It was a landmark event in modern European history. A secret CIA orchestrated attack by US and British forces on Sweden in the 1980s. It shifted European opinion away from America’s adversary, toppled a government in Germany – and may have contributed to the assassination of a Swedish prime minister.
Every Swede of a certain age remembers the events – though not who was behind them. Fro Swedes, myself included, were only too aware of the menacing presence of the USSR across the Baltic..
It is only recently that studying findings by the academic cold war specialist Ola Tunander has made me realise that these fears appear to have been exploited by NATO. The US-dominated defence organisation carried out on a friendly neutral country one of the most successful “false flag” operations of the cold war.
The goal of the false flag – posing to be the enemy - operation was to serve the US administration’s strategic military and political ambitions. It makes one wonder to what extent, ultimately, it was America and not Russia that was the aggressive party in the cold war.
All propaganda operations must work in a prepared environment. Everyone knew about Stalin; but myths were fed by lack of contact. .Soviets, all east Europeans, were seen as an undifferentiated mass, no different from each other than larvae are, shuffling in an eternal, never-ending queue of bearskin hats invigilated by secret police with burning charcoal eyes; Aged 11, I had nightmares of waking up on the wrong side of the Brandenburg gate. On summer days, I would turn over on the beach and spot a mushroom cloud of impending thunder on the Baltic horizon, slowly advancing to take over the sparkling blue July sky on our side, and wonder: surely atomic explosions were accompanied flashes of brilliant light? They were not rational times and, if you were a boy in his early teens, your reality was often framed by an unhealthy consumption of fantasy and science fiction books; and a liking for Star Wars, with its dichotomous morality and its depiction of the Dark Empire. Another model was provided by Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, which I devoured in the summer of 1981. I imagine many others had their ideas of the USSR
Sweden experienced dozens,, perhaps hundreds, of alien submarine visits into her archipelago in the1980s; many including special forces. Only one submarine was ever visually identified, because it had run aground. It was indeed Soviet. There were a half dozen high profile submarine hunts. In only one, the first, Horsfjarden, was there an in depth commission to determine the nature of the intruders. That commission pointed to the USSR, falsely as we shall see. In other istances the intruder was “assumed”, as often the sightings were often fragmentary.
Even if the first sub hadn’t been Soviet, and the commission hadn’t pointed out the second one, most people were sufficiently badly inclined towards the USSR, the “evil empire”, .– and believe that because of course the submarines were the advance guard of an impending Soviet invasion. And many started to call the Swedish prime minister, Olof Palme, a traitor. Because he was launching peace initiatives, consorting with the enemy, paying visits to the Kremlin, talking of European peace initiatives.
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Shortly after Olof Palme’s assassination in 1986, the cold war ended. In the light of what we didn’t knowo then, the period must be re-examined.. The Soviet Union was not only s colossus with feet of clay, but archives show no plans for conquest of Europe. There were indeed submarines though; only it’s been revealed that they were in the main not Soviet.
They were American, and they were British. And so were the special forces, the US navy SEALS and SBS troops, who seem to have used Sweden as their unauthorised playground. .
U-137 runs aground, sets the scene
The first and only real confirmed submarine sighting in Swedish modern history was of the Whisky class submarine, the U-137, (S-363, in Soviet nomenclature) which ran aground on a reef in the southern Karlskrona archipelago in October 1981, probably after a misnavigation, probably because its crew, or at least its captain, one Piotr Gushchin, was blind drunk. No one then believed the excuse of misnavigation; now it’s generally accepted, according to Rolf Ekeus, the respected (later Iraq WMD active!) diplomat, head of one of the submarine commissions of the 1990s.
It was shortly before the imposition of martial law in Poland two months later. Memories of Soviet tanks in Prague streets were still vivid, the Afghan invasion was just two years old. General western convictions about Soviet expansionism in every direction were uncontroversial.
So, this particular submarine was indeed Soviet: the Whisky on the Rocks episode made worldwide headlines; and the submarine was set free, sent off with a stern diplomatic warning, but the whole situation posed problems for that minority in Swedish public life which argued that it could not be proved prima facie that the hundreds of electronic detections or eye witness accounts in the next ten years were either from NATO or the Warsaw pact: one journalist who begged to differ as early as the mid 1980s, Anders Hasselbohm, who then worked for Expressen, wrote a book [called Ubatshotet - en kritisk granskning] as long ago as 1984 found sources that "asserted that "the submarines were NATO; one was damaged, and was escorted out of the straits of Oresund out of the Baltic two weeks later by another sub". Hasselbohm recently admitted the price to pay for publishing against the received wisdom: his neighbours stopped greeting him in the lift, even his mother in her hometown was shunned, because "pointing out the west; well, that wasn't the done thing." The only public figure to pronounce against the consensus was former army chief Nils Skold, who was accused of being senile.
One academic, Ola Tunander, and one journalist. Lars Borgnas, have recently worked hard through a series of papers and books, and TV documentaries to overturn the enduring consensus in Sweden, and the world inasmuch in that it remembers, that the country was menaced by Soviet submarines and supporting forces for a decade, and the biggest Soviet military action words a western state since the Berlin crisis, it was said.
”America’s undiscovered, underwater U-2 incident”
Consider the Horsfjarden incident, nine months after Whisky on the Rocks, the biggest incursion; the only other occasion when submarines were definitely detected (but not brought up), only other occasion it led to a diplomatic demarche; and the event that established firmly in the public mind the paradigm for subsequent incursions, that the Soviet Union meant business and the U-137 “spy mission” was not a one off: when the regular scrambling of Swedish navy Chinook helicopters and dropping of depth charges was later reduced to mere inside page news.
Like the Whisky incident, it made worldwide headlines.
The official story can be quickly told: the first sighting was, on 29 September 1982, a small submarine sail a couple of kilometres south of Stockholm harbour: a fast moving submarine sail 1.5m wide, 1m high appeared in a pool of boiling water marking its ascent. Second, two observers were travelling in a boat at 12.50 on 1 October, when they observed a periscope entering the waters at Muskö Naval Base, tens of kilometres south of Stockholm. When a huge submarine sail “the size of a wall” passed through a narrow channel in front of coastal defence forces (unarmed), it was game on, and the two week “submarine hunt” following brought 500 journalists from around the world to a press centre near the Musko naval base where a cat and mouse game was played between Swedish helicopters and Anti-submarine warfare (ASW) ships on the world’s TV screens with a number of submarines trapped in Sweden’s fjord system by lines of laid mines that blocked exits to open sea. .
No submarine was brought up; the Swedish navy reported that several had been severely damaged – but escaped. A CIA agent has later said the US narrowly escaped an underwater “U-2 incident”.
Soviets blamed by commission headed by Bildt and admiral secretly working for NATO
A commission was set up to determine the identity of the submarines, and to report proof that they existed, six months later, and it unanimously announced there had been six submarines, including attack submarines in the 60-80 m class, as well as mini submersibles 6 – 30m long, and that they had been Soviet. A Time magazine report of the time under the heading “Red Submarines” wrote that “It read like a chapter of seabed science fiction, but last week Swedes were taking very seriously indeed a report by their government charging the Soviet Union with a spectacular underwater spy effort off the Swedish coast”.
It’s worth looking at this commission. It was led by Sven Andersson, a slightly grey veteran former foreign minister and old hand of the social democrats,; but also had two members whose names are worth remembering, as they play a part in the story: the first is Bror Stefenson, chief of defence staff, who it emerges was in cahoots with NATO; second is Carl Bildt, today 2007 Sweden’s foreign minister; and tipped to become the EU’s newly created foreign minister in 2009 or so; in the 1990s a young prime minister, critic of Russia and sponsor of the Balts’ independence, but back even further, at the time of the submarines, was an up-and-coming young conservative party MP, aged 33, known to be knowledgeable about security issues and for being very pro-American; a frequent visitor to Washington to build links in Pentagon and Reagan’s White House.
These contacts paid off. Before becoming foreign minister in 2006, and after leaving the post of UN envoy to the Balkans he was offered membership of the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq by his friend and chair of that right-wing group, Bruce Jackson, who also headed the infamous rightwing think tank Project for the New American Century which advocated a policy of muscular nationalism to assert America’s interests in the world; its members included all the you-know-who neoconservatives. Bildt was promised a senior job in postwar Iraq if he could be the acceptable lobbying face of the neocon organization in Europe, agitating for war on the basis of intelligence estimates of Iraq's threatening intent, intelligence which, as we all know it turned out, proved to be false.
Evidence classified, Swedish PM Palme killed
The commission’s evidence that the subs were Soviet was divided into four parts: visual sightings; underwater photos of keel indentations and tracked submarines tracks on the sea floor; signals intelligence; and sonar records of submarine movement. The proof was taken on trust at the time; now it’s known that the evidence, in Ola Tunander’s words, was “mostly of bluff”.
When the commission’s Backed by public opinion, which “knew” the subs were Soviet anyway, the Swedish government made a strong formal protest to the Soviets. Later several Swedish members of government expressed doubt about the finger-pointing, but felt driven by the Bildt commission and public opinion. They included Anders Thunborg, the defence minister, who complained: “Well, we couldn’t dive ourselves; we have to trust our military leadership, and their experts”; and Lennart Bodstrom, the foreign minister who had to resign after media pressure in 1985 when he said that, after four years of sightings, he said bluntly that it was impossible to protest against an intruder that had not been identified.
The head of the government was Olof Palme, a well-known peacemaker with 15 years of mediation in third world conflicts behind him: the kind of man after whom congress centres in developing countries are named. His initiative, launched earlier in the year to bring Soviets out of the diplomatic cold now sank as fast as a depth charge. How could argue that the USSR had no hostile intents in Europe when the country was clearly showing aggressive intent designed to humiliate and show domination over his country?
Abroad, Europe’s leaders no longer took Palme seriously, as his détente initiatives through the Palme commission suffered. At home, things were almost as bad. After Horsfjarden (sometimes spelt Hårsfjärden), the number of Swedes who thought the USSR was a threat the country’s existence rose from 25% to 88% of the population.
Now Swedes speculated whether his frequent visits to Moscow, to visit soviet leader Juri Andropov, were really the trips of a mole in consultation talks for Sweden’s accession to the Soviet Union, under a bloodless coup which would take place with the assistance of special spetsnaz tip: was Palme expecting to become the Swedish Soviet socialist republic’s first premier, Sweden as the USSR’s sixteenth member, just another Estonia or Ukraine? The atmosphere is hard to recall now; people said it after a few drinks. Hans Hofsten, a senior admiral in the Swedish navy, widely believed to be the figurehead of a movement of disaffected naval officers, wrote a series of articles in the Swedish press warning about the dangers of a "Soviet republic of Sweden".
The fact that it seemed clear that a damaged submarine in 1982 had actually been let out, spared, rather than brought to the surface, pointed to his possible true Moscow loyalties, did it not? In March 1986 Palme was assassinated in an open street in Stockholm. The murder was never solved.
Yeltsin dismisses Bildt “evidence”
THERE IS A STATUE in Stockholm of king Charles XII, the warrior king who gave had an extensive northern and eastern empire in the 18th century (he was the first of the great, failed western invaders of Russia) The statue features him pointing rather imperiously to the east: for him, there were no doubts as to where the enemy lay, and he could command peasant armies of Swedes at a whim to follow him into the cold wastes of the Ukraine. But in this case, would it be fairer to point the finger in the other direction, towards the west?
As the eighties turned into the nineties, and the now almost routine reports of low grade incursions fizzled out, people started to ask questions again about Horsfjarden.
Where was the evidence: how could the government exclude the possibility that NATO subs were not also transgressing. Carl Bildt, now 41 and prime minister, took time out from building friendships with the now independent Baltic states’ new leaderships to visit Yeltsin with irrefutable evidence of Soviet incursion: a hydrophone tape recording (still secret from Swedish public) of Soviet submarine propeller sounds.
Yeltsin’s technical people were not impressed: their best experts said Soviet subs had five propellers, and this was a three propeller sound characteristic of NATO submarines. They also said it could have been a surface vessel from the Swedish navy. Could the Swedes guarantee the surface was free of ASW vessels at the time? Bildt told Yeltsin he could; even though there was no time indication on the tape, and Swedish conscript witnesses later said the area had full of Swedish ASW vessels during the day.
The Russians offered the tape up for third party international verification. Bildt refused, and continued to press for a Russian admission of Soviet incursions. When Yeltsin made the offer of third party mediation again a year later, Bildt’s office didn’t even bother to send a reply.
He had a second tape, dating from 1992; however experts later believed this to have come from a swimming mink. By then, long held doubts had begun to surface from politicians and military men who had never been convinced by the Bildt commision’s findings in the first place. A new government, social democratic, appointed a new submarine commission; yet another followed in 2001, chaired by Sweden's top diplomat, the former ambassador Rolf Ekeus, who had ceased being the UN's chief inspector on WMDs in Iraq, in 1997. The report, which said with diplomatic finesse NATO subs could not have been excluded resulted in furious denunciations by Bildt, the only commission member still active in public life. He never addressed the evidential refutations; the focus of his criticism was that Ekeus didn't understand the security sitation in Sweden in the 1980s or Palme's decision to "anchor" the report "more broadly in the political system".
Bildt's bluster failed to convince at least one man, the main scientific adviser to the Ekeus report, Ola Tunander.
A slight, quiet spoken man in his fifties, professor Ola Tunander, the star academic of Oslo’s Peace Research Institute (safely distant one could say from the Swedish establishment), is one of the world’s leading experts on the cold war in Scandinavia: he has long headed the institute’s Foreign and Security Policy Programme. His book on US Maritime Strategy and Scandinavian geopolitics, , was used as one of two major textbooks for the Swedish Military College. He has published several books on the Cold war with the leading academic publisher Routledge. He has lectured at the centre for naval analysis in Washington and at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey. Ekéus invited Tunander as an expert to this investigation, which gave Tunander access to archival material.
When the Ekeus report was finished, Tunander continued his work, drawing on written resources and on and hundreds of interviews and chats with western and naval officials, resulting in the book The Secret War Against Sweden – US and British Submarine Deception in the 1980s
The real story
Just before the start of the submarine hunt there was a public “good-will” visit by three US ships led by the US cruiser Belknap to Stockholm, after a NATO exercise in the Baltic. The ships welcomes many curious members of the Swedish public; several said they saw a small periscope near the ships, just metres from Stockholm castle,
When the US navy ships departed, they left behind these minisubs, from the depot ship the USS Monongahela to “exercise their way out” of the Swedish archipelago and to provoke Swedish defences into a reaction, which duly occurred.
In one interpretation, this was an exercise to test Swedish defences in which a few senior Swedish officers were informed of and were in collusion with the NATO exercise, ready to pull the plug if event spiralled out of control and NATO subs started getting sunk. A charitable explanation is that NATO was testing Swedish defences to be more on guard against the next Soviet incursion. (A less charitable motive relates to the so called “strategy pf tension“, in which NATO was trying to scare a neutral country into the embrace of the United States, given credence that the ships were quite public about their provocations, more than the next Soviet ones would be,) Tunander says the NATO-informed insiders were rear-admiral Bror Stefenson, chief of the Coastal Fleet, in charge of the submarine hunt that followed, who later the chief military expert on the Bildt committee that named and shamed the Soviets. Another was Per Rudberg, , who was NATO’s liaison man in Sweden and had close personal ties with Admiral Bobby Inman, former Chief of US Naval Intelligence, former Chief of the National Security Agency and, in 1981, became deputy director of the CIA.
The government, the rest of the military, and the Swedish public had no idea.
But it was an exercise that almost went wrong, as the Swedish naval defences were ignorant of the subs’ true origin, as they were exactly meant to be or they wouldn’t try hard enough, were a bit too successful and thorough.
Depth charges of the kind used were almost harmless, had to be within a metre of the submarine to do any damage whatsoever; but the 600 kilo TNT mines strung out across the fjords when the response to the sights were underway were another proposition, and one NATO sub was almost sunk when it made contact and the mine was set off: there was a back-up system where the senior informed officials were to intervene when the dangers of real sinkings were likely, but it seems the system failed.
This near sinking produced an emergency signal: a liquid was released from the sub that spread out on the surface to alert friendly satellites and circling aircraft of a U-boat in emergency: its colour was yellow/green, the US standard, Warsaw pact submarines in contrast issued smoke signals. (The testimonies on the subject from conscripts never became part of the body pf the original commission's work, and both chemical analyses made by a small craft and photos taken by helicopter shortly disappeared)
The Swedish naval forces on the hunt thought their adversary on the ropes: there were hydrophone recordings later of knocking and repair sounds as the submarine lay on the floor of the fjord; but then a strange order came from Stefenson’s naval headquarters: there was to be a “fire prohibition” the next evening from 7pm to 1am; no mine detonations on contact, the reason was “in case there were civilian boats out on the fjords”; but there hadn’t been civilians at night throughout the hunt, had been no ceasefire orders on the nights; and the local navy guards had been equipped with night vision so that even the smallest rowing boat was visible.Local officers said so at the time, and verified this, afterwards
When night fell, the mine trip wires indicated a submarine as on its way out, local commanders, eager to attack the sub, rang Stefenson, who refused to rescind his order, and the wounded submarine escaped. (the others had slipped out earlier; untrapped.) The hunt continued for next six days –there were no ceasefires on subsequent nights – but the trail had gone cold: no more subs were detected, and the journalists, and the navy, eventually went home. Helped by their contact inside Swedish military, Bror Stefenson, who had ordered his ceasefire at the critical moment, just before they were about to bombed, the US navy subs escaped – and the scene was set for Soviets to take the blame
Original evidence cooked up
But what about the Bildt commission’s “four pillars of evidence”; Tunander says that "Every statement by the commission...seems to have been bluff."
Point one, optical evidence. On the submarine commission’s optical evidence, which included civilian sightings of submarines estimated at “two thirds the length” of the 19th century ferries that ply the 24,000 island archipelago, ie 25-30 metres long; well says Tunander, no Warsaw pact submarine then or since has that length (the nearest in size is the 56metre Soviet Quebec class sub) but it fits well on the Cosmos submarine SX-756 used by Italian and western special forces. Other sightings of submarine sails taller than they are wide also suit NATO submarines: Any naval expert wil tell you that Warsaw pact submarine sails were short and stubby.
Second bit of evidence: we don’t know that NATO uses tracked minisubs, so they must be Warsaw pact. The fact, Tunander shows, is that both NATO and the Warsaw pact had tracked minisubs: the US had the DSV Turtle. For instance.
The third pillar of proof, the electronic signals – well, they were completely made up. The Swedish signal intelligence agency FRA stated in a letter to the Defence Minister in 1995, and which Tunander reveals, is that they had no information on signals linked to Soviet activities during this submarine hunt, and the Navy’s signal intelligence had received a couple of signals from Swedish waters, but they were believed to originate from the west.
It’s interesting to note that these signals, which were never made public, were fetched from the FRA by Bildt and Stefenson, and which they said constituted the strongest of their evidential reports against the Soviets.
Finally, the hydrosonar tape records; there were two, one from the 12 October which indicated a submarine travelling at 1-2 knots out of the archipelago, vibrating at 80MHz. This tape was brought to Norwegian experts – the best in NATO as they monitored the Svalbard-Norway gap for the Murmansk outbound Soviet nuclear subs– on the 14th of October; the Norwegians told the Swedes that the evidence points neither to a conventional nor nuclear submarine but rather at the “west”; this observation never incorporated into the Bildt report; American officials confiscated the Norwegian copy of the tape. A Swedish copy of the same time meanwhile that remained in Stockholm had its submarine sounds removed, so that all that can be heard is the voice of the hydrophonist in one channel saying “This is a certain submarine” while just the crash of the sea in the other; convenient if the embarrassing signals turned out to be NATO, as indeed the Norwegians said.
Then there was there famous 3.47minute sonar signals from the next day, where no time was announced on the tape by the observer, which Bildt and his technical adviser purported were the gold standard proof, but which the Soviets said were either NATO subs or Swedish surface vessels and which the Swedish government will neither release to the public nor allow to be tested independently; though Tunander has managed to get hold of the printed analysis of the sound pattern, sent it to Jarl Johnson of the Norwegian defence research institute, who confirms the Russian assertion that, whether it’s a surface vessel or submarine it has three propellers, meaning NATO.
US officials confirm NATO incursions
Sometimes some astonishing revelation will be made public, but will never bite in the public mind, and kind of sink into obscurity, at least among the man on the street. (It also mustn’t be forgotten that, the fact that Saddam didn’t have WMD is the singular fact about the Iraq war, frequently recited in the world’s media and a staple basis for post-2002 international political discourse, yet surveys show that an astonishing half the America population haven’t got this message, still thinks he did have WMDs..) One such astonishing revelation was indeed made public in this submarines story, by America’s leading defence official in the 1980s, the horse’s mouth as it were. Given the US experience just quoted, this single airing, and subsequent wire reports in what follows, not having lodged in the Swedish public’s mind may not be all that surprising.
For in fact, Caspar Weinberger, US defence secretary 1980 –87, has said that Western submarines operated ‘regularly’ and ‘frequently’ in Swedish waters in order to ‘test’ the Swedish coastal defences.
After the Weinberger interview was broadcast on the programme Striptease (despite its name, a serious current affairs show), and the then Swedish commander of land forces Bengt Gustafsson (clearly not in the loop) commented that he felt like a “useful idiot”, Former British navy minister Sir Keith Speed and former head of naval intelligence John Walker confirmed the existence of these operations to an international wire service; Speed talked about penetration dive exercises deep in neutral waters; The British prime minister’s office was briefed regularly about the risks, and these were regarded as even more secret than penetrations into Soviet waters. Sir Keith speaking about surfacing almost in Stockholm harbour. “It was a question of: How far could we get before you Swedes were aware of it,” he told the Associated Press.
After the interview with Weinberger, a US senior official told Tunander
I don’t know why Weinberger said what he did. Covert submarine operations is the most secret thing we have.… The decisions were taken by a committee of DIA and CIA people [most likely the National Underwater Reconnaissance Office (NURO)], “
Tunander said another official said he was never himself involved in these operations in Swedish waters, but he knew the people responsible for them
British involvement
Later,. British Oberon class submarine captains admitted to Tunander in his further researches with intelligence officers that they would travel submerged under the Danish straits and up and around the Baltic sea areas as far north as Lapland, on which they briefed select Swedish officials. One sub may have been present in the deeper parts of Horsfjarden – the Oberon is .88m long. They carried out expeditions involving depositing Special Boat service troops (naval equivalents of the Special Air Service) into this neutral country, generally making mockery of Sweden’s neutrality. When one of the clearest signs of submarine activity since, in 1988,a very clear sonar recording was played to NATO officials, Tunander reports, a British commander said: “My God, that’s one of ours!”
Need more admissions? Tunander was told by the head of the Norwegian foreign ministry’s political division, Ainar Ansteensen, that he was told by a CIA agent while the Horsfjarden incident happening that the submarines were mainly American. He reported about the damaged US submarine to his Commander-in-Chief General Sven Hauge, but he did not inform General Ljung and the Swedes. Also a Norwegian intelligence officer spoke about a damaged Western submarine in 1982, and he pointed to the USA and said that ‘Caspar Weinberger knew about it’ And when Tunander was sharing a car ride back in 1993 with former US secretary of defence James Schlesinger and told him about the US submarines, Schlesinger said: “I remember the incident, but not the details.”
If details were what were wanted,. Tunander continued digging, in US congressional and military records, as well as as past TV transcripts: has managed to piece together a plausible picture involving American forces: A former commander of SEAL team three, who operated in the Baltic, though officially only off the west German coast, has written that he carried out operations not looking like the US navy (ie posing as another nationals, flase flag operations that actually contravene the Geneva conventions) and doing “other things the US navy was not supposed to do”..
At a congressional hearing in the 1980s, the House of Representatives’ Subcommittee on the Department of Defense, Rear-Admiral John L. Butts, Chief of Naval Intelligence, responded that –unlike the 1982 incident – the Soviet submarine in Karlskrona in 1981 was ‘genuine’. In 1982 ‘the Swedes had several submarine contacts’ close to Muskö Naval Base, but then - his following paragraph on the national origin is classified. However, later in the text he speaks about a well known US navy research submarine, NR1, as if it had been used in Swedish waters.
Soon afterwards, John McWethy, the Pentagon correspondent for ABC , said:
“American submarines are repeatedly violating territorial waters of other nations while gathering intelligence. Most of the top-secret missions are
into the waters of the Soviet Union, but according to both active duty and retired military sources, some missions have been run into the
territorial waters of those nations considered friendly to the US.”
The Pentagon correspondent added:
“The missions are conducted by specially equipped nuclear ,inisubmarines powered attack submarines and in some cases by a nuclear powered mini-sub called NR-1 (MINI-SUB). It has a seven-man crew, wheels on its underside for crawling along the bottom and is described by the Navy as a research vessel.”
During the 1982 incident, the length of the submarine measured with an echo ranger on 5 October and the description of a submarine sail observed on 7 October fit both with the NR-1, which of course, being American, emitted yellow dye in an emergency.
Tunander also said that the ships participating in the Horsfjard incident included the Seawolf, which had operated in Libyan waters with NR1 in the 1971s, and had a specially built compartment for seal divers; and a mini-submarine called the Turtle; and several Italian minsubmarines, such as the Cosmo SX-756/.
The Americans were rewarded for their escape. According to his research in US military records, the crew of all these ships won awards for exceptional bravery for their activities in European waters between 30 August and 5 November 1982.
Top level US and UK authorisations
The characteristic of these operations, Tunander says, was the extreme secrecy, the direct links between the transgressing submarine commanders, their top military commanders, and tsome high officers of the Swedsih navy, (while excluding Sweden’s political leadership.)
The Royal Navy Oberon captain told Tunander that ministerial approval had to be given for every single operation; that there was a direct link between him and the commanding officer of submarines, and the prime minister, Margaret Thatcher.
In the US, one submarine commander, called Richard Marcinko, reported directly to chief of naval operations James Watkins. The SEAL – US special forces – operators were in the direct command of the head of allied NATO forces in Europe, while William Casey himself, erstwhile head of the CIA, flew to Stockholm personally to liaise with the handful of Swedish officers aware of the secret incursion. That some liaison was necessary was proved at the Horsfjarden emergency incident.
A CIA officer Tunander spoke to say that the near sinking in 1982 was almost an underwater “U-2” – with reference to the episode when the Soviets shot down a U2 spyplane pilot, Gary Powers, in 1960
The navy diary of the day’s events that could give one official insight into the background of Stefenson’s decisions have disappeared from the Swedish Navy’s diary, ripped out of both copies of the book, as well as a type written version.
As all this testimony indicates, although the Horsfjarden incident was the most high profile incursion – journalists never returned in such numbers, nor were findings made or presented with such fanfare again, it was far from the only one. In fact, one month before the report was presented a submarine hunt took place close to Karlskorona and yet another hunt went again in the Musko area near Horsfjarden. The day after the report was represented another submarine hunt took place on the Sundsvall coast in mid-northern Sweden. an event that dominated the newspapers A month later, on the evening of 27 May 1983, three journalists saw the tip of a small submarine sail similar to the observations made in Stockholm harbour the year before, just a few hundred metres from Stockholm castle. Now, too, important western ships were visiting Stockholm, this time Royal Navy frigate Minerva. By now, fuelled by the neverending sequence of sightings, the USSR had already been named and shamed.
Yet, when Sweden's defence minister visited his counterpart in Moscow in the mid-1980s, he was asked by his Sovet counterpart why they didn't sink the subs; and Andropov told the Finnish president Koivisto to pass on to the Swedes this piece of advice: "Just bomb them; we would be very happy if they used live amunition"; hardly the kind of advice you'd expect of the submarines were Soviet.
Thage G Peterson, a former defence minister and close associate of Palme, said: “In late 1996, I was visited by the US Secretary of Defence, William Perry…. I brought up the submarine intrusions. My American colleague smiles and looks at me with sympathy: ‘It may be other things than submarines in the water, and if there is a submarine, it doesn’t have to be Russian.”
Motives
Why did NATO carry them out over the course of 15 years, and why did elements of the Swedish navy, possibly in collusion with Bildt, let them?
First let’s analyse Swedish motives.
Doubtless one motive is to test Sweden’s defences. Another is that Swedish NATO conspirators may also have had opportunistic national motives: The London-based Peter Wallenberg, scion of Sweden's business dynasty and owner of Saab, was believed to back Swedish engagement with NATO, and may have been involved in any exile movement in the event of occupation. In return for allowing the Americans to orchestrate the Swedish public's psychology against the Soviets, the Swedish military and financial establishment may have received something in return. When Caspar Weinberger visited Sweden in 1981 (and seen often in the company of Stefenson and Rudberg) the offer could have been sweetened by offering Saab the General electric engine for its new Gripen fighter. Weinberger also offered the navy a much more advanced naval ship, the Orion, than the Swedish government then possessed.
And what about NATO's motives? The Oberon submarines started spying on Sweden in 1977; and the last observation was in 1990. One reason, the one offered at all times to the Swedish navy itself, and which then may give its consent to is: to keep Swedish defences on their toes, to make sure that NATO’s crucial Nordic flank was covered’ and so that the Danes and Norwegians, who had close political affinities to the Swedes but were in NATO could assure sceptical NATO colleagues in the defence organisation: “Well, you know now you can trust the Swedes.”
Another possible internal motive might have been: to give NATO subs practice both in Sweden’s unusually rich and complex archipelago system, a sort of perfect obstacle circuit for captains. Also: in the case of Soviet attack, a new strategy developed in the 1980s said Soviet reinforcements would arrive by sea in the captured Baltic west German ports for the final push on France, NATO submarines could be expected to lurk in Swedish waters to be able to intercept the ships.
Gladio and the strategy of tension
A third reason is psychological operations: aimed at increasing a neutral country’s support for the western powers by making them afraid of the Warsaw pact adversary. Here the efforts were extremely successful.
Even more sinister are the fifth and sixth reasons, says Tunander, and they relate to Palme.
One of NATO’s least known operational structures was Gladio, Italian for “shield”: the system of “Stay Behind” partisans that were to be organised from London or Washington behind enemy lines in the event of Soviet attack and occupation of the continent. They were established in the 1950s, through, alas, partly criminal networks, and figures with links to both the military and to deeply anti communist movements.
In Italy especially, the movements took a very broad view of their role to oppose the USSR: not only to defend after occupation, but to pre-empt communist and left wing sympathies in the country that might assist the invader – or even invite him,. To this end, in what has been called the biggest untold story in Europe since the second world war, a strategy of tension was carried out in Italy (and other European countries, especially Belgium) in the 1970s and 80s, intended to discredit that country’s strong Communist and socialist party in every way possible, sometimes by carrying out terrorist attacks in the left’s name: the Milan terror bombing at the Piazza Fontana comes to mind. In 1998, Guido Salvini, a judge in Milan, indicted David Carrett, an officer of the U.S. Navy, on charges of political and military espionage and for his participation to the Piazza Fontana bombing, among other events. Judge Guido Salvini also opened up a case against Sergio Minetto, an Italian official for the US-NATO intelligence network, and "collaboratore di giustizia" Carlo Digilio, who was suspected as a CIA informant
Prime Minister Aldo Moro’s kidnapping and killing in 1978 by groups allegedly linked to Gladio are another possibility: Moro, a Christian democrat, was thought to want to bring the Italian communists into government; the party wanted Italy out of NATO and the US navy to leave Italian ports.
Was something similar carried out in Sweden: to discredit Palme and his social democrats, trying to defuse tension in Europe and talk to the USSR on level terms? Carried out not by Italian terrorists (and some US naval officers) but by US, British and Italian submarine and amphibious forces? There was an understandable and some a fair cold war “ethic” to this:
Palme’s policy of wishing to form a nuclear-free zone in Northern Europe, including NATO members Denmark and Norway went 180 degrees against Reagan’s hawkish naval secretary John Lehman’s ambitious plans for a 600 ship navy and to station huge naval capabilities in Norway with the view to carry out a first strike against the Soviet nuclear armed fleet in Murmansk, a move that would cancel danger of mutually armed nuclear destruction and allow the US to unilaterally threaten the USSR with obliteration, thus allowing the States to stop the USSR ever thinking of using its superior conventional forces to launch a successful invasion of central Europe.
But Palme was assassinated. One fairly common theory circulating about this, is expressed in Lars Borgnas’s En iskall vind drog igenom Sverige, (“An ice cold wind blew through Sweden”). Borgnas is one of Sweden’s top reporters, and has spent twenty years making documentaries about the assassination; and his theory is that the murder was carried out by a conspiracy of mid level “out of the loop” naval officers and the Stockholm police, who feared that Palme was a traitor.
Nato’s Nordic Gladio could then be held indirectly responsible; it could be held more directly responsible if Swedish officers connected to Stay Behind through a project called Yggdrasil, consisting of high-ranking businessmen in London with connections to NATO in Brussels, carried out the killing, as some stories have circulated.
The reasoning behind this thesis that Stay Behind's people knew about the true NATO nature of the incursions, but that they might still wanted to finish off the threat from Palme, forever. At about the same time, William Taylor, a US military analyst and psychological operations expert with work in Vietnam and China, started to specialise on Sweden, which he advised was providing a poor model for the rest of Europe:
West Germany in particular was heading towards "Swedenisation” and was in danger of being over conciliatory towards the USSR. In order to change the European mentality, he advocated threats at the lower level to shift support to the USA, relying on the media to the scaremongering job on its behalf. He said that there could not be a hot war in western Europeans, but psychological and undercover operations to change the perceptions of the United States, then taking flak for the installation of cruise missiles in Europe. Shortly after the submarine incidents, German politics shifted when the Free democrats deserted their social democrat coalition partners - which had close ties of affinity with the Swedish social democrats - to form a coalition with the CDU, led by the pro American Helmut Kohl.
Taylor was a great admirer of the British, in the second world war, using the German submarine campaign to get the United States on to her side.
As another potential psyops operation, he mentioned the assassination of a leader of a democratic country.
There might even have been an element of personal pay-back in all this: many US senior officials might have recalled the way Palme was one of the most aggressive critics in the world, against the Vietnam war, comparing the Hanoi bombings at Christmas 1972 to the holocausts of Treblinka and Guernica. (On a personal , individual level though, Palme, who took his postgraduate degree in the states, remained a warm admirer of the country and people.)
Two years ago I met a Swedish man in London who gave me a sheaf of papers; he said the British press were not interested; we looked at each other wryly, and I offer it in that spirit: there is a lot of disinformation and fantasy circulating in the world of intelligence; but it was typewritten memo and photocopies of telegrams with NATO stamps indicating topics of discussion at a Stay Behind meeting in Brussels in early February 1986 (Palme was assassinated on 28 February that year): hot subject was Palme’s expected discussions with Gorbachev on then nuclear free zone in April; it had arrived via the MI-6 office in Stockholm. There were various other documents, all of which pointed to deep NATO concern about Palme’s eastern rapprochements.
What next?
When a Swedish TV documentary was aired, pworking with the same records and same interviewees Tunander used, Bildt refused to be interviewed. One commentator ssaid it was “humiliating for Bildt to have got it so wrong about the submarines. Did he misread the intelligence about Soviet submarine indications, which many social democrat ministers were later sceptical about, in good faith. Or did he deliberately distort the facts: was he inside the NATO loop.
Swedish commentator PM Nilsson likes to remark how Bildt powerfully and successfully uses his own beliefs to shape realities, a sort of Scandinavian Tony Blaiir: like the best liars, he believes them himself - especially if they help his career, as the submarine commission report obviously did. He always struck me as the gawky guy with glasses whose bulging school briefcase was always knocking his spindly legs as he wiped his nose and harried the girls in class walking home with a mile-a-minute sequence of facts about, say, the sex life of snails - or perhaps the order of battle of the Soviet navy
The submarine incursions must have represented the moment when his sense of personal destiny and that of his country came together; reality mattered less perhaps than to lift the most dramatic mythology to serve his purposes.
NUMEROUS other leads that Tunander has given us deserve to be followed up: Sir Keith Speed, John Walker (former head of british naval intelligence, who backed up Sir Keith’s remarks to the wire services) And who in NATO can tell us about the extent of Gladio; and whether other countries were exposed to psychological operations? Bror Stefenson would be good to talk too: he later became King Carl Gustaf's chief of staff, but is now retired and refuses to give interviews. Where did the SEAL and special boat service frogmen land, and how often?
Is this sort of thing still going on? One theory I have heard is that the lessons the Americans learnt from the “strategy of tension” activities in Italy and Sweden were applied in the aftermath of the 9-11 period by Bildt’s neoconservative chums: false flag operations against the United States itself by US-backed forces pretending to be an Islamic enemy, as a means for the US Bush administration to strengthen its domestic base and discredit America’s ideological and great power opponents in 2001- 2007.
Imputing America’s enemies with hostile intent to reassert its hegemony over the world. In the same way that the submarine incidents served US domination interests by subordinating its drifting allies, based on false fears of Soviet aggression..
Friday, January 04, 2008
The White Plague
It was once the biggest of all killers. Of the disease it was once said, by John Bunyan, “The captain of all those men of death that came against him to take him away.”
Or the full quote: “The captain of all those men of death that came against him to take him away was consumption, for it was that that brought him down into the grave.”
And though still with us, and on the return, both these states of affairs are sufficiently little known to be worth describing in terms of parables.
Imagine a race, humans in every respect like us, where every individual is a recovering alcoholic – except that the alcohol itself is a distant memory,
The world of alcohol, the damage it wreaked, is still recorded in ancient pop songs, in literature, in folklore, in 21st century history books – stories of binge drinking, accident and emergency visits, the slow lingering deaths, the broken promises, the broken families, the desperate negotiations with the disease, the month-long drinking bouts that cause total passivity, the relapses and dry periods. But it is hard to imagine, and no one much cares. And then someone rediscovers the formula for alcohol, and reopens the first bar in a century…
Or: imagine today’s contemporary human world suddenly struck down by a malady that doesn’t have the name of disease, because it appears not to be measurable by science: there are no germs to be isolated; indeed it seems to be an act of God.
There are enormous variations in susceptibility between individuals, and those afflicted support a huge growth industry in osteopaths, allopaths, homeopaths and practitioners of dozens of other medical – and, since it was unattributable to known science – religious practitioners. Its symptoms are many and varied, sharing signs with curable diseases and is sometimes, but not always, fatal, and in many cases the patient recovers without treatment. Eventually, since no cure is found, employers are resigned when workers take time off, for months, occasionally not returning.
Those stricken are often racked by terrible coughs, and feel exceptionally weak, and are very emaciated, but, its sufferers acquire a certain attractiveness: eyes of pearly brightness, the hair fine and silky, and skin that is white, soft and delicate; in both sexes, in the early stages, the cheeks have an attractive red flush. Writers wax how since this act of God struck mankind many a man has turned into a hawknosed romantic hero and every woman into a Victorian romantic heroine. Eventually the nation gives up looking for a cure: It became part of life itself, scarcely worth mentioning, any more than that inevitable death from old age itself; and it was universal: almost everybody autopsied from natural death had some lung-scarring suggesting they too had been struck by the malady. The mystery killer affected everyone.
These two parables are an attempt to explain to a person living today or in the near future the very ubiquity, mortality and cluelessness about the causes of TB 120 years ago, when it was estimated that every European was infected with “the white plague”, and a huge number developed he active infection – though it often went into remission, waxed and waned – for some never being more than a chronic bronchitis that enabled the patient to continue infecting everyone. The causes were attributed to miasma in the atmosphere, a failure of the individual constitutions (the theory of vitalism was strong at the time),or even heredity, but no one knew for sure, except that it was the biggest killer in Europe. The discovery of germ theory in the late 19th century, Robert Koch’s isolation of the tuberculosis bacterium in 1882 led to a hugely better approach towards TB treatment; and large sanatoria opened up in the early 20th century where TB patient were kept out of the way where they could infect others and told to rest so sthat the lung cavities that are the symptoms of the disease could heal. (The writer Betty McDonald describes the principle at one sanatorium she stayed at in the 1930s: you don’t walk on a broken leg; you don’t use a broken lung, tearing up fragilely healing fissures by too much exertion. They were told to lie absolutely still for days at a time in narcotically cold conditions, windows open in winter ) Then, in 1946, the first antibiotic, streptomycin, was discovered and TB treatment was truly revolutionised. Other drugs followed in quick succession.
While it remained common in the third world, rates fell to an all time low in the 1980s in Europe and the US.
Now, however, it’s on its way back to Europe and the UK – and in a multi-drug resistant form (MDR TB), immune to safest and most effective drugs, . Worse, waiting in the wings, in the shanty towns of India and the villages of southern Africa, is extensively drug resistant TB, immune to virtually all drugs. As this XDR is transmissible between person and person, in other words, you could potentially arrive at the situation where you’re back to square 1, as if antiobiotics had never been invented.
Paul Thorn was a young HIV positive nurse treated for his HIV in an open ward at Westminster and Chelsea hospital in 1995 when a Brazilian came in, coughed up his sputum – the standard test – and, because the nurses failed to take precautions, infected the others. Six died. Paul survived – due, he says, to consultant Richard Croker at St Mary’s Paddington, who saw him through his treatment, insisting he take his course of “heavy chemotherapy”. He was obliged by the medical authorities to stay in an isolation chamber for a long period.
I recently obtained a “first look” at copies of his diaries of the period, which will be published in March. This is what he says in his preface.
“For some time experts had been predicting that it was only a matter of time before an outbreak of TB/MDR-TB occurred in such a way. Three months after exposure to the deadly bacteria, I was told of the outbreak. My health had already been deteriorating prior to my knowledge of the exposure. During that time the bacilli multiplied slowly in my lungs without me knowing. My slowly advancing chest pain and breathlessness finally explained. Then without warning I lost my liberty and found myself locked away from society in a negative pressure isolation room so that I didn’t infect anyone else
Paul couldn’t leave the room – “you might not get out alive”, one doctor told him - and his contact with visitors was restricted. He found himself being visited by a succession of doctors and nurses in masks, and was given medication that made him woozy, confused and angry. He once threw a jug at one of his carers. When his story appeared in the media; he started getting letters of support – but also critical letters, asking why the taxpayer should pay for he mistakes owning to his lifestyle choice, since HIV exacerbated his condition.
But things got better: by October 1995 he was putting on weight, had started fitness routine.
When he was set free, he had to comply with several conditions: Though he was sputum negative and therefore very unlikely to be infectious, he still had to be careful. His doctors told him:
“You should sleep in a single room with the door closed at night, and should spend the majority of your time inside. It is relatively safe for you to go out for short periods assuming you will not be in close contact with anyone for longer than quarter of an hour or so. This means you will not be able for example, to go to restaurants, clubs, or use public transport. The flat should be properly ventilated. You will need to comply with daily direct observed therapy and will be advised to attend our out-patients' clinic once monthly. You should have no new social contacts and should not have contact with anyone who is HIV positive or otherwise immuno-compromised. You should also not have any contact with pregnant women or children."
Over the next three years Paul lost a lot of friends. His MDR TB course continued, a daily dose of five drugs taken under supervision at his local medical centre, under the internationally recognised standard of DOTS treatment, for which he says he was glad. “A lot of people, even middle class ones, lapse, forget to take doses.” As some-one who can barely remember to keep a daily dose of Vitamin B pills for a week, I sympathised with the three year marathon.
Still, Paul is glad he only caught the multi-drugs resistant and not the fiercer yet extensively drug variant, XDR TB, and who jokes that, since being cured of drugs resistant TB three years after that fateful day in 1995, he has become a “one trick pony”. Apart from his diary, he has also published a TB survivors’ handbook; he speaks at TB conferences, where he brings the joie de vivre of the AIDS activist, which he also is, to the staidness of chest medicine symposia. (“TB professors are so old school,” he says.) Anything to raise TB’s profile, which remains disturbingly low in this country, despite the UK having the fastest growing TB epidemic in Europe, the highest number of TB infected: more than 7,000 cases a year, half in London, where numbers have almost doubled in six years. Worryingly, the UK also has Europe’s highest number of patients who fail to complete their treatment or disappear off the doctor’s radar
The UK’s rise is, to be it frankly, due to London’s magnetic appeal as an immigrant destination for countries that happen to have epidemic levels of TB: and the arrivals are infection carriers who don’t even know. In these countries, even if individuals do not carry the active disease itself, they will have been around disease carriers long enough to have latent TB: symptom less and non infectious, but tapt to break out if the immune system weakens – after the arrival has been in the UK some years. It is estimated that in some countries up to half the population has been infected with the TB bacterium. In the UK, in contrast, the figure is just a percent, mostly older people exposed when TB was much more prevalent. Peter Davies, director of the TB research Unit in Liverpool, has said: “The protective moat we are ringed with, ‘against infection and the hand of war’ so eloquently described by John of Gaunt in Richard II, offers no defence against tuberculosis.”
And about 80 a year are drug resistant, which doesn’t sound much, and is tiny compared to the figures in Africa and Asia, but the gold star drugs resistance treatment you get in rich countries, that Paul received, plus the costs to society of supporting dependants if the patient has family, can rise to £250,000, according to a scientific paper by prof John Moore Gillon, a consultant at Barts hospital and president of the British Lung Foundation. Though, as statistics show, about 20 percent have treatment failure, abscond and are lost to follow up; they disappear into their communities.
A patient with active TB begins to feel better within days of beginning his antibiotics treatment: it can be hard to put across the rationale for continuing to take a cocktail of several drugs for six months – the bacilli count goes down very quickly, but TB is hardy bacterium, and the full course is needed to clear out the resisters lodged deep in the recesses of the lungs which, if left alone, are likely to have re-multiply at some point and be drugs resistant. Et Voila.
A false sense of security is one reason why MDR develops:another reason sometimes the doctors dispense a faulty drugs regimen: adding single drugs to a failing regime is a recipe for MDR. A third is that people can’t afford their drugs. In many other countries patients are forced to pay for their own second MDR antibiotics off the street, from cigarette stalls.
A jolt to complaceny would be greater visual appreciation of what’s going on.
A flight of fancy here: Unlike some species of amphibians human beings don’t breathe through the skin. Maybe that is, for the purposes of dealing with TB, a shame. If the disease’s ravages were revealed to the naked eye people would surely push to complete their medication, if at all possible.
While the disease’s slow, chronic progression can be deceptively painless, apart from the racking coughs, a tubercular lung is a revolting sight: the lung is not air sack but looks like any slab of meat, perhaps a piece of liver. In the advanced case of TB, a cross section of this lung would show extensive cavitation interspersed with calcified fibrosis and waxy-coloured granulomas: the latter the result of the body’s attempts to wall in the bacteria with fibrous tissue and constantly replenished layer of active white blood cells. The Swiss cheese hole cavitations are a breeding ground for Tb bacteria, which are then expelled through the airways where they are infectious to others. Much of this damage, ironically, is not from the hardy but languid, slowly dividing, not very toxic TB bacterium but from the body’s immune system response, the macrophages and lymphocytes, trying to expel the invader. In trying to destroy the bacteria, the body destroys itself, as the once pristine lung becomes riddled with ulcerating holes, whose walls tense and contract under the breathing mechanism, expelling bacterium droplets into the air , where they look for new lungs to ravage.
TB was once the biggest killer. It’s still the second leading cause of infectious death in the world, and on a rapid rise in the UK after its 30-year period of postwar abeyance. But TB is not the only killer.
If it’s the captain of death, death has other officers. A few weeks ago, I was at the centenary conference of the Royal Society of Tropical Medicine. Fellows from across the world had converged at the Queen Elizabeth conference centre opposite Westminster Abbey in London. These academics and fieldworkers were disease buffs: each brought their own disease to presented to the audience. In presentation after presenta tion, I heard about the different ways nature chooses to punish Africans. Unlike TB, these diseases do not exist north of the tropic of Cancer, though global warming may change that.
I had not heard of many of them. There’s Chagas’s disease, Kuru, Leishmaniasis, onchocoriasis, schistosomiasis, filariasis. There were picture of grinning, living dead; of deformed or missing limbs. They could be just the tip of the iceberg: who knows what affects remote communities. There is the usual problem of funding, since the drugs companies see no payoff in m medicines that cannot be taken for a lifetime by rich people, such as the statin heart drug, or the frivolous Viagra. Traditional healers are not engaged by western NGOs for throughput of such health information and drugs that do exist; and a population of illiterates will see even malnutrition as an act of God. Germ theory has not penetrated into the heart of Africa. As you walked among the poster presentations that reminded you of science’s iterative, tentative nature you realised: if scientists don’t know, how can the locals?
Malaria and HIV are death’s chief lieutenants, usually set apart from the neglected diseases: along with TB, they form the big three. In a survey conducted by Gallup, malaria was cited as the biggest health problem by Africans: yet while it makes people ill, it tends not to kill them. HIV kills, slowly, but has had much more funding and attention in recent years. In statistical terms it is the biggest killer, but here is a problem of attribution, for how many actually died of tuberculosis disguised as an HIV related disease. HIV is the great multiplier of TB. An opportunistic infection that is caught early on in individuals with HIV immuno-compromised systems, TB can progress in weeks to a point normally attained only after several years in HIV negative individuals.
“The coinfection problem in South Africa is enormous, it’s a huge problem,” Gery Maarten, chief respiratory physician at Cape Town’s Groote Schuur hospital tells me over the phone. Maybe a third of the population of South Africa is HIV positive: most are undiagnosed. Few even among the diagnosed are on retrovirals, which are only given at a certain advanced state of HIV. They share bush taxis, clinics, shops, lean –to shacks with TB afflicted – and catch it, sometimes again and again. And sometimes in its extensively or multi drugs resistant form. There is an interesting symbiotic scenario here: the disease has found its perfect means of causing maximum havoc with the assistance of its lieutenant. A disease that kills its host too quickly is no good, for it kills its means of transmission and therefore survival. But in the South African township scenario, TB HV negatives act as plague carriers, surviving for years, wasting slowly away; while the HIV positives are defenceless population of victims, who catch he disease, die quickly – too quickly to transmit it, but no matter. And it’s not helped by the fact that African leaders say that safe sex message is a propaganda trick by the West to contain the natural, exuberant virility of the African man and reduce African populations and that the health minister is on the record as saying a good dose of garlic will cure HIV. Not that any amount of obfuscation on the need for condoms and antibiotics will work if the TB in question is one on which no antibiotic will bite.
The World Health Organization, and the drugs firms, are now on multi drugs resistant TB’s case. As field workers and academics pour into south Africa to examine a TB condition in the townships which a late Victorian doctor from the slums of east London would increasingly recognise, several companies are developing new, electronic diagnostic tools that cut detection time from weeks to days – long detection time means the patient can continue to infect others in the community before being treated.
Big Pharma are scanning their drugs libraries for new compounds that will attack enzymes in the bacteria that will leave those of human cells alone, finding targets against which bacteria have not evolved a defence for. Several drugs are in early clinical trials, though may take another 10 years before they have reached approval.
There’s a lot more money around. Although TB has been woefully underfunded as a disease of the poor, and because of complacency in he belief that the disease had been licked in the 1960s, the Bill Gates foundation has stepped in with funding; some governments, including Britain’s, have put up their airline taxes to fund an initiative to fight HIV, malaria, and TB. There’s a problem of drugs resistance should the new drugs come on stream, but there are moves by an international umbrella group to try and integrate the new drugs into a combination therapy regime.
In any brand new drug, drugs resistance will eventually emerge after a few years. But the theory of putting two drugs in one pill works on the principle that simultaneous mutations of a bacteria against two drugs mechanism is mathematically very unlikely. This has long been well known, but inertia by governments and inability of drugs manufacturers to agree to put their recipes together in one pill has meant single pill, single drug therapy has been the norm in many places. The new scenario could be different.
So much for the growing awareness and activity at the level of international high level experts and the pharmaceutical industry. Elsewhere, there’s less of it. While doctors in South Africa, who don’t advocate garlic as their political leaders do and make do with the modern medicines they do have, are staggering under the burdens, British doctors barely seem to know what TB is, according to Dr Peter Davies.
He is pretty scathing about the fact that the majority of chairs in respiratory medicine in he UK are held in – wait for it - asthma, and just one in TB... And young doctors coming through the schools are seldom properly taught about TB; nor do the medical journals provide an education. Davies blames the drugs firms, at least in the UK, who “educate doctors through their advertisements” for putting out adverts in the medical journals that say “Cough, think of asthma” (and then marketing their asthma drug). “I can’t imagine them saying ‘cough, think of Tb’.”
There are numerous cases of GPs who diagnose TB as asthma, bronchitis, even cancer, and the index case in one outbreak in north London took a year to be diagnosed properly, by which time he had infected dozens of others around him. Fortunately, it was only resistant to one drug. Paul was fortunate in his misfortune to catch TB while in hospitalisation for his HIV condition in one of the country’s top hospitals. Others are less lucky.
At least, as yet, the tuberculosis in this country is just about treatable. But in many countries XDR as a proportion of MDR cases has been up to about 10 percent, and with the UK having 80 cases a year of MDR, Britain’s first case of XDR is surely a matter of time – there are no compulsory checks for TB in arrivals, and even if they were they wouldn’t detect the large number of latent XDRs/MDRs. Statistically, forty thousand people a year immigrate to this country with latent TB. It’s a difficult problem, for who wants to stigmatise immigrants by even talking of the threat?
The captain of the men of death may have been made to retreat; he has not left the battlefield.
Or the full quote: “The captain of all those men of death that came against him to take him away was consumption, for it was that that brought him down into the grave.”
And though still with us, and on the return, both these states of affairs are sufficiently little known to be worth describing in terms of parables.
Imagine a race, humans in every respect like us, where every individual is a recovering alcoholic – except that the alcohol itself is a distant memory,
The world of alcohol, the damage it wreaked, is still recorded in ancient pop songs, in literature, in folklore, in 21st century history books – stories of binge drinking, accident and emergency visits, the slow lingering deaths, the broken promises, the broken families, the desperate negotiations with the disease, the month-long drinking bouts that cause total passivity, the relapses and dry periods. But it is hard to imagine, and no one much cares. And then someone rediscovers the formula for alcohol, and reopens the first bar in a century…
Or: imagine today’s contemporary human world suddenly struck down by a malady that doesn’t have the name of disease, because it appears not to be measurable by science: there are no germs to be isolated; indeed it seems to be an act of God.
There are enormous variations in susceptibility between individuals, and those afflicted support a huge growth industry in osteopaths, allopaths, homeopaths and practitioners of dozens of other medical – and, since it was unattributable to known science – religious practitioners. Its symptoms are many and varied, sharing signs with curable diseases and is sometimes, but not always, fatal, and in many cases the patient recovers without treatment. Eventually, since no cure is found, employers are resigned when workers take time off, for months, occasionally not returning.
Those stricken are often racked by terrible coughs, and feel exceptionally weak, and are very emaciated, but, its sufferers acquire a certain attractiveness: eyes of pearly brightness, the hair fine and silky, and skin that is white, soft and delicate; in both sexes, in the early stages, the cheeks have an attractive red flush. Writers wax how since this act of God struck mankind many a man has turned into a hawknosed romantic hero and every woman into a Victorian romantic heroine. Eventually the nation gives up looking for a cure: It became part of life itself, scarcely worth mentioning, any more than that inevitable death from old age itself; and it was universal: almost everybody autopsied from natural death had some lung-scarring suggesting they too had been struck by the malady. The mystery killer affected everyone.
These two parables are an attempt to explain to a person living today or in the near future the very ubiquity, mortality and cluelessness about the causes of TB 120 years ago, when it was estimated that every European was infected with “the white plague”, and a huge number developed he active infection – though it often went into remission, waxed and waned – for some never being more than a chronic bronchitis that enabled the patient to continue infecting everyone. The causes were attributed to miasma in the atmosphere, a failure of the individual constitutions (the theory of vitalism was strong at the time),or even heredity, but no one knew for sure, except that it was the biggest killer in Europe. The discovery of germ theory in the late 19th century, Robert Koch’s isolation of the tuberculosis bacterium in 1882 led to a hugely better approach towards TB treatment; and large sanatoria opened up in the early 20th century where TB patient were kept out of the way where they could infect others and told to rest so sthat the lung cavities that are the symptoms of the disease could heal. (The writer Betty McDonald describes the principle at one sanatorium she stayed at in the 1930s: you don’t walk on a broken leg; you don’t use a broken lung, tearing up fragilely healing fissures by too much exertion. They were told to lie absolutely still for days at a time in narcotically cold conditions, windows open in winter ) Then, in 1946, the first antibiotic, streptomycin, was discovered and TB treatment was truly revolutionised. Other drugs followed in quick succession.
While it remained common in the third world, rates fell to an all time low in the 1980s in Europe and the US.
Now, however, it’s on its way back to Europe and the UK – and in a multi-drug resistant form (MDR TB), immune to safest and most effective drugs, . Worse, waiting in the wings, in the shanty towns of India and the villages of southern Africa, is extensively drug resistant TB, immune to virtually all drugs. As this XDR is transmissible between person and person, in other words, you could potentially arrive at the situation where you’re back to square 1, as if antiobiotics had never been invented.
Paul Thorn was a young HIV positive nurse treated for his HIV in an open ward at Westminster and Chelsea hospital in 1995 when a Brazilian came in, coughed up his sputum – the standard test – and, because the nurses failed to take precautions, infected the others. Six died. Paul survived – due, he says, to consultant Richard Croker at St Mary’s Paddington, who saw him through his treatment, insisting he take his course of “heavy chemotherapy”. He was obliged by the medical authorities to stay in an isolation chamber for a long period.
I recently obtained a “first look” at copies of his diaries of the period, which will be published in March. This is what he says in his preface.
“For some time experts had been predicting that it was only a matter of time before an outbreak of TB/MDR-TB occurred in such a way. Three months after exposure to the deadly bacteria, I was told of the outbreak. My health had already been deteriorating prior to my knowledge of the exposure. During that time the bacilli multiplied slowly in my lungs without me knowing. My slowly advancing chest pain and breathlessness finally explained. Then without warning I lost my liberty and found myself locked away from society in a negative pressure isolation room so that I didn’t infect anyone else
Paul couldn’t leave the room – “you might not get out alive”, one doctor told him - and his contact with visitors was restricted. He found himself being visited by a succession of doctors and nurses in masks, and was given medication that made him woozy, confused and angry. He once threw a jug at one of his carers. When his story appeared in the media; he started getting letters of support – but also critical letters, asking why the taxpayer should pay for he mistakes owning to his lifestyle choice, since HIV exacerbated his condition.
But things got better: by October 1995 he was putting on weight, had started fitness routine.
When he was set free, he had to comply with several conditions: Though he was sputum negative and therefore very unlikely to be infectious, he still had to be careful. His doctors told him:
“You should sleep in a single room with the door closed at night, and should spend the majority of your time inside. It is relatively safe for you to go out for short periods assuming you will not be in close contact with anyone for longer than quarter of an hour or so. This means you will not be able for example, to go to restaurants, clubs, or use public transport. The flat should be properly ventilated. You will need to comply with daily direct observed therapy and will be advised to attend our out-patients' clinic once monthly. You should have no new social contacts and should not have contact with anyone who is HIV positive or otherwise immuno-compromised. You should also not have any contact with pregnant women or children."
Over the next three years Paul lost a lot of friends. His MDR TB course continued, a daily dose of five drugs taken under supervision at his local medical centre, under the internationally recognised standard of DOTS treatment, for which he says he was glad. “A lot of people, even middle class ones, lapse, forget to take doses.” As some-one who can barely remember to keep a daily dose of Vitamin B pills for a week, I sympathised with the three year marathon.
Still, Paul is glad he only caught the multi-drugs resistant and not the fiercer yet extensively drug variant, XDR TB, and who jokes that, since being cured of drugs resistant TB three years after that fateful day in 1995, he has become a “one trick pony”. Apart from his diary, he has also published a TB survivors’ handbook; he speaks at TB conferences, where he brings the joie de vivre of the AIDS activist, which he also is, to the staidness of chest medicine symposia. (“TB professors are so old school,” he says.) Anything to raise TB’s profile, which remains disturbingly low in this country, despite the UK having the fastest growing TB epidemic in Europe, the highest number of TB infected: more than 7,000 cases a year, half in London, where numbers have almost doubled in six years. Worryingly, the UK also has Europe’s highest number of patients who fail to complete their treatment or disappear off the doctor’s radar
The UK’s rise is, to be it frankly, due to London’s magnetic appeal as an immigrant destination for countries that happen to have epidemic levels of TB: and the arrivals are infection carriers who don’t even know. In these countries, even if individuals do not carry the active disease itself, they will have been around disease carriers long enough to have latent TB: symptom less and non infectious, but tapt to break out if the immune system weakens – after the arrival has been in the UK some years. It is estimated that in some countries up to half the population has been infected with the TB bacterium. In the UK, in contrast, the figure is just a percent, mostly older people exposed when TB was much more prevalent. Peter Davies, director of the TB research Unit in Liverpool, has said: “The protective moat we are ringed with, ‘against infection and the hand of war’ so eloquently described by John of Gaunt in Richard II, offers no defence against tuberculosis.”
And about 80 a year are drug resistant, which doesn’t sound much, and is tiny compared to the figures in Africa and Asia, but the gold star drugs resistance treatment you get in rich countries, that Paul received, plus the costs to society of supporting dependants if the patient has family, can rise to £250,000, according to a scientific paper by prof John Moore Gillon, a consultant at Barts hospital and president of the British Lung Foundation. Though, as statistics show, about 20 percent have treatment failure, abscond and are lost to follow up; they disappear into their communities.
A patient with active TB begins to feel better within days of beginning his antibiotics treatment: it can be hard to put across the rationale for continuing to take a cocktail of several drugs for six months – the bacilli count goes down very quickly, but TB is hardy bacterium, and the full course is needed to clear out the resisters lodged deep in the recesses of the lungs which, if left alone, are likely to have re-multiply at some point and be drugs resistant. Et Voila.
A false sense of security is one reason why MDR develops:another reason sometimes the doctors dispense a faulty drugs regimen: adding single drugs to a failing regime is a recipe for MDR. A third is that people can’t afford their drugs. In many other countries patients are forced to pay for their own second MDR antibiotics off the street, from cigarette stalls.
A jolt to complaceny would be greater visual appreciation of what’s going on.
A flight of fancy here: Unlike some species of amphibians human beings don’t breathe through the skin. Maybe that is, for the purposes of dealing with TB, a shame. If the disease’s ravages were revealed to the naked eye people would surely push to complete their medication, if at all possible.
While the disease’s slow, chronic progression can be deceptively painless, apart from the racking coughs, a tubercular lung is a revolting sight: the lung is not air sack but looks like any slab of meat, perhaps a piece of liver. In the advanced case of TB, a cross section of this lung would show extensive cavitation interspersed with calcified fibrosis and waxy-coloured granulomas: the latter the result of the body’s attempts to wall in the bacteria with fibrous tissue and constantly replenished layer of active white blood cells. The Swiss cheese hole cavitations are a breeding ground for Tb bacteria, which are then expelled through the airways where they are infectious to others. Much of this damage, ironically, is not from the hardy but languid, slowly dividing, not very toxic TB bacterium but from the body’s immune system response, the macrophages and lymphocytes, trying to expel the invader. In trying to destroy the bacteria, the body destroys itself, as the once pristine lung becomes riddled with ulcerating holes, whose walls tense and contract under the breathing mechanism, expelling bacterium droplets into the air , where they look for new lungs to ravage.
TB was once the biggest killer. It’s still the second leading cause of infectious death in the world, and on a rapid rise in the UK after its 30-year period of postwar abeyance. But TB is not the only killer.
If it’s the captain of death, death has other officers. A few weeks ago, I was at the centenary conference of the Royal Society of Tropical Medicine. Fellows from across the world had converged at the Queen Elizabeth conference centre opposite Westminster Abbey in London. These academics and fieldworkers were disease buffs: each brought their own disease to presented to the audience. In presentation after presenta tion, I heard about the different ways nature chooses to punish Africans. Unlike TB, these diseases do not exist north of the tropic of Cancer, though global warming may change that.
I had not heard of many of them. There’s Chagas’s disease, Kuru, Leishmaniasis, onchocoriasis, schistosomiasis, filariasis. There were picture of grinning, living dead; of deformed or missing limbs. They could be just the tip of the iceberg: who knows what affects remote communities. There is the usual problem of funding, since the drugs companies see no payoff in m medicines that cannot be taken for a lifetime by rich people, such as the statin heart drug, or the frivolous Viagra. Traditional healers are not engaged by western NGOs for throughput of such health information and drugs that do exist; and a population of illiterates will see even malnutrition as an act of God. Germ theory has not penetrated into the heart of Africa. As you walked among the poster presentations that reminded you of science’s iterative, tentative nature you realised: if scientists don’t know, how can the locals?
Malaria and HIV are death’s chief lieutenants, usually set apart from the neglected diseases: along with TB, they form the big three. In a survey conducted by Gallup, malaria was cited as the biggest health problem by Africans: yet while it makes people ill, it tends not to kill them. HIV kills, slowly, but has had much more funding and attention in recent years. In statistical terms it is the biggest killer, but here is a problem of attribution, for how many actually died of tuberculosis disguised as an HIV related disease. HIV is the great multiplier of TB. An opportunistic infection that is caught early on in individuals with HIV immuno-compromised systems, TB can progress in weeks to a point normally attained only after several years in HIV negative individuals.
“The coinfection problem in South Africa is enormous, it’s a huge problem,” Gery Maarten, chief respiratory physician at Cape Town’s Groote Schuur hospital tells me over the phone. Maybe a third of the population of South Africa is HIV positive: most are undiagnosed. Few even among the diagnosed are on retrovirals, which are only given at a certain advanced state of HIV. They share bush taxis, clinics, shops, lean –to shacks with TB afflicted – and catch it, sometimes again and again. And sometimes in its extensively or multi drugs resistant form. There is an interesting symbiotic scenario here: the disease has found its perfect means of causing maximum havoc with the assistance of its lieutenant. A disease that kills its host too quickly is no good, for it kills its means of transmission and therefore survival. But in the South African township scenario, TB HV negatives act as plague carriers, surviving for years, wasting slowly away; while the HIV positives are defenceless population of victims, who catch he disease, die quickly – too quickly to transmit it, but no matter. And it’s not helped by the fact that African leaders say that safe sex message is a propaganda trick by the West to contain the natural, exuberant virility of the African man and reduce African populations and that the health minister is on the record as saying a good dose of garlic will cure HIV. Not that any amount of obfuscation on the need for condoms and antibiotics will work if the TB in question is one on which no antibiotic will bite.
The World Health Organization, and the drugs firms, are now on multi drugs resistant TB’s case. As field workers and academics pour into south Africa to examine a TB condition in the townships which a late Victorian doctor from the slums of east London would increasingly recognise, several companies are developing new, electronic diagnostic tools that cut detection time from weeks to days – long detection time means the patient can continue to infect others in the community before being treated.
Big Pharma are scanning their drugs libraries for new compounds that will attack enzymes in the bacteria that will leave those of human cells alone, finding targets against which bacteria have not evolved a defence for. Several drugs are in early clinical trials, though may take another 10 years before they have reached approval.
There’s a lot more money around. Although TB has been woefully underfunded as a disease of the poor, and because of complacency in he belief that the disease had been licked in the 1960s, the Bill Gates foundation has stepped in with funding; some governments, including Britain’s, have put up their airline taxes to fund an initiative to fight HIV, malaria, and TB. There’s a problem of drugs resistance should the new drugs come on stream, but there are moves by an international umbrella group to try and integrate the new drugs into a combination therapy regime.
In any brand new drug, drugs resistance will eventually emerge after a few years. But the theory of putting two drugs in one pill works on the principle that simultaneous mutations of a bacteria against two drugs mechanism is mathematically very unlikely. This has long been well known, but inertia by governments and inability of drugs manufacturers to agree to put their recipes together in one pill has meant single pill, single drug therapy has been the norm in many places. The new scenario could be different.
So much for the growing awareness and activity at the level of international high level experts and the pharmaceutical industry. Elsewhere, there’s less of it. While doctors in South Africa, who don’t advocate garlic as their political leaders do and make do with the modern medicines they do have, are staggering under the burdens, British doctors barely seem to know what TB is, according to Dr Peter Davies.
He is pretty scathing about the fact that the majority of chairs in respiratory medicine in he UK are held in – wait for it - asthma, and just one in TB... And young doctors coming through the schools are seldom properly taught about TB; nor do the medical journals provide an education. Davies blames the drugs firms, at least in the UK, who “educate doctors through their advertisements” for putting out adverts in the medical journals that say “Cough, think of asthma” (and then marketing their asthma drug). “I can’t imagine them saying ‘cough, think of Tb’.”
There are numerous cases of GPs who diagnose TB as asthma, bronchitis, even cancer, and the index case in one outbreak in north London took a year to be diagnosed properly, by which time he had infected dozens of others around him. Fortunately, it was only resistant to one drug. Paul was fortunate in his misfortune to catch TB while in hospitalisation for his HIV condition in one of the country’s top hospitals. Others are less lucky.
At least, as yet, the tuberculosis in this country is just about treatable. But in many countries XDR as a proportion of MDR cases has been up to about 10 percent, and with the UK having 80 cases a year of MDR, Britain’s first case of XDR is surely a matter of time – there are no compulsory checks for TB in arrivals, and even if they were they wouldn’t detect the large number of latent XDRs/MDRs. Statistically, forty thousand people a year immigrate to this country with latent TB. It’s a difficult problem, for who wants to stigmatise immigrants by even talking of the threat?
The captain of the men of death may have been made to retreat; he has not left the battlefield.
Monday, November 19, 2007
Hard to engineer a better world
Europe, I used to think, was essentially a clockwork, engineering operation where public opinion in the form of the tabloids is nothing so much as a wrecking operation. I remember when I first came to Brussels how amazed I was at the intricate structure of decision making: it was an immense flow chart diagram and everything seemed so immensely logical and rightful in its place. Commission proposed –parliament amended. With help of impact assessments; this went on to the council of minsiters, who represent the nation states after input from the committee of the regions and the European social and economic committee. The lobbyists and civil society also had their input arrows; there was Coreper, the nation states’ embassies to the EU,and the flow chart was slightly amended for second readings and what was known as conciliation, where the institutions failed to agree. It’s not that underneath this political structure there weren’t people; the people’s needs came in through impact assessments, ruled by the gods of utility. But there was no politics. It seemed a liberation. There were differences, but the system was designed to create the best of all possible worlds for homo europeanus.
And coming back to London and picking up the bleeding redtops was a shock to my Brussels-refined sensibilities: the mastheads were dipped in blood and opening the pages was like prising apart the jaws of a rottweiler. There were jokes about Europe when they bothered to write about it all, but the joke was in the vulgarians, and you do not answer a fool according to his folly.
But never mind, Europe would continue to work for them, supervise them, be an invisible guiding hand, while the masses made bad jokes, feasted on their roasts.
How does it all work? It’s the basic question. And the more I learnt about the subtlety of decision making, the way it took all sides into account, the more I got to admire the officials working bit by bit on this institution, which grew and grew better, so that decisions flowed not only more smoothly but ran Europe better. The acronyms and special jargon started to make sense, and were not there as a gratuitous obstacle to mark exclusivity –unless that rule apply to all specialist activity, including say engineering or medicine. But was necessary because of the fine honed and abstruse nature o fdecison-making.
And people said: who could say that Europe didn’t deliver: it broke down barriers to trade and movement of peoples, brought democracy to its eastern marches, raised the bar of environmental and safety standards and thus stimulating technical innovation –legislation being the driver. Whereas nation states were caught up in their petty concerns, so that roads through border areas were of poor quality, the visionaries of DG transport funded schemes that would link Athens and Stockholm, Warsaw and Lisbon, by motorways, and the whole continent by a high speed railway network, the trans Europe express. It funded abridge between Sicily and the mainland, Sweden and Denmark. There were large sums of money to bring researchers and universities together so that there would be no Chinese walls, no duplication, The bane of a Europe of40 odd nation states with their narrow blinkers on. For the consumer and expat there were low international call charges, cheap European flights, and no Spanish death duties as the most recalcitrant nationalists – the bloated, St Georges flag-draped ,mono lingual expaiateinthe southern Spain railing about ”Europe” were the biggest beneficiaries of reforms: better, fairer Spanish bureaucracy, free cross-border healthcare for ageing mother and cheap flights down to Malaga for the teenage grandchildren. .
When the people said ”What has Europe ever done for us”, the reply would be: “Watch the life of Brian”/
One of the pleasures of working in Brussels, in the European parliament, was watching the parade of nationalities: The name plates on the doors brought curiously to mind star trek in its heterogeneity: Vlasak and Lipietz, Jaatteemaki, Konya-Hanar: The European parliament was a demonstration of diversity, on show every night at nationality themed nightly receptions as the pop of champagne corks echoes around the parliament’s many lobbies, like gunfire on a night on the trenches many years ago. The idea it homogenising seemed ridiculous; for here the television set and the American TV series was surely the enemy.
I have friends of all nationalities, and the most difficult to make contact with –but ultimately the most rewarding, have been the French, because their perspectives are just so different, yet so compelling. Many times we discussed the British attitude to Europe, and they brought up the parallel of the national profession: the French, the fathers of Europe, are a nation of engineers. (Only the British tabloids and their benighted readers think they are a nation of cooks and lovers) The British are a nation of warriors and traders…or perhaps pirates. (often the same thing) . The French carefully design Europe like a grand projet, a TGV, an ariane espace or an Airbus 380 of political construction. The British just see gimlet eyed opportunities, and their pirate ships kept in port by the suffocating technocratic inevitability of it all. They approached the whole thing with a cynicism of experience rather than the analytical mind fired by idealism – the approach, as any scientist or engineer knows, leads to progress. My French friends note British euro-scepticism and ask: where is your space programme. And why trains crawl at snails pace once they reached the Kent side of the channel tunnel. The train metaphor is often used for European integration or more generally progress, and it is an apt one, for the French equate technology with politics. .
There have been times when I have hated the British, with their fat-rumped insular righteousness, but the longer I spend in Brussels the more I have come to see that they are right. Behind the flowcharts, the position and policy papers, the smooth seminars that create a consensus, the different inputs from different institutions all leading inexorably to the right decision, I have come to see people –bureaucrats, individuals fighting turf wars, advancing their careers and that of their friends. Instead of a multilateral system based on different institutions, the council of ministers –national governments –reigns supreme, supported by acolytes in the national press. I have seen huge inefficiencies: the court of auditors failing to sign off the accounts for the14th year running, the voices from scientists at conferences who have told me that European science and technology spending – the biggest science budget in Europe, and its second largest item after agriculture –is all a waste of money, and they wouldn’t touch it with a bargepole for all the conditions laid down by ignorant bureaucrats.
I have re-read my Hayek, about the dangers of centralisation and a command economy, and east Europeans like Vaclav Klaus, the Czech president, are forever and rightly warning about the dangers of the EU turning into the EUSSR. We have been here before, they say. As the EU starts extending itz competences to culture and sports, Stalin’s chilling phrase about engineering the human soul comes to mind. Engineering might be a good thing; but social engineering ,if the 20th century is any guide, is not .And society is not a machine: it’s too complicated to try and make it one.
So my feelings about the EU are undergoing a change, and I am a lot less positive than before, and getting less do. The motto of the more intelligent Tory MEPs that ”We like Europe, but that the European Union” seems to ring ever more true.
But there are moments when I still think back to those early days five years ago: the snow is patterning your hair but it has melted as it touches the cobbles of the spire-infested grand place, giving a sheen in the gaslight. You have just emerged from a smoky estaminet with some gravelly words of Leonard Cohen ringing in your ears. Soon you will be hitting the pillows. And tomorrow you will goto the building with the gardens and the big atrium,, and along with the girls and boys in suits clutching files under their arms, together make the world a better place.
And coming back to London and picking up the bleeding redtops was a shock to my Brussels-refined sensibilities: the mastheads were dipped in blood and opening the pages was like prising apart the jaws of a rottweiler. There were jokes about Europe when they bothered to write about it all, but the joke was in the vulgarians, and you do not answer a fool according to his folly.
But never mind, Europe would continue to work for them, supervise them, be an invisible guiding hand, while the masses made bad jokes, feasted on their roasts.
How does it all work? It’s the basic question. And the more I learnt about the subtlety of decision making, the way it took all sides into account, the more I got to admire the officials working bit by bit on this institution, which grew and grew better, so that decisions flowed not only more smoothly but ran Europe better. The acronyms and special jargon started to make sense, and were not there as a gratuitous obstacle to mark exclusivity –unless that rule apply to all specialist activity, including say engineering or medicine. But was necessary because of the fine honed and abstruse nature o fdecison-making.
And people said: who could say that Europe didn’t deliver: it broke down barriers to trade and movement of peoples, brought democracy to its eastern marches, raised the bar of environmental and safety standards and thus stimulating technical innovation –legislation being the driver. Whereas nation states were caught up in their petty concerns, so that roads through border areas were of poor quality, the visionaries of DG transport funded schemes that would link Athens and Stockholm, Warsaw and Lisbon, by motorways, and the whole continent by a high speed railway network, the trans Europe express. It funded abridge between Sicily and the mainland, Sweden and Denmark. There were large sums of money to bring researchers and universities together so that there would be no Chinese walls, no duplication, The bane of a Europe of40 odd nation states with their narrow blinkers on. For the consumer and expat there were low international call charges, cheap European flights, and no Spanish death duties as the most recalcitrant nationalists – the bloated, St Georges flag-draped ,mono lingual expaiateinthe southern Spain railing about ”Europe” were the biggest beneficiaries of reforms: better, fairer Spanish bureaucracy, free cross-border healthcare for ageing mother and cheap flights down to Malaga for the teenage grandchildren. .
When the people said ”What has Europe ever done for us”, the reply would be: “Watch the life of Brian”/
One of the pleasures of working in Brussels, in the European parliament, was watching the parade of nationalities: The name plates on the doors brought curiously to mind star trek in its heterogeneity: Vlasak and Lipietz, Jaatteemaki, Konya-Hanar: The European parliament was a demonstration of diversity, on show every night at nationality themed nightly receptions as the pop of champagne corks echoes around the parliament’s many lobbies, like gunfire on a night on the trenches many years ago. The idea it homogenising seemed ridiculous; for here the television set and the American TV series was surely the enemy.
I have friends of all nationalities, and the most difficult to make contact with –but ultimately the most rewarding, have been the French, because their perspectives are just so different, yet so compelling. Many times we discussed the British attitude to Europe, and they brought up the parallel of the national profession: the French, the fathers of Europe, are a nation of engineers. (Only the British tabloids and their benighted readers think they are a nation of cooks and lovers) The British are a nation of warriors and traders…or perhaps pirates. (often the same thing) . The French carefully design Europe like a grand projet, a TGV, an ariane espace or an Airbus 380 of political construction. The British just see gimlet eyed opportunities, and their pirate ships kept in port by the suffocating technocratic inevitability of it all. They approached the whole thing with a cynicism of experience rather than the analytical mind fired by idealism – the approach, as any scientist or engineer knows, leads to progress. My French friends note British euro-scepticism and ask: where is your space programme. And why trains crawl at snails pace once they reached the Kent side of the channel tunnel. The train metaphor is often used for European integration or more generally progress, and it is an apt one, for the French equate technology with politics. .
There have been times when I have hated the British, with their fat-rumped insular righteousness, but the longer I spend in Brussels the more I have come to see that they are right. Behind the flowcharts, the position and policy papers, the smooth seminars that create a consensus, the different inputs from different institutions all leading inexorably to the right decision, I have come to see people –bureaucrats, individuals fighting turf wars, advancing their careers and that of their friends. Instead of a multilateral system based on different institutions, the council of ministers –national governments –reigns supreme, supported by acolytes in the national press. I have seen huge inefficiencies: the court of auditors failing to sign off the accounts for the14th year running, the voices from scientists at conferences who have told me that European science and technology spending – the biggest science budget in Europe, and its second largest item after agriculture –is all a waste of money, and they wouldn’t touch it with a bargepole for all the conditions laid down by ignorant bureaucrats.
I have re-read my Hayek, about the dangers of centralisation and a command economy, and east Europeans like Vaclav Klaus, the Czech president, are forever and rightly warning about the dangers of the EU turning into the EUSSR. We have been here before, they say. As the EU starts extending itz competences to culture and sports, Stalin’s chilling phrase about engineering the human soul comes to mind. Engineering might be a good thing; but social engineering ,if the 20th century is any guide, is not .And society is not a machine: it’s too complicated to try and make it one.
So my feelings about the EU are undergoing a change, and I am a lot less positive than before, and getting less do. The motto of the more intelligent Tory MEPs that ”We like Europe, but that the European Union” seems to ring ever more true.
But there are moments when I still think back to those early days five years ago: the snow is patterning your hair but it has melted as it touches the cobbles of the spire-infested grand place, giving a sheen in the gaslight. You have just emerged from a smoky estaminet with some gravelly words of Leonard Cohen ringing in your ears. Soon you will be hitting the pillows. And tomorrow you will goto the building with the gardens and the big atrium,, and along with the girls and boys in suits clutching files under their arms, together make the world a better place.
Hard to engineer a better world
Europe, I used to think, was essentially a clockwork, engineering operation where public opinion in the form of the tabloids is nothing so much as a wrecking operation. I remember when I first came to Brussels how amazed I was at the intricate structure of decision making: it was an immense flow chart diagram and everything seemed so immensely logical and rightful in its place. Commission proposed –parliament amended. With help of impact assessments; this went on to the council of minsiters, who represent the nation states after input from the committee of the regions and the European social and economic committee. The lobbyists and civil society also had their input arrows; there was Coreper, the nation states’ embassies to the EU,and the flow chart was slightly amended for second readings and what was known as conciliation, where the institutions failed to agree. It’s not that underneath this political structure there weren’t people; the people’s needs came in through impact assessments, ruled by the gods of utility. But there was no politics. It seemed a liberation. There were differences, but the system was designed to create the best of all possible worlds for homo europeanus.
And coming back to London and picking up the bleeding redtops was a shock to my Brussels-refined sensibilities: the mastheads were dipped in blood and opening the pages was like prising apart the jaws of a rottweiler. There were jokes about Europe when they bothered to write about it all, but the joke was in the vulgarians, and you do not answer a fool according to his folly.
But never mind, Europe would continue to work for them, supervise them, be an invisible guiding hand, while the masses made bad jokes, feasted on their roasts.
How does it all work? It’s the basic question. And the more I learnt about the subtlety of decision making, the way it took all sides into account, the more I got to admire the officials working bit by bit on this institution, which grew and grew better, so that decisions flowed not only more smoothly but ran Europe better. The acronyms and special jargon started to make sense, and were not there as a gratuitous obstacle to mark exclusivity –unless that rule apply to all specialist activity, including say engineering or medicine. But was necessary because of the fine honed and abstruse nature o fdecison-making.
And people said: who could say that Europe didn’t deliver: it broke down barriers to trade and movement of peoples, brought democracy to its eastern marches, raised the bar of environmental and safety standards and thus stimulating technical innovation –legislation being the driver. Whereas nation states were caught up in their petty concerns, so that roads through border areas were of poor quality, the visionaries of DG transport funded schemes that would link Athens and Stockholm, Warsaw and Lisbon, by motorways, and the whole continent by a high speed railway network, the trans Europe express. It funded abridge between Sicily and the mainland, Sweden and Denmark. There were large sums of money to bring researchers and universities together so that there would be no Chinese walls, no duplication, The bane of a Europe of40 odd nation states with their narrow blinkers on. For the consumer and expat there were low international call charges, cheap European flights, and no Spanish death duties as the most recalcitrant nationalists – the bloated, St Georges flag-draped ,mono lingual expaiateinthe southern Spain railing about ”Europe” were the biggest beneficiaries of reforms: better, fairer Spanish bureaucracy, free cross-border healthcare for ageing mother and cheap flights down to Malaga for the teenage grandchildren. .
When the people said ”What has Europe ever done for us”, the reply would be: “Watch the life of Brian”/
One of the pleasures of working in Brussels, in the European parliament, was watching the parade of nationalities: The name plates on the doors brought curiously to mind star trek in its heterogeneity: Vlasak and Lipietz, Jaatteemaki, Konya-Hanar: The European parliament was a demonstration of diversity, on show every night at nationality themed nightly receptions as the pop of champagne corks echoes around the parliament’s many lobbies, like gunfire on a night on the trenches many years ago. The idea it homogenising seemed ridiculous; for here the television set and the American TV series was surely the enemy.
I have friends of all nationalities, and the most difficult to make contact with –but ultimately the most rewarding, have been the French, because their perspectives are just so different, yet so compelling. Many times we discussed the British attitude to Europe, and they brought up the parallel of the national profession: the French, the fathers of Europe, are a nation of engineers. (Only the British tabloids and their benighted readers think they are a nation of cooks and lovers) The British are a nation of warriors and traders…or perhaps pirates. (often the same thing) . The French carefully design Europe like a grand projet, a TGV, an ariane espace or an Airbus 380 of political construction. The British just see gimlet eyed opportunities, and their pirate ships kept in port by the suffocating technocratic inevitability of it all. They approached the whole thing with a cynicism of experience rather than the analytical mind fired by idealism – the approach, as any scientist or engineer knows, leads to progress. My French friends note British euro-scepticism and ask: where is your space programme. And why trains crawl at snails pace once they reached the Kent side of the channel tunnel. The train metaphor is often used for European integration or more generally progress, and it is an apt one, for the French equate technology with politics. .
There have been times when I have hated the British, with their fat-rumped insular righteousness, but the longer I spend in Brussels the more I have come to see that they are right. Behind the flowcharts, the position and policy papers, the smooth seminars that create a consensus, the different inputs from different institutions all leading inexorably to the right decision, I have come to see people –bureaucrats, individuals fighting turf wars, advancing their careers and that of their friends. Instead of a multilateral system based on different institutions, the council of ministers –national governments –reigns supreme, supported by acolytes in the national press. I have seen huge inefficiencies: the court of auditors failing to sign off the accounts for the14th year running, the voices from scientists at conferences who have told me that European science and technology spending – the biggest science budget in Europe, and its second largest item after agriculture –is all a waste of money, and they wouldn’t touch it with a bargepole for all the conditions laid down by ignorant bureaucrats.
I have re-read my Hayek, about the dangers of centralisation and a command economy, and east Europeans like Vaclav Klaus, the Czech president, are forever and rightly warning about the dangers of the EU turning into the EUSSR. We have been here before, they say. As the EU starts extending itz competences to culture and sports, Stalin’s chilling phrase about engineering the human soul comes to mind. Engineering might be a good thing; but social engineering ,if the 20th century is any guide, is not .And society is not a machine: it’s too complicated to try and make it one.
So my feelings about the EU are undergoing a change, and I am a lot less positive than before, and getting less do. The motto of the more intelligent Tory MEPs that ”We like Europe, but that the European Union” seems to ring ever more true.
But there are moments when I still think back to those early days five years ago: the snow is patterning your hair but it has melted as it touches the cobbles of the spire-infested grand place, giving a sheen in the gaslight. You have just emerged from a smoky estaminet with some gravelly words of Leonard Cohen ringing in your ears. Soon you will be hitting the pillows. And tomorrow you will goto the building with the gardens and the big atrium,, and along with the girls and boys in suits clutching files under their arms, together make the world a better place.
And coming back to London and picking up the bleeding redtops was a shock to my Brussels-refined sensibilities: the mastheads were dipped in blood and opening the pages was like prising apart the jaws of a rottweiler. There were jokes about Europe when they bothered to write about it all, but the joke was in the vulgarians, and you do not answer a fool according to his folly.
But never mind, Europe would continue to work for them, supervise them, be an invisible guiding hand, while the masses made bad jokes, feasted on their roasts.
How does it all work? It’s the basic question. And the more I learnt about the subtlety of decision making, the way it took all sides into account, the more I got to admire the officials working bit by bit on this institution, which grew and grew better, so that decisions flowed not only more smoothly but ran Europe better. The acronyms and special jargon started to make sense, and were not there as a gratuitous obstacle to mark exclusivity –unless that rule apply to all specialist activity, including say engineering or medicine. But was necessary because of the fine honed and abstruse nature o fdecison-making.
And people said: who could say that Europe didn’t deliver: it broke down barriers to trade and movement of peoples, brought democracy to its eastern marches, raised the bar of environmental and safety standards and thus stimulating technical innovation –legislation being the driver. Whereas nation states were caught up in their petty concerns, so that roads through border areas were of poor quality, the visionaries of DG transport funded schemes that would link Athens and Stockholm, Warsaw and Lisbon, by motorways, and the whole continent by a high speed railway network, the trans Europe express. It funded abridge between Sicily and the mainland, Sweden and Denmark. There were large sums of money to bring researchers and universities together so that there would be no Chinese walls, no duplication, The bane of a Europe of40 odd nation states with their narrow blinkers on. For the consumer and expat there were low international call charges, cheap European flights, and no Spanish death duties as the most recalcitrant nationalists – the bloated, St Georges flag-draped ,mono lingual expaiateinthe southern Spain railing about ”Europe” were the biggest beneficiaries of reforms: better, fairer Spanish bureaucracy, free cross-border healthcare for ageing mother and cheap flights down to Malaga for the teenage grandchildren. .
When the people said ”What has Europe ever done for us”, the reply would be: “Watch the life of Brian”/
One of the pleasures of working in Brussels, in the European parliament, was watching the parade of nationalities: The name plates on the doors brought curiously to mind star trek in its heterogeneity: Vlasak and Lipietz, Jaatteemaki, Konya-Hanar: The European parliament was a demonstration of diversity, on show every night at nationality themed nightly receptions as the pop of champagne corks echoes around the parliament’s many lobbies, like gunfire on a night on the trenches many years ago. The idea it homogenising seemed ridiculous; for here the television set and the American TV series was surely the enemy.
I have friends of all nationalities, and the most difficult to make contact with –but ultimately the most rewarding, have been the French, because their perspectives are just so different, yet so compelling. Many times we discussed the British attitude to Europe, and they brought up the parallel of the national profession: the French, the fathers of Europe, are a nation of engineers. (Only the British tabloids and their benighted readers think they are a nation of cooks and lovers) The British are a nation of warriors and traders…or perhaps pirates. (often the same thing) . The French carefully design Europe like a grand projet, a TGV, an ariane espace or an Airbus 380 of political construction. The British just see gimlet eyed opportunities, and their pirate ships kept in port by the suffocating technocratic inevitability of it all. They approached the whole thing with a cynicism of experience rather than the analytical mind fired by idealism – the approach, as any scientist or engineer knows, leads to progress. My French friends note British euro-scepticism and ask: where is your space programme. And why trains crawl at snails pace once they reached the Kent side of the channel tunnel. The train metaphor is often used for European integration or more generally progress, and it is an apt one, for the French equate technology with politics. .
There have been times when I have hated the British, with their fat-rumped insular righteousness, but the longer I spend in Brussels the more I have come to see that they are right. Behind the flowcharts, the position and policy papers, the smooth seminars that create a consensus, the different inputs from different institutions all leading inexorably to the right decision, I have come to see people –bureaucrats, individuals fighting turf wars, advancing their careers and that of their friends. Instead of a multilateral system based on different institutions, the council of ministers –national governments –reigns supreme, supported by acolytes in the national press. I have seen huge inefficiencies: the court of auditors failing to sign off the accounts for the14th year running, the voices from scientists at conferences who have told me that European science and technology spending – the biggest science budget in Europe, and its second largest item after agriculture –is all a waste of money, and they wouldn’t touch it with a bargepole for all the conditions laid down by ignorant bureaucrats.
I have re-read my Hayek, about the dangers of centralisation and a command economy, and east Europeans like Vaclav Klaus, the Czech president, are forever and rightly warning about the dangers of the EU turning into the EUSSR. We have been here before, they say. As the EU starts extending itz competences to culture and sports, Stalin’s chilling phrase about engineering the human soul comes to mind. Engineering might be a good thing; but social engineering ,if the 20th century is any guide, is not .And society is not a machine: it’s too complicated to try and make it one.
So my feelings about the EU are undergoing a change, and I am a lot less positive than before, and getting less do. The motto of the more intelligent Tory MEPs that ”We like Europe, but that the European Union” seems to ring ever more true.
But there are moments when I still think back to those early days five years ago: the snow is patterning your hair but it has melted as it touches the cobbles of the spire-infested grand place, giving a sheen in the gaslight. You have just emerged from a smoky estaminet with some gravelly words of Leonard Cohen ringing in your ears. Soon you will be hitting the pillows. And tomorrow you will goto the building with the gardens and the big atrium,, and along with the girls and boys in suits clutching files under their arms, together make the world a better place.
Bruges group meeting
I attended a Bruges group conference this weekend, at King’s College. The people were all over the age of sixty: sellotaped glasses, walking sticks, that sort of thing. A constant refrain was the call for speakers to speak up – bellowed from various corners of the room. The man behind me fell asleep, spoke in his sleep, and snored, before being woken up.
The Bruges group is highly eurosceptic; its patron is one M Thatcher. but John Redwood, the only MP present, at least had some interesting things to say. He said he voted against the EC in the referendum in 1975 because he had read the treat of Rome which talked of ever closer political union; he would have voted for good relations and a free trade agreement with the other countries “but that was not on offer”. He described the current EU as a threat to democracy. He said he, as Welsh secretary, had sat in on about 20 meetings of the council of ministers and that the way decisions were made was a disgrace to democracy. “We met in private, there were no opportunities to vote the legislation down, no one asks ‘Is your new law necessary”. Ministers were stressed by “arbitrary deadlines” set up by unelected bureaucrats; “thousands of laws” are passed in this way, he said..”And you cannot correct, amend of repeal these laws.”
He said the British parliament was packed with “eurofederalists”, and that the public was apathetic. He urged his audience to engage their friends and begin a letter-writing campaign to MPs.
He also urged unity between the different factions within Euroscepticism: “Sick of factionalism, splintering into ever smaller groups as people compete to hold on to the true faith. The Tories were on board and would vote for a referendum and “Eighty percent of the public are on our side.”
“Nobody under the age of 50 has been able to vote on the future of the EU. The EU has changed enormously since 1975. People are given referenda on whether they want regional assemblies or small town mayors, but not on whether they approve of this new Europe.”
He has a point.
Another speaker, Marc Henri Glendinning of the democracy movement, talked about how the referendum vote would be won. They would be distributing leaflets to 150 target constituencies; and holding a mock referendum in a key constituency. Overseen by the electoral reform society. “ He said the pro referendum side needed 85 MPs to switch sides – they already had 230 comprising Tories and Welsh nationalists and a few labour and Liberal MPs. “Over 400 will vote against a referendum, but 185 of those are MPs in constituencies with fewer than 5,000 majority. “And these could be persuaded if their electorate felt strongly. If we can break 30 LibDems we could persuade the new liberal leader to back the Tories.”
“Winning the right to a referendum is necessary but not sufficient.” In others words it was just the beginning. He also urged linking up with pro referendum groups in other countries, and that this was not a Little Englander issue but about the people against the oligarchic elites that rule Europe.
He is right.
They need thousands of pounds though, despite the backing of the owner of rubik’s cube. “Are there any rich widows out there,” he said, surveying his audience.
“Speak up,” bellowed the man behind me.
Another speaker said - rightly again - that British ministers and civil servants go native when they go to Brussels, intoxicated by being effective members of a cabinet that rules 500m people. Instead of representing the UK in Brussels, they came back with new found loyalty to their chums in Brussels and start representing Brussels in the UK.
That, too, is correct.
That said, the conference degenerated a bit after that.
Christopher Booker – who has written books on fiction – compared the EU to Sauron’s Mordor and the constitutional treaty to the evil ring that corrupted its wearer and controlled the bearers of the lesser rings owned by elves, dwarves and men. He intoned the inscription that great fictionalist JRR Tolkien said was inside the Ring:
“One Ring to rule them all, One Ring to find them,
One Ring to bring them all and in the darkness bind them
In the Land of Mordor where the Shadows lie.”
He said this melodramatically, in all seriousness, and no one laughed.
And then Ruth Lea, an economist and former treasury official, who had said sensible things about the need to renegotiate the relationship with Europe along the lines of the Swiss relationship to the EU – a respectable position, with a case for it – then let herself down by denying that global warming was a plot by the EU to accrete more powers. This prompted some interest among the audience, and later, as I left, I heard the whipless MEP Roger Helmer talking in his best bedside voice to a number of oldies. “Well, you know, most of the new Tory candidates deny climate change.”
The Bruges group is highly eurosceptic; its patron is one M Thatcher. but John Redwood, the only MP present, at least had some interesting things to say. He said he voted against the EC in the referendum in 1975 because he had read the treat of Rome which talked of ever closer political union; he would have voted for good relations and a free trade agreement with the other countries “but that was not on offer”. He described the current EU as a threat to democracy. He said he, as Welsh secretary, had sat in on about 20 meetings of the council of ministers and that the way decisions were made was a disgrace to democracy. “We met in private, there were no opportunities to vote the legislation down, no one asks ‘Is your new law necessary”. Ministers were stressed by “arbitrary deadlines” set up by unelected bureaucrats; “thousands of laws” are passed in this way, he said..”And you cannot correct, amend of repeal these laws.”
He said the British parliament was packed with “eurofederalists”, and that the public was apathetic. He urged his audience to engage their friends and begin a letter-writing campaign to MPs.
He also urged unity between the different factions within Euroscepticism: “Sick of factionalism, splintering into ever smaller groups as people compete to hold on to the true faith. The Tories were on board and would vote for a referendum and “Eighty percent of the public are on our side.”
“Nobody under the age of 50 has been able to vote on the future of the EU. The EU has changed enormously since 1975. People are given referenda on whether they want regional assemblies or small town mayors, but not on whether they approve of this new Europe.”
He has a point.
Another speaker, Marc Henri Glendinning of the democracy movement, talked about how the referendum vote would be won. They would be distributing leaflets to 150 target constituencies; and holding a mock referendum in a key constituency. Overseen by the electoral reform society. “ He said the pro referendum side needed 85 MPs to switch sides – they already had 230 comprising Tories and Welsh nationalists and a few labour and Liberal MPs. “Over 400 will vote against a referendum, but 185 of those are MPs in constituencies with fewer than 5,000 majority. “And these could be persuaded if their electorate felt strongly. If we can break 30 LibDems we could persuade the new liberal leader to back the Tories.”
“Winning the right to a referendum is necessary but not sufficient.” In others words it was just the beginning. He also urged linking up with pro referendum groups in other countries, and that this was not a Little Englander issue but about the people against the oligarchic elites that rule Europe.
He is right.
They need thousands of pounds though, despite the backing of the owner of rubik’s cube. “Are there any rich widows out there,” he said, surveying his audience.
“Speak up,” bellowed the man behind me.
Another speaker said - rightly again - that British ministers and civil servants go native when they go to Brussels, intoxicated by being effective members of a cabinet that rules 500m people. Instead of representing the UK in Brussels, they came back with new found loyalty to their chums in Brussels and start representing Brussels in the UK.
That, too, is correct.
That said, the conference degenerated a bit after that.
Christopher Booker – who has written books on fiction – compared the EU to Sauron’s Mordor and the constitutional treaty to the evil ring that corrupted its wearer and controlled the bearers of the lesser rings owned by elves, dwarves and men. He intoned the inscription that great fictionalist JRR Tolkien said was inside the Ring:
“One Ring to rule them all, One Ring to find them,
One Ring to bring them all and in the darkness bind them
In the Land of Mordor where the Shadows lie.”
He said this melodramatically, in all seriousness, and no one laughed.
And then Ruth Lea, an economist and former treasury official, who had said sensible things about the need to renegotiate the relationship with Europe along the lines of the Swiss relationship to the EU – a respectable position, with a case for it – then let herself down by denying that global warming was a plot by the EU to accrete more powers. This prompted some interest among the audience, and later, as I left, I heard the whipless MEP Roger Helmer talking in his best bedside voice to a number of oldies. “Well, you know, most of the new Tory candidates deny climate change.”
Tuesday, November 13, 2007
Should immigrants be tested for TB?
hould Britain test all immigrants for TB? It’s a disease almost eradicated in the native population. Yet several hundred thousand immigrants a year come, many from countries where not only active TB rates are higher in the UK, but where up to a third of the population has latent TB. That is to say they have been infected, have a few hundred of the rod-shaped bacteria in their lungs contained by their immune systems: they are asymptomatic and non infectious. In ten percent of cases, however, these latent carriers go on to develop full blown TB.
Statistically that’s about three thousand arrivals a year who will eventually develop the disease . It wouldn’tbesobad ifalthese cases were of normal TB, which is easy and cheap to treat, inconvenient mostly for the patient, who has to endure a six month cocktail of antibiotics even after he has begun to feel well.
But about 2-3percent ofTB cases these days are multidrugs resistant (MDR) – the result of por drugs compliance further back in the transmission chain – and this TB is expensive and massively inconvenient to treat, susceptible only to second line drugs which are expensive, take a long time to work and have terrible side effects. There are periods when these MDR TB patients have to be kept in isolation chambers, seen to by a phalanx of doctors and nurses. The cost of treating such a patient has been estimated at £250,000 for a three year programme, and statistically Britain should be seeing about 60-80 MDR patients a year (3% of the 3,000 TB cases), as indeed it does.
To get an idea of what treatment for MDR is like, I spoke to one of few native Brits who did catch it – while in hospital (a depressingly common route), from another patient with active MDR:
Paul Thorn was a young HIV positive nurse treated for his HIV in an open ward at Westminster and Chelsea hospital in 1995 when a Brazilian came in, coughed up his sputum – the standard test – and, because the nurses failed to take precautions, infected the others. Six died. Paul survived –by enduring a painful three year course of chemotherapy, part of that period spent in an isolation room in hospital. He sent me a copy of his diary of the period.
“For some time experts had been predicting that it was only a matter of time before an outbreak of TB/MDR-TB occurred in such a way. Three months after exposure to the deadly bacteria, I was told of the outbreak. My health had already been deteriorating prior to my knowledge of the exposure. During that time the bacilli multiplied slowly in my lungs without me knowing. My slowly advancing chest pain and breathlessness were finally explained. Then without warning I lost my liberty and found myself locked away from society in a negative pressure isolation room so that I didn’t infect anyone else.”
Paul couldn’t leave the room – “you might not get out alive”, one doctor told him - and his contact with visitors was restricted. He found himself being visited by a succession of doctors and nurses in masks, and was given medication that made him woozy, confused and angry. When his story appeared in the media; he started getting letters of support – but also critical letters, asking why the taxpayer should pay for he mistakes owning to his lifestyle choice, since HIV exacerbated his condition.
But things got better: by October 1995 he was putting on weight, and had started a fitness routine.
When he was set free, he had to comply with several conditions: Though he was sputum negative and therefore very unlikely to be infectious, he still had to be careful. His doctors told him:
“You should sleep in a single room with the door closed at night, and should spend the majority of your time inside. It is relatively safe for you to go out for short periods assuming you will not be in close contact with anyone for longer than quarter of an hour or so. This means you will not be able for example, to go to restaurants, clubs, or use public transport. The flat should be properly ventilated. You will need to comply with daily direct observed therapy and will be advised to attend our out-patients' clinic once monthly. You should have no new social contacts and should not have contact with anyone who is HIV positive or otherwise immuno-compromised. You should also not have any contact with pregnant women or children."
Over the next three years Paul lost a lot of friends. His MDR TB course continued, a daily dose of five drugs taken under supervision at his local medical centre, under the internationally recognised standard of DOTS treatment, for which he says he was glad. “These drugs represent really powerful chemotherapy. I was vomiting, my lips became numb, I became paranoid because the drugs seemed through my brain membranes. I would have stopped taking the drugs.” He never did though- thanks to the support of his consultant – and now speaks regularly at conferences as well as having published a book on how to survive TB.
There are several hundred individuals being treated in the above manner, in a lowokey way, in centres in London, Liverpool and elsewhere – under John Moore Gillon at the east London; under prof Peter Davies at the Liverpol cardiothoracic centre. Though invidious to question the dedication of staff or the determination to be cured of MDR patients, Paul did admit that he was often tempted to quit: to walk out and disappear into the community, with his uncured MDR.
It’s not that easy catch someone else’s TB, you have to spend hours in their company in an environment saturated with cough droplets, so catching it on the tube is unlikely. But there have been outbreaks – in Leicester, London, in the former a school, among former residents of a squat, from where it rippled out to 67 friends, relatives others. These have not been any multidrugs resistant outbreaks, yet.
The MDR treatment bill in the UK may only run into the tens of millions of pounds a year – these are the decisions policy-makers have to make all the time. Prof Davies does not think screening worthwhile = for a start the detection test s for MDR are complex and beyond the capabilities of embassy staff, at least until electronic kit becomes available, Then it raises the questions: if immigrants, why not all visitors? Students, tourists, temporary workers, since they could equally well –albeit at lower risk – be carriers. .No other country has gone down that route, ever..
But it’s worth awareness raising. Paul told me of one case in West London where a GP took a year to diagnose his patient with TB, having done tests for cancer as well as the usual respiratory diseases. Prof Davies blamed the drugs companies for pushing asthma drugs in the medical journals, with their slogans aimed at doctors “Cough..Think asthma” The drugs firms have long found it more profitable to invest in such western world ailments than in TB. (Though that is slowly changing.)
For while it must be a surprising fact to many that not only is disease associated with Victorian “romantic” death not eradicated but is the world’s second biggest infectious killer, it remains overwhelmingly disease of poor countries. Perhaps greater awareness will put pressure on efforts to reduce the scourge in the poor world - and thus preventing it from striking in the rich one.
Statistically that’s about three thousand arrivals a year who will eventually develop the disease . It wouldn’tbesobad ifalthese cases were of normal TB, which is easy and cheap to treat, inconvenient mostly for the patient, who has to endure a six month cocktail of antibiotics even after he has begun to feel well.
But about 2-3percent ofTB cases these days are multidrugs resistant (MDR) – the result of por drugs compliance further back in the transmission chain – and this TB is expensive and massively inconvenient to treat, susceptible only to second line drugs which are expensive, take a long time to work and have terrible side effects. There are periods when these MDR TB patients have to be kept in isolation chambers, seen to by a phalanx of doctors and nurses. The cost of treating such a patient has been estimated at £250,000 for a three year programme, and statistically Britain should be seeing about 60-80 MDR patients a year (3% of the 3,000 TB cases), as indeed it does.
To get an idea of what treatment for MDR is like, I spoke to one of few native Brits who did catch it – while in hospital (a depressingly common route), from another patient with active MDR:
Paul Thorn was a young HIV positive nurse treated for his HIV in an open ward at Westminster and Chelsea hospital in 1995 when a Brazilian came in, coughed up his sputum – the standard test – and, because the nurses failed to take precautions, infected the others. Six died. Paul survived –by enduring a painful three year course of chemotherapy, part of that period spent in an isolation room in hospital. He sent me a copy of his diary of the period.
“For some time experts had been predicting that it was only a matter of time before an outbreak of TB/MDR-TB occurred in such a way. Three months after exposure to the deadly bacteria, I was told of the outbreak. My health had already been deteriorating prior to my knowledge of the exposure. During that time the bacilli multiplied slowly in my lungs without me knowing. My slowly advancing chest pain and breathlessness were finally explained. Then without warning I lost my liberty and found myself locked away from society in a negative pressure isolation room so that I didn’t infect anyone else.”
Paul couldn’t leave the room – “you might not get out alive”, one doctor told him - and his contact with visitors was restricted. He found himself being visited by a succession of doctors and nurses in masks, and was given medication that made him woozy, confused and angry. When his story appeared in the media; he started getting letters of support – but also critical letters, asking why the taxpayer should pay for he mistakes owning to his lifestyle choice, since HIV exacerbated his condition.
But things got better: by October 1995 he was putting on weight, and had started a fitness routine.
When he was set free, he had to comply with several conditions: Though he was sputum negative and therefore very unlikely to be infectious, he still had to be careful. His doctors told him:
“You should sleep in a single room with the door closed at night, and should spend the majority of your time inside. It is relatively safe for you to go out for short periods assuming you will not be in close contact with anyone for longer than quarter of an hour or so. This means you will not be able for example, to go to restaurants, clubs, or use public transport. The flat should be properly ventilated. You will need to comply with daily direct observed therapy and will be advised to attend our out-patients' clinic once monthly. You should have no new social contacts and should not have contact with anyone who is HIV positive or otherwise immuno-compromised. You should also not have any contact with pregnant women or children."
Over the next three years Paul lost a lot of friends. His MDR TB course continued, a daily dose of five drugs taken under supervision at his local medical centre, under the internationally recognised standard of DOTS treatment, for which he says he was glad. “These drugs represent really powerful chemotherapy. I was vomiting, my lips became numb, I became paranoid because the drugs seemed through my brain membranes. I would have stopped taking the drugs.” He never did though- thanks to the support of his consultant – and now speaks regularly at conferences as well as having published a book on how to survive TB.
There are several hundred individuals being treated in the above manner, in a lowokey way, in centres in London, Liverpool and elsewhere – under John Moore Gillon at the east London; under prof Peter Davies at the Liverpol cardiothoracic centre. Though invidious to question the dedication of staff or the determination to be cured of MDR patients, Paul did admit that he was often tempted to quit: to walk out and disappear into the community, with his uncured MDR.
It’s not that easy catch someone else’s TB, you have to spend hours in their company in an environment saturated with cough droplets, so catching it on the tube is unlikely. But there have been outbreaks – in Leicester, London, in the former a school, among former residents of a squat, from where it rippled out to 67 friends, relatives others. These have not been any multidrugs resistant outbreaks, yet.
The MDR treatment bill in the UK may only run into the tens of millions of pounds a year – these are the decisions policy-makers have to make all the time. Prof Davies does not think screening worthwhile = for a start the detection test s for MDR are complex and beyond the capabilities of embassy staff, at least until electronic kit becomes available, Then it raises the questions: if immigrants, why not all visitors? Students, tourists, temporary workers, since they could equally well –albeit at lower risk – be carriers. .No other country has gone down that route, ever..
But it’s worth awareness raising. Paul told me of one case in West London where a GP took a year to diagnose his patient with TB, having done tests for cancer as well as the usual respiratory diseases. Prof Davies blamed the drugs companies for pushing asthma drugs in the medical journals, with their slogans aimed at doctors “Cough..Think asthma” The drugs firms have long found it more profitable to invest in such western world ailments than in TB. (Though that is slowly changing.)
For while it must be a surprising fact to many that not only is disease associated with Victorian “romantic” death not eradicated but is the world’s second biggest infectious killer, it remains overwhelmingly disease of poor countries. Perhaps greater awareness will put pressure on efforts to reduce the scourge in the poor world - and thus preventing it from striking in the rich one.
Sunday, November 11, 2007
The accidental war
The second world war remains a bit of a taboo in Brussels, as was evident when the Poles insisted on dredging it up at the recent summit, when they said they ought to be given council votes on the basis of a population of 66m, which would have the number of inhabitants in their country had not a certain war started by a certain nation raged over their territory.
The second world war is taboo, but it's also been an axiom that the Germans were wholly at fault, and that the west fought a good war. Totalitarianism followed totalitarianism, so the cold war melded seamlessly with the second world war. Both fights were supposedly "good fights".
Yet these days absolute good and evil is no longer anything secular Europeans believe in. So it may be that AJP Taylor, the most controversial and most popular British historian of the last century, deserves to come into fashion again.
He rejected the standard narrative that westerners imbibe with their mother's milk: that the second world war was caused by Hitler and his totalitarian dictatorship, and that it might have been avoided has it not been for the policy of appeasement which only served to whet his appetite. The lesson learnt – that dictators must never be appeased, as they will be encouraged – has had amazing traction in western, especially American, foreign policy ever since.
AJP Taylor had, when the Origins of the Second World War was published in 1961, had a distinguished career as a fellow of Magdalen and a number of highly regarded books under his belt. His telly don period was yet to begin.
The book set off a storm, and probably cost him the regius professorship of history at Oxford, which went to his archrival Hugh Trevor Roper, who comdemned his theory for every available sin.
Trevor Roper, later responsible for the Hitler diaries fiasco, by the way, said that Taylor’s evidence was unreliable; he distorted documents by selective citation and dismissed those he didn't like by claiming they didn't count. Taylor, he said, contradicted himself repeatedly and drew conclusions at variance with his evidence. Many other historians of the time agreed. Yet the book continues in 2007 to sell well, especially to undergraduates.
Taylor’s thesis was that Hitler was not evil demon but rather on ordinary German, perhaps even just an ordinary European, politician. He was not bent on European or world domination, but was just playing the European power game, as all statesmen of the time were: their motives were simply to maximise the gains of their country without resorting to the kind of war that whose damage would negate any gain. Chancellor Stresemann, the “good German” of postwar myth, who wanted to follow a peaceful path, had exactly the same plans to dominate eastern Europe as Hitler did, one way or another. Inasmuch in that Hitler did have a personal characteristic it was dithering opportunism: Whereas others saw a demonic genius bent on dominating Europe by masterfully pulling all the strings because he had a carefully laid out plan, Taylor saw only an ordinary politician who let events fall into his lap and asked how he might benefit from them.
Nations’ interests were eternal, and leaders were not motivated by ideology in their pursuit of that. Whereas others saw in Mein Kampf a blueprint for worldwide domination, Taylor heard the confused beerhall chatter of the twenties put between hard covers, and rated it what it said as unimportant. .
Whereas some saw the Hossbach memorandum of 1937 as a timetable for war, Taylor saw it as a document typifying the intrigue and machinations of the Nazi system of government - but these were red herrings that other post-war historians, setting up the war as defensive white hat allies versus Nazis ideologically bent on world domination, had mistakenly pursued.
The important things were Germany's interests in dominating eastern Europe, Russia's fear of invasion from the west, Italy's dream of a new Roman empire in the Mediterranean, the tradition of non European intervention in British foreign policy so that Britain could concentrate on dominating the rest of the world instead, all were more important, in the international pursuit of power, than spreading the doctrines of Marx or Nietszche, exporting the Concentration camp or the swastika. True, in wicked acts “Hitler outdid them all” – partly because the context of war allows wickedness to flourish – though it must be remembered that it was the British who invented the concentration camp ad the Belgians who carried out racial cleansing in the Congo.
Not that leaders were unimportant; they made all the difference, usually by being tripped up by bit part players and smaller countries while in pursuit of their national interests. So history was in one sense predetermined; in another accidental..
This Europe was one where events were brought about by the unimportant characters, and few of the big name leaders got what they wanted, even when they knew it: the weak and second rate made things happen, puppets and puppet masters changing places. It was Papen and Hindenburg who thrust power on Hitler because they believed he could control them. Schusnigg brought about the collapse of Austriai when he invaded the headquarters of the Austrian nazis.
The second world war was started by the machinations of the Polish foreign minister, who refused the reasonable German request to Danzig, a German city and inveigled the British on to the side after tabloid British opinion decided something “must be done” before bowing out. The mutually negating settlement that became known as the second world war ended with both nations’ relative eclipse and the rise of the USSR and America, which had never been a part of the European power system.
AJP Taylor came to the project after wondering why the debate about the origins of the first world war still raged while the origins of the second were surrounded by complacency: Hitler's absolute personal wickedness, and the evil of totalitarian nazism, were the received wisdoms that closed off the debate. When researching the book he discovered that the Versailles revisionists were wrong to blame the unfair treaty for the next war, and that while all powers had interests, Germany was the indeed the dynamic, expansionist element in European policy, as France had been the century before, and the other powers were trying to constrain it.
The struggle for power between nations in fact described the EU today, and one wonders: could the state of affairs of competing states in 1930s Europe been brought to the identical situation of competing and prosperous states today without the second world war and the holocausts in all senses that it produced?
Was the second world war, in fact, a bit of an accident? Brought about by the Poles.
The second world war is taboo, but it's also been an axiom that the Germans were wholly at fault, and that the west fought a good war. Totalitarianism followed totalitarianism, so the cold war melded seamlessly with the second world war. Both fights were supposedly "good fights".
Yet these days absolute good and evil is no longer anything secular Europeans believe in. So it may be that AJP Taylor, the most controversial and most popular British historian of the last century, deserves to come into fashion again.
He rejected the standard narrative that westerners imbibe with their mother's milk: that the second world war was caused by Hitler and his totalitarian dictatorship, and that it might have been avoided has it not been for the policy of appeasement which only served to whet his appetite. The lesson learnt – that dictators must never be appeased, as they will be encouraged – has had amazing traction in western, especially American, foreign policy ever since.
AJP Taylor had, when the Origins of the Second World War was published in 1961, had a distinguished career as a fellow of Magdalen and a number of highly regarded books under his belt. His telly don period was yet to begin.
The book set off a storm, and probably cost him the regius professorship of history at Oxford, which went to his archrival Hugh Trevor Roper, who comdemned his theory for every available sin.
Trevor Roper, later responsible for the Hitler diaries fiasco, by the way, said that Taylor’s evidence was unreliable; he distorted documents by selective citation and dismissed those he didn't like by claiming they didn't count. Taylor, he said, contradicted himself repeatedly and drew conclusions at variance with his evidence. Many other historians of the time agreed. Yet the book continues in 2007 to sell well, especially to undergraduates.
Taylor’s thesis was that Hitler was not evil demon but rather on ordinary German, perhaps even just an ordinary European, politician. He was not bent on European or world domination, but was just playing the European power game, as all statesmen of the time were: their motives were simply to maximise the gains of their country without resorting to the kind of war that whose damage would negate any gain. Chancellor Stresemann, the “good German” of postwar myth, who wanted to follow a peaceful path, had exactly the same plans to dominate eastern Europe as Hitler did, one way or another. Inasmuch in that Hitler did have a personal characteristic it was dithering opportunism: Whereas others saw a demonic genius bent on dominating Europe by masterfully pulling all the strings because he had a carefully laid out plan, Taylor saw only an ordinary politician who let events fall into his lap and asked how he might benefit from them.
Nations’ interests were eternal, and leaders were not motivated by ideology in their pursuit of that. Whereas others saw in Mein Kampf a blueprint for worldwide domination, Taylor heard the confused beerhall chatter of the twenties put between hard covers, and rated it what it said as unimportant. .
Whereas some saw the Hossbach memorandum of 1937 as a timetable for war, Taylor saw it as a document typifying the intrigue and machinations of the Nazi system of government - but these were red herrings that other post-war historians, setting up the war as defensive white hat allies versus Nazis ideologically bent on world domination, had mistakenly pursued.
The important things were Germany's interests in dominating eastern Europe, Russia's fear of invasion from the west, Italy's dream of a new Roman empire in the Mediterranean, the tradition of non European intervention in British foreign policy so that Britain could concentrate on dominating the rest of the world instead, all were more important, in the international pursuit of power, than spreading the doctrines of Marx or Nietszche, exporting the Concentration camp or the swastika. True, in wicked acts “Hitler outdid them all” – partly because the context of war allows wickedness to flourish – though it must be remembered that it was the British who invented the concentration camp ad the Belgians who carried out racial cleansing in the Congo.
Not that leaders were unimportant; they made all the difference, usually by being tripped up by bit part players and smaller countries while in pursuit of their national interests. So history was in one sense predetermined; in another accidental..
This Europe was one where events were brought about by the unimportant characters, and few of the big name leaders got what they wanted, even when they knew it: the weak and second rate made things happen, puppets and puppet masters changing places. It was Papen and Hindenburg who thrust power on Hitler because they believed he could control them. Schusnigg brought about the collapse of Austriai when he invaded the headquarters of the Austrian nazis.
The second world war was started by the machinations of the Polish foreign minister, who refused the reasonable German request to Danzig, a German city and inveigled the British on to the side after tabloid British opinion decided something “must be done” before bowing out. The mutually negating settlement that became known as the second world war ended with both nations’ relative eclipse and the rise of the USSR and America, which had never been a part of the European power system.
AJP Taylor came to the project after wondering why the debate about the origins of the first world war still raged while the origins of the second were surrounded by complacency: Hitler's absolute personal wickedness, and the evil of totalitarian nazism, were the received wisdoms that closed off the debate. When researching the book he discovered that the Versailles revisionists were wrong to blame the unfair treaty for the next war, and that while all powers had interests, Germany was the indeed the dynamic, expansionist element in European policy, as France had been the century before, and the other powers were trying to constrain it.
The struggle for power between nations in fact described the EU today, and one wonders: could the state of affairs of competing states in 1930s Europe been brought to the identical situation of competing and prosperous states today without the second world war and the holocausts in all senses that it produced?
Was the second world war, in fact, a bit of an accident? Brought about by the Poles.
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