While scanning through all the FT emails that I received each morning, I noted this conjunction of headlines:
UK politicians are walking around like headless chickens without a clue what to do in the face of the crisis that is developing as a consequence of the war in the Middle East. We will all pay an enormous price for their incompetence.
And so great is their incompetence that FT writers can already see that the opportunity for others to exploit this situation to their advantage is growing.
If, as seems ever-increasingly likely, Iran emerges with what it can describe as a victory from this war, whilst the forces of the USA and Israel and all their supporters are humiliated, the disruption to the world order is going to be seismic in its proportions.
The Western military industrial complex, which has dominated the world's political-economic agenda during most of the post-war era, will be revealed as something that countries with asymmetric political-economic advantages can both challenge and defeat.
What is not known is the psychological impact of this power rebalancing on the world agenda.
What we can be sure of is that if this were to happen, the status of countries like the USA, Israel and the UK will be severely diminished, and we will have to face a new world agenda that many, with their chosen prejudices within those countries, will find extremely difficult to accommodate.
We are cursed, as the Chinese proverb puts it, to live in interesting times.
What we will most certainly need is a new generation of political leadership that understands where we are in the world, what the political priorities of post conflict countries in the West should be, and how we should manage our economies to ensure that the safety of the world at large is now the priority for humankind as a whole.
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Thinking about global powers, if we objectively judged China and the USA by the same standards, which has done the most damage to the world as a whole, in the last hundred years, which has committed more war crimes and abuses of human rights, at home and abroad, which would we prefer, objectively, to have the upper hand in world afffairs right now?
Unfortunately, perfect countries are not available to choose ftom.
It would probably depend on the relationship with Russia and what that means for us. The US administration does not give me confidence that they have any clue about what world affairs. Do I want them head of the table? No, unless they become are serious about global responsibilities.
There’s an article about the last tanker of aviation fuel arriving in today’s National. It points out that until it was recently closed by INEOS, the Grangemouth refinery supplied 97% of Scotland’s aviation fuel. Now it’s all imported.
It seems to me then that, having been hollowed out of internal capacity to ride such economic shocks, the UK has been manoeuvred into a state of external dependency and ripe for exploitation.
How did we get to this?
Through corruption – political donations, knighthoods, privatisations, by rich ‘Englishmen’ and others.
This is a story that must be told somehow to the electorate. They need to know.
Gov should confiscate it on national security grounds. That would focus minds. Won’t happen, Starmer too focused on trivia, cos that is what small managers do in a tight situation.
As you, Steve Keen and others have been pointing out perhaps this war and what it is and will do to the global economy might lead to the paradigm change in economic thought and practice upon which you/we’ve been working! I hope it will be so.
In all seriousness, this website will become very important to a generation or two of people who do very little scratch cooking. I believe that planning for potential food scarcity is paramount.
March 2026 – The 1940’s Experiment
I agree
Learning to cook is going to be a priorioty very soon
And grow what you cook… Something more to learn!
Rip up the neat AstroTurf front lawn or back garden sitting/dining/barbecue area; and dig for victory (or actually, just survival)!
Pity those without access and control of some useable land.
We do grow – not a lot, but moist of th herbs we need plus some salad and that is really useful
If you look at Ukraine and Iran, one of the factors is that the defensive force is likely to have a greater determination to persist against an invading force, while the will to continue an invasion may quickly decline as the population of the invading country sees an increasing cost to that action.
As much as Trump has made efforts to co-opt various media sources, he doesn’t have the same level of control as Putin has over Russian media (or Iranian leadership over Iran’s media). While there are clearly a non-trivial proportion who buy into whatever ‘truth’ he’s claiming today, a majority of US citizens aren’t buying it.
The European Union was designed to create economic ties that made the cost of war more onerous. Globalisation also built ties that intertwine the fortunes of countries around the world. The main hope right now is that the Iran War creates a textbook example of why unnecessary war is more costly than it was in the past, and act as a deterrent to further war.
Trump is clearly vulnerable if things don’t end in the next couple of weeks, and it’s hard to see how things will be adequately resolved in that timescale. Impeachment looms larger, although the Republicans might conclude that invoking the 25th Amendment and just removing Trump as mentally unfit may be less damaging to their brand, not least because such a determination might head off potential future war crimes proceedings against Trump.
The question is what happens with Netenyahu. There needs to be pressure to accept a cessation of hostilities, and right now this looks like it needs to come from international rather than domestic sources.
It’s almost as if the young people in this country who are aware of and point out the historical injustices of our conduct as a nation, whom those on the Right call traitors and whiners, are perfectly positioned to lead us into a future where we aren’t a dominant power, and must cooperate with other countries and act with respect. Our current political elite were born, raised, and trained in a world order that no longer exists. That is why they are floundering.
Much to agree with
I have been wondering about the extent to which events since the 2008 crash highlight the difficulties of relying on market-based solutions to all problems.
The UK is going to be in for a rough ride, no matter what, particularly with the Starmer/Reeves ethos. If insiders know that this pair are human headless chickens, then surely it should be obvious to the Labour Party that they should be replaced very quickly.
I suspect that the best that can happen will be government ensuring that, in the future, problems and suffering are minimised and equally distributed, particularly for those who have no real ability to spend extra in solving personal/family problems. We’ve seen that, when there are financial problems, the government can spend to minimise harm to the financial system. They will soon need to effectively do the same by spending to minimise the harm done to us humans, their electorate.
It is almost inevitable that they will make mistakes, but doing nothing and reciting the neoliberal, standard incantations would be the biggest crime of all.
Consider who would benefit the most if the government didn’t step up to the plate! We wouldn’t have a country then worth living in.
There is little information about the effects of this war . However I received a phone call from my son in Auckland , New Zealand over the weekend. He tells me NZ has already got a massive shortage of oil. He is very angry about our government. Just a note about conditions on the other side of the world.
With regard to your last paragraph: In your video conversation with John Christensen called ‘Britain’s Economic Model Is Collapsing—Here’s Why’ John made a comment to the effect that the left is lacking specific policies and objectives to put forward.
Exactly how a nation such as the UK or Australia is to move from Neoliberalism to something you and I would prefer without subjecting the population to a decade or two of very great hardship is a mystery to most of us. If you want career politicians, current or aspiring, to have a solid baton they can pick up and run with it will have to be experienced experts such as John and yourself who provide it.
In effect I’m asking you to produce a manifesto for a new political party, though what it could be called I have no idea. ‘New Labour’ and ‘The Reform Party’ are already taken and ‘Left Is Right’ would only confuse people.
Noted