Blog 2023 Malcolm Blair-Robinson

It is impossible not to feel sympathy for the hapless May as she struggled through a coughing fit, a prank and bits dropping off the decor, to deliver her speech; all of it a metaphor for her imploding administration.

What rubbish she talks! There is all this stuff about creating some kind of Utopia from her imagination, while either ignoring her own promises, or allowing her ministers to pursue policies which make her recurring dreams impossible to achieve. This is in part because the economic model has failed and partly because she has no understanding of either economics or foreign affairs.  Then we have to put up with these trailers for blockbuster productions, which turn out to be no more than short cartoons of Tom and Gerry.

Today we woke up to news that there was to be a grand revival of council house building. But the reality is that a measly £2 billion is to be applied by 2021. This is absurd. Harold Macmillan promised and built over 300,000 council house each year. May is aiming for 25,000 over four years.

We have a housing crisis based on two factors. One is a shortage of affordable housing and the other is excessive price and rental inflation. To deal with these you build up to 2 million council houses and you introduce rent controls and security of tenure for tenants. But what the prime minister’s government does is to pump another £10 billion into subsidising house purchase, which will push prices higher, and £20 billion per year into subsidising excessive rents charged by private landlords. And why? Because landlords all vote Tory.

So have sympathy for her coughing (was she choking on her words?) but once again understand that what was delivered was another of her set piece speeches, which  turn out to be full of belief and empty of reality.

As an object lesson in how not to do things the Spanish government’s handling of its Catalonia problem is hard to beat. At the same time we have to remind ourselves that Spain is a relatively new democracy without the longevity and experience of the opportunities and limitations of the form of government described by Churchill as ‘the least worst’.

Whilst extolling the virtues of democratic government, the political establishment of Spain still contains many who secretly lack confidence in its reliability. So instead of allowing a legally approved independence referendum, which would undoubtedly have ended in defeat for the separatists who were then in the minority, the government took legal action, which it then enforced with gratuitous police violence reminiscent of the Franco era. This has converted a question about the future to a crisis about the present. It has made a unilateral declaration of independence a real and present danger. The next few days will determine Spain’s immediate destiny.

The world is more than familiar with the problems which occur when a separate nation of people are denied an independent national homeland to call their own and to govern independently. Unilateral declarations of independence, however, very rarely end well. We must hope it does not come to that.