The battered UK economy, humiliated for years, is now paying the price. A huge wave of strikes has hit Britain. A huge increase in the cost of living is the basic reason. The other reasons are to do with the effective collapse of the economy. Some pundits say 20% of the population, 3 million people, could be forced into poverty next year. (That’s in addition to the hordes of homeless.)
Whether that number’s right or wrong, nobody’s saying it’s impossible. Even the nation of parasitic Uriah Heeps Britain has become apparently knows a bullet when it sees one coming. Let alone a barrage of industrial action bullets, all of which will hit hard.
The Tories have been slavishly typically conservative. They’re anti-public sector, anti-NHS, and they’ve used austerity in successive governments for years. Now, it won’t work. The NHS has been visibly falling to pieces for years. Inflation is making a mockery of wages. Energy prices and demand over winter are expected to cause severe hardship and blackouts.
Rents are also going up, just as everything else hits the fan in keeping with the US “rent genocide” since COVID. That’s expected to do more long-term fundamental damage to the public’s strained finances.
Then there’s Brexit. Making doing business in Europe uneconomic, the UK’s biggest market, turns out not to be a good idea. Stopping access for foreign workers was also a bad move. Now, even if they could do normal business, they don’t have the people to do the business.
Europe was only too happy to take the UK’s financial sector, too. That sector just happens to be the major peg in the UK economy. Hundreds of financial companies have left the UK for pretty much anywhere else, preferably Europe. Europe, in turn, is forcing some eurozone trading companies to relocate.
In short, a disgraceful literally nation-breaking shambles has become a humiliating disaster on all fronts at the same time. Years ago, I called Brexit “Dunkirk in reverse”, being the reverse of a miraculous let-off for Britain. Now, you could include turning the nation into something like the fall of Singapore as well.
Government debt, in a crashing revenue environment, is potentially lethal. It could actually bankrupt the country. The deficit in spending in October this year alone required £13.5 billion in borrowings. If that’s average, the overall deficit per year would be well over £135 billion.
A shrinking economy doesn’t help matters. Nor will “austerity”, however self-righteous, solve the problem. To paraphrase Thatcher, you can’t spend what you won’t have, let alone the potential revenue you’ve mindlessly thrown away since Brexit.
The UK economy is looking more like a desperate car boot sale by the minute. The food supply is looking very much like a crashing house of cards. Farmers are barely making any money. If they shut up shop, that means more imports, and a further hit to the economy, enforcing higher food prices perhaps indefinitely.
The NHS, that folksy and constant trail of disasters that has the interesting task of keeping people out of the grave, is now utterly bizarre. With massive staff shortages, they’re paying at least one private doctor £5200 for one shift. A basic nurse’s salary, per month, is £4541.
…And there aren’t enough nurses to start with. This really is privatization gone mad. Presumably, when they run out of cleaners, they’ll hire private cleaners, at 10 times the salary?
The UK government has said it won’t negotiate with the nurses. It will learn soon enough that reality doesn’t negotiate, either. At this rate, all that will be left of the UK is a whimper. Never has there been a more ignorant, inept, and insipid government in British history.
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Disclaimer
The opinions expressed in this Op-Ed are those of the author. They do not purport to reflect the opinions or views of the Digital Journal or its members.
