Let's face it: Russia is dying

The BBC reports that Mr Bill Browder, head of a company called Hermitage Capital and once the largest foreign investor in Russia, has now described that large and empty country as “essentially a criminal state”. One’s first reaction is that Mr Browder, who has had far better opportunities for observation than most of us, has taken rather a long time to realise this. But then none of us has been particularly quick off the mark in grasping what has been right in front of our noses for years. Their representatives are still polluting the G8, the Council of Europe and other supposedly civilised institutions. We still pretend politely to take Mr Vladimir Putin seriously.

But I think we can accept Mr Browder’s solidly grounded appraisal as the definitive word on Russia. On the world stage it is the equivalent of the shaven-headed and tattooed drunk who waylays you in incomprehensibly threatening terms in the centre of Wigan at two on a Saturday morning. It constitutes a permanent threat to its neighbours. Its rampant gangsterism is actually worse than totalitarianism: whereas China’s oppression of the minorities in its border areas is at least motivated by trying to preserve order, Russia prefers to allow gangster enclaves to proliferate all around its borders (Uzbekistan, Chechnya, Ingushetia, Transdnistria, arguably Kaliningrad). The Soviet Union used to be described, most aptly, as “Upper Volta with rockets”. Progress of a sort has been made, and modern Russia might best be described as Moss Side with rockets.

And then they come over here, buying up nice parts of London and football clubs. Yes, they bring lots of money in, but we try not to think too hard about how some of that money was obtained. (To be fair, as Mr Browder has now ascertained, it is difficult to make money honestly in Russia, even with the best will in the world.)

But can one simply give up on such a large and powerful country? The answer is that we may have to. It’s dying. The population is falling steadily; male life expectancy is already well below 60 (and considerably lower than that for anyone getting on the wrong side of the regime). The place is even more sodden with vodka than a British town centre on a Saturday morning. The strategic balance which existed during the Cold War will soon be restored by the rise of China (which will have annexed Siberia by 2050). I mentioned once that my children looked at me blankly when I mentioned a country called East Germany: their grandchildren may be equally fogged by the mention of Russia.

OK, some will find this “offensive”, but don’t be too quick to start throwing the word “racist” around. It’s nothing to do with race. It’s simply that what happened there between 1917 and 1991 has poisoned an entire nation to death, as if with polonium-210. Regard for human life and dignity was permanently destroyed by Stalin et al. For a while it looked like the old traditions of Russia, notably those of the Orthodox Church, might provide a focus for a genuine revival. But the wound is clearly too deep; the Church, which was always that way inclined, has largely thrown in its lot with thuggish nationalism.

It’s sad. Dostoyevsky will always be among my top half-dozen writers; Solzhenitsyn and Shostakovich made admirable efforts to keep the flag flying through the 20th. But it’s gone. No point in denial. A terminal case. Let’s just hope its demise isn’t too painful for the rest of us.

End of free banking? What is WRONG with these people?

So we’re now told, by the Sunday Express, no less, that the banks are planning to charge us all for taking our own money out of cashpoints. (Yes, I know, I just happened to pass it in the supermarket.) Apparently the FSA are about to rule on the legitimacy of the arbitrary charges hitherto levied by the banks. The banks presumably thought they’d get their threat in first, to warn the FSA against doing the right thing.

Where do these people think they get off, saying that if the courts rule one rip-off illegal then they’ll have to introduce another one to make up the shortfall? The answer can only be that they are living on a very distant planet indeed. Which of course they are; they keep telling us that if they are forced by taxes or regulation to live on the same planet as the rest of us they will take their ball and go off to Dubai or the Caymans or somewhere.

And don’t tell me they’ve got some absolute duty to keep their profits sky-high. I don’t believe bank profits are ever wholly legitimate. All the money they deal with is other people’s, and far too much of it is sticking to their fingers already. All through the crisis of the last two years they have behaved with the smug assurance of those who know they have the rest of us over a barrel.

It is a fundamental principle in a free market society that you only pay for what you freely choose. If someone is asked to pay for a good or a service they must have the option of refusing to do so and going without. And banking is not optional. It is certainly compulsory for every employed person. During an earlier acute phase of my bankophobia I wrote a formal memo to the payroll office at my place of work asking for my salary to be paid to me in cash in a brown envelope. This was purely in order to demonstrate that they would never allow this; I can’t say that I was ever really enthused by the idea of yomping round to electricity, water and phone companies with a fistful of tenners. Therefore government must ensure that there is at least one bank where they don’t charge you to get your hands on your own money. (It already owns a couple – where’s the problem? Or it could be based on a revitalised Post Office.)

Meanwhile, what are we going to do about a financial ruling caste who just don’t “get it”, and to an extent far beyond that of our much-reviled MPs? We seem to have exhausted all possibilities of moral suasion and all legal and regulatory avenues of restraint. It may be getting towards the time for direct action. Perhaps we should think of November 2009 as November 1788. Where I live in agricultural Lancashire there are plenty of old farm carts which would make excellent tumbrils, and I have always intended to learn to knit.

Obama in China: his hosts are still grateful for the snub to the Dalai Lama

So President Obama is in China for the first time. (First time as President that is – no idea whether he may have spent time gallivanting around there in his youth.) In the international fixture calendar, this ought to be the Big One: the Liverpool-Manchester United of summitry. But I think it’s unlikely that we’ll need to hold the front page this time.

That’s partly for good reasons. There do not appear to be any major conflicts threatening to boil over. Nowhere in the world are the giants of the 20th and 21st centuries respectively facing each other down like boxers at the weigh-in. China does not feel the need, as Russia often does, to act all truculent so as not to be ignored. They know no one’s going to ignore them.

Of course the Chinese never lose the opportunity to score a point. The opening Foreign Ministry communiqué (issued by Mr Qin Gang, an old mate of mine and probably the only government spokesman in the world who has also umpired at Wimbledon) focussed, on, of all things, Obama’s much-appreciated refusal to meet the Dalai Lama prior to visiting China. As a black president, said Mr Qin, Obama was in a better position than his predecessors to appreciate the fight against slavery, which is what the Chinese were conducting when they overran Tibet in the fifties. (Can’t you just see the Dalai bestriding the old plantation with his assortment of whips?) Obama was also reminded of Abraham Lincoln, whose concern for the unity of his country is now matched by that of President Hu Jintao. So there we have it: main item of concern a minor squabble in which the US has already made the necessary concession. Advantage People’s Republic of China.

This is not to say that the meeting room in the Zhongnanhai Party Complex does not contain the odd large grey pachyderm. As I mentioned in my post of 3rd August, the economic issues between the two giants are deep-seated, and they constitute a total stand-off: the Chinese are not going to take the risk of freely floating their currency just to please Uncle Barack, and the US still owes China two trillion big ones and isn’t going to be wiping out the debt any time soon. And if there is a real prospect of agreement between the two major climate change players in advance of the Copenhagen summit, they’ve certainly done a good job of preserving secrecy on the matter.

It’ll certainly do Obama no harm to get a handle on how China works, and to ensure that the mood music is good (which is what he does best). But I imagine they’ll have been scraping the barrel for anything of substance to put in the final communiqué. Still, better jaw-jaw than war-war, as the man said.

How the Civil Service sabotages the campaign against forced marriages

I heard something astonishing the other day. I’m not easily astonished, and still less by the vagaries and abysmal stupidities of the Civil Service in which I spent 20 years of my life. But this one fair took my breath away. I’m assured it’s true, and my knowledge of the bovine inflexibility of the bureaucratic mind does not incline me to doubt it.

As we know, there is a problem in this country regarding forced marriages. Some families, generally originating from the Indian subcontinent, attempt to remove their children, usually daughters, from the UK in order to marry them off to someone from their country of origin. Our government, laudably, takes this problem seriously, and has established a unit in the Home Office dedicated to rescuing these unfortunate girls and bringing them back to the UK.

The sensational news I heard was that these girls are expected to pay for their own flights home. And, if they do not have the money, they can be given a loan to buy their ticket, but they must surrender their passports until it is repaid in full, thus preventing them from leaving the country in which they are in danger. This demand is made in the name of consistency, as all other Brits needing help with repatriation are treated the same way.

Now, I have no quarrel with the principle of self-funded repatriation. If you get into trouble in a foreign country, you should not expect HMG to pick up the tab for bailing you out. Embassies and consulates are not made of money, and, besides, it creates a moral hazard if cock-ups are allowed to be cost-free.

But can’t these people see that forced marriages are an entirely different case from the tourist who had his ticket nicked when he was plastered? The moral hazard argument falls away, because the girls did not choose to put themselves in such a position. And the demand for money creates far more difficulties for these girls than it would for tourists. Most tourists can drum up money from somewhere, whereas if you are going to kidnap your daughter and marry her off abroad, the first thing you do is make sure she doesn’t have access to the price of an air ticket home. And, if the tourist has no money and needs to borrow some, who is usually the first port of call? His family. Get the point?

The reality, in most cases, is that the girl will have no one to turn to for money; even friends from outside the family may let her down for cultural reasons. So, with no way out in sight, she may see no alternative to going back to the family and submitting to their wishes. What sort of concrete-headed zombie can’t see this?

There remains the argument, mentioned above, that the Government is not made of money. But let’s look at the figures involved: the Forced Marriages Unit repatriates about 300 young girls per year. These days you can fly almost anywhere in the world for £500. So the government stands to save £150,000 (probably rather less) by this measure. The total cost of the Forced Marriages Unit, with its overseas network, must run into several millions, money well spent in my view. But talk about spoiling the ship for a ha’porth of tar!

I once got carpeted for calling one section of the Foreign Office, in writing, “a bunch of brainless jobsworths”. I took my lumps and made my apologies with good grace, as no useful purpose can be served by addressing colleagues in that way. But does anyone really believe that the Civil Service is not full of brainless jobsworths? Where do they get them from? And don’t get me started on the MoD’s decision to take legal action to reclaim compensation from two seriously injured soldiers, undoubtedly at a cost greater than the sum being reclaimed…

Impunity, not formal state oppression, is the real human rights problem in China

When Westerners complain about human rights abuses in China, the Chinese are apt to bridle. Partly this is out of sheer patriotic fervour, but a lot of it is rooted in the belief that the Westerner is just parroting recycled material from 30 years ago, and has not grasped how much things have improved for the ordinary citizen since Deng Xiaoping took power. Not just in economic terms, but in terms of simple personal freedoms.

My marriage is one example. Up to about 1984 my wife could have gone to prison for the crime of “li tong wai guo” – foreign connections. Now nobody minds who you talk to, meet or marry. Freedom of speech for the individual is almost total; there are no beady-eyed informers sitting around in bars and restaurants. Except, that is, if you are on some sort of black list, which you only really get on by attempting to organise dissidence. Freedom of association is still a bridge too far.

It’s also true that the State devotes huge resources to policing the Internet. I am sure the Party realises that this attempt is ultimately doomed, both for technological reasons and because economic development demands fairly open access to information. But, for the time being, they are prepared to make the effort in order to stifle organised opposition, and, crucially, to maintain the orthodoxy of the national discourse, not allowing certain ideas even to be contemplated.

And so, a bit of perspective is needed on human rights in China: the things we Westerners worry about most are nowhere near as bad as some of us seem to think. The formal state apparatus of tyranny oppresses a few people badly, but it is a fairly small number, and, many Chinese would argue, it only affects those who have deliberately stuck their heads above the parapet.

The most serious problems in this field lie elsewhere. They were pointed up by a recent Human Rights Watch report picked up by the Independent. The report tells of hundreds of people, mainly from the provinces, who claim to have been maltreated by local officials, and, despairing of getting justice from the tight-knit local government mafias, have come to the capital to seek justice from central government, as Chinese have always done since the high Imperial days. In the capital, of course, they are just a bloody nuisance, and are subject to two main dangers: (a) their local governments sending thugs after them to bring them back, and (b) arbitrary arrest and incarceration by unofficial quasi-police thugs in Beijing. HRW mentions the existence of “black jails” in the capital, into which people are thrown without any due process or any records kept, by goons accountable to no-one who beat and even rape their prisoners.

The government denies categorically that such jails exist, but no other Chinese will deny it. The activities of hooligans who derive their impunity from being generally on the side of government, but who remain both unaccountable and deniable, are as much a fact in China as in Zimbabwe. And the worst of it is that these brutal round-ups tend to coincide with great State occasions – such as the imminent visit of President Obama. They want the riff-raff off the streets for the motorcades and the TV cameras. Some of this might not be happening but for the visit of St Barack.

Impunity is the common factor in all aspects of this problem – the petty local officials who can mess you around and extort money from you with no comeback, the higher local officials who invariably back them up, making it necessary to go and petition central government in the first place, and then the “black jail” system that hits you (all too literally) when you get there, are all part of the same phenomenon. It’s this that represents the real human rights problem in China, not gulags or secret policemen or arrests of active dissidents.

It filters through into the mindset. My wife often sits beside me when I am writing these pieces, her heart a-flutter. “Surely you can’t write that – you’ll get into trouble!” I give the usual spiel about an Englishman, provided that he is not breaking publicly proclaimed laws, being able to do what he likes in perfect serenity. “But they won’t give you a visa next time you want to go to China.” We shall see. Tomorrow I am off to the Consulate in Manchester to apply for one. I’ll let you know if I get the elbow.

Time for a new nickname for the Conservatives. Don't let in the LTV

Given the animosity which has crept into the current election campaign (much of it among readers of this blog – but I do not complain, I remember how I felt in 1996) isn’t it time for a new generation of political nicknames?

My commentators, stung not so much by my expressed views as by my declared allegiance to Labour, have come up with such gems as “the Sewer Party”, “Liebour”, “ZANULab” and the impressively agglomerative “ZaNuLieBore”. But none of these have really stuck, though I accept that the distortion of the previous Prime Minister’s name into “Bliar” has.

In Germany, the parties are generally known by their colours. Social Democrats are Red (though “very pale pink” might be more appropriate these days), Christian Democrats are Black (from their historical clerical-Catholic antecedents) and the Greens speak for themselves. When, after the 2005 elections, a Christian Democrat-Free Democrat-Green coalition was briefly considered, it was called the “Jamaica coalition”, after the colours – black, yellow and green – of the Jamaican flag. But you couldn’t do that in Britain – talking about the Reds or the Blues would only mark you out as a football fan.

No really effective nickname has stuck to my own party. Some of my Tory friends refer to us as the “Trots”, but there are far too many Trot groups around for one’s meaning to be clear, especially as some of those are actually Stalinists.

The Conservatives at least have an old-style red-blooded nickname: “Tory” was a name used for barbarous Irish bandits in the 17th century. Their opponents, the Whigs, derived their name from Scottish rebels, and in the eyes of such as Dr Johnson their name was an insult in itself. Speaking of a contemporary poet at dinner, the great Sam said: “Mason’s a Whig.” Affecting to have misheard, the lady next to him asked: “A Prig, Sir?” “Worse than that, a Whig!” the great man continued. “But he is both!” But there are no more Whigs, and the term “Tory” has become totally innocuous, used neutrally by friend and foe alike.

I have long wished to popularise my own name for Her Majesty’s current Opposition. Not only is it modern and snappy, but it also honours one of Labour’s heroes, Aneurin Bevan. I would like more people to understand me when I speak of the evils and inadequacies of the LTV. Many will remember one of Bevan’s most trenchant comments on his political opponents, a three-word phrase which I have reduced to its initials.

All right, some of my younger readers may require an explanation. Nye Bevan once memorably referred to the Tories as “lower than vermin”. I have nothing to add to that, though happy to reduce it to a set of initials.

Don’t let in the LTV. You know how long it can take to get rid of them.

Ashcroft vindicated - or maybe not

So Lord Ashcroft and the Tories are off the hook at last. All doubts have been removed about the residence status of the Tory Party’s vice-chairman and major donor.
Or so you might think if you saw William Hague on the Andrew Marr programme on Sunday. And even more so if you read the Independent’s write-up next day (http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/tories-finally-come-clean-on-ashcroft-tax-status-1817257.html). Andrew Grice, the Indy’s political editor, writes “Tories finally come clean on Ashcroft’s tax status”, and goes on to say that they have “confirmed that he is paying tax in Britain”. Job done.
Well, call me a pedantic old socialist cynic, but I’m not sure it has been. Look at what Mr Hague actually said. "My conclusion, having asked him, is that he fulfilled the obligations that were imposed on him at the time that he became a peer." He added: "I imagine that [paying taxes in the UK] was the obligation that was imposed on him." How nice that Mr Hague should be so trusting, and that he should possess such a vivid imagination!
Mr Hague’s motives are obvious, and perfectly respectable: he wants to get the Ashcroft issue off the table before the election campaign begins in earnest. It is rather strange that Central Office should have chosen the Independent to put out their version of the story: but spin, like the Almighty, moves in mysterious ways its wonders to perform. What is even stranger is that the political editor of a centre-Left paper should swallow the Central Office version hook, line and sinker.
I’m not impugning Mr Hague’s veracity: he strikes me as an honest man, as well as far too intelligent to think he can get away with telling porkies on TV. But a moment’s thought should reveal to us that what has been said is some way short of a firm statement that Lord Ashcroft is paying UK tax. And further pondering made it clear to me that Lord Ashcroft might never have paid a penny of UK tax, and Mr Hague’s statement would still not have been a lie.
Supposing (just supposing) that Lord Ashcroft had, in good faith, interpreted the obligations laid on him as falling short of an absolute requirement that he take up full UK residency for tax purposes. Then he would have been able to give Mr Hague the assurances requested. Meanwhile, Mr Hague’s imagination might always have led him astray, as imagination will. He does not state as a fact that Lord Ashcroft committed himself to full UK residence.
As far as I am concerned, the question has still not been answered. It will not be answered without an unequivocal statement in the form “Lord Ashcroft assures me that he has been a UK resident and a UK taxpayer since financial year X-Y”. I hope Labour have not been discouraged from asking it by the Independent’s trusting assurances. It still has the makings of a potential major embarrassment for the Conservatives.

The former East Germany got a raw deal out of reunification

Between 1978 and 2006 I spent a total of about six years living, working and travelling in Germany, so was well acquainted with it both with and without the Wall. As is the way of walls, it seemed pretty permanent while it was there, and as if it had never been when it wasn’t. In 1993, with a friend, I spent an afternoon walking the length of its former course before it all got built over. (While all the East Germans were streaming into the West to look for jobs, my friend and thousands of his fellow Bohemians had hopped the other way to find cheap and deliciously retro flats.) Later on the Wall came up in a conversation with one of my sons. It didn’t ring a bell. Come on, I wanted to say, you were sitting with me when we saw it happening on TV. And then I remembered that he’d been nine months old at the time.

The speed at which it happened caught everyone cold, particularly in the West. Suddenly they had got what they’d always wanted, and how on earth were they going to cope with it? Firstly, the question of unification – yes or no? The Chancellor at the time was Helmut Kohl, for whom reunification was the ruling passion of his life. Nothing must be allowed to stand in the way of his dream (and Margaret Thatcher’s nightmare). Pleas for caution were disregarded in a tidal wave of national sentiment. When the first free elections were held in the East, they brought the Eastern version of Kohl’s party to power, which included Angela Merkel. Unification was now unstoppable.

Economic integration presented more intractable problems, but these were simply steamrollered by Kohl; though he must have known that setting the exchange rate for eastern and western marks at 1:1 would be disastrous, it was simply something that had to be done.

The result of this rush to unity was that the former East Germany, once one of the more successful of the Warsaw Pact states, is now the only one that has been unable to recover under capitalism. The economically active sector of the population high-tailed it to the West to find work. The East has been done up a treat, it’s true: beautifully renovated historic towns are ten a penny, but virtually nothing is going on in them. German unemployment is much higher than ours, and that is almost entirely down to the East; this is partly due to the fact that both men and women expected to be employed in the East, whereas in the West millions of housewives are happy to stay out of the statistics. It is virtually certain that an East Germany allowed to preserve its statehood, cheap labour and attractive exchange rates for a bit longer would have been in a better condition now; but there was no saying that in 1990.

The Social Democrat opposing Kohl in the unification election of 1990 was Oskar Lafontaine: he said exactly that, got thrashed, and is now a leader of the Left Party, ironically the only real “unification” party, with its main power base in the East. Another group with its main power base in the East is, sadly, the many-headed neo-Nazi movement, which feeds on unemployment, economic malaise, and lack of sense of purpose.

Yes, the fall of the Berlin Wall was a great and unforgettable moment; but it is a pity that those who were supposed to be the main beneficiaries got so little out of it.

Does China care what happens in Afghanistan?

One more recent summit that passed under the radar of most people without Olympian boredom thresholds was last month’s Beijing meeting of Heads of Government of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO). Come again? Well, it’s a strategic cooperation arrangement between China, Russia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan, focussing on Central Asia. OK, you can go back to sleep now.

But one event might make you perk up a bit: the Summiteers received an exploratory letter from an entity calling itself the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan (the Taliban to you, me and HM Armed Forces). They were, of course, seeking support from their Asian brothers in driving the imperialists from the region, amid heart-rending expositions of their suffering. “Our parent (sic) are not able to send their children to schools with a peace of mind, fearing they might be killed”. This clearly refers only to male children: parents of female children daren’t send their children to school because they might be killed by the Taliban. Farmers and traders are not able to go about their normal business because the Brits and Yanks might kill them. No Afghan farmer or trader ever got killed by the Tallies, after all. Anyway, they wrote to the leaders of the SCO asking for support. Any chance that they’ll get it?

Well, given that the Uzbeks are inclined to boil Taliban types alive, I imagine they’ll have one adverse vote. But what about the Chinese? They have maintained a studied neutrality in that part of the world. But do they have a dog in the fight? What stake do they have in Afghanistan, apart from the fact that it is a neighbour state thanks to about fourteen miles of border?

Quite a big one, actually. A recent Economist report pointed out that at Aynak, just south of Kabul, there is a huge copper mine, one of the biggest sources of copper in the world, and two years ago the Chinese invested more than $3 billion in it. After all, the SCO is really all about natural resources – if they don’t cooperate, the water wars of the later 21st century will be something to behold. And the Chinese know damn well that the Americans are a better bet to keep their investment safe than the Taliban. So I assume the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan got a dusty answer, if it got one at all.

But it’s amazing what the Chinese get away with in terms of poncing, mooching and bludging. The Afghan police force guarding the mine is funded by the Japanese. Security in the wider area is provided by the US Army. The Chinese don’t pay a single yuan, and retain the right to get all sniffy about “Western imperialism” in public. Still, at least they’re clear about which side their bread is ultimately buttered on.

In defence of the 'endearritating' Stephen Fry

My colleague Damian Thompson has just laid in to Stephen Fry with a vengeance. Here’s the case for the defence, written a few weeks ago after the row over Fry’s Twitter comments:

I see that Stephen Fry is in trouble again, temporarily driven from Twitter by a revolt among his vast army of followers following his intervention in the Daily Mail-Stephen Gately affair. Though no Twitterer myself, I am conscious through more traditional channels of a recent rise in anti-Fry sentiment. And not just in the press, where he is now routinely mangled. He has, I think, over-exposed himself, to coin a Fryesque double entendre. And he shouldn’t have called Jan Moir a “repulsive nobody”, if only because it lays him open to suggestions that he thinks her views invalid because she is not as big a celeb as he is, which I’m sure was not his intention. (With his contention that the Daily Mail is “a paper no decent person would be seen dead with” I have no problem.)

So did he have it coming to him? I don’t think so. Not just because Stephen Fry is very clever, very witty, and widely admired for his humane and liberal views (though I know some see him as the very model of a kickable bien-pensant). The main point about him is that he is transparently a good man. The late Auberon Waugh, whose memory I revere, maintained that the only real distinction between human beings is that between the nice and the nasty. Not all the twitterers and bloggers in the world can pin the label “nasty” on Fry. There is no malice in him, or if there is he has hidden it very well.

Yes, I know he can be maddening. Fry at his archest can make even my loyalty wobble. The American humorist P J O’Rourke coined the term “endearritating”, actually for Dr Ruth Westheimer, but it fits Fry like a glove. But I don’t think venom ought to be directed towards anybody so fundamentally benevolent. Let’s do what we can to support nice people. There isn’t exactly a superfluity of them around.

Message for Guy Fawkes' Night - blow up the Government if you want - but don't expect it to change anything

“Build a bonfire, build a bonfire,
EU Directives on the top,
Health and Safety in the middle,
And burn the bloody lot.”

I’m sure there’ll be millions of us singing something like the above this Guy Fawkes Night. But we might as well save our breath to cool our hot buttered rum.

I’ll tell you what worried me most, as a Labour man. I feared a real libertarian Tory campaign promising bonfires of regulations, bureaucracy and paperwork, with details all worked out. It would have been perfectly possible to attach a research team to each front-bencher, identifying individual areas where everyone’s money and time was being wasted in the department the spokesperson was shadowing. Directly and openly identifying police paperwork surplus to requirements. Compiling a coherent action plan from the literally millions of ridiculous elf ‘n’ safety stories that have emerged over the years. Diversity surveys and compliance monitoring to be challenged to justify their existence in a balloon debate with schools, hospitals and pensions. Inviting citizens to write in with examples and suggestions – a “Bullsh*tWatch” campaign. They’d have swept the country.

Phew! I needn’t have worried. Yes, these things will occasionally be picked up as a stick to beat the Government with; but it’s not as if there were any real prospect of a new Government changing anything. If anything were likely to be done, Mr Cameron would surely have told us by now. What he did was to stand up at the Tory Conference and say, in the vaguest terms, that he will cut the cost of the Civil Service.

But we all know how well that will work. After his first Cabinet meeting, the Ministers go back to their departments with their instructions: “Sir Humphrey, the Prime Minister has told me to cut X, Y and Z.” The rest is television history. Whitehall will deal with this as easily as John Terry with a speculative long ball into the box.

Do I believe we could do with a 25 per cent Whitehall and local government headcount cut? Yes, with knobs on. Could it happen? No, there is no conceivable enforcement mechanism, and too many livelihoods and careers depend on this overstaffing. And they all have existences to justify.

Many critics of the present government blame over-regulation on the authoritarian tendencies of the Labour Party. But those tendencies are endemic to politicians, and are in any case not the key factor. Do you really believe that a down-to-earth bloke like Alan Johnson speaks up in Cabinet to say “We really must act against the scandal of parents looking after each other’s children, and giving them lifts to Brownies?” No – there are just too many people justifying their salaries by extending the scope of legislation, monitoring compliance, closing loopholes etc., and forcing this rubbish on the Minister, as did Sir Humphrey. If only civil servants were as lazy as is sometimes rumoured, we’d all be better off. Paying them to lounge around doing nothing would save almost as much as sacking them altogether.

So elect a new government if you must. But don’t expect it to make any difference. Not without more of the sort of plain speaking which no one these days feels able to get away with.

As an ex-diplomat, I volunteer to join an EU diplomatic service and sit around doing nothing

I may be Labour, but that doesn’t mean I have to like the Lisbon Treaty much. Any more than I liked Nice. Or Maastricht. It is increasingly clear that European institutions have turned into a huge juggernaut, built and set in motion by European nations, but over which they now have no vestige of control. As for the democratic deficit, it is now reaching black hole proportions.

Not that I’m dead against a degree of European integration: it makes obvious sense in the age of globalisation. But it should have been bottom up, not top down. Above all, we should have stopped and redesigned the whole bang shoot from scratch when the picture changed so radically in 1989. But by then the wheels of the juggernaut were already unstoppable. So now here we are and here we stay, no matter who wins the 2010 election.

However, a naughty and delicious thought has been germinating. As well as the Blairs and the Milibands and whoever else gets the plum jobs, the Treaty of Lisbon provides for the establishment of an EU diplomatic service.
This is not an entirely new thing, of course; the EU has long maintained separate representation in the world’s major capitals, and there are already large numbers of Brussels-based officials working as diplomats. But I can’t imagine they have a fully staffed diplomatic service ready to roll. They must be drafting new people in from somewhere, presumably transferred or seconded from national diplomatic services for the most part. But maybe, just maybe…

I tried this idea out on my son, who perceptively replied “But you don’t want to go through all that again, surely?” I pointed out that it was not diplomacy which I had disliked, it was work. Contrary to popular prejudice, British diplomats have to work quite hard. The FCO has long-established traditions of high competence and efficiency (there are exceptions, but they are the sort that prove the rule) and there are still plenty of old-style martinets in the higher reaches to enforce them. The idle and the disorganised are soon found out (no predictable jibes please – I lasted 20 years).

But Eurodiplomacy has had no time to establish such traditions. It is all fairly new, and the men in Brussels can have no clear perception of exactly what they can expect from the out-stations. A further obvious point is that the Eurodips will come from a wide variety of cultures, some of which are, shall we say, a good deal less Stakhanovite than others. To put it bluntly, there could be some very cushy little niches out there.

Would it be dishonourable of me? I don’t think so. If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em. Many of us are less than enthralled by modern capitalism; but for now it’s the only game in town, so one has to come to some arrangement with it to earn a living. All work at bottom is either vocation or prostitution. If you’re going to sell out, you may as well get a decent price.

So – FOR HIRE, reconditioned vintage diplomat, one careful owner, still under fifty, 20 years experience, German and Mandarin speaking, will eat and drink anything, adaptable to siesta culture, impenetrable bullsh*t no problem, all offers involving fat pay packet and expense account considered. Apply now to beat the Christmas rush.

Did corruption in Chinese universities cause the suicide of a brilliant young academic?

The Chinese government is not notable for accountability or responsiveness. And therefore, when the lapidary notice appeared in the official press that the 31 October meeting of the Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress had announced the replacement of Zhou Ji by Yuan Guiren as Minister of Education, it was hardly surprising that no further comment followed.

The Chinese blogosphere, and the expat academic population, claim to be a great deal better informed. They are absolutely buzzing with news of the recent suicide of a young academic at the prestigious Zhejiang University, just south of Shanghai. Dr Tu Xuxin, who had completed a Master’s degree and then a PhD in geotechnical engineering at Northwestern University in the USA, had returned to China to take up a senior position at Zhejiang. Three months later he jumped head first off the top of one of the university buildings.

The story is that Dr Tu fell foul of endemic corruption in Chinese universities. In his six-page suicide note he claimed that he had been lured back to Zhejiang on the basis that the university, already one of considerable reputation, was offering 100 newly-funded senior academic jobs, of which he had been promised one. When he arrived home, he discovered that the promises he had received were worthless. The salary range he had been encouraged to expect was £20-30,000: he was given £5,000, with no prospect of improvement. Having brought his wife back to China with him, he found her heavily disappointed and blaming it on him. The suicide note spoke of “the reality about the world of academics and research in China: cruelty, treachery, and apathy.”

Sympathy rippled around the Chinese-speaking world: but some of it was tinged with realism. A contributor to the longhoo.net site, while sympathising with the poor man, put it thus:

“Dr Tu had made the mistake of not fully researching how things are done and pursued in the academic scene in China. If anything, he should’ve been better prepared to handle the difference in expectations. Those that have lived, studied, and worked for some time overseas are easily blinded by gushes of patriotism for their home country, and thus wistfully buy into the idea that they can make huge contributions on grounds of their better talents and abilities. However, such wistful thinking is naïve in that they haven’t fully grasped the networks of connections that are the unspoken rules of the academic circle in China. Partition and usage of research funds in Chinese universities lie with the discretion of the privileged few – those with the connections. Dr Tu wasn’t prepared for this: the American system he had worked with was all about fairness and talent.”

At the same time, a story from three years ago is gradually surfacing on the net. In Yongzhou, in Hunan province, video evidence has come to light allegedly showing Zhang Yaoyin, an 11-year-old girl, being beaten to a pulp with an iron bar by her teacher, in front of the class, and then thrown out of a fourth-floor window to her death.

In any case, Education Minister Zhou Ji has resigned, or at least been transferred to an inferior post, and my Chinese friends attribute his resignation to at least one of these affairs. For the honour of China, let’s hope they’re right. China needs proper accountability, not just for sustained economic success, but for full acceptance as part of the civilised world. May Dr Tu Xuxin and Miss Zhang Yaoyin rest in peace.

Are the Chinese racist?

Yesterday The Observer reported an alarming row over a TV talent contest in Shanghai. One of the leading contestants, a 20-year-old girl named Lou Jing (pronounced Low not Loo), has attracted enormous opprobrium from all over the country. Some of the comments in the Chinese blogosphere are almost unbelievable. Sounds familiar, you might think. But the only allegation levelled at her is that she has dared to appear on television while being of mixed race, her father being a black African who was not married to her mother.

For a start, Lou Jing is extremely lucky to be alive. I thought I’d seen it all in China, but I’ve never seen an African/Chinese mixed race person there. You don’t actually meet all that many people born out of wedlock at all. This is not, as the prissy blogosphere would have it, because of the superior virtue of Chinese maidens. It is because illegitimacy is so socially unacceptable that (at a guess) 99 per cent of such pregnancies are terminated. If the mother suspected that the pregnancy had resulted from an affair with a black man, I would have said until today that that figure was 100 per cent. And this 20 years ago! Lou Jing’s mother is one extremely brave woman.

And so we come to the big question: how racist are the Chinese? The China Daily quotation used in the Observer piece – “anyone who marries a foreigner is deemed a ‘traitor’ to his or her race” – is vastly simplistic. First of all, the modern PC “his or her” is inaccurate. There are sexual as well as racial psychopathologies at work here. I am quite sure that no Chinese family objects to a son bringing home a blonde daughter-in-law. But for some reason the proportion of women to men marrying foreigners has until now been probably north of 100:1.

But even as regards daughters things have changed. (Slowly: as recently as 2004 my Chinese girlfriend, now my wife, had the police knocking on her door on a Sunday morning after some neighbour had grassed about my frequent visits.) To the sexual and racial prejudices has been added a third: economic status. Even if not all white men are rich, they will be assumed to be, and a woman who has travelled and hooked a white guy has automatically raised her status thereby.

I will confess to slightly cold feet the first time I was taken to see my prospective in-laws in Chongqing. I was assured that there would be no problems, but I knew that they were solid conservative Mao-era party stalwarts and I wasn’t so sure. Furthermore, we were met at the airport by my fiancée’s sister, whose small son cowered in terror. Actually, the whole family was extremely kind and welcoming – even the little boy, given a few hours to adjust – and I have never felt a breath of hostility on the grounds of my race or nationality. Later this month they will acquire their second English son-in-law. (The remaining daughter is married to a Canadian. But a Chinese-Canadian isn’t a foreigner at all.)

But I have asked my wife whether she would have been prepared to marry a black man. Emphatic negative. She is not personally prejudiced, and has adjusted happily to multicultural Lancashire – but she would simply not have been able to do it. It is the social conditioning: she would be too fearful of what they would say back in Chongqing. Everyone in China “knows” that all Africans have HIV. And, if a child were to be born, she could never have emulated the self-confidence of Lou Jing’s mother.

The social status of foreigners among the Chinese depends solely on their perceived economic standing. Once I was walking around a market town on the China-Russia border, and noticed that the locals were being a lot less polite than is normally the case. I realised, from some unpleasant expressions being bandied about, that they thought I was Russian – there were plenty of ragged Siberians mooching about. Once I had explained that I was British, attitudes changed noticeably.

So it’s not just racism. But it’s not not racism either. I have posted a few times on Chinese economic activity in Africa. Not that it’s necessarily politically sinister; but the phenomenon worries me. I can foresee a habit arising of expat Chinese entrepreneurs despising and maltreating their African workforce, culminating in a wholesale massacre of Chinese in Africa. Believe me, it could happen.

Legalising cannabis could make things worse

Another big row about drugs policy – like all the others, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. This one centres around the sacking of Dr David Nutt, an adviser to the Home Secretary, for public disagreement with government policy. Radio phone-ins all day have been full of rants: experts know much more than ministers, the latter should listen to them, Alan Johnson should have been sacked instead, etc. etc. The present government can no more do anything right than could John Major’s in 1996.

But the fact is that expert advisers are solely employed to give expert analysis and recommendations; they are not responsible for the political and social consequences of these, whereas ministers are. If ministers are apt to attach too much importance to possible cheap shots in the tabloids, those are political and social consequences too, and can’t be ignored altogether.

What interested me was that Dr Nutt’s departure followed so closely on Jacqui Smith’s stellar performance on Thursday’s Question Time. Ms Smith was jolly courageous to go on at all; as she must have expected, she appeared to a slightly rougher reception than that recently accorded to Nick Griffin. By the end of the programme she had turned it right round: she was getting full endorsements from Tory MP Cheryl Gillan, Plaid Cymru chief Elfyn Llwyd, and most of the audience. All by fearlessly holding the line on the drug policy argument. Dr Nutt was out next day. If she saves her seat, she will owe it to that programme.

I don’t have any coherent views on all this. All the drug arguments I’ve ever heard make sense for thirty seconds and then evaporate into a vague miasma. I’m very glad I’ve got two children through to adulthood – and in South London, too! – without any drug disasters. I know that I drink more than is good for me, and that this disqualifies me from pontificating. The argument I’ve been most impressed by in thirty years of cogitation was the late Sir Kingsley Amis’s: alcohol has probably preserved society from falling apart under the stresses and strains of modern life, and, more to the point, it is now part of the warp and woof of society, claims which more modern drugs cannot make. But then, you may correctly say, Sir Kingsley was parti pris; parts of his Memoirs are a masterpiece of alcoholic denial.

What I don’t understand is the way the legalisers keep bringing forward the argument that alcohol is a bigger social problem than cannabis, but that this is not properly recognised because alcohol is too popular for its banning to be conceivable. It’s a cogent argument, but doesn’t really support their case. If it is true, maybe it would be better to suppress cannabis, to stop that becoming so widely used that it becomes a huge and insoluble social problem – just like alcohol.

The Wii Fit Plus: a computer game the Government wants you to play

The first computer game with the explicit endorsement of the Department of Health has just hit the shops. It is called the Wii Fit Plus and is meant to enable you to achieve a sylph-like figure without removing your eyes from the screen. And it comes with the opposite of the Government Health Warning on your fag packet.

I derive this information from my younger son, just short of his twenty-first birthday and possibly the world’s leading expert on these devices. He is very much the target market for the Wii Fit Plus, weighing seventeen stone (but then so do I, and he’s taller). It shows you various exercises to do, and – this is the innovative bit – you wear some sort of attachment on your body, so that the machine knows whether or not you are doing them correctly, and precisely how many calories you are burning off, encouraging you with word and demonstration the while. If this sounds rather reminiscent of Winston Smith and the telescreen in the opening chapter of 1984, do remember that so far it is all entirely voluntary, and you can tell it to sod off just like you do the lady on the satnav.

Let’s not brood too long over what future Harriet Harmans might make of it. It sounds a bit sad, but I can see there is something to be said for it, if one is a fitness fan doomed to live under sodden English skies, or else too grossly fat to risk being seen in public in one’s sports gear.

However, the idea of an endorsement by the Government is rather a new departure. (Though I can’t help fearing that in the current political situation that may be rather a kiss of death.) Let us hope that (pause to look up name) Mr Andy Burnham is seen disporting himself with his Wii on public service advertising in the run-up to Christmas. And the mind boggles at whatever other government departments may jump on the bandwagon. Encourage Pocket-money Prudence with an Alistair Darling Piggy-bank. Or what about a sustainable Christmas tree graced with an angelic Ed Miliband? One thing is certain: any military toys endorsed by the Ministry of Defence will have fallen apart by Boxing Day.