This polemic by Simon Jenkins hits many nails on the head.

Anyone who has seen the ‘international community’ in action in a troublespot can not but be dismayed.

Generous tax-free salaries and fleets of expensive 4x4s contrast luridly with the surrounding poverty. Armies of local and imported female ‘sex-workers’ setting up camp nearby. A Cargo Cult arrival of unanticipated succour but on an unmanageable scale. Ugh.

Another feature is the capture of internationalised taxpayers’ money by different interest groups and factions not subject to normal processes of common sense.

No-one in any international body dares say that some things are just more important than other things. That would be Judgmental! Reactionary. Divisive. Or whatever.

A few years ago when I visited the UNMIK office in the sad shabby divided town of Mitrovica in northern Kosovo, there in the outer office of the senior local UN official was a bored-looking woman from Africa, assigned to the office at a senior level to monitor ‘gender issues’.

Everyone else there knew that in practice, given what was going on in Mitrovica (periodic ethnic battles beside and across the bridge), she had nothing to do.

But there she sat, self-importantly doing nothing, being paid a large tax-free salary which might have gone to helping a good selection of poor people, eg in Mitrovica.

As Simon Jenkins says, it is extraordinary that HMG give so much of our taxpayers’ money to organisations whose accounting practices and general transparency are so far below what HMG structures themselves have to accept.

Is one way forward the emerging US idea of a new ‘League of Democracies’, to try to bring to international processes some healthy – or at least healthier – accountability?

Former UN official Shashi Tharoor tries to persuade us that this is a Very Bad Idea:   

… the reason that decisions of the UN enjoy legitimacy across the world lies not in the democratic virtue of its members, but in its universality. The fact that every country in the world belongs to the UN and participates in its decisions gives the actions of the UN – even that of a security council in urgent need of reform – a global standing in international law that no more selective body can hope to achieve. This is the time to renovate and strengthen the UN, not to bypass it. 

But as he must know, the fact that so many undemocratic and corrupt regimes have serious influence via the UN is in itself a major obstacle to reform in the direction he claims to want.

Regimes which make no serious claim at all to be upholding human rights sit on UN Human Rights groupings. This ‘legitimises’ bad behaviour and blocks progress. The African voting bloc closes ranks to stop any meaningful voting on African candidates to the key UN Human Rights Council. Such manoeuvring combined with the cynical obstruction of Russia and China is condemning millions of Zimbabweans to disaster. 

Institutional reform? No way! Too many governments need to keep the organisation over-staff and wastefully run to win lucrative UN appointments as a form of patronage.

Western taxpayers are obliged to pay for all this, and then nagged to fork out for huge ‘development assistance’ to these regimes as well.

See also this unusual coincidence of US and UN views on the suffering in Burma. The USA generously has made available resources no-one else can deploy to help the cyclone victims. The Burmese regime’s UN-legitimised socialist paranoia is condemning thousands of people to likely death and disease.

Should we continue to accept that this UN and all the other offshoots of it are the best of all options, albeit coming with a puny prospect of ‘renovating and strengthening’ themselves?

No.

It will all crash at some point, of course.

In our networked world, popular and populist opposition to the double whammy absence of reasonable accountability and reasonable efficiency will tend to grow . Especially from those compelled to pay for it.

The fact that at least some victims of murderous regimes can now make cheap mobile calls to the UN Security Council to scream for help as their killers approach no doubt will help focus minds.

For a few minutes of portentous debate. Then all those grandly excellent but deadlocked diplomats repair to their tax-free UN bars, to muse amicably on the world’s wickedness.