Malcolm Blair Robinson

When a party elects with a landslide a serial rebel as its leader, it must not be surprised if that leader takes a relaxed view  of rebellion and stepping out of line. It looks like indiscipline but it is in fact an open and expressive form of politics which increasing numbers of the public prefer. They regard the smooth talking politicians toeing the party line as self seeking liars who cannot be trusted.

When the issue is some form of racial or other prejudice, especially so if it is the ultra sensitive threat of ant- semitism, great tact and caution is demanded. When wild and offensive statements are made, whatever the intention, none but the worst will be the outcome in the media, in parliament and among the public generally.

Corbyn has been too indecisive, unestimating the offence and damage being done by those with loose tongues, so that now a fracas has developed which is all but out of control. Whether voters are laid back about this or turn their backs on it, will next week be revealed. Much rides upon it.

At last we are getting some concrete analysis to support the Leave campaign. This blog has complained a good deal about the lack of a plan. Eight respected economists have now come out in support, citing opinions and evidence which can be interpreted to support the notion of greater economic growth if we leave the EU. The core is that lower sterling values will stimulate growth and a simple a WTO type agreement with the EU would be enough, in an economy which was less focussed on Europe and more proactive in the world at large. It has the advantage that it is a plan which purports to offer a better future based on a new idea rather than a nostalgic look backwards, driven by fear of immigration.

There is much to be said for this. If we are going to leave Europe there is not much point in hanging about at the fringes; better to cherry pick the deals which suit us both in the EU and across the world, which is after all the reason for the Leave campaign. Questions will arise as to whether BMW might then pack up Rolls Royce cars and make them in Germany, likewise VW and Bentley and our Japanese owned car makers. Much would depend on the competitiveness of the new UK economy versus production based in the EU, the US China or Japan. But it is a direction of travel which makes sense, whether you support it or not. Hitherto there has been nothing tangible to support. There is a lot of work required to flesh this out but this is at least a start.

It will not affect the view of this blog which is pro EU, as readers know already, for the political reasons of the end of centuries of conflict and peace upon a continent ravaged by war over a thousand years. That big picture is fundamental. The economic consequences are a related issue which can be managed. Whether we stay or go.

Whatever strategy the befuddled grandees of the GOP think there are pursuing is not working. Their nightmare has just won six states in a row and won them big. Even if neither home nor dry, Trump is most certainly in the front yard and any attempt now to shut him out will cost the GOP the White House. Because Hilary Clinton is now too far ahead for Sanders to catch her and she will be a formidable candidate. She has already spent eight years in the White House, a term as New York’s Senator and four years at the State Department. There are few international figures she has not met nor domestic politicians she does not know. She will be a safe pair of hands in uncertain times who will stand up for American interests abroad and for those in need at home. This is the kind of specification Americans vote for most, with the added excitement that she is a woman. The first woman President is a powerful vote catcher, especially among women. If she brings the defeated Bernie on board with his energised and youthful following, she will be unstoppable.

Hilary has one weakness. She is from the political establishment, indeed she is the political establishment. And all over the world the political establishment is beginning to look clunky, slow and unable to deliver a future of hope to the young. Mired in unresolvable conflicts and challenges, it is failing to aspire to offer something better than it inherited to the generation following on. This is why Sanders continues to play to cheering crowds. If he goes, his young followers will look around. Some will go for the unexciting Clinton, but many, if not most, will turn to the other outsider, Trump. If that happens, the road to the White House is open and the World will wake up to President Trump. What kind of world that will be only a fool would try to tell. We only know for sure it will not be the same. Ever again.

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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This dispute has now turned ugly. The junior doctors are about to go out on all out strike for the first time in the history of the NHS. The government now accuses them of being politically motivated and trying to bring down the Health Secretary and even the government itself. This is an extraordinary claim from a government engulfed in its own civil war over Brexit, its budget a fiasco and now in trouble over the unpopular proposal for compulsory academies for all. It hardly needs the junior doctors to lend a hand since it appears trying to topple itself.

The plain fact is that following re-organisations which began with Thatcher, went on apace under New Labour, continued with some restraint with the Coalition and now again in full swing, the NHS is a chaotic structure of quangos, trusts,  foundations and commissioning boards led by overpaid executives who waste vast resources going round in circles. Meanwhile problems with waiting times and budget deficits mounting, integration of health care more rhetoric than reality and a funding system which is mathematically dysfunctional, this Health Secretary thinks it good to pick a fight with the very young people upon whom all our lives depend. It tells you all you want to know about Jeremy Hunt and the government of which he is a member. But now times are changing. The public by a margin is behind the young doctors and the young everywhere are mobilising against the dead hands of power which hobble their lives.

Only a minority can remember the day Elizabeth II became Queen. I was just coming up to thirteen at the time and I recall it with surprising clarity. It was a chill and gloomy day when the news came, in a formal announcement on the BBC radio (then the wireless) that the King was dead. The nation was stunned. He was so young. He had been there for them all through the terrible war, the bombs and the sorrow and he had been there at the end to celebrate victory. It was this shock which consumed the nation that day rather than too many thoughts about the new Queen, away with her husband in Kenya at the start of a tour on the King’s behalf. Of course she flew back at once.

It was the picture of her emerging from the aircraft on her return, a tiny figure dressed in black, but not veiled, on the top of the steps, with the entire Cabinet bare headed and lined up below, led by Churchill, now her Prime Minister, that brought home to the nation that it was about to experience a change unknown since Victoria’s accession in 1837. Victoria presided over the  expansion of the British Empire to its highest point to make Britain the number one world power. Elizabeth was destined to preside over the dissolution of that Empire in a seamless transition to a voluntary Commonwealth with few sorrows and little bloodshed. Now nobody regrets its passing and the young have only a vague idea of what the Empire was. But Britain is still there at the centre of the world, not an Empire any longer, but a power still. Not a super-power but a special sort of power with a unique and mysterious authority which cannot be defined.

It is perhaps best explained by the magic of the Monarch, a Head of State like no other, admired by even republicans, a kind of Queen for all the world; Elizabeth at 90. And long may she reign.

 The latest edition of this ever popular psycho-thriller, now in its twentieth year, has a dramatic new cover and is offered for a limited period at the special price of £5.99 paperback and .99p  Download. A haunting tale of passion and the paranormal, written in the style of its setting in the 1920s.

A tiny English village slumbers on the Surrey/Sussex borders, but the pastoral exterior hides a number of nightmare secrets.
The return of a young man after a long absence stirs memories of the horrific murder of his mother and uncle years earlier and of an ancient curse delivered upon the family in Napoleonic times. The villagers’ unease grows as the young man embarks upon an affair with the local farmer’s daughter, and a series of mysterious deaths seem to follow in his wake. Full of authentic period detail, this is a tale which will haunt readers long after the last page has been turned.

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President Obama, hugely popular in the UK, has not hidden behind impartiality nor minced his words. The vote is for the British people, but here is what I think is his message. Moreover he drives in hard. As president of the US he has a right to state America’s preference over what happens in Europe, because when it screws up America has to ride to the rescue, testified by thousands of US graves far from home. Britain in Europe reassures America that the fabric of unity will hold.

So a delighted Cameron beams as the President pours scorn on the ease with which Leave claim to be able to fix a trade deal with the US. ‘Back of the queue’ and ‘five to ten years’ are among the phrases deliberately used in high profile media events. Hilary weighs in across the Atlantic and says Britain should stay put. Boris goes berserk. He completely loses it and starts to say the most stupid things you can imagine and hurling nasty, almost racist insults. Talk about throwing toys from the pram. Woweee!

Leave have only themselves to blame. They have been preparing for this for over thirty years and they have nothing concrete to offer at all. They are either stupid or lazy or lack judgement or all three. They should have been having talks in Washington, Berlin, Moscow, Beijing, Delhi, Canberra, Ottawa and all over, meticulously fleshing out a programme and a direction of travel. But no, too much effort. Well now it is all coming out. There is nothing on offer but faith in a bunch of zealots, harking back to a world no longer there, hoping that things will turn out okay. Of course there may be a reason for this.  They may be quite canny. They know there will lose so why bother.

So as the week ends Cameron is rescued from the nadir in his fortunes the week before, Boris has fallen off his perch and been revealed not as a majestic bird of prey but a rather noisy rooster without any hens and Obama today sets off for Germany and Angela. Just to rub it in if you have not been listening.

  The latest edition of this ever popular psycho-thriller, now in its twentieth year, has a dramatic new cover and is offered for a limited period at the special price of £5.99 paperback and .99p  Download. A haunting tale of passion and the paranormal, written in the style of its setting in the 1920s.

 A tiny English village slumbers on the Surrey/Sussex borders, but the pastoral exterior hides a number of nightmare secrets.
The return of a young man after a long absence stirs memories of the horrific murder of his mother and uncle years earlier and of an ancient curse delivered upon the family in Napoleonic times. The villagers’ unease grows as the young man embarks upon an affair with the local farmer’s daughter, and a series of mysterious deaths seem to follow in his wake. Full of authentic period detail, this is a tale which will haunt readers long after the last page has been turned.

Amazon UK             Amazon US

It looks as if we have got through the idiotic phase of wild and dire forecasts from Remain and rivers of phantom cash from Leave.  We are moving into a new dimension where hard truths are debated.  Leave’s heavy weapons are immigration and borders. Remain’s heavy weapons are jobs and the economy. Remain’s weapons are more powerful.

At this point I want to look at another occasion when somebody decided to leave a Union back in America in 1860/61. The Confederacy was high on idealism, overflowing with confidence, driven by passionate belief in its cause and confident that its economic power, derived from cotton exports to Britain and France, would force both to recognise it as an independent nation. Its industry was weak and its economic plans were fluid. Wishful thinking flowed like a torrent through every nook and cranny of this new nation, which for all the heroism and hope, was doomed to fail. Britain and France gave a bit of covert aid but turned east for vital cotton and in the end turned their backs. The new nation stood, tottered and fell alone. All the calculations mistaken, all the assumptions flawed and all the elan and glamour enshrined in the dream powerless in the face of the hard battering ram of the reality of the world as it had now become, which was not going to turn back to an older page, to accommodate a new nation looking back to values of a departed age.

It is now the case that not a single national leader, nor banker, nor economist, nor statistician of any stature or reputation in the world has come out to support the Leave campaign ; indeed the line up supporting Remain is becoming awe-inspiring. Why is this?

The answer is simple. This is not about borders, sovereignty, immigration or economics. It is about rows of crosses marking battlefields where millions have died, about a continent that has engaged in almost uninterrupted strife for nigh on one and a half thousand years, which has come together to create a voluntary Union albeit with many flaws, which is the greatest political achievement since the fall of the Roman Empire. It is about an island nation with a footprint which one way and another bestrides the world, without whom this Union may not in the end endure. Because whether Britain likes it or not, it is one of the three great powers of Europe and without it and its funny ways neither it nor the Union will thrive. The world will become a poorer more dangerous place.

In the cold light of morning when dreams turn to dust, nobody wants that.