Blog 2023 Malcolm Blair-Robinson

It was a concept built on lies, delivered to feed raw nationalism, to achieve a ‘have our cake and eat it’ outcome, which was never realistic and never on offer. Not only is it one of the greatest political mistakes in our history, it is one of the most disreputable.

The referendum which enabled it was undemocratic because of the four nations making up the UK, two voted to Remain yet were forced to leave against their democratically expressed will. Both Scotland and Northern Ireland may end up leaving the UK as a consequence.

It lacked integrity because not only did it fail to carry the constituent nations of the UK, it failed to achieve a margin for Leave that showed a clear and true majority of votes for major constitutional change. This included the withdrawal of E U citizenship from millions who did not wish to lose it.

Finally it was built on a tissue of lies and imaginings, not a single one of which has proved true in the event. We are now left to make the best of a very bad job, the multiple downsides of which have been masked by the Covid crisis, but which, day by day in so many little ways as well as big ones, are  becoming depressingly clear.

There are still paths that could lead to a new dawn for our country and a new purpose for the Union. Whether they are within the competence of this bizarre government to navigate is another matter.

We should make it our New Year resolution to find out.

That depends on many things. Circumstances, choices, opportunities, both good and bad. Of course Covid still looms, but for the purpose of these thoughts, let us move past the pandemic.

Overall there is now an underlying current driven by COP26, with much more widespread recognition of the threats posed by climate change and this will inform decisions. When you drill down into the need to reach the ultimate goal of zero carbon, the changes coming will not just be political. they will be personal.

As I am beginning to emphasise in blogs already published, this means we have to consume less of almost everything. That has unwelcome consequences for a consumer society with an economy based on consumption plus inflation of fixed assets.

So we will need to switch from using to making and much of the making will have to be about creating a green revolution of sustainable energy, communications, transport and housing, very different to what we have now. Everything will have to be built or made to last. Not to use once and throw away. Faults will be repaired not replaced, except for one exception, set out below.

If we pull this off, the outcome will certainly be sunlit uplands, but these must be for all, not just for the lucky or the pushy.  The mangled concept that the individual is everything, the state is a burden, the markets are masters and globalisation is good for all purposes and at any cost, is broken. This should not and cannot be repaired. To achieve the survival of humanity more or less a we know it, it has to be replaced.

For over a decade I have been writing and blogging about the weaknesses in our state structures, the need to reform and the rough and tumble of politics generally. The underlying core of Western society, its ambitions and aspirations remained constant. We were so pleased with the way we were, that we even sought to impose our ways on others. This led to a remarkable string of failed states and ungoverned spaces.

Social media is now awash with opinion about every facet of political, personal, family and emotional life. Brexit, Covid and Climate Change are between them delivering hammer blows to the attitudes, structures and norms of everything that went before. Yet behind the priorities of how, where, when, for whom and how much, there is a new dawn breaking. It is one of remarkable self-realisation and empowerment. It is this.

You are not your job, or your car, or your home. You are not your new kitchen, nor your social status. You, your happiness and your sense of place in the universe has nothing to do with any of these things. It is not about faith, or religion, or belonging to something.
It is about the unique miracle of the whole you as a person, an individual part of a great interdependent tapestry of conscious life, the future of all of which now depends on the priorities we apply to life now. And as we search for the best choices over issues about which a few months ago we knew little to nothing, we must accept one fundamental truth. There are millions of questions challenging the onward progress of life, but before you can help find the answers, you must first find yourself. Because the future is one not about having. It is about being.

It is also a future about having less and sharing more. Of less new and more used. Because vast recourses will be needed to mitigate climate change and become carbon neutral, creating new industries and more enlightened values. There will have to be less, a lot less, greed and fairer rewards for the millions whose daily efforts keep the state, upon which we all depend for the essentials of life, running smoothly. This will require a huge increase in investment to correct years of cuts and neglect.

In the end we will need a new appreciation of the purpose and value of the state, as the institution of civilisation which enables us collectively to survive and prosper. With it will come a new and enlightened state of mind. With that will come the understanding that the only way the individual can be truly free, is for each to work together for the common good of all.

There was a time when I thought my early assessment of Boris as a clown and a liar was too harsh. I began to to see beneath the bravado an astute politician who saw the injustice of Thatcherism being retained as a political blueprint, when times and people had changed. Who shifted the Tory party far to the left of Labour on the role of government in shaping the nature of the economic model and its impact. Who understood the need for skilled jobs providing higher lower to middle incomes. Who saw  increasing living standards was once again a key political aim.  Who meant what he said about levelling up. Who, caught off guard by the pandemic, bet the house on vaccination and won big.

Unfortunately for our country, the last several weeks have reminded me that my original judgement was not harsh, but right. Boris may be all those good things,  but unfortunately when challenge comes, he remains a stranger to the truth and an idiot on the platform, leading a team seemingly unable to deliver its promised outcomes across a range of issues. Mess and muddle seep through Whitehall like creeping lava from Boris’s volcano.

The biggest lie of all,  that Brexit will be a wonderful sunlit dawn of freedom and opportunity, is now believed in by nobody. Its promoters have either been thrown out in disgrace, gone very quiet, or vanished into the night like a phantom army. Except for Lord Frost. He ploughs on, threatening and obfuscating, in negotiations without end, rejecting reasonable accommodations as not far enough, demanding to change what he promoted, agreed to and signed. This is surely one of the darkest chapters in our nation’s political life.

And who got us here? Not Kermit the Frog, nor Pepper Pig. Just  Boris. The clown.

This blog has always predicted that in the end the West’s well meaning efforts to bring Afghanistan into the modern world would fail, not least because of the utter corruption of the  so called democratic structures which  NATO propped up for far too long. The political reluctance of the West to deal with the obvious is a failure, among several, of its post Cold War nation building adventures.

The new disclosures that most of the much vaunted security forces did not actually exist, with corrupt generals and politicians taking to themselves the wages of phantom security and police forces, is a virulent condemnation of the wishful thinking in Washington and other capitals, in spite of warnings from their own senior military leaders.  The whole sorry episode is a terrible betrayal of those who gave their lives in good faith to support a noble cause without any prospect of fulfilment.

The Taliban now impose their extreme form of Islam on their country, while cash, food and other forms of humanitarian aid is withheld by angry democracies, demanding the Taliban change their tune. But the chances of that happening are as remote as the original vision of victory, so the innocent population, now short of everything to the point at which babies are sold to raise money for food, drift towards a state of famine.

What a complete and utter disaster. Will we have the courage to own it?

In the commentary following what many found a surprising decision by the Bank of England not to raise interest rates yet, one or two economists wondered out loud whether central banks are the right institutions to be taking decisions which have such far reaching effects on the lives of ordinary people.

It is not very long ago that while the Bank of England was responsible for the integrity of the banking system,  the government, via the Treasury, had charge of interest rates, credit limits, hire purchase terms and mortgage terms, maximum payback terms and so on. In other words, the elected government decided on the political priorities and the shape of the economy based on the democratic mandate given through winning a general election.

Nowadays the Treasury is limited to taxation levels and spending programmes, but not the supply of money, the cost of money or the priorities for money.  Meanwhile the markets have free reign on the asset inflation and the currency value. Inflation itself, which appears to be gathering momentum, requires like water to a fire, a rise in interest rates. But the result would be significant for the over borrowed at every level, the kind of decision which is political in nature, as well as in its result. Non political institutions are just not suited for this, nor,  in a democracy, appropriate. Hence the dithering.

The current model of a financial sector awash with cheap money, printed by central banks, largely used to inflate fixed assets, has created the most unequal economy, with the biggest gaps between rich and poor, for generations. This Few first, Many later regime is on its last legs. How it will implode is not yet clear. A soft manageable landing or a hard destructive one?  The combination of Brexit, Covid,  Climate Change with rising energy costs and creaking supply chains, labour shortages and skill gaps, are an unprecedented combination of uncertainties.

A Bank of England dithering over interest rates, a Treasury which appears to have lost the plot and a Government all over the place on multiple fronts is not a combination which inspires confidence. This is no time to rely on muddled forecasts and wishful thinking. The confusion between borrowing and printing is an alarming sign that all is far from well among those who are supposed to know what they are doing.

It is now widely understood that Boris is the most left wing Tory prime minister since Harold Macmillan. He was telling everyone who would listen off stage at the party conference that the economic model of the last 40 years had failed. For ‘economic model’ read Thatcherism. Or perhaps the literal interpretations of Thatcherism which have formed the bedrock of Tory faith for nearly two generations.

Unfortunately Boris is not about detail. Fortunately Rishi Sunak, his chancellor, is. A lot of details, especially feel good items, have been either briefed or leaked over the last several days, as the tradition of absolute secrecy concerning the contents of the chancellor’s red box have been more or less abandoned. But these have been things which apparently will happen. So far we do not know how they are going to happen. How they can be afforded and who will pay, what will be borrowed and how much will be printed.

Before any judgment can be offered about the future of Boris and his plan to transform the economy for the better, we need to have some answers to these many questions. In detail.

Hopefully tomorrow we will get them.

Even I, who had never met him and disagreed profoundly with his political views on many issues, will forever recall the shock of the moment when my phone pinged a news alert last Friday, telling of the stabbing to death of Sir David Amess. I recalled at once the moment in the 1992 general election campaign when the holding of his then Basildon  seat for the Tories signalled the end of Labour’s expectation that by the morning Kinnock would have led it back to power. So the shock and grief to his family, his friends and his colleagues cannot even be imagined. And of course the national wound of the murder of Jo Cox five years ago was at once reopened.

The Amess family, extraordinarily dignified and forgiving in their grief, have led calls for a kinder more conciliatory tone in the conduct of the business of politics. There is a widespread feeling that the tone is wrong and hate is now a legitimate part of how we go about public life. There is a nostalgia for more restrained and united times. Unfortunately the angry words we everywhere hear and see are the symptom of something, not the cause.

That something is a widespread experience of a perceived failure of the political class to deliver on its promises. For the first time for many decades the rising generation is predicted to be worse off than those who came before. The gap between rich and poor is getting wider with each passing year. Covid revealed real differences in life expectancy and chances between ordinary people and the professional classes. Public services are everywhere stretched to breaking point. Food banks have record  numbers of users.

There has been a chronic failure to deliver, from Brexit ‘freedom’ to climate change action. There is a feeling that nothing works as it should and that things will get worse. The public is utterly fed up with broken  political promises, which vastly outnumber the few which are kept.

When Nye Bevan described the Tories as vermin, nobody imagined that MPs’ lives where at risk. Because then, whatever the language, the standard of living was rising and life chances were improving by the day. There was anger, but it was used as a driver to build better times.

It is not just the political language that needs to change now. It is the integrity of the political offer. It has to subject its language to the truth test and deliver the promises for which voters in good faith cast their ballots.

This blog will correct widespread misunderstandings about the ownership of money, especially at the heart of government.  Thatcher stated that the state had no money, it was the people’s money. She was completely wrong. That is why her economic model is now collapsing.

Money is a measure. It is issued by, belongs to and always remains, the property of the state. The state is greater than the individual. Witness the ungoverned spaces across the middle east, many parts of Africa and parts of Asia and all can see how critical a functioning state is to the welfare and life quality of everyone. The state comes first as a structure. The individual can and should have great freedom, within the state, of how to live and what to choose and, in a democracy, determines who shall be in charge and with what programme.

Therefore there is no such thing as Taxpayers’ Money.  It belongs, all of it, to the state. The state keeps as much as is needed to provide the protection, services, infrastructure, health and security individuals need either for personal or business needs. The rest may be kept by individuals to use as they wish within the law. It is for the state to determine how much it needs to do its job and the individual can retain for business or personal use, the remainder.

I realise that if you belong to a right wing think tank or studied politics at certain of our famous universities, this little piece may  make you want to throw up. But as the coming days and weeks unfold, you will begin to see what I mean.