Blog 2023 Malcolm Blair-Robinson

Tory Health

An eminent consultant, once Tony Blair’s adviser on health reforms, has joined the Tory health team as an adviser to be if they come to power.

I have three observations. The first is the doctors should have nothing to do with sorting out the problems in the health service, because they are the biggest problem. Second the internal market and fund holding surgeries of the last Tory government were a failure, so watch out. The third is everything is explained in the Health chapters of my book 2010 A Blueprint for Change.

Sorry about the plug. I do not do it often.

Economic Recovery

The result for economic growth for the final quarter of 2009 has been eased up from 0.1 to 0.3. This is better than expected. It is, nevertheless, not good. Economists and commentators expect recovery to be slow and bumpy and quite a long road. I am sure they are right.

Unfortunately, as this blog loses no opportunity to proclaim, there has been no fundamental re-modeling of the economy and we are coming out of the recession by the same road as we went in. This will mean that the recovery will be like the one which lasted from 1945 to 1984. Bursts of boom but slipping all the time behind the countries whom once we had led. We need to think about that.

Torture

In modern civilised culture torture has no place. Neither does wrapping oneself in explosives as a fast track to heaven, killing and maiming innocent civilians in the process, including women and children. To discover who is plotting and planning, intelligence services step over the line. To gain recognition or some other political ambition frustrated by vast obstacles, young idealists do the same. Torture by security services comes off the same shelf as suicide bombing. Neither is justified. Each will create more of the other.

M15 is probaly one of the most successful and certinly most experienced of the world’s security services. The values that it protects on behalf of our country are certainly the best. Unfortunately neither it, nor our country, always live up to the standards we ourselves set and proclaim. When found out we deny, lie and confuse. It is time to bring about some improvement to regain the moral authority to appeal to reason from the suicide bombers. It will be difficult to be heard but without improvement it will be impossible.