Blog 2023 Malcolm Blair-Robinson

Trump returned from Hamburg convinced he had done a good job for America. Not all the other 19 of the G20 would agree with him because there were sharp differences on climate change and free trade, but there was goodwill all round and a positive outcome of the meeting with Putin. So was his homecoming something good? No because the Russia saga continues, this time about Trump Junior meeting a Russian lawyer to dig dirt on Hilary.

I really do not care whether these Russia collusion stories are true or false. I do care about the coherent governance of the leading nation of the free world and this has all but broken down. And I will say this. If the Democrats and a few bitter Republicans succeed in their evident plan of destroying this Presidency, they will also destroy a part of America.  Already America is damaged, but unless the grown ups stand up to be counted, the damage will be permanent. It does not matter which side you are on or what your views are. To the rest of the world the whole system is flawed. From being the example to follow, it has become the one to avoid. That is big brand damage. Very big.

Re-launches do not work. Remember the one in the middle of the Tory campaign? The truth is that once the wheels fall off the wagon, that is the end of the trail. Whatever May says will have no effect, because the gap between her rhetoric and her delivery is already so well known that few will even listen. There are three options out there.

A grand war-time style Tory led Coalition with Labour, the Lib Dems and the SNP to deliver Brexit, with an election at the end. However it is unlikely that the Opposition parties would agree.

To muddle along as best as this broken government can, until the chaos of its Brexit strategy forces it to capitulate.

Have another general election in the autumn.

None of these is ideal or without risk. But the aftermath of the greatest political blunder since the industrial revolution, the Brexit referendum, will exact a political price few could have imagined. Nothing will be the same again.

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I am sure he thought he did. Trump’s charm, perhaps his power, is his optimism and self belief. So the G20 was a ‘wonderful success’ and Britain can have a wonderful strong trade deal, very soon. And his relationship with May is close and special. For the beleaguered May, whose Cabinet is barley on speaking terms with her a good deal of the time, this was intoxicating stuff. It will help her politically in the short term because she looks a little less like a political train wreck than before she went to Hamburg.

But after the generous ,very big, wonderful and exciting pronouncements from President Trump, there has to come the action. In the case of a trade deal, a lot of it. A free trade deal means open borders, harmonised regulation, laws and standards, free movement of capital, goods and people. This is not what Trump means. For that would take years to set up, not least because of the vast number of competing interests which would have to be reconciled, and unified. To replace the current deal with the EU with an equivalent with the US is not a realistic aspiration for either country.

But something more limited, starting with specific industries and services where there is already similarity and shared objectives, would be a good beginning. Neither country wants open borders, so there will be no hold up there. But the outcome, while good for those included in it, will not have the blanket advantages of the current EU deal, which is now about to include free trade with Japan.

So the lifeline for May will be rather short, because the real problems to be faced by business, science, finance,education, living costs and jobs, already surfacing, will become starkly apparent as the summer advances. These problems are immediate and have nothing to do with which side you are on. Already the economy is slowing and inflation is rising. As the details of the practical, rather than ideological, difficulties of separating something designed to remain permanent, begin to tumble from Brussels onto the floor of the House of Commons, the two headed malformation of the Tory party trying to go both ways at once, will scupper May’s ability to deliver anything. Power will rest with Parliament, not the Executive. That will change the game. Exactly how will become clear before the clocks go back in the autumn.

Meanwhile the popular politician and likely new leader of the Lib Dems, formerly an effective and objective member of Cameron’s Coalition cabinet, Sir Vince Cable, has today said loud and clear on TV, something now whispered all over Whitehall. That is the complexity of actually delivering an agreed Brexit, when nobody had the faintest idea what was involved when the prospect was offered, will demand a cost none will be willing to pay, so it will not happen. People certainly voted to leave the EU. They did not vote to be worse off, or lose their jobs and their homes. For Trump’s offer to be big enough to set everything straight will require some extraordinary changes in Washington and London, which do not seem at all realistic.

But then again, everything in politics worldwide is up for grabs, so who knows?

Regular readers of this blog will know that consistently, since 2009 when I first went into print on such things, I have been highly critical of what I regard as the mis-handling of Russia post Cold War. I also dismiss in its entirety the argument that Russia is somehow aggressive and seeking to de-stabilize the Ukraine, and the Middle East and Eastern Europe. It meddles no more than any other major power.

It was the EU and the US that encouraged the overthrow of the legitimately elected government in Kiev and allowed the replacement gang of neo-fascists to intimidate the Russian majority in Eastern Ukraine and the Crimea. It was the West that embarked on disastrous military adventures which failed in their objectives, in Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya. It was the West which encouraged the uprising in Syria which led to civil war. And it was NATO that, following the winding up of the Warsaw pact, expanded ever eastwards to the Russian border.

So when this blog discovered during his election campaign that Trump wanted to set relations with Russia on a better path, this blog backed him. I have watched in disbelief as the political establishment in Washington has done itself incalculable harm by insulting both American voters and the world at large, by making out that a bunch of Russian hackers with password phishing and fake twitter accounts, could undermine American democracy. Hackers there may be, the US and UK and among the biggest when it suits them, but Americans are not fools and it would have no effect upon how they voted, if they even noticed. The Democrats lost because nobody trusted Hilary and her programme did not inspire the traditional blue collar Democrat base. It was all about the glitterati and the celebs and not about the American heartland.

So now that Trump has at last met Putin and the two have bonded to the point of making a new beginning at least a possibility, it is this blog’s hope that an emboldened Trump will return to Washington, read the riot act and fire every top official in every agency who does not accept that the best way forward is to see Russia as a rival, yes, but an essential partner with whom most world problems can be resolved, but without whom none can come to a welcome outcome. The firing list should include intelligence chiefs, special prosecutors and yes, even Republican officials who constantly throw spanners into the works of the ongoing project of the orderly governance of the United States of America.

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There are reports that Sir Martin Moore-Bick had a rough handling at the meeting with Grenfell Tower Survivors and family members of victims. In the narrow sense of the choice of judge to head the Public Inquiry, there has been controversy from the very moment of his appointment. What is needed is a judge with a combination of technical skill to unravel the cause and effect sequences of this unprecedented peacetime housing disaster, and people empathy who can get into the skins of the victims and their suffering on a level which guarantees trust. There is no doubt that Sir Martin passes the first test, but most people and all the victims feel he fails on the second.

This blog believes it is not the judge, but the format which is the issue. Public Inquiries led by judges or other senior civil or military figures have been used with success in the past. The successes have almost always been when the issue under review does not involve deaths. When death is the driver, as in Hutton and the early Hillsborough and Bloody Sunday inquires, failure caused more problems than existed before the procedure began and fostered suggestions of whitewash and cover-up. On the other hand a full forensic inquest, under a coroner sitting with a jury, offers a far better prospect of resolution and closure for victims and their families, as recently demonstrated by the final Hillsborough inquest.

The main difference between the two is that in the judge led inquiry it is the judge who decides on the conclusion, but in the inquest it is the people, represented by the jury, who determine the outcome. The Coroner makes recommendations in the light of the verdict. That is what should be happening for Grenfell.

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