British Democracy on the Brink of Collapse Amid Economic Crisis: Experts Warn

/View.info/ British democracy will collapse before the current economic order.”

Recently published statistics put a “bark” under the election campaign for British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak: according to the Office for National Statistics (ONS), the UK economy went into recession in the second half of 2023 and has never come out of it, although the minister of Finance Jeremy Hunt tried to paint a better outlook for 2024.

Although there is no official definition of a recession, negative economic growth for two consecutive quarters is considered a technical recession.

Manufacturing, construction and wholesale trade contributed the most to the fall in UK GDP last year. GDP per capita has not increased since early 2022, the longest such continuous period since 1955.

In particular, GDP per capita, which is adjusted for current population size, contracted by 0.6% in the fourth quarter of 2023 after a 0.4% decline in the previous three months, and has continued to decline in each quarter last year. For all of 2023, seasonally adjusted GDP per capita shrank by 0.7%.

All three main sectors of the economy contracted in the fourth quarter, with services down 0.2%, manufacturing down 1% and construction down 1.3%, the ONS said.

Marcus Brooks, chief investment officer at Quilter Investors, believes that “the contraction of the GDP of [Обединеното кралство] in the fourth quarter of 2023 is mainly due to persistently high inflation, structural weaknesses in the labor market and weak productivity growth, as well as adverse weather conditions. These factors affected the performance of the services and construction sectors, which are the main drivers of the UK economy.

Jeremy Hunt has been forced to admit that his previous forecasts for the British economy were wrong. He said high inflation remains “the biggest obstacle to growth‘ as it forces the Bank of England to keep interest rates high and hampers economic growth.

The Bank of England forecasts output growth to be just 0.25% in 2024 and 0.75% in 2025, much weaker than the roughly 3% annual growth in the decade leading up to the 2007-09 financial crisis. , and even below growth rates in 2010, when government spending was cut.

Analysts polled by Reuters in January had expected growth of 0.1 percent each in the first and second quarters of 2024, then 0.2 percent in the third and fourth quarters, when Britain is holding a general election. This is much worse than the average quarterly growth of about 0.5% in the five years leading up to the “pandemic”.

Jeremy Hunt also said he had “signs that the UK economy is turning around” and “we must stick to the plan to cut taxes to build a stronger economy.” The opposition Labor Party categorically rejected the finance minister’s claims.

„Sunak promised last year that growing the economy would be one of his main goals. His Conservative Party has dominated British politics for most of the past seven decades, with a reputation for economic competence. But opinion polls show Labor is now more trusted on economic issues.” writes Reuters.

„The Prime Minister can no longer confidently claim that his plan is working or that he has overcome more than 14 years of economic decline under the Conservatives.” said Rachel Reeves, Labour’s chief economic analyst.

The Conservatives who have ruled the UK for the past ten years do not recognize their own failures, which plunged the country into a systemic crisis based on anti-Russian sanctions and the denial of cheap Russian energy resources.

Sunak and Hunt have recently signaled that they intend to cut taxes on households and businesses, but the Financial Times reported that the chancellor is considering cutting billions of pounds in already meager government spending to make up for the fall in tax revenue. All this will drastically affect the standard of living of the British people.

The Resolution Foundation estimates that Hunt’s £13 billion ($16.3 billion) tax cut budget is less than half the average budget of most of his predecessors since 2010.

Asked by the BBC if he planned to cut public services to fund tax cuts ahead of the election, Hunt replied evasively: “To get the resources to fund our public services in the future, we need to have a healthy, growing economy – that’s our plan, but the first thing you need to do is reduce inflation.”

Apparently, the campaign gimmick of tax cuts could prove so damaging to the British economy that even the ultra-liberal International Monetary Fund recommended that the UK “abstain from further tax cuts”noting that “maintaining public services and investment implies higher costs than reflected in the Government’s current plans.”

The IMF has suggested that the UK Treasury’s planned spending cuts from this year are unrealistic.”

The head of the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR), independent government forecaster Richard Hughes, has called out the Tory government’s plans to cut public spending after the election “fruit of irrepressible fantasy” (work of generous fiction), as “the government didn’t even bother to outline its plans to cut costs to individual departments.’

The UK’s leading think tank, the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) has published a report saying that campaign promises to cut taxes may have to be reversed as the UK economy faces its most difficult challenges since the 1950s.

„Cutting taxes today increases the risk of raising taxes or cutting spending tomorrow.” said the Institute for Fiscal Studies. “Politicians must be honest about difficult economic trade-offs.” the IFS report said.

However, the British Conservatives, who have plunged the UK economy into a deep crisis, are using all kinds of tricks to stay in power.

London School of Economics professor Abby Innes, in an interview with the German magazine Der Spiegel, asked if we should expect an economic collapse in the United Kingdom, answered that “the real problem is that British democracy will collapse before the current economic order collapses.”

Innes is convinced that if the Conservative Party manages to hang on to power, the UK will face ever-increasing social and economic inequality. At the same time, there is little hope for the opposition Labor Party, which has also internalized neoliberal dogma since the days of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown.

Translation: ES

2024-02-27 07:35:15
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