#WORLD #WORLDWIDE #ITALY #ANARCHISM #News #Journal #Update - (en) #Italy, UCADI: The enemies of the #EU: #GreatBritain (ca, de, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]

 Liz Truss's entrance at no. 10 of Down Steet along with her government of only

ten white males among 23 ministers with portfolios was overshadowed by the
queen's death, her obscene and anachronistic funeral, and the accession of
Charles III to the throne. If the government does not lack the diversity of
origins of colors and genres, the difference in social class is certainly
lacking: they are all very rich! This is not really new because there were also
Muslim exponents in Boris Johnson's government, but everything serves the media
image to try to intercept the population of a country where ethnic differences
and living standards are constantly growing. But if you look at the government
program, it is quite clear that the one chaired by a woman can be as infamous as
that chaired by a man. The same applies to the ministers' origin of color.

But let's get to the facts

Inflation is skyrocketing and now exceeds 11%, but according to Goldman Sachs it
will go over 22% next year, bills to be frozen require a combined £ 100bn plus
plan that will blow up UK public debt, the system sanitation is in disrepair and
would require resources that are not there, production is going through a phase
of contraction, transport and logistics for supplying supermarkets are in crisis
and so is agricultural production. Brexit has all its negative effects felt,
hidden thanks to the war in Ukraine that bleeds the coffers of the state. The
only thing that benefits from this is the war industry, which is fattening on war
profits. The most popular job is that of contractor serving the various agencies
that recruit "volunteers" for Ukraine.
In response, the government proposes to cut taxes on the rich. The government
announced the cancellation of the highest tax rate, which was 45 per cent for
incomes over £ 150,000 per year (about 170,000 euros), and reduced the minimum
from 20 to 19. Businesses will not have to face the 19 to 25 per cent corporate
tax hike that was foreseen by the previous Boris Johnson government, and which
Kwarteng abolished, thus giving up revenue of £ 12 billion a year (about 13
billion euros). The increase in social security contributions for workers and
employers has also been canceled, a measure that will cost another 14 billion
pounds, mostly intended for a (totally insufficient) increase in funds for the
national health system. The tax reduction will be financed out of debt, producing
an additional £ 200 million burden.
The government hopes that the tax cut will push the rich to invest and meanwhile
Truss does not know how to mend with the Bank of England, frightened by the need
to raise rates well above 3%, which - moreover - already considers the country in
recession. But Kwasi Kwarteng, the new Treasury Minister, 47, the son of an
economist father and a lawyer mother, promises to solve the problem, who arrived
in England from Ghana as students in the 1950s, one of the rising stars of the
conservative party. Outspoken, large, "soulmate" by Liz Truss for many years with
whom she wrote the ultraliberal manifesto "Britannia Unchained" in 2010, just 47
years old. A staunch supporter of Brexit, he is a critic of the "laziness of the
British who lose all initiative once they get a job" and promises tears and blood
to workers.
The key man in the government is said to be married to lawyer Harriet

Edwards and formerly a lover

of former interior minister Amber Rudd, Kwarteng, always knows which side to
take; before he was a loyalist of Boris Johnson, today of Liz Truss, with whom,
however, he has a professional and friendly relationship for over ten years.
Thanks to the financial wealth of his parents, the Thatcherian Kwarteng comes
from excellent and above all private schools. High school in Eton, where Boris
Johnson and David Cameron also studied. Then university, with a degree from
Cambridge in History and Classical Studies, a few semesters at Harvard and
working at JP Morgan and in the City. There were all the conditions for political
shock for the conservatives. In short, we are dealing with a group of wealthy
Englishmen who gather at the exclusive Club - the Government - even if not only
for men, as the English tradition would like.
Meanwhile, the reaction of the markets to the government's political choices was
immediate. British government bonds have lost a lot of value and their yields
have reached 4%, a very high value and not seen since 2010.

The more the price of a security falls, the higher the yield it ensures will be:
it is an inverse relationship that represents the fact that the more a security
is perceived as risky, the more investors will ask for a high interest rate, the
so-called risk premium.

The damage of Brexit

The Office of Budget Responsibility, (OBR), an independent agency of the British
government, believes Britain's GDP contracted by 0.5 percent in the first four
months of 2021, due to confusion and reorganization due to the new trade
agreement between the United Kingdom and the countries of the European Union, minus
favorable compared to when the UK was part of the EU. Furthermore, both exports
and imports are destined to drop by 15 percent compared to a possible stay within
the European Union.
For its part, the European Commission predicts that by 2022 the United Kingdom
will lose 2.25 percent of GDP as a result of the new trade agreement. While trade
data and estimates are easy to calculate because they apply to measurable
quantities - tons of goods transiting in and out of the UK - Brexit is believed
to have had and will have consequences in hundreds of different sectors, from
'labor market education, and these are all consequences more difficult to measure
even more due to the impact of the coronavirus pandemic, which has
caused an economic and social crisis almost all over the world, also because it
is extremely difficult to separate the Brexit factor from the economic crisis
generated by the impact of the lockdowns.
In recent months, around 20,000 European hauliers working in the United Kingdom
have left the country, almost certainly due to fears of bureaucratic difficulties
due to Brexit. And already from the first months of 2020, about 40 thousand tests
to obtain a driver's license have been canceled due to the pandemic. It is
expected that in the days of
Christmas supermarkets may have very few turkeys available, a traditional dish in
British Christmas lunches. This is because while the small breeders mainly use
local labor, the large distributors relied on European skilled labor that was
hired to cope with the increase in requests during the Christmas period. Now due
to Brexit it will no longer be possible to take on these specialized jobs (work
permits for Europeans have been reduced to a few categories of ultra-specialized
workers) and it will be difficult to import turkeys from Europe, given the
increasingly high costs of imports. , caused by the increase in bureaucracy at
the border.
Furthermore, the dismissal of European legislation on personal data protection by
disapplying the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) represents further
damage to the British economy as if the United Kingdom entered into data sharing
agreements with countries not very strict, or if it decides not to cooperate with
the European Commission on these points, the EU could decide not to consider the
United Kingdom a safe country for sharing personal data starting from 2025, with
very wide and partly unpredictable consequences on economic and commercial relations.
To overcome all this, the government of Liz Truss, as did Johnson's, believes
that the United Kingdom should turn its commercial and diplomatic interest
outside of Europe to strengthen ties with countries that belong to the
Commonwealth, or to what remains of the British Empire, including especially
India, Australia, Singapore, New Zealand. The idea is that the United Kingdom can
replace its European partners with the Commonwealth countries and consequently
regain some dynamism from relations with the economies of Southeast Asia, such as
Singapore and Malaysia: madness!

The damage of the war in Ukraine

Furthermore, in this perspective, the British government run by the conservatives
is focusing heavily on the war economy: it is committed to increasing military
spending by 28 billion over the next four years, to launch an entirely British
satellite by 2022, and above all to overcoming the The maximum number of nuclear
warheads that the United Kingdom will be able to keep, which will increase for
the first time in thirty years, from 180 to 260, with the deployment of one of
the two Queen Elizabeth class aircraft carriers, the last ones built by the
British navy, in the seas Asia, which is likely not to be liked by China.

The British government underestimates the fact that the war in Ukraine has
brought the BICS countries closer to Russia, detaching India from Great Britain,
also because the United Kingdom does not have a clear position on some internal
disputes within the Commonwealth, such as the territorial one between India and
Pakistan and this undermines the internal equilibrium of the association, proof
of that
that the relations between the partners are increasingly reduced to ritual and
formal relations, as the queen's funeral has highlighted. It occurs to me that
replacing the countries of the European Union as trading partners with those of
the Commonwealth will be practically impossible: there is no other market in the
world as rich and geographically close to the British territory as the European
one! Even if the United Kingdom concluded a very favorable trade agreement with
all the Commonwealth countries, this would be insufficient to cover the losses
caused by Brexit: the overall GDP of the Commonwealth is about 8,800 billion
euros, just over half of the Union's GDP. European, not to mention the enormous
geographical distances between the various countries that are part of it, which
would greatly limit the scope of trade due to the costs of logistics.
And then the new generations of Britons may not have the necessary cultural and
linguistic tools to strengthen ties with countries on the other side of the
world. According to a European Commission survey, the United Kingdom ranks last
among European countries for the ability of people aged 15 to 30 to speak two or
more languages: fewer than one in three young Britons know a second language in
addition to 'English also because the English, snooty and imperialist as they
are, think that others should know their language. If the British government did
seriously with its ambitions from Global Britain it should have invested in time
in linguistic and cultural knowledge to shape a more open UK in the post-pandemic
and post-Brexit world.

The disunited kingdom

But the biggest obstacle to the realization of these plans is constituted by the
autonomist and independence forces of Northern Ireland, Scotland and to a lesser
extent Wales. Without them, in fact, there is no longer a United Kingdom, only
England.
After the Brexit agreements, Northern Ireland remained in the European common
market and customs union to prevent a physical barrier from being built with
Ireland. However, the stay in Northern Ireland has led to many new checks and
paperwork for goods arriving from the rest of the UK, which have already caused
inconvenience to people living in Northern Ireland, but also economic damage for
British companies. . It is in the interest of Northern Ireland and the British
companies themselves that the dispute does not lead to the imposition of
reciprocal duties on incoming products. In Scotland, the regional government is
pressing for a new referendum on independence and interest in returning to the EU
is growing.
We will have to wait for the peoples of Great Britain to mourn for the death of
the sovereign so that the independentist impulses will resume and there is no
doubt that the frightening economic crisis that is preparing will turn into a
social crisis. After the announcement of the economic measures decided by the
government, the pound lost 5% of its value and i
Labor, in response to the Prime Minister's policies, hastened to ask for early
elections and to propose a state body that deals with energy production,
reversing the trend towards privatization of economic structures. There is a real
risk that in the face of growing difficulties, each of the parts of the country
that lives with suffering cohabitation within Great Britain will seek salvation
for itself, abandoning the rest of the country to its fate.
If the United Kingdom were to lose parts, in the next few years its ability to
relaunch itself on the international level would also suffer and we would be more
than satisfied as Eiropei, having at heart the well-being of the peoples of
Europe and the aspiration for peace. The dismemberment of the country would be a
substantial help for Europe in solving its problems.

Gianni Cimbalo

http://www.ucadi.org/2022/09/29/i-nemici-dellu-e-la-gran-bretagna/
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