Blog 2023 Malcolm Blair-Robinson

Trump was trailing in the polls. Now he is neck and neck with Hilary. Not only do the majority of voters not trust the first woman to run for President, but there is now a health issue and a monumental gaffe, attacking Trump’s supporters as worthless sink people or words to that effect. These mishaps certainly mean she is losing at the moment, even if she manages to make it in the end.

Her problem is that her presidential campaign, oiled and structured as a super powerful election machine running on rails, comes off them at the slightest bump. Her opponent by contrast is not running a presidential campaign in the traditional sense. He is running a Trump campaign, which is quite different. It is neither oiled nor structured, nor does it run on rails. It meanders at will in all directions. The more provocative and outrageous Trump’s rhetoric, the more support her attracts. Where people are supposed to be repelled, they flock to his call. There are two reasons for this. Trump’s campaign is not about the Presidency, it is about him. His message is direct. I can fix your life and make it better. And unlike Hilary who speaks to the people, Trump speaks  with them.

All we can say for sure is that Trump is no longer just a funny. He might just be the future.

Whatever the outcome of the leadership election, Labour is now by far the largest political party in Europe. To ignore that is to  fail to see that times have changed. Thus Neil Kinnock’s cry that Labour is facing the biggest crisis of its history is wrong. The crisis is that of the whole political class. There is a new politics out there with a mass following. It is the politics of people. People who are in touch with each other from the palms of their hands, broadcasting things as they are rather then how they are supposed to be, who no longer are willing to be told by professional politicians what is good for them. Corbyn and his followers have understood that and they have given a re-birth to the Labour Movement as the anti-establishment voice of the people, which does the people’s bidding, not the other way around.  It is an exciting time to be young as change is in the air. The kind of change that a youthful Kinnock would once, long ago, have championed.

Diane James is a formidable communicator who has been the obvious successor to Farage since the Eastleigh by-election in 2013. She has authority and charisma and is unusually fluent in a political age in which professional politicians waffle and endlessly repeat themselves for fear of saying the wrong thing. This is important because today a political party is part its the electoral appeal, but the leader is most of it.

And women in British politics are on the rise. The UK, Scotland and Northern Ireland all have leaders who are women. Sturgeon is by far the most charismatic of the three, but James will appeal to many outside the cauldron of conflicting ideas and ambitions which post Brexit UKIP has become. If she can bring good order and shared purpose to her party, Diane James will become a significant electoral factor in the future.

This blog is pleased this deal is going ahead, otherwise the lights will surely go out. But who would have guessed that the ultimate outcome of privatizing the power industry would be that it would end up owned by foreign governments? If anybody wants clear evidence of the implosion of Thatcherism, this is it. And the fact that we are all going to have to pay double the market value for the electricity produced in order to finance the construction,  just rubs our noses in it.

It has become open season for the Tory party, according to its custom, to rubbish its former leader when it appoints a new one, especially if that leader became, as was once guaranteed, prime minister. Now things are a little different in that only two of the last five leaders of the Tory party made it to Downing Street and only one on a popular mandate, Cameron. Therefore it would be right to be cautious about the censure he now faces for his Libya  adventure, but sadly it has to be acknowledged by any measure it was a disaster. The intervention destroyed a country, led to anarchy, banditry, terrorism, people trafficking on an industrial scale and yet another failed state. One would have supposed something would have been learned from the Iraq debacle, but no.

Cameron’s premiership is beginning to look like a disaster. He was a tactical politician in charge at a strategic moment. He could  see the immediate but not the ultimate. So we had Syria, Ukraine, Libya and Brexit, all of which could have been avoided with a strategic analysis of where the policy would wind up, if things did not go quite according to plan. The latest mishap, Brexit, is a prime example. Outcome the opposite of intention and no plan prepared just in case.

One day people will remember that he was loyal to colleagues and staff perhaps to a fault, championed equality and human rights, mostly at odds with the right wing of his party, including and especially gay marriage. Much of that has been positive and life enhancing for many and eventually one hopes Cameron’s name will be stamped on the good  memories as well as the bad ones.

This blog is appalled by these wild and unnecessary education reforms on several counts. The last lot have not bedded in. Faith schools should have no place in a multi-cultural society in the first place and to allow them to become closed shops on religious grounds is plain stupid at a time when we are trying to fight radicalization and bring communities together. More grammar schools are popular with the sharp elbowed better off but do very little to help those who should benefit, such as are headed for a benefit trap in a deprived area with zero good employment opportunities for the young.

Streamed all ability schools with further diversion opportunities at 13+ to vocational skills is a national need, emergency even, which has to be addressed because of a chronic skills shortage, the more so post Brexit. Grammar schools select at 11+ which is premature and tend to feed the financial professions, even if later intake is allowed as gifted pupils come to the surface. We have more than enough lawyers but not enough engineers and computer scientists. In other words we have too many people who charge for their time but not enough creating the wealth to pay them. So we borrow. Enough said.

Or is this reform agenda really noise to shield the government from embarrassment at its Brexit policy vacuum?

It is difficult to imagine a bigger mishap for the Clinton campaign than a video of her fainting into the arms of secret service agents and being bundled away in a van. She then emerges a few hours later from her daughter’s flat saying she ‘overheated’ and now feels fine. A little later it is diagnosed that she has pneumonia. At once the whole trust issue is added to a health scare. She cannot possibly feel fine. I have had pneumonia twice; once as a child before antibiotics and once as an adult with them. I can tell you Mrs. Clinton is not fine, neither will she be fine in two days. This is a very serious condition which will take time to get over, even if the acute stage is dealt with my medication. Moreover getting pneumonia in high summer is unusual and indicates a degree of stress and strain way above normal. Churchill also want down with pneumonia during the war. He described himself at the end of his tether. That is where Mrs. Clinton is now. When you look at the schedule that has been her life for over a year, that is no small wonder.

Americans like a ‘strong’ President. Yet being President imposes a fraction of the physical demands of the campaign to get elected. The country needs a cerebral president who can think things through and work thing out, who can cut deals and give leadership, not one who is going to personally lead a mission of the Seals. So it should not matter to voters if Mrs. Clinton now takes two weeks out to recover and get her strength back. But in modern America it will matter. How much we cannot tell. But it could just be the break that Trump has been waiting for.

Clearly Liam Fox’s comments about British Business have caused a big stir. It was a recording of a private meeting, but since everybody carries a recording device in the from of a smart phone, there is today no such thing as a meeting which is private. So Fox knew his remarks would escape the room.

Is he right?  Well no doubt there are many who would feel deeply hurt and insulted among the business community, but raw statistics back Fox. At something in the order of $125 billion for 2015, the UK’s trade deficit is the second largest in the world after to the US. This compares with a surplus in Germany of $285 billion, so something is not right for sure. The plain truth is that as a trading nation we are a flop, no matter whose fault it is. We create little new wealth, we are surviving (for the moment but for how long?) on borrowing to inflate assets and we cannot earn enough revenue to properly pay for public services at all levels. We owe more money as a country to the result of the world, yes that’s right, than any other except the US. This is because we fund everything we do by borrowing. much of it overseas. We import 90% of everything we consume. So the Secretary of State for Overseas Trade has a Herculean task ahead of him to turn this mess around. A few harsh, unkind and plain nasty words may be needed to get people to face reality and start to fix it.

It is also worth recording that our most successful exporting industry, motor manufacturing, is entirely foreign owned. It is the Germans, the Japanese, the Indians and more recently the Chinese, who have created success from a disaster heap. That tells us something as well.

The gravity of the hour can be underscored by the fact that this blog is backing Dr Fox. Regular readers will know that this is as close as it gets to pigs flying.

When you consider the list of urgent priorities facing this government, it is hard for anyone to agree that reintroducing grammar schools is one of them. Which is why almost nobody has. Now that May has got this off her chest we can only hope, once again, that she will get on with her day job.

For what it is worth, eleven is completely the wrong age to make any kind of selection based on ability. It is arbitrary and based on the medieval notion that children are born either ‘thick’ or ‘bright’. The private sector has something to teach here. It has evolved over centuries and makes the academic selection at 13+. That is the point at which the choice of public school based on marks achieved in the common entrance exam. Some schools demand very high attainment while others are more relaxed. Therefore any form of selection within the state system if it has to happen at all (and this blog believes it should be by stream within the school not by school) should take place then. And not just in an academic sense. This is when we should identify the future engineers, computer scientists, construction engineers, technical specialists and so on. The future of the economy depends on re-energizing these critical vocations. We have enough lawyers, bankers and estate agents.

There is a very big in-tray on this government’s desk. Not only do we have increasing irritation with lack of any coherent direction over Brexit, but there are problems with health, the railways, housing, deficits of several kinds, youth employment and many others which impact upon ordinary people’s daily lives in a negative way. With these pressing priorities the re-appearance of the old grammar school chestnut is baffling. It is not the type of school which determines excellence in standards, but the quality of teaching in it, the rigor of the curriculum, the relevance of the subjects to pupil advancement and economic need, the commitment of parents to support their children and the quality of their home life; the list is long and gets longer.

Any fool can see that if you take the brightest and most committed pupils and put them all together you will get better academic results and they will be easier to obtain because you have dumped all the problems. Grammar Schools are not so much an opportunity but a cop out. What we need is less tinkering with structures and better investment in and support for really high standards in teaching and leadership in all schools everywhere.

And that requires a good deal more money than is made available from an under performing economy which has to be re-balanced in order to generate the revenue the government needs. So far the government has had little concrete to say about that. Its own performance rating must therefore be one which demands improvement.