Quote of the week
“I always hire people who absolutely want my job. Not just in a ‘that would be nice to have her job’ way but in an absolute ‘I can do better than her’ attitude.”
Rebekah Brooks, while still CEO of News International
The MIFFs – a whole new kind of country?
There’s a good piece (here) in the Economist on a whole new kind of country – the MIFFs (middle-income, failed or fragile states) picking up on a Global Dashboard blog last week (here).
Who are the MIFFs?
Home to 17% of the world’s poor and 40% of the world’s conflict they include a whole range of countries (see below) who are fragile and no longer so poor.
UN Security Council “pathetic” on climate change – US Ambassador
US Ambassador to the UN Susan Rice, speaking in a Security Council session on climate change that took place yesterday:
In this Council we have discussed many emerging security issues and addressed them, from the links between development and security to HIV-AIDS. Yet this week, we have been unable to reach consensus on even a simple Presidential Statement that climate change has the potential to impact peace and security in the face of the manifest evidence that it does.
We have dozens of countries in this body and in this very room whose very existence is threatened. They’ve asked this Council to demonstrate our understanding that their security is profoundly threatened. Instead, because of the refusal of a few to accept our responsibility, this Council is saying, by its silence, in effect, “Tough luck.” This is more than disappointing. It’s pathetic. It’s shortsighted, and frankly it’s a dereliction of duty.
The Security Council session was an agenda of the German government, which holds the Council presidency this month. The Germans’ hope was that they would manage to get a faily robust ‘Presidential Statement’ (a bit like a Resolution, but not binding) out of the session, but thanks to Chinese and Russian opposition, only a very watered down version proved possible. See David Bosco’s take on the debate on ForeignPolicy.com here; the text of the Presidential Statement is here.
Andy Coulson’s security clearance
Media attention is focusing this morning on the question of why Andy Coulson didn’t go through “Developed Vetting” security clearance – an in-depth background check process that involves detailed interviews not just with the applicant, but with their friends and family as well, and that might in Coulson’s case have been expected to look at the whole issue of what he knew about phone hacking.
A Number 10 spokesman is quoted by the Guardian this morning as saying,
“He had ‘security check’ level of security clearance which most officials in No 10 and most special advisers would be subject to,” a spokesman said. “The only people who will be subject to developed vetting are those who are working in security matters regularly and would need to have that sort of information. The only special advisers that would have developed vetting would be in the Foreign Office, Ministry of Defence and maybe the Home Office.”
Which struck me as an odd statement – because I went through Developed Vetting as soon as I arrived at the Department for International Development when I became a special adviser there in 2003. The spokesman continues:
“Andy Coulson’s role was different to Alastair Campbell’s and Jonathan Powell. Alastair Campbell could instruct civil servants. This is why [Coulson] wasn’t necessarily cleared. Given [the nature of] Andy Coulson’s role as more strategic he wouldn’t have neccesarily have been subject to developed vetting.”
And I certainly didn’t have the capacity to instruct civil servants, so that’s clearly not it either (and in any case, why would you need DV clearance to manage civil servants? It makes no sense!)
Part of the point here is that having Developed Vetting clearance – and hence permission to see Secret and Top Secret material – is not just about intelligence material from GCHQ and the Secret Intelligence Service. It’s also, more broadly, about sensitive foreign policy discussions at PM level.
When I worked in government, material issuing from 10 Downing Street – minutes of the Prime Minister’s video-conferences with the President of the US, for example – would frequently be classified as Secret. (Which would be why, as Jonathan Powell notes in the Guardian piece, all press officers were DV cleared during his time at No 10.)
So if Andy Coulson didn’t have DV clearance, then – at least on the basis of how things worked when I was at DFID – presumably he couldn’t be part of such conversations.
In other words, the No 10 communications director must have had to leave the room when David Cameron and Barack Obama were discussing Afghanistan, for example – which does seem extremely anomalous (and I wonder whether that’s actually how it worked…).
Resource Scarcity, Fair Shares and Development
Why resource scarcity will be a game changer for global justice agendas, and what aid donors, NGOs and other development opinion formers need to do about it. WWF / Oxfam report by Alex Evans. (July 2011 – see also this speech given at the launch event)