Greatest Hits

As I peruse the statistics for the readership of this Blog, I see that most people who swing by do so for less than 30 seconds, but a non-trivial number of people stay for an hour or more.

It is boring scrolling back through archived blog material on any site. It all dates so incredibly fast.

But in case anyone wants More in an easy-to-access way, I have set up a Greatest Hits category on the Index column so that certain pieces which prompted special interest can be read quickly.

So if (as I know you do) you want Zhirinovsky, Kraftwerk, Beef, Nongqawuse, Bambiland, Liberal Fascism, EU Budget and my glorious role in crushing press freedom in the UK - there they all are, in a handy convenience pack.

EU Referendum’s thoughts on why a ‘European Foreign Policy’ is not good idea got me thinking.

What actually is ‘Foreign Policy’ anyway? Could the EU in fact be good at some aspects of it but not all? What are the pros and cons for the UK of ‘More Europe’ in the foreign policy area?

Gooooogle ‘EU foreign policy’ and a lot of dull stuff appears, not least all sorts of academic books talking dully about the EU and Foreign Policy. See eg this. And this and this.

One also comes across distinguished former practitioners making the More Europe case. See eg Lord Hannay, one of the smartest diplomats of our times on why an EU foreign policy is a Necessity, not an Optional Extra.

I find these productions unconvincing. Why? Because they are pitching the arguments on a level of generality which suits the case they want to make, constructing all sorts of clever institutional mechanisms without first really looking hard at what an EU Foreign Policy might actually want to achieve and only then considering how best to achieve it.

Diplomacy is not a matter of structures and resources, although they help cope with a lot of routine and quite important stuff.  The real problem is at the sharp end, dealing with dangerous issues and dangerous people.

That requires a subtle, powerful – even risky – approach, with people and resources geared accordingly.

Anyway.

One part of foreign policy, perhaps even the nub of it, is projecting to others beyond your own borders a clear statement of what you are and what you want. In this, symbols matter.

As I wrote back in 2005 in a searching analysis (which won some Ministerial approval!) of what the UK should do to help sort out the EU following the French/Dutch referenda defeats:

Returning to the history of those 2005 EU Budget negotiations.

It was clear from the outset to anyone in the know (a) that there would be an increased EU budget, and (b) that those who Give and not those who Get would determine just how much bigger.

Since the large number of EU member states wanting to Get were in a relatively weak position, they had to make a vast amount of noise to try to intimidate those who Give into being more generous.

Among the Getters, Poland was well placed in a ‘fairness’ sense. It was a new member state, a large new member state, and (unlike eg Spain/Italy) had not benefited from EU largesse on a massive scale previously. So if any country was to do well in relative and absolute terms, it should be Poland.

The UK position was … complicated.

This time round, following the French/Dutch referenda fiasco Prime Minister Blair had a uniquely favourable position to give the EU a firm dose of UK leadership. Would the EU now lying gasping on the floor be grateful and penitent when we pulled it back on its feet? Or would it gracelessly, greedily try to pick our pocket as we hauled away?

On the substance:

• We did not want to see an inordinate increase in the total EU Budget, as much of the money would be wasted in CAP payments to wealthy farmers, plus UK taxpayers would be paying a large slice of any increase.
• We did want to see the new member states do well – much better to invest EU funds in countries which were relatively poor than absolutely rich.
• But we had the Presidency. This was good, because it enabled us to set the overall agenda and drive the process – and indeed end it, if things were going badly wrong.
• But it also was bad, because the Presidency must play its own national hand and represent the EU as a whole in finding Compromises and Consensus. Plus every Presidency wants to be Successful.
• NB too that we were bound to be attacked flat-out on the UK Rebate issue by everyone else.
• Should we simply say No, playing the national card? If so, others could collapse the process, howling at British selfishness at the hour of Europe’s greatest need.
• Or should we say Maybe, ceding a really important national principle and opening up the way to subsequent salami slicing aimed at increasing our already generous share of the pot?

Thus the familiar pseudo-haggling, bluffing, hypocrisy and game-playing started.

The European Commission quickly threw into the ring their proposal: an Outlandish Increase in the EU Budget. It did not sound much – an increase of the Budget to 1.26% of the newly enlarged Union’s Gross National (sic) Income.

The UK opened its bidding at 1.00% of EU GNI. The difference? Some 200 billion Euros.

The Commission, bent on Much More Europe, knew very well that their bid was absurd and doomed to fail. But, hey, aim for the stars and you might hit the moon. Plus the more extravagant the opening bid, the easier it would be to present the Givers as being selfish and ‘un-European’.

This facile ploy worked as expected.

The Givers laughed heartily at Commission temerity.

The Getters, especially the new member states and Poland in particular, seized on this Commission figure as some sort of new entitlement, to the point of complaining bitterly (or to be precise pretending to complain bitterly) that UK/Giver positions represented a massive cut in ‘their’ money for which they had to be ‘compensated’ in other ways.

And so we come at last to the heart of the issue.

It would have been possible to give Poland most of what it wanted even under the much less ambitious UK/Giver offer, if the Givers themselves took less money from the EU Budget in 2007-2013, primarily through reduced CAP payments.

But France, humiliated by its referendum result, of course would not accept that.

So we in London faced a hard choice.

Should we refuse to accept French and other Giver intransigence and risk letting the EU Budget not be agreed in our Presidency, having fun blaming the French but adding even more stress to an EU already in real disarray?

Or should we accept that, to get what we wanted (ie a final Budget much closer to 1.00% than to 1.26%) French intransigence was an Immovable Object, and instead juggle the sums to offer the new member states a lot less than they reasonably had hoped for but still a goodly whack?

To be continued …

Reader Robbie has sent in a pertinent comment on my post about Objectives, Targets:

Not sure I agree with you on the wider point about targets ... Given the size and complexity of modern public service delivery, no Minister can reasonably be expected to have a strong sense of what is happening in all of their department, all of the time.

Therefore they need to identify priorities that need to be achieved for the benefit of the public, and by which the success of that Minister can be measured.

Once a priority has been identified, an outcome must be set (for without an idea of what the achieved outcome should be, the priority is meaningless). And once an outcome has been set, the department must set out how it will achieve that outcome. Progress towards that outcome is made in steps, which can only be measured by...targets.

It seems to me that if ministers don't set targets, how can they be responsible for what their departments achieve (or fail to achieve)? And if ministers aren't responsible for the success or failure of their departments, we have government by bureaucrat - unelected and unaccountable.

Value for Money: Government in a modern developed nation these days is a massive enterprise, which uses up lots of money. Unlike other organisations, it has the ability to decide how much money it needs; and can then (with relative ease) get that revenue (through tax hikes). Given that power, a responsible government must be able to prove it is spending its money in a way that gives value for money. How else can it do that except by showing progress against objectives?

Phew. Where to start?

No-one says that Governments should simply do what they damn well please with our money, even if often they do. So wanting to achieve specific things as promised in election campaigns is good.

My point is that the sprawling bureaucracy in the UK now associated with doing what Robbie proposes is choking intelligent government and public process. Much of it is in fact hilariously incoherent or even utterly stupid, or at the very best 'merely' distorting and wasteful.

And it is gnawing away at some of our most precious assets.

If we Brits have one global comparative advantage it is the English language, an amazingly clever, unrivalled tool for precision and clarity in communication in a new global era when Communication is Everything.

What else needs to be said for eg English in our schools other than "Pupils leaving school at 16 are expected to have read at least 50 of the 300 key books in Annex A and at least two Shakespeare plays. Marks will be deducted severely for poor spelling and grammar."? Then let schools just get on with it.

What do we actually get?

In effect the state for decades has nationalised most of the means of production of the English language, and as with all nationalised industries brought in clueless incentive structures and messed things up.

Each successive blunder leads to bad outcomes which in turn force civil servants to invent ever more elaborate schemes to try to solve the problem, which in turn make the problems worse.

The setting of Targets as opposed to Standards has led to teachers wasting massive time filling in forms while dwelling more on narrow exam outcomes and less on actual education.

Plus we see a stunning officially driven dumbing down in basic literacy, which now shows itself in almost every communication one receives.

Basically, Serbian and Polish children are learning good English to higher standards than ours are.

How bad is this?

I was lost for words a few years ago when an FCO fast-stream young officer and English graduate from Oxford University served me up a draft with the word 'sebatical' in it. What absence of education and basic reading and grasp of the way English works had produced that level of ignorance after some fifteen years in the better parts of the UK education system?

We now see the phenomenon of officials so gormless that not only can they not spell properly, they also do not grasp that there is a Spell-Checker on their computer or are unable to choose which of the options offered is the right one.

Another relatively new but growing official disease is Risk Management.

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

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

I was told off for being 'unhelpful'.

My answer, Robbie, is that there is no theoretical or operational basis for treating such time-consuming exercises within the current Objectives/Targets/priorities industry as being in any meaningful way meaningful. 

Any honest risk analysis for any Embassy would put at the top of its list:

• good chance that a domestic political drama will take Ministers' eyes off the ball here and/or divert resources from our problems to other problems, probably for reasons driven by internal Party focus groups or Spin or Ministers' own election prospects (a couple are in marginal seats with truculent ethnic minority communities)
• non-trivial risk of Iran attacking Israel or vice versa, prompting vast global instability affecting for the worse everything we do

But if any Embassy in Europe wrote that, they would be told off for being unhelpful.

My recommendation to FCO staff?

Act! Boldly!

Seize all FCO/HMG papers you can find with the words Targets/Priorities/Risk Assessments/Strategies/Survey/Outcomes/Outputs/Road-maps on them.

Pile them in the centre of the FCO Main Courtyard. 

Park the new Ministerial fleet of Ford Focuses a good way back for Health and Safety reasons.

Set fire to the paper mountain, dancing and cheering around the shooting flames. (Note: a tiny blow to FCO recycling policy and Global Warming, but hey, No Gain without Pain.)

March en masse to the Foreign Secretary's office. Insist that he sign new FCO Basic Policy Guidelines:

• Work flat out to stop the EU passing new Directives which harm British interests
• Ditto to stop the UN sucking up to dictators and extremists
• If necessary, threaten to stop paying for such nonsense, and mean it - Ministers will support you
• Keep a close eye on the Russians, who play hard and tricky.
• Ditto the French (less hard, even more tricky)
• In fact keep a close eye on foreigners in general - they are often up to something tricky and/or hard
• Climate Change needs attention, but don't put all our eggs in one basket - the science keeps changing faster than the climate
• End all 'development assistance' programmes - they waste money and encourage idleness/corruption
• Never appear Weak
• Be as helpful as you can to all UK business people who show up.
• Ditto to Brits who have got into trouble
• Don't waste public money or cheat on your expenses - Big Trouble if you do
• Now just get on with it

Then just get on with it.

And see if five years' time anything is really that much different/worse.

This fierce piece by Sam Leith weighs into the British Government's handling of the Al-Yamamah fraud enquiry:

There was enough evidence of corruption in the Al-Yamamah deal to warrant an independent investigation. That investigation ... was stopped after an explicit threat to withdraw a big arms contract, and an implicit threat that "lives would be put at risk" were the Saudis to withdraw their co-operation with our counter-terrorism operations. That is to announce that we're willing to do business with people who promise to connive in the murder of our citizens unless they get their way. Nice.

Iain Dale puts it another way:

We have so far not heard a squeak from Number Ten in response to the Saudi Arms deal judgement in the High Court. We still don't know whether Gordon Brown will side with Tony Blair or do what's right. What we do know from this morning's papers is that the Conservatives are siding with the Government (despite not knowing what the government's position actually is). I am sorry they felt the need to say anything yet ... As a country we are supposed to believe in freedom under the rule of law. Without the rule of law there can never be complete freedom. If the government decides that it will sidestep the rule of law on a big issue like this, it is open season for others to follow suit.

According to the Guardian, the Conservatives agree that there needs to be available a 'national interest' brake on prosecutions:

[S]hadow attorney general, Dominic Gieve, said: "We believe the existing system, by which the attorney is responsible for the public interest in deciding whether or not a prosecution should be discontinued because of national security issues, should continue. The attorney is accountable to parliament for her actions and her decision can be challenged in the courts if made unreasonably or capriciously."

Hmm.

Imagine this discussion:

S Arabia: 

"Look, this corruption prosecution is just too much. Cut it out or all deals are off."

UK:           

"You must be crazy. How can we stop it?"

S Arabia:  

"You'll find a way. To be clear: the aircraft deal worth a gazillion dollars goes, plus we'll stop cooperating on terrorism"

UK:          

"Look, if we do stop this we'll take an enormous domestic and international hit. Your venality got us into this mess. You need to deliver something serious too."

S Arabia:  

(Thinks: "Phew. I've established the principle - now what's the price?")  "OK, OK. We can do more on terrorism. We'll give you some cracking evidence to use against Osama Bin Liner whom you arrested recently."

UK:         

"Not enough. We know that you have good stuff on Obama Bin Syko and Orama Bin Killin too. Let's have that as well."

S Arabia:  

"If I hand all that over do we have a deal?"

UK:         

"Yes. Why not quietly dispose of Odama Bin Nutta when he is your part of the world next week - we'll send you the flight details. But next time don't overdo the greed thing..."

S Arabia: 

"Sorted. Oh, and we'll see you right on that Zappo fighter aircraft contract."

UK:

"I think that goes without saying."

S Arabia:

"Did I say anything ..?"

And imagine that as a result of this new information handed over by the Saudis the British police secure convictions against a group of deranged Islamists planning terrorist attacks across the UK, plus find out about and arrest four more groups planning similar outrages which could have cost several hundred British lives. Meanwhile the Saudis lift their game too for a while and quietly if vigorously take out several big gangs of terrorists.

Squalid? Revolting? Utterly Lacking Principle?

Probably. But several hundred lives and maybe more are saved. So are a few thousand jobs, and hundreds of millions of pounds in potential benefits claims.

Is all that such a ruinous outcome, given the way the world works?

You say, "Piffle. Specious. It is too high a price. We do not allow ourselves to be pushed around."

But you like me are unlikely to be one of the rescue workers digging bits of bodies from hellish Tube tunnels after the next bomb goes off. High Court judges are not often see doing this work either.

If the government has reason to think that cutting a deal with the Saudis will stop terrorist outrages in the UK, are they open to a mass lawsuit under some or other 'human rights' heading from the eventual victims' families if they refuse to cut it?

My point is that for all the rightful furore over this highly damaging series of government decisions, Life is not organised in neat legal categories. It puts forward Hard Choices. 

And insofar as the UK government did try to weigh up how best to deal with this mess, perhaps the best, even winning arguments for why it did what it did have to stay very deeply hidden so as to protect agents and other sources. Which is not to say that it did a good job in this case. Maybe PM Blair really was weak and did not cut as hard a deal as he might have done.

All that said, the original decision to stop the prosecution was demoralising on many levels. We looked at each other aghast in the Embassy in Warsaw when the news broke. Embassies are instructed to report to London even the whiff of corruption involving British firms. Why bother if an obnoxious enough bully can get a big case shut down?

Bottom Line.

When we go shopping in Covent Garden or take a flight, we take for granted that we will come home safe and sound, and not be blown to pieces by some or other psychotic terrorist.

But these people are out there in non-trivial numbers, plotting mayhem. Keeping an eye on them is hard work.

Maybe now and again the Government need to cut some dirty deals for our safety and wider benefit?

Do we want to outsource these grim decisions about the National Interest to elected politicians whom we can kick out if we feel they got it totally wrong?

Or to unelected judges? 

As Titanic-Mugabe steams urgently towards the rocks one asks oneself: what is really going on here?

The key 'deep' point to remember in all this is that Zimbabwe leader Mugabe is not (like South Africa President Thabo Mbeki) a Communist, but rather an Africanist.

The European Communist tradition stressing class struggle as hijacked by Moscow created the South African Communist Party, which in turn used the 'moderate' ANC as the vehicle to achieve a winning position in the anti-apartheid struggle.

This was quite separate from the Pan-Africanist tradition which, responding to Africa's colonised condition, originally emphasised a sort of pan-African 'national' awareness and self-improvement for Africans. Mugabe came from this latter tendency, which over time became radicalised and openly socialist.

Anyway, as the European colonial powers withdrew from Africa following WW2 there was bound to be an especially difficult struggle in Rhodesia and South Africa, where 'whites' of European descent were especially strong and rich. Armed resistance to Ian Smith's unilateral declaration of independence in Rhodesia developed. And Cold War geo-politics played its part.

Thus it happened that the Soviet Union threw its weight behind Joshua Nkomo's ZAPU movement. Robert Mugabe's ZANU movement found support from communist China, with also - after Mugabe won power - some handy local ethnic cleansing help from North Korea.

The populist hard core of Africanism is a preoccupation with Land - with the idea that Africa has to rid itself of all 'settlers' once and for all.

In South Africa I knew many members of the Pan-Africanist Congress, one of the groups hoping to achieve power after apartheid rule collapsed. PAC leaders were genial enough, but their slogan was 'One Settler - One Bullet!' Asked why they had such a violent non-inclusive mission-statement they would say 'Ah, as a poor organisation we can only afford one bullet for each settler'. Otherwise they would whip up support in the townships by saying "India for the Indians, Russia for the Russians, England for the English - why should it be Africa for everyone?"

NB too that South Africa's Black Consciousness Movement led by Steve Biko in the 1970s was in effect an attempt to create a new synthesis between 'African-ness' and class struggle, namely 'Blackness'. The ANC/SACP of course hated this new rival and shed few tears as the apartheid regime crushed it. But BCM mobilised many brilliant people. Some prominent ANC personalities now such as Cyril Ramaphosa had their formative years in such groupings; the ANC's internal rivalries today in part are about these long-standing ideological differences going back thirty years or more.  

The practical, political, moral and even metaphysical issues surrounding 'settler' land ownership in South Africa and Zimbabwe alike are, of course, obvious. After all those long years in power the Mugabe regime has failed to come up with fair but sensible solutions, which is why as it clings on to power it is still thrashing out at Zimbabwe's diminishing number of white farmers, even if this is risking collective national starvation. 

In short, Mugabe looks to be having his own special Nongqawuse Moment.

Nongqawuse was the Xhosa girl who back in 1856 in Transkei (now South Africa's Eastern Cape) announced that she had seen visions. This led to the Xhosa people in a fit of collective hysteria slaughtering their own cattle on a huge scale, creating appalling starvation. A unique example in history of collective national quasi-suicide.

Mugabe's case of course is rather different: it is the Mugabe elite putting the gun to the head of the Zimbabwean people, and telling them they need to die for their own good.

Does Mbeki as a Xhosa himself look at Zimbabwe and think about this parallel? What goes through his mind? 

In his communistic rationality he must look aghast at the catastrophe caused by Mugabe's atavistic vengefulness against 'whites' (plus he has to think about coping with the tens of thousands of Zimbabweans who have crossed into South Africa looking for food). Yet he also knows that Africanist instincts run deep inside South Africa too, even if they currently do not find explicitly powerful political expression.

So here we see a sort of Africanist Fundamentalism playing itself out.

Even leaving aside the fact that the Mugabe elite will have plundered plenty of loot for themselves, there is something in the Mugabe elite mind which wants to see all traces of 'settler-whiteness' in Zimbabwe eradicated once and for all, whatever the horrendous cost to Zimbabwe's indigenous Africans themselves.

This will represent a symbolic 'purification' of this part of Africa, following which somehow or other the territory can start to rebuild on exclusively African terms.

Fine. But what if no-one is left standing to do the rebuilding work? 

Anatole Kaletsky today gives us a lesson in how to be intimidated.

His article describing why Russia is justified in opposing NATO enlargement is everything an Op-Ed should be: urbane, perceptive, even a dash or two of wisdom.

It also is Wrong, or at least Unbalanced.

He depicts NATO as "an unstoppable politico-military juggernaut, advancing relentlessly towards Russia's borders and swallowing up all intervening countries". Help!

Russia is according to Kaletsky quite right to be worried about "Nato's explicit new vocation to keep expanding until it embraces every “democratic” country in Europe and central Asia, with the unique and critical exception of Russia itself"; this "becomes hard to distinguish from previous expansions into eastern territory by French and German heads of state whose intentions were less benign than those of the present Western leaders".

Huh? NATO is like Napoleon or Hitler? Or Russia is right to make this comparison?

Note also Kaletsky's sly use of the inverted commas: NATO seeks to "embrace every "democratic" country in Europe ...".

Kaletsky makes some fairish points about why Georgia and Ukraine might want to join NATO for specific domestic reasons, which might not be worth our defending.

What Kaletsky fails to do is point to the deeper upside of NATO membership for the countries concerned.

That upside consist of making a strategic national commitment in favour of a completely new way of doing things, actively supported and reinforced by NATO allies and processes.

NATO membership brings with it unyielding civilian control of the military. Far greater transparency in everything, including budgets and procurement. No more GRU-style military secret police subverting and spying on their own political processes. Reasonable good faith attempts to work together to look back into history to cast full light on possible past abuses (Katyn). No more bombastic obnoxious military rhetoric shaping public life.

Not all this is perfect or implemented overnight or at all. But much of it is. That compounds up over time into a powerful package, with deep policy and moral implications for the way society as a whole is run.

It represents a sense of respecting Limits on Power, the far opposite of what these countries experienced under Soviet rule.

This is why Polish democrats were so keen to get Poland into NATO, in the face of energetic former communist objections. The Poles opted for Democracy against Communism. And good grief, how right they were to do so.

Imagine what modern Europe would look like now if Poland had the political status of Georgia, lying in some sort of political-moral twilight zone with former Soviet interests linked to the KGB having a far freer time to penetrate into that society and play games with Polish assets.

Does Kaletsky think that Poland's NATO membership was a mistake? If not, why not roll out NATO values to those other European countries actively seeking to implement them? How else can they hope to bed them in? If they indeed are not fully "democratic", what precisely is holding them back?

The Russian government knows what is at stake. It rightly sees NATO values as a challenge to its quasi-Soviet claims to influence and legitimacy which it is making such heavy and explicit efforts to fortify - see Edward Lucas' book The New Cold War, especially Chapter Five ("What Makes Russia's Leaders Tick"), for a powerful description of this process in action.

So the question is, if we go along with Kaletskyism what is our message to European-minded Georgians/Ukrainians and to the Russians, and to ourselves ?

Our message to the Russians: "The worse you behave, the more we hold back. You stare; we blink. Aggressive sulking pays off."

Our message to the Georgians/Ukrainians: "Sorry, when facing neo-Soviet bullying you are mainly on your own, even though you want to sign up to our values, not theirs."

Our message to ourselves: "Be weak. It's easier."

All that said, is there is something in Russian concerns? Following the end of the Cold War why is NATO still there?

The answer to that lies in different chickens and eggs. Because Russia has not embraced democracy, NATO is still needed as a non-trivial symbol of unity and defence of Western values. But because NATO is still there Russia finds itself threatened and so does not embrace democracy.

Kaletsky takes it for granted that the way out of this dead-end is in NATO doing nothing to promote and reinforce democracy elsewhere in non-NATO Europe. That can not be right, or at least not the full story.

If Russia changed course and started again to implement full Western/European values at home and started exporting them to the rest of the former Soviet Union as happened a decade ago, the whole atmosphere would be different.

Transdniestria would be solved. Other frozen conflicts could be dealt with in a comprehensive fair-minded way. That would open the way to a quite new spirit of partnership across the board, maybe even an eventual redefinition of Western security to include Russia too, if Russia wanted to be part of that. The very idea of Europe would be redefined. Hard choices for us all in how eg the European Union and NATO fit into that new scenario. Fine by me.

Russia can not contemplate this. It implies that Russia becomes an ordinary albeit big and influential member of the Western club, one among many. Its market niche as an independent global challenger to the United States would look far more like France's: noisy, not unimportant, but ultimately effete? Its Options would be Reduced.  

And above all the power and methods of the post-KGB elite running Russia now would have to be diluted and even over time disappear, in favour of a substantively pluralist, open way of running Russia.

So maybe Russia under current management is right to be paranoid. But not all paranoids are right - or deserving respect.

Background on the fascinating saga of my leaked email back in 2005 which was splashed over the front page of the Sunday Times.

What do EU Budget negotiations and Clint Eastwood have in common?

Lots.

Once upon a time the EU decided that it needed a new Treaty to move itself on to the 'next stage' of development. So a 'Constitutional Treaty was drafted. And as there were controversial questions about its impact on national sovereignty, in some countries calls for a referendum became noisy.

Thus it was in 2004 that then PM Tony Blair announced that 'the British people would have the final say' on the Treaty. This was included in the 2005 Labour Manifesto:

British MPs take an important vote today on the Treaty on European Union.

A fine British Parliamentary moment looms. The Conservative Party are calling for a referendum. The Labour Party say that one is not necessary. The LibDems are being ordered not to vote, or something.

From the classic UK point of view (basically that we like EU integration, but not too much and not too fast) this Treaty looks to be an improvement over the ill-fated Constitutional Treaty which crashed so spectacularly back in 2005 in the referenda in France and the Netherlands. It brings in more 'nation state' hand-brakes.

Which is why the whole business is so embarrassing. Since it was not that long ago that the Constitutional Treaty itself was being praised as a "success for Britain".

This week sees the latest FCO Leadership Conference, which brings all our Ambassadors and High Commissioners back to London for a series of pep-talks, including this year their first one one from David Miliband.

I recall the similar event back in 2005 just after the Asian Tsunami disaster. One of the very few highlights of that grim event was a presentation on the horrors facing the UK and its standing in Europe if (as then seemed likely) everyone else in the EU voted to support the Constitutional Treaty and we then had our promised referendum and voted No.

We would be Isolated. Reviled.

Our very membership of the EU could be called into question. Aaaargh. (Note: intriguing in this context that the FCO explanation of Article 50 of the new Treaty reassuringly says that "for the first time, the Treaties will explicitly confirm that any Member State can leave the EU if it wants to, and they explain how this would work.")

Then, as if by magic, along came the French and the Dutch referenda which solved our problem. And enabled us to try to get the rusty European bicycle upright again from a stronger position.

So today Parliament takes a view on the new text. Yet it is not easy or even possible to find a clear account in the media today of the issues at stake which answers the basic questions in language anyone should be able to follow:

• what problem are these 'constitutional' Treaties purporting to solve?
• what were the main features of the Constitutional Treaty text which have now been abandoned?
• and why are the new Treaty passages an improvement?

At the heart of all this is a Pretty Big Question.

What is Democracy in the European context?

David Clark today opines that "there is nothing democratic about allowing one or two members of a club of 27 to block change wanted by the rest. What opponents of Lisbon are asking for is not democracy at all, but the right of a single-country veto to frustrate the will of the majority."

Wrong, wrong, wrong.

It depends on how the rules are set up. If every member of a Club agrees that in some circumstances a single club member can block decisions, when a block takes place that in fact is an expression of the democratic agreement to set up those rules in the first place. See the Greece/Macedonia name row, still alive today. Annoying. But not 'undemocratic'.

Moreover, the whole point of the EU is that it is not 'democratic' - voting (when it happens) if not the whole European integration process is skewed in favour of reassurance-via-influence for smaller member states so that the biggest MS do not predominate. Plus MS are allowed to play a 'national interest' trump card now and again to stop things they really do not like. That is just another way to incorporate some checks and balances. Without those deeply incorporated the EU would not work; there is just not enough basic trust between European peoples and leaders.

But David Clark is spot on here (emphasis added):

"..pro-Europeans ought to feel some degree of embarrassment at the way the Lisbon treaty is being railroaded through to ratification. What started as an effort to involve European citizens in a more open process of treaty change, including a European convention, has ended with a return to decision-making by the elite. It may be expedient, but it is still a retrograde step.

The problem is one of trust, or lack of it. Many European leaders are now reluctant to take the risk of holding a referendum on the EU because they don't trust voters to judge the issues on their merits, or even consider the issues at all. As with the failed referendums on the constitution in France and the Netherlands, there is a feeling that people tend to see a vote on Europe as a cost-free opportunity to lash out at unpopular national governments or express some other generalised frustration at the state of the world. It is the fact that EU treaties appear so remote to the concerns of voters, rather than the idea that they pose any great threat, that tends to produce negative outcomes. The result is democracy without responsibility."

What is clear is that all this is not clear.

So if a referendum on this subject has been promised to British voters, what is the best thing to do?

As the results come in it is clear that Vladimir Zhirinovsky has failed yet again to become Russian President.

In Warsaw in 2006 I found my way to a Kraftwerk concert, complete with their hit The Man-Machine.

When growing up I somehow missed out completely on the elusive Kraftwerk's musical impact. The show was both artistically and philosophically fascinating.

One highlight was observing one of the robotic (behold that amazing futuristic tie!) Kraftwerkers getting increasingly uncomfortable, before dashing off stage as a song finished for what promised to be a convulsive lavatorial experience - the perils of live rock music in an Ageing Society.

The retro-style and retro-substance of the show was a strange self-parody of a self-parody. As they got going some 30 years ago amidst the post-WW2 German economic boom Kraftwerk blazed a trail for electronic music and an eerie vision of an explicitly Germano-European integrated high-tech future: We want the whole World to know that we are from Germany, because the German mentality – which is more advanced – will always be part of our behaviour. We create out of the German language, the mother-language, which is very mechanical; we use it as the basic structure of our music. 

Hence Autobahn, an electronic but intriguingly lyrical tribute to German motorways before the pressure of traffic we see today. And Trans-Europe Express, extolling the joys of integrated European railway travel.  

But the defining point of Kraftwerk was their zealous admiration of technology in all its forms, plus the explicit idea that humankind would be subsumed by and in it. Hence all sorts of repetitive but drily clever songs about computers, electric cafes, radioactivity, space-labs, titanium, neon lights, numbers, robots and the like. Hard though it is to grasp now, back then even pocket calculators were really cool.

Yet the show in Warsaw some three decades on conveyed little of how technology in fact has evolved, away from Kraftwerk's vision of Big mass standardization towards Small(er) mass differentiation, or at least constantly evolving and unexpected combinations of both. Kraftwerk's backdrops were curiously dated clips depicting bland conformity, such as anonymous healthy cyclists pushing their way across a sunny Europe in Tour de France.

Basically Kraftwerk got it 100% wrong.

We are not becoming more like machines. They are becoming more like us.

Back in the summer of 2002 I made a significant but little-known impact on the Foreign Office's posting policy. I think.

Mulling over the tragedy of my career I asked my PA to crunch the numbers for me. She took the top forty names in the FCO, added up all their postings, and made a chart to show where there real expertise lay. The fascinating findings were something like this:

• there are nearly 200 countries in the world, depending on how one defines various micro-states, the Vatican and so on
• my top FCO colleagues as of 2002 had been posted to only 41 of them
• together they had had some 180 postings in their various distinguished careers
• but 112 or so of those postings had been to only five places: Paris, Washington, Bonn/Berlin, Brussels, Tokyo
• so their careers had been heavily skewed away from breadth of global and operational hands-on diplomatic experience
• and if one looked at the world's (then) troubled hot spots as described in the newspapers, almost no single senior FCO officer had had any personal experience of them at all

I wrote all this up in a terse memo, pointing out that this was not too surprising in some ways - for much of our careers there had been notably fewer countries anyway (no broken-up Soviet Union or Yugoslavia).

Plus the analysis showed that there were in fact two sorts of diplomats.

Senior folk who very skilfully haggled over and negotiated the rules of global order based comfortably, plumply and safely in Big Capitals, the UN/EU/NATO etc.

And the more junior less well rewarded poor sods (like eg me) who had to go out on the street to try to implement these rules in dangerous tricky uncomfortable places such as Bosnia, Africa, parts of Latin America, the Middle East and so on.

This had several effects, one of which was that the people actually on the ground in Hot Spots often had no real clout/authority/profile back home at a high level. Exactly the wrong way to have things set up for maximising our chances of achieving operational objectives in places where things were most difficult and where large sums of public money were being spent. 

Maybe it made sense to take a hard look at this to ensure that no-one reached the top of the FCO without having experienced recently a lot more of the dirty work to see how things actually happened? No point in having people grandly pronouncing on policies far away from the problem and devising schemes which in the messy violent reality simply might not work or even might make things worse?

I fed in this piece of paper quietly to the very top of the FCO. And, by magic or by coincidence (probably the latter), things started to change. We now have an FCO Top Gun Sherard Cowper-Coles heading a very tough Embassy in Kabul, sent there after being HM Ambassador in Saudi Arabia - that would never have happened when I was growing up.

Always a good question when a politician or senior diplomat starts talking eloquently about another country: "how much time have you yourself spent there?"

The blog of Foreign Secretary David Miliband on the FCO website is an interesting attempt to m