Blog 2023 Malcolm Blair-Robinson

Turn Left To Power is an explosive dissertation in book form offering a fundamental redirection for Labour’s return to power, with bold ideas for a new economic and social settlement, including economic and taxation reform, restoration of responsibility in government and a renewal of democracy. Full of detailed information, hard facts and the results of thorough research and deep thinking, the narrative will grip you like a thriller and open your eyes to a brighter, fairer future in a mere 25000 words. The ideas are relevant whether Brexit goes In or Out. Frank and at a times brutal, Turn Left To Power offers a collection of fundamental reforms which amount to a political revolution which can propel Labour back to government in 2020.

Check it out now. Paperback £4.99   Kindle £1.99     AMAZON UK

We will have to wait until we can analyse his acceptance speech later in the week, but Trump has confounded every pundit everywhere to come through to the final winning line for the Republican nomination. Everyone said he couldn’t, he shouldn’t, he wouldn’t, but he did. The same pundits are saying that he cannot make it to the White House because he has alienated all America’s minorities to the point where his ratings are the lowest in history for the group which is now the momentum maker of any winner’s campaign. But then Trump pulls out voters who do not vote and never talk to pollsters because nobody, not even pollsters, cares about them. But they believe Trump does.

So all bets are off. This Blog will comment but not predict. There is a real possibility of a President Trump forming an Administration like no other. I wonder what he will make of Boris.

I am going to keep the rhetoric short. The political chaos within the government is over and real politics has begun again. Yesterday we had a symbolic debate about Trident, symbolic because parliament had voted already to proceed.  It was good party politics and exposed Labour’s divisions. But now the business of Brexit, the economy, international relations, IS, Syria, name it,  all push forward for attention.

But not for Labour. For it the summer will be consumed by an election which is also symbolic, because the elected leader is the clear choice of the electorate who put him there, and if the latest poll of it by the Times is to be believed, will put him back there. But the Parliamentary Labour Party is no longer representative of the Labour membership nor of potential left leaning voters in the country. Between the end of Kinnock and the dawn of Milliband New Labour lost 5 million voters. It has been destroyed in Scotland, it will not be back there for a generation if ever. It is now dying in its last bastion, the Palace of Westminster.

If Owen Smith wins he will do so because he convinces the membership that he is as left as Corbyn and will pursue the re-engineering of Labour from the left, not the centre, because that is where the missing votes are. But he will convince them that he has the practical skills of leadership as well as the emotional drive of mission. It will signal the peaceful demise of New Labour once and for all, although a muttering rump will remain within the PLP, with its glitzy tastes  and vision empty of anything other than power for power’s sake.

Corbyn will be remembered as the failed leader who nevertheless changed the political conversation in the whole country, moved Labour back to where it belongs in the only soil in which it can grow, the left, and forced the Tories to move left also. The fall of Osborne’s austerity regime is down to Corbyn. May was just the instrument. Labour will try to unite around a new regime but it will be fractious and cracks will open up. Corbyn has increased Labour’s vote in every election at every level since he has been leader, made Labour bigger than all the other political parties put together and Owen Smith  would have to hang onto those gains and advance them.

If Corbyn wins it will be bloody but clean, if you can cope with such peculiar turn of phrase. He will invite his detractors to bury the hatchet in the PLP and most will not. He will then withdraw the whip from them or they will resign. He will be left with about 50 MPS and will cease to be the Leader of the Opposition. A new grouping will form in Parliament to claim that role. Labour members will then be free to select new candidates for all the seats the new grouping holds. In 2020 the fate of the new grouping will be the same as the SDP in 1983. Almost all will loose their seats. But the rebuilding of the Labour Movement as the power of the working people will be well and truly under way. Power in the country will not be long delayed.

Of course I could be wrong about all of this. But so far nobody, repeat nobody, has come up with anything better.

It will offend left wing readers of this blog who have not read Turn Left For Power, in which the whole issue of deterrence is comprehensively argued and examined, to learn that were I an MP today I would vote to renew. To hold a principled view that nuclear weapons are wicked and unacceptable is a posture to be admired and one which elevates the holder to the moral high ground. Such people would willingly give their lives for their beliefs. But to advance such a policy as a potential defence in a world structured as it is and not as we would wish it, is to hazard the lives of others and that is morally indefensible. I will explain.

The only time a nuclear power may be tempted to use nuclear weapons to gain advantage is upon an enemy which does not have them; to do so on a nuclear armed state will bring ruin upon the aggressor. Strategically a nuclear disarmed Britain is the most at risk target in the world. The reason is this. The decision to build our own nuclear deterrent was taken officially so that Britain could potentially act independently of the United States. The hidden reason was that Britain was fatally exposed to a Soviet nuclear strike to eliminate America’s forward base and its most powerful ally. The calculation was that the US might rather do a deal than risk its own annihilation in a nuclear response. America is risk averse to wars on its own territory, except of its own making in the 1860s.

In a nutshell the hidden reason for our own deterrent was to protect us from an American miscalculation, rather than from a direct aggressor. In today’s world we are faced with measured and careful, if more assertive, regimes in Washington, Moscow and Beijing. Pakistan is not stable but India is. Israel is not a threat to us. France is our ally.  None of these countries poses a literal nuclear threat to the UK at this moment, but all are nuclear armed.  There is also North Korea. But change the regime in any one of these countries (even an angry Trump?) and a real and sudden danger could well develop, not because Britain threatens, but because there is no doubt that America, by the power of its very existence and its military, does. And the cheap way for a fruitcake leader to send a punch to Washington is to take out Manchester, or Sheffield or Leeds. But not if the aggressor knows for absolute sure that he (or she) will not see the end of that very stupid day.

There are a multitude of issues of detail, especially connected to viability and flexibility which could affect the deterrent platform, the delivery vehicle and the payload. There is also the question of cyber warfare and the nature of deterrence fifty years from now. But today is about politics, the politics of a split and embarrassed opposition in the face of a miraculously reinvigorated government. After unprecedented political turmoil and confusion following Brexit, a show of national unity is timely. Whatever your politics. Work 24/7  for a nuclear free world by all means; there is no higher political endeavour.

But do not try to do it naked.

It is too early to judge with accuracy exactly what is going on in Turkey. We know the coup has failed. We do not know exactly who was behind it. The Erdogan government seems to know almost too much, stoking wilder theories that it was in fact behind the whole thing. Whatever the truth and there may not be one truth but several, there is little doubt that the government is using the situation as an excuse to crack down on decent. The West has a delicate path to tread here but it is well marked. First it should be made clear to the president that in properly constituted and functioning democracies coups do not happen. Second the mass arrest of thousands is not the way things are done and third the mass suspension and or detention of judges is definitely not the way things are done.

Nevertheless we also have to understand that toppling dictators, the signature dish of the West’s floundering post cold war policy, leads only to chaos and a collapsed state. It is sadly true that any leader is better than none. We must surely know that by now.

There are many people inside and outside Turkey who worry about the drift away from the secular state, which grew out of the ashes of the Ottoman Empire, and which is now threatened by the Islamist leanings of the current Turkish government. However Turkey is a democracy, has chosen its government in fair elections and to attempt to overthrow it by force is clearly unlawful. It seems that a badly organised coup has been put down by the authorities without much trouble.

However this leads to something of a worry for the West. Turkey is a member of NATO, but would not have been without the very secularism which the government tries to undermine. Likewise there would be no discussions about joining the EU, however prolonged, if at the time they started years back the current state of the political climate in Turkey had been foreseen. Clearly Turkey is a source of profound instability through opposing ideological and religious forces.

This is not a cause for complacency or reason for the West to pretend it is not happening. Democracies where coups happen are fragile and need to be supported. This will not be achieved by turning a blind eye. Instead demands should become firm. Turkey must reaffirm the secular principles upon which its modern state is founded and restore the individual freedoms inherent in that structure, including freedom of the media. Further it must reach a peace settlement with the Kurds which allows the foundation of an independent Kurdistan. Not only must these demands be an absolute requirement of any discussions at all about joining the EU over whatever time span; they must also be conditions for its continued membership of NATO.

It is difficult the grasp the scale of the horror in Nice. Nearly ninety dead, many of them children from a lorry driven at the celebrating crowd for two kilometers. It is impossible to imagine the fear, the suffering and the loss of life, let alone the shattered lives of the bereaved. The Prime Minister was right to say that our whole country in united in sharing France’s pain and sending to her all our strength to face yet another dreadful outrage against her values and her people.

This is a completely new government. And it is being put together with forensic precision and an eye for competence. One by one the hot air balloons and meddlers are returning to the back benches. This is good news for the country, which desperately needs a government of authority and mission. A mission a good deal left of Osborne’s food-bank Utopia. Of course not everybody will support the mission and on the other side of the House is an Opposition which, were it a person, would be Sectioned for its own protection.

So far it has launched a coup against its leader which failed,  a no confidence motion which was ignored, a squalid fix to keep the landslide backed incumbent off the ballot paper in the event of a contest and, the latest, is a contest in which they cannot agree upon their candidate. Meanwhile in Downing Street, a place now receded into distant folk memories of these deluded parliamentarians and likely to recede further still, events unfold at lightening speed. For the Labour Movement this could be a new dawn, but for the current Parliamentary Labour Party it is all but over. If not beaten by Corbyn, they will certainly be beaten by May, Boris et al.

Mrs. May is tough and determined. Time will tell if she is right or wrong. That is what politics is about. What we do know thus far is that her reputation for caution appears to be overstated. The summary firing of Osborne and the appointment of Boris as Foreign Secretary are hardly the work of a cautious hand. Cunning might be a better word. First she has replaced Osborne with the much more astute and experienced Philip Hammond, an arch Remainer, while another, Amber Rudd, takes charge at the Home Office and yet another, Michael Fallon, stays put in Defence.

Next she has taken three prominent Brexiteers and put them in charge of all the stuff to deliver the wild promises they made in the Brexit campaign. Loads of cash flooding back to the NHS, easy negotiations with the EU for free trade, halting the flood of EU migrants, return of sovereignty, trade deals all over the world for the asking, new sunny uplands; it is quite a sack full of Santa’s goodies. Which Boris, David Davis as Exit Secretary and Liam Fox as International Trade Secretary, will work hard to fill. And if the sack is full of garbage and hot air in the end, whose fault will that be? Exactly.

The Tory party recalls with high emotion the days when it was led by a grocer’s daughter. They were quite something. Well now it is the turn of the vicar’s daughter. And that could be quite something else.

I have just heard the most left of centre speech of any incoming Tory Prime Minister since Harold Macmillan. The make up of the Cabinet will tell us whether there is substance behind the words. I strongly suspect there is. This will indeed be an administration with a difference.