Malcolm Blair-Robinson's Blog, page 34
February 20, 2019
Shamina Begum: Let Her Come Back.
She was born and raised in the UK. She was at school here. She was on the radar of the authorities as one at risk from radicalisation. At the age of fifteen she succumbed to the blandishments of IS and joined a bloodthirsty movement which promised heaven knows what. It is now confined to a few hundred square yards, all that is left of its short lived territorial empire, and Shamina is holed up in a refugee camp where she has given birth to her third child, two having already died. Her husband has been taken prisoner and his fate is unknown. Somehow she was found by the Times. The rest you know.
However tempting it may be to banish this girl and her baby by depriving her of citizenship, it is the wrong move. This country has to take responsibility for its actions even when, especially when, they go wrong. And nobody can deny that it has a responsibility for bringing up its citizens in partnership with parents, educators and others, nor that in this case, for whatever reason, it failed. It is clearly the fault of many including the child, but in an adult world she is the junior partner.
Without citizenship where is she to go? How can we be sure it is not the wrong place? Not just for her but for us too?There is absolutely no doubt in the mind of this blog that she should be brought back, prosecuted and punished for whatever crimes she has committed and then rehabilitated into society as a fully paid up and contributing member. She is still only nineteen, her life is ahead of her and her baby is entirely innocent by any rational measure. Moreover she will for certain become an invaluable resource in combating radicalisation of impressionable children in our country in the future, not least because by then she will understand that, with all its enlightenment and benefit, our country is hers too.
February 19, 2019
New Labour and Corbyn: Again
Let’s get several things straight. But first let me say to readers who do not know, I was a founder member of the SDP, I defected from the Tories which made me a novelty, I was SDP Chairman of the City of London and Westminster South and I was close to what was going on among the defecting Labour MPs, about forty of them, and all of whom but three, lost their seats at the first general election after the drama. I did not join the combined Liberal Democrats and stayed with the SDP until it sank. I went down with the ship. The talk then was of ‘a new kind of politics’ because ‘politics is broken’. Yes we heard it yesterday, but if we are old enough, we have heard it all before.
Prior to the breakaway from Michael Foot’s Labour, Thatcher was set to lose the first election she fought as prime minister in 1983. She won by a landslide. In fact 13 million people voted Tory and 16.23 million voted Labour and Lib/SDP alliance. So she won a landslide on a minority of the votes. It is worse than that. The SDP/Libs won 23 seats on 7.7 million votes. Labour won 209 seatswith 8.4 million. A gap of only 700 thousand votes gave Labour an extra 186 seats. It is not the politics that are broken. It is the electoral system.
If you want a first past the post voting system, you can only have two main parties and they must each accommodate a coalition of views and opinions within their ranks. It makes breakaways well nigh impossible. That is why Labour and Tory have dominated our political scene for over one hundred years. If you want to change you have to introduce a proportional electoral voting system, as in Scotland and Wales. We had a Cameron referendum about that. We voted to keep first past the post. Another referendum mistake.
So forget about Labour defections. New Labour, which has completely disappeared in the country at large and from the actual membership of the Labour Party, still dominates the parliamentary Labour Party. It hates Corbyn and everything he stands for. It will never give up trying to smash up the huge following he enjoys. But at the end of the day it is votes that count. Gordon Brown, the last New Labour prime minister, managed 8.6 million votes in 2010. Corbyn delivered 12.8 million in 2017.
That is why he is leader of the Labour party. He understands Labour is the party not of the centre but of the left. It is the champion of the working class, the underprivileged, the ordinary people who through thick and thin, on earnings which will never make them rich, keep this country running. And of decent people of every class and background whose life ambitions have a place for the welfare of others, rather than being just about them. When Labour remembers why it is there it wins. What we heard yesterday from the angry seven was a lot of waffle about them and their feelings. But that is of little use to those who are having to stave of hunger by going to food banks. Which is why the defectors will be a short term wonder. In the end they too, may, in those waking moments in the wee small hours, wonder why.
February 18, 2019
Labour Split: First Reaction
In adversarial politics, political parties are essentially tribes. In some countries there is a single party of the left and another of the right. Elsewhere left and right are split into factions or smaller parties which have to come together in a coalition grouping to govern.
In the England, which is the dominant party of the U.K., it remains the case that there are two main parties. Coalitions are rare, not least because the junior partners tend to get punished at the polls. Smaller parties exist and can deeply influence the political conversation. The SDP was the midwife of New Labour, and without UKIP there would have been no Brexit. But these small parties never get big, neither do they govern.
So we now have seven angry MPs who have left the Labour Party. We will have to see if the ripples of this defection get beyond the Westminster village pond. Many people may feel that the leaked intention of Honda to announce tomorrow the shutting of their Swindon car plant a good deal more important.
February 15, 2019
Trump’s Emergency: But is it America’s?
There is no doubt that Trump’s mania about his wall, which has been thwarted by Mexico, the democrats and enough republicans to stop it when they had control of both the House and the Senate, is now an emergency for his Presidency. The question is, can this be a real national emergency for America? The answer must surely be no. A national emergency is not a device to bypass the democratic will of Congress. It is a power to be used in a pressing national crisis when extra resources have to be deployed faster than the proper due process can deliver them. It is not put there so that a thwarted President can ignore the structures of democracy.
Trump’s declaration will be challenged in Court and may well end up in the Supreme Court. If it finds that the Constitution can be interpreted to allow this misuse of executive power, only one thing is certain thereafter. At some point in the future America will live very much to regret it.
February 13, 2019
Opinion Polls: A Warning To Labour
It is my personal experience that in my lifetime our country has never been so badly governed, nor has it been subjected to such a grossly dysfunctional economic model which continually makes the rich richer and the poor poorer. Aside from Brexit chaos, transport muddle, Universal Credit failure and unreasonable pressure on all public services from increasing demand and reducing resources, we were treated to our immature Defence Secretary announcing the deployment of our giant carrier to the South China Sea so as to confront China, with other measures to needle Russia. This is not only militarily illiterate given the actual state of our forces, but adventurist posturing for which the minister has no money. He is part of a government whose policies have lead to well over a million people relying on food banks.
Yet it beggars belief that the latest in depth poll shows that the government would win a snap election. Of course the poll could well be wrong. At the last election polls, all of them, predicted a landslide for May when she suddenly went to the country and we all recall the shock on election night. Yet even the appearance of the poll, when Labour should be far ahead, is a stark warning to the Labour leadership to sharpen up its act. It cannot please everybody across the country, nor even in the Labour party itself, so it must stop trying. At the moment its stance on Brexit, nuanced, clever and cerebral to the pros, is an indecipherable muddle to ordinary people. That is blocking out its very popular policies on public services, utilities, ending austerity, sorting out the railways and no end of other positive ideas to reboot the country, currently suffocating under decaying carcass of what was once known as Thatcherism.
As for Brexit. It is a mess. Nobody voted for it. What they were offered was stay or leave. Leave was easy like cancelling Amazon prime. Well it’s not. It is a massive legal disentanglement, with unknown economic consequences, with the greatest curb on personal freedom and personal sovereignty, at the moment I am a citizen of the EU with full voting rights for its parliament, in our history. There will be no Brexit dividend whatever shape it takes.
The majority both of Labour members and Labour voters want to stay in the EU. The right and democratic thing is to go for a People’s Vote. It is clear cut, simple and in full accord with Labour’s heritage of championing the rights of ordinary people and the universal nature of democracy. It is also, with the present factinalised and divided political class and the polarised country, the only course that makes any sense. The Labour leadership are going for a general election. There are two problems with this.
First it will not resolve the big historic issue of the hour and second Labour might well lose it. A People’s Vote will end Brexit once and for all. The Tory government will fall. And Corbyn will coast into Downing Street.
February 11, 2019
DARK CRIME
Grayling: Should He Go?
Usually when everybody calls for a minister to go, there is a backdrop of scandal or misjudgement over a particular issue. With Chris Grayling it is not one thing but many; an accumulation of disaster and detachment in two Departments, Justice and Transport. In each problems, unresolved, pile up under Grayling’s leadership. So in a proper government in normal times he would have to be shuffled out.
But we are not in normal times. The government is weaker, more divided and more unable to find its way than any British government in modern history. Changing a hapless minister will make little difference. The problem, as everyone can see, is the government itself and sooner or later it, all of it, has to go.
February 9, 2019
FREE WEEKEND READING: Topical Political Thriller
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