Cicero's Songs

For some time public figures have received threats. Rarely do they take them seriously, and in fact only very occasionally are they serious. However in recent years the political discourse has grown very ugly. Although neo-Fascists and populists have fanned the flames of popular hatred, in fact the crisis of "civility" goes back a pretty long way.  After forming a coalition with the Conservatives in the UK, the Liberal Democrat leader faced significant abuse: dog shit through the letter box and all the rest of it. This routine and increasingly extreme abuse against MPs has now become simply an occupational hazard. In the 1950s MPs were generally respected, which is why the profumo scandal was so impactful, but now they are pretty universally denigrated and derided. In fact I believe that the majority of MPs are decent and honourable people who by-and-large deserve our respect, there are very few prepared to express that point of view.  However, it is fair to say that those ...

In October 1978 a then obscure Czech playwright named Vaclav Havel published an essay called The Power of the Powerless . It was a tragic time for those in Central or Eastern Europe who believed in freedom. The Soviet system had made advances across the globe and seemed to be as solid and enduring as it was soul crushing and brutal. Yet, as history shows, appearances can be misleading. Within only a few weeks the election of Pope John Paul II began a process that lead to tumult across the Soviet World and the eventual downfall of Communism. Havel's moral manifesto became the root of a political renewal which still shapes European society today. Today there is a new struggle in Europe and across the world. It is a battle between those who seek an open, free and global society and those who oppose that vision. A nascent planetary consciousness is emerging as information becomes ever more accessible and the possibility, indeed the necessity, of debate more urgent. The creation of a...

Students are meant to convulse - if one can not rebel during late adolescence, then pretty quickly you run out of time and the varied pressures of earning a living, maintaining a relationship and/or a family enforce a conformity of one sort or another. The inventive and occasionally wacky ways that students rebel stretch from placing traffic cones on the heads of statues, toga parties, to Trotskyism. Sometimes students get more serious and do things that require some kind of intervention, like an addiction to Class A drugs, attempted suicide and supporting Stalin (Yes, Seamus Milne, I am talking about you). So far, so juvenile. However, in both the US and the UK, there seems to have emerged a class of student whose infantilism rejects the entire course of Western civilisation. Someone has offended their feelings with statements that they disagree with. Yet instead of responding to a challenge to their point of view in the the approved academic way- with rational argument- th...

One of the reasons why I adopted the nom-de-blog "Cicero" was because I saw- indeed still see- parallels between the fall of the Roman Republic and our own times. Although, after the accession of Octavian, Rome remained nominally a Republic with the Emperor initially simply "first citizen", in reality the political system based on Roman Liberty was overthrown. I strongly fear that although the nominal forms of Parliamentary Democracy may survive, the principles, indeed the guiding spirit, of Liberal Democracy are being eroded to the point where our freedoms are being taken away. I see the challenges not being so much the direct threat of dictatorship, although in truth the nascent Russian democracy has indeed been overthrown by a dictator, but from a more corrosive and collective mixture of ignorance, hypocrisy and greed. The fundamental problem is that many political platforms are not created based on evidence, but on prejudice.  A good example has been the ...

I make no apology for maintaining a string of posts on the subject of Russia. The fact is that Putin's mafia state, nuclear armed as it is, poses an existential threat to the freedom and prosperity of the West and to the peace of the whole world. Russian-sponsored brutality in Ukraine, now thrown into sharp relief by the appalling mass killing of flight MH17, should disgust all civilised human beings. The initial shock of that act of barbarism may be wearing off somewhat, but its place is emerging a whole variety of questions. From "how could they do this?" has emerged another question: "What does Russia want?", yet as it becomes clear how disconnected and incompetent the Putin regime has become, and even bigger question is emerging: "Can Russia survive?" At first glance, such a question may seem to be simply absurd, or to play into the hands of the most paranoid Putinista. Yet, the scale of the human rights breakdown under Putin is now so complete...

I have recently visited China. It was not, strictly speaking, my first trip to the Middle Kingdom, since I visited Shenzhen last year and have visited Hong Kong twice before. However, it was certainly the first time to visit the heartland of China- Ningbo in the Yangtze delta and Beijing. I had always felt somewhat reluctant to visit an officially still Communist state, since Soviet Socialism remains in my mind the moral equal of National Socialism. Both systems embody a contempt for the individual, whether that contempt is manifest as race hatred or class hatred is rather beside the point. Of course I was aware that Deng Xiaoping had ended the most egregious repression, and have written on this blog that the arrest of the Gang of Four was an act of liberation in its way as powerful as the fall of the Berlin wall. Nevertheless I had rather ambivalent feelings as I boarded the flight to Beijing. The first thing to say about China is that it is now in many ways a highly advanced countr...

A whistle-stop trip back to Scotland has somewhat placed into context the crisis that Vladimir Putin has unleashed upon Europe and the world.  As military units are hurriedly scrambled into position in NATO member states, it becomes clear that Russia is merely waiting in order to unleash further aggression on Ukraine. Whether that comes in a few days, a few weeks or even a few months, the idea of a free and democratic Ukraine is as repellent to Putin as a free and democratic Russia. The crushing of all free media, all opposition points of view and even the slightest dissent in Russia has proceeded, it is now all too clear that Putin's contempt for freedom is absolute. He is openly dismissive of all Western democratic values which, in an eerie echo of Fascism, he regards as "decadent". Like Adolf Hitler in the 1930s, he has turned his tyranny abroad as well as at home. His unprovoked aggression against Ukraine breaks all treaties and all the norms of international law....

Well, it was too good to be true, the Yanukovych government did sent the riot police back into the Maidan overnight, but two bad things happened to them. The first is that even where the police pressed hardest, the crowd did not give way. The Berkut were simply not strong enough to get the crowd to move. The second was that the police themselves are now obviously divided. The most loyal forces of the government are wavering in the face of the spectacular size and determination of the crowds. Meanwhile Yanukovych is getting desperate- the attempt to extort €20 billion out of the EU in exchange for signing the association pact is a frankly rather pathetic piece of blackmail and will privately laughed out of court in Brussels. It demonstrates how far away Yanukovych still is -or ever was- from engaging with either the European Union or the thousands still in the square. His obvious duplicity has weakened him still further. The condemnation of last night's police action from the Un...

The extraordinary roller coaster of the past twenty-four hours in K'yiv has not finished yet. I have friends in the Maidan at the moment and it does appear that the riot police are withdrawing. Inevitably rumours are swirling, but after the failure to dislodge the protest either in the City Hall or in the Maidan itself suggests that Yanukovych is in real trouble. Three of the oligarchs are in the Maidan and it looks as though the rest are backing away from the regime. The presence of both Cathy Ashton and Victoria Nuland, the US Deputy Secretary of State seems to have focused minds in the regime about how to get out without the bloodbath that might have occurred last night. The huge cheer in the Maidan as the police withdrew to their buses certainly seems to suggest that crowd thinks that the threat level has eased a bit after the intense pressure of the past two days. We can only watch and wait- and pray. Ukraine has not perished yet.

Spring has come to Estonia, and it is like the lights have been switched on after the long (overlong) winter. As always, your heart leaps as the huge chains of migrating geese take to the skies, and here and there a newly arrived solitary stork wanders along the field gullies looking for frogs. The grass visibly greens from day to day, and the floors of the budding forest are bright with snow drops and the primrose-like blue flowers, known rather prosaically in Estonian as "blue flowers". Soon the swallows too will be here and the white nights of June will echo to the Estonians enjoying the brief pleasures of the glorious northern summer. Yet work must continue, and I head to Parnu, the summer capital of Estonia, amidst April showers, to take part in a conference to discuss the future options in Estonian finance. For me, Estonian finance, as so much of Estonian society, stands at something of a cross roads. In many ways the last twenty years have been a series of exams for ...

The political conventional wisdom in Britain is that the current coalition is an aberration. Sooner or later either the Conservatives or more likely, Labour, will be able to govern alone. This will be-it is argued- a return to politics as usual. I think this represents a failure of imagination. I also think it underestimates just how difficult the next decade is going to be. Europe as a whole is already in an economic crisis  which is the equal of the hungry 1930s. It is a crisis that represents a sum of failures, financial, economic and political. The fundamental problems- wrong risk models for banks, wrong levels of leverage in the wider economy and inflexible political policies and institutions- have not been addressed. Despite the best efforts of financial, economic and political leaders, the process of breakdown has continued and is even accelerating. Much that we have taken for granted is now being tested to destruction. The criticism that has been laid against George O...

There are many people I disagree with... often quite vehemently. Yet the jailing of a student for offensive tweets concerning the footballer Fabrice Muamba makes me very nervous. Freedom of expression means that we have the right to say anything within the law. The view of the court was that the drunken outpourings of Liam Stacey were illegal. They have been deemed to be not merely offensive but contrary to the law, since they have been deemed to "incite race hatred". As a result Mr. Stacey has now been sent to jail for 56 days. To my mind this is an excessive sentence, given the defendant's previous good character and in my view what has been inflicted by the word should be repaired by the word- that is to say a full and contrite apology. Some would argue that this is too lenient- yet the breach of the law comes less form the unpleasant content of Mr. Stacey's tweets, but from the fact that they were re-tweeted by genuine racists- which Mr. Stacey seems not to be. I...

The three Eastern Baltic countries, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania are relatively new constructs. Their languages are among the most ancient spoken in Europe, but their national identity was only slowly constructed, culminating in the late nineteenth century. Their political identity might have remained bound up in the Russian Empire had not that entity collapsed into murderous barbarism under the hammer blows of the evil of Lenin and Stalin. As a result of the collapse and the simultaneous fall of the German Empire in 1918, Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania together with Finland and Poland were able to construct independent states- in the case of the Baltic three, for the first time in 700 years.  Yet within twenty years of their creation they were subject to a monstrous conspiracy between a Russia under the rule of the psychopath Stalin and a German under the rule of the no less wicked Adolf Hitler. The first consequence of the Nazi-Soviet pact was their joint attack on Poland. T...

The economic problem about jobs is a bit like a game of football. A football game needs a certain number of referees and linesmen to keep the game going. However the point of the game lies in the skills of the players, not of the officials. Small children do not generally have pictures of the officials on their walls, even when a poor decision by an official may have substantial impact on the result of a match.  The same issue arises with state sector jobs. The fact is that poor regulation can kill an economy just as it would kill a football match. To my disgust, my own party was proud to announce the hiring of 2000 new tax inspectors at the Lib Dem party conference. The fact that Britain now has more tax inspectors than soldiers is a matter of shame. The fact that we have the largest and most unworkable tax code in the developed world is a national scandal. Imagine if FIFA, or some other criminal organisation, decided that there should now be 25 definitions of the offsid...

There is fear in the air. The United States, once the undisputed leader of the Free World now faces a level of debt so severe that it risks losing its AAA credit rating. China- a cruel tyranny- is imprisoning artists, yet there is little protest from the West, because the US owes the Chinese at least $ 1 trillion. The political deadlock in Washington produces futile arguments about where the President was born, rather than how to address the decline. The Arab regimes, controlling the majority of the global oil supply, now face disruption as their population demand the rights that they have been denied- with Western connivance- for so long. Russia bribes leaders of the European democracies, and yet those leaders remain in office, or if they have left office, they retain their influence unchallenged. The economic crisis is being addressed with reforms that make the banking system even more concentrated, and even less safe than before 2008. A new crisis is certain, with results that wo...

The History of Egypt over the last century has seen two major revolutions: one in 1919, which dispatched the British as direct overlords, and one in 1952 which dispatched the monarchy. When I heard that the flag of 1919 was being waved in Egypt again, I began to realise that the prospects for the Mubarak government are not looking good. They are being very foolish to arrest Mohamed El- Barradei - he may be the only way that the regime can escape with its life. Once the bazaars are pulsating with this much anger, it could be that the regime does not merely pass away, but totally disintegrates, and the breakdown of order in a country as important as Egypt is no small thing. The regime may think that be switching off the Internet and e-mail that it can prevent a revolution - this is surely folly: few revolutions in the past had such tools, but they were still successful. Egypt's revolution could still be determinedly non hi-tech and it might yet be completely successful, with today...

Politicalbetting.com this week pointed out that the succession of Ed Balls to the position of Shadow Chancellor of the Exchequer marks the final triumph of the SpAd - the political special advisor. Now virtually all of the key positions on the front benches of both the Government and the Opposition are filled with professional politicians- who know no other life outside of politics. In fact the political clique is even narrower than you might think, since in order to obtain the unpaid jobs at the foot of the political ladder, there is a minimum degree of wealth required. It is not an accident then, that so many of the political leaders of Britain come from a privately educated background. The political class- in Peter Oborne's memorable phrase - is also a narrow social elite. "The Establishment", in the shape of the public schools, has recovered a level of control over politics that would have been regarded as unthinkable just a couple of decades ago. Not just in politi...