Blog 2023 Malcolm Blair-Robinson

Let us step back from the argument in the Labour party and the jibes from the Tories about the new Bill before parliament which is designed to enshrine in law the requirement that ‘in normal times’ (?)  no government may run a budget deficit. Forget party politics. This Bill or Charter or whatever it is, is  rubbish. It is a cynical piece of theatre which has no basis in law whatever parliament does with it. This is because no Parliament can bind the hands of another and as soon as the Tories are defeated any future government can repeal this idiotic act. It has no more validity than passing a law making it illegal for MPs to sneeze on Wednesdays. It may well be prudent to run a budget surplus in so called normal times, but you cannot make a law about it.

Moreover it apparently includes borrowing for investment, which is untenable nonsense and would ensure the gradual collapse of the country’s infrastructure. Unless  the government printed money, which the Tories don’t like either. Of course it is a good idea, a necessity even, to live within your means. When it is clear you are not doing that you have two options; cut your costs or increase your income. The Tories have led the government for over five years and so far all they have offered is cuts to balance the books. These have not balanced when promised, so the deficit is still there. The other promise they made was to rebalance the economy away from house price inflation and debt to fund consumption of imported goods, to an economy based on investment, manufacturing the stuff we consume and exporting the surplus. The attempt to do that is as big a car crash as their immigration policy. The current economic model cannot deliver the revenue to pay the bills and the passage of this fatuous law will not change that.

Instead of conning the country with this cynical nonsense, Osborne  should be working hard to resolve the increasing problems affecting the most vulnerable people and the most vital services as a consequence of the failure of everything they have thus far tried. Corbyn and MacDonald have tripped up politically with their U-Turn, but they are now facing the right direction. They can be forgiven for a lack of preparation, since when they set out in their campaign for the leadership, it can never have occurred to either that they were headed for a landslide victory and some misfires are hardly to be wondered at. But Osborne has been at this for years. He is facing the wrong direction and he knows it. He is trying to make a fool of Labour, but in time this ridiculous proposal will make a fool of him. Boris is laughing.

In the view of this blog and many other commentators who look upon international affairs as an interaction of national interests which overlap, part, and then come together in different forms and ways, the West’s view of the world is muddled, its actions do more harm than good, it has no strategic view of where it wants to be and its policies are based on tribal preferences akin to football supporters.

So its interventions have lead to failed states and civil wars across the Middle East and Afghanistan and in Ukraine, where we must remember a legitimate government was overthrown and replaced with one without authority in all parts of the country leading to civil war. There is not a single place where the West’s intentions have become the outcome. Iraq, Libya, Syria, Afghanistan, Ukraine, even Egypt. And all the time the default position is to blame the Russians.

Kissinger remarked recently that the West had no strategy and therefore its tactics could not work. Russia sees the world differently. Putin has a strategy in Syria. He has seen the doleful line up of failed states in which the West has meddled and he can see the millions in flight everywhere.  He knows that if Assad falls it will be IS, not the Free Syrian Army which takes over in Damascus. Two thousand Russian nationals are fighting with IS and their bloodthirsty ideology can spread back into the heart of Islamic Russia. He sees Turkey destabilizing.

The first priority is to preserve the surviving elements of the Syrian State, which include Assad, because he knows that without the fabric of a state no political settlement is possible. The second is to seriously damage IS so that it becomes more concerned with its own survival than in spreading its influence. Then a political settlement may stand a chance and can include the Free Syrian Army and other moderate opposition to Assad. Until then any armed formations trying to overthrow the government will be targeted. Unlike the West’s Russia’s air strikes can be coordinated by strong ground forces supplied by Assad and a mixture of Hezbollah and Iranian Revolutionary Guards.

Certain things flow from this. The first is the West should tell its so called moderate friends fighting the Syrian government to turn their attention on IS. Second it should cooperate more willingly with Russia, because Russia’s aims are actually the same as the West’s, save for Assad. Third if Russia is willing to get stuck in to the trouble in Syria it should be supported, because there is no way the West can do the same.

Finally the West must learn the lesson that in volatile regions where tribal and religious rivalries simmer like a grumbling volcano beneath the surface, any government which can produce stability and a functioning state should be left alone. It does not matter whether we like them or not or whether their ideology or social structures meet our ideals. The alternative is chaos and suffering on a biblical scale for which we have no will to ameliorate and no means to end.

News is leaking out of Downing Street on purpose that Cameron has four key ‘demands’ as the price for the UK staying in Europe. They make little sense.

Apparently he is to seek an ‘explicit statement’ that the pound will remain a legitimate currency and that the EU will remain a multi-currency union. This is absurd. There is no way Europe in whatever form and however styled can even think of declaring the pound ‘illegitimate’  in fact, in law, in practice or even in fancy. Any more than some nut case in Brussels can ring up the President of the United States are declare the dollar illegitimate. If Cameron thinks such stuff is other than laughable, he must have lost his marbles.

Next come the usual repatriation of regulatory powers and some protocol that allows Euroland to federalise while leaving non-euro countries within the market. But this is all part of the ongoing conversation anyway and we do not need an in or out referendum to drive it. As for protections for the City of London? Whatever its faults its strength lies in its skills and reach all across the world built up over centuries. The City has the power to damage Brussels and whatever financial power it thinks it has, many time greater than the reverse, so this promise  is another empty vessel.

In truth there is only one subject on which the result of the referendum will turn. That is immigration. And on this we hear nothing. Unless Cameron can deliver on that he stands a real chance of losing.

BROWSE MY BOOKS WITH THESE LINKS

Malcolm Blair-Robinson U.S        

Malcolm Blair-Robinson UK

This blog is beginning to look at some of the verities which have driven the political consensus, followed by New Labour and the Tories, which has produced difficulties for which they blame each other but for which both are responsible.

In the news today is a further warning that the margin of relief in power generation this winter will be at a record low because of the failure of any government to build sufficient new power stations over the course of the last twenty years. In the narrow sense this is because the industry was privatised and became a profit centre rather than a critical public service. In the broad sense no government has grappled realistically with the issue of where our electricity is going to come from as older coal stations are shut down and older nuclear stations are decommissioned. This is a failure of the political class to cope with the challenge of office.

A second area is the NHS now gripped by a financial crisis. Long ago the NHS was run by the Ministry of Health through regional and local offices and by managers, known as Hospital Administrators. The chain of command was clear and simple and the bureaucracy modest. The Tories started the rot with an internal market, New Labour came up with Foundation Hospitals, both expanded management and administration to ludicrous numbers and then wrapped the whole thing up in a packet of quangos so complicated that even they are not sure who does what.

So now both the NHS and Power generation are in the throes of crisis. Small wonder. The failures and faults are many in both organisations. But above all we are witnessing the failures of an economic model which does not work and a political class which cannot govern.

Certain media will have have a feast on news that Corbyn has ducked the ceremony associated with becoming a member of the Privy Council. An insult to the Queen and so on. No, not at all. Corbyn is not an opportunist politician. He has not changed his tune to gain popularity. He has sat in the Commons for thirty years saying exactly the same things and proclaiming his ideology without reference to what people think. He has made the unusual journey from nut case to Leader of the Opposition not because he has moved towards popular opinion, but because popular opinion has moved towards him. In unprecedented numbers. He is a lifelong republican. Above all he is a man of principle who stands by his beliefs no matter what the political weather or popular spin.

The Queen knows that. She will not feel insulted nor snubbed because she understands Corbyn’s difficulty. That is why she will agree to his appointment by Order In Council, without all the kissing and kneeling. In fact if the truth be told, surrounded as she is by fawning courtiers and oily politicians whom even she does not trust, Her Majesty finds him rather refreshing.

There was something rather surreal about David Cameron’s speech yesterday. Much of it was admirable and far to the left of any modern definition of what a Tory is. Macmillan would have been heartened. Thatcher would have scoffed. She had a word for Tories who leaned left. Wet. There was certainly nothing wet about Teresa May’s speech the day before. In reality she and Cameron were saying opposite things, as many commentators have already remarked.

The other aspect of Cameron’s speech which intrigues is that it does not link up with most of his government’s economic programme which, without modification, not only cannot possibly deliver the good things to which Cameron aspires, but actually prohibits them. Unless he knows something we don’t. Could Osborne have a rabbit in his hat for the Autumn Spending Review?

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

It is perhaps not easy for the Eton/ Oxbridge educated elite which today runs our country to understand the very real crisis in family structures which has occurred, nor to sense the distress and hopelessness enveloping the lives of far too many young people. I am sorry for the rather catty opening to this post, but I do think taking child benefit from parents who cannot afford fines for truancy demonstrates in sharp relief that the Tory claim to be the champion of every living thing is little more than bogus hot air. Fines are not paid because these parents have lost control of their own lives, have never had a family life and cannot create one for their children, and who drift  in a terrible sub-world of drugs, gangs and loan sharks.

These parents and their children need help. Fines are pointless, which is why they are not paid. It is like fining people for being hungry. For all the bravado, this kind of thing reveals that whatever they proclaims and however they advance eye catching reforms, at heart the Tories remain the Nasty Party.

George Osborne is the Chancellor of the Exchequer, First Secretary of State and Chief Strategist of the Conservative Party. Today he took the Tory conference by storm with a further shift onto New Labour’s turf which included poaching one of their ex-ministers. He declared the Conservatives not only the party of the centre but also the party of labour. Just back from China, where he re-wrote the UK’s economic prospects and foreign policy, he today set out the whole game plan to sweep back to power in 2020. David Cameron, who is just the Prime Minister, gets to do the boring stuff like take the flack for the tax credit problems and talk to a Europe too busy to listen.

The most eye-catching of Osborne’s announcements was the repatriation of business rates to the local authorities in whose areas they are paid. This is how it used to be in the old Labour days, but Thatcher did not like the way they spent the money, so she took it from them. The political turnaround is remarkable. The Tories are now to the left of New Labour in most things. Indeed the dishevelled remnants of that once mighty political force, or force which thought it was mighty but wasn’t really, are now the last defenders of the crumbling Thatcher line. As the Lady said on the morning of her exit, it is a funny old world.

Where does this leave Corbyn? Actually in a rather good place. There is no general election until 2020, but there are local elections each year before then. Now they are getting their money back, local authorities get back their power. That is where Labour’s roots lie and they will be able to sink them deep and wide all across the country if they get their act together. That should not be difficult. The Left is now more in demand than for forty years.

Because for all the talk about being there for the many, the Tory party is still the party of capital, of debt,of the establishment and for those who put themselves first. And in spite of what everybody thinks, they are still the minority who came to power on their lowest winning total for several generations and for whom big dark clouds gather in the months and years ahead. Europe, debt, house price inflation, falling exports, the NHS; the list goes on and on. Ideal for Corbyn.