Blog 2023 Malcolm Blair-Robinson

Labour MPs have to stop being silly. To try and change leader now would be an electoral gamble too far, more especially because there is no obvious candidate in sight. Labour’s greatest risk comes from the thirty plus seats it is on target to lose in Scotland and it is there that it has to shore up support.

This is not to say Milliband does not have a credibility problem. He has but he has passed the point of no return and he and his party have now to do the best they can. The elected Senate was a good start for a simple and dramatic policy, but it is a bit outside the sphere of interest of ordinary folk in a cost of living crisis. What is needed now is stuff like taking power generation and network distribution back into public ownership in the style of Railtrack, while leaving retail sales open to competition. Making all doctors NHS employees working exclusively for the NHS would transform the health service and should be on the Labour list. A mansion tax is good as would be a turnover tax replacing corporation tax. What is no good is all the fiddly little tinkerings Labour offers, none of which add up to much and which nobody can remember.

It is worth remembering to that only three Labour leaders have ever won a majority at the ballot box for the Labour Movement. Attlee, Wilson and Blair. And they won because the country had had enough of the Conservatives in 1945, 1964 and 1997. Attlee won one more election. Wilson three more and Blair two more. The two Labour leaders who took over when Labour was in power, Callaghan and Brown, both lost and lost big. By contrast three Conservative leaders who took over power, Eden, Macmillan, and Major all won. Only Lord Home, (later Sir Alec Douglas-Home) lost and then only just.

One of Labour’s strengths is its loyalty to its leaders. The Tories are famous for knifing theirs.

MY LATEST BLOCKBUSTER THRILLER IS NOW AVAILABLE ON KINDLE AND IN PAPERBACK! GET IT NOW.

It is written in a modern style in a scene by scene format, with punctuation which follows reading flow rather than traditional rules. This creates a compelling  narrative, easy to read and hard to put down. This book is a work of fiction, but at its heart there is a real historical cover-up. This drives the plot, but almost all the events and characters are fictional. Some characters appear also in Hitler’s First Lady, but that is a novel much more closely linked to known historical facts and the true story of a family, which appears in both books as the Benedicts. Here most of their story is fiction, as are all the modern characters within the family and in the world beyond.

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About the Book

Dr. Rachael Benedict is an American historian and a best-selling author. She has a British connection through her estranged father Saul, an English thriller writer. Saul, whose parents were of Anglo-German origin, has spent much of his life plotting to expose secrets from World War Two, which are so sensitive they have been subject to an extensive cover-up lasting seventy years. As the time approaches for him to make his move to expose duplicity, murder and lies at the heart of the British State, he seeks Rachael’s help. This provokes a killing spree as parts of the security services of both Britain and the United States become engaged in the drama, with one side determined to get the secrets out and the other determined to keep them hidden.

Set equally in the United States and Britain, the narrative grips from the first page, transporting the reader to the heart of government both in Washington and London and on into the darkest corners of the secret states on each side of the Atlantic. Rachael battles forward to unearth the truth both from intrigues of the Nazi era, but also within her own family, surviving three attempts on her life, before finally achieving her goal. Not only does she expose the truth from history and from her own roots, she has to delve deep into her own emotions to find the truth about herself.