Blog 2023 Malcolm Blair-Robinson

No matter whether you are pro or anti SNP, or whether you love her or hate her, in a somewhat long winded and lacklustre election campaign Nicola Sturgeon is the outstanding star who has come to dominate beyond any other party leader. This is especially remarkable since she herself is not standing for election to Westminster. Cameron and Milliband have to spend more time talking about her party than any of their other opponents. In Milliband’s case this makes sense because he faces a massacre, if the polls are right, on May 7th, north of the border. That will preclude a Labour majority government. But there is more. It is this. Sturgeon has a whole lot of admirers among Labour candidates for Westminster south of the border, who will lean on Milliband to listen to her. And she won’t even be there.

Her man in Westminster could very well be Alex Salmond. No wonder the Westminster establishment is in a tizz. But then again, think on this. There are loads of English voters who privately think that is a very good prospect. And a good deal less divisive and crude than Farage. Cameron needs to stop and think before he speaks. Constantly going on about the risk of SNP influence could backfire even more spectacularly than the disaster of the  programme to ridicule Milliband.

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The dreadful loss of life of desperate migrants in the Mediterranean Sea is shockingly not unique or even unusual, but it is the worst so far and it has forced EU leaders to confront their own woeful performance in a crisis of their own making. In fact it is a crisis costing human life for which the cause can twice be traced back to both EU and Anglo-American foreign policy. First, the destruction by force of stable government in Iraq and Libya, the muddle in Afghanistan, the failure to insist to Israel than it finds a route to peace with the  Palestinians and the mishandling of the rise of Islamic militancy in the Middle East and Africa, have brought about murder, mayhem and destruction of innocents and their environment on a scale far exceeding any rational person’s worst nightmare.

Second the refusal by the EU to get together a proper naval force to patrol and rescue these victims of war  and trafficking, leaving the Italians and Maltese to struggle on their own beyond their resources, is both heartless and immoral. It is to be hoped that a joined up and realistic programme will now fast come into effect. It will need to accept that such are the blunders in foreign policy and strategic thinking of which all parties are guilty, but perhaps Britain and the US most guilty of all, that the diaspora of the desperate can be expected to grow to hundreds of thousands, even millions, and there will have to be a plan about where they are going to go.