Blog 2023 Malcolm Blair-Robinson

This has been a ticking bomb under the public finances for a very long time and Lord Hutton, a former Labour minister, is to be commended for the realism and frankness of his report.

Civil Service unions are understandably angry and will do all they can to protect their members’ retirement expectations. However the truth of the matter is that any concessions will have to be paid for and they will be paid for in fewer public sector jobs. The Unions need in private and when not making  propoganda on the airwaves, to reflect on the reality.  It is this. The bankers may well have been the source of the financial crisis, but the budget was in deficit beforehand. The primary reason among many is that there are too many people working in the public sector for the private sector to sustain. If the Unions want to avoid even more job losses they have to get real and do the sums themselves.

France has recognised the anti-Gaddafi forces and their administrative structure as ‘the legitimate government of Libya’. This is premature. There is no certainty that they will prevail, nor even that they have majority support in the wider context of the whole of Libya. Certainly they are in no sense ‘governing’ Libya. It may very well be that they never do. Premature recognition of a rebelling combination in a civil war is rash, even reckless and can impede a just cause to the point where it fails. Clearly the hope of the Benghazi people is that France will now help them militarily. When it does not, which is likely, the sense of let down, even betrayal, will be profound.

Everyone who wants to see a resolution of this crisis must see that only U.N. authorised (properly, not Iraq style), military intervention by non Arab states will have any chance and even that chance is long. The Libyan people have to solve this and find a way of ridding themselves of the Gaddafi family, if that is what they want. The rest of the world can pile in humanitarian aid, freeze assets, impose sanctions and generally make it worthwhile for the Gaddafis to find a way out before it is too late.There are reports they are putting out feelers.

At the moment Gadaffi is winning the military engagements and the rebels are being pushed back. That may not last, once anger at the heavy handedness of his forces and the brutality in his prisons permeates his traumatised country. There is more to happen yet and the West needs, for the moment, to stock up its powder but keep it dry.