Chinese scientists to flood Europe

China is coming.
They sold us cars, shoes, bras, computers. Now their scientists are set to flood into Europe. For those who remember how Britain balked at giving residency permits to 50,000 elite Hong Kong Chinese at the 1997 colony handover, the potential numbers are staggering.
Over 1.2 million will be eligible for a golden handshake package to fill the boffin skills gap. Europe doesn't produce enough scientists to compete with the rest of the world.
The continent is not giving birth to enough young people, those young people that are born don't want to go into science because it is too difficult and unrenumerative, and those that do go into science use their degrees to get into good finance jobs, not research or teaching.
The result: Europe no longer wins Nobel prizes.
The golden handshake - including visa, residence and employment permit free permission to settle anywhere in Europe - and a 45,000 euro annual stipend while looking for posts is sure to attract the growing number of post graduates emerging from China's universities - but who go straight into local unemployment, or a low paid job.
Even in booming China, there is not enough business to support the five million science graduates annually from, among others, the astonishing 25 research universities that are in the process of being built. (Europe can't even get its single Institute of Technology off the ground.)
Those that do employ Chinese scientists, such as Microsoft research lab Asia, get the pick of the crop. Its director was recently quoted as saying "In China, if you are one in a million, there are 1,300 people like you." Its creative output outdoes all the other three Microsoft research labs - including the one in Cambridge, England, and in Seattle, according to an interview Bill Gates gave last year. But Microsoft is as yet still in a minority.
"Chinese graduates used to be able to walk into a secure state job in China," says Jianji An, a Chinese diplomat "But because of the expansion of numbers and a new free market philosophy, no longer."
The visas will be granted subject to competitions announced on the commission's website and the programme was launched at an EU-China summit in Brussels this week, which I attended, during which China's continuing contribution to the Galileo global positioning satellite programme and its support for the ITER fusion reactor were also affirmed.
China is the largest single external shareholder in the EU's GPS Galileo project - whose recently mooted extension of use to military purposes to recoup outlays worries Washington. And the country gave Europe political support on the fusion reactor project, tipping the vote for its location from Japan to Cadarache in France - despite Japan's proximity. "The official reason was we were worried about earthquakes, but really it was a political decision," said one Chinese diplomat. All three projects indicate a deepening of relations between Europe and China on science issues, despite China's poor human rights reputation.
China has also been deepening its links with the US science community: the US national science foundation opened an office in Beijing in May, in order to collaborate more closely
on global problems like climate change, ecological disasters and the spread of contagious diseases. China is launching a moon probe next year (see picture) and hopes to be the first power to return to the moon, perhaps by 2015. But young Chinese scientists are being deterred from studying and working in the US because of the complexities of visa regulations introduced since 9/11.
Any Nobel prize boost works both ways, as the exodus of researchers to Europe - almost half as many as Europe has already - could bring with it enormous technology transfer benefits if and when the Chinese return home. "We don't see it as a brain drain, but a brain train," said one diplomat. Science policy analyst Michael Lubell of the American Physical Society was recently quoted as saying that if the twentieth century had the arms race, this century would have the brains race. But at the same time as the summit, I met an MEP and his assitant who showed me the dark side of China, more of which later.

EU's Bosnia peacemaker turns bad in Africa

Carl Bildt, Lundin Oil and Sudan

Carl Bildt, bien connu in Brussels as one of the EU's former top diplomats, has just been appointed Sweden's foreign minister.
And since Sudan and its 200,000 dead is topical at the moment, it might be a good moment to take a look at Bildt's links with the Swedish oil firm accused, so that prospecting and pumping could take place in the oil rich state, of killing and displacing thousands of innocent Sudanese civilians. Their crime: to live on top of, and en route to oilfields that the company was seeking to develop.

Bildt, 57, was Sweden's prime minister from 1991-94, and his lasting achievement is to persuade the sceptical Swedes to join the EU. They are still the EU's most reluctant members: net support is five percent, lower than the UK figure. Next he became the EU's peace broker in the Balkans,
In a peripatetic lifestyle subsequent to that, picking up speaking assignments - he was the adjudicator at a Brussels conference on EU foreign policy a few months ago - writing foreign policy articles, leading (as a largely absent leader) his moderate party to another defeat, he also picked up a good dozen or so consultancies and board memberships - including that of Lundin Oil, run by his good friend, Adolf Lundin, the income from which helped support and indeed make Bildt rich during his quest for a formal position from 2001 to his appointment in Stockholm last week.
Adolf Lundin appears to have been the classic oil entrepreneur: born in 1932, trained as an engineer, he started his career with Royal Dutch Shell, but then struck out on his own, with his company Lundin oil in Switzerland, on the philosophy of taking big risks - prospecting in often dangerous areas - and winning big. When Lundin died - by coincidence, after a battle with leukaemia, long retired - in the same week as Bildt got his new job - his newly elevated friend praised the oil magnate fulsomely to Swedish newspapers: "He was a man of the small saver, not the elegant salons. He was a great entrepreneur who had no fear of failure; of a kind we really need more of in Sweden."
One of Lundin's projects was in the Congo; another was in the Sudan, where his company was one of several risk-taking independents that started prospecting in the late nineties the rich oil potential in the savannah land areas that which made up the border area between the rebel, black south and the Arab north, ruled by an Islamist regime, who had been at war for twenty years.
In an interview with the newspaper Dagens Nyheter's veteran Africa correspondent, Anna Koblanck, in April 2001, Bildt explained the positive benefits of Lundin's prospecting and development in the area.
Arguing that Lundin's presence provided stability he said: "We give opportunities to development and an increased security against attacks and war. If the international presence disappeared it would increase attacks and insecurity.”
The truth, however, is a bit different, at least according to a number of contemporaneous press and NGO reports, from Human Rights Watch, Amnesty, and, most bluntly, Christian Aid:
"Wide stretches of southern Sudan are being
subjected to a ruthless ‘scorched earth’ policy to clear the way for oil exploration and to create a cordon sanitaire around the oilfields. As new areas of exploration open up, and oil companies facilitate troop movements by building roads across swampland and bridges across rivers, the war expands and the scorched earth advances.”
Explorations started in March 1999, when Lundin drilled an exploratory well at Thar Jath,10 miles from the Nile, and reported finding as many as 300 million barrels of ‘excellent’ reservoir quality oil in its concession known as block 5A. According to the report, a month later, the government moved troops to Thar Jath and adjacent areas,
displacing tens of thousands of people. Fighting led to suspension of drilling, and but it began again in January 2001 ‘within days of the
inauguration of the 75 kilometre all-weather road’, built by Chinese workers and paid for by Lundin at the cost of $400,000 per kilometre.
While the road was being built, a government airstrip extended, the oilfield tripled in size, and government militias and troops and burnt and depopulated the entire length of the road in preparation for its completion.
In visits to a neighbouring area, Christian Aid found thousands of villagers telling the same tale: Antonov planes arriving to bomb the villages. helicopter, burning the villages and killing anyone who was unable to flee – in most cases, the old and the very young.
‘All the villages along the road have been burned,’ said John Wicjial Bayak, a local official who had been driven from a village close to the oil road. ‘You cannot see a single hut. The government doesn’t want people anywhere near the oil.’

List of atrocities

In other atrocities featuring in the report, one village was bombed ten times
before government troops finally burned out the residents. One of the first villages attacked was Chotyiel, in October 1999. On hearing gunships, 80-year-old Liu-Liu ran to the forest with six of his grandchildren. ‘We dug a hole for the children and put a blanket on top,’ he said. ‘Then soldiers came to burn the houses. Helicopters
flew overhead. If they saw you, they killed you. We stayed 20 days in the forest eating wild fruit. It was not easy to move as we had blind people there. The Arabs are forcing the road to the village. They’re going to Rier, to the
oilfield.’
Then in March 2000 government troops supported by Antonovs and helicopter gunships attacked the village of Dhorbor, on the first stretch of the oil
road. Local officials reported more than 30 villagers killed.
On 11 May 2000 it was the turn of the village of Guit. Mary Cuoy heard shots at 4am. ‘I had a 3-year-old grandchild sleeping with me,’ she said. ‘I took her by the hand and left everything. In the morning, some people went back and saw soldiers taking the cows. Every hut was burned.’
The worst atrocity happened in the village of Nhialdiu, when on July 15 2000, government militia attacker the village already swollen with refugees, rounded up all the elderly, put them in a hut and torched it.
“Tens of thousands of people were displaced – many went to Khartoum, where they remain,” Andrew Pendleton, a senior programme officer at Christian Aid who authored the report, told me last week. “We had many people on the ground reporting for us, including Julie Flint.”
Another drilling closure followed, then more killings – documented by Sudan watcher and journalist Eric Reeves - where a helicopter gunship n the
and Lundin pulled out of block 5A in 2003, selling its share of the concession to Malaysian Petronas.
Today, the argument has shifted to who knew what and when. A lawsuit in US federal courts is taking place where Talisman, a Canadian company that operated the concession next to Lundin's is sued by Sudanese plaintiffs saying that they operated hand in glove with the government, according to Reeves.
Lundin enjoyed the same sort of security, and the Human Rights watch reports makes it clear Lundin - and therefore Bildt - knew of the campaigns carried out as the road was being built in the year 2000, since it was completely obvious to anyone in the area. The Christian Aid report quoted an aidworker saying in August of that year: “As one flies along the new oil road , the
only sign of life are the lorries travelling at high speed
back and forth to the oilfield. Small military garrisons are clearly visible every five kilometres.”
Eric Reeves says. " Lundin knew, had to have known, what was happening. I sent
what I wrote to them; and pretence of ignorance of what was happening
in Block 5a is just that: pretence.
“Carl Bildt is simply lying if he says that the oil company did not know
what was occurring in its concession. If nothing else, I told them."
In his peripatetic years, Bildt has kept a blog (www.bildt.net) and weekly newsletter in both English and Swedish where he pontificates freely on global issues, ranging from essays on the Peace of Westphalia, Hard and Soft power to analyses of the Russian security. Strangely, in seven years of newsletters, he can only once find the space to comment on the Sudan. He wrote: "Lundin could simply leave Sudan, and I can simply leave Lundin. But if that happens there will be a bunch of other rich buyers of the concession. That would be the simplest. But what would be the better for that?"
The whole thing is quite sensitive as Bildt has made Swedish relations with United States a priority, yet the US has had comprehensive trade sanctions against Sudan since 1997 - no companies, including oil companies, are allowed to operate in the country. New laws by California and a growing number of other states are forbidding their business from buying into companies - any from any country - that has investment in Sudan; Lundin still retains concessions in one sector.
As for Bildt, who left his Lundin responsibilities on his appointment and stands to make a small fortune from selling shares in a Lundin sister company, it’s interesting to speculate what he is thinking. His boss, the new Swedish prime minister, confessed to the press two ministers’ transgressions – hiring cleaners under the table and failing to pay their TV licences. The Swedish press were not happy and they were sacked. Bildt’s doings are far more controversial; yet it seems strange Bildt hasn't been mentioned in this context. With Koblanck a member of staff, Dagens Nyheter at least must be aware of Bildt's activities in Sudan. To this writer, it is sad that Europe's most prominent campaigner against ethnic cleansing seems to implicated in it happening in Sudan.

EU-related traffic figures collide with reality

Last week in Brussels the ETSC, the European Transport Safety Council, a body funded by the Commission, presented its first European traffic safety survey.
One of the Commission's main transport goals is that European countries halve the number of road deaths by 2010. The goal is modelled on the Swedish Road Administration's plan from a few years ago to halve the number of road deaths in Sweden by 2007. The Swedish Roads Administration is one dozens of state (supposed) autonomous organisations that run much of Swedish life; their real independence has been questioned by the new Swedish rightwing government, saying the former prime minister, Goran Persson, a social democrat, stuffed these supposed autonomous agencies with cronies, often leading social democrat party figures. The social democrats have ruled Sweden for 65 of the last 75 years; in electoral terms they have been the most successful, hegemonic party of any democratic country. The new government says that one reason why they have stayed in power so long is that Swedish public life is saturated with social democrats in high position who use their agencies as propaganda outfits for the party.

One example: Bo Bylund, a friend of Persson's and a social democrat, apparently puts normal people on retraining programmes and awards early retirement to healthy people in their twenties just to keep the headline figure for employment down. Conservative MEP Christopher Fjellner says "Sweden alone doesn't abide by Eurostat's definition of what unemployment is." The real figure could be as high as 15 percent, much higher than the impressive figure the Swedish unemployment service sends to Brussels.

More murky figures

I too have found an area where Swedish social democrat quango placeman fiddle the books so their masters can stay in power. Traffic safety.
I remember, writing an article for a British Sunday newspaper, visiting the Swedish national roads agency's headquarters in the town of Borlange, northern Sweden. The head of traffic safety drove me around all day in his Volvo, fitted with speed limiter and an alcolock, (an in-car breathalyser, set to become standard in Sweden by 2012). There were an unfeasibly large number of roundabouts in this sparsely populated, mid size town, and every time we slowed down there was this electronic woman's voice squawking:"You are now approaching a roundabout." Eventually we wound up at the road agency's elegant modern headquarters, where its traffic safety boss, Claes Tingvall, and the council traffic boss, greeted each other very chummily. Claes Tingvall, who is in his fifties, is a major European figure in road safety: the president of EuroNCAP, the road crash test organisation, whose surveys of car safety make every headline around the world when they are issued several times a year; he is one of the board members of the ESTC. Everyone who works on traffic issues in Brussels knows him. In a modern office room, with a view of the winter sunset tinted snow, Tingvall painted a fantastic picture of Sweden's road safety innovations - the strict alcohol laws, the flexible safety barriers on minor roads, the successful information campaigns that made Swedes obedient seatbelt wearers, the various electronic anti-swerving devices that Swedish carbuyers now insisted on, following his agency's information campaign. I went away and wrote an article praising Sweden as the country of the future in traffic safety. "The country with zero tolerance for road slaughter".

The proof

Positive coverage like this, and successful self promotion, has ensured that Sweden's views on traffic ssafety are listened to in Brussels. (And probaly got Tingvall his EuroNCAP job.)
So, what of it? Anders Englund, a traffic safety scientist, recently wrote a very critical article of the Road Safety Agency's ways. He basically accused them of fiddling the books: deaths have not halved, sioce the goal was posited in 1998. They have decreased by about ten percent between 1998 and 2005. And deaths, for the year 2006 so far, are rising. And in fact, when the goal was set, in 1998, deaths rose for a few years rather than fell. Yet the picture from 1998 onwards was of a constant fall in deat hrates. His contention was that the figures that Tingvall presided over were falsfied because deaths due to heart attack in hospital and other subsequent crash death causes was not included after 2001, giving a false, flattering picture of 2006 statistics. Fiddle number one.

That was over a year ago. And now, last week, the Swedish roads agency posted figures to the ETSC, which it presented at a press conference, that put Sweden in the top four of 25 EU members for reduction in road traffic deaths. The usual story, known to every journalist who picks up Eurostat press relases: Sweden at or near the top. But are the statistics correct? No they are not. A quick glance at the Road agency's website - a two minute job - shows that road deaths have fallen by 20 percent, not 25 percent as the ETSC presents it, in the last five years. (The drop would have been even lower had the reference point been 1998, not 2001: ten percent, as I said.)

Not much difference you might think; but yes. For most other Europpean countries have posted a drop in road traffic deaths too, of the order of 20 percent. Recalculate the figures according to Vagverket's own figures and that puts Sweden among the European average, not the European lead. (A lead, incidentally, occupied by France.) Sweden moves a large number of spaces to the right on the European bar chart. Fiddle number two. Tingvall's boss, Lennart Skogo, is paid up social democrat, which could explain why he fiddles the figures. He wants to keep his masters in power. Swedish statistics in Brussels ought to be taken with a pinch of salt, and perhaps Tingvall should reconsider his job.

An offer DG science cannot refuse

The over-funded DG Research, which has never come up with a useful drug, is acting stingy when faced with a system that has produced breakthroughs in so called neglected diseases common in the third world but which have not proved profitable for big pharma to pursue, in part because customers are poor and in part because, when companies do develop drugs to combat TB, malaria and leishmaniasis, their costs, introduction or storage mechanisms are completely inappropriate for the tropics. Only 13 drugs have been developed in the area of neglected disease since 1975, of which 12 are inappropriate for their customer base. Result: some of the deadliest infectious diseases in the world continue to kill people in poor countries. “Big pharma know nothing about the third world,” said one insider from Medecins sans Frontieres. .
But in recent years, something called PPPs, or private public partnerships, have started up which seem to work: they are an alliance between NGOs, who can identify local conditions and can furnish cheap clinical trials; governments and charitable foundations, who put up the money, and big pharma, who have drugs-making expertise. The projects, which number dozens, are set up on a not for profit basis with the multinationals standing to gain in terms of reputation and in future positioning in developing markets. They have a further advantage: the high innovation level, testing many molecules for neglected disease drugs gives the drugs makers a good source of knowledge about new compounds.
Development costs, at $10 - $20m per drug, are absurdly cheap compared to the latest vanity drug developed for the western market. Though profit sensitive, the money is taken care of by governments and charities.
Chief among these is the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation, MSF and the UK and US governments. The European commission? “They fund less than one percent of this, because they are wedded to their big multinational framework projects,” said one insider.” Perhaps they should have another look at these proposals.

Madness: right debate, wrong forum

John Bowis MEP, the conservatives’ health spokesman, has launched the European parliament response to the commission green paper on mental health.
It is all very worthy stuff. He believes strongly in the issue, and why not. There is even a reference to the Lisbon process – a sane continent is a wealthy, productive one.
The subject is, vast, and well depressing, so from a recent hearing he organised here are just nuggets. No matter how you look at it, psychiatric institutions are reservoirs of human suffering… The contradiction of psychiatry is that you that you herd patients together and expect them to feel better…For many patients, waiting for the cure is a complete waste of time: the miracle of the cure will never come…The psychiatric system is not nearly able to cure as much as it thinks, so waiting for it to do so keeps patients submissive and passive…Patients are people with lives to be led, some aspects of which may require professional assistance…France has the greatest number of psychiatrists per capita…With populations growing older and dementia rises, mental health strategies have to be integrated into public health.
Someone with mental health problems needs a one stop shop ensuring contact, access to medical care, housing and other social care needs, income legal services and rehabilitation. But if one is ill, one needs the security of home, not the isolation of high rise flats. A paradox: increased resources only come when a man jumps into the lion’s den at the zoo, or another stabs someone on the London underground, and the media and politicians clamour for action – which happens, at a price: increased stigma. Bowis concludes his report movingly.
“We need to look into the eyes of people with mental health problems. When we do, we see reflected back the confusion of emotions and thoughts. We see the fear and worry. We see the tears of frustration and despair. But we also see the hope – the hope that we will listen; that we will understand; that we will care; that we will act; that we can help.”
The health spokes man of another party said: "It's all good stuff, but mental health really an EU issue? It's surely for the nation states to settle."

petrolhead MEP finds paradise in Iraq

An entry in an occasional series about what Brussels and European parliament alumni are up to. Geoff Hoon had a bit of a reputation as an amiable petrol-head – someone who likes cars – when based in Brussels as MEP. (Labour, 84-94) Later, as British defence secretary during the latest Iraq war, he obviously got a bit carried away with boys’ toys, according to his former colleague, Home Secretary David Blunkett, whose diaries were serialised in the British press last week:
“March 24, 2003. We did warn Geoff Hoon in the cabinet when Geoff was going all gung-ho about smart bombs and the rest of it. Minister John Reid warned caution but someone else said ‘Hear, hear,’ and Tony Blair turned to him and said: ‘No, no, that's not the way. We need great caution and we don't hype anything.’ But I'm afraid Geoff just gets carried away. It just seems to happen to people in the Ministry of Defence - all this Boy's Own stuff again.’
What Blunkett fails to understand is this was all done in a greater cause: to impress Hoon’s Washington counterpart – one Donald Rumsfeld. According to another recent memoir, by the British ambassador in Washington, many of Britain’s politicians failed to gain the respect of their US counterparts when they visited the US capital in the run-up to the war. Hoon and the “intimidating” Rumsfeld found it hard to get on to the same wavelength, according to ambassador Christopher Meyer.
“It was like getting pandas to mate. Hoon got nervous in Rumsfeld's presence.”
Only the Chancellor, Gordon Brown, and [now Home Secretary], John Reid, stood out, "like Masai warriors in a crowd of pygmies,” Meyer writes.

Another agreeable waste of taxpayers' money

Craig Barrett, chairman of the world’s largest microchip maker Intel, gave a keynote speech at the Regions and Cities conference held at the palace of lesser vanities, the Committee of the Regions. The funny thing is, though I spent an afternoon there, I cannot find a single interesting thing about the event. It was all about competitiveness. This is a place where assorted worthy supporters of the social model usually discuss the merits of the 35 hour week. This, be it noted, when Asia works 35 hour days.

UK-US alliance on the ropes, surely

Two reports, one from my magazine, the Lancet, have kicked up a bit of a stir in Britain in the last few weeks, and the European Commission would be wise to take note. Britain has started to worry seriously about climate change.
The generally positive support for the advice contained in the Stern report published on Tuesday 31 October on the importance of imminently tackling the problems of climate change arguably marks a shift in public opinion in the traditional “dirty man of Europe” towards the environment.
The shift can be seen on both sides of the political spectrum. Predictably the Guardian’s George Monbiot, scourge of the kind of energy companies that hold emollient receptions in the grand hotels of Brussels, wrote effusively that the report – authored by a respected economist – had “swung the argument even before any of us had finished reading it.” More surprising perhaps was
Matthew d’Ancona, a rightwing political magazine editor well known for his Bush sympathies, writing last week “that the science of global warming has more or less arrived at a point of consensus, symbolised in popcorn politics by Al Gore's film An Inconvenient Truth.
“There are still doughty sceptics urging caution, such as Nigel Lawson [Margaret Thatcher’s onetime finance minister], who will deliver his preliminary thoughts on Stern on Tuesday.”
He added: “But the political horse has already bolted.”
All three main parties share a surprising degree of alignment on this: new conservative party leader David Cameron repositioned the Tories as a green party at the annual conference a month ago; conservation is after all a “conservative issue”; the party has a new symbol, an oak tree. Cameron needs young votes; he also genuinely burns for the issue. Last month, he challenged the government to introduce a climate change bill; if it did, the official opposition would work hard to support it.
The centrist liberal democrats have long since embraced things environmental. And then there is the Labour party, where Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, the chancellor, clearly had reversed previous scepticism and gave vocal support to the report’s publication, with Blair saying the Stern report represented the “most important report on the future” ever produced by his government and that if the findings were not heeded the “results would be disastrous”.
“The scientific evidence that global warming is caused by greenhouse gases is now overwhelming,” he told the Press Association.
Stern reports that global temperatures have already gone up by half a degree, that melting glaciers will increase flood risk, crop yields will fall, particularly in Africa, that rising sea levels could leave 200m people displaced, 40% of species could face extinction, and there will be more extreme weather. Temperatures could rise up to five degrees this century, leading to widespread famine and death, of 300m people, and a drop in global GDP of 20%.
Sterns writes that the damage can be minimised if action costing 1% of current GDP – equal to global advertising spend - is taken now, and his range of suggested measures include creating a global market in carbon pricing, extending the European emissions trading scheme to India, the US and China, setting new, tough targets for the EETS, and create a new commission to lead British companies to develop climate change solutions. A consequence of his report is that the environment minister, David Milliband, has granted Cameron’s wish and will now propose a climate change bill in November.
There is a problem with all this, of course. Commentators were quick to note that Britain could not do things alone, that even if the country became carbon neutral overnight Chinese growth would negatively compensate within a year, and that the biggest polluter of the moment, the US, and the big polluters of the future. China and India, are not set to convert at this moment of Britain’s choosing, just because London has had its revelation.
"What I see so far today does not give me any reason to believe that Mr Stern can be a spokesman who can change minds and open ears here," Samuel Thernstrom, a former communications director for the Council on Environmental Quality in the Bush White House, now at the right-wing American Enterprise Institute think-tank, told a British paper last week. .
"I don't see a whole lot new here. They're hanging a lot on what they call 'robust
economic analysis', but there's a lot of uncertainty here that they don't acknowledge."
In addition, the British government’s choice of Al Gore, who lost to George Bush six years ago in the most contentious presidential campaign ever, as its special adviser on climate change would probably reduce the report’s impact in Washington.
Even D’Ancona, who supports Bush, thinks it’s unlikely the US will start embracing policies to fight climate change soon.
Meanwhile the Lancet medical journal’s report that 600,000 Iraqis have died in the war, one third from direct action, has further alienated British public opinion. The figure is ten times higher than that cited by Bush, higher than the numbers killed in the Chechnya and Bosnian wars; Bush said the Lancet report was “not credible”. Consider these two findings - that global warming is the hugest threat we face today, and the US is doing nothing about it, despite the fact that Britain wants to. And the fact that Britain has been dragged into a war with the USA that now turns out to have caused far more deaths from allied action than the war in Yugoslavia from the Serbian army that sent Milosevic to the Hague international war criminal tribunal. Even the Tories, as remarked in a previous post, seem to be edging away from the US.
Reading the blogs, it seems to me clear that the British public are more hostile to the UK-US alliance than they have ever been. The European commission should seize the opportunity

Doctor really does know best

Who wants choice?
So, paternalism is out, choose-and-book is in: the doctor tapping in a few parameters offering a screenful of options as to what, when and how precisely the patient is to be treated. Choice of any hospital in the UK by 2008, subject to waiting lists. Stern advice, based on expertise and education? Not anymore. The patient, like the customer, is always right.
The new NHS, if it works, might be the democrat’s dream, but will choice actually involve better patient care? Not according to a recent report in the Journal of Internal General medicine.
Suppose a deadly influenza moves across the world, arriving in Europe. There is no cure, but a 10% chance of dying of the flu. However there is a vaccine – but with a potential side effect: there is a 5% chance of dying of the less dangerous variant of the ailment that the vaccine might induce. What would you take? A no brainer, one would have thought.
Apparently not: less than half the population would take the vaccine themselves if given the choice. It seems people are fundamentally not rational when it comes to assign risk regards themselves. When dealing with others, however, understanding of the probabilities – hardly taxing – take over, and the more distant the personal relation the more rational the guinea pigs in this hypothetical scenario carried out by psychologists for the journal.
But 57 percent said they would give it to their children; 63 percent said that if they were doctors they would give it to patients; and 73 percent said that if they were the medical director of a hospital they would recommend the vaccine for all patients.
In other words, people are more rational at making decisions for others than for themselves – a fortiori this applies to doctors making choices on behalf of patients, rather than the patients choosing their own treatments. Doctors have expertise, too, not just that essential objective standpoint. You might be better of, for that matter, if your friend made your choice for treatment Aristocratic socialists – who combine paternalism with equality - such as Allyson Pollock and Colin Leys have decried patient choice as a chimera: “People don’t choice, they just want care: it is like the fore brigade, not the supermarket,” they say. And they could well be right. At least if the choices they have to make are their own. Perhaps the best combination would be not patients’ choice, but doctors’ choice. The paternalists are right after all.

Tories, Europe and climate change

An occasional article in a series of Tory rapprochement with Europe. I know Tories in Brussels who hate Europe and what it stands for; but are they being let down by those back at base. I will be monitoring these developments both in the UK and London and will be bringing them to you.
There was a revealing moment on Newsnight, Britain's premier news programme, last week.
An inexperienced Labour environment minister had just been skewered in an interview which recognised that global warming was the planet's biggest problem but that only a tenth had been spent on combating climate change in the last five years compared to fighting the "global war on terror", a "war" whose utility and effectiveness has increasingly been questioned across the political spectrum in Britain.
As the sombre statistics about global climate change were being digested - we have only ten years before the barrel rolls irrevocably over the falls - the next segment cut to the annual opposition Tory party conference, held last week. You might have expected there to have been a thematic followup; but no, the chief item was a distasteful chase of the higher education minister and former Brussels correspondent Boris Johnson to try and make Mr former straight bananas to come up with a witty quip, or "gaffe" for the TV cameras. There is a point when adulation and persecution become almost indistinguishable, and Johnson was filmed being chased into the press centre; when he emerged, his hair a characteristic haystack, he was pursued by literally dozens of hacks and hackettes tape recorders and mikes aloft down the Bournemouth promenade. "We need you, Boris, we don't have a story, nothing happened today" shrieked one. No wonder the Beatles stopped touring in 1966. One of the most intelligent and congenial men in British politics, and a true free thinker, often grotesquely caricatured as a clown, looked close to tears.
The Newsnight piece, barely protected by knowing self irony, rather reinforced the point the pug-eared environment minister, who looked as if he has been born after Kyoto, made that finally shut interviewer Jeremy Paxman up: "We are all in this together." A media focusing in trivialities rather than the biggest issue of our time is part of the problem. Britain's opposition party had spent half a day on debates discussing the environment. Newsnight is the most serious programme on British television. There was more - much more - coverage of Boris on the BBC news website the next day
A Tory conference is not usually a place where a pro European can feel the atmosphere congenial. And the new Tory's party's headbangers, or, as they have been named, British Neocons, certainly behave with the usual slavering atlanticism; acting, as someone put it, quoting Leon Blum on the 1930s French communist party, as a "nationalist party - but someone else’s nationalist party."
But it would be misleading to think they are any longer dominant. For the good news is, the new leader of the party - David Cameron - might actually want and need to get closer to Europe.
Yes, stop press.
What's more, he has the support of a headbanger of yore, the formidably intelligent former party leader but now shadow foreign secretary, William Hague.
The reason? Cameron has seen the truth, even as most of the media hasn't: seen the ice shelves the size of Belgium shedding into the South Antarctic sea. The bare summit of Kilimanjaro whose giant snowcaps just thirty years ago provided a picturesque backdrops to photographs of big game hunters: the sieved Greenland icecap dotted with as many holes as a slab of ice on a warm March day. The satellite pictures that show that half the North Pole ice has gone already, and that it will be possible to sail to the end point of the compass on warm breeze by 2030. He also knows that the US administration is run by fanatically un-empirical former oil executives denying global warming and fighting wars to secure US energy interests abroad for America's enormously wasteful industry and transport capacity.
Where else to turn?
I urge you to consider Hague's speech on foreign affairs on Tuesday. This was very skilful speech. On the surface this was red meat, pressing all the buttons of the bingo hall audience of over sixties that dominate Tory conventions.
"We need to be able to make much more of a body Labour ministers hardly ever mention: the Commonwealth." He talked about confronting terrorism, Iran, and, a "resolve to defeat terrorists whose murder of innocent civilians can never be defended or excused." He spent seven long minutes, half the speech, criticising Europe, for laughs, making easy jokes about Blair's British presidency. "The British people believe integration has gone far enough and so do we." But listen more closely and read the speech and you find that - he does not exclude a new constitution, albeit subject to a referendum and with the justice and home affairs veto abolition removed.
And when you realise that the only foreign politician he has mentioned by name is the Czech MEP Jan Zahradil, with whom he hopes to form a party in the European parliament, and listen to the remark that he wants to "give leadership to a European Union in crisis it so desperately needs" and you realised that - with its six minutes, partly devoted to urging abstruse institutional changes - Europe is indeed that single part of the world where Britain wants to spend the next few years constructing a relationship. The US he but mentioned, briefly, twice.
Now, I urge you to consider Cameron's speech. It was spoken under the party's new logo of a scribbled oak tree (old symbol: a hand holding a torch: the struggles of the Thatcher years) in a conference centre bedecked by a picture backdrop of greenery and trees. There was even a juice bar. A fifty minute long speech ticking off various policy areas gave rise to disparate headlines; but he really did spell it out in his summary the big theme: "NHS, society, family and the environment." He gave praise to the Al Gore film on climate change which was shown to delegates earlier in the week, and to strengthen his credentials he rolled out that cartoon opponent Norman Tebbit who supposedly over dinner told him that "I though you were green and lean" but "now I realise you are green, lean and mean."
In the media coverage that followed, some focused on the NHS pledge, others on the embrace of Mauslim communities, the critique of US's activities in Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo. Reporters said he pledged to offer substance rather than spin, and so on. Very heterogenous.
Only two commentators saw Europe and/or singled out the real seriousness of heart about the green theme. Jonathan Freedland ofo the Guardian said that this would be an opportunity for Gordon Brown to split the party between the euro-sceptics and those who realised that a supranational grouping of nations is – and will continue to be – the only way to effect the collective action needed to bring down carbon emissions. .
Martin Kettle of the Guardian focused on the Hague speech: “Hague managed with considerable oratorical legerdemain to promote a policy of renewed Conservative re-engagement within the EU without frightening the conference into one of its all too instinctive displays of Europhobia.”
“I waited for the hisses, the boos, the shouts of disagreement that that remark might so easily have provoked in a less skilfully prepared speech. But nothing came. And in the silence, Hague leaped across to dry political land, with an assertion that "our place is to be in Europe but not run by Europe." Another skilful touch, that. It sounded like an anti-EU remark, when in fact it was the opposite, a commitment to Tory participation in the EU.”
It wiwll be interesting to see how the Tories now propose working with the EU in order to fight their big campaign issue - and whether this will extend to other areas. Also, whether the commission will take note.

Fresh Swedish gov't recruits Brussels alumni

Another entry on what Brussels ex-people are up to.
Interesting times in Sweden. First there was a change of government, from the long reigning socialists to a centre right coalition – an event rarer than the Nobel committees announcing winners we had ever heard of. Then there was the news that Sweden, which has been a semi detached member of Europe during outgoing premier Göran Persson’s last years, would be returning to the heart of Europe with two well known Brussels people at the top foreign posts. They are Cecilia Malmström MEP, whose unsuccessful “unseat Strasbourg” campaign clearly at least gave her a seat in Stockholm. She becomes Europe minister. And Carl Bildt, a former Swedish PM, well known on the Brussels diplomatic circuit, as former Balkans envoy and prominent European pro-unity speechmaker, writer and, er, thinker. He gets the plum job of foreign minister, and is, in a young government, Sweden’s senior politician in terms of experience and worldliness.
Then – within a week of taking office – the government has already been gripped by scandals. Two ministers have resigned: the minister in charge of culture and therefore television was found not to have paid her TV licence for 16 years. The trade minister resigned because she paid her cleaner under the table.And what about other targets? Carl Bildt is known to have a skeleton in his closet – profitable involvement with the Swedish Lundin oil company, which prospected in Sudan and which various charities have accused of being complicit in Sudanese government ethnic cleansing thousands of people from the oilfield areas. For now, though, they have left him alone. Let sleeping dogs lie perhaps.

Was NATO a cause of minister's murder?

The link to NATO was Sweden’s lifeline during the cold war - yet Sweden let it rot away because the socialist prime minister at the time had, for domestic purposes, created a rhetorical picture of Sweden as neutral, aloof - and slightly judgmental, in fact - of the two superpower blocs.
According to new research into Sweden’s often two-faced neutrality policy, the Swedish defence researcher Robert Dalsjo has discovered that the Swedish prime minister Olof Palme thirty years ago barely bothered to inform his successor as PM, Thorbjorn Falldin, a conservative, about the secret agreements, presumably for fear that it would expose the socialist poseur and prominent critic of Nixonian foreign policy to the charges of hypocrisy. While presenting himself as a leader of the non aligned nations, Palme presided over a secret scheme - instituted by his predecessors - that would allow refuelling afacilities to NATO aircraft, over flight rights, and extensive patrol schedule coordination, including radio compatibility with NATO. OPening a flank on Russia for NATO air patrols have the west a formidable advantage over Russia; in return for which NATO had secretly pledged to bail Sweden out in the event of an attack to keep the Oresund straits open for instance, allowing the Baltic fleet out into the open sea. There were also plans for where and how the Swedish army would fall back to positions that could be supplied by the Norwegian ports such as Narvik, and structure of partisan resistance that could be run from London.
But because he didn’t pass this on, Falldin was in the dark, so was the new chief of general staff and the defence relationship with the west lapsed. The rhetoric - or rather lack of it - became the new reality; Sweden had suddenly become naked.
The revelations from Dalsjo, published with the help of the institute of war studies at King’s in London and to appear in bookform later this year are interesting because they help to explain the intense suspicion felt towards Palme by those who knew about the old NATO cooperation when he returned to power in 1982, sharpened by a number of submarine incidents shortly after he was elected.
Navy sonars tracked suspicious objects crawling around the Stockholm archipelago; they were assumed to be Russian subs - one sub had actually run aground a year earlier, appeared on the TV news worldwide, before the sub was set free, amid much Russian apology, and let home. Palme’s failure to condemn what was seen as a sustained campaign of provocations was felt to be worrying by many.
With the benefit of knowledge of the Dalsjo revelations about Palme letting the NATo relationship lapse, it is possible to see that navy insiders who knew about NATO, which the general public didn't, could detect a pattern of nonchalance towards the west and appeasement of the east which clearly seemed to continue after his re-election Would they be worried enough to act on this, and what could have been a catalyst.
Earlier this year I had lunch with a London-based writer/researcher who had once made documentaries.
The documents passed to me by the man I had lunch with earlier this year concerned the agenda of a summit meeting between Gorbachev and Palme in April 1986 that seemed to indicate a switch in Palme’s post election pattern of behavior: from just publicly repudiating the NATO connection to actively doing the USSR’s bidding in northern Europe. The document said
Palme was to discuss Danish and Norwegian neutrality in return for a nuclear free zone and a Finnish-style Soviet security guarantee for northern Europe; the Danes had probably not been consulted but there you go.
Before he died of a heart attack at Houston airport a few years ago, the documentary was probing how far this information travelled from SOPs - Stay Behind’s headquarters in Brussels - and how, if at all, it was acted on.
Like Gladio in Italy, the would be partisan cells contained some dodgy people as well as fervent right wing anti communists - with some overlap with the disaffected Swedish military convinced of Palme's betrayal.
The Dalsjo report is the most complete exposure of Sweden’s far reaching NATO cooperation to be made available to the Swedish public. It has been hinted at before but many Swedes have preferred to think of Sweden as having been completely neutral, aloof by its own efforts. This has informed and continues to inform Sweden’s rather-high handed view of itself, regards Europe and the rest of the world. Last year a majority in a poll opposed NATO membership, presumably because Swedes thought they had looked after that side of things themselves. Further, the revelation of the partisan structures for the first time confirm thiny’s private findings, suggesting he was on the right track. The onion is shedding its layers; if Sweden’s equivalent of Gladio did kill Palme because fear he assisted the communist threat it sets Sweden firmly in the postwar European context, where the counter revolutionary activities of the various stay-behind unit set up to combat Communist infiltration has been called the biggest untold European story since the second world war. In Italy, Gladio is suspected of having killed Aldo Moro, the Christian democrat tprime minister who committed the sin of allowing communists into government. In Sweden they killed Olof Palme

Occupied city rejects tyranny of Muslim mobs

There is a school of thought in international relations that says that tit-for-tat fighting is such a tragedy, and an avoidable one. Strike and retaliation, vicious circle, dance of the doomed: Northern Ireland, the Middle East, Kosovo. Why can’t one of the parties be rational and just stop: defend itself, but refuse to fight back. Eventually the other party would see sense and stop fighting too: peace, compromise and decency would break out.
Sweden has been the principal international advocate for pacifist rationality in international relations and, as it went to the polls on Sunday, has a finding to impart to the rest of the world. Being nice doesn’t work.
For Sweden has applied its international theory of rationalist pacifism to its domestic immigrant relations, showering asylum seekers who have poured in through open doors while the rest of Europe have closed theirs with benefits, tuition, housing and huge doses of tolerance. The reward: Sweden has the highest figures of rape in Europe, fifty percent up on the last year alone, twice as high as the UK and ten times higher than Denmark; assault figures in the southern town of Malmo – gateway for most immigrants - are ten times that of the much larger city of Copenhagen across the Oresund straits, for the Danes have much stricter immigration rules. The papers are full of blond girls with bleeding, slashed faces; of high school pupils have invented and patented a kin d of chastity belt that stops young girls from being raped, top tips on the teenage letters pages to avoid being sexually hassled. The papers are full of accounts of clan feuds, honour killings; of gang rapes by Muslim boys of teenage girls cycling to parties; beatings administered to young Swedish men outside pubs and at bus stops where their mobile phones are seized. As one academic report by a Lund university sociologist put it, quoting young perpetrators, often from countries such as Bosnia, Somalia or Iraq, who were interviewed on why they did it. “We do it because we want to wage war on the Swedes. They are weak, frightened and wimpish. It is easier than working.”
And the counter response? The tendency has been for Swedish society to say: well, it’s really our fault, because they are not well integrated. So we have to be nice, not tough. No tat for the tit.
Signs of the times:
When I was in Malmo, the town where I grew up, this summer, I read all the stories: about the violence: about the notorious suburb of Rosengard, where police, public transport or the rescue services are reluctant to go, as residents turn up with hammers and stones:
At one of those perfect Swedish summer parties where the girls look like angels and the ceilings and walls are white I asked people what they thought. I out down reticence to discuss the problems with immigration in their midst to provincial, smug political stupidity, far from the intellectual environment of Brussels.
But as a friend said later: “It is such a taboo subject, the ultimate taboo.” People have very strong feelings. Indeed, on the day of the general election, I received an email from a close relative – a liberal, middle aged professional woman, part of one of the Hillary Clintonesque high flying women’s networks, whose friend had sent a round robin email entitled: “Don’t forget to do your duty today.” It was accompanied by two off colour jokes: “Everyone seems to be wondering why Muslim terrorists are so quick to commit suicide. Let’s see now. No football, no pork BBQ, no hot dogs, no golf, no lobster, no beer, rags for clothes and hats, constant wailing from the guy in the tower, you can’t shave. A wife you can’t choose wears a bag over her head and smells like a donkey. Then they tell when you die it all gets better? Really, is there a mystery there?” Then: a cartoon: “Look pay attention. I am only going to show you this once.” It has an Arab holding a bomb whose fuse is lit. “Suicide Bomb trainings school.”
This is from the usually politically correct upper middle class woman, from the acme of liberalism, the Massachusetts of Europe.
Another sign of the times. A good friend of mine, a classical singer for the top choir in Sweden, a self described social liberal, voted for the Swedish fascist party because they are the only party openly discussing the problems of immigration at the election. “Immigrants say they mug people because they are humiliated by Sweden. What fucking humiliation? The fact that Sweden gives them money, shelter, education. Is that humiliating for them?”
Patrick, a big, muscular guy in his thirties, then related an increasingly common tale: in a bar one evening, he was hassled by a Muslim immigrant, he smiled and said: “I refuse to be provoked. Come on let me buy you a drink.” The man said no, Patrik described being watched all evening then, on leaving, was beaten up. “They couldn’t get me down on the ground so they couldn’t dance the samba on me. But I had scars afterwards. Why can’t the police post people in these entertainment districts? It will cost society far less: a broken jaw can put a man out of work for six months: think of all the hospitalisation and sick leave costs.”

He, his mother, and several educated friends – one for instance works at the State Art Museum across in Copenhagen, increasingly a refuge for many Swedes – have all voted for the Sweden Democrats, as the far right party is called.
The Sweden Democrats had their best election ever, with several percent of the vote, but their success was confined to southern Sweden, which has born the brunt of the immigration; but ultimately policy will be determined by the new right-of-centre government, composed of conservatives, liberals, agrarians and Christian democrats. The prime minister elect, Fredrik Reinfeldt, has promised to increase police numbers, lengthen sentences for rapists and robbers, and the principal plank of his economic policy is to reduce taxes for the low paid, reduce employers’ taxes and make it easier to hire home help: unemployment benefits will be slashed; the state aim is to reduce Sweden’s high youth unemployment – the highest in Europe for ethnic Swedes, higher still for immigrants. Immigration is far from being Sweden’s only problem; it is part of the widening gaps between the comfortable, highly efficient, highly educated middle class who give Sweden’s its high growth rate, and what penumbra society belonging to what Reinfeldt calls the “outsiderhood” – people retired off early, on disability benefits, and young white Swedes who cannot their foot on the ladder. Young immigrants are just one of several outsider groups.
It is early days of course and perhaps he feels economic solutions are sufficient for integration, but perhaps immigrant violence needs a political solution too.
Denmark, across the straits from Malmo, has a strongly unapologetically tough approach to immigration. In addition to the flexible labour market laws that go even further than Sweden, the country has tackled the cultural and social problem head on: cutting the number of new asylum seekers to a bare minimum required under the Geneva convention, it works on assimilating the not inconsiderable number – 6 percent, about the UK figure – of immigrants already in the country. Pupils have to speak Danish before they start school.
And then there are specifically tough attitudes towards immigrant crime – in Sweden in contrast, while Reinfeldt talked about unemployment and crime, he not once mentioned the word immigrant in debates.
Danish courts recently put in prison for two and half years a sixteen year old boy from Kurdistan who had stolen a Dane’s mobile. After he has served his sentence, he will be deported.
“It is tough, but the boy was given many chances by society and we are sending a signal here,” says Copenhagen’s chief of police, Henrik Svindt.
Youth unemployment rate in Denmark is the OECD’s lowest, crime is as the statistics below demonstrate, lower too. It remains to be seen whether Reinfeldt will work at overturning these statistics; probably a good place to start is stop sentencing rapists to 80 hours of community service – which, one social worker said, is about the perpetrators “really just playing with their X-boxes”.

Israel loses fiercest European critic

There is a new government in Stockholm: what is Sweden's new foreign policy going to be like and who is going to represent it?According to an unscientific internet poll in the newspaper Dagens Nyheter, the public favourite for the post of foreign minister is Cecilia Malmstrom, the young liberal MEP, who is praised in a recent editorial for "knowing everything about the EU and Russia" and who would bring "fresh oxygen into the palace" where the "social democrat heriditary aristocracy" have been sitting for too long. Another Brussels personality who has been tipped for the post is the very tall and photogenic Anders Wijkman, a Christian democrat who knows a lot about green issues. Lena Ek, another liberal, could also be brought home. Talks are ongoiung and silence has descended over government offices at Rosenbad this week; the decisions will be revealed on October 6. Of other possible candidates, Carl Bildt, the right's last prime minister - 12 years ago - and noted international statesman - has said he wouldn't want the job and the right's senior Swedish MEP, Gunnar Hokmark, is unlikley to have to pack his bags for a new life in Stockholm. IN his revealing, recently published biography Reinfeldt admtted that Hokmark, who once ran a rightwing think tank, had "plagued the life out of the party" in the 1990s. Hokmark is not very popular with the Swedish media either, which lamented his unmemorable appearances on Swedish television during the last euro elections. "Can anyone remember what he said?" commentd one. ANother commentator wrote about Hokmark's links to an outfit called the European Enterprise institute, a carbon copy of the US neo conservative think tanks, which agitates against the EU's environment policies and workers' rights; and one of whose lobbyists was described by the Independenty last year as "itman for Exxon Mobil." What of policies? Sweden will continue its engagement in traditional issues such as human rights, free trade and enlargement. But there will be some differences too. There will be less worship of the UN, less uncritical flirtation with the third world, where a more critical democracy perspective will take place. Reinfeldt, the new prime minister, has said he will not immediately ratify the constitution. EU policy is an interesting white space at the moment; but Reinfeldt's party, the moderates, are much more Euroscpetic than they used to be.Then there is the Middle East. If Sweden will be bereft of the services of the chairman of the Sweden-Israeli friendship association, as Hokmark is, it is still likely to take a more Israel friendly line. Government officials in Jersulam were reportedly dancing jigs of joy when the most pro Palestian government in Europe lost the Swedish elections on September 17. Sweden broke ranks with the EU in May by awarding a Hamas minister a visa, and public hostility betweeen Israel and Sweden under the social democrats go back a long way: in April Sweden dropped out of militray exercises where Israel was present, with ex prime minister Persson lamenting "Israel's history of violence." Anna Lindh, the Swedish foreign minister a few years ago, once said "Israel is a democracy balacing on a thin line." A low point in a bad relationship came in 2004 when, at a display of modern art in Stockholm, the Israeli ambassador wrecked an exhibit that appeared to glorify a suicide bomber in front of TV cameras - a story which made worldwide headlines.Afterwards he criticised Sweden as a country where "people are afraid of Arabs but against Jews they can do what they want," adding that"Jews are hassled by Muslims everywhere - on the tube, in schools, in the street."Swedish commentators retorted that the action, coming from a diplomat with forty years experience, was planned in advance and with the full approval of the Sharon government to distract attention to a Swedish conference on genocide, and ramping up the hostile relationship between Israel and Europe was imperative to prevemnt Europeans from any influence whatseoever in the Middle East, which would remain a US-Israeli fiefdom. These outbreaks of hostility could now be a thing of the past. Though some commentators worry that sections of the Swedish christian demnocrats and liberals, two government parties, are "so pro Israeli it seems that Christian Zionists have been acting as their prompters", singling out the youth associations. A writer on the liberal Expressen out it: "I don't quite trust the new government; there is a worrying amount of bonkers thinking in the political right in Sweden on foreign policy. The youth associations seemed to have turned into neoconservative sects who pray to Bush and bombs with the same ideological fervour. She added: "Can we be sure that today's tired and lie-infested foreign policy is not replaced bysupport for everything the US does and throws the hope of a just peace in the Middle East overboard?"Maybe not as much as that. But relations with US, as with Israel, are bound to become closer than the days when the US withdrew its ambassador to Sweden and Stockholm was a refuge for every liberation movement in the developing world

Teenage scribblers and provincial Brussels

I have a confession to make. I can’t take the EU’s journalists – the guys and gals who work for EU Observer, European Voice, EU Politix, and, bringing up the reat, EU Reporter, seriously.
They can’t write for a start. They have got the sentence rhythm and sentence structure of a news story about right, applying the gift for mimickry of wannabes, but they have no journalistic insight, apply no journalistic intelligence. They are just teenage note takers. “MEP warns…” Yeah, and suck my dick.
Everyone I talk to about this says, “Yeah, you know, they are all very young.” But why don’t they hire someone older? As they rush around from press conference to press conference, like eager university students, you think: I bet Washington is better served than this. But then the EU is not very serious.
The average person in Brussels is a 26-year-old girl who works for a lobbyist, or an NGO. Who is she? She is from an Italy, or Belgium, or Poland. She lives in an apartment somewhere, sharing a flat with a Spanish food scientist who works for the Valencia regional office to the EU..
She puts her make up in the morning, which takes forever. Appearance is all in Brussels. She puts on the EU uniform: grey slacks, a poloneck sweater. Then she goes to work, if it is not a public holiday, of which there are many.. She has a book by Kundera in her bookshelf, and when dressed up in her bourgeois-bohemian continental daywear, she clatters down the steps to the metro at Gare Centrale you would think: if this was the opening scene in a modern French movie she would be falling in love in the course of it; but in fact she has a boyfriend - he works for the European Voice. She is very proud of this. The European Voice is cool. In her world, this paper – which is just another trade mag, there are loads on the web – is top drawer. What she does all day? Perhaps she sends a pdf file, sends a few emails, reads her local newspapers. Grabs a baguette sandwich from the area around the Place de Luxembourg, which has the world’s highest density of poky little sandwich shops, and are open between 1 and 1.05 pm every weekday afternoon.
Boring? Not at all.
There is her whole private life, a bewildering array of friends, all 26, all of whom provide a network in Brussels. She might be earning unjustifiably much on what some could see as out-relief for the privileged young of Europe, the nieces and nephews of Italian senators But she feels part of a greater whole. Her lobbying makes a difference (she thinks.). And when the EU does stuff on television, well, she is part of it.
I write about this template woman, and there are loads of women who fulfil this template, because she is the exact typical person of the European Voice’s readership demographic. They did a survey on this and say so, they are not shy. Dana Spinant, the editor, is only about 26 herself.
And what are this young woman’s views. She likes and believes in all the rationalist world-improving schemes.
She thinks the prime minister of Colombia – picketed by the commies in the European parliament – is a bad man. And she hates the Kaczynski brothers, who run Poland. They want to bring back the death penalty, limit abortion, hate the EU!
I have undergone an about turn on this. I read a faintly disapproving piece in the EU Observer. It was written in the usual metronomic style that simulates professionalism, The article was about the new regime how the Poles at the EU embassy had jumped ship – ie been sacked – for their pro EU views by new Warsaw administration and were looking for jobs in the EU institutions. Perhaps the article was their job application: the virtuous, educated Euro-Poles. The Kaczynskis are not very house trained, unfortunately.

No better

I loathed the smugness of the article, and I realised one I had prepared earlier, clipped together from reports from Poland and altogether more overtly censorious was no better.
I thought: scratch this. My earlier article – Andrew Rettman’s article. It is all rubbish.
It is arrogance piled on with and talent spread very thinly; and I am not surprised the brothers hate Brussels. Who are these people, the virtual careerists, in their virtual world? This place is shit. Anyone for yet another seminar on the single market? I’m off to write about Sudan.

Another small country faces one party purge

Halfway through the last Swedish election TV debate, Goran Persson, the Swedish prime minister, looked sideways at his left wing partners, waved his hand and thereafter seemed to fade as if to say: actually I don’t really want to win anymore, not if it means dealing with these guys for three more years. For the last eight years the social democrats have ruled in a minority government that has taken parliamentary support from the greens and the former communists under an unspoken agreement: a single party government gives the social democrats the advantage of appearing strong, lone rulers, while the outrider parties peddle influence behind the scenes. In contrast, the right-of-centre opposition has often appeared a four headed, fractious monster.
This was now set to change: the Greens’ feisty party leader Maria Wetterstrand insisted on cabinet posts if the left coalition won again; the ex-communists, under the equally feisty Lars Ohly, had said it wanted to be included too.
In a moment of opportunistic footsy the large and bumbling Persson – who loves cooking and shopping for different kinds of sausage - metaphorically stretched his hand over and rested in it the lap of the most centrist opposition party. The agrarian Centre party’s strongwoman Maud Olofsson – described as the Pippi Longstocking of Swedish politics, aged 54 - crossed her legs said a decided and public no to leaving the of carefully forged alliance, headed by her crown prince, the young conservative leader and prime minister elect, Fredrik Reinfeldt, 41, who has spent two years creating a strong right-of-centre Alliance to dispel old memories of fractiousness..
Thus rejected, Persson seemed to sit back and contemplated his future partners in government, as if he had suddenly realized their radicalism for the first time: one of which wants to abolish nuclear power – “non nuclear and”, as opposed to Persson’s studied “non nuclear if” - the other which wants to leave the EU, he might have thought: well, being a land-owner living in a southern Swedish mansion with his new wife might not be so unappealing after all.
In the event,: the opposition won a convincing victory on Sunday night, but it not without its being preceded by moments of nail-biting anxiety in the closest competition in a generation: while the economy has been growing at a sturdy 6 percent a year, and life was good for those in work, the opposition accused the social democrats of presiding over Sweden’s slipping into a post materialist leisure society, a society of young bloggers - with the highest youth unemployment in the old EU – a figure, had the statistics not been massaged, that would probably have been even higher.
The fact that the head of the unemployment service carried out a number of statistical and methodological ruses to keep unemployment down and help the social democrats was one of the instances of a problem the new government has said it wants to deal with: the election was so close because the social democrats, who have ruled for 65 of the last 74 years – a world record – have filled Swedish civil society with social democrat placemen who have soaked the country in the ruling party’s values.
As a result, though generally regarded as tired on the job, and with few fresh ideas, the social democrats and their outriders – despite being on autopilot, and faced with an unusually hungry opposition - held the right wing alliance almost to the end.
Polls put the blocs within a percentage point of each other for months.
A Swedish prime minister has wide discretion in the appointment of the dozens of autonomous agencies/quangos/boards that run much of Swedish life, from the unemployment service to the social welfare agency, the integration board to national schools agency : they are all connected to the party - see picture of the spider's web with the party in the middle - the posts are not advertised and the criteria never specified. In a recent TV interview, Reinfeldt, the new prime minister, says that while it is not wrong that the government appoints people to carry out its work, and should have the final say, the process should be subject to transparency and the posts should be advertised, as in other European countries.
One of Persson’s good friends, Bo Bylund, runs the employment service, and has been accused of putting healthy people on sick rolls and capable people on stupid retraining programmes, and failing to applying European unemployment criteria to Swedish figures, making them much lower than really are. Another friend, a former deputy prime minister, runs state television, which was held by the largest newspaper Dagens Nyheter’s commentator as being “soft on the prime minister”, refusing to rein him when he attacked the opposition during a debate.
Many ambassadors and county sheriffs are former political figures, not civil servants or career diplomats. All of these agencies wield considerable sums of money to shape public opinion, disguised as “information”, which tilt Swedes towards a social democrat view of looking at things. A brief controversy erupted when, for the nationwide mock elections held in schools, pupils were given a CD with the political history of socialism to inform their choice. The head of the school board is another social democrat.
A lot of the patronage flows from the prime minister directly, who rules one of the most centralized, most executive based countries in Europe. Only a third of cabinet ministers are MPs – there is only chamber – and so have a political powerbase beyond the prime minister’s patronage. The rest are recruited directly from outside. One potential check, parliament, is extremely weak, since MPs are elected by party lists, because of the lack of polarities of religion and class, in Swedish societies; and much legislation comes from Europe – the chair in the council of ministers is the
Reinfeldt has promised to make changes to the selection system; and while reform of parliament’s powers compared to the executive might be some way off, a coalition government of four parties – effectively four firsts among equals – will inevitably dilute the power of the prime minister as never was during the Persson era. All this will be subject to discussion, and eagerly watched.
First though there is going to be a purge of social democrats the executive agencies – starting with the hapless Bylund.

Was Rwanda saviour a stooge of big business?

Another thing for the 1,000 EU soldiers to think about as they deploy in the Congo to supervise that country's election and general transition to further development after a brutal five-year civil war that ended in 2003.
Hotel Rwanda is a moving film about THAT genocide that ends with a kind of Killing Fields scene, hero, heroine and children all reunited in a refugee camp safely behind rebel lines. At least the British directors didn't have the tastelessness to put Imagine on the soundtrack.
But in fact that movie, which builds on a generation of western journalists "work" on the genocide, has now become part of a cover-up, that conceals western involvement in a much larger slaughter in the Congo.
The structure of The Rwanda Genocide as mediated is of a regretfully vicious-mass killing of the arrogant former colonial collaborators, the thin nosed, pale skinned Tutsis, by the more bantu Hutus when ethnic tensions exploded when the ethnic Hutu president died in a plane crash in April 1994. The west did nothing - but Tutsi rebels who had once fled to Uganda a generation before came back in force, drove the Hutu mass killers away - across the border to the Congo - and made peace. The wise but young rebel leader Paul Kagame, trained at the US staff command college at Fort Leavenworth, then became president, and things have been pretty quiet in the region since. So goes the standard narrative.
In fact the Rwanda Genocide, which everyone knows about because a number of US journalists have written books about it, has served to obscure the much worse slaughter that happened in DRC subsequently, when up to four million people died - a genocide hardly anyone knows about.
The Rwanda genocide provided an alibi for Kagame who, after being lionised by the press became a US friend to invade Congo under the pretext of rooting out remaining genocidists - for the real purpose of securing US mineral resource and business interests in the mineral rich Congo basin. In the course of this large numbers of Congolese have been slaughtered.
Phillip Gourevitch, a staffer at the New Yorker, won the national book award for Rwanda: We wish to inform you that tomorrow we will be killed with our families. And Samantha Power, once a correspondent with US News and World Report, leveraged her writings on the Rwanda genocide in 1994 into a lucrative tenure at the Harvard School of Government; Kagame gave both writers access to the battlefields during the crisis, with a tight management that was not apparent at the time. Continued good contacts can be demonstrated by the fact that Powers has invited her African friend to lecture at her school; while Gourevitch has written laudatory profiles on Kagamel along with Laurent Kabilka or the DRC, as a new breed of leader.

Kagame invaded then Zaire in 1998, a country where George Bush the elder - who has interests in the mining corporation Barrack Gold - is just one senior figure in a interlocking network of senior American politicians, executives, and businessmen with extensive interests in having Congo's mineral deposits safeguarded. Just to give a flavour: recently Kagame spoke at the James Baker institute in Washington; their he met his patron, George Bush Sr; one of the Baker institutes chief advisor id the director of Total Fina, with extensive interests in the Congo. Bush Sr is a good friend of Bill Clinton, who allowed the kingpin of the African mercenary organisation Sandline Maurice Templesman to host a Corporate Council for Africa on board air force one: Templesman knows every warlord in anglophone africa, and the ACC’s members include alliburton (Dick Cheney); Lazare Kaplan; Chevron-Texaco (Condoleeza Rice); Exxon-Mobil; Asea Brown Baveri (Donald Rumsfeld); Cargill; Archer Daniels Midland; Jean Raymond Bouelle Companies; defence giants McDermott, Sikorsky, Northrup Grumman, GE, Raytheon, Boeing and SAIC (Science Applications International Corporation) and SAIC.
In return for Kagame’s rebels providing security of supply to these mega corporations of Congo’s minerals including coltan - used in the mobile phones - and cobalt, used in extensively in the space industry, payment in Congolese diamonds are transferred or sale in Brussels and Antwerp.
Meanwhile, every day, displaced Congolese die outside the copper-cobalt mines of Lumumbashi for lack of basic medical supplies. Can we look forward to a book by Gourevitch detailing his old mate Kagame's less than heroic activities In the Congo, and the full story behind his various US sponsorships? Somehow I doubt It.

Maroc

TANGIERS

“What are you doing here?” said the young Moroccan.
The ceiling fan whirred over Barca and Real Madrid
posters . Bottles of Flag Speciale beer
were on the table.
I replied:
“What are you doing here?”
He just looked at the TV, tuned to a gameshow on
Spanish TV.
This seemed to be the answer: don’t know. Just
waiting, like so many others in Tangiers: many
Moroccans smuggled themselves into Europe,
by
dangerous speedboat, others waited, sometimes in vain,
for work visas.
Earlier I had met a small man, round glasses,
who
stopped me in the bazaar.
“Sir, may I show you an excellent restaurant?”
“I have already eaten.”
“Are you interested in souvenirs?”
“I have all my souvenirs, I am leaving tomorrow.”
I let him lead me to a bar. Then I asked him why he
was doing eking out a job as a guide. He told me he
had lost his job as a manager, and that he was living
with his sister. There was no social security. His
dream was to go and work
in Spain. I gave him 10
dirhams.


CASABLANCA

While I would be flying out of Gibraltar, just a short
ferry ride from Tangiers, I had flown into
Casablanca
two weeks earlier..
The film of the same name – whose outdoor scenes look
nothing like the city, it was filmed in a Hollywood
backlot - hinges on a coincidence: two former lovers,
played by Bogart and Bergman, meet by coincidence in
a
bar in Casablanca, a long way from where they had
parted.. It was amusing therefore that I had a
completely coincidental encounter of my own, in a
café, with a London consultant friend I hadn’t seen or
heard from for a year, John. “Of all the gin joints in
all the towns...” I burst out. He was on a business
holiday trip too and travelling alone, so we agreed to
spend the evening together.
Some people bring out
the trickster in you. John was
one. We were going to score with muslim women.
The corniche area was supposed to be the
nightlife
area, but there was just a lot of families licking
icecream, and men in all the bars looking at each
other with long faces and sipping soft drinks. There
was exception: two pretty girls sitting on their own.
We sat down next to them, and I started conversation.
After a while we agreed to each other we were going
places. We went to a nightclub.
“What are you doing here?” my girl said and poked me
in the chest.
“Hey, this is easy,” I said. My girl – John picked –
told me helpfully where a cash point was. She sent
her friend, younger and bustier and pretty
when she
caught her friend’s eye and they did belly dance moves
in their seats to the music together. Why wouldn’t she
go? “Because of the police. If they see me.”
On the way back to their place – a “friend’s
apartment” – in separate taxis, we were indeed stopped
by police. I had to bribe the cop 100 dirhams or he
would throw me into a cell for the night, according to
the taxi driver. I rendezvoused with John and his girl
later outside a
“friend’s apartment” – which we later realised was a
euphemism for brothel – we had both had enough.
There
were more outlays ahead: a door guard, “just
another
100 dirhams” my
girl said. The girls already cadged a
lot of drinks, nightclub entries, mobile phone topups
and cigarette packs off us. John said: “Moroccans are
always into business, always trying to rip you off,”
We decided to call it quits.
In the taxi, John said: if only the girls hadn’t been
prostitutes.
The taxi driver, a student, said: all unaccompanied
women in Morocco after dark are.
He also said that sleeping with a Moroccan woman who
wasn’t your wife could earn you a year in prison

THE MOUNTAINS

I wondered whether it was effect of the Koran, reading
of which was said to be like dipping into a river,
lacking a
narrative of the bible. Moroccan carpet
salesmen. didn’t build up their arguments, but just
repeated certain phrases over and over again.
“Why drink from a river when you
can you drink from a spring.”
“Western Union no problem – take the carpets home, pay
later when you send money. I trust you my friend.”
“I AM NOT INTERESTED.”
He poured me
another tea. When I had left my hotel in
the Todra gorge, half an hour earlier, I was followed
by the hotel owner ten
steps behind, then his mate, Mohammed: I just wanted
go for a walk to the nearby village, but inevitably,
flanked by both of the, we ended up in his private
carpet shop. There followed a ten-minute sales
spiel.

After what I thought was a successful communication of
my non interest, we went for another tea, this time on
the carpet shop terrace, surrounded by a
vista of mountains, red in the setting
sun, in three
directions. I sighed and let my thoughts wander,
until:
“Western Union, no problem.”
Memo to self:
Some people just don’t get the message.

THE DESERT

There is a certain age when many men buy a boat and go
to sea. The desert is a kind of sea. In the last town
in Morocco
, where the highway ended, and where there
was an old sign somewhere that said it was 52 days to
Timbuctoo, I hired Ibrahim and his Mercedes
240.
The desert poured past, the light as blinding as
darkness, the sand as white as snowfield. Stones and
gravel, gravel and sand, sand and stones.
Heat distorts perception, perhaps it was one
hour or many.
It was early evening now, and dunes – huge dunes,
could be seen for miles away,
I was glad to see trees: when the ground is flat, the
sky sinks. Trees raise the sky by being big yet there
is so much further to go. It was an oasis – there were
some berber mud houses. We parked and ate
some dates
off the trees.

We began to climb, at the top of the dune, we saw a
quilt of dunes, set in relief by the sun, stretching
to the horizon. Then the stars came out, billions of
them. The stars were like green chandeliers….I
switch on the shortwave radio. Above me is a wonderful
sense of cool, listening to the rise and fall of
interference, the rolling of the huge roaring breakers
of space…..
I sent a text message to Brussels. There is no reply.

HOTEL

Back in the hotel in Rissani, after a week in the
desert,
I look at the mirror. My face is haggard, worn
down
by the sun, eroded like the mountains that turned
into rocks, the rocks that turned into sand. Life is
like jumping off a skyscraper, and this summer I have
passed the halfway point
Who is she? Imagine Anne Frank grown up on a good
diet. Elongated limbs, once an ugly duckling but now
statuesque. She used to smile like Anne Frank on the
cover, total devotion, and flap her fingers on my
naked chest whenever she wanted to say something or
was worried. Or, when she was sad, she would dangle
her handbag slowly like a pendulum. When she looked at
things there was this
intention: you could read it. I
am going to look. And then she turned her head and
looked. “I am very clumsy,” she would say. But also
very strong:
with a friend she carried a table four
flights up to
her flat off the Grand Place, very elegant and large.
And she was never ill.
Later she was very cute when she was angry. She had an
IQ of 160, had just started working for the European
Commission, and was 26. She had dumped me shortly
before starting her new job.

MARRAKECH

The Red city, in what is known as the square of the
dead, Djmaa El Fnaa. There are berbers, Gnawa
music, monkeys, fire, dentists. I go to a fortune
teller. He is summoned by a
salesman of alternative
medicines, who speaks French.
“How much will he charge?”
“150 dirhams.”
“Sure?”
“Yes.”
And we sit down next to buckets and boxes of
traditional herbal medicines laid out on a large
carpet in the square, lit by kerosene lamps, smokes is
rising from the food stalls, lit up in a ghostly way
by
their kerosene laps, and there is the sound of
drummers and snake charmers. The fortune teller gives
me six sticks inscribed with Arabic script which I
have to wrap strips of cloth. I let the strip hang
from the stick, grab the two ends, bring them together
and wrap them in unison around the stick. Six times,
and he puts it between a
large notebook in his lap,
writes furiously in Arabic as if a prescription – he
is neat, balding, looks like a Swiss accountant, quite
fair skinned, but for his jellabiyah, leans forward
several times, as if a stomach ache, making several
guttural sounds, opens the notebook and asks me
to
ynravel the strips. This I do: three strips of cloth
come off the stick completely – I wonder how this is
so
When this happens, the herb seller, who acts as our
translator, says: bad news. This means problem. The
fortune teller reads the messages on the unfortunate
sticks and tell me my fortune: I am a dreamer, have
missed lots of opportunities in life. I give a lot to
my friends and lovers without expecting
anything
back.These people are afraid of me though because I
represent a threat, and don’t return the attention. .
They think I am going to kill them. Ania is a
good
person, but to be back together with her, I must not
contact her, he will write a spiritual letter. I must
bury it under my pillow and within five days she would
contact me.
“Let her come to you,” he said. Then he
asks 1,500 dirhams. .
“Oh dear,” I say.
We haggle it down to the original
figure, a tenth of this, but the fortune teller will
not write the letter.
“That is a shame,” says the salesman, grinning
embarrassedly. “I really wanted to see for myself
it worked too.”

I did my story, on medical caravans.
Basically three days in a taxi.
Back in England, she never called. I consoled
myself
that the letter wouldn’t have made any difference;
that it was pure superstition.
I continued
waiting, like the Moroccans in Tangier, hoping,
waiting
– waiting for the exit visa

The problem in a nutshell, literally

The American historian Michael Lind observes that a society has to provide for its biological and cultural perpetuation and be capable of defeating and deterring its enemies. Today every European country fails on that count, producing too few children and failing to integrate its immigrants in a way necessary to perpetuate the culture of the host nation.
Europe may not produce failed states like Somalia or Sierra Leone, but are they failed societies – shrinking, self sterilising, lacking martial courage and communal cohesion.
Why then is the commission taking five EU countries to court for failing to charge the requisite 15 percent VAT on nappies. Europe’s yuoung people need every incentive they can get to have more children. Let us hope there will be no further action against Hungary, Malta, Poland, Portugal and the Czech Republic, who were sent a "letter of formal notice" by the commission on 18 July for charging a mere 5 percent VAT on their nappy products, and that the commission reviews its VAT policies in a family friendly manner next year. That might be a small way toward addressing Lind’s diagnosis, although as many saloon bar demographers are aware, much, much more needs to be done.

EU freedoms worsen controversial UK health reform

McAvan contra mundum


Thank goodness for the independence of MEPS.
Few in Brussels ever cast a sideways glance across the channel at the
NHS , Europe’s second largest employer after the Red Army; whose annual budget of about £85bn is actually about equivalent to that of the European Union. Its health service status ring-fences it from the attentions of the single market enforcers.
Yet the venerable British institution is undergoing unprecedented reform which some compare, in its own world, to the collapse of the Soviet system. And in fact, the NHS is introducing a single market of its own.
The new reforms involve an enormous expansion of patient choice, a new payment system for hospitals, foundation trusts, independent sector treatment centres, practice-based commissioning.
A lot of doctors are unhappy about this, partly because the pace of change has come so fast, notes Julian Legrand, a professor of social policy at the LSE and a former No 10 adviser, wrote recently. Partly because doctors are losing their autonomy. Consultants are used to having their own fiefdoms; now they have to deal with hospital managers on the one hand and performance targets on the other. They also have more constraints on their rights to prescribe medicines.
Targets, redolent of the Soviet era, are losing their popularity. But the reforms present another threat: that of the market, which is increasingly becoming a substitute for targets. Legrand argues that the discipline of the market is an improvement over the discipline of command and control targets, since these are disenfranchising, while the market offers more scope for initiative and dynamism.
The downside is job insecurity, but people lose their jobs in command and control systems also, and are in such systems much less able to get another job. Anyway, doctors can always go abroad.
With doctors, targets were far from popular, but this new system appears even less so.
At several spring and summer medical conferences that I attended, I heard them complain bitterly about the system. One compared being a GP in the new choose and book NHS – where GP and patient will sit in front of a screen and choose hospitals - to being a maitre’d in a restaurant. The loss of a sense of status is palpable, despite the recent salary increases. The BMA annual plenary voted to oppose the reforms, against the wishes of their leadership. “because the BMA leadership want their gongs” in the words of a health academic.
“If the government continues like this by the end of the decade the NHS will effectively have disappeared as a national institution providing the most economical health services in the world, freely and equally to all,” Colin Leys, a health expert opposed to the government’s reforms told me.
“The ‘NHS’ logo will still exist, but increasingly just as a logo attached to private hospitals and GPs’ surgeries.
“Soon entire clinical services – for example, mental health or paediatrics – will become unavailable locally, as hospitals drop unprofitable activities in order to survive in the market, and without any opportunity for the public to prevent it.
“This unevenness will be offset by new opportunities to buy ‘superior’ or ‘enhanced’ services through ‘copayments’.
“Those who can afford it will buy the kind of services that the NHS was created to provide free to everyone, regardless of ability to pay. Everyone else will get a ‘basic’ service, which will decline steadily as the middle class loses interest in it, and good staff flee to better-resourced and less stressful work. If this picture seems far-fetched it is because government spin and media bias have prevented a clear picture emerging.
Most of it has already occurred, or is explicitly planned.”
He could well be right. While choice is good in theory, it needs an informed customer, and healthcare is not cereal. It will favour the well off, who can afford to travel to take an advantage of the freedom to go wherever they wish..
Hospitals will be further consolidated by uncertainties of the system of payment by results in arrears, which will mean less cash flow for many hospitals, already impoverished by high management consultancy fees (An unrelated fact: Patricia Hewitt, the health secretary, is a former management consultant herself.) Any benefits of choice will lose out to inequality pf provision, as rural and unprofitable hospitals close down – it will be like the fiasco of railway privatisation. As Leys puts it: “Most people want as little choice in hospitals as they do in fire brigades.”

The interesting implication for Brussels is what impetus this will give for a health services directive this autumn. The directive says patients can go abroad for treatement if the waiting lists at home are too long - and the home state will pay, which could expand choice dramatically., though the exact details of the conditions have yet to be ublished. Although current ECJ judgments say that choice of care abroad is subject to waiting lists at home, one doctor I spoke to said that, since choice of any UK hospital was now being offered, he would be happy to let the money follow the patient abroad as well, especially if it was cheaper. This will be an interesting quandary for Labour MEP Linda McAvan, the socialists’ health spokeswoman. She is tentatively in favour of a health services directive; but has also said carelessly – or obliviously?- that: “Most people just want to decent, functioning care locally.” Which, of course, would be much more at risk from continental choice - France or Germany, take your pick - a la carte.