Blog 2023 Malcolm Blair-Robinson

It is absolutely essential for the Western coalition to get the Syrian government’s approval for any direct action against IS on Syrian territory. The Assad regime will give it gladly, since IS is its primary enemy. The time for squeamishness over taking to Assad and refusals to countenance a Syria with his regime in charge has long since gone in a plethora of misreadings and misjudgements. Things have moved on and it is the general consensus that this extremist combination of various branches of Sunni militancy is an evil to be stopped.

The web of so called allies is singular and likely to be ineffective. Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States were the original source of IS funds. Turkey is rumoured to buy IS oil. The majority of IS fighters are Saudi. The alternative combination of the West, Iran, Syria, and Russia supported by a general mobilization of Shias and Kurds wherever they are domiciled, would guarantee a swift end to this menace. That would then allow negotiations with moderate Sunnis, who have been sucked in to supporting IS, so that they could have some territory to call their own.

This requires the West to overcome its differences with both Russia and Iran, neither of which pose a real threat and both of which have everything to gain economically from re-integrating sanction free with the global economy. To achieve this requires a broad strategic vision based upon the realities which are, rather than ideological aspirations which are not. In other words no more tribal politics and more statesmanship.

The alternative is to walk into the trap set by IS with its gruesome and cruel beheadings. Their idea is to lure the West into another conflict with opaque loyalties, unrealistic hopes and flawed strategy. This will lead to another Afghanistan, Iraq or Libya. Military intervention followed by insurgency in a self replicating cycle which could last a hundred years.

Each of these books is different and not part of a sequence, but all of them have the common ability to draw you into the story and keep you turning the pages from start to finish. Click on any of the images for my page on Amazon UK and here for Amazon.com

Nobody knows for sure how Scotland will vote on Thursday. Nothing more useful can be said which is likely to affect the outcome. What will prove decisive is the persuasive power of individuals in communities across the country, within towns, villages, street and families. All are engaged. most have decided and the potential turnout looks as if it will be record breaking. On Friday Scotland will know whether it has taken the leap into independence or has won much greater devolution. Either way there will be winners. But in England?

In England there is no voting, nor has it been consulted, nor even properly told. If Scotland votes Yes it will be the biggest blow to English prestige since the loss of the American colonies, which became  the United States. Great Britain, a name coined, not to exude its imperial power, but to proclaim the national unity of the British Isles, will be great no longer. It will be almost entirely England. It will have lost one third of its land mass and ninety per cent of its oil and gas and fifty of its MPs. It will, on the world stage, look like something of a car crash. Its authority will be at the very least dented and its foreign policy in even more complicated knots. If Scotland can vote to leave the UK why cannot Crimea vote to leave Ukraine? Guess where that will come from.

But if, and it could be either tighter or easier than the polls suggest, Scotland votes to stay, England will undergo the biggest constitutional changes since the foundation of its parliamentary democracy. Yet there is no actual constitution. Most of it is based on precedent. But this is unprecedented. Moreover, nerve wracked party leaders from London, fearing the break up of the UK, have rushed north, making all manner of promises about powers and taxation which will have to be honoured, without any electoral mandate to do so. Does England get a say, a referendum of its own to agree to all this stuff? And what about Scottish MPs? Surely they cannot go on voting about what happens in England over devolved issues? Without Scottish MPs both Labour and the Lib Dems are electoral toast in the near term in England. This offers  the prospect of a  Labour government in the UK without a majority in England. In other words a set up where the Government has power in the UK, but the opposition governs in England where most of the population lives.

This fiasco could have been avoided with some care and thought and planning. It is a grotesque failure of the spin based, PR tained, Oxbridge educated political class. If change is needed anywhere, that is where to start. It’s called Clacton.