Blog 2023 Malcolm Blair-Robinson

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.