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With Britain’s economy grinding on the rocks of recession, the metrics of the Conservative Party’s forty-year “special relationship” with America prove that this relationship has been an infection borne by yet another engineered American virus. Today’s terminal decline mirrors America’s economic, political, social and moral decay.
The ravages of a wartime winter have returned to Britain. With the Bank of England similarly stricken by this special relationship, it has disastrously emulated the US Federal Reserve step by step. Dying economies are the precursor to the degradation of society. As Britain prepares to endure another desperate holiday season it is time to recall that when Margaret Thatcher became PM in 1979, before she imported Reaganomics to Britain in 1980, sterling’s value was £2.33 to the US dollar. Three years later, £1.57. Now, £1.16.
“Special relationship”, you say?
The metamorphosis, crisis by crisis, of American financial chicanery continually stoked the global economic pyramid scheme of deficit spending. This was greeted wholesale by the Exchequer and without opposition from elected officials at White Hall. However, during those four decades, Britain’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP) averaged less than a 1% increase per year with negative GDP in twenty-one of forty-two years.
In 1981 UK manufacturing as a percentage of national GDP was nearly 20% and jobs in this sector made up 21.8%. Ttoday just 7.6%. Trade union membership is down from 13 million in 1980 to just over 6 million members. The average home price (adjusted for inflation) increased from £103,237 to £271,100 while home rentals increased 8.86% per year from a median monthly rent of £357 in 1980 to more than £1400 today. In 1980 53,000 families were listed as homeless then more than doubling to 126,000 by 1989 and over 219,000 as reported in 2020.
Britain’s terminal symptoms have metastasized from America’s malignancies such as its ongoing increases from 1980 to 2019 in crime and murder rates, poverty (7% vs. 22%), personal debt (42.5% of GDP vs. £1.7 trillion/105% GDP) and student loan debt (£460Billion total/ £45,800 per student), personal and business bankruptcies, and Suicide. Obesity and diabetes costs follow the American waistline, too, and add $10.7 billion in direct NHS costs and another $33.4 in related government subsidies yearly.
Prioritizing the ever-burgeoning war annuity was, however, routine each year and increased from £24.5 billion during Thatcher’s first term to £43.3 Billion this annum.
These massive sums have been an increasing, unnecessary, and unsustainable burden on a treasury already suffering from decades of conservative tax cuts.
The American economic affliction began under Ronald Reagan and quickly changed from a promise of “fiscal responsibility” featuring financial deregulation to tax cuts for corporations and the wealthy and the snipping of the Great Society’s social safety net. What this Reaganomics also cut was the tax base. Called, “Trickle-down economics,” this injection failed to course through the arteries of society for very long, failing somewhere along the way of the wealthy purchasing super yachts, private jets and increased political influence.
Conservatives hypocritically next embraced deficit spending as prescribed by the American economic mythologist John Maynard Keynes. Thus began the yearly increases in national budget deficits and the selling of government bonds (debt) to pay for it, all the while squeezing social programs.
With interest rates approaching zero and bank depositors receiving a similar return despite record bank profits – and rarely punished with convictions for criminal behavior- the mantra of “too big to fail” by the Bank of England and the US Federal Reserve rationalized injecting manufactured money repeatedly into the economy in a trick called Quantitative Easing (QE). QE is the creation of money by printing it (digitally) after the US/UK over-budgets billions more than its tax annual base. The Treasury issues more debt (bonds) to sell to cover the deficit. Next, the BofE or Fed prints currency out of thin air to buy that debt. Sovereign UK debt is currently in excess of £2.69 Trillion. It was less than £200 Billion in 1980.
Interestingly, today there are one hundred and seventy-one British billionaires. In 1980, there was zero. That’s inflation.
Mark Carney, a Canadian, who was governor of the BofE deliberately lowered interest rates to historic lows thus making new home mortgages and equity refinancing so cheap as to transfuse 100’s of billions more in cash out of thin air as house prices soared. This was again merely a delay before the crash.
During this economic descent, too few politicians opposed this Keynesian snake oil while an increasingly complicit media dutifully back-paged it. Tony Blair and the vaporous Gordon Brown, after a decade of demonizing and privatizing the remaining vestiges of British social infrastructure in per usual Tory fashion, proved to be American lackeys rather than representatives of UK popular interests. Such treachery was highlighted in the recent article, “When Your Bank Fails, Don’t Walk…Run!”
With Blair began Britain’s slide into American-style “monocracy.” Neither US Democrat nor Republican any longer provides sincere opposition. Although Britain has yet to suffer an American-style rigged national election, the UK has been similarly stripped of opposition leadership. The shameful and inaccurate demonization of Jeremy Corbyn by British media was designed to sever forever the spinal cord of the Labour Party. It worked. As went Corbyn, so went British socialism’s last dedicated champion. Instead, Labour offered up a Blairite member of the anti-labour Tri-lateral Commission, Sir Keir Starmer: A man whose prefix nicely explains his lack of effective leadership.
Monocracy is hidden by the media which instead of balanced reporting promotes one-sided censorship using journalistic tyranny to manipulate intellectual freedom. Like America, rather than budgeting for improving national interests, Britain finds it more cost-effective to tighten social liberties. Parliament’s quietly pending Online Safety Bill makes only the lies of the media safe but does exemplify the compliant corruption of politicians and the media. With 87% of all US media owned by six corporations that have the same agenda as the three companies controlling all of UK print media, this censorship has been uniform, self-serving, and effective.
The surreptitious privatization of Britain’s National Health Service (NHS), once the example to the developing socialist world, would make Aneurin Bevan roll in his grave. Thankfully halted in 2019, here the American trick of using Privately Financed Instruments (PFI) to provide private loans that use each hospital as collateral, but under draconian terms, forced dilapidated hospitals deliberately into the arms of US hedge funds. This still costs the NHS £2 Billion per year in ongoing pay-offs.
Before 1998 higher education was free. Since then UK students have racked up £460 Billion in student loan debt with a per-student average of £45,800. Acting on American changes in 2012 the UK made student debt one of the very few non-dischargeable debts in bankruptcy. This forever saddled each student with a huge debt service, and usually without a job within their discipline. Universities are now also heavily indebted based on the promise of these anticipated student fees. Recently diluting the A-level tests assured an increase and continuance of this vital college revenue. And a drop in standards.
The parallels to America continue from obesity caused by an adulterated US-style food supply, immigrants arriving by the thousands unchecked into cities already rotting from neglect and them also drawing on already depleted social services and,or the absurd mental aberration the young call “woke” that demands the human mind now believe that hard facts are merely discretionary or that a uterus is of no consequence whatsoever in biologically defining a woman.
The biggest and most threatening similarity, however, is apathy. Like America, Britain can blame itself for watching passively while divorcing itself from political reality and leaving that job to a corrupt media and political system.
A dying nation begins its decline by debasing its economy. When the process is irreversible the nation, instead of turning to the people’s needs, begins to turn on the people themselves.
It is time for voters to inoculate their countries at the ballot box. To elect representatives of true, not alleged, character who prioritize populism, not the profits of war. Those who reject American hegemony and its many bastardizations of Trickle-down economics. Politicians who will stop feeding the American virus on the blood and treasure of their own country, and who prioritize food before guns, society before tyranny, family before party, and education before ignorance!
If Britain is to survive it must now devote its full attention to its singular, most-important national emergency…
Britain!
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Brett Redmayne-Titley has spent the last twelve years documenting the “Sorrows of Empire.” He has authored over 200 articles all of which have been published and often republished and translated by news agencies worldwide. An archive of his published work can be found at watchingromeburn.uk. He can be contacted at live-on-scene ((@)) gmx.com
He is a regular contributor to Global Research.
