UK 2023: Recession or Depression, Inflation Or Stagflation?
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| 100,000 MARKS |
My brother bought me an old book from the local charity shop last week. When I got around to opening it, inside the fly-leaf was a 100,000 Deutschmark banknote printed by the Reichsbank of Berlin in February 1923. (Pictured above). This was the year of Germany's total economic collapse, when inflation became stagflation, and a literal wheelbarrow full of cash was needed to buy a chicken; unthinkable misery. But in six months time, we arrive at the 100-year anniversary of that insane period of starvation and money-printing. Deja Vu, anyone?Welcome surprise as it was, this featherweight antique arrived with some heavy historical baggage. I love old curiosities, and am always delighted by a new 'find'. It's also a strange feeling to hold 100,000 anything in your hand. But the circumstances which led to the manufacture of these stupendously worthless banknotes (disaster, inflation, recession, collapsing government) are ominously familiar.
It's a strain on your brain when the future appears so dark and grim you can't bear to picture the trials ahead. But tomorrow's world -the one the 'authorities' keep describing- doesn't sound like a place anyone wants to inhabit.
Polticians used to make false promises about how life would improve. Now those imaginary carrots have been replaced with rhetorical sticks: threats about weird, all-consuming disasters only governments can (apparently) solve. Alas, for some reason or other government solutions always seem to involve turning working people into beggars. As they learned in Berlin a century ago, in government hands, money can lose its value overnight.
IT HAPPENED SO FAST
My life makes little sense now. Three years ago I was very busy travelling all over Britain, working hard, enjoying various recreations and experiences, with the added pleasure of providing a much-needed service to satisfied customers. Work was invariably seven-days-a-week, which always left us burned out by Christmas. So we would take January off to lounge in the sunshine of the Med before returning to launch another year.
The jobs were never particularly well paid, but involved the healthy, rural lifestyle I long ago learned to value above money. In December of 2019, the schedule of bookings on our calendar was so intense the annual holiday seemed unwise. It seemed a better idea to make careful preparations for what lay ahead: nine solid months with only occasional days off.
Then, quite suddenly, everything changed. Like millions of others across the civilised world, one night I went to sleep planning for the following day -a shopping list, calls to make, emails, clothes to pack... and woke up in a horror movie.
The hardest bit is accepting that my simple, satisfying life will never come back. My future -like millions of others- was erased overnight by government decree. Every town and city in Britain bears the scars of that controlled demolition. Every shuttered shop, every dead pub and restaurant recalls how Covid-19 blew Britain to pieces. Shopping centres reduced to barren concrete mazes; unswept corridors and unwashed showroom windows; rows of empty, nameless units that will never be re-occupied.
I had long since fallen out of love with city life, but when the Covid axe fell upon my country hideaway, there was nowhere left to go but Glasgow. The lockdown/ countdown clock was ticking, and soon the police would be blocking the familiar escape-routes. Literally forced back into the city, there was nothing to do but wait and watch.
IT WAS ALWAYS COMING
Once caught in the Covid net, I confess I felt -and still feel- like a damn fool, because I had been certain for years that such a revolution was being prepared. It was the logical next step for the vampire corporations already sucking the lifeblood of every economy. So certain, in fact, that I published more than one quite specific warning on this blog. [Read "Keep Your Needle Off My Body" from 2019]
Yet when the crunch came I had swaddled myself in a life well-lived -and failed to take the necessary precautions. Truth be told, I never dreamed the attack -when it came- would be so fast and so thorough. I had concieved of scenarios where I'd lose my home in the initial hysteria following a globalist assault on freedom; never mind, I thought, my network of contacts will help me relocate. It hadn't occurred to me that travel itself would be forbidden -overnight.
I had anticipated all sorts of things -the war on cash, hideous new police powers, vaccination mandates, censorship and the assault on free speech, the demand for global government. I simply hadn't considered that all these would be launched simultaneously, with the openly-stated goal of total control by the year 2030. (click the above link to read how the United Nations' agenda dovetails with the Great Reset)
ALL BAR ONE
In the aftermath of the first lockdown, I found myself in a country pub I had visited before, open for trade -in a somewhat altered state. A four by twenty-foot screen of plexiglass now fronted the oak and walnut bar, behind which masked, mumbling staff were pushing drinks through holes and demanding cashless payment. The reek of hand-sanitiser dwarfed the aromas of beer and crisps.
The landlord, pint in hand, the kind of gung-ho pragmatist who would die before quitting, was holding forth from an armchair in the lounge. "I had the Price brothers in last night -yeah, those two idiots- going on and on about "Agenda 21" and "compulsory vaccination "-some stupid conspiracy bollocks. It's just a bloody virus, can't people get that into their thick heads? It'll all be over in a few weeks."
I wonder (if he's still in business) whether he sees things differently yet. The plexiglass may have come down, but the price of beer-deliveries to his remote inn will now be extortionate. Customers too must drive to reach his business, and driving's not cheap. Inflation has created legions of housebound alcoholics, the NHS tells us. Poverty is spreading and as winter approaches, the cost of heating those stone-floored 18th century premises will be astronomic.
Running a small business eats so much time you tend towards tunnel-vision -believe me, I know- but how many bankrupt ex-shopkeepers does it take to change an opinion? In 2020 when I overheard the landlord's tirade, I was tempted to offer him a link to the United Nation's "Agenda 21" document on the UN website: I had it on my phone. But you can't drag sceptics over the line, they have to travel under their own steam.
ESCAPE TO THE PAST
As I imagine many, many others do, from time to time I go through the motions of life-as-it-was, given the opportunity. Tomorrow we're driving 200 miles south to a former client's house for a week: work that is guaranteed to generate a loss. Petrol prices will see to that. But we'd rather do the gig, enjoy the trip, breathe the air of a rural elsewhere the way we used to do.
That's a nice cope, but the spectre of the coming depression lurks around every conversational corner. In Britain, tens of thousands have already signed up for the DONT PAY movement which plans a mass-rejection of the planned winter price-hikes by the predatory energy firms. Some are suggesting this could escalate in the same manner as the poll-tax protests, and trigger similar political upheaval.
On the principle that well-directed anarchy is preferable to chaos, I can sympathise. One way or another, some kind of pushback has to happen, and as the corporations are now re-organising the world, it's arguably important to bypass their government sock-puppets and hit them in their own pockets. You can join the DONT PAY movement via this link:DONT PAY
On a cautionary note, I am by no means convinced this is -or will remain- an entirely grass-roots organisation. It's a standard elite tactic to create their own opposition, thus controlling it's potential to oppose. Nevertheless, even if that is the case with DONT PAY the purpose will -at least in part- be to measure the depth and breadth of dissent in the UK. I can see no downside of presenting the largest possible body of opposition to crippling energy prices.
WHAT NEXT?
Popular newspapers are (finally) predicting riots in the streets as the recession bites. These insigtful forecasters are the kind of overpaid columnists who notice the house is on fire and write a post-it note reminding themselves to buy a flame-proof sofa. At what point, we should be asking, will the recession become depression? Inflation become stagflation?
What will happen when food goes beyond 'expensive' and actually does become scarce? How will the British underclass respond to a disintegrating economy visibly overloaded by tens of thousands of unemployable inner-city immigrants? Will power blackouts and race-riots become weekly/daily events?
These are the very circumstances that confronted the German population in the engineered aftermath of the first world war. What happened next was a decade of excruciating poverty, the collapse of a failing, corrupt political system, and the unstoppable rise of a brutish nazi regime, fuelled by the frustration and anger of a public driven to despair.
Those who fail to learn from history are condemned to repeat it, they say. And I've got 100,000 marks to remind me.
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