Blog 2023 Malcolm Blair-Robinson

The Party Conference Season is drawing to a close amid an extraordinary time of anxiety and distrust. Politicians are regarded with suspicion because they talk up but deliver down.

Many shortages exist and are increasing all across the economy, affecting everyday life for everybody and every sector.  In this febrile atmosphere the Prime Minister rubbishes the entire economic model which has been the bedrock of the Tory party’s  philosophy  since Margaret Thatcher gained the leadership in 1975. So ingrained has it become that few are old enough to have had adult engagement with the Keynesian model which dominated before. Even Blair/ Brown only tinkered at the margins but did little to depart from the basic ideas.

The big centrepiece idea is that command economies do not work and that the market leading and supply and demand responding, is the only pure economic theory upon which free people can rely. The market as driver, the balance of supply and demand as regulator. The Tory party, or better said, the Boris government is now moving towards an interventionist model where the state sets conditions and everyone has to change to meet them. Brexit is obvious as the biggest game changer, but it is turning out to be a much bigger game than anybody expected, especially its promoters.

Added to that there are multiple crises building , including the out of control energy market, inflation, rising interest rates, distribution bottlenecks, labour shortages; the list grows longer every day. Boris’s speech, which wowed his party’s conference, has been almost universally ridiculed as scant on detail about how he is going to achieve his lofty ambition to change the whole broken economic model. Perhaps the biggest potential crisis of all is the mounting fear that the government does not understand what it is trying to do, nor have a clue how to do it.

Older folk remember the Winter of Discontent. Unless Boris and Co get a grip, the winter coming could be one of very real hardship and suffering for very many people.

The fuel and energy crises have brought to a head issues which have been simmering under the Boris government since its inception. They can be summed up by two questions. Does it know what it is doing? Can it be trusted? After a brief period when the combination of the Covid emergency financial support and the vaccine roll out won widespread support, the answer appears to be no to both.

So would Starmer’s  Labour do better? This is important because when a government is failing the public begins to look more closely at the opposition as an alternative administration. If they like what they see, they tough it out until an election is called. Thus Thatcher’s gradual rise during Callaghan and Blair’s rise during Major.  Even Churchill’s rehabilitation as a peacetime leader during Attlee. But if they have no confidence in the Opposition to rescue them, bad things happen. Strikes, panics, demos, shutdowns and shortages ooze their way into everyday life, like lava flowing from an active volcano.

Starmer’s Labour is hamstrung by two existential pressures. Corbyn’s Labour is still very much there and Scotland, as the bedrock 40 to 50 seats,  is not. The strategy is to win over angry middle class voters in the south, the so called blue wall,  through Starmer’s steady hands,  and send the fiery Angela Rayner, with her impeccable connection to life as ordinary people have to live it, to bring the errant red wall back into the fold.

To outsiders Labour’s conference did little to inspire a surge to its colours, but maybe it can also be said, that it did not drive the undecided away. We have instead yet another part of the national well-being which is in a state of anxious wait and see. Among the problems for the Starmer leadership is the need to move left to recapture the red wall, but move right to seize the blue wall.

We will have to be patient while Labour decides how resolve this without some crafty political fudge. Voters are too angry to buy into PR. They want polices, clear and unambiguous, that speak not to the Westminster hot  house, but to them. If Labour can deliver it will be worth the wait.

Not since the Winter of Discontent has there been so much disruption and disquiet, nor such a feeling of unease in society. From protesters closing motorways, to panic at the pumps, things appear to be going from bad to worse.  Add the news  of energy companies going under as the dysfunctional  gas  market implodes, threatening back breaking heating costs for the winter, airport log jams, supply chain gaps, cuts in universal credit, failures in diplomacy, flight from the Taliban; the list seems endless.

At the heart of it all is the Boris government, a weird collection of supremely inept politicians in thrall to the whims of one of the most frightening leaders in our history. Frightening not because he is an ogre, but because he his a fool. A clever fool to boot, the very worst kind. With the intention span of a goldfish and the ego of a one whose only care is for his own glory, he fumbles and delays, always ending behind the curve and below the need.

Thus we have our, our, country gripped by irrational anxieties and fears. But the biggest fear of all is the one that becomes ever more true with each passing day. The fear that the government has entirely lost control of events.

Events of which it and, it alone, is the architect.

In a wonderful farmhouse retreat in Cumbria,  I have little inclination to keep up with the news. So today just some quick observations.

The Kermit the Frog moment was a speechwriter’s blunder and a PR disaster. Boris’s message to the UN, whatever it was, on the critical issues of climate change and global warming, was lost in a zillion replays of an idiotic line  and a torrent of twitter derision.

On the growing fix now list are now mounting crises for which  the government has no obvious answers, or if it has,  they are too late or too little. A pattern under the regime of K the F to which we have become accustomed, since the oven ready Brexit election and the onset of the ‘mild illness’ pandemic.

There is the shortage of lorry drivers and key workers causing failures in supplies of almost everything, with food and petrol topping the potential panic agenda. There is the recurring crisis at airports with Border Force inadequacies snarling up terminals. We have an astonishing collapse of the the distribution arm of the byzantine electricity and gas markets. And there are signs of serious inflation coming down the line.

So the government has a lot to do. Almost everything is of the Tories’ own making during a decade of poor national leadership. Fix it all and Boris could emerge invincible in the face of a rather divided and piecemeal Labour reboot attempt.

But to do that he will have to offer a lot more than silly jokes about Kermit the Frog.

There all all sorts of snags, inequalities and lack of detail about the long awaited fix for social care and linked boost to NHS coffers, to cope with the aftermath of the pandemic. Having promised a plan Boris has come up with quite an eye catching one, which he promotes with enthusiasm. How much of the detail he himself understands is not clear. But it is likely to be not much. Boris is a broad brush person, not a details freak. Without becoming entangled in the political wrangling or the sums of the pundits cluttering the media, I just have this to say.

For decades the Tory party has been a low tax low spend party. If money is needed it is met by borrowing and cuts. Cuts described as efficiency savings. Over the last ten years cuts have meant starvation of resource to every public service , except perhaps the border force. Tories have a thing about borders.

Boris’s Tory party is however different. It spends big. Fighting the pandemic was, like a war, without regard to cost. So borrowing soared to mega levels unknown for a couple of generations, although the true net figure is far lower because nearly half the debt is owed by the government to itself via quantitative easing.

In the past a Tory Chancellor would have initiated cuts to ‘get the public finances in order’. But not now. This latest development signals a major shift. Stuff will be paid for by raising taxes. Cuts to public services are out. It will be interesting to see if the Party has the guts to stay the course. The political shift is clear. Labour is in danger of ending up to the right of the Tories. That will certainly please Boris’s new red wall friends. But it could drive the blue wall faithful into the arms of the Lib Dems, the Greens and Labour’s growing southern appeal.

Politics has at last become interesting again.

How is it possible, after all the investment in money and lives creating a modern democracy on broadly western Christian principles, supported by large and very well trained and equipped defence and police forces, for the entire structure of state to collapse in days, allowing control of the whole country to fall to the Taliban?

Why are tens of thousands of Afghans fleeing or trying to flee from their own country and countrymen, who they say will kill them?

Why were repeated warnings ignored by NATO politicians over the years from US and UK commanders on the ground that  the structure that the west was building in its own image was out of step with local tradition, over focussed on the metropolitan elite of Kabul and making little to no difference to the mass of the rural Afghan population?

Why were warnings from the same commanders, to the same politicians, that the whole government organisation including the civil service, armed forces and police was utterly corrupt at every level, also ignored?

How many of these corrupt officials and politicians have been rescued and given sanctuary in the west?

Have we at last learned that the misplaced idea of nation re-modelling in our own image does not and cannot work?

These tragedies of Syria, Iraq, Libya and Afghanistan are not military defeats. They are political disasters of an historic magnitude brought about by our arrogance and conceit  and a failure to empathise with any ideas not our own.

The failure to understand the illusory nature of the so called government and supporting institutions in Afghanistan is now snowballing into a crisis engulfing both the governments of the US and the UK. You cannot build a secure state with corrupt police, armed forces, government at the very top and down through public administration at every level. Neither can you promise the educated elite of that country that, in exchange for helping in the doomed project, you will rescue them if anything goes wrong. Because if it does, rescue will be difficult, if not impossible.

The days when the West, with its enlightened model of democracy, honed by 1500 years of post Roman bloodshed, could nation build  wherever it chose, are well and truly over. Moreover liberal Christianity is a very different social concept  to radical Islam and if any attempt is to be made at such a thing, it must build upon local, not Western, values. The failure to grasp this as a bedrock requirement has led to a string of disastrous military and political failures; Iraq, Syria, Libya and now Afghanistan.

The absolute chaos surrounding the airport at Kabul is a vivid firework display of the humiliation of the United States, its special relationship partner, the UK, and NATO collectively. How it will end is anybody’s guess. It may sink the Biden Presidency as a one term failure, it has badly damaged Johnson and Raab and it has greatly strengthened China, Russia and Pakistan as regional players.

But it is not over yet. The Taliban has to prove that, while brilliant at over-running modern forces (forces armed with the latest heavy weapons and supported by air power) with tribesmen on mopeds and pick-ups, the Taliban has to prove it can govern. That may be yet another disaster in the long litany of them in one of the most beautiful countries on earth.

What is absolutely for sure is that those who say if only we had stayed longer, if we had planned better, if we had done this or that, are talking the talk, but with no understanding of what the core problems were in the first place. The primary fact is that while a surgical destruction of the Al Qaeda capability in the post 9/11 era was a political and security must then, occupying the country to rebuild it in a modern format to a broadly Western model,  was a catastrophic mistake leading to disaster now.

Meanwhile we are left with appalling scenes of panic and despair in Kabul,  fear of the future among women and minorities all across Afghanistan and a terrible sense of waste and betrayal among those and their loved ones, who gave life and limb doing their duty in our armed services. To make all this come right in the end will be a very big ask. Perhaps impossible.

As I write this, the breaking news is the Taliban are entering Kabul from all sides under orders not to provoke violence. No resistance is being offered by the security forces.

From the day that the West, led by the US but including NATO, sent ground troops into Afghanistan, the mission was doomed to fail. However long we stayed, whatever good we did, however many lives we sacrificed, however many trillions we poured into the social modernisation project, or the nation building dream, Afghanistan would remain what is always has been; unconquerable by external forces.

I said it then, I remark it now. In the end, this time, the collapse comes not because of the military genius of the Taliban (formerly our friends and allies the Mujahidin in the Soviet era) but because once again a totally corrupt political class milked the West for its own narrow advantage of every dollar it could lay its hands on. We turned if not a blind eye, a myopic one. The Kabul government is now falling over because it is rotten to the core.

That is the reason staying a little longer, wishing it had turned out better and all the other hand wringing, while noble and decent, is futile. For those of our own who gave life and limb to support a cause they were told was just and worthy, we owe them a great and irredeemable debt. A debt of honour wrapped in our shame.