Blog 2023 Malcolm Blair-Robinson

Job Losses

Figures from the U.S. on the job front were disappointing recently and now we have a warning that U.K. unemployment situation, which had been better than most predictions at the start of the recession, is about to ‘stall’. This surely means deteriorate.

Unfortunately this is the inevitable outcome of government funding unnecessary jobs in the public sector by spending money it did not have. The borrowing becomes unsustainable, in our case by a mile. Like a distant thunder cloud hovering in the sky, the inevitable cuts are about to move across to darken the prospects of many loyal and innocent workers. There is no way round this. There will be a good deal of pain. There may even be negative growth or a double dip recession.

There are now more and more monetarist voices flowing across the airwaves. They are  holding their Keynesian colleagues to account. The spending and borrowing works only for a moment to create a false dawn. It does not correct the faults which caused the crisis. These have now to be addressed. The monetarist message is that the process would have advanced further and the pain would be over sooner if the job had not been put off. They have history on their side.

If the recession had been solely caused by events outside this country and beyond our control as Labour, quite wrongly,  inferred, government spending to tide us over until our trading partners recovered enough to buy our goods and services again would most likely have worked. But this was not the case. The crisis was born in London and New York, through systemic failures in the whole Anglo-Saxon economic model. The requirement is to rebuild a better model. We cannot spend our way out. We have to build our way up. From rock bottom.

Child Protection

Once again it is in the news that massive court delays, which will get worse, are placing abused children at risk and vulnerable families at risk from a wrong decision. When interviewed, representatives from the legal profession, social workers and Cafcas blame each other for then chaos. Now they have a common enemy, government cuts.

I have been advocating change since the beginning of 2009. I even received a very nice letter from Gordon Brown inviting me to submit evidence to one of Labour’s many Task Forces. Whatever little has happened does not include any of my proposals. It is clear that soon I will have to have another go.

Every report of failure and delay confirms my conviction that the working relationship between social workers, adversarial courts, lawyers and Cafcas is systemically dysfunctional and cannot ever work. I propose an end to the responsibility of social workers as the engine of inquiry into cases where potential risk is flagged up, an end to the adversarial family courts, an end to battling lawyers and closing down of Cafcas.

All this to be replaced with a Child Welfare Commission, with a Commissioner in every district with the power of a judge presiding over an inquisitorial court employing its own investigating officers, fully trained to deal with the diversity of challenge in identifying children at risk and families in need of support. Robust with the dodgy but family friendly with the frail and the frightened this logical new system would be up to date and fitted to a civilised country in the twenty first century. It would also save a good deal of money.

The present shambles is an expensive failure and an affront to the values we declare to hold dear.