Affairs Of State

Amongst the forgotten nooks and crannies of Westminster there is a little place, well a big one, called the Foreign Office. Once it was the Mount Everest of the Civil Service but like the mountain is now a much visited tourist attraction. Also it is strewn with the litter of visitors, liable to cause unpredictable damage and has lost both its mystery and purpose. It has been redecorated recently but we may need to restore it to its former glory of function.

The Foreign Office was one of the first Whitehall departments to assume a more modern form back in 1782. The two separate departments that had dealt with matters in foreign parts, the Northern and Southern Departments were merged into one. It was Jeremy Sneyd, then Head of the Northern Department and former Private Secretary to Prime Ministers, who is regarded as the person responsible.

Sneyd, born in County Cavan and who rode with the Government cavalry at Preston in 1745, was close to Sheridan and his circle. In the past he had paid off Goldsmith’s liabilities to his servants and associated ladies. He was probably the man who arranged the bail outs to some of those worst affected in the Great Crash of 1772. At least it got him a property in Cleveland Row by Clarence House, a handsome estate in Hampshire and an acquaintance with the Austen’s. This is the essential tradition of the FO, insider knowledge is a wonderful thing to have.

However, the bringing together of the opposing elements in handling Britain’s relationships with the world did not mean ending the conflicts. It internalised and disguised them. Many times in the recent past our Foreign Policy, such as it was, lurched from one stance to an opposing idea and from one hasty deal to another that was even more hasty and ill advised.

At least much of the policy was at least our own and as far as possible in our own interests, as the government determined. Posterity often disagrees but history is a moveable feast. From time to time it involved making deals with more or fewer other governments jointly and with respect to their needs. By and large, however, we remained free from permanent set up’s which fixed the ways and means of conducting international relationships.

After the debacle of World War I, this changed. There was now a League of Nations and a growing number of bodies and other organisations to which we became committed. At the end of World War II with now the American’s involved as well as many others the number of international bodies, agencies, treaty commitments and other forms of negotiation and decision increased rapidly and extensively.

By the 1960’s it was impossible to conduct any sort of independent policy. The major constraint was the Cold War need to follow the American’s, but there were others. We liked to claim that we led the way but only like a poodle leads its mistress.

In the 1970’s we bought a ticket to the Great Maze of Europe and since then the only diplomatic triumphs our politicians have claimed are those where they have taken on more binding commitments, membership of this or that at a huge price and giving away both our law and sovereignty to more or less anyone who asked for it.

In the last three years the world has turned. Just as Foreign Policy and Foreign Affairs was relegated to one of the disregarded and last of the interests of our media and under Blair and Brown the least comfortable seat in the sofa of government, we may well need to learn how to do it for ourselves all over again. We can no longer play “Follow The Leader” because we do not have any leaders any more.

But the Foreign Office is no longer what it was. Like the rest of Whitehall it has been hollowed out of its essential past functions and turned into another PR/Management freak exercise meeting targets for sales talks, sales fairs, sales conventions, contact lists media spin circuses and attending meetings on how to keep all our masters happy. The baby that was the capability for analysis of information and intelligence as a basis for policy has been thrown out with the bathwater of real international communication.

One of the main problems this or any government faces is with the radical change in the way the world works, who matters and we our need to formulate and structure a well thought out and effective Foreign Policy. To do that the Foreign Office has to change again and soon. It no longer means churning out reams of garbage based on redundant management and financial theory or fancy fictions about how we intend to make Ruritania our kind of place.

You cannot run a real foreign policy on the notion of added value. Also the Foreign Office is not there just to be a sales office, agency for the latest financial dross dreamed up in The City or a personal service for all those Brit’s who travel abroad and find out the hard way that others have different ideas about personal conduct.

We have a Foreign Office but need a real foreign policy. The present office would not know where to look for or recognise one if it found it. Jeremy, where are you now?

Maps Do Furnish A Room

The BBC has been running some interesting programmes (gasp) lately on the subject of maps and map making, parallel with items about Captain Cook and his mapping on satellite documentary channels. The reason is a major exhibition to open on 30 April at the British Library on the theme of “Magnificent Maps: Power, Propaganda and Art”. It is difficult to imagine at the beginning of the 21st Century how mapping was regarded in the past and its political and intellectual significance.

A good map can indicate in what appears to be simple visual terms what is a very complicated set of facts and ideas. The one above is taken from Economic Road Map dot com of 23 April quoting an interactive feature in Forbes on the subject of China Widens Its Reach in the extent of investments by Chinese firms and arms of its government in recent years.

What is striking about this map is that if you combine the British Empire of the 19th Century with a plot of where the overseas investment was going from the City of London in that period then there would be a strong similarity. Clearly, Imperial Russia was no part of the Empire, but there was a lot of investment there and in Imperial Russian Bonds. Equally, in other parts of the world beyond British control there was a capital in their developing railway and other communication and financial systems. A good deal of growth in the USA came from British money.

In the 1870’s Disraeli, with money borrowed from Rothschild’s, snapped up the Khedive of Egypt’s shares in the Suez Canal Company when he became financially embarrassed. In borrowing on a large scale for consumption purposes, the Khedive had not looked at the small print and when by the 1880’s he defaulted Britain put in a Baring (Evelyn Baring later Lord Cromer) and the troops and took control. This led inevitably to the entanglements in the Sudan to protect British interests. Gordon of Khartoum may have thought he was dying for Christianity but in practical terms he was there to protect shareholder value of the City’s major investment banks.

There is an academic debate over the scale and natures of China’s seagoing ventures at the turn of the 14th and 15th Centuries. Was it all about astronomy and mapping? Was it the search for new lands for trade, commerce and perhaps control? What did happen is that China, on a change of regime, stopped the voyages. Given their scale it is quite possible that it became apparent that the potential returns and benefits were not going to be enough. But that was then and in a different era.

How long will it be before China and perhaps others begin to demand more say and more action in the affairs of this nation and that in which they have substantial investments? Just how long will the heavily indebted nations of the West be able to lord it over the councils of international organisations and other entities? What is the old jingo way of putting it? We have the men, we have the ships, we have the money too?

So as our politicians and others in the debt laden parts of Europe play pat a ball with their voters how can one explain simply to the electorates that in the last analysis neither we nor they are in control or really in charge? The Greeks apparently had a choice. It seems that had an offer from China and Russia which seemed to be on generous terms and without too many strings, if they could believe it. From Germany and the EU the money came an offer with a clearer price. At the moment the Greeks have opted for Europe, it seems.

If it is necessary, whose offer will our next Prime Minister choose when the bills come in?

USA & UK - Special Relationship Farewells

It is likely that the “Special Relationship” (SR) is defunct, over, etc. and not even Global Warming, or Cooling, or extra-terrestrials are going to revive it. There is a temptation to review the history since August 1941 Atlantic Charter negotiated in St. Johns Harbour, Newfoundland, with Winston Churchill on board the HMS “Prince of Wales”, a major battleship and pride of The Fleet.

I will have to skip the first fifty or so years, it might and perhaps should have ended earlier, but the Soviet Union and various other problems kept it more or less alive, down the decades. Why now? The problem is a familiar one after a party that went on too long and in which too many people enjoyed free drinks and hospitality which has been the case since the late 1990’s. Who is going to pay the bills?

The UK is bust, the USA is all but bust. They are both in hock to many and various creditors. They are both dependent on imported oil and lot of other imported products. They have both spent the wealth that came to them from an era of cheap oil and cheap commodities. They have both embarked on a debt fuelled property and funny money enterprise that duly went down taking their essential assets with it. The UK has sold off most of its economic enterprises to either foreigners or global money machines, and the USA is doing much the same.

For much of its life the SR had a fairly clear military basis. In the last decade the UK has made a botch of its intervention in Iraq and is an unreliable dependent in the campaign in Afghanistan, both of which have compromised USA intentions. This is due to failures in the UK both of strategy and any perception of the logistics, support and cost implications of these campaigns.

The UK might provide useful business for some US procurement companies, but as an ally they are an unpredictable liability. The UK defence cuts in expenditure will finish it as a player anywhere in the world and even in its home waters. If the UK is no longer a viable military ally then what is it useful for?

The world has faced one of the major financial crises in history. So what does the UK government do? It blames the USA whilst itself being directly responsible for much of damage and the foolishness that caused the crisis. It is becoming clear that part of the financial complexity that is at the heart of the fiscal crisis in the USA and the UK rests with the huge increase in the activity of tax avoidance and evasion through tax havens and that the UK government and the City of London is at the centre of many of these entities.

Along with this is the creation of mega-companies and banks that are engaged in asset stripping and rapacious financial behaviour on a large scale. This has led to major job losses in the USA and in the UK. The attempt to defuse this has led in both countries to large increases in public sector expenditure and necessarily debt that are making greater and directly competing demands on the international credit markets. The question is becoming one of who blinks first loses.

A contingent problem internationally is that many under developed countries have had their own efforts to improve badly damaged or even ruined by the activities of the global financial companies and associated development and aid agencies. The UK government is proudly building shopping malls erected by its politicians’ favourite property companies in urban areas for elites sending the wealth lent to the nation offshore in personal accounts whilst out there in the country districts people are starving and fighting over food and diminishing water supplies. This creates more problems for the USA to solve.

In the meantime both the USA and the UK have electoral considerations. In the late 1950’s Eisenhower, having secured his second term and who disliked flying and media posturing, preferred the occasional round of golf at home. He was content to allow Harold Macmillan to flit about the world doing the Supermac routine to win votes. These days American Presidents like to see and be seen and to fly in on Air Force One with due state and authority.

When Gordon Brown turns up pretending to be important with his staff in economy class on a spare charter plane hired from a soon to be bankrupt holiday company it does not make the same impression. This kind of attempted upstaging of the President too readily turns into farce as at Copenhagen and does any SR no good at all, especially when votes are vital to political survival.

At one time it was suggested that it was the needs and the lobbying of the industrial military complex that exerted critical influence over the governments of both the USA and the UK that helped to keep the SR alive despite occasional spats when major contracts were under competition. By the second decade of the 21st Century this has changed. This complex still exists but since the 1990’s has been supplanted by another breed of lobbyists and key financial input into the political process.

Bluntly, the Labour government and the UK media are owned by the international oligarchs and financial mega-companies. The same is true of most of the US Congress; one of the running jokes is which Senator is owned by which company. For these organisations any government anywhere is simply a subsidiary that has to be managed to guarantee the rate of return on the capital employed by the owners.

In the UK the National Health Service is run mostly by Big Pharma and the financiers behind the Private Financial Initiative schemes. In the USA most of health care is at the mercy of the insurers and the lenders. None of these owners of governments have any interest in SR as moral commitment. If they wish to pit one government against another then that is what will happen.

Legal systems, constitutions, rights, social services, utilities, anything you care to mention are now all distorted and corrupted. The SR is a time expired product; politicians need to win elections and the money to win the media wars goes to those who the hirers think can deliver. In addition demographic changes in the USA and the UK have led to new populations in each antagonistic to the other partner. Londonistan is recognised as one of the world centres for terrorism operations and planning due to the bungling of the UK government.

The 21st Century is going to be one of grim economic struggle and competition for scarce resources between most of the present developed countries some of which may become under developed quite soon.

HMS “Prince of Wales” was sunk off Northern Malaysia on 10 December 1941 by Japanese air forces immediately after the attack on Pearl Harbour. The Special Relationship was sunk by Goldman Sachs.

Haiti - A Wider Aftermath

People in Haiti will be on the move again. The media coverage has been mostly around Port au Prince, understandably given the problems of communication and contact. Even had Haiti a well established efficient government, wealth, and good public services then the collapse in the internal structures would have been severe and the challenges perhaps too great to meet even then. That they did not has made matters worse, but the effects would have been catastrophic.

Although there had been a few minor earthquakes around Puerto Rico there was no indication that a major earthquake was imminent. After it occurred within the next two days there were 35 significant aftershocks, with almost unceasing minor tremors. There has been another major shock and there are fears that more aftershocks may occur.

That the situation is being taken very seriously by the USA is clear. On one news bulletin I saw the divisional flashes, the double AA of the 82nd Airborne Division from Fort Bragg. They had been destined for Afghanistan, now they were in Haiti. It was very sobering that on Tuesday 22nd December I had posted on the subject of this formation. The tasks faced by all the incoming support agencies are immense across the whole of the country, let alone the Herculean problems of the capital.

The purpose of this post is to deal with a specific issue, the implications across the region of the Haiti Disaster. On Friday 1st May last I posted “More Taxing Problems” when I wondered if a situation in somewhere like The Bahamas might lead to US Marines landing on a beach there. This connected to a post on Wednesday 25th March last “A Taxing Problem” which again deals with The Bahamas with a specific mention of the impact of Haitian refugees, many arriving as “boat people”.

Already it appears that in the few flights out of Haiti the first are on the move. As in so many migrations in the past often the first out are those with cash and the ability to do so. They are usually people with education or skills who may have business or other contacts to help them wherever they go.

The population of Haiti is around ten million and over the last decade or two already there have been outflows of people because of political difficulties and upheavals. The potential number of refugees in the immediate future can only be guessed, but past experience suggests a possible outflow well into six figures.

Whatever the role played by the USA and for that matter France in respect of current conditions in Haiti, what is clear are their concerns if there is large scale refugee movement in the next few months. For the USA, Florida, the State most likely to be affected, already has economic and fiscal problems enough and there are important elections pending for the House of Representatives in Congress. There will be concern also for Puerto Rico, although that is less accessible from Haiti.

The USA and the UK share interests in The Bahamas. For the USA they can be a springboard to Miami and Florida and for the UK there are inherited links as well as a good deal of finance tied up in that tax haven, much if it connected to the UK legal and political establishment. The population of The Bahamas is currently around 330,000, about half on New Providence Island where Nassau is located. The figure has gone up sharply in the last decade largely because of Haitian immigration, almost all amongst the lowest paid of the workforce. The Government of The Bahamas is currently experiencing considerable political and fiscal problems.

Also adjacent to Haiti are the Turks and Caicos Islands, another tax haven with a great deal of UK money lodged there. Its government ran into a chaotic mess last year and the UK now is exercising direct rule. Its population was around 36,000 and it is no condition to deal with any major refugee influx. If it happens there are direct implications for the UK.

Much the same applies to the Cayman Islands, which is said to have around one or two trillions of wealth in its trusts and tax efficient companies, but with a government that is broke. The Caymans are rather further from Haiti and less vulnerable, but any number of Haitians landing there to join its 52,000 people will present a serious problem for the UK.

Jamaica would seem to be better placed, with a population of close to three million and a more robust economic situation. However, the incursion of any significant number of Haitians into its poorest communities will have an impact. As we know any problems that occur in Jamaica can be exported to South London.

Cuba should be able to cope with modest numbers, but again has its own difficulties. Haiti’s neighbour the Dominican Republic is in little condition to take on any major responsibilities for large scale refugee movement. Whose task it would be to deal with issues if there was destabilisation in that country is difficult to estimate.

Then there is France and whether any number of Haitians would make it there. They are likely to be the better off but it could still be the place of choice for many. What might happen if many do make it to Paris is a real question.

It is several years now since I stood amongst a few Haitians cheering for their team who were playing against one made up of expatriates, mostly bankers and lawyers. They wondered why but when I explained that the expat’s were mostly Arsenal and Manchester United supporters they understood completely. I left them with a few football chants from The Kop of old, suitably translated.

Our government are saying little about the aftermath of the Haiti earthquakes and implying it is largely a matter for the USA, I assume to avoid annoying the French. But it could be a UK problem and one that will test the government to its limit.

The Great Game - The End Of The Raj

One of the more disregarded items of news in the torrent of tragedy and politics we have had in the last few days is that the UK Foreign Office, headed by Miliband, apparently is seeking to create a regional joint stabilisation council made up of the governments of Afghanistan, Pakistan, and India. Possibly other small states in the region might be invited along as observers or contributors.

It is déjà vu all over again. One of my uncles found himself up on the North West Frontier in the early 1940’s and did not enjoy the experience. He returned with the conviction that the sooner we were out of the sub continent the better and that we should stay out at all costs. Because so much of our history is seen through the murky glass of hindsight and modern ideas we have forgotten, or found it more convenient to forget because of our current ideologies that we may have been here before.

The picture above is of the Viceroy’s Body Guard in the 1890’s, after 1947 it became the President’s and before the 1870’s it had been the Governor General’s. For those who have watched the series “Jewel In The Crown” it appears in the introductions. The engagement with the sub continent changed and developed down the years and the image we have from The Raj of Kipling’s time and later is false in terms of the situation before the Mutiny of 1857 and the creation of the Imperial India of 1876. The imposition of a more Anglo-Centric character on the administration of the territories then under control or compliant began in the late 1830’s.

Before the Governors’ General Macaulay etc. in the time of Charles Theophilus Metcalfe and before there was a more Asiatic approach to governance. Metcalfe encouraged the study of the History and Culture of the East. His Aide, Major Turner Macan was instrumental in rescuing and enabling the survival of the “Shah Nameh” of Firdausi, the great classic of ancient Persian literature, a relative Caswall wrote the first grammar of Hindi, and William McNaghton in the Royal Asiatic Society created a body of study that recognised the wealth and value of the Eastern languages, literature, and culture.

The aims of the Honourable East India Company was not so much direct control and deep involvement, that was clearly beyond the resources of either the Company or of the UK, but across the sub continent the “stabilisation” of the wide mix of contending local rulers to enable trade and the reliable flow of bullion critical to the City of London and UK public finances. They wanted peace, treaties to enable admission, and a willingness for local rulers to accept trade and guidance on Company terms.

The trading and bullion issues in India were intermingled with the China trade and the Company was reaching out to that Empire because it was in the familiar grip of the expand or fail situation so familiar to much of commerce. We now may like to separate all these ventures in distinct modules for study, but for the Company and the traders of the time all things were connected. Eventually, the British lodged themselves in Hong Kong, Canton, and Shanghai in competition with other powers for as big as slice of the action in Chinese riches as they could get. This included trading in substances that were illegal in China, notably opium.

Now, at the end of it all, in the last dying gasp of Empire (aka Commonwealth) having gone from stabilisation to influence and trade, then rule, turning into Empire, we are back where we started and in a lot more financial trouble than we were at the end of the Napoleonic Wars.

We are a relatively small state with ideas above its station in the world, relying on threats and influence, needing to repair our public finances and to exert some sort of control over the international drugs trade. The men I have mentioned were giants of intellect and understanding. We are left with Miliband and Brown, neither of whom speak coherent English let alone any Eastern tongues.

And the HSBC Bank are off to Shanghai in the morning.

Lockerbie, Politics, Policy, and Prostates.

A while ago we lived in the north of England, and I wondered why at some times there would be a great many planes headed NNW overhead, but at other times none at all. Someone explained to me that the routing of transatlantic flights could vary according to weather conditions, notably relative wind speeds in the upper atmosphere. When the Pan Am flight came down in Lockerbie I realised that some 30 to 45 minutes earlier it would have been above our town.

It may be that whoever planted the bomb, assumed that it would be on the southern route, and therefore the plane would have been over open sea in the Western Approaches when the explosion occurred. Given my own flying experience, it could have been either close to or above the southern coast of Ireland. Had that been the case, it is likely that the onus would have been on the Irish, doubtless working very closely with the American’s. The UK’s role would have been one of support and co-operation.

Twenty plus miles south of Lockerbie then it would have been an English matter. That it happened within the jurisdiction of Scots Law made everything much more complicated at the time, and since. The business of whether Al Megrahi, the person convicted by an individual process of law, might be released to die on compassionate grounds has been equally complicated. The matter has become one of those deeply unpleasant and distasteful political issues that so often disfigure our public life today.

The spectacle of a man who allegedly killed so many American citizens and others at random being cheered to the echo by a crowd in Tripoli, possibly mostly hired hoods, waving the cross of St. Andrew is a deeply unhappy. As the mess over the handling of the matter deepens what is worse is the squalid and petty argument developing between Scots in London and Edinburgh as to who is really responsible for it.

One question is just how ill is Al Megrahi? There are suggestions that he looks very well in comparison to others whose condition is said to have deteriorated to the same extent. Are the Libyan doctors about to work a miracle? If he is still up and about when the next General Election is held, and Colonel Gaddafi is offering his usual advice to UK voters, what will the electors make of it all? As far as his treatment is concerned, he has certainly had a great deal more expert attention from the NHS than usual, many can die without ever seeing a consultant.

The big question, as always, is about oil supplies. Libya is an exporter, and said to have substantial untapped reserves accessible from dry land by ordinary technology, that is at relatively low cost. The UK is no longer self sufficient, and the import needs are steadily increasing. It is also a debtor and in need of someone, anyone, with available funds to take up its sovereign debt.

So the Foreign Office did a deal with the Colonel over prisoner exchanges. Perhaps much needed, because it may well be that the Colonel wanted Megrahi back, and may have been likely to arrest a number of UK citizens to hold. Given the propensities of many UK citizens to drink too much in foreign climes, never mind doing things in public that other people do not want to see, the Colonel would have found it all too easy to round up a thousand or two weeping boozers for ransom.

The question then, was how to spring Megrahi? Unluckily, as the plane came down in Lockerbie, this rested with Edinburgh. In the urge to score points off each other, the parties involved forgot the Yanks. But the Yanks had not forgotten Lockerbie.

The right answer would have been for the USA to come to a view with the Colonel, and then propose to London and Edinburgh a way of dealing with Al Megrahi. But Brown want to have the Colonel onside for any arrangements about oil quietly, and to let Edinburgh take responsibility for a questionable release, however Edinburgh wanted a huge public relations success, but only if it really smeared London. Remember, the 2010 Election Campaign is now well under way.

Both parties now to defend themselves have to disagree with Washington DC, as well as with each other, and this is not a happy situation. Insulting Secretary Mrs. Clinton is not a sensible option, whatever the SNP thinks, and President Obama is playing an honourable straight bat, whatever Labour in London might suggest.

The Yanks, more or less, are right, and in their various ways, London and Edinburgh have made a nasty mess of it; careless of the feelings of the families, careless of the long term implications, and careless of the damage being done to the last shreds of British or Scottish credibility anywhere.

Can You See By The Dawn's Early Light?

Just how independent is the USA? Like most parts of the world a whole lot less than it used to be, much less than many of its citizens believe, and it may now be arriving at the point at which its constitution may be adjusting, informally, to the world as it really is. The major source of energy and the primary base of much of its industry is oil, and it is now around thirty years since the USA was self sufficient.

The USA moved into the car and truck age long before other nations. During World War II, when many developed countries had their capability reduced, the USA even expanded. The whole way of life now depends on fuels for vehicles. So does the food supply chain, not just in distribution and delivery, but in the actual growing of crops with all the pesticides and fertilisers.

The USA needs and will need more food as its population grows. In the past the USA may have been one of the bread baskets and major food exporters of the world, it will not be long before it will begin to import, and then depend on stocks from other countries, especially if for either climate or soil degradation reasons the yields begin to fall from its own fields. Also, the way things are, it could take only one scientific blunder by Monsanto to wreak havoc in the food industry. Is anyone taking bets?

Follow the money is an old American proverb, but since World War II the money, in international terms has followed America, in the shape of the dollar. It used to be the pound sterling, until the UK went broke during World War II, and amongst the reasons for seeking freedom around the old Empire, getting away from the pound was one of the more important considerations. The USA is now a debtor nation, and a big one, and the money markets through history do not like to depend on a base currency that relates to an economically unstable, unpredictable, debt laden state.

As the drift away from the dollar gatherers pace it is not easy to predict the results. Certainly it will reduce US influence, and require it to take more account of others. For many countries the uncertainty of the currency markets will present real issues of policy making about their economic future. For all the talk of this, that or the other, it is possible it might all become very unstable, with the USA being one bidder amongst many for whatever funds might be available.

For finance as a whole, for a time Wall Street and the City of London have called the shots, and between them turned all the world’s banks into one big system. Now it could be that neither can do this as much of their banking sector is nationalised, and under severe stress. If others can control the money, you cannot be independent. Especially, if for your energy, your food, your consumer goods, and a lot else you are reliant on imports.

Enjoy the holiday, cousins.