Blog 2023 Malcolm Blair-Robinson

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Parliament is now failing the people. The government has ceased to govern. That more than Brexit itself is the crisis now. And this crisis is real, deep and damaging. A listen in to yesterday’s performance by  a straw clutching May, revealed so many conflicting views among the Tories that it is impossible to see how they can govern.

Yet there is no majority to bring the government down, to accept any permutation of any deal, to avoid a crash Brexit, nor to hold a second referendum. In my view our unwritten constitution requires the monarch, as head of state, to intervene by calling the parties together as George V did in 1930. If they fail to agree a way forward in the national interest, Article 50 should be delayed, Parliament should be dissolved and an election held.

The first duty of the new parliament would be to restore the proper balance between executive and legislature, distorted by a combination of the fixed Term Parliament Act and the Supreme Court ruling. Next must follow reforming the House of Lords and formalising the difference between parliament sitting as the Union and sitting as England. Reform of the civil service will be needed too and only when our governing institutions are seen to be fit for purpose should we even think of proceeding with Brexit.

It will not happen so we will blunder on. But this failure of governance proves the most powerful reason of all to stop Brexit. Brexit was promoted as a means of returning full sovereignty to the U.K. parliament. It is now clear that after 45 years of sharing, parliament has lost the capability to exercise coherent sovereign government. That is a most unwelcome revelation, with consequences far greater than Brexit itself.

We are no longer in just a Brexit crisis. We now have a government crisis, because the Tory party and cabinet are fractured and unable to agree the fundamentals, let alone the details. But it is even worse than that. It has become a crisis of governance, because parliament, not just any parliament, but the Mother of Parliaments, has become entirely dysfunctional over the great issue of the day, Brexit. So consumed is it by the splits and divisions within it about Brexit, it has no time or capacity for anything else. The damage to Britain’s credibility across the world will take a long time to repair.

Having won her leadership contest by what in the circumstances was a considerable margin, May has thrown herself into delivering something which might not be there. Some form of legal binding escape from the backstop. She was rebuffed by the EU in Strasbourg, lost her temper with Junker (not difficult) and now has rounded on Tony Blair for ‘demeaning’ the office he once held, i.e that of prime minister. All because he talked a good deal of sense when he appeared on Today and put the case for a People’s Vote.

That is ridiculous. Blair can say whatever he likes about anything, we do not have to listen, but we do live in a democracy. That he demeans the office of head of government by arguing that a deadlocked parliament may have to go back to the people, is a proposition so idiotic that it verges on the unhinged. It is a clear sign that the strain on May is beginning to tell.

One can only wonder what on earth will happen next. Stay tuned.

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Trump is gleeful that a Texas judge has ruled Obamacare unconstitutional. It remains to be seen whether this gets to the Supreme Court and whether its new conservative majority decides to prolong the shameful fact that the USA is the only developed country not to have a universal and affordable healthcare system.

But this is fantastic campaign fodder for the Democrats. If the Republicans in the Senate or the White House block any democratic attempt to introduce some kind of affordable care in the House, or if the Republicans do not come up with a viable plan of their own, they will lose in 2020.

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Zara Vine is a modern detective with a troubled history. Dubbed the She Wolf, she drives all before her in the search for answers and uncovers crimes of world class horror in Book One. As the youngest Detective Superintendent of the Metropolitan Police she is forced to resign because of an armed response in which an innocent is shot. Her career in tatters, her marriage over and worst of all, the death of her only child, she decides to leap to oblivion from a famous cliff top. Saved by a Samaritan, she self-drives a rebirth and joins the smallest UK Police Force. Initially tasked with Cold Cases, she is called in to solve a series of murders with sinister undertones and national implications.
But who exactly is she? Who are her real masters? What is her agenda? Compelling, taut with emotion, passion and fear, Zara Vine will draw you in and grip you right through to the stunning conclusion. 

May probably knew she would get little from Europe. She appears to have got next to nothing. Her problem, indeed the UK’s problem, is that the EU’s institutions are working smoothly and coherently and all the 27 states are in agreement, whereas the UK’ structure of government is chaotic to the point of collapse and no faction in a bitterly divided parliament has a majority. So whatever plan comes forward whether it is May’s, Norway, Canada, Crash, none can command a majority in a deadlocked parliament so high on its own arguments that it lives in a dream world of its own. There was once a simple solution to such a crisis. Dissolve it.

Indeed the threat of that happening prevented the constitutional collapse now in progress occurring in past national challenges, or the ability to actually do it brought about change and renewal. But now parliament has the power to decide whether to dissolve itself, so that remedy is lost and mayhem, not May, rules. But she does have the eerie power of one who has absolutely nothing to lose, a power unusual in live politics, and she should now use it to follow the only credible path to extricate our country from international ridicule and self-harm. She should put her plan, plus Norway, Canada, Crash and any combination acceptable to the EU, to the House of Commons. Each will be defeated. She and Parliament will then have no choice but to put the issue to the people.

And that will be the end of Brexit.

May won. And she won convincingly. The Brexiteers were beaten. Two thirds of the parliamentary Tory party backed May. Had the same margin been required before effecting major constitutional change in the referendum in 2016, which should have been the case, the whole Brexit project would have failed. The hard Brexiteers are busy running around telling everybody May is damaged and should go. In normal times perhaps. But these are not normal times and as we have seen over and over, normal political rules and conventions do not apply for now.

Moreover the Tory party is, and has been for years, two parties masquerading as one. One bit is divisive, right wing nationalist and nasty. The other is one nation, international, pluralist and compassionate. The right care about themselves and their blinkered ideology. The other, the biggest part by far, cares about people, their lives and their well being. May leads that part and for the task in hand she is made the stronger by the contest.

For the glaring truth is now there for all to see. Those Brexiteers are noisy, arrogant and assertive. They are troublemakers, big on fantasy and short on reality. They have no plan other than to wreck the plans of others. But for them the stark fact now glares blindingly before them. They are a failed minority and they can never win.

As for May, her strength lies in her weakness. Having declared she will not lead the party into the next election, she has taken full ownership of delivering a Brexit based on sanity and the national interest. All right thinking people will hope she can succeed. But because Brexit is the greatest folly in all of Britain’s peacetime history, which will inflict damage beyond anything its long procession of enemies ever got near, whoever owns Brexit will be politically destroyed. May knows that. But she has put  duty above her political survival. That is how history will remember her, long after the baying rabble at her heals are forgotten.

Even fools can see that not only is it ridiculous, self indulgent and counter productive to trigger a leadership election, but also demeaning to the notion that Great Britain retains its ability to govern itself coherently. Not only are the Tory hard Brexiteers who are driving this plunge into farce of historic proportions indeed fools, but they are the biggest fools of all.

The Tory party is riven with discord over fundamentals like the future of our country. There are splits and splits within splits. Even if they appoint a new leader it will make no difference, because the House of Commons has no majority for any conceivable permutation of Brexit. Moreover those challenging May have no agreement among themselves on who should replace her, nor what plan to follow, or how to implement it.

The country is fed up with this. It will not forgive. The Tory party will pay the price. The rising generation will turn its back, because they know where their best future lies. They know too that this is not about leaders. It is about leadership. A question burns among them brighter than a star.

Where is it?

Whatever the outcome of the contest tonight that question will go on burning.

At the heart of the British State lies a secret to keep which a cabal of shadowy establishment figures is authorised to kill. At the centre of the drama is a family with baggage from the past which has access to the truth and determines to expose it. That provokes a battle of wits among security services on both sides of the Atlantic, with links into Russia, Germany, France and Africa. A gripping narrative taking place in the modern day with a cast of ruthless characters determined to kill their way to victory. Male and female, old and young, engaging yet sinister, none quite what they seem. A sophisticated thriller of unusual pace and power written in an edgy modern style. Over 400 pages.

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