This will infuriate some of the "hug-a-bureaucrat" bloggers on this site, but I am going to say it anyway. There are several elephants in the room at the moment that we don't like to talk about. One is radical Islamism (the political agenda, as distinct from the religion of Islam which has many interpretations, some of which entirely peaceful and law-abiding and decent). I have written about that several times on this site. But another elephant in the room is the UN. And with both the rise of radical Islamism, and the disfunctional uselessness of the UN, if we continue to ignore them out of political correctness, one day both these elephants-in-the-room with either sit on us and squash us, or pick us up by the trunk and smash us against a wall. The first will do so aggressively; the latter unwittingly. Best to address the elephants now before their tusks grow too big.
It is the second elephant, the UN, that I concentrate on today. Ban Ki-moon is a limp figure who fails to inspire any confidence at all. At least with Kofi Annan one had some reassurance that he cared. Ban Ki-moon is becoming a joke. But to be fair, Ban Ki-moon is not the key problem. The UN is only as good as the sum of its parts. And China, Russia, the Asian nations and the African nations have for too long been at best pathetic and at worst complicit with some of the world's worst tyrannies: Burma, Zimbabwe and Sudan in particular. The crisis in Zimbabwe shows this clearly. The crisis in Burma last month was an almost identical echo of the same plight. The Spectator sums it all up very well in an editorial this week.
The world is certainly marginally - repeat, marginally - better off with the UN than without it. It is better to have an international organisation dedicated to bringing peace, promoting human rights and protecting security around the world than not. Having worked in East Timor, I know that for all its faults - and there were many - the fragile infant nation of Timor-Leste would never have had its first gasp of freedom without the UN, which gave birth to it and guided it through its first few years of childhood. So before the Sir Humphreys start having cardiac arrests, let me assure you that I do not advocate abandoning the UN. That would be mad -- and defeatist. But we must strain every sinew to make it work better - and to develop alternatives.
That's why I love John McCain's proposal of a League of Democracies, building on the work of the Community of Democracies - which could, as The Spectator advocates, be a body that could take action in crises such as Zimbabwe and Burma where the UN, and regional blocs such as ASEAN and the African groupings, fail. It is something which the Conservative Party Human Rights Commission advocated in its report on UN reform launched earlier this year. I hope that John McCain will be elected, and that if he - or for that matter Obama - presses ahead with this idea, the British Government will support it.