Blog 2023 Malcolm Blair-Robinson

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It is difficult to find a rational explanation about the never ending saga of Greece hovering on the threshold of Euro membership. Certainly it is guilty of a reckless period of spendthrift abandon. But that is in the past. When dealing with a whole nation of people you cannot proceed as if with one errant individual. Everyone in Europe, save for those concerned in the financial governance of the eurozone, can see that for whatever reason Greece is bust, and the strictures and demands being made by its creditors in order to provide more money so as to enable Greece to continue to pay them, are politically impossible. It can also be said that lending money to allow worthless assets to acquire notional value, ie Greek debt held by European banks and others, is fundamentally pointless, even dishonest.

Moreover it is clear that the Greek government was elected by a popular mandate which refuses to countenance further austerity in an economy already shrunk by a third and that for outside powers to try and enforce such a programme upon an unwilling people is not only undemocratic, but flies in the face of everything which the EU is supposed to stand for as a democratic union of free people. The driving force of European governance is its richest and most populous power, Germany. Berlin must now pause and consider where it is headed. Not for the first time does it stand in command of a chain of events of which it can easily lose control and in the consequent upheaval it becomes the big loser.

If Euroland proves too inflexible to cut Greece a viable deal to reboot its economy and Greece goes back to the drachma, it will be a blow to the whole of the EU and there will be a period of nervous uncertainty. The likelihood of the UK throwing in the towel and voting to leave will increase. One thing could lead to another. We have been there before and there is something we have learned the hard way. The end is never foreseen at the beginning.

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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I never voted for Thatcher but I did support her reform of trade union practices which had got out of control in the 1970s and were crippling the country to the detriment of everybody, including trade unionists. Arthur Scargill was a hero to some but to the majority he was an inflammatory hate figure. So public opinion was against the miners and behind Thatcher. Her victory over the miners and later the print unions were among her great triumphs in which she showed a steely resolve wholly lacking in previous governments, both Labour and Tory.

Since then disturbing echoes have emerged. The Scargill claim of a pits closure list, vehemently denied by the government at the time, turns out to be true from recently released Cabinet documents. More disturbing in many ways is the realisation that the police were widely used to support government policy with aggressive and sometimes violent methods against the miners and the Fleet Street unions, which went way beyond their constitutional function of enforcing the law. This has left a bitterness among mining communities whose whole life purpose was centred on the coal mining industry. Central to this are the circumstance surrounding what came to be known as the Battle of Orgreave and the collapse of the subsequent trial of those accused of causing a riot.

The decision of the IPCC not to open an inquiry on the technical point of the time elapsed is disappointing and appears, whether it is or not, an excuse to avoid awkward revelations. The alternative of a public inquiry seems now necessary and rather than let this wound which many ex miners feel remains real and raw, fester interminably, such an inquiry should be held without further delay.

An idea to stimulate economic growth without further government borrowing. Written in plain English and very easy to follow, this is the only really fresh approach out there to the intractable problems of the UK economy, and it is just beginning to be noticed in important places. Buy! Download only .99p Paperback £2.99

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Mark Carney is normally measured and careful in his pronouncements; a caution here, a warning there, encouragement too. This made his outspoken attack on the low life ethics in parts of the City, the flaws in markets driven by excess, the controls and penalties which would in future be enforced and above all the demands of the social licence as he called it, which underpins everything through which capitalism prospers in a democracy. Due to changes in the format of BBC rolling news, only clips of the speech were shown. If you have time the whole thing is worth a read over a cup of coffee. Here is a link.   MARK CARNEY MANSION HOUSE SPEECH

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The Chancellor’s announcement that he would start selling RBS shares at a loss caused the biggest stir in a fairly meaty speech yesterday at the Mansion House. His convoluted arithmetic that overall the taxpayer had made a profit out of the bank rescue programme was a pointless argument; not least because had the banks not been rescued most taxpayers would have lost most of what they possessed.It was not a project aimed at profit. It was one of survival.

He was right to say that the value now is the value which counts and that value will increase faster if the market sees a road open to the return to the private sector. The gradual break-up of more of this vulgar pipe dream to build a financial institution bigger than Great Britain itself in financial terms, will also make sense as time goes on. One thinks of Nat West and Coutts being taken out of a conglomerate which has bought these two respected banks nothing but grief.

As for the value Labour in government paid much could be said. It was too much but it is doubtful, very, that Osborne faced with a crisis beyond imagining in which both the Bank of England and the City regulators had entirely lost control, would have paid less. Indeed the reverse is possible. What is clear with hindsight is that the taxpayer should have acquired all of the shares for a total sum of £1, as the bank was completely bust, much of its balance sheet’s asset portfolio was worthless and the bank’s liabilities far exceeded any value which could be scraped together to set against them.  No doubt the calamitous impact on pension and savings funds invested in this monstrosity, if shareholders had lost everything, and the knock on effects which would have followed, were factors in setting the price at the level chosen in the heat of that unprecedented hour.

An idea to stimulate economic growth without further government borrowing. Written in plain English and very easy to follow, this is the only really fresh approach out there to the intractable problems of the UK economy, and it is just beginning to be noticed in important places. Buy! Download only .99p Paperback £2.99

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First we have a law to say that the government will not increase income tax or VAT. Now we are to have a law that says governments must run a budget surplus in ‘normal times’.

There are two thing s say. These laws are meaningless in that any government can repeal them at anytime. They are not written into the constitution because we do not have one. So they are the product of modern politicians who have trouble separating facts from spin. But they are also difficult to fathom, because  if taxes cannot be increased and a surplus has to be maintained, what happens when money is needed ‘in normal circumstances’ but when miscalculation or other factors mean there is not enough to pay for something? Trident for instance?

What then Mr Osborne?