Owning the body bags Thursday 10 May 2012  The losses arise from a restructuring of the regular Army, to accommodate its reduction from 102,000 to 82,000 personnel by 2022 - its lowest level since the Boer war at the end of the 19th century. Amongst the famous names to go will be the Black Watch, the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders and the Royal Highland Fusiliers. It is a sign of the times, though, that the coverage in the legacy media has been relatively modest, and the reaction muted. Back in 2004 when a similar cull was mooted, senior Army officers werereported to be "seething". Such was the sensitivity of the issue that talk of scrapping the Black Watch and other famous names triggered fears of a mass exodus of Labour voters to the Scottish Nationalists, the subsequent climbdown sparing the Scottish regiments. But, shifting the burden to the English regiments was met with a march outside parliament and a petition with thousands of signatures. This time round, Col. Tim Collins has entered the fray, arguing that scrapping historic regimental names is "a senseless body blow to the Army". His thesis is a familiar one. Soldiers need courage to perform their duties effectively, which is an attribute bolstered by a feeling of clan identity. Furthermore, units that retain an identity have fewer recruitment and retention problems. By contrast, the new regiments struggle to recruit, and the absence of the informal welfare system that characterises the traditional regiment adds to pressure that causes soldiers to leave the Army. Collins nevertheless recognises that the changes are being forced on the Army by tight budgets, but he still argues against a system he believes has become "too European", where men are cycled through anonymous "super regiments" on a career and convenience basis, with no regional identities and uninspired by unit histories and memories of glory. By coincidence, I was in the EU parliament Brussels last Tuesday, hearing arguments from a group of speakers about the merits of the European Common Security and Defence Policy, specifically in terms of addressing those tight budgets. These are affecting not just the UK but defence forces throughout Europe. Under the general heading of "EU-Nato relations: complementarities or duplication", the idea was that the speakers should argue for and against the proposition that an EU military capability was a waste of resource, duplicating the efforts of Nato and thus wasting money we could ill-afford. The thesis was put rather succinctly by an observer of the proceedings, British MEP and former soldier, Geoffrey Van Orden (pictured below - centre), who asserted that "playing soldiers is not the business of the European Union". As far as military matters go, we should "delete EU". Contradicting him was, amongst others, Jo Coelment, Brigadier General (retd) of the Belgian Air Force, and former Belgian permanent representative to the military committee of the European Union. Coelemont was useful in that he articulated the EU view that "pooling and sharing" capabilities was the way to overcome budgetary limitations. He saw us in transition, from individual national forces, to a disparate series of bilateral agreements, "islands of co-operation". These, he hoped, would lead to a "clustering" of defence programmes and full integration of military capabilities.  Europe, according to Coelmont, was beset by capability shortfalls, but these were not the only problem. The countries of Europe had to find a way to evolve from indifference to the concept of defence integration, to involvement and then ownership. This, in the view of Coelment, would only stem from agreement on strategy. Hardware, the tools of war, stemmed from strategy. The United States had its own unifying strategy, so the European Union needed further to elaborate its own. We needed a "top down approach", he said. And yes, he really did say that - we need a top down approach. There followed a Nato bureaucrat by the name of Adrian Kendry, a senior defence economist. He presented us with the problem of trying to tell the difference between the EU and the Nato viewpoint, the essential difference being that the one was talking of deeper and further integration, while Nato presented the idea of deeper and further co-operation. The spectre was raised of "Bonzai Armies", shrunken affairs resulting from multiple cuts,. The same solution was offered, with "pooling and sharing" of national capabilities, but under the aegis of Nato rather than the EU. This has been called "smart defence", resulting in one member of the audience asking whether everything that had gone before was "dumb defence". Kendry, like Coelman, though, was after improved consultation between the member countries on defence spending plans, taking us towards the idea of integrated defence spending. The Nato man, looking at greener grass, mooted the possibility of a new treaty along the lines of the fiscal compact, enforcing minimum levels of expenditure on defence. This brought us back to the EU and Graham Muir, head of the policy and planning unit of the European Defence Agency (EDA). He created an apocalyptic vision of a perfect storm of declining budgets, US revision of strategy offering less support to Europe, a sub-optimal defence industrial base and then, with the contraction of US defence spending, increased competition from US defence contractors for European defence business. It wasn't very long before we were again hearing about "pooling and sharing". Those new to the idea were acquainted with the Ghent Framework and a "permanent capability generation conference", which would result in a "permanently relevant EDA". All that led to Daniel Keohane of the FRIDE Institute in Brussels noting that none of the initiatives, going way back, had ever produced any actual new capabilities. Some of us in the audience might have quietly assumed that, if conferences won wars, the EU was on a winner, while our Daniel is the sort of cove who asks awkward questions like "is EU defence policy dead?" Ce n'est pas évident, he says, that EU defence policy can succeed without French leadership. Too much of this, of course, and one suddenly loses the will to live. The way to overcome all our enemies is to gather them together and lock them in a Brussels committee room for a few hours. By dint of a threat of repetition, the survivors would never trouble us again. Failing that, the man missing at the feast was Tim Collins. Had he been there, he could no doubt have told the assembly that military intervention on the ground, rather than deployment of permanent capability committees in les couloirs of Brussels, depends absolutely on national consent. Only a nation can employ soldiers who are prepared to die for their countries, in units which have their confidence.  Try to go to war without that consent and you get a million people on the streets chanting "not in my name". And while a democratically elected government can (and did) weather such a storm, once the body bags start coming in, a prolonged military adventure becomes politically unsustainable. Such wars are more often lost on the the home front, negating the exploits on the field of battle. In this context, we have Coelmont talking glibly of "ownership" of defence policy, but while the EU has ambitions of creating its own policy, it cannot own any casualties that would arise from it. Repatriation means what it says – the bodies go back home, and those at home do the grieving. It will always be national flags that drape the coffins. Taking the Tim Collins thesis as a starting point, however, you will not even get soldiers prepared to die for the EU flag. Nobody will "die for Europe", and the all important effect of unit cohesion and identity bolstering the courage of individuals cannot happen at a European level. To take account of national sensibilities, therefore, EU-flagged operations can only be deployed on low-threat operations. EU-led or flagged operations in a high-threat environment are simply not a realistic option. Casualties are the enemy of consensus – the operation would last only as long as it took the news media to transmit pictures of body bags around the world. And therein lies a fundamental point. Collins, rightly, would have it that unit loyalties are an important determinant of performance. Capabilities are of little value if the soldiers using them are, or are forced to be, risk adverse. Well-equipped soldiers without the will to fight are simply more expensive targets. The idea that capabilities can be developed in isolation from intended deployment is utterly flawed. Action in high-threat theatres requires the ongoing democratic consent of individual national populations, and that consent – no more than burial ceremonies – cannot be delegated. However well the capability question is settled (and so far it has not been), EU capabilities will never be fully deployable, which makes having them a waste of time and effort. Co-operation between countries is a common cause is one thing – integration under an alien flag is another. We should concentrate on the former and not waste resources on the latter. And therein is the real answer as to why the Van Orden premise must prevail. Playing soldiers is not the business of the European Union, because once you deploy soldiers, with real guns against real enemies, you are not playing games. And if you can't own the body bags, you should not be sending in troops that may come out in them. COMMENT THREAD Richard North 10/05/2012 |
We're not getting it Thursday 10 May 2012  The headline is attractive enough, Simon Carr in The Independent declaring, "Our leaders aren't in touch with their MPs, let alone the nation".Then, intriguingly, on the subject of "getting it" – the meme of the moment - Carr singles out Ed Miliband, telling us that "people were concerned about the cost of travelling to work and water bills". Thus, a politician who understands that people are concerned about the increasing costs of water is "getting it". However, if that is the measure, it is fascinating to see how few of the commentators in the legacy media are also "getting it". One only has to note the absence of comment on the putative water bill, an absence we noted in the previous piece. A good example of this is in today's opinion from The Great Oborne. Even though he writes about the cost of David Cameron's Coalition "growing ever more expensive" in the Failygraph, not a word about water sullies his script. But one then finds that it isn't only water that has been ignored. Squeezed into the Queen's speech was a proposal for "reform of the electricity market". We are told that a new law is required to make it deliver "secure, clean and affordable electricity and ensure prices are fair". Instinctively, one knows that the moment this administration starts talking about affordability, especially in terms of energy, it is going to cost us a whole lot more. And that is most certainly going to be the case here. The clue is in the order of the qualifying adjectives: "secure, clean and affordable". The idea of "affordability" comes third, and they are not looking for cheap electricity, but prices that are "fair". What does that mean? This is something that Oborne could most certainly have explored, as the detail pouring from The Independent tells us that the very last thing we can expect is cheap electricity. Instead, we must look to a massive investment in "low carbon power", by which means the looming energy gap is to be bridged. This will require pouring £110 billion into energy supplies and the grid - more than double the current rate of "investment". To achieve this, and to meet "legally-binding targets" on cutting emissions and boosting renewables, suppliers are going to get long-term contracts that "pay a steady rate of return for energy over the lifetime of new low-carbon generators". Essentially, we are being faced with more subsidies for wind machines. But that is only one small part of it. Plans for a "nuclear renaissance" have stalled, with the possibility that even EDF will pull out of the nuclear business in the UK. This makes gas an increasingly important alternative but op then pops Lord Smith, chairman of the Environment Agency. He tells us that "fracking" could be part of the UK's energy mix in years to come, but only with "the development of carbon capture and storage to make gas-fired power stations less polluting". The impact of that is effectively to double the energy cost and consumption rates, dramatically pushing up electricity prices - and we haven't yet finished with the energy bill. Tucked in there is the death knell for the coal industry. The bill will introduce an "emissions performance standard" to prevent construction of new coal plants which produce too much carbon dioxide. This also is carbon capture and storage. Unwilling consumers are to be forced to rely an unproven and probably unworkable technology which, even if it ever did work, would easily double the cost of coal-fired electricity generation. Putting all this together, the coded message from Mr Oborne's "ever more expensive" coalition in the Queen's speech was that we are to face not only a water price hike but massively increased electricity costs. The odd thing is that no one has thought to mention these small details. Yet, Carr tells us that Ed Miliband is "getting it". That seems hardly the case, and we're certainly not – at least, not at an affordable price. COMMENT THREAD Richard North 10/05/2012 |
A speech fringed with stars Thursday 10 May 2012  Slight though the content of the Queen's speech is, there was enough in it to give considerable cause for concern, not least the commitment to a draft bill on the "reform the water industry in England and Wales".Comment on this in the legacy media is minimal, leaving it to Business Green to tell us that legislative proposals are likely to be released for pre-legislative scrutiny before the summer recess, with the full bill coming in the next session of parliament. What is distinctly worrying here is that the bill will implement the reforms laid out in last year's White Paper. Ostensibly intended to drive new investment into the country's water infrastructure, we noted that it was the White Paper which marked a shift in water policy from the traditional one of meeting demand to mandating demand management and enforced rationing under the guise of encouraging greater "water efficiency" in homes and businesses. Thus, with no recognition at all, we are to see the implementation of EU policy, identified in our previous piece, locking us into a cycle of artificially induced scarcity and increased charges – on top of already excessive price hikes. Bizarrely though, this Queen's speech has been flagged up as being "family friendly", although there can be few things less friendly than unnecessarily increasing the costs of an essential commodity, while ensuring that it remains in short supply. Maybe, as there is to be a draft bill, there is an opportunity to press for changes at this late stage but, given this administration's enthusiasm for EU initiatives and the way it is still embracing the green agenda, one cannot be optimistic about securing any improvement. As for being a Queen's speech, therefore, that part of it might just as well have been fringed with a ring of stars. COMMENT THREAD Richard North 10/05/2012 |
Operation self-deception Wednesday 9 May 2012  And so it comes to pass that even Der Spiegel is using the same language, describing how the entry criteria for the european single currency were fudged on numerous occasions, to allow the euro to go ahead. The news magazine's finding comes following its request to the German government for the release of hundreds of pages of documents from 1994 to 1998 on the introduction of the euro and the inclusion of Italy in the eurozone. The papers include reports from the German embassy in Rome, internal government memos and letters, and hand-written minutes of the chancellor's meetings. The documents, says Speigel prove what was only assumed until now, that Italy should never have been allowed to join, and that the decision to invite Rome to join was based "almost exclusively on political considerations at the expense of economic criteria". This, the magazine goes on to say, also created a precedent for a much bigger "mistake" two years later, namely Greece's acceptance into the eurozone. The reality, though, is that this was not a mistake. Nor was it ever a question of whether it was a "stupid idea". To think in those terms is completely to miss the point. It was always a political idea, based on the idea espoused by Monnet that political integration could be achieved by stealth, through incremental economic integration. Nevertheless, while Speigel goes off the rails by talking in terms of a "mistake", it does acknowledge that the process was deliberate. The driver of le projet at this time was Helmut Kohl and, instead of waiting until the economic requirements for a common currency were met, he went ahead for profoundly political reasons. Kohl wanted to demonstrate that Germany, even after its reunification, remained European in its orientation. He even referred to the new currency as a "bit of a peace guarantee", making Italy the "perfect example of the steadfast belief of politicians that economic development would eventually conform to the visions of national leaders". Operation "self-deception" began with the Maastricht treaty and the commitment to launch the euro by 1999, with members being required to meet strict convergence criteria. But, "as luck would have it", Italy fulfilled all requirements as the date approached - surprisingly so, given that it had acquired a reputation for notoriously imbalanced budgets. The country had undergone a miraculous cure, on paper at least. However, what the papers show is that German Chancellery officials in Bonn had their doubts, suspecting that the figures may have been fudged – although that should hardly have come as a surprise. In 1995, former commission official and now whistleblower Bernard Connolly had written of blatant "manipulation and distortion". Despite this, in February 1997, following a German-Italian summit, one German official noted that the government in Rome had suddenly claimed, "to the great surprise of the Germans", that its budget deficit was smaller than indicated by IMF and the OECD. Shortly before the meeting, a senior German official had written in a memo that new posting rules for interest had alone resulted in a 0.26 percent decline in the Italian budget deficit. A few months later Jürgen Stark, a state secretary in the German finance ministry, reported that the governments of Italy and Belgium had "exerted pressure on their central bank heads, contrary to the promised independence of the central banks". The top bankers were apparently supposed to ensure that the EMI's inspectors would "not take such a critical approach" to the debt levels of the two countries. In early 1998, the Italian treasury published such positive figures on the country's financial development that even a spokesman for the treasury described them as "astonishing". The convergence criteria required that total debt of a euro candidate could be no more than 60 percent of its annual economic output, but Italy's debt level was twice that amount, and the country was only approaching the reference value at a snail's pace. Between 1994 and 1997, its debt ratio declined by a mere three percentage points. A debt level of 120 percent meant that this convergence criterion could not be satisfied, says Stark today. "But the politically relevant question was: Can founding members of the European Economic Community be left out?" For a political project, the answer was quite obviously "no", and despite considerable evidence that Italy could not meet the convergence criteria, at the Brussels European Council of May 1998, Kohl felt the "weight of history", deciding that the euro would go ahead, stating: "Not without the Italians, please". That was the political motto, says Joachim Bitterlich, Kohl's foreign policy advisor. The documents now seen by Spiegel suggest that, to get there, the Kohl administration "misled both the public and Germany's Federal Constitutional Court". What was remarkable at the time was that four professors had filed a lawsuit against the introduction of the euro. The suit was "clearly without merit," the government told the court, arguing that it would only be justified in the event of a "substantial deviation" from the Maastricht criteria, and that such a deviation was "neither recognisable nor to be expected". Yet, following a meeting between the chancellor, finance minister Theo Waigel and Bundesbank president Hans Tietmeyer, on the case before the constitutional court, the head of the economics division at the Chancellery, Sighart Nehring, noted in mid-March 1998 that "enormous risks" were associated with Italy's "high debt levels". It was left to Italian prime minister Romano Prodi, and Carlo Ciampi, former governor of the Italian central bank, to clean out the stables but, while reforms were able to reduce new borrowing, they did not dent the structural problems. Thus, the Italians in 1997 twice suggested postponing the launch of the euro, but the Germans rejected the idea. It was "a taboo", says Kohl's former advisor Bitterlich, pointing out that the Germans were pinning their hopes on Ciampi. "Everyone felt that he was Italy's guarantor, in a certain sense, and that he would fix things". It was also clear that Kohl was determined to wrap up monetary union before the 1998 parliamentary election. Thus the Italians were permitted formally to fulfil the Maastricht criteria with a combination of tricks and creative accounting, not least by introducing a "Europe tax" and selling the national gold reserves to the central bank and imposing a tax on the profits. Chancellery officials were well aware of what was going on, as indeed were Dutch officials who argued that without "credible proof" of the longevity of the consolidation, Italy's acceptance into the eurozone was "unacceptable". In the spring of 1998, however, the EU statistical office came to the rescue, certifying that the Italians had satisfied the Maastricht criteria. At that point, there was "no longer any reason to bar the Italians accession to the euro". Even though many knew that the figures were sugar-coated, no one dared say so publicly. Warning signs and non-compliant figures were steadfastly glossed over, especially through the German general election campaign, when Kohl kept the campaign focused on domestic policy. Even after the election, right up to the launch of the euro, Italy's high debt ratio was ignored. Now, says Spiegel the files from the founding phase of the monetary union reveal that the original construct cannot function. "A monetary union amounts to more than shifting several billion euros back and forth. It is also a community of fate. Shared money requires shared policy and, in the end, shared institutions". Thus, it says, if the members of the monetary union quickly make up for what they neglected before embarking on the euro adventure, the project of the century can still succeed. But the longer the necessary reforms are delayed, the more costly the journey becomes for everyone. Even to the last, then, the magazine is ignoring its own findings – that the euro was indeed a political project, in which economic considerations took the back seat. The founders went with what was politically achievable at the time, hoping then for a beneficial crisis to arrive, legitimising the measures which had been omitted but which always had been essential. To call these measures "reforms" is a travesty. They were deliberate omissions, the ultimate deception being that consequences of their omission could be dealt with without devastating consequences. That alone was a reckless gamble, and one which has yet fully to play out. Neither the deception, nor the self-deception are over. COMMENT THREAD Richard North 09/05/2012 |
What else is the meaning of democracy? Wednesday 9 May 2012 Against the backdrop of averring that we, the British people, shared the responsibility, Gollanz wrote: We do not escape by the plea that we have not understood these things, or that we have "not been interested in politics", or that we were powerless against our Government. It is precisely for being docile, unpolitical, servile to their Government that we attack the German people. It is our business to be interested in politics, and to control our government. What else is the meaning of democracy?This fits with my own aphorism: "democracy is not a spectator sport", but I like the assertion that it is our business … to control our government. There is a pervasive view within government that they are the masters and we are the servants, but it is and must always be that it is the other way around. That the servants are out of control does not change that relationship. It is for us to assert it – and we make a start on 14 July at The Old Swan. And this will be the first of our efforts. For those others who have asked, on the agenda is to set up a nationwide series of meetings. We, the people are on the move. COMMENT THREAD Richard North 09/05/2012 |
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