WORLD WORLDWIDE EUROPE ITALY - news journal UPDATE - (en) Italy, UCADI #186 - The decline of the British Empire (ca, de, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]

 The last gravedigger of the empire, Rishi Sunak, throws in the towel and

calls elections for July 4th, calling the country to an electoral
consultation, while he leads a party in deep and irreversible necrosis.
The situation cannot be worse: the economy is a disaster, Brexit has
turned out to be a filthy nonsense. Instead of strengthening the
country, it has weakened it in all fields, definitively transforming it
into a platform from which some of the most reckless and dishonest
financial speculators in world finance operate. In other words, the
country has become what it was: a country of corsairs, pirates,
buccaneers, adventurers, arms sellers, mercenaries, soldiers of fortune.
Observers agree in identifying the causes of this decline in the effects
of Brexit. Already in 2022, the International Monetary Fund had strongly
criticized the economic maneuver launched by the then Prime Minister Liz
Truss, which was characterized by the reduction of taxes for high
incomes and identified this choice as the cause of the heavy drop in the
pound. Truss had first removed the head of Economy, then she resigned,
making way for Rishi Sunak. The new Prime Minister has given "a U-turn"
to fiscal policy, passing a budget law made up of cuts in public
spending and an increase in the tax burden. Thus the effects of a
limping economic policy have been added to other factors such as
inflation, the high cost of energy, the effects of the failed migration
policy, the vertical crisis of the health and school systems, which has
led to a weakening of the pound , impacting businesses and families in
difficulty. It is certainly true that the international situation weighs
on the choices of governments, but it is also true that the consequences
of Brexit are having a heavy impact on the situation of the British economy.
Although the economy returned to growth, after two consecutive quarters
of contraction at the end of 2023, exceeding analysts' forecasts and
immediately causing the pound to rise, according to data released by the
Office for National Statistics (ONS), in the first quarter 2024 the
British GDP increased by 0.6%, recording the most significant expansion
of the economy since the end of 2021, it can be said that rather than
growth we are witnessing a rebound if we take into account that in 2021
the GDP had fallen by 10%.
In other words, the British economy had contracted by 0.1% in the third
quarter of 2023 and by 0.3% in the fourth quarter, thus entering a
technical recession that proved shallow and short-lived, as GDP British
increased by 0.2% in February and 0.4% in March: a positive trend that could
consolidate in the coming months.
While the services sector is growing and there is a return in the
confidence of consumers who dare to spend again, the construction sector
appears problematic, which recorded a decline of 0.9% in the first
quarter of the year, which constitutes the second consecutive decline in
investment in the sector. According to the ONS, the climatic conditions,
with
many days of incessant rain contributed to the contraction in the
sector. The increase in GDP per capita of 0.4% in the period
January-March 2024, after seven consecutive quarters of decline, appears
to be due to profits deriving from increased war production, but
nevertheless remains 0.7% lower than a year ago, reporting the decline
in the population's standard of living. Despite the return to growth
announced today, the British economy remains one of the slowest to
recover after the pandemic, second only to Germany among the G7
countries. This element of analysis emerges clearly if we look at the
fact that the economy increased by only 1.7% compared to 2019.
Falling inflation and wage increases should repair part of the damage
done to household incomes and support consumption, while the recovery in
Europe should support exports. Despite the better prospects, however,
the improvement in GDP will be limited in Great Britain by weak
productivity and poor prospects
employment and the British economy will be the bottom of the G7 next
year and will grow by just 1% in 2025, placing it behind Germany which
is expected to record a +1.1%. Therefore the Organization for Economic
Co-operation and Development reduced its 2024 growth forecast from 0.7%
to 0.4%, explaining that high interest rates and the impact of high
inflation will continue to act as a drag to the British economy.

The cost of Brexit
According to an analysis released by Bloomberg, Brexit costs the country
100 billion pounds a year. Leaving the EU had a 4% impact on the British
economy. The farewell to the Union was an act of economic self-harm,
with a negative impact even faster than expected.
The slowdown in investments has cost, from the 2016 referendum to today,
29 billion pounds, or around a thousand pounds for each family, so much
so that it is calculated that in 2026, there will be a (negative)
difference equal to 3.2% of the GDP.
The population is also realizing this: two Savanta Poll surveys
published by the newspaper "The Independent" confirm this. Two-thirds of
Britons think that leaving the EU has made the economic situation worse,
while only 13% believe that things have improved. Not only that: two out
of three UK citizens would like to vote again. 22% would like to do it
immediately, another 24% in the next five years and 11% in six to ten years.
It would seem that, in this situation, Labour's chances of winning the
elections are very high, so much so that 30 percentage points seem to
divide them from the Conservatives. And yet Labor has the same position
as the Conservatives on the war and therefore remains silent on the
costs that military commitment entails for public finances. In the long
run they risk paying the price for this irresponsible choice, and it
follows that the country's economic situation can only get worse. Thus
the new government that will emerge from the elections will be called
upon to manage the discontent that could be resolved with an
increasingly evident recession, characterized by a drastic drop in the
purchasing power of wages which falls into a situation that is anything
but calm, so much so that in February the unions called the largest
strike in the history of the national health system, now in shambles.
Nurses, ambulance drivers and paramedical staff took to the streets to
ask for a sharp salary increase, which, however, is not feasible for the
government. After 14 years of economic chaos, people remain poorer,
prices in shops are still very high, families pay hundreds of pounds
more in mortgage interest. The country has gone from negative growth to
asphyxiated growth.

The definitive crisis of the Five Eyes (FVEY)

The time has now come for England and the entire country to realize that
there are no longer the resources to keep up even the remnants of the
empire and above all the Five Eyes "surveillance" alliance which
includes Australia, Canada , New Zealand, the United Kingdom and the
United States and which claims to control and govern the world, in the
name of one
supposed superiority of societies of Anglo-Saxon origin. This alliance
developed the ECHELON surveillance system to monitor the communications
of the former USSR and its allies, which later became a means of
monitoring private communications around the world; a supranational
intelligence organization that does not answer to the recognized laws of
its own countries. Documents leaked by Snowden in 2013 revealed that the
Five Eyes had been spying on people and sharing gathered information in
order to evade restrictive national laws on citizen surveillance .
It's time for this bunch of filthy white supremacists to stop
considering the world and its peoples as subjects at their mercy,
supporting the superiority of Western civilization and the governments
that embody it; Anglo-Saxon countries, and England in particular, need
to become aware that they represent the dregs of the
human race that wants to impose itself on humanity by any means, that
aspires to be a group of free and equal peoples, in rights and dignity,
in well-being and freedom.
It follows that if the British people want to continue to bear the cost
of exercising so much power, if they want to maintain military bases
everywhere in the world, if they want to police shipping lanes and
dictate the rules of trade, if they want to impose their own order, bear
the economic weight and costs of this choice, depriving themselves of
the resources needed for education, healthcare, research, social
well-being, the construction of homes, the improvement of the climate
and the environment, for a more serene and happy life, just to satisfy
the lust for power of its ruling classes.
The time is no longer in which the ships of the British Royal Navy plied
the sea routes as privateers, draining riches from all over the world
and pouring them onto the British Isles to accumulate assets destined to
conquer the world. The time is no longer in which the country can
exercise the activity of government of the subjugated peoples, through
colonial domination, draining their economic and commercial, mineral and
human resources, imposing the use and consumption of opium through war,
as they did on several occasions with China, in order to make profits.
It is time for the English people to realize that the era of robbery and
supremacy is over, as is the time when the country was at the helm of
political and civil transformations, at the forefront of research and
culture, experimented with participatory democracy and social justice,
provided welfare that brought wellbeing to the country.
Yet an objective examination of reality should allow the attentive
observer to see the signs of progressive disintegration of the state
structure which for centuries has been the basis on which the edifice of
Great Britain rests. With ever greater strength and determination,
Northern Ireland is moving towards reunification with the Republic of
Ireland, while the Scottish people - despite some contingent setbacks -
opt for the choice of creating their own autonomous institutions that
separate their destinies from rest of the British Isles.
And perhaps this is the path through which history intends to do justice
and to relegate a people who have marked the history of the world to a
finally subordinate position or at least to an equal position on an
equal footing with the destiny of other peoples.

G.C.

https://www.ucadi.org/2024/06/30/il-tramonto-dellimpero-britannico/
_________________________________________
A - I N F O S  N E W S  S E R V I C E
By, For, and About Anarchists
Send news reports to A-infos-en mailing list
A-infos-en@ainfos.ca