Start the Week

28/02/2011

Andrew Marr with the former UN deputy secretary-general Mark Malloch-Brown, who argues that national governments are no longer equipped to address complex international issues. The Conservative MP Daniel Kawczynski describes the "corrupt grandiosity" of the Libyan leader Colonel Gaddafi, and explains what is meant by the government's 'principled engagement' with the country. The historian David Gilmour looks back a hundred and fifty years to the unification of Italy, and considers whether it has ever really become a coherent nation-state. And the human rights lawyer, Baroness Helena Kennedy, believes we need to be more judgemental if we are to live an ethical life.

Producer: Katy Hickman.

Duration:: 41m
Broadcast on:: 28 Feb 2011
Audio Format:: other

Thank you for downloading the Start the Week podcast from BBC Radio 4. For more information, go to bbc.co.uk/radio4. Hello, Libya is going to dominate the news again this week, surely, and we have some fresh perspectives on the crisis. Mark Malek Brown, a former Labour Foreign Affairs Minister and the Lord, served at the United Nations and the World Bank and his new book, Part of Autobiography, Part Pilemic, looks at why global institutions have so little grip at times like these. And then we're going to hear from the historian, David Gilmore, about the country whose dreadful colonial record made Libya miserable long before Gaddafi. That's Italy, subject of his fine new history. Italy makes us think of Berlusconi, who along with Gaddafi, raises in turn the question of shame, or perhaps I should say shamelessness in public life. And Helena Kennedy, Barista and Labour peer, is here to suggest that we need more shame and finger-pointing. First, though, to the author of Libya's Green Book, sponsor of worldwide territorial buffoon, and not for the first time, focus of world attention. Daniel Kavchinsky, the Conservative MP, has written a biography he called simply "seeking Gaddafi". I think he meant it only in the spirit of intellectual curiosity at the time, rather than as an agent of the international criminal, court Daniel. But let's start as it were at the beginning of the story and remind ourselves that Libya has had a dreadful history as a country long before Gaddafi. It was a sort of spatchcock together and went through, I hadn't quite understood, the sort of genocidal nature really of Italy's colonial rule over Libya before the Second World War. Yes, Mussolini's control grip over Libya before the Second World War and during it was absolutely brutal and some estimates put the numbers of killed in Libya was at least somewhere in the region of between 20 and 30% of the population. Mussolini was determined to hold on to that country no matter what, and a brutal oppression. And in fact recently, of course, Signor Belusconi signed a deal with Gaddafi in terms of compensating Libya for all the crimes that took place in Libya during those times. And then it was essentially a battlefield during the Second World War. There was a long haggle afterwards. We get King Idris and the only election the Libyans have ever had, 1952, 1953, something like that. Yes, yes. And Gaddafi's coup. And in the book, you point out that Gaddafi really modeled himself almost entirely on NASA at the time. We discussed Egypt and this program before. Yes, we mustn't forget also. I mean, one of the most poignant things that I've ever done as a member of parliament was walking through the British war cemetery in Tripoli and row after row after row of immaculately kept graves. One notices just how young these soldiers were when they died in 1943, liberating Tripoli. Quite extraordinary, some of the British sacrifices that took place during the Seqmal War. So we should we should also mention that. But certainly, yes. Canography in this first year of power, he met with NASA. NASA was still alive then. And he looked up to him. He wanted to emulate NASA. He wanted to be the sort of NASA of the Arab world. He wanted to lead the Arab world. He even wanted two countries to fuse for a while, didn't he? Wanted Libya to become part of Egypt. Well, he tried a marriage of convenience with all sorts of countries. There was a union with Morocco at one stage. There was a union with Tunisia. There was a union even with Syria. He tried to to create a pan Arab state. Ultimately, his I think his his ultimate goal was a pan Arab state with him at the helm. When that failed to materialize, because each each people's country, he tried to merge with, refuse any association. No thanks, but no thanks. He then turned his attention to Africa, of course, and describing himself as King of Kings. He wanted to be the de facto ruler of Africa with Libya at the helm. And we tend to see him these days as a kind of a sort of darkly comic buffoon figure with his great epilets and his strange uniforms and his camels and his tents and all the rest of it. But actually, as you recount in this book, for decades, he supported almost any vicious terrorist group around in the world that was going and caused an immense amount of pain and suffering around the world. Huge. When he was born in 1943, of course, war was raging around him. British forces were fighting the Italians and Germans. But he from that very early period, he got it into his mind that the West was evil. The West was imperialist. The West was out to dominate the world, to control the Arab world. And he became fixated with the West and his mechanism by which he would confront the West. He knew he couldn't take on the West in terms of military presence and armies. The way he was going to do it is through funding terrorist organizations, guerrilla operations to try to nibble away and undermine the whole of the sort of democratic West. And just to take a local example, had his arms shipments to the IRA made it through in total, there would have been absolute mayhem in Ireland, wouldn't there? Well, absolutely. And of course, this is one of the outstanding things that I know that the previous Labour government and my own government have been working on with Gaddafi is to try to get compensation for the victims of the IRA. IRA is absolutely appalling the amount of support that he gave and shipments. And it's just thanks. I mean, rocket launchers and missiles and all sorts of stuff that was most of which was stopped, actually, before it got to Ireland. Semtex, it was all there. And he saw the IRA as a very effective tool to use to undermine the United Kingdom. There's so much we could talk about. But just two other things I want to raise before we bring everybody in. We should not forget the war with Chad, which was one of the most brutal and under-reported and under-remembered wars in Africa. Well, it was over. Again, this shows Gaddafi's sort of ludicrously. It was over a tiny baron strip, the Azuz strip, on the border with Libya and Chad, a meaningless sort of parcel of land. And he spent literally hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars in pursuing this war, flying tanks from Tripoli into the desert. And it was only actually, Chad was held by her former colonial power, France, France intervened. And of course, he lost the war. But it was a huge loss of life. I mean, the sort of numbers that were killed on both sides just over that one war is incredible. I'd just like to say that also, we're talking about the devastating situation in Libya now and all the deaths and we're all deeply shocked by it. But this has been happening in Libya for many, many years, for decades. So there is an element of huge world hypocrisy. Everyone's throwing up their hands now saying, "Oh, this man must go because he is killing his own people." Well, he's been killing his own people for 40 years without anybody, you know, they much about it. Absolutely. And it's only thanks to this pan-Arab uprising that the whole of the world's media is now focused on the Arab world, that the spotlight has been shown on Gaddafi. But my book actually chronicles the extraordinary brutality, repression and killing that has taken place in Libya over decades. This is a butcher. He makes Ciao Czescu look positively, you know, sanguine. Ciao Czescu, who he much admired, not surprisingly, just before we opened up one other point, does Libya exist? By which I mean, you know, the liberated areas around Cyrenaica, in many respects, people there feel as if they live in a different country anyway. And there's a possibility, I suppose, of Libya breaking up. There is always that risk. But I think that they are too very different. It's a very big country, first of all. And they are two very different type of regions, Cyrenaica, to Tripolitania. But I very much hope that they will stick together. I think there's a tremendous sense amongst people I've spoken to, that they want the country to stay together and work together to build a new democracy in the free Libya. Now, Brian, you've been watching this in all sorts of different roles. What do you think of? Well, the story, isn't it? The story is a legion, but you know, they all go back to the fact that a slightly buffoon-like figure, who nevertheless is ruthless and violent in his internal oppression and equipped with a huge checkbook from his oil revenue, can cause vast unaccountable consequences way beyond his own borders. And, you know, I saw this both at the UN where we constantly, I mean, Kofi Annan, as Secretary General, went off to look for him once to try and get him to kind of pull back on Chad. Only time I have a loss to Secretary General, you know, anxiously in New York, we couldn't find him until he finally showed up at a tent in the desert. But I think, you know, fast forwarding to the Labour government years where I saw a bit of this, you know, obviously, you know, Gaddafi had been brought back into the community of nations by a Labour Prime Minister, Tony Blair, desperate to play himself back into Middle East politics after Iraq. This gets inherited by Gordon Brown, who finds, when he's organizing the G20, that Gaddafi is now chairman of the African Union and the man he must invite to the G20 summit to represent Africa in London. So I'm sent off to the African Union with an instruction to find an alternative representative, because whatever happens, don't come back telling me, says the Prime Minister, that telling me that that man is going to pitch his expletive deleted tent in Hyde Park. Well, of course, we joke about it, but he pitched his tent and camels in the middle of Paris and many other places on the way around. I mean, I'm here, of course, you know, because I want to talk about ethics. And by God, does this issue bring up the whole question of ethics in the international domain? Because hypocrisy is the word to use here. Because we know, we've always known what Gaddafi stood for and the way that he behaved towards his people, the human rights abuses that any of us involved in the human rights world knew what he was up to. And yet, this business of bringing him in from the cold was celebrated as some great achievement, when in fact, we know that it was about oil. It was about some of the ugliest kind of dealing. And let us remember the the jobs that came out of that, the number of people who ended up immediately going into BP and got the rewards that came from doing the deal with Gaddafi. So there's a real issue. MI6 officers leaving MI6 in Libya and going to work for BP. Members of senior Labour persons. And I understand that Mr Blair has in the last what seven months had a whole series of meetings with Gaddafi. And that wasn't, and that yes, and that's not about the yearning for democracy of people. I suspect it's about business. And I think that doing business with somebody who has the history of this man, and let's remember until very recently, this was a man who was behind it said, the killing in Lockerbie of many, many people, many deaths. And yet nothing happens in Libya without him knowing about it. That he had his hand on all of that, and yet we embraced him to get oil. Well, there were stories that the people responsible for the Lockerbie bombings are still with him in the barracks at the moment. David Gimmel. Yes, I think if we are, we all hope that the Libyans themselves will get rid of Gaddafi. But if they don't, if he does fight back, we have to be very careful about the sort of intervention that's going to happen. We must hope it will be done by the Arab League. I'm very careful that it's not led by the West, especially Britain and America. I don't think that we realize how unpopular we are still on the Arab Street, not just as a result of the invasion of Iraq, but also of, you know, bears failure to criticize the invasion of Lebanon, for example. Daniel Kucchi. The point that this has been sort of an embarrassing stain on British diplomacy. Would you go along with that? I mean, I'm a Malcolm Rifkin saying that he thought it was the worst example of organized diplomatic hypocrisy in modern British history, or something like that. I participated in a debate, the Doha Debates in Qatar, where we debated for a totally Arab audience whether or not it was right to release Mr. Amograchi for example, and we won that overwhelmingly. Sorry, you say it wasn't right to win it to release it? Yes, yes. Do we clear? You know, to be clear, this house deplores the release of Mr. Amograchi, and what was very interesting is that a lot of the young Arabs listening to that program said to me, "On the one hand, you're telling us that you are pursuing anti-terrorism agenda around the world, but on the other hand, you're releasing a convicted bomber of the worst terrorist atrocity on your soil since the Second World War." So that's sending out very mixed messages. And I think that we have bent over backwards to accommodate Colonel Gaddafi, and yet got very little in return, apart from these oil contracts. I mean, don't forget, the other thing that my book mentions is PC of On Fletcher, killing of the British police officer. Yes, James Square. We still don't have her killer, and I hope one of the things resulting from this collapse of the Gaddafi regime is that finally we will start to see the Metropolitan Police will be allowed back into Libya to try to find the killer of our serving police officer. The story we were told was that there were weapons of mass destruction, that he was on a course to creating weapons of mass destruction, and we still haven't heard whether that was ever true. No, indeed. Well, let's move on to another part of this story, in a sense, which is that we see on our television screens, and read in our newspapers, the International Community, the Security Council, all these people in in suits, raising their hands solemnly to get resolutions passed about Colonel Gaddafi, and we all wonder how much does it really mean? How much does it count? In the unfinished global revolution, Mark Malick, Brown, you're quite scathing about aspects of world governance, and you've seen it from the inside, World Bank, United Nations, you've spent your career, a lot of your career doing this kind of stuff. Where do you, I suppose, where do you start in all of this? Do we start from a post-war settlement in terms of international institutions, a post-1945 one, which simply doesn't work anymore? Well, you know, obviously, if you've been in the business, I mean, you're still an optimist. Yes. What you've got to retain is the ability to say, look, this isn't working, how can we improve it? So I come at it from that perspective, but, you know, in 1945, something extraordinary was done, because an American leadership recognized that the consequence of the Second World War was that the world's problems were going to be dropped into its lap, and it still had a lot of domestic things to do. And so, you know, Roosevelt and then Truman saw the United Nations above all else as burden-sharing the problems of global security and global development. It was a very pragmatic construct. And I hope that emerging powers, like China and India, who are now having a portion of the world's problem dropped onto their laps, are going to recognize that coming back to multilateral arrangements is in their interest as much as anybody else's, and that they will, in a sense, be the leaders of the renewal of these institutions, because, you know, in recent years, countries such as Britain and France have become rather lonely champions of the UN, while emerging powers have said, we don't have enough stake in it. They sort of look to other arrangements. The US has been a terrible sort of, if you like, a la carte user of it, when it wants to, it does, when it doesn't, it doesn't. And the whole system has sort of sagged a bit, got demoralized, under-invested in, etc. And yet you say you're an optimist, but you also say in this book that there is a kind of quiet, creeping revolution going on in, you know, international governance or international politics, whatever you call it. Yes, because problems have gone global. We saw it with the financial crisis when even America couldn't fix the banks. It needed to appeal to other countries to come together as the G20. Where do we look for the reform movement, as it were? Well, I think we look for them around different issues, you know, extraordinary coalitions of individual countries who are leaders on some particular issue, landmines or climate change, combined with foundations, not-for-profit organizations, philanthropists, and strikingly businesses to try and fix problems. And I, in the book, give lots of examples of this, the coalition that broke the dramatic increase in the rate of HIV/AIDS infections around the world, which was, you know, a disparate bunch. Is it a bit like what happens in side countries, is that you need the state, and you need private life and all of that? But between the two for a civilised society, you need civil institutions. And in the sense, you're saying what we're saying is the growth of, as it were, civil institutions at a world level? Yeah, I think at the moment the state is a kind of passive reactive follower if the analogy is that it's the United Nations and that indeed those civil society institutions are very much the leaders, the balance of power is different at the global level to the national. And what I hope is that the United Nations and other bits of the system will kind of respond to the challenge and opportunity and raise their game in response to what civil society is doing. Could I ask a pessimist's question in all of this, which seems to be part of the problem, is that almost nobody feels any sense of ownership or connection with international bodies or international leaders, because inevitably they're going to be people from another part of the world for most people and so on. And politics has always been rooted in some sort of democratic connection between the ruled and the rulers, which cannot happen on an international level. And I see no way around this. I see no mechanism by which we can feel more connected to international institutions. Well, I think three points. I mean, one, they're always going to remain institutions which are kind of represented by stakeholders, states primarily, but businesses, NGOs, others as well. We're not going to move to a kind of global directly elected parliament of any kind. So I actually, in my vision of these things, a strong national state looking after its people's interests is the absolutely critical connection and it's not replaced by this. It's just that we shouldn't expect ever a popular United Nations. Well, no, I think, you know, it'll be popular by secondary effect because a British politician will be able to come home and say, I fix that climate change or employment problem, which is, which is affecting British voters. But I've just two quick points on it as well. I mean, I think it is additionally fair to say that in someone like Kofi Annan, who I worked for, a Ghanaian, nevertheless, a global figure with a sort of real beginnings of a kind of international political celebrity to him, which is, I think, one reason certain politicians around the world wanted to take him down a notch. And finally, of course, the book itself is an attempt to kind of open up some of this to kind of take the little black box of globalization and say, look, nothing affects all our lives more. Here's a kind of somebody who's in the front row, had a bit of a seat at some of these key events. This is my effort to kind of make it more personal for everybody. Helen, I enjoyed your book greatly, Mark, and you had an amazing career. And I have heard you described as the most charming man in the international stage, and the book told me why that was. But I did feel, I did laugh the other day when I heard that they were voting for Gaddafi to be brought before courts for crimes against humanity. And I thought, yeah, but what about the fact that the United States that's calling for this hasn't signed up to the International Criminal Court? And I, like you, an optimist, and I do believe that you need to have global institutions. But I think that the, in many ways, we have to embrace the bigger challenges, which is it is almost impossible to get people to agree around the kind of institutions and how you can make them really work. I think that we're really talking about here, we still have to grapple with the fact that we're talking about globalization being about globalized money. It's about capitalism and about the problems, about restraining that, because that's what makes the problems of poverty. That's what makes the problems about not getting to grips with the environmental issues. All those things, because in the end, making money corrupts the efforts to improve things. And so I think it's harder than we'll ever know unless we get to grips with that central question. I suspect Daniel Kefchinski might disagree with that a little bit. I'm surprising myself. How much I'm agreeing with, actually, with bonus candy from the Labour Party. But I think that with regards to the United Nations, obviously there is a lot of hypocrisy that goes on. I mean, China, obviously, is a very important power in the UN, on the Security Council, and yet has appalling human rights abuses as well. And there is- Yet voted against Gaddafi, I noticed that the security accounts quite interesting. Yes, interesting that they did that. But I think that if the UN is going to have real credibility moving forward for the next generation, then something has to be done about the paradox that some of the most powerful countries in the United Nations actually have quite poor human rights backgrounds themselves, such as Russia and China. David, you're welcome. I understand absolutely the need for stronger global institutions to tackle problems of poverty and the environment. But you also say we should have- they should have rules in place that allow for peaceful adjustments between states. But how could that happen if the United Nations can't do it? I mean, all the rules in the world say that Israel should not be building settlements on Arab land in the West Bank. But if the United Nations can't stop there, what mechanism could? Well, I think, David, I mean, that's the nub of it, and you've all, in a sense, touched on it from from different points, which is, at the moment, it has a very weak and selective authority when states choose in the Security Council choose to empower it, and there's a dramatic inconsistency. I mean, you know, a Chinese participant today would make the very point you've just made in response to Daniel, you say, you know, sure, we may have internal problems, but what about U.S. double standards in the Middle East? And, you know, the fact is we've got to build a culture of respect for common, supported rules of international behavior. So, you know, the International Criminal Court, America isn't yet a signatory. I have no doubt that privately Obama would want to be a signatory. The fact that they have now used it this weekend as a sanction against Libya is to me an important, incremental step forward. Well, of course, international means based on nations, and we've discussed already Italy's role in Libyan history and the possibility that Libya might one day break up. David Gilmour, in your book, The Pursuit of Italy, there is a huge sort of question mark hanging over the whole notion of Italy as a unified nation. It was late into the game, late into the colonial game as a result of that. You quote several times the great phrase about it being a sin against history and geography, I think, the notion of a united Italy. How much do you think Italy's geography has affected its political story? Oh, I think geography has prevented Italy from ever acquiring that sense of national identity that could have led to a successful state. I mean, it's the most easily invaded country in the world, like the sea for more size. Every army from Hannibal's to Napoleon's has come over to the Alps and it's therefore become a country of settlers and invaders. In the ninth century in England, the Anglo-Saxons united to form a nation against the Danish threat. In the ninth century in Italy, you had the Arabs and Sicily, you had the Byzantines and up, you had the Franks, Lombards, Goths, Romans, elsewhere, then you had the Normans coming to the South and you had the Albanians emigrating. You couldn't form a sense of national identity out of that. So without the extraordinary story of this kind of fanatically militaristic and aggressive little city, Rome, right at the beginning, pushing outwards, then it's as it were always invited people in. There's no way Italy has to be an empire or it's more or less a colony. You take the story all the way through starting right at the beginning and we can't tell the whole story obviously. But there is that extraordinary moment in the 19th century when you get all these wonderful red-shirted Gary Baldi supporters and great idealistic statesmen. And it does seem for a while as if Italy is going to become a great liberal country along the 19th century model. Yes, I think the national movement in Italy was very small. It was overwhelmingly northern and middle class. Very few people in the country, very few people in the South wanted it at all. And in fact, without the support of France, the French army in 1859 and the Prussian army in 1866, I don't think Italy would have been united. Certainly not by themselves at that time. I mean, in the crucial year of 1859 for the north, just 20,000 Italians volunteered to fight for the cause. I was a population of 25 million. I didn't really end. And you also refer to the wonderful myth. You think it's a myth that Verdi was so popular because when you stood up and you shouted Verdi, it meant come on, come on, you think to remind your king of Italy? Yes. I think the evidence for that is three months at La Scala in 1959. But it's become part of the Italian, 1859. The Italian opera houses up and down the country were all shouting out. Many of the things that people love about Italy to this day, which for instance, the variety and richness of the architecture and the cuisine and the number of different dialects and languages around Italy, all again point to the notion that this is a very strange, unitary state. It's a country of terrific diversity. Italians still think of themselves as Tuscans or Venetians, and even Tuscans prefer to think of themselves as Pissans or Le Vernezi or Florentines. It is a very local country and the dialects are extraordinary. You see, when Italy was united, it is estimated that only two and a half percent of Italians spoke what we now know as Italian. Everybody else spoke dialects, which you couldn't understand in the other regions. The very notion of Italian is new as well. Yes. And the way that the early governments tried to make it, to try to make Italians, was to try to make Italy a great power, and make them all fight wars, and this ended up with fascism and the humiliation of the Second World War. Now Italy is a completely denationalized state. Does that explain Berlusconi? Is that how they end up with someone like Silvio Berlusconi at the helm? Well, Berlusconi is an Italian phenomenon, but he's not typical of Italian politics. Verstarti is one, three thumping electoral victories that nobody else has done. No, I think Berlusconi has other advantages. First is that the writers are natural majority in Italy. It's about 55 to 45. And then... He's the first person who's managed to unite the different groups on the right together, other one battles. Yes, yes. Also, he has control of almost the entire television, which is the only media that counts in Italian elections. Do you think that Italy should stroke, will, stay together? I think it can only survive if it becomes a truly federal state, which is what it should have been all along, and which individual regions allow to spend their revenues on their own projects. I mean, in a properly united country, like say England, the richer regions take it for granted, that they will subsidise the poorer ones. But in a country in Italy, the north does not feel. It should be produced so much of its revenue to support what's going on in Sicily. And Calabria, especially, there's no quite a lot of that money is going into the mafia. It's a huge amount of immigration, and a huge amount of mafia, and very little industry, and massive quantities of EU-Dosh going down to keep things going in the south. And a highly productive, tax-paying, vigorous north. Exactly. Yes. I mean, the north are losing about... And Rome, stuck in the middle. Rome, just like both sides. Yes, yes. One of the rest of it. You're an italyophile. Yes, I love it, I love it, really. Yes, but I mean, the thing about it is that perhaps some nations have some strengths and not others, a nation-building, and perhaps the creation of institutions is not where Italy's strengths lie. It's in art, it's in painting, it's in all its creative stuff. But that business of institutions, which of course, Marc has been talking about at the world level, isn't that the problem in Italy? That it's never really got its institutions up and running in a really strong way. If you want to bring people together under a nation, then you need to have good legal systems. You need to have your political system working well, and it didn't ever create institutions that had that capacity. And that's been one of the problems, isn't it? Yes, well, at the time of unification, Piedmont imposed not only conquered the rest of the country, it also imposed its own laws on the rest of the country, and its institutions and its monarch. And this was not accepted well by the rest of the country, especially not in the South. You see, the other thing is that globalization creates for people this sense of wanting to retreat into smaller groupings and communities and so on. The fear of the big makes people, that's why we've seen the rise of these sort of this daintity around smaller. David's very eloquent on the importance of the commune, and commune life, and everything being local. That is the centre of Italianite, the loyalty to the local commune. It does make me think that if Italy is now constitutional rubble, as it were, then it was ever that. It's always been the most beautiful, alluring, gorgeous rubble in the world, and people have always come there for that to enjoy. I thought there was a wonderful fact, which goes to this, which was that shortly after reunification of Italy, there were more soldiers trying to hold the country together than the British had across their whole empire. And that says everything, because I think today, whether it is Iraq, Afghanistan, or Gaddafi and Libya, we've forgotten the most simple lesson of political rule, which is don't go against the grain, secure the consent of people. And if you're trying to construct a country that people don't want to live in, you're not going to get that consent. And that's when you have to shove in hundreds of thousands of troops. There's no substitute for people accepting the political entity of which they are part. Daniel, I think it's interesting that Señor Boliskerni, we've been talking about him, is actually the closest to Gaddafi of all the European leaders. And I think he has met Gaddafi on 17 occasions over the last two years. And no matter how much we criticize, or no matter how much I like to criticize Mr. Brown and Mr. Blair, I think they've shown slightly more caution towards Gaddafi, compared to somebody like Mr. Boliskerni who has blatantly, in the pursuit of Italian business interests and org contracts, carried favor with this man. Well, you bring us perfectly to our final guest today, Helena Kennedy, who is going to be giving a lecture called Ethics in a Changing World. And it could be said that Boliskerni is the prime western example of a cheerful shamelessness about everything from money to sex and politics in between. Helena, I suppose the first question, however, is whether anything has really changed when it comes to public ethics. You look back and the biggest change is perhaps merely that we know more about how people in positions of power and authority behave, rather than that they behave any differently or worse. I think you're right. I mean, a lot of it is to do with transparency, and the whole business of communication means that we actually do know much more. I'm not looking back to a golden age, and I think we're all ethically compromised, and I wouldn't suggest for a minute that I have any less human frailty than any of these. But all I would say is that I started thinking about this issue of ethics, and it's come around this table today. I mean, first of all, in our responsibility to the rest of the world, and when you look at the way in which the rich world lives, and the poor world is so often abandoned. But I really wanted to bring it even closer to home, which is that I think that I started thinking about this particular issue around the business of expenses, and the scandal around MPs, and House of Lords abuses of the system. And about the sense that people seem to have, which was, well, I wasn't breaking the law, so that made it all all right. So there wasn't something sort of just below the legal standard, which was about behaving decently. And what is it that makes people ethical? And what are the constraints that operate? And I think that one of the things, of course, and you started off this program today talking about shame, I mean, I think that it's been interesting that people haven't felt very ashamed of some of the things that have gone on, and actually will still reason it out. And we had it not just over in peace expenses and the business of Lord's claims, but the dodgy dossier, there was no huge sort of humbling or embarrassment over having created false pyramids for going to war. The banking thing, the still business of claiming huge bonuses, no shaming, despite the scandalous stuff. Can I ask, we were talking just a moment ago about the importance of the commune and the town and the society. Is it that so many people don't really live in a society or a group of people in front of whom they would feel ashamed? That's one of the things that I've looked at, which is that I think that because people have lost their sense of community, those whom they would feel embarrassed in front of, I mean, we're probably constrained, because certainly I am, that my Catholic family in Glasgow would be horrified if they thought that I was on the fiddle. And in the same way, I belong to another community, which is the legal community, the bar that I belong to. And again, I would be ashamed if people felt that I somehow did inappropriate things as a professional. It's that cold look across the table, across the breakfast table, or the dinner table that matters so much. But I don't think that there's very much of that. I think there's a sense in which we're not supposed to be judgmental. But I really, at the heart of this, I don't want to just deal with the psychology of that. I want to deal with the fact that I want to talk about the public, the common good. And I think that one of the things that's happening in our society is that because we are sort of bringing the values of the business world, where profit is the important thing, how much money you earn is so important, all those things that are valued there. By introducing them into, for example, public service, denigrating public service, and by people feeling, well, the only thing that matters is how much you're paid, for example, or that you reach your targets, that somehow you start degrading the good stuff in our society. So what is the way back? Well, I think that you see, I mean, I'm very anxious about the privatization of public services, because I think that what you do is you end up making that the value is about money. And I do think that by doing so, we are actually interfering with some of the best stuff that happens in our society. It's about valuing the things that, you know, everything has a price, but nothing has, we don't value the stuff that are really important. Daniel Kavjinsky. Well, I was very interested in what Baroness Kennedy was saying about politicians and how they stand up to people around them in terms of being accountable. I think this expensive scandal has been, I'm glad we're over the worst of it now, but I had a public meeting in my own constituency, immediately afterwards. I think the 300 people turned up, and there was such an palpable anger. Luckily, my expenses were in the clear, but people were very angry, generally, because they felt very betrayed. And I think that you've got to make politicians very cognizant of being accountable to the people they represent. I mean, I ignored advice from the fees office. The fees office were churning out all sorts of advice. That is the thing, it was a little club who said it's fine. You do this, everyone does it, and it takes quite a lot to stand up and say, "Well, actually, no thanks." Well, I did, and I won't go into all the details, but I certainly said to the fees office, "I'm under no circumstances. Am I following this advice?" But why did I do that? Because at the end of the day, I thought to myself, "How would my constituents think about me behaving in this way?" We thought about the local newspaper, really, or something like that. What would it look like? What would it look like? Local Tory MP does X, Y, and Z, but the thing is, you've got to go back to your people and you meet them. If you live in the community, you've got to look in their faces, and I think if you abuse their trust, you can no longer stand for election. My point really is, in a global world, unfortunately Glasgow or the local constituency becomes a long way away, and we're creating these global financial elites, and allowing them to reward themselves in a way completely detached from, if you like, the value they contribute. They can go around and only meet and live alongside each other. That's the other thing. It's a real danger. It's in the countries in which they're... How can you inculcate this sense of shame? I imagine you can do as a child and bring religion into it. But otherwise, isn't it just exposing them in the media? And aren't we, therefore, slightly playing the tabloid scheme? Well, I don't think this has to be about religion. I think it's about a sense of what is right and decent, and I think we've stopped talking about our responsibility to each other, because at the end, a large part of it is about that. The things that we don't like are things where we feel it's not... There's a sort of looking after number one, and not thinking about the collective good. And I think we have to have a better conversation about what the common good is. Well, our better conversation must now come to an end, because we've run out of time. But thank you very much to all my guests today. Helena Kennedy will be giving her last lecture as president of the School of Oriental and African Studies, called Ethics in a Changing World on Thursday. Daniel Kechinske's book Seeking Gaddafi was published last year, Mark Malick Brown's The Unfinished Global Revolution, and David Gilmour's The Pursuit of Italy, are out in all good bookshops this week. Next week, Environmental Disasters with Australian Conservationists Tim Flannery and Peter Harris and Richard Susskind, on Justice and the Law, but for now, thank you and goodbye.

Producer: Katy Hickman.