Blog 2023 Malcolm Blair-Robinson

Zimbabwe Sanctions.

South Africa has called for sanctions to end. I agree. Sanctions prop up the tyrannies they are designed to hurt. They deprive the ordinary people and create the opportunity for the despot in charge to bribe cronies with luxuries. The way to get rid of such regimes is to empower the people through greater prosperity to have time and energy to change their government. To cut off medicine, food and light causes so much initiative to be required for survival that politics takes a back seat. If we had opened up to Iraq after the first war to expel them from Kuwait, the Iraqi people themselves would have had the resources to change their government if they wanted to, or Saddam would have mellowed like Gadafi.

Now that there is a power sharing government, creaky and unstable but trying and already showing huge improvements in the quality of daily life, we need to set the country free of foreign shackles. It will then have the strength to free itself of its own. 

I have an interest in this. My grandfather was an early settler in what later became Southern Rhodesia, and my mother was born there. A cousin was a senior banker and diplomat who emigrated to America when Smith declared unilateral independence. Zimbabwe is a great country with room for everyone to live in harmony. White extremists have surely learned their lesson. The time is now for black extremists to show they have done so too. Starting with the President himself. The rest of the world needs to stop setting conditions based upon their own standards, arrived at only after many centuries of bloodshed and the slaughter of millions, and give these people a chance. That would shut down the patronage of ZANU(PF). Then things would really get moving.

Listen to the South Africans. They talk good sense.

Chilean Earthquake

Our hearts, thoughts and prayers go out once again to the victims of natural disaster, this time Chile. A much more advanced country than the last victim, Haiti, with vastly better infrastructure and a rehearsed emergency plan. I fear we may not yet know the full extent of the damage and loss of life. We can only imagine the trauma of those caught up in such an event and the grief of the survivors for family and friends who are gone. The collective sympathy and aid of the rest of the world is on its way.

This hemisphere is having troubling seismic disturbance. We must hope San Andreas remains quiet down below.

Opinion Polls

Well, well! The Tory lead is down to 2%. The bullying allegations have played in Brown’s favour. If this happened on polling day Cameron would be defeated. Parliament would be hung, but the Tories would not be the largest party. This blog thinks this is a good moment to take stock of the parties. The election is going to be much more exciting than we thought.

First let us look at the numbers in the coming battle. Brown occupies the high ground. He can lose around 30 seats to keep a majority of one. Cameron has to win 117 seats to get that magic one. The scale of the Tory defeat under Major in 1997 requires not just a Tory victory. They have to inflict a massacre. Until recently they were on course to do so. Now it may already be out of reach.

What has happened? Basically the Tories screwed up. The first part of thier campaign has been a muddle of mixed messages and daft ideas. This has caused people to lose confidence at two levels. If they are going to do those sorts of things, do we want them in power? Far more damaging is the astonishment that given such a winning position at the outset they have manged to play bad cards in the wrong order. This causes the fatal doubt; if they are too shallow and inexperienced to run a campaign, how can they possibly be trusted to run the country? Who are their advisers? What about this Coulson person? Who is Lord Ashcroft?

Labour have had a lot of problems, but they appear to be overcoming them one by one. Brown, the underdog in adversity assailed by events and people on all sides, driven to titanic rages, has taken hit after hit, but like a blitzed city whose people refuse to give in, he has tottered on in defiance promising victory is possible. First the British love the hero underdog. They love Churchill not for the triumph of D-Day but for the calamity of Dunkirk. Here is Brown, near blinded as a lad playing rugby, betrayed by Blair, losing his first born, the world financial system crashing about his ears (never mind if it was his fault, everybody was at it, mostly the bankers and most of them are Tories), but he is always there. He says he is there for us. Well perhaps he is?

So as we move into the critical phase, things are getting worse for the Tories and getting better for Labour. Even if the economic recovery falters in the first quarter after improved figures for the last quarter, it can be explained by the transport chaos of the weather and the return of vat to its normal rate. Overall things seem to be improving. All that could change. A more profound economic event or some even more dramatic eruption in Labour’s hyperventilated ranks could blow everything. But at the moment the campaign is moving Labour’s way. Just like Gordon said it would.

Today Cameron has to make the speech of his life. More than that the speech of his party’s life. He has done it twice before. The first to gain the leadership and the second to break Brown’s confidence in the election that never was. The speech alone will not now be enough. There has to be a clear, radical and comprehensible  programme presented today certainly, but organised into a winning campaign critically. This time the campaign mangers have no room for screw ups.

The Lib dems know this is not their hour. At this point, as the third party, they must hone their local campaigns to put themselves as the primary challenge in as many seats as possible, while securing those they already hold. They can win from both Labour and Tory, but can lose to both also. In the final phase they can proclaim their programme. Properly done this will play well as they have some of the best ideas, especially constitutional reform. Their goal is different to either of the two big parties. In a hung parliament they must go for the balance, because in a hung parliament, balance is power.