by David Steven | Apr 22, 2010 | UK
Which leader is best able to talk convincingly about the global risks the UK faces?
In the past decade, all the key game changers have been international: 9/11, the food price spike, and the financial crisis. But the international agenda is much harder to explain to voters than local concerns about hospitals, schools, or crime. Which party has a coherent narrative about the UK’s place in the world?
Which leader is up for a fundamental rethink of everything the UK does internationally?
An accelerating shift in the global balance of power, combined with rapid technological change, mean that every aspect of the how the UK operates overseas should be open to question. Our diplomatic, military and development programmes are all struggling to meet policy objectives. Which party is prepared to countenance a genuinely fresh start?
Is all the UK’s international expenditure under review?
Only the Lib Dems are prepared to put Trident on the table. All parties assume that development spending will be ring fenced. And there’s a general assumption that the foreign service will continue to be starved for funds. But strategy (and the need to close the budget deficit) should drive funding decisions – not the need to protect sacred cows.
Does the leader have anything fresh to say about the UK’s alliances?
Can the European Union ever become an effective foreign policy actor? How? What policy results do we expect from the transatlantic relationship? Can the UK seize a brief window of opportunity to make the G20 function effectively? (BTW – ten points are subtracted from the first leader to get misty eyed about the Commonwealth.)
Who is most convincing on Afghanistan?
Clearly, the NATO mission in Afghanistan is in deep deep trouble – with few signs that the insurgency is being tamed or that the Karzai government is getting a grip on the country’s problems. Something has to change, but I’ve no idea what. Does Cameron, Clegg or Brown?
What about the NPT review?
Doha and Copenhagen have shown that the international system is unable to cope with global problems. The odds suggest that the NPT will fail as well, as the pace of nuclear proliferation picks up. The review conference starts immediately after the election. Will the new government bring any fresh ideas to the table?
by Richard Gowan | Apr 21, 2010 | Cooperation and coherence, Global system, Off topic
Dag Hammarsjkold never did this!
Ban Ki Moon will make his prime-time American television debut this evening on…American Idol. Yes. You heard correct. Sources confirm that the UN Secretary General will make a special guest appearance on tonight’s American Idol charity special, Idol Gives Back.
The program, which airs tonight at 8 P.M. (EST) on FOX, has raised over $140 million to benefit charities around the world. The show is much like the regular American Idol program, but interspersed are celebrity cameos and vignettes that highlight charities at home and abroad. The Obamas are also confirmed to make an appearance.
One of the charities highlighted this year will be the UN’s Biruh Tesfa (Bright Future) Project, a joint UN Foundation, UNFPA and Population Council initiative to create safe spaces for over 600 out-of-school girls in Ethiopia. Idol Season 7 Winner David Cook visited the project a few weeks ago, and my understanding is that footage from that trip will be shown tonight.
So will we see the return of MC Ban tonight? Sadly, no. Sources tell me that the Secretary General will thank Idol, via a video message, for supporting the work of the United Nations. The UN Foundation is one of five beneficiaries of Idol Gives Back.
If you want to catch this Ban sighting with fellow UN and Idol enthusiasts, the UN Foundation is hosting virtual watch parties. Enjoy!
What on earth would the SG’s predecessors’ think?
by Alex Evans | Apr 21, 2010 | Europe and Central Asia, UK
Tony Barber in Brussels:
Viewed from Brussels, the rise of Nick Clegg and his Liberal Democrats in Britain’s election campaign is a fantasy come true. For most of its 37 years in the European Union, Britain has been the bloc’s most awkward, cussed member-state. Now, the unthinkable is happening. Britain’s opinion polls are topped by a party whose leader spent five years working at the European Commission and another five years as a MEP in the European Parliament. Gott am Himmel! A Brit who actually understands the place!
And it doesn’t stop there. Clegg studied at the elite College of Europe in Bruges, an institution geared to producing crop after crop of graduates with a lifelong enthusiasm for EU integration. He speaks Dutch, French, German and Spanish, making him as proficient a linguist as such dedicated Europeans as Herman Van Rompuy, the EU’s full-time president, and Jean-Claude Juncker, the Luxembourg premier.
Clegg has a Dutch mother, a half-Russian father and three children called Antonio, Alberto and Miguel. There has been no British party leader like him since the EU’s 1957 Treaty of Rome. In fact, you may have to go all the way back to Charles James Fox, the Whig who briefly served as foreign secretary in the Napoleonic wars, to find a British statesman whose mental outlook was so naturally rooted in Europe. Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive! Clegg’s emergence is enough to make even the most agnostic Eurocrat think that there must be a god, after all.
by David Steven | Apr 21, 2010 | Cooperation and coherence, UK
So the UK’s airspace is open again after the Civil Aviation Authority issued this rather plaintive statement:
The CAA has drawn together many of the world’s top aviation engineers and experts to find a way to tackle this immense challenge, unknown in the UK and Europe in living memory.
Current international procedures recommend avoiding volcano ash at all times. In this case owing to the magnitude of the ash cloud, its position over Europe and the static weather conditions most of the EU airspace had to close and aircraft could not be physically routed around the problem area as there was no space to do so.
We had to ensure, in a situation without precedent, that decisions made were based on a thorough gathering of data and analysis by experts. This evidence based approach helped to validate a new standard that is now being adopted across Europe.
The major barrier to resuming flight has been understanding tolerance levels of aircraft to ash. Manufacturers have now agreed increased tolerance levels in low ash density areas.
The no-fly zones – if they are the same agreed by Eurocontrol – are a few tiny patches of sky, leaving the media increasingly convinced that the past week has been a to-do about nothing (cf. BSE, swine flu).
With the crisis seemingly ending in farce, let’s hope there’s not a final tragic act (a plane loses an engine or falls out of the sky) or sequel (Katla erupts). If that happens, journalists will swiftly execute a U-turn – to complain that governments have been reckless in putting passengers’ lives at risk, or have failed to equip the world’s aircraft with the sensors that can keep them flying when ash is in the air.
It’s still not clear to me how a few test flights – which one expert yesterday derided as evidentially useless – have allowed a safe level of ash for jet engines. According to the Guardian, however, there has been a tussle over the issue that long pre-dates this crisis, with industry (afraid of legal action) previously arguing for a rigid application of the precautionary principle.
When the inevitable enquiry is announced, I hope it is given a broad remit to look at how European society responded to the crisis, and not just be charged with focusing on technical issues.
As I have argued on Saturday morning, governments allowed themselves to get behind the curve on the crisis and never recovered; the media was always uncomfortable with the issue (until it settled on someone to blame); while the public response (including widespread use of social media) tells us a lot about how we are and are not resilient in the face of crisis.
All these aspects should be studied by the enquiry team.
In the UK. a lot of attention will quite rightly focus on how three organisations worked together – the CAA, NATS (the air traffic controllers), and the Met Office. While it is hard to know what went on behind the scenes, in public, the relationship between the three seemed increasingly strained.
At the start of the crisis, NATS was very happy to be in the lead. Over time, it became increasingly keen to pass the buck, underlining that it was only following advice given it by its fellow members of the ‘no fly’ triad.
Communication from the three organisations was woeful, in marked contrast with the much more proactive approach of Eurocontrol. I fail to understand why Ministers did not force them to run regular joint press conferences – and to establish a shared web portal (backed up by a Twitter feed) to provide regular and comprehensive updates.
Here’s a thread I think the enquiry might like to pick at, taking it into the opacity and vagueness of official communications. What on earth happened to the mysterious ‘second cloud’ that NAS was warning us about only the night before last?
Since our last statement at 1530 today, the volcano eruption in Iceland has strengthened and a new ash cloud is spreading south and east towards the UK. This demonstrates the dynamic and rapidly changing conditions in which we are working. Latest information from the Met Office shows that the situation is worsening in some areas.
I never saw any other evidence that this new cloud really existed (though perhaps it did) – but its existence was unquestioningly reported by media on both sides of the Atlantic. How, if the situation was worsening, could airspace be reopened just 24 hours later?
For all Global Dashboard coverage of the crisis – click here. Plus some risk management lessons from the Economist. Also, John Kay. And Sue Cameron gives Lord West a pasting for deploying the navy.
by David Steven | Apr 20, 2010 | UK
Blimey:
Stewart Jackson, Conservative shadow communities and local government minister and the party’s regeneration spokesman, was reported by audience members and rival parliamentary candidates to have told a public meeting organised by Peterborough Senior Citizens Forum last month that, in Afghanistan, “fifteen year old Muslim boys’ initiation rites are to rape a woman and shoot a foreigner”.
Jackson, who is the sitting MP in Peterborough, confirmed to this magazine that he had made the comments. But he said that the comments were made in reference to the situation on the ground in Afghanistan. He said they were “100 per cent” not his personal opinion but rather a view expressed in a briefing he had received on Afghanistan from the Ministry of Defence (MoD).
He said: “During a public discussion I referred to claims made at an MoD briefing on the situation in Afghanistan, this was part of a serious debate about complex issues and I hope no one is using it to try and score political points.”
But a MoD spokeswoman said that such a description of the situation in Afghanistan would be a complete departure from normal MoD practice. She said: “I can’t say that nobody from the MoD has ever said that but that is not the sort of thing we would ever say in an average MoD briefing”.
Update: This plays into an obsession on the fringes of the right with Muslim ‘rape gangs’. Our old friend, Mark Steyn, is a key promoter of this idea…
Update II: Stewart Jackson appears to have related concerns about the UK’s ‘broken society’:
The heart of Middle England is destined for asylum meltdown… News that the results of New Labour’s failed immigration policy are rising levels of violence and lawlessness on the streets of Peterborough come as no surprise to me – or anyone else who lives in the city…
Anyone walking through the city centre can see increasing numbers of young unemployed Kurdish men hanging around and residents are increasingly fearful as their area is used as a dumping ground for such ethnically mismatched groups like Afghans, Kurds and Pakistanis who riot and fight…
Tensions are growing not just between different ethnic minority groups – but also across the whole city – Pensioners, young families, professionals, Pakistanis. People are angry and feel impotent. When I knock on doors, people tell me that they’re fed up with seeing young men on street corners – mainly asylum seekers – intimidating old people and young women.
They’re fed up with homes being bought up in their neighbourhood by unscrupulous landlords milking the Housing Benefits system to let out to illegal immigrants used as cheap labour. And they’re angry that police resources are being diverted to keep warring factions in the city centre apart, whilst their streets suffer increased burglaries, robbery and car crime.
Update III: The UN has called rape a ‘profound’ crisis in Afghanistan.
Our field research also found that rape is under-reported and concealed and is a huge problem in Afghanistan. It affects all parts of the country, all communities, and all social groups. It is a human rights problem of profound proportion.
Women and girls are at risk of rape in their homes, in their villages, and in detention facilities. Rape is not unique to Afghanistan, but the socio-political context does have particular characteristics that exacerbate the problem. Shame is attached to rape victims rather than to the perpetrator. Victims often find themselves being prosecuted for the offence of zina, otherwise known as adultery.
For the vast majority of victims, there is very little possibility of finding justice. There is no explicit provision in the 1976 Afghan Penal Code that criminalizes rape. Thus, the UN recommended that the legislation on the Elimination of Violence Against Women make explicit reference to rape, contain a clear definition of rape in line with international law, and hold the government responsible for tackling this ugly crime.
The question remains, though, whether there is any evidence of it being used as an ‘initiation rite’. I think Stewart Jackson is going to have to give more details about who from the MOD briefed him and exactly what they said.
