Malcolm Blair-Robinson's Blog, page 205

Cameron and Milliband: Political Gaffes

Yesterday we had the Leader of the Opposition admitting he forgot the deficit and immigration, the two biggest political hot potatoes, in his speech. Today we have the Prime Minister apologising to the Queen for making small talk of her private phone conversation with him, while in range of a sound system. This conveys a rather amateurish impression at variance with the British tradition of wise statesmanship and steady hands at the top. But then we have also had Prince Charles comparing Putin to Hitler and the famous case of  ‘the bigoted woman’ who ensnared Gordon Brown in 2010.

We could say this tells us something about carelessness. Or we could say it tells us something about cynicism at the top. Or it could tell us nothing, but instead pose a question. It is this. Are the protocols by which we conduct our public life still appropriate in an open democracy in the twenty-first century in the midst of a communications revolution, which means all the people are in touch with everything all the time and relaying the realities of news to each other, bypassing every formal and official channel?

The answer is clearly NO, and has been so for quite some time.

Page Turners To Enjoy

 

Each of these books is different and not part of a sequence, but all of them have the common ability to draw you into the story and keep you turning the pages from start to finish. Click on any of the images for my page on Amazon UK and here for Amazon.com

Ed Milliband: So He Forgot?

Whatever it is when a party leader forgets to mention the deficit in a keynote speech, it is not the stuff of a Prime Minister in Waiting. But before getting het up about it, this is not how politics works now. Party conferences fire up the faithful but they no longer have any impact on election outcomes, because people and technology have moved on. The gaffe will provide lots of laughs at the Tory conference and elsewhere and will push Ed’s poll ratings down a point or two, but it will be the debates between the party leaders during the actual campaign which will have the impact. And those debates could well have a fourth contributor, Nigel Farage. So anything may happen.

Meanwhile freezing child benefit will not play well on Labour’s doorsteps. Few will believe that just £2.4 billion pounds alone ‘will save the NHS’ and while the 50p top rate and the mansion tax will be popular with voters, they will yield little cash in the great scheme of things, ie the deficit. Which is why perhaps Ed forgot to mention it.

Air Strikes On IS in Syria

This development was not unexpected but it is significant on three levels. The first is that it is not just the US alone, but includes participation in one form or another from Sunni Arab states who represent the moderate interpretation of Islam supported by the vast majority of their faith. That is the overt coalition. But the covert coalition is much more interesting and in a global sense hugely more important. Russia and Iran are not objecting and neither is Syria, having been informed in advance; a courtesy which brought it on board. It is critical that  Ban Ki Moon has nodded it through the UN on the grounds that Syria is no longer in control of the territory attacked. This all represents a complex web of diplomacy and statecraft of a quality not seen for a long time. It is important that the small time politicians who have not a clue what is going on and demand a meeting of the Security Council be ignored. That would require everybody to take up entrenched positions including a Russian veto.

The next question is ground troops, because however much pounding from the air you do (remember Viet Nam and the B  52 raids on Hanoi), unless you follow up the gaps opened up from the air on the ground, no long term advantage is gained. There are only three ground forces in the region capable of doing this and then only just. The Assad Syrian Army, the Kurdish Peshmerga and the Shia led Iraqi Army and its associated Shia militias. The Iraqi contingent is the weakest.

What has to be done is to fully equip  all these forces with the latest weapons and in addition train up the Iraqis. Russia and Iran will keep Assad’s army fighting fit, the West generally can equip the very well organised and led Peshmerga and Iraq will be, as it is already, a combined effort of Iran, Russia and the US. This is an altogether new grouping of powers which flies in the face of what people have come to know as the line up of goodies and baddies.That is why it stands a much better chance of working. It will not defeat IS but it will neuter it to the point where moderate Sunnis will have a chance to shrivel its perverted ideas and regain lost territory. That will require the abandonment of the Sykes Picot map and the re-drawing of boundaries.

The UK is about to join the air assault, having gone through a delicate dance of diplomatic veils to make sure its Parliament says yes. Commentators, especially the much more aggressive British contingent, so unlike the deferential style in the US, are trying to tease out an admission that western ground troops will in the end be needed. Apart from the fact that public opinion on both sides of the Atlantic is dead against that, any such move would be a disaster and play right into the hands of IS who daily prays with all its might for exactly that to happen.

If ever such thoughts cross the minds of politicians they must add this to the mix. A fighting force that regained some ground would merely trigger another insurgency. To do the job you would need an army of occupation for the entire area of Syria, Iraq, Libya and maybe Lebanon. You are looking at up to three million men and women together with a Marshal style plan for civic and economic regeneration. It would last at least twenty years and would require the re-introduction of some form of conscription in the participating powers. Any western politician who proposes it would be toast and any general who argues it could be done with less, is of the kind who wins battles and loses wars.

Tony Blair and IS: Wiser Now?

In a recent interview for the BBC Tony Blair had a much more measured contribution, while observing that at some point somebody’s boots may be needed on the ground to defeat IS. He made the point that it would be much better if it were not Western boots but he thought nothing should be ruled out.

The issue with IS is this. It must be contained militarily because of the suffering caused by its advance to those who do not embrace its cause. Terrible brutalities to the innocent are its hallmark. What it is trying to provoke is Western military intervention with ground troops because that will, it knows, embroil the West in another unwinnable war and rally many who ordinarily oppose it, to its colours. At all costs the West must restrict any intervention to air power used with precision, and humanitarian aid. It cannot, as politicians claim, be beaten, because above all it is not an entity but an idea. It is a bad idea based upon an unrecognisable interpretation of Islam, but even if you took back every square yard of its territory and killed every one of its fighters it would re-emerge in some other format, first as an insurgency, then as a force.

The only way to deal with this is to kill the idea and the only people who can do that are the  Sunnis themselves. To give them space to do this will require the help of both Kurds and  the Shias who feel equally threatened. These must provide the ground forces, but it is the moderate Sunnis who must win back the hearts, minds and faith of their own people who form the backbone of this bloodthirsty conglomeration. The West can supply weapons, intelligence and some special force mentoring as well as air power, but no more. To ensure the plan succeeds requires the cooperation of  the coalition which John Kerry has put together, but with this proviso. The vital players in this drama are Iran, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Russia, Turkey and Assad’s Syria. They must be on board or the enterprise will fail. This will require the crossing of diplomatic barriers and a settling or deferring of differences, but without this, IS will carry on, however big the coalition of the others who are on America’s (and Britain’s) list of good guys.

 

Books At Bedtime!

 

Each of these books is different and not part of a sequence, but all of them have the common ability to draw you into the story and keep you turning the pages from start to finish. Click on any of the images for my page on Amazon UK and here for Amazon.com

Labour In Trouble: Serious Trouble.

Whereas a year ago an average of opinion polls gave Labour a projected majority in 2015 of about eighty, its lead has now dropped to a tiny projected sixteen. This is the wrong direction of travel for Milliband and Balls. Moreover English voters are determined that the fifty nine MPs in the Commons elected from Scottish constituencies should, in the light of the greater devolution promised to Scotland by all parties to gain  a win for NO, should end. Forty-one of them are Labour. Without their votes Labour will not have a majority in England. The Tories know this. The Tories also know that the fear which stalks them in every waking hour, UKIP, and which beat them in the European elections, has seized the moment and its leader, Nigel Farage, has overnight become an English Nationalist. This is an entirely new kind of politics and English nationalism, for long unspoken, is now out in the open.

These new politics are complicated by the fact that the Thatcher era was popular in England (and very popular in the U.S.), but less so elsewhere. Eventually the Tories have become the party of England. Their sister party in Northern Ireland, the Ulster Unionists have no seats at Westminster, Welsh Tories have eight and Scottish Tories have one. English Tories have two hundred and five. In other words the Tories lose only one vote in Scotland if Scottish MPs are banned from voting on English matters but Labour loses forty-one. That means no Labour majority in England for a Labour Government. But if Labour comes out against the English votes for English matters against the tide of opinion, it stands to lose many of its existing English seats and Milliband can kiss goodbye to any thought of winning the next general election.

Labour now is in a mess just when it should be strong. It messed up its campaign in the Scottish referendum and had to be rescued by a re-born Gordon Brown promising more devolution. It has made a mess of its economic policy so that few understand it and nobody trusts it. It lacks a big narrative and a message of hope. It is prone to policy initiatives which nobody can remember the day after. This is its last Conference before 2015. There are only two outcomes possible. The eve of victory or the eve of defeat. To avoid the latter Ed Milliband now has to step up to the plate. For defeat in 2015 would most certainly be the end of Ed. This could be, even may be, his last conference as Leader.

The question of devolution of the the most centralised power in the West is one which cannot be solved just with a ban on Scottish MPs voting on English matters, but the British way is to effect constitutional change in bite size pieces. Eventually there must be a wider constitutional settlement, greater devolution within England itself and even a written constitution drawing together all the various measures in a coherent and accessible form. But there has to be that first bite and the tide of opinion is that the time for that is now. Failure to grasp this will drive frustrated voters to UKIP. Farage will become England’s Salmond.

Weekend Reading

 

Each of these books is different and not part of a sequence, but all of them have the common ability to draw you into the story and keep you turning the pages from start to finish. Click on any of the images for my page on Amazon UK and here for Amazon.com

Alex Salmond: A Remarkable Politician

It matters not what your politics are. Alex Salmond is the most astute politician in the British Isles and his influence goes way beyond Scotland’s borders and his legacy will last well beyond his retirement. This blog feels he still has much to offer and expects to see him back.

There is no doubt that the YES campaign believed not only that it could win but that it was winning. It came very close. If ten per cent of NO votes had switched to YES, Salmond would have been home and dry. Those votes would have been his if the Nationalist party had taken more trouble to prepare a coherent plan for a proper currency and undertaken the groundwork to set up something which would have been credible to business and the markets and above all their voters. The muddle on offer, which would have been voted down in the House of Commons even if the veto was lifted by the Cabinet and Opposition, meant a vote for Salmond was a leap into the unknown. Warnings poured in from business, economists, bankers et al and voters took fright.

Yet what was achieved is actually bigger than the notion of Scottish independence itself. Salmond has set in train  a process though which the creaking centralised and only partly democratic system of government in the UK and especially in England, will be replace by a devolved system on federal lines for the whole Union and all its parts. This will substantially increase the power of each nation to determine the shape of all the issues which affect everybody’s daily life. A voluntary Union in which Scotland will find itself playing a major role on a much broader canvass than would have been possible on its own. All that will be down to Salmond. Without him nothing would have happened.

So the message from this blog to Alex Salmond is this. Rise from your disappointment. It is much better than you think. You may have lost the battle, but shortly it will be seen by all that you have won the war. For all of us.

The Union Holds: Now It is all about England.

Although many thought that the undecided and undeclared voters would break YES, they mostly broke NO, giving the Better Together campaign a wider margin of victory than it expected after recent poll scares. Scotland has earned the admiration of the world for the flawless way in  which it conducted the referendum, with a record breaking turnout and the complete absence of disorder.  The whole United Kingdom wakes up stronger this morning with a greater sense not only of its own worth, but also by how much it is valued as a power in the world. Moreover the Scots, by their example, have shown how effective democracy can be in a world of violence, discord and civil war.

Although the argument about Scottish independence is now over, the one about the structures of government in the UK as a whole, is about to begin. Central to that is the change in the constitution to prevent MPs from devolved areas voting on English matters. The implications of this are constitutionally huge and will bring about the most profound changes in the way the UK is governed, not least because of the 64 million who populate the Union, 56 million are in England. It will also reaffirm the UK’s durability and modernise the outdated and in parts undemocratic, structures of government. This will in turn strengthen her credentials as a power upon the world stage.

To get there will take a good deal of argument and as in Scotland, passions will run high. After a night more or less without sleep watching the referendum results, it will not be helpful to readers if I attempt to advance the parameters of the problems and opportunities now, but watch this space. Meanwhile it is a good day for the UK, for the EU for NATO. Above all it is a good day for Scotland. We have heard a good deal of nonsense in the recent past about beacons of democracy, which turned out to be no such thing. Well Scotland is a beacon today, and its light is admired the world over.