Regime Change in the UK
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The downfall of Boris Johnson was totally expected, and it happened almost exactly as I had predicted in this blog.
This is not because I am smart, but because it does not require smarts to predict that outcome. The writing was on the bloody wall. If anyone is surprised with what happened, that person is either blind, stupid or belong to that naïve group brainwashed by mainstream media propaganda all this while.
In this blog we have said in no uncertain terms that Bojo was destined to be dumped by his own people. I was not far off on the timing. And I am no expert on British domestic politics.
A prediction of Johnson’s sacking did not require familiarity with anything to do with the UK. It was, as I have said, simply because this Prime Minister was more concerned about Uk-raine than the Uk.
Of course, you would not get the view that Johnson was in trouble if you have been limited in your reading. Boris was a media star, Churchill in the 21st Century. He is ahead of the pack supporting Ukraine. No appeasement for the likes of Putin. Blah, blah, blah.
After Boris fell, every newspaper suddenly attributed the regime change in London to Boris’ personal traits, his putting himself above the law, and his disdain for the political system that nurtured his own rise to power. He was better than the rest of British politicians, until he was not.
I would not need to write too much this week. It’s now all out in the open. I would just like to present some of the articles written by erudite editors all over the world on the Johnson debacle and then add my two cents worth to the analysis at the end.
Here is the first one.
The Guardian view on Boris Johnson’s resignation: good riddance.
By: Fintan O’Toole
7 Jul 2022
“His political career has consisted of chucking rocks over the walls of the neighbours. We will live with the damage for years
It seems rather apt that Boris Johnson pocketed a huge advance from a publisher for a book about William Shakespeare but never got round to writing it. Johnson’s rise and fall hovers between cheap farce and theatre of the absurd. It has none of the grandeur of tragedy. The only line of Shakespeare’s that came to mind at his political demise was the first bit of Mark Antony’s elegy for Julius Caesar: “The evil that men do lives after them”. If the good that Johnson did in his public life is to be interred with his bones, the coffin will be light enough. But the evil will weigh heavily on the coming decades.
This is what is so strange about Johnson’s place in history. It is hard to think of a figure at once so fatuous and so consequential, so flippant and yet so profoundly influential. His reign was short – its malign hangover will last long. He was a politician so incompetent that he could not keep himself in office even with a thumping parliamentary majority, a sycophantic press and a cabinet specially selected for slavish self- abasement. Yet he has remade the political architecture of Britain, of Ireland and of Europe.
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Johnson’s dark genius was to shape Britain in his own image. His roguishness has made it a rogue state, openly defiant of international law. His triviality has diminished it in the eyes of the world. His relentless mendacity and blatantly self-seeking abuse of power have ruined its reputation for democratic decency. His bad jokes made the country he professes to love increasingly risible. |
There is no pleasure in this strange story – not for the majority of British people, not for Ireland and not for Europe. It was another great English writer, John Donne, who wrote that “If a clod be washed away by
the sea, Europe is the less”. Britain was never a mere clod, and Europe is indeed the less for its departure. A dense but delicate network of connections and relationships – with Ireland as well as with the continent – has been cut or badly frayed. As Europe faces two overlapping existential crises (the climate crisis and the invasion of Ukraine), Johnson’s Britain has made itself a source of further disruption and uncertainty.
The disgrace is that, for Johnson, all of this is so trifling. His lust for power was real and deep, at least as demanding as his other, more bodily appetites. But what, in the end, did he really mean by power? His understanding of it was always that of the juvenile delinquent. On Desert Island Discs in 2005, he spoke of the pleasure of making trouble, which motivated his mendaciously anti-European journalism: “Everything I wrote from Brussels, I found was sort of chucking these rocks over the garden wall and I listened to this amazing crash from the greenhouse next door … and it really gave me this, I suppose, rather weird sense of power.”
It is indeed a weird idea of power. The soundtrack to Johnson’s political career is the crash of breaking glass as he chucks rocks over the walls of the neighbours across the Irish Sea and the Channel. The construction products of Johnson’s imagination – Boris Island, the garden bridge in London, the fabulous bridge that was going to connect Scotland to Northern Ireland – were fantasies whose very grandiosity made them infantile. But at least they never happened. It was the destructive side, that pleasure in political vandalism, that became real – a reality in which Britain seems likely to be trapped for a long time after his departure.
The worst aspect of this is his reckless sabotaging of the Good Friday agreement. It is possible to imagine that Johnson was smug enough to think that both British and EU political institutions were sufficiently robust to withstand his own cynical abuse of them. But surely even he must have had a basic understanding that peace and reconciliation in Northern Ireland is a delicate and radically unfinished business. He must have had some inkling that this is one place where the consequences of stirring up tribal identity politics were all too obvious.
But he did it anyway. He deliberately trivialised the problems of the Irish border, comparing it to the line between two traffic zones in London. He dismissed Northern Ireland as the tail that was wagging the Brexit dog – an irritating appendage, in other words. He played with the delusions of his admirers in the Democratic Unionist party, egging them on or abandoning them as the mood took him. He lied repeatedly about the meaning of the protocol he negotiated. He introduced legislation deliberately designed to make Northern Ireland a source of open-ended conflict with the EU.
This achieved two things. It brought relations between Britain and Ireland to their lowest point for decades. And it thrilled autocrats everywhere. Johnson made the rule of law and the honouring of treaties into another of his bad jokes. On 1 July this year, Johnson tweeted that “25 years ago, we made a promise to the people of Hong Kong. We intend to keep it.” The Chinese embassy in Dublin retweeted this with a reply: “2 years ago, we made a promise to the Northern Ireland Protocol (sic). We are determined to break it.” The terrible thing is that the Chinese were, in this respect, right: Johnson’s behaviour has given them licence to ignore the obligations they entered into 25 years ago.
This is the level to which Johnson has reduced Britain on the world stage, making it fair game for the taunts of tyrants. Even while Johnson was doing good by supporting Ukraine, he was simultaneously giving Vladimir Putin grounds to believe that the west only pretends to believe in the rule of law. This descent is not just bad for the UK. It is bad for the whole democratic world. Johnson turned one of the great historic democracies into a state in which his own cynicism, recklessness and lack of honour became official policy. In doing so, he has allowed every enemy of democracy to say that it is a hollow system whose rules and values are a sham.
It isn’t – and there are those who will continue to fight to defend and deepen it. The great question that faces Britain is whether it can rejoin that side of the fight, as an honourable, law-bound and serious presence in international affairs. It is very hard to see an answer coming from within the ranks of those who allowed Johnson to make such a mockery of their own country. The harm that Johnson has inflicted will not be undone quickly – or by those who found it intolerable only when it threatened their own immediate interests.”
Fintan O’Toole is a columnist with the Irish Times
By the above account, Johnson was all evil, after all…
Obviously, Johnson has his dissenters in his own country where he has been voted in to lead. Instead, he prefers a role as a Churchillian style wartime leader, heading a moral campaign on behalf of the Ukrainians at the other end of Europe. If I were British, I would have long asked, WTF is this bloke doing?
Another useful summary of all that British newspapers had to say was provided by the BBC:
“Newspaper headlines: Johnson resigns and country in ‘state of paralysis’
“Friday's newspapers are dominated by one story - Boris Johnson's resignation. "Downfall" is the single word headline in the i newspaper.
The Guardian says "it's 'almost' over" - highlighting the row about when the prime minister will actually depart.
The Daily Mirror accuses Boris Johnson of "clinging on for one last party" - with a source suggesting he has plans at the end of this month for a "lavish wedding bash" at Chequers. Downing Street insists he is motivated only "by duty."
The Daily Telegraph focuses on the warning of senior Tories that his "long goodbye" will leave the government "paralysed for months."
The Times reports that Mr Johnson's plans to reverse corporation tax rises and bring forward a one penny cut in income tax to next year have been shelved.
Some papers review the Tory leader's resignation speech, which the Financial Times calls "grudging and unapologetic", the Guardian calls "tinged with bitterness," and the i's editor says his "anger bubbled beneath his bonhomie."
But the Daily Express suggests it was "heartfelt" - and along with the Sun offers the prime minister thanks for Brexit. In its editorial the Sun pays tribute, describing him as a "flawed but giant figure in the nation's history."
The Times examines the start of what it calls the "bitter succession contest," with allies of potential leadership candidates already attacking their possible rivals.
The Daily Mail claims the Tories have "lost their marbles" - saying they haven't a clue who'll replace Mr Johnson. The paper warns that the party may live to regret his exit.
The i suggests that what it calls the "crowded field" is likely to be cut to the final two within 13 days. The Telegraph insists in its editorial that speed is of the essence.
Looking at the reaction of news websites around the world, Le Monde suggests that what it calls Mr Johnson's "humiliating downfall" has left the UK with a "damaged international reputation."
The South China Post asks whether "hubris syndrome" was why it took Boris Johnson so long to resign and warns that it may prove very costly to the Conservative Party for failing to cut down their leader sooner.
The Moscow Times quotes the Kremlin spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, who says they'd like more professional people who can make decisions through dialogue to come to power in the UK, but aren't hopeful.
The Frankfurter Allgemeine says by resigning Mr Johnson avoided becoming the "British Donald Trump."
The Washington Post concurs suggesting it's "testament to the power of elected politicians to hold their leaders accountable," in a way, it says, the Republicans have not done with their former President.
There's praise in the Sydney Morning Herald from an Australian former High Commissioner to the UK, George Brandis, who describes Boris Johnson as "hugely consequential" having changed the course of British history in a way few have managed.”
All these words of wisdom on Johnson are well articulated. What more can I, an insignificant blogger, have to add? I would only say though that he would not have been found to be so inadequate so late if the UK economy had been flying, and did not have crisis after crisis piled upon it.
The Brexit divorce from Europe was the first gathering of the storm. Much has been written about it in the last five years. Here is the latest account of the disaster from the Financial Times in late June:
“The deafening silence over Brexit’s economic fallout.
By George Parker and Chris Giles, London Financial Times 20 Jun 2022
As he battled to save his job this month, Boris Johnson warned his MPs not to get into “some hellish, Groundhog Day debate about the merits of belonging to the single market”. Brexit, he warned his mutinous party in a sweaty House of Commons meeting room, was settled.
Later that day, Johnson limped to victory in a confidence vote, but only after 41 per cent of his MPs had voted to oust him from Downing Street. He is safe for now but the defining project of his premiership — Brexit — still hangs like a cloud over Britain’s fragile economy.
Johnson may not want his party “relitigating” Brexit but neither does Sir Keir Starmer, leader of the opposition Labour party, around a third of whose supporters voted Leave in the 2016 referendum. Nor does Andrew Bailey, governor of the Bank of England. Rishi Sunak, the chancellor, would rather talk about something else. Brexit has become the great British taboo.
But as the sixth anniversary of the UK’s vote to leave the EU approaches, economists are starting to quantify the damage caused by the erection of trade barriers with its biggest market, separating the “Brexit effect” from the damage caused by the Covid-19 pandemic. They conclude that the damage is real and it is not over yet.
The UK is lagging behind the rest of the G7 in terms of trade recovery after the pandemic; business investment, seen by Johnson and Sunak as the panacea to a poor growth rate, trails other industrialised countries, in spite of lavish Treasury tax breaks to try to drive it up. Next year, according to the OECD think- tank, the UK will have the lowest growth in the G20, apart from sanctioned Russia.
The Office for Budget Responsibility, the official British forecaster, has seen no reason to change its prediction, first made in March 2020, that Brexit would ultimately reduce productivity and UK gross domestic product by 4 per cent compared with a world where the country remained inside the EU. It says that a little over half of that damage has yet to occur.
That level of decline, worth about £100bn a year in lost output, would result in lost revenues for the Treasury of roughly £40bn a year. That is £40bn that might have been available to the beleaguered Johnson for the radical tax cuts demanded by the Tory right — the equivalent of 6p off the 20p in the pound basic rate of income tax.
Despite these sobering figures, Johnson’s complaints about the prospect of “relitigating” Brexit was exaggerated, intended to portray himself as the victim of a putative plot by pro-Remain MPs. In fact, British politicians — and the wider country — are still traumatised by the bitter Brexit saga, and deeply unwilling to revisit it.
Still, this month has seen the first stirrings of a debate that until now has been buried as the evidence of Brexit-induced economic self-harm starts to pile up. Few are talking about reversing Brexit altogether, but another question is being asked: should the UK start to explore with Brussels ways of softening its edges?
Show, don’t tell
Downing Street insisted this week it was “too early to pass judgment” on whether Brexit was having a negative impact on the economy, which could be heading into a recession. “The opportunities Brexit provides will be a boon to the UK economy in the long run,” Johnson’s spokesman said.
Both Johnson and Sunak insist that it is hard at this stage to separate Brexit’s economic impact from the shock of Covid. In the meantime, the prime minister promotes the “benefits of Brexit”, such as new trade agreements with Australia and New Zealand and the freedom for the UK to set its own rules.
Sunak has promised a reform of rules in the City of London, including reforming the EU’s Solvency II rules to allow insurers to spend more money on infrastructure projects. He has announced eight new freeports with special tax privileges.
But economists have not yet been able to find any significant positive impacts of these policies. Some, including Johnson’s patriotic promise to put a “crown stamp” on pint glasses in pubs and to allow traders to sell their wares in pounds and ounces, are primarily symbolic.
Critics of government Brexit policy are routinely derided. Suella Braverman, attorney-general, last week accused the ITV presenter Robert Peston of “Remainiac make-believe” after he challenged her over the government’s unilateral plan to rip up the Brexit treaty relating to Northern Ireland. Braverman claimed the so-called Northern Ireland protocol had left the region “lagging behind the rest of the UK”. In fact, Northern Ireland (the only area of the UK to remain in the EU’s single market for goods) is the best performing part of the country, apart from London.
When Bailey appeared before the House of Commons treasury committee in mid-May, the BoE governor acknowledged that his predecessor Mark Carney had made himself “unpopular” for saying Brexit would have a negative effect on trade, but that the bank held to that view.
Kevin Hollinrake, a Tory member of the committee, says Bailey was trying to avoid becoming a political target and was “deliberately avoiding” talking about Brexit. “It’s a singular issue for the UK,” the MP says. “We have changed our immigration rules. It’s about non-tariff barriers. You’ve got to be willing to look at what’s happening on the ground.”
While some gloomy predictions have failed to materialise, such as former chancellor George Osborne’s 2016 warning of a recession immediately after a Leave vote, there is growing evidence that Brexit is causing more lasting damage to UK economic prospects.
Ministers are becoming more reluctant to proclaim the economic upsides of Brexit. Kwasi Kwarteng, business secretary, was asked last week at the FT Global Boardroom to list some Brexit benefits. He focused on the UK’s ability to respond swiftly to Russian aggression in Ukraine — “it has substantial benefits particularly in international policy” — rather than on business. Sunak’s allies say the chancellor’s approach is to “show, not tell” on Brexit, pushing through City regulatory reforms rather than giving boosterish speeches on its economic merits.
The fallout in data
The first and most obvious economic blow delivered by Brexit came when sterling fell almost 10 per cent after the referendum in June 2016, against currencies that match the UK’s pattern of imports. It did not recover. This sharp depreciation was not followed by a boom in exports as UK goods and services became cheaper on global markets, but it did raise the price of imports and pushed up inflation.
By June 2018, a team of academic economists at the Centre for Economic Policy Research calculated that there had been a Brexit inflation effect, raising consumer prices by 2.9 per cent, with no corresponding increase in wages.
Some households, such as those relying on state pensions, were compensated in higher benefits, but the CEPR team found no overall offset with higher incomes. “The Brexit vote delivered a swift negative shock to UK living standards,” they wrote.
While the UK was still in the EU and during the Brexit “transition phase”, there were no significant effects on trade flows. But this has changed since stricter border controls were introduced at the start of 2021, imposing no tariffs, but significant checks and controls at the formerly frictionless border.
Economists have used this point in time to contrast how the UK’s trade performance compares with those of other countries before and after the EU-UK Trade and Cooperation Agreement’s imposition. The results have been increasingly ugly, especially for small companies trading with Europe.
Red tape caused a “steep decline” in the number of trading relationships after January 2021, according to a study by the Centre for Economic Performance at the London School of Economics. The number of buyer- seller relationships fell by almost one-third, it found.
The same group found food prices had risen as a result of Brexit. Comparing the prices of imported food such as pork, tomatoes and jam, which predominantly came from the EU, with those that came from further afield such as tuna and pineapples, it found a substantial Brexit effect. “Brexit increased average food prices by about 6 per cent over 2020 and 2021,” according to the research.
Summing up the effects on trade in which imports from the EU have fallen while exports have not risen, Adam Posen, head of the Peterson Institute of International Economics, says “everybody else sees a recovery in trade following Covid and the UK sits flat”.
The third visible effect of Brexit on the UK economy has been in discouraging business investment. In the first quarter of 2022, real business investment was 9.4 per cent lower than in the second quarter of 2016. That fall was mostly due to Covid, but it had flatlined since the referendum, ending a period of growth since 2010 and falling well short of the performance of other G7 countries.
Weak investment is a particular worry for Sunak, who sees business investment as the route to greater prosperity. Before departing the BoE in 2020, Carney told a House of Lords Committee that Brexit uncertainty was holding back business investment. Worse, he said, business planning for various Brexit scenarios was taking up a lot of management effort. “Time spent on contingency planning is time not spent on strategic initiatives,” he said.
Since then, negative perceptions of the UK have continued among business with the chancellor finding he had little bang for his £25bn buck of super deductions in corporation tax to encourage capital spending. As Bailey told MPs last month, the super-deductor was “not at the moment having the impact that was expected”.
Unhappiness about high immigration was one of the most contentious issues of the referendum, with a central promise of the Brexit campaign being tougher controls over the number of people entering the country. While net immigration from EU countries has stopped, with effectively no change apparent in the two years to the end of June 2021, net immigration from non-EU countries has remained high, with 250,000 in the latest year.
Collateral damage
There is, as yet, little appetite among Britain’s political leaders for a return to the EU — even if the other 27 member states were prepared to open the door. Even the pro-EU Liberal Democrats admit reversing course is a long-term aspiration, rather than an immediate goal.
As part of his attempt to avert a coup, Johnson wrote to MPs this month that he had “created a new and friendly relationship with the EU”. The opposite is true. Brussels restarted legal action against the UK this week over the Northern Ireland protocol: relations are at rock bottom.
The EU has warned that British scientists will be excluded from the €95bn Horizon research programme as “collateral damage” in the row about Northern Ireland. The prospect of any kind of rapprochement at the moment, at least while Johnson remains prime minister, seems remote.
But in recent weeks, a tentative debate has started over whether the UK would be better off trying to reach accommodations with the EU to smooth trade in some areas, rather than launching a new front in the Brexit war with unilateral action over Northern Ireland.
In an article much-discussed at Westminster, the pro-Leave Times columnist Iain Martin wrote this month: “To deny the downsides of Brexit on trade with the EU is to deny reality.”
Tobias Ellwood, a former Tory defence minister, suggested Britain should rejoin the EU single market to soften the cost of living crisis, said there was “an appetite” for a rethink and claimed polling indicated “this is not the Brexit most people imagined”. And Daniel Hannan, a leading Tory Brexiter, repeated his longstanding view that Britain should have stayed in the single market under a Norway-style relationship with the EU, while adding that to rejoin it now “would be madness”.
Anna McMorrin, Labour shadow minister, was recorded telling activists: “I hope eventually that we will get back into the single market and customs union.” She was forced to apologise by Starmer: such talk remains dangerous in political circles.
Even so, a Starmer-led future Labour government would change UK relations with the EU. The party’s mantra has become “make Brexit work”: rejoining the single market may be off the agenda, but Labour wants to find ways to improve on the bare-bones tariff-free trade agreement Johnson negotiated with the EU.
Rachel Reeves, the shadow chancellor, told the Financial Times last year that Labour wanted to strike a deal with the EU to reduce the most onerous paperwork and checks on food exports. The party also wants an agreement with Brussels on the mutual recognition of professional qualifications.
Even among the Eurosceptics in Johnson’s cabinet, there is now an acceptance that the UK should be seeking to rebuild economic relations with the EU, including in areas like the Horizon programme, to avoid exacerbating the looming cost of living crisis.
“Would I like to be in a better place on Brexit?” asked one pro-Brexit cabinet member. “Yes, absolutely. But we’ve got to find a way of doing it without it looking like we’re running up the white flag and we’re compromising on sovereignty.”
Additional reporting by Sebastian Payne in London
The above article in the FT indicates there are HUGE problems caused by Brexit. What else is new, when you break off a 50-year relationship with your largest trade partner? It is in fact the first fatal blow to the British economy wrought by careless politicians. This was followed by a second blow. The commitment to the western sanctions levied on Russia to punish that country for the invasion of Ukraine is Stupidity Squared. The west, without proper understanding of the economics, and had no contingency plans, simply ingested poison to kill Russia.
This has led to the deepening sense of doom and gloom by the British public. Across all strata of society, Boris was synonymous with the problem. It evolved into a “cost of living crisis” which in the end brought him down.
As the top man in the government, Johnson had his job all cut out for him. Any responsible Prime Minister should have been working on the severe problems facing the UK economy and bringing the British people to a better future.
But no, there was no glory in solving arcane economic problems. It did not fit his ambitions. He had to be Churchill.
Zellensky the clown came along and gave him a stage for historical fame. BoJo took it with alacrity. It showed.
In just 120 days of war, Boris crashed and burned.
In an unexpected recast of the “it’s the economy, stupid” refrain from the Clinton era, the latest mortal wound to the British, EU, and American economies has led to continuing regime changes in the western countries arrayed against Russia. It is breaking these economies.
And their governments.
Don’t take my word for it. Let me just point to the sharp depreciation of the following currencies since the start of the sanctions:
- Japanese Yen
- Euro
- British Sterling
All three major currencies were around Ten year lows. In fact, the Euro was already at Twenty year lows, and the Yen was probably at 30 year lows. This is the vast FX market making its vote on whether the governments of these countries are doing their jobs right.
This is dramatic economics. Think about it. When the Yen breaks 30 year lows, it is going to be a completely new economic regime. If it goes to what some forecasters say, 160 yen to the dollar (I am not fully with this view yet), inflation in Japan will be serious. At that rate, it may begin to be price competitive with China and South Korea, but it lacks the young population with which to become competitive again. It will suffer the downside of a weak currency without the upside.
For the Euro, the currency was shortly at parity with the US Dollar. Again the weakness makes it price competitive against the US, with Greece and Spain enjoying a boom in tourism. However, Germany and the northern European countries would not enjoy the massive boost in exports that comes with a very weak currency if it ends up de-industrializing when gas from Russia is cut off. And on the flip side of a weak Euro, inflation will worsen and cripple the entire EU economy. It’s again all downside and no upside in these circumstances.
As for the UK, with Brexit in full force now that covid is over, and with the inflation implied by the weak pound deepening the cost-of- living crisis, it will need sensible leaders the UK does not seem to have to bring the country out of the trouble Bojo has gotten it into.
The minimum it needs to do is to come to terms with a powerful commodity-driven Russian economy, ie stop taking that damned poison. The new British leadership will now need to display a mastery of language telling the opposite story related by Johnson – how they will support Ukraine without having to send any more billions (weapons or cash) Zellensky’s way.
I have explained my views many times in the past few Commentaries. I don’t want to sound like a broken record. Those views have come to pass, and this is after several regimes in the west have already fallen, since the first - Scott Morrison in Australia. There was then Estonia, Latvia, and the France parliamentary elections that leave Macro weakened, but Boris Johnson is by far the biggest friend of Ukraine to tumble.
My only surprise is not that it happened or that it happened in the time frame that it did, but that when the news broke, nobody in the west was willing to address another important reason for the Bojo calamity. They cited everything from scandals to personal behaviour to Johnson’s lack of responsibility for the two constituencies that his party lost when he ran away to Kyiv, dealing instead with easy stuff like promising blank cheques to the Ukrainians (who can’t do that?) to fight on. But evidently, the most important cause of the destruction of his popular support was simply his negligence of the worst economic crisis in Britain in many decades.
If the UK economy were going great guns, they would have found some way to let Boris have his way. With a looming economic crisis, they were just looking for a quick way to castrate him. They did with 50 resignations of MPs-in-government. That’s emphasis for any wayward politician.
Johnson, like all his G7 partners, his NATO friends and the EU community that he chose to lead Britain out of, is still calling for keeping Ukraine engaged in its brutal war. This is not withstanding the fact that the war is being lost painfully, with complete destruction of their army, trained to NATO standards over 8 years and beaten to pulp in just 120 days, and with most major weapon systems obliterated. That disastrous error is obvious to all, and Boris was summarily dealt the fate that he had wished on Putin.
And the other politicians in the west are nervously watching the thermometer as summer reaches it glorious peak and then sink into the frigid temperatures of a gasless winter.
All that bluster of western politicians just months ago, about how Putin made the gravest mistake of his life in attacking Ukraine and that he will be quickly deposed by an uprising of the Russian people bludgeoned by western sanctions, has backfired so strongly that Johnson for one did not even see the guillotine fall on him. How could he, with the G7 leaders, have gotten it so, so wrong???
Johnson is clearly caught by surprise at the turn of events. He is still trying to cling on as interim PM, but that will not work. Judging from the sentiment in the newspapers cited above, he will be gone in days long before he finds a honeymoon home. Sad.
And that idiot Zellensky who expects support in perpetuity from his western friends (he was mad enough to ask for US$750 billion in his latest wish list) will find out soon enough that he will not have any friends left to rescue him from the doom, destruction and bankruptcy he has brought his country into. America does not back losers, and the European leaders, are at the end of the day, at the complete mercy of fickle voters who will soon see Zellensky's calls for unlimited largesse to be completely untenable. Fool.
Less than a month ago in St Petersburg, Putin and Lavrov threw the iron gauntlet on the table, telling Boris and Liz Truss, if you want to break Russia, come on, do it. Last week, Putin repeated that challenge saying, the west has lost, even when his country has not “done anything yet”. What he is saying is that he can defeat Ukraine and the collective west even without committing his full army or any of its best units, including the elite First Tank Army, available to him, and if the west wants to take him on, he has no fear of them.
If you are on the wrong side of Putin’s threat, it is indeed worrisome.
Not to 87 percent of the people in the world though. At the G20 meeting in Jakarta last week, the G7, which used to dominate the world economically and at functions like these international meetings, chose to become a side show. G7 tried to force a condemnation of Russia, but this was ignored by the rest. The 87 percent…
It is a sign of things to come. The west vs the rest. The Global South will challenge the unipolar system with its self-declared rules (ie obedience to the global hegemon, the US) and forge ahead with a new economic system for 87 percent of the entire world.
Let’s see how that will shape up.
Wai Cheong
Investment Committee
The writer has been in financial services for more than forty years. He graduated with First Class Honours in Economics and Statistics, winning a prize in 1976 for being top student for the whole university in his year. He also holds an MBA with Honors from the University of Chicago. He is a Chartered Financial Analyst.
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