Blog 2023 Malcolm Blair-Robinson

President Obama has overruled the advice of his generals and rightly so. This pointless but costly war has bumbled on for ten years, daily snatching the lives of brave servicemen and women who give their all as the highest calling of patriotic duty. It also costs the lives of countless Afghans, some fighters, but many innocent. The vision of a democratic state, unified and at peace, was always unrealistic and is now no more than a pipe dream of the most hallucinatory kind.

Afghanistan is a tribal society of centuries standing, averse to central government, with its own tradition of war lords and tribal elders, which has never and will never, re-mould to some democratic system of Western origin. It presently has a government elected by fraudulent means which is widely acknowledged to be the most corrupt in the world. It is financially dysfunctional and cannot even pay its soldiers regularly, because so much of the largess dispensed by the West, lines the pockets of its dishonest ministers and officials.

The Taliban, repeatedly described by generals high on a cocktail of wishful thinking and self delusion, as on the back foot, constantly reappears to commit murder and mayhem. They know they only have to wait, until the foreign troops go, when the Karzai government will implode as its leaders flee, their pockets a jangle with pilfered aid, while their security forces defect to the Taliban, who will then return in triumph to power. To reinforce the humiliation of those who promoted this ill starred campaign, even when it was clear it could not succeed, The Taliban will actually provide, in  spite of its archaic format,  a government which will be a good deal better than the one it has put to flight.

The Deputy Prime Minister wants to give everybody free shares in Lloyds Bank and RBS, so as to reward taxpayers for bailing out the banks. This is just silly.

First we are in the midst of a sovereign debt crisis, destabilised by a euro crisis. At best this will lead to significant sovereign debt re-structuring, starting with Greece. This will mean substantial losses to European banks, with UK banks exposed either directly or by credit default swaps and the like. We all know how much they are worth when reality kicks in. Except it is worse, because some will require a payout to French and German banks to cover their losses, which UK banks have covered. It is not impossible that further rescue by taxpayers will be needed, not least because the coalition government, of which Nick Clegg is Deputy PM, has shuffled about and delayed urgent bank re-structuring, which leaves these profligate institutions too big to fail. In fact they may now be too big to save.

On top of all that, the issue of whether HBOS should be separated from Lloyd’s is not fully resolved, nor whether Halifax should be reconstituted as a building society and separated from Bank of Scotland. There is too the question of whether Nat West should have its independence restored and whether Coutts, as the country’s poshest bank, might not do better out of Sir Fred’s former and now tottering empire.

To come up with this childish plan in order to appeal to simplistic echoes of Thatcher’s Sid, tells us a good deal about the drifting nature of Clegg’s brief as Cameron’s minder. It does not enhance their joint creditability and coming on top of one of the richest harvests of policy u turns in the history of government, makes it look as if the weakest links in the coalition are at the top. Compare with the single minded Osborne and Alexander, with Hague and Cable in the wings.