Malcolm Blair-Robinson's Blog, page 72

Kennedy Papers: Unlikely To Answer Key Questions

The most telling thing about the release of the latest batch of Kennedy papers is that President Trump was forced by the US security agencies, in the interests of national security, to hold some back. Originally he had announced he would release them all.

Over fifty years after the event there cannot be any live security issues ongoing, so that excuse is invalid. There could very well be serious national embarrassment, accompanied by public outrage, if it is the case that the assassination of the iconic President was the work of some home grown conspiracy with connections to high places, which has been covered up for half a century. The American people are surprisingly tolerant of their many headed system of governance. Except when it lies to them.

At the moment they are not sure who is at fault and what lies have been told by whom. What is for certain is the belief, held by a substantial majority of patriotic Americans, that they have not yet been told the truth. They deserve now to be brought from the darkness of this historic murder into the light of finally knowing who actually organised it and why.

Kenya: Risk To Stability

Kenya was once a beacon of calm good governance in post empire Africa. But no longer. The rules of democracy are not being obeyed. These are that elections must be free fair and accepted as final; the government must govern for all; the losers must be willing to be governed by the winners who must govern fairly; the turnout must be sufficient to validate the mandate of the party or coalition which forms a government and everybody must accept the result and move forward.

None of these conditions are now being met in Kenya. The Opposition candidate refuses to take part in the presidential re-run, the Electoral Commission cannot guarantee that the election will be free and fair and the Supreme Court could not muster enough judges to hear a legal challenge. This is a very dangerous road for a democracy to wander down. It leads eventually to the status of a failed state. The world has more than enough of those already.

Interest Rates: Put them Up Now

Let us hope that this time the MPC will at last do what it should have done years, literally, ago, and move interest rates upwards. It has got nothing to do with slightly better growth, 0.4 is little more than flat lining in the big scheme of things, it has to do with the exploding debt levels in households which are now becoming a real and present danger to economic stability. Throw in uncertainty about Brexit and a politically volatile climate, and you have all you need for a great big crash.

Edging up interest rates will restore them to their proper function of an active tool in economic management and act as a warning. It will at last deliver some prospect of people getting a return on their savings, which will begin to reshape the economy away from its addiction to borrowing funding asset inflation and back to saving funding wealth creation.

There is one cardinal rule of low interest rates. They do not make mortgages cheaper. They just make them bigger.

Killing Jihadists: Are We Sure About This?

Rory Stewart, perhaps one of the best political historians around and an expert on the origins of conflict in the Middle East, has said that British IS fighters are so full of hate that they should be killed, rather than be allowed back into the UK. Unfortunately Stewart is also a government minister, so his pronouncement is a declaration of government policy.

There is no doubt that public support for this ruthless analysis will be widespread. The important question is will it make our homeland safer? The important issues are that such a policy rather flies in the face of who we think we are and what sort of civilisation it is we wish to promote. It is also unclear how this policy is to be implemented. Drone strikes and battle casualties will be the main stay, but suppose they re-enter the UK what then? Shoot them as they arrive? Try them for Treason, which still carries the death penalty? Is this really what we want?

The profile of these radicalised young people is almost all one of exclusion and deprivation. Many who have thus far survived regret their involvement with IS and want to return home. They aspire to moving on from their participation in this savage ideology. Killing them would do no good. Rather it would do much harm because it would transform them from perpetrators to victims and act as a powerful recruiting tool for new converts. Because they will have friends and family who will be dismayed and from among them new fanatics will emerge.

So we need to think about this rather carefully. The Middle East is a beacon for drastic action by the West which has exacerbated problems and made things worse. Summary killings of misguided young people undermines our own humanity, becoming in itself a perverted terrorist victory. We surely do not want that. We must have a programme of rehabilitation. It is the companion of any initiative to halt radicalisation.

Sajid Javid Wants To Build More Houses: So He Should.

But will he? This country needs up to 2 million new homes built over the next four of five years. Not to buy, but to rent. At affordable prices so that a nurse can rent a decent home, have money over to save and live without resorting to food banks. With proper long term tenancies which give full security. Just like Harold Macmillan provided in the 1950s. He managed, in spite of post war shortages, to build 300,000 houses a year, council houses as they were then called. He was not a socialist firebrand but a millionaire Tory Housing Minister. He was so successful that he later became Prime Minister.

Now Javid hopes to borrow billions to equal Macmillan’s achievement. Whether this has to do with wanting to build more homes, or perhaps something else, is for you to work out.

Brexit Again: A Watershed Moment

The Brussels drama ended better for May than might have been the case, as EU leaders made a serious attempt to appear more sympathetic and accommodating. However their position remains unchanged on all the key issues. They have conceded that they will work out how to conduct trade negotiations in the future, which, because they like planning ahead, they have already been doing unofficially anyway. But it gave hope to May. In turn she has got the message that the UK has to come up with chapter, verse, and outline figures on all the financial commitments it is willing to honour, in order move the negotiations forward. She was boxed in and she had to give. Parts of her party, including some of her cabinet, will be aghast. Yet it will not matter. There has been a sea change.

It is hidden from view and unremarked. But if you delve deep into the psyche of mood both here in the UK and in the EU, you find that something has happened. The hard Brexiteers have lost. Their failure to invest the time and energy over the years of their campaign to have ready a properly costed, legally analysed, practically workable and economically and socially advantageous plan to give life to their Brexit dream, has cost them all. For it is now clear there are only two possible outcomes moving forward.

The first is that a deal is negotiated for a soft and sensible Brexit which will leave in place the main aspects of the economic structure, as well as most of the rights for free movement, residence and EU citizenship. This will mean more or less open borders and some form of contributions to associate membership of both the customs union and the single market. Co-operative joint initiatives over all sorts of things from space explorations to drugs licencing will remain in place. Almost all the EU regulations now in force will continue to apply and there will be an acknowledged role for the ECJ, perhaps some sort of joint panel with the UK Supreme Court.

If that cannot be agreed and the only thing left is the hard Brexit, the people who got us into this mess crave, then the whole project will implode, because nowhere, either in the UK, the EU or the rest of the world, is there a majority for such a reckless leap into the unknown. It would take twenty years to sort everything out and set Britain back on an upward path, causing a whole generation to miss out. Even if the final outcome is indeed better, the price to get there in one nobody is willing to pay and the risk of disaster is one nobody is willing to take.

And for the hard Brexiteers? Sorry my friends. You had your chance and you blew it.

Tor Raven: Political Drama for Troubled Times

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. Tor Raven’s novel captures the mood of those times with a host of fictional characters who engage in political intrigue, 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.

 

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Catalonia: Spain Is Right To Act

The Spanish authorities now have no choice. Majority public opinion, across all regions and parts of Spain, demands that Catalonia be brought back into the framework of the Constitution and the rule of legitimate law is restored. The Catalan government did not, as it claims, obtain a mandate for independence. Only 42% voted at all and while 90% of those did back independence, that makes only 38% of those entitled to vote. That is not a mandate. It is certainly a fact that there was heavy handed violence from the national police to try and prevent voting, but that is not an excuse. The Catalan authorities deliberately went ahead, in defiance of the Constitution and a court order, with an illegal poll, knowing it would be divisive and the outcome ambiguous.

This blog has already pointed out that unilateral declarations of independence rarely succeed, because at the heart of the democratic notion of independence two things are critical. One is near unanimity and the other is international recognition. Catalonia cannot even muster a bare majority for its reckless project and no significant country in the world will recognise it. The EU will not even mediate. Hundreds of companies have already moved their headquarters out of the region and back into Spain.

Having said all that, it was a big mistake for Spain not to agree to allow a legal referendum, since a majority would have voted No and the whole project would be over for a generation. So it must now be conciliatory in taking back control over this confused region and make clear that once the dust has settled and full orderly functioning of the governance of the region has been restored, a legally authorised referendum on independence will be allowed. Not tomorrow or even soon, but one day. That is how the bubble of Scottish independence was burst. No force, no fluster, just the freedom to choose.

Because that is how democracy works. That is what it is. Spain is a democracy, although a relatively new one. It must gain the confidence of its convictions. All the democratic world will support it.

Brexit in Chaos

In the fog of what has become the Brexit battle it is hard to tell, as May confronts her fellow EU leaders in an attempt to get her way and move on to talks about transition, where we are headed. What we do know is we are lost in that fog close to a cliff.

Nevertheless there are some scraps, which put together, can tell us something. The hard Brexiteers are frantically writing letters and sounding off to urge we walk away. Towards the cliff. They say it is only a little jump to the sunny beach below. They urge us thus because the greatest fear tears at their hearts and invades their sleep in the small hours of each night. Their absurd project is in trouble.

There is no longer a majority in the country for Brexit, which latest polls confirm most people now think is a mistake. There is no majority for it in Parliament either. It might just be possible to gain acceptance for a sensible Brexit which leaves most of our current status intact, while detaching the political class from a say in the future.

On the other hand it may very well be that having realised the impact on jobs, living standards and prospects of all of us and the under 50s in particular, people then will focus on the advantages of European citizenship and the empowerment given by electing members of the European Parliament. Because whilst old people may hark back to some Utopia which was never there, the young look forward to a future which could be a great deal better. Not by standing alone in the corner, but by embracing the European family of which we are all a part.

That is when this whole folly will collapse. Brexit will be over.

 

Tor Raven: The Hastings Option: Download or Paperback

The narrow, ordered life of a gentle but almost reclusive artist, Jane Block, is disturbed when a bequest, intended for her dead mother, passes to her. Mystery surrounds the nature of the inheritance and Jane is led on a sinister trail to secrets of the past, forcing her to confront her own fears and inhibitions. She finds herself caught in a frightening quest to unravel a mysterious cover-up from World War Two, and in so doing finds intrigue, love and betrayal.

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