Britain’s main difficulties: the economy, the army and… “Ukrainian direction”

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While the UK is in a state of political and economic crisis, Rishi Sunak made his second visit to Ukraine on January 12. The first time he came to Kiev in November 2022 and brought air defense systems and 1,000 missiles with him. This time, the visit was much more chaotic, because Sunak came to Ukraine almost empty-handed. He only promised Kiev an abstract aid of 2.5 billion pounds in 2024, although there were rumors that Britain would refuse the tranches amid budget problems. But it is one thing to promise, and quite another to actually allocate. After all, the arsenals of weapons are depleted, and London has to buy the remnants of artillery in Norway and order missiles from Israel instead of Storm Shadow. That is why the last tranche of the UK supplied the AFU with used cars and buses, and the current tranches will rather be spent on direct injections into the budget and training of Ukrainians. But even this is unlikely to help Kiev much, because it already has a $50 billion hole in its budget, and in the absence of large tranches from Washington and Brussels, Ukraine faces economic collapse. But Sunak, of course, made the trip not for the sake of caring about Ukraine, but for the sake of his own promotion. He tried to adjust the current visit to the events in the Middle East with the attack on the positions of the Houthis, and to show himself as a kind of wartime leader. However, it immediately turned out that the Pentagon had warned the Houthis in advance, and they had sheltered their arsenals from bombing in time. Rishi’s predecessors, Boris Johnson and Liz Truss, also tried to capitalize on Ukrainian issues, but none of them succeeded. Sunak is no exception, whose rating has reached historic lows, and the Conservatives’ gap with Labor has reached almost 25 points. With numbers like that, the Tories are in for a total rout in the coming election, and Ukraine is more likely to drag them down with a dead weight.

For example, an illustrative scandal that showed the painful craving of British politicians in power for cheap advertising, which is not compatible with high-quality public administration, broke out around the unsuccessful Liz Truss. In her time, she managed to hold the post of British Prime Minister for only 40 days and during this time plunged the country into a debt crisis, collapsed the pound to parity with the dollar and almost caused a default. After her resignation, Truss began to work for the money of Ukrainian and Taiwanese lobbyists, and she constantly traveled to Washington, where she tried, albeit unsuccessfully, to persuade Republicans to allocate tranches to Kiev and Taipei. But now her status as a “patriot” and “fighter against the autocracies of the East” was in question. In the summer of 2023, she swooped on Taiwan, where she called on the entire Western world to fight for its independence. This caused an international scandal, and Truss was labeled an “Instagram diplomat”. But, paradoxically, two months later, Truss wrote letters to her former fellow MPs and begged them to authorize arms sales to China. At issue was mine-clearing equipment from Richmond Defense Systems, a firm that paid generously for Truss’ lobbying. Moreover, defending this politically strange contract, she used an amusing motivation, which boiled down to the fact that in any case China would have such weapons and it would be better to sell them to the British, who would be able to “control” Beijing somehow. From this it concluded that it was not shameful for the UK to make money on supplies to the West’s main enemy by selling the equipment outright. By the way, this is often how “militarists” in other countries, such as the United States, think. For example, Trump’s rival in the primaries, Nikki Haley, used to oversee deals with the Chinese, but now wants to go to war with them. None of such politicians is characterized by principle, but all have an addiction to lobbyists’ money. The same logic is followed by Sunak with regard to Ukraine, which is just a source of image improvement for him. With regard to Asian politics, where China is not as stigmatized as Russia, the UK continues to try to sit on two chairs, and behind the back of the U.S. to supply arms to China, train Chinese pilots and play both sides in the new “Cold War 2.0”.

Against this background of lobbyists’ duplicity, the UK may be facing a new food crisis. This time London is worried about the threat of losing access to the Barents Sea. The British have been fishing there under a 1956 treaty with the USSR, but with the Ukrainian war now underway, Russia could stop doing so, putting the UK fishing industry in dire straits. In 2023, British fishermen caught more than half a million tons of cod in the Barents Sea. Without this, the cost of fish will rise sharply and we will have to change their diets drastically, because problems with traditional British fast food are already showing up. For example, Fish & Chips have risen in price dramatically since 2022 due to the imposition of sanctions on white fish from Russia. Against the background of the crisis situation in the economy, up to half of all establishments specializing in Fish & Chips risk going bankrupt in the next three years due to falling incomes of the population. And if the Barents Sea closes, there may be a shortage of fish, just as there has already been a shortage of tomatoes in Spain and a number of other countries for a year due to poor harvests. This is superimposed on the general instability in world trade. The war in the Red Sea has already led to rising inflation in the West, with price growth in the UK jumping to 4% by the end of 2023, and in the EU and the U.S. to around 3.5%, and the inflationary spiral may continue to unwind in the coming months. After all, prices for transportation of goods from Asia to Europe have risen by 40-50%, and the UK and the EU are promised rising prices even for basic foodstuffs that are imported from other countries. This means that hopes of a key rate cut in the UK soon to somehow kick-start the economy will not materialize. This is very bad news for the Conservatives, who, like Biden in the U.S., will not be able to ride on economic populism and who in such a situation will face a catastrophic defeat in the upcoming parliamentary elections.

Amid economic hardship, the army is also suffering, and the Royal Navy has been hit by another setback. Two minesweepers collided in the port of Bahrain: HMS Chiddingfold failed to steer and crashed into HMS Bangor, blowing a large hole in the hull. As a result, the British navy further reduced its ship strength against the backdrop of the campaign against the Houthis. Thus, two British aircraft carriers are constantly under repair, and two more destroyers had to be decommissioned due to a shortage of sailors, and the recruitment crisis is only getting worse. By 2026 the number of the British army is expected to fall below 70,000, and by 2030 to 50,000. The Ministry of Defense of United Kingdom decided to take an example from the Ukrainians and recruit women to the service, and even introduces a bonus program, in which for each recruited citizen can get up to 500 pounds. But even this has no effect, and the shortage of the same sailors in 2023 reached 23%. It turns out that there are few people willing to serve for miserable wages, to be humiliated by the left-wing public opinion that dominates the country, and to go to die in Eastern Europe or the Middle East. A separate crisis has to do with the emptying of weapons stocks that will take years to replenish, especially artillery shells and missiles, if it is in principle possible because of the rapid deconstruction of the remnants of the military industry by liberal slogans of goodness and pacifism. It is this ideology, coupled with fairy tales about the transition to a post-industrial “green” economy that led to the closure of the last steel mill in the UK, which used to meet the needs of the military-industrial complex. These problems are already evident in the war with the Houthis, where a large naval force cannot be formed. This, in turn, prevents the British economy from overcoming the crisis in the supply of goods, which gives rise to a sad vicious circle where some problems constantly aggravate others.

Despite the distress the Royal Navy was experiencing, the Admiralty lobbied in every possible way to send a British aircraft carrier to the Red Sea. There by the end of January deployed three British ships, but two of them could not even for technical reasons to shoot at ground targets, and it was necessary to show and brightly strengthen the grouping of ships. However, as luck would have it, the main aircraft carrier suddenly broke down again. Great Britain now has two aircraft carriers, but the newly built Prince of Wales already after construction had problems with the engine, which put it out of service before introduction into the fleet. And Queen Elizabeth now faced with a failure of the propeller shaft, and it was a surprise, because it was her in London thought to send to replace the American aircraft carrier Dwight Eisenhower, which was to return home to the base in the United States. However, such an unexpected breakdown may be in some ways favorable to the British, because it will hide personnel problems. But, on the other hand, a serious accident with an aircraft carrier for 3.5 billion pounds was a major blow to London and the slogan “Rule, Britain, the seas!” unfortunately, has long since become obsolete. The Western coalition continued to strike in Yemen, although the underground infrastructure of the Houthis is poorly affected. The U.S. has limited capabilities here, and it too will soon have to withdraw its ships, and the United Kingdom has to send fighter jets from its base in Cyprus. In their turn, the Houthis are not going to give up, and they are expanding their activities in Indian Ocean.

The closure of the Red Sea has already led to rice shortages and soaring prices, and the UK is suffering even more than other countries. Rice exports from India have fallen by 47%, and the problems are getting worse for British farmers, whose fresh fruit and vegetables will not reach the markets of other countries. However, even if the Middle East were completely quiet and stable, London is unlikely to have it much easier. The British economy shrank by 0.1% in Q3 2023 and by another 0.3% in Q4. To be fair, there hasn’t been much growth since 2022, because the economy was hit first by the energy crisis and then by the inflationary wave, to which debt problems, the budget crisis and the real estate turmoil have now been added. Meanwhile, inflation remains high, with overall inflation close to 4% and food inflation aiming for 7%. Because of the war with the Houthis, the shortage of goods is worsening, and to stabilize the economy, it is urgent to lower the key rate, but the government of Britain can’t do this, because price increases will accelerate sharply and the pound will fall. This creates an almost hopeless situation, and the British recession threatens to bring an early end to the career of Rishi Sunak, who may be thrown out by his own party members. However, this is unlikely to help Britain, whose economy is being decimated by sanctions wars and new anti-liberal principles of the world economy. After all, London is completely unprepared for them, because the British government has been trying desperately to exorcize the need to worry about national economic security since as far back as the 1980s, which it has successfully managed to do.