This is not to denigrate the Nobel Peace Prize. Previous US winners have included Henry Kissinger, without whose efforts Agent Orange or Pol Pot might just as well have been the names of household detergents. And let’s not forget Kofi Annan – crazy name, crazy guy – whose inspired and proactive UN leadership during a global upsurge of genocide and unrest – er – did fuck all to stop anything. So far, Obama has not closed down Guantanamo and has fudged the issue of outlawing US sponsored torture. He is poised to enthrone a blatantly corrupt warlord and stands on the brink of escalating the Afghan conflict into a full-blown war which carries no prospect of ‘victory’ for the US or anyone else. He regularly condones the use of pre-emptive murder of political opponents in foreign countries – drone bombing in Pakistan and Somalia, for example. He was notoriously silent on the Gaza atrocities and is turning a blind eye to Israel’s cruel, illegal East Jerusalem land grabs designed to provoke a third ‘final solution’ Intifada, while blathering about peace in the Middle East. Paradoxically, and probably for all the wrong reasons, Netanyahu is doing a far better job of facing down the extremists, but he’s no John Lennon.

A token prize to a token President who deems destroying Afghanistan part of a ‘necessary war’ on the grounds that eight years earlier the (Saudi) perpetrators of 9/11 lived there, while still fawning at the feet of the country which provided 17 of the 19 known terrorists involved and funds Wahabbist hate regimes sets a fine example to warmongers everywhere. Whatever next? Tony Blair as President of Europe? Or is that too far-fetched?

President Barack Obama’s support for preventively detaining terrorism suspects undoubtedly surprised some of his longtime backers. Holding prisoners at Guantanamo, without the certainty of trial or release, was a defining feature of the previous administration’s counterterrorism policy – and some of its fiercest critics expected Obama to change the policies. But the possibility had been percolating for months. With his pledge in January to close the Guantanamo prison within a year, Obama set off a fierce, mostly under-the-radar debate among legal experts about whether it will be possible to meet the goal he announced yesterday: to build “a legitimate legal framework” for imprisoning terrorism suspects indefinitely.

The question affects more than Guantanamo. The fates of 169 detainees there remain undecided, according to Obama’s numbers yesterday, and administration officials have suggested that they will be unable to prosecute as many as 100. But the legal status of thousands more held by the United States in Afghanistan and elsewhere overseas also hangs in limbo, and any detention policy will have ongoing effects as the fight against al-Qaida continues. Here are some of the key issues facing the architects of a new preventive detention system, or, as it’s sometimes called, a “national security court”:

President Obama said yesterday that some suspected terrorists “cannot be prosecuted.” How could that be – haven’t there been plenty of previous cases involving terrorism?

Yes, there have been. A significant number of people have been convicted of terrorism-related offenses in federal trials, including several accused of acting on behalf of al-Qaida. From September 2001 to May of last year, the government won 145 convictions against terrorism suspects, according to an analysis by former federal prosecutors for the progressive legal nonprofit, Human Rights First. That’s not to say it’s easy. The criminal justice system was built to safeguard the rights of defendants. Prosecutors can’t win a case without enough admissible evidence. Sometimes, as in this week’s arrest of four suspects in New York, investigators have tape-recordings of the alleged illegal activity. But more often than not, they depend on witnesses. They can’t use testimony obtained through abusive interrogations. And intelligence agencies are typically loath to collaborate with a public prosecution that puts their sources on a witness stand.

Recent court filings by the Obama administration in cases challenging the legality of Guantanamo detentions offer a glimpse of possible hurdles to prosecuting an accused terrorist. Criminal defendants have the right to see information in government files that could help show their innocence, so prosecutors have a duty to search for all plausibly relevant documents to turn over. Officials said in the filings that evidence about the Guantanamo detainees tops 1.8 million pages, total. All of those would need to be searched for exculpatory information. A test query for several detainees yielded between several hundreds and tens of thousands of “hits” each.

Isn’t detention without trial illegal on its face?

Not necessarily. The traditional laws of war permit preventive detention of both enemy soldiers and hostile civilians until the end of the fight. Standards like the Geneva Conventions require humane treatment of these detainees. Holding aggressors without any intention of trying them is a time-honored right of fighting nations. Why? In wartime, combatants are supposed to fight – so, fighting itself is not a crime. Fighting dirty – for instance, purposefully killing innocent civilians – is prosecutable as a war crime. But even then, there’s no right to a speedy trial, and the captor nation can take its time deciding when or even whether to press charges. It has long been accepted that a nation at war has the right to protect itself by keeping enemies from returning to the battlefield, without having to invest resources or risk public release of military secrets in full-blown trials.

Every trial risks the possibility that a defendant could be acquitted or receive a moderate sentence. Under the laws of war, governments don’t need to take that risk.The possibility that convicted terrorists could win relatively quick release isn’t just theoretical. Of the three military commission convictions so far at Guantanamo, two resulted in sentences of, essentially, time served. One of those convicted was Salim Hamdan, Osama bin Laden’s driver, for providing material support to al-Qaida. He was sentenced last year to five-and-a-half years in prison – six months more than time served – and now lives free in Yemen, in a case where the government had sought life imprisonment. A detention system premised on the laws of war would permit Obama to keep his promise of yesterday: “We are not going to release anyone if it would endanger our national security.”

So is the United States at war with terrorists?

A trickier question than it might seem. Terrorists don’t wear uniforms or rush to a battlefield. The front, many argue, could be anywhere – a hotel room in Albania or an alley in Manila. For its part, al-Qaida declared war on the United States in 1998, shortly before its operatives blew up American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. Obama has expressed no skepticism on this point, saying in his speech: “We are indeed at war with al-Qaida and its affiliates.” He was able to say so because Congress, which has the constitutional power to declare war, issued the 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force after the 9/11 attacks.

That means some terrorists can be held indefinitely as prisoners of war, according to David Cole, a Georgetown University law professor long associated with civil liberties causes. Cole recently stunned the progressive legal community by supporting preventive detention for some detainees in a Boston Review essay. Cole explained in an interview, “You might not have evidence that would satisfy the criminal-conviction standard of proof beyond a reasonable doubt, but perhaps you have very good evidence that a person was a fighter for the Taliban. Should we just release him to go back to the caves and start shooting at U.S. soldiers, just because we don’t have sufficient proof to convict him of a crime?”

Retired U.S. Army Major General John Altenburg, who until resigning in November 2006 had the task of deciding which Guantanamo detainees would be slated for military commission trials, said the Bush administration’s “arrogance and naiveté” about public perception had tarnished the otherwise valid notion of detaining terrorism suspects under a wartime rationale. He said in an interview, “What the previous administration did was allow critics to define the terms of the debate to be the terms of domestic criminal law. So the public is reacting with, ‘What about their lawyer? What about their right to a speedy trial?’”

In fact, Altenburg said, the al-Qaida detainees are not entitled to a speedy trial any more than German prisoners of war in World War II were.

If wartime detention is OK, and the U.S. is at war with terrorists, then why does the nation need a new detention law?

This appears to be as much a question of political support as one of legal reasoning. Obama said yesterday that he’d seek a law spelling out procedures for preventative detention for reasons of political legitimacy. He said he wanted to avoid his predecessor’s “ad hoc legal approach for fighting terrorism.” Earlier this week, top Obama aides invited the most ardent opponents of preventive detention, including the head of the American Civil Liberties Union, to a two-and-a-half-hour meeting. Although administration officials have not publicly discussed that session, some guests were startled by the argument that the president already has sufficient authority to preventively detain terrorism suspects. Kenneth Roth, the executive director of Human Rights Watch, said afterward on a conference call with reporters that there was a “surprising misapprehension about what the laws of war permit.”

The legal authority that courts have recognized for the current military detentions of “enemy combatants” is the 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force, which doesn’t even mention detentions. If captives are moved to U.S. soil, they’ll likely be able to invoke greater legal protections than they’ve got now, according to a January analysis by Congressional Research Service lawyers. Possibly, some will even be able to seek political asylum under immigration laws. Long-term preventive detention would therefore require a new law and possibly amendments to others.

Part of the legal puzzle has to do with trying to apply traditional laws of war to the “novel” type of conflict that is terrorism, says Harvey Rishikof, professor of law and national security studies at the National War College. It’s just harder to tell who’s a combatant – and therefore detainable as a POW – and who’s a criminal suspect due for trial, because terrorists are “stateless actors” eschewing uniforms and avoiding battlefields. Attorney General Eric Holder hinted at the complexity of the “battlefield” question as it applies to terrorist combatants at his confirmation hearing. “There are physical battlefields, certainly, in Afghanistan,” he said. “But there are battlefields, potentially, you know, in our nation. There are cyber battlefields.” He went on, “There’s a battlefield, if you want to call it that, with regard to the hearts and minds of the people in the Islamic world.”

Major General Altenburg said, “I personally think the battlefield has to be beyond the ground of an Afghanistan, because al-Qaida is everywhere. Now, there’s no [court] holding anywhere that says that is the law of war, because again, this is unprecedented.”

How would preventive detention of terrorism suspects work?

The closest the public has gotten to a legislative blueprint for preventive detention of terrorism suspects appeared in a recent Wall Street Journal op-ed by Republican Sens. Lindsey Graham and John McCain. They called for a “uniform set of standards and procedures administered by a civilian judge,” who would decide the challenges to the legality of detention that the Supreme Court has said are a detainee’s right, and “an annual interagency review” to determine whether a detainee continues to threaten national security and should be held. The senators are expected to be influential voices as any new policy develops.

But before looking at the procedures, policymakers will have to decide who will face detention. The Bush administration initially claimed that it could indefinitely detain anyone the executive branch deemed an “enemy combatant.” The courts trimmed back that sweeping view, saying that the authority was shared with Congress and subject to judicial review. The question is especially acute for terrorism detention, says Harvard law professor and former Bush official Jack Goldsmith, who with Neal Katyal – then a Georgetown law professor, now Obama’s principal deputy solicitor general – was one of the earliest proponents of a new legal regime for terrorism suspects. Because this enemy doesn’t wear a uniform and, to the contrary, takes pains to blend with civilians, identifying candidates for military detention is harder. But since the end of this conflict may similarly be hard to know, there’s a risk that wrong decisions could harm innocent people for a very long time, Goldsmith warns.

One way to get lawmakers to seek utmost accuracy in any detention system, said Goldsmith at a recent Brookings Institution forum, would be to apply it to U.S. citizens as well. “The threat of terrorism can come as easily from a U.S. citizen,” he said. He noted, though, that the idea “is controversial and probably a nonstarter.” It could also be struck down by the Supreme Court, where there are some strong views that citizenship comes with special constitutional protections.

Cole, the Georgetown law professor, stressed that only detainees fitting a classic war-captive profile – members of an organization against whom Congress has authorized the use of military force, who deliberately act or plan harm in order to advance the military goals of the enemy – should be considered for preventive detention. Other terrorists, he said, “should be dealt with through the criminal law.” Broadening the field, he said, would be “a first step on a slippery slope of a broader use of preventive detention for other crimes.”

Some opponents of preventive detention say it’s Orwellian that such a system would imprison a person based on future dangerousness. But, says Cole, even if “we can’t predict the future,” it is possible to measure whether there is “a substantial risk that someone will engage in future dangerous conduct. Waiting for a wrong is not adequate.” Such judgments are made all the time, he said, in civil commitment proceedings, bail hearings and immigration decisions. He said that the key was to focus the inquiry narrowly, not on suspects’ character or beliefs, but on “whether they pose a risk of returning to the battle.”

Retired U.S. Navy Lieutenant Commander Charles Swift, who as a military lawyer represented Hamdan in his commission trial, worries that a preventive detention option will allow inaccurate judgments of dangerousness. He said that, after hearing all the evidence, “military [jurors] didn’t view Mr. Hamdan as a substantial war criminal.” But someone like Hamdan would be a prime candidate for indefinite detention over prosecution, he said: “The indicia of his criminality were extremely low, but his proximity to bin Laden was extremely high. The adversary system helped show how Hamdan was not dangerous – the question is, whether a national security court would allow that.”

Crucial questions will have to be answered about what burden of proof the government would have to meet to put someone in preventive detention. In civil trials, the prevailing party has to win by a preponderance of the evidence – meaning it’s more likely than not that the party is right. The criminal standard of proof beyond a reasonable doubt is much higher. Cole advocates that preventive detention be permitted if the government shows “clear and convincing evidence” that the detainee fits certain dangerousness criteria – the current standard for deciding whether an ordinary criminal suspect can be released on bail.

Proponents agree the government should have to periodically renew its case for detaining a person. While wartime detention permits imprisonment until the end of hostilities, no one assumes that it will be clear when hostilities with al-Qaida and its affiliates have ended. Holder said at his confirmation hearing that he could see such reviews happening annually.

Any new system will also have to build in rights for people facing detention. Should they have lawyers of their own choosing? Can hearsay evidence – the testimony of people who don’t have to show up in court and answer for themselves – be accepted against them, as it is under certain exceptions in ordinary court proceedings? Should detention hearings be open or secret? Federal courts are permitted to seal documents or close sessions in cases involving classified or other sensitive information. The presumption, however, is that the courts are open. Goldsmith said preventive detention proceedings should also be presumed public, calling it “essential” to establishing legitimacy here and abroad.

Finally, there is the question of who will decide. The Supreme Court has said that a neutral decision-maker is required to ensure due process for detainees. One of many criticisms of Guantanamo’s Combatant Status Review Tribunals – instituted by the Bush administration and still in effect today – is that the decision-makers are subordinates of the very military commanders who claim the detainees should be held as enemy combatants. Most current proposals for a new detention system say independent federal judges should make the final call.

Culture Secretary Andy Burnham tells BBC's Jonathan Dimbleby that government approval of the licence fee increase in an election year was entirely coincidental.

OK, they didn’t quite phrase it like that, but the backstory is that the BBC’s ‘liberal’ culture has traditionally manifested itself in bias against the Conservatives. Ironically, When New Labour swept to power, empowered by the support of the Murdoch media empire, it set about taking control of state communications in classic Stalinist fashion, starting with an exponential expansion in the number of government-salaried PR flaks. Led by the boorish Alastair Campbell, they intimidated, bullied and bored the BBC into a parody of independent broadcasting. Early into Labour’s Reich, many BBC apparatchiks felt about as comfortable as Irish kids in a Christian Brothers care home. When BBC reporter Andrew Gilligan claimed in 2003 that the ‘Weapons of Mass Destruction’ Dossier, the pretext for the UK to go to war in Iraq, was ‘sexed up’ by Campbell, the government went to war with the BBC. Gilligan’s source, UN weapons inspector Dr David Kelly, was hounded to suicide and Campbell made it his declared intention to ‘fuck’ Gilligan and the BBC. The resulting ‘sexed-down’ Hutton enquiry exonerated the government and led to the resignation of Gilligan, BBC Director General Greg Dyke and Chairman Gavyn Davies. New Labour poodle Mark Thompson replaced Dyke. The BBC, or at least any pretence to independence, was indeed fucked. 

This man, the highest paid recipient of state benefits, received£6 million, equivalent to half the BBC film budget, in 2008. Life is beautiful.

Unless you were in management. Dyke’s predecessor, Blairite John (now Baron) Birt, hobbled the corporation with wasteful and demoralising layers of neo-Soviet bureaucracy, schizophrenically linked to ‘streamlining’ attempts to create a neo-commercial ‘internal market’ culture. Instead of making programmes, producers and editors held the coats of outside contractors who charged ‘market rates’ – cost plus a profit – often to do exactly the same thing as inhouse staff. In a bizarre conceit of ‘competitive pricing,’ the BBC started paying market-leading fees to random ‘talent’ like Jonathan Ross, Graham Norton and their production companies to make formula chat shows, on air up to five nights a week. Professional interrogators such as Newsnight’s Jeremy Paxman now command over £1 million per year to broadcast polemic to minority audiences. Everyone, apart from the audiences, has benefited immensely.

In a mirror image of commercial media, the pyramid scheme was sustained by ballooning growth in executive salaries and infrastructure. As commercial stations succumbed to market forces as viewing figures and advertising revenues declined despite an economic boom, the BBC, with £3.2 billion guaranteed revenues from a captive taxpaying audience, has expanded more or less any way it chose. 

The BBC never tires of proclaiming itself as the envy of the world. To the degree that it maintains an undemocratic right to broadcast, based upon compulsory subscription, this may be true, especially if you are a journalist in the free market. It broadcasts some excellent, worthy factual and documentary content, consistently good comedy shows and panel games and has a great website. But does it efficiently deliver value and relevancy? Morale, especially amongst its creative staff is generally low. And, dare I say it – of course I will – its news output is often partial, patchy, and hopelessly unrepresentative. This morning on the posh channel, Radio 4, we heard another non-story about MPs’ salaries, a small piece about Congress resistance to Obama’s Climate Change Initiatives and Guantanamo travails, a longer piece about Madeleine McCann, an even longer piece about the alleged demise of the dormouse from Britain’s countryside and the earth-shattering news that a couple of WH Auden’s embarrassing odes to Soviet Communism, used as subtitles for an obscure propaganda film, lost for 50 years in the archives of the British Film Institute, have been uncovered – and found to be crap. Mostly twaddle, not news. Commercial channels may be no better, but they rely on subscription revenues and advertising, not state coercion, for their right to exist. Their audiences vote with their wallets. When the Tories return to power, a Great Terror will descend upon this monument to Birt/Blair/Brown Stalinism. The chatterati will wring their hands, but the proles will hardly notice. Telly is telly, especially when it becomes digital wallpaper. It doesn’t have to be that way.  

John J Kelly

We landed in the middle of the night in Addis Ababa, took a small plane across the highlands to Dire-Dawa then travelled by jeep to Harar, passing vast herds of camels and a few hitch hikers with AK 47s on the road – destitute demobbed soldiers abandoned after the abrupt withdrawal from Somalia, a footnote to the Bush-sponsored ‘war on terror’. Fifteen hours after leaving Heathrow, we drank coffee, picked from the bush, roasted and ground before our eyes by a group of kids who might just hold the key to Ethiopia’s future. That’s what Simon had brought me to see, and that’s why I’m telling you this.

Manufacturing coffee at Webmart Business School, Harar

Simon Biltcliffe is a new age print farmer. His company – better described as a Posse – Webmart, brings buyers and sellers of print together. Webmart (turnover £37 million and rising) is fuelled on can-do, adrenalin and the principle that you make a lot of money if you save people money. Old school Quality, Service, Value empowered by peer-to-peer high technology enables turnarounds and transaction cost savings that would give RyanAir a run for its money (without the sweary CEO and leery attitude towards customers and suppliers). Planned philanthropy is embedded in the business model. Because. That’s why kids in a forgotten region of the horn of Africa were wearing yellow T shirts, learning how to use computers and how to build sustainable 21st century enterprises.

Hyena man and friends

We watched a shaman feed wild hyenas with strips of meat hung on a stick (from his mouth) at dusk outside the ancient Medina walls of Harar, one of the holiest cities of Islam (85 mosques)and erstwhile home of Arthur Rimbaud (he was an arms dealer when he wasn’t a poet). There was nothing remotely Disney about those beasts, the true entrepreneurs of the plains. Contrary to popular belief, lions feast on what the hyena packs leave behind. The Hyena man ekes a living with tips from passing travellers and a stipend from the elders – appeasing hyenas must rank among the most dangerous and unusual of council jobs.

Only 16,000 tourists came to Ethiopia in total last year and very few westerners make it to Harar. Sir Richard Burton (pervy Victorian adventurer and translator of the Kama Sutra, not the Welsh actor) was one of the first westerners allowed into the medina in the 1870s. He stayed a week. A Rastafarian called Solomon showed us round the back alleys (there weren’t that many front alleys). He remembered Geldof fondly – said Bob had stayed for five days back in the ’80s, loved it but hadn’t been back. He asked me about his wife and kids. I didn’t elaborate on Peaches or poor Paula. The Rastas aren’t favoured on account of their worship of Haile Selassie, but Christians, Muslims, Hyena men and folks with sidearms rubbed along together just fine, as far as we could see, contrary to dire western rumours of Islamic militancy and religious conflict.

Ethiopian natural resources

All were united in their need to work out how to survive another day. We had cash, food, shoes. We were lucky. We travelled further east, to Babile, a predominantly Somalian refugee township, where the lucky folk had cut up tyres on their feet. Most kids were missing one or more parent. Some were HIV orphans, others were victims of someone else’s pointless war. Although it rains for three months a year, water is scarce and agriculture is neolithic. The Chinese are building a pipeline and digging wells, but somehow it hasn’t happened yet. Women and kids slave as they have always done. The lucky ones have something to do. Babile’s cash crop is Chat, a mild hallucogenic leaf which men chew to give them energy and help them forget. Nothing much happens before the noonday chat wagon arrives, then men squat, chew and mill about. Our driver, somewhat alarmingly, was an Chat afficionado. He gave me some leaves to try: it would have been rude to refuse. The journey back to Harar was mellow.

Business 101, Harar, Ethiopia

Webmart Business School pays young people to come to learn computer and basic business skills. Even this tiny stipend helps the students and their families – often without parents – eat regularly. The logic and business plan is compelling and ambitious. Given the hurdles to development, it is pointless to sustain stone age subsistence farming practices. You can dole out metal hoes to replace the wooden ones and bring the people into the 18th Century, but Ethiopia needs and deserves access to 21st Century trading and management leadership. And it should be homegrown. The sleekest people driving the biggest trucks were UN workers and NGOs. The only difference between them and the wonderful kids we met was circumstance of birth and access to international aid money. Unchannelled Aid anchors subsistence, dependence and, sadly, enables corruption. In itself, it is as pernicious and harmful as Chat.

In partnership with Alchemy World, a small but perfectly focused social entrepreneurship group, Webmart is funding the development of a cadre of students who can seed a self-help culture in a country which has no shortage of beautiful and intelligent people, but precious little in the way of luck and natural resources. Back in Addis, we watched Obama’s inauguration on TV. Africans were uncritically proud. We met an Alchemy graduate who had made $400.00 in the last month from her nascent travel business. Her father makes $37.00 a month and needs to support a family of seven. Reed Elsevier have given her a stand at World Travel Mart in London in November, and support Alchemy with free advertisements. I for one will chip in for her expenses.

The maths are simple. 1000 Alchemy graduates could permanently transform the lives of tens of thousands of people. If they are obliged to emigrate they get upskilled jobs when they do. If they stay, they have the nous to exploit the undoubted human and natural resources of this extraordinary country. The investment has to be better than waiting for the next sack of UN rice or the Chinese water that never quite makes the last mile. What’s in it for Webmart? Absolutely nothing, apart from knowing that selling that print run just might have changed the lives of people who deserve a chance to help themselves.

John J Kelly.

PS. If you want to help, contact Simon Biltcliffe or Alchemy World.

   Lula da Silva says this problem was caused by white men with blue eyes. That lets both of us off the hook

Several Latin American leaders have reported the same disturbing hallucination. A rumpled fat man with a very large head, dressed in a cheap suit and badly-knotted tie turns up unannounced and tries to get them to commit to spending vast sums of money, which they do not have, on unspecified things which they do not need. ‘At first I thought it was the Man from Del Monte,’ said an anonymous victim, ‘but he insisted his mission was bigger than pineapple chunks and concerned nothing less than saving the world’s poor from the wasteful antics of the world’s rich. I pointed out that it was ‘white men with blue eyes’ who had caused the problem. At that point he took out his false eye and said “well in that case, it wasnee me.” My friend Cristina Kirchner says he recommended ‘quantitative easing’ but it sounded like Peronist hyper-inflation. When she politely asked him about the Malvinas, he said; “Exactly. Remember the Belgrano. Vote yes to excess and nobody gets hurt, Evita.”

‘When I recommended that he went to see President Chavez of Venezuela, who has vowed to cut spending on mobile phones, parties, cakes, pointless trips abroad and wasteful public projects, the Man from Del Monte said Hugo was a publicity-crazed megalomaniac, friend of someone called Red Ken, only interested in nationalising banks and keeping global assets such as oil and gas to himself and helping troublemakers like Cuba, Nicaragua and Guatemala. Besides, only the top 20 countries by GDP were invited (including the EU, which wasn’t yet a country). 

“The Man from Del Monte promised plenty of snatch squads, riots and mayhem, tasers and coshing just like the old days in Latin America. “These people dinna ken that giving billions of dollars to bankers would help the world’s poor,” he said. “But look at Fred Goodwin. He rose from poverty to become the UK’s highest paid pensioner – and he’s only 50.” I said I was unaware of this Fred Shred man, but that his friend George Soros, who had helped the UK in the past by selflessly keeping it out of the European Monetary System and making $1 billion dollars on the side, had said that the focus should be on the developing economies. I said that Mrs. Merkel had put two fingers up to his proposal that Germany become a Weimar Republic again, and that the world’s bond markets had failed to see the logic of his masterplan, failing to buy less than £2 billion of UK gilts. “The world’s poor bankers won’t forget that,” he growled, “and neither will the Bilderberg boys if you don’t join the coalition of those willing to spend recklessly and print pretend money – you did it in the past, why not now?” When I asked him if Barack Obama was coming, the Man from Del Monte, he say “Yes. I’m taking him to dinner at a jive club and buying him an Arctic Monkeys T shirt. Plus, the police have orders not to stop his car when he travels through Brixton.”  ”Why didn’t you say so earlier, fat boy, I’ll be on the next plane,” I said, “But why are you holding your G20 photo opportunity in a horrible docklands warehouse in a bankrupt country?” “It’s symbolic of the new economic landscape we’re all working towards creating,” said the Man from Del Monte. ‘And, anyway, that’s where we’re holding the Olympics, too.”

John J Kelly

‘Over the ages, great changes have tended to come out of adversity.  The welfare state was after all born out of depression and global conflict.  A moment of crisis is precisely the time to think boldly about what it was that precipitated the disaster, and to plan for doing things better in the future.  For some years now I’ve felt that our national politics in Britain has lost the ability to be bold.  It has become too “managerial”, too absorbed with minor adjustments – tinkering, almost – and too little prepared to set ambitious goals and seek to persuade people to join the journey towards them.  We need to recapture some of that spirit, in the same way that politics and political discourse have been triumphantly revived over the past couple of years on the other side of the Atlantic.

‘When we emerge from this economic turmoil what we mustn’t do is simply re-establish what went before, and continue with all the old assumptions – about patterns of growth, consumption, and impact – as if nothing had happened.  2009 could be the year when we radically change some of our economic and social habits, and make a historic shift towards a more sustainable pattern of human activity and economic interaction. 

‘It was notable that when the Climate Change Act finally passed through the House of Commons there were only three votes against it.  It is rare for such a fundamental piece of legislation to arrive on the statute book with such overwhelming cross-party support.  Could we dare to hope that this same non-partisan approach could be established more generally for the environmental and climate change agenda?  How about, as a start, an official mechanism for sharing information and papers between government and opposition parties, on privy council terms, on a regular basis?  It’s done when the country is preparing for war; given the sheer importance of the issue, can’t it be done for the war on climate change?  And how about a cross-party delegation at Copenhagen, to demonstrate the national commitment that transcends any single government or parliament?

‘Not only should the Government be doing things itself in the short term, but it must also be acting as a catalyst for much wider change . . . They could start by developing a full-scale, comprehensive, nationally publicised programme to fit better insulation and provide improved energy efficiency to people’s homes.  We’ve had some scattered initiatives to date, but no sense of a full-scale national endeavour.  When the change was made, years ago, to natural gas in the home, there was a team of people who called door to door, making changes, fitting new meters and valves, and explaining what was happening.  Everyone knew about it, everyone made sure they participated, and a remarkably smooth and successful transformation was achieved.  We need the same approach. 

‘In the immediate term, Government – and the broader public sector – should be leading by example.  All public buildings should be fitted with solar or photovoltaic panels.  New buildings should be fitted with ground-source pumps.  Public land should be used, where possible, for wind power generation.  Every new public building should meet the highest possible standards for energy and water efficiency, becoming a showcase of good practice for other local businesses and organisations to follow.  Government and public bodies should be switching their fleet vehicles to those with low-emission and hybrid engines, and reducing mileage wherever possible.  Video-conferencing should be used more frequently.  And I would like to see every government department and public-sector organisation required to publish an Environmental Responsibility Report alongside its budget each year.

‘Government can also make it much easier for households to get access to photovoltaic panel technology, and wind turbine technology, for their own homes.  Feed-in tariffs are an important part of the picture, but how about a one-stop-shop clearing house for arranging and organising the work, run by each local authority or a cluster of local authorities, to enable householders to get it done with a minimum of fuss and effort?  And how about interest-free loans to assist those households who might find it difficult to pay up-front?  How about priority access to the electricity grid for household renewables, as happened in Germany?  This resulted in far higher take-up by households than here, and we should learn from the incentives and procedures they put in place.

‘One of the great tragedies of the past twenty years has been that some of these early forms of renewable technology – wind turbines, and solar and photovoltaic panels – have been seized on and developed by other countries, and not by firms based here in Britain.  Does this have to be a permanent state of affairs?  As we increasingly ratchet up the demand for these forms of energy generation, isn’t there a strong case for trying to develop a large-scale manufacturing capacity here?  There are some small investments . . . . struggling against mega-competition from Denmark and Germany and elsewhere – but these are isolated examples.  Surely this should be a case of genuine opportunity that could be unlocked by investment from the Regional Development Agencies?  

‘Nick Stern, for example, said at the recent Davos summit that the world needed to invest $400 billion in low-carbon technologies and infrastructure over the next two years.  President Obama has placed green technology and renewable energy at the core of his proposals for a major public-works stimulus to the US economy: making the argument on energy-security and environmental and economic grounds.  There is good precedent for this.  Franklin Roosevelt planted hundreds of thousands of trees as part of the New Deal public-works programme – and in the process helped to stabilise the shifting soils of the dustbowl lands that had created such agricultural poverty over earlier decades.  He built dams and channelled water and irrigated new pastures.  He understood precisely how the deployment of publicly-led investment could help to transform the relationship between the land and the people who could derive work and benefit from it.  Barack Obama recognises this too, for energy as well as for land. 

‘The centrality of green initiatives to the Obama rescue package is highlighted by estimates from the Climate Change Centre of Excellence at HSBC, comparing the green percentage content of stimulus packages on a country by country basis.  The initial analysis shows that green investments represented only 2% of the Bush Stabilization Act measures;  they represent 16% of the Obama proposals.  The comparative figures for the other highly-performing countries are 34% for China, 19% for Germany, 10% for Spain, and 69% for South Korea.  The equivalent figure for the UK is 7%.  This is disappointing for the UK.  It represents some good specific initiatives, but it has tended to be in bits and pieces.  There is as yet no sense of an overall, coherent, planned, national strategy to see green investment as central to the recovery.  There should be.  And surely the forthcoming Budget – together with the publication of the low-carbon industrial strategy – is precisely the place to do it.

‘At the heart of any such green investment strategy must be nothing less than the complete transformation of energy generation in Britain.  If we are to have the remotest chance of meeting our 80% reduction target by 2050, we have to have more or less de-carbonised our electricity production completely by 2030.  And in order to do so, we have to ensure that carbon is removed from fossil-fuel-burning processes (more of this in a moment).  We have to include new nuclear generation within the overall mix –and this means solving the major outstanding dilemma of how to find a safe and secure repository for our high-level and intermediate-level radioactive waste.  And we have to make huge strides in our hitherto faltering progress in the development of renewables.

‘There’s a tendency amongst some within the “green movement” to talk only of doom and gloom.  To paint a picture of rising sea-levels and disappearing forests and growing deserts and violent storms and food and water scarcity and destroyed biodiversity and wars over environmental territory, and to tell us all that we’re going to hell in a handcart unless we all turn into green hippies and live off the land.  The problem is, it simply isn’t going to happen;  people won’t want to live their lives like this.  It’s difficult enough to convince people to do something, however small, to help to avoid a disaster that is waiting to happen but hasn’t happened yet.  To do so on the back of an unrelievedly doom-laden analysis isn’t going to persuade very many people.  We need to learn the classic lesson that Barack Obama has re-taught us:  tell it as it is, yes, but give a sense of hope that things could be made to be different.  And that all we need is the will to do it.

‘What’s more, in relation to environmental change, we’ve done it before.  The past fifteen years have seen an 80% reduction in sulphur dioxide emissions.  The hole in the ozone layer has been repaired.  The threat of acid rain has retreated.  It’s all happened because of human endeavour, incentives, and regulation.  And in the process we’ve demonstrated that it is possible to change environmentally-destructive behaviour for the better.  We need to apply the same dedication, now, to the issue of climate change. 

‘So, give everyone the facts, yes.  Give them hope too.  And then go beyond that, and give them the opportunity to shape the debate and discussion about what we want society to look like in forty years’ time.  Until last year, we tended to assume that the key to perpetual economic progress was ever-increasing consumption, and indeed that part of the cure for our economic ills is to re-start the consumption motor.  Could we, though, envisage a time when we think more of the balance between consumption and consolidation and – dare we think it – sharing;  when we try to find our way to a new economics that factors in the needs of future as well as current generations;  when we try to place a real value on the resources that we use up, and the waste we generate, and the impact on the rather fragile world around us without which we couldn’t do anything;  and when we see wisdom in some rather old concepts like husbandry and stewardship and well-being?  These aren’t easy things to shout about and inspire people with.  It means appealing to something more than the automatic immediate aspirations people have.  It doesn’t mean abandoning the sense of reaching for the best that life can offer.  But it does mean having the maturity to discuss and decide, seriously, what the shape of “the best” might be.  Surely it must be the case – in the shadow of  economic crisis – that the right time to have this discussion, to make this change, is here and now.

 As George Bernard Shaw used to say, “Some men see things as they are and say why;  I dream things that never were, and say – why not”.   

Pop artist Patrick Hughes used to hand people an exquisite calling card inscribed with the single phrase: ‘Why are you telling me this?’ I’ve been trying very hard to understand why anyone feels the need to bother strangers with random jibber-jabber, and how this has become a global phenomenon. Trying to fathom the Zeitgeist, I joined Twitter, but frankly couldn’t make beak nor tail of it. The first thing it asks is ‘ what are you doing right now?’ My immediate reaction was: ‘depends who’s asking.’ I probably should have stopped there, but in a spirit of uncharacteristic bonhomie replied that I was ‘thinking about revolution, and how to start one.’ Nobody seemed interested. I tried again, wondering if ‘the CIA, Mossad and M16 ‘Twittered.’ I now have seven followers. One is Barack Obama. Last time I looked, he was following 368,000 Twits. If he’s spending his time reading messages in the ether about someone’s plans to meet their friend Sandra for a lary hen night, thinly-veiled PR plants such as: ‘Buying tickets to see the great film, Watchmen,’ or ‘drinking Lucozade’ I think we have the answer as to the outcome of the current global crisis.

Oo-ee chirpy chirpy cheep cheep, chirpy chirpy cheep cheep chirp (repeat)

“Things Can Only Get Better” by D:Ream was the sinister and emetic anthem of Blair’s New Labour, fittingly a middle-of-the road song from a made-up pop group. Things most certainly didn’t get better for the huddled masses in Iraq, who got their arses tweeted out of existence by people they’d never harmed and didn’t even know. They didn’t get better for the workers – they never did, really. They didn’t improve for the middle classes, who saw their real disposable incomes fall by up to 30% in the US and UK. They did get better for Tony, Cherie, a bunch of warmongering liars, private equity spivs, arms dealers, some Jocks who ruined our financial system and people who sell surveillance systems. I’m not a natural optimist, and don’t join in with football chants or the national anthem. I didn’t cry when Elton John crooned ‘Candle in the Wind’ in a ridiculous wig at Di’s funeral. I’m not a natural Twit. My loss, I know. Another Scottish pop group, actually called ‘Middle of the Road,’ penned one of the most vapid hits of all time: ‘Chirpy Chirpy Cheep Cheep,‘ whose non-sequitur lyrics can be viewed as a surrealist comment on the emptiness of existence (‘where’s your momma gone – far, far away’) or as absolute bollocks. Either interpretation will suffice, if you think about it, which I know is a deeply unfashionable pursuit. It spent 34 weeks in the international charts then disappeared like Boo.com.

Fair play to Twitter and all the Twits. My partner in crime, Daniel Taghioff, started Twittering a week ago at my behest and has amassed a following of thousands. His tweets are sensible, pithy and occasionally witty. But I’m with Patrick Hughes. I don’t know why you’re telling me this.

John J Kelly

A load of crystal balls but I like it and who am I to talk?

I was cloyingly complimentary about The Economist a few posts back, but need to put the record straight by sneering at the article by ‘editor-in-chief’ John Micklethwait in ‘The World in 2009.’ His sententious advice to Barack Obama uncharacteristically reeks of transatlantic cant. He observes that Obama will find it difficult to please the left wing of the Democrats and will need to work hard to combat impatience for change. Then he urges Obama to try not not to change too much at all. His assumption that continuing to wage war in Afghanistan and staying in Iraq are non-negotiable options is redolent of the specious neo-Liberal fence-sitting that allowed the last administration to wage war and wreak havoc at will. Obama needs to effect radical change to achieve escape velocity from the powerful dark gravity of the status quo. The first 90 days will shape the rest of his term. Hillary Clinton may represent reactionary interests. Maybe Barack walks that road too, under which circumstances John M. is right. But while the majority of Economist revenues and the largest group of subscribers are in North America, its editor, an expert on the US – see The Right Nation – does not have to try quite so hard, quite so soon, to appease its disgruntled conservatives, unless he is one himself, of course. 

On the other hand, Ann Wroe writes a playful obituary of the Presidency of George W Bush in the endpages of the same Brainiac’s Annual, which also contains an excellent section on the environment, a very good piece by John Peet about Europe’s unresolved conflicts and an unmissable piece by Laza Kekic: ‘Twenty years of capitalism: was it worth it?’ which debates whether former communist states in Central and Eastern Europe have necessarily progressed since the Berlin Wall came down.

My late and much-missed brother-in-law, FT writer Peter Martin invented The World in . . . series when running The Economist Intelligence Unit 23 years ago. Daniel Franklin has done his memory proud with this edition in particular. I disagree with much of it, especially Kissinger’s witterings (let’s whack Iran), but it takes all sorts and . . there I go again, liking The Economist. Tell me I’m not a Tory. Or a neocon. Or an economist.