Blogoir

Ever wondered why so much human activity is a bit ... odd?

Now we know.

A thoughtful reader writes:

There is one issue that occasionally troubles me.  It is quite obvious in politics and senior positions elsewhere, that leaders cannot have a grasp of everything.  Thus they must trust to their judgement on whom to believe on particular issues. 

This is particularly important on issues where the informed consensus (or its self-professed members) have not got it right, either totally or in significant part.  I think here of issues such as Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming (CAGW).  Eventually, any wrong consensus must break; how can that be made to happen sooner?

So, how is it best for leaders to decide whom to believe, on matters beyond their personal detailed competence (and also those where there is not time to learn up on the whole issue)?

Very good questions.

In the British system at least, our leaders rely upon a combination of formal and informal advice.

On the formal side there are the posts of Chief Scientific Adviser, Chief Medical Officer and so on -- senior experts tasked with making sure that top levels of government have the best possible scientific/technical advice available. As well as that, individual Departments also may have in-house experts in science, economics and other specialist fields.

Leaders also likely to have a range of senior outside experts upon whom they call now and again to get a feel of the ebb and flow of debate as seen by clever people not within the system.

Plus, of course, individual experts may well send in their suggestions and complaints about official policy; a well-written letter from a senior expert sent to the Prime Minister will require an answer served up by the Whitehall system as a whole, and the fact that the letter has been read so widely down the policy chain itself acts to keep people on their toes and not take conventional wisdom for granted.

Beyond all that lies the hullabaloo of democracy. Think-tanks, commercial research organisations, scientists working for large corporations, amateur enthusiasts and energetic bloggers: they are all whirring away to get their points across in one way or the other. Letters to government ministers and/or MPs make an impact in this sense. The official system has to keep alert to public thinking and concern, whether it wants to do so or not.

All that said, no leader can take into much of this stuff. At the high policy levels knowledge declines steeply and instinct kicks in. The more so since the issues leaders in fact focus on may not be the issues under discussion.

Take the Copenhagen Climate Summit. The assembled armies of climate NGOs and lobbyists seemed to think that the issue was all about "climate change". But as the conference end-game loomed quite different priorities emerged for the key leaders concerned, namely their own reputations and how their own countries might best jostle for position in the new global order. Hence the ensuing fiasco.

Climate Change is perhaps the classic example of policy area where it is impossible to pull together an expert consensus. Partly because the science itself is so complicated. But more importantly because expertise is required from so many different areas and such long timescales are involved. Not to forget the enormous financial and other costs needed to change course in any way which counts.

Sir David King previously was the British government's Chief Scientific Adviser, and a prominent voice calling for Action to deal with CAGW. I myself lost faith in his judgement over his emotional reaction to unwelcome facts in a completely unrelated area.

How does a consensus break down? Depends what you mean by consensus.

Even if a large bloc of scientific opinion takes one view, public opinion may not take the same view. This in fact is a genuinely difficult area for leaders. On the one hand, they are being given credible expert advice pointing clearly in one direction. On the other, they know that if they move in that direction they are likely to lose votes.

The Climategate episode exemplifies this dilemma, albeit in a not unhelpful way in that it points to the need for much greater transparency and integrity in scientific process -- in a world of highly networked collective intelligence, the days of a small elite telling us all what to do and think our numbered. I hope.

Conclusion?

Leaders are no different from the rest of us. They sit in an office having little idea of what is going on down the corridor, let alone further afield.

Perhaps the greatest challenge they face is not mastering scientific briefs, but rather avoiding the temptation constantly to be "doing something" when each and every problem appears.

Over at Business and Politics is my latest piece, on the BP oil disaster in the Gulf of Mexico.

It looks in a roundabout way at issues of information flow, risk management and 'corporate culture':

Perhaps our hard-pressed rig operator makes the mistake of fact, misinterpreting the information being pushed to him by all the safety systems. Maybe he makes a mistake of judgement: he reads and analyses all information intelligently, but decides to take a decision which makes everything far worse.

In either case it is possible that the decision taken would not lead to disaster, had it not been for an underground factor previously undiscovered or not identified as likely to cause extra risk. In other words, the operator was doing his best at the very frontier of scientific knowledge, but that frontier itself was just not good enough.

Of such tiny subtleties are vast calamities made. Lawyers can not wait to get their hands on these problems in any subsequent enquiry or lawsuit. Anyone facing extended cross-examination by a wily barrister over split-second judgement calls is likely to end up sounding, looking and feeling confused or foolish...

My piece at the Independent on the outcome of the Ejup Ganic trial in London provokes the usual flurry of comments:

Mr Crawford is one of the morons that manipulated both US and UK foreign policy towards Bosnia in the 1990s. As an officer in the NATO force that arrived in Bosnia in 1995 I can say, unequivocally, the Bosnian muslims were just as much criminals as their Serbian and Croatian counterparts. It is time to start punishing their leadership as well. The Ganic story is not over.

What about those poor conscripts who have been burnt down by
thugs who call themselves ,,Bosnian Army,,? Do they deserve justice?No?And why? Because,they were Serbs.How unfortunate. How much did you get paid for your ,,opinion,,? Lunch? Shame on you!

Appalling! His excellency, the former ambassador Crawford (to Serbia) reminds Serbia that it should shut up because that is the script handed to it by the International Community. Serbia is guilty by definition, so the accusations of war crimes that Serbia may have against others are not to be considered (Ex turpi causa non oritur actio)! Talk about specious syllogisms! 

Mr Charles Crawford is a man of honor and integrity. SHame on you for attacking him.

Some background.

The Independent asked for 400 words. I sent them some 500. They condensed that down to 330 without sending me a final version. So key nuances which went some way at least to tackling points made in the critical comments were lost.

Such is Journalism.

In case anyone is still interested, here is what I think is the full judgement.

The judge said this:

There is nothing within the request which would bring the conduct alleging issuing a command to attack a military convoy within the meaning of a grave breach of the Geneva Conventions 1949. However there is a reference to an Ambulance within the convoy and the request alleges that Dr Ganic expressly ordered an attack upon the Ambulance within the convoy. To that limited extent I am satisfied that the conduct alleges an extradition offence.

I am not satisfied that the rest of the convoy had any right to protection or that the soldiers in the 30 vehicles were prisoners of war.

Without having heard the evidence presented it is hard to say why he reached this conclusion. But it is clear from the video footage of the Dobrovoljacka St shootings that the JNA convoy was leaving Sarajevo under some sort of UN-brokered ceasefire agreement.

Is there really no case to answer that it is a breach of the laws at war to attack a convoy in such circumstances? Apart from the wider policy issues, this finding directly contradicts the testimony of a British expert on the whole story whom the judge praised for his accuracy.

The Serbia side does not appear to have found any satisfactory answer to the Sarajevo/BH side's arguments that Serbia offered to let the Ganic extradition request lapse in exchange for political support for Serbia Srebrenica Declaration. The judge reasonably gives significant weight to this in support of his wider concern that Serbia's application was in one way or the other 'politically' motivated.

The judge took evidence from various notable people on that point including from Dr Schwarz-Shilling (sic and Lord Ashdown), former High Representatives in Sarajevo. Both asserted that the extradition request "is about politics rather than justice". Since neither of them have lived in Belgrade and both have seen the BH issue mainly from the vantage-point of Sarajevo, their evidence on this point should have been dismissed on the grounds of irrelevance.

Lord Ashdown even linked the extradition request to the date of the opening statement by Radovan Karadzic at ICTY, a linkage so footling that the judge explicitly dismissed it.

The judge was improperly dismissive of the role of the Belgrade war crimes courts and seemed to accept as true various tendentious generalisations about Serbia and Serb views put forward by Noel Malcolm and others.

These statements persuaded him that Serbia's application should be barred by Section 81(a) and (b) of the Extradition Act 2003 on the grounds that the request had been made "for the purpose of prosecuting or punishing him on account of his race, religion, nationality and political opinions". This in my view is a far-reaching and obnoxious finding, based upon noisy assertions rather than hard facts.

All in all, a powerful but not especially coherent and convincing judgement. That said, in the circumstances it probably was correct enough.

It looks as if the Serbia side had not prepared its case re launching the extradition request and then thought through how best to handle the extradition hearing. It did poorly in presenting witnesses to rebut the openly 'political' case put forward by the Bosnia side. And by attempting some behind-the-scenes deal with Sarajevo while the matter proceeded in the UK courts, Belgrade foolishly laid itself open to a charge that its 'real' intentions were 'political' rather than legal/justice focused.

To be 100% clear for the record.

I am NOT saying or suggesting that war crimes against Serbs should not be prosecuted. I pressed hard for that to happen when UK Ambassador both in Sarajevo and Belgrade.

Nor am I saying that because of Srebrenica/Mladic Serbia is disqualified from running war crimes trials in Belgrade, or from putting in extradition requests such as this one.

Nor do I believe that Belgrade is unable to run a fair trial of non-Serbs. I do think that keeping fair is a difficult problem for all the local war crimes processes in former Yugoslavia:

The ICTY is not the whole story. Special courts for “lesser” war crimes have been set up in Serbia, Croatia, and Bosnia. These important trials are little acknowledged elsewhere in Europe. As British ambassador in Belgrade, I hosted a Kosovo family in Belgrade to give evidence in one of the first trials, involving alleged war crimes by Serbs in Kosovo. They said they had been treated honorably by the Serbian authorities.

The core problem with these trials is that each ethnic community concerned likes to see a conviction of someone from another community who brutalized their fellow ethnic cousins. But they hate it when “their” court is expected to put on trial one of “their” people. They hate it even more when a court elsewhere in the region looks to go lightly on someone from “its” community. Why, cry Serbs, has the Bosnian legal system for nearly 20 years done next to nothing about the 1992 Dobrovoljacka Street killings?

The reality is that every community in the former Yugoslavia sees itself as a victim of something or other. And a central part of being a victim is that you never get justice. So local politicians who believe in pushing the war-crimes agenda face an uphill task -- where are the votes in doing so?

To make it even more difficult, the Serbian government is (as the Amnesty woman at the “Storm” screening rightly pointed out) undermined when other European countries won’t respect Belgrade’s warrants to arrest people indicted in Serbia on war-crimes charges. It makes no sense for the European Union to insist that the region run these trials to high international standards and then not respect local efforts to do that.

BUT...but...

The hard fact of it is that there is a nasty, neo-national socialist tendency in Serbia which flourished under Milosevic, and that those poisonous attitudes infect the way the Serbian elite presents itself. (Similar neo-national socialist tendencies of course are alive and well among Croats, Albanians/Kosovars and Bosniacs/Muslims, a key point lost on some of the supposedly expert senior witnesses presented by the defence at the Ganic trial.)

Serbia's internal struggles continue over what Serbia and Serbs represent both to the world and to themselves.

And that was what ultimately undermined Serbia's case in London; in form and substance it just wasn't convincing.

I was chatting to a senior oil executive the other day (as one does), and I asked how that vast multinational corporation ran its top speech-writing function.

"Oh,we have the usual - a team of young speechwriters, which is what you need these days."

Really? Why do you need young speech-writers?

What books have they read? What hard decisions have they ever had to take? What pain have they suffered? Where have they been? What encounters with senior foreign people have they had - do they know just how to pitch things right?

What experience do they bring to the job, other than the doubtful one of being 'young'?

Today I heard about Peter Mandelson in India from someone who had watched him in action. His visit came soon after the dreadful performance of David Miliband who insulted his much older Indian counterpart by being over-matey with him during their private meeting.

Peter Mandelson by contrast (I was told) insulted on a much bigger and public scale.

He addressed a large gathering of business people at an event also attended by several senior Indian politicians. In his random Nu Labour way, he made a flaccid speech about globalisation, including passages saying just how well India was doing as an 'emerging economy'. He then left the event to move on to 'another engagement'.

I think that this must be the speech concerned:

For a couple of years up until about the middle of last year there was a debate going on in the financial services sector and in the financial media over the extent to which the emerging economies - including India, of course - had ‘decoupled’ from the developed world.

Have India, China and the other emerging economies achieved enough momentum economically to fundamentally break the link between their economic destiny and ours in the EU and the US?

... I welcome the fact that the Indian government remains so committed to liberalization of its financial, legal and accountancy sectors, which will be an important contributor to attracting the foreign investment it wants for its large infrastructure projects.

The Indian knowledge economy has ambitions to cater for a global market. The expansion of Indian manufacturing, which the government rightly sees as central to defining India’s future place in global value chains, will be built on the further opening up of the Indian market to industrial imports.

This sort of thing is in fact very hard to draft well. See especially the absurd and unwise phrase "I welcome ..."

How does one say anything much about someone else's country at such an event without somehow seeming to be assuming to oneself the role of loftily pronouncing on the good marks and not so good marks, like a cargo cult schoolteacher?

Here the ignorant and jejune speechwriter obviously failed to get it right, a high-profile blunder all the more embarrassing for the UK as it came immediately after D Miliband's fiasco.

After P Mandelson had departed, a senior Indian speaker addressed the throng and had them in stitches laughing at Mandelson's patronising style and hollow substance:

"We look at the UK and see it as a sub-merging economy!"

Maybe there should be a new rule.

No politician should have a speech-writer younger than s/he is.

Just think of all those mountains of money and time wasted on so-called diversity training, when simple reminders about Good Manners would have been far more effective.

Let's see if David Cameron can get things back on track.

Over at Business and Politics I brood on the dismal sniggering by UK business people when the Prime Minister informed them that he had summoned the UK's Ambassadors back to London - and made them all fly economy class.

Inappropriate. If you publicly sneer at your own team, won't everyone else do the same?

More important, it's counter-productive in the Prime Minister's own terms. He says wants the UK's Ambassadors to support British business. How does he think that in fact they can do just that?

Why does this sort of thing make me, a libertarian-minded conservative, feel queasy?

Partly it’s the hint of the faux-egalitarian blokeiness which characterises our tragic age, a sense that high-end behaviour and practices are less worthy than the lowest common denominator ‘solidarity’ of everyone having a pint in the pub.

That, you recall, was something New Labour cultivated ad and indeed ultra nauseam. In January this year it got David Miliband into trouble in India, when he annoyed the Indian Foreign Minister by calling him by his first name, a move at once naively patronising and culturally insensitive. So much for all those FCO diversity targets.

Whereas the media have focused yet again on the lame issue of Ambassadorial residences overseas, no-one has mentioned the sniggering feebleness of the business people whom the PM addressed.

According to the Indy they laughed when Mr Cameron said that all the Ambassadors had been ‘made to travel economy class’ to join the London meeting. Huh?

Why did no-one have the guts to call out something like this:

“Excuse me, Prime Minister, but we are hoping to win a huge contract in Nigeria. You got it 100% wrong.

 Having our Ambassador in Tokyo sweating in economy class rather than talking for hours to the Nigerian Finance Minister who was in Club on the same flight sends the Nigerians all the wrong signals as to how his views are valued in London.

And, much worse, it misses a terrific chance to lobby quietly for this deal and many others on that long and boring flight!”

Shame on you, business-people. You deserve what you'll get.

Crawf Minor (Lower Sixth) is in hot pursuit of several Maths A-Levels here in the UK.

All of which reminds me that once upon a long lost time I could pick my way through the mysteries of cos and sin and even on a good day tan.

Not to forget my old enemy: d²y/dx²   This allowed one to calculate not the rate of change, but the rate at which the rate changed.

Or something like that. I think.

People who can fathom out this sort of thing are smart. In fact, some of them go on from tricky basic maths to acquire lively and unpredictable new pets:

Langton got involved with ants.       

Paterson with worms.

Others had to make do with turmites. Or even busy beavers.

The notable thing about this sort of thing from our point of view is the deep idea that order (and 'orders') can and do come forth naturally without clumsy central direction. A light framework plus a few very simple rules are enough to generate impressively large and robust new structures. 

Which is where we walk over to Cafe Hayek (where orders emerge) and read this excellent piece about why new developments are often disappointing, and why indeed a solution to a problem often isn't very widely applicable:

Development happens thanks to problem-solving systems ...any solution that is going to work is likely to come from the use of local knowledge, or at least dispersed knowledge rather than some expert who proposes some solution from the outside without local knowledge.

That's the core brilliant Hayekian idea, unanswered by collectivists and centralisers of all shapes and sizes - dispersed knowledge.

More:

You can’t just take some piece of a market-based solution and impose it from the top down. You want organically emergent solutions that bring all the pieces along at once. Competition encourages the other pieces to emerge. Top-down solutions usually constrain competition and miss out on the extra parts of the puzzle.

... How do you liberate people to allow them to help themselves? You look for the barriers that keep them from helping themselves. Ironically, sending large amounts of money to corrupt leaders probably creates the single largest barrier.

Of course.

Which is why the rise of the mobile telephone gives Africans new chances to help themselves without development experts and corrupt leaders pushing them around.

And, perhaps, why it is a good and profound move to move huge slabs of NHS money to general practitioners (ie non-hospital doctors) so as to try to capture  much more directly in public health spending the benefits of all that dispersed GP knowledge about the nation's aliments ?

In my eccentric Left phase as a student I got very depressed by a popular book by a young David Horowitz, a prominent American Leftist who railed at great length (460 pages) against the iniquities of Amerika and its unforgiving anti-communist foreign policy machinations.

Not only was the USA surrounding the peace-loving USSR with military bases. It had corporations bent on world domination. Aaargh.

The book was called The Free World Colossus.

David Horowitz went on to fall out in a major way with his senior New Left friends, disillusioned and revolted by their lies, hypocrisy and casual violence.

He now keeps very busy tracking Leftist propaganda and trickiness in US universities and far beyond, with these days a special added focus on Left cosiness with Islamist extremism. All of which makes him a cult hate figure for campus radicals.

The interesting thing about Horowitz is is almost exhausting frankness about his former beliefs and why he had such a dramatic change of mind. He has written extensively on the subject, including on how his family life and personal relationships shaped his early Marxist politics. He pores over the way emotions and ideas play into each other. See his many works here at Amazon.

Which is why I commend this superb essay by him over at NRO, in which he tries to analyse the beliefs of Christopher Hitchens, another prolific eccentric belligerent militant atheist Leftist who in one way or the other has fallen out with many former comrades.

First, this is a beautifully written piece of work.

Second, it is generously done, on both the intellectual and human level.

Third, it is very smart as only a piece by someone who has brooded deeply on politics and life from most points of the political spectrum can be. It takes great events of our times and explores how political and private reactions to them run into all sorts of contradictions and hypocrisies.

Magnificent. Must-read if you are interested in ideas. 

Belgium emits the usual confidence that the UK even under the Conservatives will be absorbed into EU processes ... nicely:

Belgian negotiators are convinced that Mr Cameron's hard line opposition to giving more sovereignty up to the EU, a pledge written into his coalition government's agreement, will be sacrificed in the interests of pragmatism.

The senior source observed that no EU agreements would ever be possible if all European leaders stuck to the "totality" of their election manifestoes.

"It is impossible to have compromise with total programmes," he said.

Pragmatism. There's a word.

Meanwhile back in Europe-as-it-really-is, have a look at this excellent piece over at Transconflict looking at the way Belgiam is creaking at the seams, with separatist elements cleverly using EU iconography and language to advance their cause.

Note especially the idea of 'rational nationalism':

The N-VA has managed to make people forget the old, vague, romantic and not particularly mobilizing notion of full Flemish independence and reframe its nationalism as a moderate political demand for autonomy. The party employed a number of metaphors to communicate this message.

“We don’t want a revolution, just evolution”, said N-VA leader Bart De Wever repeatedly. We do not want to split Belgium, we will just let it “evaporate”, was another slogan...

... But the idea that more nationalism is needed, and not less, to unblock the political debates between language groups at the federal level has worked extremely well as an electoral slogan ...

“Rational” Flemish nationalism was thus presented as an antidote for the confusion of Belgian “politics as usual” and as a discourse of clean efficiency, not one of exclusion or lack of solidarity across language groups...

Are the Flemish N-VA and Milorad Dodik in Republika Srpska by some chance related?

And if Belgium itself as it currently exists is being challenged to this extent, what legitimacy do Belgium's leaders have in expecting the UK to fall into line?

Just asking.

It's a tiring job reading Tim Worstall's blog every day, as he demolishes one idiotic idea after another, a fevered lumberjack in the wide leafy Forest of Nonsense felling tree after tree with mighty blows.

Where does he find the energy?

For a good example of another tree toppling to the forest floor, try this one, on public funding of science.

There is particularly thick part of the forest called Ritchie. Watch our man hew away here to fine effect.

Chop. Crash.

Excellent NYT piece by Errol Morris via Browser exploring the Dunning-Kruger Effect: the fact that our incompetence/ignorance masks our ability to recognize our incompetence/ignorance:

Donald Rumsfeld gave this speech about “unknown unknowns.”  It goes something like this: “There are things we know we know about terrorism.  There are things we know we don’t know.  And there are things that are unknown unknowns.  We don’t know that we don’t know.” 

He got a lot of grief for that.  And I thought, “That’s the smartest and most modest thing I’ve heard in a year.”

Of course there are different sorts of 'unknowns'. 

Facts I know I don't know (eg the longest river in Uzbekistan).

Facts which may or may not be facts (are there any rivers in Uzbekistan).

And phenomena which I am unaware might even exist (by definition indescribable).

See this:

To me, unknown unknowns enter at two different levels. The first is at the level of risk and problem.  Many tasks in life contain uncertainties that are known — so-called “known unknowns.”  These are potential problems for any venture, but they at least are problems that people can be vigilant about, prepare for, take insurance on, and often head off at the pass. 

Unknown unknown risks, on the other hand, are problems that people do not know they are vulnerable to.

All of which goes to point up the stupidity of wasting too much time on 'risk management matrices', another New Labour blight on public life:

Embassies have to complete every few months a spreadsheet which lays out 'risks' to policy and the accomplishment of our Objectives.

The first demand for one of these arrived in Warsaw, attaching the Asia Directorate's model as a splendid example. I crossly sent back an email saying that maybe, after everything which had happened in the Asia region not that long ago, a risk assessment which omitted the word tsunami might be thought to be a little ... ridiculous? I predicted that in a few years' time these banal exercises like so many others would have collapsed under the weight of their manifold contradictions.

I was told off for being 'unhelpful'.

The real problem in foreign policy objective/target-setting is indeed the unknowable unknowns - the impact of a tsunami on Indonesia's fortunes, or indeed 9/11.

Which again is why it is so stupid to organise British/EU policy round the things the Treasury thinks it can measure.

But then precisely because we are stupid enough to do just that, we can't recognise that stupidity.

QED.

Will the EU exist in its current form in a million years' time? No!

In 100,000 years' time? No!

In 1000 years' time? No, but there may be traces of its current form.

In 100 years' time? Maybe, but much changed.

In a mere 10 years' time? Probably, but perhaps rather differently organised.

So if the EU as currently configured sooner or later is going to come to an end, the question arises: what factors might bring about its early departure?

The deep issue is Trust.

The whole point of the European Union is that the different member state governments, and rather more reluctantly their voters, proclaim undying trust in each other. This allows shared institutions to be set up and creates a framework within which 'integration' can proceed, overcoming all those centuries-old hatreds and rivalries which have led to calamitous wars.

It is now clear that Trust is once again declining.

Take this disturbing interview (in Polish) with Jan Krzysztof Bielecki. Bielecki was briefly Polish Prime Minister in the early years of the creation of a market economy after communism. He is now a top banker and thinker, one of the smartest people in Poland and an avid football fan.

This interview purports to turn upside-down Poland's dramatically successful open market policies pursued since 1990. Bielecki in particular argues that Poland should no longer welcome foreign capital in strategic privatisations and particularly in the banking sector. That openness to foreign money had been essential in the early transition period, when there was no Polish capital to speak of. But things are different now. 

Bielecki makes his concerns explicit. The fact that so much (some 70%) of Polish bank capital is in foreign hands leaves it open to those foreign interests to suck money out of those banks if they fall into difficulties, a policy said to be favoured by the EU. 

In other words, the sub-text (and not so sub-) is Poland's fear that the fruits of all those years of diligent saving and prudent investment following the end of communism could be snatched by (say) French or German banks to help them deal with the consequences of their own imprudence in (say) Greece and Spain.

Which, in turn, means that Poland - whose population is one of the most 'pro-Europe' in the EU - now has serious doubts about trusting its major partners to look at any interests wider than their own. As Bielecki is one of most influential leaders in Citizens Platform circles, this means that the two candidates in the coming Polish Presidential elections run-off will be toying with openly Poland First ideas.

You might say that Poland has had the benefit of foreign (European) investment when times were good, and so it is fair that Poland shoulder its share of the pain when times are not so good. And you might be right.

The question Bielecki implicitly poses goes unerringly to that central point: what is fair in such circumstances? Who decides where the cost of playing fast and loose with investment decisions should fall?

Should that be done at the strategic level 'above' mere member states? Maybe.

But what if it looks as though in fact those decisions are being taken by a core of member states to defend their own national interests, in this case their rickety banks and/or their flawed political judgement in creating a flawed Eurozone? That they cannot be trusted to act only in the common interest - and to shoulder the costs of their own blunders?

In such 'unfair' circumstances the only way Poland and other member states can defend themselves (and their national wealth) is to start thinking about defining policy in more 'national' terms themselves.

And so the moral logic of the EU as founded on unfailing trust at the highest levels dissolves. As that goes, so too does the will to keep the institutional show on the road.

Which in turn forces to the fore the issue of 'first-mover advantage'. 

Yes, there is Solidarity in staying with the team and furiously paddling as a group to help get the canoe to safety. But if one country suspects (a) that the Eurozone is doomed and (b) that other Eurozone members think the same, does it not pay to jump off the sinking canoe well before it hits the waterfall?

The more so if (c) that country sees other canoe paddlers looking shiftily around as if preparing themselves to jump?

Here's one brilliant lurid scenario by James Bennett in which Germany Shrugs - and jumps:

Nicholas. This is Angela. I am very sorry to have to tell you this, under such circumstances. But you will understand why it must be like this. And I wanted to tell you first.

She relayed her news.

The aides could hear the scream of pure anger as Merkel held the phone away from her ear. The tirade continued for about half a minute. Then there was complete silence. She put the phone back to her ear.

My dear Nicholas, you can hardly complain. After all, you threatened me with the same thing back in May ... If any one suspects that another is about to leave, the only thing to do is leave first. When you threatened to leave, we realized that was the position in which we had been put. So we had to make our preparations.

Sarkozy spoke in a calm, level voice. But I was not serious. It was a bargaining position.

Perhaps. But the Prisoner’s Dilemma requires certainly, not probability.

All of which goes to explain why the Cameron government, far from being 'isolated' in Europe as assorted Guardianistas led by Denis MacShane wailed would happen, is being wooed vigorously by Germany and Paris alike.

Why?

Because they want - and need - British money to help them out of their deep holes.

Raiding Polish banks is just not enough.

It comes round again.

The bewildering inability of an England football team to field a midfield group of players able to tackle hard and/or trap and control and pass the ball with high accuracy/speed almost every time. This time with added goal-keeping cluelessness.

The effect is ingeniously to organise the team so that our best player, Rooney, scarcely gets a single good pass in a dangerous position.

Instead we fall back on the time-honoured ploy of heaving it into the penalty area hoping that someone taller than the defenders will connect with the ball in a helpful way.

Argentina, Spain and Brazil with all their buzzing midfield energy and skill will have us for breakfast, if we somehow scrape through to play them.

Sigh. On to 2014.

Blogging will be light in the coming week (as it has been for the past couple of days) as I am travelling to Geneva/London/Warsaw and then after a weekend on to Brussels.

Today I returned from Strasbourg, the beautiful city which hosts the outlandishly glassy-eyed European Parliament and the rather more sensibly scaled Council of Europe.

The guide mentioned the Nazi destruction of a famous synagogue during WW2, but somehow missed this earlier horrible Strasbourg episode of European ethnic cleansing of all those pesky Jews.

Come on, readers, wherever you may be on the planet, but esp in the UK.

We urgently need a networked generosity swarm effect here.

Time to chip in for a good cause.

Update: many thanks to those who have pledged a little something to Elly. As Instapundit says, Faster please

When I was growing up, Israel was a favourite in some progressive quarters - an open-minded and successful society in a national-socialist Middle East, with trendily progressive kibbutzim where gap year students could go and hang out in the sunshine.

Israel had been created in 1948 with the best possible level of international credibility of the times - support from both Washington and Moscow, as shown by these wise words:

During the last war, the Jewish people underwent exceptional sorrow and suffering... The United Nations cannot and must not regard this situation with indifference, since this would be incompatible with the high principles proclaimed in its Charter...

The fact that no Western European State has been able to ensure the defence of the elementary rights of the Jewish people and to safeguard it against the violence of the fascist executioners explains the aspirations of the Jews to establish their own State.

It would be unjust not to take this into consideration and to deny the right of the Jewish people to realize this aspiration.

Then slowly but surely the mood changed after the Six-Day War.

Israel started to be portrayed not only as an oppressive but increasingly as an outlandish and above all illegitimate phenomenon, a pseudo-country created and surviving only on injustice to others. A unique apartheid-style phenomenon on the world scene, with the (un)usual suspects shrill in the attack.

Their hard core aim is simple. That Israel in its current form (ie as a mainly Jewish homeland) must cease to exist.

This means that any accommodation between Israel and the Palestinians or its Arab neighbours (eg in a 'two state' solution) has to be at best a short-term tactical manoeuvre aimed at consolidating gains in preparation for a final heave to topple Israel (and the Jews) once and for all.

Here is a hard-nosed Israeli look at the global delegitimization attack in all its myriad current variations (my emphasis):

Clearly, an Israeli and Palestinian comprehensive Permanent Status Agreement that establishes a Palestinian state and brings about an 'end of conflict' or 'finality of claims' would weaken the grounds of Israel's delegitimization. However, even given such an agreement, the logic of the delegitimization campaign would persist.

The issue of Israel's Arab citizens may become the next ‘outstanding issue' driving delegitimization in the event that an Israeli-Palestinian Permanent Status Agreement is secured. In fact, the Resistance Network has already attempted to mobilize this community albeit with very limited success.

Here too, credible and persistent commitment for full integration and equality of Israel's Arab citizens would weaken the grounds of Israel's delegitimizers, but will not end their campaign, whose logic is rooted in challenging Israel's existence and not its policies.

The binary 'to be or not to be' policy aimed at destroying Israel has had a huge boost from the election of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in Iran. He more than anyone else (OK, with some noisy help from Chavez) has radicalised global discourse and challenged hitherto established moral standards, all in an explicitly anti-civilisational direction. See eg his explicit anti-Israel diatribes and his sly Holocaust denial.

The practical result of this sort of language, as backed by huge amounts of Arab oil money pumped and unrelenting official Islamic indignation, is that demands for 'justice for the Palestinians' morph effortlessly into rabid anti-Western and anti-semitic ideologies. Anti-Israeli and openly anti-semitic ravings seep into Western discourse at all levels, not least the Guardian and Independent.

Israel struggles to cope with the sheer weight of propaganda and military force aimed in its direction. Maintaining reasonable and consistent operational policies is increasingly difficult.

Here is a good short piece by Jeffrey Goldberg which wonders if Israel can still summon the seichel (which means wisdom, but it also means more than that: It connotes ingenuity, creativity, subtlety, nuance) to deal with the existential threats it now faces.

An important new force in all this is Turkey. For many years Israel and Turkey had a close and friendly relationship, with Turkey happy with its role as a key Western ally and growing European partner.

That is changing fast. Turkey's 'moderate' Islamic leadership see the USA's interest in NATO wilting and the ailing EU looking hard for reasons not to let Turkey join any time soon, if ever.

So as a large and confident country Turkey finds new opportunites for unilateral regional and even global leadership, eg by getting engaged with Iran and Brazil on the Iran nuclear problem and by asserting an ever-tougher leadership role vis-a-vis Israel. The Ottoman Empire Strikes Back - not necessarily something which the Arab states welcome? In any case, a major setback for general Western cohesion.

All this leaves 'the West' unhappy and uncertain.

Much of President Obama's openly Left and Hard Left Democrat base seems to have given up on Israel completely, leaving President Obama at best a lukewarm supporter of Israel's cause. Pro-Israeli conservatives in the USA find it all depressingly hard going.

The European Union with its growing Muslim minorities wrings its hands; the new UK government has edged towards a more critical position.

The main point for me is that the intellectual and political onslaught against Israel is so stunningly dishonest as to reveal that a much deeper Negotiation is going on.

Basically, almost all parts of the planet and indeed much of the chattering classes' space in the democratic West are directly or by implication supporting policies of a new Strident Irrationalism, aimed at delegitimizing not only Israel but Truth itself.

Facts in this drama count for nothing. Not the fact that if we are looking for brutal violence at sea and horrible oppression at home, North Korea leaves Israel and everywhere else on Earth far behind.

Not the fact that when Muslims are massacred almost every day they are massacred not by Israelis but by crazed Muslims.

Nor the fact that if we want to rail against crimes against humanity in the Middle East, the biggest and worst have been committed by Arab leaders against their own people.

And certainly not the fact that whereas Israel obviously operates some sort of pluralist political system, much of the Arab world is still rotten with the legacy of oppressive lumpen national socialist extremism dating back to WW2. Had the Arab world opted for pluralism and progress after the Cold War ended, the whole context for dealing with the Palestine problem would have been far easier.

Behind these malodorous hypocrisies lurks a darker force, hoping to deligitimise not only Israel but also the Holocaust and Nazi/Soviet crimes and the whole moral force of 'the West' and the Enlightenment.

This is the Negotiation of our age. Between Hope and Nihilism. Israel and the Palestinians are merely collateral damage.

Here is an intrepid young runner determined to raise money for Race for Life.

Many thanks to Specialist Speakers for their fast and generous donation. And to Bev.

More please.

Much more.

The BBC have been in touch asking if I would be interested in joining the panel on the next Big Questions programme, featuring lively debates on moral issues.

One possible subject would be the ever-fascinating subject of Homosexuality in Africa - as looked at briefly by me here. And here.

Check out this interesting Guardian piece by Madeleine Bunting which tries to 'put the issue in context', prompting an avalanche of comments for and against.

I alas had to decline the BBC request - already booked for a distinguished luncheon engagement next Sunday. But I suggested to them that they might try to break the question down to more manageable issues:

• should Western societies take a view on homosexuality in Africa?
• if we do take a view and decide that we want to influence things in a more liberal (by our lights) direction, what sort of policies are likely to work and what are not?

Iain Dale has quickly been on the case, getting a speedy and (I think) sensibly cautious reply from our new DFID Minister Andrew Mitchell:

But we should beware appeals for us to make aid a political weapon. Malawi is a desperately poor country, where about 40% of the people live on less than 34p a day. Britain’s aid plays a vital role in reducing this poverty.

We must not let down the people of Malawi. Rest assured, we, and our major international partners, will make urgent representations to the government of Malawi to review its laws to ensure it meets its commitments to human rights.

And this conviction will remain firmly in our minds when we negotiate the way we deliver our aid in future.

Mind you, it is one thing to wag our censorious finger at little Malawi.

Nigeria is something else.

John Redwood MP puts it tersely:

Its first task, as stern budget superviser urging member states to rein in deficits, should be to make dramatic reductions in the EU budget. From each member states point of view the money spent on EU matters and projects is of more marginal importance than say the money spent on domestic education and health care.

The EU should take the lead to in cutting spending to relieve the budgetary pressures. Spending cuts should start abroad. The EU’s sensible requirement for controlled budget deficits should make them lead by example.

Its second task should be to draw up a big Repeal Directive, removing from the law codes many of those fiddling and costly interventions in business life which have led to the export of so many jobs from the EU to less regulated places like China and India...

Indeed.

As I keep intoning, the only heavy leverage the UK has in EU processes is money - our money.

So the forthcoming EU Budget round is going to be existentially important for both the UK and the EU.

Will the UK government have the steely resolve needed to press for massive cuts in the EU Budget (and to some extent EU functions)? Or not?

It will be impossible to persuade hard-pressed UK voters aghast at cuts in public spending here that it makes sense to pour taxpayers' money into un-cut EU spending.

This could be a fine area for an iron London/Berlin alliance. Germans are dismayed at the turn of events in the Eurozone, and should be open to British ideas for Discipline.

Meanwhile others are insisting that as the Eurozone enters swampy ground, the only policy is to tie even more tightly together not only Eurozone members but all EU members. If one sinks, all sink:

If a country joins the euro area, it shares a common destiny with the other members. There is a need for a quantum leap in the governance of the euro area.

It is hard to see all this going far without changes to EU treaties, and all the new political drama (including in the UK) which that will bring.

John Mauldin's latest newsletter (free, but you need to sign up for them - well worth it) has doubts:

Europe is run by Keynesians (as is the US). They see everything as a liquidity problem. And sometimes it is.

But the PIIGS have a debt problem. And you don't cure a debt problem with more debt unless you have a clear path to grow your way out of the debt. But as I have demonstrated, there is no clear path to growth with the current policies. They will produce deflationary recessions, lower government tax receipts from reduced GDP, and higher unemployment...

This is just the beginning of their woes. They have a long way to go and a short time to get there. Can it be done? Yes, of course.

But it is going to require a great deal of change. I hope they pull it off, I really do. I have been to most of Europe and love every bit I have seen. The world is better off with a united Europe.

That being said, I have my doubts that the European Union in its current form will exist in 5-7 years. I hope I am wrong...

I tend to think that he's correct - that the EU as currently configured can not survive much longer. If only because the measures needed to make the Eurozone work will compel new levels of 'integration' for all EU members which will go well beyond what some countries can accept.

Things are already coming to a head, via Qualified Majority Voting.

Under EU rules decisions in many policy areas and binding on all can be taken by votes of EU member governments. Hitherto voting has not been a decisive factor, since EU member governments mull things over, look at the weight of likely opposition to see if any combination might have a blocking minority, and cut deals.

So there is voting but it in effect usually defines a different way to reach a consensus.

What we can expect soon are proposals put forward for voting which are said to be essential for Eurozone members as such, but may well have negative outcomes for non-Eurozone members. The Eurozone members may then start to push through those votes in the face of outright opposition from many of the others - but especially the UK.

If that starts to happen systematically, the implicit deal based primarily upon a sense of consensus will have been changed irrevocably in favour of majority-led power-plays. The legitimacy of that sort of decision-making and its outcomes will fall to be challenged very hard.

So there has to be a good chance that the result is the emergence of some sort of formalised new arrangements, maybe two or more smaller European unions.

In one group, those countries which are ready to stop being countries and form a new bloc phenomenon, with one currency and the inflexible fiscal, popular voting and other mechanisms needed to make that happen.

And in another, countries which are satisfied with looser and more flexible cooperative arrangements.

Anything really wrong with that, as long as the two groups live nicely together and don't fight?

Not really. But the transaction costs and associated convulsions will be considerable. Which group Germany would now join?

Maybe those convulsions, huge as they must be, are preferable to standing in a swamp watching the slime-level inexorably head north above our knees, no-one able to move because we are all tied together?

Do our political leaders think about the reality of the difficulties we face as they haggle over the results of the election?

The policies of Gordon Brown as trumpeted by Blair/Mandelson/Miliband/Polly for more than a decade have been ruinous beyond any calculation.

The very fact that senior Lib Dems are not bent on wiping out the Labour Party completely almost disqualifies them from being taken seriously. Such are the siren blandishments of being lured away from liberalism into the collectivist 'progressive' camp.

I agree with Iain Dale. There is nothing else to discuss, Lib Dems. Grow up. Take responsibility. Decide.

Or get your vain little party over and done with, splitting once more into Liberal and Socialist factions, and let the Liberals get on with joining the Conservatives to put the UK back on course.

I have a notorious but trustworthy Chinese Alarm Clock handy in case David Cameron wants to set a very early deadline.

While the clock starts ticking and the Lib Dems break out in a clammy sweat, everyone else should go and shed nervous tears over Robert Samuelson on the Welfare State's death spiral:

What we're seeing in Greece is the death spiral of the welfare state... Aging populations have been promised huge health and retirement benefits, which countries haven't fully covered with taxes. The reckoning has arrived in Greece, but it awaits most wealthy societies

The welfare state's death spiral is this: Almost anything governments might do with their budgets threatens to make matters worse by slowing the economy or triggering a recession.

By allowing deficits to balloon, they risk a financial crisis as investors one day -- no one knows when -- doubt governments' ability to service their debts and, as with Greece, refuse to lend except at exorbitant rates. Cutting welfare benefits or raising taxes all would, at least temporarily, weaken the economy. Perversely, that would make paying the remaining benefits harder.

Greece illustrates the bind. To gain loans from other European countries and the International Monetary Fund, it embraced budget austerity. Average pension benefits will be cut 11 percent; wages for government workers will be cut 14 percent; the basic rate for the value added tax will rise from 21 percent to 23 percent.

These measures will plunge Greece into a deep recession. In 2009, unemployment was about 9 percent; some economists expect it to peak near 19 percent.

If only a few countries faced these problems, the solution would be easy. Unlucky countries would trim budgets and resume growth by exporting to healthier nations.

But developed countries represent about half the world economy; most have overcommitted welfare states. They might defuse the dangers by gradually trimming future benefits in a way that reassured financial markets. In practice, they haven't done that; indeed, President Obama's health program expands benefits.

What happens if all these countries are thrust into Greece's situation? One answer -- another worldwide economic collapse -- explains why dawdling is so risky.

[Presses button on alarm clock. Silence. Broken only by loud ticking...]