“The Financial Jigsaw” has been serialised here and now is replaced by this weekly “Letter from Great Britain.”
NOTE – If anyone would like an electronic copy of the complete book, I should be pleased to email a free PDF on request to: [email protected].
BOOK UPDATE:
A hardcopy of my book, “The Financial Jigsaw” is now available priced at £25 GBP plus P&P in A4, workbook format, bound with clear plastic covers, printed locally on demand. Please email: [email protected] with your order, I will offer a quotation for shipping to your area, and please include your full postal address. TIP: Readers often work with the free PDF in conjunction with the easy-to-read hardcopy for quick access to internet links and especially the footnotes.
GOOD NEWS!
BBC Backs Down: Patriotic lyrics will be sung at ‘Last Night of the Proms’:
https://summit.news/2020/09/02/bbc-backs-down-patriotic-lyrics-will-be-sung-at-last-night-of-the-proms/ AND: https://youtu.be/nvesu6oK4rU
BAD NEWS! The British people are warned to start stocking up now as Brexit talks look set to fail (see below) and supply chains will be disrupted, as described in Appendix V of my book. “Haulage bosses have called for an “urgent” meeting with Cabinet ministers over concerns there are “significant gaps” in the UK’s Brexit border preparations. Eight logistics organisations, including the Road Haulage Association (RHA), have written to Cabinet Office minister Michael Gove to highlight fears the UK-EU supply chain “will be severely disrupted” next year if issues are not resolved before Brexit”.
The British government furlough scheme is changing from 1st September and this is expected to increase unemployment as companies lay off some employees to defray the extra costs. Employers now have to start paying national insurance, pension contributions (12%) and 10% of staff wages.
Up until now the government has paid 80% of furloughed staff’s wages up to a cap of £2,500 a month. Until 1 August, employers had also been able to claim national insurance contributions and employer pension contributions from the Treasury. But from 1 September, the government will only pay 70% of wages up to a cap of £2,187.50 for the hours the employee is on furlough. Read more:
https://www.yourmoney.com/household-bills/furlough-changes-take-effect-from-today
The global COVID 19 crisis is a catalysing event which has been misused to bring about the Great Reset. In order to convince the people to comply with their orders, the UK State has inculcated the population into a state of fear.
States around the world have practised social engineering using deception, by proselytising an unquestioning faith in an illusory form of science (scientism), behaviour modification, unlawful regulation and propaganda. They have used their obedient MSM to convince their peoples that the threat of COVID 19 is significantly greater than it actually is.
COVID 19 has been exploited in order to replace our inalienable human rights with an enforced obligation to obey public health orders. Public health has become biosecurity and there is no longer any such thing as a healthy human being. All humans are now biohazards and biohazards must be controlled or removed from society for the common good.
With the British people living in unwarranted fear, the UK State has been able to introduce draconian anti-democratic (quite literally) legislation. We are faced with an existential choice. We can either give up any childish pretensions that we live in a free and open democratic society that values liberty and plurality of opinion, and accept the fascist dictatorial rule of a global technocratic parasite, or we can exercise conscious resistance and refuse to comply with the orders of the State.
https://in-this-together.com/covid-19-scamdemic-part-1/
More than a third of UK 15-year-olds scored low on life satisfaction, the annual Good Childhood Report from the Children’s Society found. They also fared badly across happiness measurements including satisfaction with schools, friends and sense of purpose compared to children in other European countries.
The rise in UK child poverty and school pressures were cited alongside the fear of failure as reasons why only 64% of UK children experienced high life satisfaction – the lowest figure of 24 countries surveyed by the OECD. Richard Crellin, one of the authors of the report said: “We reflected this could be linked to a pressure in British society to take things on the chin and have a stiff upper lip. Young people across the UK told [how] they feel judged if they don’t succeed first time.”
The rise in home working has thrown city centres into crisis. If I were in the property game, I’d buy anywhere with a cathedral. When in March Boris Johnson ordered Britons to “stay at home”, I heard a death-knell sound. So shocking was this fear-based lockdown that a new Morgan Stanley survey shows that even now only 34% of British office workers have gone back to work. This compares with 76% in Italy and 83% in France.
Two weeks ago Johnson abruptly changed his mind and told office workers to report for duty. Few have obeyed. Walk through London’s Canary Wharf, Manchester’s Deansgate or Birmingham’s Colmore Row, and you see ghost cities. Offices stand vacant, shops, pubs and cafes closed and even boarded up. Come September, some workers will return, but I can find no expert who expects them in anything like their previous numbers. Read more:
AND this is causing the leisure industry to cut back on employment, for example:
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2020/aug/27/pret-a-manger-to-cut-nearly-2900-jobs
The global advertising giant WPP said on Thursday that just 3% of its 10,000 UK staff is regularly in the office.
Sales at pub, restaurant and bar chains halved in July compared to last summer, as almost two-thirds of restaurants remained closed and consumer wariness sparked a surge in home deliveries. Sales in July were down 50% year-on-year, with restaurants worse hit than pubs and London suffering more than the rest of the UK. Bar sales fell 63%, restaurants 60% and pubs 45%, according to the Coffer Peach business tracker, which collates figures from 49 group-owned and managed companies that run more than 7,500 sites.
I remain sceptical about the employment situation here in UK and particularly for certain sectors like software and IT where one of my sons works. Demand for office workers in the UK is lagging behind other types of work, according to data that suggests the labour market is undergoing an “asymmetric recovery” after the near-total freeze in hiring during the coronavirus lockdown.
The proportion of workers with new jobs in industries that mainly employ people in so-called white-collar roles – such as media, software and finance – has lagged behind other sectors despite the gradual return to workplaces, according to data from LinkedIn.
There are a number of reasons why the UK’s economic performance was so much worse than other G7 countries in the second quarter of 2020. These included:
Timing
Other countries, such as Spain, Italy and France locked down their economies more quickly than the UK, which resulted in more of the economic hit coming in their first quarter. Britain locked down later.
Stringency
Having been slow to act, the UK kept tough restrictions in place for longer than most other countries in Western Europe.
School closures
The decision to close schools meant many working parents – 8% of employees on some estimates – have had to stay at home and look after their children rather than going to work. Schools in many other countries have reopened.
Structure of the economy
Britain is primarily a service sector economy and a relatively large share of activity depends on face-to-face social interaction that is susceptible to physical distancing. Consumer spending in areas such as cinema, restaurants, hotels and live entertainment accounts for 13% of the economy in the UK, compared with 11% in the US and 10% in the eurozone, according to Goldman Sachs.
The fear factor
Polls have shown that people in the UK are more worried about Covid-19 than the populations of other countries. Ministers are concerned this may have slowed the return to work as restrictions were gradually lifted in May and June.
Poverty is a big issue in UK and this report from the Institute for Fiscal Studies in March 2019 indicates just how far the country has fallen in economic terms since the global crisis of 2008. The Covid-19 crisis has only made what was a bad situation much worse. It is clear that governments around the world are using this crisis as an excuse for a failing global economic system already evident for years following the last GFC.
“Unemployment in UK is much lower than in the past but is now rising fast. However, for those who are in work, pay growth has been very weak. This means that work is a less reliable route out of poverty than we might have expected. After adjusting for inflation, the lowest-earning working households today earn little more than their counterparts in the mid-1990s.
Tax credits in particular are being used to plug the income gap left behind by a lack of pay growth. In 1994-95, 40% of working age benefits was paid to households with at least someone in paid work. In 2016-17, this was 58%. Read more at: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-47623277 AND https://www.theguardian.com/business/2020/feb/07/uk-live-poverty-charity-joseph-rowntree-foundation AND https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/jul/21/uk-households-suffer-biggest-financial-hit-since-1970s-due-to-coronavirus?
Now that UK has left EUROPE I will comment on relevant EU – UK events as they arise:
“Michel Barnier has sarcastically wished Brexiteers vying for a no-deal Brexit ‘good luck’ as he warned that a lack of compromise from the British side is bringing the UK close to crashing out of the EU.” Read more:
COVID-19: which European country has the strictest response policy? With the 17 indicators they [Oxford University] designed, they came up with the Oxford COVID-19 Government Response Tracker. They divided their findings into four indices: overall government response, economic support, containment and health, and stringency. The latter scores the strictness of countries’ measures and aims to fuel the discussion regarding appropriate measures. Read more: https://www.euronews.com/2020/08/31/covid-19-which-european-country-has-the-strictest-response-policy?
“The WHO China Country Office was informed of cases of pneumonia of unknown aetiology (unknown cause) detected in Wuhan City, Hubei” the W.H.O. wrote in a statement, days after receiving the 31 December letter. At the time the virus had 27 known cases and no deaths.
The W.H.O. advised authorities to keep a close watch, but not to introduce any specific measures for travellers or trade. The coronavirus has since spread to most countries around the world, with over 25 million confirmed infections. At least 800,000 people have died with the virus.
Europe and the world have entered a new normal. Economies are struggling to recover after weeks of lockdown and new restrictions on businesses that are reopening.
“Social distancing” has welcomed a new era in personal space, where authorities advise: “keep 1-metre distances between people.” And in some places, the wearing of face masks has become mandatory. Read more:
https://www.euronews.com/2020/08/31/coronavirus-eight-months-on
To be continued next week.
