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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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.