Bagehot's notebook

MY PRINT column this week is based on reporting visits I recently made to an inner London secondary school. I found the experience hugely encouraging. It's a great school, in a tough neighbourhood. That begs the next question. If it can be done here, why can't it be done everywhere? I don't pretend to have all the answers, but offer this as a snapshot of one successful school, doing a lot of things right.

Here's the column:

DANIEL RILEY, a young trainee teacher from west London, attended a school so bad that it was shut down while he was there. It was, he recalls with commendable understatement, an “unstructured” place. Fewer than 20% of pupils achieved five good GCSE passes, including mathematics and English (the main benchmark for secondary students, involving exams commonly taken at 16). There were fights. Some, involving knives, ended with arrests. There were drugs—the school drew its pupils from tough housing estates, and gangs prowled at the gates. The teaching was “not inspired,” Mr Riley says, sticking with the understatement. He recalls lessons spent copying texts from books.

As happened to a few dozen failing institutions under the previous Labour government, Mr Riley’s school was turned into an academy—a state school removed from local council control and given new freedoms over staffing and teaching methods. Six years on, Paddington Academy draws its pupils from the same estates. But the school is unrecognisable.

Last summer 69% of pupils met the benchmark for good GCSEs, easily beating the national average. More than half come from homes poor enough to earn free school meals and more than three-quarters do not speak English as a first language, making its intake exceptionally “challenging”, in Whitehall jargon.

Now when Mr Riley meets teenage students they seek advice about university. His dream is to return to Paddington Academy to teach full-time. It is easy to see why. The school is a success, recently earning an “Outstanding” grade from Ofsted school inspectors. It is, more subjectively, an impressive place. It feels calm and academically ambitious. It hums with optimism.

The Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition has put great faith in school autonomy: there are now 1,500 academies in England. A single column cannot pretend to prove that faith right or wrong. Bagehot spent time at Paddington last month with a more modest goal, to look at one successful school and try to discern what makes it different. Two big lessons jumped out.

First, Paddington is built around remarkable people. An unusually high proportion of staff come from Teach First, a programme that sends highly-qualified graduates into challenging schools for at least two years. Staff stay late for homework clubs that run until ten at night (many pupils come from crowded homes) and volunteer for weekend workshops. A teacher guiding 15-year-olds through a thoughtful debate on British manufacturing was a Treasury economist before switching career. His economics GCSE class is an experiment, part of a policy of promoting more academic subjects. Maths is the most popular subject for the oldest, sixth-form pupils, followed by sciences. Create an expectation that students can take hard subjects, and they will demand them, the teacher says. Thanks to pupil lobbying, the school now offers the astronomy GCSE.

The students’ families—from Africa, Bangladesh, Iraq, Kosovo and the Caribbean in the main—are remarkable, too. Many went through “trials and tribulations” to reach Britain, explains a 15-year-old girl who plans to be a doctor, so “we like a challenge”.

Second, Paddington uses distinctive methods. A motto is: “the street stops at the gates”. There is a strict uniform code, and pupils must remove hooded tops and caps as they arrive. Pupils are educated for the professional world, says a teacher: if they call a boss “Bruv”, value judgments will be made about them. Pupils agree. Using street slang would be an easy option in school, says a teenage boy. Alas, the world “out there” will not be easy.

Competition is embraced. Pupils are ranked on progress against individual targets every six weeks, with results posted publicly on a board. A difficult home life triggers support but not excuses. Some pupils arrive speaking no English: they are offered up to four years’ specialist help, but expectations are not lowered.

Staff enforce the small details of behaviour ceaselessly, with meaningful looks, a warning finger briefly held up, or a word of praise every few seconds. The goal is not Gradgrindian discipline, but the avoidance of bigger confrontations. Good deeds are consistently rewarded, lapses always have consequences. Pupils’ blazer lapels sag with enamel badges for choir, language-learning, mentoring younger pupils and so on. When the school gained its “Outstanding” grade, pupils were crestfallen to hear that this did not bring a badge. The school’s excellent and tireless principal, Oli Tomlinson, finally had “Outstanding” badges made in blue and gold enamel, bearing the Ofsted logo.

No excuses, no barriers

A common charge from academy critics—notably teachers’ unions—is that they practise selection on the sly by excluding difficult pupils. Early on, Paddington did expel some pupils from the old school, but now takes hard cases itself. At a morning meeting, staff discussed the progress of a new pupil rejected by all neighbouring schools: it went well, they agreed, considering it was his first day out of prison. Yet students feel safe. It’s better than primary school here, says a 12 year old: “People respect you.”

Paddington Academy is a brilliant school. That is great for its 1,200 pupils. But for others to benefit, Paddington’s strengths—its remarkable people and methods—must be echoed elsewhere. Methods can be copied. It helps that Paddington is part of a chain of academies sponsored by a charity, the United Learning Trust, driving the spread of good ideas. It also helps that school league tables are being beefed up with much more data, making Paddington’s success more visible. Remarkable people are harder to reproduce. Yet Paddington’s dynamic young teachers talk of their luck at working at a school which transforms lives. Mr Riley, fresh from university, longs to join them. The country needs more Mr Rileys. Schools as inspiring as Paddington are a good first step.

TO his slight surprise Bagehot was recently asked to review all the new biographies of Queen Elizabeth II being published to mark 2012, her 60th year on the throne. It was a bit like asking an agnostic to be Vatican correspondent, but five books, 1500 pages and a lot of corgi anecdotes later, I finally surfaced. At moments it felt a bit like eating a banquet entirely consisting of cakes and pudding, with Turkish delight to finish. But in amongst the cloying fluff there were some good stories. It was striking to be reminded how shabby and poor war-broken Britain was (there were nice details about peers of the realm at the queen's coronation in 1953, assured that they could substitute rabbit fur for ermine and told they could hide sandwiches in their coronets).

I think my favourite anecdote involved John Prescott, a curmudgeonly lefty who served as deputy prime minister to Tony Blair. Early on in the era of New Labour, it is claimed, Mr Prescott was due at a palace reception to meet his sovereign. Among his Labour colleagues there was much speculation as to whether he would bow to the queen or defy what he surely considered the snobbish, southern tomfoolery of court etiquette. The moment arrived, the pair were introduced, and the queen politely greeted her deputy prime minister... in a suddenly tiny voice. Straining to hear, Mr Prescott bent down. Oh, so John's bowed then, murmured his colleagues. He's Lord Prescott now, so he clearly got over it.

Here's the review, published in this week's print edition:

BEING on show is a serious business for Queen Elizabeth II who acceded to the throne 60 years ago next month. On royal tours and walkabouts, she is careful to choose bright colours and small-brimmed hats, glides through crowds “like a liner” and seemingly never tires. “Oh look! She’s keeled over again,” the queen once noted at a stifling-hot palace reception, spotting her then prime minister, Margaret Thatcher, pale and slumped in a chair.

On several occasions she has been urged to retreat behind more obtrusive layers of security. Each time she has refused with something between a joke and a motto for her six decades on the throne, telling aides: “I have to be seen to be believed.”

Yet for the 85-year-old monarch, pictured above with Prince Charles shortly before her coronation, belief requires distance, too. Younger generations of royals have kissed and told. But the queen has never given an interview. Though some of her 12 British prime ministers were convinced they forged a special bond during weekly audiences with their sovereign, her personal politics remain unknown.

Over the years, various aristocrats, cousins and horse-racing grandees have been more or less plausibly identified as her friends. Even among such intimates, boundaries are observed, for fear of crossing an unseen line and triggering a stare of blank, silent rebuke. “She is never—you know—not the Queen,” advises an unnamed friend, quoted in the opening lines of a new biography by the BBC’s senior political interviewer, Andrew Marr.

Yet as a constitutional monarch, ruling with the tacit consent of the majority, she is not the only judge of the trade-off between necessary display and indispensable discretion. The public have a say as well. Some of the queen’s closest brushes with disaster have involved a lack of visibility, most painfully in 1997 when she remained in Scotland with the royal family after the death of Diana, Princess of Wales. She only returned to London after pleas from her new, young prime minister, Tony Blair (and lynch-mob demands to “Show Us You Care” from the tabloids).

The double nature of the queen—an unusually private woman with extraordinary public duties—poses a test for all who try to write about her. Including Mr Marr’s book, five new biographies have been prepared for 2012, the queen’s diamond jubilee year. The authors boast of watching the queen at work, interviewing officials from the royal household and of trawling through archives. They quote family members, friends and people with a claim to know the queen.

In the process, all five biographers wrestle with the question neatly framed by their subject herself: if to see the queen is to believe in her, what vantage point allows the most authentic experience of faith? Which queen is the most “real”, the private woman or the public figure? Each offers a different answer.

Two of the authors, Sarah Bradford and Robert Lacey, are veteran royal historians, whose 2012 biographies draw on previously published work. With the frankness of an old pro, at one point Ms Bradford names different schools of royal-watching. There is the “work of the Queen” genre, as pioneered by the 1969 television film “Royal Family”, which showed the monarch working through boxes of state papers, preparing state visits or relaxing with her family. Alas, she explains, once the public had seen inside royal drawing rooms, they soon wanted to peer into the bedroom. Thus arose the “royal soap opera” genre. Ms Bradford takes readers on a brisk, assured canter through the familiar landmarks of both genres, adding a dose of history as she goes. Mr Lacey, who has been writing about the queen for nearly 40 years, advertises his slim volume as a “pleasant afternoon’s reading”, which it is not. At once knowledgeable and jaundiced, Mr Lacey seems slightly sick of his royal subjects, as do the unnamed courtiers and insiders whom he quotes.

Robert Hardman, a royal correspondent for the Daily Mail, offers a convincing tour of the British monarchy as an institution, apeing the vantage point of the fly-on-the-wall documentary. His access produces an interview with Prince William and several lesser scoops—a rarity in the world of royal biography, in which the same anecdotes turn up in each book. But access has its limitations. The young prince is more loyal than revelatory about his grandmother, explaining that her “gravitas” awes even her family, that she offers good advice and was “so excited” by her 2011 state visit to Ireland. Some lesser sources appear to be quoted largely to thank them for their time.

Sally Bedell Smith, an American author of books about Pamela Harriman, Princess Diana, Bill Paley and others, offers her readers the illusion of knowing the queen as a friend. Ms Bedell Smith brightly describes her own brief chats with the monarch at a Washington garden party and a London reception, before sprinkling her account with minute indiscretions from other people who have met her. The elder President Bush reveals that Elizabeth II is “rather formal” but not “standoffish”. A witness describes how a puppy defecated in front of the queen during a visit to a Kentucky horse-breeder, breaking the ice. Nancy Reagan recalls a breakfast with the queen, Prince Philip and Prince Charles at Windsor Castle; she was surprised that everyone poured their own cereal from the box. It is reported that the queen likes a travel rug round her knees and used to wear a hard hat when watching stallions cover her mares (now she stands on a viewing platform, after health and safety advice). This footling stuff is only of any interest because it is about the queen. But—fatally—those same domestic details have nothing to do with why Elizabeth II, as queen, is interesting.

Mr Marr, a former political editor of the BBC and author of some shrewd books on modern Britain, sets himself a more ambitious task: to explain what the queen’s role and position tell us about her subjects. It is an admiring portrait, of an unfashionably dutiful monarch who in her weekly audiences offers prime ministers what he calls “a kind of higher therapy”—a chance to share anxieties or explanations which will never leak, with someone who has read almost every state secret of the past 60 years (and so has heard worse before). He describes the queen and her strong sense of vocation, as a monarch “God-called” to give her life to her people as a sacrifice. Only by understanding that calling, he writes, can the queen be understood.

In perhaps a claim too far, Mr Marr emphasises the comfort offered by the queen as a symbol of the continuing British state. By representing those who did not vote for the current government or did not vote at all, she strengthens democracy, he suggests. It is a clever thought, but may overstate the degree to which most Britons suffer from constitutional angst.

But a symbol she certainly is. And in modern Britain—a restless, exhibitionist place—Mr Marr’s Queen Elizabeth stands out for her discretion, and for understanding that symbols are “better off keeping mostly quiet”. There is a lesson there for her heir, the Prince of Wales, Mr Marr suggests sharply.

Mr Marr palpably likes the queen, whether for touring the country to greet and thank people mostly ignored by “London power brokers”, or for relaxing when her work is done with “a glass of something cheerful”. Yet liking is not really the point. In Mr Marr’s words, there is only a little space, though “an interesting space”, between the queen and the woman who lives her life. Her calling gives her meaning. She “is what she does”.

Mr Marr’s sober conclusion feels right. To adapt the queen’s one-liner: for all that the spectacle and unattainable glamour of royalty still fascinates (and helps sell books), for Britain’s jubilee monarch the show is a means to an end. Being seen is about being believed.

MY RECENT interview with Alex Salmond, the leader of Scotland's pro-independence party and head of the Scottish government, forms the basis of this week's print column. Here it is:

ALEX SALMOND, leader of Scotland’s pro-independence party and first minister of the Scottish government, has a revelation to share. Over the years, he confides, there has been a tendency among some people in Scotland to blame things that go wrong on the English. He adopts a sorrowful air, as if pondering—for the very first time—man’s capacity for grievance.

Happily, Mr Salmond has a plan. He intends to hold a referendum on Scottish independence in the autumn of 2014. Grant his homeland its independence from the United Kingdom, he says, and the honest folk of Scotland will be friends with the “plain people of England”. Flanked by a pair of large Scottish Saltire flags, he quotes the homespun wisdom of a childhood family friend, predicting that, after independence, England will lose a “surly lodger” and gain a “good neighbour”.

Mr Salmond calls himself the most Anglophile figure in Scottish politics. He has “great faith” that the English people can craft a modern new identity without the “appendage” of Britain. In a public lecture in London on January 24th, he plans to argue that the example of an independent Scotland will “reinvigorate” England, and old English traditions of radicalism.

Alas, there are a couple of reasons sharply to distrust Mr Salmond’s vision of the Scots and English shaking hands over the corpse of Great Britain. One involves breathtaking political hypocrisy. A more serious problem centres on Mr Salmond’s oddly old-fashioned understanding of identity in modern England.

Start with hypocrisy. For Mr Salmond to act dismayed by anti-English grumbling requires a degree of political chutzpah bordering on performance art. He is the man who once accused Margaret Thatcher of imposing a “government of occupation” on Scots, and referred to the British government’s taxation of oil revenues from Scottish waters as probably “the greatest act of international larceny since the Spanish stole the Inca gold”.

As first minister, he has shown a genius for stoking cross-border resentments. There was indignation in England this month when he declared that—after Scottish independence—the British government should be liable for the bailed-out Royal Bank of Scotland and its vast debts (London officials failed to regulate the banks, sniffed the first minister). North of the border, Mr Salmond is portraying a legal wrangle with the British government over how to hold his referendum as a conspiracy by “Westminster politicians” to keep Scotland’s mineral resources.

Defences can be mounted for Mr Salmond. He is an elected politician, opportunism is what politicians do. Mr Salmond is no bigot. He says, with feeling, that modern Scottish identity is open to all: Pakistani Scots are as Scottish as any other.

Where Mr Salmond needs challenging, urgently, is over his vision for Britain. There he is out of date, and capable of wreaking real harm. Since his days as a gadfly member of the House of Commons in the 1980s, Mr Salmond has portrayed the British state as a relic, calling it “fundamentally unattractive” and sunk in xenophobic decline. As late as 1999, according to his biographer David Torrance, Mr Salmond told the BBC that Britishness had been claimed as an identity by thugs and racists, while Englishness was an “aristocratic, almost medieval concept”.

Follow that line, and independence sounds like a progressive act to promote friendship between the yeomen of England and the brave hearts of Scotland, liberating two ancient cultures from the moth-eaten baggage of imperialist, embittered Britishness.

But Britishness has evolved. Two decades ago, it was a complacent default identity, with many English using Britain when they meant England. Now, it is becoming a consciously-chosen layer of identity, especially among immigrants, from British Muslims to black Britons and beyond.

Englishness is the subject of a tussle. To some, it carries nastily tribal, exclusive overtones. Racists want to appropriate the English flag of St George, as they appropriated the Union flag for a time, decades ago. Their adversaries, like the left-wing singer Billy Bragg, are as enthusiastic as Mr Salmond about England’s radical tradition. In between those two poles, there is evidence suggesting a link between the rise of Englishness and feelings of being ill-served by the status quo. YouGov, a pollster, recently compared voters who called themselves English with those who identified as British. Those feeling “English” were more likely to want to leave the European Union, by a margin of 58% to 37%. New research by IPPR, a think-tank, shows Englishness rising in popularity, alongside a growing sense that the English are not fairly represented in the British Parliament.

Not only British, but also

Painfully for Mr Salmond, who professes to love the EU and loathe the Tory party, his strongest sympathisers in the House of Commons are English Conservative MPs on the Eurosceptic right. Many are tempted to wave goodbye to a Scotland they see as a “subsidised People’s Republic”, says a Conservative MP from the 2010 intake. The move would have the happy side-effect of depriving Labour of scores of seats. The traditional Tory attachment to the union no longer stirs the grassroots, says the MP, who during his hunt for a seat earned his loudest cheer by asking why the English could not declare independence from Scotland.

Mr Salmond rejects such talk. Tory right-wingers do not mean what they say, he snaps: “They want to hold Scotland fast.”

The SNP leader has a right to argue for Scottish independence. But to make that case, he is seeking to make the English into foreigners, and deny millions of hyphenated Britons, from Anglo-Scots to black British, the country in which they feel at home, Britain. That is not a progressive act, nor a modern one. Warm words about friendship between neighbours cannot excuse it.

BANG on cue, after a week of calls for the Scottish people to be given their say on the future of the United Kingdom, come the calls for the English to be given their say, too. These calls to heed the will of England divide into a couple of categories.

First, assertions that if the Scottish minority are to be offered a referendum, it is glaringly obvious that the English majority (with 85% of the population) must have one as well. The Daily Mail seems especially keen on this argument, giving it both barrels with a blast from Simon Heffer "Hang on, Mr Salmond. The English MUST have a say on Scotland's future too...", and one from Melanie Phillips:

England is fed up to the back teeth with the Scots pocketing a whacking subsidy from Westminster while constantly — and offensively — whingeing about England. And if Scotland has a referendum on its independence, then, in any just universe, the rest of the UK must vote on the proposal, too. For while those five million Scots may argue that they have the right to decide how they are governed, they do not have the right to break up the United Kingdom regardless of the wishes of the remaining 55 million of its citizens

Second, assertions that it is time to bite the bullet, stop pussy-footing around and end the anomaly that Scottish, Welsh and Northern Irish members of the British parliament at Westminster can vote on laws affecting English schools, hospitals or roads, though—post-devolution—English MPs have no say over these matters in Scotland, Wales or Northern Ireland. Biting the bullet, it is suggested, involves either the creation of a new English parliament, or legislating so that only English MPs have a say over English laws.

Lots of English voters are receptive to such arguments.

New research for the IPPR think tank shows that 79% of English voters want Scottish MPs excluded from votes on English-only laws. In a poll published at the weekend by the Sunday Telegraph, ICM found 49% of its English respondents wanted an English parliament, with similar powers to those enjoyed by the Scottish parliament in Edinburgh (with the proportion rising to 58% among those aged over 65). English voters were also slightly keener on Scottish independence than Scottish voters, the same poll showed (though once the margin of error is taken into account, the result was more of a dead heat).

But at the risk of being difficult, giving the English their say is not quite as simple as all that.

First, those demands for English voters to be consulted on Scottish independence, as well as Scots. What would happen if the Scots voted yes to independence, in a formal referendum but the English then voted no? Would the English prevent the Scots from leaving? If so, how? Would English police be sent north to quell street protests? Would gunboats be sent up the Forth?

Next, those calls for English laws to be decided by English MPs. This is a seductively fair-sounding solution, and indeed was included in the Conservative Party manifesto for the 2010 general election. It is, in effect, a solution to a constitutional conundrum known to Westminster wonks as the West Lothian question, after the constituency of the Scottish Labour MP who first raised it, decades ago.

The Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition is about to unveil a committee packed with worthy sorts to ponder the West Lothian question, and impatient English patriots are already grumbling about an important issue being kicked into the long grass.

But if the West Lothian question has been unresolved for decades, there is a reason. In his recent book "The Coalition and the Constitution", Vernon Bogdanor, a constitutional sage (and former tutor at Oxford to one David Cameron), outlined a heffalump trap lurking in those calls for "English votes for English laws."

The first is that, in recent general elections, the Conservatives have won a majority of seats in England or something close to one, but failed to win a majority in the United Kingdom as a whole. In 2010, the Tories won just a single seat in Scotland (giving rise to the current Edinburgh gibe that, thanks to two recent arrivals at Edinburgh Zoo, there are now more pandas that Conservative MPs in Scotland).

Now, says Professor Bogdanor, imagine a system of "English votes for English laws" operating in such a parliament, where there is a majority of the right in England, but a majority of the left for the whole United Kingdom. In such circumstances, government would risk being bifurcated. As the professor puts it:

There would, therefore, be one government for English domestic affairs such as education and health, and another government for UK-wide matters, such as economic policy, social security, foreign affairs and defence

None of this is to say that the West Lothian question (or the broader problem of growing English resentment about devolution) can or should be dismissed as silly.

Indeed, as Professor Bogdanor notes, but for an accident of electoral arithmetic in 2010, that simmering resentment could have already exploded into very serious tensions already. After the May 2010 elections ended without any party commanding an overall majority, there were efforts by some in the Labour leadership to cobble together a rainbow coalition of Labour, the Lib Dems and a bunch of small, mostly nationalist parties. These efforts foundered because a Conservative-Lib Dem coalition, though seemingly an outlandish idea at first, enjoyed a much more stable majority.

But, says the professor, supposing talks between the Tories and Lib Dems had failed, and a rainbow coalition of the left had come into being. Between them, he notes, Labour and the Lib Dems have just 234 seats in the House of Commons, as compared with 298 seats for the Conservatives. That means that a government coalition of the left would only have been able to secure its legislation by whipping non-English MPs through their division lobbies, night after night. Coalition MPs from outside England would have been imposing their will on England.

Given the fact that coalition governments are already a novelty in Britain, it is entirely possible, the professor suggests, that such a coalition of the left would have been seen as "illegitimate" by English voters.

As for creating an English parliament, it is arguably a neater solution, but hardly a small (or cheap) step. The country would then have an English parliament, a Scottish parliament, a Welsh assembly, a Northern Irish assembly and a British parliament for everything still decided at national level, such as foreign policy and defence.

I have lived in a country like that for five years: it's called Belgium, a kingdom blessed with six parliaments and six governments. And all those debating chambers, mini-ministers, federal ministers and hangers-on do not come cheap. Given the current British mood of lynch-mob fury towards politicians, I wonder if creating more of the rascals is really what voters have in mind.

BAGEHOT is in Edinburgh. Yesterday afternoon I interviewed Alex Salmond, first minister of the devolved Scottish government and generator of a hundred headlines this week, as the man who wants to break up Britain.

My report for the newspaper is here. With apologies for a very long post, I thought some readers of this blog might like a fuller account of what the first minister said.

Mr Salmond, who led his pro-independence Scottish National Party to a thumping victory in the 2011 Scottish elections, is preceded by quite a reputation nowadays.

"The most talented politician in the British Isles," I was told by an academic, as I made some last-minute calls about the implications of Mr Salmond's declaration, earlier this week, that Scotland would hold a vote on independence in 2014. "A brilliant demagogue...slippery... a total opportunist," one of his political rivals assured me. Over coffee in London last week, a senior Labour politician urged me, with surprising passion, not to suspend my critical faculties when meeting Mr Salmond. Don't be lulled into thinking you are in a foreign country, and so cannot understand what he is up to. Ask him your toughest questions, urged the Labour grandee.

I met the first minister at his official residence, Bute House, an Adam mansion in Edinburgh's New Town. It was my first time inside, and—perhaps appropriately—the setting felt at once foreign and familiar. Charlotte Square, on which Bute House sits, strongly reminded me of Dublin. Inside, however, the look is of 10 Downing Street redux, down to the smartly-uniformed officers opening the glossy black front door, the slightly austere Georgian hall and the stern portraits of previous first ministers marching up the main staircase.

And Mr Salmond? A panda-like figure, round of form and face, he bustled into the room flanked by aides and his chief economic adviser. He seemed charming, combative, self-deprecating and swelled with pride, all at the same time. And that was just the first minute. He had just come from opening a new headquarters for Barclays Wealth and been mobbed by television crews, he joked. Had something just happened?

In his day, Mr Salmond has had some pretty harsh things to say about the British state and its economic treatment of Scotland. A fierce left-winger in his youth, before a more recent conversion to talk of Nordic, business-friendly social democracy, he once called the use of North Sea oil revenues by the British government "probably the greatest act of international larceny since the Spanish stole the Inca gold". He referred to Margaret Thatcher's Conservative administration in Westminster as a "government of occupation", on the grounds that Scots voted by a large majority against the Tories, and Mrs Thatcher in particular.

The British state is "fundamentally unattractive", he declared in 1988, when he was an effective gadfly in the House of Commons in London. Britain, he said, was unpleasant in its views towards foreigners and depressing in terms of the breakdown of social cohesion. As an idea, Britain was "declining and out of date".

Now, as head of a devolved Scottish government, hosting The Economist in his Georgian drawing room (open fire, elegant sofas, fine plasterwork) he was on his most conciliatory form. Once Scotland gained its independence, its ancient friendship with the English would be "re-invigorated", he declared. Quoting a boyhood friend of his family from Linlinthgow, the town of his birth, he said that Scotland yearned to be a good neighbour, not a surly tenant. For too long, he sorrowed, a number of Scots had blamed everything that went wrong on perfidious Albion, in something of a culture of grievance. Surly, he said again, as if pondering the term. That is a good way of putting it.

Well hang on, I asked. What about him? What about the widespread charge that he specialises in policies designed to provoke grievances on both sides of the border? Take his policy of offering free university tuition to Scottish and European students, while charging English, Welsh and Northern Irish students thousands of pounds in fees. What about his recent demand for extra money for Scotland, to compensate his people for spending on the Olympics in London? His political opponents are convinced that his plan is to boost Scottish pride north of the border while provoking English rage south of it, I noted. He earnestly denied it, shaking his large head at the extraordinary nature of the charge.

With a referendum behind him, the government in London would find him a very reasonable negotiator, he said, with few red lines. Asked about sensitive issues, from Scotland's future currency to the fate of Britain's nuclear deterrent (currently based in Scotland), he combined soothing, friendly noises with a continuous, relentless flow of facts, figures and debating points. It felt a bit like interviewing a teddy bear driving a bulldozer. The tone was sweet reason itself. But there was no stopping him.

Mr Salmond had prepared a great slew of facts and figures, setting out why Scotland was in better economic shape than the wider United Kingdom. His government's chief economist sat on a sofa nearby, to provide further detail if needed. Mr Salmond was keen to share this good news. He argued that, if you include revenues from North Sea oil and gas, Scotland ran a current budget surplus in four of the last five years while the United Kingdom was in deficit each and every of those years. Include a geographical share of oil, goes another of his statistics, and Scotland's population share of UK net debt in 2009-10 is 46.3%, compared to 52.9% of GDP for the whole of the UK.

I fear I did not pursue these numbers very far. This appeared to disappoint Mr Salmond's entourage, who ended up just giving me all their figures afterwards in a briefing note. The chief economist slipped from the room, halfway through the interview.

The thing is, all the claims and counter-claims about whether Britain subsidises Scotland or vice versa are essentially questions of politics, not economics. Mr Salmond says 90% of North Sea oil and gas revenues belong to Scotland, relying on one interpretation of the maritime border that suits him. His opponents say that England has a claim to between a quarter and a third of the North Sea oil and gas fields, relying on different maps.

The Liberal Democrat cabinet minister for Scotland in the British government, Michael Moore, last year produced tables that are every bit as stern and important-looking as Mr Salmond's. But these show different deficit and surplus numbers for the same period. Mr Moore argues that Scotland has run deficits for years, even if North Sea revenues are counted. Indeed, he says: "If you had allocated every single penny of oil and gas revenues to Scotland over the past 30 years - a figure of £156 billion - then you would still fall £41 billion short of what both governments have actually invested in Scotland."

Still the numbers come. Mr Salmond told Channel 4 News last night that Scotland would take 8% of Britain's national debt, in line with its share of the wider British population, but would not take on any of the bad debts associated with the failed Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS), the Edinburgh-based bank which at one point grew to 250 times the size of the Scottish economy (with Mr Salmond enthusiastically egging RBS on in its disastrous plan to buy ABN-Amro, the Dutch bank). The British Treasury collected tax revenues from RBS and failed to regulate it properly, Mr Salmond explained, prompting Channel 4 News to headline its report "Salmond: you keep Scots bank debt, we'll keep the oil money".

Talk to English Tory MPs in London, and they grumble loudly about Scotland being subsidised to the hilt by Britain. In Stirling, on my way to visit the site of the Battle of Bannockburn yesterday morning, a local ranted at me that Scotland was sick of paying for Britain, and should seek its independence, just like Ireland and, um, Wales.

Whose numbers are right? I have no idea.

The bottom line, surely, is that an independent Scotland's future solvency cannot be separated from the negotiations that would follow a referendum vote for a split. Some broad arguments can be made about the merits of being a small country with a large banking sector, but when it comes to divvying up public debts, pensions liabilities, gold reserves and the like, everything would be up for grabs.

That being so, I decided to spend my hour with the first minister trying to pin him down on his political plans for that fight. I had only partial success, but did come away with a few, tentative observations about Mr Salmond.

1. Though he has devoted his life to Scottish politics (unlike the big beasts of the Scottish Labour Party, who still mostly flee to London to try their luck on the British national stage), Mr Salmond is strikingly keen to measure himself against other front-rank British politicians.

He talked, a lot, about George Osborne, the chancellor of the exchequer and chief electoral strategist of the Conservative Party, who is reportedly leading the tactical charge against Mr Salmond's referendum. Sometimes, this was to attack Mr Osborne as a foreign Tory interfering in Scottish politics. At other times, he boasted that "my old friend Mr Osborne" is "rather impressed" with policy innovations dreamed up by the Scottish government, such as the Scottish Futures Trust, (a clever wheeze for paying for public works). Mr Salmond is "not sure" Tory MPs would like to know that Mr Osborne was looking at SNP ideas, he added, grinning prettily.

Mr Osborne's tactical skills came up, again, in discussions of the independence referendum, and the row that now looms between Edinburgh and Westminster over when to hold such a vote, how to run it and, vitally, what question to put on the ballot paper (the British government wants a straight, yes-or-no, question about independence, Mr Salmond has dropped hints about adding on a second, fall-back option offering much deeper devolution, leaving only defence and foreign policy in British hands).

Unbidden, Mr Salmond drew a comparison with last year's Britain-wide referendum on whether to change the voting system used at Westminster general elections, during which the Conservatives soundly defeated their Liberal Democrat coalition partners. That's a complicated tale, but in essence the Tories opposed adopting the Alternative Vote (AV), while the Lib Dems campaigned in favour. The No camp backed by the Conservatives ran a pretty tough campaign, including personal attacks on the deputy prime minister, Nick Clegg.

The Conservatives "were very successful at kippering the Lib Dems," Mr Salmond ventured. "I'm not Nick Clegg."

Asked to expand on this, the first minister argued that the Liberal Democrats had been "desperate" to change the voting system to their dream of full proportional representation (PR). Somehow, Mr Osborne "stitched up" his Lib Dem colleagues in government and managed to get them to agree to a referendum on something that wasn't PR, so the Lib Dems' own enthusiasm fell away. Then the Tories further undermined the case for change with ruthless campaigning.

He tried to look all shocked at the ruthlessness of Mr Osborne. But if I had to guess, I'd say he likes the articles popping up in the press this week, portraying the independence fight as a contest between two great political strategists, Salmond v Osborne.

2. When cornered on a hard question about Scotland, Mr Salmond likes to go global, and throw around all manner of obscure and clever foreign analogies. These do not always withstand close scrutiny.

For instance, a big important question about Scottish independence concerns the new country's currency. Mr Salmond used to want to join the euro as soon as possible. He has gone a bit quiet about this (funnily enough). So at least for a while, his new Scotland would use the pound. That inspires alarm in some quarters, as people wonder if it is really wise to reproduce, via a new currency union of Scotland and England, the same wizard-wheeze that lies at the heart of the euro-crisis, namely a monetary union without a political and fiscal union over the top. I put this to Mr Salmond.

Oh not at all, he said. The fundamental problem of the euro is about uniting wildly diverging economies, with very different levels of competitiveness: countries like Greece and Germany. Scotland and England are very similar, even if (twinkle, twinkle) Scotland is more competitive by some measures.

Hmm, I said. Are we not now living in a world that has learned a bitter lesson from the euro crisis, so that bond traders are much less likely to take things like sovereign creditworthiness on trust, and are much more sceptical about breezy assurances that economies are jolly similar?

Ah, the euro is just a bad comparison, he continued. A better analogy is Belgium and Luxembourg, and their currency union before the euro.

Hmm, I thought (for I am a sad geek of an ex-foreign correspondent who once covered the Luxembourg referendum on the ill-fated EU constitution, and interviewed various Luxembourgeois about their views of currency union, who told me how humiliating it had been in the days when the Luxembourg franc was basically the Belgian franc in drag and Luxembourg had no monetary independence at all). Hmm, I said, expressing some of that out loud, are you sure Scots would accept such limited monetary independence?

Mr Salmond was off, dancing and diving, explaining how much more credit-worthy Scotland would be, how modest its stocks of debt, and how restrained its borrowing. Well, hang on, I said, in this suspicious new world, assurances of fiscal rigour are out of fashion. Over in euro-land, people want binding debt brakes written into constitutions, and deficit rules policed by supranational judges. Would an independent Scotland accept legally binding debt and deficit rules as the price of sharing sterling?

"I'm in favour of a stability pact," Mr Salmond said. What does that mean, I asked. Binding rules? The first minister was off again, explaining how an England-Scotland monetary union was not like the euro, and how the great advantage of holding a referendum meant that after a clear vote, Scotland and England would be negotiating in an atmosphere of goodwill. Pushed one last time, he delivered the gnomic pledge: "We'd negotiate a stability pact appropriate for the circumstances."

Another big, tricky question is what to do about defence policy in the event of a break-up. Would Scotland leave NATO, I asked? Ah, replied Mr Salmond happily. SNP policy is that Scotland would not be in the command structures of NATO. That means it would be like Sweden or Ireland.

Well hang on, I found myself saying again. Sweden and Ireland are not members of NATO. They're members of Partnership for Peace, said Mr Salmond. Yes, but that means they are not members of NATO, I said. (It was that kind of interview).

To be fair, once we had stopped roving round the map looking for analogies, he was forthcoming about his plans for an independent Scotland's military posture. He drew my attention to the recent strategic defence review conducted by the British government to manage deep spending cuts. This, he said, would leave Scotland home to a rapid deployment force of between 8,000 and 12,000 troops, a single air base and a single naval base. That's the sort of scale of armed forces an independent Scotland would have, he explained, with the big difference that the Scottish public did not want weapons of mass destruction in Scotland (a reference to Britain's submarine-based nuclear deterrent, Trident, which currently operates out of the deep, discreet waters of a Scottish loch).

We are not going to be unreasonable about it, we are not going to say Trident must leave the day after independence, he went on. But it would have to leave.

What about American submarines and warships carrying nuclear weapons, would they still be welcome in Scottish waters? I don't envisage a boycott on visiting forces, of the sort that New Zealand had, he replied.

Would Scottish forces go to war with the armed forces of the continuity British government? We'd have sent them to Iraq in 1991 if asked to join the international coalition, he replied. We wouldn't have sent them to Iraq in 2003, to participate in an illegal war. Scottish warplanes could have taken part in the 2011 raids over Libya, because that air campaign had legal backing from the UN.

Would Scottish citizens now serving in the British armed forces have to leave? Not at all, said Mr Salmond. There are all manner of foreigners serving in the British armed forces, from Irish or Commonwealth troops to the Gurkhas.

We've done a lot of thinking about these things, Mr Salmond told me. We are not wanting to be upsetting or awkward. On the contrary, there will be lots of positives. Look at the relationship between Ireland and Britain, and how it has been enhanced by mutual respect. He checked himself. Scotland is not Ireland, he said carefully. Scotland was never an oppressed country.

But in general, went his message, the friendship between Scotland and England will be given new life by Scottish independence.

That leads me to observation 3, which seems to me to be a real point of vulnerability for Mr Salmond.

3. I think Alex Salmond is out of date when it comes to English nationalism, and the changing nature of Britishness as a form of identity.

I think his views of Britishness are a bit stuck in the 1980s, when he first sat in the House of Commons in Westminster. Back then, it is true that far-right fringe groups such as the National Front had aggressively adopted Britishness as their identity. Their slogans included: "There ain't no black in the Union Jack". As late as 1999, according to David Torrance, Alex Salmond's biographer, the SNP leader could be heard telling the BBC that Britishness had been claimed as an identity by thugs and racists, while Englishness was an "aristocratic, almost mediaeval concept."

If you stick to that view of the world, then promoting friendship between the good, honest folk of Scotland and the plain, decent people of England must look like a progressive act, liberating two ancient cultures from the moth-eaten baggage of imperialist, nostalgic, exhausted, embittered Britishness.

I have a hunch that is how Mr Salmond sees it. He has always been very careful to distance himself from the angrier forms of nationalism, and stress the idea of Scottish independence as an outward-looking, internationalist cause.

With that in mind, I asked him about the dramatic rise in anti-Scottish sentiment on the right of the Tory Party. Doesn't it worry you, I asked, that your strongest supporters at Westminster are the very people you most dislike: nationalist, Eurosceptic English Conservative MPs? There is a striking overlap between the MPs who want to quit the EU and those who want to kick out what they consider to be scrounging, subsidised Scotland.

I told him about the young Tory MP I knew from the 2010 intake, who confided to me that during the long slog of seeking a safe seat, the loudest cheer he earned at a selection meeting came when he was asked if he thought the Scots should be allowed a vote on independence. He had replied, blimpishly, that he wanted to know when the English might be allowed to vote on whether the Scots could stay. The cheers lifted the roof, apparently.

I would never judge the plain people of England by some views heard by foolish Tory backbenchers, Mr Salmond replied airily, adding that this was not too modern a phenomenon, either. In the House of Commons in the 1980s, he said he heard plenty about Scotland that if said about another country would be "deemed quite unacceptable".

But it is precisely that same breed of Tory MPs who are the loudest advocates in London of granting Scotland its independence, I insisted.

His face darkened. Do they mean it? he snapped, utterly unwilling to concede the point. They do not, he said. "They want to hold Scotland fast."

They don't, I retorted. They really want to kick you out. (It was that kind of interview).

Mr Salmond remembered his calm and soothing manners. Just as I have great faith in Scotland's hidden powers, he breathed, I have great faith in the English people to forge an English identity.

But it's more complicated nowadays, I suggested. Britishness is now the country's multi-cultural, inclusive identity. People talk about being British Muslims, or British Asians, in a way that they would never talk about being English Asian. Englishness is becoming mixed up with tribal grievance. If you see a St George's flag flying outside a council house in England, it is often a sign of protest and complaint. The union flag is not used by the far-right now, they use the English flag, I suggested.

What about Billy Bragg, retorted Mr Salmond, naming a left-wing singer and activist whose work explores the history of English political radicalism and popular protest?

What about the English Defence League, I said, naming a nasty far-right group that has made headlines in recent years?

Mr Salmond paused briefly before saying: people should reclaim their flag, and do it as quickly as possible.

Later, he returned to the theme. You say Britishness is a less tribal identity, he said. But isn't one of the great successes of modern Scottish identity that it is non-exclusive? People can be Pakistani Scots. Mr Salmond quoted a famous line from a Thatcher-era cabinet minister, Norman Tebbit, who asserted that immigrants could not consider themselves British as long as they supported a foreign team at cricket. No Scot would be asked to pass a Norman Tebbit cricket test, Mr Salmond said firmly.

For a nimble man who has changed his political arguments at dizzying speed over the years, whenever circumstances required it, I think Mr Salmond is a bit stuck on this one. His sense of Scottishness as a generous, open-hearted, authentic identity seems partly defined as a rejection of a closed, pinched Britishness that carries a powerful 1980s whiff.

Mr Salmond knows his Scottish politics, better perhaps than any other front-rank politician in his country right now. But I think his understanding of Britishness, and Englishness, is oddly out of tune with the present.

Perhaps this does not matter. He only needs to win the votes of Scots in 2014 to win his referendum. But English opinion seems to matter to him. Later this month he is coming to London to deliver a Hugo Young lecture on how an independent Scotland may prove a stirring example for England. I wonder if he will be surprised by who cheers his message, and who is cast down by it.

THIS week's print column looks at a story that filled British newspapers this week: the conviction and jailing of two white men for the 1993 murder of Stephen Lawrence, a black London school student stabbed to death as he waited for a bus with a friend, purely because of the colour of his skin.

Commentary in Britain seemed to divide, often, along two competing lines. One camp said that the murder case and the long campaign by the Lawrence family for justice, had changed Britain for the better. Another said that racism, and racial inequalities, still blight Britain. It seemed to me that this was not a case of either/or. Britain still has a race problem, but public attitudes to race have changed since 1993, and the horrible murder of Stephen Lawrence played a role. Here's the column.

THE assault that killed Stephen Lawrence, an 18-year-old black student stabbed as he waited for a London bus, lasted less than a minute. That was in 1993. On January 3rd, after a campaign for justice lasting longer than her son’s life, Doreen Lawrence heard a jury find two men guilty of the racist murder of her son.

Mrs Lawrence declined to celebrate as she emerged from the Old Bailey. Racism still exists in Britain, she told reporters. It has taken 18 years to convict her son’s killers because the police failed “so miserably” to do their job. Yet high-profile supporters of the Lawrence family, drawn from across the political spectrum, take a much more upbeat view of the case, and its impact on Britain.

January 3rd was a “glorious day”, declares the Daily Mail, a conservative-leaning tabloid which—at one point in an admirably dogged campaign to see the teenager’s suspected killers in court—splashed five men’s faces and names across its front page, daring them to sue if they were not murderers. It was a glorious day for Stephen Lawrence’s parents, the Mail insists, and for British justice, the police and the press.

Jack Straw and David Blunkett, who as ministers in the previous Labour government rewrote ancient laws and shook up police procedures in response to the Lawrence case, say that the family’s campaign has made Britain “a better place”. There has been praise, too, from the Metropolitan Police in London. The force was branded “institutionally racist” by a 1999 inquiry into the Lawrence case headed by Sir William Macpherson, a retired judge, who recommended scores of reforms. Those changes have “vastly improved” police work, claims the force’s acting deputy head, Cressida Dick: a terrible killing’s legacy has been a “force for good”. For Trevor Phillips, boss of the Equality and Human Rights Commission, a watchdog, the dignity of Stephen Lawrence’s parents played a “vital part” in changing attitudes to race.

It all makes for a painful puzzle. On the one hand the Lawrence family, still wary and worried that racism has moved underground. On the other, their admirers across the Establishment, thanking them for helping to transform Britain for the better.

One key to the puzzle is the asymmetry between personal and public grief. Mrs Lawrence’s son is dead, she reminded reporters. “How can I celebrate when my son lies buried?”

Another is that each side is talking about a different thing. Mrs Lawrence is offering an answer to the question: is race still a problem in Britain? She says, accurately, that it is. In contrast, those heaping praise on the Lawrences are addressing separate, if related questions: have public attitudes to race changed, and did the Lawrence case play a part? The answer is yes, twice over.

Caution is needed. Britons have not become swooning converts to internationalism. Transatlantic Trends, a big annual opinion poll, found the British unusually hostile to immigration in its latest survey, with 68% of Britons seeing it as more of a problem than an opportunity, far exceeding the gloom found in France, Spain, Germany, Italy or America.

Moreover, measures recommended by the Macpherson inquiry to combat official racism remain controversial, especially on the right. That almost 40,000 hate crimes were reported in 2010 strikes many conservatives (and police officers) as proof of political correctness run amok rather than national wickedness.

Yet something simpler and bigger has changed. Respectable, middle-class Britishness—a rather embattled identity that feels under threat from all manner of coarse and alien trends—now involves at least an aspiration to be colour-blind. Overt, unashamed racism, even when far less vicious than the sort displayed by Stephen Lawrence’s killers, has become indecent.

Supporters of the Lawrence family’s campaign duly stressed that the murdered boy, while “not perfect” (in the words of a family lawyer) was studying for school-leavers’ A-level exams and dreamed of being an architect. His parents—who emigrated from Jamaica in the 1960s—were described as hard-working, married church-goers. Their children played tennis, it was reported.

In contrast, the press talked of the thuggish backgrounds of the young white men suspected of killing Stephen Lawrence, and their family connections to local gangsters. Police surveillance tapes, later made public at the Macpherson inquiry, recorded the men expressing violently racist beliefs and fantasies.

At that point, argues Mr Phillips, public opinion jumped past race. Britons saw the Lawrence family as exemplars of traditional values of faith, work and ambition, under assault from an ugly face of modern society that was “vulgar, violent and vicious”. It hardly mattered that the ugly face was white.

Being British: everyone’s invited

Britishness (as opposed to the more tribal Englishness) has become an inclusive identity, based more on values than ancestry. This could be seen during the riots in August 2011, when three young Muslims were killed in Birmingham. Tariq Jahan, the father of one of the men, successfully urged an angry crowd, in the name of Islam, to avoid revenge attacks. Mr Jahan was hailed by politicians as “the true face of Britain”. The press warmly agreed.

None of this allows for complacency. Mrs Lawrence buried her son in Jamaica, convinced a British grave would be desecrated—as a memorial plaque in London has been, several times. Britain “didn’t deserve to have his body”, she told the BBC recently.

Such pain is hard to gainsay. But public opinion was shifted, durably, by the contrast between the Lawrences’ decency, the viciousness of their son’s killers, and the casual incompetence with which police handled the death of a young black man in 1993 London. That public dismay left the criminal justice system on trial and scrambling to reform. As a result, the Lawrence family and Britain have an unbreakable bond.

MY PRINT column this week attempts to step back from the noise and chatter in Westminster about the coalition and that David Cameron veto, to ask a simpler question: what does any of this mean for Britain's membership of the club? I am off on leave after this, so blogging will be light. For readers who celebrate Christmas, have an excellent one, and the happiest new year you can manage in the circumstances. 2012 is going to be bumpy.

Here is the column:

THE British government has no intention of walking out of the European Union. But Britain could end up falling out. The recent, testy summit in Brussels, at which David Cameron blocked a new EU treaty after failing to obtain veto powers over future financial regulation, points to ways in which that might happen.

Bagehot’s gloom is not universally shared, it should be conceded. The sophisticated view around Westminster is that Mr Cameron’s decision to say no to a new EU treaty was not such a big deal. This reasoning is buttressed by clever arguments.

Britain, it is said, may have looked isolated after some two dozen countries signed up to the latest half-baked wheeze to save the euro. But isolation is not a worry when you are right. The deal that Mr Cameron blocked—a German scheme to starve the euro zone to health, bolted onto a French plot to marginalise Britain and create a congenial (ie, Gallic) mini-club within the wider union—was a stinker that will do nothing to restore market confidence in the tottering single currency. By preventing such a bundle of bad ideas from being hard-wired into the EU’s treaties, Mr Cameron was doing the rest of Europe a favour, not least because a formal EU treaty would have had to run the gauntlet of Eurosceptic members of Britain’s Parliament, whose blood is up.

Finally, it is murmured, Britain has been semi-detached ever since it declined to join the euro. Other Europeans have always been keen on regulating things and talking about solidarity (ie, spending someone else’s money). Successive British governments have treated Europe as a flawed, overpriced but geographically unavoidable mechanism for eliminating some barriers to competition and trade. Everyone should calm down.

Britain has not been here before

This approach is too languid. British views of Europe may not have changed very much. But the EU is in unprecedented flux. There are scenarios that could see Britain stumbling out of full membership, largely by accident.

The fate of the fiscal pact agreed in Brussels on December 9th remains as clear as mud. The final tally of countries taking part may be lower than the 23 initially announced, as governments struggle to ratify a document that is woefully lacking in detail. But the president of France, Nicolas Sarkozy, has for the moment secured a long-cherished French ambition: an agreement on holding frequent summits of national leaders from an inner core of countries, excluding Britain.

Britain could yet secure a seat at those summits, backed by others (eg, Germany) alarmed by Mr Sarkozy’s boasts about a new, two-speed Europe. If not, the dangers are grave. In Europe, summits of national leaders wield political clout that trumps other checks and balances. If an inner core of leaders “caucus” together and stitch up deals on the single market or financial services, Britain could be left seething with impotent frustration.

Then add a deepening of the crisis in the euro zone. Among some Tories, a euro collapse is seen as a scary event with upsides, among them vindication for those in Britain who said the currency could not work. Those contingency-planning for a break-up are less sanguine. One senior politician describes Treasury studies of the surprisingly big disruption caused to British banks when tiny Iceland’s economy imploded in 2008. Euro-zone paralysis would be incalculably more dangerous, he says.

The diplomatic consequences of a crumbling euro are perilous too. Being proved right wins the British little leverage. In the final stages before a collapse, they could face fresh demands for help, attached to large numbers. Britain is currently refusing to contribute to a planned new bail-out fund for the euro zone, the European Stability Mechanism (ESM). It is also resisting calls to offer billions more pounds to the IMF for euro-zone use. Indeed, Eurosceptic MPs are threatening to hijack a parliamentary vote in early 2012 allowing other governments to create the ESM, to attach a demand for a referendum on Europe.

If the crisis takes another turn for the worse, nasty scenarios are not hard to imagine, involving frightened euro-zone leaders meeting without Britain and agreeing desperate plans that no British government could accept, let alone get through the House of Commons. Some, such as Mr Sarkozy, already barely conceal their desire to marginalise Britain, vowing to use new European structures to pursue more regulation, in opposition to those only interested in a single market. Others, friendlier to Britain, nonetheless believe Mr Cameron has behaved badly.

Even Britain’s favoured solution to the euro zone’s woes—pushing for Europe to become more competitive—is widely seen as a selfish alternative to solidarity rather than as a bid to help. Mr Cameron denies he sought a special British opt-out at the Brussels summit, saying he wanted to shield Europe’s entire financial sector from harmful regulation. Other leaders suspect darker motives. Mr Sarkozy, who is facing a tough re-election fight next spring, claimed that Mr Cameron wanted to make the City of London into something like the Cayman Islands. A frequent British ally, the Dutch prime minister Mark Rutte, grumbled about Britain seeking an “unacceptable” competitive advantage.

Combine such forces and it is possible to imagine Mr Cameron’s government trapped, unwillingly, between an impossible piece of hostile Euro-legislation, domestic British anger and unstoppable pressure for a referendum that cannot be won.

Whatever Westminster sophisticates murmur, the politics of this crisis are moving into new territory. Britain’s relations with Europe are now inseparable from how, and whether, the euro survives. That is the real lesson of the fractious Brussels summit. What happens next may test not just the government’s powers of diplomacy, but of imagination itself.

COULD David Cameron have done anything different at Thursday night's EU summit, when he refused to sign Britain up to new EU treaty rules overseeing taxation and spending in the euro zone, after failing to secure safeguards to shift key areas of financial regulation to vote by unanimity?

I was asked this question on the BBC today, and I did not come up with a good answer. During the interview, I had already set out the view that I still hold: that those in Britain cheering the Prime Minister for wielding a veto are missing the bigger point, namely that a true veto stops others from doing something you dislike, whereas Mr Cameron's decision to walk away from the table did not stop the majority of other EU members from agreeing to push ahead without him.

I mentioned the accusations from some other EU players that Mr Cameron negotiated and prepared his position clumsily, as set out in my last post quoting the scathing analysis of one (well-placed but avowedly partial) source.

But I also wanted to be fair to Britain's position. I think that a big part of the problem of Britain's relationship with Europe is that we genuinely are different. To simplify, as I said on the BBC this morning, I think that to some extent what happened on Thursday night was the logical end-point of a relationship based on distrust. Successive British governments have believed that on balance membership of the EU is in their interests (or is worse than non-membership). But because we are different (and because we take a common law as opposed to Napoleonic view of regulation, favouring a world in which everything is allowed unless it is expressly prohibited), we seek at every turn to pin down every detail of new rules or schemes being proposed, in case some of it turns out to be harmful. What was on the table on Thursday night was not clear in all its details when it came to the implications for the single market, so it was genuinely a tricky document for Mr Cameron. That being so, you can see why he wanted to secure some safeguards.

Since writing my last post, I have spoken to British officials who advance a number of arguments in defence of what Mr Cameron did. The request for unanimity decision-mkaing for the City was really pretty modest, one says. It was not sprung on other EU governments as a surprise. George Osborne, the chancellor of the exchequer, had briefed colleagues extensively, for instance. What is more, France and Germany negotiated with real aggression, it is said: it was not Britain that was being unreasonable.

Mr Osborne was interviewed on the Radio 4 Today programme. He firmly dismissed talk of British isolation, saying that the country had "gained" by walking away. He told the BBC:

The integration of the eurozone, which we think is necessary to make the single currency work, is not taking place within the full panoply of the European treaties, with the full deployment of the European institutions enforcing those treaties. And because we were unable to get British safeguards that might have allowed that to happen, we're not allowing it to happen...If we had signed this treaty - if David Cameron had broken his word to parliament and the public, gone there and caved in without getting the safeguards he was looking for - then we would have found the full force of the European treaties, the European Court, the European Commission, all these institutions enforcing those treaties, using that opportunity to undermine Britain's interests, undermine the single market

Mr Osborne added that Britain remained a full member of the EU of 27 countries, noting that he, along with government colleagues, would still be attending monthly meetings of ministers from across the club.

Read Mr Osborne's argument closely, and he is candidly describing a Europe that includes hostile forces willing to undermine Britain's interests. He is further suggesting that Mr Cameron's decision to walk away from a formal EU treaty has denied those hostile forces the ability to use the "full panoply" of EU institutions against us.

Now, I am not going to mount some blanket defence of the other EU countries and say there are no hostile forces at work out there. It is clear that France, for example, takes a radically different view of the City of London and whether Britain has any right to seek to secure it from intrusive euro-rules. The veteran Brussels correspondent for Libération, Jean Quatremer, describes on his blog, for instance, how:

As Nicolas Sarkozy told a group of journalists [after the summit meeting], Mr Cameron wanted "to create an off-shore zone in the heart of Europe" by securing an exemption from financial market regulation, "when at the same time he insists that the single market's integrity must be protected."

That is a deliberate distortion of Mr Cameron's actual request, which in at least one area (the regulation of capital cushions for banks) sought to secure the right for Britain to impose tougher standards than those being proposed at the EU level.

But, here is the problem. To believe that Mr Cameron has done something to protect British interests by walking away from the table, you have to believe that Britain can continue to use its membership of the full EU to keep a firm grip on the new euro-plus club (membership at 23 so far, and likely to rise). On paper, legally, that belief works. It is certainly tricky to see the legal route that would allow a non-EU club within the club to start using the European Commission, European Parliament, European Court of Justice as regulatory battering rams against Fortress Britain.

Mr Osborne is also right that he will be invited to monthly gatherings of EU finance ministers, despite what happened on Thursday. But if five years reporting from Brussels taught me anything, it is that in Europe, (a) politics trumps law, and (b) in Europe, supreme political power flows downwards from summits of heads of state and government. Other bits of the machine have influence, but for the trickiest and most painful questions, only "heads" as they are known in diplo-shorthand, will do.

There is a grave crisis under way in the euro zone, which lots of European governments feel as an existential threat. That makes me doubt that any magic piece of paper exists that a single, dissenting country can brandish to stop 23 (or 24, or 25) threatened, panicking governments from using the tools they feel they need to save themselves. If the crisis deepens, and the euro-plus countries start to feel that they are being made to defend themselves with one hand tied behind their backs, they will not tolerate a legalistic British veto for very long. At that point, expect to hear lots of European politicians calling for the euro-plus 23 or 24 or 25 simply to become the new European club. (Indeed, reports Bruno Waterfield in the Telegraph, it has already started among low and mid-ranking Euro-politicians).

Can a legal way be found to do that? I am not a lawyer, but I do note that one of Mr Sarkozy's greatest boasts after Thursday is that he has secured agreement for heads of state and government from the euro-plus pact to meet every month for as long as the euro-zone crisis lasts. Britain will not be invited. And that will be an astonishing source of political power, I would argue, for just those hostile forces identified by Mr Osborne.

A final thought. The MPs, commentators and columnists cheering most loudly this weekend are Eurosceptics who do not believe full EU membership can work for this country. Many of them want to leave and negotiate a Swiss or Norwegian-style trading association. In other words, although they are hymning their praise for the government and Mr Cameron, they do not actually agree with the government's analysis as set out by Mr Osborne.

They do not believe, as the chancellor tells the BBC, that integration in the euro zone is needed to make the single currency work, and they do not believe that Britain's interests are going to be marvellously defended by British ministers going to Brussels for monthly meetings of the various EU councils of ministers. They think the euro is doomed, integration cannot and should not work. They hope that Britain is detaching itself from the folly that is the EU, and are already arguing that Mr Cameron must soon seek a radical renegotiation of relations, tested by a referendum of the British people.

Avowed "better-off-out" Conservatives are a (substantial) minority among Tory MPs. Most Conservative MPs would not want to leave the EU outright tomorrow, but want to try for the return of powers from Brussels. Yet it is that minority that is cheering most loudly right now, and which is asserting with great confidence that it was their pressure in recent weeks that made Mr Cameron realise that he could not risk presenting a new EU treaty to the House of Commons without huge concessions.

As Charles Moore writes in the Telegraph:

Several factors gradually bore in upon Mr Cameron as the day approached. He learnt from his mishandling of the Commons vote on an EU referendum last month. Literally never have so many Eurosceptic Tories filled the lobbies against their party line. This was followed up by serious, though discreet, ministerial protest, most notably from Iain Duncan Smith and the Northern Ireland Secretary, Owen Paterson. The Prime Minister realised it would be impossible to return to Parliament promising his party a new treaty that they distrusted while refusing them the referendum that they demand.

Then he worked out that the Liberal Democrats, however fervent their europhilia, were not going to kill the Coalition for a treaty which was expressly being advanced by President Sarkozy (in re-election mode) as a means of making London pay for the euro.

Dreadfully late in the day – as is so often the case with Mr Cameron and his “government by essay crisis” – everything became clear to his cool mind. He could stave off a referendum, hold together his Coalition, win over his party and prevent further encroachments on British commercial freedom by the use of that one little, previously unsayable word, “No”.

At the top of this blog posting I said I felt I had not answered the BBC's question well, when they asked me what Mr Cameron had done differently on Thursday night. On the radio, I talked about how he could perhaps have prepared his negotiating position with more skill.

I think I should have said, on reflection, that his problems date back six years, and left him with very little room for manoeuvre long before Thursday night. Ever since his campaign to become Conservative leader, Mr Cameron has spent years saying he believes in the benefits of full EU membership while offering concessions and pledges to colleagues who not believe in full EU membership. That sort of political contortionism is not sustainable forever.

Perhaps, as one official suggested to me this weekend, France set a trap for Britain on Thursday. If so, I have a nasty feeling that by the time Mr Cameron walked into the room, he had left himself little choice but to walk into that trap, eyes open.

BRITAIN did not walk out of the EU last night. But let there be no doubt about it: we have started falling out.

David Cameron finally did what British prime ministers have threatened in Europe so many times, and used his veto last night in Brussels, my BBC radio told me at dawn this morning. This is an astonishingly dramatic moment, the BBC added: the British prime minister has refused to sign up to a new EU treaty involving all 27 members, because the rest, led by France and Germany, would not grant him the safeguards he sought giving Britain powers to block unwelcome regulation of the City of London.

As a result of Mr Cameron's veto, the BBC said, 23 other countries have now agreed to seek their own fiscal pact involving deep integration around the tax and spending powers of member governments. Standing on its rights as a member of the current EU treaties, Britain argues that such a pact within a union should not be allowed to use the institutions that legally belong to the 27, such as the European Commission, the European Council or the European Court of Justice. At one point, an EU diplomat informed me in an overnight email, Mr Cameron could be heard arguing with his fellow-leaders that when members of the new club of 23 hold their planned monthly summits, they should not be allowed to use the buildings and meeting rooms of the European Council.

The BBC's exceedingly well-informed political editor Nick Robinson predicts this will lead to a long series of legal battles and rows with other EU countries, and to calls from gleeful British Eurosceptics to press on and seek a wholesale renegotiation of British relations with Europe (which they will then want put to a referendum, threatening to split the Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition).

That stuff about drama and rows is clearly right. But I fear I do not see where Mr Cameron used his veto.

In my version of the English language, when one member of a club uses his veto, he blocks something from happening. Mr Cameron did not stop France, Germany and the other 15 members of the euro zone from going ahead with what they are proposing. He asked for safeguards for financial services and—as had been well trailed in advance—France and Germany said no. That's not wielding a veto, that's called losing.

Now, the EU is proposing quite a range of damaging and stupid new rules for financial markets. Anthony Browne, a chief policy aide to the Mayor of London (and key Cameron rival) Boris Johnson has a point when he writes this morning on ConservativeHome that:

Faced with a choice between an EU treaty to save the euro and retaining control of regulation of the City, President Sarkozy decided to retain regulation of the City

But nobody can say they were surprised. The French government has been saying for weeks that it would not allow Britain to have a sweeping opt-out from financial services rules. Only last week, I quoted a pair of French government sources in my column, writing:

France sees a strong Europe as a lever of influence. Disliking the enlarged EU of 27 countries (in which its clout is diluted), France wants to use the euro crisis to deepen integration around a core of countries that use the euro, under the political control of a handful of big national leaders. To comfort French voters, Mr Sarkozy has started talking up euro-zone integration as a shield against globalisation and bullying by financial markets.

Today’s unprecedentedly Eurosceptic Conservative Party sees a strong Europe mostly as a threat to Britain’s global leverage. Mr Cameron says he supports deeper integration within the euro zone, as long as Britain does not have to pay, loses no sovereignty and yet is not marginalised. That is not enough for Tory MPs. They want the prime minister to use changes in the EU’s architecture to secure concessions, such as opt-outs from European employment law or EU rules that harm the City of London.

French sources call it “totally unacceptable” to allow British banks to set up in deregulated competition just across the Channel. Britain wants rights of oversight over the euro zone, it is said in Paris: well, the euro zone needs oversight over the City of London. If Britain seeks to “profit” from the crisis, then rule changes can be agreed by countries that use the euro, excluding Britain

And a very big part of what happened last night was a reflection of Mr Cameron's weakness within his own party, following a rebellion over a Europe vote that saw 81 Tory MPs ignore a strict, three-line whip. What happened last night, in addition to a fight to protect the City of London, is that Mr Cameron failed to secure a deal that he felt able to sell to his deeply Eurosceptic party (with two cabinet ministers demanding a referendum on any new treaty in the last few days, and scores of MPs ready to rebel on any EU bill put through the House of Commons).

It is worth being clear about this. Mr Cameron says he refused to sign up because he was defending British national interests in the long-term. In the immediate term, he took the decision to reject a new EU treaty because he was not sure he could get it through the House of Commons.

Having failed, he walked away, empty-handed. Just three other countries walked with him—Hungary, Sweden and the Czech Republic—and one or all of them may yet end up joining the new pact. We are not very far away from a final division of the club with 26 countries on one side, and one on the other.

This moment was both predictable and predicted. Everything dates back to a first meeting between the newly-elected David Cameron and Angela Merkel in Berlin in May 2010. By chance, in my previous role as Charlemagne, I was in the chancellery that day as one of a small group of Brussels correspondents invited for briefings from the German government. Mrs Merkel badly wanted Britain to stay on the inside track of the EU, we learned, fearing that she would find herself alone in the room with France and the Club Med countries. She wanted Britain and others for balance, and was anxious not to push away allies such as Poland who in theory plan to join the euro one day and are desperate to avoid being in an outer core.

Thus Mrs Merkel wanted to push ahead with new treaties to save the euro at the level of all 27 countries. I stayed on to watch Mr Cameron's meeting and joint press conference, and heard the British prime minister explain that he wished the euro well, but could not commit Britain to any involvement in deeper integration. I wrote this:

Mr Sarkozy dreams of building a new power structure round the 16 euro-zone countries. But Mrs Merkel wants economic policy to be decided by all 27 EU members, precisely because she likes to balance “Club Med” members of the euro zone with more liberal countries, including Britain, Sweden, Denmark, the Czech Republic and Poland. Yet David Cameron, the British prime minister, is adamant that deeper economic co-ordination in Europe must affect only the 16. That may be savvy British politics, but it risks pushing Mrs Merkel into France’s arms.

A year and a half later, at some time around 4am last night in Brussels, Mr Cameron pushed Mrs Merkel into the arms of the French. She went along with this, and this was predictable too. In November I wrote a column from Berlin (sorry, last quotation from myself), setting out the German view:

there is frustration in Berlin at what are seen as British double-standards. Mr Cameron tells euro-zone members to do more to save their currency. Yet Britain does not offer to help and demands to be consulted on big decisions, for example on bank recapitalisation. In Brussels Mr Cameron tells the EU to beware of breaking up the single market, and stoutly defends free-trade rules that apply to all. Yet back in London, ministers talk of special opt-outs giving British business low-cost, deregulated membership of the common market.

In Berlin the belief is that rewriting single-market rules would lead to many countries demanding more protections—the opposite of what Britain wants. Belgium, for instance, might push for more workers’ rights. Facing a tough re-election fight, Mr Sarkozy last week declared that Europe should not be a “dupe” when it came to global trade, and proposed EU import taxes to help pay for European welfare systems.

Germany’s priority is rules establishing unprecedented oversight of euro-zone economies. If Britain asks too high a price for its consent, Germany will reluctantly agree to a new treaty outside the EU system. This, it is expected, would involve more than 17 countries but fewer than 27. Britain would lose its veto

Berlin offered one more, very clear message: that British Eurosceptics were wrong to declare that Britain could become the leader of the 10 countries that do not use the euro, the ten "outs". There is no club of outs, I was told, and Mr Cameron had a bruising taste of this reality at an October summit when Mr Sarkozy angrily told some of the countries outside the euro that they had no interest in siding with Britain.

What happens now? Well, British Conservative Eurosceptics divide into two broad camps. A more moderate camp have convinced themselves that EU membership is blocking the sweeping supply side reforms that they believe would propel Britain to renewed growth. They think that if Mr Cameron can only shed the influence of hand-wringing Euro-Quislings in the Foreign Office and the Liberal Democrat party, he can play hardball and renegotiate a new, low-cost, low-regulation free-rider membership of the single market.

This moderate camp is guilty, mostly, of excessive optimism.

For a fine summary of this position, look at this week's Spectator magazine, and its main editorial, headlined: "Leadership, please."

Published on the summit eve, the leader says:

British Europhiles have long scorned the concept of a 'two-speed Europe', but that is, by default, what is likely to emerge from the mess. We will have a first tier bound by fiscal as well as monetary union, smaller than the current eurozone, and second tier which will be increasingly divorced from the Franco-German power axis. Ideally, the second tier should impose minimal regulations and resemble the free trade area we signed up to in 1975.

David Cameron is losing an opportunity to assert himself as leader of a wider European alliance. It could be an appealing place: promoting the free movement of goods, people and capital, but with each country retaining sovereignty and the power to set its taxes, prepare its budgets and retain a veto over rules which will be harmful to its national interest.

The Prime Minister is in a position of great strength, if only he would realise it. He is in the position that John Major was in the early 1990s, having lost a disastrous gamble to enter the Exchange Rate Mechanism (another bad idea which this magazine was alone in opposing). Then, it was all too easy to portray Britain as isolated in Europe. Now, there are already ten EU nations outside the eurozone who will play no part in any fiscal union. It is a constituency begging for direction—if only David Cameron would seize his opportunity

This fantasy politics lasted all of 12 hours.

The other Eurosceptic camp are essentially pessimists. A big dose of their pessimism about the flawed initial structures of the single currency has been borne out by events: to have a grown-up debate, this needs admitting. But they are much too gloomy about the single market, which they believe is not worth the cost of Britain's EU membership. They are much too sanguine, I would add, about the costs of a break-up of the euro (one Tory MP yesterday called for the disorderly break-up of the euro, while John Redwood, a darling of the right and former cabinet minister, today urges an orderly break-up of the currency as soon as possible). This camp thinks that British influence in the EU of 27 is not worth a candle. One red-faced misanthrope, Edward Leigh, yesterday told Mr Cameron not to come back from Brussels waving a piece of paper like Neville Chamberlain. For such Tory MPs, it is always 1938.

They would like Britain, essentially, to be Switzerland with nuclear weapons. I think Britain is bigger, and better than that.

Nor do I think we would be granted the sort of Swiss deal that British Tories yearn for. Switzerland is allowed access to the single market for relatively low cost because it is small. Because Switzerland is small, its absence from the single market table does not fundamentally alter the nature of that market. A walk-out by Britain, the largest free-market minded power in Europe, would change the nature of the single market fundamentally.

I also think that Switzerland's deal with the EU is not as good as British Eurosceptics think. It is built around accepting large chunks of EU regulation without any say in order to protect Swiss bank secrecy.

Oh yes, the banks. The City of London is very important, and the EU has some bad ideas for regulating it. But I find it hard to cheer the idea that Mr Cameron took an extraordinarily big decision last night about our relations with Europe because he was so convinced he could not win arguments in Brussels about those regulations.

A final thought. If we do end up leaving the EU for the sake of the City of London (a big if) it would be ironic if some of those same banks and hedge funds then turned around and announced they were leaving Britain anyway because euro-zone rules made it impossible to work in London, and so they were off to a combination of Paris, Frankfurt, Zug and Singapore. So sorry old boy, nothing personal.

PS for analysis of the wider euro-zone deal reached last night, which does not look very impressive, my Charlemagne colleague was up all night in Brussels and has posted here.

FOUR months after the summer riots that struck London and towns across England, researchers from the Guardian newspaper and the London School of Economics have performed a valuable social service by interviewing 270 of the rioters. The results have been filling pages all week in the Guardian, and were turned into a long film for the BBC television programme Newsnight, last night.

The researchers draw a political conclusion from the findings, arguing that the government and much of the media incorrectly dismissed the rioters as criminals and opportunists who took advantage of a temporary collapse in law and order to grab consumer goods for themselves.

Instead, they say, these were in fact political acts of protest against government spending cuts, economic injustice and, above all, against the police, who the rioters hate as agents of oppression for stopping and searching them as they walk about their local streets.

A Guardian columnist, Gary Younge, put it this way:

Four months later the absurdity of the official response to the riots is painfully clear. It took a while. Given the spontaneous, geographically diverse and inchoate nature of these disturbances, there was never a credible single cause. Even if there had been, there were few among the rioters who would have been in a position to articulate those grievances. The journey from the margins to the mainstream is a perilous one, which few make intact without losing their voice.
The government's narrative may have been ridiculous, but in the absence of a counter-narrative, many believed it plausible. The impression of unclaimed chaos and the shots of burning cars, devastated shopkeepers and hooded youth lent credibility to claims that this was nothing more than young hooligans running amok. "A riot," said Martin Luther King, "is the language of the unheard." Now, thanks in no small part to a study undertaken by the Guardian with the London School of Economics, we've had a chance to listen…
First, the rioters were far more politically conscious than even many on the left, myself included, first thought.
This in no way romanticises their actions. Looting is opportunistic, and most of those involved freely admit to being opportunists. When asked how he heard about the riots, one interviewee said he got a message on his BlackBerry saying people were "getting free stuff out and about", so he joined in. One should not overstate the case: stealing trainers and burning police cars are not the hallmarks of political sophistication. But then nor are riots. They are the crudest tool for those who have few options. By definition, they are chaotic. Rich people don't riot because they have other forms of influence. Riots are a class act...
The second theme to emerge from the report is that the rioters' primary grievance is not the one most of us imagined…
…Cameron characterised the moral collapse that made the riots possible thus: "It is a complete lack of responsibility in parts of our society; people allowed to feel the world owes them something, that their rights outweigh their responsibilities and their actions do not have consequence." He could just as easily have been talking about bankers.
...Economic issues were important. The cause most often cited for the riots was poverty (86%), but unemployment (79%) and inequality (70%) featured prominently too. Few guessed, though, that this tinder in the box was lit at least as much by the long arm of the law as the invisible hand of the market. Almost three-quarters of interviewees said they had been stopped and searched by the police in the last year; 85% said "policing" was an important or very important cause of the riots. Just 7% believed the police do a good job in their area

Writing for the Guardian today, the Archbishop of Canterbury manages to express sympathy for the rioters and take a swipe at consumerism and (via a nifty analogy) float the idea of moral equivalency between the riots and the financial markets. I have read the piece twice, and can find no mention of sympathy for victims of the riots. It is too much to expect an Anglican archbishop to sympathise with large companies whose premises were looted, or the police injured during the violence. But it is striking there is no mention of the 213 small shopkeepers whose premises were looted, the five left dead, or those who had their homes robbed and burned. The archbishop expresses anguish over spending cuts, and his pity for "hard-pressed education professionals" attempting to teach in "almost impossible conditions". He makes no mention of the Church of England, religious faith or God.

The Newsnight film was a pretty portentous piece of work, filled with grave black and white captions, doomy music and the voice of the reporter who made the film intoning such lines as: television pictures showed images of mindless violence, but the rioters told us these were anti-police riots.

Now, put me in many contexts, and I am quite the hand-wringing bourgeois liberal. Watching Newsnight yesterday evening, I fear I came over all Judge Dredd.

The researcher’s contention, in a nutshell, is that the rioters were not criminals who ran amok for a few days in August, losing their moral compass when they realised their actions would probably be without legal consequences. Instead, we are asked to believe, they are angry young people who hate the police and believe that they were taking revenge on a heartless world.

The problem is that after wading through screeds of interviews, and watching the interviews on Newsnight, it is clear that the question is not one of either/or. The rioters interviewed come across as criminals with a faulty moral compass who ran amok and hate the police.

Newsnight devoted a long chunk of airtime to Daniel, a young man who was held up as a key piece of evidence that the riots were not about looting and mindless violence. It is true that Daniel was angry and articulate, set out his moral code (as when he spared the life of a policewoman because she was a woman), insisted he did not take part in looting and stressed the political and economic factors behind his hatred of the system, including cuts in welfare benefits and a hike in tuition fees.

The problem is that Daniel also told us that despite living under the tyranny of state welfare cuts, he only managed to attend the riots by cutting short a foreign summer holiday nine days early, after receiving video clips from friends in London of burning police cars, and calls to avenge the fatal shooting by police of an alleged gangster, Mark Duggan.

I don’t want to sound heartless (oh, alright, this is going to sound heartless). I have no idea what Daniel’s personal circumstances are, and they may be grim. But it surely takes a special sort of lefty myopia to stick someone on television as a case study of economic despair, only to explain all about their long foreign holidays, their smart phone and their ability to book an early flight home at short notice.

Now, is it possible that the police are rude and insensitive in some or many of their dealings with people like Daniel? I suspect it is quite possible. It is also a serious problem that many young people have failed to be convinced by government assurances that they need not fear higher university tuition fees (because they are not paid up-front but via state-subsidised loans). If that puts young people from low-income families off university, that is tragic.

But I fear, listening to the torrents of interviews last night, I also agreed with the pithy conclusion of one of Newsnight’s studio guests, the former Metropolitan police chief Lord Blair. He noted that a big majority of those arrested after the riots had previous criminal convictions. It is, he suggested, not surprising that such people dislike the police. And if they hate the police because they are stopped and searched a lot, well, maybe in their case the police are stopping and searching the right people.

Here is the BBC’s interview with Daniel:

Me and a couple of my friends were on holiday, and people were sending broadcasts. And a couple of my friends pinged me telling me what was happening.
[images of burning police cars and calls for revenge for Mark Duggan]
As soon as I saw that, I was happy, like. For some reason I just wanted to be there. I actually wanted to burn the cars and just see it burn. It was all like, cos the police, like from what I've been through my whole life, police have caused hell for me, like.
We all cut our holiday and came straight back to England. I always thought to myself when I was on holiday this chance may never come again I saw it as my opportunity like now was the opportunity to get revenge.
It wasn’t even just the police, just the whole government, everything they do they make things harder for us, they make it harder for us to get jobs. Even when we do get benefits, they cut it down, like some people are trying to change their lives and go to university, and they are raising up the prices, and then people can’t afford university so they go back to selling drugs and stuff and then when they arrest them and say right, we don’t understand why all of these young people are acting like this. When really and truly they are the reason why we are the way we are.
And if we get back to England and we actually damage, like do a lot of damage to the point where forget all the benefits they cut off they will have to pay like 20 times worse than that, so it was just our way of getting revenge.
"We thought, Okay, you want to financially hurt us? We'll financially hurt you by burning down buildings. I saw MacDonalds get set on fire, and it was completely set on fire, and I petrol-bombed it even though it was set alight, and I felt good.
When we first got there, we saw the police they had their shields up, running, so we thought ok like they are on the defensive so we just sort of started picking up bricks and bottles and threw it at them. It felt good, it felt like Call of Duty. It made me feel cold as well. Cos, I knew when I was doing it that it was somebody’s mum or dad, but I didn’t care about that. I just saw it as a chance to get revenge and I took it with both hands.
It was a war, and for the first time we was in control. We had the police scared, it was no more us being scared of the police. We actually had the choice of letting officers off the hook or seriously injuring them. I threw a brick at a policewoman, I saw her drop I could have just easily bricked her again, I didn’t cos she was a woman.
I wasn’t there for the robbing, I was there for revenge. I will always remember the day that we had the police and the government scared. For once, they were living on the edge, they felt how we felt. They felt threatened by us. That was the best three days of my life

As I said before, the London School of Economics researchers did us all a favour. It is sobering to know that people like Daniel think they were in a war with the police and the government in August. But having heard their grievances—and without ignoring the need to tackle social inequality, education, joblessness and other social ills—I still want them to lose that war.

IT IS becoming clear that British diplomats had a very close shave in Iran when student members of a regime-controlled volunteer militia, the baseej, stormed two British Embassy compounds in Tehran on November 29th. The recently-appointed British ambassador to Iran, Dominick Chilcott, has given a remarkable interview to the BBC about what he and his staff went through on Tuesday, made somehow all the more chilling by Mr Chilcott's sober, matter-of-fact delivery. The world had already seen pictures of demonstrators crossing over the high, spike-topped brick wall of the main embassy compound in central Tehran, and images of vandalism inside the site (which is a bit like the campus of a British public school in feel, with a mixture of grand buildings and surprisingly homely cottages scattered around a walled park).

Today, we heard how the diplomats found themselves under physical attack, in a situation whose ground rules had abruptly changed from the familiar, almost theatrical protests that have long plagued the embassy in Tehran to something much more sinister. The full interview is to be broadcast on Newsnight in a while, but I saw long extracts while waiting at a BBC studio this afternoon to be interviewed about the euro crisis on a different news programme (a shorter extract is here). At one point, the BBC interviewer asks the ambassador if he thought that he and his staff were about to be taken hostage, in a repeat of the American embassy siege. I would not be telling the truth if I said it did not go through our minds, Mr Chilcott replied. The Iranian police were behaving so strangely, and failing to come to the assistance of the British diplomats, that they could not be sure how the whole protest was intended to end, he said. The embassy is very used to protests, and normally, indeed on every previous occasion, the local police have outnumbered the demonstrators. Mr Chilcott was too polite to say it, but there has in the past been something almost comically amateurish about many demonstrations.

I am no expert on Iran, but I did report from the country while working in Asia some years ago. I was working in China at the time, so was used to reporting in an opaque, complex dictatorship with secret police, travel restrictions on foreign reporters, heavy-handed surveillance and more sinister forms of spying, or so I fondly imagined. In Iran, what I found was a place that made China look as transparent as a pane of glass. Restrictions were ambiguous: someone who at first seemed to be wholly on the side of the state would turn out to be not so loyal in private. Those who seemed to be allies could not always be trusted. Middle class Tehranis seemed to be wary, even frightened of the controls that might snap shut on them in an instant. But there was nothing hermit-like about their lives. Private houses had illegal satellite TV on which CNN and the BBC played non-stop. Many divided their time between Iran and Europe, or were in contact with relatives in America. Catching an illegal taxi to the Chinese embassy (it's complicated), my driver got into a row with a uniformed policeman, and ended it by trying to run him over, gunning his engine as the officer ran backwards with his hands on the bonnet, hurling abuse. Nobody got arrested: a challenge to state power that would be pretty unthinkable in the Chinese capital. Yet in the shadows of an illegal demonstration, plain-clothes men in an unmarked car spooked other foreign reporters with more experience than me of Iran. A while before, I was told, such unidentified agents of some bit of the state apparatus had taken a western reporter into their car, beaten him badly (with special attention to his kidneys) and dumped him on the side of a highway miles out of town, leaving him to limp home. That did not happen in China: western journalists were harrassed, but never hurt, and you knew which agency was doing the harrassing.

Yet menace is sometimes matched by something like student cheek. The thoroughfare on which the British Embassy stands is named Bobby Sands Street, so that its postal address is a memorial to an IRA hunger-striker. A diplomat I knew in Asia who had worked at the British embassy would tell the story of student demonstrators who brought a portable sound system to one protest, but were thwarted when the small shopkeepers opposite the embassy got fed up with all the chanting and unplugged the PA system. After a moment, embassy guards heard a knock on the metal gates. They slid open the little hatch in the gate, and found the protest leader wanting to ask a question. My friend was called. Please can we plug our loudspeaker in to your power supply, the student leader asked. Startled by the request, my friend finally agreed to take the proffered plug and cable and see what he could do. He waited a while, then opened the hatch again. I'm so sorry, he fibbed to the student leader, our plugs are all the British three pin style, and yours won't fit. Oh, said the student, crestfallen. Another knock. Do you have a British flag we could burn? asked the student politely. No, said my friend, more brusquely this time, and slid the hatch shut.

There was nothing so quaint about this week's incursions. As Mr Chilcott makes clear in the BBC interview, this was an altogether more spiteful, sinister affair. First, the diplomatic police told the embassy there would be a protest at the main downtown embassy compound. The embassy duly put in place its well-honed procedures, sending home local Iranian staff and despatching non-core British staff and dependents to the embassy's second, 50-acre compound in the north of the city, known locally as Qolhak Garden. What the police neglected to say was that a second protest would hit Qolhak Garden without warning, and that officers would stand back and let the protestors make their way into the compound. Staff retreated to their "keeps", or strengthened safe areas inside embassy buildings, designed to hold out intruders just long enough for the police to arrive and rescue trapped diplomats. Except the police did not come to rescue them. Mr Chilcott described how a colleague made it to his keep, placed a heavy safe against the steel door, a bed against the safe, and then wedged himself against the bed. For 45 minutes protestors worked to smash their way in, finally destroying the entire door frame and getting inside. The keep did its job, he said, the Iranian police did not.

At the main embassy compound downtown, Mr Chilcott and his staff locked themselves in the secure top floor of their chancery building. They could hear demonstrators looting and smashing their way around other buildings, and trying to break into the chancery. Finally, they were able to enter a consular office and start a fire, sending enough smoke into the top floor safe area that the ambassador and his staff were forced to flee down a fire escape. By sheer good luck, by the time they reached the ground, the protestors had moved to another area, and the ambassador and staff were able to find a small party of Iranian police, who told them to hide in a remote building in the corner of the site, with the lights off.

This was the centre of the capital city, Mr Chilcott noted. If the police had wanted to stop this, they could have flooded the compound with officers and rescued the British. The police, and whoever was pulling the strings behind the attack, chose not to intervene for a long while. In the meantime, demonstrators matched acts the ambassador called spiteful: hacking and slashing at oil paintings of Queen Victoria and Edward VII in the main residence and smashing furniture. But this was not mindless violence, the ambassador pointed out. The student baseej took everything electronic they could find, from portable computers to hard drives and mobile telephones.

The violence had to be state-sponsored, Mr Chilcott ventured. But the bit of the Iranian machine that he dealt with day to day, the foreign ministry, seemed to be taken aback by the British response of pulling all its staff out of Iran and expelling all Iranian diplomats in London, closing both embassies (though not severing formal diplomatic relations).

"The risk is that certain people in the regime who liked the idea of confrontation, because they felt it would rally people to the flag, miscalculated how strong the response would be," Mr Chilcott told the BBC. "They probably didn't expect us to send home the Iranian embassy in London and, reading between the lines, you can see in the way they have responded to that move, some remorse in having provoked it. I think that might apply more generally too."

As mentioned in my last blog posting, France has led the way in offering European Union support, recalling its ambassador for consultations in Paris (in common with several other EU countries), and calling for a new sanction barring EU countries from buying Iranian oil. At a meeting of EU foreign ministers on Thursday there was much talk of solidarity, but no agreement on boycotting Iranian oil. Spain and Italy had grumbled at the level of diplomats in working groups that they would need more time to find alternative sources of energy. Greece, which is heavily reliant on Iranian oil because few other suppliers are willing to supply a country on the brink of bankruptcy, blocked a boycott. A report on the EUObserver news website quotes unnamed diplomats saying that some other countries were also hiding behind Greece, saying:

People don't say it out loud. But there is an understanding oil sanctions would hurt the EU rather than hitting Iran where it hurts and would make oil cheaper for China

In the British press, there has been some grumbling from right-wing outlets that Britain's response has been wimpish and demanding to know why we have not severed relations completely.

The sad truth, alas, is that not much has changed since the French president, Nicolas Sarkozy, summed up the options for the outside world with great clarity. We can seek a negotiated settlement with Iran, Mr Sarkozy said, or we can face a disastrous choice: "the Iranian bomb or the bombing of Iran.” That remains the basic calculation, and hawks need to be clear about the risks of bombing Iran, which could include retaliatory attacks on Israel, Saudi Arabia, NATO sites in Turkey and other targets, as well as a spiral of violence involving Iranian proxies in the region.

There is momentum for tougher sanctions in the EU, and some hope, it is argued, in the fact that China and Russia (who routinely block tough sanctions against Iran in the UN Security Council) firmly condemned Tuesday's embassy attacks. 

Meanwhile, the pace of covert attacks on alleged Iranian nuclear sites, scientists and missile experts does seem to have stepped up, with talk of mysterious explosions and assassinations in Isfahan and elsewhere.

Not very much is certain about this week's attacks on British diplomats in Tehran, other than that they were swiftly endorsed by hardline politicians, and that some elements in the regime have an interest in confrontation. It cannot be certain how far the hardliners wished that confrontation to be taken this week, nor whether they may have miscalculated when it came to the British response, as Mr Chilcott says. What is quite certain is this: if the intention was to scare but not harm British diplomats, something could easily have gone badly wrong this Tuesday. Britain, and by extension all who fear an escalation of the Iranian crisis, had a narrow escape.