Blog 2023 Malcolm Blair-Robinson

Afghan Tragedy

Such terrible news when a rescue mission goes wrong and worse when friend kills friend. I have heard various officers defending the very sad outcome as a risk inherent in a dangerous mission. There are some questions to answer nevertheless. Two in particular:

Why was the mission launched against the advice of local tribal elders and Mullahs, who were trying to negotiate the hostage’s release?

Why were hand grenades thrown in the proximity of the hostage?

One can only imagine the suffering and grief, made even worse by today’s news, of this brave woman’s family and friends.

This should be a moment of quiet reflection and sympathy for them.

Graduate Tax

Apparently this is no longer on the cards. There are certain unavoidable truths. University have to be paid either by the taxpayer or the student. If the decision that all or part should be paid by the student, as the majority do not have the ready cash, either they must be lent the money, to repay when they earn, or they must pay in higher taxation on their earnings.

The financial effect to the student of these two approaches is broadly the same, since whether money is taken from their later pay in extra tax or loan repayments; money is money whatever you call it. This whole question does, with other current problems of matching expenditure by government to its incoming revenues, pose an interesting question. It is this.

There is an obvious fact that people do not pay enough tax to meet all the demands they make upon the state and the deficit is evidence of this. The gap can be narrowed by increasing economic activity and thus tax revenue, or by raising tax rates, or any combination of the two. There is an accepted wisdom that excessive tax rates drive down revenue, so tax increases are generally avoided if possible. Nevertheless I have for long thought that the basic rate of income tax (at 22% basic rate and 20% lower rate) under the last Conservative government was about right,  and subsequently pushed down too low by New Labour, to balance the national books.

Add to that the fact the  New Labour built economic prosperity on debt;  its own and the consumer’s. This created an economy which generated from the working population huge revenue, in the form of interest payments on debt, to the banks, thus reducing the available margin to go to the government in tax, without hitting economic activity.

If we can now build an economy less reliant on borrowing and if households have to pay less for it, a margin will develop to restore, safely, a basic rate of income tax which pays, with other taxation, the bills of the government. In other words move back to a more realistic rate of basic rate tax. Fundamentals, like higher education, might then go back to being free to all.  As it was before New Labour came to power in 1997.

Israel and Middle East Peace

Once again this hangs by a thread because of Israeli settlement building. This aggressive policy, without foundation in international law, is condemned by almost every government across the world including all Israel’s allies. It also offends countless Jewish people, integrated into countries in the West.

Nobody seems to be able to make the Israeli government see reason, not even the country upon which they depend for support, the United States. Essentially Israel holds all the cards. It can bully, oppress and occupy as much as it likes; this produces a terrorist reaction. That it turn is taken as licence to be even more obdurate and inflexible. This cannot go on.

First the West (not the U.S. because the Israeli lobby is too powerful for any politician to challenge successfully) must begin to distance itself diplomatically from Israel and make its isolation more obvious to ordinary Iraelis and those with dual citizenship. Next the Holocaust must be decoupled from modern Israel. The whole of civilised history will, till the end of time, look upon that unspeakable event as the worst of crimes against humanity. The suffering of Jews at the hands of the Nazis continues to provoke waves of justified sympathy for a people subjected to inhuman cruelty. The scars will never heal.

But what happened in Germany and Occupied Europe in the war years, has no practical connection with what happens in the territory occupied by both Israel and Palestine in the Middle East today. Only Israel has been given the status of recognition as a nation State and when this was granted it was on the assumption that it would conduct itself according, not to fundamental interpretation of Old Testament writings, but to the principles of International Law and the Charter of the United Nations. Unfortunately Israel is now governed by those who think that the former take precedence over the latter.

They should soon be told that if that approach persists it throws wide open the question, thought long settled, of the legitimacy of  the State of Israel itself.  These people will not listen until they realise they really do have something to lose. This is not anti Jewish, anti semitic or anti Zionist. It is not anti anything or anyone. It is purely an acceptance that in international affairs there has to be a fair basis for the rules which govern recognition, frontiers and friends.