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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Last time it was the Americans in Afghanistan. This time it is the Russians in Syria. The common theme of the two is the deaths not just of the sick and wounded, but of the super-brave who volunteer to care for them when they could instead lead ordinary lives in a safe country and earn a good living.

Another common theme is that whatever the sophistication of modern weapons systems, accidents like this, which all combatants know to be PR disasters, will occur. Finally it opens once again the question, what do these wars achieve? First we have unstable and violent Iraq, then we have the same in Afghanistan. Next comes Libya, a failed state turned bandit country. And now Syria. It started as an event within the false dawn of the Arab spring, a quarrel between Sunni and the Alawite ruler and his ally the Shia. The West did nothing to damp down the strife; it encouraged the overthrow of Assad and even announced he had fled. Just look at Syria now. Is there no diplomatic conscience?

Now everybody is mixed up in the fighting, not just IS and Al Qaeda, but Russia, the US, Britain and France and now Turkey and soon Saudi Arabia. They are not fighting each other, neither are they fighting the same enemies. But everyone is fighting a completely pointless war to gain control of a country in ruins. If you are unlucky enough to be Syrian the threat to your safety comes from all directions and is overwhelming. No wonder millions have fled.

Dr. Rachael Benedict is an American historian and a best-selling author. Through the death of her estranged father she sets out to expose secrets from World War Two, which are so sensitive they have been subject to an extensive cover-up lasting seventy years.  This provokes a killing spree as parts of the security services of both Britain and the United States become engaged in the drama, with one side determined to get the secrets out and the other determined to keep them hidden.
Rachael battles forward to unearth the truth both from intrigues of the Nazi era, but also within her own family, surviving three attempts on her life, before finally achieving her goal. Not only does she expose the truth from history and from her own roots, she has to delve deep into her own emotions to find the truth about herself.

Click on image for uk.          Click here for US

The recently agreed fighting pause is a cause for celebration within the limited boundary of satisfaction at talks between  engaged powers (but not the belligerents) all of whom want peace, but each of whom has a different view of what that peace should look like. We all know what Syrians towns look like, many of centuries standing and historic importance; they look like nothing on earth. Just piles of rubble and empty walls. Most of the population have either died or fled and millions are en route to Europe. The West makes itself feel better by accusing Russia of bombing civilians, when in truth fighters and innocents are entangled in the rubble as a deliberate means of combat employed by the so called moderates.

From the very beginning the West, which likes to draw lines in the sand, has drawn shapes that make no sense and has resulted in vast humanitarian suffering and the rise and rise of IS. There is no such thing as moderate opposition fighters. There are moderate opposition politicians who have a dream of a Syrian democracy, but they are not in Syria and they are not fighting. The moderate opposition fighters are a figment of Western wishful thinking. They fight among themselves, are driven by  a lust for power and if they ever achieved it, would produce fractured and chaotic governance a good deal worse than pre-war Assad. Soon IS would be the dominant power in what would be little better than a bandit region.

If the opposition was indeed acting in the best interests of the Syrian people they would have stopped fighting long ago. It is clear this is a war comprehensively lost by all parties and has resulted in the mindless destruction of a country and the slaughter of up to half a million people. The West’s muddled strategy of good and bad enemies and outside the tent allies is hopeless. The Iranian/Russian approach of ending the fighting by brute force may sadly, very sadly, be the most humane way forward. That is a frightful indictment of a calamitous failure of politics, strategy, diplomacy, tactics and reason.

The Health Secretary has decided to impose a new contract on junior doctors. Maybe introduce would have been a better word. To lay people the published terms look quite generous, but the working hours of junior doctors are to those outside the medical world, horrific. The whole argument is a product of the structural failure of the NHS, with its multiple quangos, fragmented management, efficiency drives which cost more to administer than they save, and a list of idiocies too long to record. And then there are the moonlighting consultants, trained at public expense (over £300,000) who only have to give 42 hours per week to the NHS before going on to make big money round the corner in private medicine.

Things will get worse. To make them better two fundamentals need to change. First the NHS has to be a 24/7 integrated system with hospitals operating three 8 hour shifts for everything and everyone, 365 days a year so that operations and treatments can be continuous and waiting lists eliminated, along with all the negative consequences of that ridiculous concept. All doctors, including consultants, must work full time for the NHS and be debarred from private practice. If they leave and go abroad or go private they must repay the cost of training a replacement at current prices.

The second fundamental is the issue which is too big for the spineless politicians we have in place to face. It is the funding profile. Mathematically you cannot have an infinite service funded by a finite budget. The more the NHS does and the more patients it sees the less money there is to go round because only for very short periods does the government of the day increase the cash flow. The system also creates a  management structure which is dysfunctional. There has to be a system of taxation and or insurance which expands as demand expands to pay for itself by the volume of business it does. All the quangos, boards and whatever must be removed and responsibility taken directly by the Ministry of Health at national, regional and district levels. No CEOs, directors or whatever. Only ministers and managers.

The public loves the NHS but hates paying for it. That has to change too. It has to cough up the tax and insurance needed to fund the whole thing properly. The government has to take responsibility for how that money is spent and the outcome delivered. If it falls short it will find itself sacked by an angry people. That is how public services using public money are supposed to be run. All this ducking of ministers behind quango boards and independent advisers has to end. Either they deliver or they go.

There is nobody on earth who has the vaguest clue about US politics who would a year ago  have predicted that Donald Trump (What? have you gone mad?) would be leading for the Republican nomination and a socialist Bernie Sanders (Who ? And there is no such thing as socialism in the US. It is political death!) is leading for the Democrats. And both by a country mile. Moreover both now have traction. They can be stopped, but it may be too late. The reason is simple. Right across the world there is a build up of resentment against political establishments in every country and that contagion has now reached America. Both Sanders and Trump have one thing in common. They are anti political establishment. There is a very big tide of anger out there and it will not be easy to halt it.

Ominously there are signs of difficulty in the global economy. Oil and and shares are plunging, growth is slowing and bank shares are being dumped. Deutsche Bank is widely rumoured to be in trouble. These are not good signs. If things get bad voters will round on all who they think have put them there.

2016 is going to be an historic election year. What we do not know is what kind of history it will make. The kind in which the establishment took back control, or the sort where it lost it altogether.

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Malcolm Blair-Robinson U.S        

Malcolm Blair-Robinson UK

Dr. Rachael Benedict is an American historian and a best-selling author. Through the death of her estranged father she sets out to expose secrets from World War Two, which are so sensitive they have been subject to an extensive cover-up lasting seventy years.  This provokes a killing spree as parts of the security services of both Britain and the United States become engaged in the drama, with one side determined to get the secrets out and the other determined to keep them hidden.
Rachael battles forward to unearth the truth both from intrigues of the Nazi era, but also within her own family, surviving three attempts on her life, before finally achieving her goal. Not only does she expose the truth from history and from her own roots, she has to delve deep into her own emotions to find the truth about herself.

Click on image for uk.          Click here for US

There is no more perplexing state than North Korea. Under the continuous rule of one family since its inception it has aspects of a Kingdom. The parades are evocative of Nuremberg at the height of the Nazi era. It remains in a technical state of war with South Korea. It has enormous economic problems, part self inflicted, part through sanctions. Its people exist in a world of their own because they are denied access to the real world outside. The West sees it as a threat. The Russians see it as dangerous. China, its ally (or keeper?) sees it as a nuisance. Everybody is against any notion of it having nuclear bombs or ballistic missiles.

Talks about turning the armistice into full blown peace have been going on for 63 years. This is a signature process of the US. Cuba, Israel and Taiwan, are almost as long winded. On the other hand Britain has dealt with Malaya, Kenya, Cyprus, Rhodesia and Northern Ireland. It understands as a former Empire, that the moment comes when it is best to move on. The US would argue that Britain’s problems were semi-domestic and had to do with giving up imperial power and were therefore easier to solve. It would offer the Falklands as one which remains unresolved.  One where they support, kind of, Britain’s position out of friendship rather than conviction.

If you stand back, as this Blog likes doing when it can disentangle emotion from judgement, North Korea looks rather different from an overt threat. Its actions are not driven by expansion and a lust for power. They are actually driven by fear. Fear of the world in general but in particular fear of the United States. These rockets which go up (but with pay loads that cannot get back down), satellites which do not transmit and those underground nuclear blasts, are all about conveying a sufficient capability to defend itself, so as to force the US to negotiate a deal. This is where the problem lies, one which China has correctly identified.

America does not do deals. Iran was a milestone that many US politicians would like (but will not be able) to reverse. It cannot to deals with its own internal problems and all it issues to do with race, guns and governance are ongoing. It is the world master of confrontation and stand off. It never backs down (oops Viet-Nam).  But at the end of the day either north Korea is going to beaver away underground until it has an H-bomb which can be mounted on a rocket which is reliable, can re-enter its payload and hit Los Angeles or San Francisco, or at some point America has to talk. That would certainly make the world a better and safer place. Twin ambitions of Americans since the founding of their country.

At the moment nobody. There seems to have been a rather desperate TV debate among the candidates, all of whom are now waking up to the fact that they are approaching a win or bust moment. So they all piled in, hoping to score a point. Locals report that Bush had a better night than previously,Trump was booed for being nasty to him, Christie demolished Rubio and so on. In a year’s time nobody will be able to remember who all these people are. Bar one. But which one?

One of the problems with the Republican primary campaign thus far is that it has been all about Trump. If he does not start to pull ahead very soon, he will begin the lengthy process of losing. Somebody will then have to emerge as the favourite. And that somebody must be a credible presidential candidate who can appeal across America’s many divides. That will be easier said than done. Appealing to the Tea Party while turning everyone else away is the road to some other place than the White House.