Media Crises

As well as surging into the Total Politics Top 200 UK Political Blogs this blog has made it into the Top 20 UK Libertarian Blogs.

I achieved a more than respectable 11th place, amidst distinguished company.

Since the libertarian trend in all its many varieties is the shape of the future, this is a great result.

Many thanks to all readers who kindly took the trouble to vote for this blog in this category. If you have not yet done so, have a read of my Well-Armed Red Riding Hood story. 

Its (and, on a good day, my) philosophy: Strong, Thoughtful and Generous.

This morning on the radio I stumbled upon veteran UK broadcaster Katherine Whitehorn's impossibly grand voice condescendingly calling into question the value of markets.

Here, if you can face it, is the full text of her Point of View.

Off she goes:

Political correctness has long been condemned, often unfairly, for the absurdity of always saying person rather than man or woman, for trying to be polite to minorities, or for refusing to call anyone top of the class for fear someone else weeps for being bottom.

But this isn't the real political correctness - what's really been the only politically correct thing to say under Mrs Thatcher, and under Tony Blair, is to assume that competition is better than co-operation, that it's the only useful spur to action.

On and on:

We are heading, it seems, for bad times such as we had in the 1970s. Then the main trouble was that the unions could disrupt anything and everything at will, and flabby management seemed unable to do anything about it.

But we still had the best broadcasting in the world, a health service which had only suffered two exasperating reforms, an education system widely respected and an efficient civil service not subject either to the stodginess or the questionable integrity of civil services elsewhere.

I have always thought history will find it odd that, in those circumstances, Britain decided to copy the practices of commerce, and model all its institutions on the thing it did worst.

Apart from the unremitting tedium of this Viewpoint, it is strange that KW pits 'competition' against 'cooperation', and that she appears to assume that 'cooperation' = state-owned/run organisations and them alone.

Competition is no enemy of cooperation. It usually expresses cooperation. It compels phenomenal examples of cooperation round the planet.

I have just been to Tesco. Every product of the myriad items sold there (including a lively Polish food section) has arrived there via sophisticated minute-by-minute cooperation between myriad firms and their myriad employees.

Or take YouTube and all the other 'community' sites now flourishing. What is that other than spontaneous cooperation arising from countless spontaneous competitions of designs and ideas between clever people and networks?

KW's trite mistake is to confuse hopelessly pricing mechanisms, public ownership and public control, private incentives and private ownership. The examples she gives are a mess.

Listen carefully, Katherine.

Any system incorporates incentives, positive and negative as well as implicit and explicit. Every activity has an opportunity cost - you can do only one thing at a time and therefore the 'cost' of doing that is the benefit foregone of not doing something else.

The main problem with state-run systems is that their incentive structures necessarily tend to be stagnant, limited and clumsy - hence the manic proliferation of 'targets' we now see, as an attempt to pep things up a bit.

Plus we see what we see, and measure what we can measure.

The NHS saves the lives of thousands of people every year, but who counts the opportunity cost of lives lost because the NHS does not offer certain treatments or pay for certain drugs?

As state-determined education - largely free from competition - steadily dumbs down exam and learning standards, who counts the opportunity cost of future jobs and opportunities lost because our children are too poorly educated to be fully effective as grown-ups?

So if you are saying that our beloved BBC, health service, civil service and education system are all now notably worse than in the 1970s, you might like to ponder the thought that maybe this is because the inefficiencies inherent in running massive systems in this way have compounded up alarmingly.

You can't seriously be saying that the trivial 'competition' elements battened on to these inefficient structures over the years (eg outsourcing cleaning in hospitals) have caused the problems you identify.

Can you?

Which is not to say that outsourcing cleaning is necessarily a good idea. It is good to promote loyalty within organisations from top to bottom.

But maybe again the proliferation of UK/EU officially-inspired regulations on 'health and safety' and other things themselves have created a context in which cost-incentives encourage managers to go for it?

Large-scale emergencies put everyone to the test. Does state-run 'cooperation' out-perform privately incentivised cooperation? Not necessarily.

And so on.

Ho hum.

No surprise I suppose that Ms Whitehorn is given such a prominent platform to ramble on in this feeble way against competition by the BBC, an organisation which raises its funding via a poll-tax on all TV viewers rather than by competing normally in the market-place.

Jon Worth has a couple of thoughtful observations on the farcical European Parliament report which broods on the disruptive role of bloggers.

I think that he has a point, of sorts. But the best way to deal with vampires when they pop out is not to assume they are unmenacing just because they are pallid and sickly. Rather nail them briskly to the floor with a wooden stake.

Above all, he ignores the fact that reports such as this - paid for by us victims - tend to help define the European psychological and political-moral debate over media issues, ensuring that it plays out in a context which starts from an instinct for EU/state-sponsored official 'balance', rather than an instinct for freedom.

Look at the hapless socialist Estonian MEP who launched this dire exercise, trying to explain herself:

Speaking to the EUobserver, Ms Mikko clarified her intentions: "We (sic) do not need to know the exact identity of bloggers. We need some credentials, a quality mark, a certain disclosure of who is writing and why. We need this to be able to trust and rely on the source."

"The Economist is a valuable brand, its articles are trusted by readers without contributors having to reveal their names," she said. "If there is a way to validate the best bloggers the same way that publishing in the Economist validates its writers, it should be done."

"It is clear that a Harvard professor of international relations is likely to treat, for instance, the Middle East peace process or European integration in an educated and balanced manner," she added. "The same trust cannot be put in a radical high school student from Gaza or a Eurosceptic who has never been out of his village"

"The reader should know why this or that blogger should be trusted on a particular issue."

Almost every word she says here is profoundly, unfathomably stupid.

Above all there is a way to 'validate' the best bloggers.

It's called the marketplace, millions of judgements by millions of people, evolving over time, exploring what makes sense and what does not.

This tragic woman needs a strong coffee in Cafe Hayek - where orders emerge.

Back from a long drive in the heavy rain, passing the time listening to BBC radio Any Questions for the first time in years. (Note for non-Brits: this is a veteran deeply earnest current affairs programme featuring four panellists of differing views answering questions from a live audience from a local venue somewhere in the UK.)

Tonight's episode featured two prominent British professional women of unrelentingly progressive views.

Maybe it was the awful weather, but I found it dispiriting to hear them opine at gloomy length about why British women are not breaking through the Glass Ceiling despite so many measures designed over decades to promote 'equality', then, scarcely pausing for breath, make various crass remarks against Sarah Palin (yes, including disparaging her hairstyle).

(Note: back in the USA latter-day left-feminism likewise has simply collapsed under the strain, so we have to look to conservative white men to explain things.)

Most such BBC and other media debates in the UK are depressing for another reason, namely the unimaginative range of views expressed and the underlying assumption that if there is a problem somewhere in society we all need More Government to help tackle it.

As I swerved through floodwaters I found myself howling for someone to throw in one or two rabid libertarian thoughts now and again. One of the male panelists, a Republican American of course, was somewhere in that area but not with much élan.

Lots of agonising also from the two women about the deep divisions within the Labour Party and the 'dangers' of the party splitting irrevocably. I would have said that politics is a market-place too, and that it does no harm for a large ruling party to crash and burn now and again when it has run out of intellectual and moral juice.

There'll always be another politician coming along to vote for.

Maybe we need a quite different form of politics - one based upon the state fearing the people, not the other way round. 

Politics not all about treating citizens like criminals. The horrible demise of the Labour Party could set a powerful example for a few years and so be just the job.

This (via Daniel Hannan) is absolutely grotesque.

What are we being reduced to?

And why are we paying taxes to subsidise the madness of thought leading to such a pernicious, creepy document being even considered, let alone written?

The UK's Top Political Blogger scores an embarrassing own-goal.

In the tsunami of commentary on the Sarah Palin speech, this piece by Michael Ledeen is interesting for non-Americans (and maybe for many Americans too):

... For the first time in memory, we have a major candidate who comes from the frontier, and it’s not surprising that the pundits are having a hard time coming to grips with this phenomenon. For Sarah Palin’s world is not defined by the major media or by the glossy magazines; she hunts and fishes, she’s unabashedly patriotic, her son is in the Army, her husband races across the snow...

This article by Bruno Waterfield and the leaked EU report about the way the No campaign successfully mobilised public opinion via the Internet to bring Ireland reject the Lisbon Treaty are fascinating on many levels.

Note especially the Euro-lamenting that traditional media outlets are facing many new forms of competition and therefore serving up a less good product:

Remember Bill Ayers?

He's back. And not everyone is happy about it, trying to bully the issue off the US airways.

Those horrid right-wing Republican smears! Trying to link Obama to a respectable, nay mainstream figure in the progressive camp. Whatever next?

Some good advice to the Obama team.

I have opined about the Rules purporting to lay down what diplomats can and can't say once they leave the FCO. See eg here.

Now my former colleage Sir Edward Clay has reiterated his concerns about the FCO Rules:

The rule requires former diplomats to consult about any proposed public comment - written, broadcast, in press articles, books, school debates - reflecting their career experience. This is not about official secrets. It is an attempt to convert a career-long professional duty of personal discretion into submission to censorship until death...

The worrying thing is not only regulation 5 but its vague scope and application. My part-time job was withdrawn hours after I commented on Radio 4's Today programme and in the Guardian about the government's suppression of the SFO's inquiries into BAE's dealings in Saudi Arabia damaging the credibility of its policies on good governance and corruption. This action reinforced my point.

... The FCO must rethink regulation 5 again, this time with more respect for freedom and for informed discussion of foreign policy. It should also publish its regulations: officials have a right to know which of the limitations on their liberty that they accept on joining the FCO will endure when they leave; citizens should also know by what decrees they are denied access to the views of former public servants.

Of course officials already do have the right to know these 'limitations on their liberty'. And is there really an issue about such Rules being published for the edification of the public?

Strive as I do to be indignant about all this, I fail.

Here I am, more recently retired than Edward Clay, blogging and writing away, often in a way highly critical of HMG positions. Yet I clear nothing with the FCO in advance, nor have they made any attempt to shut me up.

So in practice the impact of the Rules is not necessarily 'draconian', although I am not revealing/analysing operational decisions by Ministers on a highly controversial topic such as the decision to invade Iraq.

This is where Sir J Greenstock's book on Iraq has been left in the fridge. See his own characteristically gracious and sensible views in this lively exchange.

And whereas I suspect almost every serious serving diplomat accepts reasonable limitations on how far sensitive information gleaned during a career is published afterwards (and when), any such limitations are bound to be 'vague' to some degree.

The problem at the heart of all this is twofold:

• weak Ministers in a weak government annoyed at some disloyal former civil servants' memoirs, but themselves pouring fuel on the flames by employing their creepy armies of SpAds who hope to cash in when they leave office by throwing around internal gossip
• a serious incongruity between (a) any norms laying down post-career guidelines for publication, and (b) the fact that huge amounts of stuff can be prised from the system anyway via wily Freedom of Information Act applications.

In short, not a sinister attempt to censor until death. Rather the normal muddle of a democratic society.

As Georgia burns we look to the FT to guide us through all the complexities.

And sure enough:

Paris Hilton is no average airhead, as her self-parody shows

They're right. She is way above average airheadnesses.

She is top of the airhead range.

More on the feisty Report by the HoC Public Affairs Select Committee report which came down heavily on FCO rules purporting to limit what diplomats might say after they leave the Service.

Craig Murray calls these regulations 'near-fascistic':

The idea, of course, is that only the ministers' version of truth will enter history. You can be confident that Jack Straw's memoirs will not tell you that he instructed Richard Dearlove that we would use intelligence from torture, or that we colluded with torture and extraordinary rendition in Uzbekistan and elsewhere. You needed my memoirs for that. If Jack Straw had his way, I would not have been able to publish my book telling you the truth; in fact the new regulations were born directly out of Straw's fury at Murder in Samarkand.

We now have a government so despised that it strives to protect itself further and further from scrutiny...

Let's be a tad more dispassionate.

Back to first principles.

The public want - and expect - to know in some detail what Government is up to with their money. 

The public also want Government to Just Get On With It, weighing complex interests and principles and taking hard decisions intelligently. 

As we are a free country, people should be able to comment on and/or write searching analyses of policy issues once they are out of public service, subject to some sort of reasonable cooling off period.  

That said, the public simultaneously like tittle-tattle and 'revelations', but also do not like seeing former officials trading in the public’s information to make a personal profit. 

These fickle public expectations are not invariably compatible with each other, or with real life. 

Foreign policy in particular requires a different quality of common sense confidentiality.

Domestic issues are in a way all 'ours' - disagreements and negotiations are within the British political family, all of whom claim that they want the best for the country.

Foreign affairs are different. Day in, day out HMG are involved in tough negotiations round the planet with people who may be our enemies, or who rightly want to do the best for their countries by exploiting British weaknesses/mistakes. It is madness to show our detailed analysis and negotiating hand to our rivals for ‘UK freedom of information’ reasons, when they of course will not reciprocate. 

At the very hard end of the spectrum are highly sensitive intelligence reports, sometimes gleaned from foreigners risking their lives to share information and insights with us (which NB does not mean that those reports are accurate/reliable).

The public know that the world can be a dirty place. They broadly trust the government to defend British interests by using such material wisely. This means keeping secrets secret, the public respecting limits on the public's 'right to know'. Lost lap-tops containing secret official material convey a sense of fathomless incompetence.

In return for ceding extra government discretion in this murky area, the public react badly to politicians whipping up public sentiment on the basis of inconclusive intelligence analysis, as happened in the run-up to the Iraq intervention. 

You know when you are seeing something Really Secret when its heading is a Greek letter or acronym you haven't seen before: TOP SECRET UK EYES A EPSILON/LOCKTIGHT or somesuch.

During my career I have seen all sorts of highly confidential analyses of controversial issues and countless Top Secret reports. I have written such papers myself.

Now I have left the FCO. Should I be free to use my privileged access to this fruity material to make money or stir up public anger, even if I happen to think the moral case is just?

In my view, no. Certainly not immediately I leave the Service, and for some purposes never.

The 'system' (and here I part company with Craig Murray) does offer all sorts of democratic best practice ways for officials to register substantive concerns, compatible with maintaining the secret methods needed to track foreign spies working against us, or managing threats posed by ruthless terrorist killers themselves armed with high-tech kit.

Have we got everything Perfect? No.

Room for improvement/tweaking? Probably.

Risky business for politicians and the public alike, one way or the other? Yes.

All that noted, if we agree that I am not to be 'allowed' to use my knowledge of highly sensitive processes/facts as I like immediately on leaving the FCO, how to give effect to that?

And if there are Rules or Principles, how to apply them? What threat should hang over me to deter me, a former British diplomat pecking away at my lonely keyboard, from overstepping the rules, in letter or spirit?

Legal proceedings against potential publishers?  Prison?

Threats to my pension? Ah now you're talking!

Finally, who in the end decides if a line has been overstepped, and what should happen next?

The Public Affairs Committee made a strong point in noting that in Freedom of Information Act disputes a separate outside mechanism has been set up to stop a Ministry being judge and jury where its own information is concerned. Something like that could be used to settle in a gentlemanly way rows over contested memoirs of the Jeremy Greenstock sort?

Ministers! The smart way to lean is towards generosity, creativity and flexibility. Do not appear vindictive/obsessive/defensive.

Few if any 'revelations' by former civil servants do drastic irreparable damage. We are in fact quite loyal for most purposes, most of the time.

Much worse political damage can be done by appearing to cover up and duck the hard questions than by taking some hits, heavy and unfair as they may be at the time.

And, above all Ministers, behave in an honourable, trustworthy and fair-minded way towards your officials and the public alike.

This gives you your best chance of winning their respect and so surviving the inevitable squalls of democratic public life in good shape, maybe even with a reputation enhanced.

Light touch, old boy, light touch – always the safest policy.

Here is Future One. Martin Jacques gloating over 'western impotence' as evidenced by our inability to get what we wanted in Burma or Zimbabwe.

In the parallel moral universe of MJ, South Africa's President Mbeki has "scored a major diplomatic triumph" by getting the two main parties in Zimbabwe to the negotiating table.

If allowing one of the most dismally incompetent and vicious leaders in world history to ignore his defeat in an election and cling on to power is a triumph for Guardian readers, yes, well done Thabo!

Meanwhile In Burma the West could not intervene and ended up quietly channelling its assistance to cyclone-ravaged Burma via ASEAN, "the obvious and desirable course of action".

Yes, Martin, how obvious and desirable it is that thousands of people die for lack of the assistance we generously offered, helpfully to demonstrate Western impotence to Guardian readers.

Here is Future Two. Kevin Kelly talks about the next 5000 days of the World Wide Web and the profound transformations coming our way.

Set aside 20 minutes of your life to listen. And to think.

Future Two will defeat the banal emptiness of Future One.

It rolls out to the planet, including Zim and Burma in due course, the true new power of 'the West': connectivity, transparency and individual freedom.

And sure, as Asia and Africa and the Middle East take up these values 'the West' will have a lot to think about. New syntheses of power and responsibility will emerge. All very complicated.

But the problems we and our leaders face are all about managing Western success and indeed grasping  the scale of it, not managing failure.

... just when Barack wants to make America cool again, people are being really mean to him.

How cowardly is that?!

Via American Digest.

The role (if any) played by former diplomats in public life depends to quite a degree on how - and how far - they draw on their extensive and unique experiences in the Diplomatic Service.

So, questions.

What are the limits if any on what they can say publicly about information/insights and sheer gossip gained from working for the taxpayer?

And who decides?

Following the noise generated by the memoirs of Sir Christopher Meyer the Government looked again at the rules. And aimed to tighten them up.

My former colleague Sir Edward Clay has come out especially strongly against this move:

It remains to be seen whether future retirees will flout the FCO's legally dubious gag; the FCO clearly intends to hear progressively less from its retired and senior members, unless it approves of what is uttered. It suppresses valedictory despatches from retiring ambassadors, afraid of criticisms. There have been whispers of an attempt to get mandarins to sign over copyright on anything they write - novels and poetry, as well as despatches.

The FCO tells retirees that the rules applying to their serving colleagues also apply to them, for ever. Books, articles and lectures have got to be cleared months ahead. But the real rub comes with the requirement to give five days' notice of what they intend to say in any appearances on, or articles in, the media: any public comment based upon any of their professional experience is covered, far broader than previous strictures on official secrets or confidentiality. Unspecified civil or criminal proceedings are threatened for transgressors.

Sir Edward's and other vigorous interventions have prompted Parliament to take a look. The HoC Public Administration Select Committee is expected to pronounce today. A trailer.

In case you are wondering, before I left the FCO I told them that I was planning to write this Blog. I would use my judgement as to what I did or did not publish. I did not plan to seek publicity for myself via self-indulgent gossip or hot policy 'embarrassing revelations', mainly as I had none to reveal.

Rather I planned to talk about the diplomatic and political world in a quizzical, sometimes sharp way, to cast light on processes in public life and the professional dilemmas that arise.

Sounds good to us, they said.

Not a peep from them since.

Basically, the argument from some former Ambassadors is that they can not trust the Government to enforce these rules fairly.

Is not the problem that the Government these days can not trust senior civil servants to respect them?

Whence this decline in mutual trust?

A fish rots from the top.

This report as picked up by Iain Dale and others asserts that:

Internet users will be protected from abusive bloggers and malicious Facebook postings under proposals to set up an independent internet watchdog, The Daily Telegraph has learnt. The body, made up of industry representatives, would be responsible for drawing up guidelines that social networking sites, the blogosphere, website owners and search engines would be expected to follow.

The recommendation is one of several that the House of Commons culture, media and sport select committee is expected to make in its long-awaited report on harmful content on the internet and in video games.

The Report itself is here. Its overwhelming focus is "the use of social networking sites and chatrooms for grooming and sexual predation."

I have gone through the document. There is only one single reference to blogs/blogging:

One of the things British diplomats do in foreign parts is study the local media, to keep up with the obvious news but also to follow in a deeper way what makes those societies tick.

Armed with good basic background understanding, they then fan out to talk to the editors and pundits and politicians to ask the Big Questions.

Then they send (or at least they should send) terse, insightful reports to London with recommendations on what HMG should be doing.

Meanwhile foreign diplomats in London are studying our press too, to see what makes us tick.

And what do they make of - and report home about - pieces like this?

This article is fascinating for its Manifest Badness, on so many levels simultaneously.

It's all about:

the latest example of a noticeable social trend, one that we shall call, obviously, “dolliness”, after the woman who embodies its spirit. Think of the Spice Girls tour and the Sex and the City film ...  a new form of female camaraderie that, while clearly not new, is suddenly out, proud and quite deafeningly loud.

I try not to think about such things. But note the writing: four weary adverbs already, bulging the text like cotton wool stuffed in to expand an unstrained M&S bra.

What about this:

A group of grown-up women out on the razz is rarely cool — or sexy, in the traditional sense. But so what? When the rest of life is a performance, a game of pretending to be a grown-up, a complete cool-void can be a relief.

Ha.Grown-up women are all about pretending to be grown-up! I knew it.

But they're for sure brainy:

And it’s a nonsense that conversations at girl-only nights are just “women’s talk” ... What started out as a few women — among them June Sarpong and the writer Kathy Lette — gathering at the home of Ronnie Ancona became a monthly fixture for 30 or more. Sometimes the conversation was about about the burqa; sometimes nail varnish. Usually both.

Doesn't vampy black nail varnish avoid an unseemly and impious clash?

You can love men, live for them, but what a relief it is sometimes to be around people you don’t need to be anything with.

Women together, and vacuous articles in the Times about women together. A load of nothing?

Martin Kettle in the Guardian on Labour's horrible byelection loss in Glasgow yesterday:

Almost no Labour MP, including Brown, is now safe. Glasgow East was Labour's 25th safest seat in the UK and its third safest in Scotland. The seat had been Labour since the 1920s. If the 22.5% swing was replicated in a general election, Labour would have just one Scottish MP left. It doesn't get worse that this.

Er?

Of course it can get worse. Labour could have no seats in Scotland.

Or would that in fact be better? 

My new Total Politics piece is out, full of Helpful Tips about how a new Minister should start to run a government Department.

It's quick to register and you can then see it on the E-zine.

More in the pipeline for issues 3 and 4.

The steady insight of Lord Owen, with the deafening noise emitted by Simon Jenkins.

Good piece in the Independent too.

But they spoil it by adding a list of War criminals still at large.

These people are not war criminals. They are war crimes suspects or indictees, unless and until they have been tried in their absence and convicted.

Innocent until proven guilty, and all that. Important!

News that the Arabic word for God has been found miraculously enscribed on a piece of meat in Nigeria alas does not impress me.

When I was in Serbia the erudite paper Twilight Zone carried a picture of the image of Milosevic which had been found on a piece of toast.

And these days people are impatient for miracles.

So, praise the Lord, you can make your own.

Nigel Short has a lively use of words, as well as a lively chess style.

See the detailed rulings on his use of the word 'dunderheads' to describe two senior chess officials.

Defamatory or 'mere vulgar abuse'?

Who said that chess is boring?

Crawford v Murray (if that is what it is) has reached the Evening Standard's Londoner's Diary (alas not available on their website):

Mandarin puts knife into FO’s loose cannon

UNCIVIL war has broken out at the Foreign Office. Charles Crawford, the retired former ambassador to Warsaw, has broken ranks to express publicly for the first time what the FO really thinks of its errant ex-ambassador in Uzbekistan, Craig Murray, and his memoirs, Murder In Samarkand: A British Ambassador’s Controversial Defiance of the War on Terror.

Most significantly Crawford, whose acerbic memos had a cult following in the FCO, contests the theory that Mur­ray’s career was a “brilliant” one, des­tined for great things before being derailed by his removal from the post for accusing the government in Tashkent of human rights abuses...

... A contemporary of Tony Blair’s at St John’s Oxford, Crawford is no stranger to stirring up a hornet’s nest — in 2005 one of his “blackly humorous” personal emails was leaked to The Sunday Times, revealing how much he hated EU budget negotiations and suggesting they would be better conducted by Mr Blair placing a large alarm clock on the table with a deal to be done by the time the bell rung.

While many in the FCO privately agree that Murray has “gone native” and lacks judgment they will be sur­prised by the vehemence of Crawford’s remarks. He is the most senior manda­rin so far to speak out so strongly against a former colleague who was highlighting human rights abuses ...

Droll headline. 

Just to point out that as neither CC nor CM are actually employed by the FCO any longer, it is a bit odd to say that "an uncivil war has broken out at the Foreign Office".

Nor have I in any way purported to proclaim that what I write is "what the FO really thinks" about Craig Murray and his story.

Insofar as the FO really thinks about this matter, I imagine views are mixed.

Some people may have approved of Craig's vehement opposition to the War on Terror and liked his defiant stand, even if it ended in a mess.

Others may have approved of Craig's vehement opposition to the War on Terror but thought his way of selling it was in purely professional terms unwise/bad and/or counter-productive.

Others may have disapproved of Craig's War on Terror views and thought his way of selling them was bad.

Others may not have cared one way or the other on the policy level, but been happy or unhappy about the way the business was handled in personnel terms.

The Ministers involved at the time maybe viewed the whole business differently from their officials.

And so on.

What I plan to do is to carry on looking at the book in detail on my website, since it gives a probably uniquely rich seam of 'raw honesty' illuminated by vivid examples of policy and operational dilemmas for the British diplomats involved, at home and at Post alike.

Thus the book raises convincingly many serious questions for practitioners and the public. It deserves what it has not had so far (I think), namely a critical practitioner's analysis of it.

So, on we go tomorrow.

Because it allows massive direct hits on Utter Fatheadedness, and then documents carefully the attempts of the fatheads to cover their tracks, giving millions of people hours of amusement watching it all.  

Never thought I'd say it, but the time has come to vote SNP.

Anything but this.

I was a great fan of the Balkan 'yellow press' in all its exotic glory.

Presumably these strange papers and magazines have a non-trivial readership otherwise they would not be published in such profusion. So as Ambassador wanting to develop insight into the thinkings of society as a whole, I felt it well worth swinging through them now and again.

My favourite was Twilight Zone (Zona Sumraka). It looks to have become a bit more suburban of late, being reincarnated as Magic Zone. In Belgrade a few years ago it broke an amazing number of world scoops, which alas the planet heeded not.

Remember the terrifying Calcutta Monkey-Man? 

Twilight Zone discovered that NATO special forces had secretly kidnapped this evil creature and used latest DNA technology to clone it, before bringing it to Kosovo. But it had escaped and was feasting on Albanians! 

Not to forget the genetically mutated beetles created by NATO bombings of Serbia, poised to start breeding in your garden.

Or Tutankhamun's mysterious Ring of Power which caused havoc in the wrong hands. It had been discovered by a malign German scientist and brought to New York, prompting the 9/11 disaster, and after various detours causing earthquakes/plagues/floods was heading for ... Mitrovica!

Unambiguously excellent.

There is also a political yellow press, which hopes society stays cynical and stupid. These publications take a tit-bit of gossip from the editor's cousin working in the police and explode it out of all proportion: All politicians are corrupt! All diplomats are spies! Albanians are dangerous!

Yet these papers too are not without interest, and operate on many levels.

A current sophisticated example is Kurir - see this world scoop of a former Kostunica adviser meeting a former US Ambassador. Sinister indeed.

A further recent scoop is how the British and US intelligence services conspired together to plan to assassinate Serbian PM Kostunica in Sarajevo back in 2002. The evidence is the purported transcript of a tape-recording of a conversation in a Belgrade restaurant between two UK and US diplomats.

Come on, Kurir.

You know that when the waiters in these places change the dirty salt and pepper pots for clean ones, we diplomats always speak louder and more clearly into the new microphones and make up silly stories.

Kurir of course do know this, so they slip in some clever little signals to show the real experts that the whole thing is a spoof, like deliberately confusing 'Anthony' for 'Andrew' within the same sentence. Elegantly done.

Croatia's legendary publication Feral Tribune has closed for financial reasons.

Feral was an outstanding and courageous source of scurrilous but hard-hitting attacks in the 1990s on Croatian President Franjo Tudjman and his close associates, who strove mightily to close down the paper.

In 1997 Robin Cook flew from Banja Luka to meet Tudjman. Tudjman knew that the issue of official Croatian assaults on free media would come up.

It did. As I heard the story later, when Robin Cook raised the subject Tudjman clicked his fingers and in solemnly walked a flunky with a silver tray laden with articles from the Croatian media critical of Tudjman, complete with lampooning pictures of Tudjman with spectacles and a silly beard crudely added.

Tudjman insisted that the media in Croatia were free, as this weighty material scandalously attacking him showed.

R Cook opined that in democracies such phenomena in fact were quite normal.

"Look at this!" said Tudjman. "No other government in the world would accept such attacks on the head of state."

"Sometimes the truth hurts," mused the Foreign Secretary.

Easy enough to find on the Internet examples of Feral in its most aggressive form, including brave investigative reporting of atrocities committed in Croatia against Serbs.

For something more subtle, try this. A reporting piece by Ivan Lovrenovic evincing insight, wisdom and generosity of spirit. Great journalism. 

Hvala, Feral. 

From this vast distance it is not easy to follow the procedural manoeuvres of the majestic and variegated Canadian 'Human Rights' industry in its pursuit of Mark Steyn.

But Mark and Maclean's magazine looks to have won one handy free speech victory, with the Canadian Human Rights Commission dropping its case against them:

The Steyn article discusses changing global demographics and other factors that the author describes as contributing to an eventual ascendancy of Muslims in the 'developed world', a prospect that the author fears for various reasons described in the article. The writing is polemical, colourful and emphatic, and was obviously calculated to excite discussion and even offend certain readers, Muslim and non-Muslim alike.

Overall, however, the views expressed in the Steyn article, when considered as a whole and in context, are not of an extreme nature as defined by the Supreme Court in the Taylor decision. Considering the purpose and scope of section 13 (1), and taking into account that an interpretation of s. 13 (1) must be consistent with the minimal impairment of free speech, there is no reasonable basis in the evidence to warrant the appointment of a Tribunal.

Maclean's of course incurred significant costs in defending themselves against these idiotic pseudo-charges.

A verdict/decision is still awaited from the British Columbia Human Rights Tribunal.

Much more on the whole saga here.

The EP Culture Committee blogging menace nonsense (below) points up a factor in the Lisbon Treaty which is not really discussed.

Namely that as more and more 'areas' become subject to voting rather than consensus at the EU level, member states lose two things:

• the right to block at the end of the road ideas which are utterly fatuous; plus, even more importantly ...
• ... the right to stop such ideas gaining credibility and bureaucratic momentum in the first place

Just say some proposal to qualify our basic freedoms (in this case the right to write what we damn well please on a blog without being subject to the pathological attentions of an EU Ombudsperson) starts to run around the European Parliament or EU Commission. Various Euro-busybodies take it up.

What can the UK do to stop it? If it is in an area which falls under consensus, we can simply say NO in a loud voice at the start and then wearily tell everyone that we mean it when we say that we will block it.

Then we hope that it crawls away to die.

And we also hope that if it lingers on, our willpower won't be eroded as the gruesome thing trundles towards a final decision. Because once it starts to trundle, it takes on a pseudo-legitimacy of its own.

Even if as in this case only a seemingly modest 'voluntary code of practice' emerges as a 'fair compromise', a key principle will have been conceded (and winning that concession was actually the point - establish the principle, then haggle over the price) This opens the way to future inroads as and when the EU gets round to it.

However, if a proposal comes under a Qualified Majority Voting heading or can be tweaked to do so (ie just as the odious Working Time Directive was smuggled in via 'Health and Safety' provisions), we immediately have to start rallying opposition in the hope of defeating it in a vote.

Much more risky on the substance as zany 'trade-offs' start to appear, not to mention debilitating and wasteful. And all untransparent to citizens.

The answer comes, "Er yes, but so what? We can propose things which other MS don't like, so it all balances out. And the threat that a big and tough MS like the UK will mobilise a blocking minority deters a lot of nonsense anyway"

To which I say, "Er no. There are too many MS out there who have quite different attitudes to basic human liberties and the balance of power between citizens and the state. The tendency in practice is to dumb down competitive differences for the sake of the European Social Model and Generalised Harmony. See eg the various Directives seeking to limit by EU fiat the number of hours we all work, and giving agency staff many of the rights of permanent staff, an explicit drive to kill off a flexible British success story." 

So, European bloggers.

Hit back. As hard as you can.

The tragedy is that Euro-processes have forced you to waste more than a second of your busy and productive lives thinking about how best to do so. 

Irish voters!

Read this terrifying piece describing how the Culture Committee of the EU Parliament wants to deal with Bloggers "with malicious intentions or hidden agendas" who "pose a danger".

Then go and vote.

You know which way.

Busy times in the ever-complicated relationship between Poland and Germany.

Robert Kubica becomes the first Pole to win a Formula 1 Grand Prix race - driving a BMW in Montreal.

Then Germany beat Poland 2-0 in Euro 2008, with Polish-born Lukasz Podolski scoring twice - for Germany!

Before the match there was the usual noisy tabloid war, rising to excellent heights of "Give us their heads!" tastelessness, even though one of the noisiest Polish tabloids is owned by the German Springer group.

All this reminded me of the wonderful Malbork Castle in northern Poland, founded in 1274 by the Teutonic Knights:

The castle was expanded several time to host the growing number of Knights, and became the largest fortified Gothic building in Europe, featuring several sections and walls. It comprises three separate sections - the High, Middle and Low Castles, separated by multiple dry moats and towers. The castle once housed approximately 3,000 "brothers in arms", and the outermost castle walls enclose 52 acres (210,000 m²), four times larger than the enclosed space of Windsor Castle.

The Knights were Tough Eggs, rampaging to and fro against the then Poland and into the rest of Europe down the succeeding centuries. But they did have a keen sense of humour.

In one smart tower of the castle is a hole in the floor by way of de luxe mediaeval lavatory. If a guest had failed to meet the Knights' exacting standards he would be offered the use of this facility, and in using it would be surprised whan a hidden lever was pulled, plunging him down on to the rocks far below.

The football tabloid war prompted the usual dreary calls from some windbags in Germany for the Polish government to 'take action' against such abusive media material.

Pathetic. The whole point of football is that it gives us all a marvellous and (usually)harmless outlet for atavistic, raw nationalism. Not to mention post-modern irony.

Which is definitely better than what we had previously.

This is a perceptive argument that B Obama has brought together the techniques of 1960s' New Left/Marxist 'community mobilisation' with networked Internet cleverness.

But allowing the masses to 'own the campaign' has been accomplished in part by letting all sorts of extremists (anti-semitic, communist, Jihadist and others) rant away prolifically - on Obama's own community website!

Deliberate but over-ambitious 'community building? A security lapse? Dirty tricks? Incompetence?

Now the most offensive contributions are quickly being removed. And the site managers are busy trying to hide their traces by 'cleaning' the memory caches of Google and other search sites.   

A bit late?

Lest you think that Mark Steyn is nothing but a crazed Canadian demographer, have a re-run of this utterly classic piece of work.

His famous interview from 2018 with Monica Lewinsky's dress:

To be honest, I was lucky to get the interview. The dress was supposed to be doing the BBC - the full “Panorama special” treatment, Martin Bashir, the works - but, to protect her identity, they wanted to do that undercover secret-location protect-your-identity trick with the camera that makes part of the screen go all fuzzy and blurry.

“Are you crazy?” she yelled at them. “It’ll look like I’ve still got the stain.”

Read on.

What do this outlandish 'banning' of a Transformer t-shirt from an aircraft and the Mark Steyn Human Rights Tribunal trial in Canada have in common?

This.

In US and English law there is a so-called eggshell skull doctrine. This has it that if one commits a tort or crime, one has to accept the responsibility for all the losses suffered by the victim even if some of them were unpredictable.

So, if you hit someone on the nose but unbeknownst to you (or even the victim) the victim's nose was especially and freakishly fragile, you can be held liable if you alas inflict massive brain damage in this case even if in 99.999% of such cases that would not occur.

The point of this of course is to protect everyone fairly from tortious acts, and thereby deter such acts.

The 'human rights'complaint against Mark Steyn in Canada is in effect a bewildering, pernicious attempt to extend this doctrine to cover every eventuality, even when the action complained of is not unlawful. 

Mark Steyn writes an article in a prominent Canadian publication about what he sees as a looming clash between traditional 'European' values and 'Islamic' values. Some Muslims do not like it.

They press the editors to give them a full unedited 'right of reply' and try to badger them into making a sizeable payment to an Islamic charity (Note: extortion?). The editors robustly say 'Get Lost'.

The objectors resort to Canada's human rights tribunal machinery, which seems to have amazing and far-reaching communistic powers to suppress freedom of expression if a complaint is deemed to be 'justified' by virtue of the injury allegedly caused to "dignity, feelings and self respect":

37 (1) If the member or panel designated to hear a complaint determines that the complaint is not justified, the member or panel must dismiss the complaint.
(2) If the member or panel determines that the complaint is justified, the member or panel
(a) must order the person that contravened this Code to cease the contravention and to refrain from committing the same or a similar contravention,
(b) may make a declaratory order that the conduct complained of, or similar conduct, is discrimination contrary to this Code,
(c) may order the person that contravened this Code to do one or both of the following:
(i) take steps, specified in the order, to ameliorate the effects of the discriminatory practice;

…(d) if the person discriminated against is a party to the complaint, or is an identifiable member of a group or class on behalf of which a complaint is filed, may order the person that contravened this Code to do one or more of the following:
(i) make available to the person discriminated against the right, opportunity or privilege that, in the opinion of the member or panel, the person was denied contrary to this Code;
(ii) compensate the person discriminated against for all, or a part the member or panel determines, of any wages or salary lost, or expenses incurred, by the contravention;
(iii) pay to the person discriminated against an amount that the member or panel considers appropriate to compensate that person for injury to dignity, feelings and self respect or to any of them.
(3) An order made under subsection (2) may require the person against whom the order is made to provide any person designated in the order with information respecting the implementation of the order.
(4) The member or panel may award costs
(a) against a party to a complaint who has engaged in improper conduct during the course of the complaint, and
(b) without limiting paragraph (a), against a party who contravenes a rule under section 27.3 (2) or an order under section 27.3 (3).
(5) A decision or order of a member or panel is a decision or order of the tribunal for the purposes of this Code.
(6) The member or panel must inform the parties and any intervenor in writing of the decision made under this section and give reasons for the decision.

Thus the way appears to be open for the Tribunal now hearing the Steyn case to ban in Canada one of the top-selling books on Amazon. Pop!

This is obviously insane on the level of normal democratic practice. But what is wrong with it in a deeper, philosophical way?

It basically means that society has to be organised around the limited tolerance and imagination of its most neurotic and extreme members. Anyone who is 'offended' by anything can raise a complaint and have some hope of getting 'redress', even when the alleged offender is doing something otherwise lawful (ie enjoying the right to air his/her opinions). 

This in turn trends towards creating a culture of defensive whiners, adults by age but seven-year olds by attitude, who go rushing and blubbering to teacher just because someone said something nasty about them.

Feelings trump reason - the ultimate moral disaster.

Where does the Transformer t-shirt case fit in?

Because we have drifted into a situation where the state assumes for itself the requirement to 'balance' all competing claims betwen Reason and Feelings, on no sound or even articulated basis of principle whatsover.

And once that idea gets universalised - once the proposition seeps into official instinct that everything (a) in principle might need balancing (b) by officials -  we have reached a very high-water mark of Liberal Fascism.

The t-shirt case shows just how far state control has gone far out of control in the UK. The Heathrow officials who dealt with this episode did not think:

"Hmm. How do we balance the idea that some people might dislike this t-shirt with his freedom to wear what he damn well chooses? Ooops. We don't, of course. His right trumps all. Shame on us for even contemplating his clothing in the first place!"

Instead they thought:

"Uh-oh. This maybe could be provocative. What if someone complains? We could get into trouble if we did not do anything. Better to be safe than sorry - let's make him change it!"

Thus what in fact get 'balanced' are rival furtive nervousnesses within the minds of the officials about purely theoretical complaints. The rights of the passenger are not even weighed. Appalling.

Back in Canada, the Tribunal listening to the fanciful complaints of a few activists and wondering whether to ban a best-selling book likewise are ponderously and self-importantly weighing and balancing issues they should not be touching.

The classic hard anti-free speech argument goes like this:

"Of course there are limits on free speech! What about someone who screams fire in a crowded theatre, causing panic leading to someone being trampled to death?!"

But even if one accepts that that sort of behaviour maybe does merit sanction, it is not the same as a few people in a theatre reacting in a panicky self-indulgent way just because another member of the audience says something to a friend which they happen to overhear and don't like.

In that case the core issue for society is how to deal with the neurotic tiny minority who take offence loudly and unnecessarily when the vast majority are quite content. And the state's sanctions regime needs to be tilted to deter them, not the law-abiding subject of their pitiful querulousness.

So a great deal is at stake in the Steyn case, about the way mature Western democracies organise themselves and their core moral incentive structures.

Do we incentivise and uphold values of robust self-reliance and individual choice?

Or do instead encourage defensive paranoia?

Do we encourage adulthood?

Or childishness?

Do we employ armies of civil servants to seek to strike a carefully considered, duly weighed and weighted balance - between Good Sense and Stupidity?

Guido and Iain Dale are riding high in visitors to their respective websites.

Big numbers, comparing favourably if not better with similar sites run by 'mainstream' media outlets. Increasingly they all feed off each other, of course.

Why not? For far too long a tiny number of media pundits have held extraordinary influence over public life round the world. Not because they were smarter or wiser than many others, but because they were taken on by major newspapers and ran a cosy and lucrative oligopoly.

Bloggers and other web analysts give these plump pundits healthy competition.  Plus they point out errors at supersonic speed: 'fact-check your ass', as it's known in the trade.

My own readership is more ... modest. Still, 3000 Unique Visitors a month is OK by me, given that the site has been going only a few months. Thanks, readers

Plus the site has helped me get a droll piece in a brand new UK political magazine launching this month: Total Politics. Be there, or be square.

Gerard Baker in the Times today makes a weighty case against Hillary and why Democratic voters have rejected her.

So she should be put out of her misery: It would not be sexism or chauvinism but the clear-headed decision of a wise statesman, if Senator Obama brought this particular woman's presidential hopes to an unmourned end.

Sounds good? Yes.

But it's not true. Voters haven't, or at least they have not done so in any decisive way.

Look at Real Clear Politics analysis of the actual vote counts so far. Obama is ahead by only some 500,000 votes from 33 million so far cast.

Which maybe explains why Hillary Clinton battles on.

Facts. Nothing like em.

The BBC website currently has the following headline:

Iraqi al-Qaeda commander 'seized'

Why the inverted commas around the word 'seized'?

There is nothing in the ensuing story to explain why, unless the idea is to imply that the Iraqi forces who say that they have done the seizing are lying or wrong.

Why not 'Iraq' al-Qaeda commander seized?

Or Iraq 'Al-Qaeda' commander seized?

Or Iraq Al-Qaeda 'commander' seized?

When I was a stude