).

Without any disrespect to them I must point out that Mayor Egginton and Councillor Ross talked exclusively about local government and the possibilities of independents rising within it. As Councillor Ross’s career shows that has always been possible for people who have no desire to align themselves with any party but want to serve within their local authority. Frequently, as in this case, they can rise in the national structure of local authorities.

This gives us no indication of what can be done at the national or European level or what needs to be done. There are many reasons why people will vote for an Independent councillor that would not apply to a Member of Parliament.

Lord Ramsbotham, a man of genuinely distinguished military and public service career, spoke of the advantages that Cross-Bench Peers have over MPs who are beholden to their parties. They are also beholden to their constituents who may or may not re-elect them. If candidates are to be chosen in open primaries, as the Jury Team suggests, they may or may not be picked if they start doing what peers, and not just those on the Cross Benches do, which is speak and vote as they see fit.

One can’t help wondering how many of those people asked in the YouGov poll, who dutifully expressed their distrust of MPs would also insist that the House of Lords should be an all elected one, a development that Lord Ramsbotham, very sensibly, sees as the destruction of the Cross-Benches and, one may add, of the general independence of the Upper House? We are back with that impossible contradiction.

So we come to the two MPs (one former) who, actually, spoke first, immediately after Sir Paul Judge. Their presence, we were told, showed that it could be done: an independent can get elected to the House of Commons.

The problem is that Sir Paul was a little economical with the actualité. There were certain aspects to their elections that will not be there for Jury Team. Richard Taylor referred to one of them when he explained that he was very lucky in that there was an overwhelming local issue – the Kidderminster hospital – in his constituency and people felt very strongly about it while the sitting MP, David Lock, was “precisely on the wrong side”.

Very true. What neither his short address nor his website tell us is that the Lib-Dim candidate in Wyre Forest stood down both in 2001 and 2005, urging his supporters to vote for Dr Taylor. That sort of thing does help and is unlikely to happen when Jury Team puts up its candidates.

In the case of Martin Bell the situation was even more favourable. When he stood against Neil Hamilton in Tatton in 1997 both the Labour and the Lib-Dim candidates stood down, urging their supporters to vote for Mr Bell. Furthermore, he received a great deal of help from the local Labour association. Again, this is not something that will happen to any Jury Team candidate.

While we are on the subject of St George of the Anti-Sleaze Campaign, a.k.a. Martin Bell, it is worth reminding ourselves of his subsequent political “career”.

In 2001 he announced that, unless the Conservatives at Tatton choose Neil Hamilton again he would stand down. They chose George Osborne and Martin Bell stood down, retiring into his castle, well satisfied with slaying the Dragon of Sleaze.

He was then called upon to fight another battle and stand against Keith Vaz who had become embroiled in a far worse scandal than anything Neil Hamilton had managed. St George of the Anti-Sleaze Campaign refused, pleading his war-weariness but then rode out again on a very different battle: he stood in Brentwood and Ongar against Eric Pickles, a man of limited ability but blameless reputation.

Mr Bell had clearly realized that fighting an election against Keith Vaz with no quarter given by the Labour machinery and no help from any other party would have been a silly idea so he decided to fight against another Conservative on the grounds that the local association had been infiltrated by a Pentecostal Church.

The evidence for actual infiltration was rather slim and, in any case, why was St George of the Anti-Sleaze Campaign getting involved in the internal squabbling of a Conservative association? He lost and did so again in the 2004 European Election when he stood as Independent (for no discernible reason) in the East of England Region.

He now spends his time in that graveyard of all ambitions, a UNICEF ambassadorship, grousing about politicians and journalists alike.

Incidentally, if they wanted an existing Independent MP, why didn’t they bring out George Galloway? After all, his party, Respect, has now split and he may well be the only representative of his particular branch of it.

There were two other people on the platform, Lyn Tofari, potential candidate for the South-East Region and Miranda Banks, potential candidate for the South-West. At the time they were the only ones to have come forward. By now Jury Team has more potential candidates on whom people can vote through the internet or by mobile phone.

Open primaries are a big part of Jury Team’s plans, as they oppose the choice of candidates by closed circles within parties. They have a point there and the situation is particularly bad with the European elections in which lists are drawn up by parties (though it is not clear that the would-be candidates and campaign managers know this).

But will an “open” primary be any better? After all, this is a primary of self-selected voters who are likely to vote immediately on reading the summary posted by the candidates. There will be no question and answer sessions, no way of establishing what the candidates are like beyond the way they see themselves. This is not precisely how the American system of primaries works but then the Americans have primaries within what is virtually a two-party structure.

Ms Tofari gave us an interesting speech about how she had become involved in local politics, first at the parish level, then rising to other bodies. Her next logical step was going to be a seat as an Independent on Buckinghamshire County Council but she abandoned that in order to become involved with Jury Team and to stand (possibly) for the European Parliament. On the whole, I think that was a mistaken decision.

Ms Banks, on the other hand, leapt around the place, gesticulated with great fervour and meaning, talked much of painting pictures, creating images and, generally, managed to leave no cliché unsaid. I was not altogether surprised that she is a “performance psychologist”.

After the formal parts of the meeting, during which not one reference had been made to the fact that 80 per cent of our legislation comes from the EU and Parliament can do nothing about it, even when it actually goes through that institution, I went up to talk to the two wannabe candidates.

Why were they thinking of standing for the European Parliament (I didn’t think they would know what I meant by Toy Parliament)? Well, they explained to me, it’s because neither they nor other people know anything about the EU and they thought they would do this to find out.

Rather an expensive way of learning something that they could read on a certain blog or, failing that, on the Europa website, which is full of very useful information.

Then I expressed my surprise that among all the complaining about politicians being subjected to party discipline or being interested only in their own career, there was no mention of the main problem, the 80 per cent of our legislation coming from the EU and of Parliament either knowing nothing about it or not being able to reject it. And, by the way, I added, the European Parliament is not the primary legislating body in the EU.

I got blank stares in response. I didn’t know that, one said. No, added the other one as well as a young man who had joined our group, I didn’t know either. This is the sort of thing we need to find out, they said.

We chatted a bit longer along the same lines. It was clear that neither the two would-be candidates nor the rest of the audience, many of whom were thinking of joining, had the first notion of how the EU works, how it affects our legislation and how it is structured, let alone what its purpose is.

There are far more candidates for the open primaries listed on the site but a swift perusal of their election mini-manifestoes confirms that people are signing up without bothering to find out what it is they want to be part of.

We hear a great deal about the arrogance of politicians and all those who live in the Westminster/Brussels bubble. Indeed, I have written and spoken about it myself. But what of the arrogance of people who think that they should be in that bubble, make decisions that affect us all and generally throw their weight around without wanting either to slog through the party structure (fair enough if you do not believe in it) or to make the slightest effort to find out what is actually going on around them?

What on earth makes these people think that the world (or Britain or their region) is waiting breathlessly to hear their ignorant ideas on what needs to be done? At the very least, they could find out that the European Parliament does not function in the same way as the Westminster one does. Or about the treaties. Or about the European Communities Act. Or, or, or ….

In the end it is not only our politicians who are failing in their duties but many of us as well – our duties as citizens of a constitutional democracy. Those duties include finding out information. Much of it is easily available. Before rushing in to give us the benefit of their wisdom, members of Jury Team ought to start thinking about their own tasks and duties.

COMMENT THREAD

The underlying problem

2009-03-15T20:34:00.001Z

It is the Ides of March and, therefore, issues of importance need to be looked at. Not that the EU is not important but, in many ways, it is the symptom, not the cause.

Yesterday I did a longish stint on the BBC Russian Service and, in the course of it, spent two minutes talking about the growing popularity of Ayn Rand’s novel “Atlas Shrugged” in the United States and the ever more frequent signs of “Who is John Galt?” appearing at the continuing Tea Parties across the country. (This movement has been documented extensively by Instapundit, Sister Toldjah and Michelle Malkin, among others.)

The point, for those who do not know about John Galt is that “Atlas”, the productive members of society, withdraw their labour because they no longer want to carry “the world”, that is the huge and ever-growing load of government, politicians, civil servant, public servants, regulators, all those who do nothing but leech off them and use the money to run their lives. Since her day the problem has become worse and the situation in the US is such that people are seriously threatening to limit their work to the minimum necessary to survive in order to deprive the human and institutional parasites of their lifeblood.

But Atlas is shrugging as this placard says and the book is no #27 on Amazon.

I have certain difficulties with Ayn Rand. In the first place, she was not a very good writer and her novels are long, boring and lumbering. She is also, like so many political philosophers who comment on the present as well as try to tease out more permanent laws and theories, better at seeing what is wrong than at building up alternatives. Her solution as presented at the end of “Atlas Shrugged” is seriously unsatisfactory to anyone who really believes in individual liberty and is likely to turn into another Animal Farm.

Her worship of strength, contempt for any weakness, disdain for private charity and hatred for anyone who disagrees with her makes me feel that Whittaker Chambers was, yet again, correct when he caught a whiff of fascism in her writing, particularly in “Atlas Shrugged”.

More than anything I dislike her disciples and followers, though, one could argue, she is not responsible for them. Their reaction to anyone who disagrees with the slightest point Ms Rand made is vitriolic hatred and abuse, all of which, apparently, demonstrates their belief in freedom.

Having said that, I have to add that Ms Rand’s analysis of what is wrong with society in general both at a more superficial and the underlying level is unmatched. She slices through all orthodoxies and shows very clearly how it is they manage to produce the noxious results we all have to live with.

I have never been able to get through Ayn Rand’s novels but I have read a number of her essays, which tend to reformulate the same two or three ideas but they are good ideas. However, the best summary of the underlying problem is in the Introduction to her collection “The Virtue of Selfishness”, written in 1964.

The meaning ascribed in popular usage to the word “selfishness” is not merely wrong: it represents a devastating intellectual “package-deal”, which is responsible, more than any other single factor, for the arrested moral development of mankind

In popular usage, the word “selfishness” is a synonym of evil; the image it conjures is of a murderous brute who tramples over piles of corpses to achieve his own ends, who cares for no living being and pursues nothing but the gratification of the mindless whims of any immediate
moment.

Yet the exact meaning and dictionary definition of the word “selfishness” is: concern with one’s own interests.

This concept does not include a moral evaluation; it does not tell us whether concern with one’s own interests is good or evil; not does it tell us what constitutes man’s actual interests. It is the task of ethics to answer such questions.

The subsequent essays try to establish some immutable laws of ethics that could underpin human behaviour, always concentrating on the need and advantage of rational self-interest.

Further down in the Introduction Ayn Rand says:

Altruism declares that any action taken for the benefit of others is good, and any action taken for one’s own benefit is evil. Thus the beneficiary of an action is the only criterion of moral value – and so long as that beneficiary is anybody other than oneself, anything goes.

Hence the appalling immorality, the chronic injustice, the grotesque double standards, the insoluble conflicts and contradictions that have characterized human relationships and human societies throughout history, under all the variants of altruistic ethics.

Observe the indecency of what passes for moral judgements today. An industrialist who produces a fortune and a gangster who robs a bank are regarded as equally immoral, since they both sought wealth for their own “selfish” benefit. A young man who gives up his career in order to support his parents and never rises beyond the rank of grocery clerk is regarded as morally superior to the young man who endures an excruciating struggle and achieves his personal ambition. A dictator is regarded as moral, since the unspeakable atrocities he committed were intended to benefit “the people”, not himself.

Ayn Rand knew all about dictators being regarded as moral. Having escaped from Soviet Russia in 1926 she spent a good deal of her life in the United States, particularly in Hollywood battling against the various Communists who produced pro-Soviet propaganda, which culminated in the particularly evil or preposterous, depending on how you look at it, wartime films, “The Song of Russia” and “Mission to Moscow”. Here is a little more on the latter film.

We, too, know about this in the double-think and hypocrisy that prevents people from saying openly that Communism was the other evil ideology of the twentieth century and was responsible for far more deaths and a greater social, political and economic catastrophe than Nazism. Ah, we are told, but, at least the Communists meant well.

Finally we come to those well-meaning agents of altruism, the governments who take money away from those who work in order to impose what they see as a fair society, which just happens to be a society in which the elite has more and more entrenched privileges than the rest of us; the regulators who, in the spirit of pure altruism and paid for by the taxpayer, regulate our lives for our own good; and, finally and most importantly, the NGOs who demand more and more unaccountable power for themselves in order to run the world or various parts of it for what they see as other people’s benefits, destroying people’s lives and all hope in developing countries.

The EU (oh, yes, I was going to work my way round to it) is part of this world-view of altruism, in which the worst sin is exercising self-interest even if it is that self-interest that moves the world forward and spreads wealth around it. It is, however, merely a symptom of the underlying problem.

Muddled thinking

2009-03-12T10:14:00.008Z

Having expressed a certain lack of enthusiasm for the great Declan Ganley, I did go with interest to the launch of the Libertas's electoral campaign in the UK. The press conference was not as well attended as I would have expected. When Kilroy Silk launched Veritas in 2005, there was barely standing room in the big hall in One Great George Street and the main media had sent their big guns. This launch was thinly attended though I gather from Mark Mardell's blog on the BBC site that he was there or, at least, he had spoken to the leader of the campaign, Robin Matthews, described as a former British soldier. Actually, that may have been the previous day as the blog was posted at 10.30 am, the start of the press conference.

A "former British soldier" is a remarkably coy way of describing a 21-year army career and Mr Matthews was no more forthcoming during the press conference, saying merely that he had served in Bosnia, Sierra Leone and Afghanistan. Mr Ganley also added in ringing tones (he is good at ringing tones) how ironic it was that Mr Matthews has travelled round the world as a British Soldier "championing the values of democracy" only to find them being eroded at home.

Yes, that is ironic, all right and one is glad that Mr Matthews has understood this but one is not too sure that he knows quite what to do with that understanding.

A few quick enquiries established that Robin Matthews left the army with the rank of Lieutenant-Colonel and during 2005 he had commanded The Light Dragoons, a British Cavalry Regiment, on operations in Iraq. After that he was seconded to army media operations, which is not, I fear, any recommendation though it might mean that he knows journalists and will be able to give them stories.

The official bio says:

Just prior to leaving the Army, he was seconded as the Strategic Communications Advisor to 16 (Air Assault) Brigade, Helmand Province, Afghanistan and also acted as the spokesman for all British Forces there.

On the subject of army spokesmen in Afghanistan and the problems they have caused in not providing a clear narrative or even accurate information I refer my readers to postings by the boss, too numerous to link to.

However, this may explain why Mr Matthews thinks that he can just sit back and journalists will approach him. Some will, perhaps, but he is no longer the spokesman for the British Forces in Helmand but the leader of a political party on the fringes. He will have to learn some media savvy very quickly.

We were not told who else will be standing in Britain but were assured that there will be a candidate in every constituency, including Northern Ireland. That makes 83 candidates. There will also be candidates in every EU member state but it is not clear how many.

Why should we vote Libertas in June? Well, setting aside the rather nebulous talk about "restoring democracy to Europe" of which more below, the main argument seems to be that they are putting up ordinary people and not politicians.

This appears to be the USP of another party that is to be launched next Monday, Jury Team, set up by Sir Paul Judge (judge – jury, geddit?). This one wants to do without parties as well, believing that doing away with those noxious organizations will make "politics more accessible, politicians more accountable and political institutions more transparent". An attractive notion but, in actual fact, it will create something approximating Russian politics where the nascent parties have been effectively abolished in favour or a more personal style.

We, veterans of the eurosceptic movement and of party launches have sat through numerous meetings when various political groups announced that they would field "real" people or "ordinary" people, not politicians with whom the electorate is fed up and who have moved away from "real" and "ordinary" people.

This is a very fine example of what is known as muddled thinking. There is a definite dissatisfaction with politics and politicians and part of that comes from the widespread feeling that politicians now seem to be part of a separate class that has no dealings at all with the rest of the population beyond canvassing for votes every so many years.

A far greater part of the dissatisfaction comes from an understanding, inchoate but real, that those self-same politicians, while grabbing more money and privileges for themselves have, in fact, made themselves and us completely powerless by handing over powers to the EU as well as numerous unaccountable quangos.

Disentangling all that and discussing what the answer might be is quite difficult; it is much easier to say that all would be solved if people in politics were not politicians or if politicians had done ordinary jobs.

The argument is fallacious. Being able to do an ordinary job and even being good at it does not necessarily indicate any political ability. History is littered with successful businessmen or military men who failed comprehensively when they took their skills into the very different field of politics.

There is no evidence that a businessman of any kind understands larger economic matters or that a good company officer knows aught about defence (or even other parts of the army, never mind the navy, the air force or the marines); bus drivers know what is good for … well, bus drivers and do not necessarily know about transport policy and the idea of teachers being in charge of education policy (which should not be part of the government's portfolio anyway) is terrifying. I am not even talking about the possibility of those people knowing anything about other political matters. They might or they might not.

The fact that James Callaghan left school at 17, not being able to afford the Oxford place he had won and worked in various "real" jobs as well as serving with great distinction in the Royal Naval Reserve during World War II may have made him a better man but contributed little to his abilities as a politician, though he was quite good at getting round his colleagues.

While having a separate professional political class may not be such a good idea, having people who do not know anything about politics going into it is no better. Admittedly, what we have at the moment is the worst of both worlds: a class of professional politicians who know nothing about politics. Substituting amateurs with no knowledge is hardly the solution.

Apart from anything else, a bunch of elected politicians who have absolutely no understanding of what they are doing, being "ordinary" or "real" people, are extremely easy to manipulate either by the leader of their grouping or by the government, wherever it happens to be.

Nothing in Mr Ganley's or Mr Matthews's statements or in their replies to the various questions made me think that they have the faintest understanding of how the EU works or, indeed, what it is Libertas wants to achieve.

In his introductory comments Mr Matthews spoke of "a Europe that seeks to transfer more and more power to Brussels, chipping away at national sovereignty in the process". But the whole raison d'être of Libertas is to create a pan-European party that will, somehow, make the EU more democratic and accountable, which is what it apparently was at some point in the past.

I asked Mr Matthews whether his aim was to campaign to restore power to national parliaments or to reform the EU, whose structure would not change even if the Lisbon Treaty failed, and if the latter, how was he intending to go about it. His reply did not fill me with confidence.

The first thing, he said, was to take stock and to ensure that there is a vote on Lisbon (preferably, one assumes a No); whether people are prepared to sanction this enormous transfer of power to the European elite. Then we can move on and, in due course, Libertas will publish its policies. I suspect this means that they have not thought beyond the first step.

Back when I cut my eurosceptic teeth, the days of Maastricht and the battle for that referendum, it made a certain amount of sense to say that we should concentrate on this treaty that had qualitatively changed the process of integration.

The European issue was new to most people as the project had been apparently (though not in reality) quiescent for many years; it was necessary to introduce all the many aspects of it into public discourse and to suggest withdrawal appeared to be politically suicidal. Luckily Jacques Delors on the one hand and the people of Denmark on the other helped us to make "Europe" familiar to many.

We have moved a long way from there, though not as long as we would have done had some people concentrated more on what really matters - politics and policies. To return to the same point and argue that we must not frighten the horses and let's discuss the Lisbon Treaty, which is so horrific that it makes one faint with horror, before we, possibly, move on to other issues is pointless at a time when people are seriously discussing the possibilities of British withdrawal or even the complete collapse of the EU.

But then, that is precisely what Mr Ganley is afraid of: that those wicked eurosceptics will have their way and the great European project, which, in his opinion, would be absolutely wonderful if only it acquired popular support, will collapse. That is why we say that Libertas is not fighting on our side - they want to strengthen the EU, we want to destroy it in order to start creating genuinely democratic structures in European countries and alliances between them and outwith Europe.

Libertas is facing a number of problems. In the first place, there is some doubt as to whether they will be able to stand in the election as Libertas UK as UKIP has registered that name as a political party and has put up one candidate in a local by-election under that name. Usually that means that the name of the new party has to be changed but it is not clear what is the situation with a pan-European party, which is based in Brussels.

To those sensitive souls who tell me this was a dastardly low-down trick by UKIP I say pshaw. This is no more dastardly than the Tories trying to infiltrate their people into the UKIP administration or Libertas, itself, cavalierly sidelining other Irish organizations who had laid the foundation for their own work - organizations such as The National Platfrom, led by Anthony Coughlan, which somehow managed to win the first referendum on the Treaty of Nice without Mr Ganley or his financial input.

As far as the Treaty of Nice is concerned, Mr Ganley has amnesia. Year Zero came with the French and Dutch votes against the Constitution. There was no history before that.

Then there is the question of money. Mr Ganley told one questioner very firmly that he was through with putting money into the campaign because, he could not resist adding, this was not just about him but about all the people of Europe. The question is how many of those people will put money into what promises to be a very expensive exercise.

Mr Ganley's own idea is that it is the small donors that matter. I think he has been misreading the funding of the Obama campaign. There is well-documented evidence all over the internet and the blogosphere that most donations to the latter were not all that small and those that were under the reportable level were all too often multiple donations. There were, as Hot Air documented several times, no real checks on whether money came from the same card several times.

Mr Ganley, on the other hand, is calling for people to contribute one pound each. If you give even a pound, he said, you will feel yourself to be part of the campaign and will get involved. Um, no, that is bad psychology. People give money to a political party in order not to get too involved, unless they give a lot, in which case they want their investment to pay off.

Still, big money is needed for political campaigning across 27 countries and it is not clear where it will be coming from.

Then there is the question of competition, particularly in Britain. Libertas is not like UKIP, they explain because they want to make Europe or the EU (the two are still interchangeable) stronger and more democratic in order to harness the energy of the European people. (I kid you not.) UKIP, on the other hand, wants Britain to withdraw, as does the BNP, though that party was not mentioned. That is just negative.

Actually, that does not have to be negative if plans are elaborated on the subsequent political development because politics is not either/or - either you stay in the EU or you fall into the darkest abyss. Even the Commission does not use those crude arguments any more. Why on earth does Libertas?

In any case, "we want to withdraw, restore power to Parliament and govern ourselves in our own interest" is a difficult to achieve policy but it is very clear if one wants to explain it to the electorate. We want to make the European elite democratically accountable is not so easy to explain, especially if you do not even know what you mean by that or how such a thing can be accomplished, even in theory.

The Conservatives, too, are stirring, obviously frightened by the ever more crowded electoral field on which their rather feeble eurosceptic credentials will not be discerned. Whereas, if all you are offering is a vague desire to reform the EU, well you have the Lib-Dims and the Greens. No doubt others will appear in the next few weeks. Then there is the about to be launched Jury Team, about which I shall write next Monday. (Or as close to it as I can manage.)

Finally, Mr Ganley issued a warning. They will be attacked (well, one usually is in politics) and we must not believe what will be said about them. Once again, he put on his "ready-to-go-to-the-stake" expression: they are afraid of us in Brussels, he said, they do not want a pan-European movement, they will accuse us of being eurosceptics. But do not believe them.

Well, OK, I will not believe them.

COMMENT THREAD

Let it snow!

2008-12-04T11:41:00.004Z

Would you send used Land Rovers into this?

2008-11-22T15:26:00.006Z

The official termination of hostilities in Iraq on 1 May 2003 brought with it a brief honeymoon for British forces occupying southern Iraq. The predominantly Shia population did not show they same degree of antagonism to the occupying forces as did the deposed Sunni further north and, for a period, troops were able to patrol in soft hats, without body armour.

Media coverage of that early period has already begun to focus on the "soft hat" patrols, backed by a trickle of "feel good" stories typified by a BBC contribution from the BBC on 13 April 2003. This told of a Northumberland soldier who had liberated a "unique symbol of Iraq's fresh hope for the future" - a litter of puppies. Born in the week that British soldiers had occupied Basra, the five puppies had sought and found refuge in an Army compound in the centre of Basra. "Sentimental soldiers" of Zulu Company 1st Battalion Royal Regiment Fusiliers had adopted the puppies and their wild mother and taken them under their protection.

While a few lucky puppies might have prospered, the British were not getting off to a good start. Casting around for an experienced Iraqi to head an interim administration in Basra, British Army intelligence "talent-spotters" had nominated tribal sheikh Muzahim Mustafa Kanan al-Tamimi, a man considered sufficiently distanced from the regime to make his appointment acceptable to local people.

But, reported The Daily Telegraph, "they appear to have miscalculated." It turned out that their chosen man had been a former brigadier in Saddam Hussein's army and a member of the Ba'ath Party. The announcement of his role had been greeted with tumult in Basra. A rival clan had staged a near-riot outside his home as he had held talks with other local leaders. British troops had to be called in to calm the situation. Hundreds of protesters marched through the city centre waving banners reading: "No to tribal government. No to old Ba'ath party members. Yes to freedom."

Sheikh al-Tamimi was quietly dropped but that was by no means the end of the strife. When the Army finally appointed an interim council, half of the dozen members were said to have held prominent places in the fallen regime. One of them, Ghalib Cubba, a rich businessman known in Basra as "Saddam's banker", had held soirees at which the leader known as Chemical Ali had been a regular guest. Others included the imam of Saddam’s mosque and a university lecturer who had had a reputation for converting students to the Ba'ath cause. As news of the council's make-up filtered through to the streets, reported The Telegraph, "some appointments drew fire."

At this stage the "fire" was verbal rather than physical. There were still three brigades of British troops in southern Iraq, plus a smattering of forces from other nationalities, enough to contain small demonstrations. But that was to change. In late April, it was announced that the force level would be reduced to one brigade. The stage was being set for the coming turmoil, as troops numbers were to be reduced to a level below that which many believed safe.

Nevertheless, even though the US-held zones were erupting into violence, Basra remained quite – on the surface at least. This allowed a number of commentators to make comparisons between the two areas, with favourable comments directed at the British – even if they were more a stick with which to beat President Bush than they were genuine compliments.

That was undoubtedly part of the motivation for an editorial in May 2003 when the US tabloid USA Today ran an editorial headed: "British postwar approach provides model for US". While in Baghdad, the paper noted, US soldiers in full combat gear sit nervously atop tanks scanning the horizon through gun sights, "the atmosphere in Basra is more relaxed." It continued:

The British forces that run the city have restored water and electricity to pre-war levels and have won the locals' trust. Soldiers are barely noticed: Unlike the armored convoys rumbling through Baghdad, an occasional jeep carries one or two soldiers sporting berets instead of combat helmets. British and Iraqi police conduct joint foot patrols. Often, a British officer is seen gossiping with a local sheikh or fixing the plumbing in a hospital. Some looting persists at night, but chaos and shortages are far less than in Baghdad.

US is bungling the country's postwar reconstruction. In other words, the US is failing to achieve the same success that the British have accomplished in restoring Basra to normalcy. And in so doing, it endangers Bush's pledge to replace Saddam Hussein's brutal regime with a prosperous democracy.

Although less visible – and considerably less well reported – behind the scenes it was less than sweetness and light. Some of this was picked up by The Daily Telegraph when, on 9 May, it reported on how "fanatics" were trying to fill the power vacuum left by the fall of Saddam, putting a community in fear. This particular story focused on how Catholics selling alcohol in Basra were being forced to shut up shop and were being murdered if they did not.

The finger had been pointed at several Shia groups with fundamentalist tendencies that were suppressed under Saddam. Their leaders had been forced into exile and were now starting to return, mainly from neighbouring Iran. Among them were names that were to become very familiar to Western readers. One was Mohammed Bakr al Hakim, leader of the Badr Corps, the paramilitary wing of the Supreme Council of Islamic Revolution. Another was the party of Said El Sadr, who had been killed by the Saddam regime in 1999. But the name on most people's lips was the El Dawa Religious Party, a grouping with extremist tendencies whose founder, Mohammed Bakr El Sadr - a cousin of Said – had been hanged by the regime in 1980.

It was al-Hakim, though, who was making the most noise, at least, according to Stephen Farrell of The Times. On 12 May, he described the "huge crowds" that had greeted the ayatollah's return from exile and his message that US-led forces should leave the country. There were no overt threats – at least none recorded by Farrell. Simply, al-Hakim was telling the crowds, estimated at 60,000 in one location, that "this nation (Iraq) wants to preserve its independence and the coalition forces must leave this country." In what Farrell called a "nuanced" message, al-Hakim declared, "We must never permit the presence of foreigners and we must not be their slaves. We must show that we can rule ourselves." The speech created, "an effect akin to drums of war", Farrell observed.

A sanguine assessment also came from The Economist on 15 May. It noted, under the title, "Insecurity in Basra, Iraq's second largest city," that while every household in Basra had two or three guns, according to a witness to the daylight murder of two Christian liquor-dealers, the British, were ill-equipped and disinclined to fill the gap left by the 16,000 police who used to keep order in the city and the surrounding countryside.

Until last Saturday, the magazine said, metropolitan Basra was being policed by 48 armed British military policemen, plus 900 unarmed locals: they were detaining just four or five miscreants daily. On 10 May, some 500 more Iraqi policemen had joined the force, and more were to follow, but it was to be months before they were trained.

Despite this, we saw evidence of what was clearly a determination of the British government to disengage from the administration of southern Iraq. On that 15 May, the control of the Iraqi port town of Umm Qasr, to the south of Basra, was handed over to the local authority, the first such transfer of power since the invasion.

The claims of "success", however, were overshadowed by allegations that, in its impatience to leave, the Army was handing power to a corrupt interim council that had been embezzling funds and aid. One soldier had been less than happy, declaring: "It has not done much for morale among the Pioneers. We've worked hard to get where we are today, but there is concern as to just what we're leaving ordinary people with." He described the handover as a "bloody disaster".

There was also concern that members of the police force, currently under the supervision of the Royal Military Police, had been using "old-style techniques" to beat confessions out of those they have arrested. Disgruntlement among troops across the south over the choice of new police officers, many of them former Ba'athists, was rife. "They're all murdering bastards," said one lieutenant at a police station in Basra, where MPs had been pulled out.

Meanwhile, the problems of administering Basra as a whole were coming back to haunt the military administration. After their attempt a month earlier to find local leaders to run an interim council, commanders gave up, disbanding the council and forming an interim committee dealing with the technical tasks of reconstruction, and a civic forum of political leaders. The latter was to work on setting up a democratic local government.

The "utilities" committee was headed by Brigadier Adrian Bradshaw, the commander of the British Seventh Brigade. Despite chronic shortages of water and electricity, rubbish is piling up in the streets and continued looting, the move was not well received. When the committee met for the first time on Sunday 1 June, as many as 5,000 gathered outside the military base in Basra, led by Shia Muslim clerics. They carried banners with "No to British rule over Basra" and "We can rule ourselves" on them. One of the organisers of the demonstration, Sheikh Ahmed Malki, was unequivocal. He told the news agency AFP: "We demand an Iraqi governor, elected by the people while they are imposing a British governor on us."

Earlier that week, prime minister Tony Blair had visited British troops in Basra and praised them for the way they had taken the city. He was the first foreign leader to visit postwar Iraq, where he told the soldiers they were now rebuilding in relative peace. "You fought the battle, you won the battle, and you fought it with great courage and valor," he said. "But it didn't stop there. You then went on to try to make something of the country you had liberated. And I think that's a lesson for armed forces everywhere, the world over."

The inhabitants of Basra do not seem to have been impressed. This was a city where, after dark, gunfire could be heard across the city and looting of government buildings, businesses and homes continued. And news was spreading of a scandal over "shocking pictures" revealed by The Sun newspaper, which showed male Iraqis at a Basra military base apparently forced into sexual positions by their British captors. In another, a prisoner was suspended by rope from a fork-lift truck driven by a laughing British soldier. Fusilier Gary Bartlam, 18, had been detained by civilian police after he had taken a roll of film to be developed to a shop in his hometown of Tamworth, Staffordshire.

The story flashed around the world, even appearing in the Australian Sun-Herald. Although an English language story, the Sun's lurid details were translated into Arabic and posted on a number of websites, remaining to this day. This coincided with a story, just three days later, of MoD police investigating the death of two Iraqi civilians in British custody. The gilt was rapidly rubbing off the gingerbread.

Bad news of a different kind came a few days later when, on 6 June, Sheikh Ali Najm al-Saadun, who headed an influential tribe in Basra, was shot dead by four hooded assailants. The location was near the Basra office of the Supreme Assembly of the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, the main Iraqi Shiite movement. The al-Saadun tribe had close ties with the deposed Baath regime of Saddam Hussein. Members of his tribe said they suspected the group's armed wing, the Badr Brigade, of being behind the murder.

The next day, what were described as "local officials" in Basra were reported complaining of a "significant escalation" of political militancy against the interim authorities. Saboteurs appeared to be targeting the power grid with the aim of crippling a key oil refinery. A series of destructive attacks on carefully selected power lines around Basra in the recent weeks had played havoc with the energy-hungry Basra Refinery, an important source of petrol for the domestic market. Looting – a continuous problem - had not been a motive, the officials had ventured, because no cables had been stolen from the toppled electrical towers.

That same day, the Arab news agency Al-Jazeera was reporting that hundreds of lawyers had demonstrated in Basra to demand the British rid the judiciary of Ba'thists, reinstated after the war. The BBC reported that a group of around 2,000 Shi'ite Muslims had also staged a demonstration, this one against the presence of British forces in Basra. Led by clerics, the protestershad marched through the city shouting, "No to Tony Blair, no to Satan." Their protest ended in front of the headquarters of the British military command in Basra, where they chanted, "Leave peacefully lest we expel you through our jihad." They then handed in a petition demanding a British pull-out to the outskirts of the city.

Significantly, although the name was not yet to mean much to most people in Britian, the protesters were said to have rallied on the instructions of an organisation named after Ayatollah Mohammed Sadeq al-Sadr. The "drums of war" were beating louder.

What may or may not have been significant was another report that a cell of Saddam Hussein's Fedayeen militia had been uncovered. This emerged after the arrest of one of its members, Haidar Yassin Daoud al-Tamimi. He confessed to having been sent to Basra by Baathist officials to "gather information about al-Dawa and British forces" in preparation for launching attacks against them. He claimed that the Baath and Saddam's Fedayeen had "a large network of activists in (Basra) province as well as a cache of arms, including heavy weapons, in one of the villages of the area."

At that time, there had been innumerable rumours of a come-back from Saddam Hussein – who was still at large - and his loyalists. These were not to come to anything. The threat was closer to home, a further presentiment of which came with a report that British military vehicles had been stoned in Basra. As many as 10,000 people had taken to the streets to demand self-government. Again they were led by Shia clerics, chanting threatening slogans such as, "Answer our demands or you will regret it".

Of more immediate concern, perhaps, to the ordinary people was the dire state of the utilities, with a report of the telephone system still disabled, Basra telephones working only for local calls. But, out of the spotlight, there were ever-increasing signs that the hard men were taking over. One such was the fate Saad Bazzaz's Arabic-language newspaper, Azzaman. Bazzaz, one of the new style of media entrepreneurs in Iraq, ran separate editions for Baghdad and one for Basra. Every day, the paper carried on its back page photographs of glamorous western women, models and movie stars. His offices in Basra had been attacked by Shia extremists.

A further insight as to the conditions came from New York Times op-ed columnist Nicholas D. Kristof. Writing for his paper after a visit to Iraq, he recounted a discussion with a taxi driver in Basra who expressed fears that the occupation was falling apart. With Saddam still at large, there werereal fears that he would return, the driver telling Kristof that some of his passengers now they wished he would come back, "because at least under him we had security." Insecurity casts a huge shadow over all of Iraq, wrote Kristof:

Few people dare go out at night, and even in the day there are carjackings and armed robberies. On the highways, bandits sometimes rake cars with automatic weapons so that they can plunder them. On my first night back in Iraq, I sat outside my little hotel in Basra, trying to make my satellite phone work and listening to gunfire erupting around the city.

He then continued with an account of conditions at Basra General Hospital:

… Dr. Abdul Wahhab frets that the medical situation is worse than before the war. There is no functioning health ministry to procure drugs, water shortages have led to cholera as families drink from rivers that are also sewers, and UNICEF calculates that 7.7 percent of Iraqi children under 5, almost twice the rate before the war, now suffer from acute malnutrition.

On top of all that, Dr. Wahhab really got fed up last week when a gang of bandits attacked the hospital's infectious diseases unit, firing automatic weapons and hurling grenades as doctors and patients scattered. The bandits were after the air-conditioners.

Meanwhile, in what in retrospect seemed an attempt to keep a lid on a deteriorating situation, Britain was paying monthly wages to thousands of demobilised Iraqi soldiers, after the The US administrator in Iraq, Paul Bremner, had disbanded the Army, leaving some 400,000 people out of a job. The payments were described as part of Britain's hearts-and-minds campaign to avoid stirring up resentment against the occupation of Iraq. There was, however, an "unspoken desire" to reduce the threat of the Shi'ite population in the south taking up weapons against British soldiers as some Sunnis had done against US forces.

As another indication of how security in the city of Basra had deteriorated, a British Army Major had become southern Iraq's chief paymaster, after UK forces had secured the vaults of the central bank in Basra and moved large amounts of money to a secure military base before looters could reach it. Not even the banks were safe.

Yet, as the demonstrations and unrest gathered pace, with the discovery of leaflets calling on the people of southern Iraq to rise up against the British, Brigadier Adrian Bradshaw, commander of the 7th Armoured Brigade, told BBC radio that protests in Basra were simply part of the normal process of democracy establishing itself. "We are not worried," said Bradshaw, "What we are seeing here is a new emerging democracy starting to flex its muscles. I think we should expect to see a certain amount of expression of opinion." "We don't feel threatened in southern Iraq. That is because we have won the people’s trust by being open with the Iraqis we meet."

Something then was to happen, which was to change that view. A hundred miles of so north of Basra, in the province of Maysan – also within the British sphere of operations – lay the small town of Majar al-Kabir, itself 15 miles south of the provincial capital, al Amarah. The area itself was a Shia stronghold which had suffered greatly under the rule of Saddam Hussein and, when British troops initially entered this town, they had been treated as liberators. Early in June, British politicians had even been taken to al Amarah to see for themselves how well the transition from the old regime to a new elected authority was going. British troops in the area were ordered not to wear body armour or helmets.

However, British forces had been carrying out a programme of disarming the population, carrying out house searches and road blocks in an attempt to gather up the weaponary. By all accounts, this policy had been extemely unpopular, so much so that on Monday 23 June, negotiations had been conducted with local leaders and an agreement reached – the nature of which was disputed – which appeared to have been taken by the locals as an agreement than searches would be suspended.

Then, on the Tuesday morning, at around 9am local time, a detachment from the 1st Battalion the Parachute Regiment, 12 soldiers in all, arrived in Majar al-Kabir in two Pinzgauer military vehicles, accompanied by a group of local Iraqi militia. According to senior officers after the events that were to happen, they had arrived to take part in what was called a "routine joint patrol" in the town. There had been no intention to search the houses.

The soldiers' intentions were misinterpreted and the detachment was quickly surrounded by a 500-strong group of angry residents. Stones were thrown, soldiers retaliated with a baton round and shooting then erupted on both sides. Another small force of paratroopers sought to rescue them but could not get through. Fire became so intense that the soldiers had been forced to abandon their vehicles and seek shelter, calling for reinforcements. An RAF Chinook was despatched with another relief force but it came under sustained ground fire and was forced to turn away, with seven injured on board. A fierce firefight lasted for three hours, with gunmen "so frenzied" that as soon as one was shot, another one would take his place. The 12 soldiers were eventually rescued by troops in Scimitars light tanks, backed by air cover.

Unknown to the Paras, however, in another part of town, at the local police station, there were six Royal Military Police from 156 Provost Company. With the Paras gone, the crowd turned their attention to the MPs, surrounding the police station. With limited ammunition and no radio communications, they were unable to save themselves and were slaughtered by the crowd.

The immediate political response from London was soothing. Tony Blair insisted that there was no need for more troops. He had been told, he said, by the Chief of Defence Staff Sir Michael Walker that British commanders inside Iraq felt they had enough troops on the ground. Of the situation of a whole, he declared, "Progress is being made but it is a job literally of rebuilding a country and it will take time. I think it is necessary to take the time to get the job done." The Army was also anxious to demonstrate that it was "business as usual", enlisting the help of the BBC to days after the death of the MPs to run a "feel good" piece about a soft-hat patrol in Basra.

On the Saturday, 28 June, however, the Paras returned to Majar-al-Kabir and that was anything but business as usual. They turned out in force, 500-strong, backed by 100 armoured vehicles including Challenger tanks and attack helicopters. They were greeted by freshly-painted banners, in both Arabic and English, denouncing the British Army. One demanded, "Why did you shed the blood of innocent unarmed people?" Another read: "Where is the freedom of Iraq? Is it patrolling military forces and searching houses?" The display of force, though, was largely symbolic. The Paras stayed for barely an hour and carried out no weapons searches.

Anton La Guardia, diplomatic editor of The Daily Telegraph was in no doubt that the honeymoon was over. British ministers, he wrote, in recent weeks had been "very worried" about the situation in Iraq and there had been insistent murmurings about the need for more troops. Bernard Jenkin, the Conservative defence spokesman, was cited, saying: "We have the best trained and equipped troops to deal with these threats, but if we require more troops in Iraq to operate safely, then the Government must send more troops."

Jenkin's views were echoed by Major Charles Heyman, Editor of Jane's World Armies. Writing in The Times, he took the view that it was impossible to get away from the stark reality that there were not enough coalition troops on the ground in Iraq. The death of the six MPs he regarded as "bound to happen". The situation could get worse and it was likely that "there could be more casualties during the coming months.” The signs are, wrote Heyman, "that this could become a nasty, long, drawn out campaign across the whole of the country, and at a time like this the Government has two options, either reinforce or withdraw." He could not predict the outcome of the campaign with any certainty but, he concluded, "I can look at the evidence and say that the security situation is likely to worsen during the coming months."

Indicating how far opinion was split, though, journalist Charles Recknagel wrote a piece citing two opposing experts. On the one hand, he had Michael Clarke of the Department of War Studies at King's College in London, who did not rule out the attack having been carried out by elements of the Shi'ite community becoming increasingly restive with foreign occupation. But neither did he rule out Saddam loyalists, establishing a guerrilla presence in the south.

On the other hand, there was Philip Mitchell, a "military expert" at the London-based International Institute for Strategic Studies. His view was that the attack may have been carried out by smugglers eager to maintain a state of lawlessness that has characterised the Amara area since the end of the war. "I think based on the events of previous weeks, all the reports from that area have been that the locals have been at relative peace with the Brits, with the troops in the area," he told Recknagel. "So my gut reaction is that this is a one-off. Although it seems to indicate some sort of organization and planning, to me, I think, having read some of the reports, it stems more out of local criminal activity than out of anti-Brit, pro-Saddam supporters being involved."

Patrick Cockburn, writing for the Independent on Sunday, disagreed. He noted that, when the six Royal Military Police had entered the ramshackle town of Majar al-Kabir on the edge of the Iraqi marshlands, "they were entering the streets of one of the most dangerous towns in Iraq." Guerrillas had harried Saddam Hussein’s army for decades from hideouts in the reed beds around Majar al-Kabir and later, after their enemy had drained the marshes, from holes dug in the ground.

He also noted, as had many commentators, that the friction over the disarmament progamme may have sparked the incident but he also pointed to "a deeper reason for the animosity." In private, Cockburn wrote, tribesmen say they are convinced the real motive behind the searches is that the US and Britain want to stay a long time in Iraq. He cited just one of the tribesmen, saying: "We are just waiting for our religious leaders to issue a fatwa against the occupation and then we will fight the occupation."

That, to Cockburn, suggested one thing. Far from opposition coming from remnants of Saddam Hussein's forces, Majar al-Kabir showed that the US and Britain faced many dangerous enemies in Iraq who had nothing to do with the surviving supporters of Saddam Hussein.

Nevertheless, in early July the then foreign minister Jack Stray visited Iraq, where he was determinedly upbeat. His "take" was that, while the security situation was better than it was two months ago, there were still elements of the Baath Party and the Fedayeen "operating in a relatively organised way" against coalition forces. He said there had been no request for reinforcements, "although it was understood that the option of sending more troops remains under review."

Yet, only a day later, a British Army spokesman was confirming that one soldier had been injured in a Basra "blast". An Iraqi oil official also confirmed that "subversive elements", had attacked one of the oil pipelines in the Faw Peninsula, in southern Iraq. A fire had broken out on the pipeline. That had been on the Friday, the same day a had sniper shot and wounded in the leg a soldier from 1st Battalion King's Regiment. This had happened on the northern outskirts of Basra when a routine patrol when had come under fire by two gunmen. The assailants fled and the patrol had found five Kalashnikov assault rifles.

Relief agencies were also having troubles. The UN's World Programme was losing trucks to armed hijackers on the road between the Kuwaiti border and Nassiriyah. Food from Kuwait had to be transferred to Iraqi trucks at the port of Umm Qasr. Umm Qasr itself had been affected by looting in mid-June for some days after the withdrawal of Spanish troops. British forces, with the aid of Iraqi guards, had to be brought in to provide security.

It was not only trucks being "hijacked", but people as well. Colonel Ronnie McCourt of the British army in Basra told The Guardian that there had been between 10 and 15 kidnappings in the first two weeks of June. "It is partly for money, partly tribal disputes and sometimes people taking a hostage to swap for one of their own who has been taken," McCourt said. A spate of armed robberies as well as the kidnappings had prompted the UN in Basra to ban its staff from going out after 8pm. They had been prohibited from walking anywhere, and cars had to travel in pairs. There had also been a rise in the number of revenge killings. Colonel Ali Abdullah Najim, the police chief in Basra's central district claimed to have had reports of seven to 10 homicides a week connected with revenge against members of the former regime.

One had to look elsewhere, however, to see the evidence of how the hard men of the Shi'a factions were moving in. This came from the London-based Al-Sharq al-Awsat Arabic newspaper, subsequently translated and posted on the English language wire services. It registered an appeal by the Sunni Waqf Directorate (an Islamic charitable foundation) in Basra over an attack on 16 July by a 40-man force of armed "assailants", who took control of the building and expelled all employees after threatening to kill them. In addition, they stole all the documents and records and moved them to an unknown location. The director, Haqqi Isma'il was appealing to "Islamic governments, religious institutions and academic circles" urging them to intervene.

There was no mystery as to the identity of these assailants as they carried with them a letter from Ali al-Asadi, a representative of the Al-Sadr Office in Basra, demanding that the directorate be handed over to them and claiming that the Saddam Hussien’s regime had taken it away from the Shia.

In making his appeal, Isma'il was seeking to avert the "outbreak of a looming crisis amid total silence on the part of the British troops in control of Basra". The aggressors’ persistence in their attacks, he warned, "might result in a sectarian crisis that could be hard to settle at such a delicate time." He also referred to a previous incident in which groups had broken into five Sunni mosques, expelled worshippers from them and taken control of them. Complaining that the British had refused to intervene, had disregarded all the appeals and had "confined themselves to holding some meetings, which were fruitless."

Whether coincidence or not, the BBC's correspondent in Basra, Hugh Sykes, chose the next day to file a report headed, "Patience runs low in Basra". In it, he retailed the complaints of Basra locals, one of whom was a café owner who had bitter words for George Bush and Tony Blair. "Those men are only thinking of themselves," he said. "Liberation has brought insecurity and crime to Basra - robbers, mugging, kidnappings for ransom. And they can't even provide us with reliable electricity."

This seems to be the time when the British military forces decided on a "crackdown" on violence and disorder. Security roadblocks were being set up all over Basra and in the districts of Safwan, al-Zubayr and in central Basra.

But events elsewhere were to take a hand. In the holy city of Najaf, where Moqtada Sadr was currently in resident, action by US troops led to rumours that Sadr had been arrested. As the rumours spread to Basra, between 2,000 and 3,000 protesters flooded the streets, stoning a car they believed belonged to a British civilian administrator. British troops were forced to intervene, shots were fired and Sadr's representative in Basra, Sheikh Ali al-Assadi, was among the three wounded.

The contrast with what happened next – or did not happen – perhaps offered the best clue as to what was going on. A mere two days after rumours of Sadr’s arrest had sparked protests in the streets of Basra, the media was reporting that Saddam Hussein's sons Uday and Qusay may have been killed in an American raid on a house in northern Iraq. This was subsequently confirmed, but even despite an Arab satellite broadcaster playing what it said was a new tape with a message from Saddam Hussein, ordering his former soldiers to rise up against the American occupation, there was no sign of mass unrest in Basra.

The only recorded incident around that time was an attack on a Czech field hospital in Basra, when three shots fired by unknown men hit the accommodation quarters, slightly injuring one Iraqi patient. The incident was classified as an "occasional shooting", which occurs from time to time in this part of Basra, a Czech spokesman said.

More serious incidents occurred on 27 July. In the centre of Basra, unidentified men attacked a liquor store with RPGs firing two or three rockets, leaving five people wounded and caused substantial damage. A British military base was also attacked. Some parts of the building were destroyed and electricity supply to the district was completely cut off. According to local reports, British troops surrounded wth area with "several patrol vehicles and tanks". Three or four loud explosions were heard from the centre of the city, followed by rounds of gunfire. Some buildings suffered heavy damage and there were civilian casualties.

Of other notable events around the time, one was another incident involving the Czech forces, this time their military police, who got caught in crossfire between two local gangs near the village of al-Uzair, not far from Basra. They were part of a British patrol, which was forced to take refuge in a police station until the arrival of British reinforcements. A day later, four Iraqis were wounded in an attack targeting British forces near Basra. That morning a a bomb had exploded at the Khalij al-Arabi petrol station just over a mile south of Basra on the road to Zubair, seconds after three British military trucks had passed. The blast wounded four Iraqis, and damaged one minibus and one truck. There had been only slight damage to one of the military vehicles.

Another British military vehicle in Basra came under attack on 9 August, again in front of a petrol station, with reports of assailants hurling a grenade at it. The vehicle caught fire, according to Ali Hussein, a taxi driver who had been filling up his car with fuel at the time of the attack. Then, four armoured vehicles and Land Rovers had arrived, only to be stoned by a gathering crowd. Soldiers had fired shots in the air and rubber bullets into the crowd, wounding – it is claimed - at least four Iraqis, including a child. Very quickly, the crowd grew to more than 2,000. Soon they were erecting barricades of burning tyres in the streets and stoning passing cars.

This was the start of two days of rioting, as Iraqis protested against power outages and petrol shortages. In the baking heat reaching 122°F, with no electricity for air conditioners, tempers had snapped. In a bid to restore calm, the military had to deploy Warriors of the King's Regiment to safeguard fuel deliveries. In the thick of the action, which had left at least one Iraqi dead, had been Sheikh Abu Salaam al-Sa’adi, Muqtader al-Sadr's representative in Basra. The military suspected him of orchestrating the trouble, bur conceded that, without water, wages, fuel and power, few people in Basra need much encouragement to turn to violence.

Another casualty of the riots was an ex-Gurkha, who had been working for Global Security, a private security contractor. At the time, he had been in one of two vehicles delivering mail when two or three armed Iraqis had set up a road block in the centre of the city and had signalled to the vehicles to slow down. Both cars had continued driving, shots had been fired and several rounds hit one of the cars, wounding the Gurkha in the shoulder. He died shortly afterwards. An official statement described the incident as a "terrorist attack".

Washington Post correspondent Anthony Shadid forecast that in Barsa, the "worst may be ahead," citing a fishing net salesman Sabah Khairallah: "One month," said the gaunt, unshaven and angry Khairallah. That's how long he gave the British forces occupying Basra to bring electricity, water and fuel. After that, more riots would ensue. "But not with rocks," he said, nodding his head. "With guns."

Leaders from al-Fudhala, described as an influential Shia religious organisation, gave the British less time, warning them that they had a week to sort out the severe electricity and petrol shortages. But they were only talking about more protests. Not so, Sa'id Ali, a young man who gave his opinion unsolicited to The Independent. Echoing Sabah Khairallah’s comment to the Washington Post, he said, "If the situation continues like this we are willing to give up our women and children to be martyrs. We will stop buying petrol and start buying weapons to fight."

Whether directly connected to the general mood of dissatisfaction in Basra, or not, we shall probably never know. But, one day after Sa'id Ali's strident comments had been published, on 14 August, a military ambulance was travelling from Basra, conveying a soldier to the military hospital in the Shaibah logistics base outside the city. It never arrived. Shortly after 9am British time, the vehicle was struck by a roadside bomb hidden next to a lamp post. It killed Captain David Jones, injured two soldiers, and badly damaging the vehicle. The Daily Telegraph reported the incident as "the most serious attack on British forces since the attack on the military police in Majar-al-Kabir." Furthermore, it wrote, as this was the very first roadside bomb attack on a British military vehicle, the fear was that the "honeymoon" with the Shia was over. British troops in were now to be targeted by guerrilla attacks.

More accurately put, it had been the first "successful" – from the point of view of the attackers – roadside bomb attack, in that it had killed a British soldier. Defence analyst Paul Beaver told the BBC that the incident looked like, "a step up in operations by a group you can only call terrorists." Adding, "This is very much a pre-meditated act of terrorism," he feared it could signal a change in the way groups opposed to the ruling US-led coalition operated in the south of the country. The BBC's own correspondent, Mike Donkin, agreed. "There will be real concern now that the tide has turned for the worse in the south," he said. "The Basra area will now be considered a dangerous potential flashpoint." Without doubt, tension was rising. On Sunday, 17 August, a Danish solider was reported killed after his unit had stopped a truck carrying several Iraqis during a routine overnight patrol. This was later reported as a "friendly fire" incident but it was symptomatic of troops on edge.

Almost in passing, it seemed, Ali Hassan al-Majid, one of Saddam Hussein's most brutal henchmen who had earned the nicknames "Chemical Ali" and "butcher of the Kurds" for his poison gas attacks, had been captured. He was number five on the US forces' most-wanted list.

Quickly following that, there was an incident on 23 August when three soldiers from the Royal Military Police - Major Matthew Titchener, Co Sergeant Major Colin Wall and Corporal Dewi Pritchard - were killed in an ambush in central Basra. Another soldier was seriously injured. They had all been riding in a Nissan sports utility vehicle in a routine two-vehicle convoy and had come under small-arms fire from an unknown number of men in a pick-up truck at around 8.30am. The soldiers had returned fire, but appeared to have been killed either by a grenade thrown from the other vehicle or when their own vehicle crashed into a wall. This brought to ten, the number of British soldiers killed in action since the formal cessation of hostilities on 1 May.

The BBC Arabic Service reporter, Issam Alainachi, had been on the scene within ten minutes of the attack, later reporting that it would be "particularly worrying" for the British forces in Basra. They had been trying hard to win over the local people, carrying out patrols on foot, sometimes without body armour and helmets, even though they often risked being stoned by gangs of children. However, said Alainach, they had recently been taking more precautions. He cited Major Ian Poole, British Army spokesman in Basra: "For the last couple of weeks, British soldiers have been wearing body armour on the ground because it felt the potential threat was sufficient to warrant that," he said.

"Everybody's nervous now," said Cpl Warren Salisbury, of the Queen's Lancashire Regiment, as he performed security checks on cars in the centre of Basra. He was talking to The Daily Telegraph after the event. "I'm nervous every time I go out. The attackers have upped it now, and we are conducting a lot more operations against them in return." The Telegraph's report went on:

Increasingly edgy soldiers expressed their concerns about the soft-skinned civilian cars, known as "white fleet" vehicles, which have been rented by the Army to make up for a shortfall of "green fleet" armoured Land-Rovers. Though bullets ripped through the unarmoured Nissan driven by the victims of Saturday's attack, a British military spokesman in Basra yesterday said "white fleet" cars would still be used for "essential missions". But soldiers manning the checkpoints around Basra yesterday dismissed the "white fleet" vehicles as "a waste of space". They claimed that the cars were favoured by senior officers only because they have air-conditioning. "Money would be better spent fitting air conditioning to the armoured equipment," one soldier said.

Nevertheless, Lynda Sawyers, a British military spokeswoman, was telling that media that the deaths of yet another three MPs was, "a very unusual and unfortunate incident. We have very good relations with the people of Basra," she said. At British Army headquarters at Basra's airport, we were told, officers were confident that British troops were not yet facing an "established pattern" of attacks.

The Sunday Mirror, that week, was having none of it. It enlisted defence experts to warn that the tragedy could mark the start of a terrorist campaign by Iraqis, particularly in Basra. One of its experts was Major Charles Heyman, previously used by The Times, said: "I'm afraid today's attack was just a matter of time. Over the last two weeks we have seen a good indication of what is to come. Today's deaths were predictable, as is, I'm afraid, a low-level insurgency campaign against the occupying forces in Basra and southern Iraq. There's no way you can get away from it - it is desperate news. Basra has been simmering for some time."

The paper also aired the views of "former officer and defence expert" Michael Yardley. He said: “We were always going to see an extended guerilla and terror campaign against Allied forces. We know that Saddam Hussein planned for this contingency - to bring chaos. It has been suggested that these are random attacks, but they are more than that, although we can't be sure who is responsible – 'holy war' Jihadists, remnants of Saddam Hussein's intelligence or Fedayeen militia."

The main thrust of the Mirror story, however, was a charge that the military policemen had been killed "when they were ambushed in a hired four-wheel-drive", "because the Army doesn't have enough armoured vehicles to go round." They were "sitting ducks" because of a shortage of military Land Rovers. The mens' comrades in an armoured Land Rover on the same patrol, the paper claimed, had escaped unharmed, but could do nothing to prevent the tragedy.

An Army spokesman in Basra confirmed that a number of soft-sided, four-wheel-drive civilian vehicles had been hired locally to "supplement" a shortage of Land Rovers, while Major Ian Poole, also speaking for the Army added, "We are working hard to identify the attackers. We will look seriously at any lessons learned in regards to putting new measures in place."

Whether intended as resassurance or whether it reflected the real thinking of the "brass", Dominic d'Angloe, spokesman for Basra's Coalition Provisional Authority, also added his penn'orth. "We thought things had been calming down in the region. We are all very shocked," he said. This was very much at odds with a report filed by Gary Marx for the Chicago Tribune a few days later, whe he observed: "More than two weeks after deadly riots hit this southern city, residents are simmering with discontent."

The very next day, 27 August, there was another lethal attack on a British soldier. The casualty this time was Fusilier Russell Beeston, a Territorial Army soldier in the 52nd Lowland Regiment.

Beeston's six-vehicle patrol, made up from troops of King's Own Scottish Borderers and the 52nd Lowland Regiment, was returning from an operation in which – it was reported - "two Saddam loyalists" had been arrested in Ali al-Gharbi near the Iranian border, not very far from Majar al-Kabir. The convoy had been on its way back to its base in al Amarah when it had found its way blocked by vehicles driven across the carriageway by Iraqis determined to release the captives. The convoy diverted through the village of Ali al-Sharqi, but again the Iraqis anticipated their arrival. Near the village they encountered an angry crowd.

Fusilier Beeston was ordered to dismount from his Land Rover, the aim being to walk the convoy through the crowd by acting as armed escorts. But, as soon as the riflemen left their vehicles a second group of Iraqis emerged to seal the road behind them. With hostile men to their front and rear, the dismounted soldiers fired two volleys into the air. The show of force was intended as a warning, but Iraqis responded with automatic rifles and rocket-propelled grenades. Fusilier Beeston was hit in the chest by rifle bullets. He was treated at the scene but died from his injuries while his unit was still under fire. Helicopters and rapid reaction troops were called to the scene to help the patrol extract.

Fusilier Beeston was the 50th British soldier to die since the start of the Iraqi invasion (the 21st to be killed in combat), yet it looked as if a spokesman for the King's Own Scottish Borderers was seeking to make light of the affair. It was the first attack on British forces in that area of Maysan province, he said, "There is no indication that this attack was deliberately targeted". Instead, according to this spokesman, "it came as the result of a crowd who, we suspect, were orchestrated into expressing their anger at the arrest of a well-known local figure." Another army spokesman, however, said it appeared the convoy had been lured into an ambush by the use of a roadblock which diverted them into the town.

The Scotsman was in no doubt. Its headline declared, "British troops are prime target in Iraq," its story noting how a "… premeditated attack on British troops in Iraq … reinforced the impression that they are now being regarded as viable targets by Iraqi opposition fighters." The attack, it wrote, "suggested that the low key British tactics that have proved relatively successful are no guarantee of long-term success." The Guardian was of a similar mind, reporting:

It is increasingly apparent that the British military's "softly, softly" approach and its attempt to strike up a relationship with local communities is having less impact. Although the south is dominated by Shias, who had most to celebrate from Saddam Hussein's fall, anger at power shortages, high crime levels and the slow evolution of an Iraqi government is triggering riots and increasingly violent attacks.

Two days after Fusilier Beeston had been killed, an explosion "rocked" a British military base in Basra. The MoD said the blast had happened within 300 metres of the British base. No casualties were reported. Within the week, prime minister Tony Blair was giving a "cautious response to a call for 5,000 extra British troops" as news emerged that France and Germany had delivered a “cool response” to a draft resolution sponsored by the United States, which aimed to create a United Nations an international force in Iraq.

Admitting that the situation in Iraq had deteriorated in recent weeks and was "serious", his defence secretary Geoff Hoon had already ordered a review of British troop levels. By the week end, a 120-strong company of the 2nd Battalion, the Light Infantry, was under orders to fly out from Cyprus to spearhead a new deployment, join the force of 11,000 in southern Iraq. Geoff Hoon was expected to announce that about 1,200 soldiers were to be sent and "defence sources" were saying that another 1,800 would be put on standby to join the mission.

The decision was made on the day a British bomb disposal specialist was killed near Mosul. Ian Rimell, a 53-year-old father of three children, from Kidderminster in Worcestershire, died and his local bodyguard was injured when they were ambushed on the road to Baghdad. His widow, Jennifer Rimell, said she was angry at the way her husband had died in that "he was not a soldier and was in Iraq to help the people."

Almost unreported, that weekend, the main headquarters of the Shiite Islamic Al-Dawa party in Basra had been targeted. Two men armed with Kalashnikov assault rifles opened fire from a car at 8:00 am in the morning, before coming back three hours later and firing again. After the attack, a dozen armed party activists set up a roadblock near the Iraqi police, in full view of British soldiers aboard a military vehicle positioned in the area.

Overnight, on 10/11 September, 3000 miles away, light sleepers in Belfast and the occasional motorist were startled by the sight of convoys of military vehicles being driven through the night, towards the docks. The "Snatch" Land Rovers were on their way to war, an event curiously unrecorded by the media, except for the local BBC bureau. It found an Army spokesman to say that the Land Rovers, all drawn from reserve stock or currently surplus to requirement in Northern Ireland, would give much-needed and potentially life-saving protection to army patrols in southern Iraq. "We are very pleased to be able to help our colleagues serving in Iraq," the spokesman said.

COMMENT THREAD

We are not the only ones

2008-11-12T14:22:00.002Z

Barack Obama’s election was the result of a democratic process (give or take a few problems with the MSM and fund-raising by the winning candidate’s campaign, which are unlikely to be investigated, according to a link on Instapundit). It is not true that conservative ideas were rejected wholesale or, even, that the Republican Party was. The results are a little more complicated than that and are being chewed over, even as I write and you read.

The winning side, on the other hand, is beginning to face up to some unpalatable problems. The Washington Post, for instance, having admitted that they were dishonest and unethical during the campaign (though they did not admit the full extent of that dishonesty), is now prattling about continuity trumping change.

(The Jewish World Review has a wonderful Open Letter, written by Barry Rubin, which starts with the words:

Right now you don't understand why Bill Clinton and George Bush couldn't solve a little thing like the Arab-Israeli conflict, defuse the massive hatred of America in the Middle East, end terrorism or turn radical Islamism into an ideology of peace.

Don't worry. You will.

Reminds me of all the various Prime Ministers in this country who come to office not understanding why their predecessors could not solve the “European problem”. They exit sadder and a little wiser but no nearer to a solution.)

However, it was a defeat for the Republicans and for the right, in general and it is necessary to take stock and think about the future. I am glad to say that taking stock for the right in the US does not seem to follow the path of our own Conservative Party a. k. a. Tory Socialists since 1997.

First of all, let me remind our readers that, in the wake, of Obama’s victory I put together some ideas about the position of the right, particularly in this country and very unhappy those thoughts were, too. Nothing I have heard from Tory Socialists or their allies in that party has given me any hope.

Let me give one example. I have been told more often than I can count it by the Tory Obama-supporters that he has promised to cut tax for 95 per cent of the population. There are certain problems with it. For instance, there is a tax cut being promised to people who do not actually pay income tax (what everybody is talking about, I assume) because their income is too low. So, if they get a tax cut, that will be a tax credit, though as they do not pay tax, it will be a benefit. Somebody has to pay for it and the threshold for those tax cuts is going lower and lower. Last heard of, it was $150,000 and I do not believe that 95 per cent of the country’s population earns less than that.

I may be wrong because nobody can predict anything, especially in politics, but it does not strike me as likely that 95 per cent of the population will benefit, especially when one looks at the ever-growing bail-out and all the many things Obama has promised to set up and pay for from government funds.

Ah well, I am told, even if it is not true, this shows that right-wing ideas have triumphed. Oh good. Well, yes, socialist ideas, openly spoken, do not win elections. I think we can say that without fear of contradiction. Just look at the trouble Obama got into when he, not having a teleprompter to hand, admitted to Joe the plumber that yes, indeed, he was planning to tax small businesses more to redistribute the money. The subsequent vicious campaign against Joe was a lesson in … well, vicious campaigning.

On the other hand, sitting back and saying that we are doing fine because our ideas have triumphed is precisely the course of action that has made us what we are on the right in Britain: fat, complacent and defeated.

Some of the Republican stock-taking seems to consist of highly unpleasant back-biting, taking the form of unnamed McCain staffers, who are really to blame for the man’s lacklustre campaign, spreading vitriolic and stupid gossip about Governor Palin, who has reacted with remarkable sang-froid. The whole sorry saga can be followed in various stories on Hot Air.

More on the hoaxer that was the source of the Palin stories here and a very good article in the Wall Street Journal on the need for Senator McCain to speak out. But all that is by the by. Mud-slinging and it-was-not-our-fault-honest whining will disappear after a while if for no other reason that even the clueless staffers and journalists who fall for hoaxers like Martin Eisenstadt [read his self-justification and scroll down] will realize that the public finds it all very distasteful.

Of greater interest is a piece by P. J. O’Rourke on why the Republicans lost and deserved to lose. (Then again, Mr O’Rourke has never, in his life, written a piece that was not of interest.) The article has received much attention on the American blogosphere and is well worth reading in full even if he, naturally, concentrates on matters to do with that country.

P. J. O’Rourke’s list of the many things the conservatives managed to get wrong is very long and probably incomprehensible to many British readers. After all, who gets worked up about abortion in this country, anyway? My own view on the subject as subject is that we should get a little worked up as there are aspects to it that would be hard to stomach if people paid attention.

It may be wrong to interfere with people’s privacy if they want to have abortions and the majority of the United States may be in favour of some form of it being legal (though the figures are quite complicated) but, in my experience, what bugs a lot of people is the way abortion was introduced: through a constitutionally dubious legal decision, rather than votes in states. (There is an echo of that in the present row about gay marriages, particularly in California.) One important part of conservatism in the United States is a strong belief in the Constitution and the separation of powers. I think Mr O’Rourke ought to have devoted some time to that.

His idea of explaining to people exactly what the various possibilities open to governments are sounds rather whacky when one thinks of the average electoral campaign, never mind the exhausting one America and the rest of us have just gone through.

Conservatives should never say to voters, "We can lower your taxes." Conservatives should say to voters, "You can raise spending. You, the electorate, can, if you choose, have an infinite number of elaborate and expensive government programs. But we, the government, will have to pay for those programs. We have three ways to pay.

"We can inflate the currency, destroying your ability to plan for the future, wrecking the nation's culture of thrift and common sense, and giving free rein to scallywags to borrow money for worthless scams and pay it back 10 cents on the dollar.

"We can raise taxes. If the taxes are levied across the board, money will be taken from everyone's pocket, the economy will stagnate, and the poorest and least advantaged will be harmed the most. If the taxes are levied only on the wealthy, money will be taken from wealthy people's pockets, hampering their capacity to make loans and investments, the economy will stagnate, and the poorest and the least advantaged will be harmed the most.

"And we can borrow, building up a massive national debt. This will cause all of the above things to happen plus it will fund Red Chinese nuclear submarines that will be popping up in San Francisco Bay to get some decent Szechwan take-out."

Yes, this would make for longer and less pithy stump speeches. But we'd be showing ourselves to be men and women of principle. It might cost us, short-term. We might get knocked down for not whoring after bioenergy votes in the Iowa caucuses. But at least we wouldn't land on our scruples. And we could get up again with dignity intact, dust ourselves off, and take another punch at the liberal bully-boys who want to snatch the citizenry's freedom and tuck that freedom, like a trophy feather, into the hatbands of their greasy political bowlers.

There, I suspect, speaks a man who has never had to run a political campaign. Long before one got to item 2 the listeners would have lost interest and gone off to vote for the other guy who had promised some instant solution in a sound bite. As a character says in that superb musical “Bandwagon”, you can’t spread principles on a cracker.

On the other hand, as Marxists defined it a long time ago, there is propaganda and there is agitation. There are political principles and there are sound bites; both have their place in political discussion but the sound bites should be based on political principles and, above all, information.

Here, on the other hand, is another article that advocates more precise ideas by way of a Night of the Long Knives, by Deroy Murdock in the National Review. What is rather interesting about this piece as well as P. J. O’Rourke’s is that neither suggests that the way for Republicans to get back is to move further to the left and espouse their opponents’ ideas, the panacea that was advocated here in 1997 with the disastrous result that the Conservatives have been out of government for ten years and the right is all over the place.

Mr Murdock’s idea is that only a return to Reaganism (and, perhaps, an improvement on it, if that is not too sacrilegious an idea) can save the Republican Party. They also need to get rid of those who have compromised it in the years since that great presidency. Well, that’s being hopeful. Politicians never know how much trouble they created and cling to their position with a ferocity that is off the Richter scale.

John Hinderaker on Powerline also raises the subject of what the conservatives should do now but does not answer the question – it is a little hard to do so immediately – merely suggesting that new ideas and a new understanding is needed. Obama managed to win support by simply sounding different.

By merely raising the idea of a new kind of politics that would get past the current battle lines and come at issues from new directions, he became one of the most popular figures of our time, even though he had absolutely no clue how to do what he talked about. We should be able to do at least as well as that.

It seems slightly pointless to emulate somebody who hasn’t a clue what he is talking about simply because that empty rhetoric won him the election handily but not by a landslide as it had been predicted in a year when the Democrats were predicted to sweep all before them. This sounds a little too much like the sort of stuff our own Conservatives have been producing in the last ten years to no effect whatsoever. I am, on the other hand, looking forward to any future discussion on Powerline. They are always interesting.

Well, that’s America. What about us? How are we doing on the right? Still not very well and still clinging to the idea that we have anything in common with that sorry lot of incompetents, the Conservative Party or Tory Socialists.

As it happens, the things people are interested in have not changed all that much anywhere, despite the article on Powerline. High on the agenda is the economy and taxation. The Conservatives seem to have blown it again. The proposals are described as timid, unimaginative and generally unhelpful in its complexity. The Taxpayers’ Alliance gives a harsh verdict, which would be a little more credible if they did not come up with that old canard about cutting VAT by 2 percentage points. An interesting thought – where do they get this idea that it can be done by national government fiat? In order to achieve a temporary derogation a government has to apply to the Commission. Now, it is possible that, in the circumstances, the Commission will be happy to give that permission but, in order to remain credible, it might be a good idea to get these facts right.

The reason for the timidity is quite clear. The Conservatives have no idea of what they think governments should be doing and how much income they should be getting. They cannot actually present the arguments Mr O’Rourke suggests because they have not got that far in their thinking.

Then we get to the big issue of the day, the one Tories and their various think-tank acolytes will not touch: the European Union, which has now invaded every nook and cranny of our national life. No political campaign can be conducted without running up against that noisome organization but the Tory Socialists pretend that it is a separate issue and can be discussed as such. The separate issue, they say pompously and stupidly, is of little interest to the electorate. Oh right. How about the fact that VAT is an EU tax? Or that immigration is an EU competence? Or that we have outsourced international trade to the EU? Are these of interest to people in this country? You betcha.

I realize that once again I am raising questions without providing answers. That will come in good time through this blog and, I hope, the Bruges Group. (Still working to set something up in that organization that would provide serious research.)

For the moment let me return to the Marxist idea of propaganda and agitation. As outlined by the first Russian Marxist, Georgy Plekhanov, the two had to address two different groups. Plekhanov was one of the world’s worst political writers so it takes a little time to work out what he is saying but, on the whole, this is accurate.

Propagands is a more extensive, more profound collection of ideas, aimed at people who are already aware of political ideology. In Marxist terms that was the conscious working class, though in reality it was the intelligentsia and the middle classes that mostly fell for it. Agitation, on the other hand, is what we would probably call political campaigning – a collection of easy ideas and slogans poured out at people who have not yet started thinking about politics. Many of them will be taken by those slogans sufficiently to move on to the next stage and listen to propaganda.

Let’s translate it into our own terms. Shooting from the hip gets us nowhere because we cannot substantiate our own arguments. What we need is a body of research and analysis that deals with the various topics (by which I mean serious research rather than vague figures that are presented with the hope that nobody will challenge them) and can be mined for those arguments. The notion that “ordinary people” cannot understand serious arguments is rubbish. Konstantin Stanislavsky said that there are no small parts in plays only small actors. There are no stupid electorates only badly presented political arguments.

Well, what now?

2008-11-05T21:29:00.004Z

This is November 5, there are fireworks outside and the day is appropriate for thinking about blowing up politicians. Our politicians, nobody else's. When I saw and heard this morning the joyful whoops of our own Tories because an extreme left-wing socialist (so far as we know but more anon) has been elected in the United States I announced that I was on a mission to destroy that party. A friend asked me whether they needed my help. Possibly not, but I am happy to supply it.

Since then I have calmed down a bit, noted that the final results in America are not quite as bad as we had feared (I am talking about Congress now) and I can now start thinking more or less rationally. (OK, stop sniggering at the back.)

First of all, let's get some of the hype out of the way. Yes, the new president is mixed race, something that could not have happened even forty years ago and can happen in only one country of the western world – the United States. On the other hand, he is not a descendant of slaves. In fact, given that there is East African Arab blood there, he is quite likely to be a descendant of slave traders. None of that matters.

Let us not forget that another barrier has still not been crossed – far too many people find the idea of a woman President (remember that 51 per cent of the population?) still unthinkable. I have high hopes for 2012, though.

The truth is that having an African father does not make one a magician who can change the world by waving a wand. In this case, it merely makes one a rather vacuous and somewhat corrupt politician. So, the world, despite the hysteria in our own and the American media, has remained stubbornly unchanged, though the New York Times is suddenly discovering nuances in Gitmo. Not long before David Cameron will follow suit, then.

Clearly, somebody has not given President Medvedev (Putin's mishka) the memo about it being a new dawn as he has used his first address to the nation to hit out at the “selfish” American foreign policy and announce that Russia was planning to install short-range missiles in the Kaliningrad (formerly Königsberg) enclave. He said this just hours after Obama’s victory was confirmed and appeared not to be overawed by the historic significance. This sort of thing can make the German media seriously upset with the Russian president.

Our Islamist friends are completely unimpressed though the Muslim Brotherhood express their hope that Obama will do as they tell him.

Meanwhile, the markets tumble and Reuters, who also campaigned for Obama, fear that he will not have the money to introduce whatever it is he wanted to introduce for health care. I strongly suspect that, despite certain people getting carried away by the hope and change message, mortgages will still have to be repaid or the banks will foreclose and gasoline, though cheaper and no thanks to Obama, will not be free.

And, um, the first job offer seems to be going to a very familiar face, old Clinton hand and an associate of Mayor Richard Daley's. My, my, hope and change before our eyes.

Here is a good summary why things are not quite as bad as one might imagine, though they are not good. I don’t agree with everything in that analysis. I do not, for instance, think there will be a nuclear war between Iran and Israel for various reasons, though I do not think that the mad mullahs should be allowed to have nuclear weapons. I also think that with General Petraeus in place, there is a reasonable chance that things might be turned round in Afghanistan but that is in the realm of discussion.

However, the point about the American President having considerably less power than people think is a very good one. No American President could do to Congress what a succession of Prime Ministers have done to Parliament. Those who see Obama as a miracle worker do not seem to understand this. The Founding Fathers in their wisdom foresaw the possibility of a demagogue getting to the top and created various barriers. These are very hard to remove.

The scenario with the media, I suspect, will go differently. They are crazed with their triumph now and have forgotten that readerships, viewing figures, share prices are slipping. But those facts will catch up with them and there will be the problem of boredom. So one or two journalists might start doing what they refused to do in the last couple of years and dig up a few facts about Obama, which have been hidden away but are discussed on the blogosphere.

Will we finally find out more about the Chicago Annenberg Challenge and the millions wasted and mis-spent? Are we to be told what Obama’s achievements at Columbia and Harvard really were? Where is that birth certificate? There are many more questions. But what will happen to any journalist who might try to write about it now that it is too late and the election cannot be affected? My guess is that they will fall foul of the Obamatroops and will start whining. That will be fun to watch.

Will those who jumped on the bandwagon like Peggy Noonan and Colin Powell get their reward or will they be discarded as not being useful any more? What fun if it is the second. That’s what I would do if I were Obama. Not being nasty or anything but I do despise people who are that cheap.

It will be fun to watch all those who are screaming about hope and change slowly realize that there is no change and little hope; that nobody, least of all a complete novice, can make good all those promises.

It will be fun to see the European leaders reel in shock as President Obama asks for more troops in Afghanistan and imposes all kinds of protectionist measures to keep the unions who brought out the vote happy. What will the Tories say when President Obama instructs the Democratic Congress to pass legislation that abolishes secret ballot in union votes and elections? Still applaud the hope and change bringer? What if Prime Minister Gordon Brown decides to follow suit?

It will be fun to watch as the libertarians realize that yes, indeed, there is a difference between the likes of Obama and the likes of McCain and, especially, Palin.

It will be fun to watch Joe Biden make an even bigger fool of himself than he has done so far. Absolutely nobody can accuse him of being the evil genius behind the presidency and we can always remind people how much smarter and more attractive Sarah Palin is.

It will be fun to watch all those who are hoping for a mega-hand-out walking away with little to show for their loyalty.

Of course, the trouble is that President-elect Obama has achieved nothing in his life and has put an omertá on every action in his past. So even those of us who have followed the campaign on the more outspoken blogs know nothing about him really. Perhaps he is a secret Reaganite. It is unlikely, given his various friends and mentors as well as the few pronouncements he has made, such as the one about redistributionist tax, but, of course, we don’t exactly know whether he really believes what he and his friends and mentors have been saying or whether he was just ready to be raised by the Chicago political machine.

It will not be fun to watch the Democrats make a complete hash of the American economy and reduce it to Carter-like levels. It has been calculated that FDR’s New Deal set back economic recovery by seven years and, eventually, he was rescued by the war. Obama can set it back even more and he will not be rescued by the Japanese who are not anxious to bomb anyone, least of all the Americans.

It will not be fun to watch the callow and ignorant Obama being bamboozled and challenged by our enemies just as the callow and ignorant Kennedy was by Khrushchev. Out of Kennedy’s lack of ability we got the Berlin Wall and the Cuban crisis. Then the man decided to get tough and tied America down in Vietnam.

What will come out of Obama’s lack of knowledge and experience? Another attack by Al-Qaeda, who did not dare to do so while Bush was president? What will Obama do if he decides to show himself to be tough? Will he bomb Pakistan as he said in one of the Primary debates? Or Iran? Contrary to what BDS sufferers might think, it is the weak, uncertain, fearful politicians who are dangerous not the ones who know what they want even if they are not always right about the path they take. Obama, the man who does not dare to reveal anything about himself, is a danger to us all, precisely because he is unknown and unpredictable.

It will be no fun to watch the poisonous, illiberal, anti-democratic tranzis and their supporters try to inveigle America into organizations such as the International Criminal Court, against express constitutional instructions and against the country’s interests. That is, of course, the promised land that the lefties and the tranzis have glimpsed: the surrender of the largest democracy in the world. Then again, it will not be as easy as they think.

So, what is to be done? I am delighted to see that the American right is regrouping already. This is what Michelle Malking is saying and she speaks for many:

There is no time to lick wounds, point fingers, and wallow in post-election mud. I'm getting a lot of moan-y, sad-face "What do we do now, Michelle?" e-mails.

What do we do now? We do what we've always done.

We stand up for our principles, as we always have — through Democrat administrations and Republican administrations, in bear markets or bull markets, in peacetime and wartime.

We stay positive and focused.

We keep the faith.

We do not apologize for our beliefs. We do not re-brand them, re-form them, or relinquish them.

We defend them.

We pay respect to the office of the presidency. We count our blessings and recommit ourselves to our constitutional republic.

We gird our loins, to borrow a phrase from our Vice President-elect.

We lock and load our ideological ammunition.

We fight.

Above all, we do not behave like the British Conservative Party has done for the last ten years. She did not say it but I am happy to supply the extra words.

The right in America often does well under a left-wing government, though there is some worry about Obama’s distaste for the Constitution and his obvious dislike of the First Amendment. There is no getting away from the fact that they will be very busy in the next few years.

We must stop relying on the Yanks for unbounded political and financial support. Of course, they will remain our allies and the fight for the Anglosphere goes on but we, on this side of the Pond, must also gird our loins and start fighting.

I have pointed out before that the right in Britain is in a parlous state. We have become fat and complacent and allowed the Conservative Party to take over as the lead organization. If nothing else, their unholy glee over Obama’s election should put to rest any doubt we might have about what they are: Tory Socialists and we do not want them. In fact, if this ship is to reach its destination or even leave the harbour, the Tory Socialists will have to walk the plank.

No longer do I want to hear confidential whispers about how some Tory boy or girl really does not disagree with me at all, is not too far from my point of view, really would not like to see any further European integration. Let's say it loudly and clearly: if you are not with us you are against us.

The rest of us, those who want to build up the right, who believe in Britain being an independent democracy with small government and a great deal of individual freedom, who believe that the future belongs to the Anglosphere and we want to be part of it, need to start formulating a battle plan. And there can be no rest, no whining and no self-satisfied patting of each other's shoulders until we do so and act on it.

UPDATE: I have just been informed by a very sound American contact that one of the achievements of the blogosphere has been to change opinions on the American right from being vaguely pro-EU to being more than vaguely anti that pernicious organization. So here is a trek to follow, one that is very easy for us.

COMMENT THREAD

Snatch Land Rover Links

2008-10-31T15:41:00.005Z

Five million down

Men of iron

A dose of reality

A question of negligence

Minister defends Snatch

Stupid, malign fools

Inquest fatigue?

It definitely saved my life

It does not end there

A breach of human rights

The last "hello"

Five years on

Shooting the messenger?

More coffins for the troops

They didn't have to die

Without further details ...

No one to blame!

Costing lives

Another day, another inquest

A lack of focus

A dangerous "puff"

Lesson to learn

Death trap failed to protect soldier

Another Vector?

The spectator sees more of the game

All because the generals prefer their shiny toys

What a difference a year makes

How we got it wrong

A humourless post

These men should be dead

Imagine this was a Snatch

We are not wrong

The battle of Basra

Alright - I did tell you so

It was a Snatch!

The road to defeat

Are they insane?

A purely imaginary world

Run out of town

Ignore the good news

Counter-insurgency in the House

Two soldiers lightly hurt

A retreat from politics

Muppets half hour

Squandered lives

Cost-effective defence

God is on our side

Adding to the confusion

Of course we do care

The lies of Lord Drayson

The great debate

Jan tomorrow

The mean streets of Basra

The wickedness of the Beeb

Coffins on wheels

The greatest enemy

The ministers must lie

Mobility and protection

Canaries down the mine

The wheels on the truck go round...

How Blair is killing our soldiers

The dog that didn't bark

Shape up or get out

Are we a nation of mummy's boys?

Buffalo links

2008-10-29T22:22:00.002Z

A failure of opposition

Not taking it seriously

At last!

Lessons to learn

All because the general prefer their shiny toys

Dammit, I spilled my water bottle

Turning point

Have you noticed ...

War tourism

Leave it to the experts?

Ignore the good news

Again ... and again

The wrong kind of war

looking the other way

The wickedness of the Beeb

Coffins on wheels

Canaries down the mine

The wheel of the truck go round and round

Are we a nation of mummy's boys?

Us and them

The law is the law …

2008-10-15T01:05:00.006+01:00

Our honourable and esteemed Members of Parliament have for many years laboured under the delusion that they produce laws. For sure they may, with the assistance of their clerks and printers, churn out pieces of paper with words on them. Those may bear impressive titles, like "Act of Parliament", or "Statutory Instrument", but they are not laws.

Some people – too many – take these pieces of paper seriously. "The law is the law and must be obeyed," they parrot, especially when it comes to things like speed limits and other irritations.

Down at the cutting face, though, that never used to be the case. As a young public health inspector, working for a large city local authority – one of a large team - there was only one law: my law. On my patch, a small slice of the Council area, I made the law. Furthermore, I was policeman, judge, jury and executioner. In truth, there was only one primary law: "Don't mess with North".

That one superior law, however, did not stop me or my fellow inspectors making subsidiary laws, each to apply in our own patches – "districts" we called them – as occasion demanded.

At times, our law-making was quite prodigious, aided considerably by a highly reputable firm of law stationers. At a not insubstantial cost to our employer, and thus the good ratepayers for whom we toiled, this long-established company produced for us pads of extremely impressive forms. These were "Notices" – always with a capital.

With space at the top to type in the name of our employer, each proclaimed in bold capitals, "Take Notice" adding, "… that the aforementioned local authority does hereby require you …". There was space for the recipient's address, and then a large space in which we could insert our specific "requirements". The Notice was finished by the addition of a date by which said "requirements" should be completed, with the usual signature block and all the rest.

If anyone ever asked by what authority we issued such edicts – and very few did – we would tell them they stemmed from the Local Authority (Consolidated Powers) Act 1938. This Act was later amended and updated to become the "73 Act", to reflect local government reorganisation. Do not bother to look it up on Google though. It does not exist. It never existed. In the office, the "Notice" was known by its short title: "Section 3 of the 1938 Bluff Act".

Most times, it worked. For a whole variety of minor aggravations, where a request or a friendly warning had been disregarded, out came the "big stick". People usually came into line. Some had smart lawyers and refused to comply. We had our ways of dealing with that.

One such came about in an unusual way – even for us. There was this restaurant, a small one in the university area. Dirty, it was – very dirty – and I wanted to close it down. The law – the stuff which came from Westminster – allowed me to do that, but I had to serve the official closure notice on the owner of the premises, otherwise it was not valid.

This business, however, was not operated by the owner, but a tenant. He would not enlighten me as to who the owner was. That presented a problem: through some peculiar defect in the law (since remedied), I had no statutory power to demand that information. So off went a Section 3 Notice to the "occupier", demanding the owner's name and address. This one did have a smart lawyer. I got a tart letter back by return, refusing the information.

I did have the option of prosecuting the restaurant operator, for offences under the food hygiene laws. But that was a mug's game. When I say "one" in respect of the restaurant operator, the operation was owned by a syndicate. This was the immigrant fraternity and they often played that game. You would set up the prosecution and they would dissolve the syndicate, close the premises for half a day, reform the syndicate – same people, different order on the documents – and re-commence trading. Back to square one.

Okaaaay. So I went back and did a reinspection – a thorough one, in the middle of their lunch trade, their busiest and most profitable time. And when I say thorough, I mean thorough. To do that, of course, I needed to remove all the kit from the cupboards, all the food from the shelves, all the contents of the refrigerators, the cutlery from the drawers, the crockery, Uncle Tom Cobbley and all. How else could I inspect them? Out it all came, tossed none too gently into the centre of the kitchen floor, conveniently visible from the dining area.

Offering them friendly "advice" on how to clean up the mess, I left them to it, only to return the next day, and the next, and the next … On my day off, a fellow inspector helped me out and, just in case they thought they would get a break over the weekend, I did a Saturday evening inspection. It really was quite amazing how quickly they came into line. The restaurant is still there, trading under the same name. It's quite a nice little operation now.

As for the "real" law – the stuff from Westminster - that was optional. If we said it was law, it was law. If we said it wasn't, it was ignored.

Take the "nail brush law". The Food Hygiene Regulations required of every wash basin in every food premises that they were equipped with soap, towel and nail brush. A boffin in the public health labs had done some work on nail brushes though. He had found that, in the warm atmosphere of a kitchen, after a few uses, the germ growth was so horrendous that you had to nail them down to stop them going walkies. That's why we called them nail brushes.

Thus, the word went out to discourage their use. If we saw them, we binned them and told people accordingly. Never mind the law – our job was public health, to protect the public.

Mind you, the law is the law … On the few occasions that we prosecuted food operations – and it was invariably the last resort, sometimes after years of warnings – we did everything to make them stick. While you could get them for dirty floors walls and ceilings, they only had four walls, and one each ceiling and floor – six offences. Add two or three missing nail brushes and that nicely padded out the charge sheet. It was only a few hundred quid extra fine, but it added to the pain.

Eventually, they did change the law. But not before we had a prosecution and got the Mags to impose maximum fines for some missing brushes. It was quite fun telling the punter that, had he been a few weeks later, he would have got away with it.

Prosecutions, though, were only for the small guys. They got hurt, and if that was our intention – then hurt there must be. There is no point in pussy-footing about. If the guy is a public menace and won't listen, then you have to take him out.

Corporates, though – they were different. You could take them to court. A gang of my fellow inspectors, in different local authorities, tried it. The corporates would put up their smart lawyers, forcing us to match them out of our budget with expensive barristers. Even if you got top whack on fines – and £20,000 was a big fine in those days – they would shrug, sign off a corporate cheque and walk out of the court smiling. They paid their lawyers more.

I had one on my patch – a big-name branded hotel and restaurant, dead smart and stuck-up. It was a pain. They knew exactly how far they could go. Not good, but not bad enough to make a prosecution stick. You'd send them a Notice - a proper one - requiring works. They would do some of them.

A small independent – they would do the work straight away. Some of them had to struggle to afford it, but two or three visits later and you could sign them off. Not this lot. It took as many as ten or twelve visits to cajole them into completing the works, by which time you were back on a new inspection cycle, starting all over again.

They were messing me about. They knew it. I knew it. They thought they knew the law and they did – Westminster law. But they didn't know my law. The only law you don't break: "don't mess with North". I did the rope trick. This was not the Indian rope trick. Just rope – give them enough rope and they'll hang themselves. Instead of the three-month cycle, I left it six months in the hope that they would get complacent in my absence and get bad enough to nick.

You can't do that these days, incidentally. Inspection cycles are set by EU law, and if you miss one, there is holy war. But that's another story.

On the appointed day, I went into the kitchen. It wasn't good, but not as bad as I had hoped for. Fortunately, the Gods were smiling on me that day. Unbeknown to the chef, the walk-in cold store had broken down overnight. Stacked with meat and other perishables, they had gone off. As I approached the store, I could smell it.

Food in a commercial food premises, unless it is specifically marked to the contrary and segregated, is deemed food "exposed for sale". And "exposing" rotting food for sale is an offence. By this time the meat was rotting – high as a kite.

Furthermore, if such food was present – unfit food – I had the power to seize it and take it before the Mags to get it condemned. That was Westminster law and I was quite happy to use it when it suited me. The hotel management offered to "surrender" the food, but I wasn't having that. This had to hurt. I was going to make it so, in a way they would not forget.

Our department had its own "condemned food" truck. We offered a service to local food producers, taking away their waste, disposing of it under supervision to stop foraging in the tips. It had painted on the side, in very large, prominent letters, "condemned food".

I got on the 'phone and whistled up the truck. But, instead of going to the loading bay round the back, discretely, I had it park in the front. We put it in the guest drop-off bay right opposite the front door. Then I got my lads, two of them, kitted up in white coats, hats, boots – all the gear – to go through reception, through the ever-so posh restaurant and into the kitchen. By then, it was lunch time. The place was full of diners, the expense account crowd and all the rest.

At our leisure, we carried the trays of rotting meat, one at a time, through the crowded restaurant, through reception and into the truck, in full sight of the diners. It took us a long time.

To cut a long story short – there was much more merriment before we had finished - I met the operations director of the hotel some long time later. By then, I had changed sides and was working for the company. He told me I had shaved 20 percent off the turnover of the hotel that month, and it had taken over a year to recover. In fact, by the time the word got out, it never really did recover. The company eventually sold the hotel. But, I never had any more bother with it. They learned about North's law the hard way.

That, also – with the others – was an example of result-based regulation. The name of the game was to keep operations safe. We did what it takes to keep them that way and protect the public. We were good at it, and the law – Westminster law – was only one very small part of our toolkit.

In its own way – using a similar approach – that is what the Bank of England used to do in order to keep the financial system sound. I know this as I have spoken to some "old timers". The businesses and the objectives might have been different. But I recognised the techniques and strategies. More to the point, I recognised the philosophy. It was the same.

And if it sounds like we were a law unto ourselves, we weren't really. The punters just had to believe that. There were all sorts of checks and balances to make sure we didn't go off the rails and get too big for our boots. They didn't always work, and the system was far from perfect. But it was much, much better that what we have now.

That is the subject for another post.

COMMENT THREAD

"A disaster waiting to happen"

2008-10-13T17:18:00.007+01:00

The financial crisis in which we are presently engulfed was a "disaster waiting to happen". This is the final chapter in an inevitable, but wholly avoidable disaster that involves primarily a complete breakdown in the structure of our law, and its enforcement. In short, what we are experiencing is a major regulatory failure, possibly the most serious and expensive in the history of mankind.

Yet the words in the title were uttered by myself, over ten years ago, in respect of a completely different regulatory disaster. I expressed them to Sheriff Principal Graham Cox in Motherwell Sheriff Court in April 1998. That was my expert view of the meat product manufacturing operation run by Scottish butcher John Barr in Wishaw (pictured), Lanarkshire, and its condition prior to 21 people being killed and 400 infected from an outbreak of E coli O157:H7 over December 1996 and January 1997

The reason the operation killed so many people is exactly the same reason our banks and our economy is in meltdown: bad law and dangerously poor enforcement - in this current case the one created at global level transmitted to us via EU law, the other via the Financial Services Authority, itself an EU construct.

Therefore, to understand why we are in this mess, right now, it is extremely instructive to explore what happened in that unremarkable little Central Scottish town of Wishaw all those years ago.

Bear with me on this one. This is going to be a long story and, before we embark on it, you need a little background. First of all, you might ask, who is this Richard North, a lowly blogger, to deliver such a robust opinion, and by what right does he make such an assertion?

Well, blogger I might be now – and many other things besides – but it wasn't always so. Before I walked away from a challenging and exciting profession – in disgust (for reasons I will explain later) – I was the leading food safety expert in the country.

I can say that without false modesty – false modesty itself being a form of vanity. In my (albeit very narrow) field, I was the best. (I even have an award for it, "The Foodtech Achievement Award 1999" for my "outstanding contribution to food hygiene and safety" – the only award I will ever get. I still have the engraved plaque. I'm quite proud of it.)

And that's why I was called to give expert testimony in one of the most important and controversial Fatal Accident Inquiries Scotland had had for many years.

One of my specialist areas (more accurately, sub-specialism) was enforcement standards. Having worked in law enforcement in the public sector, I had moved over to the private, as a consultant. There I had, on behalf of my clients, been on the receiving end of enforcement action all over the country. This had given me a unique overview of enforcement standards.

In my opinion, they were poor – dangerously so. Inspectors – or environmental health officers, as they chose to call themselves - simply were not doing their jobs at all well. They were neither protecting the public, nor indeed the traders, who also suffer massively from food poisoning outbreaks. Many, like John Barr, lose their businesses.

Over term, I had become increasingly voluble about what amounted to a massive regulatory failure. In the business – and this might sound odd – we needed good regulation, properly applied. The logic is unassailable. If you have an operation which is doing its bit, spending the money on maintaining "backroom" standards, and the operation down the road is not, it has an unfair competitive advantage.

My 1996, my profile on this issue was extremely high. By then, I had been working with Christopher Booker for four years, feeding his column, and we had been running a campaign through The Sunday Telegraph and The Daily Mail on the "hygiene police", and "mad officials".

Our line was based on the premise, "the sledgehammer to miss the nut". We did not oppose regulation, or officials - per se. The objects of our ire were bad law and poor, or inadequate enforcement.

Thus, when the John Barr outbreak happened, I was more than a little interested. I had just completed my PhD which, to a very great extent, dealt with enforcement and food poisoning investigation procedures. I wrote about the outbreak extensively in the national press – and elsewhere – forming the opinion that, as much as anything else, it had been a regulatory failure.

The point, which I was to make to Sheriff Cox, was that – in the main – food poisoning outbreaks are preventable. They are not Acts of God, or accidents. In commercial premises, they invariably arise from a chain of events which, from an oversight of the premises, are detectable. A skilled inspector can, from observation, identify these issues, take remedial action and thereby prevent disease.

That was the real point. That is what we, as a profession – whether public or private sector – were there for. We were there to prevent disease, to protect the public. Furthermore, that was the purpose of the regulations – a tool to help us achieve that desirable object.

In respect of John Barr, I was appointed by the lead law firm representing the bulk of the victims, working with an astute solicitor by the name of Paul Santoni. My task, at the Inquiry, was to give expert evidence which would help the Sheriff determine the cause of the deaths of 21 people.

Having seen the detailed plans of the operation and all the technical evidence of the case, the facts were clear to me. As I was subsequently quoted in the media recording my evidence:

…when the Wishaw butchers started in a small way the working layout had been adequate. But as the business grew the layout was no longer adequate and there was a very real and unavoidable risk of cross-contamination from raw meats to cooked meat products. His report was further quoted as saying, "It's nothing short of a minor miracle there had not been a food poisoning outbreak earlier."

In our book, Scared to Death, we tell the story in detail – in Chapter 6, headed "Officials can kill". I've pasted the whole excerpt, which repeats some of the detail, but it's a good read:

The most famous thing that ever happened in the drab former coal-and-steel town of Wishaw, near Motherwell in the Clyde valley, took place in late November 1996. A group of pensioners gathered in a church hall for lunch, to eat stewed steak and puff pastry supplied by the award-winning local butcher, John Barr and Sons. Afterwards many fell desperately ill, until eventually 21 died. Many more had suffered permanent damage to their health, particularly affecting their kidneys.

The cause of the infection was soon identified as E.coli O157.H7, the strain identified since 1982 as potentially lethal and now responsible for the worst E. coli outbreak the world had ever experienced. The source of the infection was tracked down to John Barr's shop.

When Barr was told this by Graham Bryceland, the chief EHO of North Lanarkshire council – until now, he claimed, he had never heard of E. coli - he agreed to stop selling cooked meats. But Bryceland took no further action and only days later Barr supplied more than 100 guests at an 18th birthday party at a nearby bar with 300 slices of turkey, ham and other cooked meats. Again some of the guests soon fell ill. When Bryceland was informed, he summoned Barr out of a service at the local Catholic church for an angry interview at the council offices, but failed to record what was said.

A year later, when in total 200 people around Wishaw had been confirmed as suffering from E. coli poisoning, with hundreds more suspected, Barr faced trial, charged with the "culpable, wilful and reckless supply" of contaminated meat to the birthday party.

Because Bryceland had failed to keep a record of his interviews with Barr, and because there was a dispute about their earlier agreement over cooked meat, a large part of the prosecution case collapsed. Four charges were dropped, and Barr was cleared of any personal blame. On two remaining charges, relating to hygiene and the sale of contaminated meat, his company was in January 1998 found guilty and fined £2,500.

Three months later, however, a new drama began. Under Scottish law, a Fatal Accident Inquiry had to be held into the first E. coli outbreak, because 20 people had died. Its purpose was to establish the cause of death; to determine whether any precautions might have been taken to prevent the deaths; and to identify any system defects which caused or contributed to them.

In April 1998 the inquiry opened, under Sheriff Graham Cox. The Motherwell courtroom was packed with a dozen legal teams, several led by QCs. Seated behind batteries of laptops, most represented public bodies, whose prime concern was to defend their own role in the events surrounding the outbreak. Centre stage were the lawyers for Bryceland and North Lanarkshire district council.

The one exception was a local Wishaw solicitor, Paul Santoni, representing the family of one of the pensioners who died. To act as his chief expert witness, he had called in Dr Richard North, not unknown in the area since the role he had played in the Lanark Blue case three years earlier.

What had particularly caught their attention was the role played in the story by the local EHOs, who, after the tragedy occurred, seemed to have found it only too easy to identify 134 serious hygiene faults in Barr's premises and procedures, any one of which might have contributed to the fatal outbreak. But if all these faults were now so obvious, why had North Lanarkshire's health officials not spotted them before the event, during what were meant to be their regular inspections?

Certainly most of the deficiencies were so glaring that an experienced hygiene expert should have picked them up immediately. As one of the most dangerous of the bugs which can damage human health, E. coli O157 had in recent years become increasingly common in raw meat, not least because of the stress imposed on animals by the concentration of the slaughterhouse industry into fewer and larger units under the EC's "hygiene" directive, 91/497/EC.

The design of Barr's premises ensured a high risk that cooked meats might be contaminated by raw meat. No procedures were in place to ensure that they were cooked sufficiently to eliminate E. coli. Cleaning procedures were woefully deficient. The catalogue of failings was endless. Yet what came over in the courtroom was a picture of hopeless incompetence, as the various officials sent out to inspect Barr's shop from North Lanarkshire's gleaming council headquarters dominating the centre of Motherwell limply admitted that they had failed to notice any of these points.

The last full inspection of Barr's premises had been carried out 10 months before the disaster took place by a Mr Proctor, a 23-year old EHO not long out of college. Not only had he failed to identify any of these deficiencies; he had even recommended that Barr no longer need the six-monthly inspections required for "high risk premises". The state of the shop was so satisfactory, the young official had advised, that in future it would only need inspecting once a year.

As Santoni and North gradually teased this chilling story out of the increasingly discomfited EHOs, the lessons it conveyed were not lost on Sheriff Cox. When his report appeared in mid-August, they formed the central thread of his conclusions. He identified the council's incompetence as a major system failure which had played a crucial part in bringing the disaster about. He contrasted the inexperience of the young EHOs sent to inspect Barr's shop with the much more experienced inspectors sent in to investigate afterwards, asking why Bryceland had allowed such a risky operation to be inspected by people without appropriate knowledge.

But he went on to point out that, "having obtained an honours degree in environmental studies, Mr Proctor should have been capable of carrying out an inspection which would have revealed the apparent hazards in Barr's premises". Even if the shop had remained on a six-monthly inspection rota, the sheriff witheringly argued, this still probably would have made no difference, because of the unprofessional way in which inspections were being carried out.

The real significance of Cox's report was that he did not just confine his findings to underlining the failings of one team of EHOs. His criticisms went much wider, not least in emphasising on how the whole purpose of arming EHOs with such draconian powers under the Food Safety Act had been to put them in the front line, by giving them the prime responsibility for ensuring that food sold to the public was safe.

There had long been a tendency, the sheriff went on, to lay all the blame for breakdowns in hygiene just on the businesses which produced and sold the food. Certainly, he agreed, Barr should be held liable for his own part in the tragedy. But ultimately, he said, if public officials are to set themselves up as experts in hygiene, then both businesses and the public have the right to expect them to do their job properly.

If there was a major failure, as here in Lanarkshire, the inspectors must equally share the blame. Cox said he was far from impressed by the attempts the officials had made throughout the inquiry to shuffle off any responsibility and to place all the blame on an incompetent butcher, who had every right to expect competent advice from those paid to be the official "experts".

With that, I hope, you can tell where I am coming from, and my direction of travel. At Motherwell that August, we got what amounted to a landmark judgement. For the first time in recorded history, we got an official verdict which stated that the officials – the regulators – were culpable for their [in]actions.

When disaster strikes in situations where they have a statutory powers directed at preventing those disasters, they too bear some responsibility when they fail properly to exercise those powers.

Other posts on the financial crisis here.

COMMENT THREAD

Courageous journalism

2008-10-11T01:25:00.000+01:00

Those are not words we often use in the same sentence on this blog but fear not: this posting is not about British journalists but about an extremely brave Russian (well, half Chechnyan) lady who spoke this evening at the Pushkin House.

Natalya Estemirova is a journalist and a human rights activist who lives in Grozny among the rubble and the severely traumatized people - the ones who have survived the carnage, the bombing, the shelling, the random killings, the kidnappings, the tortures. She does what she can to help them by building up structures that will aid individuals and their families.

Above all, she tries to tell the truth of what has been happening in that country and what is happening in the surrounding Caucasian autonomous republics: Ingushetiya, Dagestan, North Ossetia and, more recently, South Ossetia. The world does not really want to know though, at least, some parts of it are more interested than people in Russia who, according to Ms Estemirova, simply do not want to hear on the rare occasion stories and evidence do get through to them. It is all too difficult.

Natalya Estemirova's great friend, Anna Politkovskaya, was murdered just over two years ago, on October 7, 2006 (coincidentally President Prime Minister Putin's birthday) but she is detemined to continue the good work. Last year she was awarded the first Anna Politkovskaya prize by a rather odd organization called Raw in War (Reach All Women in War).

Some of its work is entirely admirable but its trustees and patrons seem to be the usual assortment of rent-a-quote celebrities, almost entirely from the left and its founder Mariana Katzarova spent more time talking about the war lords in power in Afghanistan because of NATO, who prevent the development of proper democracy and human rights (of which there was such a lot before the NATO invasion) and comparing the West to Russia than on the troubles of the Caucasus.

Ms Estemirova's stories were moving and harrowing. For someone who has supped full of horrors she is remarkably cheerful and determined though full of fury when she talks about President Prime Minister Putin, his protege President Ramzan Kadyrov, Chechnya's dictator in all but name, and the bloody rule of some of the military commandants.

At the same time she also told of the young conscripts, whose lives are very hard and who often try to help the civilians they have to deal with, particularly the children. There was even one commandant who, in a difficult area, did his best to ensure that food came in to the civilians and various problems were sorted out. He asked Estemirova that his story not be published because as soon as his chiefs hear about it they will move him. Eventually, his tour came to an end and so did the relative peace of the area over which he had held sway.

Journalists love to talk about themselves and each other and present each other with various awards. This year the Anna Politkovskaya award was presented by Jon Snow to Malai Joya, the young Afghanistani MP who has been suspended for vociferous criticism of the tribal elders. She is not a journalist but a woman whose courage and human rights activity deserves commendation.

The question is how did Jon Snow feel when stood in the Frontline Club between these two incredibly brave ladies, one of whom risks her life to bring important stories into the open. Did he even stop for a moment and ask himself why it is that he cannot report with honesty, decency and seriousness in the easy world in which he lives?

COMMENT THREAD

The financial crisis - links

2008-10-05T22:12:00.005+01:00

Below are links to our recent posts on the financial crisis, listed in chronological order, starting with the piece on 27 September:

Therein lies your problem

A puzzling development

Playing with fire

The contagion spreads

In Europe but not ruled by …

This is one we missed

Doomed?

The elephant emerges

The smoking gun

We get what we deserve

No shortage of warnings

A dark and dirty game

The heart of the crisis

The elephant dives for cover

They really do not know?

Sauve qui peut

Beware of Greeks …

The House approves

Sucking the life out of politics

What is worse than scum?

The story so far

Blood on the floor

Seventy percent of the crisis

Oh Shit!

And double shit…

Happy days are here again (not!)

The love that dare not speak its name

Spluttering?

Practically irrelevant

Groping…

Except …

The truth will out … but not here

What they actually agreed

Joining the dots

God help us!

Neelie 1 – Ireland 0

A crisis of enormous proportions

Now there's a thing

Something smells

The politics of denial

It ain't working yet

A fascinating insight

Questions in Parliament

Children at play

Hic sunt dracones

Follow me!

The driver quits the train

The blind will not see

Unfair to Tories!

They've known it all along!

The end of civilisation as we know it

A delicious rant

Cracks beginning to show?

A failure of regulation?

Mad Bank Disease

It ain't going to work

It is all soooo complicated

Bureaucratic Spongiform Encephalopathy

The law is the law

Do they read the blog?

We will keep adding to this list as the story develops, or visit our main site for the latest posts, and our forum where the issues are expertly discussed.

First report

2008-09-25T18:27:00.004+01:00

[There are no illustrations in this longish posting because I cannot imagine what would be appropriate. When in doubt, ignore pictures is not a bad motto.]

Part of Monday was spent at a conference organized jointly by (deep breath) the Center for Security Policy with the New Criterion, Hudson Institute, City Journal – Manhattan Institute and our own Centre for Social Cohesion. With such illustrious sponsors there were illustrious speakers, including Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Mark Steyn, Daniel Johnson, Melanie Phillips, John O’Sullivan and David Pryce-Jones. Several postings will be needed to do it all justice and this is merely a preliminary musing.

The theme was “Free Speech, Jihad and the Future of Western Civilization” with a sub-heading mentioning libel tourism, a peculiarly British problem but that was not one of the main subjects. Since there were no lawyers on either of the panels, there could be no discussion of how the libel laws of this country can be changed as, we all agree, they must be.

A repeated theme elaborated by several speakers was the notion that the danger we are facing through soft jihad is greater than any we have faced before as neither Nazism nor Communism were so obviously ensconced in our society. There were no schools named after Lenin or St Adolph churches on street corners. Thus, our refusal to fight the jihad is liable to destroy Western civilization in a way the other two ideologies could not.

Let me, respectfully, disagree with that. The presence of mosques and madrassas (that means school) on our street corners need not be a problem as long there is a reasonable oversight as to what is taught there. No religious or educational institution is supposed to encourage people to go out and murder various others. By and large the people who attend these institutions have no power or influence in our society. (In fact, many of the youngsters have little to look forward to and that is a separate problem that needs to be addressed.)

Obviously, we cannot allow the building of extraordinarily large mosques, whose minarets will dwarf all Christian churches; nor can we have muezzins calling the faithful to prayer five times a day in Oxford. This is not a Muslim country.

However, there is an important difference between the inability displayed certainly by the establishment and various institutions in the West to fight for our culture and our civilization as against soft jihad and the refusal to do so when Nazism and, more importantly, Communism was the threat.

When the Archbishop of Canterbury speaks of the “inevitability” of Sharia law being accepted on equal footing with the ordinary law of the land or the Lord Chief Justice speaks of being

willing to see sharia law operate in the country, so long as it did not conflict with the laws of England and Wales, or lead to the imposition of severe physical punishments,

they do not really mean that they see Sharia as being superior to Western law.

Admittedly, it is difficult to work out what the Archbishop means at the best of times and Lord Phillips appears to think that Sharia should go beyond dispute resolution and, possibly, apply to marriage arrangement with all that implies for Muslim women. Nevertheless, both statements are expressions of moral paralysis and, possibly, physical cowardice rather than belief in the system.

This is very different from the real fifth column that all Western countries had for Nazi and, much more so, Communist ideology. The politicians, officials, diplomats, film producers and actors, officers during the latter half of the Second World War, academics, teachers, and others promoted Communism, openly or covertly, because they believed that the Western system of social, political, economic and moral ideas must be destroyed in order to create a higher societal structure. Not only was that much more dangerous it was also much more long-lasting.

I would argue that our perplexity in the face of the latest enemy and inability to proclaim the superiority of our own values of political, religious and social freedom have been caused to a very grerat extent by the infiltration of the much more dangerous enemy the West faced for decades until the Soviet Union collapsed in the early nineties.

At the conference Ayaan Hirsi Ali talked of soft jihad as termites. You may think your beautiful furniture is still standing but as soon as you move it there is a complete collapse – the termites have destroyed it. I am afraid it was the Communist infiltration that were the termites and the furniture that was in place and looked so nice cannot stand up to the strong movement that is being inflicted by the jihadists.

In the same way, many of us would argue that another specie of termites are the tranzis and, particularly, the European Union that is lodging in our furniture and destroying it from inside.

The extent to which that system’s agents penetrated our society has been documented in greater detail for the United States than for any European country, including Britain. Partly, this is a matter of luck – the CPUSA’s documents have ended up in the hands of competent researchers and historians, thus making it possible for the Yale series on the history of Communism to be published, starting with “The Secret World of American Communism” in 1996.

Then there are is the historical fact that the Venona documents that produced a remarkable list of individuals, some of whom have not yet been identified, were decoded in the United States, though often with British help. The declassification of documents was possible because of America’s Freedom of Information Act, which actually allows people to find out matters of some importance. Similar attempts to find out names of agents have failed in Britain and in European countries.

There are other issues: the famous libel laws that have prevented many an historian from disclosing the truth about the situation in Britain; and a curious desire to bury and ignore the past, often coupled with misplaced compassion for the now elderly agents or their families if they themselves have died.

Even in the United States McCarthyism is a word to invoke shivers of horror in many a right-thinking individual and George Clooney can get away with making a deeply dishonest film about the period, “Good night and good luck”. Ed Murrow may have been “a useful idiot” but the man at the heart of the story, Lawrence Duggan, was most definitely a Soviet agent and his death, allegedly a suicide, remains deeply suspicious.

The announcement that the Rosenbergs were definitely spies by one of their co-agents produced a frisson of astonishment in the New York Times.

In other words the debate is not ended and a great deal more is likely to come out on the subject of those “invisible” groups of agents, most of whom were in some position of power and influence. Compare that to the position the soft jihadists hold in our society.

Some, either Muslims themselves or their sympathizers, who, nevertheless, do not actually want to live in a Sharia-run society, have acquired positions in such organizations as the Canadian Human Rights Councils (that are now being investigated and may well cease to exist soon). Some, like Khalid bin Mahfouz, have enough money to manipulate the disgraceful British libel laws in order to impose censorship on all those who try to discuss what he has been doing with his money. But most of the mosque-goers and madrassa-attenders are on the fringes of society. That causes problems of its own but they cannot be compared with the likes of Harry Dexter White or Alger Hiss.

This is not to say that I do not find soft jihad seriously disturbing. Attempts to silence research, debate, even artistic expression whether through our libel courts, the Canadian Human Rights kangaroo courts or the manipulation of the American legal system and academia (so what else is new?) are outrageous and must be resisted.

(Incidentally, all those people who were so schocked by the fact that Governor Palin, as Mayor of Wasilla, asked the City Librarian about the possibility of certain books being withdrawn, not actually suggesting that she should do so, were very silent when Cambridge University Press, terrified by Khalid bin Mahfouz’s determination to bankrupt them if necessary, demanded that all libraries worldwide should withdraw copies of “Alms for Jihad”. Luckily, the Office for Intellectual Freedom of the American Library Association recommended that American libraries refuse to comply and many readers seconded that.)

The decisions taken by the OIC and the Human Rights Council are also worrying. We all know that these organizations should have no influence on what happens in our countries at all and we also know that there will be creeping indirect influence. In fact, as I have suggested before on the BrugesGroupBlog, the transnational organizations are, in many ways, a greater danger to us than the Islamists.

We cannot allow books being pulped or withdrawn from publication because there are people around who do not like what is being said with respected writers and researchers like Rachel Ehrenfeld being prevented from publishing her work; we cannot have journalists like Mark Steyn and Ezra Levant bullied and harassed by sinister commissars for truth, who are not accountable to anyone and who have no legal framework within which they must operate (though, I understand they are now being investigated by various law enforcement agencies); we cannot accept that the likes of Robert Spencer of Jihad Watch should be silenced because they dare to point to unpalatable truths.

At the same time let us not forget that there are other forces that try to abolish liberties that had been fought for. The EU, as my colleague has reported, is once again trying to control blogs and bloggers, no doubt for the good of us all.

Over on the other side of the Pond, there are constant Democrat threats or promises to reintroduce the “Fairness Doctrine”, whose aim is to close down the highly successful right-wing radio channels and programmes. There were reports of Obama campaigners closing down Clinton-supporting blogs and trying to derail interviews with the likes of Stanley Kurtz on the subject of Obama’s links with the not-all-that-remorseful former Weatherman Bill Ayers and their joint behaviour over the Chicago Annenberg Challenge. Those egregious Holocaust denial laws not only go on in countries like Germany but there have been proposals to extend them to other countries. And, of course, we all, in Britain, live under the constant threat of the libel laws as operated by rich crooks with the aid and support of some (not many) members of the judicial profession.

The point I am making that the censorship and other aspects of the soft jihad are imposed through fear not through ideological agreement. In the first place, it is physical fear. If we don’t agree to stop investigating the Koran or pointing out that almost all recent terrorist acts were committed by Islamist groups, they might come after us. We might be blown up or murdered in the street like Theo van Gogh was. At best we shall have to live under permanent protection like Ayaan Hirsan Ali and other outspoken Muslims and ex-Muslims do or like Geert Wilders, the Dutch parliamentarian does, or like the Danish cartoonists do.

There is also the matter of intellectual cowardice. Too many people in the establishment and, one has to admit, outside it are terrified of proclaiming a point of view, particularly if it sounds nasty or unpleasant. The exceptions are the United States and Israel. You can say anything you like about them. Actually, you can say anything you like about any right-wing analyst or politician, as Governor Sarah Palin has found out.

The third intelinking thread is moral cowardice or, rather, a moral paralysis, the result, I submit, of the activity of those termites. Faced with a determined onslaught by people who are not particularly interested in convincing us but in overcoming our possible resistance by any means necessary, too many of us find it hard to define what it is we are fighting for and how to go about the fight.

The EU, needless to say, has been part of the problem. By insisting that member states abandon their own identities and histories in order to become part of the grand project; by officially proclaiming that part of the project is not upsetting anybody (except those who oppose it) as Commission President Barroso made it more or less clear in a waffly statement about the Danish cartoons and certain reactions to them, the EU has made our fight against the enemy that is trying to destroy our culture that much more difficult. Come to think of it, the EU, together with other tranzis and many of our own establishment, has refused to acknowledge that the enemy exists and is armed.

However, this is a war we can win. The Islamists, unlike our earlier enemies, are offering very little. Few people want to live under Sharia law or go back to a particularly backward version of the social structure of the Dark Ages. So they are beatable as long as we remain determined to do so and that means, among other things, not handing over Muslim populations to their rule.

The idea of imposing Sharia on Muslim communities in the West, thus creating a legal apartheid and condemning millions of people who should be living under our laws to that backward social structure ought to be repugnant.

We can stand up to these people, rescue their victims (those unfortunate youngsters who have been seduced by highly unpleasant imams and the women who are trapped in Sharia family rules, for instance) and, in the process, reassert those values that make the West, in particular the Anglosphere, the most attractive and energetic part of the world.

Going back to the conference, I want to quote two of the speakers (others will turn up in other postings), both writers I admire greatly and who have made appearances on the blog: David Pryce-Jones (here is his blog) and John O’Sullivan.

Mr Pryce-Jones is an expert on Middle Eastern history and very knowledgeable on Islam. In fact, he is considerably more knowledgeable than many of the Imams that spout hate-filled rubbish and all those who protest against “Islamophobia”. (Nothing new in that, many eurosceptics are more knowledgeable about European countries and their history as well as the EU than all those who scream “swivel-eyed Europhobes”.)

He started his comments by mourning the degradation that has fallen on the North African and other Arab Muslim countries in the last few decades, blaming it on the absolutist political systems that have grown up in them since the Second World War.

The nationalists got rid of the few nascent political institutions that the French and the British left behind (very few, as it happens) and turned the countries into oppressive one-party states. When these did not produce all or even some of what they promised, a power struggle ensued with the radical Islamists taking over, often in very bloodthirsty fashion. (Let me just add that the story of radical Islamism growing out of left-wing, Soviet supported Communist or quasi Communist regimes has not been properly told. It is so much easier to blame Western imperialism. The latest issue of the Salisbury Review has a fascinating article on this process in Algeria by the Portuguese writer and politician Patricia Lança but you have subscribe to the magazine to read it in full.)

Breaking absolute power is immensely difficult though, as Mr Pryce-Jones pointed out, the much-maligned Bush regime seems to have managed it and Iraq may well turn into an exemplar for the rest of the Middle East. It is certainly a worrying precedent for the rulers of those countries.

In the meantime, Mr Pryce-Jones advocates a new and more attractive Congress for Cultural Freedom that will give a forum to those Muslim thinkers and writers who are not so much “moderate” as that is a meaningless term but intent on turning Islam into a modern ideology that can survive without too much bloodshed into the twenty-first century and develop into the future.

The original Congress for Cultural Freedom was set up by the disillusioned left to counter the very effective Communist propaganda and other activity that was destroying Western culture and society. It was financed by the CIA because no-one else would. I think we can all agree that its work was but partially successful.

A Congress that would be opposing Islamism will have to be different as it will have to concentrate on the Muslim countries and communities themselves. In the West, it will have to proclaim the importance of Western values and culture and fight cowardice and abject desires to surrender rather than a powerful ideology.

John O’Sullivan, Executive Editor of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, pointed out that not all threats to free speech come from radical Islam. He should know. He and his staff are fighting very tangible threats and attacks in many countries, not least Russia.

He further pointed out that the lack of decent British patriotism that can be passed on to the young (and old but let that pass) has created problems for everyone in this country, not just the Muslim communities. (This, too, is a point we have made frequently on this blog.)

He suggested a programme of five points:

End multiculturalism and concentrate on teaching that decent British patriotism that includes a great deal of history, not forgetting that within a liberal (in the true sense of the word) Western culture there can be many divergences.

Something nasty to be done with the establishment, whose idiocy and dishonesty has, if not exactly landed us, certainly has kept us in the mess we are in. Of course, the establishment tends to be rather left-wing these days so let us not have any more nonsense about the poor underprivileged left, ranting against power structures that disappeared decades ago.

A serious reform of the police, which has become “the paramilitary wing of the Guardian”, a phrase so clever that many of us in the audience immediately made a note of stealing it.

An alteration to immigration rules that would prevent all those endless first cousin marriages to people from backward villages in the Indian sub-continent. This, needless to say, will start working towards an improvement in the situation of women in the Muslim communities.

The fifth point was the most important one as this is something we can all do immediately: resistance to foolish intellectual fashions, no matter where they come from.

So there we are dear readers. A first report on the many subjects raised by an important conference and a general musing on the subjects covered. I may add that quite a few people on the panel and in the audience might not have agreed with my opinion. Unsurprisingly, I remain convinced by them.

Who should decide - Part 2

2008-09-12T16:22:00.003+01:00

[This is a continuation of a posting I put up yesterday.]

Let us have a look at Jonathan Freedland's piece first because it comes from the same stable that tried to influence the last presidential election by urging Guardian readers write to voters in Ohio, suggesting to them that for everybodys sake they should vote John Kerry (D). Ohio, incidentally, the last major State to declare, went Republican.

Mr Freedland's piece is riddled with inaccuracies. He rehashes all the accusations against Governor Palin, having clearly not heard the truth about any of them; he calls Andrew Sullivan a conservative, something that has not been true for some time; he assumes that it is black candidates who do worse in elections than in polls, whereas the truth is that it is left-wing candidates; and he actually thinks that the ill-fated Berlin rally was a good thing. Then he delivers what he thinks are the killer punches:

If Americans choose McCain, they will be turning their back on the rest of the world, choosing to show us four more years of the Bush-Cheney finger. And I predict a deeply unpleasant shift.

Until now, anti-Americanism has been exaggerated and much misunderstood: outside a leftist hardcore, it has mostly been anti-Bushism, opposition to this specific administration. But if McCain wins in November, that might well change. Suddenly Europeans and others will conclude that their dispute is with not only one ruling clique, but Americans themselves. For it will have been the American people, not the politicians, who will have passed up a once-in-a-generation chance for a fresh start - a fresh start the world is yearning for.

And the manner of that decision will matter, too. If it is deemed to have been about race - that Obama was rejected because of his colour - the world's verdict will be harsh. In that circumstance, Slate's Jacob Weisberg wrote recently, international opinion would conclude that "the United States had its day, but in the end couldn't put its own self-interest ahead of its crazy
irrationality over race".

Even if it's not ethnic prejudice, but some other aspect of the culture wars, that proves decisive, the point still holds. For America to make a decision as grave as this one - while the planet boils and with the US fighting two wars - on the trivial basis that a hockey mom is likable and seems down to earth, would be to convey a lack of seriousness, a fleeing from reality, that does indeed suggest a nation in, to quote Weisberg, "historical decline". Let's not forget, McCain's campaign manager boasts that this election is "not about the issues."

Well now, let us try to sort this rubbish out. First of all, one cannot start by dismissing Sarah Palin, whose one great fault is that she is an outsider by Washington DC standards and then demand that Americans vote for the insider and call it "change" and "fresh start".

Furthermore, after the Democrats discarded Hillary Clinton, surely not voting for the McCain/Palin ticket would mean that the American electorate is motivated more than anything else by crazy irrationality over gender. If not voting in Obama is racist, not voting in Palin must be sexist. You see, Mr Freedland, two can play that stupid game. (As a matter of fact, whoever loses in 2008, Palin will emerge as the winner. Tough luck Mr Freedland.)

But, of course, it is more than that – we are talking about Americans not recognizing their own “self-interest”, which consists of being liked by Mr Freedland and Slate’s Jacob Weisberg and the mob in Berlin who applauded wildly whenever Obama mentioned completely irresponsible things such as solving the Darfur problem and global warming. (Incidentally, Senator Obama’s contribution to the problem of global warming is not, as you would expect, very helpful, as this account makes it clear.)

The conclusion one finally draws from that ~~attack~~ column is that as far as Mr Freedland is concerned Americans have to prove their non-racist credentials by voting in a black man (or, in this case, a mixed race one) and any black (or mixed race) man will do as they are in Mr Freedland's mind completely interchangeable. Ahem, isn't that rather racist?

I know of a very large number of Americans who read everything Thomas Sowell or Shelby Steele writes, are followers of LaShawn Barber's blog (woops, she is a black woman so she does not count), think Clarence Thomas is a good Supreme Court judge and would happily vote for Michael Steele (more here). (Incidentally, the last two of these have received a staggering amount of racist abuse from the left. Clearly, this does not bother Mr Freedland.) But they will not vote for Barack Obama not because he is black (well, mixed race) but because of who and what he is. He himself, not the rest of the male black population. That is what politics is about, Mr Freedland, in a democracy and not the sort of oligarchic government you are happy with.

Nor do I see why America needs to prove its anti-racist credentials to countries where ethnic minorities do not exactly prosper (a look at the situation in France might be instructive). The present Secretary of State and her immediate predecessor are both black. The fact that neither has managed to overcome the problems with the job is irrelevant. Their white predecessors did not either.

There are numerous black Senators, Representatives, Governors, Mayors (oh yes, they are important in American politics, despite Mr Freedland's ignorant comments), State legislators. The mere fact that a black (well, mixed race) man was chosen to be the candidate for one of the main parties is a huge achievement. Then again, the fact that a woman has been chosen to be the Vice-Presidential candidate for one of the main parties is also a huge achievement. And she, unlike Geraldine Ferraro, stands a good chance of winning and, probably, going on to becoming the Presidential candidate.

So much for Mr Freedland. Let us turn our attention (and, I trust, vitriol) to the BBC World Service poll. Goody, goody, the "World Wants Obama as President". Well, the majority of the 23,500 people asked in this poll across 22 countries does, anyway. Not decisive, I should have thought, particularly as these would be people who had access to the BBC and, more to the point, to whom the BBC had access.

A total of 23,531 people in Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, Egypt, France, Germany, India, Indonesia, Italy, Kenya, Lebanon, Mexico, Nigeria, Panama, the Philippines, Poland, Russia, Singapore, Turkey, the UAE, Britain and the United States were interviewed face-to-face or by telephone in July and August 2008 for the poll.

Of course, one has to add that in July and August Senator McCain had had very little coverage in much of the world media (including the American MSM) as it was before his brilliant pick of Governor Sarah Palin as his Vice-President. Is the BBC going to conduct another poll that would take recent developments into account? I think not.

Several things strike me about the piece, apart from the comment:

In the United States, three polls taken since the Republican party convention ended on Thursday (local time) show Senator McCain with a lead of 1 to 4 percentage points - within the margin of error - and two others show the two neck-and-neck.

One wonders whether there was any mention of the margin of error when Obama's lead was below 5 percent, which has happened a number of times. Again, I suspect not. It's the way you tell 'em.

The summary of the figures is odd:

The margin in favour of Senator Obama ranged from 9 per cent in India to 82 per cent in Kenya, while an average of 49 percent across the 22 countries preferred Senator Obama compared with 12 percent preferring Senator McCain. Some four in 10 did not take a view.

Right. So nearly half the world, according to this, actually has no view on the subject. That's very interesting. I didn't see that in all the headlines. The spread is also interesting. The margin of preference was nine percent in India, a country that has close links with America and is worried about the defence situation in Asia.

In Kenya, that seat of freedom and democracy, the margin was 82 percent. Would that have anything to do with the fact that Obama's father (who had abandoned him and his mother when the child was two years old) was Kenyan? Surely not.

We have been here before in 2004 when we wrote about the sheer arrogance of presuming to dictate to the Americans how they should vote here and here. The subject came up earlier in this campaign as well.

Let me sum up: the American President and the American Congress are elected by the American people according to the rules laid down in the American Constitution, which has been around for well over 200 years. This is called constitutional democracy. The alternative of acclaiming the POTUS by journalists, NGOs, tranzis and people they condescend to ask is not acceptable. Though it may suit Senator Obama's campaign who lost a lot of good will in America when they had their man strut around as if he was already the President. Unfortunately, America has this small thing called an election. Oh dear, I am repeating myself.

Then there is a question of governments and elections in the countries where they so blithely tell us who should be the American President. Just how much say do the people of China, Egypt, Indonesia, Kenya, Lebanon, Nigeria, Russia and the UAE have in the selection of their own government, a matter of greater concern to them, one would have thought?

So we come to the last and, for us, the most important point. Does Mr Freedland ever mention the fact that in Britain around 80 per cent of the legislation comes from the European Union with the Parliament, even if it is aware of it, unable to strike it down? Has the BBC ever conducted a poll about the fact that legal decisions in Britain can be overthrown by the ECJ and legislation properly passed in Westminster can be declared invalid by the same body?

This is what I wrote in July in response to the notion that "we" should have a say in the choice of the POTUS:

To which one can say only one thing: who is this "we"? We, the people of European countries, do not have a say in the selection of our real government. Nor do we have a say in whether to have a completely new constitutional arrangement, to wit the ~~Constitutional~~ ~~Reform~~ Lisbon Treaty imposed on us. When the people of one European country are graciously allowed to vote on the subject and say no, plans are made to disregard their vote. So, before we claim a right to impose our views on the Americans on who should be their President perhaps we should take a closer look at what is happening in our own countries.

Furthermore, is it not strange that "our" opinion always seems to be on the side of the Democrats and the more left-wing and anti-American their rhetoric is, the more "we" seem to like them? Could it be because we are fed a succession of … ahem … inaccurate stories about American politics by our own media and various political pundits? Or could it be that "we" are only a very small proportion of the population?

Well now, let me ask that question buried in the first paragraph: before we start interfering with the American constitutional structure are we to be allowed to decide whether we want the ~~Constitutional~~ ~~Reform~~ Lisbon Treaty imposed on us and is Mr Freedland going to write an angry article about the need for Britain and other European countries to turn over a new leaf and resume their existence as democratic countries? I take that is a no. After all, it is so much easier to make irresponsible statements about the next occupant of the Oval Office.

What do they hope to achieve?

2008-08-29T11:55:00.002+01:00

In Wednesday's Wall Street Journal Bret Stephens's column argued something we have been saying on this blog for a long time: Russia’s flaying about and bullying neighbouring smaller and weaker countries are not a sign of strength, no matter what most of the media repeats ad nauseam; it is a sign of weakness.

Putin, supposedly the strong man of Russia and of the whole Eurasian sphere, has demonstrated his and his government's weakness on a number of occasions, in the international and, more importantly, the domestic arena.

"In Russia," wrote the great scholar of Russian imperialism Dietrich Geyer many years ago, "expansion was an expression of economic weakness, not exuberant strength."

Keep this observation in mind as Vladimir Putin and his minions bask in the glow of Western magazine cover stories about Russia's "resurgence" following its splendid little war against plucky little Georgia. The Kremlin is certainly confident these days, buoyed by years of rising commodity prices and a bullying foreign policy that mistakes fear for respect -- the very combination that made the Soviet Union seem invincible in the 1970s.

Then there is the question of demography. Russia is not reproducing itself by its birthrate and has the lowest life expectancy, especially for men, in the developed world (if one can really count it as a developed country). Given that its military strategy still seems to depend on "we have more soldiers than you have bullets", the demographic factor is very important as President Putin (before he became Prime Minister) for one, had noted.

Then there is the question of the all-important oil and gas production where many things are going wrong, not least because of the Russian state determinedly taking over and gradually easing out those Western firms that could provide investment and expertise.

There's bad news here, too. Oil production is set to decline this year for the first time in a decade, a decline that is widely expected to accelerate rapidly in 2010. Of Russia's 14 largest oil fields, seven are more than 50% depleted. Production at its four largest gas fields is also in decline. Russia drilled about four million feet of new wells last year. In 1990, it drilled 17 million.

None of this is because Russia is necessarily running out of oil and gas: Existing fields could be better managed, and huge expanses of territory remain unexplored. Instead, it is a function of underinvestment, incompetence, corruption, political interference and crude profiteering. "If you're running Gazprom but you don't really own it, then your interest is in maximizing short-term profits, not long-term development," a Western diplomat told McClatchy's Tom Lasseter.

Amazingly, the system is of deliberate design, as if nothing was learned from the collapse of communism. Parastatal companies are rarely if ever efficient. Yet Mr. Putin has gone about effectively nationalizing entire industries. Foreign investors crave predictability. Yet Mr. Putin has created conditions which his own president, Dmitry Medvedev, calls "legal nihilism." Foreign customers of Russia's commodities seek reliable supplies. Yet Mr. Putin has made no secret of his willingness to turn the energy spigot off whenever it suits his political convenience.

All of which makes one wonder why Russia has chosen to flex her muscle militarily rather than, as before, through her control of energy supplies now. For the attack on Georgia was carefully planned and was not a spontaneous reaction either to the Georgian attempt to reconquer South Ossetia or to the Kosovan declaration of independence.

It is not entirely clear what advice Saakashvili was receiving from his allies in the West or from his own cabinet, some of whom may well have wanted to provoke a fight at this point, knowing that the Georgian forces were not ready to fight a strengthened 58th Army (which is not an elite organization but quite the opposite).

There is some evidence that the Russian forces were not very well equipped technically, that the Georgian air force did rather better than expected and rumours that the Georgian ground forces managed to inflict more damage than the Russians had expected. Much of their advance, in any case, came after Saakashvili had ordered the Georgian troops to stop fighting and had asked for cease-fire negotiations.

The Russians are not releasing information about the numbers that had gone in or the numbers that came out after the long-delayed adherence to the agreement supposedly brokered by President Sarkozy but largely ignored by President Medvedev. Given that those early numbers about the supposed “genocide” in South Ossetia have been discarded even by the Russian authorities, any information emanating from that source can be described safely as mere propaganda. Independent journalists are not being allowed in to the occupied territories and the fog of war seems denser than ever.

It is possible to do a preliminary summing up of the situation. As these are largely well-known facts from news stories, there seems no point in linking them as it would be difficult to decide who to link to. On the other hand, if there is a story that has not been widely published, a link will be provided.

The Russian Duma, Prime Minister and President have all announced that the two break-away autonomous republics, Abkhazia and South Ossetia, will now be independent of Georgia. This is a reversal of Russian policy so far. Despite the presence of a large number of Russian "peace-keepers" in the two areas, there has been no formal recognition of their "independence" as Russia is not too keen on that subject, having the odd problem or two of her own in the Caucasus. The names of Chechnya, Ingushetiya and, possibly, North Ossetia spring to mind.

Interestingly enough, China has distanced herself from Russia, as have the other member states of the Shanghai Co-operation Organization, though that is not how the Kremlin likes to put it.

In a joint statement, the leaders of China, Russia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan said they "support the active role of Russia in assisting peace and cooperation in the region."

The six in the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) also "express their deep concern over the recent tensions surrounding the South Ossetia question and call for the sides to peacefully resolve existing problems through dialogue."

Echoing language used in the West over the conflict, a portion of the statement also said the summit members supported the principle of "territorial integrity" of states.

Russian President Dmitry Medvedev said the statement showed a "united position" on the Georgia conflict, and Kremlin officials indicated they were happy with its phrasing.

China's foreign ministry reiterated, however, its concern over Russia's decision to recognise two breakaway Georgian provinces as independent states, and experts were split on how to interpret the Dushanbe statement.

This is not good news for Russia. They were undoubtedly expecting hostility from the West, though maybe not the NATO fleet in the Black Sea, which has produced some venomous statements from President Medvedev and various military spokesmen. One would expect a certain amount of venom but the shrillness of attacks both on the United States (whose fault it all is, naturally) and on its allies from the hitherto mild and rational Russian president has taken a lot of people aback. Though I must admit that his description of the EU's carefully worded non-threat of possible sanctions as the product of a "sick" and "confused" imagination made me smile.

President Medvedev's virulent language that descended into gutter speak at times in the weeks since the beginning of the invasion of Georgia indicates either that he is prompted by Prime Minister Putin, who has always spoken in that way, or that he is trying to show himself to be as tough as his predecessor was.

Of course, the two ex-Georgian autonomous republics are not going to be independent and from various reports it would appear that this fact is beginning to dawn on the unfortunate inhabitants there. While, one assumes, many were hoping for nothing more than Russian protection, the stark truth is that they will be subsumed into the country. How anyone who lives on Russia's border can make such a mistake is a mystery. Then again, they had very few choices.

Occupation forces in the guise of peacekeepers (Russian ones only) will be positioned in both republics with many missiles in South Osssetia. Abkhazia appears to be in the process of being bought up by various Russians who have always liked holidaying in Sukhumi and its surroundings.

Over and above that, the Russians are staying in a security zone that extends 14 kms beyond the borders of the two regions. Since most of the troops have been withdrawn from Georgia, leaving behind a certain amount of devastation and, as usual, tales of extensive looting, those occupying the security zone will be a sitting target, should the Georgians decide to take a leaf out of other Caucasian people’s book. Then again, the Kremlin might welcome some attacks, in order to re-invade.

All round, this does not appear to be a sufficient reward for what may have been unpleasant fighting and for losing whatever position they may have managed to achieve in international affairs. The idea spread by the Kremlin and its busy propagandists is that the West will forget after a while, since they need Russia as a supplier of energy and in the fight against terrorism.

As for the second, Russia is a questionable ally in that she plays a complicated game, which is of little use to any other country. As for the first, Russia’s behaviour may well be encouraging more European countries to start looking round for alternative sources of energy, especially as at some point in the not too distant future Russia may well have to start making decisions on whether to continue to sell abroad and deplete the domestic market with all that entails, or to satisfy the domestic market and forego income from Europe.

Another interesting development is the defiance shown by countries that may be next on the Putin-Medvedev shopping list, such as Ukraine. This is being openly encouraged by several Western countries, with the US and Britain in the lead. Reports of the military effort that was needed to invade Georgia does not indicate that Russia is ready to move into Ukraine, a much larger and more populous country with a better equipped military.

Of course, there is the possibility of fomenting a civil war, which will result in Russian intervention to guarantee stability there as well as in the Caucasus and the detaching of Crimea to be subsumed into Russia.

In the meantime, the expression a new Cold War has taken over all public discourse, whether it is the Foreign Secretary warning Russia not to start one or President Medvedev saying that Russia is not afraid of it or simply everybody discussing whether we are heading into one or not. One wonders whether all those somewhat pompous critics of Edward Lucas's book, like the ex-ambassador, Sir Rodric Braithwaite, who was so sure that Mr Lucas did not understand Russia, are feeling a little silly at the moment. Probably not, if I know anything about ambassadors (Charles Crawford being the honourable exception).

Was this really what the Putin-Medvedev ménage had intended? Or is the whole unpleasant saga aimed, as previous foreign sorties had been, at the domestic market? Is the invasion of Georgia, in other words, yet another way of whipping up fear in the Russian population?

Shouldn't Brown and Cameron do "foreign"?

2008-07-16T21:36:00.002+01:00

A little while ago I was asked by the BBC Russian Service to comment on the ongoing problems in Russo-British relationship. What will happen at the Brown-Medvedev meeting at the G8 Summit? Not a lot, was my prediction, and I seem to have been right.

The larger point is one that I had made before in the selfsame studio: Gordon Brown’s views on foreign policy are completely unknown. Does he even have any views? Does he even know that there is a world out there? He certainly has no concept of what Britain’s foreign policy might be based on. And, sad to say, neither does the Leader of Her Majesty’s Opposition, whose Shadow Foreign Secretary seems to be a part-time member of the front bench, even though he is shadowing one of the great offices of state.

This became painfully obvious during the last NATO summit when important matters were discussed. The question of whether Ukraine and Georgia should be asked to participate in the Membership Action Plan (MAP) went to the heart of several rather tricky problems. How far should NATO extend? What is to be done about making the Caucasus – important for all sorts of reasons, not least oil – secure? And, above all, is Russia to be allowed to interfere in internal NATO matters? Subsequent developments in the Caucasus with Russia, to all intents and purposes, invading Abkhazia, known as the break-away region of Georgia, have confirmed the importance of all these issues.

The summit divided rather sharply between those, led by the United States and Canada, who wanted to invite Ukraine and Georgia to participate in MAP and those, led by Germany and France, who opposed it, largely because they did not want to upset Russia, from whom Germany and some other West European countries are buying an ever larger proportion of their gas and oil and will do unless, as seems likely, Russian production is steeply reduced.

The final outcome was unexpected. While Chancellor Merkel and President Sarkozy with their acolytes, the Spanish and the Benelux governments, strutted round boasting of how they had stood up to America, President Bush quietly lined up his allies and the final statement promised both Ukraine and Georgia eventual membership of NATO. This went further than the original offer of the Membership Action Plan that had been defeated by Russia’s proxies.

What was Britain’s position? Did Gordon Brown line up with George Bush and Stephen Harper with their allies or with Angela Merkel and Nicolas Sarkozy and their allies? Neither. Prime Minister Brown sat on the fence, whining that there was no consensus he could adhere to. What was the Opposition’s attitude? Did they think Britain should go with the pro-MAP or the anti-MAP group and did they demand a debate because HMG had shown itself to be so utterly feeble? Well, no. The whole episode seemed to pass Messrs Cameron, Hague and Fox by without so much as a raised eyebrow.

The main problem here is the European Union, a subject, which seems to mesmerize most politicians, particularly the Conservatives. When asked what their views on foreign policy are, they (and their Labour counterparts) inevitably start talking of the EU and, possibly, the Lisbon (formerly known as Constitutional) Treaty. The trouble is that the EU is not a matter for foreign policy only. As it is the fount of most of this country’s legislation it has to be discussed under domestic matters. At the same time, it is well-nigh impossible for Britain to develop a coherent foreign policy as long as such matters as international trade agreements remain in the hands of the European Union and the Common Foreign Policy is an avowed aim of the integration process.

Of course, if neither the Government nor the Opposition express any ideas of what Britain’s foreign policy should be, the situation becomes even more difficult. Apart from an insistence that we must ratify the Lisbon Treaty, no matter what happens with promises to support the French desire to create a European force and a generalized bleating about the situation in Zimbabwe, we have heard very little from the youthful Foreign Secretary. Gordon Brown makes the odd comment about the need to send either more aid or just as much aid to countries that clearly need to be weaned off it in order to develop their economy. He is also sometimes in favour of a close alliance with the United States and sometimes against it.

On the other side David Cameron shows no interest in matters of foreign policy beyond the odd trip to help some African country and getting into a muddle as to what he intends to do or not do about the Lisbon Treaty. This would not matter if the Shadow Foreign Secretary made it clear what the Conservative ideas on British foreign policy are. William Hague, who cannot be seriously described as an opponent of the European Union or even of the integration process, has been known to make the odd comment about the Lisbon Treaty (he is against it) and the remote possibility of Tony Blair becoming the first President of the European Council (he thinks it’s funny).

There are the compulsory comments on the need to help poor countries without any serious ideas as to how this might be done and there was at least one major speech. In it the Shadow Foreign Secretary explained that Britain should move away from a close relationship with the United States and look to other countries, the growing economies of Asia such as China and India. The speech appeared to be rather random, written after a cursory glance at the atlas.

Surely Mr Hague must know that Britain’s relationship with India, with whom there are historic links, which is an Anglospheric country with similar political, legal, constitutional and, intermittently, economic ideas must be different from that with China, which is an oppressive Communist gerontocracy where political and economic tensions are becoming more and more apparent. Surely Mr Hague is aware of that entity we call the Anglosphere. Perhaps not, as he has never referred to it and has ignored the fact that both India and Australia have separate and close relations with America and both are developing into serious regional powers. In other words, there is no suggestion that under William Hague’s guidance and David Cameron’s leadership the Conservative Party has the slightest intention of developing a foreign policy.

Given Britain’s history it is, to put it mildly, disconcerting to find the country in a situation where neither the Government nor Her Majesty’s Opposition has the slightest interest in her position in the world.

Anything better than this!

2008-07-09T00:10:00.008+01:00

Monday 12 June 2000 and I was riding the suburban train from Paris Charles de Gaulle Airport to Paris Nord, then to switch stations and get the train to Strasbourg where I was to spend the next few days at the European Parliament.

When disaster struck, it was all so natural. About halfway through the journey, a young lad - of Arab appearance, maybe late teens or early twenties – came up to me as we were stopped at a station. He came quite close, asking me in French whether this was the train to Charles de Gaulle.

It took me a time to work out what he was saying but once I understood, I told him he was on the wrong train. In my best pidgin French, with much gesticulating, I told him he wanted one going the other way. The lad dashed for the doors, which were just closing, and the train moved off. Only then did I notice that my computer bag, containing my laptop, was gone. The bastard had nicked it!!

At Gare du Nord I was minded to report the theft to the police, but I could not see a police station or any sign of one. I thus resolved to report it at Gar de l'Est, where I recalled seeing a police post. I found it easily enough but the two policemen and the one policewoman behind the counter – none of whom, incidentally, spoke English - told me that it was outside their jurisdiction.

The crime had occurred "sur le train" so it had to be dealt with by "le bureau chemin de fer". Fortunately, or so I thought, their office was just round the corner, an anonymous door in the wall with only the tiniest of signs alongside. I pressed the entryphone button and was admitted, only to be told by the police there – who also did not speak English - that I had to report it to the police in Gare du Nord. "Forget it!", I told them – I had my train to catch to Strasbourg. I would report it on my way home, that Thursday – which indeed I needed to do in order to claim the insurance.

A mere routine, I thought. It was something I was going to regret.

Come the Thursday, I left Strasbourg on the 2.39 pm train, headed for Paris. A colleague had written me a letter in French, explaining the details of the theft, asking the police to prepare a certificate for the insurance claim. She also had written a letter on European Parliament writing paper, explaining that I was very pressed for time, having to catch an aeroplane at Charles de Gaulle at 8.15 that evening.

The train was due in at Gare de l'Est at 6.40pm and the trip from there to the airport would take an hour. Since I had to check in half an hour before the flight, that gave me only ten to fifteen minutes to make the report and get the certificate. I was going to be pushed.

At Gare de l'Est, I walked across to Gare du Nord – that was the quickest way. I had already found out that the police post was situated on Platform 3, but what I hadn't reckoned on was how big Gare du Nord really was. Needless to say, platform 3 was at the opposite end of the point I entered it. I made my best speed and found the bureau Chemin de Fer halfway down the long platform. There were absolutely no signs directing people to it, and only the tiniest name plaque adjacent the door, when I finally got there. No wonder I couldn't find it on my way out and, if I hadn't known to look for the "bureau Chemin de Fer", I wouldn’t have known what I was looking for anyway.

As with the other bureau – at Gare de l'Est – the door was guarded by an entryphone. I pressed the button and was admitted, to find three policemen. I gave them my colleague's letter and one of them read it, conferring with his own colleague.

As before, none of them spoke English but the first officer explained that this bureau only dealt with immigration matters relating to the Eurostar. In French, he explained to me that there was another "bureau" on the station, and I had to go there.

Here I was, at a major international station, dealing with police whose job was immigration, and none of them spoke English. Nevertheless, they did give me a photocopy of a hand-drawn map. Obviously, this was not the first time they had been confronted with this problem. As an additional clue, one of the policemen told me to look for the "porte bleu".

According to the map, the proper "bureau" was back the way I had come, but fortunately – as I thought – in the direction of the suburban station from where I was to catch my train to Charles de Gaulle. Indeed, as I followed the map, I found myself led into the very part of the station where I wanted to be.

But, for the life of me, I could not see the "bureau Chemin de Fer". In desperation, I asked the assistant of a newspaper kiosk, who pointed beyond the electronic barriers which guarded the entry to the platforms. I had to get a train ticket in order to get to the police station!

Fortunately – or so I thought – I had the return half of my ticket bought earlier in the week to get me to the Gare du Nord, but when I pushed it into the slot to open the barrier, all I got were insistent electronic bleeps. The damn thing refused to open.

By now I was running seriously short of time and, with no railway officials in sight, I resolved that the quickest way to get access was to buy yet another ticket. That cost me ten minutes, working up the interminable queue to the ticket office, and left me 49FF (£5.00) poorer. Nonetheless, I did get past the barrier, into a cavernous hall, with no sign whatsoever of the fabled "bureau Chemin de Fer". On the verge of giving up entirely, I tried walking up what appeared to be a completely unused area of the expanse. Lo and behold, at the very end, I spotted a blue door.

Once I got right up to it, I spotted the tell-tale plaque alongside, announcing the presence of this fabled bureau. I pressed the button on the entryphone – what else did I expect? – and the door clicked open. Inside, I was confronted with… another door and another entryphone.

After the ritual pressing and pushing, I then found myself in an enormous room, an absolute hive of activity with policemen in uniform rushing hither and thither. In the corner was an American-style lock-up cage, housing a very unsavoury-looking character. At the very far end of the room was a small counter, behind which stood a single policeman, with a single chevron on his epaulettes. He looked at me expectantly as I approached, almost quizzically as if to say, "What are you doing here?"

To my complete lack of surprise, he did not speak English. I gave him my colleague’s letters, and made sure he read the one saying I was in a hurry. He read both slowly and deliberately and then asked, "Passport, monsieur?" That was my big mistake. I gave it to him, whereupon he disappeared, with it and my letters. Ten minutes latter, with me still standing at the counter, he reappeared, drinking a cup of coffee from a vending cup, sans passport and letters, completely oblivious to my presence.

As I summoned up the courage to challenge him, I was approached by a sergeant who had my letters – but no passport. Would I look at some photographs, he asked – in French. Like his colleagues, he could not speak English. I demurred, saying a had only seen the thief for a matter of seconds, and in any case, I had a plane to catch.

The sergeant disappeared, only to be replaced by another. Suivez moi, this officer commanded, leading me to a booth in which there was a desk and a computer terminal, and my original sergeant. I was given a chair and told to wait.

Alongside me in the booth, also seated, was a young man. It turned out he was another "victim" who had managed to discover where the police were hidden. He was there – like me as I now discovered – to look at photographs. Once the sergeant returned, it was obvious he did not know how to work to computer, and had to ask for help from his fellow sergeant – who had little more idea.

Once they got the machine working, they turned to my fellow victim. He had fallen foul of a black perpetrator, aged between 35-45. Between them, the sergeants loaded up some rather poor pictures of blacks between 35-45, all of whom looked the same. Despite my letter telling the police my perpetrator was an Arab in his late teens to early twenties, the sergeant thought it a good idea if I looked at each the photographs as well, requiring from me a ritual "non" as each picture came up on the screen.

My fellow victim was dismissed – with equally negative results - and the sergeant then tried to load the "Arab" file. To my horror, the database then kindly reported that there were over 7,000 entries to review. By now I had visions of being there all night.

However, perhaps prompted by my increasingly despairing cries of "l'avion", accompanied by my tapping my watch, the sergeant relented and, with a Gallic shrug, switched off the computer. It was now just gone half-past seven and, a pinch, I could just make Charles de Gaulle. If I was very, very lucky, they might let me on the plane. But I did not have my certificate for the insurance.

The sergeant led me to an interview booth and left me there, where I was joined across the desk by the original sergeant. He had my passport, which he returned to me. I considered making a bolt for it but the man demanded my attention. He was going to fill in a form on the computer.

Working from a type-written instruction sheet, he started asking me questions, in French, the answers to which he laboriously tapped in to the computer, one-finger style. At least I learned the words for "Windows 98", which had been in my bag with the computer: "Windows quatre-vingt dix-huit".

At last, after what seemed an age, but in fact wasn't very long, he finished. There was just an outside possibility I could catch the plane. But it was not to be. With a flourish, my sergeant pressed the button on the keyboard to print out my coveted certificate, but nothing happened. He looked puzzled and called over his fellow sergeant. "Il a disparu", he complained. He had wiped the file from the computer and we had to start all over again.

By the time he had finished, it was five to eight. My flight was 8.15 and the train took at least 25 minutes. You will have to hurry monsieur, said my sergeant, exhausting his English vocabulary. What could I do? I thanked both officers gravely, shook them each by the hand, and departed. I arrived at Charles de Gaulle at 8.35. My flight had long gone.

COMMENT THREAD

It's a hard life in the tranzi world

2008-06-20T15:16:00.000+01:00

Well, not hard in the usual sense of the word but one does have to do a certain amount of twisting and turning. Take the case of Farouk Hosni, Egypt’s Culture Minister, a close friend of President Mubarak and leading candidate for the top job at the UN Education Scientific and Cultural Organization, or Unesco.

An article in the Wall Street Journal gives a delightful account of his many twists and turns to accommodate everybody. First he tells a Muslim Brotherhood MP that he would burn Israeli books himself if he found any in the Egyptian libraries (what else would be the job of a Culture Minister?); then he backtracks in the light of the various protests, though UNESCO seems to have had no official or unofficial reactions to that comment.

Why should anyone wonder? Is that not what politicians do on a regular basis? Backtracking, I mean, not burning books, though that comes up from time to time as well. Sadly for Mr Hosni, the issue is a little harder to deal with.

With a plum U.N. job slipping out of his reach, Mr. Hosni backtracked. He said the "book burning" remark was merely "a hyperbole -- a popular expression to prove something does not exist." The minister, who is close to President Hosni Mubarak and his wife and considered a liberal by local standards, went further the following day. He told Agence France-Presse that it is "a big mistake that Israeli books have not yet been translated (into Arabic). I have officially asked for it to be done. If people protest, I don't give a damn."

So, three decades after the Camp David accords, would Mr. Hosni support the opening of so far nonexistent cultural ties with Israel? What about a museum of Jewish antiquity and culture in Cairo? The Egyptian went into reverse again. Impossible, Mr. Hosni said, as long as "there are bloody attacks every day against the Palestinian people in the West Bank and Gaza strip."

Let me guess. There will be no Israeli books translated into Arabic and stocked in Egyptian libraries and bookshops, not even those that oppose Israeli policies. Perhaps Mr Hosni would not be too happy about Egyptians wondering why it is that writers in Israel can oppose their government's policies with no fear of being silenced or imprisoned while in Egypt even blogging is hazardous if it happens to be outside the accepted political line.

Needless to say, France is officially backing Mr Hosni's candidacy for the UNESCO job. There may be a certain amount of embarrassment on the subject.

Meanwhile, as the indispensable UN Watch has documented, the new expert acquired by the UN Human Rights Council to oversee its standing enquiry into "Israel's violations of the principles and bases of international law" is Richard Falk, known for his support for truther 9/11 conspiracy theories.

Here is Hillel Neuer of UN Watch trying to find out what Mr Falk's explanation is for his curious ideas and why is the UNHRC continuing to ignore SecGen Ban Ki-Moon's suggestions that they should start looking at other violations of “the principles and bases of international law” (whatever that may be), not to mention serious human rights problems across the world:

Thank you, Mr. President.

Professor Falk, we appreciate this opportunity to ask you questions.

As we gather to address the Middle East, let us all commit to a future where every child, Palestinian and Israeli alike, will see the promise of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights become reality.

With this goal in mind, Professor Falk, let us turn to the report that you presented today, HRC 7/17.

One of the report's exceptional features is its sharp criticism of the United Nations itself. Leading UN institutions and officials are accused of being insufficiently supportive of the Palestinians, of failing to acknowledge international law, which, according to paragraph 54, "brings the very commitment of the United Nations to human rights into question."

The report criticizes the United Nations role in the Quartet and the Road Map for Peace. It criticizes the United Nations Security Council and one of its permanent members in particular. It criticizes the United Nations Secretary-General, suggesting, in paragraph 53, that he may be refusing to fulfill legal obligations out of political reasons.

Professor Falk, my first question to you is by what methodology does one challenge some UN decisions, while accepting others uncritically?

Why are there no questions about today's Agenda Item targeting Israel, as expressed by Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon on 20 June 2007, and I quote: “The Secretary-General is disappointed at the Council’s decision to single out only one specific regional item given the range and scope of allegations of Human Rights violations throughout the world.”

Finally, in light of the concerns expressed by the President of this Council -- in the newspaper Le Temps and elsewhere -- about the credibility of this council on the Middle East, could you tell us what credibility you expect your reports to have, when leading newspapers such as The Times of London are commenting on your support for the 9/11 conspiracy theories of David Ray Griffin, who argues, and I quote from the Times article of April 15th, "that no plane hit the Pentagon," and that "the World Trade Center was brought down by a controlled demolition"?

Thank you, Mr. President.

There is then an attempt by the Egyptian delegation to delete the entire statement and question as being irrelevant to the Palestinian issue. This is rather interesting as normally we are told that everything is relevant to the Palestinian issue. Still, the request was refused, which is a step forward for the UNHRC. Here is the video.

Meanwhile, the UN Security Council has voted unanimously in favour of classifying rape as “a tactic in war and a threat to international security”, apparently in the teeth of objections by China, Russia, Indonesia and Vietnam and to the delight of human rights organizations.

As a matter of fact, the definition is accurate enough – mass rape as a method of waging deliberate war is not new and well understood. Next up is a report on how widespread the practice is and what can be done about it. We are looking forward to proposals on severe action by the UN in cases of widespread rape by UN peacekeepers.

Aren't we glad to be funding NGOs?

2008-05-31T21:16:00.002+01:00

That is, needless to say, a rhetorical question. Apart from anything else, if we were glad to be funding them, we would do so and not have money compulsorily extracted from us for the purpose. NGOs are not charities that live on voluntary donations but are provided by taxpayers’ money.

This story comes via the Taxpayers’ Alliance blog, which quotes a recent report from NGO Monitor, to which they do not link. Tsk, tsk. But then, it is not always easy to do so, which makes me wonder how often NGO Monitor might suffer from hackers.

The Executive Summary, which is only one page, outlines the problem. The EU is, according to its own propaganda, committed to a peaceful solution that will not involve the destruction of Israel or the expulsion and worse of the Jewish population of that country. (Anyone who thinks that the destruction of Israel will bring peace to that part of the world has not been paying attention.)

That’s the propaganda. The reality is that

Between 2005 and 2007, the European Union provided tens of million Euros from public funds to numerous non-governmental organizations (NGOs), many of which are politically active in the Arab-Israeli conflict. In addition to offering services, their reports are perceived as providing expert information to policy makers, journalists and others, and their campaigns have significant political impacts. These activities however, are often inconsistent with the stated objectives of both the NGOs and EU frameworks under which they are funded, including the use of funds ostensibly designated to promote peace, for pursuing political objectives which undermine the protection of human rights.

The Report gives details of the NGOs that have received money to promote their political agenda:

This detailed research documents the degree to which EUfunded NGOs exacerbate conflict and advance particular political agendas. Many of these groups participated in the NGO Forum of the 2001 Durban conference, and their reports and campaigns repeatedly refer to Israel as a “colonial entity”, and “racist and apartheid state”, while promoting boycotts, divestment and sanctions (BDS). Some EU-funded NGOs also consistently advocate a rejectionist Palestinian narrative of the conflict, erase the context of Palestinian terrorism, falsely accuse Israel of “war crimes” and seek to undermine Israel’s Jewish identity.

The chances of the next Durban conference, scheduled for 2009, being anything but another anti-Israeli, anti-American, anti-Western hatefest are slim.

Some of the problems are endemic to NGOs and all tranzis, particularly the European Union, the one fully political expression of tranziedom and it boils down to one word: unaccountability. Forget transparency – it means nothing. You can open up the odd meeting to audiences and publish any number of documents. As it happens the EU is quite good at publishing documents; considerably better than our own government or civil service. As long as there is no direct line of accountability to those who provide the money, which is the poor benighted taxpayers, corruption, both financial and political, is inevitable.

Whether the organization in question is a relatively small one like the London Development Agency, whose shenanigans played their part in Ken Livingstone’s downfall, or a much larger and better financed NGO or those über-tranzis, the EU and the UN, the result is always the same.

Naturally enough, the most ruthless and corrupt players take control. So far I have not seen any suggestions for reform that would overcome these problems as unaccountability is endemic to NGOs and tranzis, there being no direct link between funding, political decision making and specific project management.

After all, there is nothing particularly surprising about the following:

This report also examines the limited transparency and accountability in EU funding for NGOs. Despite the tens of millions of Euros provided by taxpayers, there is no uniform framework or central database for obtaining information regarding which NGOs the European Commission funds. Moreover, much of this funding information is unavailable or hidden beneath numerous bureaucratic layers. The various EC offices that do provide some information on NGO funding use different systems to display this data, making comparison and analysis particularly difficult. Although some EC officials cooperated in providing funding information to NGO Monitor, the difficultly in obtaining this data reflects the lack of transparency. Some requests for specific funding information went unheeded.

In addition, the official guidelines by which the NGOs are selected to receive public funds are very vague, allowing for a high degree of individual preference and bias on the part of EC officials. These (often) anonymous officials and outside experts decide on the allocation of millions of Euros to highly political NGOs, yet are not subject to any external process of accountability. The absence of specific performance indicators to evaluate the impact of EU-funded NGO projects adds to the accountability deficit.

Outrageous, maybe; surprising, no. To be fair, I do not get the impression that NGO Monitor is surprised.

While we are on the subject of NGOs, let us take another look at that interesting and self-righteous organization, Amnesty International. We have written about it on various occasions, for instance here and here. To sum up a long and tedious development, Amnesty International has fulfilled its exemplary role in O’Sullivan’s First Law – not being specifically a right-wing organization it became a left-wing one.

No longer does it limit itself to helping prisoners of conscience in various oppressive countries. The organization’s main role now seems to be, despite the research done by its overworked and underpaid staff (not, naturally enough SecGen Irene Khan), to attack the West, particularly the United States and Israel with other countries that have the temerity to fight terrorists and terrorism coming close behind.

NGO Monitor has been looking at Amnesty International in connection of that organization’s reports on the Middle East. Here is the summary of its latest findings:

NGO Monitor has systematically analyzed Amnesty International’s Middle East coverage in 2007, applying a quantitative methodology, similar to that used to examine the agenda of Human Rights Watch.

The results show that in 2007 Amnesty singled out Israel for more condemnation than Syria, Saudi Arabia, Libya, Lebanon, and Algeria.

More items were published condemning Israel, than the Palestinian Authority, Hamas and Hezbollah combined. If detailed reports are used as an indicator, Amnesty ranks Israel and Iraq as equally the worst human rights abusers in the Middle East.

Israel’s democratic and open society ironically invites disproportionately negative reporting from Amnesty International. Access to information facilitates more comprehensive research than in less democratic regimes; democracy demands higher standards of human rights, according to Amnesty International’s Israel branch; external factors, such as media attention, dictate AI’s policy.

Amnesty's 2008 annual report (covering events in 2007) is yet another example of the NGO's highly biased approach. It presents a gross distortion of the conflict, selectively reports events to remove the context of terrorism and ignore human rights issues not related to its political agenda, while repeating un-sourced and anecdotal claims.

Not precisely what Amnesty International should be doing but as a tranzi NGO it has long ago abandoned its useful role of campaigner on a single but very important issue.

On the organization’s own website one can find all sorts of interesting matters. There is, for instance, the appeal to world leaders to do something about human rights. Well, not to the ones who can do something about it, with the exception of China and Russia, both up to a point, but leaders in general.

Amnesty International’s Report 2008, shows that sixty years after the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was adopted by the United Nations, people are still tortured or ill-treated in at least 81 countries, face unfair trials in at least 54 countries and are not allowed to speak freely in at least 77 countries.

True enough, but then all those countries are in the United Nations and have all signed the Universal Declaration as well as any other declaration going. In any case, the collapse of the Soviet Empire has brought about a certain amount of alleviation on the subject of human rights though that event had little to do with the UN or that wretched Declaration, which had been strongly influenced by the Soviet Union back in 1948.

So, apart from bringing down unpleasant regimes, something AI does not approve of, as we know, what else can be done?

“The most powerful must lead by example,” said Ms Khan.

China must live up to the human rights promises it made around the Olympic Games and allow free speech and freedom of the press and end “re-education through labour”.

The USA must close Guantánamo detention camp and secret detention centres, prosecute the detainees under fair trial standards or release them, and unequivocally reject the use of torture and ill-treatment.

Russia must show greater tolerance for political dissent, and none for impunity on human rights abuses in Chechnya.

The EU must investigate the complicity of its member states in “renditions” of terrorist suspects and set the same bar on human rights for its own members as it does for other countries.

Ms Khan warned: “World leaders are in a state of denial but their failure to act has a high cost. As Iraq and Afghanistan show, human rights problems are not isolated tragedies, but are like viruses that can infect and spread rapidly, endangering all of us.”

An interesting list and even more interesting emphasis on what matters in human rights. Apparently, it is the war on terror that produces most of the crimes and they are the ones Amnesty International feels the need to emphasise. Iraq and Afghanistan, eh? Not Iran or Syria, one assumes, or is it to be assumed that those two countries are looking to the United States for leadership?

China and Russia are chided lightly and in a very limited fashion, particularly the former. We must not get too worked up about real tyrannies where free speech is suprressed and all critics of the political regime and of officialdom are imprisoned. Oh and it has the highest number of capital crimes and rate of executions after trials that are the shortest in history. Not something Amnesty International should pay attention to?

What of the latest annual report? The Introduction lives up to all one’s worst expectations. It seems that matters have become worse in the last sixty years despite the hope that was engendered by the end of the Cold War which “were dashed by the explosion of ethnic conflicts and implosion of states that unleashed a spate of humanitarian emergencies, marked by massive and vicious human rights abuses”.

So, um, how did the Cold War end, what were the immediate results, why were there these hopes and who unleashed the various conflicts? Indeed, why was there a fertile ground for those conflicts? And why is the name of the Soviet Union not mentioned in this rather sketchy outline of the last sixty years?

Could it be that the powers that be in Amnesty International actually share ex-President, now Prime Minister Putin’s view that the collapse of the Soviet Empire was the greatest geopolitical disaster?

Moving down we find that the worst human rights abuses happen in the United States (our old friend Guantánamo again) and the EU is rapped over the knuckles for not controlling the member states when they exercise “rendition” of terror suspects to countries where they might be ill-treated at the CIA’s behest. No, since you ask there is no particular evidence and no mention in the Introduction of the fact that there are human rights abuses in other countries. And since when have terrorists been political prisoners to be supported by international NGOs?

There is no question about it, Amnesty International sees the war against terror a far greater problem than the terrorism itself, no matter what some of the more detailed chapters in the Report might say. Their website talks far more about protecting rights in the fight against terrorism than about protecting rights against terrorists.

The real problem about NGOs is that they are not charities who live exclusively from private donations. There are big donors, of course, but a reasonable amount comes from government and tranzi funds, in other words, from the taxpayer, whether we like it or not.

What the future might hold

2008-05-28T11:23:00.004+01:00

Last Monday I attended no less than two separate talks on, as it turned out, related topics. In the morning Michael Barone, one of the best known American political commentators, author of many, many articles and columns and of several books, most recently, of “Our First Revolution: the remarkable British uprising that inspired America's founding fathers”.

Barone spoke about the presidential race in the United States, not a subject we cover too much on this blog for several reasons. In the first place, it is much written about in the main stream media, though I would not trust British journalists on the subject. They were, after all, convinced that Kerry would win in 2004, a position whose absurdity was clear to anyone who followed events in the American media and the blogosphere.

Secondly, it is a subject that is widely discussed in the American blogosphere. Nothing we say can rival the extensive knowledge and grasp of detail displayed by the likes of Barone himself, Michelle Malkin, Christopher Hitchens or Mark Steyn, to name just a few.

Thirdly, this is not really our subject, apart from the need to point out periodically, that there is this country in which the executive and legislative, properly separated, are both elected by the people of that country. Look upon it and despair about our own situation. No wonder people are gnashing their teeth in envy and calling for the rest of the world a.k.a. the great and the good as well as the tranzis and the NGOs to impose their decisions on the American people.

Still, the President of the United States is an important person for all of us and occasionally we need to look, at least in general terms, at the process that will decide who that person is going to be. A briefing by Michael Barone is a good opportunity for doing just that.

The first thing to be noted (and I do wish British commentators in both the old and new media would do so) is Michael Barone’s strong and reiterated assertion that the result of the presidential election is, at this stage, unpredictable. Obama is not about to be anointed as POTUS, though it is more than likely that he will be the Democratic nominee, not without some trouble there, as it happens.

I may add that Obama’s recent faux pas of threatening people with all sorts of nameless things if they keep quoting what his wife said in a public speech as part of her campaigning on his behalf “inappropriately” has not won him many supporters. The ones who have descended into Obamania are there and will stay there. He needs many more votes, though.

Michael Barone is not an Obama fan but that is not why he remains uncertain about the outcome. He is far too good a commentator to take the wish for the deed. The truth is that the outcome is uncertain because American electoral politics is once again experiencing a big shift and because there are many doubts about all the candidates, Barack Obama, in particular.

His description of American politics was that it has moved from trench warfare with clearly signposted lines and entrenched positions to open field warfare with politicians and voters moving around, separately or in groups.

It is true the President Bush’s approval rating is low but the Democratic Congress, elected with much fanfare in 2006, rates even lower. Recent by-elections have gone the Democrats’ way but, as in this country, people vote differently and less “responsibly” in by-elections than in general ones.

Another sign that the Democrats are doing well is a much higher proportion of people identifying with them than with the Republicans. This, however, is a tricky issue. Republican self-identification was at its highest in 2004 since the 1930s when these questions were first asked. What Mr Barone did not add, as all of us know, is that the Republicans did win the odd election or two during that period. So self-identification is not necessarily a guide to a more general voting pattern in the country.

Democrats this time round have shown themselves much better at fund raising, utilizing the internet for that purpose very successfully. But all indicators that there is a swing to them from the Republicans go fuzzy when it comes to the presidential campaign, whose intra-party bitterness has had a negative effect, so far as one can tell, on the electorate.

Above all, the presidential campaigns hinge on responses to specific candidates.

Within the Democratic Party there is tribal warfare being waged between the black and other groups (the latter including Hispanic and Asian ones as well as Jewish), between older and younger voters and between upscale and downscale ones. How that will play itself out when the candidate is finally chosen remains unpredictable. Notoriously, Obama is very unpopular among non-black working class voters, who still make up a very large part of the Democratic Party’s supporters. On the other hand, will any of them go so far as to vote for John McCain? It’s not impossible as McCain is centre-left but it is far from a given.

Much of Mr Barone’s talk concerned detailed analyses of figures and groupings, subjects that are not for this blog. He did mention that, so far, there has been little concentration on specific issues and a good deal of discussion as to whether this election will mean the end of the forty year long conservative political hegemony. Again, that is not a given, since in those forty years there were various electoral results.

However, it is fair to say that there is a new generation of electors who do not remember the horrors of the seventies and cannot be scared by them. We face a similar situation in this country and it is an inevitable one.

Voters of that kind in the States cannot see that big state is necessarily a bad thing. Voters of any kind in Britain find it hard to believe that big state is not a good thing so we part company from our brethren over the Pond.

However, the same generation of voters, added Mr Barone, wants to have choices and knows about them through the internet. This could mean a possible Republican opening to that generation. Oddly, he did not mention the widespread popularity and influence of right-wing blogs, who definitely do have a link with the post 1970s generation.

The economy, which is stubbornly refusing to sink as low as it has been predicted for some time, could give either candidate an advantage. If things are not as bad as people say, voters might want to stick with the existing party or they might decide to give the other guys a chance, knowing that things remain fairly safe.

Then there is the question of foreign policy, one that does concern us on this side of the Pond.

Foreign policy may or may not play an important part in the election though the question of security undoubtedly will. Again, one cannot quite predict the outcome as the situation in Iraq has improved considerably and not all the efforts of the MSM and of Democrat politicians can disguise that fact. McCain, as the man who had always advocated something like the present surge, may well reap the benefits.

This is one of Obama’s weak points as he stumbles from one idiotic statement to another and tries to bluster his way out of it. His extraordinary outrage at Bush’s general comments on appeasers in the Knesset, which stated to all the world that he thinks of himself as one, is one more thing that might harm him later on in the fight against McCain.

Barack Obama’s pronouncements on foreign policy have been muddled and full of contradictions as well as showing a distinct lack of knowledge or understanding. It is hard to decide on the biggest gaffe. Was it the reference to 57 states, excluding Alaska and Hawaii? Or was it his completely unhistorical assertion that in talking to the enemy, in this case Baby Assad of Syria and Ahmadinejad of Iran, not to mention various terrorists, he would be following in the footsteps of FDR, Harry Truman and JFK.

Sadly, neither Roosevelt nor Truman are known for too much parlaying with the enemy and the one time Kennedy tried it, in 1961 at the Vienna Summit with Khrushchev, the results were disastrous and he foreswore any future exercise of that kind.

A fascinating article in the IHT gives a good account of that event and its outcome, suggesting that Obama should pay a little more attention to what Kennedy really learnt from it all.

One interesting point about foreign policy ties up with the other talk I attended later that day. In his recent speech on foreign policy John McCain suggested that a new organization should be created perhaps in place of, perhaps in parallel to the United Nations – a league of democracies.

The Henry Jackson Society hosted Professor Thomas Cushman, Founding Editor and Editor-at-Large of the Journal of Human Rights and Professor of Sociology at Wellesley College when he spoke on that very subject.

The first part of that proposition is easy to outline and prove. Just a few examples to do with UN peacekeeping scandals and the Human Rights Commission, not to mention the Durban Anti-Racism Conference, and you have managed to prove to many people’s satisfaction that there is a great deal rotten in Turtle Bay, though the chap next to me did not really like Professor Cushman’s description of the UN as a league of autocrats. According to him matters could be improved if we could make the Security Council function better. When asked how he envisaged that he became somewhat coy.

The problem is, of course, with the second part of the proposition, the creation of a league of democracies, as proposed by Professor Cushman and various colleagues of his. The international community, as it exists, explained the good professor, is problematic in that it pays more attention to “international law” than humanitarian principles, which means that individual countries can do what they like with the UN, as representative of that community, powerless to act.

Which leaves us with the need to define "international law".

There is also the problem that the UN consists of those very countries that break all the supposed founding principles of the organization. The idea of setting up a parallel organization that would consist only of countries who agreed on certain principles and would accept that desirable interests, such as freedom, democracy and human rights, should also be vital interests, sounds tempting. I have heard it enunciated in general and not so general terms on several occasions. But the devil, if one may say so, is in the detail.

First of all, it is interesting to note that, though the idea of a parallel organization to the UN is seen by many on the left as being neo-con and, therefore, an emanation of Satan, it has actually become a talking point among politicians of differing hues. And the left with some exceptions, as Professor Cushman rightly pointed out, ceased to interest itself in human rights or freedom some time in the middle of the twentieth century if not earlier.

Thus there are suggestions from Democrat-supporting think-tanks of such names as Alliance of Democracies, Community of Democracies (this one from Madeleine Allbright) and Concert of Democracies. John McCain has suggested League of Democracies and mused about the possibility of about 100 members.

Given that the name League of Democracies irresistibly reminds one of the ill-fated League of Nations, it may not be the right one to go with but none of the others sound particularly attractive either.

Professor Cushman thinks that’s too many as it would be hard to find 100 certified democracies. I’ll say. His idea that at first the new voluntary organization should be restricted to just a few – number unspecified – of solid democracies that will not turn into anything else.

That raises one or two problems. How do you define a solid democracy? How long does it have to have been one? What are its characteristics? Let’s see now. We’ll have the Anglospheric countries, Britain, US, Australia, Canada, New Zealand and India. India? Hmm. There are a few problems there but, I suppose, one could overlook them.

What of the other European countries? The Scandinavian ones, certainly. France, I suppose. Germany has been a successful democracy long enough to count. But what about Spain, Portugal, Greece and the East European countries? Russia, presumably, would not qualify and neither would China. Japan probably yes. But what of Singapore, Indonesia, Philippines and other South-Eastern countries? It exhausts me just to think of all the problems of definition.

Naturally, I was unimpressed by Professor Cushman assuming that the EU, of all organizations, could be a model for the new one in the way it has assimilated new members, first providing them with strong guidelines on how to become worthy of membership. The EU is not a loose organization of democratic states but a less than democratic state in the making and Professor Cushman, with all his astonishing qualifications, fails to realize that. How seriously should we take his other statements?

Furthermore, it is unclear whether this organization is to be anything more than just another talking shop, though this time not with an anti-American, anti-Western bias (maybe we had better keep France out, after all). When I asked whether he envisaged an integrated force that would intervene in countries that abused human rights most flagrantly, the good professor openly told me that he was being evasive because he sees that problem as being well into the future. I think not. If you set up an organization you need to decide at an early stage what the aim is and, in general terms, how that aim is to be achieved. Otherwise, you blunder into badly planned scenarios.

There are a few points to be made here, though. Firstly, it is good that the subject of how to by-pass the UN to the point when it might disappear, is becoming part of mainstream American political discussion. Of course, the best way of achieving that objective would be to stop giving the wretched organization money but, I suppose, it is reasonable for politicians to be able to say that there is an alternative to something that is completely rotten and corrupt but is seen as a shining star of human hopes, if only it could be polished up a bit.

On the other hand if Obama does become President (and with all those idiotic gaffes, McCain’s chances are looking better and better) he will not want to do anything. He, as Professor Cushman said, will be a hero at the UN.

Secondly, the idea of making it clear that countries that actually believe in certain principles, even if they do not always act on them, are basically different from those that merely sign up to agreements and proceed to violate them before the ink is dry is full of potential.

Thirdly, there is no harm in affirming that those principles, based on freedom and democracy should become part of the democratic countries’ interests. Nor is there any harm in creating some organization in which the United States will be merely first among equals and, surrounded by allies, will take cognizance of them. Actually, as we have written before, it is not true that President Bush or any of his predecessors refused to listen. He merely refused to listen to America’s enemies.

Fourthly, national sovereignty is a severely overrated concept. The only reason the UN is stuck with it is because the Soviet Union insisted on putting it into the founding charter (and the meeting that signed it was organized and managed by the well-known Soviet agent Alger Hiss), wishing to prevent any discussion of its own record on freedom and human rights. But if those concepts are to trump national sovereignty there has to be a decisiveness about the need to intervene if necessary, a way of defining when that necessity arises and a method of achieving that intervention. None of which, it seems to me, are even close to being discussed seriously by the potential founders of the League of Democracies.

The real crisis has yet to come (Part 2)

2008-04-26T20:23:00.009+01:00

If, as we argue, the worst of the current "food crisis" may be over – in the short-term – if the obscene rush to turn food into fuel continues, we will over the medium to long-term be seeing massive shortages of food, precipitating a global crisis. The problems of the last two years will be seen as but a harbinger.

The devil, as always, is in the detail, and that detail is extremely difficult to find – itself a telling indicator. But, starting that the beginning, the figures tell an alarming tale. Here, we rely on an 2006 FAO report, ethanol production had expanded by 53 percent from 30 billion litres in 2000 to about 46 billion litres in 2005.

That report was based on the EU share of renewable fuels in total transport rising to 5.75 percent, when it was expected that world ethanol consumption (the favoured biofuel) would reach 54 billion litres by 2010. As we know, though, the EU is not stopping there. It current 2020 target is ten percent.

In broad terms, the FAO provides a damning indictment of that target. It estimates that the EU would need to convert about 70 percent of its agricultural land to provide that amount of energy, adding that the United States, Brazil, and Canada would require about 30, 3, and 0.3 percent of agricultural land, respectively.

At the moment though, we have an interesting situation. Ethanol production in Europe is in a state of collapse. Owing to the bizarre tax situation which allows US ethanol to undercut European-produced product, much of the supply is produced from US-grown corn (maize).

The problem here is that this situation cannot last. According to latest market reports, global maize production is currently 772 million tons, with US corn at 332 million.

Next year, the harvest is only expected to increase to 777 million tons, which will not meet the increased ethanol demand arising from the United States. As a result, it is expected that we will see a global decrease in stocks of 103 million tons. Furthermore, since corn is also used for animal feed, increased production in this sector would require replacement by sorghum, barley, oats, and wheat, creating pressures elsewhere in the supply chain.

From that, it would appear that increased European demand to meet the EU target - which has just been increased to 2.5 percent of total transport fuel consumption, as an interim step toward the 10 percent target - cannot be met from US sources.

Nor is that situation likely to improve. The week before last, President Bush proposed a new energy bill which would increase the US biofuels mandate to 162 billion litres by 2022, or quadruple the volume required under the current "Renewable Fuel Standard". This alone dwarfs the 75 billion litres previously predicted for 2020, based on earlier targets set in the United States, China, Europe, Japan and Brazil.

Brazil is a good indicator of the way things are going. Initially, EU member states though they could rely on importing some of their requirements. One place they looked was Brazil, which is planning to increase its ethanol production from sugar, producing 32.7 billion litres in 2015, as compared to 13.5 billion in 2005.

Unfortunately, Brazil intends to absorb most of its increased production domestically and is looking to export only six billion litres of ethanol per year. That would barely dent Europe's needs, which – according to one estimate - are expected to grow to 21.5 billion litres a year. For each ton of wheat, 336 litres (approx) of ethanol is produced, so this would need 63.9 million tons of wheat, nearly half the EU's total wheat harvest.

That is the measure of the scale of the EU's problem, even if the figure came from a Brazilian website. That we had to look there illustrates the extraordinary difficulty in finding hard data on the level of biofuel needed to meet the EU's ten percent quota.

The only hard figure we were able to find from commission sources, in a study dated 2001, related not to the 10 percent target, but to the original 5.75 percent quota settled at that time, applying only to the EU-15 (pre-enlargement).

The contribution from biofuels needed to meet that lower quota was estimated then to be around 17.5 Mtoe (Million tonnes oil equivalent) on which basis the 10 percent quota, calculated on the same basis, equates to 30.4 Mtoe. The 30.4 figure equates to not 21.5 but 38.5 billion litres of ethanol.

In fact, the EU anticipates that the quota will be met by a mixture of ethanol (blended with petrol) and biodiesel, but such is the lack of data that, to develop the argument, it is easier – for the time being – to work with a notional 100 percent ethanol production as a basis of calculations.

Identifying an annual requirement of nearly 40 billion litres of ethanol (or equivalent) truly points up the enormity of the task the EU has set its member states. If wheat were used as the feedstock, 120 million tons would be needed. That would absorb well over 90 percent of the entire EU wheat production and use 15.6 million hectares of prime agricultural land – or more than a quarter of the total cereal area in the EU. (Currently, the usable agricultural area of the EU-27 amounts to 183 million hectares. About 108 million is arable land, of which the cereal growing area is 59 million.)

Herein lies the huge disconnect. In its 2001 report, when the EU was considering only a 5.75 percent biofuels quota, it drew attention to the amount of set-aside available. At that time, with voluntary set-aside of 1.6 million hectares, the total stood at 5.6 million hectares.

"Given this surface of set-aside and considering only primary biomass as a function of the crop grown," said the commission, "between 4 and 15 Mtoe of biofuels would be supplied for transport uses, making for between 1.2 and 5 percent of total European petroleum products consumption."

From this, two points emerge. Firstly, the commission was effectively relying on turning the whole of the set-aside allocation to biofuel production. But, even then, much of it was already being used for a variety of industrial purposes, ranging from animal feed to hemp and even lavender and linseed production. Secondly, after the "food crisis" had taken hold last year, the commission suspended set-aside to allow the land to be used for food production.

Given the much of the land was already in use, the commission was indulging in what amounted to Enron-style triple-counting, allocating the same land to general industrial use, then to biofuel production and finally to food production.

Furthermore, the range of figures offered by the commission, on the amount of land needed, is extraordinarily wide. At its most pessimistic, we see that to produce 1.2 percent of biofuel would need 5.6 million hectares. On that basis, the ten percent quota would use up to 46 million hectares, nearly all of the total EU cereal and four times our estimate. Even at the most optimistic, the commission figures put the land requirement at over 11 million hectares.

If by now, the impression is of a confusion of figures, that is an accurate reflection of the state of play. Furthermore, the various estimates must be seen against the recent performance of the commission, in forecasting cereal yields and prices.

Having seen relatively high commodity prices in 2006, it actually forecast a record harvest for 2007 and declining prices. In fact, we saw the price of milling wheat in Rouen rise from €179 to almost €300 per ton while market prices for feed barley increased in the wake of rising wheat prices. In France barley prices have doubled since the summer of 2006, reaching €270 per ton in Rouen at the end of September 2007.

At the same time, its forecast of a total cereal production of 270.9 million tons for the year actually turned out at 255, while consumption hit 267 tons against a forecast of 268.

The commission having sold off much of its intervention stocks, this turned the EU - which has traditionally been a net exporter - into a net importer (eventually having to import 18.9 million tons), forcing the commission to take emergency action in December 2007, suspending import duties on all cereals except oats, buckwheat and millet.

What this basically amounts to is that the commission was comprehensively caught out, displaying a lack of competence that is quite staggering. And it is this same commission which is offering what amount to back-of-the-envelope calculations and indulging in triple-counting of land availability, all in an effort to assure us that its biofuel policy will have little or no impact on the price or availability of food.

If the EU was the only player in the game, this could be the case but, with biofuel having become a global obsession, the 27 member states are at the centre of an epidemic of insanity. They will be competing in a cut-throat market where the total demand will outstrip supply. The net effect can only be shortages and price hikes, with developing countries the main losers.

But, as we have seen in recent months, even marginal shortages of some commodities can have a dramatic effect on prices even in developed countries, adding significant amounts to food bills.

Despite this, the commission rejects criticsm of its policy. The huge tragedy of that is, without the insane rush to biofuels, the world agricultural system is well capable of meeting current food needs and the increases in demand for the foreseeable future. The crisis that has yet to come will be artificial, unnecessary and devastating in its effects.

COMMENT THREAD

The real crisis has yet to come (Part 1)

2008-04-26T02:03:00.007+01:00

Some 40 percent of the EU budget still allocated to the Common Agricultural Policy. With the commission claiming as its flagship policy the fight against "climate change", and its biofuels quotas an important part of that strategy – all in the context of the current "food crisis", this puts European agriculture once again at the centre stage of EU politics.

Rises in food prices also have a strong domestic impact, giving a political "edge" to a matter of strong international concern.

It should thus come as no surprise that these issues have risen up the political agenda and have captured the interest and much of the attention of this blog, especially as the serpentine twists and turns of a rapidly developing situation defy easy analysis and require careful attention. Inevitably, therefore, these issues will tend to dominate the posts, and will do until some clarity or resolution is reached.

That said, there seems to be no resolution on the horizon, the latest development being a dramatic downturn in the price of wheat futures on the Chicago market, the benchmark soft red winter wheat falling to its lowest level since November at $8.01 a bushel on yesterday, 40 percent below its record peak of $13.50 a bushel in February.

This is variously reported by the BBC and others, lending sustenance to those who claim that the recent spikes in wheat prices reflect speculative pressure rather than any real market shortage.

Nevertheless, it was the case that the global wheat production for 2007 was 601 million tons while demand peaked at 612 million, and although the shortfall was met from global reserves, imbalances – often caused by government intervention (or lack of it) – did contribute to the upwards price pressure.

Anyhow, as would be expected, soaring prices have triggered increased wheat plantings for the current season, estimated at 3.6 percent globally, allowing the International Grains Council to project a record world wheat crop of 645 million tons for the 2008/9 harvest, weather conditions permitting, against a projected consumption of 619 million tons.

This global estimate includes predictions from the China National Grain and Oil Information Centre, and important player on the global scene. Although the US is known for its wheat growing, China is in fact the world's largest producer, delivering over 100 million tons annually, more than double the US output. India, incidentally, is number two, producing 70 million tons or thereabouts.

According to the Chinese figures, winter wheat output will grow 1.3 percent this year to 102.6 million tons, lifting its total wheat output, including spring wheat, to 107.6 million tons this year, up 2.5 percent from 2007.

What is puzzling about this buoyant forecast is that yields seem unaffected by the agricultural damage, estimated at 80 billion yuan (about $11 billion), caused by the great winter snow disaster.

This may be explained by the fact that the snows largely affected production in Anhui, Jiangxi, Hubei, Hunan and Guizhou provinces, while the major wheat growing areas are in the eastern Shandong and northern Hebei provinces.

However, Anhui, and Jiangxu are also important wheat-growing areas, so one wonders just how accurate the estimates are, given a totalitarian regime where information is tightly controlled. The USDA, though, seems to think that it is mainly the rapeseed crop that is affected. The snow may even have been beneficial to the wheat crop, in easing some local drought conditions.

With the focus on wheat, we are not entirely out of the woods. Sudakshina Unnikrishnan, an agricultural analyst at Barclays Bank, suggests that the price of other grains like rice, sugar and corn could remain high. "The increase in wheat planting could come at the expense of other crops - it's a zero sum game," she says.

This seemed to be borne out by Chicago prices. July rough rice futures soared 2.3 percent last Wednesday to a record $24.85 per hundredweight. Said Kenji Kobayashi, a grains analyst at Kanetsu Asset Management in Tokyo, "Some of the main rice producing countries have imposed export curbs ... and this has combined with low global stocks to drive rice higher."

A day later, though, US Agriculture Secretary Ed Schafer was exuding reassurance, saying there was no shortage of rice in the United States. He put the surge in rice prices down to speculation about future rice shortages – in part, at least. "We don't see any evidence of the lack of availability of rice. There are no supply issues," he declared.

Ramming in the message, he then added, "Part of the price issue is speculation because we're so close to capacity...that if something disrupts it like the weather pattern then you can start seeing some supply issues. But today there are no supply issues that we see in the marketplace or in the foreseeable future."

On the face of it, therefore, one could perhaps tentatively suggest that the crisis is over, or largely under control – given that there are no weather events which have a major impact on yields. But what is missing from the equation is any estimate of the crops needed for biofuels. This we explore in Part 2.

COMMENT THREAD

Lies, damn lies and David Milband

2008-03-05T20:40:00.005Z

We lost – wholly predictable, but that does not make it any easier.

Meanwhile, despite horrendous problems with the internet (remaining connected for no more than a couple of minutes at a time), I have managed to complete the transcript of the Milband – Hague "debate". It is posted on EU Referendum 2.

When it comes to defending his beloved treaty, foreign secretary David Miliband is a liar. Not once, but many times offering a naked, unreconstructed, obvious lie. And the worst of it is that is opposition counterpart, William did not pick him up on it, thus letting him get away with it without a serious (or any) challenge.

The particular lie is familiar to use all, uttered on the Today programme this morning, when Milband told listeners, again and again that, the "constitutional treaty has been abandoned". This, he claimed, Angela Merkel had claimed, along "with every other European head of government".

Thus does the whole of the foreign secretary's case for opposing a referendum stand, building on his careful omission of the term "constitutional concept" which was actually what Angela Merkel and her fellow heads of state said.

Thus is Miliband's case built. It is rather appropriate that, like the construct he so loves, he has to rely on a diet of lies and deception. Read the transcript, and note the comments from Nick Robinson. None of the political parties come well out of this and, as for Hague … beyond contempt.

I'll post an analysis of the debate as soon as I can, internet connection permitting.

COMMENT THREAD

The clash of the giants (not)

2008-03-05T20:10:00.003Z

This morning, David Miliband, the foreign secretary, and William Hague, the Tory spokesman on foreign affairs, debated on the BBC Radio 4 Today programme the referendum issue on the ~~constitutional~~ Lisbon treaty. This is the transcript:

James Naughtie: The Commons will decide today whether or not there will be a referendum on the European Reform Treaty – the Lisbon Treaty. The Government says it's not necessary because the treaty is no longer a constitution on which a referendum would have been justified.

The Conservatives say that it is a constitution in all but name and that there should be a national vote. The Liberal-Democrats who could put the government in real peril if they joined the Tories in the voting lobby are abstaining although there may be some rebels. We heard from their leader Nick Clegg earlier in the programme and he reaffirmed the abstention pledge.

So let's hear the argument. The Foreign Secretary David Miliband is in the radio car. The Conservative’s foreign affairs spokesman William Hague is at Westminster. Good morning to you both.

Both: Good morning.

James Naughtie: Mr Hague: What is it that convinces you that, despite the changes made to this treaty, it is still a constitution in all but name?

William Hague: Well every government in Europe other than the British government maintains that the substance of the constitution is still there. Chancellor Angela Merkel has said the fundamentals of the constitution have been maintained and indeed when you look at it, ninety percent of the constitution is still the same: the new EU president; the EU foreign minister - albeit renamed the High Representative - the loss of more than 50 national vetoes. We could go on with a long list of these things. And I asked the government, I asked the Foreign Secretary last autumn to publish a comparative table, a comparative analysis clause by clause of the constitution and the treaty. Significantly they were not willing to do so.

James Naughtie: David Miliband, why if Angla Merkel for one says that the fundamentals are the same, why do you insist that the constitution has been abandoned.

David Miliband: Well, I oppose a referendum on this treaty for the same reason that William Hague voted against a referendum on the Maastricht Treaty in 1992, which is that neither of these treaties exercise a fundamental shift in the balance of power between the nation state and the European Union.

And as for Angela Merkel she, along with every other European head of government, announced last June that the constitution had been abandoned – the words of every single European head of state. Why did they say that? Because voters in France and the Netherlands rejected the previous Constitution.

James Naughtie: Mr Hague, if it hasn’t been abandoned, why did they say that it had?

William Hague: Well, of course it suits people promoting the constitution to say its no longer a constitution …

James Naughtie: By your argument they don't need to make that case in Europe because they’re not fighting the same kind of battle of battle that the government is here.

William Hague: But of course they want to help those governments that have difficulty with the concept, as here in Britain but the important thing of course is what is in the thing and ninety percent of the content is absolutely the same. Many of the Articles …

James Naughtie: Give us an example of one thing which changes the relationship between the national state and the EU, so that we can discuss the specifics.

William Hague: Fifty vetoes are lost, for instance where we now have a unanimity requirement, in fifty of those areas we move to qualified majority voting…

James Naughtie: OK …

William Hague: Let me just add one thing. Very significantly, what we were debating in the Commons last night, the power is taken in this treaty to abolish all remaining vetoes other than in defence without any recourse to any further treaty. And that is something quite different, on a scale different from what we've seen before.

James Naughtie: David Miliband.

David Miliband: I think that exposes exactly the argument that there isn't a fundamental shift in the balance of power. William Hague talks about fifty-one vetoes. Sixteen of them don’t apply to the United Kingdom because we're not members of the economic and monetary union and because we have our own opt-in on justice and home affairs. Another fifteen or so of them are purely technical matters to do with pension rights and the appointments of various committees. Twenty of them are actually in the British national interest in areas where William Hague wants to see more action. Let me give you examples: in development assistance, for example, and disaster aid relief or in terms of some of the energy deregulation

These are areas where it is actually in the British national interest. And it’s absolutely clear that on any reckoning that there are fewer changes in qualified majority voting in this treaty than in the Single European Act or the Maastricht Treaty. So I think that this exactly exposes the core of the argument which is that we are a parliamentary democracy and only in circumstances where there is a fundamental shift in the balance of power, for example if we wanted to join the euro, then we should we go back to the people. Otherwise we have our own parliament people make their choices at general elections and there simply cannot be stood up that there’s a shift in the balance of power.

As for the second example that William Hague gave, there is a triple lock on all of the changes that he alleges are going to be smuggled in by the back door. Every government has to agree them, including our own, so we have a veto. Every parliament has to agree them, so our own parliament for the first time has a veto on change. In additional the European Parliament has to play a role. And the truth is that the isolation of the Tories is not just on the issue of whether or not there should be a referendum, because as I say every government in Europe has said the constitution has been abandoned. The real issue is that they oppose the Lisbon Treaty itself, even though it means more voting weight in the European council of ministers for Britain, even though it cuts the size of the commission, whose bureaucracy is always being attacked, and even though in important areas of foreign affairs it actually streamlines the delivery of foreign policy delivery that is decided by member states

James Naughtie: William Hague.

William Hague: Well yes, let me come back on that because first of all large parts of this treaty were opposed by the government itself as David Miliband himself knows. He often tries to portray that the Conservative party as being alone against it but many of the foreign policy provisions in it were opposed by his predecessor Margaret Beckett until the final few days of the negotiation on the treaty. Now David argues that the loss of vetoes, the twenty particular vetoes he mentions, are in the national interest and I say they are not …

James Naughtie: All of them?

William Hague: Yes. The issue today, however, is something different. It is should the people be able to decide about that. And while he says that none of us argued at the time of Maastricht for a referendum, no political party in the 1992 general election said it would hold a referendum on the Maastricht Treaty. Every political party in the 2005 election said it would hold a referendum on what is essentially this treaty.

James Naughtie: Are you making the point that the commitment to the referendum on Maastricht would have come from a pledge in the manifesto and not from the content of the treaty itself?

William Hague: Absolutely because what we're dealing with here is something that goes wider than Europe. It is an issue of trust in politics. What are we going to say to all those people … we as members of parliament go around and say you must vote, politics matter, elections count and in future we will have to explain that an entire House of Commons, elected with a commitment to a referendum, decided by a majority that it would not have that referendum because the majority thought it would not win …

James Naughtie: In practical terms, Foreign Secretary …

David Miliband: Let me come back there because William Hague has said something that is absolutely extraordinary, which is that the content of a treaty that parliament is discussing has no impact on whether or not there should be a referendum.

Illegible

David Miliband: Don't interrupt because you have said something that I think is very, very unwise. You’ve just said that the content of a treaty has no impact on whether it should be in a manifesto. So, for example, if there wasn’t a manifesto commitment to have a referendum on the euro, but a government decided that it should … enter the euro, it wouldn’t be bound to go to the people. I say that it's the content of a treaty that matters. So in the case that I've just given, if the government suddenly decided it didn’t want to join the euro, it would be bound to consult the people by virtue of the nature of the fundamental constitutional issue that it involved. And I really think that, on reflection, William Hague will realise that it’s absurd to turn over hundreds of years of precedent, where are parliament is the place to decide these issues. How many people have come onto this programme saying they want parliament to play a bigger role in our national life. Here is chance for parliament to do its job in a competitive way, as you see from all the debate about this vote today. And then for general elections to decide the nature of the government. It must be the case that it's on fundamental issues of principle where people are consulted

William Hague: The overriding issue of principle here is that a referendum was promised …

David Miliband: On a constitution which has been abandoned.

William Hague: Which has not been abandoned. And a family solicitor who told people that a document had been abandoned when ninety percent of its content was the same would be drummed out of his job.

David Miliband: Hang on, 27 heads of government have .. [illegible]

William Hague: … hundreds of years … Well look at the heads of government. Bertie Ahern says thankfully they haven’t changed the substance. Ninety percent of it is still there. The Spanish Prime minister said a great part of the content of the constitution is captured in the new treaty. This is what the heads of government have said.

David Miliband: But I can trade you quotes as I've shown because you've started by alleging that Angela Merkel, the head of Germany said it was the same as the constitution … [interruption] Hang on, hand on, well I've said she said its abandoned. I can give you back the Conservative Dutch prime minister ….

James Naughtie: We've heard quotes from both sides, yes. Let's move on, finally.

David Miliband: The constitutional treaty abolished all previous treaties of the European Union. It did something that was legally unprecedented. This treaty – it was rejected by the voters - this treaty says we should not abolish all previous version of the treaties of the European Union. Instead, we should amend the institutions of the European Union. That seems to me to be something that parliament was created to scrutinise and decide on.

William Hague: And look at what has happened when parliamentary committees, cross-party committees with a Labour majority have examined this question: the foreign affairs committee, the European Scrutiny Committee. The European Scrutiny Committee concluded that the treaty, the Lisbon Treaty was substantially equivalent to the constitution and efforts to portray it as otherwise were likely to be misleading.

David Miliband: I'll have to come in there …

James Naughtie: Very quickly, foreign secretary, very quickly foreign secretary …

David Miliband: William Hague has read half of the sentence. What the ESC has said, the European Scrutiny Committee said, was that for those counties didn't have the protocols that Britain has negotiated, in respect, for example, justice and home affairs, there were significant similarities. So let's be absolutely clear about what parliamentary committees have said. In key areas of structure, in key areas of content, and in consequence as well, the Reform Treaty has significant differences from the constitutional treaty. And those are important in our discussion. But the fundamental issue is, does it constitute a fundamental shift in the balance of power, in which case the people should be consulted or is in fact a job for MPs. And I believe that, as an amending treaty, it's a job for MPs.

James Naughtie: Can I just ask you foreign secretary, one last question. Isn't the politics of this clear? And isn't it the case that you as a government are pretty well losing the argument on Europe because, by every measure of opinion we've got that you'd lose it?

David Miliband: I am sorry that you have given William Hague a points victory in the last ten minutes discussion [illegible]. I would dispute that. No, I don't accept that proposition. I think that there is an important principle here, which is what's the job of parliament? And the job of parliament must be to scrutinise legislation and then decide whether or not to pass it. In exceptional cases where there is a fundamental shift in the balance of power, then of course there should be a referendum, and the scrutiny should be intense and the scrutiny should be serious. But in the end this is what we pay MPs for.

James Naughtie: Foreign secretary, William Hague, thank you both very much.

Comment by Nick Robinson, political editor (abbreviated).

What's striking though about this I think Jim, is that we thought that this would be a huge story, didn't we – this story of the Lisbon Treaty. This debate seemed likely to dominate the Spring and it really hasn’t. This is the first bit of attention it's got.

Now some people have criticised the media, the BBC for not giving it enough attention. But shall tell you why. The front benches have conspired to make it dull. The government doesn't really want much attention on it, there is a degree of embarrassment on it, that they’ve changed their position on the referendum, not one but twice in recent years.

The Conservatives, yes, are united in the main in favouring a referendum, but they believe that William Hague tried winning elections by being eurosceptic and failed. And he's one of the leading Tories in saying let's not bang on about this issue. And the Lib-Dems for their own reasons, really know that they are split on the issue of the referendum and therefore have also chosen not to give it a great deal of attention.

So it is likely that there will be no referendum. The Lisbon Treaty will be signed …

COMMENT THREAD

"It will start in Kosovo and end in Kosovo"

2008-02-23T19:44:00.004Z

Kosovo’s declaration of independence last Sunday was the least surprising event of this year (though, naturally, there is plenty of time to go for more dog-bites-man-supermodel-takes-drugs stories in 2008). While I am not at all surprised that Serbia and Russia are going through the motions of rage and astonishment I find the silliness and ignorance of commentators in the West – for once, I think, the blogosphere is slightly worse than the MSM – perpetually odd.

When Hashim Thaci was elected to be Prime Minister of Kosovo last November he announced that he would declare his country to be independent as soon as possible after December 10, when the international mediators were supposed to report back to the UN on the progress of negotiations over Kosovo’s status.

The negotiations led nowhere and the UN continued to procrastinate. The election of Boris Tadic, supposedly pro-Western but really little different from his more nationalist rival, as Serbia’s President earlier this month speeded up events. Mr Tadic may want Serbia to be in the EU – promising the Serbs great prosperity through that move – but he, too, was against Kosovan independence. For that matter, no Serb politician at this time is interested in any arrangements with Kosovo apart from some kind of a return to the past, something that was clearly never going to happen. But then Yugoslavia was never going to be turned into Greater Serbia either but it took ten years of war, thousands of dead, tens of thousands displaced and severe economic hardship for the Serbs to accept that.

President Tadic, backed by the Russian government, has gone to the United Nations Security Council asking for the independence to be annulled and Serbia’s “territorial integrity” to be restored.

Serbia has also recalled its ambassador from Washington and filed legal charges against Hashim Thaci and the Kosovan leadership in general. Other measures against countries that insist on recognizing Kosovo are being threatened:

Last week, Belgrade vowed to downgrade — but not break — diplomatic ties with all nations that recognize Kosovo's independence.

Later Monday, the Foreign Ministry said ambassadors to France and Turkey also were ordered back to the country, following their formal diplomatic recognition of Kosovo. They were withdrawn for "consultation until further notice," the ministry statement said.

"America and the European Union are stealing Kosovo from us, everyone must realize that," said Tomislav Nikolic, the head of the ultra-nationalist Radical Party. "From this moment on, we must count the days until we liberate Kosovo."

I haven’t heard the word “liberate” used in that sense for some time. Well, not since the disintegration of the Soviet Union.

The Prime Minister of Serbia, Vojislav Kostunica, who describes himself as being more nationalist than President Tadic, has attacked the United States for backing Kosovo’s independence bid, saying, in a way that is all too familiar to those who have ever paid any attention to Serb rhetoric, that President Bush and other European supporters of Kosovo will go down “in black letters” in Serbian history. There are rather a lot of black letters in Serbian history, so there is no real need to worry.

Prime Minister Kostunica also stated on national television:

Today on February 17, the fake state of Kosovo was illegally proclaimed on [Serbia’s] territory under the control of NATO. This was an act of legal violence. The United States puts force above law and showed that they were ready to break international laws for their own interests.

On the whole, it is not all that advisable for Serb politicians to talk about putting force above law. Those of us (and I exclude the many who have been commenting on the event in a hysterical and ignorant fashion) who recall the Yugoslav war of the nineties remember the attack on Slovenia, the bombing of Vukovar, the massive attack on Bosnia, not to mention the conduct of that war and the attempted ethnic cleansing of Kosovo. One could argue that these were all done by people who put force above law.

In fact, given the outcome of that prolonged war as far as Serbia is concerned, one has to wonder whether Serbs might not be admitting to themselves that those ambitions for Greater Serbia were a very big mistake. Without them some form of a lose federation might still have been in existence on the territory of former Yugoslavia (as created in 1918).

But then, modern Kosovo under that name has been part of modern Serbia only since 1912. The idea that Kosovo has been a Serbian province for many centuries is something of a myth propagated very successfully by the Serbs. Come to think of it, Serbia itself existed as an independent state only sporadically between the early fifteenth century and the second half of the nineteenth. At other times it was part of Hungary, of the Ottoman Empire for a very long time and, subsequently, of the Austrian one.

The argument that Kosovo is somehow naturally part of Serbia depends entirely on the fact that in the fourteenth century it was just that and the Battle of Kosovo, which was not quite a decisive Ottoman victory but which the Serbs consider themselves to have lost, was fought near Pristina in 1389.

Not many borders in the world are the same now as they were in 1389 and there is no particular reason why Serbia’s should be. This posting is not really the place for anything remotely resembling an analysis of the complicated history of the Balkans in the early modern period: the toing and froing of armies; conquests, other conquests, reconquests; alliances formed and broken; states and statelets emerging, disintegrating and reconfiguring. There has been much written on the subject by historians of the period.

The point is that none of it is of any relevance to the twenty-first century and there is no reason why decisions should be taken on the basis of what the situation was like for a few years in the fifteenth or sixteenth century.

It is fair to say that Kosovan resentment has been in existence since 1912 and was certainly strengthened by the gay abandon with which it was included into a country of Southern Slavs after the First World War. The Albanians are not Slavs but neither are they Turks or close cousins thereof, as described by one blogger, whom I shall not name, not wishing to embarrass him.

The history of Yugoslavia between the wars consisted to a great extent of attempts to turn the country into the Kingdom of Serbia and resistance to that from other member states. This may sound familiar to those whose memory extends as far back as the mid-nineties.

The history of the Second World War in the region is muddled and contradictory while being possibly more violent and ferocious than anywhere else. There was a great deal of collaboration with the Nazis but also a great many uprisings and various guerrilla campaigns, sometimes against the Germans, sometimes against other guerrilla groups.

Yes, indeed, there were Albanian partisans, just as there were Serbian, Croatian and Bosnian ones. And there were collaborators among all those people. That’s the way it goes under occupation where there is a certain amount of internal resentment already. Britain supporting first one group, then another did not help matters.

Moving right along we come to Tito’s Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, built on the bodies of those murdered by him and his henchmen in the years after the Second World War. He did, subsequently, keep some kind of a balance between the various republics by a mixture of oppression and mild economic reform.

Even before Tito’s death it was clear to many that the country will not survive him for long. Furthermore, it was said, the trouble “will start in Kosovo and end in Kosovo”. Tito died in 1980 and the country staggered on for a few years.

Trouble did begin in Kosovo in 1987 when a youngish party apparatchik saw that he could turn a more or less routine episode of nationalist trouble-making by Serb and Montenegrin activists to his advantage.

The best description of what happened can be found in Noel Malcolm’s “Kosovo: a short history”, which may not be unbiased (no history book is) but is remarkably detailed and knowledgeable (apologies for all the funny names and spellings but that is what you get when you deal with the Balkans):

In April 1987 news came from Kosovo that the group of Serb and Montenegrin activists round Bulatovič was intending to bring another large protest to Belgrade. They asked the Serbian Party president, Stambolič, to come and speak to them first in the town of Kosovo Polje; reluctant to enter such a hostile bear-pit (he had already made several speeches criticizing Serbian nationalism), he sent his deputy, Slobodan Miloševič, instead.

As Stambolič later recalled, Miloševič had never shown any interest in Kosovo, and had even said to him on one occasion: “Forget about the provinces, let’s get back to Yugoslavia.” But the events in Kosovo Polje on 24 April 1987 were to change all
that.

While Miloševič listened to angry speeches by local spokesmen in the ‘House of Culture’, fighting broke out between the large crowd of Serbs outside and the police, who responded with their batons. The fighting had been carefully planned by one of the local Serb leaders, Miroslav Šolevič (local, at least, in the sense that he lived there: he had moved to Kosovo from the Serbian city of Niš): as he later admitted, he had arranged for a truck full of stones to be parked outside the building, to give the Serbs a copious supply of ammunition.

Miloševič broke off the meeting and came out to speak to the crowd, where he uttered – luckily for him, on camera – the words on which his entire political future would be built: “No one should dare to beat you!”

The crowd enraptured by these words, began chanting “Slobo, Slobo!” With a skill which he had never deployed before, Miloševič made an eloquent extempore speech in defence of the sacred rights of the Serbs. From that day his nature as a politician changed; it was as if a powerful new drug had entered his veins.

Phrasing it slightly less eloquently, I would say that he transmogrified himself from a second-rate Communist thug into a first-rate nationalist thug, in the process ridding himself of his friend and political patron Stambolič, elevating himself to the presidency of Serbia and, in a somewhat unconstitutional fashion, of Yugoslavia and acquiring a large number of either foolish or knavish supporters in the West.

The rest is history of a particularly unpleasant kind but one that seems to have disappeared down the memory hole as far as many people are concerned. The truth is that few people bothered to follow the story of the celebrations of the 600th anniversary of the Battle of Kosovo; or read the subsequent reports of oppression and human rights abuses that were coming out of Kosovo in the early nineties; or bothered to understand how Yugoslavia disintegrated and what Serbia under Miloševič was trying to achieve by what methods.

Just a few points to be noted: the war did not start in 1999; that was the end-game with NATO intervening decisively to prevent a repetition of the events that had taken place in Bosnia. It was not started by the German recognition of Croatia and Bosnia, which came about six months after the start of the bombing of Vukovar (that’s in Croatia and was bombed by the so-called Yugoslav but, in fact, Serbian air force) and after an EU-sponsored referendum in Bosnia had produced a decisive pro-independence result.

Once again, this is not the place to go into all the details of the war of Yugoslav disintegration that took up the nineties. In a way, it was historically satisfying to see that the end of the century resounded with problems in and around Sarajevo, the place of those famous shots (fired by a Bosnian Serb) that plunged Europe and the world into the mess from which we have not, as yet, extricated ourselves.

As far as Britain and the EU are concerned we need to remember that the part played by our own Conservative government was disgraceful. One needs to go no further than Douglas Hurd’s justification of the arms embargo of people who wanted to fight for their own and their countries’ survival by the words “we do not want to see a level killing field”.

(Subsequently, Mr Hurd was found negotiating a special deal with President Miloševič for NatWest Bank. The deal fell through after a certain amount of publicity. As I recall Dame Pauline Neville Jones, fresh out of the FCO, where she, too supported Serbian claims to keeping Yugoslavia together, was involved in those negotiations.)

The EU was in the process of being formed through the Maastricht Treaty and saw the Balkan troubles as a wonderful opportunity to assert itself on the international scene. With Jacques Poos, the foreign minister of Luxembourg, who held the presidency at the time proclaiming that this was “Europe’s hour” and Jacques Delors sniffily telling the Americans to mind their own business, the EU was all set to sort the problem out.

Unfortunately, the EU’s idea of sorting out the problem was to insist on the inviolability of federal Yugoslavia, to brand all opponents of it as nationalist extremists, to encourage Miloševič in keeping the “sovereign” state together, no matter what it took and to deny Bosnian and Croatians the right to defend themselves.

It all ended very badly, indeed, with NATO, led by the Americans and the British under a Labour government having to intervene to stabilize the situation, at least temporarily. As the Dayton Agreements refused to deal with the Kosovan problem, that temporary state was short.

In 1999 NATO had to intervene again and in effect separate Kosovo from Serbia, who has, since lost its junior partner, Montenegro, as well.

Why the EU should take that view is understandable. As the push to speed up integration in Western Europe gathered momentum, the disintegration of existing federal states, first the Soviet Union, then Yugoslavia, was distinctly unwanted. While guaranteeing the borders of the Soviet Union as Commission President Delors proposed at the infamous Rome meeting of the European Council was beyond the Europeans’ capabilities, something, they thought, could be done to keep Yugoslavia together.

The subsequent crisis clarified two problems: one is that “Europe” was not quite as united on various international issues as its leaders pretended to be; and, secondly, that in the absence of a clear policy and, above all, a military force to support that policy, neither the ideology of integrationism nor the desire to stand up to the Americans was sufficient.

A more peculiar development was among eurosceptics. While many, as could have been expected logically, supported the break-away member states of Yugoslavia, many if not the majority, astonishingly, bleated about the sovereign state of Yugoslavia, the evil Croats and the non-existent Bosnians (that was before anyone who was even theoretically Muslim was described as being evil by definition).

Much of it was half-digested propaganda emanating from Belgrade, whose officials had been well trained in such matters, being high-ranking members of the Communist Party. Some could be attributed to lack of interest until British troops were involved and since this was Blair’s war, it had to be a bad one.

There were idiotic rantings about German plots to send storm troopers into Croatia or wherever. And there were badly argued references to something called the Westphalian system, which is not quite what people seem to think it is. (At which point I must excuse myself. The Treaty of Westphalia and its implications will have to wait for another posting.)

It would have been sensible for eurosceptics to stop looking for parallels to the EU in Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union under Stalin (parallels that do not stand up for one minute) and to look a little closer to home. No the EU is not like Yugoslavia, though there are certain similarities, not least that strange system of rotating presidency.

The point is that Yugoslavia was an artificially created federal state, whose members decided that for various reasons they wanted out. For eurosceptics to support the representatives of the federal state in their fight to suppress those movements for national self-determination is illogical to put it mildly.

To swallow the image of Miloševič and his thugs as fighters either for Yugoslav sovereignty or freedom from Islamic jihad (as defined some years afterwards by people who have clearly never met a Bosnian or a Kosovan) and to support the “sovereignty” of whatever state he happened to be in charge of is fatuous in the extreme.

Let us imagine a situation in which the European Union has managed to transform itself into a sovereign state by considerably more peaceful means than the creation of Yugoslavia, let alone its re-creation under Tito. According to the logic outlined above, no member state will have the right to secede and no outsider will be able to help with that secession because that would be breaking up a sovereign state, which is clearly against the Westphalian system. Think about it.

So we come to the situation as it developed since Sunday’s widely expected declaration of Kosovan independence. Understandably, it has caused certain flutterings in various dovecots though why there was so little preparation for this event remains something of a mystery.

For the rest of the posting I shall ignore the stupid and ignorant comments made by eurosceptics on the subject of Kosovo and Serbia (have I used the word ignorant before?) as being par for the course. As we have said on this blog many times, the reason we keep losing lies in ourselves not in our enemy.

Let us concentrate on what matters. Kosova, as it is known, is now an independent state. Well, at least, it is independent from Serbia, though it has been described as an EU Protectorate. Dusan Reljic, the Kosovo expert interviewed by Der Spiegel sounded doubtful about the effect this will have on the international system. In particular, he was worried about the situation the UN might find itself in:

The fact that the majority of Western countries are recognizing this move by the parliament in Kosovo means that the West has opted for a resolution to this situation outside the UN system. And this of course is not strengthening the UN.

Very few things do strengthen the UN and, in particular, it is not strengthened by its venality and corruption or its inability to come to any kind of decision in emergency. Come to think of it, the UN was in the Balkans for a couple of year in the nineties – a great effort that was in Bosnia, that culminated in the Srebrenice massacre.

This seems to have been forgotten as the latest news is that Serbs in northern Kosovo have threatened the UN police.

What of that other transnational organization that once, a long time ago, felt that the Balkans were its problem not to be solved by anyone else?

SPIEGEL ONLINE: Do you think that EU's failure to show a united front on Kosovo has damaged its attempts to have a coherent foreign policy?

Reljic: It shows that there is a plurality of thinking within the European Union and the EU is not a homogenous bloc. I don't think that any one expected the EU to act as a single state. The EU is not a single state.

The decision of the Kosovo Albanians to proclaim independence is not something that the EU has endorsed. The EU has been pushed by the US into this position. This was not original EU policy.

Then again, original EU policy was not all that successful.

Before we go into the details of what the EU might or might not be doing about the latest twist of Balkan history, let us look at the notion that the international system will suffer irrevocably by this upheaval. The chances are that there will be a fall-out, though it is hard to predict where.

The most immediate result was South Ossetia and Abkhazia declaring that they wanted independence from Georgia – much to Russia’s horror but more of that later.

The question is surely whether there is something sacred about the international system as it stands. Like the climate which has been changing ever since its existence the international system has never stayed in one place for very long. The very idea of that is ludicrous.

As it happens, there was relatively little change in the years between 1945 and 1990, apart from the fully expected disintegration of the French and British empires. The descendants of those have stayed more or less in the borders defined by the “imperialists” and all joined the existing international structure, particularly the United Nations.

Is there some reason why the post-1945 construct should last for ever? Right until the collapse of the Soviet Union, the assumption among many commentators was that it would do just that. That event was not the end of a process but the beginning. Many things will change in the international system, some for the worse, some for the better.

After all, the international system, as it exists now, includes the United Nations with all its outpost organizations, the European Union and many other transnational organizations that are claiming ever more power, pointing to the Second World War as the reason for it.

In other words, many of us would like to see changes in the international system as it exists. We do not necessarily mourn events that undermine it.

So what is the European Union doing about its backyard? In the first place, as Javier Solana pointed out:

The EU has already decided to send a mission, a mission of stability, a mission of rule of law. It should contribute to the stability of the Balkans.

A mission always seems like a good idea but whether it will contribute to anybody’s stability is open to question.

The defence ministers are discussing “the possibility of building a special security force in Kosovo as well as measures needed to prevent clashes spreading to Bosnia and Herzegovina”, though Chief Foreign Affairs Honcho, Javier Solana does not seem to think that there will be any necessity for reserve forces to be employed. More like, there will be no reserve forces to employ.

KFOR is there, led by NATO with some UN involvement, trying to keep the peace in northern Kosovo, which is predominantly Serbian.

While the EU is playing some part in Kosovo in terms of its structure, its members seem unable to agree on whether to recognize the new country or not. Germany, France, Italy and the UK have more or less recognized its independence, following the lead set by the United States. Greece, Cyprus, Spain and Romania have announced that they will not do so. Slovakia and, presumably, Bulgaria are undecided. In other words, that common foreign policy remains as elusive as ever for the same reason as before: there are few common interests across the European Union.

Countries that have potential seceders are worried about the effect Kosovan independence will have on them. Others maintain that they have close relations with Serbia, what with them all being Orthodox though this does not stop Greece or Serbia from opposing the war against terror, despite most terrorists at the present being Muslim.

Serbia is once again doing is best to antagonize its possible supporters. Not only have there been riots in northern Kosovo, where the Serbs are, presumably, hoping that the Bosnian situation will repeat itself and the “motherland” will come to their rescue. Unfortunately, the situation has changed and it might be worth the Kosovan Serbs’ while to work out how they can work the system peacefully.

There have been riots in Belgrade itself. A large, government-backed rally of 200,000 or so, dissolved into violence as groups attacked embassies of western countries that had recognized or semi-recognized Kosovo. The American embassy was set on fire and an unidentified dead body was found when it was put out. The embassy staff is all accounted for so the body must be one of those who had invaded the building but did not get out in time.

It is all America’s fault, say the Serbs. They should not have encouraged or recognized Kosovo.
Meanwhile, to continue the policy of antagonizing potential friends and supporters, the Serbian Foreign Minister Vuk Jeremic issued all kinds of threats as he spoke to the European Parliament.

In an emotional address to MEPs just three days after Kosovo declared independence from Serbia, the country's foreign chief argued that Serbs "will not go quietly. We shall strive for what is just and rightfully ours."

In the subsequent debate there were references to the events of 1999 (though not 1989) and suggestions that Kosovo’s case was unique. Mr Jeremic, apparently, laughed though whether bitterly or not is unclear.

"The case of Kosovo is truly unique, because the international community had to step in to protect it on humanitarian grounds, and it became a protectorate for nine years," argued Dimitrij Rupel, the foreign minister of Slovenia, the current EU presidency country.

But his Serbian counterpart, Mr Jeremic, laughed off this assertion, saying: "Do any of you honestly think that just by saying that Kosovo is sui generis, you will make it so? That there will be no consequences to the stability and security of the international system, just because you say it won't?"

Mr Jeremic also confirmed that Serbia would break off diplomatic relations with all EU countries that have already recognised Kosovo or will do so. "And we shall undertake all diplomatic, political, measures designed to impede and reverse this direct and unprovoked attack on our sovereignty."

On the whole, I think we can live with those threats. Presumably, when Serbia refused to contemplate what might happen if Mr Thaci fulfils his promise, its politicians thought that the threats were of some real significance. The idea of saving us the cost of another embassy, several consulates and other diplomatic paraphernalia sounds quite attractive. Can we have a few more threats of that kind, please?

The Americans have already started evacuating some of their non-essential staff from Belgrade.

One presumes, the EU will go on discussing and debating for some time, contributing some security forces and aid to Kosovo; also criticizing Serbia for its behaviour, trying to bribe the country out of its intransigence. Will it work? With the support of the United States, probably. But on its own the EU, as ever, will achieve very little. After all, it is no use pretending we can actually afford to make members out of the detritus of former Yugoslavia, given that we are still trying to recover from taking in Romania and Bulgaria.

Serbia is being supported in the UN by Russia and China. Birds of a feather, I suppose, and I have no doubt those commentators in Britain who are weeping about Serbia are very proud of being on the same side as those two countries.

China has no dog in this fight and will do very little. Its reaction is partly an almost automatic anti-Western stance and partly a statement of its own attitude to regions that might break off. The problem is not so much Taiwan that is de facto independent, though that might change one day, but Tibet and Chinese Turkmenistan.

These are countries whose claim to independence is stronger than Kosovo’s but it is not even discussed by the Chinese government or media. There is not the slightest possibility that, unless China implodes, the example of Kosovo could be followed by Tibet. After all, the example of East Timor was not.

That leaves Russia as Serbia’s supposed patron. Back in 1999 Russia still had a free media and I used to read the newspapers avidly. Their reporting and analysis of what was going on in the Balkans were far better than anything seen in the British ones. Of greatest interest was “Izvestiya”, which has since sunk back to almost its Soviet level of boringness and inconsequence.

It was quite clear from all that was written by various people, whose opinion on what was going on in Serbia/Kosovo was different, that nobody thought Russia should get involved. Every time President Yeltsin staggered up in a drunken haze and threatened Russian retaliation, his ministers immediately made it clear that he didn’t really mean it and the old man has had one too many again. He-he.

As a result, I confidently predicted to all those in various parts of the political world who got all excited about us upsetting the poor Russians that nothing would happen. I was right. Apart from that odd and only marginally successful dash to Pristina airport after which the Russian soldiers had to be fed and watered by NATO troops, nothing happened.

Mark my words, so it will prove now. Russia is not worried about Serbia and is not going to waste its inadequate forces in the Balkans. The Wall Street Journal pointed out on Monday [subscription only, I fear]

With no troops or permanent interests on the ground, however, Moscow seems likely to be happy to score political points against the West – and then, as always in its dealings with the Balkans, abandon the Serbs to their fate.

What Russia is interested in is developments on her own borders. No, I do not mean Chechnya or Dagestan or Ingushetiya. Kosovo’s independence will not make a jot of difference to that problem, which has been going on intermittently since the end of the eighteenth century when the Russians first moved into that part of the Caucasus.

The problems I am talking about are South Ossetia and Abkhazia, both at present in Georgia and both regions where Russian has been stirring up trouble and, on various occasions, getting involved in military activity. The point that journalists here have missed is that Russia is not at all keen on these two autonomous republics becoming independent of Georgia.

Once they have shaken off the shackles of Georgian oppression (or so they seem to think) they will become Russia’s problem and the latter will lose many of the excuses for interfering in Georgian affairs, at least militarily. Furthermore, it is true, as Russian officials say (and there is good reason to suppose that they might even be telling the truth) that Chechnyan terrorists and fighters (boyeviki) routinely hide out in South Ossetia then acquiring the region all for their own may not be seen as a bonus by the security forces.

Despite the two autonomous republics declaring their wish to become independent, Russia has not so far recognized them and has not indicated that it intends to do so. Let us face it, the international structure that some people are so worried about is, at present, in Russia’s favour and she does not want to upset things too much. Oh, and by the way, it does not matter what we do or say. That nice Mr Putin will still be unpleasant to us. Live with it.

The informal meeting of the 12 CIS (Commonwealth of Independent States – all the former Soviet republics apart from the Baltic ones) heads of state yesterday has passed without any incidents. In fact, it was quite successful, as normally there is a boycott or two and you rarely get the whole dozen together.

According to Interfax, Abkhazia and South Ossetia were not planning to appeal to the CIS heads of state to be recognized, anyway. President of Abkhazia Sergei Bagapsh explained that a great deal of preparatory work will have to be done before that appeal can be made. I would guess, at least some of the preparatory work will be finding out what the Russians really want from their unreliable allies.

Will Kosovo survive? For the time being yes. One can never really predict much for the Balkans but it is protected by NATO and aided by the EU. Its chances of survival are as good as those of any new Balkan state.

Will it be a democracy as the Kosovan government promises? Again, the chances of that are as good as in any other former Yugoslav country. Much will depend on the behaviour of the Serbs in the north of the country when they realize that Serbia will not come to their aid. Much will also depend on the behaviour of the Serbian government. As we know from the example of Northern Ireland, having a larger neighbour who helps troublemakers is not conducive to peaceful existence.

Much will also depend on the Kosovan government and whether they live up to their fine words.

Meanwhile we have to live with the fact that the Balkan kaleidoscope has been given another shake and this situation is likely to remain for some time. With a bit of luck, the international system has also received another blow from which it will find it hard to recover.