Blog 2023 Malcolm Blair-Robinson

Having scattered the ERG to the four winds May looks to be in danger of throwing her advantage away if she refuses to budge on any significant red lines. She will have to give away something in order to achieve a compromise with Labour. Meanwhile there is absolutely no doubt that Britain’s reputation as a leading parliamentary democracy, if not the leading one, is shattered. Almost the whole world looks on in disbelief as our influence and credibility drains away.

Business is now furious, unable to believe that neither government nor parliament has been able to organise a consensus,  with arguments raging at every Westminster level about splitting hairs and massaging futile unrealistic dreams. The ideology of the far right is leaking into the daily rhetoric of ardent Brexiteers, especially the extremists of the ERG.The country has not been so divided in living memory. We are set to crash out of the EU before the end of this week. Still we are not sure what will happen, indeed nobody has any idea.

No longer does anyone who wants to leave set out how the nation will be better off. This is because even they now realize any kind of Brexit from crash to soft will make us worse of economically and socially than being in the EU. Moreover the glow of national independence is dimmed by the realisation that the very existence of the EU as our nearest neighbour and trading partner will make it impossible, even if we are outside, to even tie our shoelaces without having to conform with the de facto power of greatest political union in the world. A power we used to share and help to mould, as probably the most powerful and respected country within the union.

It is May’s job now, not to save the Tory party which has all but destroyed itself tilting at windmills and promising the undeliverable, but to save our country from perhaps the greatest self inflicted disaster in its history. She must reach out to Corbyn, paint over her red lines and fix a deal. The EU will help. It values Britain more than this country presently values itself.

The issue which everybody feared is now proven beyond doubt. Malfunctioning software in a safety system proved catastrophic, wresting control of the plane from the pilots and crashing the otherwise normally functioning aircraft. This happened twice. The entire fleet of 737 Max is grounded. Boeing expect all to be airborne again in weeks following a software upgrade.

But is it as straightforward as that? We now know the fitting of heavier engines in this model to make it more fuel efficient has altered the characteristics and balance of the airframe, introducing a serious risk of stalling if the angle of attack, as the climbing angle is called, is too acute. This informs a safety standard well below the level acceptable in a modern aircraft . The remedy was an automatic intervention to pull the nose down to a safe level, which twice, through a fault, put the planes into a dive, killing over 300 people. But the question is now being widely asked among aviation experts, should there be a more fundamental redesign of the airframe? Surely something unsafe which can be ‘fixed’ is not now an acceptable level of safety. Do we not need a design which is safe in the first place even if perhaps a little less efficient?

This question will hover over whatever Boeing does from now on. It will certainly dwell in the minds of regular fliers and will worry airlines about completing their orders for this plane. It will also exercise the many Aviation authorities across the world who will be tasked with granting licences for the 737 Max to return to the air. Because of major evidence of flaws in the efficacy and independence of the emasculated US FAA, its opinion is no longer the gold standard which other similar authorities  will be willing to rubber stamp. They will now want to form their own opinion. It may be many months before these planes are again in the sky with passengers. It may also never happen. The 737 Max may be another Comet 1.

The answer is Yes. But not beyond repair. The Tory and Labour front benches now have to give up party politics and stem the rising waters of an emergency engulfing the very stability of the United Kingdom. Neither leads a united party. May leads little more than half a party, and only for the moment. Ahead is a big challenge entangled in too many words, idiotic dogma, wishful thinking and emotion run amok.

But what is needed in outcome is stark in its simplicity. Either a workable exit from the EU in an orderly and constructive way, perhaps confirmed in a People’s Vote, or the scrapping of the whole project by revoking Article 50.

Simple. Now do it.

If the Democrats choose Joe biden to beat Trump in 2020, they will lose. He has many qualities. He is very experienced, well liked, steady and level headed, already a proven statesman and he understands how the world works. Correction. How the world used to work. That is the problem. It is a bigger problem than his roving hands. Indeed they are a symptom of the problem not the cause. Joe Biden comes from a past with different values, where touchy  feely was if not good, not bad either and where power came from the top down, not bottom up. An age of the notion of political class.

Trump is the outsider, chosen because he is not a politician, with no expectation that he should be clean. In fact an acceptance that he would be more effective if he were dirty. So a string of accusing lovers and prostitutes, law suits, investigations, proven lies and U turns make no difference. Indeed to his base it adds to his appeal. If Biden runs against Trump it will be because he is the opposite of all that. He is a pro. Even if he survives the touchy feely stuff, it puts off the women voters. To the young, who are critical to the outcome in 2020, he is a dinosaur from a past from which they believe they have broken free.

The Democrats can win in 2020, but only with a candidate who is all about the future and a product of the bang up to date present.  The exception may be Sanders, but my guess is that his values will endure and inspire, but his day, too, has passed.

She had become a byword for disaster. Wherever she went defeat was her handmaiden. Then suddenly out of nowhere she corralled her dog fight cabinet for eight solid hours, having seized their phones, so that they were cut off from leaking to the outside world or being briefed by their many factions.

First they were given the blood curdling report from the head of the civil service of what a hard Brexit would actually cost, then they were given the latest polling data and lack of personnel, logistics, money and membership which would make an election suicidal for the Tories. Finally the riot act was read to the hard Brexiteers, that through their allies in parliament, the ERG and the DUP, voting down everything to do with leaving the EU in a constructive fashion, she was now going to press the nuclear button. Corbyn.

She then had them effectively held prisoner until she had spoken to the nation and told it of one of the most unexpected and dramatic political reversals in our history. When she had finished the dejected and silent cabinet slinking out of Downing Street told its story of men and women in shock.

May had suddenly done what this blog had been urging for months and wiser commentators from the very moment she lost the election in 2017. She now recognised holding the Tory party together was a lost cause, the ERG were the enemy, the time had come to crush them and crush them she has. By winning the last battle, rather than making it the first, she has destroyed them. Like a great battleship going down they will explode in a wild display of flashes and bangs which will light up the sky, but as a political force they are finished. The Nationalist uprising is over.

Brexit is now officially a national, not party, emergency requiring, like both world wars and the great depression, a national solution. That means the two leading parties, nowadays Tory and Labour, working together. Either they will agree a plan forward which will take the UK out of the EU in an orderly fashion, which puts the national interest first, or the project will be delayed more or less indefinitely when it will fizzle out, or Article 50 will be revoked. There is also the possibility of a People’s Vote, which kill Brexit off. But one thing is for sure. The vision of fantasy trade deals and global Britain, never a prospect or reality, or the glibb exit of the EU and to hell with the consequences, is over.

The Brexit offered in the 2016 referendum on a fraudulent prospectus and voted for by the 17 million was never there. Like a building site greeting duped holidaymakers expecting a luxury hotel, sold to them by a dodgy holiday company, the dream was a con. In a very recent post this blog advised May to threaten to make her deal a confidence vote and if she lost she would advise the Queen to send for Corbyn. Well, she went one better. She sent for Corbyn herself.

I take my hat off to her.

This blog has no time for the DUP which has brought down power sharing in Northern Ireland and is now making organised government in the UK impossible. It is a Leave party, but Northern Ireland voted Remain. It is against the Backstop but the majority in NI favour it. It claims to put the Union with the UK above Brexit. Yet in driving the nation to a No Deal Brexit by demanding changes to which the EU will never agree, it poses the greatest existential threat to the United Kingdom since its formation.

Because hard Brexit will create turmoil to everyday life in NI, as it will  require direct rule and  controls on the border between the two Irelands. That will build irresistible pressure to unite North with South, keeping NI in the EU, by removing it from the UK. Every poll reveals a majority for Irish unity in the event of a return to border controls. Far worse for the DUP than the backstop. Then of course there is Scotland, yanked out of the EU against its will. We know what comes next there.

May got herself mixed up with the DUP out of desperation at the loss of her majority. But the ERG climbed into bed with them out of choice because it thought itself clever. Something else to explain to the Tory Shires.

The nation, indeed the world, looks on in disbelief as the hope that parliament having taken control,  showed it could exercise it, passes in another string of Nos. This is because there is no spirit of compromise at one level and at another far too many members have no idea what they are doing or why. Add to that a voting system which mathematically is almost certain to produce deadlock, rather than one which, by elimination through transferrable or preference votes, automatically reveals a winner, and you have the fiasco that the Mother of Parliaments has become.

So it is back to Downing Street for another Cabinet punch up. Anything can happen there. What should happen is an announcement by May that her deal with minor tweeks acceptable to Brussels will go back for its fourth vote but as a confidence motion. If lost the government will fall, May will drive to the Palace and advise the Queen to send for Corbyn. That will concentrate minds. Corbyn would,  with a crash Brexit hours away, have to use the Royal Prerogative to revoke Article 50 to save the nation from disaster.

The ERG could then go home to their various constituencies and explain how it was they played their cards with such skill and panache that they ended up scuppering Brexit and putting Corbyn in power. Popular events in the Tory Shires, to be sure.