Blog 2023 Malcolm Blair-Robinson

As this blog has repeatedly declared in post after post over the years, there can be no solution to the troubles in the Middle East, especially IS and Syria, without Russia and Iran. Recent improvements in relations with Iran was a good sign but what is now going on is a game changer. Russia and the US are talking about joint military actions which will enable IS to be rolled back from Syria through a combination of re-armed and re-equipped (by Russia) Assad forces on the ground and co-ordinated US and Allied air strikes. Russia has stopped insisting that Assad stays; only that the Syrian government must be supported and the terrorists defeated. The UK backs the US position. This would be the first time that the three WWII allies work together in unison for a common purpose. Their combined military strength is several times greater than the rest of the world put together.

Russia now accepts that Assad will have to go as part of a peace settlement, but wants him to have a soft landing after regaining control of a viable part of his country. The UK and US will go with that as long as Assad goes sometime. Meanwhile in Ukraine there is evidence of a fresh effort to find a political solution built on the Minsk agreement. Again and again this blog has explained that nothing can be resolved anywhere unless the West and Russia work together. Although on the margin Russia is, and has been since Napoleonic times, a Western power with an Eastern hinterland.

While Europe quarrels about how to handle refugees and exhibits a dysfunctionality at variance with the word Union, perhaps because of it, there is now beginning to shine a ray of hope that an end is in sight of one of the greatest human tragedies of our time, as common interest at last informs the critical thinking in Washington, London and Moscow. When they march together, everybody else has to fall in line.

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.

KINDLE OR PAPERBACK     UK    US

They were slaughtered at the general election for three reasons. The first was that the young could not forgive them for breaking their solemn pledge not to increase tuition fees. The second was that their former Labour supporters who voted Lib Dem in 2010 could not forgive them for joining up with the Tories. Finally the Tories said to their people ‘ you will get us anyway so why not vote for the real thing?’

Since WWII the  Liberals have struggled to break through. They began to advance when Tory voters, who felt their party  had imploded in the post Thatcher era, could not bring themselves to vote for Blair. In 2005 they reached their high water mark of 62 seats because many left wing Labour voters stopped voting  for Blair, having seen that New Labour was little more than pink Thatcherism. The number of potential voters who believe in ‘Liberalism’ has not for decades been sufficient to get even the reinvigorated party anywhere on its own. It needs at least defections from one or the other of the two main parties, preferably from both, together with a favourable voting distribution.

The challenge is made the more daunting with the unstoppable rise of the SNP, the improving image of Plaid Cymru, the shift of the centre to the left and of the Tories to the centre, UKIP and the Greens and what looks like a re-energised Labour movement under Corbyn. Their feisty new leader, Tim Fallon, will fire them up to go, but exactly where may have to wait upon events.

The biggest problem of all, but also the biggest opportunity, lies in the disconnect between seats and votes for a third party. Here are the voting figures for the last ten elections and the seats won.

1974   5,346704  13       1979   4,313804    11       1983   7,780949    23      1987   7,341651   22

1992   5,999606  20       1997   5,242947    46      2001  4,814321     52     2005   5,985454  62

2010   6,836198  57       2015   2,415888      8

Study the figures and you will see how the party can increase seats and lose votes at the same time. It is all in the distribution. Between 1983 and 2005 the Lib Dems (starting as the SDP/Liberal Alliance) lost 2 million votes but increased their seats from 23 to 62. Their 2015 tally was the lowest Liberal vote since 1970, when they won six seats. Wishful thinking will lead them to hope for defections from Corbyn’s Labour in parliament. It is unlikely to happen but when it did in the Foot era, almost all of them lost their seats. Dissident New Labour MPs would be better advised to cross to the Tories, with whom they have much if not most in common,  especially if they want to advance their careers.

For Tim Farron this is an opportunity to shine. It can only get better, since if it get’s worse there will be nothing.