Blog 2023 Malcolm Blair-Robinson

Some commentators are suggesting that John Kerry made an off the cuff slip, when he suggested the US would call off military strikes if the Assad regime gave up its chemical weapons stockpile, and has thus handed the advantage to the Russians. This is nonsense. First, President Obama has admitted to discussing the idea with President Putin at the G20 and, second, the reason the Russians have the advantage is that the American threat of military action is deeply unpopular everywhere among populations weary of war, including and especially in the United States itself. The American political and military leadership is out of step with majority world opinion while the Russians are walking neatly in time.

There are a multitude of tacky elements to the US position and that of the UK government, but not its parliament. No fuss was made when Saddam Hussein, then an ally of the West, used such weapons against Iran, nor when he used them again against the Kurds. There is now clear evidence that the original Aleppo chemical strike which gave rise to the red line declaration, was launched using improvised munitions and non military grade gas. This points to the rebels. Any American military action must have the inevitable effect of degrading Assad’s military infrastructure and give advantage to those who oppose him. Yet he is not America’s enemy and has not threatened the United States. On the other hand a leading element of his enemy is Al Qaeda and affiliates, perhaps the best organised and best led of all the many formations. Al Qaeda is America’s sworn enemy.

If Assad falls the so called moderate rebels are not anywhere near strong enough to control the chaos which will follow, whereas Al Qaeda and other Islamic groups almost certainly are. Thus the outcome, even if the chemicals are destroyed in the apparently ‘tiny’ missile strike, may be that the country falls into the hands of the worst enemy of all.

Outside the White House, Pentagon, Downing Street and the Elysee Palace, the rest of the world knows this and wonders at the contradictions and confusion. It also vehemently believes that no kind of bombing can be carried out without civilian casualties and cannot see how this can alleviate the suffering of the ordinary people of Syria. Nor can it guarantee the destruction of the gas, the storage of which is said to be spread among very many sites, some of which may already be in rebel hands.

As one who spent his early childhood never far from his gas mask and later survived the unpredictable bombardment of VI and VII missiles which decimated many streets in my neighbourhood, I am still able to recall just what it is like to live in a war zone. I also recall that it was widely accepted at the time that the reason the Germans did not use gas was not that they had signed a treaty, but the knowledge that if they did we would use it on them big time. It was called deterrence.

But in the end any weapon used against civilians is uncivilised and the death of a child, whether blown apart by shrapnel or suffocated by poisonous gas, is still the death of a child. Oh, and what about napalm in Viet Nam? The biggest problem which the United States faces is the way it manipulates its principles to serve its interests of the moment. It is a problem entirely of its own making and belongs to a past era. Others have moved on. There are better ways of doing things. If history tells us anything it is that killing cannot save lives.

Ed Milliband knows that he has both public opinion and the majority opinion of rank and file union members on his side, when he talks of reforming the relationship between the Union movement and its political party. There is certainly a case for modernisation to a model which suits the world in which now we live, which is a very different one to that of the early nineteenth century.

Nevertheless it is not as simple as it looks and great care must be taken before knocking the structure down before there is a clear and stress tested plan of what is to replace it. Labour is not just a political party. It is a crusade for human justice and a fair deal for those who serve or toil;  is the voice of the underdog, the forgotten, the sick and the weak; its values are fashioned from life and not form luxury; it believes in all of us together rather than me first. It is a Movement, not just a Party.

When we write it we say Labour in the singular; when we speak of the Tories or the Lib Dems, they are plural. The reformers believe that if people contract out of block affiliation and go for individual membership of the Labour Party its roll will increase. This, if it happens, would buck the modern trend. People no longer want to be members of political parties. They want to be members of Facebook or Twitter and through instant social media they like to join campaigns to achieve something worthy. They become followers, not members.

This does not mean that there should be no modernisation to make the Labour Movement more in tune with modern trends, but to base it on an expected surge in individual membership if automatic affiliation is cast aside, is to look back to a different social structure to the one we live in today.

Watch it Ed. You could drive the Labour bus over a cliff.

George Osborne claims, with justification, that things are moving up rather than down and there is a slow recovery under way. It is certainly broader based than the ‘no more boom and bust’ model driven into the ditch by Labour, which remains confused about what it would actually do to make things better rather than worse.

Nevertheless this recovery is still too reliant on consumption rather than manufacturing and production;  it is about spending  existing wealth rather than creating new. It is also fuelled by quantitative easing into the financial sector which has raised share prices and is now feeding through into increasing house prices, but is not fuelling expansion in production to anything like the same extent. None of this is good news and it means that such a recovery as will develop on this foundation will be subject to severe correction trauma at some point down the line and before it has succeeded in transforming Britain’s chronic economic decline relative to its peers.

Inherent in the current situation is a single explosive anomaly. Assets are rising while living standards are falling. In particular house prices are now rising significantly faster than inflation. If this is not ringing a very loud bell at the Bank of England it should be. In many blog posts and in my book published in 2009, I argued the case for a separate Bank of England controlled Mortgage Rate, operating alongside Bank Rate, to allow a signal for the increase in mortgage costs to curb house price rises, whilst leaving interest rates for business low. It is time to look at this idea.

Failure to curb rising house prices, rising as they are from an excess value anyway, will guarantee one thing for sure. This so called recovery may last until the general election in 2015, then it will blow up. It may be that is Osborne’s plan. It is certainly where Labour should concentrate its economic guns. If it has any.

It is an absolute requirement of the re-balancing of the British economy so that it can sustain a continuous period of economic recovery, rather than a flash in the pan, that housing costs relative to living costs and earnings fall very dramatically. At the moment they are going in the opposite direction. This is not good news for Mr Osborne, or for anybody.