Blogoir

Over at Business and Politics.

Thus:

Remember the Bible parable of the Prodigal Son? He squandered his fortune but saw the error of his ways and crept back home. He was warmly welcomed by his father, who explained the significance of his repentance to an older brother unimpressed by the precedent being set:

This brother of yours was dead and is alive again; he was lost and is found.

The moral core of this story turns on the fact of his sincere repentance – and an unambiguous willingness by the wastrel to work hard to put things right.

The Bible does not say that the wastrel is ‘entitled’ to carry on sponging off his relatives indefinitely – that they have to show him limitless ‘solidarity’.

As we look at Greece’s manoeuvres to persuade partners and markets to lend them yet more money to help stave off self-induced Disaster, the issues boil down to this:

• Is Greece serious about repenting its erstwhile wasteful ways?

• Is Greece capable of sustaining the sort of brisk standards now being set by Poland?

Indeed. So what are the answers?

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...

* * * * *

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.  

I was down at Guidhall in the City yesterday, to watch the special ceremony of Poland's excellent Ambassador Barbara Tuge-Erecinksa being accepted as a Freeman of the City.

Barbara was deeply involved in the Gdansk Shipyard protests and the heroic rise of the Solidarity movement:

Active in the underground during the martial law in Poland, she was harassed by the communist party. "It wasn't a big deal compared to what happened to some," she remembers. "The worst experience was when my son was one year old -- to see those security men searching in my baby's cot."

The ceremony in part marked Guildhall's expression of appreciation for the remarkable generosity of Poles who during WW2 found a way to offer money to help repair Nazi bomb damage to the building.

And did you know another proud Polish connection? That Chopin's final concert was at Guildhall in November 1848, to raise money for Poles who had fled France to escape more continental revolutionary violence?

No, you didn't. Here is some background from Jack Gibbons, with deft musical accompaniment:

His last public appearance took place in London at the old Guildhall on 16th November 1848. The occasion was a concert and ball in aid of Polish refugees. Chopin played several of his shorter pieces on an upright piano in a side-room adjoining the main hall.

According to his pupil, Princess Marcelina Czartoryska, "Chopin played like an angel". By now completely exhausted, Chopin was greatly relieved to return to Paris where he spent the last months of his life virtually bedridden, supported by the generosity of his friends and pupils.

Yesterday a delicate modern bust of Chopin by Jaroslaw Alfer (latterly not on display as renovation works at Guildhall proceeded) was unveiled by the Ambassador in a new place of honour.

Or should it be honor?

All right-thinking and/or snooty English people will say that of course it is honour.

Honor is an Americanism. Ugh.

And they are right, these days at least. The different usages became formalised in the nineteenth century.

Not that the great men of 1800 or thereabouts minded too much. Thomas Jefferson's original draft of the US Declaration of Independence used honour.

And there on the wall of the room in Guildhall where Ambassador Tuge-Erecinska was sworn in as Freeman is a framed letter from Lord Nelson, expressing his honor.

All in all, a most honourable day for UK/Polish relations.

An elegant essay by Theodore Dalrymple on legendary lofty US economist J K Galbraith.

Needless to say, what caught my eye was reference to a book JGK wrote in 1958, Journey to Poland and Yugoslavia.

As a fine, prosperous East Coast liberal from a democracy, JKG was disinclined to see what if anything might be wrong with these one-party communist states:

The main function of what Galbraith writes is to minimize the horrors of Communism, upon which he has hardly a word. Indeed, strict political control never intrudes much on his consciousness when he is in the Communist world. “I have generally avoided quoting by name my Polish . . . sources in this account,” he writes. “This is not because I have any great fear of compromising them. Many people . . . take no small pride in speaking plainly and do so without evident restraint.”

Other priceless observations follow. Noticing the drabness with which people are dressed, Galbraith remarks that it “may be the problem of socialism. Planners can provide for everything but color, and they cannot allow for that because so much of it is associated with idiocy great and small. In any case, the people of Poland have more liberty than variety.”

Under Soviet-imposed socialism you are free, Poles!

Free, that is, in general, which is the main thing. Just not in particular, which could be most disadvantageous.

One of the great advantages of Galbraith-style planning is the elimination of “idiocy great and small,” of the kind that people are apt to embrace when they have the choice. The solution: eliminate choice. You can have any color you like, so long as it’s chosen by the philosopher-king.

Later he went to China and somehow missed the fact that millions of people had been wiped out in the Cultural Revolution and preceding famines caused by Mao's policies:

Nor was Galbraith interested in who the Red Guards were or what they actually did. The fate of individual people was far beneath his notice, which explains why his anecdotes are so rarely interesting, let alone illuminating. His is a humanitarianism without a human face.

The point now?

Galbraith has come back into fashion: not only his ideas, which imply the need for a huge and expanding class of redemptory politicians and bureaucrats to save people from a fate that would be wretched without them, but his aristocratic assumption of unchallengeable moral superiority, written in his prose as it appears to be written on President Obama’s face.

How delightful to be so generous, so very right all the time, and yet make a fortune and stay at the Ritz!

Read the whole piece - a deft demolition of JKG's bewilderingly idiotic idea that business/markets are inherently ruthless, governments inherently benign:

There remains, however, an astonishingly gaping absence in Galbraith’s worldview. While he is perfectly able to see the defects of businessmen—their inclination to megalomania, greed, hypocrisy, and special pleading—he is quite unable to see the same traits in government bureaucrats.

Families are tricky. They stretch to outer limits our private sense of responsibility.

You are Diligent. You work hard and honestly, you treat everyone fairly, you are generous towards friends and family, but you dislike being exploited or ‘expected’ to help others who don’t do all they can to help themselves.

You have four siblings, Dopey, Grumpy, Lazy and Feckless:

• Dopey does his best, but is dim and usually misses opportunities to do better; he appreciates favours from other family members, and now and then reciprocates in a cack-handed way
• Grumpy works hard and has had more success in life, but begrudges others their success; she expects favours to be offered generously by other family members, but is ungrateful/dismissive when that happens and never offers favours in return
• Lazy never tries hard, preferring the idea of the good life to the reality of the hard work needed to achieve it – she values favours, but usually does not reciprocate. Not exactly selfish or mean-spirited – just somehow air-headed and not that bothered
• Feckless works hard but squanders the results on fun and parties – has no long-term plan and lives only for the moment

You may or may not be your siblings’ keeper. But if you have good fortune or they fall on hard times, how far might those siblings make a moral claim to part of your success?

Complex issues and emotions are involved:

• The limits of generosity of the would-be giver – should Diligent be so generous to the others as to put his/her own immediate family’s welfare at risk?
• A calculation by Diligent as to how far the favour will in fact be used well – better to give more support to someone who at least tries hard but usually fails, or to the sibling who is in more need but likely to fritter away any support given?
• Does reciprocity or at least genuine gratitude come into play? Should Diligent’s generosity be affected by how far the individual recipients of generosity might extend favours if roles were reversed? Is it somehow better or more just to share more generously with people who are grateful, than with people who ‘expect’ support and then sneer at its level?
• And underlying it all is a philosophy of how the world should work. Does Diligent believe that the best way for people to get through life is to take responsibility for their own fate, and that those who make miscalculations should themselves bear the cost of the consequences and not try to get others to bail them out?
• Or does some sort of abstract ‘solidarity’ automatically kick in, so that any sibling falling on hard times through the results of selfishness or idleness or greed or fecklessness or incompetence can call on Diligent to sacrifice some of the results of his/her hard work and thrift?
• If that ‘solidarity’ principle applies, how far might Diligent insist that the selfish/idle/greedy sibling be shown to have mended his/her ways as a condition for support? Is it not heartless to expect everyone to behave well as Diligent invariably does?
• If Diligent subsidises his siblings’ poor work, is he doing them benefit or harm in the long run? 

A lot going on here at the most human micro-level, even in the happiest families.

So welcome to the European Union, namely Article 122 of the THE TREATY ON THE FUNCTIONING OF THE EUROPEAN UNION (Consolidated Version - emphasis added):

1. Without prejudice to any other procedures provided for in the Treaties, the Council, on a proposal from the Commission, may decide, in a spirit of solidarity between Member States, upon the measures appropriate to the economic situation, in particular if severe difficulties arise in the supply of certain products, notably in the area of energy.

2. Where a Member State is in difficulties or is seriously threatened with severe difficulties caused by natural disasters or exceptional occurrences beyond its control, the Council, on a proposal from the Commission, may grant, under certain conditions, Union financial assistance to the Member State concerned. The President of the Council shall inform the European Parliament of the decision taken.

Should Diligent Germany now help Feckless/Lazy/Grumpy/Dopey Greece and the other PIIGS?

The rule when the Eurozone was set up were clear. No bail-outs for countries not accepting financial discipline!

The threat of this awful implacable inflexible harshness was thought to be a necessary and sufficient condition to compel countries which had no serious tradition of running a currency successfully to realise that they were being promoted to the major league, and had to lift their game.

Ha ha. That boring northern European stuff is not for us gay southern European types. Who dares deny us our carefree way of life? We always knew that we wouldn’t accept all that drab discipline and paperwork and transparency – and taxes! And you stuffy Germans knew that too, even if you say now that you trusted us to behave like you.

So what’s the problem now? If there’s a crisis now, it’s your fault, not ours. You knew for years exactly what was going on, but looked the other way.

Wha-a-a-a-t? You’re saying now that we have misbehaved and that you won’t bail us out? That we have to tidy our room, work harder, tighten our belts and be poorer? That we are to get less lavish dinners than everyone else here? For years to come?

Are you patronising and selfish oh-so-clever people crazy as well? Where’s the solidarity in that?

Don’t you realise that what you are dealing with here?

When you brought us into your neat, tidy house, the whole point was that we would set the limits of general tidiness, not you! Which means that if you now insist that we tidy our room, we’ll wreck the whole place - just to spite you - dragging everything down to our level.

So what would you rather have? A complete mess, or a quiet life?

Borrow some money from some other suckers such as your own taxpayers’ kids if you have to. It will be years before they realise that you can’t repay it.

And puh-lease. Don’t start whinging that the Irish are behaving well, so we should do the same. If they want to make a scrawny fool of themselves by going on a long-term diet, that’s their problem.

It’s just not our style, here in the sunny south. It’s our culture, see? And Europe is all about celebrating diverse cultures.

Now excuse me. It’s long lunch time - I'll send you the bill later. Then I’ll need a siesta.

* * * * *

All of which goes to show that the Eurozone crisis is exposing the very heart of European Solidarity (or not). Since it goes to really very simple issues of trust and responsibility.

And perhaps there just are limits to trust and responsibility. Perhaps it makes no sense to set up supranational institutions which ultimately are unable to cope with these simple values, as the political legitimacy of those institutions is grounded not in trust and responsibility backed by law and elections, but in vainglorious elite ambition and hoping for the best. In the end, it just can't - and more importantly won't - work that way. 

See also in the USA. The Tea Party tendency is protesting that government is Just Too Big:

... more and more people are waking up to the fact that this just doesn’t work. We don’t have the money to keep throwing more and more of it into dysfunctional public schools, overpriced state colleges and government at all levels. In the competitive world we all live in now, our society has no choice but to learn how to do these things much more cheaply. Otherwise the blue sector will drag the whole country down with it.

This is part of what drives the Tea Parties: there’s a sense out there that the time for careful, limited reform is past. We need a crowbar, not a scalpel, to fix the blue beast.

It’s all the same point, expressed differently on either side of the Atlantic.

In the banking sector and in the public sector alike, limits of risk-management and common-sense responsibility have got lost in a sea of complexity. And accountability has spiralled out of control.

Back to manageable family values?

I have had an enquiry from someone who follows closely UK immigration issues asking about the policy issues surrounding the opening of the UK labour market to Poles in 2004 when Poland joined the EU:

Did the UK government encourage mass Polish immigration into the UK?

No.

Well, not really.

What happened was this.

Parts of the Blair government were very nervous about a tidal wave of Poles and other Eastern Europeans washing over the UK once we opened our Labour markets unconditionally.

Or rather they were nervous about the Conservatives making a big row about it after Jack Straw announced the policy in 2003. The more so since most other EU countries in a show of noisy EU anti-solidarity made clear that they would not open their labour markets unconditionally.

Which meant that whatever tendency there was for millions of Poles and Czechs and Slovaks and the rest to storm out from their respective homelands to look for jobs would be funnelled mainly in our direction, making the tidal wave even more fast, big and scary.

So intense consultations took place round Whitehall - should the UK row back on this commitment?

PM Blair took a breezy decision. Let it rip.

Previous experience with Portugal and Spain suggested that there would be a surge of interest (and people) but in due course it would all calm down without too many problems. But he threw a small bone to anti-immigration fears by setting up a 'registration scheme' for new arrivals with a view to at least having some sort of numbers to use in subsequent debates on the issue. Other administrative devices were used to try to stop people coming over to UK and promptly claiming benefits.

Thus it transpired that I as Ambassador had to go along to the then Polish Interior Minister Jozef Oleksy to break the official news of our keenly awaited decision. Oleksy previously had been Polish Prime Minister, but had an unerring knack of attracting controversy and scandals - a droll and unconventional figure by most former communist standards.

I pompously told Oleksy that I had the honour to inform the Polish Government that HMG had taken an important decision concerning the UK labour market after Poland's EU accession in May 2004, namely:

• The labour market would be opened unconditionally with immediate effect on 1 May 2004.
• Any Poles who wished to travel to the UK to live or work could do so with out a visa.
• Moreover, an effective amnesty would be given to all Poles who had been living in the UK and working illegally.
• All Poles seeking to work in the UK would be expected to register under a new scheme, but registration was not a condition for getting a job.

Oleksy looked at me in amazement and said in Polish: "Gdzie tkwi haczyk?" What's the catch?

"No haczyk," I replied. "It's as simple as that."

Oleksy simply did not believe me. He was sure that just as most EU capitals were announcing different severe restrictions on Polish workers after Poland's EU accession, the UK had to do the same. There had to be a catch with those tricky Brits!

He kept pressing:  "Gdzie tkwi haczyk?"

I assured him that there really was no haczyk.

We meant it. Unconditional opening with immediate effect after Poland's accession. The Brits were simply generous, open-hearted people. The Poles might like to remember who their real European friends were after this.

That's how the Polish Flood started.

By mid-2006 there were claims that there were more Poles in the UK than in Warsaw. Some indeed were feckless.

But by 2009 as the UK economy drooped many were heading back home. 

In the great sweep of things, Tony Blair got this one just right.

Ten years from now, let alone twenty or fifty or one hundred, the whole episode will have been forgotten. Those Poles who have stayed in the UK will be doing well, often paying taxes and generally acting as a force for good sense and intelligent conservative values. If any country wants immigrants, get Poles.

Although in a famous telegram to London I did warn Whitehall that this was coming the UK's way - whether we liked it or not. (I'll write this up separately).

Unfortunately there were risks for Poles coming to our country, as the families of Anna Brandt, Karolina Gluck and Monika Sochocka so tragically found out.

For most others the experience seems to have been positive and helpful, with lots of Polish compliments to the UK on its easy-going ways and lack of bureaucracy(!).

And let's not forget that a while ago we were exporting our unemployed people to Poland in large numbers to look for work.

These things come and go.

As you try to grasp what is happening in Ukraine, you may well be asking yourself: what does Ukraine mean anyway?

And, needless to say, views differ. There is a root word kraj in Slav languages which has all sorts of nuanced meanings in different Slavonic languages, linked to the idea of land, or borders of land, or land on or around the borders of a country/territory.

Remember the Krajina Serbs, who attempted to set up a Serbian territory separate from Croatia until Croatian forces crushed their resistance and most Serbs fled to Serbia?

Or indeed Momcilo Krajisnik? Another unhappy Slav with the kraj root in his name.

So Ukraine suggests either a 'border' territory, or a 'separate' principality or territory in its own right, depending on who's talking.

Ukraine's voters accordingly seem to face two eternal choices. Either to be somehow part of the Russian psychological space, on the frontiers of Russia's western lands. Or to be a separate territory, defined in their own terms, and looking at least as much to Europe as to Russia.

Which explains why any person elected President needs to be a magic knight:

The conclusion to be drawn from all this is not a particularly happy one: the majority of Ukrainians don't want a head of state with clearly formulated ideological priorities, with the experience and attitudes of a radical political fighter, with an explicit geopolitical orientation, and with an economic-reform program that can be hard on their wallets. That may explain why different groups of Ukrainians have such widely diverging views of their country's past and future...

... the voting habits of the majority of Ukrainians could still enable a politician to become head of state who is capable both of winning the support of the majority of voters and of implementing genuine modernization.

That politician would simply have to have enough human virtues, combined with managerial ability, to overcome all possible objections on the part of either the east or the west of the country, and both the right and the left.

That may sound like a fantasy, but then the whole of Ukrainian history for the past 20 years has resembled a fantastic saga of wandering in circles locked in time, waiting for a knight to break the spell.

Elections there tend to be close-run things these days. Western Ukraine, predominantly Ukrainian-speaking, looks mainly West towards Brussels. Eastern Ukraine, predominantly Russian-speaking, looks mainly East towards Moscow.

Viktor Yanukovych is seen as East, Yulia Tymoshenko as West. It looks as if this time round East has edged home in front.

A triumph for Moscow over the West/Europe?

Maybe. But not a huge one.

There is now a lively and tough political space in Ukraine, and whoever runs the place has no real choice but to manage relations with both Moscow and the EU carefully.

Ukraine's main problem is that it is the subject of an existential tug-of-war between a Westernising trend in Slavic thinking and a more traditional Moscow/Eastern trend.

Alas for Ukraine, the Russians weigh less but pull harder on their end of the rope than the EU does. 

Some Europeans are more European than others. Too many EU capitals in general (and Paris in particular) are quite happy for that part of Europe to be seen as 'not quite European enough', and to stay mainly outside European processes. Why annoy the Russians for the sake of all that empty space and complicated people? 

Some Russians hanker after reabsorbing Ukraine somehow, although the grisly case of Belarus and wider failed attempts at CIS integration show that even under what appear to be optimal conditions it is not possible to put chunks of the Soviet Union back together again.

So Moscow contents itself with making sure that if Russia can't have Ukraine, the West won't have it either.

We can expect Yanukovych (if confirmed as President) to talk a lot about Europe, safe in the knowledge that the EU doesn't know what to do about Ukraine other than send in lots of consultants and bureaucratic experts, some of whom do some useful work now and then. Nothing much will happen on Ukraine/NATO.

Which is not to say that Ukraine will stagnate (necessarily). As someone has wittily put it:

On the one side we have neo-imperialistic Russian instincts, and lucrative energy pipeline intrigues.

On the other, a slow but inexorable tide of the porridge of EU process – and all sorts of transparent modern investment opportunity – edging eastwards across Ukraine on a scale far exceeding what Russia can ever offer. 

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.