by David Steven | Feb 22, 2010 | UK
The eruption of bullygate reminds me of this recent exchange between Labour MP, Sandra Osborne, and Peter Ricketts, the Foreign Office’s Permanent Secretary:
Osborne: Could I ask you about staff morale as far as bullying, harassment and discrimination is concerned? In the staff survey of 2008-I know that Mr. Bevan referred to the 2009 survey, which has not yet been published-17% of all FCO staff reported experiencing this, and it was only 11% on average across Whitehall. Also, 20% of locally based staff reported this, as opposed to 14% of UK-based staff. How do you explain this relatively high level of reporting of harassment and bullying?
Ricketts: First, can I say that I find it absolutely unacceptable? It’s something that we are worried about and working on. We are very, very keen to see that we get to the bottom of it and root out whatever the problems are. Mr. Bevan can give you details of where we are in the 2009 staff survey. To our real disappointment, that number has not come down very significantly. It has come down from 17 to 16%, which is not good enough, so we have to continue to tackle this problem seriously.
Part of it is understanding exactly what is going on here. We put together bullying, harassment and intimidation, and I need to understand more about what are the actual problems that staff are reporting there, because any suggestion of bullying or harassment is completely unacceptable. Indeed, we are prepared to take staff out of positions abroad and bring them home if we see evidence of behaviour that is bullying or harassment, and we have done that, so we’re trying to send the strongest signal we can, which is taking people out of their postings and bringing them back to London if we see evidence of that.
Osborne went on to point out that “reported levels of discrimination, bullying or harassment tended to be higher among the staff at lower grades, disabled staff and minority ethnic groups, black staff in particular.” James Bevan, the FCO’s DG for Change and Delivery, replied:
You are right. We were so concerned by the 17% figure from the last survey that we commissioned a more detailed analysis of what the data were telling us, and they told us that, by and large, the allegations tend to relate to junior officers who feel that they are being bullied by senior officers and to local staff who sometimes feel that they are being bullied by UK staff, and that there is a higher prevalence of reported experience of this behaviour from black minority ethnic and other minority groups.
One thing that I have done is to meet with representatives of the black staff to talk through why they think this is happening. I have to say that there were some very convincing stories which resulted in my writing to all our heads of mission abroad to say that we are particularly concerned at the high levels of reported behaviour affecting black and minority ethnic staff and that we wanted to crack down on it absolutely to make sure that it reduces next year. The task for us now is to analyse the latest data in the new survey and see if that has happened. If it has not, we will have to keep going.
It’s a worrying finding.
Update: It turns out these are not new findings. From 2006:
One in ten government workers in Whitehall say that they are being bullied, a staff survey has revealed. The research says that the figure rises to one in three in the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, with black and Chinese employees suffering the worst harassment.
by Mark Weston | Feb 20, 2010 | Africa, Conflict and security, Economics and development
“It’s not diamonds that are the problem,” says Ali, a Lebanese diamond dealer in eastern Sierra Leone. “Diamonds are just stones. It’s people that are the problem.”
Sierra Leone has some of the highest quality diamonds in the world. Like a lottery winner who wastes his fortune and sinks into misery, however, the country has been unable to cope with its windfall. “Blood diamonds” have been blamed for causing its horrific civil war, which saw rebel militias, Liberian thugs, mercenaries, Sierra Leone’s army, and UN and Nigerian “peacekeepers” killing and maiming in a desperate struggle to gain control of the gem trade.
Since the war finished in 2002, Sierra Leone has languished among the world’s poorest countries, with nothing to show for its rich treasure trove of minerals. Economists see it as a classic example of the resource curse, which plagues many poor nations endowed with valuable natural commodities: mineral wealth allows governments to neglect the rest of the economy, enrich themselves, and ignore those outside their circles, forcing the excluded to resort to violence to obtain a share of the loot.
But the failure of resource-rich nations is not inevitable. Botswana has thrived on the back of its diamond mines. South Africa, brimming with gold and diamonds, is Africa’s largest economy. Australia, another diamond producer, doesn’t do too badly.
Earlier this week we spent the day at a diamond mine near Kenema. Johnny, a Sierra Leonean who has spent most of his life in England, has come back with his wife Suzy to dig for diamonds. Using borrowed money, they have leased an acre of land deep in the jungle and hired fifty men from surrounding villages to dig a forty-foot-deep pit and sift through the mud and gravel it throws up.
It is easy to see the allure. When we arrive, Johnny shows me yesterday’s haul of eight small stones. The first looks like an undistinguished lump of glass, but the second, flawless, looks like a diamond and, although rough (it will be cut in India or Antwerp), its different facets glitter as I turn it around in the sun. It is worth about £1,000. On the neighbouring plot last year, a Lebanese found a thirty-carat diamond worth £4 million. From one moment to the next, Johnny could get rich.
Or die trying. Another nearby plot was mined for two years by some Americans. They didn’t find a single gem. Prices fell by 80% in the recession, prompting many miners and dealers to switch to gold, which provides a steadier, less risky income. Ali’s business partner almost bankrupted him by giving him a fake cheque for £100,000-worth of diamonds. “We say the profit from diamonds reaches from your toes to your knees, but the losses reach up to your throat,” he says, making a strangling gesture. He is currently pursuing the man through Interpol.
(more…)
by Alex Evans | Feb 19, 2010 | Europe and Central Asia, Influence and networks, UK
At the Chatham House seminar a couple of weeks ago on David and my paper on how the UK organises for influence – part of the Institute’s program on rethinking the UK’s international ambitions and choices – one of the members of Britain’s foreign policy making community put a blunt question on the table. Do we want to be a global player, or do we want to be Norway?
Pleasingly, this question was answered moments later by another participant who does a lot of consulting work for Chinese, Indian and Russian firms, who pointed out that as far as emerging economies are concerned, the UK is already Norway. (Well, actually it was slightly less good than that – specifically, they felt that the UK was irrelevant except as far as its indebtedness was concerned – but let’s not get stuck on details.)
Me, I feel we’re at risk of losing sight of a larger point: that being Norway would be awesome for British foreign policy. Consider:
– No-one trusts us because we’re Perfidious Albion and we keep invading people. Everyone trusts Norway, on the other hand, so they’re like the capital of peace mediation and get peace processes named after their capital city.
– Norway used their North Sea oil to set up a vast Sovereign Wealth Fund. It’s worth £259 billion. They’ve used this to become the mother of all socially responsible activist investors, and can just unilaterally decide to launch massive global policy initiatives to halt deforestation. Hey Gordon – where’s our North Sea Oil SWF? Huh? Huh?
– While we make a lot of noise about Official Development Assistance Spending, Norway gives nearly twice as much ODA as the UK as a proportion of GNI: 1% versus our 0.56% in 2010. Norway also does way better on policy coherence for development than the UK: in the 2009 CGD Commitment to Development Index, Norway scored 6.6, ranking 3rd overall among 22 rich countries. The UK only got 5.1, placing us 12th.
– Norway still has fish in its fisheries, because it successfully used the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea to tell the EU fishing fleet to go screw itself. (The EU duly subsidised its flotilla of mainly Spanish boats to clean out African waters instead. Heh heh – ever the enlightened ‘post-modern superpower’, eh readers?)
– Ummm… oh yeah, Norway’s not in the EU! They are, though, in the EEA – so they still get membership of the Single Market (though not the CAP or the CFP – result!) and still get access to fun x-Europe schemes like the European health insurance card, Erasmus university exchanges, etc. (Admittedly, I’m actually in favour of increased European harmonisation on foreign policy. But being a realist, I recognise that Europe’s heads of government are not with me on this one. This being so, colour me unconvinced on the argument that “being an EU member increases the UK’s influence on foreign policy”. Er – Copenhagen?)
Plus they have the Northern Lights, and the Hurtigruten, and they officially read more than anyone else in the world.
Case closed. Just figured out our project’s core recommendation. Time for lunch.
by Alex Evans | Feb 19, 2010 | Economics and development, UK
Ask not for whom the bell tolls: it tolls for the UK, as Jennifer Hughes has it…
A UK newspaper is said to have once run the headline “Fog over Channel, Continent Isolated”.
British attitudes may have changed since, but there will be some in London watching the eurozone wrangles over Greece and thanking the UK’s monetary isolation. But this would not reflect the market reality: while headlines have focused on Greece and the other weak eurozone members, investors have been steadily selling UK debt.
On Thursday this reached some milestones; 10-year gilt yields hit 15-month highs and the spread, or premium the UK pays over German borrowing costs, reached a full percentage point for the first time in four years. The UK now pays as much to borrow as Italy, considered one of the more vulnerable eurozone members and – at best – rated two notches below Britain.
