Blog 2023 Malcolm Blair-Robinson

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.