What is important?

In the 30 months that this blog has existed, the world has changed more than we believed it ever could in such a short period. Many of the changes have been triggered directly by the cataclysmic events leading to and following 9/11 but, of more relevance to this blog, by the failure last year of the EU constitution.

Strangely though, while the damage caused by that failure was obvious and public, less so has been the more serious damage done to the whole of the European ideal by its main actors, France and Germany, ruling themselves out of key parts in what has been called the "war on terror", and specifically the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. Thus, while individual European countries have been represented, "Europe" as a political entity has been a mere spectator and, as a result, almost entirely lacking in influence and importance.

Strangely, therefore, what we saw in the run-up to the constitution now no longer exists, even as a dream. Then, there was the prospect of a political Europe, which seemed to be on the verge of creating an independent entity with its own foreign policy and eventually its own armed forces. But this was not to be.

Because in what are essentially shooting wars, what brings influence to the table is military power – boots, guns, aircraft and all the other paraphernalia of war – EU influence has waned to the extent where, as an actor on the world stage, the organisation is no longer important. It may still preen and posture but, in any of the recent major events in the world, from Darfur to the current crisis in Afghanistan, no one has been beating a path to Brussels.

This has very much been reflected in our coverage of events. When we changed our strap line, which became, "To discuss issues related to the UK's position in Europe and the world", the EU was still an important part of that world. But, as time has passed, it has become less and less so. Important it might still be in the internal affairs of the UK – something which still affords us great irritation – but, in Britain's "position in the world", the EU is possibly less important than it has been since we joined the Community in 1973.

Contrary to the hopes and expectations of the Euro-enthusiasts, it is not Britain's membership of the EU that has brought it power and influence on the world stage, or enabled it to keep its position on the world stage. To the chagrin of many, it is the fact that our government is prepared to put men with guns in key hot-spots, with instructions to kill people. It is for that reason alone that the UK - with its now minuscule and dangerously over-stretched armed forces - has been able to punch above its weight.

But, if the gains made are real, they also look like being temporary. It is becoming increasingly likely that our armed forces will have to beat an ignominious retreat, first from Iraq and then, quite possibly, from Afghanistan.

If these retreats come to pass they will, to some considerable extent, have been occasioned by the failure to devise, structure and equip armed forces which are capable of dealing with the very special and difficult conditions of a counter-insurgency against an enemy that has very different moral and cultural values.

The truth of the matter is that those forces were originally geared to fighting a battle against the might of the Soviet Union, across the plains of northern Germany. Latterly, they also acquired some skill and experience in dealing with low-level and restrained terrorism, as in Northern Ireland, while also dealing with public order and other issues throughout the world. But the fact is that the forces went to war against terror equipped to fight a conventional war against a conventional enemy.

It has to be said – and has been argued closely on this blog – that the failure to equip the forces for the actual war they were to fight is responsible for their lack-lustre performance and will be – if it happens – largely responsible for their ultimate failure. And there is no shame in that. No army can be expected to prevail when given the wrong equipment for the wrong war.

Now, if it is too late to do anything about this state of affairs – at least in sufficient time to have an influence on immediate events – there is both time and the opportunity to do something about the way the armed forces are equipped (and structured) for future conflicts.

And no one who has followed this blog - or who has otherwise acquired even the vaguest understanding of the relationship between the performance of the armed forces and they way they are equipped – will be in any doubt that this is important. In many respects, it could well be far more important than our membership of the EU, not least because, long after the EU has ceased to be, we could still be having to live with the decisions made that affect our armed forces.

What brings this to the fore, however, is our own parliament or, to be more specific, the Defence Select Committee. Under the chairmanship of the Rt Hon James Arbuthnot MP, it has decided that it is to hold an inquiry into the MoD's FRES programme.

This, as we never tire of saying, is – at £14 billion - the largest single procurement programme in the history of the Army, representing a complete revolution in the way the Army is equipped and structured. It will define for the next twenty years or more the capabilities of the Army and, crucially, what it will not be able to do. Thus, it is absolutely essential that we get it right – and that includes asking whether FRES is the right system and whether it should go ahead at all.

Unfortunately, the odds are already stacked against an impartial or effective inquiry. The Committee is describing FRES as a programme "to provide the Army with a medium-weight armoured vehicle capability" yet, as we know, it is much, much more than that – as the price tag of £14 billion indicates. It will be the British entry into the arcane and still untried world of net-centric warfare.

Further, from the notification of the inquiry, it does not appear as if the Committee is prepared to look anew at whether FRES is the right move. It tells us that it will focus "on progress in delivering the FRES programme." It will examine "the operational requirement for FRES and how the MoD and industry plan to meet it", and it "will consider how the programme has been managed so far, its current status and the anticipated in-service-date."

Additionally, we are told, the Committee "will explore how other nations are seeking to meet the requirement for medium-weight armoured vehicles and what lessons could be learnt from their experience." And then it will also consider how the MoD will manage any capability gap between now and the FRES In Service Date including any implications for the FRES programme of the MoD's recent announcement to procure additional armoured vehicles for operations in Iraq and Afghanistan (such as the Mastiff, pictured above).

What makes this so worrying is that, although FRES has emerged as the MoD's favoured option for re-equipping and re-structuring the Army, the concept has never been tested or debated in the Houses of Parliament and thus, the government is committing massive expenditure and the whole future of the Army to an untried concept which has never even been discussed, much less approved, by MPs.

This cannot be right and it cannot be right that the Defence Select Committee is so restricting the scope of its inquiry. It must look at the system anew and it must give a lead to both Houses and the nation as to whether we should embark on this potentially dangerous experiment.

And that, unlike the EU, really is important.


COMMENT THREAD

Suffer ye children

If there was ever an image which was calculated to turn people off politics, it is this, culled from a national newspaper today – illustrating the merriment of the Tory front bench at the prime minister’s discomfort over the "cash for honours" issue.

It was precisely this sort of "Punch and Judy" politics which the Boy King pledged to leave behind. Yet here are three senior members of his shadow cabinet, Alan Duncan, George Osborne and Oliver Letwin, behaving for all the world like schoolchildren.

The chaps may have come away from yesterday's Prime Ministers' Questions feeling terribly pleased with themselves but they should be aware that the rest of the nation looks upon their puerile antics with a mixture of loathing and contempt.

And this, incidentally, is the same day that we hear that a Tory MP and close political ally of the Boy King has left his wife and two children for a man.

When a nation is at war and its troops are in harms’ way, masculine values usually come to the fore. But, it seems, we are wasting our time expecting these from our current parliamentary opposition. We must look elsewhere.

Lightning II strikes

You can follow the ins and outs of the Turkish accession negotiations for all you are worth but, as we have remarked several times on this blog, the real bellwether is the military. If you want to know where sentiment lies, watch what the military does.

And the military have just spoken. Against the heady days last year when the "colleagues" were looking to a quick sale for the Eurofighter, Turkey's Air Force has just selected the US-led F-35 Joint Strike Fighter (JSF), now called the Lightning II. They are expected to commit around $10 billion to buy about 100 new-generation fighter aircraft.

The Air Force, as the user, is not the sole authority for a final decision, but its position is dominant and backed by the powerful General Staff. "Although this decision is not official yet, we can say that Turkey's JSF move is almost final, after the Air Force has clarified its position," said one defence analyst in Ankara.

As a sop to the Europeans, there was a possibility of going for a mixed buy of the JSF and the Eurofighter, but the Air Force, whose fighter fleet is exclusively of US design and which follows a strong American tradition, has opted for an the all-JSF solution.

And the Europeans can put their Eurofighters where the sun doesn't shine.

Time to press the panic button?

When Michael Yon writes, it is always worth reading. But his latest piece in the Weekly Standard is more than a little worrying. Mark this on your calendar, he writes:

Spring of 2007 will be a bloodbath in Afghanistan for NATO forces. Our British, Canadian, Australian, Dutch, and other allies will be slaughtered in Afghanistan if they dare step off base in the southern provinces, and nobody is screaming at the tops of their media-lungs about the impending disaster. I would not be surprised to see a Nato base overrun in Afghanistan in 2007 with all the soldiers killed or captured. And when it happens, how many will claim they had no idea it was so bad and blame the media for failing to raise the alarm? Here it is: WARNING! Troops in Afghanistan are facing slaughter in 2007!

If that was a piece in isolation or from a different person, it could be ignored. But it is from Michael Yon, and it meshes with the piece over the weekend that had Field Marshal Sir Peter Inge warning that British forces risk defeat in Afghanistan.

This, we thought, might be overwrought - but we cannot be sure. But, while we cannot rule out a major push by the Taliban, as Yon argues could happen, we do know that the effect of air power on concentrations of fighters can be decisive. Should a Nato base be seriously under threat, it is almost certain that the full weight of air assets would be mobilised and disaster would surely be averted.

What seems to be of more concern, however, is that very different messages are coming out of the theatre. From The Telegraph today, for instance, we get a highly downbeat report of how America's ambassador to Afghanistan is expressing deep unease over the British ceasefire with the Taliban and subsequent withdrawal from the town of Musa Qala in north Helmand.

The source of unease is Ronald Neumann, who is saying that there is "a lot of nervousness" about who the truce was made with, who the arrangement was made with, and whether it will hold – and not a little concern about whether the area will become a sanctuary governed by the Taliban. "If you have an area that is under the Afghan government flag but is not under the actual authority of the Afghan government then you are losing in a very big way," says Neumann.

But what is also of concern is Nato's supreme commander Gen James Jones. He – also according to The Telegraph – is saying that the mission to subdue the insurgency was at a turning point. He is predicting that insurgents will not continue to confront coalition troops in pitched battles but turn instead to the car bomb tactics that had proved so devastating in Iraq. His view is: "Militarily we will not be defeated … Their strategy is that we suffer a loss as a result of 1,000 IEDs [roadside bombs]."

That ties up with another report which suggests that Taliban militias have taken control over key border areas of Pakistan, where they are effectively running the civil administration. With the withdrawal of the Pakistani Army under the so-called "Waziristan accord", a power vacuum has been filled by mullahs and their long-haired, bearded, AK47-toting militants.

Then, from David Loyn, writing in The Independent, we get an account of how the Taliban army is highly active and visible in Helmand province, clearly in control over a wide region - the same Taliban that Brigadier Ed Butler, the commander of British forces in the region, said were "practically defeated".

Loyn claims that they are "confident and well-armed, all with AK-47s, and many of them carry rocket-propelled grenade launchers." Their communications equipment and vehicles are new and they have a constant supply of fresh men from the madrassas, the religious schools in Pakistan. And the "Waziristan accord" has made it even easier for the Taliban to manoeuvre.

Furthermore, Loyn has it that the Taliban commander predicts that suicide bombing would be employed far more intensively in the future. "There are thousands waiting at the border," he says. "We are trying to stop them because they would cause chaos if they all came at once."

What is also clear, Loyn asserts, is that the Taliban are now far more numerous than previously believed. Thousands of young men now see them as a resistance force against international troops who have had five years and are not seen to have delivered results.

Meanwhile, he writes, the scale of institutionalised corruption practised by the Afghan National Army is shocking. They demand money at gunpoint from every driver on the main roads in the south. It was to stop just this kind of casual theft that the Taliban was formed in the first place in 1994. For the first time since then, the Taliban are now being paid again to sort out the problem.

So, what do we have here?

Putting it all together as we so often do, it seems that the Taliban is far more numerous, better equipped and organised than is being suggested officially; Nato forces – specifically the British – have been forced to give ground; and cohorts of suicide bombers are waiting in the wings, ready to unleash a reign of terror.

All-in-all, things are no better than when we wrote in September about this issue while, in many respects, things look significantly worse.

Yet… are these just words? Do they have any meaning? If they do, and the situation is anywhere near as dangerous as it appears to be, then our troops are in very grave danger. One can begin to see why Dannatt is so keen to pull troops out of Iraq in order to beef up the forces in Afghanistan.

And, if we are actually in danger of losing – or taking such serious casualties that we are tempted to pull out – has anyone really thought through the global implications? Has anyone even thought how it would affect the morale of people back home, and the behaviour of domestic Muslim communities?

Methinks that, if there is a panic button, someone should be pressing it.

COMMENT THREAD

Those murderous French

There has been a French parliamentary inquiry, which – predictably – cleared its own government. But now a former senior Rwandan diplomat has told a tribunal in his own country that France played an active role in Rwanda's 1994 genocide.

The Rwandan tribunal is hearing from 25 survivors of the genocide, who claim to have witnessed French involvement and will rule on whether to file a suit at the International Court of Justice. The panel is headed by former Justice Minister Jean de Dieu Mucyo and its proceedings, which began in the Rwandan capital, Kigali, on Tuesday, are being broadcast live on local radio.

France has denied playing any role in the 100-day frenzy of killing in which 800,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus died but Jacques Bihozagara, the former Rwandan ambassador to Paris, claims otherwise. He argues that the French were heavily involved at all stages, driven by concerns about their diminishing influence in Africa.

And, for a country in denial, it has also failed to express any regret. In fact, claims Bihozagara, French involvement continues to this day – its government has still not apprehended genocide suspects living in France. Furthermore, it is also alleged that French soldiers provided escape routes to militia escaping to the Democratic Republic of Congo after the massacres.

This was under the guise of a United Nations mandate known as Operation Turquoise, ostensibly to set up a protected zone. But French soldiers were actually deployed to protect the genocide perpetrators, allowing Hutu extremists to enter Tutsi camps and continue the slaughter even in the protected zone.

From other reports, we learn that French soldiers are accused of training and arming some of the Hutus that carried out the massacre, and some 50,000 people are reported to have been killed after French forces brought Tutsis out of hiding under the false pretext that they had secured the peace.

After hearing the testimony, the panel will have the next six months to determine its findings which, if the earlier testimony is any guide, should prove to be explosive.

Any such findings, however, will not be just of academic interest to the British government. As my colleague has remarked, France is a country which has yet to come to terms with its post-colonial legacy yet which, through the European Union common foreign and security policy, is binding Britain tighter and tighter into its sphere of interest.

Even now, we are still committed to further military integration driven largely by France, which raises the spectre of British troops in the not too distant future being deployed in pursuit of French foreign policy objectives.

Given that the continuous and expanding threads of evidence point to France as a country that has, from Vietnam through Algeria and a succession of African colonies up to and including the Ivory Coast, exercised a wholly malign influence, we really do have to ask ourselves whether this is a country with which we can afford to be associated.

For so long we have heard all manner of jibes and accusations against the United States but, if we are to choose between allies, the murderous history of the French would seem to make them a very poor second-best.

COMMENT THREAD

"Never glad confident morning again"

It seems that I have used that quotation before, though not in the title, when writing about Nikita Khrushchev’s secret speech to the Twentieth Congress of the CPSU. Still, it can be repeated, for it was that speech that started the chain of events, which culminated in the Hungarian Revolution that began 50 years ago today.

The celebrations in the country have been marked by ferocious disputes and worse; angry accusations of bad faith then and now. Some survivors, like General Béla Király is filled with some gloom; others like the former student leader, quoted by the BBC, appear to think that the fight against globalization is the same as the fight against Bolshevism. At best, that shows certain lacunae of knowledge.

David Rennie spoils his good deed of bringing General Király to the attention of the readers of the Spectator by his almost inevitable arrogant silliness. The suppression of the Hungarian Revolution could have triggered off World War III. Oh really? Between whom and whom? Exactly who was going to move in there to help the Hungarians? Apart from anything else, there was the little matter of the Suez crisis going on and it absorbed most of the energy and attention of the Western powers.

David Pryce-Jones, who has written a book about the Hungarian Revolution says this on his blog today:

Help Hungary. Help!” was the final appeal on the radio, put out by Gyula Hay, the playwright and in his day a veteran Communist too. In sad fact, the United States did nothing, making it plain that the Soviets could do their worst. On hearing that a revolution had broken out, President Eisenhower limited himself to saying, “The heart of America goes out to the people of Hungary.” Heart is all very well, but what about muscle? Robert Murphy, then undersecretary of state and an experienced trouble-shooter, summed up Washington’s failure: “Perhaps history will demonstrate that the free world could have intervened to give Hungarians the liberty they sought, but none of us in the State Department had the skill or the imagination to devise a way.

Could the West have helped? Who can judge that fairly now? But we do know (well, most of us do but David Rennie has special information): it was not going to. As Professor Jeremy Black writes in his latest book, “The Dotted Red Line”:

Indeed, appeasement was as much inevidence over Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968, as over Austria and Czechoslovakia in 1938.

With the difference that Hungary in 1956 showed herself willing to fight unlike either of the victims of Nazi aggression in 1938.

In the Wall Street Journal Europe today the novelist Péter Nádas writes about his memories of that fateful day. He was fourteen, in his last year at elementary school or, even first year of gymnasium and he could, when released from his classroom, join the crowds that thronged in the streets of the capital and around the Parliament building. My options were more limited as I was considerably younger.

1956 was a great year in my life even before the events of October as that was when I went to school. It was all rather exciting, all that readin’, ‘ritin’ and ‘rithmetic. On the other hand, there were incomprehensible dark eddies and waves swirling around all of us, children. I did not know, of course, that my father was active in the various Petöfi Circles where furious discussions about the state of affairs in Hungary were going on. I did not know till many years later that he had got hold of a copy of Khrushchev’s speech and read it out at one of the meetings. But then, neither could it have occurred to me that with a family that had links with the Soviet Union, and my brother and I half-Russian, we could well be at risk if nationalist feelings got out of control.

All of us at school, however, had noticed a previous event: the flying of black flags on October 6. Before the Soviet liberation of Hungary and the subsequent establishment of the Communist system, this had been the day of mourning for the 13 generals of the 1848-49 War of Liberation who were executed by the Austrians. The black flags had always flown. In 1956, as the system began to disintegrate, that day was chosen for the reburial of Lászó Rajk, the main defendants in the 1949 show trial, which had destroyed the last possible rivals to Matthias Rákosi. It was a grey day of the kind one sometimes gets in Danube basin as it was preternaturally clear. The moisture droplets in the atmosphere clarified the greyness in the air. And the black flags flew everywhere.

My parents went to the reburial together with all their colleagues from the university. The talk at home became more strained and more difficult. Speaking from my own childish memories I’d say the events of October 23 were no surprise to anyone.

On that Tuesday I was at school in the morning (the post-War baby boom had not been catered for adequately by schools and classes had to double up – one week we went in the morning, another week after lunch). I came home to find my parents out and, astonishingly enough, my grandmother in charge of the flat. She was there to look after me and my baby brother as my parents, having joined the demonstration, were not expected back till very late. (By the time they did get home we were in bed, some of the crowd had got hold of guns and had run to take over the radio broadcasting station. There was shooting in the streets and my grandmother was stuck with us for the next five days. Wisely, she never volunteered to child mind again.)

The crowds marched in all the streets. The traffic stopped and there were simply crowds of people marching and shouting slogans. There were many different ones. They were demanding that the Russians go home, that the star be removed from the national flag, that the Kossuth emblem be restored, that Transylvania be given back to Hungary. (Romania is coming into the EU next year. That should be fun.)The star above the Parliament was put out and some of the demonstrators, sped to the various barracks where the soldiers opened the gates, enthusiastically burned flags or cut out the star from the middle, handed over rifles and joined the crowds outside. What had started as a student and workers’ demonstration with one of the best known actors reciting Sándor Petöfi’s famous poem “Arise Magyar” written for the 1848 Revolution, had, also, become a revolution.

For me it became obvious next morning when I was allowed to sleep in as school had clearly been cancelled. "What's happening?" – I asked when I found my mother in my room and the sun streaming in (which it never did at 7 o'clock). – "Is there a war on?" "No, a revolution." What a very odd idea, I thought. Revolutions happened in history. The rest of the day was spent in the hall/dining room that had no windows. My father tried to reach the radio, by first walking, then crawling across the sitting room to his study. The first attempt failed because an artillery gun was fired into the courtyard of the block of flats and the windows all shattered. The second attempt failed because another bout of firing caused the breaking of the chandeliers above him as he was crawling across the floor. The following morning we went down to the bomb shelter together with our neighbours from all the flats and stayed there until the 28th with my mother occasionally nipping upstairs to get some food or some clean clothes. Needless to say, the children thought it was great fun.

Then we went back and stayed in the flat with only my parents going out occasionally, including my father taking my grandmother eventually home. In the meantime we listened to the radio. The news consisted largely of speeches by Imre Nagy and, increasingly, by János Kádár, of no real interest to a young child. Much more enthralling were the messages from various people to their families and friends, trying to find out where everyone was. And the constant playing of the Kossuth Radio tune, the Kossuth Song.

My father told stories afterwards of the people he met and spoke to in those days before the tanks came back. There was a young lad, he remembered, who was hanging around the street with a rifle in his hands. My father stopped to chat and ask what he thought would happen. “Nothing to worry about,” – said the boy. – “We just have to hold out for a few days and then the UN will come in.” Every now and then I think of that boy and what might have happened to him. Did he survive? Did he go to prison? Did he escape to the West? Is he around now, gloomily surveying the present?

Then it was all over. One morning we were woken up long before dawn. My parents, who had clearly not slept at all, were fully dressed. My mother was busy dressing my brother and hurrying me into my clothes. My father was standing there in our room, carefully checking that he had all the right documents in the inside pocket of his suit jacket. We went back to the bomb shelter.

The Soviet tanks with many reinforcements were rolling back into the city.

COMMENT THREAD

Passing of a great man

Some of our readers might have heard the sad news of the death of Lord Harris of High Cross. Yes, yes, I know he was in his eighties but that does not alter the fact that his passing fills one with great sorrow both on the political and, in my case, personal level.

Ralph Harris was one of the people responsible for the intellectual underpinning of the Thatcherite revolution. His colleague, Arthur Seldon, died last year. (And, by a strange coincidence, I attended yesterday the memorial meeting for Sir Alfred Sherman, a somewhat more controversial figure but one whose achievements must not be overlooked. Lady Thatcher was present, looking fragile but well.) Sadly, that generation is going and we shall all be the poorer for it.

I have known Ralph since my teens (though he actually thought he had known me as a young child) as my father attended the IEA lunches in the late sixties and early seventies, when their ideas were generally considered to be a brand of harmless lunacy at best. Even in those days Ralph cultivated his persona of the Edwardian gentleman, hats, moustaches, waistcoats and walking sticks included.

What mattered above all was not his mannerism, not even his fantastically ebullient personality – nobody could ever forget Ralph even after a brief meeting – but his hard-headed approach to Britain’s problems.

Neither he nor Arthur Seldon would have been welcomed in the wishy-washy, condescendingly tory-toff Conservative Party of David Cameron. They would both have been horrified to hear that a Conservative Party leader could snootily dismiss the notion of choice in education for all. I can still remember Ralph Harris’s tones when he talked about that public school boy Anthony Crosland vowing to destroy “every f***ing grammar school”. [Apologies for the implied swearing – those are the words Crosland used.]

Ralph Harris came from a working class family in north London, went to a grammar school and thence to the University of Cambridge. He knew the importance of good education for people who wanted to rise and achieve; he, as well as Arthur Seldon, knew that the working classes had been perfectly capable of looking after themselves and their families; they knew how destructive the welfare state, imposed largely by do-gooding middle class politicians, been to working class families and, beyond that, to the whole of this country’s society.

When, in 1956, Antony Fisher decided that the best way to combat the prevailing socialist ideology of the time was to set up a think-tank that would generate ideas and argue the issues according to rigid intellectual principles, he recruited Ralph Harris from St Andrews University to be the new general director. Harris recruited Arthur Seldon to be the editorial director.

As John Blundell, the present General Director of the Institute of Economic Affairs put it:

Over the fireplace in the boardroom at 2 Lord North Street, the very room in which this conversation takes place, hang four framed photographic portraits. Top left is 1974 Nobel Laureate F. A. Hayek and top right is the entrepreneur Antony G. A. Fisher.

Below Hayek is his pupil Arthur Seldon and below Fisher is his protégé Ralph Harris. This arrangement is quite deliberate and many is the time in that room when, speaking about the IEA, I have, pointing up to all four great men and moving my finger clockwise from Hayek, said: ‘Hayek advises Fisher; Fisher recruits Harris; Harris meets Seldon. In nine words, that is the start of the IEA.’

Well, the rest is history, though it took a long time and a great deal of work for the ideas to seep through to the media, the political class and a sufficiently large part of the population to make some of them, at least, come true.

Ralph, himself, has always acknowledged that the battle has been only half-won, what with ever greater regulation being imposed on the privatized sector and no attempt to reform and transform the public sector. They won some of the battles of ideas but not others.

It was not in Ralph’s nature to rest on his laurels. He continued to be involved in IEA affairs even after he formally retired; he founded the Centre for Research into Communist Economies (now Centre for Research into Post-Communist Economies), which taught many of the East European reformers, continuing even now to provide them with intellectual backing; he founded and continued to be active in FOREST, the pro-smokers’ rights organization, speaking frequently on the subject in the House of Lords whither he had been sent by Margaret Thatcher in 1979 (typically, he chose to sit as a cross-bencher).

Perhaps, his greatest achievement after the founding of the IEA was the founding of the Bruges Group in 1989 to be an independent euro-sceptic think-tank. He was its first chairman and, as is his wont, continued to be interested in its affairs, turning up for meetings in his trilby and brandishing a walking stick.

After my father’s death I saw little of Ralph for several years. Then, in the early eighties I translated a book by Gorbachev’s economic adviser, Abel Aganbegyan, whom Ralph met in the Soviet Union. The book was called “Moving the Mountain”, which amused Ralph and his wife no end, as Mr Agabengyan himself resembles a mountain of no mean proportions.

The book was published to some notice and my own copies were put aside. Then one day I received a letter on House of Lords stationery from Lord Harris of High Cross. He had read the book, noted the name of the translator (a most unusual behaviour) and decided to get in touch.

We remained on friendly terms and fond as he was of my parents, he found it extraordinarily pleasing to be working or, at least, discussing work with me, especially in the Bruges Group. Ralph had been in favour of the Common Market in the sixties, seeing in it the salvation for Britain’s sclerotic, socialist economy. As time went on and the supposed free market failed to materialize and as the European project came to resemble ever more that hated socialist system, he became more and more euro-sceptic, favouring speedy withdrawal and a rebuilding of Britain.

This summer Ralph introduced the Bruges Group meeting, which I then chaired, at which Jim Bennett, author of “The Anglosphere Challenge” and founder of the Anglosphere Institute spoke. Ralph was beside himself with excitement at the new (and sometimes not so new) ideas he was listening to. He explained that he fully intended to read and study the subject as he had not really thought about these various matters before quite in those terms.

Nothing could sum up Ralph Harris better than this excitement when faced with new ideas, new concepts at an age when many people feel that they deserve a rest and after a life-time of achievement.

The last time I saw Ralph was just a few weeks ago, also at a Bruges Group meeting, when Andrew Roberts (another stalwart Anglospherist) spoke about his latest book, “The History of the English Speaking Peoples Since 1900”. True to himself, Ralph was the first in the queue for the book (though he sent me off to get him a glass of wine, just as he would enquire minutely at CRCE meetings about the food on the table and ask me to fill his plate with all the nicest things).

And this morning he died, seemingly of a heart attack. Our feelings go out to his wife, Josie, and his family. We shall not see his like again.

The great disconnect

There has been a modicum of excitement on the blogosphere of late, with the arrival of a brash new kid on the block in the form of the UK's first and only internet television station dedicated entirely to politics.

Rejoicing in the name 18 Doughty Street, an opportunity to test this new genre came today with the release of an interview from the previous evening. This was between one of the station founders, Tim Montgomerie, and shadow secretary of state for defence Liam Fox in an extended discussion lasting – with a pre-made video insert - a full 42 minutes.

If this service is going to have any value at all, it is precisely its ability to devote considerable more time to unfashionable politicians than is afforded by the main broadcast networks. It can offer a "soft" format, unconstrained by the time limits normally imposed, giving the interviewee every opportunity to put over that which he or she wishes to present. And this is without the filter of the hard-edged media personality who is more concerned with creating an entertainment experience than in gleaning information.

Obviously, there must be something more to this than simply sitting politicians in the corner of a set, pointing cameras at them and letting them talk. For an interview to make sense and convey interest, it must have a shape. Thus the guiding mind of the interviewer is still massively important.

Whether the format succeeds, though, is a little bit difficult to judge on the basis on one interview on one subject, in the early days of the experiment. Looking at it as objectively as one can, the test on this particular occasion – where the shadow secretary of state for defence was being interviewed – was to determine whether the man knew anything about defence, and whether his ideas on that subject were credible.

More to the point, it could be argued, the real measure of a successful interview would be whether a non-expert observer could adduce from the line of questioning that Liam Fox was credible and knew what he was talking about – or not as the case may be.

Under the guidance of Tim Montgomerie, it has to be said that we heard a great deal about Fox's ideas on fuel security and how there is a convergence between defence and environmental policy - in that reducing our need for oil and increasing energy security is a Good Thing. Liam, we learned, will even send you a leaflet on this, called "over a barrel".

However, when it came to a discussion on defence, one has to say that we are not very much further forward. This may be a reflection of the fact that Liam Fox does not know very much about defence, but it cannot be said that this emerged during his interview. He simply was not asked.

Call me pedantic if you will, but if you are asking a potential defence minister about his plans in a new government, and you actually have troops engaged in a shooting war, then you would tend to ask him a few details about this. You would ask about defence objectives, force numbers required to achieve those objectives, and the force structures, equipment and broad strategy. You would ask this specifically in terms of Afghanistan, in terms of Iraq and then more generally in terms of what a defence minister might want and expect his armed forces to do.

Here in fact was the great disconnect. Armed forces are extraordinarily task-orientated but, to achieve any of their tasks, they need quite specific structures and equipment, and the numbers of men and women on the ground.

As to Iraq, we went into the invasion – the war phase – with an armoured division designed and equipped to fight a Cold War enemy, against a conventional, badly equipped, disorganised and unmotivated enemy. We then took on a counterinsurgency / policing task, against a formidable, highly motivated and increasingly sophisticated enemy, for which our troops were (and are) inadequate in numbers, ill equipped, ill trained and poorly motivated.

But did we get any detail from Mr Fox as to what force structures, equipment, etc, he would want for troops in Iraq … or in Afghanistan, or to guard our trade or energy routes? Did he have a view on the largest and most expensive procurement programme ever devised for the Army, the £14 billion Future Rapid Effects System? Did we learn whether that was the right move?

On a broader level, should we have an air-portable Rapid Reaction Force at all, for which FRES is designed, or should we be thinking more in terms of long-term counterinsurgency campaigns and nation rebuilding? Should we be going ahead with the Joint Strike Fighter? Do we need two new aircraft carriers? How many destroyers and frigates do we need? How many more assault ships? Should we continue with the Eurofighter, and what other aircraft does the RAF need?

OK… I think you can guess that none of those details emerged from 18 Doughty Street. Should Tim have sought to elucidate them? Well, it would have been interesting if he had tried – it would have been even more interesting had he succeeded. But he did not try.

Am I expecting too much… being too demanding? I don’t know, but if operations like Doughty Street, with all the access and all the time in the world, don't ask these sort of questions, is there any point of having them?

COMMENT THREAD

Another patronising, holier-than-thou post

There was something close approaching joy in the EU Referendum household this morning at the sight of The Daily Telegraph with its front page headline declaring: "Navy 'too weak' for big role in Korea blockade".

Not, as you will appreciate, was there any comfort to be gained from the message. But the very fact that a British newspaper has actually noticed something like this and is able to detach itself from its feminine side long enough to report it on the front page is indeed something to celebrate.

Equally, one took considerable enjoyment from the leader – something almost of a throwback to the days of Empire, the headline trumpeting: "Britain's obligation to blockade North Korea".

And then… what a wonderful opening line: "If you want to engage in gunboat diplomacy, it helps to have some gunboats."

How true. How so very true.

Thus says the newly-masculine Telegraph, Britain has been in the vanguard of those pressing for sanctions on North Korea after its detonation of a nuclear device. And "now that the UN Security Council has authorised those sanctions, it falls to us to assist in their enforcement in any way we can, in particular via a blockade of North Korean trade."

Yup… go with that – and with the next bit:

…just as the Army has been starved of the resources to do its job in Iraq and Afghanistan, so there are serious question marks over whether the Navy is equipped for this task. Since Labour came to power in 1997, the Navy has lost a third of its ships. We should be able to rustle up a couple of frigates or destroyers, a submarine, even an aircraft carrier.

The trouble is that the paper seems to lose it a bit – it goes on to say:

But as the Sea Harrier was withdrawn from service earlier this year, and its replacement does not arrive until 2013, those ships will be defenceless against missile fire. Unless our fleet shelters under the protection of the French or the Americans, its air defences are pitiful; were the Falklands crisis to recur today, our task force would be sunk before ever sighting Port Stanley.

Gone are the days of Desmond Wettern, when a Daily Telegraph correspondent was regarded as a world authority on naval issues. We are now reduced to this abysmal degree of ignorance. And ignorance it is – this is not "techie" pedantry: there is no way a Sea Harrier was ever and could ever be considered as part of a missile defence – it is (was) an air superiority fighter and its role would only be (as in the Falklands) to intercept enemy aircraft. Whether it could handle North Korean Mig 29s is another matter.

Furthermore, in any fleet, an aircraft carrier is an extremely vulnerable and attractive missile target and, therefore, far from contributing to missile defences, requires the deployment of considerable assets to protect it from attack.

One can see the point the Telegraph is trying to make though. The news piece sets it out:

…senior navy officers expressed deep concern about their ability to defend their ships against a hostile missile or fighter threat after a decision was enforced six months ago to scrap the Sea Harrier fighter. As a result of government cutbacks any British ships deployed to the South China Sea to enforce the UN resolution would depend on the American or French navies to provide "beyond visual range" air defence with their aircraft carriers.

The Navy has been cut by almost a third since Labour came into power, and the admission by Royal Navy commanders that they were struggling to find suitable ships to deploy to the UN force will raise further questions about the Labour government's handling of the armed forces' budget. Britain's military commitments to Iraq and North Korea have exposed glaring deficiencies in resources and equipment.

Thus do we get "defence correspondent" Thomas Harding citing a "naval officer", writing: "… without the Sea Harriers the ships will be vulnerable to attack if there are no US Navy Aegis class ships in the area. … The Fleet will not have adequate air defence until the first Type 45 destroyer enters service in three years."

This then allows the newspaper leader-writer, by way of a conclusion, to twitter: "It will be a disgrace if Labour's neglect of our Armed Forces renders us unable to play our part."

But I must stop doing this - dismissing Harding and his ragbag of fellow hacks as intellectual pygmies. One must not be so arrogant or opinionated. It is totally unreasonable to expect newspaper writers to know anything of what they are writing.

Far be it for me to point out, therefore, that the Type 45 Destroyers (or their equivalent) would have been with us years ago but for the er… Conservative government’s obsession with trying to develop a common European frigate - the ill-fated Horizon project.

One must not say that they are also grossly over-priced and that this is entirely due to the insistence on fitting European missile systems. Nor must one note what we got from Mr Thomas bloody Harding on the day of the first Type 45 launch. We simply must not remind people that he trilled that the Type 45 was a 'quantum leap forward' for the Navy, faithfully reproducing the MoD press release, almost to the letter.

My critical piece, incidentally, was headed, "A retreat from defence", commenting on the inadequacies of British journalists, but I now realise that this was simply unwarranted arrogance.

All this is behind me now. Mr Harding is a Great Man and the Wondrous Daily Telegraph has now pronounced that the reason we are short of ships is entirely the fault of the Labour Party. Who am I to disagree with that, or even mention that, had the Conservative Party gained power at the last election, things might not have been any different?

Me, I'm just an ignorant blogger.

COMMENT THREAD

Before defeat becomes a rout

There is a certain child-like naïveté to the media coverage of General Dannett's remarks which has now run unabated for two days, taking pole position in The Sunday Times this morning.

If one was to see such quality in coursework offered by sixth form pupils, though, one would smile indulgently and take the time out to correct it. But we are not dealing with a sixth form here so much as a situation where the children have taken over and there is no grown-up in a position to set them straight.

Without such guidance, the media narrative has settled on this being an instance of, variously a "brave", "honest", "blunt" soldier – even now a "soldier's soldier" who has courageously "told the truth" about the problems in Iraq. He is even described as having "put a rocket up the politicians who were making life hell for his beleaguered troops", thus leaving Tony Blair variously "battered" and attempting to "play down the rift", with the government "engulfed in a firestorm".

Some hacks write about "damage limitation", others applaud Dannatt's candour while others, with all the pomposity and gravitas that their platform affords them, are calling for his resignation.

This is absolutely classic of the "biff-bam", soap opera, personality-driven style of news reporting that we have to suffer these days, where everything is reduced by these intellectual pygmies to its most basic elements and then expressed in one-dimensional terms with all the subtlety and depth of a Tom and Jerry cartoon.

What none of these prattling children even begin to do, though, is examine – much less evaluate – the issues to which Dannatt spoke. And, in endorsing his call for a "phased extraction", the neglect of years is returning to haunt them. Atrophied through years of under-use, their limited brains are quite unable to grasp that the UK is already in the process of withdrawal from Iraq and is seeking to complete the process as fast as is politically and humanly possible.

That is the missing element – the spectre at the feast. It has been brought about by the fact that the British Army is not and has not been for some time up to the task of maintaining order in Southern Iraq. The "best soldiers in the world" are very far from the best – and not even "good enough". That we have, "the best Army in the world" comes from exactly the same stable as, "our NHS is the envy of the world" – with about as much foundation.

Like every other British employer, the Army is struggling with the aftermath of the collapse in the education system, having to deal with recruits of low educational attainment at a time when the technical demands on individual soldiers are increasing.

With competition from other industries, an increasingly unmilitaristic society and the relative poor pay and conditions, it is also having the greatest difficulty recruiting (and keeping) good officers, a situation only temporarily ameliorated by the influx of high quality females attracted by gender equality provisions.

And, if manpower is often of poor quality and insufficient in numbers, so is much of the equipment - as we have recorded on this blog – a great deal of it dangerously so. Furthermore, equipment which could or should be available has either not been thought of, is thought unnecessary or is simply too expensive.

A defeatist attitude amongst British forces is now evident, witness the incident on 3 October when a British soldier was killed and another seriously injured after three mortar shells landed inside the Shaat al-Arab Hotel base in Basra. Rather than any determination to avenge colleagues, what was particularly chilling was the almost off-hand way that British Army spokesman, Major Charlie Burbridge, was cited as saying, "It is a major challenge to stop these sorts of attacks."

Yet, challenge though it might be, it is by no means impossible. Faced with the same problem, the US Marines have developed lightweight counter-mortar radar which can be used to detect incoming rounds and direct helicopters or other assets to deal with the terrorists.

Yet that is simply not an option for the British. Even if they had the radar, they have neither the helicopters nor the rapid armoured vehicles that they would need to combat this threat. Instead, they must take the casualties and hope that, in due course, it will all end.

What is perfectly illustrated by this example is that equipment (and manpower) inadequacies have a significant effect on the tactics adopted – for the very simple reason that certain options require certain equipment - and thence morale and capability. Lacking the necessary (much less desirable) equipment, tactics are often inferior, capabilities are limited and morale falls as a result.

But there is also a peculiarly British arrogance in this theatre where commanders have mistakenly believed that skills acquired in Belfast and other public order operations are necessarily transferable to Iraq, slowing down and sometimes completely inhibiting the development of more appropriate (and effective), theatre-specific tactics.

All of this means that the British Army in Iraq is the next best thing to a failing organisation. You do not need to be the Chief of General Staff to realise that its continued presence will serve only to exacerbate the security situation – and expose British troops to continued casualties. But that is the situation into which General Sir Richard Dannett – as professional head of the Army (its chief uniformed bureaucrat) – has walked.

The degree to which the situation has deteriorated is well illustrated by this BBC report and this local report. With the British roundly having been accused of causing the chaos and the security decline in southern Iraq, especially Basra, by their leniency with the militias and their parties, no one believes the sitation is recoverable. The British presence is simply no longer desired.

Knowing that his Army is not up to the job in Iraq and that the government is neither willing nor able to provide the men and material necessary for it to improve its performance - even if that was possible - Dannatt's only option is withdrawal. And not only does he know this – the government knows it and agrees. Furthermore, the decision to withdraw was made some time ago (when, precisely, we do not know, as the policy change was never announced), so Dannatt's difficulties lie not with the government but elsewhere.

Arguably, Dannatt's central, professional problem is how to extract the Army from Iraq in one piece, without the catastrophic loss of morale that would accompany an enforced withdrawal or open defeat. His public problem, therefore, is how to dress a defeat up as – if not a victory – "a job well done", giving sufficient of a figleaf for the Army to walk away without too much immediate loss of face.

If you thus read his statements, from a military point of view, what he is saying is nonsense. Troops being present, doing their job, will invite a hostile reaction. That is both necessary and welcome in the normal run of things as it is only by provoking the enemy can you bring him to battle and defeat him.

But Dannatt has no intention of even trying to defeat the enemy so, by declaring the obvious, he is simply attempting to create a public climate where withdrawal is seen, on the one hand, to be operationally desirable and, on the other, not as a retreat or a defeat. That is where the media have probably made their biggest error. Somehow, they seem to believe that Dannatt is talking through them to the politicians. They cannot seem to cope with the possibility that he is using them to talk to the wider media as well as the public.

If that is why a Chief of the Defence Staff is talking to the media then, despite the spluttering of Charles Moore and Matthew Parris, he will remain in office. It will show that he knows – as does the government – that he has to get his troops out before a defeat becomes a rout.

COMMENT THREAD

What is it going to take?

One of the most egregious long-term failures of our media (and some of our domestic politicians) must surely be their complete inability to come to terms with the EU's Galileo satellite navigation system.

Not only has it failed to pursue the question of why we need an expensive duplicate system, when the US has committed to providing its own "Navstar" GPS entirely free of charge, but it has also faithfully parroted the EU mantra that Galileo is a "civilian system under civilian control".

Even without evidence to the contrary, though, it is self evident that GPS is a dual-use system – it has both civil and military applications. Furthermore, since the sharp end of each satellites is simply nothing more than a transmitter, the actual function of the system is user defined. Although fitted with the same equipment, a red truck with a blue flashing light rushing to a fire may be civilian while a green truck filled with men with guns rushing off to a fire-fight is a military application.

That Galileo does have many military applications (some of which are illustrated, left and right) has considerable political implications. Yet, even though the French defence minister, Michèle Alliot-Marie, confirmed as early as December 2004 that the system had military applications that the French intended to use, the media has largely stuck to the legend that it is a civilian system.

As time has progressed, however, it has become increasingly clear that the business model on which Galileo is based is unlikely to recover anything like the original investment and, two years ago it was clearly evident that the economics would be largely dependent on the spin-offs from arm sales.

Add to that the partner nations, which include China, India, Ukraine and Russia (the latter doing deals for hi-tech military equipment with EADS) and the possibilities for mischief are endless, especially as there is no effective politico-military control system within the EU that could mirror the US system and keep Galileo out of enemy hands. In that sense, the fact that it is a "civilian" rather than (originally) a military system – like "Navstar" is a disadvantage.

With the EU now warning that costs are "spiralling out of control" – all the indications short of certainty are that the military dimension will play a larger and much more important part in the development of the system

Thus, when one finds as of 12 October that EU transport commissioner Jacques "Wheel" Barrot - nominally in charge of Galileo development – has been telling a conference in open session that although, "Galileo was supposed to be a civilian system… I wonder whether we shouldn't question that," this is highly significant

"Using it for military purposes, for defence purposes ... would be very interesting in terms of paying for the infrastructure and the investment," he says, affirming that which we have been maintaining all along – that it is essential to the economics of the programme.

As we have written, unrestricted military application of the Galileo system has massive implications, not least for our relations with the United States and our Nato partnership. Thus, at this stage, where it now becoming clearly evident that there is a military dimension to the system, one would have thought that the MSM would now be taking an interest and kicking off a debate.

But, to date, there has been nothing. Surely, though, there must come a point when this can no longer be put down to the innate stupidity and ignorance of the MSM hacks, and one has to look to something more profound to explain their inertia? Whatever that might be, it is certainly germane to ask what is it going to take for them to take an interest in such a vital matter?

COMMENT THREAD

Nobel prizes, Turkey and France

It would appear that the Norwegian Nobel Committee shares this blog’s view that there is something farcical about the whole idea of a peace prize. Let us recall the citation. The prize is to be awarded to

the person who shall have done the most or the best work for fraternity among nations, for the abolition or reduction of standing armies and for the holding and promotion of peace congresses.

Well, failing such luminaries of peace congresses as SecGen Annan, Jimmy Carter or Bill Clinton, the committee decided on someone who has actually achieved something though not, perhaps, anything to do with the citation.

This year’s Nobel Peace Prize went to

Bangladeshi Muhammad Yunus and the Grameen Bank for their efforts to help "create economic and social development from below" in their home country by using innovative economic programs such as microcredit lending.

Microbanking may well be a very helpful development. Certainly, in that it emphasises individual entrepreneurship, private property and fiscal responsibility rather than feckless claims of aid money, it has a sense of purpose. One could even argue, as the Nobel committee did:

Lasting peace cannot be achieved unless large population groups find ways to break out of poverty.

Since NGO activity and large amounts of aid money are guaranteed to keep people in poverty we look forward to a complete ban of peace prizes or, indeed, any kind of prizes to those organizations. Nevertheless, we cannot help feeling that there is a certain desperation about the award. Best they can do, I suppose.

Meanwhile, I have to acknowledge to have been wrong in my prediction about the Literature Prize. The award went to a man who is reasonably well known, though it is not clear how many people have read him outside Turkey. Furthermore, Orhan Pamuk does not appear to be an anti-American ranter but a man who has tried to think hard and write about the complicated history of Turkey and her even more complicated present and future.Still, as the International Herald Tribune put it rather delicately:

The Swedish Academy never offers nonliterary reasons for its choices and presents itself as being uninfluenced by politics. But last year's winner, the British playwright Harold Pinter, is a prominent critic of the British and American governments, and the academy does not appear to be immune to the political implications of its decisions.

"You're beginning to notice a certain sensitivity to trends - they are giving the prize as a symbolic statement for one thing or another," Arne Ruth, former editor in chief of the daily newspaper Dagens Nyheter, said in an interview. Of Pamuk, he said: "He is a symbol of the relationship between Europe and Turkey, and they couldn't have overlooked this when they made their choice."

Pamuk, who said in 2004 that he had begun "to get involved in a sort of political war against the Turkish state and the establishment," is spending a semester teaching at Columbia University in New York. Nationalist Turks have not forgiven Pamuk for an interview last year in which he denounced the mass killing of Armenians by the Ottoman Empire in World War I. He narrowly escaped prosecution after the remarks were deemed anti-Turkish and a group of nationalists began a criminal case against him.

Pamuk is one of those who calls the 1915 massacre genocide, something the Turkish government refuses to do (possibly because it does not want to start paying out compensation to descendants of victims and survivors).

Interestingly enough, this is an issue that will go on being discussed in Europe as the question of whether Turkey should ever be a member of the EU continues to haunt Europe as the spectre of Communism once did.

The Trib sees it as a coincidence that

on Thursday, one house of the French Parliament approved a law making it a crime to deny that the Turkish killing of Armenians from 1915 to 1917 constituted genocide.

Furthermore,

the Armenian foreign minister, Vartan Oskanian, praised what he said were Pamuk's courageous words about the past, in a statement that was bound to irritate Turkey.

One can see why many Turks might feel that the prize was not given on the basis of literary merit only, though many others must feel rather proud that one of their writers is being acknowledged in the West.

What of that new French law, then?

Well, France had decided that the massacres should be called genocide back in 2001. What the new law that, so far, has passed only the lower chamber and still needs to get through the Senate, says that it will actually be a crime to deny that this was genocide.

According to the legislation that was carried by 106 votes to 19, anyone denying the genocide would be sentenced to one year in prison and ordered to pay a 45,000-euro (56,570 U.S. dollars) fine.

Armenia has expressed herself to be delighted with this development while Turkey is extremely annoyed. To be expected, both of those reactions. The EU has also voiced reservations.

"If this law were to indeed enter into force, it would prohibit the debate and the dialogue which is necessary for reconciliation on this issue," said a commission spokeswoman.

This was the enlargement spokeswoman, Krisztina Nagy, who happens to be Hungarian. She also expressed the view that historical events should not be decided by lawyers and legislators but by historians. Exactly what we said about Holocaust-denying.

The EU’s main concern at the moment is the relationship with Turkey and how it will reflect on possible accession negotiations. But there is a certain irony here. Orhan Pamuk was threatened with prosecution and possible imprisonment because he has insisted on calling the massacre genocide. If the French law goes through, anyone who denies that it was genocide will be prosecuted and imprisoned. A neat balance, one might say.

President Chirac has also realized that the Armenian issue is a good one to flaunt if he wants to keep Turkey out of the EU. A couple of weeks ago he went to Armenia and made much of the fact that this was only the second CIS country he has visited after Russia.

While some of his Armenian hosts thought the visit showed their country’s growing regional importance, others were a little less impressed and wondered about the real reason.

"Judging by the deeds and the words of Jacques Chirac [during the visit], his thoughts were in neighboring Turkey rather than in Armenia," commented former Armenian Foreign Minister Aleksander Arzumanian in a 6 October interview with the Russian newspaper Izvestia. "And this is understandable, as now serious problems have emerged between united Europe and Turkey."

Mr Arzumanian’s understanding of what is going on in Europe seems to be lacking in substance and subtlety if he thinks that there is such a thing as a “united Europe”, but, at least, he has grasped that Chirac’s thinking is somewhat tortuous. Other commentators have gone even further:

Other analysts see regional issues as motivating the French president’s trip. A desire to compete with Russia and, maybe, the United States for influence in the South Caucasus could be one explanation, said David Hovhannisian, a political scientist and former Armenian ambassador to Syria. Chirac is also interested in Iran, Armenia’s southern neighbor and a longtime ally, with an eye to participation in infrastructure and non-military nuclear projects, Hovhannisian added. Armenian Foreign Minister Vartan Oskanian told reporters after Chirac left that the French president "was very interested to learn" President Kocharian’s opinion about Iran’s nuclear capabilities.

Richard Giragossian, a Washington-based political scientist, however, argued during a public lecture in Yerevan on 5 October that France’s influential Armenian community rather than any geopolitical factors prompted the trip. This opinion was partly shared by the 168 Zham daily, which said that the visit had acted as "triple PR" - for Chirac himself, for Kocharian and for Armenia, which used the opportunity to tout the country as a foreign investment destination. The trip included a concert for 100,000 in downtown Yerevan by French crooner Charles Aznavour, the son of Armenian immigrants.

Whenever l’escroc Chirac decides to tout France as a power that might compete with the United States and, in this case, Russia, one has to ask oneself whatever happened to the common foreign and security policy.

Whichever way one looks at it, we are likely to hear a good deal more from France on the subject of those massacres (woops, sorry, genocide). Whether the French politicians really care one way or another is something else again.

Get some professionals in

Over on Purple Scorpion is an interesting commentary on one of the latest developments in the long-running sage of the REACH directive. It is one of several pieces on the general issue of EU regulation, a theme also developed by Tim Worstall, with some interesting comments on his post.

Taking in our posts on the subject (here and here) this means that the blogosphere is making the running on a crucial issue which, so far, has had only very limited exposure in the MSM.

On an entirely unrelated issue, the blog Winds of change points up a study from a Canadian military think tank. This is on the fascinating subject of blast-resistant vehicles, written in such a way as to be accessible to the non-technical reader and thereby illustrating the broader relevance of the issue.

If we had a halfway decent media, that is precisely the sort of thing we would be seeing in our newspapers and on television, and be hearing on the radio. But, instead, we get low-grade superficialities such as that which we reported earlier or the banal trivialities in which the media now seem to excel.

How interesting it is, therefore, to have the Daily Telegraph's Shane Richmond quoting a fellow hack telling us that, "informed opinion is everything - as opposed to the largely uninformed opinion that the ranks of citizen journalists, can through no fault of their own, provide".

This is also a newspaper which is investing heavily in its electronic services, running a stable of corporate blogs as a means of dealing with the challenge of the internet. But, instead of exploiting the freedom of the medium which actually allows you to put up more detailed, discursive posts, with cross links to other sites and with multiple pictures and diagrams, the paper has gone the other way, homing in on the superficial, the trivial and the personal.

Critical though I am of British bloggers, this low-grade material typifies and illustrates all that is wrong with the MSM. Furthermore, although none of these "clogs" has its own "hit counter", the number of comments and referrals from links are low, suggesting that traffic is way below the newspaper's expectations. And, if they did not have the umbrella of the brand on which to rely, I suspect that many of them would be struggling to get their daily hit rates into double figures.

Effectively, what this tends to confirm is precisely the theme of my previous piece. Within the MSM, we are not dealing with any great conspiracy to shape the news agenda. More likely, we are suffering the attentions of a bunch of feckless amateurs who are totally out of their depth when it comes to serious issues. And it is not going to get better until they get some professionals in.

COMMENT THREAD

The march of the amateurs

We have spent considerable time chuntering that the MSM does not give any space to defence procurement. Now, however, equipping the armed forces is at last on the agenda and we are beginning to see some articles on the issue. But, if the Guardian is any guide, they might as well not bother.

In a piece headed, "British military bites the bullet", with Mark Oliver asking, "Is the British military underfunded, or just spending badly," we find that the years of ignoring the subject, combined with the inherent ignorance and laziness of the MSM, produces something so distorted it is hardly worth reading.

The one thing Oliver does not do is answer his own question - to which the answer is "yes" - yes, it is underfunded and it (or the MoD) is spending badly. But there is a strong European element to the mis-spending, which The Guardian does not even begin to address (although it does mention the Eurofighter and the Type 45 Destroyers), so I thought it would be helpful to put together some examples of Euro-wastage. These are just some of them:

The joint US/UK Tracer/FSCS programme to develop a tracked armoured reconnaissance vehicle. For the British Army, this was to replace the ageing Scimitar CV(R)T. However, the MoD pulled out in 2000 before the first prototype was ready in order to pursue a European project, losing at least £131 million for absolutely no gain.

The Future Command and Liaison Vehicle - the "Panther": Italian-built at a cost of £413,000 each, these supposedly carry out some of the roles of "Tracer" (above) but are useless for patrolling or other functions in either Afghanistan or Iraq. The cost of £166 million for 401 vehicles is, therefore, dead money.

The "Cobra" anti-battery radar - high tech equipment for detecting the source of artillery shells, mortars and rockets. German-built, 10 sets were procured at £17.8 million each. Buying US-built "Firefinder" systems at less than £10 million each would have saved £82 million, giving the Army a perfectly acceptable anti-artillery capability.

The "Trigat" projects - medium and long-range anti-tank missiles. British participation in these European projects (appropriately, developed by "Euromissile") cost us over £314 million before we had to pull out after the systems failed to deliver, leaving the MoD with a total loss. A rush purchase of US-built Javelin missiles had to be made to equip the Army.

The Multi-Role Armoured Vehicle (MRAV) project, named the "Boxer" - a joint German, Dutch and British venture, managed as a European project. The MoD pulled out after the vehicle proved too big and too heavy for the RAF's fleet of Hercules transports, with a total loss to the defence budget of £48 million.

The MoD has spent (or has committed) £1045 million to developing Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), first the Phoenix - losing £345 million - and now the Watchkeeper, to be built by the French-owned Thales company. Yet, despite this extraordinary expenditure, the MoD has no UAV capability in theatre and is having to spend upwards of £60 million on buying/leasing US Predator UAVs. Had we bought proven US systems in the first place, we might have saved more than £400 million.

The MoD has bought 22 of these European Westland-Augusta Merlin HC3 transport helicopters. Working out the purchase price is near impossible but at an estimated £30 million each, US equivalents would have been less than half-price. alternatively, the RAF could have bought Chinooks at £25 million each, saving £110 million in total and considerably more on maintenance, the Merlins currently exceeding expected maintenance costs by over 200 percent.

At over £60 million each, these Eurofighter aircraft are an acknowledged Cold War relic. Although rated highly as an inteceptor, current versions have no ground attack capability. US-built F-16s, an adequate fighter with a proven ground attack capability would have cost in the order of £20 million each. With 232 on order, notionally, the MoD could have saved upwards of £10 billion.

Not only the aircraft but also the weapons - the European-designed Storm Shadow air-launched cruise missile costs an amazing £1,000,000 each - for what is effectively a 1,000lb bomb. Having bought 900 of them, the MoD could have saved over £830 million if it had purchased the US equivalent, the JASSM.

The Eurofighter is also to be equipped with European-designed air-to-air missiles. These are known as the Meteor. With the total costs at over £1.4 billion, purchase of US-designed Raytheon missiles (which are being bought anyway as a stop-gap, until the Meteor is ready) would have saved the MoD some £900 million.

In the rush for European harmonisation, the MoD joined with the French and Italians on the "Horizon" programme for a common frigate. Formalised in 1992, the UK eventually pulled out in April 1999 after failure to agree a common specification and complaints of "unfocused management", with an estimated loss of £537 million, leaving the French and Italians to continue with the project.

Co-operation did not end with the Horizon project. Although the MoD decided to go it alone with the platform, emerging as the Type 45 Destroyer, the ship is equipped with European-designed missile launchers and missiles, which largely account for the huge cost of £1 billion per ship, some £400 million more than the Australians are paying for the more capable US-designed Arleigh Burke class missile destroyers. With five ships now planned, that is a saving of £2 billion.

For the Type 23 anti-submarine frigates, we developed our own type 2087 sonar, at £9 million per set. But the development costs were an additional £300 million, given as a free gift to the French company which bought up the UK manufacturer, leaving it free to sell cut-price versions to the French Navy. Had we bought from the Americans, we could have saved that £300 million.

And finally, the EU's Galileo satellite navigation system. By the time it is fully operational, the UK will have paid £400 million towards its development and commissioning costs - the system being then used to underpin the European Rapid Reaction Force. But the US "Navstar" GPS is already available - and free of charge. The £400 million is a total waste of money for a duplicate system.

Putting these all together - but excluding the Eurofighter costs, which are a special case - the excess payments, for no gain whatsoever, come to £8.8 billion. That is considerably more than is spent in any one year on procurement. That would buy a ridiculous 35,000 RG-31 mine protected vehicles or 350 Chinook helicopters.

That is the measure of the wastage on European projects and, the amazing thing is, the MSM can't even begin to work it all out. Read the Guardian piece and see how amateur Mr Oliver really is.

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