Re: The Sunday Times zamiescil kontrowersyjny list ambasadora W. Brytanii w Polsce
- From: "Unicorn" <uni@xxxxxxx>
- Date: Sun, 11 Dec 2005 12:12:34 GMT
PS.
The Sunday Times - Britain
The Sunday Times December 11, 2005
British ambassador in Warsaw's leaked email in
full
From: Charles.Crawford
Sent: 08 December 2005 05:36
To: KDarroch; Nicola.Brewer
Subject: LOOSEN THOSE EU BUDGET TALKS - LET'S
END THE MISERY
Kim/Nicola,
This Budget thing is already dragging on too
long. So here is a draft speech for the Foreign Sec or PM to use next week
to bring it to a rapid and successful conclusion:
"OK, partners, here is my Budget final offer
(Puts a large naff kiddies alarm clock on the table).
We all know that the hypocrisy and absurdity
of this process are passing any reasonable limit.
I am being asked to give more UK taxpayers
money to an EU which for years can not produce properly audited accounts.
Mon ami Jacques with the support of most of you is nagging me to give the EU
more money while the refusing to surrender an inch or even a centimetre on
the CAP - a programme which uses inefficient transfers of taxpayers money to
bloat rich French landowners and so pump up food prices in Europe, thereby
creating poverty in Africa, which we then fail to solve through inefficient
but expensive aid programmes. The most stupid, immoral state-subsidised
policy in human history, give or take Communism.
As for the new member states, we like you so
much that we are proposing in the Budget a huge new transfer of funds to you
on a scale which will give your people the greatest boost in 1000 years. I
will be attacked by my scary new teenage Tory opposition for building roads
and hospitals in Poland and Hungary, rather than in poor areas of the UK.
We - unlike most other old EU MS sitting here - have opened our labour
markets. HMG have created more jobs for Poles in the past year than the
Polish Government. Yet not one of you nor a single newspaper in any of your
capitals has expressed a single word of gratitude or appreciation for the UK
position in all this. So much for solidarity.
Shame on you all. Enough is enough.
In a moment I will press the button on this
vulgar clock, made cheaply and well in China. It will ring loudly in exactly
an hour's time.
At that point I will ask everyone round the
table whether they accept our current offer. Yes, or No.
If anyone says No, we end the meeting. The EU
will move on to a complete mess of annual budgets. Basically suits us -
we'll pay less, and the rebate stays 100% intact. My ratings will go up.
However, despite the rudeness and ingratitude
of the new member states as expressed here today, we in London do want to
help them So if the Budget deal does end in an hour's time, we will take
action alone.
I have here with me a draft press release
which says the following:
Following the failure of the EU Budget talks
today because most EU member states refused to accept a generous, innovative
new budget proposed by HMG, the UK Gov announces that it is going to set
aside a good chunk of the money it was prepared effectively to deduct from
its rebate under the current proposals, 5 billion pounds, to set up a new
Strategic European Development Fund - the Mother of All Know How Funds, but
on steroids.
This Fund will be accessible for those of the
V4 plus Balts who agree to join its programme - if they all feel too
humiliated by our lack of EU solidarity to join, that's great - we'll keep
the money for ourselves. If only some of them join, that's great too- those
who do will get proportionately more.
The Fund will cut out all the bollocky EU
bureaucracy which comes with the current spending round, which means that
for every pound we pay into the EU pot for Structural Funds for new MS about
a [make up a suitable percentage] goes in sticky transaction costs, local
and Brussels corruption, overhead and other rubbish, and so does not benefit
the intended recipients.
The Fund will go for any sensible strategic
development idea that comes along, with emphasis on R&D and Innovation, plus
reform of the region's abysmal legal systems, the main Communist - era
legacy problem in Europe. But if you want to build some new roads, that's OK
too.
The Fund will be managed according to state of
the art transparency and efficiency:
a.. Internet procurement
a.. 90% money spent to require matching
private sector funds, so as to encourage new private investment on a vast
scale
a.. top-level auditing
a.. explicit buy-in by recipient governments
to compensate the fund on a 'triple damages' basis for any losses proved by
independent auditors to be due to official local corruption, and to
prosecute the people concerned
a.. up-front urgent action by recipient
partner governments to set up their own streamlined procedures and new laws
to allow this money to be spent fast
a.. oversight by independent all-party experts
and bankers/business leaders in each country to ensure scrupulous honesty
and agree national priorities
a.. hard targets set for spending with regular
public updates
a.. hundreds of short-term fellowships to
enable the brightest and best from these countries to see EU best practice
in action in the UK
a.. [Aside: PM Marcinkiewicz: you asked me
recently to help with ELT in Polish schools - spend 100 million of the Fund
on this, so that every kid learns English, plus save money by shutting down
French and German language classes!]
a.. and so on
This Fund mean that the UK's money goes much
further, much faster and much more efficiently into the regions concerned
than it possibly could under any EU programme.
Five billion pounds spent this way equals far
more than 10 billion spent through the EU, by building in good incentives at
every level to encourage openness, free enterprise, creativity and honesty.
The Fund will give the UK and British
expertise and the English language together a dominant economic, political
and intellectual position in the most dynamic region of Europe for decades
to come, forcing legal and business reform on a huge scale according to the
purest Anglo-Saxon principles.
And it will be incredibly popular in the
countries concerned, since it will force the region's governments sitting
shiftily round this table to be far more honest and accountable than they
are at the moment.
More! The roaring success of the Fund will set
in motion the accelerating downsizing of all EU-level spending and a
fundamental rethink of global aid philosophy. UK voters and voters all
across the EU will love it because it spends their money well, plus
highlights the wastefulness of what the EU is doing at the moment and cuts
out completely the blathering European Parliament. Wider public pressure for
reforms along UK lines will become irresistible.
Basically, a terrific deal for the UK, for the
modern European ideal of well-coordinated light-touch integration, and for
the populations of the countries concerned.
End of draft press release.
We nonetheless remain willing to sacrifice all
that in the interests of discredited, inefficient, socialistic, EU
'solidarity' - if that is what you really all prefer - to sign up for the
latest offer for the
Budget which is on the table.
Over to you, mes chers amis!
(Presses button on alarm clock. Silence.
Broken only by loud ticking)
I have a suitable alarm clock if that helps.
Charles
Charles Crawford
HMA Warsaw
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2087-1917543,00.html
The Sunday Times - Britain
The Sunday Times December 11, 2005
Our man in Warsaw
CHARLES CRAWFORD, Britain's ambassador to
Poland, is not your regular, stiff-upper-lip career diplomat. The
football-loving official has a down-to-earth style and an "off-beat sense of
humour", according to colleagues.
The ambassador doesn't serve Ferrero Rocher
chocolates, but he knows how to treat his guests. Earlier this year, he had
240 pots of Rodda's Cornish clotted cream flown out to serve at a tea party
in Warsaw to celebrate the beginning of the British presidency of the EU.
While serving as ambassador in Belgrade two
years ago, he sent a coach to rescue some Newcastle United football fans who
were being held under armed guard in a city centre hotel by Serbian police
and invited them to a reception before kick-off at his house. (He kept a
signed photo of the footballer Paul Gascoigne in one of the loos).
His own preferred team is Spurs, but the
51-year-old official lists other hobbies as music and chess. One of his
family treasures is a chessboard given to him by the world grandmaster Gary
Kasparov when he was working in Moscow. It is inscribed with the words:
"Good luck in the chess game of diplomacy". After his injudicious email is
disclosed today, he may need all the luck he can get.
According to colleagues, this is not the first
time he has sent a frank memorandum back to London early in the morning.
"Charles is very hard-working although he does have an off-beat sense of
humour. He is a very funny guy, trying to do his best," said one friend
yesterday. "The email was probably an expression of his frustration."
His diplomatic career spans nearly a quarter
of a century, joining the Foreign Office in 1979 after training to be a
barrister.
By his own account he has had a "fascinating"
career, serving in the embassy in South Africa just as the apartheid regime
came to an end in the late 1980s. "I recall vividly my own private meeting
with Nelson Mandela soon after he was released from prison," Crawford says
on the foreign office website.
Then in 1991 he was "plunged into the drama"
of the collapse of the Soviet Union. In 1993 he went to Moscow as counsellor
in the embassy. He says that highlights there included the first black tie
dinner at the Kremlin since the Russian revolution and the attack on the
White House, the parliament building in the city. The fighting occurred only
a few hundred metres from his flat. He keeps a videotape of his children
playing in the yard with the noise of gunfire in the background.
From Moscow, Crawford was moved to post-war
Sarajevo to take forward the Dayton peace accords. He describes the posting
in Bosnia-Herzegovina as "exhausting".
Afterwards he took a year's "career
development" sabbatical to Harvard University in America, which he says "I
used mainly to learn how to use the internet".
He returned to London in 1999 to run British
policy towards the former Yugoslavia, working closely with Serbian leaders
to bring about the downfall of Slobodan Milosevic. A posting to Belgrade to
re-open the British embassy followed.
Crawford began his current job as ambassador
in Warsaw just over two years ago, and in a recent interview described
Britain's relations with Poland as "terrific".
He is married to Helen and has two sons and
one daughter, signing off his droll career notes by saying he and his "long
suffering wife" are hoping his time in Poland "will be rather calmer" than
what he went through in the Balkans. That may be hard now.
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2087-1920075,00.html
>
> http://www.bbc.co.uk/polish/worldnews/story/2005/12/051211_letter.shtml
>
>
>
begin 666 trans.gif
M1TE&.#EA`0`!`)$"````,P```/___P```"'Y! $```(`+ `````!``$`0 ("
$5 $`.P``
`
end
.
- Follow-Ups:
- References:
- Prev by Date: Re: The Sunday Times zamiescil kontrowersyjny list ambasadora W. Brytanii w Polsce
- Next by Date: Najstarszy Brytyjczyk
- Previous by thread: Re: The Sunday Times zamiescil kontrowersyjny list ambasadora W. Brytanii w Polsce
- Next by thread: Re: The Sunday Times zamiescil kontrowersyjny list ambasadora W. Brytanii w Polsce
- Index(es):
Relevant Pages
|
