That’s the way the money goes

Britain has been in financial trouble since fighting two World Wars, of course, but it did manage finally to pay off its US war debt in 2016. [Correction – 2006: only 60 years rather than 70!]

But you’ll remember that when Gordon Brown’s New Labour was finally ousted by a Conservative-Liberal coalition, the 2008 crash had ensured that there was no money left in the Treasury, to quote the famous note the outgoing Chancellor left for his successor. And Gordon Brown had sold off all our gold, and made sterling a fiat currency dependent on the US dollar.

Austerity followed, with the national finances slowly beginning to heal, apparently, at the cost of decreased wealth for the great majority of Britons, who had bailed out the banks to the tune of £850 billion. The GNP looked healthier, but was shared far less equitably.

Things domestically were, perhaps, looking to improve, but we should not forget that for a decade economists have been warning that the rich kids have been playing exactly the same game that led to the 2008 collapse, only with bigger numbers: this time, the entire financial system is in jeopardy, and the banks have been given leave to “bail in” your savings, so you go down when they do. There is a good case for saying that the bankers were looking to capitalise on, or even engineer, some crisis like a pandemic to sink the unsustainable mess they have caused and make it look like they weren’t to blame.

Sure enough the Government decided to waste money like water on the COVID scam, largely on wasteful schemes to pay people not to work, doomed-to-fail (because scientifically illiterate) projects like Track-and-Trace, unnecessary virtue-signalling like the Nightingale hospitals, profiteering ventures in PPE, the money-thirsty quest for an independent “world-beating” vaccine and, of course, many billions spent on advertising and other propaganda. Not to mention failure to prevent widespread fraud, to the tune of hundred of billions of pounds. What the UK did, most of the West also did in lockstep, strongly indicating that the prodigality was intentional, or else surely some finance minister, somewhere, would have tried to rein in expenditure.

All the money for this came from further borrowing, which once again will have to be paid back by taxpayers, or their grandchildren, whose livelihoods were, in many cases, destroyed by the untested and ineffective COVID policies. The Government has responded by printing money, leading to inflation which further decreases the average person’s wealth.

Despite this disruption to the nation’s economy, the government became fanatical about promoting Net Zero for imaginary anthropogenic global warming (at this point it’s worth remembering that the central England average temperature has not changed for thirty years). Fuel poverty was already a reality in 2019 as green energy was subsidised by consumers who couldn’t afford solar panels that sold electricity to the National Grid. Nobody consulted them on Net Zero.

But by the time of COP26, when rich politicians, oligarchs, and climate experts like David Attenborough and Greta Thunberg flew into Glasgow in private jets, and were not even slightly embarrassed by Boris Johnson’s blustering remarks about a more diverse and inclusive climate, the public was more aware than ever that Net Zero means choosing between food and warmth for many. The outcry over the banning of gas boilers in favour of expensive heat pumps widely recognised as inadequate forced Johnson to include mentioning “nuclear” for the first time, even at the the conference. But a new (hitherto unplanned) generation of nuclear reactors, if it can be made to happen at all, will be at the expense of already cold and hungry taxpayers… especially if it is rushed through as another emergency, ignoring due diligence again.

So, with such an economic crisis looming, what came next? Why, Britain strode forward at the warmongering forefront of an ideological proxy war against Russia. It’s government waved the flag for economic sanctions which Russia seems quite able to weather, but which further impoverish the British taxpayers who haven’t got to vote on anything much at all in the last few years, least of all whether they want to bankrupt themselves further by starting World War III. Inflation looks set to become hyper-inflation, accompanied by the collapse of the petro-dollar because much of the world is fed up with aggressive Western parasitism, and have used the opportunity of the stupid sanctions to break free economically.

Just to remind you, Ukraine is a non-NATO country at the other end of Europe. The idea that Russia would celebrate a victory over that corrupt and oppressive state by invading England is only plausible to those who believe President Trump really was financed by the Kremlin, and that Hunter Biden’s laptop was also a Russian plant. It is more than doubtful whether financing a war there is really in the interests of the British voters already struggling to keep warm. The sanctions are likely to make food, as well as fuel and fertilizer, harder to come by and dearer (by trillions of pounds, if hyper-inflation really takes off). And is not the purpose of governments to benefit their citizens, not meet ideological goals?

Yet not only has our government embraced this foreign cause as enthusiastically as the Church of England and Facebook have, but the geographically challenged Liz Truss has committed 8,000 of our young men to Europe, clearly with no other aim than fighting against the better equipped Russian war machine (we have already sent all our weapons to Zelensky, you see). Their lives cannot be replaced, but the weapons will be cheerfully made up, and even upgraded, by US and UK arms dealers – at the expense of the British taxpayer, again, whose defence spending did nothing to protect them, but only to change other countries’ regimes.

All this is made worse by the fact that, like our puppetmaster the US, Britain has largely closed down its manufacturing industries with the conceit that our economy is based on “service industries.” What this really means is that our currency is backed by nothing much. For every person actually producing something, there are a dozen or more pushing paper, or rather programs, around. Even in medicine, where one could argue that the rather indirect “product” of medical staff is people returned to the working population, there are far more bureaucrats than front line workers now. I’m told the same is true in the armed forces: Diversity Officers and the 77th Brigade will not avail much against hypersonic missiles, I’m afraid.

Of course, though I can say this for now, it will become treason if someone arbitrarily decides we are at war, and I will no doubt then be interned even if I stop writing. Cancel culture will be complete, then.

The worst of it is that it was plain to all except the Government experts that you only get what you pay for, and that you can only pay for what you have earnings to afford. COVID inflation was, only last year, going to be a mere blip, cured by printing more money. You and I knew that that wouldn’t work, because we have seen the recent example of Zimbabwe, and collected the overprinted Weimar Republic stamps in our childhood.

We seem to be heading for a totally unnecessary war. “That’s the way the money goes – POP.”

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About Jon Garvey

Training in medicine (which was my career), social psychology and theology. Interests in most things, but especially the science-faith interface. The rest of my time, though, is spent writing, playing and recording music.
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