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Immigration: Some is good, More isn’t Necessarily Better

The reason the UK is attracting migrants from all over the world is, thanks to our Empires, our Language is the word language. Migrants are more likely to speak English than French (which is why Algerians and Senegalese tend to stay in France). There are a huge number of people from all over the world already living here, so migrants can plug into existing communities.

Thanks to the invention of free-market, liberal democracy in the 19th and 20th centuries, and especially since the rejection of Socialism in 1979, the UK has a vibrant and diverse economy, that can absorb near-enough everyone who wants to come and play. The UK is richer than Poland, and despite Labour’s best efforts, remains a better place to live than Eritrea. We have secure property rights, which means foreign oligarchs can stow their looted wealth in the form of London property, where the likes of Putin cannot confiscate it.

The UK is a prosperous country, with an open economy, secure property rights and a relatively liberal society. British people are tolerant of immigrants and the UK enjoys good community relations.

We do not have ID cards, and the police cannot stop you on a whim. Thus “illegal” immigrants find it easy to find work in the grey economy. Because we have a relatively generous welfare state, there are a lot of jobs – fruit picking, cleaning, domestic labour, care etc out of which the UK-born have priced themselves. The prize – indefinite leave to remain – is within reach of almost anyone who can get here, and work undetected for long enough.

That is why people cling to the axles of lorries to leave France, and it is mostly something of which we can be proud.

People, self organising in Calais, for the right to cling to the axle of a Britain-bound Lorry.

Immigration is good. It does not follow that more is better. That tolerant and open society requires that the majority in it are born, and steeped in it from birth. The main fear the native population has from immigration is communities – the Bradford Pakistanis for example who come to dominate an area, and then cease to integrate. Integration into mainstream British life is vital, if that open society is to be maintained. The Ugandan asians and the Afro-Caribbeans who came over in the 50s and 60s have integrated. Sikhs and Hindus do. Arabs and Eastern Europeans do. Nigerians do.

Despite our success in integration, we cannot take the millions waiting to cross the mediterranean, though in practice we do end up taking most of those camped at Calais. In making it hard to come (sales of wetsuits, and the discovery of corpses in Holland and Norway are indicative of the risks people are willing to take) we limit the number prepared to try.

We cannot allow too many people brutalised by war, ignorant of how to survive in a liberal society to come, lest they are tempted create their own ghettos like Bradford. Too many people, and the incentive to learn English properly, and the imperative to integrate that comes with it, is lost. And it is the Ghettos that people object to, not immigration. It’s not race, it’s the compatibility of culture and the rate of change of a society; a rate of change that many of the people neither asked for, nor want. When a majority of children in the local school are not British, people question the change: Is this for the best?

So. Net migration to the UK is running at 1-200,000 a year. We add two million people every decade or so. This is why the UK is climbing the charts of National GDP, not falling. We’ve even got Germany in our sights. UK to be the 4th Largest economy (US$ Nominal terms) on earth in the not too distant future. Immigration is at such a level that the UK has halted its relative decline. Whatever the economic benefits, there are limits to immigration consistent with a liberal, tolerant and free society, especially from countries without a tolerant, liberal and free culture.

Labour, in office openly sought to “rub the right’s nose in diversity”, hoping immigrants would vote labour in perpetuity. The risk comes when the electorate never bought into the plan. When it was suggested there were limits to migration, people were told they were “racist”. The idiot poujadism of UKIP was the result: leading to the return of openly Nativist politics to the mainstream of British politics. The contempt Labour have shown for the electorate on this issue, is one of the main reasons they are facing oblivion now. The mixing up of Migrants with refugees and asylum seekers to suggest “we” have a moral duty to take people, is just continuing this ignoble tradition of contempt.

People want to stem migration of illiterate spouses from Pakistan, but these people are coming to join relatives already here. People want to limit Lithuanian bricklayers, or Polish plumbers but these people are covered by EU free movement of people (and in any case are vital to dealing with the shortage of housing…). We and the EU need to do much more to stem the flow, humanely, of very poor people from Africa, Afghanistan and Syria, and this includes aid and intervention to put their countries back together. So this leaves skilled migrants from outside the EU such as Nigerian doctors, Malawian nurses or Chinese people coming here to study, all of whom are particularly helpful to the UK economy, if there is to be any reduction in the number of Net Migrants.

It’s all counter-productive. Cameron deserves blame for setting a silly target on a whim, and Labour deserves blame for encouraging the boil to fester for a decade and creating the problem of legitimacy immigration now faces. Any attempts to control immigration mean putting bureaucrats in control of whom a Bradford Pakistani can marry, or whether a Somali can work as a Taxi driver. It’s going to throw up hard cases and inhumanity, as any bureaucratic system inevitably must. This sticks in my libertarian craw. There are going to be Canadians and Australians not granted leave to remain despite holding down decent jobs and living with British people. And all this because of silly targets, and the failure of some communities to integrate. We cannot stem the immigration people do have a problem with, so we’re abusing immigrants who’re going to accept our norms and be accepted.

We cannot take them all. The right-on left should stop the sanctimonious moral preening of pretending we can. We cannot stop them all coming. The idiot right should stop demonising people who’re mostly just trying desperately for a better life for themselves and their families.

We are lucky to have been born here. Part of our duty is to protect the legacy of good governance and social harmony we’re bequeathed. This legacy needs protecting from immigrants who won’t ever share our values, if too many come at once as well as from idiotic populists on the right, dog-whistling to racists and from left-wing extremists who hate our society and way of life, and who wish to see it swamped to spite an falsely concious electorate which repeatedly failed to vote socialism. Net migration is running at 1-200,000 a year. We can cope with that, just. Especially if they come from a variety of places, both terrible and less terrible. But not much more than that, really.

There you have it: An unsatisfying fudge, like so much of the democratic politics that have created the society immigrants are prepared to risk so much to join. Much more fun to read a moral absolute – a Guardian editorial telling you how brave and noble the immigrants are, or the Daily Mail’s dehumanising sub-fascist rhetoric. But the extreme position is almost always wrong, and the unsatisfying fudge of democracy works, despite appearances.

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The Oil Price Collapse, & why No-One Starves in the West.

Two years after the fall of Soviet Communism, a visiting Russian official seeking to learn about how free market systems worked, asked the Cambridge economist Paul Seabright “Who is in charge of Bread Supply in London. He was astonished by the answer: “No-One”.

No-one has starved in a free market system since the Potato Famine in Ireland in the 1840s, which happened because of the failure of a staple crop, and despite significant Government initial efforts to alleviate it. The free market failed there, for a huge number of reasons but that remains the only example, and much has been learned since. Many of the other famines in what were nominally free-market systems, like the Bengal Famine of 1943 can be put down directly to interventions in the markets such as the (democratically elected) Punjabi Government preventing the export of food to Bengal, whose other major source of food, Burma, was having a little local difficulty which became known to history as World War 2. Because of this intervention by the Punjabi government in the market in response to shortages, and subsequent inaction by the Indian Government, over a million people died.

The oil price rose throughout the ’00s in response to the rise of Chinese demand, lower interest rates and increased car use in the developed and developing world. Then people started to hurt. Oil price protests rocked the world. The cost of maintaining subsidised petrol in the non-petro-state middle-east is one of the sparks that lit the ‘Arab Spring’. In the west, cars got more efficient as the price (and taxes on petrol) rose. People bought smaller and more efficient cars. Highway speeds fell, as cars started to have ‘fuel economy’ displayed on the dashboard and people realised how much more it cost to drive at 90mph than 70. People changed their behaviour and drove less: ‘Peak car’ was in 2005 in the USA.

Meanwhile, engineers went looking. We had long known about ‘Tight oil’ (oil soaked into porous shale or tar-sands), but it was expensive to produce, and uneconomic to extract, until the prices rose. And when they did, engineers sought means to improve production efficiency. And they were successful. The spike of Oil prices in response to cheap money and the recovery from the credit crunch led to an enormous explosion of production in Texas and North Dakota in particular. The USA became the world’s largest oil producer in 2013. Cost of tight-oil production in Texas is around $40 and falling. In much of the traditional reserves in the North Sea, it’s $35.

There is the equivalent of five Saudi Arabias worth of reserves in the Eagle Ford shale in East Texas alone. (1.25tn Barrels of Oil Equivalent vs 255bn BOE) . And it is ALL economically viable to extract so long as oil remains above $50 per barrel. And there’s the Bakken in North Dakota and others. Peak Oil? Um… no.

So the response to a temporary shortage of Oil was for people to use gradually less in response to a price signal, and for people to go looking for more, in response to the same price signal. And the result is the glut of Oil the world is currently enjoying as oil that was prospected when the price was $120 is now hitting the market. My guess is we can expect $45 or so and then stabilisation around $50-70. Having got used to Oil at twice that price, it will feel like a tax cut for the world. (Except Nigeria, Venezuala, and Russia…).

What is true of Oil – the price goes up when demand exceeds supply – is true of wheat, and pork bellies, and olive oil, and corn or Tea. And the substitutes, barley, chicken, rape-seed oil, Sorghum, coffee, and so forth get used instead. People economise and substitute. So long as the market remains, it will become increasingly profitable to move stock from places of low value to places of high value where things are scarce.

Even the much-maligned speculation, or what used to be called ‘hoarding’ helps, by creating a reserve  in anticipation of higher prices to come, to be released onto the market in response to shortages. Hoarding ensures the commodity is always available at a price. And so no-one starves.

And the lessons: how to grow crops or burn fuel more efficiently, cannot be unlearned. So when supply returns, prices often collapse, the speculators often get badly burned, but the economy as a whole is richer as a lot is being done more efficiently.

Ah… I hear you say… but what about Africa: how can Africans pay the same prices as Europeans? But 21st century famines in Africa are almost never SUPPLY problems, but DISTRIBUTION problems. This isn’t about cash-crops being removed even as people starved, like Ireland in the 18th Century. We in the rich west are not taking African food because we can pay more, indeed quite the opposite. There’s often plenty of food, grown in the region or supplied as Aid, but due to poor infrastructure or more often, war and banditry, it cannot get to where it is needed. Where the rich west is holding Africa down is by preventing much of the continent from developing a cash-crop economy. The Africans are actively prevented from supplying our markets with cheap food by rich-world Farm subsidies, So roads aren’t built, and when the crops fail, food cannot get in from outside, either in response to rising prices or even Aid. Aid which often as a by-product, destroys the livelihoods of local farmers by undercutting them.

The European Union, USA and Japan, to name the most egregious examples have their boots on the face of Africa, keeping him down, but not in the way you’d think. African farmers cannot compete against our heavily subsidised farmers and so cannot invest or develop their production, even if they wanted to. The market for the end product isn’t there. Without that bottom rung, the rest of the development ladder is much harder to climb. Then, by demanding Africa opens up their economies to everything, except the one thing they have a comparative advantage, African economies struggle to compete and struggle to develop.

The fact Africa now contains some of the Fastest-growing economies on earth is a testament to the triumph of the human spirit in the face of adversity. Imagine how much better it’d be if we’d not retarded African development by to appease French farmers’ selfishness. Every famine since 1840-41, everywhere in the world is BECAUSE, not despite a Government somewhere intervening in the market. And the same is true of poverty. The African governments and their trade partners who’ve worked this out are doing well. But it took millions of lives, and is still not widely understood.

Rising prices are merely the means by which no-one starves and the pumps still have petrol. Would you rather we ran out occasionally?

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Landing a Probe on a Comet vs Tackling Poverty

On March 2, 2004, an Ariane 5 rocket took off from French Guiana containing the Rosetta spaceship. A few days later, having escaped the earth’s gravity and put into a heliocentric orbit, Rosetta commenced a 10-year 6,500,000,000 km journey which involved taking slingshots off the earth (three times) and Mars (once) to rendez-vous  with a rubber-duck-shaped snowball the size of Cambridge 300,000,000 miles away, moving at 42,000 kmh, Having achieved the rendez-vous, a dishwasher sized probe with three harpooned legs was to be released to float down to the surface of the comet, as it hurtled through space. Touchdown was achieved on 12th November 2014. 

This is, quite simply a technical and scientific achievement equivalent to putting man on the moon. To my mind it is enough that it’s there to do, but this isn’t just an everest for rocket engineers. We will get data on the origins of the early solar system, and possibly the origins of life on earth from this mission. We will know more about what comets are made of. Much of this is pure science of little immediate or practical use. Put charitably “Why are we firing rockets at snowballs in space?” is a question about opportunity cost. What did society forgo to achieve this soft landing on a comet. And the answer is “not much”.
There is a complaint that “we should be curing cancer” or “ending poverty” with the money spent on space exploration. “What good is it to me?” some ask. I’m tempted to dismiss such soulless utilitarianism as the bleatings of one who’s already dead inside. The point about pure science is that it leads to who knows what future advances that solve real problems. Perhaps vital resources can be recovered from comets cheaply. We might learn a bit about the composition of objects that might hit earth, potentially generating knowledge that saves life on earth from extinction. To ask “what is this for?” is to betray a total lack of imagination. If nothing else a nine-year old might be watching the probe land on a planet and be enthused to become an engineer, and go on to do something we haven’t even thought of yet.
“End Poverty”? Benefits paid to poor people are not where they are because they’re the most that can be afforded. We could afford to pay the unemployed more to live on, or top up low wages by more. The reason they’re low is because of the freeloader effect. The higher benefits are relative to work, the more attractive benefits become, and the lower the returns to work. People do not want to work hard to pay taxes to fund a comfortable life-style for those who don’t. More people would choose benefits over work. Thus benefits are set at a level which means live subsisting on them is pretty rotten. Any more would be politically impossible to sustain. Besides, poverty isn’t solved by cash transfers, but by work, and trade and free markets. This is the same thing that will ultimately cure disease. That and the application of pure science.
“Curing diseases?”Aids or Ebola will be cured by free trade with Africa, allowing their farmers access to our markets. Such trade will stimulate road building; roads, which unlike those to mines, go to where Africans live and work. Roads stimulate trade. With trade comes a cold-chain. That means vaccinations. Vaccinations mean healthier people. Healthier people do better in education, making them more productive. Being productive, means being richer, and being richer means people wear watches. And when people wear watches, they know when to take their anti-retrovirals. And if people take their anti-retrovirals, their HIV blood counts go down, making them less infectious. Less infectious means fewer infections. And fewer infections which become chronic rather than fatal conditions will lead to the steady decline in AIDS infection rates we’ve seen in the west. 
In developing all the above, a few decent health-centres and hospitals will mean Ebola will not spread when it’s first identified. How much will this cost us? Less than we spend stopping it happening now. (Farm Subsidies like the CAP are, you see, wholly, genocidally evil). Trade you see is not Zero-Sum. Africans get richer because the market for their produce increases. We get richer because more people are competing to supply our markets so we get things cheaper (and vice versa). We’re both richer. 
Cure cancer? It’s difficult to see how a rocket engineer could help there. There’s very little tangible that can be done in that regard that isn’t being done now. There’s already good money in curing cancer. So if we cannot give more money to the poor, cure Aids Ebola or Cancer with the money, why not give us something inspirational? To encourage us to let slip the surly bonds of earth and look out to the stars. That’s a public good, that is. But to cure poverty or whatever, we need to stop the Government doing bad stuff to Africans, not stop it doing wholly amazing, inspirational science.
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Slavery

Perhaps slavery would have been abolished in the Americas nearly a century earlier, had the Colonists lost the war of Independence?

Most wars are about economic matters, and it’s difficult to over-state how central slavery was to the economy of early America. Yet in 1772, the Somersett Case brought before the King’s Bench which concerned a slave brought to England by a Customs official, and concluded that chattel slavery was unsupported by common law. “The air of England“, as was argued by Somersett’s council “is too pure for a slave to breathe“. Hundreds of American slaves attempted to make the passage to England and freedom following this ruling. Just four years later, the Colonists declared independence. I do not believe these facts are unrelated. George Washington was a major slave-owner as was Thomas Jefferson. Both men appeared to know the institution was wrong, but felt unable to do all that much about it.

The war of Independence was, as the US Civil War a century later, at least in part about slavery. Washington resisted free blacks in the Continental army in which around 500 served for fear of the principle it would set to slaves. America’s first Emancipation proclamation (in reality, a fairly desperate last throw of the dice by someone hoping a slave rebellion would carry the day for the Crown) was issued by the Governor of Virginia, Lord Dunmore in 1775. Thousands of freed slaves fought for the British side against the colonists. While the Dunmore proclamation may have hastened the end of slavery in the American colonies had the British won, the abolition of slave trade (1806) and the abolition of slavery in the British Empire (1833) may have had a much harder run. The abolitionists would have faced a greater array of more powerful economic interests.

It’s a comforting Narrative for the Englishman therefore that slavery was abolished in the British Empire before it was in most other European and American powers, and that having done so, the might of the Royal Navy was deployed in suppressing the trade. This does not absolve the UK, or the British Empire of the stain of slavery. While the British may have been the first power to end slavery, while the slave trade was legal, and for some time while it wasn’t, the British economy was enormously boosted by the trade in humans, which ceased when it was becoming less economically viable. The British and Portuguese were by far the biggest slave traders for over 200 years.

Around 11m (estimates vary hugely) Africans were forcibly removed over the 300 years of the triangular Atlantic trading route, of which slaves from West Africa to the Americas formed the “middle passage”. This devastated the societies and economies of the entire continent, and left much of Africa, even into the interior, a low-trust society to this day. Unlike the Black Death in Western Europe, an equivalent tragedy, which left the remaining people richer, the slave trade left societies in which people could not invest in land or technology because of the ever-present risk of kidnap. There is evidence that many tribes actually regressed, abandoning technologies such as crop-rotation and the plough in response to this onslaught. Much of West Africa is corrupt, violent and poor as a direct legacy of the Slave trade.

The societies which escaped the worst excesses colonialism and slavery, notably Namibia and Botswana, are doing much better than the rest of Africa to this day probably because their tribal institutions and societies weren’t ruptured by grotesque incentives of the slave trade. The south was poorer and remains poorer than the rest of the USA because of slavery and Jim Crow. The “special institution” has devastated Africa and left America uncomfortable in its soul following centuries of Race-laws, hate, fear and torture in the Southern states. It’s a special kind of evil that poisoned everything it touched and does so to this day.

And that’s before we consider the individual human cost. Millions of lives lost to sickness, violence, warfare and simply being thrown overboard should the middle passage prove longer than counted for in supplies. Think about that for a minute.

This may not have happened on the Tecora, on the voyage depicted in Amistad, but it did happen.

It’s not an exaggeration to conclude the industrial trade in Humans, at which the British once excelled, is a historic crime of an equivalent magnitude to the Holocaust. This is why I do not get angry when politicians talk about reparations for slavery. I am rich and free and many Africans poor, in part because of the enduring legacy of slavery.

Why am I writing this now? I read ’12 years a slave’ by Solomon Northup the movie of which is to be released in the UK shortly. The more I read, the more fascinating I find the entire grotesque, horrifying business. It’s a short book, and one I urge you to read before you go see the movie.

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Update from the Libyan front

At the time of writing my first post, Qaddafi’s forces were massed outside Benghazi, ready to take the city, and the world was deciding whether or not to stop him. Thankfully, they did decide to stop him, which means that all those who thought we shouldn’t, started imposing unreasonable expectations on both the international coalition manning the air campaign to explain their aims, and the rebels on the ground to turn themselves into an army. My second post was written as the world rained bombs down on Qaddafi’s tanks and artillery the world stood transfixed as it usually does when given a display of military hardware in action.

Some of the criticism of the allies’ motives and objectives are valid, most are not.

What are we trying to achieve? Well this is clear but unstated. Regime change. The criticism that the coalitions’ aims are vague is nonsense. It’s simply maintaining a diplomatic and legal fiction that this is primarily humanitarian. Of course, the main reason Qaddafi must go is humanitarian – he must not be allowed to butcher (as he has clearly threatened) his own people. Remember, just like the only other equivalently murderous leader in the Middle-East/North Africa was Saddam Hussein, so the west is not as many people believe, being inconsistent. You need to be both a recalcitrant git with a WMD habit AND a murderous bastard (10s of 000s) to get bombed into the stone-age by NATO. To my mind this sets the bar appropriately high for intervention in another country’s affairs. Lessons from the Iraq debacle have been learned. Western Ground forces will not be deployed.

This also deals with the nay-sayers’ whataboutery. Bharain’s Government has shot dead a few dozen protesters. Awful, disgusting behaviour, but sending an army into a hostile city it is not. The fact that the US fifth fleet is based there gives the US leverage it would immediately lose were it to start sabre-rattling against the Al-Khalifas. Likewise Yemen. Like it or not, only a fool would intervene in Yemen, a mountainous, tribal country where Al Quaeda holds sway and where the Government’s writ does not run to the whole country (ahem Afghanistan ahem). These countries’ current leaders are not quite as Ghastly as the capricious clown in Tripoli, and they behave themselves, at least as far as western Policy is concerned. We’d be mad to go after them. Ditto China, Zimbabwe and all the other nutty suggestions I’ve seen floating around place.

Many of the opponents of intervention believe themselves to be “realists” who demand to know the outcome before the event. By which time the window of opportunity to act has usually been lost.

Back to Libya. Who are the rebels? opponents of the intervention often ask. Well they’re a mixture of Qaddafi’s army whose deserted and young men from the east of the country with guns. There is a 33-man council, not all of whom are named, as some are from Tripoli. Some of the Council have served with Qaddafi in Government. So the criticism that the Council lacks credibility or experience is harsh. Given that the best-organised resistance to the Military strongmen in much of ME/NA has been Islamic of one form or another, I’d be surprised and wary if they were not represented. There are guys on there who know what they’re doing sufficiently well to be recognised as the legitimate government of Libya by (so far) the Libyan UN delegation, France & Qatar. Finally, any putative Government of Libya would have to be pretty bad to be worse than the existing one. If you’re clinging to Nurse for fear of Worse, and that nurse is Muammar Qaddafi, you’re a dick.

The intervention had the desired effect, in the short term at least. Qaddafi withdrew from outside Benghazi, which appears safe for the time being, and the rebels “took” several towns along the coast. However, it now appears that far from Qaddafi’s forces “collapsing” and “in headlong retreat” they sensibly decided to react to the allied air onslaught by shortening their supply lines and holding more defensible ground. They have subsequently resumed the advance, having halted the rebels just outside Surt.

Caution is the watchword. Wars are always risky, and Qaddafi is a wily, ruthless old fox. Western Journalists, in love with footage of Aircraft taking off from carriers (few of which are being used in this operation, the RAF is using bases in Cyprus and Italy) think that allied bombing is the key to winning wars, perhaps schooled in the wars of the 20th century in which Air power dominated WWII, Gulf War 1. However in asymmetric war – Vietnam or in support of troops insufficiently skilled to use close air support, like Libya now, air power is of less use.

The real use of Air Power in this campaign is to reduce Qaddafi’s freedom of movement, degrade his forces’ heavy weapons but above all to give the rebels heart that they are not alone. Napoleon Bonaparte remarked “in war, the Moral is the Physical as three is to one”. However recent reports suggest many of the rebels are not fighting very hard. There certainly appears to be no great desire to dig in, defend a build up area and seek a decisive battle. Perhaps they are not yet ready, and they are harassing until they are. That would suggest a level of sophisticated strategy for which there’s no evidence. It certainly suggests a total lack of effective small-unit leadership. Indeed all the reports suggest that rebel command and control is extremely rudimentary.

So, what can we expect from the next few weeks? Well the lines will ebb and flow. Towns will “fall” or “be taken” as one side flees, or advances. Journalists on the ground will continue to be mystified and spout words like “strategically important” as if they knew what was going on. Every rebel retreat will be a “disaster” every town taken by them will be a “triumph”. Meanwhile, command and control structures, manning, equipment and training, no doubt facilitated and co-ordinated by special forces from western powers and possibly Egypt, will steadily improve. To imagine that the rebels could have held a determined Qaddafi two weeks ago is Naive. The Allied air offensive has bought time.

If, and this is a big “if” the rebels can learn and learn quickly how to defend a built-up area, and hold ground in the face of a determined assault, they will win. At the moment they’re running up the front line, expending ammunition in the general direction of the enemy and running away at the first hint of resistance, assuming the rebels’ military effectiveness continues to improve, Qaddafi will lose. He is hemorrhaging authority, and at some point, his army will look at the forces ranged against them and think “you know what? fuck this for a game of soldiers” and change sides while they still can, as will his senior commanders and Qaddafi will be left with a few family and Loyalists in a bunker ’till he’s dragged out and strung up.

There are 4 possible outcomes:

  1. Collapse of the Qaddafi Regime, interim council take over and elections happen 12 months later.
  2. Stalemate: Tripolitania and Cyrenaica split (as they have always historically been). The oil’s mostly in the Eastern half, run by people we supported. This is probably still a win for the west.
  3. Qaddafi wins back control of the country. We’re back the the status quo ante Blair with a hostile Qaddafi at the helm of a weak, isolated and broken nation, at no great cost to ourselves. This, and mass murder on an epic scale in Benghazi, is what would have happend had the west not intervened. This result represents no gain for the west’s expenditure of military hardware and diplomatic capital.
  4. Total collapse of the country into Somalia-style anarchy. This is the only (and most unlikely) scenario which could be a major problem to the west.

If 1 or 2 happen, or possibly even 3, then the west has, at the behest of Libyans and the Arab league gone to war in support of a popular Arab uprising. The Islamist narrative of the west as a boogeyman for Muslims is significantly weakened. It is this, I suspect, which is the major driving force behind the intervention, not oil. Most of the right wing objections (the left-wing anti-war mongs can be ignored – most of them are traitors anyway) are about ceding 3 in order to avoid 4 at any cost, and then hoping the resulting genocide in Benghazi doesn’t trouble their news. The supporters of intervention believe the risk of 4. and the potential military cost is small enough to justify the possibility of obtaining 1. or 2. That’s all it is: a risk/reward, cost/benefit analysis. The difference is the cynicism and pessimism of those who think we can’t and the rebel’s cause isn’t worth helping.

There are major strategic wins possible for the west, even if Qaddafi remains in control of some of the country and whether he remains so is up to the fighters on the ground in the western suburbs of Benghazi and points West. Can they? We shall see. But the risks to the west, assuming our leaders are not totally stupid and leave the boots on Ground in sandy bits of the world which aren’t Libya, remain small. Surely preventing a genocide in Cyrenaica is worth the risk we might not succeed?

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No-Fly-Zones & the “Wisdom” of Cowards.

There’s no point setting up a No-Fly-Zone in Libya because the killing is going on, on the ground; and because in any case, by the time it’s set up, All of libya will be Gadaffi’s once more. I think I have summarised the position of Thinking Strategically.

1) An international No-Fly-Zone would have limited, but still some military value to the insurgents. However its main benefit would be to send a powerful signal to the young men facing tanks armed with just .50 calibres on the back of Toyotas, that they were not alone. Never under estimate the importance of such things to fighting men.

2) It ain’t over. Gadaffi may have all the toys but is he powerful enough to subdue a hostile city, one which may be recieving material from outside? The insurgents are deploying a handful of tanks, and some artillery. No doubt their command and control are improving daily. The battle for Libya may last a year or more.

3) How popular is Gadaffi? Will young men coming from the Benghazi front in body-bags cause the people supplying the troops to turn against him? If he’s using mercenaries, how will he pay them?

Now chuck the might of NATO plus assorted Arab airforces into the mix, especially if as the US seemed to be hinting today, the planes in question might be doing more than a No-Fly-Zone.

Is it pointless to intervene in Libya?

What about the risks? We lose a plane? Meh (…if we rescue the pilot…). A pilot down, worse, but they’re trained in desert survival, and if they can’t take a joke, they shouldn’t be in the cockpit. Besides if there’s a NFZ, we can get a chopper to them quicker than Gadaffi’s thugs without too much problem. War has risks, which are accepted by the men and women who fight it.

I fail to see how this represents a greater risk than the opportunity to get rid of a dangerously capricious clown whose goons are responsible for 1) the greatest act of mass-murder on British soil 2) consistent support for anti-western terrorists, including the IRA. 3) the murder of a Policewoman and 4) serial and serious crimes against fashion.

We should have RAF jets over libya now. Tomorrow at the latest, last Thursday if possible.

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International “Law”, the UN & Libya.

Let’s face it, the only country which COULD help the Libyan insurgents in any meaningful way is the USA. But Obama won’t go without a UN resolution, Which Russia will veto, and he’s shown precious little interest in the issue. Britain & France could conceivably mount a half-arsed no fly zone. We could impose some form of trade embargo against the Libyan regime using the handful of remaining Jets or brace of warships our countries still possess, or arm the Rebels & provide some covert military support: sending the SAS and the Foreign Legion into the North-African desert where they were both born. But they won’t do even that without a UN resolution. And do you honestly think Barak Obama will support Britain & France, former colonial powers, taking action in Africa? France is absolutely correct to recognise the insurgents council as the legitimate Government of Libya, but this demonstrates another truth. France only chooses the morally right side, when they are about to lose, horribly.

To wage war without a UN resolution is “illegal”, and therefore we have outsourced out foreign policy, our ability to make timely war on tyrants, to the lawyers. International law is now a joke – with the vile totalitarianism of China & the amoral, oligarchic Russia sitting in the colon of the security council like an impacted turd preventing any coalition of democracies from taking action to support an uprising against dictators, anywhere in the world. Giving nasty totalitarians a veto over the actions of democracies is constipating our efforts to spread democracy, or indeed do the right thing, anywhere, ever.

Meanwhile, Qadhafi demonstrates to tyrants, including those in Moscow & Beijing that exemplary violence against insurgents will go unpunished and that the west is powerless. Hamstrung by a legal regime based on a corrupt, flawed organisation which can never reach agreement in this multi polar world. The window of opportunity to get rid of this capricious clown in Tripoli is closing, fast and is now measured in hours and days, not the weeks it takes to get a UN resolution.

If you are an “international lawyer”, or think that there is some higher court than the electorate to which the leaders of sovereign democracies are subject, the blood of Libyan insurgents is on your hands. You may bleat about ‘Iraq’ but it’s Colin Powell’s fear of “international law” which prevented the coalition supporting the Marsh Arabs (who now basically no longer exist as a people) when they rose up against Saddam Hussein. Iraq II may have demonstrated the futility of imposing democracy un-asked-for, but that is NOT what happened in Southern Iraq in 1991 and it is NOT what is happening now in Libya.

War is risky, but it is the right of sovereign democracies to wage it against tyranny, and the job, it seems of international lawyers to prevent it & thereby support the self-serving (even more amoral and self-serving than ours) foreign policy of Russia & China which is to actively support vile dictators (with whom it’s easier to do business than businesses operating under the rule of law) and loot their countries of resources. Supporters of international Law give, in effect, a Chinese & Russian veto on Western foreign policy. Russia and China are NOT so encumbered, knowing that the west are not going to go to war in support of, say Gerogia. Supporters of international law, and the Chinese/Russian veto, are every bit as responsible for what is going to happen to the people of Benghazi when it falls to the regime as the Libyan soldiers pulling the trigger. Indeed, more so. Most Libyan soldiers don’t really have a choice.

The Libyan insurgents are crying out, begging for our help, yet the Lawyers are saying “Russia says no, so we can’t go”. If the idea of a free Libya is going to be killed, let it at least take the bloodstained UN and the idea that “international law” is in any way binding, with it. I hope the cameras are rolling when Qadhafi’s tanks roll in, so those Lawyers can see clearly happening what the west COULD have prevented. Not that those cold-blooded reptiles will give a shit.

In the mean-time all I can do is hang my head in shame at what my country has become & weep for the lost opportunity for the Libyan people for whom this is not 1989, it’s 1956.

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In Praise of the Chinese in Africa


Africa’s hope?

Western aid budgets are generally tied to commitments from third-world governments to behave as far as environmental destruction or human rights are concerned, and to spend at least some of the moolah on their people rather than their wives’s shoe collection or at the Mogadishu Mercedes Benz dealership. The Chinese are criticised for plundering the natural resources of Africa without requiring such sops to the conscience of the affluent, but at least their engagement in Africa can be called “investment” and is refreshingly free of leftist cant.

I’ve argued before that the CAP is responsible for more human suffering than the Second World War, and whilst Europeans and Americans are feather-bedding their farmers, they are preventing Africans getting their cash-crops to rich-world Markets. This means that roads and infrastructure to get cash crops out aren’t built and when the crop fails, there are no roads to distribute the food aid, and everyone dies because they are still subsistence agriculturalists or pastorialists rather than steadily specialising and developing in a productive economy. Famines are rarely about failures of crops, they are usually about failures of distribution. They are also about incentives, as Communist ideologically inspired famines of the 20th century showed.

Chinese engineers are overseeing the building of a Road network and railways that are designed to get raw materials to the market. Plundering Africa of its mineral wealth if you like. But nothing’s going to stop those roads distributing aid in time of famine or allowing farmers to distribute surplus in times of plenty. Likewise mobile phone networks are cheap to build and allow communication by farmers about prices for goods in various nearby towns. These networks will follow the mining engineers’ roads too. This allows, paradoxically, farmers to benefit from higher average prices, and consumers from lower average prices. The difference being lower wastage. Roads also allow medicines, and and effective cold-chain to deliver vaccines to the poor (A rare genuine good done by NGOs and development aid) more effectively.

Much Western development aid does not seem to realise that economic activity is like water, it flows down the path of least resistance. You cannot just give clean water if there is no economy to sustain its infrastructure in the long-term. You just create dependency. A road is only going to be maintained if there is an economic rationale like a mine or cash crop to sustain it.

If western governments spent less time worrying about their aid budgets as a percentage of GDP to appease ignorant hand-wringers in Guardian editorials, and allowed the third world to sell food to us instead, there would be an economy in the poor parts of Africa to develop with in the first place. Without the primary industries giving the rationale for basic infrastructure, there will be no economy, and people in parts of Africa will remain miserable supplicants of western charity. If William Kamkwamba and his family were able to sell stuff in a productive economy, they wouldn’t need to scrape together the resources for a solitary windmill and Poppy Spalding wouldn’t be able to bleat about “the world’s poor” after her gap year of misery tourism. If Africa was allowed to trade on equal terms with the west rather than suffer from dumping of Agricultural produce destroying local markets, and were instead allowed to sell maize to us, then NGO wallahs wouldn’t be cruising around in Air-Conditioned Toyotas distributing largesse like a feudal baron’s consiglieri. But I think the NGO wallahs like being the big man, because (with one or two exceptions) they don’t seem to argue for free trade.

So. China raping the continent for its mineral wealth is likely to do more good for the people of Africa than the entirety of western Aid budgets (which in the case of the British Coalition exists behind a budget ring-fence for reasons of political expediency rather than the greater good). It is ironic that Communist China realises that Trade not Aid is the way to develop Africa and raise its people out of poverty. Whilst America and the European Union subsidise agriculture to the tune of twice African GDP, the twin holocausts famine and Malaria in Africa will continue.

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