Blog 2023 Malcolm Blair-Robinson

Malcolm Blair-Robinson is a writer and blogger who has been a keen political observer for more than sixty years. Born a Tory, he became a founder member of the SDP, before gradually migrating left. In 2014 he published his idea of Dynamic Quantitative Easing which aroused interest in high places and this forms a core element of this powerful and compact analysis of Labour’s opportunity to regain power. Frank and at a times brutal, Turn Left To Power offers a collection of fundamental reforms which amount to a political revolution.

Post Brexit and with a swing left of the  political centre ground, as the failure of globalization to bring improving prosperity to the majority becomes the mainstream challenge worldwide, this small volume is a must read not just for Labour supporters, but for all who would like to find a way forward, whichever political party you favour or if you favour none.

CLICK IMAGE TO BUY DOWNLOAD £1.99 OR PAPERBACK £4.99

Labour has been working hard to regain the initiative as the political opposition following its bloodletting on who should be its leader. Having resolved that self indulgent question with the ever popular Corbyn returning with an increased mandate, it finds a country drifting rudderless in a Brexit fog and awaiting with anxiety the onset of a deliberately disruptive Trump Presidency.

Not since the end of WWII has the country had to face uncertainties simultaneously with its greatest ally and its closest trading partner. Thus far the May government seems unable to offer more than fancy rhetoric, resulting in mounting public impatience. The spectacle of two of her cabinet ministers being separately chased grim faced and tight lipped in Whitehall by angry media (Health and Transport) was telling. Daily there is news of terrible disruption on the tubes and Southern Rail, which is causing very great suffering to the life and working patterns of millions of ordinary people. Almost hourly it seems, there is news of some further pressure building in the NHS,  in which the deeper you dig the worse it gets; almost every authority within its Byzantine structure warns of mounting crisis.

This extraordinary state of disarray should be an opportunity for the official Opposition to seize control of the political conversation with bold plans and a clear vision befitting a government in waiting with a real chance of winning power. Labour has some sound policies and intelligent positions, yet it is constantly entangled in gaffes and mixed messages which appear to confuse even its own stalwarts. Worse, it trails in the polls (Con 42 Lab 28 according to latest) at a level to which even Michael Foot barely sank and he faced a break-away wing formed into the SDP. This is not good by any measure.

It is not as bad as it might be because now we have fixed term parliaments. Talk of a snap election is a fantasy, because legally (another Cameron blunder?) there is no such thing, unless two thirds of the Commons votes to dissolve itself and turkeys do not vote for Christmas. Failing that May would have to lose a vote of confidence and the alternative, Corbyn, as leader of the next largest party, would have to do the same, before the Queen could lawfully turn out the lights and send them all to the country and their electoral fate. There is one other possibility.  Boris pounces and deposes May as leader of the Tories and replaces her as PM. That would hardly help Labour. It might be a calamity.

So Labour has to start getting its act together. That includes the muttering Blairite wing as much as the activists in Momentum. Make no mistake from one who knows about things like this, either they come together with a common message which they all articulate and embrace and in turn support their leadership and each other.

Or voters will scatter them to the four winds.

Set in the mid nineteen nineties, this fast moving thriller lifts the curtain on sex, sleaze and corruption in high places as the long reign of the government totters to an end, following the ousting of the iconic Margaret Thatcher. The novel catches the mood of those times with a host of fictional characters who engage in political intrigue, sex, money laundering and murder, pursued by an Irish investigative journalist and his girlfriend, the daughter of a cabinet minister found dead in a hotel room after bondage sex.

Download £2.08    Paperback 8.99

KINDLE OR PAPERBACK     UK    US

The answer is the latter in the case of the UK in 2017. There was a time perhaps in 2010/11 when austerity was good, but without making it part of a plan to re-boot the economy and maintaining it year after year, through one parliament into the next, is mathematically pointless, hugely damaging to the lives of everyone not in the ruling class and causes economic blindness to those who practice it for so long. Thus it is we have a government which does not know how to move forward in any direction, because it and its advisers have entirely lost the economic plot and have no idea what they are doing.

May makes her lofty speeches about those left behind and the message of Brexit, but the root cause of all she talks about, including Brexit, is never ending austerity, causing under funding of almost every public function or service upon which taxpayer’s money is spent. This makes everybody angry. Unions go for strikes, prisoners go for riots, some go for protests, but most go for despair. For a very sad few this is all engulfing and life changing or, even worse, ending. But for most it is a creeping feeling that things are never going to get better. The anger, like the magma in some long dormant volcano, is building.  If May does not come forward with real plans to enrich people’s life experience in everyday details, that anger is going to burst all over her. And her problem is that there is only one thing which will ease the pressure and she does not have it. Money.

A modern state works best if its two sectors, public and private work in balance and for the common good. There should be every opportunity for the ambitious to forge ahead, provided it is not at the expense of the vast mass who enable the fabric of modern civilization at every level, whose calling is not self enrichment because their jobs can never make them rich, but without whom the lights would go out, the planes crash, the trains fail, the epidemics spread, the floods engulf and the general structure of a modern state would collapse.  The majority who work for the common good should be able to get a square deal which shares in rising standards bought about by economic growth and advancing innovation. And they should be able, because many of them run them,  to rely on efficient public services and utilities which are modern, efficient and caring.

The current economic model looks after the top end of the professional classes really well and celebrities have never had it so good. Most of their money has first to be earned further down the food chain either to pay them fees, ticket sales or subscriptions or from taxation. And this is where it all goes wrong. Because this mass does not earn enough, while the top people earn too much. Moreover the taxation model is a century out of date and utterly fails to deliver the revenue required. It needs restructuring on entirely different principles to spread the burden much wider, so that it delivers higher revenue at lower rates. It is all possible, my book Turn Left to Power explains.

In simple terms the UK does not have a problem of too much expenditure; it is a problem of too little income. Austerity makes the problem worse. That is what May has to deal with.

Few decent people would find fault with a good deal of May’s speech about her new buzz trend, the Sharing Society. But what happened to Cameron’s Big Society, based presumably on Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society of the post Kennedy era? The common thing about all these societies is that they never happen. Because people are bigger than politicians and are less easily manipulated. They do not just talk about life in difficult places. They live it. Thatcher said there was no such thing as society, but that was perhaps going too far.

Johnson was trying to heal the racial divisions which divide America still, but were even worse in the days of segregation all across the Deep South. Cameron was trying to make his party electable. May is trying, well I am not quite sure and neither is anybody else. There is a lot of worthy talk and a good deal of drift. An action government hers is not, still paralyzed like cowering rabbits in the headlights of this stupid Brexit juggernaut.

Meanwhile crises are building in social care, mental health (yes I know she touched on it but again it was about stuff like roping in teachers to help as if they did not have enough on their plates already) the trains, the tubes, education funding, potholes (the local government people said £12 billion was needed and the government announced an extra £250 million and no that’s not a typo) and as always the NHS. This is now so strapped for cash that the system is in places breaking down altogether. Last week three elderly people died alone and unattended on trolleys in hospital corridors because there were no beds, no staff available and no proper care.

There was a time in this island nation of ours, when people did care about each other (although without a special label), that such news would have erupted into a national outrage of such ferocity that it would certainly have brought down the health minister, if not the government itself. But now it hardly made the news. We are just so used to hearing awful things like that. Why? One word. Every single bad thing leads back to it. Even Brexit.

Austerity.

Read the next post.

It will appear on or after January 10th.

For years I have been saying and writing that with the collapse of communism and the Soviet Union, Russia should be accepted by the West and is no longer, and should not be seen as, an enemy. America has consistently refused to accept that notion and has during Obama’s second term  done much to build Russia up into a threat. The supine British Foreign Office has backed this ignorant appraisal. Using it as a basis of making judgement on world affairs since 9/11 has led to the biggest string of intelligence misreadings, military misjudgments and diplomatic blunders in Western history since the fall of Napoleon.  I have often felt that the maintenance of Russia as an ogre on the rampage was critical to avoiding  a wing or two of the Pentagon being made redundant. Anyway now everything has changed. More than that it has been turned on its head. Diplomacy, the military, the works, even the world view.

President Elect Trump has told the whole world via Twitter that anybody who does not see that Russia and the US need to work together to sort the current problems in the world is STUPID. Hear! Hear! Brilliant! I love it! This is going to be a presidency which reshapes the world as we know it. Because Trump is a visionary (with lots of faults over misogyny, groping and other stuff too) who sees up ahead something much better. And there is a chance he will get us all there.

Because he knows that Russia is the largest country in the world which is in many ways an unfathomable enigma, which does not even value many the the jewels of the American psyche, yet has been critical in the defeat of threats to the survival of all the West holds dear in every conflict for more than the last 200 years. Without Russia we would today live in a world shaped by Napoleon or the Kaiser or Hitler or some combination or output of them all. And even the stupid would not have wanted that.

As for the British Foreign Office, I would close it down and turn it into a (Trump?) hotel. I would open a Ministry of External Affairs tasked with looking to the future, informed by, but unshackled to, the past. And with a completely new team down to the doorman. Boris does not even come into my plan. Anyway he is far too busy with his own.

It is put about by Downing Street spinners that May will be making a Big Speech soon (soon =after the Supreme Court has given its ruling, also soon, but that soon = when they are ready). She will lay out her government’s negotiating ‘stance’ and at last we will know where we are headed. But it is more interesting than at first it sounds. Because there are powerful rumours, not from Downing Street, No 10 anyway, that tell us that ‘substantial parts’ of it are being drafted by Davis the Brexit Secretary and Boris. Ah ha!  So that is what is afoot.

You can read it, the rumour, as the Prime Minister is a listening person who likes to engage the creative talents of senior clever colleagues. Or you can read it that she is a listening person who is having to do as she is told because those very senior colleagues have decided that they have had enough dithering and discord and she either does as they say (and write) or they will walk out of her government and bring the whole thing down.

Liam Fox, the International Trade Secretary, the supposed no 3 in the Brexit Trio, now a Duo, has been sidelined and is not contributing. That is because he talks nonsense and nobody takes him seriously. Even in the government.

I am sorry but the latest update of my blog platform from WordPress has omitted the justification option button, causing a more untidy looking blog at the margin. I am sorry about this. Hopefully there will be another update to correct the problem.

The Obama administration did much to restore America’s tarnished overseas reputation post Bush II, but paradoxically was entirely out of its depth trying to resolve international problems, which largely it made worse. Trump has all along demonstrated a more focused understanding and has appointed a cabinet which appears to reflect that. Careful reading of the tea leaves (an English expression for watching the signals for baffled American readers) in Trump Tower indicates that Europe will be left to get on with its problems but will have to dig a lot deeper into its own pocket if it wants US military protection.  Russia will become a partner of mutual interests diplomatically and even militarily to step up the fight against IS, but will be allowed to sort out Syria to its own liking and will be left with its own programme for Eastern Ukraine. Israel will be assured of US backing but will be told with a smile that the price for keeping it is to get its peace act together with the Palestinians, in which it will be allowed a pretty free hand.

The main focus will be on China economically and diplomatically with a proactive agenda and a menu to secure the Trump administration’s continued backing for the sacred One China doctrine. This will include a more evenly balanced trade deal incorporating tariffs and less unfair competition from continuous devaluations of the Yuan,  together with access for American goods in the potentially vast expansion of China’s gradual economic re-balance to home consumption. Militarily Trump will concede some degree of a sphere of influence for China (similar to the reality of Russia) but will seek a joint approach to dealing with the increasing threat from North Korea. Here military action will be firmly on the agenda, including a preemptive surgical nuclear strike with low yield precision weapons which can penetrate any underground factories and silos. This will not be advertised, even on Twitter.

There is absolutely no way Trump will sit on his hands waiting to see if North Korea can actually perfect a rocket and hit America with a nuclear warhead. Trump knows that this is the only real threat to the United States apart from terrorism and he is going to deal with it. He will seek to convince China that he is serious and in turn hope that Beijing will be able to convince Pyongyang. Part of the carrot aspect could be a meeting with the North Korean leader hosted by China.

Western capitals, including London, will have to get used to a very different world view and refocus on diplomacy which moves forward, rather than goes round in circles. It will be challenging, sometimes alarming, but also refreshing.

By the way, where is Boris?

To all followers of this Blog, my best wishes to achieve your goals and ambitions in 2017. A lot is going to happen in what will be a year of many changes. We have Trump, Brexit, Europe, the Middle East, faltering globalization and the rise of an anti establishment political wave called populism. All of it is new, so there is no reliable basis for prediction or outcome. We can only hope that those who have been passed by in the rising standards of the few will get a better deal and those for whom each day and night is ripped by violence and terror will be granted their yearning for a more peaceful world. Those in public life who have responsibility to deliver these things must redouble their efforts to do better than has been the standard of the more recent past.