Blog 2023 Malcolm Blair-Robinson

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 worst nightmare of the eurozone, the EU and the markets has happened. Greece has not just voted No but by a large margin of 61/39. This is way bigger than anyone expected. Indeed most expected a narrow Yes.  I am not going to comment upon the likely outcome, because the drama is unfolding minute by minute and nobody now knows what is going to happen. This blog has several times said what should happen, but we shall have to see.

This is a political game changer on a huge scale. Greece is the symptom not the problem. This is a massive blow to the whole multi-headed system of governance in the EU, which is undemocratic and incapable of functioning in time of need. It is probably a fatal blow for the notion that the Dutch finance minister can head some unelected financial council and tell another country how it should order its affairs and how its people should live, to include children living on the streets. And it makes manifest beyond challenge the idea that you can have a currency without a government, a treasury or a finance minister, which can at the same time measure in one value the economies of widely differing actual value. It is also a blow to German leadership of the EU which has led to this most spectacular repudiation.

Now at risk is the Euro, but also the EU. Unless this is sorted out in a credible way, which does not include every tighter austerity and ever bigger debts, a vicious cycle which has led to the social limit of financial policy to be breached, the Euro will at best totter froward to an uncertain future. Unless there is a greater connection between what people think and want in the EU and what politicians say and do, Britain will vote to leave. France, already in disagreement with Germany over Greece and disenchanted with the EU because it is not working for the people, could follow.

Believe me this is history in the making. What will be made is not yet clear. One can only hope it will be something good. But it could be something quite bad. Or very bad.