Despite the impression many seem to have of me, I live life in a generally optimistic mood, and enjoy much of it a great deal. That is in part because I find pleasure in many small things: the starlings grabbing all the attention in my garden as I write this are one such source of pleasure.
However, as 2023 begins, more macro levels of optimism are harder to find. As I noted on Twitter this morning:
I think this a fair summary. The incompetent reopening from Covid was, like much else to do with that disease, partly the fault of the UK government's mismanagement, but they were not alone. And I do not accept the theory that the war in Ukraine is the fault of the west, let alone the UK, and so think there were externalities that the government could reasonably use as excuses for events in 2022.
However, 2023 is likely to be different. The government's reaction to the events over which they had little initial control will be what defines 2023, and all the indications are that things will go very badly indeed.
At the risk of sounding like a tired record, we do not need high-interest rates, tax increases and austerity coupled with low pay increases. Those, though, are what we are going to get when what we need in 2023 are the exact opposite.
I am not suggesting 2023 was ever going to be a bed of roses: even if policy was what I wanted it would be a painful year adjusting to a new price level that few expected and which will have knock-on consequences that need managing.
But what we did not need was what we will get. That is, recession, personal and business bankruptcies, significant unemployment and stress of varying kinds at levels few have previously experienced in the UK, and as a result of total government economic mismanagement. Mismanagement, that is, unless you assume that the aim of that management is to reallocate resources ever upwards to a few in society when things might just be looking good for the precious few beneficiaries on whose behalf this government must be working if that is the case.
I'd like to think that there might be respite from this theme in 2023, but without a change of policy there will not be, and I cannot see that change of policy happening. With luck, Labour might realise that it has to change to win an election; without luck we will be stuck with policies intended to deliver despair from both major parties, as is the case right now.
What to do about it? I will keep on explaining the world as I see it. I am hoping for more energy to do that. After six months I have now gone for my longest period without antibiotics since early July (three weeks) and am feeling better, although my energy is still not back to the levels I enjoyed before long-Covid began.
So far, I have no plans to revive the idea of finishing the book that was half-written before Covid hit again. But I have spent some time thinking about TikTok, YouTube Shorts and videos on here because I am all too aware that blogging is a dying art form: no young person now goes near blogging and the message has to get to wider audiences. So I have plans for 2023. We cannot give up in the face of the onslaught to come.
But today? I might go to look for pink-footed geese on the Norfolk coast. Finding micro pleasures will be essential in the year to come.
Good luck everyone. We will need it. And there could be a better ‘other side' after all this, and it's worth working for.
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Good luck to you, Richard. Hoping for your health to improve. You offer the best analysis and solutions. Please keep doing what you do. If we don’t try, we cannot succeed.
Happy New year.
Hoping you find your geese.
Cheers
Alec Hitchman
Thanks
Geese should be certain: I have not been for some time though
Why are younger people not going near blogging? I don’t understand why they would avoid it.
When they can have video and sound they do not read
Hence TikTok, Instangram, etc
Larry and Richard
that just confirms I am now officially ‘old’.
🙂
Hi Richard
Sorry to hear about the long COVID holding you back in the last few months.
More power to you in 2023.
Addressing wealth inequality over the next year (and consistently flagging up how the govt are enabling it, despite their protestations of ‘levelling up’) is going to be of huge importance. More people need to understand that the Tories are not actually on their side.
Sunak and Hunt will keep promoting GDP growth as the solution to everything- although they will be less naked about their ambitions than Truss & Kwarteng. The press will collaborate, mainly because they do not understand any other measure of economic success or failure.
Opposition parties need to find a way of communicating alternative measures and alternative models without turning off voters by seeming to be too technical. Focusing on discrediting trickle down economics would a start.
It won’t be easy but, to me, that is how our country can be changed for the better.
Happy New Year Richard, and for the dinosaurs such as me, please keep blogging.
Richard,
I don not disagree with your view of 2023, but I cannot quite go along with your statement that “I do not accept the theory that the war in Ukraine is the fault of the west, let alone the UK” without very heavy qualification. Putin is responsible, but without our encouragement I seriously doubt we would be in the mess we now find ourselves in. Here is my case; not, I admit, for the first time – but it needs to be argued, again.
Hoist with their own petard, the Conservatives not only blame everyone else for failing the country in office, but claim their failure makes them the only people competent to find the answers.
Boris Johnson, self-proclaimed his leadership of the opposition to Putin. He also claimed that Britain’s ‘heroic’ Brexit shared important features with Ukraine’s resistance. Ukraine wants to join the EU, but that isn’t going to happen soon, and wasn’t helped by the Brexit antics. In Conservative-land, this is a mere bagatelle.
Alexander Stubb, a past PM of Finland, a country with a 700+ mile border with Russia, and that lives ever ready for the worst under the shadow of Putin, had this blunt, brutally frank view of Conservative Britain: “This idea about ‘Global Britain’ is as true as ‘peaceful Russia’,” according to Stubb. “Simply utter rubbish, to put it diplomatically. To claim that Boris Johnson ‘has taken a lead globally in standing up to Putin’ is an illusion only possible in Brexit la la land.”
That is just the ‘warm up’ to my case. I want to lay out the ghastly trail of the failure of our governments – not exclusively in the West but notably and catastrophically driven by the egregious failures of the Conservative Party to put British and European security before the priority of pure neoliberal, ideological greed and British exceptionalism.
The PM and the Conservative Party have a serious problem to answer, regarding the degree to which Russian oligarchs established their power and influence in our political culture, and even key institutions of the State. The Conservative Government was slow to sanction the oligarchs. The connections between the Party and oligarchs are yet to be adequately scrutinised in a public arena.
Then we have the great British foresight about Putin. What foresight? None. Not only did we not have any; we failed, and even dodged the issue, in a blue funk. Britain has failed either to understand or challenge Russia’s developing strategy since 1999; effectively to re-establish the outline of the Warsaw Pact – which has even mutated into a grandiose Russian Empire in Europe (given the failure over 20 years to challmnge it), that now threatens Eastern Europe. We complacently did nothing: so here were the warnings, set up in neon letters for foreign policy strategists, intelligence services, diplomats, defence specialists and politicians; the people we rely on to advise – from the place we have to rely on to listen, and to take up the leadership required for all this – Downing Street.
In 1999 Putin smashed the Chechen capital of Grozny using methodsof total war he used in Syria and then in Mariupol and Kherson; scorched earth – it isn’t as if he didn’t give us fair warning of his methods. Nobody on the West, including Britain chose to notice. He then sent Britain a horde of oligarchs, just to buy London. We lapped it up. We even repeated the London ‘White Russian’ farce in the years up to the 1917 Revolution (including the Sidney Street siege, 1911). Soon enough the oligarchs had their feet under the table at the highest level, and we merely ignored the delicate inconvenience that they were also committing suicide in suspicious circumstances, it almost seemed in waves. We chose not to notice; indeed we handed out Peerages, the Conservative Party accepted their money (it beggars belief); so incompetent and egregious was the failure, the Home Office eventually acknowledged that, after the Ukraine invasion and the sanctioning of oligarchs (too late I might add); no less than eight sanctioned oligarchs had been granted Tier 1 ‘Golden Visas’ that were available to those capable of providing £2m for entry to the UK. in 2014. We were handing out Tier ! visas on the cheap for ready cash; while simultaneously proving ineffective and totally inept in handling rubber boats in the Channel, or offering a functioning and adequately resourced immigration service for genuine immigrants, even for people to whom we owed a deep obligation – in Afghanistan. This was, frankly villainous
As if we did not have enough warning of Russia and its new purpose under Putin, who increased his ambition the more he saw the incompetence, venality, division and weakness of Britain and the West, he tested Britain again in 2006 (assassination of Alexander Litvinenko by radio-active polonium in the genteel public lounge of a Mayfair Hotel, with poisoned tea – and with scarcely any substantive political consequences); we did virtually nothing; the ‘usual suspects’, a few Russian diplomats were sent home. That’ll show them! It didn’t.
Putin’s response was seen in the immediate years to come, in Georgia, in Syria (a dress rehearsal for the methods used in Ukraine). Then Russia sponsored a ‘military operation’ in Donetsk, Ukraine in 2014. We did precisely nothing in response, for eight years. A war in donetsk-Luhansk went on for eight years. We did nothing. Russia could do just bout anything and we could find a way to ignore it. So Russia understood fully what we were telling them through supine inertia; he invaded Crimea in 2014. Still the West did nothing, with Britain at the forefront. Why wouldn’t Putin think he could now do anything he wanted? Because still , nothing happened. supine inertia continued. The Oligarchs thrived. He invaded Ukraine in 2022. He didn’t even bother to claim it was an invasion; who was going to notice?
Put that way, there is definitely a case
I guess part of the answer is that people hope for the best and that dealing with Russia as a rational actor would encourage rational and liberal forces within the country. There is also the suspicion that American Cold War warriors are exaggerating ‘the enemy threat’ to play up their election chances.
Alexandr Stubb is worth listening to. I see a number of politicians from smaller European countries who seem bright, very well educated and have experience of working in international organisations and, due to PR voting, with other parties. Then we look at people like Johnson or DeSantis ( the leading contender for the Republican nomination in 2024) in the US and the gap is remarkable.
In the link I post here, he lays out what he thinks is the cause of the war. Stubb admits in another video he had an over optimistic view of what could be achieved in easing relationships with Russia. Mearsheimer is quoted by a number of people who have just seen his videos and think that is enough. Context is everything-is an old saying which is usually very true. He focuses on the interaction of states. He does not take into account the rapid social change which took place in Eastern Europe. For 30 years people could now travel easily in Europe, they have acquired the internet and have access to western ideas. I would say this has caused changes fro the bottom up. People, more the young ones but increasingly most, now see themselves as part of Europe. They wouldn’t be fighting so hard if this was a ‘proxy war’ fought by the US to weaken Russia.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vlB-pRqdyBg&t=47s
Thank you for that Mr Stevenson; very illuminating, but I would wish to make a number of points.
First, I agree wholeheartedly with Stubb that ultimately Putin is responsible for the Ukraine; but I made that clear ‘up front’ in my comment above. My issue is with the West’s response to Putin’s aggression, and why it should have been able to work out Putin’s beliefs and strategy. I believe Putin played to his sense of the West being decadent, decayed and weak; and discovered increasingly over 20+ years of exploiting every opportunity to test the weakness, that the West appeared to confirm the teheory; it did not challenge his aggression; and even accommodated it. That is not Putin’s fault; that is ours.
It follows that I agree with Stubb’s rejection of the Meirsheimer thesis (at least as Stubb portray’s it), and indeed with most of Stubb’s analysis of Russia and the West; and he is in a far, far better position to make his case, than I am to challenge it; and that covers broadly, most of his 5 key points.
Where I find I disagree with Stubbs, is astonishingly in his conclusions; it is all Putins fault (well, yes it is); but not the West’s fault, at all. Well it is, I’m afraid. Every family in britain is paying part of the price. The scales have fallen from the West;’s eyes, and suddenly Sweden and Finland are moving toward Nato. The West is sanctioning Russia, and yet Europe is going through a cost of living crisis because of the Ukraine war; and the sudden realisation dawns that far from Western sanctions bringing Russia to its knees, Russia has been allowed to corner most of the European gas market; and when it comes to hardship, yhe real truth of Russian history of Empire is that Russia is indifferent to the hardship of its own people at home, or its casualties on the battlefield; but we should have known that; it hasn’t changed for Russia since Barbarossa in 1941. Russia is indifferent to the cost of a war, or the sacrifice, or how long it takes. We know that; or should know that. The only way the Soviet Union could even estimate its losses in WWII was by calculating the opening and closing poulations, 1941 and 1945; the subtraction gave the population loss, around 50m (Ericsson, from russian sources). What didn’t we know?
What is it the West didn’t already know? Or work out from the examples of Putin’s testing of the West, 1999-2022?
We may debate how wrong the West was in the way it supported Russia after the fall of Gorbachev; but that ship has long sailed. Once Putin consolidated his leadership, the West required to take a far more robust line against Putin’s probing exploitation of any weakness. Instead the predominant line was supine inertia. Stubb indicates some robustness by the US, eventually over Georgia to some effect; but thereafter? It was back to supine inertia for the Crimea. I suspect the blight of neoliberal ideology throught the West is in part to blame; it looked at the small and not very advanced Russian economy (compared to US, China, EU etc.) and decided it had nothing to fear; a big mistake, because it is in the complexity of the global economic network, the commodities and energy services, the supply chains; the intricacies of byzantine interconnections; that exponentially scale up the danger if the global system is disturbed at points of real weakness. We were asleep. We have paid heavily for that folly.
I think you are saying
The choice of going to war was Putin’s but we made it easier for him to do so by not taking his threatening actions seriously.
That is a reasonable perspective.
Many in the west think economics trumps other considerations. Nationalism of the sort that proclaims ‘we are different and better than you” drove two world wars, Brexit and many other situations around the world. Putin may well believe that Russian civilisation is superior. I have come to see that sort of nationalism as an evil.
Mr Stevenson,
Thank you for engaging constrcuctively with my comments.
“The choice of going to war was Putin’s but we made it easier for him to do so by not taking his threatening actions seriously”.
Yes, but that summation suggests oversight. It was worse, because Putin watched Europe lose focus on what he must have calculated was a failure to ensure energy security, the US to lose a sense of its world role and descend into Trumpism, and Britain demonstrate, at every turn that it represented the apogee of his view of the West as decadent, money grubbing and weak; Britain more than anyone would serve his sense that he could ‘get away’ with anything.
On your view of Nationalism, I agree only up to a point. The irony is that this is another really slightly glib characterisation of a problem that Putin has been able to exploit at home for his own purposes. How does he justify attacking Ukraine? Not only by claiming to the narrowest sect of extreme Russian Nationalists, that Ukraine is inviolably ‘Russian’; but to the wider, more realistic Russian population, that Ukraine is Facsist. That turns minds to Russia’s great triumph, the defeat of Hitler. In Russia the Nationalist (in your terms) threat to Russia is always seen through the lens of Fascism. Putin finds his ability to exploit this his greatest propaganda weapon.
Putin can only do this because he can turn the legitimate desire for liberty of the Ukrainian people, to embrace European democracy, and freely leave the hegemony of an absolutist tyrant, into a rallying cry to Russians of the Soviet defence again Facsist invasion. The name that both sides use in this terrifying reminder of the very worst of WWII, is Banderas (Snyder, ‘Bloodlands’ for those who wish to delve into the history); an explosive name that serves only to confirm that Ukraine sees this as an existential war to the bitter end.
I do not claim to a deep knowledge of Ukraine, but I do know we are still in the paddling pool and in Britain (and the West), seriously get down to learning how to swim in this world. we cannot afford to keep making mistakes.
Absolutely right JSW. Your arguments are supported in this piece from the ByLine Times. The likes of Catherine Belton, Carol Cadwalladr and John Sweeney have been writing about this for 10-20 years.
https://www.bylinesupplement.com/p/putins-brexit-coup?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=1162849&post_id=94229408&isFreemail=true&utm_medium=email
The other standard argument for ‘its the West’s fault’ is the one about ‘NATO expansion’ promoted by Corbyn, Stop the War and others on the further Left. They reveal their deliberate ignorance of Russia’s long history of brutal colonialism and imperialism towards its neighbours of which Ukraine is just the latest episode. The Holodomor in Ukraine. The same destruction and war crimes that have been experienced by the Baltic States, Poland and others time and time again and as a result those states were only too keen to join an alliance that might prevent it happening again. And its now prompted Finland and Sweden to do the same.
In their loathing for the West be it the US, EU, NATO or even the UK, there has been a section of the Left that has adopted the ‘my enemy’s enemy is my friend’ principle and as a result are seen to defend or at least choose not to criticise some pretty disgusting regimes. ‘Whataboutery’is not a justification. I suspect that has been a factor in turning away voters who might otherwise have been attracted to what in many cases were good Labour policies.
It was the second argument I rejected in my original comment
All the best Richard. New Years Day concert from Vienna quite fun – then out to find Brent gueese on the Blackwater
I hope for a few of them too….always look a bit like vicars in bird form to me
Happy New Year, Richard.
I hope that your current recurring Long COVID issues can be resolved this year.
Keep up the good work….at a suitable pace that balances your comfort and satisfaction!
Thanks
Not just Richard’s LC; everybody’s. How will we run power stations when the executive and staff all have LC and can only work intermittently and haphazardly in that they can’t predict if/when they’ll be able to work? How can people be trained to run power stations when both trainers and trainees can only attend intermittently and haphazardly? Where will our heat, light and power come from? Same for water, food, banking etc etc.
It’s becoming obvious from anecdotal evidence there’s a new strain or variety of Covid extant, one which evades testing and may well evade the vaccines as well. We won’t be able to avoid it then. Also increasingly obvious is that each time someone gets Covid they come one step closer to succumbing to LC, presenting us as a society with the problems I’ve outlined above.
Our health service is already awash with critical incidents and appears to be functioning at or very near capacity. Do we have to wait for people to actually be dying in the street before we accept that unless a genuine cure for C/LC is found and quickly, we are heading into a new Dark Age, one which humanity might not survive?
Happy New Year.
Fun times! 🙂
Ukraine is not just the fault of the West but the West contributed to it – they are causal, as much as some elements inside Ukraine herself were. They have mismanaged Putin, and make no mistake, he needs to be handled carefully the flawed character that he is. But the West – always in a hurry due to being so certain about being on the side of angels – did not handle him carefully like they did not handle post communist Russia decently either. The West’s blindness to its own shortcomings remains a huge problem and your blog bears witness to that on the domestic front.
What is so sad is that after reading nearly all of Tim Snyder’s work on this troubled region that it has been plummeted into chaos once again. The Ukraine seems fated to be a grave yard for ordinary people who are be squashed by competing ideologies. Awful.
Anyway, I’m not here to fall out with you – I just felt that your point about the West above needed unpicking a bit. As for everything else, I agree that we may be in for another year of no new ideas.
And I look forward to what you have to say about that!
You and John create a compelling case
Thank you for the response.
I read about what might happen in Russia in John Gray’s ‘False Dawn: The Delusions of Global Capitalism’ (Granta, 1998). In Chapter 6 ‘Anarcho-capitalism in post communist Russia’ (pp. 133-166) Gray shows great foresight and research warning us what was going to happen. He fingers Western economic shock therapy as a totally inappropriate policy response to change in Russia that would have far reaching, long lasting consequences. He also alludes to the utter contempt that Russia has for Europe and its ideals.
Gray observes some sort of perverted, twisted Western logic in how Putin has set himself up. Not for Putin is the globalised selling and buying of strategic assets like oil to foreigners as happens in Western markets sold on the cheap. No – Russian oil will be managed by Russians – Putin and his mates. The shenanigans about that can be read I think in Tom Burgis’s ‘Kleptopia’ (2020) and how American oilmen looking to make a quick buck were strung along so that Putin could see which one of his fellow Russians could be trusted to keep strategic assets ‘in the family’ and who was more U.S. friendly.
Bringing ourselves up to date is the very brave Catherine Belton ‘Putin’s People’ (William Collins, 2020). Although Belton spends lots of time on the spider’s web that is Putin’s grip on on the Russian economy, she also hints here and there at how modern Russia sees the West. Take for example, p.488:
‘It looks like the whole of US politics is for sale’ said a former Russian banker with ties to the security services. ‘We believed in Western values….But it turned out everything depended on money, and all these values were pure hypocrisy’.
I can only agree with the gentleman.
Have you read Michael Hudson’s latest ‘The Destiny of Civilisation’ (2022)? He is another one who holds the West accountable for Russia. He’s quite blunt about it.
I’ll say it again: The West mistook Western style capitalism (MacDonald’s, Louis Vuitton bag shops and Costa coffee houses on the high street in Moscow) for democracy. Even when time and time again we know (or we should know) that modern capitalism is actually nothing to do with democracy – as Philip Mirowski (2013) and Shoshana Zuboff (2019) have tried to tell us.
With thanks.
Forgive me if i have posted this before. I have a former student who worked in Belarus for a while and one of his friends sent him this web page. It was put up by Novesti -a media company who follow the official line -a day of so after the invasion and then taken down shortly afterwards as the extent of the resistance became apparent .
https://web.archive.org/web/20220226051154/https://ria.ru/20220226/rossiya-1775162336.html
I’d go even further PSR and claim that if it hadn’t been for the despicable way, first Reagan then Bush Snr treated Gorbachev over glasnost and perestroika, Russia would be in a different place and there wouldn’t even be a Putin.
I’m exteremely disappointed to read that you have abondoned your book project. There is a real need for one on MMT written with a UK perspective, even if it is with the ‘M’ meaning Murphy rather than – dare I mention the name – Mitchell. Curently there are only the two papers by Berkeley et al and Ryan-Collins et al which are both far too technical for the general public. Plus your e-book which is not detailed enough. You have a much more user-friendly way of putting things. Can I possbily encourage you to get back to it?
No publisher is interested in that, per se
Sorry
I was afraid that would be the case. There’s always Kindle, but it wouldn’t get to a very large audience as I know from a friend’s experience.
True, but I note what you say
I can’t help but wonder if wonder if this disinterest is encouraged by the heavy hand of the British establishment.
What about crowdfunding it using unbound.com
I have thought about that possibility
Like you, I have no hope things will change for the better in 2023. I do look forward to seeing your YouTube video in the near future. Onwards and upwards! Hope you enjoy improved health too.
Hello Richard.
Happy New Year to you.
This is my first post here and the first visit in a few months or so.
Interesting to see your thoughts on tiktok and other social media. Do you have any ideas on how to reach the younger audiences? Any influencers on tiktok that you have in mind that might inspire?
All the best for the coming year.
I use Twitter, extensively
I am told to do TikTok next
I have no idea who the influencers are – I would seek to use my Twitter following to become one
Hope you feel better soon Richard. Happy New Year to you and family.
I hear that TikTok is at least part owned by China and some have ditched it because, apparently it has been used to monitor people in governments etc. My son reckons Instagram is good, I have no idea. I like Twitter still, but it’s reach is limited more now perhaps. Keep blogging though, if poss, it’s a good way to reach people, though I keep having to sign up for email alerts re articles as it seems to sign me out.
Thanks. H.
Sorry about the email doing that
Is anyone else having that problem?
On the Ukraine war, I’d highly recommend a slim tome by Medea Benjamin and Nicolas Davies for a clear-eyed and sober analysis of the origins of the current conflict. War in Ukraine: Making sense of a senseless conflict. https://www.orbooks.com/catalog/war-in-ukraine/
The crucial role of the military industrial complex that Dwight Eisenhower warned of when he left office just be acknowledged. Corporate control and greed are the cornerstones of the current failed neoliberal system.
Thank you for all the economic and financial information that you have given me via your blog over the last year. You make economics and government finance sound easy yet we have a government who I am sure has similar knowledge from gurus in their midst but continue to siphon off money from middle and lower earners towards the rich in this country or another.
We need interesting economics and finance to be taught much more widely in schools and higher education in order that the populace know what they are voting for in a government.
I am a follower intermittently of a Dr John Campbell on YouTube who presents research papers connected in the main with coronavirus. I have always thought that his method of presentation although basic would be a model that you could adjust in order that your presentation of economics would be more attractive to more of the population.
Personally I have learned so much by reading your work but sad to say this has made me so very much more angry and disappointed in politicians – especially those running this country and realising how corrupt and wicked they are in their governance.
All the best for a happy Guid new year 2023&
Thanks
And I will check him out
Yes, I had to re- subscribe 3/4 months ago and my first blog came in today.
Keep well, Richard, many of us in Scotland much value you contribution
Alex Thomson
Weird
I will check it out