The future of universities

For some time now I have been wanting to comment about two issues – first, whether funding and expectations of universities throughout the world has not reached an unrealistic level; and, second, the more coherent and urgent shape taken by recent discussions about the possible negotiation of a more independent status of my small country (Scotland). A report issued at the beginning of February by the Scottish Executive on the governance of Scottish Universities brings the two issues nicely together.

I have, of course, been highly critical of university social sciences on this blog – but it was the iconoclastic chapter about higher education in in Ha Joo Chang’s 23 Things they don’t tell you about capitalism which brought my thoughts to a head.
An article in the London Review of Books contained an excellent summary of the current misgivings about the direction taken in the past few decades by British Universities -

We are all deeply anxious about the future of British universities. Our list of concerns is a long one. It includes the discontinuance of free university education; the withdrawal of direct public funding for the teaching of the humanities and the social sciences; the subjection of universities to an intrusive regime of government regulation and inquisitorial audit; the crude attempt to measure and increase scholarly ‘output’; the requirement that all academic research have an ‘impact’ on the economy; the transformation of self-governing communities of scholars into mega-businesses, staffed by a highly-paid executive class, who oversee the professors, or middle managers, who in turn rule over an ill-paid and often temporary or part-time proletariat of junior lecturers and research assistants, coping with an ever worsening staff-student ratio; the notion that universities, rather than collaborating in their common task, should compete with one another, and with private providers, to sell their services in a market, where students are seen, not as partners in a joint enterprise of learning and understanding, but as ‘consumers’, seeking the cheapest deals that will enable them to emerge with the highest earning prospects; the indiscriminate application of the label ‘university’ to institutions whose primary task is to provide vocational training and whose staff do not carry out research; and the rejection of the idea that higher education might have a non-monetary value, or that science, scholarship and intellectual inquiry are important for reasons unconnected with economic growth.
What a contrast with the medieval idea that knowledge was a gift of God, which was not to be sold for money, but should be freely imparted. Or with the 19th-century German concept of the university devoted to the higher learning; or with the tradition in this country that some graduates, rather than rushing off to work in investment banks, might wish to put what they had learned to the service of society by teaching in secondary schools or working for charities or arts organisations or nature conservation or foreign aid agencies or innumerable other good but distinctly unremunerative causes.
Our litany of discontents makes me realise how fortunate I was to have entered academic life in the mid-1950s, and thus to have experienced several decades of what now looks like a golden age of academic freedom, It was a time when students were publicly funded and when the Treasury grant to universities was distributed by the University Grants Committee, largely made up of academics and working at arm’s length from the government; they understood what universities needed and they ruled with a light touch, distributing block grants and requiring only that the money be spent on buildings, teaching and research. It was a time when the ‘new’ universities of the 1960s were devising novel syllabuses, constructed with an eye to the intellectual excitement they generated. Of course, there were fewer universities in those days, and only a minority of young people had access to them. It is a matter for rejoicing that higher education in some form or other is nowadays potentially available to nearly half of the relevant age group. But because there are so many universities, real and so-called, there are fewer resources to go around and the use of those resources is more intensively policed. As a result, the environment in which today’s students and academics work has sharply deteriorated. When I think of the freedom I enjoyed as a young Oxford don, with no one telling me how to teach or what I should research or how I should adapt my activities to maximise the faculty’s performance in the RAE, and when I contrast it with the oppressive micro-management which has grown up in response to government requirements, I am not surprised that so many of today’s most able students have ceased to opt for an academic career in the way they once would have done.

But that is to look at things very much from the perspective of the academic. Ha-Joo Chang looks at it from the point of view of the student and of society as a whole. In 23 Things They Don't Tell You about Capitalism, South Korea-born Chang offers a critique of education in his home nation. In a chapter titled "More education in itself is not going to make a country richer", he takes issue with "the common myth that education was the key to the East Asian miracle". Chang argues that "an unhealthy dynamic has been established for higher education in many high-income and upper-middle-income countries". Once enrolment reaches a certain rate, "people have to go to university in order to get a decent job" - even though most jobs do not require specialist training in higher education. The case of Switzerland shows that high national productivity can be achieved with low university enrolment, Chang suggests. However, rich nations such as the US and South Korea waste resources on higher education "in the essentially zero-sum game of sorting" - that is, establishing each individual's ranking in the hierarchy of employability. "When everyone accepted that educational performance is really the right measure of your innate capabilities, there is all the interest in the world to help your children to produce better educational achievements. Parents started hiring private tutors and sending them to expensive cramming schools."
In his book, Chang argues that "what really matters in the determination of national prosperity is not the educational levels of individuals but the nation's ability to organise individuals into enterprises with high productivity". Chang says the situation "does change over time but you need a lot of effort. You can't just decide tomorrow not to discriminate against people from lesser universities."
A diminishing of the attachment to higher education would also require great investment in sources of employment for people not cut out for university, he adds.

In the next post, I will introduce the Scottish context (where local students do not pay fees) - and give a flavour of the independent report commissioned by the Scottish government on the management of Scottish Universities. Interestingly the committee was Chaired by a German with irish citizenship who became Principal of a Scottish University a few years ago. He has an interesting blog.

A new language for political change?

Where is the modern equivalent of the classic "What did you do in the war, daddy?” – to make us oldies face up to our moral responsibility for the degraded world we have allowed to develop in the past 30 years?
The last post started out as a confession – but then got sidetracked into an annotated bibiography. So let’s get back on track.
I was, in many ways, typical of an important strand of the generation which was at university in the early 60s – and which helped release the economist and managerial gene from Pandora’s box. We knew better than our parents. Everything needed to change - organisations (particularly the public ones) were outdated and needed to be shaken up in the name of managerialism. The compacency (if not self-interest) of officials needed to be challenged – whether by community activists or by market forces. I was no believer in markets – regional development, after all, was my first great passion. And I had read my Galbraith and realised how oligopolistic and manipulative our bigger companies were (although even these were being threatened in the early 80s by young, upstart companies – at least in some sectors).
It was indeed a cultural revolution if not a Reformation– with rationality being the new religion and social scientists the new priests. Trade unions were seen even in the Labour Party to which it had given birth and succoured over decades as Luddites – as part of the collectivism from which we were to be saved.
What I was trying to say in the last post was that we have allowed the worship of choice and of market forces to go too far. Too many people, of course, have been deceived into thinking that corporate power is the market. And it has been all too easy for those marketing the market (in the media) to link anything collectivist with a dangerous or depasse socialism.
So a new language seems to be needed to reassert civilised values – and perhaps it’s the language of "The Commons" some references to which I stumbled upon recently. The most interesting is a manifesto of sorts from a German -

Over the last two hundred years, the explosion of knowledge, technology, and productivity has enabled an unprecedented increase of private wealth. This has improved our quality of life in numerous ways. At the same time, however, we have permitted the depletion of resources and the dwindling of societal wealth. This is brought to our attention by current, interrelated crises in finance, the economy, nutrition, energy, and in the fundamental ecological systems of life. These crises are sharpening our awareness of the existence and importance of the commons.

What exactly are the Commons? They are the fundamental building blocks and pre-condition of our life and social wealth. They include knowledge and water, seeds and software, cultural works and the atmosphere. Commons are not just “things,” however. They are living, dynamic systems of life. They form the social fabric of a free society.
Natural commons are necessary for our survival, while social commons ensure social cohesion, and cultural commons enable us to evolve as individuals. It is imperative that we focus our personal creativity, talents, and enthusiasm on protecting and increasing our social wealth and natural commons. This will require a change in some basic structures of politics, economics, and society.

More social prosperity instead of more gross domestic product! When the economic growth curve drops and the GDP sinks, it seems threatening to us. Yet appearances deceive. The GDP merely maps production figures and monetary flows without regard for their ecological or social value; such numbers do not measure the things we truly need to live, – they may simply count their destruction. Social prosperity cannot be measured through such means. A reduction in the GDP does not necessarily signal a reduction in the real wealth of a society. Recognizing this fact widens our perspective and opens doors for new types of solutions.

More detail can be found in report of a December 2010 Conference and its proceedings; and in the papers of this site

Everything for sale?

Last September, I wrote with some indignation about a Romanian journal labelling an article I wrote for them "left-wing”. Despite my work as a Labour Party Councillor in the 1970s and 1980s (the last 5 years on a full-time basis), I was always opposed to its statist bias. Put this down to the influence of Karl Popper, Ivan Illich and Paulo Freire. As a result, my main contribution to politics in the West of Scotland was to drive an agenda of support for community structures and inititatives. When the Labour party had its left-right split after its 1979 defeat, I was left feeling homeless – with neither option attracting me. And my suspicion of some attitudes in state professionalism and ambivalence about public sector trade unionism led me to view with some sympathy some of the Thatcher policies on contracting-out and privatisation of public services.

I feel, therefore, I can be fairly objective in assessing the results of the privatisation which has swept the globe in the past 30 years. With the exception of gas and electricity, I think the results have been disastrous. This post is written for open-minded readers who want some guidance on useful material on the issue - particularly from the British experience (which has, after all, been at it for 30 years now).
For how privatisation of water, social care etc have panned out I mentioned recently the Public Services International Research Unit of the University of Greenwich which has been giving great briefings on the consequences of privatisation globally for more than a decade.

Privatising the UK railways is perhaps the greatest disaster story – with subsidies to the private rail and track companies being almost three times (at constant prices) the subsidies which british Rail received – and the level of consumer comfort, convenience and satisfaction at an all-time low. Christan Wolmar is the great historian of UK rail privatisation

The English academic, Julian le Grand, was one Tony Blair’s advisers and promoter of the idea of releasing market forces into British social services such as health and education.
Perhaps the text which best captures the hopes and fears is The House of Commons Select Committee on Public Administration 2005 report - Choice, Voice and Public Services and, particularly the 190 pages of evidence it received from both sides of the ideological fence.

The most prolific writer on (and critic of) the privatisation of the british health system is Allyson Pollock – whose most recent book on the subject is NHS Inc. She also blogs occasionally about the issues. The UK government is now attempting (for England only) the most dramatic set of changes ever seen - wcich would effectively dismantle the public Health Service - here is the view of an independent peer (and medic) who was once a Minister of Health.

The role which market mechanisms do now play in education (and might further in the future) can be followed in the second volume of the House of Commons publication mentioned above. An acadenmic treatment is Education Management Organisations and the Privatisation of Public Education: A Cross-National Comparison of the USA and Britain and an angrier statement from a practitioner in Education for sale.
One of the most formidable books I have on my Sirnea bookshelves is Robert Kuttner’s Everything for Sale – the virtues and limits of markets (1996) which received the following accolade from the late economist Robert Heilbroner "I have never seen the market system better described, more intelligently appreciated, or more trenchantly criticized than in EVERYTHING FOR SALE." A New York Times review gave a useful summary of the book -

Mr. Kuttner's target is the total faith in the market-pricing system held by economists of the Chicago school (and by members of two allied scholarly movements in the fields of political science and law -- public choice and law and economics): their idea that whatever is must be optimal if it is the result of the operation of a market. More broadly, Mr. Kuttner wants to dismantle the view that markets essentially work and government interventions essentially don't. By relentlessly piling on example after detailed example of market failure and government success, he gradually makes the idea that all efforts to modulate the market are doomed seem like a blind prejudice that has been holding the nation inexplicably in its grip. If you're ever challenged to name ''just one thing'' the United States Government has ever done right, you'll be fully prepared to answer after reading ''Everything for Sale.'' There are all sorts of necessary social and economic goods, Mr. Kuttner says, that markets can't be relied upon to provide. Free markets underinvest in pure research, so government needs to finance it, or to structure the economy so that private companies can afford to conduct it. Government made us prosperous by creating the higher education system, railroads, canals, commercial aviation and the Internet. Moreover, markets generate problems -- pollution, dangerous products, economic disasters like bank failures -- so they need to be regulated. Regulation does not retard growth: ''The zenith of the era of regulation -- the postwar boom -- was the most successful period of American capitalism.'' Finally, markets fail to provide all citizens with such essentials as health care, physical safety and basic economic security, so these have to come from government.
Demonstrating an impressive mastery of a vast range of material, Mr. Kuttner lays out the case for the market's insufficiency in field after field: employment, medicine, banking, securities, telecommunications, electric power. This material isn't exactly riveting, but it is presented clearly and convincingly enough to qualify as self-improving reading matter. Then he shows, over and over, how his primary villains, academic free-market ideologues, have pushed society in the direction of abandoning carefully constructed solutions to market failures -- solutions that were working quite well.
Mr. Kuttner is an unapologetic social democrat, a believer in America's moving in the direction of a Western European or Scandinavian-style mixed economy, with a bigger Government, higher taxes and stronger unions. One of the strengths of ''Everything for Sale'' is Mr. Kuttner's complete lack of the usual tendency in journalists and policy intellectuals to keep the discussion within the frame of the political possibilities of the moment. He wants to change the debate entirely. He insistently attributes our economic problems to political, not market, failure. For example, American blue-collar workers are underpaid, he says, because it isn't skills they lack but political power. Conversely, the solution to most of the market's deficiencies is not fine-tuning but ''a redistribution of economic and political power.'' As Mr. Kuttner explains (in italics), ''There is no escape from politics

Kuttner’s book deal, however, with the economic arguments. It does not really go into the politics. For that you have to read Colin Leys’s Market-Driven Politics (2001). It was Leys who helped me understand exactly what is meant by the dreadful word "commodification” and his book shows how it started to be applied in the UK in the 1980s to such fields as health and broadcasting. Leys is actually a development economist and most of his material on the internet is therefore on that topic – although an interesting preface to a new book of his called Total Capitalism is available here

The photograph is of Loch Lomond in Central Scotland - a National Park for public benefit and therefore free from development and market forces.

Consultancy....again

Eighteen months ago I highlighted a story about the English health service spending 300 million in the previous year on consultancy companies – equivalent to the pay of 10,000 nurses. This was just the tip of the iceberg – with spending on consultants having got out of control under New Labour. A 2006 book on the subject suggested that spending had gone up 10 times under them. Four reasons for this –
• New Labour’s initial suspicion of the senior civil servants who had served a radical right Conservative Government for 18 years
• a naivety about the implementation of complex IT projects (and lack of coordination on them)
• The curious combination New Labour had of managerialism and social engineering
• the jobs and connections many of the new Ministers had had with big consultancies when in opposition.

A story in today’s Guardian indicates that in New Labour’s final years, the spending increased by a factor 50 to one in one department. The Ministry of Defence apparently spent only 6 million pounds a few years ago on consultants but its bill came in at 297 million in 2010. Curiously, The Guardian tries to put the blame on the Coalition Government but, on my arithmetic, 2009.2010 was still on the New Labour watch. What will be interesting will be to see the figures for 2011 – when the present government started its programme of reducing defence manpower by 60,000.
The paper did report a few days back that government departments have spent 30 million pounds hiring temporary staff to cope with the shortage of staff they are experiencing after the redundancies of the past year.

Exactly a year ago I drew attention to the publications of the National Audit Office (NAO) on the subject. The NAO is supposed to be the nation’s financial watchdog but started to look at the issue of consultant use only in 2005. Since then it has issued various reports exposing the bad practice and issuing both recommendations, guidelines and the inevitable “toolkits”. Their last report (issued in October 2010 for the new government) gives a useful overview of issues - and one of the annexes to the significant 2007 report is a helpful set of guidelines on increasing the commitment of clients and consultants during the projects.
It’s sloppy journalism on the Guardian’s part not to give this sort of background – and follow it up eg by asking whether the NAO has been asking what use departments have been making of their guidelines.
For those interested in the consultancy business, a more analytical study of the different types of consultancy has been done by a Canadian think-tank.

On the subject of slack journalism, it is a blog in Paris which tells us here in Bucharest that several Romanians have been on a hunger strike in an attempt to get some transparency on the crimes committed during the communist era. Doru Maries is near death - having been on hunger strike for 90 days. The local media have apparently given no coverage to this.

Presidents...and presidents

Yesterday I watched Sarkozy’s opening speech of the French Presidential campaign which he delivered to 10,000 faithful at Marseilles. A stirring event – like 2 previous he delivered recently before he actually declared his official candidacy. So far I haven’t seen Hollande on TV5. Both candidates are up against a strong National Front challenge – so hardly surprising that Sarkozy’s speech was virulently nationalist -

Aimer la France, c'est refuser d'accepter les 35 heures (the working week which Sarkozy has tried to break) c'est refuser de promettre la retraite à 60 ans (...) c'est refuser d'augmenter les dépenses et d'augmenter les impôts en pleine crise de la dette (...) c'est refuser d'aborder l'immigration par la seule posture idéologique", a-t-il lancé.  « Quand on aime la France, on n'est pas du côté de ceux qui, pour défendre leurs intérêts, bloquent le pays et prennent les Français en otage (...) on a l'obsession de ne pas l'affaiblir (...) on dit la vérité aux Français sur ce que l'on veut faire, sinon on jette le discrédit sur la parole publique", a poursuivi le chef de l'Etat sous les applaudissements. (Liberation)

"Je me souviens qu'au début, j'ai fait de la politique parce que je voulais agir, je voulais résoudre des problèmes, je voulais aider les gens à surmonter leurs difficultés, a poursuivi le candidat de l'UMP. Mais en me tournant sur toutes ces années, j'ai compris que le combat essentiel, c'est celui que l'on mène pour le pays qui nous a vu naître. Il n' y a pas un seul combat qui soit supérieur à celui qui mène pour son pays." (Le Monde)

For a detailed assessment of the policy platforms, we have to go to a blog which actually gives us a useful insight into the socialist candidate Jean-Luc Melenchon who is also running and attracting about 8% in the polls at the moment and whose manifesto is apparently a best-seller

The German Presidency is, as they say, "honorific” – and, with both of the last 2 incumbents having to resign, there are those who suggest the post is unecessary. This is to disregard the moral authority which incumbents such as Richard von Weizsacker and Johannes Rau brought to the country. Weizsacker was a Christian Democract and President 1984-1994 and West Berlin Mayor 1981-84. Rau was a Social Democrat; President 1999-2004 and Head of the huge RheinWestphalen Land (Region) from 1978-98.
I was spellbound listening to the speeches of the former as he made his famous gentle and highly civilised commentaries. A Foreign Affairs review expressed it well -

More than any of his predecessors in the presidential office, he has used that supraparty position to address fundamental issues, such as the ever-present unease about the German past, and he does so with clarity and admirable forthrightness. He has what few statesmen nowadays have: moral authority, and in his book-with its intelligent interlocutors-he turns from the past to the present and the future. His greatest worry concerns the vitality of liberal democracy in the enlarged Federal Republic, particularly in light of the power of German political parties in politics and public life generally-their power and the paucity of their imagination, the failure of their leadership. He is remarkably candid in his criticism of parties that only seek electoral gain and calls for a more active citizenry and regrets the immobility of Germany's political life, "the Utopia of the status quo." German commentators have seized on formulations that clearly hit the inadequacies of the present government, but these are incidental and inevitable. Weizsäcker's criticisms go far deeper. It took courage and, I suppose, the deepest concern to disturb the political complacency of his country and to do so with thoughts that in the German context and in some parts recall conservative criticisms of the Weimar period. But Weizsäcker's aim to strengthen, to vitalize liberal democracy is beyond question.

Johannes Rau was a son of a Lutheran priest and this showed in his approach. You can see a speech here which he delivered to the Israeli Knesset, the first German to address it.

I was lucky enough to meet both of these men informally and can therefore vouch personally for the humility they brought to their role. Weizsacker was holidying in Scotland and popped in quietly to pay his respects to the leader of the Regional Council. As the (elected) Secretary to the majority party, I had private access to the Leader’s office and stumbled in on their meeting. Rau I also stumbled across when in a Duisberg hotel on Council business. He was not then the President – but I recognised him when he came in with his wife and a couple of assistants, introduced myself ( as a fellow social democrat); gave him a gift book on my Region which I happened to be carrying and was rewarded with a chat.

I am glad to see that, with the nomination of Glauk, Germany seems now to be returning to its tradition of Presidents with moral authority. The German political system seems to me one of the best - with the leaders of strong Laender in the 2nd chamber acting as a responsible challenge to the Executive. Typical that, despite all the so-called discussion which has been going on for several decades about the reform of the British second chamber, this option has never been presented forcibly..... 

Some readings on the crisis

It may not have been evident from recent posts that one of my central concerns is the identification of an agenda for social change which is capable – by its appeal, relevance and clarity – of uniting a significant block of change agents in Europe at least. Two of my common moans are the insular nature of so much of the writing about this which one finds in the English language; and the failure of so many of the writers to build bridges to others writing on relevant subjects.
These faults were very evident in a Noreena Hertz pamphlet entitled Coop Capitalism just published by Cooperatives UK. Hertz is, apparently, one of these young celebrity Economists who have been taken up by the mass media and one of whose faults is to present ideas as if they were new. I’m not sure, for example, if her use of the term "gucci capialism” adds to our understanding of the crisis we face – and her references to examples of cooperatives are highly selective and superficial (Mondragon gets no mention). She allows this blurb about her to appear in the pamphlet -

many have described Professor Hertz as a visionary and she is one of the most influential economists on the international stage. Her work is considered to provide a much needed blueprint for rethinking economics and corporate strategy. For more than two decades Noreena Hertz’s economic predictions have been accurate and ahead of the curve. In her number one best-selling book “The Silent Takeover”, Hertz predicted that unregulated markets and massive financial institutions would have serious global consequences whilst her 2005 best-seller, “IOU: The Debt Threat”, predicted the 2008 financial crisis. Her books have been translated into 17 languages

Here is an example of how the media treat her – but here a more serious treatment of her ideas . I realise, of course, that such a comment could be taken as an example of how the left tear one another part – but change agents need to show more modesty and generosity in their referencing of relevant work.

Labour Left has published a 300 page Red Book which can be downloaded here. Labour Left’s ambition is 

to generate ethically socialist policies for inclusion in the next Labour General Election manifesto. We aim to intellectually reclaim what it means to be left and we wish to help Ed Miliband steer a course away from Neo-Liberalism. It is clear from the surge in new members, especially younger ones since the General Election in 2010, that there is an appetite for socialist policies that tame the excesses of capitalism and re-balance the UK economy in a way that is fairer to the have-nots

Unfortunately, like all collections, the book’s contributions are ad-hoc (if worthy) presentations of various ideas relating to health, education and environmental issues – with no wider analysis of policy contexts nor argument as to whether the particular ideas would be supported let alone successful.

At the other end of the analytical and geographical spectrum is a major publication from the European Trade Unions Institute which, in 300 pages, looks at the changes in the infrastructure of each of the main European economies in the last 20 years. It takes as its starting point Colin Crouch’s insight about the strange non-death of neo-liberalism and is entitled A Triumph of Failed Ideas – european models of capitalism
It made me realise how seldom I have referenced the valiant efforts of various European Trade Unions and their research bodies in their tracking developments of the past decade eg the fantastic public services international research unit of the University of Greenwich which has been giving great briefings on the consequences of privatisation for more than a decade; NHS policy briefings ; European Services Strategy Unit.
But I have just come across what, for me, is the best source of radical thinking and activities in Europe – the Transform network which issues a biannual journal.

Geopolitics of Coffee and tea

One of my favourite blogs is the It’s About time one – which sends me on a daily basis marvellous pictures of old paintings generally on a theme such as the ruffles which adorn the necks of aristocratic figures or the preparation of foods in medieval times – eg here and here
Some amazingly modern faces and styles are in evidence
I hadn’t realised that the famous Vienna coffee shops came from a some coffee beans being found in the fields outside Vienna in the aftermath of the Ottoman siege of Vienna in the 17th Century. Curious that the main thing which impacted me on my first visit to Istanbul some 25 years ago was their teas! In powder form and carried on trays around the bazzars and served as you looked at carpets.
My 3 years of ceremonially receiving and serving teas in small, beautiful bowls and teapots in Uzbekistan 1999-2002 almost killed the coffee habit in me. The coffees of Sofia dragged me back to the dangerous weed – but, at least, Sofia hedges its bets by having so many small shops which seel both coffee beans and Chinese teas!
I wanted to get an explanation for this apparent decline in Turkish tea-drinking but Google seemed strangely hooked on either the Tea Party or the Greg Mortensen saga (Three Cups of Tea). Wikipedia tells me that

tea became the widely consumed beverage of choice in Turkey only in the 20th century. It was initially encouraged as an alternative to coffee,which had become expensive and at times unavailable in the aftermath of the First World War. Upon the loss of southeastern territories after the fall of the Ottoman Empire, coffee became an expensive import. At the urging of the founder of the republic, Atatürk, Turks turned more to tea as it was easily sustainable by domestic sources

A Greek site tells me that tea there was expensive and, on independence from the Ottomans, was considered an upper-class habit. Another site told me of the Ottoman (red) tea spoken about by travellers and still apparently available in places such as Bursa - with 10 different natural ingredients - ginger, havlıcan (a plant in the ginger family), hibiscus, linden, cloves, lemon, orange, cinnamon, apple and thyme.

And I found this superb tea and carpets site which reminded me of the carpet-buying days in central asia and Turkey which preceded my current passion for painting.

Finally some lovely miniatures from the website with which I started

Technocrats, securitats ...and cronycrats

An article in Scottish Review by someone apparently also living in Romania asks whether we now have 'Eurocracy' replacing democracy – pointing not only to the parachuting of bankers into the Greek and Italian Prime Minister jobs (in the greek case, the same guy who had overseen the falsification of accounts when the country entered the euro) but also to recent events in Romania. Romania has just completed a 2 year (apparently successful - at least in IMF terms!) spell of control by the IMF and, the article writes, –

two days after the IMF representative left Bucharest, the government of the deeply unpopular prime minister, Mr Emile Boc, resigned en masse and was swiftly replaced by a completely new government of what appear to be young technocrats. In Romania, the prime minister is appointed by the elected president. Finally, two days later, the governor of the Romanian Central Bank, the only man with any clue about fiscal and economic policy in the entire country, announced that responsibility for the nation's fiscal policy should no longer rest with the IMF but should be transferred to those nice German regulators at the EU, through the new fiscal treaty. Romania's president was one of the first non-Eurozone government heads to sign the treaty. Romania is confirmed as the next country, after Greece and Italy, to be governed by Merkozy's EU fiscal and political regime.

I have much sympathy with the author’s general point about the reduction of democracy but he is not quite right to argue that the new Romanian government is an example of the new "technocracy”. It is certainly true that the new Prime Minister Mihai Razvan Ungureanu, is not an elected politician. He was, previously, head of Romania's foreign intelligence – which makes him a "securitat" rather than "technocrat"! His full list of new ministers was approved yesterday in the Parliament. M.R. Ungureanu's government team is formed of all-new members from the Democratic Liberal Party (PDL), while coalition partners, the Hungarian Democrats (UDMR), and the UNPR retain their ministers who have served in Emil Boc's government. Two independents also keep their portfolios. Half, therefore, of the new government is unchanged – and only about 6 (on my count) are not politicians half of them incumbents. The full list of the new government is:

• Deputy PM - Marko Bela (UDMR, incumbent)
• Home Affairs and Administration Ministry - Gabriel Berca (PDL)
• Finance Ministry - Bogdan Dragoi (PDL)
• Economy Ministry - Lucian Bode (PDL)
• Foreign Affairs Ministry - Cristian Diaconescu (UNPR, incumbent)
• Transport Ministry -Alexandru Nazare (PDL)
• Environment Ministry - Laszlo Borbely (UDMR, incumbent)
• Tourism Ministry - Cristian Petrescu (PDL)
• Defense Ministry - Gabriel Oprea (UNPR, incumbent)
• Culture Ministry - Kelemen Hunor (UDMR, incumbent)
• Justice Ministry - Catalin Predoiu (independent, incumbent)
• Communications Ministry - Serban Mustea (PDL)
• Labor Ministry - Claudia Boghicevici (PDL)
• Education Ministry - Catalin Baba (PDL)
• Health Ministry - Ladislau Ritli (UDMR, incumbent)
• Agriculture Ministry - Stelian Fuia (PDL)
• European Affairs Ministry - Leonard Orban (independent, incumbent)

As many of the new members of the government are young - some of them in their early 30s - Mihai Razvan Ungureanu pointed out on Wednesday it was a young government formed of

new faces, exceptional professionals, people who I've worked with in various structures of the government. It is a government worthy of trust and ready to show not only a change in political generations but also a change of principle in activity

Frankly I don’t hold my breath. I have already commented that the younger generation of ambitious people here is no better than its elders. They owe their position to those elders (whether parents or protectors) and their education abroad has made them even more arrogant than their elders. It is, for me, significant, that the new Minister of Finance is the very young man I fingered in September 2010 for cronyism and disregard for such legalities as the need to make an open and honest declaration of financial interests. He was then State Secretary at the Ministry and is therefore apparently one of the non-elected technocrats – except that I doubt whether his route to that high-level civil service position permits that term to be used of him and his like. This is what my September 2010 blog said about him -

People like Dragoi enjoy such patronage (with no experience - he became a State Secretary at the age of 26 after an extended education!) and protection and seem so contemptuous of these forms that he doesn't even bother to update his form which understates his income by a factor of 40! 250 euros he says when it is actually 9,600!
His out-of-date form does, however, declare some of the additional revenues he earned as a committee member of various state funds.
I alighted on his declaration form by accident – just choosing his file at random from the list of officials’ forms. These assets, earnings and concealments reveal systemic immorality which, in Romania’s case, seems to be shaped and sustained by the role of its political parties which grabbed significant amounts of property in 1990 and which now determine the career path of young characters like Dragoi (nationally and internationally) and take in return a significant part of his earnings. For more on this issue see Tom Gallagher's 2010 article.

When people talk about pinning their hopes on the younger generation, I will always think of this face. It is when such behaviour is revealed that I feel some shame for having spent time working trying to reform such systems.

Perhaps, therefore, the term we should be using for Romania and similar countries with similar systems is not "technocracy" (which implies ability) but "cronycracy". By the way, an earlier article in Scottish Review by the same author was the best piece Ive read about the reasons for the protests here which led to the change in government.

The caricature is Daumier - one of history's best! This one is called Marionettes.