1/ What Britain is witnessing is the beginning of Dark Blairism. This is the final stage in the collapse of the country. 🇬🇧🪦🧵
2/ The first iteration of Blairism was a happy-go-lucky affair. Blair and co were Marxists of a variety, but happy Marxists who rejected state socialism and embraced cultural radicalism - a new, freer society where different groups would live in harmony.
3/ But society rejected this vision. People had “biases” - a false consciousness of sorts, mostly amongst the uneducated gammons and chuds. They couldn’t get into Oxbridge to study with Tony, so the state needed to be used to educate them.
4/ Educating the gammons didn’t work. In 2001, they rioted. Annoying.
5/ At the same time the left-wing were busy rejecting Blair’s neoliberal economic vision. These people were suffering from false consciousness too. They didn’t understand that hypercapitalism, married to a didactic police state, was the path to personal actualisation.
6/ Why not kill two birds with one stone? Turn the left-wing on the gammons. Allow them to distract themselves with the ‘far right’ so they don’t complain about financialisation and the collapse of well-paid manufacturing jobs. They just needed a slogan: “anti-fascism”.
7/ Then the financial crisis hit and Blair’s fake pleasure economy collapsed. Annoying.
8/ Worse still, those stupid left-wing protestors were back. Instead of reading Derrida on the “deconstruction of race” or Stuart Hall on “reception theory” they were whining about the economy. Very annoying.
9/ No problem. Turn on the left. Send in the cops. Push them back into the libraries to “decode texts” and hand the broken economy to the Tories for 15 years.
10/ Interlude. Everything gets worse under the Tories. The culture sours and turns weird. Immigration goes absolutely bonkers. The economy stagnates. Tories collapse.
11/ Here comes Keir. Starmer is like Blair but much more embedded in the state. He was the head of the Crown Prosecution Service and knows how to use the cops when needs be.
12/ Within weeks of Starmer taking power, his Chancellor - another civil servant type from the Bank of England - informs the public that the Blairite neoliberal model has driven Britain into bankruptcy.
13/ That’s fine though. It means the Blairites can hand over control to technocrats while they work on finalising the cultural change at the heart of their project. The Office of Budget Responsibility will manage Britain’s bankruptcy, lowering living standards gradually.
14/ All going according to plan. But wait! More riots! This time bigger than 2001. Annoying.
15/ Annoying, yes. But also an opportunity. For what? Applying Blair-era counter-terrorism laws to British people angry about immigration policy. Education didn’t work. How about laws that are probably not constitutional?
16/ What about the left-wing? Eventually they are going to notice the economic decline. Hmmm. Maybe get them focused on the far right? Maybe even ally them with the police? Very good. This could work!
17/ Welcome to Dark Blairism. Declining living standards managed by technocrats. Civil unrest and disorder. Ethnic conflict. Collapsing social trust. Extra-constitutional legal processes.
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1/ In a new study undertaken in partnership with @hiia_budapest I compare the relative geoeconomic strength of NATO and the BRICS+. We do not think a war between these is likely, but a war between members might turn these into autarkic trading blocs.
2/ Our first major finding is that the economies of the two groupings are now roughly the same size, with BRICS+ being slightly larger. This is an enormous development. Policymakers seem to imagine that we live around the year 2000 in this regard. They’re dead wrong.
3/ We also find that the BRICS+ is far ahead on steel production, of which NATO has barely any. It seems unlikely NATO would be able to build sufficient materiel without access to BRICS+ steel. Very important finding.
1/ Here is a thread on why recent record sales by the Chinese of US Treasuries might be one of the first signs of a major fiscal crisis in the US. There is a lot of confusion about how this would work so let's go through it step by step.
2/ What matters here is not overall US government debt but rather the balance of payments. If a country runs a trade deficit this must be offset by financial inflows on the financial account to maintain equilibrium.
3/ The United States runs a consistent, large trade deficit. As predicted - because it is a necessity - this trade deficit must be matched with financial inflows. Let's look at what those inflows are.
1/ A new paper is out with the @hiia_budapest. In it we explore reindustrialisation. With governments across the world waking up to the catastrophe caused by a decline in manufacturing we want to explore what reindustrialisation might entail and what might constrain it.
2/ Do not believe those who tell you deindustrailisation is driven by technology. A portion of it is, but most of it is a redistribution of manufacturing capacity from the Western countries to the emerging BRICS+ bloc - especially China.
3/ Some countries try to build manufacturing sectors by attracting FDI. Good news for countries with higher wages: only a weak correlation between wage rates and FDI. So, wealthy countries can attract FDI without crashing living standards. (BRICS in red, West in blue).
1/ Ever since the pandemic the Western world has started to talk about ‘derisking’ and ‘decoupling’ which are both euphemisms for increased protectionism in the West, especially vis-a-vis China. A study I worked on with @hiia_budapest shows that this has not been thought through.
2/ Through globalisation the world has become highly interconnected. It used to be that China relied heavily on imports but now the EU is more reliant and the US is as reliant.
3/ Nor are many of these imports from other Western countries. The EU is as reliant on imports from BRICS+ as China is on imports from the West and America isn’t far behind.
1/ In conjunction with the @hiia_budapest I will be working on a comprehensive series of economic studies on the emergence of the multipolar world in the 2020s. In the first othis series, we explore the Origins of Economic Multipolarity. Highlights in this 🧵.
2/ China overtook the US and the EU as the largest economy in 2017, but little attention was paid to this because of a flood of fake economic metrics (details in report).
3/ Following on from this, the new BRICS+ that added new members in August of this year, is now as large as the entire West in terms of its total economic size. If more members join from the shortlist it will be substantially larger.
1/ In our new paper demographer Paul Morland and I argue that Western countries facing low and falling birth rates are confronted with a trilemma. They can only pursue two of three possibilities: economic dynamism, ethnic continuity, and egoism. @arc_forum
2/ Countries like the United Kingdom can barely reproduce itself. Deaths in the country are close to outstripping births. Extremely high immigration rates are needed to keep the economy rolling.
3/ Immigration can be healthy. But at a certain point it becomes destabilising, both politically and socially. Rates of immigration can, for example, predict income inequality, as low-skilled migrants are forced to become a self class.