Malcolm Blair-Robinson's Blog, page 122

Labour: A Better Way Forward

Turn Left To Power is an explosive dissertation in book form offering a fundamental redirection for Labour’s return to power, with bold ideas for a new economic and social settlement, including economic and taxation reform, restoration of responsibility in government and a renewal of democracy. Full of detailed information, hard facts and the results of thorough research and deep thinking, the narrative will grip you like a thriller and open your eyes to a brighter, fairer future in a mere 25000 words. The ideas are relevant whether Brexit goes In or Out. Frank and at a times brutal, Turn Left To Power offers a collection of fundamental reforms which amount to a political revolution which can propel Labour back to government in 2020.

Check it out now. Paperback £4.99   Kindle £1.99     AMAZON UK

Labour Goes Over The Cliff

Things in politics can become chaotic, but like the financial markets today, can steady and settle at a new norm. But every now and then both run out of control and go over the cliff. This is what is happening to Labour now.

There are at present two prospects open. A war between the parliamentary party and the party members which the members will win, keeping Corbyn as leader, giving birth to a much more left wing party than we have seen since 1945, which will then go on a re-selection binge and change the character of the parliamentary party with one rooted in communities across the land and detached from the establishment, and especially the Westminster establishment. This new socialist political force will be too embryonic to win any snap election if the Five Year Parliament legislation is repealed on the election of a new Prime Minster and will lose seats, but at the next it will win a landslide. Just as at the end of WWII the people kicked out Churchill whose party had both taken them into the war and won it, they will decide to back Labour for the programme of rebuilding a fairer society after Brexit is complete. And it will be a landslide because when England decides to change, it does it fast. I say England because by then Scotland will be going or gone.

Or Corbyn will be sacrificed for some unifying leader of whom few have previously heard, who will promote a policy of all things to everyone form the dear old centre ground. In that event UKIP will move in a seize the high ground of the left, just as the SNP have in Scotland and Labour will lose every election which comes along as far as the eye can see.

There may be a third possibility, but at the moment this blog cannot see it.

Cabinet Meets: About Time Too

The Cabinet meets today and so it should. This busted government is still in office and needs to come up with a plan. The busted opposition with bits flying everywhere has to be put back into some kind of order. This is no time for a vacuum of leadership and political chaos.

Osborne Is Back : To What?

Once again Osborne is in evidence and gave an assured performance at the Treasury before the market opened this morning. The point that the financial system was robust enough, with support measures in place and in action, to withstand the Brexit shock is valid and a lot of midnight oil has been burned behind the scenes to assure jittery markets. This is potentially worse, if things run out of control, than the crash of 2008, but not as instantly cataclysmic. Osborne’s statement that Banks are ten times stronger than at the start of the crash is hardly reassuring since at the start of the crash some were bust several times over. Ten times stronger than mega bust is quite weak, hence the midnight oil.

His statement that Britain’s economy is strong is open to interpretation, and one with which this blog profoundly disagrees. An economy based on house price inflation and shopping funded by borrowing is socially destructive, because it sucks resources from the industrial heartlands and pumps them into capital to buy more assets, which inflate. The result is a widening gap between those who do well on the merry-go-round and those who either cannot get on or fall off, leading to pockets of deprivation and exclusion which the lucky ignore. Eventually there is a political explosion. In our case it was the vote for Brexit.

Labour Can Win : Turn left To Power

Turn Left To Power is an explosive dissertation in book form offering a fundamental redirection for Labour’s return to power, with bold ideas for a new economic and social settlement, including economic and taxation reform, restoration of responsibility in government and a renewal of democracy. Full of detailed information, hard facts and the results of thorough research and deep thinking, the narrative will grip you like a thriller and open your eyes to a brighter, fairer future in a mere 25000 words. The ideas are relevant whether Brexit goes In or Out.

Malcolm Blair-Robinson, writer and blogger,  has been a keen political observer for more than sixty years. Born a Tory, he became a founder member of the SDP, before gradually migrating left. In 2014 he published his idea of Dynamic Quantitative Easing which aroused interest in high places and this forms a core element of this powerful and compact analysis of Labour’s opportunity to regain power.  Frank and at a times brutal, Turn Left To Power offers a collection of fundamental reforms which amount to a political revolution. He is dismayed by the unfairness of the current economic model and is driven by the hope of a better future for the rising generation.

Get your copy now. Paperback £4.99   Kindle £1.99     AMAZON UK

Not One Crisis : But Three

We now have three crises running in tandem. The first is financial and economic, with short and long term threats. The second is political where both government and opposition are floundering and where no plan exists even in outline of what to try and achieve in negotiations with the EU and how we benefit from Brexit. The third is constitutional. There is no clarity on how a snap general election can be called since we passed a law to stop it when we tinkered with the constitution and introduced fixed term parliaments, or whether there would need to be another referendum to accept the quit deal offered by the EU and above all because the Union with Scotland is already breaking up.

Each of these is a show stopper. All three together is beyond the competence of any political leader now in sight. We must hope that one emerges or that all the Kings horses and all the King’s men can in fact put Humpty back together again. Because Humpty is our nation’s future and that means ours, and at the moment it is bust wide open.

In future new posts will try to deal with each crisis separately. Their only link is the Brexit vote. That has now happened, it cannot be either ignored or reversed and everyone has to set about picking up the peaces. Including this blog.

Political Meltdown: Get A Grip!

They said ‘Nothing will change immediately’ if we go Brexit.

No. The market and sterling have sunk and are just about afloat, Moody’s has downgraded the UK’s credit rating, the prime minister has resigned, so have half the shadow cabinet in an attempt to rid themselves of the hated Corbyn, the government is split and all but dysfunctional, no party grouping actually has a majority in the Commons except for Remain MPs cross party, the UK is now in the process of breaking up, with Scotland pursuing its own agenda both domestically and in Europe.

There is total silence from Leave except to row back from the undeliverable promises they made in order to win. Nobody has a clue what happens next. To all practical purposes there is a state of political collapse of a kind unknown in the United Kingdom. There has been nothing like this in peacetime nor in war. All we can say is that it is a mess beyond everybody’s wildest imagining and, worse, nobody knows where we are headed, or what damage has been inflicted on the EU itself. Because make no mistake, if that goes pear shaped, there are no sunny uplands awaiting the surviving remnants of the UK.

The markets will need to be very patient. We will see tomorrow. And a final thought. Never were the risks of having no codified written constitution more obvious, a danger that may in the end prove fatal to the ongoing notion of Great Britain.

Labour in Turmoil: Be Careful With Corbyn

At last New Labour in parliament judges its moment has come and is mounting its attack on Corbyn’s leadership. This Blog exhaustively has studied why Labour lost in 2015 and where the votes to give it victory were to be found and they are not where New Labour supposes. Corbyn has the biggest popular mandate of any political leader in Britain, signatures on an online petition backing him are approaching 180,000, Labour upped its vote in the two by-elections under his leadership by a greater margin than polls suggested and did much better than everybody was spinning in the local elections, where Labour’s vote was nearly 4% up and the Tories 4% down. He has added more than 200,000 members to  the Labour membership to make it the largest political party in the UK by far.

But the big snag to most of the parliamentary party is that Corbyn is far to the left of their establishment sentiments. They are too blinkered to see that it is in the unfairness and inequality of our banker dominated economy which New Labour helped build, which has abandoned the old industrial heartland and  impoverished large parts of the United Kingdom, that the key votes are  to be harvested to give a crushing Labour win in 2020. These forgotten political areas where UKIP picked up over 3 million votes and which New Labour abandoned, are also the ones that voted Brexit. That is not Corbyn’s fault. It is New Labour’s. If the parliamentary party goes to war with its members in the country, it will have signed its death warrant, which will be carried out in a spectacular electoral massacre in  2020. Just like the SDP in 1983.

Ratings Downgrade

Well here we are Post Brexit Day Two. Moody’s have downgraded the UK’s credit rating from stable to negative. The only British Commissioner in Brussels has resigned (fired), leaving the City of London exposed. The Scottish Cabinet has approved the opening of discussions with the EU institutions  to determine how Scotland’s EU membership can be protected and in case there is no other way, work is to start on preparing  for a second independence referendum.

None of that can be described as good news. Why did the Brexit campaign not mention these possibilities? Is this what 17 million people voted for?

Supporting The Banks. Again.

In the middle of yesterday’s drama Mark Carney appeared on TV to announce the availability of £250 billion in emergency funds to support the banks, whose rash bets on Remain had caused overnight financial mayhem.  One of the reasons there was a surprise Brexit win was that to vote for something really stupid on a lot of false promises which cannot be met, was at least a way of protesting at an unfair economic model which doles out billions on demand to reckless banks, but has no funds to support the steel industry and all the skilled and hard working families who have made it their lifetime vocation, in many cases for generations.