Blog 2023 Malcolm Blair-Robinson

If there is a terrorist incident or some other threat or event involving national security, there is a seamless response programme which mobilizes all relevant services under the COBRA umbrella, delivering exceptional outcomes in often challenging and heartrending crises. But we have seen several instances of what might be called civil threats, for example the Foot and Mouth outbreak, sudden floods and now the terrible Grenfell Tower disaster, when the initial response at best has been far short of what was expected and where victims have been left to struggle with little support.

This is not good enough and must change. Cobra’s reach must be extended or a new civil authority must be set up to mobilize, coordinate and rehearse the responses of all civil authorities to unexpected events which leave victims traumatised and thus far it seems, authorities, beyond emergency responders, paralysed. We disbanded Civil Defence as the risk of World War Three receded. Now we need something to replace it, tailored to the times in which we live.

The political landscape has so many different aspects that to blog about the whole picture is too complex in a reasonable length post. So I shall be making a number of key points over the following days. Readers can join them up or just remember the things that grab their attention.

Today let us take an overview of where we are. The Winter of Discontent in 1978/9, when public sector workers went on strike creating mountains, literally, of rubbish piled in public places and the dead were left unburied, was the final expiry of the post war settlement in which the state was the primary player in the life, economy and well being of the nation. It was clear the state had failed. In came Thatcher and everything changed.

The state was elbowed aside by free markets, there was no such thing as society, the individual had primacy over community, nationalism gave way to globalisation, industrialisation was dumped in favour of asset acquisition, jobs were exported and everything we used imported. Saving was abandoned and borrowing became a contagion.  A whole generation of politicians and public officials grew up who knew of no other way.

It is not necessary now to list the glaring failures of that collapsing model. There have been warnings. Corbyn and Brexit. But the final and horrific sign that it is all over, is the terrible spectacle of innocent men women and children being burned to death in a public housing tower, because nobody would listen to their pleas that the building was a fire trap. And if that were not enough, the gross incompetence of the civil authorities to respond to the aftermath has unleashed a tide of anger which cannot now be turned.

Just as the Thatcher era was founded by a very clever woman who had the ear of the people and read them with skill, could get things done and win election after election, so it is that as it all implodes, there is in Downing Street the next clever woman to hold the top office. But there, as we all know only too well, the comparison ends. As is perhaps fitting.

Once again we find ourselves expressing horror and sharing the pain of the victims and their loved ones caught up in tragedy. We are familiar in these islands with violence between Protestant and Catholic. We have suffered terror attacks from a perversion of Islam called IS. We cannot now go down the road of attacking Muslims in revenge. The white van assault on Muslim worshipers in Finsbury Park is terrorism pure and vile. The whole country condemns it. It is unnecessary and cruel. There must be no more.