Malcolm Blair-Robinson's Blog, page 149
September 23, 2015
Conference Reading
Set in the mid nineteen nineties, this fast moving 
thriller lifts the curtain on sex, sleaze and corruption in high places as the long reign of the government totters to an end, following the ousting of the iconic Margaret Thatcher. The novel catches the mood of those times with a host of fictional characters who engage in political intrigue, sex, money laundering and murder, pursued by an Irish investigative journalist and his girlfriend, the daughter of a cabinet minister found dead in a hotel room after bondage sex.
EU Leaders Meet
When the EU leaders meet today they will have a lot to do. Things are not going well. Tsipras has been re-elected in Greece by a wider than expected margin (many in the Euro group hoped for his defeat) which ensures a bumpy ride ahead for the Eurogroup finance ministers. Greece, with its ally the IMF, will demand and have to get debt relief. Volkswagen, a brand synonymous with quality and fair dealing, a metaphor for post war Germany itself, has been found to be under the thumb of con men who have organised an emissions fraud on a grand and calculating scale which has caused both dismay and disbelief. The cost will not be the four billion euros set aside to reprogramme the cars and do a bit of PR. It will be nearer thirty billion, when account is taken of fines and law suits in the US alone. This is not a design fault or a quality control issue. This is planned designer fraud. Volkswagen is the EU’s largest manufacturer.
Then there is the migrant crisis. Yesterday the EU foreign ministers met and quarrelled. Finally they agreed with four against and one abstention to share a compulsory quota of 160,000 migrants. This is Noddy Land politics. Already this year 500,000 have entered Europe by sea alone. The populations of Afghanistan, Syria, Iraq and Libya, as well as Eritrea and Sudan are on the move, in flight from the chaos of their homelands. There is no point in rehearsing why this unprecedented diaspora is happening, simply that it is. And there has to be a coordinated emergency plan to cope. Sharing out 160,000 souls is good but will hardly make any difference. The test is to think big and act bigger. Thus far it is a test Europe is failing. Meanwhile the numbers surge on forward overwhelming even those keen to welcome them. Soon the problem will not just be migrants. It will be Europe itself.
September 22, 2015
Nazi Era Thriller
Rudolf Hess, Hitler’s deputy and right hand man, flew to Scotland on a mysterious peace mission in 1941, which has never been convincingly explained, to meet unidentified politicians who wanted to end the war. The truth has been covered up for generations because to reveal it would somehow undermine the honour and constitutional fabric of the United Kingdom. Who was plotting against Churchill? What were the peace terms on offer? What happened to Hess? Was he killed in the War? Was the prisoner in Spandau a double?
There are many questions to which in the modern day one man, Saul Benedict has all the answers, because his parents were players in the drama involving Churchill, Hitler, leading politicians and an important Royal. Saul is an author and declares his intention to write a book to reveal all, but he is shot dead, apparently accidentally by a poacher. But was it an accident? Rick Coleman an investigative journalist determines to find out and in doing so to uncover the mystery.
Taking place in the modern day but with flashback chapters which gradually unfold the hidden secrets, the novel is a fast moving and compelling read based on the family knowledge of the author whose parents had connections to both Hess and Hitler and to British Intelligence.
Osborne in China
The UK might be forgiven for thinking it had two Prime Ministers. George Osborne, Chancellor of the Exchequer and (this is important) First Secretary of State, has already emerged as the power in the first majority Tory Government in five elections. His incisive style, precise purpose and clear explanations are entirely different to the avuncular waffle of the official PM. Cameron never answers a question and is forever ‘doing the right thing.’ But nobody is sure what the thing is, let alone whether it is right.
Osborne’s visit to China is momentous because it shifts the emphasis from quarrelsome Europe to a new dynamic with the world’s second biggest economy, soon to be the biggest. The timing is perfect. China is trying to achieve a shift from an export driven economy to one in which domestic consumption plays a bigger role and where overseas investment, already strong in Asia, extends its global reach. Osborne declared that Britain aimed to become ‘China’s best partner in the West’. He said this at the Shanghai Stock Exchange while announcing that plans are afoot to link the Shanghai and London stock exchanges in an epoch changing development of flexible trading. He had already announced inducements to encourage wide ranging Chinese investment in the UK including nuclear power and railways.
Coming upon the recent thaw, albeit a slow drip, in relations with Moscow to make common cause against IS, there begins to emerge after years of muddle, a coherent strategic direction for the UK. It is to be on good terms with each of the three Superpowers. The US is the military partner, Russia will slowly emerge as the strategic political partner in Europe and the Middle East and China will be the business partner. Among them all the UK will be the only one buddies with all three. So far this may be more by accident than design and the foreign office has an uncanny ability to screw up.
Unfortunately for Osborne all this is not matched by a coherent domestic economic policy, wedded ideologically to cuts, in which bad news is piling up in small doses. Wages up is good. Unemployment up, falling industrial production, a bigger budget deficit than in August 2014 and exports falling are not. Perhaps China will have some suggestions.
Politics: The Centre Ground
As the conference seasons gets into its stride, we hear a lot from politicians and commentators about the centre ground of politics.There is a class of politician which sees it not just as the safest place to be, but the point from which all political wisdom flows. They see the right and left wings as extremities to which nutters journey without hope of ever seeing power. And to centrists power is everything.
There is another way of looking at things and one favoured by this blog. This holds that there is no power in the centre at all. It is all in the wings. You cannot have a political centre without wings any more than you can have a town centre without a town. In a capitalist democracy there are two competing engines of power. Capital and labour. For the society to work fairly and for the economy to prosper at all levels, the two must be approximately balanced in terms of the energy they can bring to bear. Either can exercise power, depending on the choice of voters, but whichever does, is held back from excess by the opposing power of the other.
The Left promotes the interests of labour. By that we mean all those who earn a living in a job vital to the running of a civilized state which can never make them rich. A nurse, a teacher, a bin man, a care worker, a train driver, a power engineer; the list goes on and on.
The Right promotes the interests of capital. Capital includes those with property and wealth but above all represents those whose incomes have no glass ceiling, because what they do has less connection to the public good and more to do with individual achievement. It may involve financial risk and includes the fabled entrepreneurs. They always class themselves as the wealth creators. They are but they are not alone because labour creates by its toil far more, but it shares it out among the many. Capital organises itself so that as much wealth as possible is held in the hands of just a few.
Politicians, good ones, spring from either of these two wings, disciplines or convictions, call them what you will. Dull and uninspiring politicians who come without any conviction, other than the advancement of their own careers to wield power, prefer the centre. That is why they should be left there and ignored.
September 21, 2015
Refugee Crisis
As previously posted, this blog is of the view that the EU is doing itself no favours by the absolute confusion over its policy towards the greatest diaspora of modern times and its apparent lack of urgency in trying to reach one. Meanwhile the flow of hopeful multitudes continues, all but overwhelming the resources of a growing list of EU members to the south and east. More drownings have been reported. There are, however, hopeful signs.
There is evidence that Hungary’s hard line position has softened but that Croatia’s warm welcome has buckled under the strain of vast numbers. Reality has forced something of a coordinated process to transit everyone to Germany with the minimum formality. This makes more sense than trying to set up sophisticated bureaucratic procedures in fields and tiny border crossings. But Germany, alone willing to take realistic numbers, will itself begin to creak both logistically and politically, as the hundreds of thousands turn into millions.
The best news is that a serious diplomatic effort is now in hand involving the US and Russia, backed by Iran and the UK, to end the war in Syria and establish a durable government which can operate a good deal better than the fiasco in Libya, the disaster in Iraq and the tragedy in Afghanistan where the Taliban is becoming, as predicted by the blog time and again, ever more powerful. Military defeat of the IS is impossible short of genocide, as you cannot invade a religious ideology. What the joint powers can achieve by military means is a containment which tells IS it cannot win. If this new effort gets that far, somebody will then have to talk to IS. At least there is a map of where to go, even if the road is hard. Only when peace is restored will the flow of millions ease.
This four power initiative has taken most of the world by surprise. There are four main drivers. The first is that IS is the common enemy of all the players. Second, although tactically the American led air strikes on IS targets has frustrated its advance and helped drive it back here and there, it is still gaining territory and followers and expanding into Libya. Third, the abject failure of the Pentagon plan (which was always a pipe dream, never a plan) to train moderate fighters to oppose Assad has failed completely with the net total of recruits in the filed amounting to an embarrassing five in total. This is because there are no fighters now opposing Assad except IS, Al Qaeda and the Al Nusra front, all extreme Islamists of militant anti-western intent. America now understands that its own troops would do more harm than good. Fourth, Russia remembers Afghanistan undermined the Soviet Union so that later pressures brought it down.
But another dark cloud caused the phone lines between the capitals to buzz. The flood of refugees threatens to destabilize Europe, whose rickety system of multi headed governance cannot even manage its currency properly, let alone an influx of millions which everybody feels duty bound to welcome but who in reality nobody wants. Any destabilising of European unity is something on nobody’s wish list, America, Russia and Britain most of all. Because they have been called in to clean up too often before.
September 19, 2015
Syria : An Historic Moment
As this blog has repeatedly declared in post after post over the years, there can be no solution to the troubles in the Middle East, especially IS and Syria, without Russia and Iran. Recent improvements in relations with Iran was a good sign but what is now going on is a game changer. Russia and the US are talking about joint military actions which will enable IS to be rolled back from Syria through a combination of re-armed and re-equipped (by Russia) Assad forces on the ground and co-ordinated US and Allied air strikes. Russia has stopped insisting that Assad stays; only that the Syrian government must be supported and the terrorists defeated. The UK backs the US position. This would be the first time that the three WWII allies work together in unison for a common purpose. Their combined military strength is several times greater than the rest of the world put together.
Russia now accepts that Assad will have to go as part of a peace settlement, but wants him to have a soft landing after regaining control of a viable part of his country. The UK and US will go with that as long as Assad goes sometime. Meanwhile in Ukraine there is evidence of a fresh effort to find a political solution built on the Minsk agreement. Again and again this blog has explained that nothing can be resolved anywhere unless the West and Russia work together. Although on the margin Russia is, and has been since Napoleonic times, a Western power with an Eastern hinterland.
While Europe quarrels about how to handle refugees and exhibits a dysfunctionality at variance with the word Union, perhaps because of it, there is now beginning to shine a ray of hope that an end is in sight of one of the greatest human tragedies of our time, as common interest at last informs the critical thinking in Washington, London and Moscow. When they march together, everybody else has to fall in line.
Weekend Reading: Downfall In Downing Street
Set in the mid nineteen nineties, this fast moving thriller lifts the curtain on sex, sleaze and corruption in high places as the long reign of the government totters to an end, following the ousting of the iconic Margaret Thatcher. The novel catches the mood of those times with a host of fictional characters who engage in political intrigue, sex, money laundering and murder, pursued by an Irish investigative journalist and his girlfriend, the daughter of a cabinet minister found dead in a hotel room after bondage sex.
