Malcolm Blair-Robinson's Blog, page 156
August 5, 2015
Labour Leaning Left
The arguments put forward by this blog about the Labour leadership campaign that the party needed to move left, because the centre occupied by the Tories has shifted to the left, are now more or less mainstream. There are still a few lost souls from New Labour who imagine that cosying up to business is the road to victory, but the compelling evidence of over four million votes lost to the party step by step, election by election in the New Labour era is compelling; as is the Cameron victory on fewer votes than any Tory victory since well before WWII. In other words the working class have stopped voting Labour in very large numbers and mostly are not voting at all or voting UKIP. In Scotland the SNP which is to the left of Labour, wiped the latter out.
The support for Jeremy Corbyn, who began as the outsider and who is now making the running because of his uncompromising left wing agenda, confirms this analysis. New Labour appeals to pink Tories but not to Labour voters. But if Osborne retakes the pink vote, Labour, however it styles itself, can never win without the red vote holding solid in its support. Comparison with Michael Foot is misguided. He took Labour left when the centre had moved to the right and met disaster. Taking Labour right when the centre has shifted left would meet the same fate.
This penny has now for the most part dropped. Any Burnham, driven from his lead at the start by the rise of Corbyn, has shifted left also; today he is saying he will re-nationalize the railways. That would be popular as the public has never really supported the weird franchise system, but caution must be exercised on the new road left. Offering up just a Clause Four type menu will not do. The left must show it has a coherent economic strategy which will work, that goes way beyond tinkering with benefits and tax rates. It will need to re-establish a modern version of the financial structure which underpinned the security of working people which the Thatcher consensus unravelled.
This means that the mutual building societies, friendly societies, banks, insurance companies and other financial institutions will have to be rebuilt, so that working people no longer have to look to the City and meet the demands of shareholders, but can look, as they did for decades, closer to home and in doing so safeguard not only their individual financial welfare whether it is saving or borrowing, but also protect and support each other by doing so.There is a lot of work to be done, but done properly it will transform the lives of millions for the better.
August 4, 2015
Printing Money To Grow the Economy
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Tories: Is the Government In Control?
Whilst the remnants of New Labour run around like headless chickens in the face of the Jeremy Corbyn steamroller, the new Tory government is pressing on with left wing nostrums which would have delighted even Stalin. I refer to jailing landlords for up to five years if they fail to evict families from their properties when told by the government that these people have failed in their application for asylum. So if you are a private landlord you have to turn up on a cold night and throw onto the street a mother, three young children and a crying baby with a chest infection. And if human compassion prevents you from carrying out these heartless instructions, you make yourself liable to imprisonment of unusual severity for what amounts to a regulatory offence.
Of course I have taken the logic of this policy to an extreme conclusion that even the Tories would shrink from; not least because all private landlords vote for them. But that is where the policy leads if you follow it through. This is the point. There is beginning to emerge a whiff of a government whose talk does not match the action and the action fails to take account of the consequences. The stark fact of thirty miles of blocked motorway causing the suspension of normal life in East Kent because all the byways became jammed too, preventing access to work, school and shops, produced no more than a flurry of COBRA meetings and a promise of sniffer dogs and fencing. None of the underlying problems of the diaspora of desperate people described by Cameron as a swarm, which struggle across the Mediterranean in waterlogged boats, from a string of failed states in which the West is the chief architect of their collapse, are being tackled with any degree of competence likely to inform a resolution.
If you delve into the benefits system, the NHS and Homecare, affordable housebuilding, power generation, the courts, the prisons and loads of other areas in which the government is the authority or the paymaster, you will find dysfunction and demoralisation. At the moment Ted Heath is back in the news for the wrong reasons. But it is an apt message to remind us that his government fell because it lost control of events. Cameron has not yet lost control, but he is no longer in control. That is a dangerous place to be. To get out of it will need more than posh words.
July 31, 2015
How To Print Money And Fuel Growth
An idea to stimulate economic growth without further government borrowing. Written in plain English and very easy to follow, this is the only really fresh approach out there to the intractable problems of the UK economy, and it is just beginning to be noticed in important places. Buy! Download only .99p Paperback £2.99
Downfall In Downing Street: Get It Today!
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.
Migrant Chaos: Something Must Be Done
Having been on a two day break in Kent when I was able to see first hand the road chaos, not just on the motorway but on the byroads which I coped with using local knowledge acquired by living in the county for the first 44 years of my life. I think this first Blog on my return should be about this.
It is not a crisis over lorries or even over migrants. It is a crisis of governments losing control of events and floundering about in the consequences, making puffed up statements, holding emergency meetings and proving incompetent to find a pathway towards resolution. The British government is as much to blame as the French, both are victims of EU discord and both have been responsible for making things worse. The toppling of Gaddafi was a lunatic act resulting in a failed state at the southern gateway to Europe. Various other foreign policies have contributed to the diaspora of the desperate. Accord among EU nations about how to help these helpless people is non-existent; much of that is the UK’s fault through its nihilist approach to a quota scheme, leaving Italy and Greece to cope with the brunt of the influx and Germany to make the best effort to accept them into her midst.
First of all France has to use troops if necessary to secure the Channel Tunnel and Britain should offer a brigade of its own troops to help. Permanent lorry parks on a grand scale must be established on both sides of the channel to provide holding arrangements to cope with this and future emergencies arising out of accident, strikes, breakdowns or other issues, including migrants. Proper camps must be set up on both sides of the channel to house thousands of refugees while decisions are made whether to admit or deport them.
The UK has to get its head round the realities of immigration. Legal EU migrants, whatever UKIP says, contribute more in tax than they take out in benefits by quite a margin so all this talk of taking control of our borders is posturing nonsense. The problem we have is with illegals actually coming here or trying to in massed assaults involving thousands. They try not because they want benefits, but because they want to work and the opportunities they aim for are in the black economy. And the reason they aim for the black economy in Britain is because it is the easiest in Europe to access. And why? Because we are the only advanced economy in Europe in which yo do not need to carry an identity card.
Think about that.
July 29, 2015
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July 28, 2015
Labour: Election Mist Clears
Details of the alleged plots and schemes to sink the Labour party are beginning to emerge. On the one hand there does appear to be some evidence that a few Telegraph readers on the nutty wing may have become supporters in order to vote for Corbyn, but the main thrust seems to be coming from a campaign from several unions to call or text their members and encourage them to vote individually, as the blanket union vote for the new leader no longer exists. It will therefore make it much more difficult to remove any candidate by a later challenge without appearing an out of touch spoiler, if the winner has a substantial lead in what is now a popular vote. What is clear is that many, if not the majority, of those votes are likely to come from people who have given up voting at all because of disenchantment with New labour. There could be up to 4 million of those, though how many will take part is difficult to tell.
A recent poll found that people were generally voting for the candidate whom they thought had the best chance of winning for Labour in 2020. Except for Corbyn. His votes are coming from people who like his policies and the distance he is putting between his vision and New Labour. That is where his strength is coming from. So while the mist is clearing, visibility remains at best fair. There is very little doubt that Labour has temporarily lost its way and when it finds it again, whoever wins will be obliged to lead from far further left than anybody since Neil Kinnock. But it will be a left of fairness, inclusion and rebalancing the economy to favour labour over capital. It will not hark back to Clause Four or union indiscipline. Those days are gone.
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July 27, 2015
Trouble In The Lords
On a personal level it is sad to see a career unravel, but Lord Sewel can blame nobody but himself. What this does bring into sharp relief is the irrelevance and unsuitability of the House Of Lords as an institution of government in a country which bestrides the world claiming to be a democracy. Originally a seat in the Lords was an honour you inherited when the aristocracy was a power in the land. The industrial revolution opened up the opportunity to get a seat through money. The modern method is to get there for rather vague reasons to do with charity, sport, business or whatever. Also through politics. Here the route is far better defined; rejection, failure and old age.
If things were ticking along just nicely we could perhaps totter on. But the Union in the UK is by no means secure amid arguments over devo-max, English votes and an underlying resentment in the three smaller nations of the predominance of Tories in England, when elsewhere their representation varies between little and nil. The premises of the House of Lords would be ideal to house a UK Parliament, elected by universal franchise. It could also be the revising chamber for all the National parliaments, including the English parliament which would occupy the present House of Commons.
As for the Noble Lords, just send them home. If they would like to come back they would have to do so individually backed by a mandate of the people. They would not thus be ennobled, but they would be modern elected democrats. They would also have to behave.
