by Tom Luongo, Tom Luongo:
In a lot of my commentary I give the UK a lot of grief. I give many people a lot of grief. It’s kinda my thing.
But to remind everyone, I was one of the chief champions of Brexit, cutting my teeth hard during the endless Brexit negotiations of 2017-19, trying to explain why things were happening the way they were.
I always knew that Brexit was a fight between UK elites beholden to Davos, the same folks that overthrew Margaret Thatcher in the 1990s, and the people themselves, backed by what I’m now calling The British Remnant. This group is easy to understand, they are the group still clinging to the glory of an Empire lost and will graft themselves to whoever they have more influence with.
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Neither of these groups love their native population, just to be clear. But the Remnant loves to invoke past glory to keep “Little Britain” still thinking someone cares about them. There are no good guys in this however, only villains and victims.
The heroes are few and far between. The people of the UK are victims. Their governments have been the villains. But the question always arises, is there a bigger villain?
To me that answer is yes, the EU. And I say that knowing that their desire to do away with the British Remnant is an unqualified good thing. It dovetails with what I would like to see. But I also say that knowing that those who are trying to replace the Remnant on the world stage are even worse, especially because a good portion of that British Remnant will happily cut a deal with the EU to advance its long-held agenda of global control if the US is successfully color revolution’d into splitting up.
Divide and rule. It is the prime strategic ploy of abusers, narcissists and villains. Triangulate two factions into fighting each other while you sidle up to both of them. It’s worked brilliantly for the British and their allies for hundreds of years.
So, there are a lot of mixed feelings in laying out these scenarios. Because someone is going to wriggle off the hook if things work out for the best, defined as the US surviving in its current 50-state form, the BRICS alliance forming up to unify Asia, and the post-WWII institutional order, including the old monetary system, is destroyed.
To be blunt, I give that outcome something like a 5-10% probability.
Some form of the British Remnant or the EU will survive this. Globalism will not die, but it can be weakened severely and set on a different path, one not quite so sinister. So, for today’s post I’m going to reframe my comments from that perspective, seeing the UK as a victim, trapped by their proximity and relationships with the EU.
This, of course, is not the real story, only a part of it.
So, let’s get to the meat of today’s comments:
Linked above is a pretty good video discussing the background to today’s overlapping crises in the UK. It’s worth watching for the statistics and the general arc of the story but it misses some essential elements of the larger picture.
Starting with the basics. London dominates the UK economy. Without London the UK is already an irrelevant economy. Taxes are insane, only surpassed by the regulatory burden on the middle class. I’ve talked about this in my post about the television show Clarkson’s Farm. The things Jeremy presents in that show, which I highly recommend as both entertainment and education, are just one angle on what’s been going on in the UK.
What the video misses is that all of this is purposeful policy and that policy has been very successful. They identify three shocks to the British economy that rocked it to the core: Brexit, COVID, Ukraine.
I’ll give them credit they integrated Ukraine into their analysis, few do.
Brexit
Let’s start with Brexit. While the video blames Britain’s lost decade on why the people were angry enough to vote to leave the EU, it implies this was the wrong choice. It wasn’t. Remember back to the Brexit vote and the main criticism of Brexiteers was that they were backed by big oligarchic “old money,” that it wasn’t a grassroots movement.
