Over at The Sharpener there’s a discussion of why blogs allegedly have more political influence in the United States than our home-grown blogs have here in Britain. One reason advanced is the supposed superiority and variety of the British mainstream media compared with their American counterparts when it comes to a range of well informed political views across a wide political spectrum (I paraphrase, I hope not unfairly).
I wonder how far this comparison can be made to stand up? The Times is a shadow of its former thundering self; the Independent too often deserves its Private Eye nickname; the Financial Times is excellent but specialised; the Guardian and the Telegraph are fine papers in their different ways but both have irritating foibles derived from their respective ideological positions, the former often descending into PC puerilities, the latter into offensive if generally comic reaction. By comparison, the New York Times and the Washington Post are outstanding (notwithstanding recent turmoil and troubles at the Times), the Christian Science Monitor and the Wall Street Journal have their enthusiasts, most other major cities besides New York and Washington have their serious and perfectly respectable print organs, and the FT is very widely available throughout the US. It’s true, as one commentator at the Sharpener has pointed out, that outside the big US cities you’re lucky to find a New York Times or a Washington Post, whereas even the newsagents in tiny villages just about everywhere in Britain generally stock a few copies of most of the UK’s ‘serious’ papers; but that has little relevance to the question of political influence vis-à-vis blogs. For generally balanced and well informed comments on current issues, comprehensiveness of news coverage, and the essential separation of news from comment, I would argue that the New York Times and the Washington Post are superior to any British newspaper with the partial exception of the Financial Times, which is anyway these days almost as much an American as a British paper, and which doesn’t lay claim to the status of a journal of record.
Perhaps the more interesting (and more complex) comparison is between British and American current affairs programmes on television. Watching a couple of the most prominent American current affairs program[me]s yesterday (Sunday), I was struck, as I always am, by how good they are, and how much better than anything on British television, with the possible exception of some of our television news channels. An outstanding example is MSNBC’s Meet the Press. The transcript of yesterday’s programme provides a fair idea of the quality of the discussion, but it’s even better as transmitted, with the introductory remarks by the excellent presenter, Tim Russert, superbly illustrated by selected clips and texts. The combination of round table discussion between outstanding print journalists and pundits (David Broder, David Brooks, Judy Woodruff and William Safire), with questioning of experienced political practitioners (Ken Duberstein, Ronald Reagan’s chief of staff; Hamilton Jordan, Jimmy Carter’s chief of staff, Leon Panetta, Bill Clinton’s chief of staff and historian Michael Beschloss), makes for stimulating and informative television. And the striking feature of this and a number of other similar American television programmes, on MSNBC, CNN, CBS and other channels, is that each panel member or interviewee is allowed to say his or her piece at reasonable length, often thoughtfully and deliberately, sometimes hesitating in search of the right word without being interrupted every time there’s the smallest pause for breath or reflection. 
Russert and other presenters and interviewers, such as CNN’s ubiquitous and admirable Wolf Blitzer, manage to be civil and patient with the contributors, while pressing them on the more neuralgic issues and challenging attempts at evasion. There are virtually no signs of aggressive scepticism or insulting accusation. Enough time is allotted to each segment, even allowing for the tiresome commercial breaks, for reasonably thorough discussion and analysis. Anchors and interviewers exude authority without arrogance, and treat the programmes’ guests with refreshing respect. The programmes are pacy but unhurried.
< Wolf Blitzer
Sadly, almost all British current affairs programmes on both radio and television lack all these qualities. Perhaps it’s partly that our presenters and interviewers are mostly so much younger than their American counterparts, and lack the Americans’ gravitas. Some of the most ferocious young women (especially; some of the young men, too) interviewing on television and radio channels other than the BBC look and sound as if they are barely out of their teens. Always rushed for time, interviewees (especially politicians, but also many other experts and pundits with a controversial point of view) are subjected to serial interruptions the moment they pause to draw breath; interviewers treat them as adversaries, aggressively challenging and contradicting at every turn; some (such as, notoriously, Jim Naughtie) expand their long and rambling questions so self-indulgently that there’s often nothing left for the interviewee to say at the end of them but ‘Yes’. The technique of the open question that draws out an interesting and revealing response is all but unknown to most of our electronic media interviewers. Many seem more concerned with making their names as tough and aggressive inquisitors, and in demonstrating their own expertise and their clever scepticism, than in allowing their victims scope for expressing themselves fully, accurately and informatively. It’s sad to have to acknowledge that these strictures apply, more often than not, to the Today Programme and Newsnight, BBC flagship news programmes both, as well as (to a lesser extent) to The World at One and PM. Panel discussions such as Any Questions and Question Time are constantly distorted by the adversarial choice of participants: the party politicians, selected on the Mendelian principle of one Labour, one Tory and one LibDem, laboriously reproduce the yah-boo inanities of prime minister’s questions in the House of Commons, scoring elaborate points off one another at the expense of any attempt at serious discussion of the topic. Much the same applied to last night’s Panorama programme, which discussed a key question of the moment: should we remove our troops from Iraq immediately (i.e. within the next few weeks), or should we leave them there until "the job is done"? Instead of a format like that of the American ‘Late Edition‘ or ‘Meet the Press’ that might have allowed reasonably full contributions from people with experience and knowledge of the issues, Panorama opted for a deliberately adversarial framework with advocates of the opposing views ‘cross-examining’ each other’s ‘witnesses’, each allowed a maximum of around two minutes, followed by even briefer and necessarily even more superficial comments from the many Iraq pundits in the audience. Very frustrating.
Personally, unlike many others, I largely accept the argument of our star interrogators, John Humphrys and Jeremy Paxman, that since parliament has virtually given up any attempt to fulfill its task of holding the government to account, the executive having by various means gained complete control over the house of commons while resisting all efforts to democratise the second chamber, the media are the last remaining institution in the realm that can put pressure on evasive and secretive ministers to reveal what they are up to and why they are up to it. Investigative journalism and probing interviews, even sometimes aggressive examination in front of microphone and camera, often have their place, and we would be an even more ineffectual democracy without them. But we could learn a thing or two from the Americans about serious analysis and discussion of serious issues by people who know what they are talking and writing about, in print, and on television and radio.
Brian
Levy Barder was Harry’s father, and so Brian’s grandfather. (Click here for Jane’s up-to-date account of Harry and his family, including Levy.)
Incidentally, this photograph has been uploaded here from the admirable web-based photograph album application Flickr, where you can see not only the picture of Levy but also many of my other (mostly unrelated) pictures too. Just click on the picture, or on the title under it.
Brian
Notwithstanding appearances to the contrary, neither this blog nor the website it lives in is devoted exclusively to contemporary politics, civil rights controversies and expressions of anger and disappointment concerning Mr Tony Blair. Many of the best pieces are by contributors other than me, including two new and highly readable pages.
The first is an account by the researcher, historian and former diplomat, David Tothill, of an instructive controversy that arose over a contract entered into (or possibly not entered into) years ago by a prominent Australian diplomat, later head of the Australian Foreign Ministry. The dispute raises interesting questions concerning diplomatic privileges and immunities, on which I have been musing here recently. David Tothill’s account is here.
The second is by my wife, Jane, who has largely re-written, expanded and brought up to date her earlier account of my father, Harry, and his family and forebears (therefore of course also mine). The new revised edition (here) is not only a fine piece of family history reseach, tracing Harry’s and my Barder family origins back to the Jewish quarter of Krakow in what is now Poland, but also a highly readable piece of social history about the fortunes of an immigrant family which came to England in the 1850s and how they adapted to their new circumstances down the generations: multiculturalism? integration? assimilation? Judge for yourself.
Jane’s several other pieces of family history — chronicling both her own and my family histories, including the adventures and misadventures of the German Lutherans in the American colony and state of Georgia on the other side of my own family, are also on this website, and listed here. Leave enough time to enjoy!
Brian
Immune from what?
In the preceding article about the question whether diplomats enjoy immunity (in fact they don’t) from the obligation to pay the London congestion charge, I have outlined some of the ways in which accredited diplomats, while required under international law to respect and obey the rules and laws of the country where they serve, are not generally subject to the jurisdiction of the host country’s courts, may not be arrested or searched, nor taxed. Their houses and offices may not be entered by the local police and their documents and communications may not be searched or tampered with. The magisterial Dictionary of Diplomacy (see the hat-tips footnote to the preceding article) in its entry on diplomatic privileges and immunities identifies three categories of these:
First, there are certain inviolabilities enjoyed by a diplomatic mission and its diplomatic staff. These apply to official premises and private residences, the mission’s archives and documentation, and its correspondence, none of which may be entered or tampered with by the receiving state. The persons of diplomatic agents and of their family members residing with them are also inviolable, in the sense that they may not be arrested or detained. Secondly, such individuals enjoy immunity from the criminal jurisdiction of the receiving state and, in most respects, from its civil and administrative jurisdiction. Thirdly, they enjoy certain privileges, such as exemption from dues, taxes, and many customs duties, from the liability to undertake public service, and (generally) from having to submit their baggage to inspection at frontier controls.
These distinctions may be academically useful, but in practice all three categories entail certain specific immunities or exemptions from obligations imposed on ordinary local people, and many diplomats tend to be wary of describing any of them as a ‘privilege’, with its implied connotation of an optional or luxury item not strictly necessary for the performance of a diplomat’s functions. However described, all these exemptions have been regarded for centuries as essential for the protection of diplomats against undue pressures that might otherwise be exerted by the host country’s government – pressures applied directly on the individual diplomat concerned, and thus indirectly on his government. An embassy and its diplomatic staff are in a sense extensions of the government and country that they represent, stationed abroad and therefore physically at the mercy of the host country’s government, police and security services. Diplomats are always potentially in the position of hostages, especially when relations between the host government and the government represented by the diplomats are bad. Occasionally, despite the protection notionally guaranteed by virtually all states to diplomats under the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations of 1961, a particular country’s diplomats may actually be taken hostage and used as pawns in the attempt to extort specific concessions from their government, as happened when the then Iranian government took the staff of the American embassy hostage in 1979. As the President Jimmy Carter Library and Museum website records,
On November 4, 1979, Iranian militants stormed the United States Embassy in Tehran and took approximately seventy Americans captive. This terrorist act triggered the most profound crisis of the Carter presidency and began a personal ordeal for Jimmy Carter and the American people that lasted 444 days.
It is a measure of the importance that almost all governments attach to the inviolability of their diplomats serving abroad that the United States sent an expeditionary force to Iran to try to rescue the diplomats by military force.
What’s the point?
Diplomats have been guaranteed a special status of inviolability and immunity since the earliest days when an ambassador went as the personal representative of his monarch to deliver a message to another monarch and to take back the reply: even, or especially, in time of war or imminent war, the person of the visiting ambassador could not be harmed, detained or maltreated, since such treatment would amount to the maltreatment of one monarch by another, as well as defeating the object of a mutually convenient procedure for exchanging messages, assurances, threats, proposals, and the rest of the small change of diplomacy. The 1961 Vienna Convention was a codification of measures and principles that had been an accepted part of customary international law for centuries. Diplomats, the last line of defence against violence in international affairs, are an endangered species when nations quarrel, and worth the effort of preservation.
As the Dictionary of Diplomacy explains,
the justification for treating diplomats in this special way is that such measures are necessary for diplomatic functions to be executed effectively. This is not always understood by a state’s public opinion, which can lead to adverse comment on the matter.
The temptation for a cynical government to exploit the availability on its soil of vulnerable, usually unarmed diplomats from another country with which it is quarrelling or in ideological conflict, in order to influence that country’s behaviour or policies, may be very strong. At the height of the cold war in 1971 the British government, after delivering several warnings of what was to come if the Soviet government failed to remove numerous spies from the UK, gave 105 Soviet intelligence officers notice of their expulsion and gave them two weeks to pack their belongings and depart. A stunned Soviet government, not expecting such robust treatment at the hands of a second-rank power like Britain, reacted angrily, demanding that the expulsion orders be retracted and threatening dire but unspecified retribution if the expulsions nonetheless went ahead. During the two weeks’ grace allowed to the 105 Russian spies, the Soviet government put every possible pressure on Britain’s diplomats in Moscow (of whom I was one) in the hope of forcing our masters in London to relent. Four British diplomats in Moscow (including me) were singled out for constant harassment throughout the two weeks before the 105 left England (in a specially chartered ship). But there was no overt breach of our Vienna Convention immunities: if we were effectively hostages to the Russians in Moscow, our Soviet diplomatic opposite numbers in London were just as much potential hostages to the British government, even after the 105 had departed. The principle of reciprocity is a vital diplomatic tool, and often an added protection for vulnerable diplomats in hostile territory. To quote the Dictionary again:
if state A’s diplomats are treated in a less-than-proper manner by state B, it is highly likely that state B’s diplomats in state A will suffer the same fate. So important is the role played by diplomats, and so keen the wish of sending states to guarantee their personal safety, that it is extremely unusual for a state not to take great care to guard against that eventuality.
Even in times of somewhat less strained Anglo-Soviet relations, the Soviet authorities were not averse to a little gentle harassment of western diplomats in Moscow, partly to impress on them who was boss, partly as a reminder that potentially uncomfortable penalties could be imposed on a western diplomat whose activities might embarrass the Soviet Union or whose attitudes seemed to the Kremlin or to the KGB to be unduly hostile. Our cars, easily identified as from a western embassy, were repeatedly, routinely stopped by uniformed militiamen who would demand to see our ‘dokumenty’ – our diplomatic identity cards and our car licence and insurance documents. Knowing that once any of these precious papers were handed over, they might well not be returned on the pretext of some imaginary irregularity, we never allowed the militia to handle our ID cards, simply showing them through the car window: and we always kept the car documents securely locked up in the Embassy, inviting the militia to address any complaints or demands to the Soviet Foreign Ministry. And we never obeyed an instruction to get out of the car. Without the protection of our Vienna Convention rights, such essentially minor harassments could easily have escalated into serious interference in our everyday lives and work.
Duty-free booze?
Exemption from local taxation, excise and duty payments is perhaps the most controversial of the diplomat’s immunities: it is the nearest that these exemptions appear to come to a ‘privilege’. But here too the host government’s right to impose taxes on a foreign country’s diplomats could be a potent instrument of pressure. It would not be difficult to put together an exorbitant demand for allegedly unpaid taxes designed to intimidate and deter an otherwise recalcitrant diplomat prone, for example, to embarrassing public criticism of the host government’s human rights record or of its failure to deal with rampant local corruption. Think Craig Murray in Uzbekistan, Edward Clay in Kenya or our British diplomats in President Mugabe’s Zimbabwe. The fact that diplomats can buy their booze duty-free may seem an unnecessary luxury, and so no doubt it is, but excise duty on alcohol is just another form of tax, and it would be an impossible task to pick and choose among a host of different taxes and duties to decide which ones diplomats should be liable to pay, and from which ones they should be exempt. In any case, British diplomats abroad get no personal benefit from their entitlement to duty-free liquor, since the calculation of their local cost of living allowances takes the exemption into account: if they pay less for their Scotch, they receive correspondingly less in allowances, so the benefit accrues to the British taxpayer, not the diplomat. Moreover much the greater part of the booze bought by British (if not some other countries’) diplomats is directed down the throats of the foreign dignitaries (or visiting British politicians and businessmen) whom our diplomats are required to entertain, part of the necessary lubrication of international relations and the promotion of peaceable amity among the nations.
It should also be remembered that many of the exemptions and immunities enjoyed (if that’s the right word) by diplomats apply only to their official functions and activities. Private contracts and commitments may be enforceable in the civil courts as with anyone else. The borderline between official and private business may however often be blurred: David Tothill, researcher, historian and former diplomat, has written an entertaining account of a long-running controversy that largely turned on just such ambiguity.
Sir Henry Wotton >
"An ambassador is an honest man, sent to lie abroad for the good of his country"
Abuse of immunities
It may be worth repeating one of the points that emerges from the preceding discussion of diplomatic immunity (or lack of it) in relation to the congestion charge. Abuse of immunities and exemptions such as these is always possible, and some abuse inevitable: diplomats as a race are not necessarily and in all circumstances less venal than businessmen or politicians. But it’s a myth that a diplomat who abuses his position is necessarily safe from exposure and retribution. If he breaks the host country’s laws, he can’t automatically be taken to court, charged, tried or sent to prison, nor even fined. But a complaint by the host government to the offender’s ambassador (repeated in more serious cases in a complaint to the offender’s Foreign Ministry in his country’s capital) is likely in most cases to lead to his withdrawal and return to his native land, perhaps for punishment, almost certainly for disciplinary action. If a complaint fails to achieve a remedy, the host government might try the embarrassment potential of negative publicity, something most ambassadors will dread. If that too fails, the host government may demand that the offender’s ambassador, or his own government, should agree to waive his immunity so that court or other punitive action may be taken against him locally. Article 32 of the Vienna Convention provides that
1. The immunity from jurisdiction of diplomatic agents and of persons enjoying immunity under Article 37 may be waived by the sending State.
2. Waiver must always be express.
3. The initiation of proceedings by a diplomatic agent or by a person enjoying immunity from jurisdiction under Article 37 shall preclude him from invoking immunity from jurisdiction in respect of any counter-claim directly connected with the principal claim.
4. Waiver of immunity from jurisdiction in respect of civil or administrative proceedings shall not be held to imply waiver of immunity in respect of the execution of the judgement, for which a separate waiver shall be necessary.
And, finally, if the offender’s government and ambassador refuse to waive his immunity, it’s always open to the host government to expel him. Expulsion from a much sought-after posting such as London, Paris, Berlin or Washington on grounds of illegal or even just inappropriate behaviour is normally a serious matter, and may spell the end of a diplomatic career. On the other hand, expulsion from a post where diplomats suffer hardship, ill-health, harassment, restrictions or a foul climate, or all of the above, may not always be regarded by the expellee as an unmitigated disaster – especially if the grounds for the expulsion are merely a tit-for-tat measure in retaliation for expulsions by the other side, and thus ‘nothing personal’. During the two tense weeks in 1971 when the Soviet authorities were applying every possible pressure on British diplomats in Moscow in the hope of forcing the British government to rescind the expulsion orders against the 105 Russian spies, the embassy staff in Moscow were bracing themselves for the impact of the inevitable Soviet retaliation once the expulsions had actually taken place. On the Sunday of the second week, as the 105 in England were finishing their packing, the Sunday Express published a cartoon by the immortal Giles showing the staff of the British embassy in Moscow clustered in the entrance hall of the embassy to greet their ambassador on his return from the Soviet Foreign Ministry with news of the Soviet response to the expulsions of the 105. “Bad luck, chaps,” the ambassador is saying, “only four of us expelled.”
Brian
The controversial Mayor of London, Ken Livingstone, has scored a popular bull’s-eye with his congestion charge (a form of road toll) for using a car in central London, a scheme which has significantly improved traffic flow, encouraged use of public transport, and raised handy additional income for investment in London transport. But when in July Transport for London (TfL) raised the charge from five to eight pounds a day, the American embassy joined a few others, including the Germans, in declaring that they would no longer pay the charge, on the grounds that they considered it a form of tax from which diplomats are exempt under the Vienna Convention of 1961. This has prompted the predictable rash of tabloid, blog, forum and other media comment on the allegedly anachronistic concept of diplomatic privileges and immunities under which rich and pampered foreign diplomats can drink champagne, avoid car parking charges, and molest children without any comeback on the part of the affronted citizenry, all at the affronted citizenry’s expense.
< Fi Glover
As a former diplomat, and supposedly a past slurper on the diplomatic privilege and immunity gravy train, I found myself being questioned on the BBC Radio 4 weekly politics programme ‘Broadcasting House’ on 23 October 2005 by the sparky Fi (pron. Fee) Glover, the programme’s presenter, about these weighty matters. The event, if such a brief radio item can be so described, is commemorated in a signal act of filial piety in Owen Barder’s blog, which even includes a link to Owen’s recording of the relevant interview, enabling anyone sufficiently interested to listen to my three or four minutes of fame by clicking here. (I am further indebted to Owen for almost all the chapter and verse cited below for the exact status of the congestion charge.)
As I had to share the last five or six minutes of the programme with the weather forecast, there wasn’t time to get into the intricacies of the precise status of the congestion charge, still less of the rationale for diplomatic privileges and immunities. So here goes.
The congestion charge: are diplomats immune from paying it? The short answer is No. (It’s also the long answer, actually.) It all hinges on whether the congestion charge is a tax – in which case diplomats are immune from any obligation to pay it – or whether it’s in the category of “charges levied for specific services rendered”, the precise words of Article 34(e) of the Vienna Convention:
34. A diplomatic agent shall be exempt from all dues and taxes, personal or real, national, regional or municipal, except: …
(e) charges levied for specific services rendered…
So what is this congestion charge? It’s levied by Transport for London, which has the formal status of a public corporation, as confirmed by the British Treasury’s Classification of Expenditure – Public and Private Sectors:
Public corporations: Post Office; Transport for London; British Nuclear Fuels; National Health Service Trust hospitals; Trading Funds; Royal Mint; Companies House; Land Registry; Manchester Airport; Forest Enterprise; Tote; Patent Office
Revenues from congestion charges are not part of central or local government revenues: any surplus from the charges is ploughed back into London transport costs, not available for local or national government expenditure. ‘Transport for London’ is in the same category as the post office, as the preceding quotation shows, and even impoverished American diplomats wouldn't claim exemption from the obligation to pay for their postage stamps.
A paper for the OECD National Accounts Experts Meeting of the OECD Statistics Directorate confirms the formal position:
One example is the London congestion charge … This could have been seen as a source of tax revenue if the money had gone in to a general fund for spending on the full range of services. However the legislation specifies that the income from the congestion charge can only be spent on a limited range of transport related items in London. Transport in London is organised as a number of real and quasi public corporations owned by local government in London. These provide market services to users of London's transport including underground trains and buses. We see the road charge scheme as an additional market service provided by them. There is cross subsidy between different categories of user but this is common in the provision of services in the private sector. The congestion charge is … a service charge not a tax because of the ring fenced accounting inherent in the scheme. This is also consistent with the national accounts manuals where the Eurostat Manual on Government Deficit and Debt, which is consistent with ESA95, cites road and bridge tolls as examples which should be treated as payments for the provision of services.
Thus the UK Office of National Statistics, applying international guidelines agreed by the European Union and the OECD, has concluded that it is a charge and not a tax.
The position is made additionally clear by the fact that the UK tax authority, the Inland Revenue, does not allow expenditure on congestion charges as a tax-deductible business expense,[1] as it would if the charge could be regarded as a tax:
…motorists will not be able to claim the money [paid in congestion charges] back as a tax-deductible expense. The Revenue said that it would treat such charges in the same way as it looks at Underground and rail fares and parking fees, which are not seen as allowable business expenses.
But that’s not all. The congestion charge is self-evidently a form of road toll, as the previous quotation confirms. Not only do diplomats in (probably) all countries, certainly including the USA, pay road tolls without attempting to claim diplomatic immunity from them (partly no doubt because a diplomat trying to refuse to pay a road toll wouldn’t get to travel very far): the US Federal Department of Transport itself defines road tolls as user fees (as opposed to taxes):
a toll for the use of highway is considered a user fee since it is related to the specific use of a particular section of highway
US Embassy, please note.
The Americans’ and Germans’ assertion that the congestion charge is a tax, and not a charge levied for a specific service rendered (i.e. permission to use certain defined roads at specified times on a specified date), is simply unsustainable. The diplomats should grit their teeth and pay up (as they did, apparently, until the charge was increased!).
However, that’s not quite the end of the story. Failure to pay the basic charge results, after a certain length of time, in an increased penalty charge, eventually mounting to as much as £150:
Following a final check at midnight, the computer will keep the registration numbers of vehicles that should have paid but not done so. We will then manually check each recorded image and issue a Penalty Charge Notice of £100 to the registered keeper or hirer of all those vehicles. As with parking penalties, this will be reduced to £50 for prompt payment within 14 days. Failure to pay the penalty charge within 28 days will result in the penalty being increased to £150.
Once a penalty has increased to £150, a charge certificate will be sent to the registered keeper or hirer of the vehicle advising them of the increase and that action to recover the outstanding penalty will now be taken. As with parking penalties, failure to pay the outstanding charge can result in further action, including registration of the debt with the County Court and finally bailiffs being appointed to recover the debt.
The diplomat who has failed (or refused) to pay the initial charge is probably just as much under a legal obligation to pay the consequent penalty charge as he was to pay the basic charge in the first place, the penalty charge having the same legal character as the basic congestion charge. But enforcing it may be another matter:
Vehicles with three or more outstanding congestion charging penalty charges may be clamped or removed by staff operating across the whole of Greater London, not just in the congestion charging zone. The current clamp fee is £65 and the removal fee is £150. Storage in the car pound also costs £25 a day. If a vehicle is clamped or removed, then all of the outstanding penalty charges and the appropriate clamp/removal and storage fees must be paid before the release of the vehicle is authorised. If the release fee is not paid, then the vehicle may be disposed at auction or by scrapping. The registered keeper will remain liable for all outstanding charges, including a £60 disposal fee.
Here the question of the inviolability of the diplomat, and his immunity from the jurisdiction of the courts in the country where he is serving, comes into play. Under Articles 29-31 of the Convention, the diplomat cannot be arrested or detained, and his papers and (in almost all circumstances) his property enjoy similar inviolability. Article 22 also specifies that –
The premises of the mission, their furnishings and other property thereon and the means of transport of the mission shall be immune from search, requisition, attachment or execution.
The combined effect of these provisions seems to be that Transport for London would have no way of forcing an accredited diplomat to pay either the basic charge or accumulated penalty charges. Clamping or towing away the offending owner’s vehicle, scrapping or selling it, attempts to recover the debt through the County Court, or action by bailiffs to extract the money owed, would all contravene Britain’s obligations under the Vienna Convention. So is the free-loading diplomat sitting pretty as he ignores his obligation to pay charges which, under the same Convention, he is legally obliged to pay?
Once again, the short and long answers are both No. Under Article 41 of the Convention, –
Without prejudice to their privileges and immunities, it is the duty of all persons enjoying such privileges and immunities to respect the laws and regulations of the receiving State.
Transport for London, the London Mayor, and in particular the Foreign & Commonwealth Office in London have a genuine cause for complaint against an embassy or high commission (the title of the equivalent of an embassy of another Commonwealth country) if its diplomatic staff are consistently failing to respect British laws and regulations from whose operation they have no immunity under the Convention, as is undoubtedly the case with regard to non-payment of the congestion charge. The embassy’s administration officer, or some other member of its staff, perhaps the deputy Head of Mission, could expect to be summoned by the head of the relevant department in the FCO to receive a friendly but stern rebuke, with a formal request to ensure that his or her embassy’s staff are reminded of their obligations and instructed to pay whatever debts they have incurred. If this has no effect, in due course the ambassador or high commissioner himself would no doubt be summoned to the FCO to see a minister or, more likely, the permanent under-secretary of state, to receive a similar message, accompanied by an expression of regret that the earlier interview at lower level has not been acted upon.
Still no remedial action by the offending embassy? The FCO has three more weapons in its armoury, one a pea-shooter, the other two potential Weapons of Mass Destruction. The pea-shooter is a briefing of the UK media about the issue, including the naming and shaming of the offending embassies and high commissions for publication, accompanied by suitably scathing editorial comment, perhaps with a formal complaint to the embassy’s own government via a formal démarche to the country’s Foreign Ministry. The WMDs are, first, a formal request to the relevant ambassador to waive the immunity of the offenders in his mission from legal process so that court action may be taken against them to recover the debts due: and, secondly, if even that fails, the FCO may issue a warning to all embassies and high commissions that the FCO will henceforth keep a record of the personal identities of all individual diplomats who persistently fail to pay their congestion charges: and that any diplomat found to have committed this offence, say, three times will be required to leave. Three hits and you’re out.
Article 9 of the Convention contains the host country’s ultimate deterrent to bad behaviour:
The receiving State may at any time and without having to explain its decision, notify the sending State that the head of the mission or any member of the diplomatic staff of the mission is persona non grata or that any other member of the staff of the mission is not acceptable. In any such case, the sending State shall, as appropriate, either recall the person concerned or terminate his functions with the mission.
It will be surprising if this final sanction fails to work. Most foreign diplomats like being posted to London and are deeply reluctant to leave. On past occasions when there have been similar arguments over diplomats in London refusing to pay their parking fines, all stages of the escalating counter-measures described above have proved generally ineffective except the last. We may be pretty sure that this will do the trick.
One final postscript. Both the Foreign & Commonwealth Office and most of the heads of mission in London will want to avoid if possible allowing this issue to escalate into a full-blown row that might even sour otherwise good relations between friendly governments. Their instinct will be to search for a mutually face-saving compromise. One such might be a provision that embassies and high commissions should henceforth pay a reasonably modest annual charge, the exact amount varying according to the numbers of their diplomats involved, that would entitle their diplomatic staff to use their cars in the congestion charge zone without individually having to pay. Diplomats do, after all, have to move around in central London in the course of their duties, for example to visit the Foreign & Commonwealth Office and other embassies, and there may be security problems about their use of public transport, problems of a kind that would not apply to most other Londoners. I offer this possible solution, entirely free of charge, to the warring parties, à toutes fins utiles (as diplomatic toffs of the old school used to say). Pax vobiscum.
Well, not quite final. This disquisition has gone on, you may think, quite long enough. For some thoughts about the more general question of diplomatic privileges and immunities, their rationale and justification, if any, Watch This Space.
[1] But now see the Customs & Revenue document cited by Matt in his comment below.
Brian
The journalist (and a good friend) Stephen Grey has recommended a long but absorbing article in the New York Times magazine of 23 October 2005 by Dexter Filkins, The Fall of the Warrior King, about a group of American soldiers in Iraq. Filkins shuns knee-jerk condemnation while exposing terrible failures of foresight, planning, training, preparation, and imagination. This is compassionate and insightful writing that compels a tragic conclusion: the individual American soldiers, both officers and men, however brutally some of them may behave under extreme pressure, are themselves victims, almost as much as the Iraqis who suffer at their hands. All of them are victims of a disastrously misconceived policy that demands of them the performance of a task which is simply impossible, driving them relentlessly into ever greater excesses of rage and frustration — or, on occasion, to deeds and responses of courage and humanity.
We need a similar analysis of how the British soldiers in Iraq, coming from a very different military tradition and to some extent from a different military experience, are responding to much the same pressures and dilemmas. There is a fair amount of evidence, but so far as I know most of it is piecemeal and inconclusive.
Stephen Grey has performed a valuable service in drawing attention to this article. He himself is of course a journalist of great distinction, having by his own virtually unaided efforts uncovered the scandal of ‘rendition’, under which the CIA and, probably, other US agencies kidnap individuals suspected of involvement in terrorism and fly them clandestinely, and illegally, to interrogation centres outside the US where they can be subjected to the kind of treatment in the process of extracting information from them which would be illegal and a cause of outrage in any civilised country. Unfortunately Stephen’s website does less than justice to his own achievements, not apparently including his famous article of May 2004, ‘Bush’s Gulag’, nor the fact that Stephen won a prestigious award for it. Peter Wilby wrote in the New Statesman of 3 October:
Congratulations to Stephen Grey who, as announced elsewhere in this issue, has won an Amnesty International media award for his brilliant New Statesman cover story (published under my editorship last year) on "Bush’s Gulag". But I have a little axe to grind.
Grey’s piece was shortlisted on an earlier occasion by the Foreign Press Association (which represents foreign correspondents based in London) for another award. It was beaten into second place by the Sun’s Trevor Kavanagh, who reported the contents of the Hutton report shortly before its official publication. Kavanagh’s scoop has received at least two other prizes.
The plaudits lavished on Kavanagh speak volumes about the London-based media, and I was surprised that foreign journalists had been sucked into this self-referential world. Kavanagh told us something that would become freely available to the public a few hours later. Its premature publication changed nothing.
Grey’s story – about how the US was handing over terrorist suspects to regimes that used torture – followed months of unaided research. It exposed a practice that was secret and intended to remain so. The disclosure, eventually followed up by almost every serious newspaper and magazine in the world, may have saved the lives of some and the freedom of others.
The media awards industry, which grows every year, habitually ignores such achievement. It prefers one-day wonders, often of significance only to Westminster cognoscenti, and stories about trivial domestic scandals. In that, I am afraid, it reflects the priorities of the national press.
I hope Stephen will overcome his natural modesty and bring his website archive up to date with his more recent articles, the news of the Amnesty award, and the text of his Gulag article, which repays re-reading at regular intervals in order to keep the adrenalin flowing and the anger glands in full working order.
Brian
Notebook
By Sam Leith, Daily Telegraph, 17 October 2005:
For my own curiosity, I tried making a list of substances I’ve used that I shouldn’t have, and arrived at: speed, dope, acid, ecstasy, MDMA, ketamine, amyl nitrate, cocaine, nitrous oxide, magic mushrooms, temazepam, valium, salvia divinorum and khat. (Also, Rohypnol, though that was by accident. How did I know she was going to swap our drinks?)
This isn’t the pharmacopeia of a determined drug fiend. It’s pretty much what you’d expect from an average, middle-class drug tourist of my age and circumstances. I’ve never tried crack or heroin, and have done none of the others in great quantities.
And who is Sam Leith, I hear you ask?
SAM LEITH is 31 years old. Literary Editor of The Telegraph, he also contributes book reviews, snide gossip and other nonsense to The Spectator and Literary Review. He lives in Brixton with his brother and a cat called Henry. The cat regards him with suspicion.
I think I’m with the cat. Still, 10 out of 10 for candour. David Cameron, you listening?
Acknowledgements to Tim Worstall.
Brian
When Jane was sorting through some old photographs, she came across a wartime ‘forces airmail letter form’ from her father to his mother, and copied it out. At the time her father, Fred Cornwell, was somewhere in the Middle East. He had just been in action at the battle of El Alamein, which had ended on 4 November, barely a fortnight earlier, and was getting over diphtheria. It’s interesting that in the middle of war and battles and serious illness, he could still see this completely different world as a greengrocer with a stall in Brixton Market from which he went to fight in the 8th Army, and to which he returned after the war.
19 November 1942
6105756 Pte Cornwell F.
16 Platoon ‘D’ Coy
1/6 Queen’s Royal regiment
Middle East ForcesDear Mother,
Once more I am writing to you from the Convalescent Camp but I am certainly feeling a lot fitter than I did, in fact getting slowly back to normal again. The time is passing quicker now than it did because I do a few odd jobs now, so it helps to make you fitter again. I suppose the cold weather is well in now at home. It is still fairly warm here during the day, but cold, very cold in the mornings and during the night. We had about three days of rain over the week-end and it certainly does rain and the huts cannot keep it out altogether. I had a couple of airgraphs and three letters from Margaret [Fred's wife] yesterday, and by the dates there is a few more drifting about somewhere but I hope they catch me up in time. In fact they are pretty sure to, it only means waiting for them. The oranges are getting more plentiful now and we buy them, about halfpenny each, tangerines 2 for tuppence halfpenny. Potatoes are scarce here and I think they are worth about 1 and 6 a lb. in the towns, so I presume fruit is more profitable here than veg. The only veg we seem to get a lot of is pumpkin, and that is served to us every dinner time. Uncle Dodger had better send his pumpkins over here (he sometimes sells them doesn’t he?) I’m not stuck on them at all so I don’t have any. Hope to receive a few letters from you all at home, you may be sure they are welcome and looked forward to. The war news is more of a tonic now don’t you think. Well mother I must close now, remember me to all at home. Take care of yourself. God bless you.
Best of love,
Fred
The letter is beautifully written and easily legible even though in a sharply down-sized photocopy, the form in which it was received in Brixton, London SW9. Jane has similar letters to her own mother (Fred’s wife), and to herself (his daughter). Fred ended the war as a Sergeant, and was demobbed in April 1946, a year after the end of the war in Europe. After he got home he rarely spoke of his war-time experiences in the desert and in Palestine. He was a voracious reader.
Brian
Those who fervently support Turkey’s eventual admission to the European Union point to the major benefits for Turkey of being required to improve its civil rights performance and democratic credentials in order to qualify for EU membership. It’s also argued that Turkish membership will demonstrate to the world the EU’s inclusive and non-discriminatory character: the admission of a country with an almost wholly Muslim population of some 80 million by the time of its admission, making it the biggest or second biggest country in the EU, will certainly represent pretty convincing evidence that the EU is not, or is no longer, a neo-Christian conspiracy against Islam, as Turkey’s exclusion might just conceivably suggest.
These weighty arguments for Turkish membership surely prompt the question whether similar benefits might be obtained by inviting in one or two other countries, not hitherto regarded as likely candidates. The most obvious must be Iraq. If it is argued that Iraq is not in Europe, that’s easily answered: nor is most of Turkey. The United States, Britain and others have expended considerable blood and treasure in the effort to bring the benefits of democracy to Iraq, with so far somewhat limited success: how better to reinforce the momentum of democratic reform and the institution of civil rights in Iraq than to hold out the offer of EU membership once these changes have been made? True, it might not work: perhaps the obstacles to a democratic régime in fractured, war-torn, occupied Iraq are too great for even the lure of a seat at the EU table to overcome. 
But an EU offer seems, on the face of it, a more plausible proposition than the attempt to force democracy on Iraq at the point of a rocket-launcher, even if the rocket launcher is backed up by several thousand uniformed and heavily armed American and British (and some other) troops, with helicopter gunships and heavy bombers overhead to add to the persuasiveness of the argument. What’s more, eventual Iraqi membership would bring yet more valuable diversity and colour to the EU, with further evidence of EU inclusiveness and its enlightened and outward-looking world-view. Conversely, what does the continued exclusion of Iraq from the undoubted blessings of EU membership say about the Union?
My second proposal for further EU expansion is less obvious, and perhaps more controversial: why not Swaziland? The country is a monarchy, a system familiar to many Europeans; indeed, its current King enjoyed the benefits of an English public school education, at the same school (coincidentally) as that once attended by the present writer, so His Majesty may be assumed to feel some affinity already with English (or at any rate English public school) ways, thus easing the adjustment to EU values. The virtual breakdown of the nuclear family structure in many EU countries, and the prevalence of multiple sexual relationships among large groups in EU society, will also strike a familiar chord with many Swazis, whose head of state chooses at least one new and additional wife each year in a colourful ceremony that for all I know may well have its origins in the attempt to replicate the State Opening of Parliament, the Coronation, the Miss World contest, or Big Brother. The requirement to meet the EU’s exacting standards of democracy and human rights would do Swaziland no end of good, and Swazi membership, once achieved, would certainly add to EU diversity at least as much as Iraq’s, if not quite as much as Turkey’s.
King Mswati III of Swaziland >
The clincher, it seems to me, is that for the EU to persist in its current obstinate exclusion of Swaziland is bound to lay the Union open to the charge of racial discrimination, a charge potentially even more damaging than the parallel accusation of EU Islamophobia arising from any reluctance to admit Turkey — or Iraq.
Come on, you chaps in the EU Commission: what about it? Peter?
Brian
Those of us who have cursed at the waste of time and (our own) money involved in trying to telephone a UK company with an 0870 number, and finding ourselves listening to Vivaldi for half an hour while we wait for a human to answer us, will have been cheered to read an article in the Financial Times of 8/9 October 2005 [subscription needed for full text] by David Baker, who rightly likens this sly practice to "Sainsbury’s charging an entry fee". Not only is it impudent to make us pay to contact a company with whom we want to do business or to which we want to make a complaint: the system actually provides the company with a financial incentive to keep us waiting as long as possible before connecting us to a human, since the longer we are on the line to them, the greater the share of our money they receive. In my view the offence is hugely aggravated by the interruptions to that tinny Vivaldi every 30 seconds for recorded assurances that our custom is important to them, that our patience [what patience?] is appreciated, that the company is full of remorse for keeping us waiting, and that we shall ‘shortly’ be answered by one of their operatives. These meaningless messages are even more insulting than the initial routine involving seven, eight or nine rounds of instructions: press one if we want to tell the company chairman that he’s an incompetent jerk, press two if we want our money back, press three to complain about the length of time we have been kept waiting, and press four if we want to hear the list of options all over again. (It’s sometimes possible to short-circuit this exasperating minuet by simply refraining from pressing any numbers at all after being connected, pretending not to have a tone-dialling telephone: often this produces a human quite quickly.)
Mr Baker makes two excellent suggestions.
First, most of these rip-off merchants actually have an ordinary telephone number (costing no more than national rates, i.e. a good deal less than an 0870 number) for use by customers outside the UK, and if you can find out what it is, you can use it — and the human who eventually answers won’t know that you aren’t using the 0870 (or other rip-off) number. You won’t save a huge amount of money, but at least you’ll have the satisfaction of knowing that a slab of the cost of your call isn’t going to the company that you’re calling, so you are beating a nasty, avaricious system. Best of all, you can probably save prolonged research in multiple websites to find out an alternative national number by visiting just one invaluable website, "Say No to 0870", run by Daniel Blamire, where you can rapidly find alternative national numbers for a wide range of UK companies, and very often a free 0800 number too. There’s also provision on the website for those who have tracked them down themselves to add new cheaper or free alternative numbers to the database where they haven’t already been included.
Secondly, Mr Baker suggests that if you can’t get a cheaper or free number from www.saynoto0870.com, and if you can’t unearth one yourself, e.g. from the company’s website, –
…why not use some consumer power and find an alternative supplier instead?
Another irritant is the now widespread habit on the part of the more inefficient companies of keeping their e-mail addresses a closely guarded secret, so that the only way to contact them after a fruitless hour or two on the telephone is to navigate your way through interminable pages of the company’s website to a page from which you can send them a message — but only after you have filled in every personal detail about yourself from the colour of your eyes to your grandmother’s maiden name; and even after you have done all that and typed in your message, you’ll probably find that when you hit ‘submit’, all you’ll get is a message saying that this service — service! — is currently unavailable. Even if you do manage to transmit your message, you’re as likely as not to get an automated e-mail in reply saying that it’s not possible to reply to individual messages, but the company will certainly give its undivided attention to what you have said . And you’ll be warned not to attempt to reply to the e-mail. The company is to all intents and purposes incommunicado. Not hard to guess why, either.
It’s depressing that so many of our household name private sector companies are not only hopelessly incompetent, but so greedy and so contemptuous of their customers into the bargain. So it’s good to know that Mr Blamire’s ‘No to 0870′ website permits us all occasionally to make a tiny, largely futile, but enjoyable gesture of defiance. Other bloggers, please copy!
Brian
