Blogoir

A friendly reader asks:

Thank you for producing such a thought-provoking and readable blog.

I thought you may be interested in this link to a press release from the Swedish MFA. They plan to close 6 Posts and open 10.

http://www.sweden.gov.se/sb/d/12653/a/138250

Several of these post closures are in the EU. I would be interested in reading your view in the blog (if you have time) about their choices.

Do you think it is a good strategy to close EU posts or is it better to shrink them? Also now with the development of the European External Action Service, is it more important to have posts in EU capitals than outside the EU (not counting the US, China, etc)? 

Then a Member State can lobby in each EU capital to push for the EU to follow a foreign policy most likely to benefit that Member State's national interest.

Well.

It depends upon what each country believes its diplomacy is for.

In the UK's case, we are a major net contributor to the EU budget. Plus we have allowed all sorts of issues within the EU to be decided by 'qualified majority voting'. Which means that EU decisions we disagree with and which may cost us a lot of taxpayers' money to implement can be imposed on us by a majority vote.

So we have very good reasons to want to make sure that we have an effective diplomatic network around the EU, both (a) to work out what dire schemes are out there and (b) to lobby hard to get other governments to support us in blocking stupid measures intended to damage our competitiveness. See the heroic work by the Embassy in Warsaw to work with Poland to fend off the evil Working Time Directive.

This, by the way, is another reason why HMG Targets for the FCO as proclaimed by Brown/Miliband have been utterly malign.

It takes only one successful intervention by an Embassy in Europe to save the taxpayer hundreds of millions of pounds. Yet there is no way to make that calculation in the way the Brown/Treasury targets allocate the money to the FCO. Hence the FCO is now facing another round of heavy cuts, footling in overall terms but more than enough to create real risks to national interests. Madness.

We also have a strong diplomatic tradition far beyond Europe, which more than justifies itself in terms of giving the UK international impact and insight. The idea that we are 'punching above our weight' is annoying. Our collective British weight is substantial, and we should punch away, preferably below the belt now and again to show we mean it.

Meanwhile the EU External Action Service is creeping into the picture.

It is going to take a long time (say 10 years) for this new formation to acquire coherence and a clear role. Its own position within the EU system is still complex and not fully defined (eg what is it meant to be doing with and in eastern European countries covered by the Enlargement Commissioner?).

Yet slowly but surely it will take on some sort of shape on the ground. And member states diplomats will be seconded to it. Rumours suggest that a sizeable number of FCO staff have put their names forward for secondments, no doubt dismayed by the collapse of the FCO's morale and impressed by the higher salaries EAS offers.

Thus we have a perverse situation (or not, depending what you want). The EAS is deconstructing national diplomatic services in favour of some ambivalent European supranational formation. Taxpayers are seeing their national foreign services eroding for lack of funds, and this new organisation growing.

All of which rests on one profound Euro-collectivist premise: that in the EU 'national' foreign policies are on the whole a negative phenomenon.

So to answer (I hope) the questions.

Most EU member states' embassies in other EU countries these days are mainly symbolic or heavily focused on a tiny number of issues.

Only the larger member states' Embassies play a serious role in lobbying locally on foreign policy questions, since only the larger EU member states actually have foreign policies (ie positions matched to some resources for advancing them).

Those small/medium member states aspiring to wider diplomatic/political influence and impact beyond the EU lose little by scaling back their diplomatic presence in EU capitals. They just have to take their chances in Brussels with Voting; they can not deploy firepower of sufficient intensity to lobby much on internal EU issues in all those EU capitals.

Hence we see Sweden not unreasonably cutting back in EU Europe but redeploying in non-EU Europe and some places in Africa, where Swedish diplomacy can make a difference.

That would be unwise for the UK, as it would make us all the more vulnerable to fatuous EU decisions with dangerous implications for our national budget. Yet Brown/Beckett/Miliband have been busy for years doing just that.

One way to fend off Eurosceptics in the UK is to show that we almost always thwart the stupid aspects of EU integration, but that just can not be done by bickering between bureaucratic experts in capitals and last-minute haggling in Brussels alone.

You need a team of excellent energetic people (UK-based and Locals alike) on the ground too, to lobby for UK positions and to identify weak points in the positions and psychologies of others - just as I had in Warsaw.

Oh, and a government in Westminster which has not completely lost sight of common sense.

Adam Jasser (Polish, Reuters journalist-turned-pundit, good egg) argues that the grim problems besetting Greece and its public finances could lead to the Eurozone getting even stronger:

In all the talk about the pain inflicted on countries in the Eurozone which fail to run their affairs sensibly it is overlooked that that pain is the WHOLE POINT.

Because there is no ready way to bail out profligate countries, and because a wide single multilingual/multicultural currency zone has stickiness in terms of the way people move about (ie it is quite unlike the USA), the threat of that horrible pain is what is meant to compel slack members to reform their ways.

Which is why Adam is dead right here:

The EU is therefore right to begin pondering how to enhance policy coordination and strengthen the community’s ability to fine tune individual economies. Convergence criteria will most likely have to evolve to include a limit on current account balances and an enforcement mechanism for sticking with the rules will have to be put in the hands of the Commission. 

But all of that falls short of what is really required. What the euro is clandestinely working towards (like a sleeper planted by the EU “federalists”) is a far-reaching unification of the social and economic models that today function in the EU.  The existence of variously efficient pension systems, labour market rules, business environments and tax regulations are the root cause of the imbalances inside the euro zone...

In short, the Euro will work properly only if national economic decision-making can be superseded by ruthless EU-level decision-making to 'fine-tune' a national economy if a country gets too far out of order.

Lots (lots) more harmonisation towards a 'federal' Europe, where Germany calls the ultimate shots.

Maybe some countries will think this is just too high a price to pay for 'integration', and either retreat gracefully from the Eurozone in due course or crash painfully out of it.

Either event could be quite a good outcome, paving the way for a quite new set of variable geometry relations between all EU member states and eg Turkey/Ukraine too, which, being based on experience of how such 'deep' integration works (and has to work) in practice, will be all the more acceptable to the various populations of our happy continent.

Here from euobserver is a detailed account of the goings-on behind the EU scenes, as everyone tries to work out how the new EU External Action Service will be structured.

And who will get which jobs, since that will have a huge influence on the way it all works (or not) in practice, not to mention the opportunities for dispensing patronage.

Here is another euobserver article on the shape of the EU's future representation overseas.

Lo and behold, up my droll friend James Morrison has popp'd up as the head of Baroness Ashton's cabinet. She is in good hands.

Never underestimate the grinding unrelenting power of the EU machinery and the pooled wealth behind it. Key points to look out for as the discussions continue:

• where in all this fit member states and their diplomats
• how EU positions will be articulated at the UN
• what if any oversight and associated 'control' is grabbed by the European Parliament

Member states face a dilemma. The Lisbon Treaty strengthens their role in EU foreign policy at the coalface since it makes provision for member states diplomats to be seconded to EU missions.

But whom to send? The best, the worst, or the average?

Sending the best people takes them away from national foreign policy roles and boosts the long-term legitimacy of the EAS. Send the worst or the average - if others send the best - reduces the likely impact they are likely to have within EAS deliberations.

Most member states will want to cherry-pick, lobbying furiously for a certain number of key Ambassadorships and Deputies for their nationals as the price for getting the whole thing going. Within the member states there will be ruthless knifing as 'new' member states jostle for position against 'old' member states:

One thorny little bramble for Ms Ashton will be ensuring that new member states get a satisfactory share of senior appointments.

The EU Council and the commission, which will furnish two-thirds of EEAS personnel, are currently dominated by people from old member states. Out of the commission's 1,657 foreign relations officials, 117 are from the 12 countries that joined the union after 2004. Just one of them, Hungarian diplomat Janos Herman in the commission's Norway embassy, holds a top-level post.

"The Brussels mafia has made sure that our dirty moustaches are kept out of this," one Polish-origin EU official said.

And all this in turn will provoke intense sulking within the Commission as people who have dreamed of heading their own EU mission get trumped near the finishing line by smug member states diplomats keen to show that they are the real thing.

This is only the very start of a process which will last years if not decades. There are bound to be all sorts of difficulties working out the new structures, let alone doing anything with them.

Here in the UK we have the prosepct of regime change this year, so a Conservative government led by a team not exactly oozing Europhilia will need to look hard at what D Miliband has done in the twlight days of his rule and see if they want to unscramble any of it.

The Ever-Closer the Union, the Much Harder the property settlement if there is ever a Divorce?

Edging back to normal life again after three days running around bewinter'd Poland. What a pleasure to be in a country able to cope sensibly with snow.

Far from snow is Haiti.

Ben Macintyre blames the French for brutalising Haiti into paying ruinous reparations for its temerity in wanting to espouse the Liberty part of the French Revolution. An interesting example of the Foreign Policy of Compound Interest - the wealth sucked out from Haiti over many decades has not had a chance to grow steadily to the local population's benefit.

The problem is that once a country ends up in too weak a state to prosper, all sorts of bad people flourish, and all sorts of clever people show up with ingenious schemes to make things better:

Before the earthquake, Haiti had 10,000 non-governmental organizations working there, the highest rate per capita in the world. In 2007, notes Bret Stephens of the Wall Street Journal, it had ten times as much foreign aid as investment.

If people are determined to blame Haiti’s problems on someone other than the Haitians, perhaps they could start by looking at the damage done by the foreign-aid industry.

Except that they won't.

Now the usual international or even national feuding is breaking out over who should do what to help the victims. Should the US Army get involved in directly helping people, or is that best left to 'assistance professionals'?

There was a classic case of this in Afghanistan where DFID demanded that some British Army local project-work be stopped because the work was insufficiently strategic.

They probably were right. Digging a well or putting a roof on a ruined school is not (on one way of looking at it) as strategic as more patiently identifying water and education plans for the region as a whole, preferably with 'full local participation' and 'due account paid to local gender issues and sensitivities' and so on.

Yet while that work trundles on there is no water from the well, and the school can't function.

Maybe the best or indeed only strategy is to get people in a position to start to do practical things for themselves, and then let them work out the strategies.

It reminds me of when Clare Short created DFID. The new Department's bureaucrats were full of themselves, keen to show new and above all strategic thought. So DFID support for the pioneering network of ad hoc local projects in Bosnia as previously run by the British Army soon stopped. Not strategic.

Clare Short herself came on a visit to Bosnia and we went to a small village where there had been a British plan to replace the electricty lines destroyed in the war; this very local scheme had been dropped by DFID as insufficiently 'strategic'.

The Bosnians told her that without power they could do nothing. Clare Short (being a domatic but practical Leftist) saw immediately that they were right and told her people to find the DFID funds to get the powerlines back up. 

A few large, slow, well thought-out, all-embracing, top-down plans?

Or many small, improvised, suck-it-and-see initiatives which together may add up to something - and which give the people who live in these places the chance to mobilise their own resources?

No right answer.

Remember my rather dismissive account of the UK's attempt to teach the Russians how to fish, rather than inundate them with free fish? And the ensuing Big Mac Attack?

I have just heard from a former member of the UK Agriculture Ministry MAFF (by no means related to naff) who was engaged on all that work back in early Yeltsin Russia:

I liked your Model Farm item, but it was a bit incomplete.  Fact is, that we in MAFF got so p*ss*d off with KHF and their byzantine procedures that we found some Departmental money of our own that we could legitimately gift to UK private-sector industry (in this case the seed-potatoes sector) to plant the stuff directly on Russian sacred land on the Model Farm territory, with the full and happy support of the Russians. 

Who said this?

In 1989 I made a trip to England. I was hosted by Prime Minister [Margaret] Thatcher at her residence at Chequers for official talks and she invited me personally up to the attic.

There, in the attic of this ancient, ancient palace, there were many antique relics -- it was like in a theater. And there was a big table and on that table there was a folder, an old, brown folder. Do you know whose folder that was? I said, "How could I know?" And she said, "Napoleon's." "I've never brought a French person here," she said.

Imagine, 200 years had passed. France and England are in one union. World War I passed. World War II. The modern friendship. But still, everyone has a different opinion about that. For the English, he was a murderer and a man who brought a lot of harm. For the French, he was a hero. And you have to respect that, mutually.

When and under what conditions do we leave the past to mind its own business and no longer prey upon the present?

A Polish friend sends me this:

An economics professor at a local college made a statement that he had never failed a single student before, but had once failed an entire class. That class had insisted that socialism worked and that no one would be poor and no one would be rich, a great equalizer.

The professor then said, "OK, we will have an experiment in this class on socialism. All grades would be averaged and everyone would receive the same grade so no one would fail and no one would receive an A.

After the first test, the grades were averaged and everyone got a B. The students who studied hard were upset and the students who studied little were happy.  

As the second test rolled around, the students who studied little had studied even less and the ones who studied hard decided they wanted a free ride too so they studied little. The second test average was a D! No one was happy.

When the 3rd test rolled around, the average was an F. The scores never increased as bickering, blame and name-calling all resulted in hard feelings; no-one would study for the benefit of anyone else.  

All failed, to their great surprise. The professor told them that socialism would also ultimately fail: when the reward is great, the effort to succeed is great; when government takes all the reward away, no one will try or want to succeed...                                        

What one person receives without working for, another person must work for without receiving. The government cannot give to anybody anything that the government does not first take from somebody else.

When half of the people get the idea that they do not have to work because the other half is going to take care of them, and when the other half gets the idea that it does no good to work because somebody else is going to get what they work for, that is about the end of any nation

Dr. Adrian Rogers, 1931

Look at it like this.

In a city there's a nice large green public park, where families and individuals stroll around happily.

One day a group of leather-jacketed aggressive foul-mouthed types and some snarly dogs turn up and postion themselves prominently in one corner.

This happens day after day.

Gradually the people who used to enoy the park start to steer clear of that corner. An unspoken sense of subtle anxiety develops among them.

Who are those people, and what are their intentions? Are we safe there any longer? And do we need the hassle in our lives of having to worry about it? Why not go elsewhere for a walk?

I was talking to someone who works in the EU system and lives here in Brussels. She has moved away from the Brussels centre because (as a 'white' European) she does not want to be jeered at and spat at by gangs of Moroccans and other immigrants hanging around on street corners. If necessary she'll leave Brussels and move to join her husband in a part of the EU where these issues do not arise.

Back to the park scenario. The point is that whereas the municipality/public own the park, the arrival of the nasty gang on a regular basis means that the psychological ownership of the park quickly starts to shift. 

Like an evil miasma, the gang's sneeringly malign influence spreads across that space, the more so for being ostensibly aimless and unfocused. 

The legal owners of the park (here in the form of the police) have to decide. Do they compel the aggressive new element to leave the park? Not easy. The gang members are committing no clear offence worth all the hassle of going to court; they may not go quietly; and above all the problem is not a Priority Target for government resource-allocation purposes.

Thus inch by inch the values of the more aggessive element come to prevail in the minds of all concerned. And if the gang hang around for long enough and erect a temporary structure unchallenged, the formal legal ownership of the park itself will start to mutate into something less clear. 

Even if the gang leaves and goes somewhere else, the underlying anxiety within the public will linger - maybe they'll come back one day. 

One way or the other, the gang wins. The public 'retreats'.

Which of course also goes to explain Russia/Georgia and many other issues of global politics. We are moving into a dangerous phase where the symbolism of will-power and sheer determination seem to matter as much as who formally owns what.

This is the deep sense of Russian policy towards the former Soviet republics and eg the Orthodox parts of former Yugoslavia (ie Serb-dominated areas). Moscow is aiming to assert that those territories may be legally independent but in fact they are under Moscow's psychological 'protection' - if the EU/US/West tries to push its values into those regions, they will face Resistance.

Ditto the new surge in open naval piracy. These nimble pirate gangsters are asserting that they define the operational and psychological order on the high seas - and if merchant ships do not repel them by force, they will use force to take them over.

So are the exceptionalist demands of eg Islamist extremists (and not-so-extremists) in Western countries all about establishing a psychological force field around their activities, as the first stage in establishing a quasi-judicial space outside normal national jurisdiction? In form and substance a process of incremental territorial conquest?

And as Mark Steyn argues, do we know it's really working when we see it happening and simply ignore it?

You didn’t have to be “alert” to spot Major Nidal Hasan. He’d spent most of the last half-decade walking around with a big neon sign on his head saying “JIHADIST. STAND WELL BACK”. But we (that’s to say, almost all of us; and certainly almost anyone who matters in national security and the broader political culture) are now reflexively conditioned to ignore the flashing neon sign.

Like those apocryphal Victorian ladies discreetly draping the lasciviously curved legs of their pianos, if a glimpse of hard unpleasant reality peeps through we simply veil it in another layer of fluffy illusions.

Two joint terrorism task forces became aware almost a year ago that Major Hasan was in regular email contact with Anwar al-Awlaqi, the American-born but now Yemeni-based cleric who served as imam to three of the 9/11 hijackers and supports all-out holy war against the United States. But the expert analysts in the Pentagon determined that this lively correspondence was consistent with Major Hasan’s “research interests”, so there was no need to worry.

That’s America: Technologically superior, money no object (not one but two “joint terrorism task forces” stumbled across him). Yet no action was taken...

The truth is we’re not prepared to draw a line even after he’s gone ahead and committed mass murder. “What happened at Fort Hood was a tragedy,” said General Casey, the US Army’s Chief of Staff, “but I believe it would be an even greater tragedy if our diversity becomes a casualty here.”

A “greater tragedy” than 14 dead and dozens of wounded? Translating from the original brain-addled multicult-speak, the Army Chief of Staff is saying that the same fatuous prostration before marshmallow illusions that led to the “tragedy” must remain in place. If it leads to occasional mass murder, well, hopefully it can be held to what cynical British civil servants used to call, during the Northern Irish “Troubles”, “an acceptable level of violence”.

Fourteen dead is evidently acceptable. A hundred and forty? Fourteen hundred? I guess we’ll find out...

When it comes down to it, what is a Blog?

Not much more than personal musings, often with links to other websites which in one way or the other serve to reinforce the point one is trying to make.

Some sites aim higher - to become places where intelligent people go to find at a one-stop-shop manifold links to intelligent work of all shapes and sizes.

Such as Edge, which is way too intelligent for me:

THE AGE OF THE INFORMAVORE

We make technology, but our technology also makes us. At the online science/culture journal Edge, BB pal John Brockman went deep -- very deep -- into this concept. Frank Schirrmacher is co-publisher of the national German newspaper FAZ and a very, very big thinker. Schirrmacher has raised public awareness and discussion about some of the most controversial topics in science research today, from genetic engineering to the aging population to the impacts of neuroscience.

A superb and reliable aggregator is Arts & Letters Daily: not too many new links each day, but each one posted with dry humour and a liberal-minded instinct.

Have a look before they disappear down the A&LD page at the superb collections of links to articles and other writing of all shapes and sizes about the 20th anniversary of the end of European Communism and the Fall of the Wall. Such as this interview with Adam Michnik:

With the West struggling to come up with a response to Iran's nuclear ambitions, Mr. Michnik cites Ronald Reagan's approach to Poland as a useful model for President Obama. The day after martial law was imposed in 1981, the U.S. publicly sided with the Polish people against their regime.

"You have to support in a smart way those forces in Iran that aren't like that crazy president, that Islamo-Maoist Ahmadinejad," he says. "What is important for them is to see in America a friend. In Poland it worked; today there's no more pro-American country in the world." The violent repression of democratic protestors in Iran since June, he adds, indicates that "the ayatollahs must feel the breath of history on their backs."

But many many others too.

Finally, I have tripped over The Browser, another excellent site pulling together interesting work in a manageable format.

Including this handy link to the expensive watches worn by powerful Russians.

There's just too much to read, folks.

Reader Norman Fraser takes me to task for disagreeing with David Aaronovitch:

No Charles this will just not do. You are attempting an act of heroic sophistry here and you are clearly not up to it. Quibbling about the words in one article is just not enough. There is too much other evidence that Kaminsky is an unpleasant man with a history of extreme right-wing statements and actions which he now seeks to explain away - unsuccesfully.

The Jewish Chronicle term his current position on Jedwabne as "ingenious" and summarise the case aganst him well here http://www.thejc.com/news/uk-news/20816/exclusive... Looks like a clear case of back-pedelling anti-semite homophobe to me

Here is the reply I have sent him:

I have spent too long in that part of the world, perhaps. The experiences people have had and the prejudices for better and worse they have inherited are far beyond anything we can understand.

So it’s all about being patient and letting people ‘catch up’ with our own lofty liberal standards. It’s not so long ago that gayness was outlawed in the UK and public facilities in the USA were racially segregated, so we too need to be a bit more modest in sneering at others. Poles are moving along their own trajectory towards contemporary European tolerance from a very different place, just as the Irish have done. The Arabs are far ‘behind’ if one wants to look at it like that (they I suspect do not). 

The bottom line in all this is that Poland is a notably less extreme and more ‘European’ place than it was six years ago, thanks primarily to the Kaczynskis getting in to power and (yes, maybe reluctantly) finding themselves having to deal with a new European dimension to Polish politics. They brilliantly sucked the electoral juice out of the Red/Brown Polish populists (30+% of the vote in 2003, nowhere now) and threw the husks aside.

Excellent result for Poland and Europe. Who would you rather have in the EP? Michal Kaminski or Andrzej Lepper? Do you see no difference?

Kaminski played a good part in accomplishing that seismic shift. The hypocrisy of Miliband/Aaronovitch lies in not accepting and praising that as at least part of the story, and in not being sympathetic to the Polish process as a whole.  

It’s all a sordid British political game at the expense of another country’s tragedy, so shame on those who started it.

All this is a bit Polish-specific, I know, but those making these accusations are counting on general ignorance of Poland to get away with it.

David Aaronovitch (who like David Miliband comes from a family steeped in High Marxism) has a vigorous go at David Cameron this morning over the Jedwabne/Kaminski issue.

There are already three David's in this story. But what to do? Co zrobić?

DA on DC:

But more than that, I find myself amazed by how Mr Cameron ever came to be in the position of demanding that a foreign secretary, descended from Polish Jews, should apologise for possibly offending the sensibilities of a foreign politician who vehemently opposed there being an apology for the massacre of Polish Jews. I think of all the things that Mr Cameron has got right in his leadership of the Conservatve Party and my mental jaw drops at the sheer wrongness of it.

Clunk.

What propels his jaw southward? He quotes Michal Kaminski:

Last month Mr Kaminski (who had denied giving the interview) confirmed this position. “If you are asking the Polish nation to apologise for the crime made in Jedwabne,” he said, “you would require the whole Jewish nation to apologise for what some Jewish communists did in Eastern Poland.”

It is this argument that so incenses me, as it would anyone, I think, who had sat through Our Class. The idea of collective Jewish Bolshevism was a major anti-Semitic trope before the war; it was a major element of self-justification after it.

But surely Kaminski is agreeing with him, by saying that it is not right to condemn whole categories of people merely because some members of that category have done something wrong?

Look, why does someone apologise for what someone else has done? Where does responsibility begin and end?

Aaronovitch brushes such central issues aside as the emissions of Tory columnists, bloggers and activists ... devoting their time to nitpicking sophistry about the nature of collective guilt

He has to do so, since otherwise he might open himself up to having to apologise for the failure of President Kwasniewski not to apologise for the way Poland's Communists instrumentalised anti-semitism after WW2. They're both ex-commies, right?

Maybe DA needs to follow his own advice to DC and get out more, in this case by going and living in Poland for a good while to try to put his head round the enormity and passion these issues arouse in that part of Europe.

The odd thing about Poland is that there is a pronounced 'national' identity of a defined Polishness. People there argue as to where that comes from. Is it something created by an intellectual elite in the nineteenth century as a defined 'national consciousness' in the way German-ness and Italian-ness were created then? If so, is it 'real'?

Or is it something deeper and organically authentic? Both?

It follows that insofar as Poles are proud of - and define themselves by - their collective Polishness, they may have to look differently at ideas of collective responsibility.

Can they have the benefits of all that collective solidarity and tradition of principled heroism without accepting the burden of especially evil deeds committed by some Poles along the way?

Which is why their leaders and commentators do pore intensely over such issues as Jedwabne, trying to make finely woven but defensible moral and political distinctions to separate out Right from Wrong. Has DA read what PM Jerzy Buzek said about Jedwabne, and thought about the careful wording behind it?

What DA fails to grasp is that President Kwasniewski in his genial cynicism was a master of using these sensibilities and contradictions for his own political purposes. His Jedwabne 'apology' and the uproar it generated was all about creating an uproar in the hope that in the ensuing complexities he would be able to present himself as the good guy.

And it worked then, and works still.

Bad stuff happened done by some Poles years ago.

Kwasniewski apologises (sort of).

Therefore Kwasniewski = Good Guy, and anyone else = Bad Guy.

And while all this is droning on - all good former communists stick together.

Because they and only they define the parameters of these issues.

As to DA's final gush, that this whole business is brought about because DC is pursuing EU policies which go against 'British interests', the fact remains that the basis of the matter is a philosophical rejection of a 'federal Europe'.

On that one DC has a very strong majority of voters here behind him.

So don't worry, DA, about the UK being marginalised in Europe when DC becomes Prime Minister. The rest of the EU need lots of British taxpayers' money and British military skill within the fold, so they'll talk to us - very actively.

My various blog posts on the Kaminski story have caught a wider audience.

So I have decided today to come out.

Back in May this year I, like everyone else, was revolted by the goings-on in Parliament and Government over expenses and other abuses.

What especially annoyed me was the fact that over some 28 years in the FCO I had been meticulously careful in spending public money, both under the rules and within the spirit of the rules.

Had I been caught straying in either respect, I (rightly) would have been punished. And Labour Ministers/MPs would be pointing to my punishment as evidence for their own integrity in managing public money.

Yet lo, it turned out that within that world of MPs/MEPs going to the highest levels in all Parties there were far too many people manipulating the allowances/expenses system for heavy personal gain.

So when David Cameron said that people who previously had not been involved in politics might apply to join the Conservative Party Candidates List as part of a wider move to effect a tough spring-clean at Westminster, I thought "why not?"

Thus at the end of May I set in motion the procedures for getting some serious references and formally applying. Which, of course, meant that I had to leap off the non-political fence and join the Conservative Party, which I finally did on 11 August.

That was my first time as a member of any Party since I left Oxford University in 1976, having been briefly on the OU Conservative Association committee during a period of seething left-wing activism including lots of fiery speeches by my co-lawyer at St John's College, one T Blair.

Having applied to get on the Candidates List, one then has to go through a Parliamentary Assessment Board, a half-day series of quite lively and even stressful tests (written and oral). I did that, paying £250 for the privilege, at the end of July. And I passed. See this account of the success of the Conservative initiative to attract new blood into the Party and politics more generally via these PABs.

Once one is on the List, one waits for lists of seats seeking candidates to be put round. Then one has to decide to apply or not.

The fact that one is on the List is private until the person concerns decides to make it public. I chose to maintain my privacy, mainly because I did not expect to win a chance to fight a seat and the moment would pass.

I have applied for only one seat so far, namely Devizes - not far from where we now live. I heard a couple of weeks ago that I had done well enough to be a reserve (in the top eight from some 170 candidates) but not the final six, who present themselves to the Devizes Conservatives tomorrow when the new candidate is to be chosen.

A good first showing. But not good enough. Unless one of the successful six would-be candidates drops out for some reason in the next few hours, that's that. On to the next try, if one suitable for the Crawfs as a whole emerges. 

So there it is.

Some no doubt will now crow that anything I have written about Michal Kaminski or the Labour Party or anything else can be dismissed as typical Tory double-dealing.  

Well, so be it. Nothing I have said about Kaminski was private, confidential or otherwise unavailable information. 

I served as a diplomat under Margaret Thatcher, John Major, Tony Blair and (briefly) Gordon Brown. I rose up through the FCO ranks steadily enough under the Conservatives, enjoying my two years as Geoffrey Howe's FCO speechwriter.

But my FCO career accelerated under New Labour, since Robin Cook in particular appreciated my quirky energy and grasp of Balkan issues, as did No 10. My file of FCO appraisals contains many compliments from Ministers and politicians from different Parties. In short, I did my job as a politically neutral civil servant.

Now I am again a free person. I am happy to put myself forward to serve the public in a different role. If I am lucky enough to get the opportunity to run for a Parliamentary seat, and then persuade enough voters to vote for me so that I win an election and get in to Parliament, my life will change. If not, not. 

On my blog which has run since early 2008 without a single peep of concern or even interest from anyone in the FCO, I have been critical of the current UK government and its policies on various occasions. But I have been careful not to put out embarrassing tittle-tattle or other really confidential material gleaned from my own career in a way designed to cause deliberate embarrassment. I also have not opined on many issues where my main role in so opining would be to reveal sensitive inside information.  

Of course during 28 years in the FCO I have seen, read and heard plenty of significant and senior things which 'the public' might well like to know. Part of the code of ethics of the civil service involves respecting due professional confidentiality. That is what I have done, using some real-life examples to comment instead to my small but loyal blog readership on deeper issues of principle which rise up and collide with reality in our public life.

On we go.

The Problem of our times is not addressed by fleeting party-political bickering about who does/did what or said what.

It is the operational management of Complexity, at all levels.

We are confronted with far too many private and public institutions which (we are told) are Too Big To Fail - yet also in practice Too Big To Succeed.

Labour as currently constituted has (in my view) no philosophical answer on this question, only an instinct to extend the state in all its modern bossy intrusiveness and a hope to minimise its losses through dumbing down the arguments by smears and gimmicks.

The Conservatives in turn face appalling problems if they do get into office next time round. Where to start in hacking back the state in all its post-modern luxuriant forms, while at the same time keeping intelligent government going?

Goodness knows.

But the answer surely lies at the libertarian/conservative end of the philosophical spectrum - trusting people more, and the state less.

Perhaps it will help to have to hand some independent-minded people on board who believe that and who know the system inside out -  and are ready to wield a large spring-cleaning brush.

Welcome Iain Dale readers.

* * * * *

One of the points made by Labour against Kaminski is that he was in effect playing an anti-semitic card by arguing against the apology by then President Kwasniewski for the Jedwabne massacre.

It's obvious! Any Pole arguing against the form or principle of such an apology has to be at the very least a revolting person, and more probably a horrid anti-semitic extremist.

Well...

80% of Poles at the time (2001) felt that is was good that the crime at Jedwabne had been made public, but a similar 80% did not feel any moral responsibility for it - why should they? Opinion on President Kwasniewski's apology was divided, with a slight margin in favour.

Noting the complexity of these issues, the then Polish PM Jerzy Buzek was very careful in the way he chose his words:

The slaughter in Jedwabne was not perpetrated in the name of the nation, nor in the name of the Polish state. Poland was at the time an occupied country. Yet, if as a nation we have the right to be proud of those Poles who, at the risk of their lives, sheltered Jews then we must also acknowledge the guilt of those who took part in their slaughter.

We are ready to confront even the darkest facts of our history, but in the spirit of truth, without seeking presumed justifications. We will not, however, agree to have the Jedwabne event serve to popularize false theses of Poland's complicity in the Holocaust or about inborn Polish anti-Semitism.

Hmm. Is that formulation not just a bit defensive. Even ... shifty? Surely that crafty drafting masks a deep anti-semitic instinct!

And where is Mr Buzek these days?

Oh yes, here. 

Some things are complicated and deeply morally challenging. Simplify them for banal political purposes at your peril.

Update:   Welcome co-conspirators. Guido is on the case.

* * * * *

The Labour Party are now officially making a total fool of themselves over Michal Kaminski.

Young British diplomats are taught that it is poor technique (and, worse, stupid) to quote someone's words from a magazine without checking that that person really did say and mean those words in the sense they appeared in print.

Yet that is what David Miliband and Denis MacShane have boldly done, quoting Poland's Chief Rabbi Michael Schudrich against Michal Kaminski.

And so they are left looking ridiculous, since the BBC came up with the novel idea of asking Rabbi Schudrich himself what he thought. And his carefully chosen words hit the empty bulk carrier of Labour hopes deep beneath the water-line.

Boom.

Glug glug glug glug ... silence.

Let me put this in simple words.

When the Law and Justice party won the 2005 general elections, there were a few progressive squeaks about the fact that European Civilisation had just ended since Poland had been kidnapped by wild anti-semitic homophobes.

Closer examination suggested that this was not in fact the case.

Which was why in successive high-level meetings between PM Tony Blair and Polish leaders there was not one word of concern expressed publicly or privately by the British side on these scores.

I know because I was in on all these meetings.

And, yes, in 2005 Michal Kaminski himself was there at the No 10 dining-table next to PM Kazimierz Marcinkiewicz, scoffing prawn cocktail as Tony Blair's guest.

If David Miliband will not apologise to Michal Kaminski and sticks to his guns that Kaminski is a disgrace, maybe he should then apologise to the British people for Labour using taxpayers' money to host such a disgraceful person at this high level and then resign?

And while he is at it, he also might explain why not a single word of instructions issued to us in Warsaw from London to take up with the Polish side issues of anti-semitism, Jedwabne and all this other stuff.

What in fact happened was that the Labour leadership energetically supported by D Miliband instructed the Warsaw Embassy to get as close as we could to the Kaczynskis and their party, to help align them with us in successive big negotiations over the EU Budget (2005) and Lisbon Treaty (2007).

Which is what my team and I did, with excellent results - and much praise from the FCO and No 10.

A great comment on Denis MacShane's tragic piece in the Guardian by LatimerAlder:

Surely surely in the past 12 years your totalitarian government must have passed a law against Flogging a Dead Horse?

After all you've made nearly every other human activity illegal.

News just in from New York on a new UN Resolution

We the Peoples of the United Nations

Noting the fact the universal human right that people may and indeed do travel from country to country on business, which means that they do not need to be brutalised en route;

Recalling the United Nations Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment adopted by the General Assembly on 10 December 1984 (especially the good bits about Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment);

Mindful of the need for people to be treated decently;

Determined to rid the world of shoddy service and incompetence in all their myriad forms;

Noting with satisfaction the excellent precedent set by the start of the trial at ICTY of Radovan Karadzic on numerous counts of crimes against humanity;

Further Noting with dismay that on the evening of 25 October the airline Wizz Air was unable to arrange the departure of its scheduled flight from Luton to Katowice at the announced time, viz 2040;

Recoiling in horror at the fact that the aircraft finally left Luton at 0230 approx on 26 October, arriving in Katowice at 0500 with passengers in a severely exhausted condition;

Aghast at the fact that between 1840 when check-in started at Luton and 0130 approx there was as far as could be ascertained not a single announcement made to passengers as to what might be going on with this flight, creating a sense of persecution and Cruel, Inhuman and Degrading treatment among aforesaid passengers;

Hereby Resolve:

Never to fly Wizz Air again.

Never.

And we urge the Security Council to remain seized of the matter, and to consider urgently what legal measures might be taken to compel the management of Wizz Air to explain themselves at the International Criminal Court.

* * * * *

Who says the UN is useless?

Liam Murray does a good job in suggesting how British National Party leader Nick Griffin might best present himself on TV tonight when he joins a controversial BBC Question Time panel.

The excellent point being that if the other panellists want to be seen to show Griffin up as a nasty extremist, they need to prepare for his best, blandly friendly style and think of ways of dealing with that lest they look the more aggressive and unpleasant.

Somehow Liam's posting made me think of the final second round TV debate between Presidential candidates Donald Tusk and Lech Kaczynski in Poland in 2005.

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.  

Is it a good idea to bring the BNP into a respectable TV debating format like this?

I don't watch TV (much) so I have no real view. There is no prospect at all of the BNP achieving anything other than marginal nuisance value, so it probably won't make much difference. UKIP is much more of a threat to all mainstream political parties, yet life goes on.

Former Foreign Secretary Jack Straw is on the panel tonight. I recall a senior FCO official telling a meeting of UK Ambassadors that "of course Jack Straw is sensitive to Muslim concerns - he comes from a Muslim constituency".

By which he meant that Straw represents a Christian 'White British' constituency with a sizeable but by no means decisive Muslim community in it, namely Blackburn.

If there is one thing which annoys ordinary folk, it is the idea that 'their' reality and values are being defined by the presence in their midst of a lively ethnic minority, especially a community whose loyalties are not always clear.

Maybe something for the patronising British chattering classes to mull over as they work out what the BNP 'really' represents?

Tory Bear does some digging on the Labour Party's zany allies in the European Parliament.

And strikes gold.

Or does he?

He is unimpressed with Mr Andrzej ("It is impossible to rape a prostitute!") Lepper:

Where to start with their leader and the sleaze, the criminal activities and the general insanity of the man. Another former communist, he has done time for assault and even demanded sexual favours for jobs in his office.

Of course I met Lepper a few times when I was Ambassador in Poland. He was a genial and wily Polish version of Vladimir Zhirinovsky, although being Polish Mr Lepper's excesses are much more genteel and do not involve shooting at voters' pets from a railway carriage.

For a few helter-skelter months Lepper was even Agriculture Minister in the Polish government, where he made a rather favourable impression on a passing House of Commons delegation. But eventually Jaroslaw Kaczynski threw him overboard, having drawn away the core of Lepper's voting base.

Alas Tory Bear is wrong to say that Labour "sit hand in hand" in Europe with Mr Lepper's Self Defence party. The empty Lepper tendency collapsed in the 2009 EP elections and they won no seats.

And is another of his targets the Troofer Giulietto Chiesa still an MEP? Apparently not.

Hmm.

This time a curious and very unastonishing piece in the Spectator by Martin Bright, which uses as some vital evidence Craig Murray's long-lost fleeting relationship with Kaminski in the mid-1990s.

I have posted a comment suggesting that media bunnies might like to ask David Miliband three questions:

• did No 10 host Mr Kaminski for lunch with a passing Polish leader following the Law and Justice election win in 2005? My own memory says yes, but I might be wrong! So let's check, please
• did No 10 and the FCO urge the Embassy in Warsaw to get alongside key PiS people such as Mr Kaminski to help secure the EU Budget deal in late 2005?
• did No 10 and the FCO congratulate themselves on a fine outcome for the UK at the 2007 Lisbon Treaty talks, achieved in good part because PM Tony Blair worked so closely with President Lech Kaczynski?

What is wrong with Labour? Is this the best they can do?

Burble on about close links between the Conservatives and PiS when they themselves have worked hard to get key PiS people onside to help achieve UK Objectives?

Not so much beyond contempt as beyond bizarre.

Craig Murray has a good posting on the important interview between Iain Dale and Michal Kaminski. It just shows where things now stand when a mere Blogger does what no so-called serious MSM journalist has done, and talks to the person at the centre of a controversy to hear what he might have to say.

Craig uses this interview to give some pertinent thoughts on Polish anti-semitism and other 'racist' phenomena in Poland, drawing on his own time in Poland in the 1990s:

... I should add that a young black British businessmen reported to me that being spat at was an almost daily occurence.

The strange thing is that I adore Poland, and Poles, and Polish culture. I was ever so happy in my time there. There are reasons for the development of this deep-seated racist strain which are historic. There is a limit to how far you can blame individuals for adopting attitudes which are widespread in their culture; and without understanding you cannot change attitudes. Which brings me back to Kaminski. Much as he tries to hide his past, for the present I do not think we should rule out that he really has changed his views, after being exposed to wider cultural influences (like Iain Dale!)

...

A key part of Poland coming to terms with its anti-semitism will be an acknowledgement of what Polish people did to Jews in or just after World War II. Iain Dale's questioning about the Jedwabne massacre is actually important. This was one of a number of massacres of Jews by Poles, but there were also hundreds of individual murders of Jewish survivors who inconveniently resurfaced, and perhaps tried to reclaim their property.

Poland must come to terms with all of its history, not just the heroic bits. Poland suffered terribly for three hundred years of near continuous foreign occupation. It was moved about physically on the map, sometimes disappearing, and emerged an artificially placed and artificially ethnically homogenous nation. Of course it was screwed up and nationalistic. Of course Kamnski is screwed up and nationalistic. Poland is slowly getting better. Who knows? Maybe Michal is too.

Not quite how I would have put it, but it's a free country.

Some wider thoughts.

'Anti-semitism' comes in all sorts of shapes and sizes, so when we talk about so-called 'Polish anti-semitism' we need to be a bit more precise.

At one extreme of the anti-semitism spectrum there is one of my favourites, Japanese Anti-Semitism, which has nothing to do with any actual Jewish people as far as one can tell but rather spirals off into surreally kinky Asian occult fantasising.

The Polish case is quite different. For centuries as Poland's borders ebbed and flowed in central Europe large communities of Jews lived in Polish villages, towns and cities, often flourishing and achieving reknown. As and when surges of anti-Jewish feeling erupted elsewhere in Europe, Jews headed for Poland or Polish-dominated places.

For example, Jews were not even allowed to live in Moscow until about 1800. Their numbers grew there until some 30,000 Jews were expelled in 1892; they headed for Lodz and Warsaw.

A further disaster happened in 1914/15 when Germany attacked Russian territory and the Russians expelled up to  500,000 supposedly disloyal Jews at virtually no notice, 100,000 people dying in the process.

To cut a long and complex story short, the reality of anti-semitism in Poland does not spring from mystic nutty theories of Jewish conspiracy/supremacy, although that strain is now there (see below). It rather comes from a combination of centuries-long Catholic anti-Jewish teaching (the Jews being deemed responsible for the crucifixion of Christ) and what might be called 'normal' ethnic rivalry/tension of the sort seen today in plenty of other places, where different language/cultural communities are jostling for position precisely because they are so close and mutually entangled (see eg Bosnia).

Which explains why, yes, Poland between the Wars did take up its share of the sort of Nazi-backed pseudo-scientific anti-Jewish propaganda and legalised oppression which by then had a thriving tradition elsewhere in Europe, but also why Poland conspicuously did not rise up against its Jewish population when the Nazis invaded. The Nazis built several big death-camps in Poland once they embarked on the Final Solution because that's where so many Jews were (plus eg Auschwitz was a handy railway junction for trains from elsewhere in Europe).

So now (as Craig rightly says) there are different legacy issues in Poland.

Plenty of Jewish cultural activities go on. A huge new museum for the history of Polish Jews is being built in Warsaw. Many Poles are discovering unexpected Jewish roots in their own families. All serious political leaders emphasise their good relations with the Jewish community. Above all, John Paul II made a massive effort to lead the Catholic Church towards reconciliation with the Jewish faith, and that is percolating its way through the Church in Poland too.

On the other hand, there is a lumpen low-level anti-semitism around on a scale which is depressing. Newspaper kiosks in Warsaw carry weird little pamphlets about Jewish conspiracies, stickers against Jews appear inside buses, football fan graffiti attacks other clubs for their Jewish affinities, and so on.

As for wider racism, Poland looks to visitors from the UK like a stunningly 'white' place. Dark-skinned people are few and far between.

Is Poland an especially racist place? Not obviously. Once (prompted by an alarming report from our Embassy in Budapest describing how dark-skinned colleagues in Hungary were being jostled on public transport and constantly receiving racist slurs) I asked one Embassy colleague with Asian DNA if she had had problems in Warsaw. "Apart from some funny looks now and then, no."

So, praise the Lord, on this one I am basically with Craig Murray.

Racist/ethnic/religious/cultural and other aggressive forms of Fear of The Other have been a feature of life round the planet for much of human history, if not all of it. We are all working our way through it, some with more integrity and open-mindedness than others. 

Poland was the default refuge of choice in Europe for Jews for hundreds of years. Its huge and successful Jewish community was obliterated by the fathers and grandfathers of the Germans sitting primly in EU meetings now. It also saw a huge number of Poles being executed by the Nazis for trying to protect Jews from persecution.

In short, Poland is the last country on earth which needs to be lectured on the subject of anti-semitism.

And the noises in the UK from senior parts of the Labour Party spin-machine to try to smear the Conservative Party for their links with supposedly 'anti-semitic Poles' are beyond contempt.

I wrote about the British Embassy in Warsaw's encounters (and not) with Roman Polanski last year:

It turned out that Polanski has been invited 'privately' to lunch at HM Ambassador's Residence in Warsaw under a previous management. So UK taxpayer's money had gone to feed and water this fellow in some style.

An interesting situation under domestic and international law. Had R Polanski set foot in the UK he might well have been arrested and sent to the USA to face justice at long last. Yet he entered HM Ambassador's Residence in Warsaw and tucked in to steak and chips funded directly or indirectly by the UK taxpayer.

There is a great hubbub now from France and Poland and friends of Polanksi around the world that to arrest him now is unjust. He has lived 'in exile' for years. The child he abused has grown up and no longer wants him prosecuted. There were fishy things about the judge in the case. And so on.

Here (h/t Instapundit) is a thoughtful piece from Roger Simon on the case and the deeper feelings it evokes in him at least:

Lurking behind the stylish images and high art of The Pianist, I heard Roman Polanski talking to me. I heard him imploring me and saying – see what I have suffered, it was horrible beyond comprehension, you must excuse me anything I have done. I felt exploited and I didn’t like it.

... Suffering from the Holocaust is not an excuse for bad behavior – or perhaps even, as is more accurate in Polanski’s case – allowing your personal demons to be an excuse for that behavior.

So I’m feeling exploited again, angry at U. S. authorities for bringing this up after all this time and angry at Roman for not facing the reality of his actions...

Look, Polanski is weak like the rest of us. But in the end, there is something about him that is a metaphor for Hollywood – despite that he has been exiled from here these many years. A tremendously talented man, he is the emblem of special pleading.

If as many people think Polanski's case for lenient treatment or even a pardon is so strong, and maybe after all these years it is, let him get on a plane back to the USA and accept his fate with dignity.

Or maybe the facts of the case are just a bit too horrible and he and his supporters do not want them splashed all over his reputation - and theirs?

Also some might think that Poland's clamour for Polanski not to be extradited to the USA sits a bit uneasily with its shiny new policy on dealing firmly with paedophiles:

“I want Poland to have the strictest possible legislation against criminals who rape children. It is as simple as that,” said Mr Tusk.

Is there the basis of a deal here?

Polanski stays in Poland - but takes his medicine?