The Shape of Things to Come
Mass Unemployment. Destruction of the tax base. End of the social democratic contract.
I wrote Worlds Ends: Coronavirus, Frankenstein and Other Monsters, in the doom-laden days of April 2020. Analysing Project Panic and Project Fear, showing how the Johnson government lied and continued to lie to the nation about the Plan being followed, demonstrating that “science” never had anything to do with lockdown decision making. I made some awful predictions. Sadly: they are maturing.
Following the dire and delusionary events of the last week, worse is now certain to come.
The Landscape
UK plc transformed in the 1980’s from a sclerotic manufacturing economy, into a foreign capital infused services circus. This was always an economic model of reliance: on cheap money; on foreign capital flowing through free exchanges; on asset bubbles; on commodity and goods exporters being willing to accept fundamentally worthless British currency in exchange for their outputs.
For 30 years, that reliance model has been relentlessly pursued. Its most obvious manifestation was the transformation of British politics: from a collection of serious statespersons contesting the socio-economic direction of an independent commodity producing and manufacturing economy, to a circus of charlatans, selling fantasies of national self-worth in a coffee shop economy.
The crash was bound to come at some time. No economy can survive as a collection of bargains between end-vendors of foreign made tat, call centre and estate agent operatives, and a set of professionals to manage and massage the books. The life of borrowed time was conveniently illustrated by the tripling of Britain’s public debt mountain since 2000: including the absurd ode to austerity. The ever fattening waistline of the PSBR, aspiring to slim, but always piling on a few more pounds instead.
In coronavirus terms, the British patient had a host of dangerous co-morbidities. The clinical outcome was a foregone conclusion.
It’s Too Late To Say We’re Sorry
I’m full of admiration for Peter Hitchens, Simon Dolan, Lord Sumption, Sherelle Jacobs of the Telegraph, Alistair Hames on Twitter, InProportion2. And many more in the Coronasceptics community. All who have pointed out the Emperor’s nudity. Who have urged a change of course before it’s too late for the good ship Britannia. But the iceberg irrevocably holed us below the waterline in that week culminating in “You must stay at home”.
None of us have time for the reptile-5G conspiracy theorists. There is no Plan. There is no Cabal. The world was, as at 2019, very nicely under the control of those hypothesised to control it. The elephant (reptile, or 5G mast) in the room for the Century21 conspiracy theorists is: explaining why the globally empowered should have wished to diminish and destabilise the very socio-economic conditions of their power. The idea that China would have wished deliberately to poison its own export customers, takes second place in the ranks of ridiculous ideas.
The chaos of the Covidiot response to a (possibly) novel, certainly age-skewed virus, with massive heterologous (cross) immunity: that’s the result of panic, not plan. As Worlds Ends demonstrates, Govt UK had a Plan. Signed off by Whitty and Ferguson. Manufactured and curated by the best of the British civil service establishment. The keep calm and carry on Plan. The one that Govt UK was still claiming to be following as late as 11 May 2020.
But, in those mad days of March 2020, Plan was replaced by Panic. This is not historically unprecedented, The guns of August 1914 blighted 40 million lives in death and casualty, irrevocably changing the world: and all by mistake, coupled with panic. The precedent reverberates further: why, by Xmas 2014, did the State antagonists, upon realising the futility of their military ventures, not convene a peace summit?
There were voices venturing such an arrangement, not least Tommy and Fritz playing football in no-man’s land. However, having loosed the horsemen of the apocalypse from the stable, those in possession of political realism rightly reckoned that, to admit such grand folly would result in social revolution. They were right. Of course, the deluge came anyway.
The same predicament faces the charlatans presently occupying political office in Govt UK. Suppose that every single MP and MSP were to sup from the cool-aid of Coronascepticism. To stand en masse in a contrite Noble Address: “Sorry people of Britain. We are, all of us, united in confession of a terrible mistake in public policy. We panicked. We lied you into accepting the stupidities which we enforced to satisfy our own panic.”
Then what? A political society is not peacefully reconstituted overnight. The only thing more frightening than a revolutionary situation with Bolsheviks or Fascists to vanguard it, is such a situation with nobody left to lead at all. Anarchy sounds fun, until it’s a reality.
In a society divided between those who fear they’re going to die, because they believe the lies of Govt UK, and those who know that the UK is doomed, because they don’t: there is no debating our way out of the impasse. Politics is dead in Britain. It died on 23 March 2020. Boris and his collection of reality averse spinners, have been piddling on its grave ever since.
The human instinct, when confronted with incontrovertible evidence of error, is not generally to confess, audit the error path, and promise to do better. It is to gaslight in extravagant, other-blaming, denial. Exactly what Govt UK has spent the last few days doing: blaming You.
Without a choice, Because it’s too late to say sorry.
Now we must all live with the consequences. Here, I draw out some big picture shapes of the things to come.
Busted Flush
Self-evidently, Sir Keir has won in 2024. It’s a strange state of affairs where he has stood throughout as Jeeves to Johnson’s Wooster, passing the petrol as Boris burns down the stately home of England: yet only Boris gets the blame. Criticising manifest incompetence in the incendiary enterprise, whilst endorsing the conflagration, is hypocrisy of the highest order, of course.
Nevertheless, Sir Keir will inherit office: with no power. As Wilson and Callaghan found, being Neo-Keynesian Labour is impossible, when there’s no state money to splurge. Their economic inheritance was an Eden, compared to that charnel house, the ashes of which the victor of 2024 shall rub into his face, with short-lived joy.
The road to fiscal purgatory finds a landmark with Sunak’s cancellation of the November Budget. An admission that Britain’s books can’t be balanced. For the international capital markets, it’s like cancelling an appointment with your bank manager, when he’s telephoned you in expression of concern with your overdraft.
Death Squared
In Worlds Ends Chapter 10, I ran a model of excess (non-covid) deaths for April 2020-April 2021 of 257,000. Even with a benign summer, we are already at around 15% of that figure. With 7 grim months to come.
The true total of real covid deaths? We know it’s nothing like 47,000. It’s a fact that 25% of deaths were wrongly recorded, even before covid regulations removed Death Certificate quality control. We know that deaths have been covid ascribed when certainly due to other causes. We know that ‘suspected covid’ has been used as if it were covid, and that this covers a significant proportion of care home reports.
In broad summary, at best we are looking at a current ratio of 1:5. For every actual covid death, the policies of the panicked political class have cost 5 excess deaths. That ration is only going to worsen.
Murdering the Golden Goose
The bludgeoning of GB plc has proceeded in sadistic, overlapping stages. March to early July:
full lockdown for 3 months
semi-lockdown following
voluntary lockdown due to the Frankenstein of fear cultivated deliberately by the Cabinet of Covidiots, and their willing executioners
The September Measures:
work from home
rule of 6: heading towards Scottish no-mixing households
>13 million Britons in April style lockdown
10pm curfew
effective closure of all arts, entertainment and sport
No V. Not Even a W
Predictions of a “V Shaped” recovery from April 2020 for GB plc were optimism ad absurdiam, at the outset.
The September Measures have rendered a “W Shaped” recovery just as fantastical:
the evisceration of public finances: over £2 trillion debt; a PSBR leaping from c. £30 billion to >£300 billion; demolition of tax revenues
asset price bubbling in the housing market
destruction of the commercial property market; consequential dismemberment of the institutional pension market (a train coming down the track)
collapse of the global supply chain (not entirely Britain’s fault)
devaluation (heading towards a $1: £3 exchange rate)
seeding stagflation: inflation plus stagnation
It really is a problem for a service economy when you stop people buying services
Now What?
Economic forecasting: in a functioning, albeit fake, service economy that was difficult. So many variables.
Once you’ve crashed your vehicle through the mountain road barriers and begun the plunge, variables decrease under the inexorable acceleration of gravity. There’s only one path to a final destination.
Let’s do a quick audit as at April 2021. Just that point when the maniacs will be preparing a 1st anniversary lockdown:
Unemployment: 5 million and rising
Utter failure of Furlough Mark 2: German employers know that someone will eventually want to buy first-class manufactured goods. British employers have nothing to sell except smoke and tat. German employees will be retained. Brits will go to the Job Centre.
Employers, having closed offices and endorsed WFH, have been busy doing what is already happening in USA: Employees are turned self-employed; Employers save NICs, and all pension and welfare benefits; Former employees save on commuting expenses and overpriced Pret lunches; But lose out on security and benefits; Employers set pay at regional levels, according to place of WFH. A London wage becomes a Devon or Shropshire wage.
Total collapse of private sector worker bargaining power: refuse transformation of paid employment into gig economy contracts by all means - there are 5 million willing to take your place.
Consequent further downturn in consumer demand.
Sunak must by law have a Budget, otherwise no taxes can be collected. Although any violation of the British Constitution is now permissible under Covid legislation.
The September Measures, and subsequent tightenings, resulted in HMRC failing to collect in January any but a dismal percentage of outstanding 2020 tax. And next to nothing for 2021.
Items 1-5 have collapsed the tax base. The PSBR is now the only vehicle for financing state spending.
Interest free loans to GB plc have now started to become seriously interest bearing: or else.
Cuts in public expenditure of quantity and quality not seen 1945 are inevitable.
NHS has run out of money. Hospitals are empty. NHS Trusts decide to pay doctors and nurses only for work done. Not to be sitting idle. Effective privatisation of NHS. Same trend followed in education: paid holidays ended. Trend leaks into entire public service. Doctors and nurses: threaten to go on strike - who cares, since you have no patients. A re-run of “The Compassionate Society” Yes Minister farce, without the laughs.
Profitable elements of NHS service taken over by private contractors. Long term and acute care effectively abandoned. Privatisation of the NHS from the inside. All because of idiotic clapping of measures to save that which Covidiocy destroyed.
Average rise in annual all cause UK mortality of >20% (>120,000 extra deaths a year). Average life expectancy trends downwards to pass below age 72 mark by 2030.
Stamp Duty bubble burst in March 2021. Collapse in house prices heading towards 50%.
Employers have closed expensive offices. Massive glut in commercial office space. An entire year of commercial property valuation collapse. Property company balance sheets devalued, with breaches of lending covenants.
Result: banks and pension funds start failing
Supply side inflation mounting due to rigidities in global supply chain, and difficulties in stocking on credit.
Massive de-stocking: reflecting both supply side and demand side difficulties.
Massive failure in consumer demand: retail sector insolvent.
Yet stockmarket has a boom, as Employers pocket the temporary advantage from reducing employee costs (including offices, HR staff, admin and support staff) by 60-80%. It’s in effect asset stripping through generational transformation of the conditions of work.
Just a few highlights there. Now, further into darkness, GB plc in 3-5 years time:
Stagflation: supply curve down, no capital investment, demand curve down. Cost push inflation exacerbated by sterling devaluation. Inexorably rising interest rates. Depression era economics with no ability of State to finance Keynesian fiscal expansion.
Collapse of tax base: from 5 million self-employed, to an economy with 5 million long-term unemployed; 5 million disguised unemployed in zero-hours contracts; 15 million formerly employed, now involuntary self-employed.
Inability to borrow abroad, save on unaffordable interest terms.
Capital controls imposed: GB plc is closed to foreign investment.
Hollowing out of city centres. Example: acres of abandoned office space in Canary Wharf now the equivalent of the derelict dock warehousing they replaced. City centres are now the haunts of criminality and vagrancy.
Middle class squeezed at every end into impoverishment.
Rise of barter economy between those with skills to sell.
Where does it end?
The 20th century was an oddity. A combination of factors allowed a sclerotic UK industrial economy to struggle on until the mid-70’s. Transformed into a service economy through the 1980’s GB plc succeeded in maintaining an illusion of economic health for 30 years. Then the panicked covid response ended the 20th century.
The 21st century for Britain beckons. As a post-industrial, bankrupt, wounds licking, obscure island.
In Worlds Ends, I predicted a transition to classic capitalism: a tiny elite, surrounded by a small middle class professional layer; and an impoverished remainder. That is already coming true.
I did not forsee that the political class would be so inept as to enact a repeat performance of panic, when there was not even a hint of fire in the theatre. But, by doubling down, just as the political class did after Xmas 1914, they have guaranteed armageddon.
Britons have no inalienable right to prosperity. This is still a capitalist global mixed market economy. The British political class have imposed socio-economic measures which prevent a service economy from functioning. The result is that Britain can no longer even pretend to pay its way in global markets.
These have to be paid for. In a currency exchange drawn on an economy which is insolvent by any measure.
Inability to pay results inevitably in compelled autarchy. Britain will need to re-open the coal mines. To frack the Home Counties. To un-mothball dangerous nuclear facilities. Food self-sufficiency will become necessary. 1945 will look like a golden age.
It’s to be expected that a forecast such as this will be scorned. Like the soothsaying of Ferguson, Whitty and Valance, it’s a “worst case scenario”. Theirs never had any chance of coming true. Because they were not forecasts at all. They were deliberate lies.
The items numbered 1 - 20 above are simply extrapolations of trends which we can already see. If only a small part of those scenarios pan out, Britain will be catapulted back to 1970’s levels of living standards: and without the manufacturing base which sustained them.
But I’m Scared I’m Going To Die
If aged over 65, you will, sometime in the next 18 years. That’s an actuarial certainty.
Here’s a question I’ve not seen asked: Would you volunteer to die a bit early, if it ensured the opportunity for your children and grandchildren to live out their lives in potential prosperity? Or, would you value your own mortality above their lives and the conditions of their prosperity?
The human instinct is to work, save, live and sacrifice, in order that our successors will have it better. So, it’s pretty obvious what the answer would be.
Any Answers
No.
Once the Frankenstein of fear was created, such that 50% plus of the British population surrendered to its shadow, it was too late. That was back in March / April. The deliberate injection of mortal fear into the British population broke the social democratic contract. It was naked terrorism.
The reality of the obvious, is that the correct course of action is to abandon Covid policies and return Britain to normalcy, whilst tending to the permanent scars already inflicted. But the Frankenstein fear, injected by deliberate acts of political terrorism into the veins of the British people, cannot be washed away.
The political class is in a dialogue with that Frankenstein, not reality. That dialogue is incapable of producing any answer. It is self-sustaining self-mutilation.
But, enjoy at least a good laugh as the fires started by these sadistic, selfish, incompetents have ultimate effect to immolate them also.