There are 15 000 lobbyists in Brussels...and they are coalescing. The 31 members of the European Public Affairs Consultancies Association represent 600 of them and include giants like Burston Marsteller and Weber Shandwick. Art Thieving is another boom business. Art is stolen for use as collateral in arms and drugs deals. Henry Moore’s Reclining Figure hoisted by crane in Hertfordshire is probably sitting in a shipping container.

Metsu’s Love Letter was stolen in Ireland and turned up in Istanbul. It was collateral in a heroin deal. The heroin was supplied upfront while the seller agreed to pay once he had sold enough heroin to raise the cash. The painting was given to the supplier as surety on the deal. Art works can circulate in criminal networks for years. Insurance companies often pay a ransom for the return of valuable works...thereby underpining the price. Notice how the good, the bad and the ugly coalesce into a single self-replicating system or mechanism. Toni Pinschof wants us to take a leaf from the gun runners’ handbook. Here is his recent memo on politics and power.

‘Most movements are seccessionist in origin wanting to separate from the herd rushing toward the cliff's edge. Any number of workshops on related or unrelated topics will go nowhere afterwards unless they identify, then meet each other...maybe coalesce or stay distinct...but set up some sort of organised continuity for action.

‘Disparate people meeting and talking have little common territory when thet arrive for a conference. They all go back home afterwards but they should at least in spirit ‘emigrate’ together and declare a territory that they then continue to inhabit. The next generation would then naturally be a nation born into the values and myths of physical or figurative seccessionist emigrants. The practical effect would depend on the extent to which their new territory is manifest on its outreach or simply its ‘reach’ ...a word which is cognate with ‘reich’.

‘Whatever thoughts we have and over however many decades we caress them, we shall drop off the twig without a whimper long before we get anywhere near to having the power to do anything about them collectively unless we get behind the effects to the causes. So long as the power of choice is wielded only individually we shall go on blindly to the cliff's edge. But, if you seek a theme to bind together all those disparate workshop themes that might interest both the quick and the dead go for power and its use (= abuse) in all its forms...’

This merited my endorsement so I added my tuppence to the debate by suggesting that every true radical can take onboard Toni's points about power...the thing the reformers feel uncomfortable talking about. In a diplomatic attempt to persuade our convenor to take this line I suggested we might focus on Chapter 5 of Village Democracies. This opens like this: 'Any practical proposals which do not focus on the problem of power and of ways of securing control of its play...are only too likely to serve as little more than a distraction.'

I went on to propose that 'Local Power...and how to get it back!' might be the conference theme and that a Middlebury Institute-style organisation...The Edward Goldmith Institute...should be established in Thomas Naylor/Kirkpatrick Sale fashion at the end of the conference. Patrons, officers and logos would be in place ahead of time. That way instead of a wishy-washy 'We will establish an institute' the conference could give a resounding endorsement to the work of the Edward Goldsmith Institute and direct its future work. Participants would get the fifth chapter of Village Democracies as a booklet plus discount tokens for Village Democracies. I then started work on a 1500-word essay entitled Local Powers for the next issue of Rye's Own.

I drove into town in the afternoon to watch Merry Christmas...a film with English subtitles to the French and German. The setting is the trenches at Christmas in 1914. French, Prussian and Scottish soldiers celebrate mass together, play football in no-man’s land and fraternise in a serious breach of military discipline for which they are all duly reprimanded. I hesitated between Papworth and Goldsmith as the name for the institute but eventually came down 55:45 on the side of the piper. In the film it is the piper who trigger the cease-fire.

A Danish soprano and a German tenor had got permission from the Kaiser’s son to entertain the troops on the front line. As the trenches were only 25 yards apart they entertained the Scots and the French trenches too. Soon the Scots were joinng in with their bagpipe accompaniment. Then the officers had a word and suddenly fraternity burst out. A.A.Milne missed something. I want some archbishops on the Peace Party’s pre-emptive peace list...alongside the politicians, media moguls and arms manufacturers.

There are four million closed circuit cameras in England. Your average Londoner gets her picture taken 300 times a day. The latest police system links 3000 cameras to the car registrations records. Now you know why you never see a bobby on the beat. They are back at the nick going boggled eyed at their television screens. Compare the 1 in 14 caught on camera in England with the 1 in 12 on the planet who own a gun. Nicholas Cage poses the real question in Lord of War: ‘How do we arm the other eleven?’ Mark Thatcher keeps trying.