Blog 2023 Malcolm Blair-Robinson

The Government keeps telling us the UK economy is in great shape. It rather depends what they mean. Retail sales seem to be holding up quite well. Manufacturing shows signs of responding to the exceptional opportunities offered by the low pound. Shares are high and property prices may be off the boil although still simmering. Wages in real terms are rising and unemployment is low.

But and this is a very big collection of buts; too much spending is funded by borrowing, we are a nation of borrowers not savers, the balance of trade is horrific, the gap between rich and poor grows, opportunities for the young shrink, the taxation base is too small to balance the government’s books, the industrial base may now be too small to generate the needed new wealth, infrastructure decays faster than it is renewed, public services are starved of cash and standards are falling, there are problems on the rail network and throughout the NHS and to add to many other issues kicked like rattling cans down a dusty road, there is the looming uncertainty over Brexit. Not one single element of this and certainly none of the details which made people vote for it, is clear, even in outline.

So if you think you know where we are headed think again. Nothing will become clear until the new government starts to govern. So far it just comments. And many of these comments make little sense. Time is running short. If May is not careful it will run out.

It appears that a coherent and well rounded programme to tackle the very serious problem of childhood obesity (with crossovers into adult obesity) has been watered down on the orders of 10 Downing Street on the grounds that necessary and urgent sanctions could dent the profitability of the food industry at a time when the economy may be faltering.

This is morally indefensible and politically inept. It appears that the new prime minister over-ruled her senior colleagues and insisted that peak time TV ads for killer foods and related promotions aimed at young people should continue against all the advice of everyone who takes this issue seriously. Meanwhile there are reports, mentioned in previous posts, of spats among Brexit ministers and a there is a clear policy vacuum at the Treasury. This all contributes to uncertainty and delay in the real economy right now and far more than any restrictions on future junk food advertising.

This is just not good enough and when Mrs. May comes down from her Swiss mountains and returns, she must up her game. Her holiday will then be over. Her political honeymoon has ended already.

As the Blog has already noted, by conventional measurement, long experience and shrewd arithmetic, the Trump campaign has crashed and Hilary is a shoe in if she does not trip up or bust a heel before November. However there is a growing unease that polls and suchlike are not telling the true story because Trump is appealing to voters whom everybody, including pollsters, ignores, and there may just be a surprise in store. There is also the possibility that Trump is so reviled by official politics that respondents are not revealing their true intentions.

There is no point in guessing, neither is there much point in going into orbit every time Trump says something that extends the known boundaries of outrage and insult, mixed with irresponsibility. But it is worth reflecting that his foreign policy speech made sense in many ways to this Blog, which has been forever highly critical of both the State Department and its faithfully ally, the Foreign Office. Their policies at every level are bound to fail,  do so and become very destructive when mixed with muddle headed military force.

So the simple nostrum that Trump will do business with any country which is fighting IS, whether he likes their ideology or not, shows a much more realistic way forward, than the Obama/Clinton method. Roosevelt and Churchill hated communism, knew Stalin butchered his own people and was a tyrant of the most frightening kind. But they still allied themselves to him to defeat Hitler.

This blog rarely comments on sporting events because it has no expertise to bring a new angle to discussions. But the Olympics are special and what is happening in Rio is very special. I was brought up and lived most of my life on a diet of consistent and continuous Olympic disappointment. There was a here we don’t go again feel to our efforts on a par to the despair which follows the England football team. But then in 2008 things began to change in Beijing as Team GB showed real benefits from professional training and preparation, backed by significant investment of lottery cash, a John Major initiative for which he should be better remembered.  London 2012 began hesitantly then produced a national triumph beyond the wildest imagining.

As I write this GB sits at number 2 spot in the medals table, behind only the United States and ahead of all of the rest of the world. Once again there was a hesitant start, very British that, but momentum has been steadily building. Whether we can retain this amazing position in the tables is not certain, but to be there at all is a moment well worth living for.

This blog does not  claim knowledge of Labour’s Rule Book nor the workings of the NEC. It takes an outsider’s view of the spat over who can vote in the current leadership election. It just seems peculiar that people who joined recently and have paid their membership fee on the expectation that they would get a vote, are denied one.

The claim from the Corbyn camp that these people have given their money to Labour only to have it used to deny them a vote has resonance, makes common sense and will stick. Moreover it plays to the whole conversation that something is wrong with the core of our democracy and that people in power ignore the interests and wishes of the people who have given it to them. So this decision will probably help Corbyn’s electoral chances, as it will drive more votes his way, than it will help Smith. But like everything else in these political times, we really do not know.

What we do know is that the original judge ruled in favour of the members, on the simple grounds the Law of Contract having supremacy over party rules. The Court of Appeal reversed that ruling. In the wider sense this blog finds that rather disquieting.

At first splash this looks good news for Smith and a setback for Corbyn. But when you look at the figures it is almost at the level of a stunt. There are some 641000 members of this Union. Just short of 44000 took part in the ballot. That is less than 7% of the membership. Of this tiny sample 60% backed Smith. That is  26400 or 4% of the total membership. I am not sure if this can be called an endorsement, but if it can, it is certainly not a ringing one.

The message here is short and sweet. The B of E could not buy enough of yesterday’s quota of government bonds because there were not enough sellers. Bond yields have gone negative. We have said before and will say again the critical management of the economy is the political responsibility of the government and not the central bank, which has done its best and has gone as far as it can.

All eyes are now no longer on Threadneedle Street but Downing Street. The new Chancellor must emerge very soon from Number 11 and if not show his hand, at least declare what game he intends to play. The commercial and business community, as well as consumers and households, cannot be left drifting clueless until November. Or not without such damage as to make repair yet another intractable problem piling up in the in tray of a government seemingly of talk but no action.

The disconnect between the PLP (and the outgoing National Executive) and the the Labour Movement,  which is by far the largest political force in the country, is now all but unbridgeable, whoever is leader. This latest appeal against a common sense judgement in order to deny votes to legitimate members over a later change of date rules, is petty, extravagant and so far away from the problems in the North East or other forgotten areas of the former industrial super-power, as to amount to a declaration that New Labour has lost the plot entirely. Talk of Trotskyite infiltration is such balderdash that people who utter it reveal they simply have no idea where real politics, which matter to real people, now are.

Wherever Jeremy Corbyn goes he is greeted by cheering crowds, not energized like this for a generation. The chances of Owen Smith winning are slim but in politics anything is possible. What is not possible in the modern world is a bunch of researcher turned MPs, without a dirty fingernail between them, acting as ‘we know best’ representatives of a new kind of politics of which they have no comprehension. The first thing the new leader will have to do is solve that conundrum. No guesses for the easy way to do that.

Meanwhile there is a big clue in the  Brexit vote. It contained 3 million Leave voters who had either never voted before or not done so for years, part of the 5 million cohort that New Labour dumped on its way to celebrity and spin. The other clue is that very many of the new members backing Corbyn are young, ambitious, well educated and determined to change the direction of travel of the most unfair economic settlement seen for more than a century. You can work the rest out.

Like everybody else this blog is fiercely hostile to doping in sport and favours severe censure of those who engage in it; not just the competitors, but the dopers who feed them and the systems which allow it to happen. But it is not right to punish the innocent because some, even most, are guilty. That it not rough justice, it is not justice at all and it is most certainly an abuse of human rights in the broad sense.

When it comes to Paralympic sport the issue is even more sensitive. Nothing has done more to repair the self- esteem of people with disabilities and to re-include them into normal active life (how short a time ago they were just labeled a cripple!) than the wonderful spectacle of the Paralympic games. They have been wonderful for all those whose bodies are not perfect and wonderful for all those whose bodies are, who who now hold these new heroes and heroines in the highest honour and admiration.

To a Paralympic athlete competing at all is a double triumph of will over adversity and to be excluded through no fault is mean and wrong. The IPC did not intend it that way; its frustrations and anger are justified and its intentions are good. Above all it has to support all the clean athletes who are by far the majority, so that they are not unfairly beaten in competition by cheats. But some of the Russian athletes are clean and to compete means more to them and is perhaps more of a personal triumph than with any other national team. To deny them is to be cruel without purpose, because it is upon these clean competitors that modern Russia will have to rebuild its sporting structures in a quite different format to its Soviet heritage.

The IPC showed decisive authority but in so doing exposed a lack of judgement. This is a great pity. Another way to upbraid Russia should be found.

The shock resignation of Judge Dame Lowell Goddard, the New Zealander heading up the vast Child Abuse Inquiry seems hard to fathom. But she is the third Chair of this inquiry which has hardly begun its public hearings to go. That tells us more about the inquiry than its chair perhaps.

At the time of her appointment I was flabbergasted, not because she seemed unworthy but because the Home Office went to the other side of the world to recruit her. And now she has packed her bags and gone home, having had enough. But enough of what exactly?

It surely must be clear to the Home Office, admittedly not one of the world’s fast learners, that the structure of our public inquires, where we put a judge in charge and name the whole thing after them, do not really work. They bite off more than they can chew, take years to come forward with findings and then mostly, but not always get forgotten, This inquiry is critically important and cannot be allowed to fail. Michael Mansfield has expressed himself ready and willing. The victims back him. Why not the government?

Perhaps it fears he may get to the truth.