Blogoir

What was Kim Philby really up to when he started working for the Soviet Union?

Boris Volodarsky follows the complicated story:

Stalin had decided that one of the ways to solve the ‘Spanish problem’ would be to assassinate Franco. In 1937 Soviet military intelligence, the GRU, sent several operatives on a mission to murder the Caudillo.

Before the GRU officers started to move, the NKVD asked Maly in London to find an agent for a risky assignment in the rebel zone. Philby was chosen partly because he had expressed interest in Spain and had holidayed there with his wife in 1935. It was not concealed from Philby that his task would be to find a way to approach Franco and kill him...

Read on ...

The BBC lovingly analyses Fidel Castro's speech to the 'National Assembly' in Havana:

... a hush descended ... He smiled and waved to the crowd as he lapped up the warmth of their applause ... a short but polished performance from the lively and healthy-looking Fidel Castro, his voice stronger and more assured ... Now it seems he may have found a new mission in later life - to save the world from nuclear destruction.

Thank goodness for that. I was getting worried there.

The whole speech lasted just over 10 minutes and then, seated, he fielded questions for another hour.

Er ... and what did he say then?

For that we turn to the Miami Herald.

Castro made a couple of blunders, referring to the Russians/Russia as 'the USSR' and 'the Soviets'. Plus he claimed that the Big Bang which formed the universe happened 18,000 years ago.

Really?

With all this fretting about nuclear war and now this, maybe he's getting all his Big Bangs muddled up?

What a farce.

A curious article over at Foreign Affairs about the efficacy of democracies in doing better to protect citizens from earthquakes.

Is it because democracies are simply richer and so build better buildings? No:

In a democracy, leaders must maintain the confidence of large portions of the population in order to stay in power. To do so, they need to protect the people from natural disasters by enforcing building codes and ensuring that bureaucracies are run by competent administrators.

... Earthquakes in politically sensitive areas such as the capital may threaten autocrats, but high-casualty events elsewhere do not; politicians respond to the desires of their immediate constituents and regard the needs of others as far less salient.

It matters little that the means exist to mitigate the effects of disasters if politicians are not incentivized to implement them. Despite high casualties, autocrats can expect to keep their thrones.

On the other hand, democratic leaders who fail to prevent natural disasters from causing calamity are replaced. As such, democrats plan and react to natural disasters, while autocrats do not.

No doubt there is something or other in this argument. The hot breath of angry voters on a politicians plump neck no doubt catches said politician's attention.

That said, if the issue is incentives this article surely incentivises leaders to become autocrats - why put up with all this democratic hassle when you're likely to be thrown out of power for something which was not your fault?

My beef with the piece is that it somehow assumes in a mechanical way that 'democracy' is only about power being dispensed downwards in a notably more efficient way than happens in autocracies. The true virtue of democracy - toughly enforcing building codes!

It's far more interesting than that.

In a democracy people themselves have power.

The power to sue other people (and indeed the government) if they do not do their jobs properly. The power to work for private corporations or research labs and create better, stronger materials. The power of transparency so that people can see what designs are being used and how contracts are awarded. The power of using the Internet to find global best practice in earthquake prevention techniques. And so on.

Not that all of this works well 100% of the time. But these things are mutually reinforcing, and the overall impact is to empower and incentivise everyone in a better direction. The system as a whole is more responsible and responsive.

The article contradicts itself:

In China, the government only half-heartedly assisted the remote province of Qinghai after an earthquake in 2010 and suffered few political consequences for its inaction. But when an earthquake hit Sichuan in 2008, the Chinese government -- wary of protest in this politically and economically powerful center -- undertook relief operations that won the approval of much of the international community.

Ha! Having seen that disasters annoy the masses, the crafty Chinese autocrats lifted their game. And became more effective autocrats. Nay, they won the 'approval' of the 'international community'. Tra-la.

Democratist replies to my earlier posting:

I have a number of points to make about the following statements you made in "International Election Monitoring: Keeping Democracy Honest?"

 

"The problem is that observers necessarily observe the observable, and only a tiny proportion of that."

What about LTOs and the Core Team? They are the field for two/three months and provide a lengthy reports on the political context - meeting all the key national and local politicians and bureaucrats - these will be factored into the "Preliminary statement" (on the day after E-Day) and the "final statement" that comes out a few weeks later.

Also - 10% coverage of all polling stations provides more than enough information to get a very good idea of what is going on - ask a statistician.

"It is not much use international observers dutifully watching voting and counting of an election where some candidates have been unfairly excluded and/or where the media coverage of the campaign has been skewed massively to favour one side (ie the ruling tendency)."

Yes it is - because we make it clear that this is what happened, and provide lots of evidence of how this was manifested on the ground. This can have important implications in the days following the election, precicisely because the OSCE has such a good reputation with the populations of these countries - and this can have a major effect on what happens there in the days immediatly following the election (e.g. Georgia 2003, and Ukraine 2004). Even Serbia in 2000 - although I suspect you know more about that one than me.

On the contrary, the very fact that international observers are observing such an election might be said to give its outcome a legitimacy it richly does not deserve.

Yes and in the past the OSCE has refused to observe for this very reason - e.g. Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan several times.

"We make our first report of what is to be a long day. Then we move on, spending only 20 or 30 minutes at each polling station. At various intervals we must phone our LTO team and read out, question by question, our results. The tick-box approach is evidence of the EU’s lack of trust in our judgment. We are data collectors, not observers. It speaks of a bureaucracy keen on statistics that it can brandish scientifically."

Again STO work has to be seen in the context of extensive core team and LTO reporting.

"Even when an election is obviously unfair and international observers say so (as in Sudan this year), the self-proclaimed winner just brazens out the criticism and carries on regardless of EU hand-wringing"

The OSCE and EU are separate organizations - my piece was about the OSCE ODIHR  (I am not an especially big fan of the EU). Observation is certainly no panacea (but tell me what is?) But, even where where dictators just "brazen it out" the observation does at least have the effect that it adds to their bad press, and - as in the cases of Georgia 2003 and Ukraine 2004 (both observed by the OSCE) can contribute to their overthrow. Why do you think the Russians have been so petrified of "colour revolutions" since 2004? Why do you think they prevented the OSCE for observing their parliamentary and presidential elections in 2007 amd 2008?

While I think that it would be great if the UK sent its own observation teams (although it would take a while to build up the same sort of credibility the OSCE has in the region), I think it is somewhat unlikely given that they aren't even willing to send 10% of OSCE observers at the moment (as they had usually done prior to 2008) - since, as you may have noticed, HMG is presently a bit skint...

Fair enough.

The OSCE 'space' differs from other international areas as its members have made all sorts of specific commitments to each other, including to take seriously OSCE election observation teams' findings. OSCE election observer teams who point to serious shortcomings therefore have a different sort of political weight.

Which indeed is one reason why Moscow and some other former Soviet area capitals manoeuvre to try to cut back OSCE activities and/or credibility.

And why Democratist is right to urge HM Government to keep paying its full share of the bill as a strategic investment. Even in these financially tricky times.

Now that Cuba has agreed to release - and exile - a goodly number of political prisoners, Spain expects the European Union to 'respond' and be more flexible.

I have written here on various occasions about Cuba. Maybe the most astonishing thing about this run-down Cold War relic is not the fanatical loyalty its incompetent undemocratic regime attracts from so many foreign people who appear to enjoy their own democratic way of life.

No, it is the fact that the EU has in fact no real policy on this matter.

This ought to be a no-brainer.

Cuba is island which is geographically and civilisationally part of 'the West', which speaks European languages and which is thought to be keen to keep some distance between itself and its massive USA neighbour.

So the EU should be pressing a Deal:

• here's what we'll do, Cuba
• we'd like you to be independent and, if that's what your people really want, a country which emphasises Equality rather than Freedom
• and we'll help you stay independent of the USA
• so large sums of money will be made available to help you make the sort of transition which has happened so successfully elsewhere in the former Commie world
• you can move at your own pace, as long as you do move with some energy in the right direction
• Dull but honest European advisers will pour in to help you devise modern welfare programmes
• and your young people can come en masse to Europe for scholarships and training in non-American ways of running business and a government
• BUT, there is a but
• you do have to accept, and we hereby call for as an integral part of the process, a date for free and fair elections and an end to one-party communist rule. Not tomorrow. But definitely within a sensible time-span.
• We'll even help the Communist Party with campaign advice of the sort we give to other parties set up once politics is liberated properly once and for all 
• OK?

The EU is nowhere near that sort of common sense, generous deal, aimed at ending the misery in Cuba in a progressive, measured and principled way.

Indeed, my spies in the FCO tell me that the new British government is busy limply positioning itself 'in the middle of the EU pack' between those who want to suck up to the Cuban Leftists (Spain) and those who want freedom in Cuba (Poland).

Come on everyone, including in the FCO.

Lift your horizons. We can do better than this!

Oh, and if anyone wants to know how we brought democratic change to Milosevic's Serbia, they only need to ask me.

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. 

It is wearying being peppered with facile media so-called analysis of the Russian spy story featuring this sort of line:

Huh? What's all the fuss about? What's there to spy on in the places these amateur people were living in? Did the Kremlin really want to infiltrate the PTA? Typical Cold War rubbish, recycled now for purely PR reasons, guffaw guffaw

See eg Alexander Chancellor here in the Guardian:

One reason for this must be the complete futility of the alleged Russian operation. The FBI had not only been watching the suspects closely for up to a decade, but it had found no evidence that any of them had furnished Moscow with even a scrap of useful information during that time.

With their elaborately prepared false identities, most of them posing as ordinary American suburbanites, holding barbecues and discussing their children's schools over coffee with their neighbours, they were in regular contact with the SVR, Russia's foreign intelligence agency, but don't appear to have had anything much to report that couldn't have been discovered by anybody surfing the internet.

Here's Marina Hyde also in the Guardian, in full titter as she is mercifully spared from knowing anything about the subject:

The minute the news broke, it produced the most nostalgic of frissons. How high did it go? Who had they turned? Were indictments of state department officials merely days away?

No, disappointingly. Without wishing to denigrate the vital work of parent-teacher associations in Boston, it seems fair to hazard this one doesn't go all the way to the top. With the exception of the chap who enterprisingly based himself in Washington, and whose social-networking page shows him smiling gauchely outside the White House, the rest of the accused seem to have infiltrated east coast suburbia.

Let me explain a few things. (I was asked to do so by Reuters and did so, but the published results were a bit, hem, thin.)

What are the many difficulties involved in successful espionage?

Something like this:

• identifying where highly sensitive and useful information might actually be stored or circulated
• identifying weaknesses in its protection (human or technical/physical weaknesses)
• using those weaknesses to get access to the information
• copying it in an undetectable way
• getting that information back to HQ
• all done without anyone noticing or suspecting
• preferably repeatable many times over - a steady flow of good information is likely to be much more useful than a one-off leak

These days a silent arms-race goes on behind the scenes between computer programmers. Those countries and organisations minded to invest huge resources into this sort of thing attack each other through computer networks. The FCO/MI6 are under literally non-stop cyber-bombardment from hostile intelligence services and hackers.

These non-stop computer attacks seek to find technical loopholes in systems and through them to suck out inside information. Even unclassified information can be useful, such as HR data or even the patterns of telephone calls from and within buildings which, once the date are crunched, help narrow down who is doing what job, or not.

The other main approach is to get people to work for you, willingly (bribes, ideology) or unwillingly (blackmail, threats to relatives). It is one thing to attack MI6 electronically from banks of secret computer terminals in Siberia. Quite another to have someone actually inside the building.

NB that such a person may well not be tasked with smuggling key information out of the building - it could be enough that s/he helps you identify personal or other weaknesses which you might try to exploit.

In all this 'human intelligence' or HUMINT work, obvious problems arise.

First, how does a hostile external intelligence service attacking the UK identify potential recruits and then make the fatal pitch, inviting them to work for the 'enemy'? That requires impressive judgement, lest the target feigns acquiescence, pockets the money, and promptly notifies MI5 that this hostile approach has been made. That would allow MI5 to identify said hostile intelligence agent and maybe unravel all sorts of patiently crafted schemes.

Second, if a traitor is successfully recruited how to get hold of any information which the traitor can steal from within? A successful traitor needs to pass useful information maybe for years to come, without being suspected or detected. Not easy.

All of which goes to show where 'sleepers' and 'illegals' come into the picture.

It is not easy for (say) a Russian diplomat or 'businessman' repeatedly to approach a US official or to sniff around a US government agency without some sort of suspicions being raised.

So, why not use people who are really Russians but who look like Americans!

To carry this off requires years of patient, unproductive work as the would-be Americans build false identities and try to manoeuvre themselves into useful places.

Which in turn is why the drivel in the Guardian and elsewhere simply misses the point.

Most will fail to get anywhere significant. That's the point.

In effect the Rusians are hedging their bets, being busy on short-term tactics (massed computer attacks on USA systems) but also investing in long-term strategy.

Some of these people might hit the jackpot and get a job in a sensitive facility, or marry someone whose close friend is in a sensitive facility, or be part of a local community where people who work in sensitive facilities hang out.

The sleepers need not get results by acquiring information. They may do very well for the Russians by helping spot weaknesses ("Joe Jones's cousin Fred works in the Pentagon comms centre and is having a messy divorce and drinking problems. Mary Kennick's husband knows someone in the White House protocol team who has heavy gambling debts...").

Given the phenomenon of the Six Degrees of Separation, it would be surprising if they did not find some such weaknesses.

Plus, think about the problem of conveying stolen information safely to Moscow. It could be dangerous for a Russian mole in the US Air Force to pass information regularly to Russian diplomats - far easier to swing through a leafy suburb and slip it to an unsuspected American-lookalike sleeper.

Or consider the difficulty in setting up an operation, eg to get microphones planted in a building. Not so easy for a Russian to run a recce of that building and see how the security works. But an 'American' sleeper might be able to do that for you.

In short, without looking carefully at the whole production chain of intelligence information, it makes no sense to snigger at the significance of this excellent US power-play against a laboriously established Russian network.

Worse, it is naive and stupid to the point of dishonesty.

Read Edward Lucas who, of course, gets it:

The brilliant work by America's FBI in unearthing the biggest spy ring for decades should be a deafening wake-up call for every country that values its freedom and security.

Sadly, complacency and self-interest still muffle that alarm.

Update: another strong piece by Edward Lucas here, going into expert detail as to why the Russians would want to target UK assets for very well defined reasons.

BBC Radio 5 Live has just been poring over poverty in South African townships and today's UK Budget.

They interviewed some township shack-dwellers in Port Elizabeth where, you will remember, veteran collectivist ANC/Communist Govan Mbeki was all against local self-help. With the dismal results now apparent today, albeit not for his ANC/SACP pals in power who live very well indeed.

The township people spoke with commendable energy about their miserable plight, calling again and again for opportunities to work: "Let me come with you to England - I'll feed your dogs".

An ambitious worldview not usually associated with the UK underclasses?

Back to that Budget. Lord Ashdown (Lib Dem) bluntly and correctly blamed Labour for leaving the new coalition government such a feckless debt mountain. He was then asked what the answer was to poverty.

His reply was ... well, wrong.

He said that there is no one answer, but a combination of policies (taxation, education, public services).

In other words, in Paddy Ashdown's mind the answer to poverty is only some or other deft bundle of centralised redistributive measures.

But that assumes that there just IS something to redistribute.

The answer to poverty is wealth. What is wealth?

The combination of human ingenuity and natural resources. Where human ingenuity is suppressed and natural resources are underused or just meagre, you get poverty - the natural state of things.

The only way to end poverty is to identify the motors which create wealth, and the circumstances in which people do all they can to work creatively.

That might mean some centralised government support for the policy framework which lets that happen and eg takes some wealth from the successful to try to boost the prospects of the unsuccessful (although many different ways to do that effectively suggest themselves).

It also means government getting out of the way and not piling on requirements which make it harder for people to work and/or discourage the people who do most to create wealth.

Lord Ashdown asserted that the Fairness agenda was the Lib Dem's gift to the nation, or somesuch.

Not that I am ungrateful for such LibDem munificence.

But perhaps it is not much of a gift if it comes with no sense of how the creation of wealth actually happens?

A Polish reader Ludwik Kowalski now long established in the USA has sent in a link to this unusual free online memoir, namely extracts from his diaries which he wrote while growing up in the USSR then Stalinist Poland:

This is my “book of life.” It is based on what I recorded in diaries, first as a teenager in the USSR and Poland, then as an adult, in Poland, France and the USA. It traces my evolution from a dedicated Stalinist into an active anti-Stalinist. Romantic affairs and other preoccupations are not totally ignored...

My notebooks were kept in an old green metal trunk. In late 2009, at the age of 78, I finally decided to open it. Up to then, I had never re-read the diaries. Their total volume was approximately three cubic feet.

One thing became clear as soon as I started reading. Translating everything made no sense, considering poor composition, numerous repetitions, and too many details. But I began to see my life more clearly, and decided there was enough substance to be of interest to others...

Here is my story in a nutshell. Born in 1931 in Poland, I spent my early childhood, up to age 15, in the Soviet Union. During that time my idealistic father became a victim of the Stalinist regime; like millions of others, he was arrested and sent to die in Siberia.

My mother and I returned to Poland after the end of WWII. That is where my undergraduate and graduate education were completed. In 1957 I went to France for postgraduate studies. After returning to Poland in 1963 with a Ph.D. in Nuclear Physics, I was invited to a scientific conference in the US, and became a research associate at Columbia University. My teaching career began in 1969...

Well worth a look.

First, it's free.

And second, it is striking to read about the intellectual and emotional evolution from a boy who wrote cheery poems praising Stalin to ahighly educated man who finally grasped the truth about the Soviet regime and its cruelty to millions of its own people.

A neat little piece here, getting to the heart of Reality - and where Reality meets Politicians.

Not a place politicians much like, as it shows too much about them:

“Plug the damn hole,” Obama told them.

That’s the politician’s answer to every intractable problem: give orders, issue threats, and wait for obedience. But the creative human mind cannot take orders like that. Notice I didn’t say, “refuses to take orders.” I said, “cannot take orders.”

By that I mean, the task of plugging a leak 5,000 feet below the surface of the Gulf of Mexico is an engineering feat. BP’s acknowledged role in causing the leak does not alter the fact that careful study, creative thought, and the exacting deployment of technical and mechanical skills over long distances are all necessary in order to fix the leak.

No amount of jaw clenching or bug-eyed threats from politicians can bring the solution one inch closer to reality.

The human mind does not operate by force from outside. If engineering achievements could be conjured up by barking orders, the Soviet Union would be a thriving nation overflowing with engineering marvels, instead of a dead husk...

Some US Senators are asking some terse questions about Venezuela's active anti-American policies:

The State Department currently designates four nations — Syria, Cuba, Sudan, and Iran — as state sponsors of terrorism. These countries provide ideological support and material assistance to terrorist groups.

Once you consider the evidence behind Venezuela's substantial ties with U.S.-designated terrorist organizations and state sponsors of terrorism, we would like to know the strategic implications of designating Venezuela a state sponsor of terrorism.

We would also like to know the implications for the integrity of this list if Venezuela continues to evade designation. . .

Austin Bay mulls over the (as usual) limited options facing South Korea in responding to North Korea's role in sinking a South Korean ship and killing 46 sailors.

This seems a good scheme:

Explicit naval tit-for-tat, which exposes and exploits North Korean strategic weakness before a global audience, has more political impact. Seoul and Washington should consider seizing North Korean ships in open waters around the globe. Ships and cargoes could be held pending reparations.

In Asia, Pyongyang might route its ships through Chinese and Vietnamese coastal water (paying bribes to local coast guards in the process), but eventually they will encounter the U.S. Navy. The maritime cowards will encounter cameras and appear on YouTube. The Google world will get it.

In the Rhineland fiasco, the Western allies lost face. This Korean confrontation is also about political face, and it's time Kim and his killers lost theirs.

Exactly.

Welcome Britblog Roundup readers.

As readers will have noticed, someone describing himself/herself as George Dutton is now following this site closely and commenting with oh-so-clever remarks celebrating Socialism.

He quotes from a remarkable essay by Albert Einstein on Why Socialism? from 1949.

Here is Albert fretting over the survival of the human race (as well he might, given his busy contribution to atom bombs):

The abstract concept "society" means to the individual human being the sum total of his direct and indirect relations to his contemporaries and to all the people of earlier generations. The individual is able to think, feel, strive, and work by himself; but he depends so much upon society -- in his physical, intellectual, and emotional existence -- that it is impossible to think of him, or to understand him, outside the framework of society.

It is "society" which provides man with food, clothing, a home, the tools of work, language, the forms of thought, and most of the content of thought; his life is made possible through the labor and the accomplishments of the many millions past and present who are all hidden behind the small word "society."

It is evident, therefore, that the dependence of the individual upon society is a fact of nature which cannot be abolished -- just as in the case of ants and bees.

Will the Eurozone move to help the UK if we fall into difficulties?

Hell no:

Jean-Pierre Jouyet, a former French Europe minister and the current chairman of France's financial services authority, yesterday predicted only "God would help" a rudderless Britain after it snubbed its euro zone neighbours.

"There is not a two speed Europe but a three speed Europe. You have Europe of the euro, Europe of the countries that understand the euro ... and you have the English," he said.

"The English are very certainly going to be targeted given the political difficulties they have. Help yourself and heaven will help you. If you don't want to show solidarity to the euro zone, then let's see what happens to the United Kingdom."

But Euro-blandishments are not slow in heading to the new occupant of No 10:

Sweden, with a centre-Right Prime Minister, Fredrik Reinfeldt, who is a close political ally and personal friend of David Cameron, has called on Britain, a fellow non-euro country, to change its mind.

Anders Borg, Sweden's finance minister, said his country was thinking of supporting the EU fund even though his country rejected euro membership six years ago.

"It is completely unrealistic to think one cannot," he said. "I think it is unrealistic to imagine that Britain won't take part. London is Europe's financial centre. If bank financing and payments no longer work, it will only take a few days before the financial markets in London are dramatically affected."

The whole point of the new Eurozone arrangements (made up on the run) is to reallocate risk ultimately to taxpayers in a few countries, thereby significantly increasing the 'moral hazard' problem:

I think that the EU has developed a much stronger external narrative, telling markets that they should treat the eurozone as a single whole, which is strong and solvent, and not try to pick off weaker members because they will get their fingers burned.

But, and I think this is still a big but, the political narrative inside the eurozone is still lagging way behind. If the markets outside are being told to treat the eurozone as a single fortress, defended by unlimited budgetary firepower from the rich members of the club, voters in places like Germany, the Netherlands or Finland are absolutely not being told that they now inhabit a single economic entity, in which big chunks of the budget are pooled.

Eurozone 2 is, in a word, dishonest.

So if the UK so bungles its finances so grossly that we have to call in outside assistance, it should be from the global marketplace according to normal market disciplines or from the IMF in the usual 'take your medicine' way.

We should not go crawling to the German, Finnish and Dutch taxpayers for alms, the more so when those taxpayers have not been asked to sign a huge blank cheque to let the French loftily help other countries (or not) at their expense..

UK to Eurozone members:

We have a Conservative-led government. We are not a nation of second-handers and moochers:

You don’t think through another’s brain and you don’t work through another’s hands. When you suspend your faculty of independent judgment, you suspend consciousness. To stop consciousness is to stop life.

Second-handers have no sense of reality. Their reality is not within them, but somewhere in that space which divides one human body from another. Not an entity, but a relation—anchored to nothing.

A handy working definition of the European Central Bank, now that Germany with its erstwhile iron financial discipline has been reduced by Paris to become a nation of schmucks?

Here is a brisk piece I wrote over at Business and Politics, denouncing Labour schemes to loot football clubs to promote the 'mutualisation' of public services and the 'democratisation' of football club ownership.

This is so repulsive and insane an idea that one scarcely knows where to start.

OK, I'll start here.

A football club in the UK is private property.

It may prosper. It may go bust. That is the business of the people who own the club. No-one else.

Anything else is lumpen communism. 

I'll end there.

For all those of you rightly obsessed with Malta and Bosnia, let's not forget that Poland has a Presidential election again this year.

These happen every five years. A President may serve only two terms.

So, question. Will President Lech Kaczynski win again?

His first victory in 2005 came when he defeated his centre right opponent Donald Tusk in the second round run-off. The TV debates, where the younger and rather glamorous Tusk was expected to shine ended up working in Kaczynski's favour:

The Left-populist Andrzej Lepper had been eliminated in the first round, and his (mainly poor) voters were likely to incline to Kaczynski. Instead of trying to woo them in his own direction, Tusk made a serious mistake in excitedly accusing Kaczynski of being the sort of extremist who would attract such low-life support.

This allowed Kaczynski to say something to the effect of "Look, millions of Poles have suffered during Communism and the transition from it. We need to bring these deprived people in to the political mainstream, not insult and marginalise them!"

Kaczynski that night came across as much the bigger man. And won the election handily.  

My feeling about Lech Kaczynski is that for personal reasons going back deep into the Solidarnosc period in Poland, he and his twin brother wanted to win the 2005 Parliamentary and Presidential elections more to show that their view of history had been vindicated than to run Poland.

Which helps explain why President L Kaczynski's ratings have never been especially favourable. He has tended to issue tetchy pronouncements from his office rather than get out and about and engage with people.

In most Western capitals the Kaczynski twins are depicted as ultra conservative Catholic nationalist/Rightists. This is not accurate. What they represent is a respectable but defensively idiosyncratic patriotic/etatist viewpoint.

On one side they defend Poland's hard-won sovereignty from Russian energy interests, German WW2 property claims and Brussels bureaucrats alike. On the other they make a populist if not socialist appeal to the 'little man' as the victim of Poland's gloomy history, endemic post-communist corruption, and vast impersonal (and usually unnamed) forces outside Poland's control. They (especially the President) are suspicious of deregulation, free enterprise and the sort of wealthy success which entrepreneurship can create.

This grumpy steady-as-she-goes style is a reasonably successful formula in the Polish context. It has had the outstanding virtue of eliminating Poland's 'red-brown' populists completely from Parliament.

But its natural ceiling is about (at most) some 30% of the vote in normal polling. In the 2005 Presidential elections Kaczynski cruised to victory because he was able to add to that base a lot of post-communist centre left and further left voters too, unnerved by Tusk's unabashed free market policies..

So who might beat President Kaczynski this time round (assuming that he decides to run - not yet officially confirmed, I think)?

Donald Tusk, now Poland's Prime Minister, has decided to stay where he is. That has left the way open for his Citizens Platform party to choose their candidate.

Which they have done in an impressively organised vote of party members including Internet voting. Over 20,000 people took part.

The winner was Parliament Speaker Bronislaw Komorowski, who beat Foreign Minister Radek Sikorski by a strong 2:1 margin.

Why did the steady Komorowski defeat the younger and dynamic Sikorski so easily?

Partly because Komorowski has been a continuous presence on the Polish scene for so long, whereas Sikorski has spent a lot of his life in the UK and USA. 

And perhaps because party members suspected that a Presidential campaign between Kaczynski and Sikorski might play to the strengths of Kaczynski, allowing him to play the Experience and Reliable cards too strongly.

Komorowski by contrast offers both those qualities in generous quantities, but with a much better record than the President of smoothing over problems and not seeming to enjoy truculent political confrontation at home and abroad for its own sake.

Which is why the polls currently have Komorowski a firm favourite to beat Kaczynski, although no doubt the gap will narrow somewhat as the race develops.

So President Kaczynski has a difficult decision. To run again in very unfavourable circumstances and risk an embarrassingly large defeat? Or to stand down, but with no-one from his party likely to have a better chance to beat Komorowski?

As for Radek Sikorski, his ratings with the public are better than his ratings within the Citizens Platform party. He is still on the right side of 50 - he has many more chances to come and surely will take one of them.

Such as in 2020 when President Komorowski's second term ends. If he is ready to wait that long?

Welcome Iain Dale readers.

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Am I missing something here, or is this beyond stupidity?

Two German members of the supposedly liberal ALDE group in the European Parliament:

We cannot leave it to private rating agencies to decide whether Europe is creditworthy. By lowering Greece's creditworthiness after the country corrected its budget deficit, they further intensified the crisis. It seems that we have yet to learn from the obvious failure of rating agencies during the financial crisis that preceded the crisis in Greece. We have to learn and address the failings of private ratings agencies.

Here's a plan.

Let's leave it all to the official agencies in Athens and Brussels who dishonestly or knowingly or negligently have led us into this mess.

Not.

So what if private ratings agencies create problems for Greece, the Euro or for anything else.

The reason that happens is that they have established over many years a record for some sort of credible analysis and reliability, so people believe them.

Plus the whole point of freedom is that in the ensuing turbulent ebb and flow of ideas the public get to choose which approach seems to make sense.

No doubt private and public analysts alike got many things wrong when times looked good. Over-optimism is contagious.

But now when things are shown to have been based on dodgy foundations is just the time when we need every piece of analysis we can find.

And if global markets choose to believe the more gloomy ones from private ratings agencies rather than reassuring noises emanating from Brussels and Athens, too bad.

That's an incentive signal. It shows that Brussels and Athens need to work harder not to get to the point where that pessimism looks to be well justified and/or has consequences.

It's called Cause and Effect. Not something the plump members of the European Parliament appear to understand.

A lively effort is being mounted to raise money to secure the release of one Nick Hogan, who has been imprisoned here in the UK for not paying a £3000 fine and a further £7000 in costs for failing to stop people smoking in his pub.

Try Old Holborn, who has set up a PayPal button. Nearly £4000 has been raised in little over 24 hours.

Galling as it is to have to pay money into the coffers of the state to get Nick Hogan free when he arguably should not be in prison, it will be an impressive sign of libertarian people power if he is quickly released when the money to pay his fine is raised.

What I strongly object to is the definition of a privately owned pub as a 'public place' under the relevant legislation. Just because the public have 'access' to a pub does not mean that it should be treated as a public place. The public are welcome to walk in and see what they like and dislike before deciding (or not) to stay.

If a landlord wants to allow people to smoke or take their clothes off or otherwise amuse themselves on property he owns, anyone not liking it may leave. Market forces can decide how far pubs and other establishments make provision for eg smokers and/or non-smokers alike.

This tendency by the state to usurp private property rights for 'public' purposes is utterly obnoxious, whether it applies to pubs or sport. See this piece on Football Socialism.  

Yesterday in London I was on the stage at the Polish Cultural Centre in West London for a discussion about Solidarity - Thirty Years After.

Others on the panel were Wladyslaw Frasyniuk (former top Solidarity activist and former political prisoner turned politician) - someone whose lively intelligence has left him an influential but quixotic player in Polish politics.

And Dougie Rooney, current President of the Trades Union Congress and a strong supporter of nuclear power.

Wiktor Moszczynski, press officer for the Federation of Poles in Great Britain, presided.

In my own remarks I shamelessly grabbed the opportunity to tease Dougie Rooney and remind the audience, not that most of the people there needed reminding, how the rise of the Solidarnosc movement in Poland in the 1980s had been a ghastly embarrassment for the British Left in general and the TUC in particular.

For many years senior Labour Party and trades unionists had been trooping to Moscow to ask for unobtrusive support from the Soviet leadership in their class struggles in the UK. In an epic act of national betrayal, Edward Kennedy too had travelled to Moscow in the mid-1980s secretly to ask for Moscow's help in defeating Ronald Reagan.

Not to mention that further back in 1920 assorted trades unions in England had mobilised to stop the British government sending weapons and supplies to newly independent Poland, then under attack from the Red Army whose avowed aim was to conquer Poland then move on to Berlin, Paris and London.

"Hands off Russia" had been the progressive cry, just when revolutionary Marxist Russia was greedily laying its own hands on as many territories as it could.

So, I said, there was a long tradition of both useless Useful Idiots and dangerous Useful Idiots in the Labour Movement, who had hated the fact that Polish workers were having the temerity to stand up for freedom against the Soviet empire, and so were threatening 'detente'.

Such attitudes ran deep in British society by the 1980s. By then Soviet Communism was like the weather - it was just there, for better or worse. I had had a problem in the FCO for echoing the Evil Empire language of Ronald Reagan in a speech I had drafted for Sir Geoffrey Howe. All sorts of people popped up pompously to intone that that sort of inflammatory rhetoric was likely to be 'destabilizing'.

Yet the Soviet Union was an empire, and it was (more or less) evil.

Luckily the arrival of Pope John Paul II, Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan had created a far-sighted vision for looking at Soviet Communism which created new realities on the ground far beyond these limp official cluckings.

In Reagan's wonderful phrase, "My idea of the Cold War is that we win, they lose." Which was what had happened.

I said that it was not surprising that the British Left had been hopelessly confused on the whole question. Run a Google search now and you see all sorts of squabbles still echoing on between the social-democratic Left, the Communist Left, the Trotskyist Left and the Really Trotskyist Left over who did what to whom back then.

And how appalling it had been for all of them that Margaret Thatcher was greeted by huge crowds of cheering Polish workers in Gdansk after defeating the Miners here in the UK.  

John Prescott (who knows a few things about British socialist and union politics) had found it all very hard to take, as he told me on one of his visits to Warsaw a few years back. Not only had many Poles seen Margaret Thatcher as a vision of hope. Much worse, the new Solidarity members coming to UK for fraternal consultations had all been pointy-head academics, not a real shipworker among them! 

I made one other point which perhaps was less comfortable to Polish ears.

Namely that on the one hand Poland rightly prided itself now on the huge sense of national unity and democratic but disciplined Christian principles which Solidarity came to represent. See eg this meeting itself.

But that mythic representation of Solidarity sat uneasily with the fact that millions of Poles had been more or less loyal to the Communist regime, whose agents and informers had penetrated to the top of Solidarity and indeed the Catholic Church. 

Hence continuing bitter feuding today over the 'deal' done with the Communists in the late 1980s.

Did Solidarity under malevolent influence of senior traitors within its own ranks pull its punches and let the Communists tip-toe away far too easily? And even if that was the case, did Poles now want to force through the final unmasking of all those double-agents in Solidarity and Church ranks?

This prompted shouts of Yes! from a small but noisy contingent of younger Poles in the audience, who appeared to blame Frasyniuk and other Solidarity veterans for the fact that so many young Poles still did not have jobs in Poland, and suspected that Lech Walesa had been a double agent...

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It is all 30 years ago now. Ancient History.

Lech Walesa himself is still only 67. All being well he'll be around for Solidarity's 50th birthday party in 2030.  

John Mauldin of Thoughts from the Frontline writes a powerful weekly email on economic and investment themes to which one million people have subscribed.

As have I.

Because it is free.

His latest one is superb, disentangling different expert pessimistic and not-so-pessimistic analyses about the problems of the Eurozone, Greece and Spain in particular.

What I liked about this essay was the way he looked hard and fairly at rival views of unquestionable professional integrity, trying to find common ground and exploring the deeper reasons why they diverge.

He writes with tight precision:

... the valuation of the euro is not in and of itself a reason for the euro to disappear. At one time it was $.82. Then over $1.60. All currencies fluctuate, some more than others. What destroys them is political malfeasance.

What would put the euro at risk of a bad political decision?  A Greek bailout without serious conditions would be the one thing that could be a very bad start to a downward spiral. If Greece is bailed out, then why not Portugal or Spain or Ireland? What about the emergency room crisis that is Austrian banks?

The line has to be drawn, and it has to be a hard line.

On Spain he quotes another top analyst, Ray Dalio:

... Spain's external debts, have exploded without a significant offset of external assets. On net, Spain owes the world about 80% of GDP more than it has external assets.

As a frame of reference, the degree of net external debt Spain has piled up in a currency it cannot print has few historical precedents among significant countries and is akin to the level of reparations imposed on Germany after World War I.

We don't know of precedents for these types of external imbalances being paid back in real terms.

Heavy stuff. Don't subscribe unless you aren't feeling weak.

Meanwhile Soeren Kern at Pajamas Media explores how the leftist Spanish ruling class are blaming Anglo-Saxon economics for their rotten situation. And, that old stand-by when you have run out of intelligent things to say, conspiracies:

“Spain is the victim of an international conspiracy to destroy the country’s economic status, and then, the euro,” he said. “Nothing that is happening, including the apocalyptical editorials in foreign media, is just chance.”

Well, that is true. Hard to imagine articles in newspapers and magazines about Spanish recklessness being created by ad hoc atoms of ink randomly settling on the page.

But it misses the main point. Namely this staggering graph in the WSJ showing why for some 40 years the USA's federal government too has been on (and remains on) a reckless binge:

The small cheer in all this horror is that the US Democrats, main drivers of government profligacy, are running scared. The Tea Party tendency is focusing hard on this issue, to fine effect.

It is only a small cheer. Since the scale of the problem is now so daunting that it is hard to see good options for dealing with it. Stephen Spreuill looks at what the Republicans might include by way of policy ideas to start the decades-long trudge back to sanity.

What goes up, goes up and up and up before there is a crash or a total breakdown, when it comes down. The Eurozone is inherently less rational a phenomenon than the dollar, and so it will face its existential crisis sooner.