Blog 2023 Malcolm Blair-Robinson

Bonuses at the MOD

I think the authorities who run things need to learn a simple truth. Times have changed. In Thatcher’s day a bonus was a good and clever thing which said everyone should be open to reward for extra effort. Now we have been busted by the bankers and deceived by our  MPs. No longer will this form of enrichment, however worthy, regain its acceptability, certainly not when out of taxpayers’ pockets.

We have to return to the old idea that you get paid a fair and adequate rate for the job and that’s that. It is supposed you will do your best and show initiative in your post. Your bonus is to keep it.

If you want extra you can set up on your own, take the risk and the sky is the limit. That’s the difference between being an entrepreneur and an an employee. Each has worth and merit. We cannot have the one without the other. But we need to remember there is a difference between the two.

Drugs and the Elderly

I agree that too many drugs are given to older people. As we get older various infirmities and malfunctions occur. This is part of the ageing process. Sometimes drugs are available which will make a real difference to the quality of life, but few are free of side effects. These have to be weighed against the potential improvement in life quality and a judgement taken. Older people cannot take too many drugs at once. It can set up an immune system reaction which is itself an illness. I know. It happened to me.

Never should drugs be given just as a matter of routine care procedure without proper cause.

Armistice Day

My father survived  WWI, but my uncle was killed on the Somme. I have some of his letters home, written in pencil from the trenches. Their innocence and courage is humbling but their vision of hope tears the heart, even today, as I hold the fragile yellowed paper and witness, through the eyes of an eighteen year old, the cruelty and suffering.

In WWII my great grand parents were killed in the blitz. I learned my tables in the school cellar, where we were driven by the air raid siren, while stuttering flying bombs above us prepared for their final silent dive of death and destruction. I remember as we recited the 4x table a tremendous concussion of a close impact causing the floor beneath our feet to heave and dust fall from the ceiling down upon us. Our shrill voices faded but just for a moment. The teacher tapped her ruler ‘come along children! Six fours are?’  Twenty four! we trilled.

There is a lot to remember.

COPY OF ARTICLE ON GUARDIAN ONLINE

You might find this interesting

Queen should call snap election over MPs’ expenses, campaigner says. Malcolm Blair-Robinson has written to three party leaders plus the palace warning next week’s state opening of parliament may be unconstitutional

Constitutional campaigner Malcolm Blair-Robinson has written to each of the three party leaders and the palace warning that it might be unconstitutional for the Queen to press ahead with the state opening of a “disgraced and rotten parliament” next week.

“The situation which arises as a consequence of the scandal of MPs’ expenses is without precedent in our long history,” he writes, in a letter addressed to the prime minister, Gordon Brown, the Conservative leader, David Cameron, and the Liberal Democrat leader, Nick Clegg.

Blair-Robinson, who has written a book entitled 2010: A Blueprint for Change: Bold Ideas for Voters, said he had taken legal advice and sought the opinion of the Ministry of Justice and had been informed by the department that while it “would not necessarily agree with the conclusions” he draws, his “interpretation of the constitution is basically sound” and his analysis “arguably, fair”.

This year the state opening of parliament is due to take place on Wednesday 18 November, but Blair-Robinson claims that if parliament was allowed to “stumble into another session” then “constitutional issues may arise”.

“The national situation, which grows more uncomfortable as each week passes, demands that the issue be put to the people in a general election so that her majesty can summon a new parliament to tackle the challenges before us all,” he said in his letter to the three party leaders.

And he reminds them that the “reserve power to act in defence and protection of the democratic rights and freedoms of her people rests with Her Majesty as head of state”.

“It is her custom to act only on the advice of her prime minister, on the matter of dissolution, but she can act on her own in the public interest and there is no law to prevent this,” he wrote.

In a separate letter to the Queen’s private secretary, Christopher Geidt, Blair-Robinson says that if the three party leaders fail in their duty to request the dissolution of parliament then “the responsibility must fall directly upon Her Majesty, as head of state.”

A Buckingham Palace spokesman said the palace would not comment on individual letters but added: “All correspondence receives a response. If it is about a constitutional issue it will be forwarded to the relevant government.”

A spokesman for Clegg said: “We have been calling for a general election for some time now to give the people the right to have their say, so on that basis we would support the call for a general election as soon as possible.”

A Downing Street spokeswoman said it had not yet received the letter, but the prime minister had made his position on MPs’ expenses “very clear”.

Cameron’s office has also been contacted for comment.

Nuclear Power Stations

Many people are worried about nuclear power stations. Having lived for twenty years until 1990 in sight of one when they were in their heyday, I am relaxed about NPower. Our problem is that through ducking this issue for too long we are now out of time and at risk of the lights going out before much more time has passed. The effect on a modern on line economy of the power cuts of the seventies would be catastrophic. Moreover no modern heating system in urban areas works without electric pumps or ignition.The elderly and the frail would be at risk.

This is where modern government is so poor and short term. We need to stop thinking in soundbites just to the end of today and starting planning for tomorrow and the day after. We also need to restore confidence in our institutions of government.

New Session of Parliament

There is a Constitutional issue here. Either go to my website or Guardian.co.uk /Politics to see why.

Expenses

What on earth is going on? First we have Sir Thomas Legg. Then we have Sir Christopher Kelly.Now we have Sir Ian Kennedy who is alleged to be saying that he won’t implement Kelly’s recommendations because he does not have to. What kind of farce is this? Have they still not got the message in Westminster? We have had enough!!!

The public will not stand for this. The whole authority of governance is at the point of unravelling.

Printing Money

So the Bank of England has decided to go for a further, but cautious, £25bn of quantitative easing, to help the struggling economy. This was probably the right decision if you embark on this printing money road in the first place. The worry is that the cash is not filtering into the real economy but is being used by banks and other financial companies to trade. New instruments are evolving it seems, involving packaged carbon futures, bundled up like the sub prime mortgage toxic rubbish which has cost us all so dear.

This reinforces my suspicion that you cannot regulate all this. The only route to go henceforth, is to separate useful banking from financial gambling, cut the latter off from taxpayers’ cash or prospect of rescue and let the unlucky ones go bust, however big they are. The alternatives will be to borrow our country in bankruptcy or print our currency into oblivion.

Afghanistan.

Another sad report of bright and valuable young lives lost. Oh their poor families! I do so wish, as the whole country does, that this could end.

From the very beginning I feared that the response to 9/11 was wrong and that the West, led by the ghastly Bush administration, was walking into an Al Qaeda trap. I am now sure this is the case. Not since the bumblings of the Crimea have we been engaged in such ineffectual wars. At least we kept out of Vietnam. Why have we forgotten the lessons of that epic U.S disaster?

Vietnam fell to the Communist North because it offered better, less corrupt, government which focused on the everyday needs of the population. It was willing to go on until the weakness of the corrupt institutions of the south sapped the will of its army and the patience of its people.

America tried overwhelming military force and arial bombings on WWII levels to no avail. It then, knowing its own public opinion was going cold on the project, redefined its strategy and trained and equipped the South Vietnamese army to take over after US forces withdrew. This it did and proclaimed victory for its intervention. The North launched its final offensive. The southern army capitulated and the government fled. The Northern victory was total. Total US casualties for this failed war were over 210,000 of whom nearly 60,000 died.

The defeat was, according to the US, supposed to trigger a communist overrun of all South East Asia. It did not happen. Instead the region became the cradle of the new emerging economies which now hold most of the cash the West has frittered on its borrowing binge, and without whose willingness to purchase US  and our own Government debt, we are all bust. 

The whole ‘protecting our homeland’ concept of these wars both in Iraq and Afghanistan, not only makes utterly flawed strategic assumptions and wrong claims to beef up public support, but forgets also every lesson of Vietnam. The truth is that the current frontier where terrorist threats to our citizens germinate is the cauldron of injustice in Palestine where Israel and her subjugated neighbours, the Palestinians, fight with every fair means and foul and have done for the last sixty years. Afghanistan and Iraq are messes entirely of our own making which have no other function than to make matters worse.

Defining Justice

Sara Payne has, following the horrific murder of her little girl, been a courageous and energetic campaigner for victim support. He work has brought real improvements.

In defining justice itself we need always to remember that victims cannot be part of that process or the critical line between justice and vengeance starts to move. Mrs Pain is right to ask for more support for victims and a more inclusive explanation of the basis of any punishment given out by the courts.

Victims should understand the nature of any punishment but they must not play a part in defining it.