Endgame in Syria: a Texas take...........

The American take on engaging Syria over its use of chemical weapons is mixed and depends on which part of the country is polled. Adding to the uncertainty generated by the lack of a clear mandate is the extreme politicking going on among the anti and pro Obama camps.

 

A week ago, Fox news was condemning O for not engaging Syria and now, when intervention seems imminent, Fox is scourging O for even thinking of doing so. Fox makes the additional point that if O takes on Syria without consulting the Senate and House, he would be in violation of the Constitution. Such action, Fox continues, would be but another example of O's disdain for the law of the land.

 

Many pundits fail to clarify the difference between chemical and conventional warfare. The former is totally indiscriminate as we well know. To the extent that chemicals kill or seriously harm humans and animals within range, this type of warfare is particularly inhumane. The West has pretty much frozen the use of chemical warfare since its effects became known in WW I.

 

The Yanks liberally employed agent orange in Vietnam claiming ignorance of its effects on human beings. An old soldier in our neighborhood, a Marine, just passed away from cancer which he claims was caused by his exposure to agent orange in Vietnam. Although the poor lad was treated at a Veterans hospital, the government denies any link between agent orange and cancer.

 

Yesterday, it was almost certain that O would act today, Thursday. Reinforcing, or perhaps causing, this conviction, Russia announced that O would strike today. If he does, he will be alone as Parliament in the UK has not given David Cameron the anticipated rubber stamp to join the US intervention.

 

Obama has already stated that he will not act alone. Hence, the US is waiting for a decision from the UK. As one of the ranchers here put it, 'a dollar is waiting on a dime'. However chauvinistic this may seem, it offers an insight into where the USA-UK relationship stands among local cattlemen.

 

That Israel is madly issuing gas masks to its population is a pretty good indication of what they expect. Namely, that the US will order its fighter jets to hit selected targets in Syria and that in return, either Syria, or Iran, will retaliate against Israel. Iran has already threatened such action and all concerned are taking them seriously.

 

From every perspective, the prevailing bete noir for the West in the Middle East is Iran. People in the US understand this and would not be upset if Iran, its government, its Revolutionary Guard and its Ayatollahs, would all be taught an object lesson in American firepower. The risk, of course, is that American and even American and allied firepower is not enough to successfully conduct a surgical operation that would neutralize Iran.  

 

The people in the US would like the Middle East to go away. They are fed up with Iran, Egypt, Libya, and Syria in particular and have no affection for the OPEC states and our dependence upon them for whatever oil we are still importing. This disenchantment, indeed, contempt, is widespread thanks to the expansion of fundamentalist groups such as Hezbollah and the Muslim Brotherhood.

 

This disdain has migrated to Muslims in general, especially those easily identified by traditional Muslim dress.

 

Nor is the thought easily digested that the US military capability may be insufficient to meet that of Iran and its allies. Judging from the number of wounded warriors who are now in rehabilitation, war dead and continuing fatalities in Afghanistan, Americans are worried that we cannot win a war in the Middle East using conventional weapons. The number of Americans who would promote the use of nuclear weapons is alarming.

 

Just now, America has little stomach for war. We would like to see a sure fire engagement that would rid us of the Asaad nightmare full stop. There is a nagging feeling that if such action were to be triggered, it would be neither rapid nor sure fire. America is conflicted and nowhere more so than in Washington.

Syria: the end-game?

Why would Obama attack Syria?

 

There are at least three reasons.

 

The first is that he has gained a reputation amongst many Americans of being a foreign policy-lite wimp who will go down as another Jimmy Carter.

 

The second is that if he does nothing the Iranians will know that they can carry on their nuclear programme without the prospect of US intervention. They will be laughing all the way to the reactor.

 

The third is the prospect that a show of US weakness will shift the balance of power in MENA towards Russia and China.

 

A particular difficulty  to discern Obama’s war aims. ‘Regime change’ is unlikely to be on the agenda. Change to what? There is no sign whatsoever of a Government-in-waiting, but plenty that extreme Islamic militants are waiting to exploit to the full the coming chaos.

 

The objective may be to demonstrate that the use of chemical weapons is going too far, and Assad had better get back to killing people in large numbers by more respectable means.

 

We must wait and see what the UK government will do. Public opinion is solidly against any British intervention, but so it was with Gulf 2. As 4 out of the last 5 Prime Ministers have at least one war on their CVs, perhaps Cameron will follow suit. In his position as Peace Envoy in MENA, Blair is calling for war, of which he has a lot of experience.

 

The two countries that have the most to lose and gain are Saudi Arabia and Turkey, both of which have the military capacity to see-off Assad in short order. Why are they not doing so? Success for Assad will be success for the arch-enemy Iran. Saudi in particular must be very concerned about overspill from the Sunni-Shia civil war (which is what is really happening throughout Islam).

 

If the pun may be pardoned, Obama is now between Iraq and a hard place. With one exception, every US foreign adventure in the past 50 years has ended in failure, and generally made matters worse. The use of chemical weapons was his ‘red line’, a phrase that he must now be bitterly regretting. A ‘line in the sand’  would have had more resonance with the American people, preceding, as it did, a military defeat.

 

Where will it all end?

 

Assad has no future.

 

Unless he stays in power for ever, he will probably be killed, either by an internal coup or through losing the war. If he survives there will be an ICJ arrest warrant out for him. It will be a case of ‘no hiding place’ – unless, of course, he is given asylum by Russia or China.

 

My guess is that Syria, a mish-mash of a country created when the British and French carved up the Ottoman Empire, will fragment into to its ethnic and religious components. It will be years before there is any return to relative normality.

 

And an afterthought

 

When Israel took out Saddam’s nuclear facility it was roundly condemned, not least by the US. When Saddam killed thousands of Kurds with nerve-gas, it was business as usual for the West.

 

It’s a funny old world.

Don't knockthe NHS: reconstruct it.........

 

My experience of the NHS here compels me to think more kindly of it than do many of its critics.

 

In 1948, shortly after the NHS began, my elder brother was diagnosed with TB/ meningitis. If the NHS had started just a while later he would have died. As it was, he spent 2 years in hospital and was one of the first patients to be treated with streptomycin. He was also a cripple from birth as a result of a congenital dislocated hip (for which under private medicine he would not have been insured as a preexisting condition). So he was a lifetime patient of the NHS. As a successful businessman, he also paid his dues.

 

In those early days the NHS was regarded as a wonder of the world, which it was. But that was then and now is now. Society has changed out of all recognition in the past 65 years, and social attitudes have changed with it. We now have an entitlement culture in which services are regarded as a right rather than a boon.

 

One manifestation of this is that the NHS has been taking a lot of flak in recent years, both from people and press and from grandstanding politicians. How justified is it? ‘Not very’ is my reply.

 

The Red Tops are constantly accusing it of being run by too many fat-cats in suits. Not true. Only 2.8% of the staff establishment is classified as ‘management’.

 

They also say that it costs too much, and yet we spend £300 per person per year less on health care than the European average. The cost to the nation is just over 6% of GDP. In Germany it is 10%. France spends 25% more than Britain.

 

A recent independent survey comparing the  British experience with Australia, Canada, New Zealand The Netherlands, and the US has shown an average patient-satisfaction rating of over 80%. The NHS came second overall. It fell down in one major area – cleanliness, where it came it sixth, a consequence of ‘lowest tender’ privatization, perhaps.

 

That we get many complaints and a few major scandals must be set against the fact that it treats 1 million patients every 36 hours. In a perverse sense, the fact that scandals are of such rarity that they make the front page for days is a success measure.

 

And yet……….

 

Things cannot go on the way they are. God knows how many ‘reforms’ have been started, going all the way back to the ‘prescription charges’ row that split the Labour Party.

 

The truth that politicians do not have the moral courage to face is that the NHS has two basic structural faults that will not respond to minor surgery.

 

The first is its founding principle of free delivery at the point of service, regardless of ability to pay.

 

It is simple economics that if you provide a free good, the demand will be insatiable, inexhaustible, and ultimately unaffordable. This is precisely the NHS predicament. Over the years, science has provided exponential improvements in health care, but this involves ever-more expensive technology treatment and  drugs. It has also played its part in extending average lifespan to around 80, almost a doubling in a century. This has been accompanied by higher expectations and an entitlement-culture that leads people to seeing the Doctor for the most trivial reasons.

 

The second is that the NHS is simply too big. It is almost impossible to manage an organization that employs 1.4 million staff, especially when officials and Ministers in Whitehall insist on micro-managing from the centre. Only Indian Railways and Wal-Mart  are this size.

 

Without fundamental change, the NHS will collapse under the weight of its own contradictions.

 

The free-good philosophy must be abandoned and charges levied for certain categories of patient and treatment.

 

We hear much about the overburdening of A&E departments. A starting point would be charges to walking-wounded who appear in Casualty at the week-end with injuries from drunkenness, brawling and other anti-social behaviour. The outcome might be fewer patients and higher revenue.

 

All patients with a family income of £24,000 should be required to make a contribution to their treatment, beginning with a fee for each consultation. This might reduce time-wasting for trivial, cut waiting times, and do away with the hated appointments-ritual. In return, GPs would be expected to restore week-end surgery hours.

 

But changes of this kind are simply nibbling around the edges.

 

The NHS can’t be ‘reformed’; it must be reconstructed.

 

How?

 

The German system has its attractions. Health care is the responsibility of the Lander together with mostly not-for-profit independent hospitals and private practitioners. The Federal Government is a regulatory body and funding source but has no management role. The budget is 72% from taxes and 23% from private contributions. This creates a system that has a degree of democratic accountability and transparency, to which patients must make a financial contribution, and with a bottom-upwards management philosophy in which decisions are made at the lowest appropriate level.

 

This is well suited to a Federal system; could something similar work in the UK?

 

One solution might be to revert to the basic structure pre-1974, when hospitals and clinical services were the responsibility of Regional Health Authorities, with community health being run by local authorities. But it was frustrated and restricted by the dead hand of Whitehall.

 

There would need to be substantial differences. The Ministry of Health should play the same role as the Federal Government in Germany. The RHA should have some democratic presence. In particular, the head of service should be elected, on a similar basis as the new Police Authorities. The prospect of being turfed-out by the voters at the end of 4 years would concentrate the mind considerably.

 

It should have its own taxation powers, so that voters could see exactly how much of taxpayers’ money was being spent and where. This is well-nigh impossible under the present regime. (The overall cost of the NHS is currently £109 billion, which by my reckoning is about £1500 per person). On the basis of ‘he who pays the piper’,  it would also severely limit the ability of Whitehall to put its oar in.

 

So there it is, Jeremy Hunt. Now get on with it!

MENA: Obama loses the plot.

After having drawn numerable red lines over the use of chemical warfare, we are again cowering to the criminal Syrian regime.  O is making a steady diet of eating his own words and in the process weakens and demeans the US government. Our standing in the world has fallen considerably simply because we have a leader with a big mouth.

 

The conventional wisdom regarding O's reluctance to take action is his unwillingness to take on Iran. Ultimately, someone will have to take them on. Our spooks just pulled off a sting on a foreigner who agreed to bring a sample of yellow cake to the USA in anticipation of agreeing a sale of the chemical to Iran. This continuing story has the potential for being ultra-bizarre.

 

The Russians are finally doing something positive by asking the Syrians to allow UN inspectors into Damascus to determine the cause of death of so many citizens. It is notable that the Kurdish population of Syria have been recent victims of Assad's WMDs.  They are persecuted every country in which they live.

 

Nobody likes the Kurds. I wonder why.

 

O is equally conflicted over American policy toward Egypt. He appears to be protecting the Muslim Brotherhood in excess of their worthiness to be protected. His policy takes insufficient note of the Egyptian Military's capacity and desire to curtail Muslim fundamentalists on the one hand and their proven capacity to manage the country on the other. O is punishing our allies and aiding our enemies.

 

The American public certainly supports the Military over the MB.

 

 

Politics............and celebs.

There is a story that I hope is true about the tax-dodging Irish guitar-plucker who is saving Africa.

 

In the middle of a live performance in Glasgow he stopped playing mid-‘tune’ and started to clap slowly.

 

‘Do you know’ he said ‘that every time I clap an African child dies?’

 

And a voice in the audience yelled back ‘Well, stop f*****g clapping, then!’

 

That puts into context the absurdity of so-called celebrities using their position to stuff their half-baked political views down our throats.

 

Now we have the egregious Nigel Kennedy at it, he of the ludicrous clothes and faux-Estuary accent (his natural speech is Received English, proper posh).

 

He chose a BBC concert to say something very silly and offensive about Israel – ‘apartheid’ he called it.

 

Well, Nige, does Israel have racial segregation of housing, education, public transport, public lavatories, shops, hospitals, clinics, in fact everything? Does sex between a Jew and an Arab carry a long prison sentence? Do Arabs have to carry a dompass at all times? Are they banned from all political office?

 

No, I thought not. So play the fiddle, not politics.

 

What is it about celebrities that they believe they have a unique socio-political message for us ordinary mortals?

 

There is ‘Sir’ Shaun Connery, an ardent advocate of Scottish independence and supporter of Wee Eck….at long range from  the privations of the Caribbean.

 

We have Madonna hoovering up African kids. As she is constantly on tour perhaps she puts them in the equivalent of kennels during her absences. Her imperious ways have certainly gained her no friends in Malawi, where the controversy over her purchase of a  baby still rumbles on.

 

And Oprah, whose intervention in girls’ education in South Africa has gone terribly wrong. Plus a knighthood for Baldrick for ‘political services’ (Socialist, natch, surely the most ridiculous ‘honour’ since - well – Dellboy Trotter).

 

There are many more – Bono, Bob Geldof and the rest - who believe that they are uniquely qualified to pontificate about poverty, climate change, Syria, or whatever current topic is ‘sexy’; they always have a nostrum for all the world’s ills.

 

As Clement Attlee once said of one of his more-than-usually garrulous MPs, ‘ A period of silence would be welcome!’

Let's get fracking!

Some years ago I was given a Master-class in fracking by an American oilman. That does not make me an expert but I guess I know a little more about it than the Greens, Friends of the Earth, No Dash for  Gas and others of the ragbag  from Rent-a-Skiver currently infesting the village of Balcombe.

 

Let’s get started on some myths.

 

Contrary to the conventional view, there is nothing new about fracking. It is not the latest technological miracle that will save the planet or destroy it.

 

Fracking has been around in some form since 1868. The modern technique was developed 50 years ago. It began to take off in a big way in 1975. The great breakthrough came  around 20 years ago with the development of horizontal drilling. Since the 1980’s over 200 wells have been sunk in Britain, and 300 fracking licences have been issued

 

A site in Nottinghamshire has been providing gas since 1963. One nodding donkey provides 300 barrels of oil and 1 million cubic feet of gas each day. It supplies energy to 21,000 homes. The Fylde field has long been providing the equivalent of 50% of North Sea gas output.

 

Fracking is applied not only to natural gas but to oil, water, disposal of difficult wastes and other uses. It provides most of Germany’s natural gas. It is now being used in the Karroo to supply water to one of South Africa’s most arid and poverty-stricken regions.

 

Now to the environmental impact.

 

There is not one scrap of scientific evidence that fracking contaminates water. Hundreds of thousands of fracking operations have been carried out in the US. Contamination of aquifers? Zero! The film ‘Gasland’, which showed flames coming out of a man’s kitchen tap was a deliberate distortion of the truth. The homeowner had actually drilled his own borehole into a pocket of methane.

 

Visual intrusion? When fully extended a nodding donkey is 15 feet high. Compare this with the wind turbines that march across the Yorkshire Dales, or the hundreds of electricity pylons from Sizewell that disfigure the Suffolk countryside.

 

Effect on wildlife? There is absolutely none. The Nottinghamshire nodding donkey is inside a RSPB bird sanctuary. The effect of wind turbines on bird-life is considerable.

 

Much hysteria has been generated about the so-called seismic effect. The eco-warriors tell us that fracking in Lancashire will cause damaging earth tremors in Blackpool. The truth is that earth tremors caused by fracking, mining or any other intrusion into the earth’s crust are miniscule. The strongest recorded on the Richter scale was described as ‘micro’, about the same as a bus passing a house.

 

Let’s examine the economic and geo-political impact.

 

The largest known reserves of shale-gas are in China, and we can be absolutely certain that they will be exploited.

 

The US has the capacity to produce 2 trillion cubic feet of gas, which is between 50 and 100 years demand. Fracking will supply 70% of natural gas in the near future.  And here’s the amazing news. Anticipated reserves in the UK are only a little less than America’s.

 

The effect on the American economy is striking. Abundant and cheap energy from fracking has led to a manufacturing boom, with a year-on-year growth of 5%. This has been particularly marked in the petro-chemical industry, with cheaper feed-stock gas for plastics plus lower energy bills. New factories are opening, but perhaps equally important  has been a reversal of ‘off-shoring’ as America’s manufacturing costs fall and China’s labour costs rise and productivity per capita falls.

 

The price of American gas has fallen from $13 per million British thermal units to as low as $2.7, and is currently around $4. The upshot of this is that Americans pay about one-third of the price of gas in the UK.  An interesting side-effect is that terminals that were built for the import of LPG are being converted for exports(although the US Government has always been a bit twitchy about exporting energy).

 

In the UK, we can look forward to industry becoming more competitive, falling energy bills for all, and a reduction in fuel-poverty. In future our main energy source will be the most environmentally friendly of all fuels.

 

To prevent the lights going out in the not-too-distant future, the alternatives are nuclear or coal or, most likely, both.

 

The geo-political impact will be game-changing. The US is rapidly approaching energy self-sufficiency. Its interest in MENA will diminish alongside dependency on Gulf oil. The outcome for Russia could be dramatic. Its economy is largely energy-based, and alternative sources of cheap gas would diminish not just its GDP but also its political clout. It is no coincidence that the pressure groups caused fracking being banned in Bulgaria were largely funded by Russia.

 

So back to Balcombe.

 

The entire hullaballoo is based on an untruth. Cuadrilla is not fracking. It doesn’t even have a fracking licence. It is drilling an ordinary exploratory well on a site that was previously drilled without the intervention of Bianca Jagger and the March 1987 Playmate of the Month. If there is oil in commercial quantities that flows normally there will be no fracking.

 

So far, the sole impact of the eco-warriors at Balcombe has been to destroy 24 acres of  sheep-pasture that will now have to be ploughed and re-seeded.

Worse than Savile?

The seemingly- never ending Yewtree investigation arouses two conflicting emotions.

 

The first is revulsion at the thought of grown men forcing themselves on immature school-girls.

 

The second is disquiet at what could be turning into a witch-hunt. There is a feeling that it is about vengeance as much as justice, that it is morphing into punishing the monstrous Savile by proxy. It is nearly two years since the scandal broke, the police have made more than a dozen arrests, and yet they have only secured one conviction in all that time.

 

This was a guilty plea.  It will be instructive to learn how the CPS will get a result in a defended case. It will be difficult to obtain corroborative evidence. There will be no forensics.

 

When are charges to be brought against the other suspects, or dropped? Why did the police release the identities of the suspects before they had sufficient evidence to bring charges?

 

Some of the cases are nearly 50 years old, but they continue to be pursued.

 

And yet the authorities have decided not to pursue the accusations of  massive corruption levelled at BAe Systems over Saudi arms deals which continued into the mid-90’s,  on the apparent grounds that the evidence is too stale.

 

But there are two crimes against women that surely are more disgusting that molesting young girls, which, compared with the post-Savile hullaballoo, get very little attention from the media or public concern. Perhaps it’s because they only affect certain ethnic minorities.

 

The first is forced marriage, which is particularly prevalent at this time of year.

 

The second, and by far the worst, is female circumcision, or female genital mutilation, which is even more prevalent throughout the whole year.

 

Forced marriage is rape by other means.

 

Imagine the situation. A bright 15 year-old girl with a promising future, Bradford born and bred and Yorkshire through and through, is excited because her parents are taking her to Pakistan for her school holidays. But as soon as she arrives she is forced into the bed of a total stranger to become a brood mare and, possibly, a fast-track means to a British residency for yet another Punjabi peasant.

 

It is estimated that there may be as many as 8,000 existing cases in the UK right now and that there are 1,500 new ones every year. The summer holidays are the danger time; it is said that 5 girls are taken out of Britain every day.

 

Only now is it being criminalised.

 

Female genital mutilation is especially loathsome. At its extreme it involves cutting away the entire female genitalia. It is estimated that there are around 23,000 girls at risk in the UK every year. The NHS treats 70 cases per month. The procedure is carried out with a knife or scissors; no anaesthetic, of course, accompanied by excruciating agony and a high risk of haemorrhage and infection.

 

It has been a crime for 29 years.

 

How many convictions in that time?

 

None!

' Between the Rock and a hard place!'.......

It is beginning to look as if the Spanish have got themselves between the Rock and a hard place. A political and PR disaster is in the offing.

 

Boris Johnson has said the obvious, that this is all a diversion from the dreadful problems facing the economy plus corruption accusations in high political circles to which the Royal Family has been linked.

 

And this ploy cuts both ways.

 

William Hague has been excoriated in the media for being ‘weak’, for having a foreign policy that consists mainly of reading out scripts from the State Department. This could also be Dave’s ‘Falklands’ moment, enabling him to show that he is not just a slimy PR man, as James Delingpole described him in his Telegraph blog last week, but that he does actually have cojones.

 

Spain is rapidly getting tangled in a ‘lose-lose’ situation.

 

The people suffering most from the blockade of the border crossing are the Spanish workers who travel to Gib every day. This is just about the poorest region in Spain, with an unemployment rate even by Spain’s abysmal standards. The Spanish are not the most temperate of people. How long before tempers snap? It also looks as if it is awakening the dormant Catalonia issue, about the last thing Spain needs in its present condition.

 

The UK is threatening to invoke EU law. As one might expect, this is full of ambiguity and success is not guaranteed. But there could be a piquant twist. Spain may retaliate by invoking the Treaty of Utrecht 1713, but by doing so they would admit to its current authority and legality. And both Spaniards and Gibraltarians might apply to the ECHR.

 

Just to make matters worse, Spain is now trying to set up a two pronged challenge in alliance with Argentina, bringing the Falklands back onto the international agenda. Any concession by Dave under these circumstances would be political death.

 

If the dispute ends up with the ECJ and it rules in favour of Spain, UKIP will be doing handstands and Dave’s referendum will be a foregone conclusion.

 

Brussels must be aghast. Dealing with disputes by force is a negation of one of the founding principles of the Union. The ‘north’ will be very unhappy. If an adverse impact on the Spanish tourist trade, perhaps exacerbated  by a UK surcharge on flights to Spain, causes the economy to tank even further, they will have to pick up the tab.

 

No wonder we call this ‘the silly season’.

'Foreign aid stops immigration' says Dave.

Even by his standards of cant, David Cameron excelled himself when he  told BBC Breakfast that the increase in the foreign aid budget was partly intended to discourage immigration. He reckons that pouring tax-payers’ money into places like Somalia will stop mass migration to the UK. Well, at least the food donation to Al Shabbah will keep the terrorists well-fed for a few years.

 

The tiny island of Montserrat is a microcosm as to how aid works.

 

It is not much more than a volcano. Before the devastating eruption in the 90’s, its main business was George Martin’s recording studios, plus a bit of tourism.

 

The most productive part of the island was wrecked, and even today is an exclusion zone. The area is an awesome sight. The main town, a picturesque 18^th Century port, has disappeared completely under volcanic mud and ash. Both the port and the airport were totally destroyed. The entire population was evacuated, most to the UK and US.

 

A suitable case for aid? Up to a point.

 

A new airport was built, in the wrong place according to the locals, at a cost of £8 million. It has 3 departure a day. The runway is 600 metres, about the length a flying club strip, so only the smallest commuter planes are operated. There is no safety run-off; at the end of the runway is a sheer drop into the Caribbean.

 

It was very susceptible to closure in bad weather, making for an unreliable service, but it was the only means of getting off-island. I suggested that instead of spending aid money on consultancy fees to London-based fat-cats the ferry service to Antigua should be restored. I see that this has now happened, a few years down the track.

 

The total amount of aid to the island stacks up to about £324 million. The total population is about 5000. So that’s £65,000 for every man, woman and child. A resettlement grant per family might have been a better idea, but that’s not how the system works.

 

The acid test of an aid programme is simple. Does it do any good?

 

We just don’t know, because aid programs are heavily input-orientated, that is, the measure of success is the proportion of the budget spent in each financial year. At this time it appears to be less than 50%, partly due to the quality of management and partly due to the fact that DFID is awash with money and lacks the institutional capacity to invest it.

 

And it is not generally known that a very high proportion of the UK aid budget goes in ‘multilateral aid’. This is a euphemism for handing over stacks of dosh to the EU to spend as they will.

 

Not much attention is paid outputs – whether the work was done satisfactorily. I worked on a 3-year  project for DFID and didn’t even have an exit interview, never mind a discussion of my end-of-tour report.

 

No attention at all appears to be paid to outcomes – whether the ‘investment’ had the desired effect. I suggested that all institutional development projects – those intended to improve public service management – should have an efficiency audit six months and 5 years after completion. No response, but then I wasn’t expecting any.

 

And I sometimes wondered if I occupied the same planet as the shiny-bums in Whitehall or Brussels. One bright young thing came up with the notion that  computers should be put in all schools in the African country where I worked. I demurred. They had no electricity supply. I suggested that the money might be better spent on putting glass back into the windows and tiles on the roofs, but that was not very sexy.

 

So what does work in poverty alleviation? In a word, globalization. It is estimated that more than 200 million people have been lifted out of poverty as a result.

 

There are no equivalent figures for foreign aid.