Blog 2023 Malcolm Blair-Robinson

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The prime minister made a good speech yesterday which brought certain tabloids to a state of ecstasy, full of confidence and jingoism. At a certain level it was inspiring and it was good politics for sure. Most of it is rumoured be be written by Boris, who was trawling the media afterwards with back up. As you will know, if you are a regular follower of this blog, I am and always will be, for remain. I am emotionally, by family ties, by heritage and by conviction.

But I do see the other side of the argument and I do understand those who think it better to leave. Many of my posts have highlighted all that is wrong with the EU. Now we know where we are headed, or at least where our government is headed (I did not vote for these people) I have no hesitation in opposing the whole thing hook, line and sinker and declaring this hard Brexit programme an act of international vandalism for which a price will one day be paid.

My first objection is that I believe the EU is the greatest diplomatic achievement since the fall of Rome and one which has brought an extraordinary period of peace and harmony in Europe, underpinned by a new sense of fellowship, shared heritage and belonging. It is held up by three pillars, Germany, Britain and France. If one pillar goes, as I have already argued, the structure may fall. To suppose that we will profit from that in the long term is ridiculous.

My second objection is  the legal, financial and human consequences which will be felt in every corner of the land by ordinary people who will be caught in chain reactions which they will be unable to control. Every tiny part of the business, legal and trade infrastructure and every centre of expertise, is built to the European model and integrated into a European whole. To order the amputation of all this, without a clear idea of what comes next, is to play fast and loose with people’s lives and livelihoods, for which no government has a licence nor this government a mandate.

Third, the younger generation voted overwhelmingly to remain. They are the ones who are going to have to live with this. They have been ignored and moreover abused. because many of the youngest adults have obtained degrees and run up vast debts on student loans, to find the whole horizon for their career opportunities has been changed on wave of prejudice and ignorance.

Fourth, the strain has already caused the collapse of the power sharing government in Northern Ireland. Nobody is sure it can be put back together. Remember NI voted to remain. The Democratic Unionists, for which this blog has no time at all, voted to leave. With their  strident new leader, the DUP has nothing to offer but tension and discord.   Meanwhile the latest polls show that Wales, which voted leave, would now vote remain and, as we know only too well, hard Brexit will almost certainly trigger another independence referendum in Scotland. So the suggestion that there is unity among the home nations for this hard Brexit plan is rubbish. Only England supports it and even that is now doubtful.

Finally the deal to leave the EU and all its works requires only the approval of the council (Heads of Government of the 27) and the European Parliament by majority. So that is quite straightforward. But some kind of trade agreement with the EU and or the Customs Union requires ratification by all 27 states individually. How long that will take and whether it is politically even possible is anybody’s guess. As for the WTO, just remember that to return to membership as a sovereign state, GB will have to gain the approval of all the members unanimously, 157 of them. That is when Gibraltar and the Falklands will appear on the menu.

The tabloids praise May to the skies. They compare her to the Iron Lady. The difference is Thatcher knew what she was doing. Until the poll tax. That sank her. If May is wrong over this it could sink us all. Of course Britain has a great tradition of being inspired by rhetoric. Churchill is the gold standard, but even he could not have won the war, indeed would have lost it, if not rescued by the Americans. Trump is a great fan of Brexit, although is not perhaps a master of its detail. But he offers a fast track trade deal. Maybe history will repeat itself. But the price that Churchill paid was a bankrupt country and loss of the British Empire. We do not know what price May will pay, but be assured it will be something.

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This Nazi era drama, it is available free to download NOW. The cover image shows Karl Kaufmann, Gauleiter of Hamburg, and husband of the woman on whose life the character of Lise is based in the book, riding with Hitler in his Mercedes in the 1930s, at the height of the Nazi consolidation of power.

Lise Bauer is born in Africa in 1906, brought to England by her parents from where she is expelled with them in 1914, because her father is an East Prussian. They settle in America and become Americans, but return to Europe in the 1920’s. Here Lise is involved in the rise of the Nazi party, marries one of Hitler’s closest associates and later has a relationship with Hitler himself, before divorcing her husband and marrying an English friend of Hitler’s deputy, Rudolf Hess. She settles again in England with the consent of the security services and she and her husband establish a cell to act as a secret communication channel between Hitler and Churchill at the critical period of WWII.
The novel offers a new view of Hitler’s sexual relationships, a plot to overthrow Churchill and the flight to Scotland by Rudolf Hess. Using historical characters often portrayed in a new light, this dramatic account challenges the accepted view of recorded history. 

Compared to its present format Yes. It has reached its high water mark. There will be no advance to federalization. Whatever its political class hopes for and whatever the insular Brussels declares, there is now no longer a majority among the European people for ratification of any further loss of sovereignty. But it is worse than that. There is a majority for Brussels having a good deal less and nation states having a good deal more.

I have had suspicions ever since the Brexit vote that, like a spider’s web, you could not detach a member, and a key leading power at that, and not damage the whole thing to the point where it starts to lose tension and unravel. I have no doubt the EU cannot sustain both the loss of GB and the loss of whole-hearted support from Washington.

Now the questions have been asked they will not go away. Moreover what this blog said long ago, is now being said by the man who will be the President of the US before the week is out. The EU has become Germany’s vehicle for economic hegemony. Trump speaks not to politicians but to the people. And the people listen.

This does not mean an implosion. Nor does it mean chaos, at least one hopes not. But what it does mean is that as Britain negotiates its exit, the EU itself will have to reform to survive or else Italy and France will follow, spurred on by some rather unsavoury political echoes from right wing political movements in the newer Eastern members. The natural synergy between the membership has been lost because it has become too big. The economic shared interest has been shattered by Germany’s control of the Euro. Once again Germany has used its power with a, perhaps unintentional, heavy hand. We are also again at a point where German power has expanded too far south and east and ground to a stop. This time it is soft power, but soft power still damages weaker populations.

It will all be peaceful and the supreme lesson has been learned that all the countries of Europe, west and east, can live together as neighbours. But all living in the same house does not work. Especially after one moves out, leaving Germany as the landlord. This is not a criticism of Germany. It is just too good at everything for everybody else to keep up.

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 St.John Whilloe is the black sheep member of a wealthy legal family,  whose firm of solicitors looks after the affairs of many of the top  people in the country. He is consulted by a young woman who claims  to be frightened of her husband. Things are not as they seem and  St.John finds himself drawn into a complex web of intrigue and  murder. He is soon in a race against time to solve a mystery with roots  in a tortured family history, with sinister paranormal undertones.

The NHS is in crisis. Even the government acknowledges this, although it will not admit it. There are problems with the way it is managed and the way it is structured. Ministers have tried to distance themselves from these problems behind a mountain of quangos. Yet even if all these failures and stupidities were dealt with, the key problem would remain. The NHS funding model is no longer fit for purpose. The nation is trying to do too much with too little when it comes to the nation’s health and social care. This cannot go on and a conversation has to begin to put things right. A lot more money is needed, at least a third more. Perhaps an even bigger increase, is required to bring our provision up to a modern standard, unstressed, effective and efficient.

The total cost of the NHS in the last financial year was about £116 billion. Of this £100 billion was spent on NHS England. Total revenues received by the Treasury from all sources were around £534 billion, so it is clear that a high proportion, roughly a fifth, is being spent on health. That is a lot, but it is nowhere near enough. There is a credibility gap, between the huge sums the government throws about in soundbites to evidence its generosity and the shortage of money everywhere apparent in the system itself. This is because we look at percentages of the revenue stream, when for health we should look, as other developed countries do, at percentages of GDP. By that measure we come at or near the bottom for expenditure, as well as for doctors per head of population and likewise for beds. So it is a bad report. Yet the NHS is our biggest employer, with more people working for it than anywhere else and its performance gets more air time than any other function of government.

So where does it go wrong?

First, as I have said many times before, you cannot provide an infinite service on a finite budget, any more than an airplane can fly without wings. The more patients who arrive at the various points of demand, the less money there is to go round and the more stretched resources become. We have to change to a system which increases the flow of cash the more patients, procedures and treatment the NHS actually  provides on the front line. Each patient brings in money. More patients must mean more cash. The only way to do this is to alter the funding model to an insurance based platform.

This does not mean profits for medical insurance companies and exclusions for pre-existing conditions. It means the government (or its own insurance corporation) becomes the insurer and charges everyone a premium which reflects the cost of running the NHS as it happens and properly. The insurance is compulsory, covering everybody, thus eliminating underwriting issues about contra- selection. Everyone contributes and everyone is covered, no matter what their health situation.  The cost varies year by year depending on the demands made upon it. On current figures it would more or less replace the basic rate of income tax, which could begin much higher up the income chain. Meanwhile premiums would be expressed as percentages of personal income, so that higher earners would pay more and the lowest incomes nothing.

The other reform which is a must is that all medical staff must be employed by the NHS and work exclusively for it. Self employed GPs under contract and Consultants seeing patients in private practice, culled from NHS waiting lists, is absurd and has to end.

These are just ideas. They are not new. Neither are they exclusive to this blog. You will begin to hear about them more and more. The time to fix the NHS has all but run out.

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Dr. Rachael Benedict is an American historian and a best-selling author. She has a British connection through her estranged father  who has spent much of his life plotting to expose secrets from World War Two, which are so sensitive they have been subject to an extensive cover-up lasting seventy years. He finally seeks her help to reveal lies and murder at the heart of the British State.  This provokes a killing spree as parts of the security services of both Britain and the United States become engaged in the drama, with one side determined to get the secrets out and the other determined to keep them hidden. Set equally in the United States and Britain, the narrative grips from the first page, transporting the reader to the heart of government both in Washington and London and on into the darkest corners of the secret states on each side of the Atlantic. Rachael battles forward to unearth the truth both from intrigues of the Nazi era, but also within her own family, surviving three attempts on her life, before finally achieving her goal. Not only does she expose the truth from history. She has to delve deep into her own emotions to find the truth about herself.

Readers know that this blog always takes a measured and generally, in spite of all its flaws and assertiveness, positive view of Russia. Readers also know that my contempt for the Foreign Office analysis of what our relations with Russia ought to be, is almost total.

For Americans, whilst most enemies in their history have been something that happened, but barely got under their skin, there are two that were part of their upbringing, their psyche and their culture. The first is in the past. It was the British Empire. You have to read contemporary correspondence and diplomatic exchanges to see just how dangerous things became during the civil war period (1861-65) and how relentless was the ambition to supplant the Brits as the number one World Power in the first half of the twentieth century. By then the rivalry fell short of enmity, but beneath the smooth surface of transatlantic relations there was always a bitter edge. To the north of the US lay Canada as an independent country bound into the British constitution, a constant reminder of the failure of the original plan that it too should be part of the United States.

The second enemy was Russia. But not at first. Indeed America and Britain worked surprising well with Stalin during World War II. FDR got on so well with Stalin that he began to see how, if he promoted the Soviets to great power status, he would correspondingly reduce the power of the British Empire.  Churchill became alarmed at the way he found himself at times sidelined, as Stalin and FDR began to communicate directly with each other, rather than through the UK as had been the case at the beginning. The carve up of Europe which sowed the seeds of the cold war after the German surrender was not to Britain’s liking at all. This anxiety was justified in British eyes by the subsequent  turn of world events.  America soon became, via McCarthy and his followers, hysterically anti-communist (it remains an illegal political philosophy, peculiar in an open democracy), so both sides of the Atlantic were once again in step.

But the real problem between America and Russia, which was not ended with the conclusion of the cold war, began with the Sputnik, when a stunned America discovered that the Soviets were ahead of them in missile technology. This was reinforced by the Cuba missile crisis and the dawning recognition, which became a cultural and visceral fear, that Russia is the first and only country in American history which has the power to threaten the very existence of the US, indeed to wipe it from the map. And that power, as Putin keeps murmuring in the background lest it be forgotten, remains.

Trump is an impulsive debater, an unguarded Tweeter but a rational thinker. He knows that soon China will also have a enormous destructive power from a growing missile capability and he sees big economic issues likely to lead to worsening relations. He is prepared to challenge and spar with China, because he has a lot to gain in jobs for the forgotten rust belt  workers and a more equal business relationship. But America wants nothing whatsoever from Russia other than a partnership to stop the spread of Islamic terrorism and middle east wars, and a de-tuning of rising tensions in Eastern Europe, which are both contrived and unreal, but expensive to feed. So he plans a love in with Putin for which preparations among aids are well in hand.

Britain, the biggest listener and spymaster in the world, has been horrified that once again it might be cast aside from its BFF status like in the sunset days of FDR. So it was behind the tip-off to the US that warned of the Hilary hack and one of its ‘retired’ MI6 officers is the author of the Trump Moscow prostitute, weapons of mass destruction style, dossier. At one level these tricks have worked. Most of America is now in fear of ‘threats’ from Russia. Except Trump. And he is the only one who counts. Now. So the UK foreign office will have to dry its tears and fall in line. Or, and this is already under way, draw closer to China. That could get very interesting. There are a lot of fools in the foreign office, but maybe not everyone?

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Rudolf Hess, Hitler’s deputy and right hand man, flew to Scotland on a mysterious peace mission in 1941, which has never been convincingly explained, to meet unidentified politicians who wanted to end the war. The truth has been covered up for generations because to reveal it would somehow undermine the honour and constitutional fabric of the United Kingdom. Who was plotting against Churchill? What were the peace terms on offer? What happened to Hess? Was he killed in the War? Was the prisoner in Spandau a double?
There are many questions to which in the modern day one old man, Saul Benedict, has all the answers, because his parents were players in the drama involving Churchill, Hitler, leading politicians and an important Royal. Saul is an author and declares his intention to write a book to reveal all, but he is shot dead, apparently accidentally by a poacher. But was it an accident? Rick Coleman, an investigative journalist, determines to uncover the mystery.
Taking place in the modern day, but with flashback chapters which gradually unfold the hidden secrets, the novel is a fast moving and compelling read based on the family knowledge of the author whose parents had connections to both Hess and Hitler and to British Intelligence.  

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America has become disorientated by the victory of a presidential candidate whose fundamental support comes from the notion of disrupting the status quo in almost every direction. So the handover, so carefully choreographed in normal times to represent almost a royal rather than democratic transfer, is blown apart by reports of Russian hackers (the inflammatory word is Russian, not hacking, which happens all the time) and Tweets from the president elect who communicates his thoughts on everything to the whole world almost every hour of the day. This leaves the establishment aghast and the press corps running around looking silly proffering old news. So parts of it try to stir things up. Trump loves that and stirs back.

But in the end there is a real world out there and problems have to be solved. We know Trump plans on getting a better working relationship with Russia, a better economic balance with China, a more realistic relationship with Europe which costs America less and he plans to have a serious attempt to rekindle lost rust belt jobs. He has not assembled a team of admirers, nor like almost all his predecessors has he had to give jobs to people he owes. He has chosen a strong team of big, or very big, hitters who disagree with him on quite a lot. But he will task them to deliver outcomes in their spheres of responsibility, of which deadlock or a stand-off will not do at all. Solutions, not postures, will be the demand of the Trump oval office. And solutions which above all work.

Most of that most of America will like, because it is very American. It is true that a majority of people voted for more of the same, but if you look at the map you will see the majority of the country voted not just for change but disruptive change. So it is now time for the losers to end their hysteria and fall in line. That is what democracy is. Somebody wins.