Keep her for entertainment, say I

I have been told by one of the less entertaining readers of this blog that I have out-Thornberried Ms Emily Thornberry of whom I had actually heard even before the low-grade scandal she was involved in that made her name so well known. Not many other people had. As insults go it is not much. I have had far better ones in my life but I do think a short paragraph about the former Shadow Attorney-General is a good way of starting a posting about entertainment in politics.

The whole Thornberry saga showed her stupidity, the ease with which her Leader could be thrown into panic and the general dullness and, as I said above, low grade of politics in this country. That, as it happens, is a good thing. Dull politics enlivened by the odd bout of entertainment is an excellent system to live under. A good many countries are envious of that, their politics being considerably more exciting and frightening. I do not wish to change things, not even to satisfy the People's Will.

All the same, entertainment is needed from time to time and the departure of Cherie Blair from the public scene has taken a good deal of it away. That is why we are so grateful to Ms Thornberry for brightening our days (just a few of them, to be sure, but it is better than nothing) as the new recruits to the People's Army are not likely to do that.

There is, however, another female politician who provides some entertainment (not on the Cherie scale but that was a superlative effort). I speak, of course, of the egregious Cathy Ashton or Baroness Ashton as she is better known, former High Panjandrum of the EU's Common Foreign Policy and before that many things, particularly Treasurer of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament though, apparently, she had no idea but none at all, where some of the funds came from.

As this blog mentioned before, la Ashton may have been superseded as the High Panjandrum but was staying on to "complete" the negotiations with Iran. Readers of this blog will not be surprised to hear that although, according to Secretary of State Kerry the negotiations have gone on very well, the deadline has again been pushed forward to next July.

The EU is now wondering what to do with la Ashton. Do we keep her till then, assuming that the deadline will undoubtedly have to be extended again?

For her part, Ashton - the EU’s former foreign policy chief, who has chaired the nuclear talks for the past 12 months - on Monday read out a joint EU-Iran statement and left the press room without taking questions.

She stepped down from her EU post on 1 November, but was kept in the nuclear talks until Monday’s initial deadline.

Her new boss, Italy’s Federica Mogherini, told press in Strasbourg the same day that she is consulting with the US and Germany on whether to keep Ashton in place until July.

“That’s for me to consider”, Mogherini noted. “It will be decided in the coming days”.

She added there is “a little bit of disappointment, we were all hoping for an agreement tonight [but there is] … also a little bit of hope”.

"It's important that negotiations will continue”.

Federica Mogherini is the new High Panjandrum and she has already provided us with one good story: on November 7 RFE/RL reported that her chief spokesperson, Catherine Ray, married a partner in a Brussels public relations firm that lobbied for Gazprom. Love, of course, can blossom in the most unlikely conditions but is there not a hint of a clash of interests here? Goodness me, no, announced the EU. Everything is ship-shape and Bristol fashion. I am rather looking forward to what else Signora Mogherini and her office might produce by way of entertainment.

However, we cannot rely on them solely or on Ms Thornberry whose days as a comedienne may well be over. We need Baroness Ashton as well. We also do not want her back in the House of Lords, demeaned though it has been by this and the Blair governments. Keep her on as negotiator-extraordinaire with Iran, say I.

A modest proposal to businessmen with eyes on Russia and Ukraine

To be accurate, what I intend to write is not even a proposal, more of a suggestion, brought about by my continuing astonishment at the naiveté or stupidity or hopefulness beyond experience of businessmen who still think that they can go into Russia or Ukraine (until recently), buy property, set up a business or open a branch of existing one and get away with it, perhaps to make profits. How many cases of people being bullied, cheated, robbed, reduced to a nervous break-down and having their Russian employees murdered must we witness before people abandon all hope?

Now, don't get me wrong: I do not consider those businessmen to be motivated by charitable impulses. Not only do I not think that they are, I do not think that they should be and I would not trust them if they were, NGOs and large charities not being among my favourite organizations. 

Nor do I think those Western businessmen are particularly honest or honourable themselves and I came across a number of people who saw a chance in the collapse of the Soviet Union for a quick buck or a thousand in the chaos that was around them. But, surely, they have realized by now that the state and its minions in those countries, Vlad and his Chekists as well as Yanukovich and his "family" until recently are more corrupt, more brazen, less scrupulous and can command more power of different kinds than any Western business. 

Curiously enough, the problem of bullying, violent expropriation and nullification or subversion of contracts is greater in Russia and Ukraine than in the Caucasian and Central Asian republics not because these are not corrupt or oppressive but because, as the evidence seems to show, their officials, once bought, stay bought. Not so with the "European" parts of the former Soviet Union (excluding the Baltic states, always an anomaly) who have always been rather contemptuous of their Caucasian and Central Asian brothers and comrades. Perhaps, they should rethink that attitude. 

These thoughts were passing through my head as I was reading Oliver Bullough's recent report, published by Legatum Institute and Institute of Modern Russia, entitled Looting Ukraine: How East and West Teamed up to Steal a Country. 

I shall write in greater detail about the report, its somewhat emotional title and the presentation of it I went to. In this posting I want to concentrate on one tiny example Mr Bullough cites. Discussing how corruption worked under then President Yanukovich he explains that towards the end "property rights became so loose, and rule of law so weak, that state officials and insiders began, simply, to seize businesses", giving Yanukovich a hefty share of the profits. 

A certain British businessman, here named Bernard Carr, lost an office building to "competitors" who gained access to the land registry. This is his account:

It's basically about who pays the police more. The problem was that the police were being paid by both sides. We were paying the police and so was he. So we went to court and tried to buy our way through the court. The lawyers said if we paid 6,000 euros we would win, but you can't guarantee the other guy won't pay 7,000 euros. And you don't get a refund if you lose, which we did ... I have lost count of the number of times I've been told that if I pay someone a couple of grand a problem would go away, but then not have it go away.

I do not expect anyone to feel particularly sorry for Mr "Carr" or be sympathetic to his plight. It did, however, led me to that suggestion. It is that every businessman who thinks that he can do business in Russia and Ukraine and all he has to do is shell out a few appropriate bribes ought to have the following two lines inscribed on the wall of his office and, perhaps, as a screen-saver on his laptop:

That if once you have paid him the Danegeld,    
You never get rid of the Dane.

This is slightly bizarre

Bulgarians demonstrating against their corrupt politicians (whom, I believe, they elected but that is another story) is not bizarre. Nor is the trapping of "more than 100 politicians, journalists and staff" inside the Parliament building overnight particularly bizarre. I bet most of them were harmless, underpaid staff rather than politicians but that is the way of demonstrations, riots and even revolutions.

What is bizarre in my view is the support voiced by the European Commission for the anti-corruption protests.

EU commissioner for justice Viviane Reding at a Citizens’ Dialogue event in Sofia said she was “very much moved by the strong desire of the Bulgarian citizen to have this change, to fight for democracy, to fight against corruption.”

“My sympathy is with the Bulgarian citizens who are protesting on the streets against corruption,” she said.

Nothing wrong, one might say, with supporting the protesters. I feel the same way myself. But is the Commission now on the side of street protests against the governments of member states? Does it intend to form an alliance in order to strengthen its own position?

So that's that

Those readers who might have found the saga of the Czech Prime Minister of some interest (here, here and here) will, undoubtedly, be disappointed though possibly not surprised to find out that it is not going anywhere.

According to this detailed Wall Street Journal article

Earlier this month, prosecutors asked Parliament to lift immunity for Mr. Necas, as they investigated his role in the awarding of jobs at state enterprises to three former legislators allegedly in exchange for their help in passing a bill to raise taxes.

On Tuesday, the Czech Supreme Court ruled that the three former lawmakers and Mr. Necas couldn't be prosecuted since at the time of the alleged wrongdoing, they were legislators. The three former lawmakers were released from jail Tuesday night. They couldn't immediately be reached for comment.

In a news conference late Wednesday, Mr. Necas criticized the probe as "an absurd drama. It isn't an absurd comedy, but it's actually very serious, affecting actual people who ended up in prison during the investigation."

Lawyers for the MPs have previously said their clients did nothing wrong. Mr. Necas has also denied any wrongdoing and said the deal with the MPs was just normal political horse-trading, akin to offering an ambassadorship to a political ally.

Meanwhile the doubtfully appointed caretaker government may face opposition from the parliament but the lower house has voted not to dissolve itself and call an early election. They will somehow manage with the government they do not like and do not agree with, which was appointed over their heads by President Zeman.

Russian criminals use EU banks. Shock!

Given how many different bits of regulation the EU has imposed on its member states and how many other bits of legislation and regulation those member states imposed on their citizens, all in order to prevent money laundering, it may come as a surprise to readers of this blog to find out that none of them manage to prevent money, stolen from the Russian people and Russian businesses from being laundered through EU banks. Well, it may. Personally, whenever I hear stories like that I recall Captain Renault:

  Mind you, that wonderful scene also shows what a complete numpty Victor Laszlo was and how unlikely it was for the resistance to get anywhere under his idiotic leadership but that's another story.

Back to those EU banks and Russian money. Bear in mind that the EU makes all sorts of noises about the terrible state of affairs in Russia. The noises are not loud enough to make any difference. For instance the killers and torturers of Sergei Magnitsky, found guilty of "fraud" several years after his death, happily come and frolic in EU countries. This is known as sophisticated soft power that is different from the rough and tough American foreign policy (though we don't hear so much about that under Barack Obama's presidency.)

The next well known Russian dissident to go to prison will be the anti-corruption blogger and protest organizer, Alexei Navalny. To be fair, a number of other Russian dissident dislike him but that has ever been so. There are no dissident movements anywhere that do not spend more time fighting each other than the enemy.

Meanwhile Navalny is trying to tie up some lose ends before he is put out of action for six years if the prosecution gets its wish, which is quite likely as the judge in question has never presided over an acquittal.

On Tuesday (16 July), he, and his group of other young jurists, unveiled the secret business empire of Vladimir Yakunin [in Russian], a government official who runs Russian Railways, the country's state-owned train operator.

According to their information, Russian Railways has channelled millions upon millions of taxpayers' money into businesses owned by Yakunin's wife and two sons.

The businesses include hotel chains, blocks of flats and marine ports.

But the Yakunin connection is hidden behind layers of offshore firms, dozens of which are registered in EU member state Cyprus.

That would be the Cyprus that has recently been bailed out by the rest of the EU, I take it.

Here is the Yakunin story on the BBC Russian Service that is easily translated into English, on Forbes (ditto) and on Kommersant. Apart from EUObserver there seem to be no English-language media accounts. (Sorry, there is one, the Moscow Times.)

Navalny told EUobserver by email from Moscow on Tuesday that the EU's frequent statements on lack of rule of law in Russia "are, of course, a good thing."

But he is "sceptical" they will prompt change.

Instead, he urged EU authorities to help Russian people by enforcing rule of law in EU member states.

Or, in other words, by stopping Russian criminals from using European banks and offshore structures to conceal their ill-gotten gains.

Noting that the EU's joint police body, Europol, the European Commission and six EU countries are now investigating a money laundering trail linked to the death of Russian whistleblower-auditor Sergei Magnitsky, Navalny said: "This work is fundamentally important."

He added: "Stolen money was smuggled outside my country and re-invested in Europe … If the commission and Europol do their job properly, it will create an extremely important precedent."

He said the EU should go further, by creating new legal obligations for sensitive Russian investments.

It is always rather charming to see people from countries that are considerably more corrupt than the EU (believe it or not) look to that organization for some action rather than just pretty words in the battle they are waging. Sadly, I have to tell Mr Navalny (should he be reading this blog, which is not very likely) that the EU is not going to do anything to upset President Putin and his camarilla and neither will the member states, which is a good deal more shameful.

UPDATE: A day before expected, Alexei Navalny was sentenced to five years' imprisonment, allegedly for corruption but in reality for blogging against the Putin mafia and exposing their corruption. Self-pitying activists and members of the blogosphere, please note: this is what oppression looks like.

They never fade away

Several news items of interest about people who really should retire from the political and media circuit but seem unable to do so. First of all, we have our old friend Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the man who has caused so much hilarity through the various scandals he was involved in and who opened up a, sadly, brief discussion about the sexual mores of the the French political left. He is back in the news, having gone the way of other dubious Western politicians and taken the Putin rouble.

He "has been given a board position in the Russian Regional Development Bank" in order to raise the corporate profile of said Kremlin owned organization. The New York Times reminds us that the bank is a subsidiary of Rosneft.

Rosneft’s media office declined to elaborate on the appointment or on how Mr. Strauss-Kahn would be compensated.

Mr. Strauss-Kahn, a former French presidential contender, is re-emerging in a much smaller role than he once had. The Russian Regional Development Bank is hardly a financial heavyweight. It ranks No. 64 in Russia by assets.

Vedomosti, the leading Russian business newspaper, reported that Rosneft may be seeking to raise the profile of the bank by hiring a former International Monetary Fund director.

It is not as good as the various lavish positions former Chancellor Gerhard Schröder managed to grab.

If DSK is trying to make his way back or, at least, to earn large sums of money, Claude Juncker is refusing to go away. As Der Spiegel put it yesterday:

Jean-Claude Juncker has been in power in Luxembourg for 18 years, but he still isn't ready to fade into retirement. After tripping over a secret service scandal, he is now planning his comeback -- a project that could ultimately land him a senior European Union position.

The Luxembourg Prime Minister, the longest serving politician in Europe, has been holding on, refusing to admit that he had any responsibility for decisions taken by government officials while he was in the main seat (that is, for the last eighteen years).

In the end, he chose to go on the offensive. He appeared in parliament and proposed holding snap new elections. In doing so, he escaped the humiliation of a no-confidence vote and didn't even have to officially resign. Not even Helmut Kohl could have come up with a better trick.

His position in the EU is not nearly as strong as it used to be and his relationship with Chancellor Merkel and President Hollande (the only two that matter) is said to be tense. But he has become used to being a political leader and he does not want to go.

Now that the decision has been made to hold new elections, it is unclear how much longer Juncker will continue to sit at the table of EU leaders. Although his CSV is likely to remain the strongest party, it is unclear whether the patriarch will be able to easily find a coalition partner. In the wake of the intelligence scandals, the Socialists, part of the current coalition government, have moved closer to the opposition Liberals and Greens. It can't be ruled out that, for the first time, there will be a three-party-alliance in Luxembourg after the new elections. Unlike the CSV, the Socialists have completed a generational shift. Long-standing Foreign Minister Jean Asselborn is no longer campaigning as the party's top candidate, instead paving the way for the younger generation.

But even if Juncker doesn't get another chance at home, his career likely won't come to a rapid end. The European People's Party is urgently seeking a top candidate for the European Parliament election in May 2014. Juncker, known throughout Europe and fluent in many languages, would be the ideal candidate.

The winner of the election also stands to be appointed to a top EU post. Juncker, for instance, could become president of the European Commission or the European Council, even though he, of course, denies any such ambitions. He wants to remain in Luxembourg, says Juncker. "I'm campaigning to become my own successor."

And talking of people who refuse to fade away, I see those giants of political thought, Ken Clarke and Peter Mandelson are back, having formed a new pressure group with the help of Danny Alexander. Called British Influence (the one that has been missing in recent decades) it is proposing that

Britain should abandon attempts to secure a new "special deal" from the European Union and push instead for reform covering all 28 EU members.

That should work. Mind you, I can see those ideas becoming quite popular when we reach the fabled referendum shore.

Where are we on prime ministerial resignations?

Reuters reports that another Prime Minister, this time the Spanish one, is under some pressure to resign. So far, he is holding the line, admitting nothing or saying "if you please ma'am, it was only a little one" and definitely not resigning as that might jeopardize his career his reforming polices.

The scandal this time is not to do with convoluted political corruption as in the Czech Republic or with "illegal security agency activity such as phone-taps and corruption", as in Luxembourg, where the venerable Claude Juncker has temporarily retired from active politics.

The Spanish story is about money going into ... ahem ... wrong hands.

[Prime Minister Mariano] Rajoy has so far limited the impact of the scandal, which involves alleged illegal donations by construction magnates that were supposedly distributed as cash payments to party leaders in return for juicy contracts.

The former party treasurer, Luis Barcenas, is now inside a prison for "charged with bribery, money laundering, tax fraud and other crimes" and, it seems, that there were close contacts between the Prime Minister and the former party treasurer.

Once again: the Prime Minister of Spain is a member of our real government.

Curious developments in Hungary

Rumours of this reached me a couple of weeks ago and the story is being confirmed through a secretly made tape as well as denied officially while investigated by the public prosecutor. So, provisionally, we might say it is true.

Like most European countries, Hungary has been trying to control smoking in public and has now moved towards controlling the sale of tobacco products, allegedly, in order to wean young people away from smoking.

Unfortunately, as this story makes clear, there are problems in the system. There are now far fewer outlets and all those who had sold tobacco in the past had to apply for licence. Astonishingly, licences were awarded to people close to the ruling Fidesz party, often, as in the case of the town described in this article Szekszárd, people directly related to those in power.

No, they didn't have to learn much

A friend and regular reader of this blog (one of the few not the many) sent me this link with a comment: "How quickly they learn.". The story is that

Brussels-based news agency Euractiv has found that Poland is claiming €33 million of EU carbon allowances for a coal plant in Leczna, near the Ukrainian border, which does not exist. Polish authorities say the plant is being built. But there is zero sign of work at the greenfield site.

Well, no, they didn't have to learn. Back in the days I was still arguing against East European countries coming into the EU I also said that, given their history in the second half of the twentieth century these countries are not going to be fazed by the corruption of the EU. Au contraire: they will take to it like duck to water.

Corruption of the mind

There can be little doubt in anybody’s mind that motivates politicians is love of power, which is even more of a corrupting influence than power itself. It is, after all, the love of money that is the root of all evil not money itself. The same goes for regulators of various stripes who are really politicians that do not ever need to face the electorate.

The declaration by the Environmental Protection Agency that CO2 (a naturally occurring substance and a necessity for plants) to be a danger to human health may sound like a stupid joke. In fact, it is a huge power grab by an unelected agency and the Executive because Congress is refusing to play ball (well, Senate is) on the Cap and Trade Bill. The legislative is being by-passed and the greenie hysteria is being used for something not envisaged by the Founding Fathers. Iain Murray explains it all in detail.

This is the latest example in the United States of such a development but we see this everywhere – from the UN to our own government, backed, in this case by that bunch of sheeple, our Parliament.

In a way that is not the interesting part of the story. Politicians of whatever variety use any excuse to grab power is a story in the sense of dog bites man or supermodel takes drugs is a story.

It is the scientists who knowingly produced inaccurate (at best) information, refused to answer questions, destroyed raw data and generally falsified the evidence that underpinned this debate, then hysterically refused to discuss matters or answer questions even when they came from other scientists that are of interest.

After all, the overwhelming majority of scientists do not start their careers with the thought of falsifying information, not even in order to keep a highly paid job or scholarship. Those considerations will go a long way but how did we get to the position that scientific establishments became promoters of propaganda in order to feed governments’ and regulators’ desire to control the population and scientists (for the most part) went along with that? We do not live in the Soviet Union where disagreement with the party line on science meant imprisonment, torture, labour camps or a bullet in the back of one's head.

Pondering over this and coming to no obvious conclusions I recalled one of the most impressive films I saw this year: Andrzej Wajda’s Katyn. The subject matter is obvious: this is about the monstrous crime carried out by the Soviet Union and its security forces against Polish officers, whom they imprisoned seventy years ago and murdered in their thousands in the spring of 1940.

It is also about other things: survival in terrible circumstances, the fate of a country and its people caught between two totalitarian regimes, and individual reaction to those regimes. About one third of the film takes place in the immediate post-war months in Poland and we follow several characters as they deal with the fact that once again Poland is occupied and the truth about what happened to the officers Katyn is being suppressed.

How is one to react? Some refuse to knuckle under and defy the authorities with the truth. Others decide to keep quiet in order to rebuild their lives. The conflict appears most clearly with two sisters, whose brother had been one of the victims of Katyn. One, a girl who has survived the Warsaw uprising and its brutal suppression, announcing that she is on the side of the murdered not the murderers, goes to a great deal of trouble to set up a memorial stone for her brother with the truth of his death inscribed on it. We last see her being pushed into an underground cell; the memorial is now a broken slab with the information obliterated.

Her sister takes a different view. She knows the truth but thinks that as Poland will never be free again, it is best to keep quiet, and try to rebuild the country. She encourages (in vain, as it turns out) a talented young man to re-write slightly his CV by omitting the words about his father, “murdered by the Soviets”, because she considers it to be more important for the young man to study, to create, to help build a new society than to insist on shouting the truth from the rooftops.

Much to be said for that point of view, one cannot help thinking, as one watches the destruction of all those who know and speak the truth. But then a thought occurs: yes, this seems a very small compromise with a probable good result. Yet how many more compromises will this young woman, the director of the art college, have to make in the future? Will she have to betray people? Almost certainly she will find herself having to reject those whose parentage is unsatisfactory in the new socialist republic unless she encourages them to tell even bigger lies. How far can one go before one is completely enmeshed in mental corruption?

At what point would a scientist, who, let us say, genuinely believes in man-made global warming, decide that a little bit of fiddling with the evidence in a good cause makes perfect sense? And having done that little bit of fiddling does he find himself having to cover up for it and for the fact that man-made global warming has become a “scientific fact” on the basis of his ever so slightly fiddled evidence? When do they find that there is now no drawing back without losing a great deal of face and creating a great deal of trouble for everyone concerned? How far can one go before one is completely enmeshed in mental corruption?