Malcolm Blair-Robinson's Blog, page 165
June 11, 2015
Royal Bank Of Scotland: What Value?
The Chancellor’s announcement that he would start selling RBS shares at a loss caused the biggest stir in a fairly meaty speech yesterday at the Mansion House. His convoluted arithmetic that overall the taxpayer had made a profit out of the bank rescue programme was a pointless argument; not least because had the banks not been rescued most taxpayers would have lost most of what they possessed.It was not a project aimed at profit. It was one of survival.
He was right to say that the value now is the value which counts and that value will increase faster if the market sees a road open to the return to the private sector. The gradual break-up of more of this vulgar pipe dream to build a financial institution bigger than Great Britain itself in financial terms, will also make sense as time goes on. One thinks of Nat West and Coutts being taken out of a conglomerate which has bought these two respected banks nothing but grief.
As for the value Labour in government paid much could be said. It was too much but it is doubtful, very, that Osborne faced with a crisis beyond imagining in which both the Bank of England and the City regulators had entirely lost control, would have paid less. Indeed the reverse is possible. What is clear with hindsight is that the taxpayer should have acquired all of the shares for a total sum of £1, as the bank was completely bust, much of its balance sheet’s asset portfolio was worthless and the bank’s liabilities far exceeded any value which could be scraped together to set against them. No doubt the calamitous impact on pension and savings funds invested in this monstrosity, if shareholders had lost everything, and the knock on effects which would have followed, were factors in setting the price at the level chosen in the heat of that unprecedented hour.
June 10, 2015
Dynamic QE: The Answer For Growth? Learn about it for .99p
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
Osborne’s Laws
First we have a law to say that the government will not increase income tax or VAT. Now we are to have a law that says governments must run a budget surplus in ‘normal times’.
There are two thing s say. These laws are meaningless in that any government can repeal them at anytime. They are not written into the constitution because we do not have one. So they are the product of modern politicians who have trouble separating facts from spin. But they are also difficult to fathom, because if taxes cannot be increased and a surplus has to be maintained, what happens when money is needed ‘in normal circumstances’ but when miscalculation or other factors mean there is not enough to pay for something? Trident for instance?
What then Mr Osborne?
June 8, 2015
Europe: Tory Divisions Crack Open
Here we go again. Back to the Major years, with the Tories governing from a party split on the critical strategic issue of the day. We now have fifty backbench Tories parading their self righteous drivel about parliamentary sovereignty set to cause just the same mayhem as the gang of nonentities who all but brought Major to his knees. Cameron is right to announce that ministers who do not back him will be fired.
This blog is pro EU and pro Britain being a member. We applaud the free movement of people and capital, the European Parliament, the European Convention on Human Rights, the European Court and the fact that our undemocratic parliament, with only one House elected and that by a grossly unfair and unrepresentative voting system, is not sovereign over everything. We have no written constitution, such constitution as we have is under the control of the government when every other nation in Europe has a written constitution under the control of the people, and the citizens of Great Britain, who are also citizens of the EU, sorely need the protection of their rights and liberties which membership of the EU brings them.
Of course the EU has its faults and of many of its policies, including those towards Russia, this blog is opposed. We are strongly critical too of the ridiculous posture of the euro countries towards bankrupt Greece. But we can influence events as a member and if we could stop talking about all our niggles and how we might leave, we would find that many would in turn listen. And if those niggles just now and again get the better of us emotionally, just stop to recall that the anniversaries of both WW1 and WW2 now being remembered, are just the chain of events which the political dream of the EU was structured to prevent occurring ever again.
Labour and the Lib Dems need to stop navel gazing and get their acts together, find new leaders (they should have kept the old ones for the moment, neither should have resigned) and prepare for battle. The Tory party is set fair on a course to its own destruction. It has already destroyed Cameron’s authority which came from his victory. Instead of continuing to see him as a prime minister with a mandate, EU leaders now see a man with problems in his party which he is trying to appease.
June 7, 2015
G7 Summit: Time to Talk To Russia
It is clear that the EU sanctions are doing a good deal of damage to the EU economy and especially to the eastern members who have greater trading links with Russia. It is also clear that the penny is beginning to drop that Russia itself feels far more threatened by NATO and EU expansion than the reverse, although for domestic political reasons the Baltic states and Poland tend to play up the aggressive intentions of the Russian bear.
Meanwhile the suffering in Eastern Ukraine goes on with no real end in sight to pockets of quite fierce fighting, even if some level of truce does exist. To suppose that all would return to normal if Russia walked away is to admit denial of the facts. As with all civil wars the vengeance and bitterness has acquired a momentum of its own. The only way to resolve this is first for Russia and the West to reach a better understanding of each other’s security concerns and to address them. This must include a halt to the eastward expansion of NATO, unless Russia is brought into it as a full member, by far the best outcome. Once that is resolved in principle if not in detail, a new spirit of cooperation should enable a solution to the issue of how a reconstituted Ukraine should be organised, with a system of governance which can work, to include where the borders are. Such a settlement will then have to be jointly enforced by Russia and NATO since none of the warring parties will give up unless they are made to.
June 6, 2015
Gothic Crime From 0.99p
Click Image for Paperback £4.99 or Download .99p
St.John Whilloe is the black sheep member of a wealthy legal family, whose firm of solicitors looks after the affairs of many of the top families in the country. He is consulted by a young woman who claims to be frightened by her husband. Things are not as they seem and St.John finds himself drawn into a complex web of intrigue and murder. He is soon in a race against time to solve a mystery with roots in a tortured family history, with sinister paranormal undertones.
Corruption In High Places
It is reported that Cameron is to engage in a degree of finger wagging about the trillion dollar corruption industry woven into public life around the world, as part of his contribution to the G7 summit. It kind of looks good on the home media but will have little practical effect, even though all the other heads of government will be obliged to agree.
Unfortunately Britain has unwittingly stoked this pestilence by its practice of paying huge tranches of overseas aid to developing governments whose auditing practices are rudimentary and whose customs make these cash flows fair game for local politicians and commercial interests. If Cameron were to announce that the UK would in future stop altogether payments to governments and instead give the cash direct to the charities or other authorities distributing the aid and encourage other aid giving countries to follow suit, he would deliver a blow to the thieves and fraudsters which would inaugurate real improvements.
International Thriller: Paperback or Download
nd a best-selling author. She has a British connection through her estranged father Saul, an English thriller writer. Saul, whose parents were of Anglo-German origin, has spent much of his life plotting to expose secrets from World War Two, which are so sensitive they have been subject to an extensive cover-up lasting seventy years. As the time approaches for him to make his move to expose duplicity, murder and lies at the heart of the British State, he seeks Rachael’s help. This provokes a killing spree as parts of the security services of both Britain and the United States become engaged in the drama, with one side determined to get the secrets out and the other determined to keep them hidden.
Click on image for uk. Click here for US
Downfall In Downing Street: Corruption And Sleaze
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.
MPs And Their Pay
The arguments continue about the pay of members of parliament, with cabinet ministers and backbenchers (of all the main parties) lining up to say they are going to pay the increase to charity, in self righteous declarations designed to appeal to voters. In fact, as IPSA points out, the award is revenue neutral as reductions in pension contributions and the removal from the expenses list of various items previously claimable, means that the bill to taxpayers will not increase.
Unfortunately all this hair shirt stuff is thought necessary not just because public sector workers have much lower pay increases, but because politicians are so reviled by the people that any money paid to them is begrudged. This prejudice is made worse by the recent death, caused by alcohol illness, of a much admired and respected parliamentarian, giving rise to all sorts of discussions about the stress on MPs with a good deal of wasted time in a Palace of Westminster awash with bars open all hours.
I wrote in 2009 that the way parliament functioned was completely unsuited to the modern world and was failing to meet the needs of the people it was organised to represent. I see no reason now to retract those thoughts; rather to reinforce them. My proposal then was that every constituency should have a Parliamentary Office, which would be the place of work of members of parliament, open always to the public, through which their local member would be able to look after their needs and champion their causes. Parliament would meet three or four times a year to learn about, approve of or reject the plans of the government, which would concentrate much more on governing by organisation and function and much less by endless streams of legislation. What seemed a good idea in 2009 seems, in the light of events, and even better one today.
