Strange Times
Things are falling apart and the shortest suicide note in history
Rishi Sunak announces the upcoming resignation of whoever planned the outdoor press conference
It has certainly been a strange couple of weeks. Last Wednesday there was a (fortunately unsuccessful) assassination attempt on Robert Fico, the Prime Minister of Slovakia. Then on Sunday the helicopter carrying the President of Iran to a ceremony on the border with Azerbaijan crashed into a hillside with no survivors. On Monday, the Presidency (not the President) of Ukraine expired, but there will not be any elections, while by contrast, this Wednesday there was a surprise announcement from British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak of a snap Election on July 4th.
The fact that this came on the same day as a frankly bizarre announcement by the deputy head of the British Government about a National Resilience network implying that all households should have 3 day emergency rations raised a lot of eyebrows. Presumably this was an attempt to repackage the disaster of lockdown as somehow ‘brilliant and world-class’ while simultaneously keeping everyone paranoid. Throw in an unusual statement from Buckingham Palace that the Royals would suspend almost all engagements until the election and the conspiracy theorists have gone into a frenzy about Sunak wanting (or not wanting) a war with Russia.
Meanwhile, as the picture shows, the actual announcement was not made in the new multi million pound Media centre, but outside number 10 in the pouring rain, with Rishi Sunak not even given an umbrella. The staging couldn’t have been worse if they tried - including a loudspeaker in the background blasting out the New Labour Anthem from 1997 - D-ream’s “Things can only get better” (spoiler alert, they didn’t). This begs the question(s)
If Sunak was in control of events, why did he do it in the pouring rain?
If he listened to advice from his PR team that was that foolish, how much of the rest of his premiership has been similarly based on such ‘wisdom’?
Do his advisors all actually work for Labour?
Frankly there is no good answer. Saying Labour doesn’t have a plan while you are standing there with no umbrella and clearly no ability to check a weather forecast is so comically bad. But it gets worse…
The Shortest Suicide note in History
Today, Sunday, the genius advisors to the British Prime Minister have announced National Service will be compulsory for 18 to 21 year olds, at a stroke ensuring that nobody under the age of 21 will vote conservative, and nobody with Children over the age of 10 will either. Thus to appease their core vote and please the Military Industrial Complex, they alienate every swing voter. In 1983, Michael Foot’s Labour Manifesto was described as the Longest Suicide Note in History. This looks like the shortest.
Elsewhere, Europe is staggering as its economy reels from massively inflated energy prices, US imposed sanctions on Russia (Janet Yelland was once again threatening Austrian this banks this week) and the German coalition government is struggling to stay intact. Meanwhile the Dutch finally formed a government (generally referred to as ‘far right’, but we prefer the term anti-globalist), that just passed a motion declaring the chant ‘from the river to the sea’ to be a criminal offence at the same time as Ireland, Spain and Norway recognised Palestine as a country. The ICC recommended both sides in the Gaza conflict face prosecution and were threatened with sanctions by the Biden White House, for including Israel at the same time as the US is also threatening sanctions on European Banks dealing with Russia, imposing sanctions/tariffs on Chinese exports under spurious claims of public subsidies (while massively subsidising its own industries though the so called ‘Inflation Reduction act’), vetoing resolutions at the UN and ‘discussing’ confiscation of Russia’s foreign exchange reserves. In effect, undermining every institution of the so called rules based international order it claims to be defending.
Every day we see a new example of the west undermining the very Rules-based Order it claims to be defending
Elsewhere, the latest ‘protests’ in Georgia are also interesting as the government tries to pass a foreign agents’ bill that would reveal the funding of the 20,000 NGOs that operate in the country. Anyone receiving more than 20% of their income from a foreign country has to declare this. The protests look classic ‘color revolution’ and there is only one obvious loser from this legislation, which is ironic, since it was based on legislation the US has had itself since 1938. Those defending the protests do so on the dubious proposition that the bill would prevent Georgia joining the EU which a lot of people want and it must thus be stopped. A lot of people think we saw this movie a decade ago in Ukraine.
Meanwhile, President Macron rushed to New Caledonia, where large protests are taking place in response to changes to the legislation being pushed through from Paris. France is presenting itself as a ‘Pacific power’ as part of the US led coalition aimed at pivoting to Asia, but in the wake of Mali rejecting French ‘oversight’ last year and Niger, ‘asking politely” (several times) for the US to take its forces out of the country, rejecting its ‘offer’ of protection from terrorists and inviting the Russians in instead, the so called ‘Global South’ clearly has other ideas about their perceived role in US led coalitions. Forcing people to ‘pick a side’ doesn’t always get the answer you wanted.
Disruption is everywhere as the inherent contradictions of the false narrative of Freedom and Democracy versus autocracy run into populist (i.e democratic) pushback and are being met with increasingly authoritarian restrictions by ‘Democratic’ governments, particularly on freedom of expression. Canada’s online harms bill being the prime example.
Against this background, Elections are coming up for the European Parliament in early June and the anti Globalists look set to dominate, as we warned back in January (see Farmers at the gates) much to the horror of the Globalists at the WEF and presumably they will be much relived that Sunak took the option to get the Blairites back in number 10 (officially) as soon as possible by calling an early Election - and certainly before the threat of Trump appears in November. Sunak and his Chancellor Jeremy Hunt have basically been a Blair/ Brown tribute act, as were Johnson and Gove and Cameron and Osborne before them, which is why the damage done to the UK economy by the original Blairite revolution has not been reversed.
The only successful redistribution of wealth under New Labour will be from Britain to other countries
The reality for the British Electorate is that little will actually change as neither main party will address the historical errors, let alone the two most recent, disastrous, Globalist policies - mass immigration and Net Zero - that are the root of most of the populist protests. Thus instead they will focus on throwing more money the UK doesn’t have at a (still) unreformed social system that doesn’t work, while committing large proportions of future Budgets to the US and UK military Industrial Complex in support of US foreign Policy - this being the so called ‘special relationship regardless of who is in the White House or Downing St. The few policies they will bring in to appease their base, principally aimed at taxing ‘the rich’, will almost certainly only hit the middle classes (as always happens) and the only wealth redistribution they will achieve will be from Britain to other countries.
One point that will doubtless have escaped the brilliant (sic) minds at the Treasury and Labour headquarters is that the mobile capital they are targeting is exactly that, and will go to the Gulf. With a multi polar world, the obvious financial centre is no longer London, especially if they confiscate your reserves. It is Dubai. Equi-distant from Hong Kong, Singapore and Europe, it is also close to India and Africa and, from the City’s point of view on trading, it is in a similar time zone, so can do Asia in the morning and the US in the afternoon. It also doesn’t want to take half your salary, half your estate when you die, doesn’t have penal property taxes or consumption taxes and has no (imminent?) plans for a wealth tax. Sure, the weather isn’t great for half the year, but maybe ask Rishi about late spring in London?