Blog 2023 Malcolm Blair-Robinson

The government has decided to spend £9 million (to government the expenditure equivalent of an ice-cream) on leaflets to be sent to all of us, explaining why we are have having this absurd referendum, what the value of belonging to the EU is and what are the risks of leaving, organised into a simple factual format. Very good.

Leave have gone bananas. That’s just too bad. If it were not for their endless agitation we would not be wasting the £70 million plus it is costing to stage this drama to help them with their sovereignty phobias, nostalgia for a world long gone and pipe dreams about an idyllic future which is just not there.

The government is backing Britain in the EU. It is entirely right and proper that it should set out its case. At least the leaflet is not partisan, since most of the shrunken  Tory  membership, which is both at an historical low and well past middle age, are for Leave.

The mayhem caused by the leak of documents spilling the beans on tax dodging, money laundering, wealth concealment and much else is only just beginning. More and more will spill. Heads of State, crooks, fraudsters and the mega rich are all there. Including the Cameron family.

The excuses coming out of Downing Street are that the prime minister’s late father was a businessman who complied with international law and did nothing wrong. Of course it is wrong to cheat your country out of revenue and to hide behind phantom shares so that nobody knows it is you. This is a truly shocking revelation which tells the country how the fees for Eaton were earned and how the Bullington Club binges were paid for.

Public opinion will not be forgiving. Cameron is already damaged. This is another hit which makes his future very uncertain. He will do well to end the year without having to move house.

The steel crisis has revealed the inherent problems with the post Thatcher Tory party. It believes the state has no place in either business or markets. Unless state intervention drives up capital values or supports property prices and low wage costs. So billions are used to subsidise excessive rents and low wages or to support house purchase and billions more are printed to prop up a blown financial sector, but when a strategic industry like steel runs into crisis the initial reaction is to let the markets run their course. It then finds itself so far on the wrong side of public opinion that it has to react to stop a political crisis. The result is a rudderless muddle while the steel industry is left distraught and in limbo. Meanwhile the the balance of payments deficit, or current account deficit, reaches and all time record. UK exports are floundering. The march of the makers has become a joke.

Just as an untended garden where nature is left to take control unchecked becomes at first attractive and then a wilderness, so handing over control of the economy to the markets is at first  a breath of fresh air leading to healthy expansion, only to become a chaotic structure in which some countries have all the cash and the others have all the debt. Moreover this leads to those whose income relies on assets never having it so good and those whose labour drives the fabric of civilised living having it not good at all.

So our country finds itself indebted to the world at large as never before and faced with a mounting industrial and energy crisis as more and more resources are taken to fund and subsidise rising costs and falling real income, with little to no new wealth creation. To counter this there is a need for a bold new plan. Free of busted ideologies and nostrums which favour the few over the many, in which the state is a player, indeed a leader, and markets are organised to develop a contribution not just for their own benefit but also for the public good.

Here are three of my popular thrillers. Two are dramas played out today but founded in the Nazi era. One is a political thriller from the immediate post Thatcher era. Click on the links above each title. From £2.08 Download and £6.99 Paperback

UK         US

  UK      US

  UK      US

World events are hard to predict and few would have foreseen that in the second decade of the twenty-first century mass migration would threaten the cohesion of Europe or indeed that it would be the outcome of the ill judged War on Terror.

There are two kinds of migration. That which is legal, organised and approved; EU migration to work in the UK is an example of this. It can bring public resentment and cultural stress, but it is essentially harmless.  The second kind is the diaspora of the desperate now engulfing Europe, of people fleeing various civil wars. Here the West, including NATO and especially the US and UK who were the ringleaders, bears a heavy responsibility for starting wars which not only cannot be finished but deliver results opposite to the aim. One can only hope that lessons have been learned, although the outpourings of several of the candidates aspiring to lead America give cause to wonder.

The problem with mass migration is that however hospitable a nation or a group of nations may be to those in need, the concept is framed in hundreds or possibly thousands. When it becomes hundreds of thousands and then millions everything breaks down. Political unity, consensus, tolerance and welcome are all overwhelmed together with resources and services to cope. Those who thought they had set out on a journey to a better life are left freezing in fields while agreements buckle, administration flounders and anger rises.

There is no answer to this or if there is this Blog does not have it. There is a direction of travel which says these wars must be brought to an end, countries have to be rebuilt and conditions must be made to prevail which will draw people back to their homelands. The cost will be vast; a clean up on a scale not seen since the end of WWII. The West will have to foot a lot of the bill, but a major burden must fall on the Arab states who have become mega rich on oil production and who, if not directly engaged in one of the several wars, have in their different ways and without exception, fanned the flames.

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It is becoming clear that Leave cannot articulate a coherent plan for exactly how the UK will prosper if we leave the EU. These anti EU idealists believe in their hearts that to leave and be free is all that matters. Only a minority, certainly a motivated minority, agree, but enough who will follow a cause on merit, might join them to convert them into the majority, if they can show for sure people will be better off in the long run. This is clearly beyond Leave’s competence and outside their planning. But they can still win.

Remain’s campaign is relatively simple. We are too interwoven into the EU fabric to withdraw without significant damage in the short term and without any certain advantages in the long term. Fear of change in other words. Very little positive stuff about the huge achievement of a united Europe after centuries of bloodshed, the benefits of being able to travel, live and move capital without restrictions anywhere within its borders. Just fear. Fear of the unknown.

But Leave is stoking a fear of its own. Fear of immigration. Never mind that the probable root cause of the growth of the UK economy faster than others in the EU is because of the economic benefit of having more migrants working here. It is a fear of pressure on housing, services, health and education,, because all of those core elements of life are on their uppers after years of austerity.

So the vote will in the end not really be about staying in Europe. It will be about fear of leaving or fear of immigrants. People vote against what they fear. The result will be determined by what people fear most.

Here are three of my popular thrillers. Two are dramas played out today but founded in the Nazi era. One is a political thriller from the immediate post Thatcher era. Click on the links above each title. From £2.08 Download and £6.99 Paperback

UK         US

  UK      US

  UK      US

When a crisis breaks upon a country, what is needed is a decisive government that acts fast and firm. News that  the core of Britain’s industrial power, utterly fundamental to any notion of a manufacturing economy (a notion abandoned by the asset inflating Tories some while back although not admitted) is on the brink, has gripped the nation  in anxiety and come as a hammer blow to those whose life vocation is the manufacture of the world’s best steel.

One casts back to the moment in 2008 when the head of the world’s largest bank rang the Chancellor of the Exchequer at lunch time and declared that his bank would run out of money by 3pm that day. Whatever their faults and whether you like them or not or whether their politics appeal or no, Darling and Brown acted at once to save not only the UK’s financial system from collapsing, but that of most of the free world. So we might suppose that Cameron and Osborne, faced with a lesser challenge but one with long term consequences for our country potentially as great, would too step up to the plate.

Before we examine what is actually happening at the apex of this divided government now foundering at every level and in every quarter, let us examine the root cause. This crisis derives not from the failures of our steel industry. It has two prime causes. The first is that China has got its sums wrong, is having to rebalance its economy involving sacking 1.5 million workers and in order to ease the pain is allowing its steel industry to dump on world markets steel products at well below the price its costs to produce them. The second is that, unlike America which has imposed penal import tariffs to ensure none arrives in the US and its home industry is protected, Europe has failed to act and has imposed such modest tariffs that they act as no bar to importers. And why? Because one country is opposed to raising tariffs and has sufficient support to block levels which would, like America, protect home production. And which country is that? Yes it is the UK.

So the fumbling Osborne, the oily Cameron and the globe trotting Javid, hold meetings (well not Javid who was away on a jolly) and issue the usual unctuous reassurances everything will be done, when in practice they plan to do nothing but talk. What a mercy and a blessing it is they were not in power in 2008. ‘Propping up the banks is not the answer’ would have been the Downing Street line until the Queen rang up and asked why she and none of her people could access their money.

This is a moment when ideology has to be dumped, the steel industry nationalised, its pension black holes plugged, its plant upgraded, and its market protected from global threats which are both unsustainable and unfair. Anything less than that is just silly. It is worse. It is cruel to the people of the steel community who for generations have always been there for their country. It is now time for their country to be there for them.