Blog 2023 Malcolm Blair-Robinson

Defence Review.

Anxiety is building up among some MPs and military brass that cuts will be imposed impeding our forces’ ability to maintain current operations.

This is the whole idea. Or it should be. This country can afford to defend itself and its vital interests with the most advanced modern weapons sufficient to deter or destroy any aggressor. What it cannot afford is to project global military power to coerce sovereign states or to bombard or invade them to make them follow our bidding. Not only does our military need to have that power scaled back, but the Foreign Office must come up with a global policy based on what is right, as well as realistic and reasonable, for Britain. Plainly much of what has gone on in the last ten years was not.

Governor’s Speech to TUC

Mervyn King made a brave speech today and came clean with the Trade Unions that the crash was not the fault of their members. This endorsement should be warmly appreciated by all those union bosses not blinkered by a political agenda in danger of neutering their collective power. The public will back a union campaign to call on the government to protect the vulnerable and for the cuts to be fair.

If the militants push the TUC into a political confrontation with the Coalition which is more about power and less about the reality that even under Labour cuts were scheduled and must happen no matter what, they will lose their public sympathy. Right across the economy households are paying down debt and saving more than for nearly a generation. The people themselves know you cannot go on borrowing more and more without it costing more and more. The Unions need to remember that.

Tea Party

It is very intersting that Tea Party candidates, endorsed by Sarah Palin, are gaining ground in Republican primaries.

From what I have heard and read of their opinions and approach, I am much reminded of the arguments of the secessionist politicians of the 1850’s. Slavery was then the talisman, as Healthcare is this time, but the argument is and was then really about Federal power and its authority over the individual States. This is much fired up by economic impacts; then the financial losses associated with abolition; now the taxation burden of Obama’s brand of what they see as Socialism.

In the end I suspect the majority of the country of the modern United States is no more inclined to go with this interpretation of the Constitution than it was in 1860. As a student of history I find it truly remarkable that the schism inherent in the ambiguities of the U.S Constitution, settled by a bloodbath of young men in the 1860-65, then and thereafter declared resolved, remains very much alive in the culture one hundred and forty- five years later. It is also interesting to see that the political parties have swapped sides. The rebel cause, its Tea Party brand harking right back to the earliest rebellion against colonial rule, now marches under the banner of the Republican party, founded to champion the power of the Union over its constituent parts.

I do not suppose Sarah Palin has given this much thought.