Malcolm Blair-Robinson's Blog, page 74

Catalonia: The Independence Dream

The problem of the dream of independence for small countries absorbed into larger ones, or nations of people in a region split between two or more countries, is that achieving independence requires a large degree of unanimity if it is to succeed. It needs the backing of the country of which it is a part and it needs a democratic mandate which will be decisive and beyond challenge. That means something in the order of a 70% turnout and a 66% vote for independence. Because unless there is a reasonable degree of unanimity upon the nature and identity of a country, independence will fail.

Only 42% of those entitled to vote did so. 90% said yes to independence. That is 37.8 overall, nowhere near a mandate. Now there have been huge demonstrations against a break away, banks are moving their headquarters out of Catalonia, the EU has said it will not recognise an independent Catalonia and Spain has said if it happens by declaration, it will invoke Article 151 of the Constitution and impose direct rule.

Even if it is declared, independence will not happen. Because to declare it is one thing, but to be recognised to have it is quite another. Without recognition it is worthless. The best way forward is a time for reflection followed by a legally authorised referendum. That will vote No and it will be over.

A Weekend of May

It is an extraordinary collapse of government authority when almost the only topic of political conversation is the survival of the prime minister. So having said most of what was useful in yesterday’s post, here are just a few more thoughts.

Talk of leadership challenges and stalking horses are rubbish. For years now the Tory party operates under rules quite different to the Thatcher era. Nobody can challenge the leader. If 15% of Tory MPs write to the chairman of the 1922 Committee asking for a vote of confidence in the leader, it will be held, but not for any other reason.

If  May won she would carry on. If she lost she would resign as prime minister. She would not be entitled to stand for the leadership again and only on her resignation could nominations open for a successor. Through a knock out process of voting among MPs, the field is reduced to two, at which point the party membership get the chance to make the final choice. It is a cumbersome system in opposition. In government, in the midst of the Brexit mess of stalled negotiations and unbridgeable gaps amounting almost to a national emergency, which it could shortly become with deteriorating economic prospects, three months of hustings  is just not a runner. Neither is another leader elected unopposed.

If May goes, her government falls with her. Either there will be a general election or the Queen will send for Corbyn. There will be turmoil in the markets, although much of the uncertainty is already factored in, so it will be contained. Much more significant is the prospect that Brexit will collapse. That is why the Brexiteers, having plotted May’s downfall for months, are now trawling the studios praising her to the skies. If she is a real leader she will take the opportunity to sack the lot of them from her cabinet. She has a big cross party majority in the Commons for a sensible Brexit or none at all.

Now The End Game: May Losing Grip On Power

Like all end games, their length is uncertain until the end is reached. But this government is now spiraling out of control. Markets, the EU, business and the most hard pressed generation since WWII, let down by the most unfair economic model in modern history, are all walking away from a complete shambles of governance.  It is not just May, although it is hard to recall a bigger disaster for the Tories than their choice of leader to navigate through Brexit and out of austerity. It is not just Cabinet disunity, although that is on such a scale that it is producing a paralysis of action and an avalanche of waffle.

It is a faltering economy, what the Financial Times calls a bloodbath in the public finances, stalled negotiations with a mishandled Brussels, uncertainty over what sort of Brexit is coming , tens of thousands of families living in temporary accommodation, rising prices and pressure through lack of funding in all public services, including health, education, public housing and social care. Above all there is now the powerful whiff of putrefaction in Whitehall as confusion reigns in one ministry after another and the authority of the government finally rots down in the rising political heat.

May Struggles On

It is impossible not to feel sympathy for the hapless May as she struggled through a coughing fit, a prank and bits dropping off the decor, to deliver her speech; all of it a metaphor for her imploding administration.

What rubbish she talks! There is all this stuff about creating some kind of Utopia from her imagination, while either ignoring her own promises, or allowing her ministers to pursue policies which make her recurring dreams impossible to achieve. This is in part because the economic model has failed and partly because she has no understanding of either economics or foreign affairs.  Then we have to put up with these trailers for blockbuster productions, which turn out to be no more than short cartoons of Tom and Gerry.

Today we woke up to news that there was to be a grand revival of council house building. But the reality is that a measly £2 billion is to be applied by 2021. This is absurd. Harold Macmillan promised and built over 300,000 council house each year. May is aiming for 25,000 over four years.

We have a housing crisis based on two factors. One is a shortage of affordable housing and the other is excessive price and rental inflation. To deal with these you build up to 2 million council houses and you introduce rent controls and security of tenure for tenants. But what the prime minister’s government does is to pump another £10 billion into subsidising house purchase, which will push prices higher, and £20 billion per year into subsidising excessive rents charged by private landlords. And why? Because landlords all vote Tory.

So have sympathy for her coughing (was she choking on her words?) but once again understand that what was delivered was another of her set piece speeches, which  turn out to be full of belief and empty of reality.

Spain and Catalonia: Not The Way To Go

As an object lesson in how not to do things the Spanish government’s handling of its Catalonia problem is hard to beat. At the same time we have to remind ourselves that Spain is a relatively new democracy without the longevity and experience of the opportunities and limitations of the form of government described by Churchill as ‘the least worst’.

Whilst extolling the virtues of democratic government, the political establishment of Spain still contains many who secretly lack confidence in its reliability. So instead of allowing a legally approved independence referendum, which would undoubtedly have ended in defeat for the separatists who were then in the minority, the government took legal action, which it then enforced with gratuitous police violence reminiscent of the Franco era. This has converted a question about the future to a crisis about the present. It has made a unilateral declaration of independence a real and present danger. The next few days will determine Spain’s immediate destiny.

The world is more than familiar with the problems which occur when a separate nation of people are denied an independent national homeland to call their own and to govern independently. Unilateral declarations of independence, however, very rarely end well. We must hope it does not come to that.

 

Interest Rates: Up Or Not?

The Bank of England, having recently said interest rates would not go up, is now saying they might. Yes well!

The B of E’s record is mixed. On many issues relating to faults in the financial structure laid bare by the crash, good progress has been made. But the political decision to vary interest rates has proved too controversial for it to act. There is no such thing as the finite economy or the perfect model. It is all a matter of priorities and preferences. The only certainty is that there are winners and losers.

Under the pre-Thatcher post war model, a socialist consensus supported by the two main parties, standards for ordinary people continuously rose, while the rich struggled, if that is the right word, with the burdens of ultra high taxes and aggressive industrial relations. Under the post-Thatcher model, in which markets and central bankers have been put into the driving seat,  government is left to tinker with distribution of the outcome, while not able to influence the outcome itself. So the rich have become first super rich, then mega rich, then uber rich, while everyone else struggles.

Instead of benefiting from low interest rates, with low payments on affordable mortgages, they have vast, near unaffordable, mortgages on over inflated properties. While the Bank talks about keeping rates low, property prices go on rising. So the people who borrow on the money markets to lend are protected, while their customers, the ordinary folk in suburbia, are forced to pay more and more because property prices have no restraint and go up and up.

Well it is all going to end in tears. Lots of them.

 

Tory Civil War: A Dysfunctional Government

Once again Boris has set out to undermine May, offering conditions for the progress of Brexit. He does so with impunity because the government’s position is itself so vague that it is hard to nail the Foreign Secretary for being disloyal. Meanwhile as the Tories gather in Manchester, some have shut their eyes and are hoping for the best, some, including senior figures, are calling for  hard Brexit and yet others are calling for a softer Brexit which amounts to staying in  everything but the political institutions which run the EU.

Both these latter strands of passionate opinion have a certain integrity. What does not is the government’s official negotiating position. This is  full  aspirational rhetoric but light on specific detail on each of the contentious issues, leaving  the country and the EU baffled by the ambiguity of it all. Moreover it is full of contradictions which are impossible to square in reality, for example free access to markets without adhering to the rules or the membership fees. If there are options that will never be one of them. And remember this is not a party enjoying the luxury of arguing in opposition; this is the government tasked with the biggest peacetime restructuring since the Romans up sticks and left.

So this is a very worrying time for the ordinary person in the street. What would help would be for the soft Brexiteers to come clean on the ongoing political and financial cost of staying in the customs union and the single market. Even more important is for Boris and his gang of pipe-dreamers to quantify even a single advantage of leaving the EU, while setting out in cold hard figures the short and medium term economic damage of hard Brexit which will scupper the hopes of a generation. Boris’s hero Churchill, he see himself as a modern incarnation of the national Icon, in exchange for blood toil tears and sweat, offered the people one simple goal. Victory. What exactly is Boris offering? My suspicion is he is only offering Boris.

Aung San Suu Kyi: Big Questions

The world is shocked by the scale of the horrors unfolding in a country it was thought was coming in from the cold. When the Nobel Peace Prize winner became its leader there was hope everywhere that Aung San Suu Chi would herald a new beginning for her country. The brutality of the ethnic cleansing of the Rohingya, over half a million of whom have fled to neighboring Bangladesh, is stunning and raises multiple questions about her integrity as democratic champion of human rights.

A junior Foreign Office Minister has said, following a visit to her, that she assured him that the Rohingya would be allowed to return. Really? To What? All their villages have been burned to ashes and many family members killed. As the UN has declared, this is a terrible humanitarian emergency. Its resolution will require a good deal more than the worthless assurances of this discredited icon.

May: Another Speech? But They Listen to Corbyn.

She makes a lot of speeches, this Prime Minister. But it is all talk and no delivery. So the break through of Florence becomes the latest deadlock in Brussels. It is a long and boring story which today we will skip. The latest effort, much trailed for delivery at the Bank of England, extols the free market economy. Why, when there are clear problems of inequality, asset inflation, low productivity and chronic austerity, do that? You may well ask. The answer is it that is what she was brought up to, skipping barefoot through the cornfields. It is all she knows. She turns out to be somewhat wooden and rather dull.

By contrast her rival, Jeremy Corbyn, who began as a no hoper, a fruitcake pedaling yesterday’s ideas, has become the man of the moment with rock star status, pulling thousands to cheer him wherever he goes. He declares the present model of capitalism broken, failing the many, while enriching the few. His party has now moved back to its socialist roots pulling the centre with it, finding its lost voters, millions of them, and adding members so that it has more than all the other political parties in the UK put together. It has just had its most successful conference for a generation and in the words of its leader is poised for power. Power to change and the confidence and courage to change almost everything.

This Blog has supported Corbyn from the beginning. In May 2016 I published Turn Left To Power. Almost all of it is now official Labour practice and policy.

 

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Labour: Mandatory Re-Selection

This has always been a sensitive issue for labour. I have never understood why. Of course constituency parties must have a chance to select their candidate before each general election and there is nothing repressive or left wing about the notion. It is democracy. Becoming an MP is not a job for life. Sometimes it turns out to be, but that in itself is wrong. It is this Blog’s view that re-selection of candidates by every political party before each election should be mandatory by law and that no member of the House of Commons should serve more than three terms.  If and when the Lords are elected similar rules should apply.

Being a parliamentarian is not a profession, it is a public service. For the system to work well, it needs a constant input of fresh ideas. Experience of politics in counter productive and causes time to be spent on business of interest to politicians, which too often leaves the people cold. What is needed is experience of life. Life out there and for real. Not in the Westminster village.