As with the NHS and the BBC, fortunes will end up in the hands of private consultants, experts and crappy agencies. If we were serious about our military, we would restart our shipbuilding industry which would probably feed our steel industry. Where does all the money go from subletting our military sites to commerce? I am no socialist but public ownership of certain industries is essential, I include in that the Prison service, Water and Rail networks. Privatisation has failed and resulted in profiteering and a death of civil engineering and long term planning. We have become a very sick country indeed and I’m afraid greed is one of the main culprits.
I agree with you John, and would be all in favour of the nationalisation of the defence industry. Like you, I am no socialist either. But one of the reasons for Russia’s success in defence production is the centralisation of effort into a single conglomerate - Rostec over the past decade
The BBC saddens me. It was always my go-to place for news but I became more critical of the phrases and terms used. Eventually realising what it doesn't say shows how compromised it is.
Saddens you, it has been a vile anti British anti white propaganda channel for decades. It is absolute filth & full of parasitical disgusting champagne socialist who need to be sacked and thrown out on the streets. Have you just woken up.
By 2035 Trump will be 93, if he’s still in the land of the living, and Starmer, Macron and Mertz will be comfortably retired and inconsequential footnotes in the history books, if that.
The conflict in Ukraine will by then have been resolved in Russia’s favour and Starmer’s promises will have long been forgotten, as will have been his ludicrous hundred-year security treaty with a country that will likely no longer exist.
All politics are domestic as someone once said, and we should bear that in mind when considering how much value to ascribe to Starmer’s attempts to drum up positive media coverage by inventing a non-existent threat from Russia, and promising on behalf of future governments to spend enormous sums of money to address it.
As ever on this topic I feel the need to point out that spending 5% of GDP on 'defence' is for the UK over 11% of government budget. This is because IMF figures show that Britain's government spending (~budget) is 44% of GDP. (The USA's government budget is only about 36% of GDP.)
Just to put figures on that. If the actual spend was £5bn, UK GDP would be £100bn, and the UK government budget would be £44bn. So 'defence' spending would be 5/44 = 11.36%.
In other words, presenting 'defence' spending as 5% significantly understates the real figure in cash terms. That's 11.36% of our budget that we can't spend on health, education, pensions...
The thing every British taxpayer should be angry about, if they understood what was going on, is that we are doubling 'defence' spending, not because the British people have asked for it, but because Donald Trump ******* says so!
We are basically allowing the USA to act as a second tax collector in the UK. We will be paying tax (and national insurance etc) to the UK government, but also now paying tax to the USA. NATO is morphing into a multinational tax collector to fund the US military industrial complex.
So having extricated ourselves from that other multinational tax collector, the EU, Britain is now submitting to another one, the USA. They TELL US what to pay and, like a coward, we just pay it.
I'm struggling to see Britain as a 'sovereign' nation here.
The 'Special Relationship' don't you know. So special that we have been kow-towing to the US for 70 years, and now we've regained our sovereignty from the Brussels kleptocrats we have no idea what to do with it.
'The war in Ukraine is not an existential issue for Britain. Only a fantasist would believe that Russia is about to invade the UK or has plans to do so in the future.'
Very true, Ian. This is the crux of the problem with Starmer. He is ideological and intransigent where reason, pragmatism and good sense are called for, and calculating, technocratic and transactional where a healthy sense of one's values and society's values at large are called for.
He is exceptionally skilled at choosing the wrong tools for the job and getting the balance between forces terribly wrong. He is one of worst political leaders in the world. Not that he's the worst human or worst person, but that he's fundamentally very poor at understanding what he is and what he is not, what he needs to be or do and what he doesn't in any given situation, and what's called of him.
He's also exceptionally bad (as most western leaders are who arose as the power of the Liberal Order relative to others tapered off) at understanding IR and world politics. He lives in an ideological bubble where hubris and hypocrisy prevent him from seeing anything clearly. When political orders begin to break down, those that continue to believe in them become both too blind and too brave for their own good. Starmer exemplifies this tendency perfectly.
You break his flaws and weaknesses down very well, Ian, and I imagine you could write 10 pieces putting him to the sword, albeit he is such a dreadful bore to write about.
Thanks Shane. Two light hearted responses - Starmer has certainly chosen lots of tools for the job… And, I have yet to become bored of writing about how useless he is, though there may come a day… All the best.
Haha, he sure has)) There's another feather in his cap - the skilled choosing of tools.
You're welcome, Ian. I know he's more insidious and destructive than this simplification, but he does remind of that Noel Gallagher quip about Liam: 'He's a man with a fork in a world of soup'. One would hope Starmer's brand of leadership suits no age, however.
excellent summing up Shane. I thought it almost impossible to have someone as bad as Boris as PM but he has managed it. Then again i never thought that he would be anything more than what he is, his treatment of JC being a case in point , i think for the most part he is very much controlled by those around him .
Putting the knife into JC was probably a right of passage for him that proved he had expunged every single thing that could be deemed socialist from his politics. I had forgotten what he did there, thanks for reminding me. He really is a special kind of weasel.
They're all terrible now. They all have pretty much the same economics with a few trifling differences between them. Where they differ is how much they do or don't pander to different groups on gender, race, pronouns etc. Is exactly what the megarich always wanted - for everyone to forget about wealth and just kill each other over unreconcilable issues.
I will have my own piece on Starmer out tomorrow morning if you fancy a read. I'll also subscribe to you as I suspect we'll have a solid exchange of thoughts and ideas. Cheers mate))
Starmer's move is about keeping the US, especially Trump, off the UK’s back. When you're a middle power in a bloc dominated by a superpower, you bend when the pressure comes.
But the catch is always domestic: because every pound spent to appease Washington is a pound taken from hospitals, pensions, and support for the disabled. The public might not connect the dots in think-tank terms, but they feel the trade-off. And that's where the danger lies.
A PM who looks like he's spending big abroad while cutting back at home just hands ammo to his rivals (inside and outside the party).
This isn’t about moral clarity or global leadership. But the thing about power is, once you start bleeding it at home, your position abroad doesn't hold up for long either.
One of my biggest complaints about reading Geopolitical analysts is that they, to a person, are economically illiterate.
First off, why would you put debt servicing as a ratio to GDP? What does the GDP have to do with debt servicing? Absolutely nothing. In fact, if the government wanted to increase GDP by 5% all they have to do is increase government spending by 5%---because GDP, for the bizarre reason that we allow government economists to decide these things, includes government spending. Nor does it provide a quick county-to-country comparison because all these countries are under a different tax regime and all their GDPs have a different proportion that is attributable to government spending.
So, what are the tax receipts that the UK is using as income to service their debt? That is your starting point. What is the trend in these receipts? Are they declining, increasing? Do they match any increases in government debt over the same time period? What is the burden to the generic household and what can they bear?
If you desperately want to use GDP... What is the proportion of government spending to GDP? Is it matched by a similar increase-decrease in the non-government spending?
And secondly, the UK is staring at both a banking crisis and a potential sovereign debt crisis. This would take a long and complicated discourse to fully explain so I'm not going to here. But I will attempt a brief argument...
Why do you think the establishment is so urgently gung-ho on access to Ukrainian, Russian, Syrian and Iranian resources? Not to mention places like Burkina Faso and the talk of Canada's abundant resources? Can you ever remember a war where banks could not finance both sides of the conflict and thus be assured of always surviving that conflict profitably? Such is not the case in a sanctions environment. How are their investments in Project Ukraine going to get paid off?
And when there are deflationary sources at play in a nation where currency is in fact debt and requires inflation of the money supply (ie fresh loans) to ensure past loans can be paid and bankruptcies kept to a healthy minimum, strange things can happen to bank balance sheets. Keep in mind too that in a deflationary environment, corporate receipts decline, the value of corporations and their equity declines and the value of hard assets like land can decline. All of these are held as perfected collateral in the banking system. When that collateral becomes less perfected, either lending is reined in or creditors are forced to up their collateral. Difficult to do and usually the system then falls into a vicious deflationary cycle.
This is the precipice on which the UK is perched and so yes all of these wars are existential to the colonialist UK, in particular the one in the Ukraine. The great thing is that as Project Ukraine fails, so will British and European banks and finally the world might be free of the European colonialism that has been skimming off the income of us regular folk for centuries, while keeping entire nations under their thumb. Maybe we even get a World Bank loan bailout that has forced sterilization of Brits and Europeans as one of its requirements, just like the West did to its colonies in the 1970s.
I know but you began your missive with "Keir Starmer is a Moralizing Hypocrite" and that insult is up there in bold black and white at the top of the page, so what can we do? I'd hate to think there's more than one moralizing hypocrite in this room...
This really sums it up 😘”Like the worst type of gauche Gucci socialist, the Prime Minister is a moralising hypocrite, lecturing citizens from on high while living a life of unimaginable privilege.”
excellent Ian. The benefits system is not so much broken as the fact Govts over the last 40 yrs have followed a neoliberal economic system that has failed . The only people benefitting being those at the top. Thru PFI we have had billions of public money given to private hands and that is only one example . As you pointed out our general spending is in no way extreme, some of the poorest benefits/pensions in Europe. The real problem is trying to maintain the Global power delusion. More billions for the Trident replacement costing around 18% of the overall budget, a further 20 billion underspend also on projected projects. so even the 50 billion we do spend on defence isnt as it seems, failure also to not invest in newer technology and keeping on with outdated tanks. The figure as far as bribes/graft, must be mind blowing ! The trouble with K S is as i have said before a weak man trying to be tough, he has no real political skill and i dont see him surviving the Parliament .
Whilst the poodles of war gather for their war gaming high jinks at the NATO bullshit and shill fest, indulging in their endless blue sky schlock, we have our own corgi - Cur Stormer, subordinate to SS Ober Gruppen Merz - straddling the leg of the Orange cyclops, that shambling, new world bully whilst on terra firma, all the roads to Rome remain broken, the trains don’t work and cheap, shit jobs mushroom from the post-industrial corpse. Endless photo-ops at The Hague of gurning non-entities who airily summon imaginary money from thin air as the NCB’s presses work overtime, busily producing tomorrow’s economic desolation for all, won’t cut it: the European electorate is beginning to see through their lies and fantasies. This is the death agony, folks, and, today, this hour, is a ringside seat.
So, let's get this straight: when Starmer came to power, the public was told that the Tories left a massive hole in the public finances, which he had to urgently bridge and at least one of the ways to do that was to cut winter fuel allowance for the pensioners, which would allegedly save £1.4-£1.7bn. He has since done a U-turn on that one, which means that the British public still has the same hole in the finances that Starmer reportedly inherited. Therefore, his solution is to find another way to cut welfare and this time by a bigger amount, which he highly likely will need to do another U-turn on? And what do we call those who keep doing the same thing over and over again expecting a different outcome? 🤡
Having said that, do you notice that the one thing that no British PM ever does to bridge the dreaded hole in public finances is raise taxes for the corporate and banking cabal! Instead, they ALL talk of cutting taxes for the transnational business cartels, which already do everything to avoid them through various loopholes. The public in the meantime only sees tax increases by various means as every government speaks of taxing the wealthy more with the "wealthy" being the definition of those with salaries of £50K+ and tinpot businesses with the turnover of £200-300K per annum.
The main issue for the public in the west regardless of the country is that we no longer have any statesmen in charge of any western country. We have managers and administrators lobbied into power by the aforementioned corporate and banking cabal, who see their roles as legislating and regulating in its favour. This is the main reason why Trump is completely unable to achieve anything in any peace negotiations. He cannot see the difference between making a business deal and negotiating an agreement between two countries or to put it simply between the corporation and the state. Therefore, he will be a complete failure unworthy of a mention in the history books in the end. Just like Starmer, Macron, Merz and all the rest of them.
I don't want to sound like a conspiracy theorist, but: "one thing that no British PM ever does . . . " - Why did money used to be thrown at the tory party by a lot of large firms, and why was Corbyn metaphorically defenestrated? Money is used by people with lots of it to buy influence, and that influence is generally directed at getting themselves more money (and more influence, and so on ad infinitum). But I'm sure you know this, as is evident from your last paragraph.
Russia is not our enemy. The real threat is already here, embedded within our own institutions, dictating policies in the civil service and beyond. A well-organized Muslim network advances its agenda unchecked, enabled by weak, spineless liberal ministers who have surrendered to dhimmitude.
The idea that Russia wants to invade Europe is absurd. We’re broke, resource-poor, and a fractured society, one that no citizen ever voted for. Britain has degenerated into a failing state, clinging to delusions of past grandeur while sliding into third-world autocracy. Along with other Western nations, we’ve recklessly created a Frankenstein’s monster in Ukraine, a disaster that will plague us for generations. Ukraine is albatross around our neck, you are so correct to say “I consider Zelenskya far bigger existential threat to Britain than Russia. In his bid to cling to power, he wants to drag the whole of Europe into the mire with him” that’s because he knows his vile little life depends on the continuation & widening the conflict & even a third world war is no issue to him, because with peace comes accountability. Ukraine is suffering massive casualties.
There is no Russian threat to Europe—and there never could be. Russia, with 145 million people and vast natural resources across 17.5 million square kilometres, has no need to invade a depleted Europe of 500 million crammed into 5 million square kilometres of resource-scarce land. The real aggression comes from NATO—an expansionist tool of Dollar hegemony, Davos elites, BlackRock, Vanguard, and corporate predators like Monsanto.
As Columbia’s Jeffrey Sachs (3/8/23) stated:
“The war began with the violent overthrow of Ukraine’s President Yanukovych in February 2014—a U.S.-backed coup, overt and covert, in service of NATO expansion.”
Russia isn’t the invader—it’s the last bulwark against Western imperialism
“The primary interest of the United States over the last century – in the First, Second and Cold Wars – has been the relationship between Germany and Russia, because united they would be the only power that could threaten us – and so we have to make sure that doesn’t happen.”
Look for legal woes coming at Nigel Farage (like Le Pen or Bolsonaro..) and also an accelerated economic collapse blamed on Putin, Trump or someone. Then we will hear a new catch phrase along the lines of build back better. It may take another plandemic or similar emergency.
Good call, although you will note that Reform have already signalled they are 100% Pro-Israel - that keeps them safe from that particular side of politics.
It is obviously time for Nigel Farage. CLEARLY, neither the Conservatives nor Labour can even field reputable candidates that can guide the country and make realistic decisions. The only thing done over the past ten years that was of benefit to the U.K. was to leave the EU. Just peruse the list and try to remember anything else positive. Starmer, Sunak, Truss, Johnson, May……
MPs rebelling verbally means nothing. Let's see how they vote. The last real rebels were turned into independents by Starmer. It's amazing how main UK parties have come to see voters as a way to implement licenced grifting and that's all. They just want your votes. Nobody has a post empire plan. Nobody!
(Lies about WMDs aside) Blair's "Education Education Education" was a plan, although it was too focused on academic subjects and not enough on practical subjects; half the population going to university is nonsense. Britain needs skilled doers, not just penpushers.
Thirty years after "Education Education Education" Britain has a new motto: "Ukraine Ukraine Ukraine". That definitely isn't a plan. Just a recipe for disaster.
On that we can agree. Both of my brothers learned trades (welder and car mechanic) at the local technical college in Southampton. A brilliant college and both have gone on to have good careers on the tools. We massively undervalue vocational skills in Britain. Not only that, but despite Education Education Education, we want to import highly qualified labour and have more people perform basic manual labour like fruit picking. It’s bizarre!
As with the NHS and the BBC, fortunes will end up in the hands of private consultants, experts and crappy agencies. If we were serious about our military, we would restart our shipbuilding industry which would probably feed our steel industry. Where does all the money go from subletting our military sites to commerce? I am no socialist but public ownership of certain industries is essential, I include in that the Prison service, Water and Rail networks. Privatisation has failed and resulted in profiteering and a death of civil engineering and long term planning. We have become a very sick country indeed and I’m afraid greed is one of the main culprits.
I agree with you John, and would be all in favour of the nationalisation of the defence industry. Like you, I am no socialist either. But one of the reasons for Russia’s success in defence production is the centralisation of effort into a single conglomerate - Rostec over the past decade
Russia are supposed to be looking for non military uses for the military technologies. That feedback loop is definitely missing in UK industries.
The BBC saddens me. It was always my go-to place for news but I became more critical of the phrases and terms used. Eventually realising what it doesn't say shows how compromised it is.
Indeed. I feel that same.
Saddens you, it has been a vile anti British anti white propaganda channel for decades. It is absolute filth & full of parasitical disgusting champagne socialist who need to be sacked and thrown out on the streets. Have you just woken up.
The BBC is state propaganda, it's a myth making machine👍
It’s all a bit of a nonsense really.
By 2035 Trump will be 93, if he’s still in the land of the living, and Starmer, Macron and Mertz will be comfortably retired and inconsequential footnotes in the history books, if that.
The conflict in Ukraine will by then have been resolved in Russia’s favour and Starmer’s promises will have long been forgotten, as will have been his ludicrous hundred-year security treaty with a country that will likely no longer exist.
All politics are domestic as someone once said, and we should bear that in mind when considering how much value to ascribe to Starmer’s attempts to drum up positive media coverage by inventing a non-existent threat from Russia, and promising on behalf of future governments to spend enormous sums of money to address it.
You’ve nailed it. Those shameless brigands gathered at The Hague are mere foot notes - little more.
As ever on this topic I feel the need to point out that spending 5% of GDP on 'defence' is for the UK over 11% of government budget. This is because IMF figures show that Britain's government spending (~budget) is 44% of GDP. (The USA's government budget is only about 36% of GDP.)
Just to put figures on that. If the actual spend was £5bn, UK GDP would be £100bn, and the UK government budget would be £44bn. So 'defence' spending would be 5/44 = 11.36%.
In other words, presenting 'defence' spending as 5% significantly understates the real figure in cash terms. That's 11.36% of our budget that we can't spend on health, education, pensions...
The thing every British taxpayer should be angry about, if they understood what was going on, is that we are doubling 'defence' spending, not because the British people have asked for it, but because Donald Trump ******* says so!
We are basically allowing the USA to act as a second tax collector in the UK. We will be paying tax (and national insurance etc) to the UK government, but also now paying tax to the USA. NATO is morphing into a multinational tax collector to fund the US military industrial complex.
So having extricated ourselves from that other multinational tax collector, the EU, Britain is now submitting to another one, the USA. They TELL US what to pay and, like a coward, we just pay it.
I'm struggling to see Britain as a 'sovereign' nation here.
The 'Special Relationship' don't you know. So special that we have been kow-towing to the US for 70 years, and now we've regained our sovereignty from the Brussels kleptocrats we have no idea what to do with it.
'The war in Ukraine is not an existential issue for Britain. Only a fantasist would believe that Russia is about to invade the UK or has plans to do so in the future.'
Very true, Ian. This is the crux of the problem with Starmer. He is ideological and intransigent where reason, pragmatism and good sense are called for, and calculating, technocratic and transactional where a healthy sense of one's values and society's values at large are called for.
He is exceptionally skilled at choosing the wrong tools for the job and getting the balance between forces terribly wrong. He is one of worst political leaders in the world. Not that he's the worst human or worst person, but that he's fundamentally very poor at understanding what he is and what he is not, what he needs to be or do and what he doesn't in any given situation, and what's called of him.
He's also exceptionally bad (as most western leaders are who arose as the power of the Liberal Order relative to others tapered off) at understanding IR and world politics. He lives in an ideological bubble where hubris and hypocrisy prevent him from seeing anything clearly. When political orders begin to break down, those that continue to believe in them become both too blind and too brave for their own good. Starmer exemplifies this tendency perfectly.
You break his flaws and weaknesses down very well, Ian, and I imagine you could write 10 pieces putting him to the sword, albeit he is such a dreadful bore to write about.
Thanks Shane. Two light hearted responses - Starmer has certainly chosen lots of tools for the job… And, I have yet to become bored of writing about how useless he is, though there may come a day… All the best.
Haha, he sure has)) There's another feather in his cap - the skilled choosing of tools.
You're welcome, Ian. I know he's more insidious and destructive than this simplification, but he does remind of that Noel Gallagher quip about Liam: 'He's a man with a fork in a world of soup'. One would hope Starmer's brand of leadership suits no age, however.
excellent summing up Shane. I thought it almost impossible to have someone as bad as Boris as PM but he has managed it. Then again i never thought that he would be anything more than what he is, his treatment of JC being a case in point , i think for the most part he is very much controlled by those around him .
Cheers Patrick, appreciate that.
Putting the knife into JC was probably a right of passage for him that proved he had expunged every single thing that could be deemed socialist from his politics. I had forgotten what he did there, thanks for reminding me. He really is a special kind of weasel.
They're all terrible now. They all have pretty much the same economics with a few trifling differences between them. Where they differ is how much they do or don't pander to different groups on gender, race, pronouns etc. Is exactly what the megarich always wanted - for everyone to forget about wealth and just kill each other over unreconcilable issues.
I will have my own piece on Starmer out tomorrow morning if you fancy a read. I'll also subscribe to you as I suspect we'll have a solid exchange of thoughts and ideas. Cheers mate))
Starmer's move is about keeping the US, especially Trump, off the UK’s back. When you're a middle power in a bloc dominated by a superpower, you bend when the pressure comes.
But the catch is always domestic: because every pound spent to appease Washington is a pound taken from hospitals, pensions, and support for the disabled. The public might not connect the dots in think-tank terms, but they feel the trade-off. And that's where the danger lies.
A PM who looks like he's spending big abroad while cutting back at home just hands ammo to his rivals (inside and outside the party).
This isn’t about moral clarity or global leadership. But the thing about power is, once you start bleeding it at home, your position abroad doesn't hold up for long either.
Indeed.
One of my biggest complaints about reading Geopolitical analysts is that they, to a person, are economically illiterate.
First off, why would you put debt servicing as a ratio to GDP? What does the GDP have to do with debt servicing? Absolutely nothing. In fact, if the government wanted to increase GDP by 5% all they have to do is increase government spending by 5%---because GDP, for the bizarre reason that we allow government economists to decide these things, includes government spending. Nor does it provide a quick county-to-country comparison because all these countries are under a different tax regime and all their GDPs have a different proportion that is attributable to government spending.
So, what are the tax receipts that the UK is using as income to service their debt? That is your starting point. What is the trend in these receipts? Are they declining, increasing? Do they match any increases in government debt over the same time period? What is the burden to the generic household and what can they bear?
If you desperately want to use GDP... What is the proportion of government spending to GDP? Is it matched by a similar increase-decrease in the non-government spending?
And secondly, the UK is staring at both a banking crisis and a potential sovereign debt crisis. This would take a long and complicated discourse to fully explain so I'm not going to here. But I will attempt a brief argument...
Why do you think the establishment is so urgently gung-ho on access to Ukrainian, Russian, Syrian and Iranian resources? Not to mention places like Burkina Faso and the talk of Canada's abundant resources? Can you ever remember a war where banks could not finance both sides of the conflict and thus be assured of always surviving that conflict profitably? Such is not the case in a sanctions environment. How are their investments in Project Ukraine going to get paid off?
And when there are deflationary sources at play in a nation where currency is in fact debt and requires inflation of the money supply (ie fresh loans) to ensure past loans can be paid and bankruptcies kept to a healthy minimum, strange things can happen to bank balance sheets. Keep in mind too that in a deflationary environment, corporate receipts decline, the value of corporations and their equity declines and the value of hard assets like land can decline. All of these are held as perfected collateral in the banking system. When that collateral becomes less perfected, either lending is reined in or creditors are forced to up their collateral. Difficult to do and usually the system then falls into a vicious deflationary cycle.
This is the precipice on which the UK is perched and so yes all of these wars are existential to the colonialist UK, in particular the one in the Ukraine. The great thing is that as Project Ukraine fails, so will British and European banks and finally the world might be free of the European colonialism that has been skimming off the income of us regular folk for centuries, while keeping entire nations under their thumb. Maybe we even get a World Bank loan bailout that has forced sterilization of Brits and Europeans as one of its requirements, just like the West did to its colonies in the 1970s.
One of my biggest complaints is that pundits who start their extremely long winded / half-baked comments with an insult are twats.
I know but you began your missive with "Keir Starmer is a Moralizing Hypocrite" and that insult is up there in bold black and white at the top of the page, so what can we do? I'd hate to think there's more than one moralizing hypocrite in this room...
😁
This really sums it up 😘”Like the worst type of gauche Gucci socialist, the Prime Minister is a moralising hypocrite, lecturing citizens from on high while living a life of unimaginable privilege.”
excellent Ian. The benefits system is not so much broken as the fact Govts over the last 40 yrs have followed a neoliberal economic system that has failed . The only people benefitting being those at the top. Thru PFI we have had billions of public money given to private hands and that is only one example . As you pointed out our general spending is in no way extreme, some of the poorest benefits/pensions in Europe. The real problem is trying to maintain the Global power delusion. More billions for the Trident replacement costing around 18% of the overall budget, a further 20 billion underspend also on projected projects. so even the 50 billion we do spend on defence isnt as it seems, failure also to not invest in newer technology and keeping on with outdated tanks. The figure as far as bribes/graft, must be mind blowing ! The trouble with K S is as i have said before a weak man trying to be tough, he has no real political skill and i dont see him surviving the Parliament .
Whilst the poodles of war gather for their war gaming high jinks at the NATO bullshit and shill fest, indulging in their endless blue sky schlock, we have our own corgi - Cur Stormer, subordinate to SS Ober Gruppen Merz - straddling the leg of the Orange cyclops, that shambling, new world bully whilst on terra firma, all the roads to Rome remain broken, the trains don’t work and cheap, shit jobs mushroom from the post-industrial corpse. Endless photo-ops at The Hague of gurning non-entities who airily summon imaginary money from thin air as the NCB’s presses work overtime, busily producing tomorrow’s economic desolation for all, won’t cut it: the European electorate is beginning to see through their lies and fantasies. This is the death agony, folks, and, today, this hour, is a ringside seat.
So, let's get this straight: when Starmer came to power, the public was told that the Tories left a massive hole in the public finances, which he had to urgently bridge and at least one of the ways to do that was to cut winter fuel allowance for the pensioners, which would allegedly save £1.4-£1.7bn. He has since done a U-turn on that one, which means that the British public still has the same hole in the finances that Starmer reportedly inherited. Therefore, his solution is to find another way to cut welfare and this time by a bigger amount, which he highly likely will need to do another U-turn on? And what do we call those who keep doing the same thing over and over again expecting a different outcome? 🤡
Having said that, do you notice that the one thing that no British PM ever does to bridge the dreaded hole in public finances is raise taxes for the corporate and banking cabal! Instead, they ALL talk of cutting taxes for the transnational business cartels, which already do everything to avoid them through various loopholes. The public in the meantime only sees tax increases by various means as every government speaks of taxing the wealthy more with the "wealthy" being the definition of those with salaries of £50K+ and tinpot businesses with the turnover of £200-300K per annum.
The main issue for the public in the west regardless of the country is that we no longer have any statesmen in charge of any western country. We have managers and administrators lobbied into power by the aforementioned corporate and banking cabal, who see their roles as legislating and regulating in its favour. This is the main reason why Trump is completely unable to achieve anything in any peace negotiations. He cannot see the difference between making a business deal and negotiating an agreement between two countries or to put it simply between the corporation and the state. Therefore, he will be a complete failure unworthy of a mention in the history books in the end. Just like Starmer, Macron, Merz and all the rest of them.
I don't want to sound like a conspiracy theorist, but: "one thing that no British PM ever does . . . " - Why did money used to be thrown at the tory party by a lot of large firms, and why was Corbyn metaphorically defenestrated? Money is used by people with lots of it to buy influence, and that influence is generally directed at getting themselves more money (and more influence, and so on ad infinitum). But I'm sure you know this, as is evident from your last paragraph.
Russia is not our enemy. The real threat is already here, embedded within our own institutions, dictating policies in the civil service and beyond. A well-organized Muslim network advances its agenda unchecked, enabled by weak, spineless liberal ministers who have surrendered to dhimmitude.
The idea that Russia wants to invade Europe is absurd. We’re broke, resource-poor, and a fractured society, one that no citizen ever voted for. Britain has degenerated into a failing state, clinging to delusions of past grandeur while sliding into third-world autocracy. Along with other Western nations, we’ve recklessly created a Frankenstein’s monster in Ukraine, a disaster that will plague us for generations. Ukraine is albatross around our neck, you are so correct to say “I consider Zelenskya far bigger existential threat to Britain than Russia. In his bid to cling to power, he wants to drag the whole of Europe into the mire with him” that’s because he knows his vile little life depends on the continuation & widening the conflict & even a third world war is no issue to him, because with peace comes accountability. Ukraine is suffering massive casualties.
There is no Russian threat to Europe—and there never could be. Russia, with 145 million people and vast natural resources across 17.5 million square kilometres, has no need to invade a depleted Europe of 500 million crammed into 5 million square kilometres of resource-scarce land. The real aggression comes from NATO—an expansionist tool of Dollar hegemony, Davos elites, BlackRock, Vanguard, and corporate predators like Monsanto.
As Columbia’s Jeffrey Sachs (3/8/23) stated:
“The war began with the violent overthrow of Ukraine’s President Yanukovych in February 2014—a U.S.-backed coup, overt and covert, in service of NATO expansion.”
Russia isn’t the invader—it’s the last bulwark against Western imperialism
“The primary interest of the United States over the last century – in the First, Second and Cold Wars – has been the relationship between Germany and Russia, because united they would be the only power that could threaten us – and so we have to make sure that doesn’t happen.”
George Friedman .
Look for legal woes coming at Nigel Farage (like Le Pen or Bolsonaro..) and also an accelerated economic collapse blamed on Putin, Trump or someone. Then we will hear a new catch phrase along the lines of build back better. It may take another plandemic or similar emergency.
Good call, although you will note that Reform have already signalled they are 100% Pro-Israel - that keeps them safe from that particular side of politics.
Wether we can afford the increase in defense spending is probably irrelevant.
The 🇺🇸 wants to see a large increase in EU defense budgets and obviously hopes it gets the contracts, they win$$$$ we loose.
Our infrastructure and quality of life will continue to erode and I suspect that is the plan.
The good news is that as everything (other than military spending) collapses our chances of meeting the "green agenda" targets will increase.
It is all driven by BS not AI👍🤝
It is obviously time for Nigel Farage. CLEARLY, neither the Conservatives nor Labour can even field reputable candidates that can guide the country and make realistic decisions. The only thing done over the past ten years that was of benefit to the U.K. was to leave the EU. Just peruse the list and try to remember anything else positive. Starmer, Sunak, Truss, Johnson, May……
MPs rebelling verbally means nothing. Let's see how they vote. The last real rebels were turned into independents by Starmer. It's amazing how main UK parties have come to see voters as a way to implement licenced grifting and that's all. They just want your votes. Nobody has a post empire plan. Nobody!
(Lies about WMDs aside) Blair's "Education Education Education" was a plan, although it was too focused on academic subjects and not enough on practical subjects; half the population going to university is nonsense. Britain needs skilled doers, not just penpushers.
Thirty years after "Education Education Education" Britain has a new motto: "Ukraine Ukraine Ukraine". That definitely isn't a plan. Just a recipe for disaster.
On that we can agree. Both of my brothers learned trades (welder and car mechanic) at the local technical college in Southampton. A brilliant college and both have gone on to have good careers on the tools. We massively undervalue vocational skills in Britain. Not only that, but despite Education Education Education, we want to import highly qualified labour and have more people perform basic manual labour like fruit picking. It’s bizarre!