Blog 2023 Malcolm Blair-Robinson

Tony Blair, evidently a devout Christian, has an ideology which is curiously old fashioned. He believes that he is a goody, those who see things differently are baddies and all can be put right if you intervene militarily and impose an outcome by force. Democracy will take over, freedom will flower and milk and honey will flow. His friend George W Bush thought the same things, so they were able to put their ideas into practice and others followed in their footsteps. We know the names of these Utopian dreams; Afghanistan and Iraq, misreading the Arab Spring, Libya and as a direct consequence of Sunni insurgents believing the West would intervene to back them as it did in Libya, Syria. Every one of these countries is now in chaos.

Today’s world of instant communication and social media brings individuals together to form a critical mass in a way unimagined in the past. This makes insurgencies easy to organize and the task of formal militaries in confronting them very difficult without resorting to sledgehammer blows. These create more insurgents bent on revenge. Thus it is that whereas war with all its destruction and death wears out a military machine, it actually builds up and breathes life into an insurgency. It is therefore the case that once armed conflict is started, it proves almost impossible to stop it. The instruments of surrender, peace treaties, security pacts and so forth, once dominant as roadways to settlement, are now little better than worthless paper. Whatever their words the people ignore them.

It is not clear to this Blog how on earth it is ever going to be possible to bring order and peace to the Middle East, but if it ever happens it will be because the people who live there have finally had enough. It will not be because of military intervention, from whatever worthy source and with whatever blessings from Blair the enterprise is endowed.

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We are now watching the final outcome of the post WWI settlement, when France and Britain divided the spoils of the defeated Ottoman Empire. They drew lines on a map and created two counties, one a republic, Syria, and one a monarchy, Iraq. The boundaries of these countries, within which some of the world’s oldest cities had stood from deep into Biblical times, took no account of tribe, ethnicity, religion or sub group, all of which became separated from one culture and joined to another without any say in the matter. We know from Ireland just how tense these divides can become and how toxic are the relationships which fester and multiply. Only strong leadership of an authoritarian stamp will keep the lid on the mix, which is why both Iraq and Syria became authoritarian dictatorships.

The assumption by the West that these could readily be replaced by pluralist democracy, which ignored the history and the fault lines, has been proved to be spectacularly flawed, at terrible human cost. These two countries are now fractured beyond repair and one way or another will divide together into new enclaves of common ethnic origin. Not until that happens will there be any lasting peace, but how long it will take and at what human cost is impossible to foretell. All we know is the cost in human suffering is already beyond appalling and will get worse, and it should never have happened.

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Last night’s speeches at the Mansion House were refreshing in that George Osborne, who had remained indifferent from the carefully calibrated warnings from the previous governor, Sir Mervyn, now Lord, King about various aspects of the economy, woke up at last to the dangers of house prices and a debt fueled recovery. Mark Carney warned of structural imbalances and of the need for Bank Rate to rise sooner rather than later, even quite soon. Many had felt the previous pronouncements from the Bank about interest rates too complacent.

This is good news. We now know both the Bank and the Treasury are aware of icebergs floating about and are willing to act if we appear headed for one. We can breath a quiet sigh of relief that immediate collision will be averted. The problem remains that we should not be in these waters at all and our course still needs to be re-set. Too much of the consumer boom relies on money borrowed from banks and finance houses, who in turn borrow from abroad in order to lend; the pound is far too high making imports cheap and exports expensive; this has a negative impact on UK manufacturing and employment, especially in local industries; we are not only over-borrowed and borrowing still, but running trade and budget deficits at every level.

All this is masked by a feel good factor arising out of inflating house prices, because these increase borrowing margins for consumers to spend, but so far no really big plan for house building exists to increase supply by the margins necessary. The brown field site initiative, also launched last night by the Chancellor, is a contribution too small to turn the tide.

It was a good banquet at the Mansion House last night, but as yet not good enough. But it was a move forward in the right direction.

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The answer is both. It is a sign that concentrating all power to the centre with virtually nothing between governors and government is no way to run a publicly funded institution such as education. It is a symptom of what can happen when you do.

It all goes back to the Thatcher era reforms which sought to remove responsibility from local government for education management. These were popular and predicated on the belief that parents were more sensible that loony left councillors, and could be trusted with a greater say in the way schools were run. With that generation of parents and councillors there was a popular truth in the idea, even if in practice it was flawed. A few years ago I became a school governor for the second time. My first experience was in the sixties when the District Education Officer was in charge. When I was again appointed, forty years later, nobody was actually in charge in the old sense; many were the people who exercised various specified responsibilities limited by statute, but all power rested with the Secretary of State. This included the removal of the chairman of governors.

The Tories are ideologically opposed to big government and centralized power, yet they have been responsible for the greatest advances in Whitehall control over the last forty years. Labour now proposes that someone should be in charge of all schools locally, whatever their definition; Faith, Free, Academy, Local Authority, C of E or whatever. They talk of a Director of Standards. This is one of Labour’s few good ideas.

The balance between religious freedom, faith and the general good is not easy to organize in a truly multicultural society. In a society governed by adherence to one faith, as used to be the case when the Church of England retained its standing, which allows and is tolerant of other faiths, it is relatively easy. Now we have to move forward with a much more clearly defined and regulated secular platform, to which every citizen of whatever faith is subject and which every public institution is required to uphold. This is tricky territory for politicians. They will have to pluck up their courage and advance into it.

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On the face of it there is no reason why government ministers should not disagree and even row. When it becomes public because of covert briefings and midnight phone calls, the media goes into hyper drive. In Twitter speak every piffling detail of who said what to whom, on whose authority and with what intention, becomes a series of trending issues. Rising stars are dimmed and the careers of young advisers lose a wheel. But and this is the big BUT, does it grip anybody outside politics and the media and does the public care?

No.

Because in real lives with issues about jobs and childcare and house prices and debt and health and kids’ homework and in-laws, there just is not time to fool about like this. There are real things to get stuck into which cannot wait and which have real impact on the here and now.

So there are in government. This Blog has argued before, that fixed term Parliaments do not suit the flexible vagaries of our unwritten Constitution and that five years is too long. The absurd exhibition of bad behaviour which now grips the Westminster village is clear evidence that this Blog is right. The people who pay for all this by their toil and tax have to suffer another eleven months of electioneering, with little useful being achieved for their benefit by the spoiled children who rule them. The really depressing thing is that there is little to suggest that those who hope to replace them next May are any better.

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The Ukraine is beginning to look as if there may be some way out of its dire situation. The new president has a mandate the mob appointed Government in Kiev previously lacked and is already making conciliatory noises. Putin  has declared himself willing to enter into a dialogue with Poroshenko and they have already had a brief exchange of words. Make no mistake, the obstacles to progress are formidable and the possible pitfalls like a honeycomb. Nevertheless there is now some light, where formerly there was only darkness.

Without going into the detail of where things might now go, this Blog will step back and try to sketch out the big picture. This is because there appears not to be one in either the State Department or the Foreign Office, or if there is , it is locked away out of sight. By following a series of knee jerk decisions based upon the dogma of tribal politics, the pile up of disasters is spectacular. Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria and Crimea, as well as large Al Qaeda associated armed formations operating in Syria, Iraq and various failing states in Africa. Meanwhile tensions rise over all manner of territorial disputes in the South China Sea. Some of these misfortunes are a direct result of Western policy, some are made worse by the Western response and some are disasters in the making.

During WWII Western policy was the defeat of the military/ fascist dictatorships of Germany, Japan and Italy whatever the cost. Following victory, the emphasis changed to building stable democracies in the shattered countries, with the underlying aim of eliminating a return to the bad ways of the past, but also increasingly, to prevent the expansion of communism. This later objective became known as the Cold War. When that ended in the collapse of the Soviet system and the break-up of the USSR, as well as the conversion of China into an economic powerhouse built on a unique platform of communist led capitalism, the world was for the first time for over a hundred years without power blocks and formal enemies.

Unfortunately the success went to the heads of Western foreign policy makers. They chose a path of expansion and domination when they should, instead, have seen the need for inclusion and compromise. Lunatic invasions and occupations went hand in hand with a steady expansion of NATO eastwards, without, at the same time, making any serious attempt to bring Russia into the fold. Way back when the first countries in post war Europe got together to create the Common Market, they did so in the belief that the only way to guarantee peace and stability in Europe ( or that part not under the control of the Soviets) was to unite the vital interests of the old rivals, France and Germany, in a common cause.

At the end of the Cold War the same principle applied to Russia. She should have been invited into the EU and helped to meet the conditions for membership. The instability in the East is a direct outcome of this failure to think with strategic coherence then. It is time to now to start afresh.

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No. It is indeed the case that the outcome was a foregone conclusion and that to European standards this election was neither fair nor free. But Syria is not Europe and it is at war with an insurgency of many colours, some of which are the archest enemies of Western civilization known. The West, whose collective foreign policy over Syria has been every bit as big a disaster as Libya, Iraq and Afghanistan, points out that people only voted in areas held by the Assad government and not in large parts of the country held by the rebels. This, it cries, renders the election invalid.

Really? When Abraham Lincoln was elected president of the USA in 1861 by a landslide in the Northern states, he was so unpopular in the South that several states did not even print his name on the ballot papers. When four years later he stood and won a second term, no voting took place at all in the half of the country which had become the Confederate States of America. Nobody suggested then nor since that he was not the legitimate President of that part of the country which remained loyal to his cause.

The West utterly misjudged the Arab Spring, seeing only some Utopian eruption of pluralist democracy, oblivious to the very real dangers posed by tribal, religious, ethnic and ideological fissures and the chaos and suffering which would follow if these broke national fabrics apart. Russia warned but nobody listened.

Whether Syria will ever be put back together with the boundaries set post WWI is unlikely. What is clear is that whatever the imperfections, a very large number of Syrians, especially Christians and other minorities, see the Assad Presidency as their best hope and are willing enthusiastically to support it. No solution can be brokered by the international community at whatever level unless that fact is recognized and accepted, however much humble pie has to be eaten to do so.

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