Blog 2023 Malcolm Blair-Robinson

These can be summed up under four headings; Greece, migrants, the UK and a sluggish economy with high unemployment. It all looks manageable but at the moment none of it is being managed. It is being kicked about and argued over but little actual progress is being made. Why?

Largely because the peculiar multi-headed governance system which this blog has criticised so often, works for strategic expansion and writing treaties, but it does not work for the management of the consequences when the best laid plans go wrong. First there is no leadership structure which can be recognised, second the relationship between the Parliament, the Commission and the Council is too obscure to mean anything to the people of the EU and third there is no authority which can decide and whose decision rules.

So we have no agreement over Greece and anything now cobbled together will do no more than prepare the next Grexit crisis, there is disarray over what to do about the extraordinary migration of oppressed and poverty stricken people from the Middle East and Africa and there is no clear vision of how to re-energise the EU economy and reduce record levels of unemployment. It is not that these problems exist which is the worry. In the real world there are always problems. The inability to find or agree solutions is the issue. It is one of leadership. Germany could give it but is cautious because of its past, France would like to but is under Hollande a busted flush, and the UK, which usually shines in just this environment is caught up in arguing about whether it might leave and thus carries no weight at all.

And then there is the Ukraine. This was a very bad moment to pick a diplomatic confrontation with Putin. Rumour has it that he has had enough of sanctions and is about to strike back. We shall see. Watch Greece.

Set in the mid nineteen nineties, this fast moving thriller lifts the curtain on sex, sleaze and corruption in high places as the long reign of the government totters to an end, following the ousting of the iconic Margaret Thatcher. The novel catches the mood of those times with a host of fictional characters who engage in political intrigue, sex, money laundering and murder, pursued by an Irish investigative journalist and his girlfriend, the daughter of a cabinet minister found dead in a hotel room after bondage sex.

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The news that the Royal set up is to be given a 6.7% pay increase for the coming year, based on some formula connected to the crown estates, is both preposterous and insulting and should not under any circumstances proceed. Shortly George Osborne is to get to his feet in the Commons and announce how he is going to axe £12 billion from the welfare budget, by its very definition an axe which will cut through the daily lives of the weakest is society and the poorest in the land. It is absolutely out of order and morally indefensible for the Royal Family, who live in luxury beyond the imaginings of the majority, surrounded by armies of servants and flunkies from a bygone age, to accept a lavish helping of public cash when up to a million of their subjects rely on foodbanks, while public servants lower down in the pecking order have to make do with a 1% pay rise.

This blog supports the monarchy, but not at any price and certainly not with this degree of public insensitivity. As for the plaintive whine that  the Queen might have to move out of Buckingham Palace while it is refurbished, because it has not been redecorated since 1952? Well they had the money every year and it was their responsibility to maintain their property. Cameron needs to put a stop to this.

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It is good news that the governor of South Carolina has indicated that the Confederate Flag should not fly outside the State Capitol. The Confederate States of America is a country defeated in war which no longer exists. It is right that its symbolic battle flag should not be flown from official buildings, other than museums and commemorative sites where the US flag should fly beside it.

Symbolism is powerful and emotive but the same symbol can be different things to different groups of people. To some this flag recalls deeds of valour by ancestors upon fields of battle where heroes fought with their lives for the independence of their country. To others it recalls the fallen dream of a different kind of North America; a nostalgia for something which might have been. But to another group this flag became the symbol of white supremacy and the rallying totem for a culture of segregation, cruelty and repression and because of that every African American in the South looks upon it as an evil emblem flown to evoke a dark past and an an attempt stamp it on the present.

This blog has often pointed out in the modern context that armed conflict rarely solves ethnic or cultural divisions. Having become the world’s most enlightened democracy it was completely wrong in 1861 for democracy to be cast aside in favour of conflict, killing and conquest. Had slavery ended by democratic agreement as it did in the British Empire in the 1830s, its legacy would have been far less toxic and the emancipation of African Americans far more complete and inclusive. The war was not about slavery, it was about the right of people to choose a different path to independence; the ending of slavery became the cause to justify the slaughter, but the fight would have happened if no such thing had existed.

America had fought for and won its independence from an all powerful state, Great Britain. There were many who held that the Union had simply replaced Britain as an all powerful overlord which failed to recognise the sovereignty of individual states within the American family. That alternative vision was subjugated by force of arms, but it did not die. Because of the war all sorts of bitterness, prejudice, repression and fear became a consequence unforeseen at Appomattox. These scars are still not fully healed. America is one country but it remains two nations. If Charleston’s tragedy can pull good from the evil of that deed, it will be to ignite a drive that at last it is time to become one.

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This attack is ongoing as I write this. It is dreadful that after all the lives lost in years of intervention, so fragile is the security situation that the Taliban can directly attack the seat of government in Kabul. It shows that the future of Afghanistan is uncertain without some kind of accommodation with the Taliban, whose military defeat is out of reach of all the forces mustered against it. In the view of this blog it underlines a systemic fault in Western foreign policy in which the UK has been a principal architect.

There has been a view, and this lingers still among the zealots, that military or political intervention to encourage the overthrow or actually to overthrow an unpalatable regime the West does not like, will improve the stability of the governance, quality of life and freedom of the people of the country and region concerned. The opposite has been the outcome.

Not just once, but time and again. In Iraq where we invaded, in Libya where we bombed, in Afghanistan where we occupied, in Syria where we called for the overthrow of the Assad regime and backed the initial rebel grouping and in Ukraine where we backed street demonstrations which overthrew the legitimately elected government and replaced it with a western leaning one of very doubtful provenance, which split the country in two and has led to civil war. There are now five major states in strategically important regions in varying states of dysfunction, violence and failure.

The individual circumstance of each country were different but the principle underlying the response was the same. The West had a duty to intervene to rescue a subjugated people and failure to do so would risk enhanced threats to Western collective security.  The opposite has been the outcome in every single instance. Not only has humanitarian suffering been on a scale not seen since the worst periods of the twentieth century world wars and of much longer duration, but the threats to the West have multiplied and expanded way beyond the level at which action was initiated. This is a collective failure of strategic analysis and policy application of depth unseen since the fall of the Roman Empire. The worst of all is that few if any lessons have been learned and it is still far from over.

The reported finding by a judge that an electronic tag must be removed from a terrorist suspect on the grounds that his human rights are being breached because he suffers from delusions that the tag is a bomb is as perverse as finding against the tax authorities because the person they accuse of tax evasion suffers delusions that George Osborne is Dracula.

This blog is in favour and fully supports the Human Rights Act and sees it as a valuable safeguard for citizens in a country without a codified constitution. Like any set of laws it is open to interpretation and requires measured judgement to be effective. There will always be idiosyncratic judgements, which is why there is an appeals process, and when they occur it is a mistake to call for a change in the law. A look at how judges are selected and appointed might be more to the point.

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.

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The news of the church massacre has stunned America and shocked the world. The fact that it has happened at all flies in the face of everything America stands for and believes itself to be. An exasperated and deflated President seemed powerless to do any more than ring his hands. And no wonder. This is apparently the fourteenth time he has had to comfort America in the aftermath of a  massacre of innocents at the hands of a nutcase with a gun.

America is the only developed country in the world in which the citizens are lawfully armed against their neighbours and have the legal means to purchase weapons to launch such attacks. The perpetrator of this attack was given the gun which he used, as a twenty first birthday present by his father. That gift would have been a crime in the UK. Yet every attempt to control guns is thwarted by the country’s most powerful lobby which sees the means to kill at hand in the home or pocket a constitutional right which is synonymous with freedom.

But it is now getting worse. Racism is back. This latest tragedy is the murder of black people, among them men and women of distinguished public service and unimpeachable integrity, by a white man full of colour prejudice and hate who killed not because of who his victims were but because of the colour of their skins. Few crimes can be worse nor their motivation more perverted. It comes after several incidents of police shooting unarmed black people for little if any reason, which has inflamed tensions and caused riots.

America is now presenting an ugly aspect of itself which disgusts the world and diminishes its authority. The great irony is that America is the country which sets the bar of excellence highest, champions freedom above all others and seeks to do the most good. Sadly the weaknesses of its foundations, built upon  slavery determined by race when all men were said to be equal, and resolved by conflict in one of the bloodiest civil wars in history, rather than by dialogue in a country claiming to be the most complete democracy in the world, have become fissures which have not and cannot heal unless there is a national awakening that things cannot go on as they are. Only when all its people are, are said to be and are treated as truly equal and of equal value will America be truly free. And only when the citizens are disarmed by law and the constitution amended to prohibit the unauthorised ownership of guns will Americans be safe.