BRITAIN

IN Britain, it shouldn’t have gone unnoticed that the world’s great and good seem to have it in for us these days. Barely a week passes by without some grand panjandrum from a mighty global institution having a run-in with the way things are done on these shores.

The International Monetary Fund (IMF) is the latest to have a go. Last week its chief economist urged the UK Treasury to forego further tax cuts in its March Budget and pump-up public spending instead.

The IMF has form when comes to lecturing Britain – often getting it completely wrong in the process. The IMF has no particular expertise when it comes to Britain and often regurgitates the global consensus advocating high taxes and big government.

The IMF is also something of a slow learner. It consistently underestimates the performance of the UK economy yet remains stuck in a doomster type loop.

For example, just twelve months ago it forecast that the UK would be the only G7 economy (a group of the world’s major free-market economies) to suffer a recession, with a 0.6 per cent decline in GDP.

In the event the recessionary wooden spoon went to Germany, which is often the apple of its eye. The UK economy grew by only a smidgen last year, but, contrary to the IMF gloomsters, it did not decline.

However, the political damage had been done. When the IMF starts predicting that we’ll be the worst in class, a cacophony of vested interest groups among us with a permanent grievance against their country, start to shout loudly and gleefully about how this is yet further proof of what a basket case we’ve become.

Yet, when it transpires that the forecasts were wrong, they’ve already packed their bags and moved on to some other alleged weakness. They never pay a price or any form of penalty for running the country down on a false premise.

Of course, the IMF isn’t just wrong about Britain. It forecast the U.S. economy would grow by only 1.4 per cent last year when in fact it expanded by over 3 per cent. A significant difference.

It predicted its beloved eurozone would grow by 0.7 per cent when it barely managed 0.1 per cent. There is no doubt, though, that it has a particular penchant for being down on the UK.

Undaunted, the IMF is now forecasting that the UK will be the slowest growing G7 economy this year. That’s likely to prove once again to be a cheap stunt. A study of IMF predictions about British growth since 2016 found them to be wrong 80 per cent of the time – and always for being too pessimistic. The IMF has rarely been wrong for over-estimating the performance of the British economy. No surprise there.

Brexit has given added piquancy to the gloomy predictions.

The powerful elite of the IMF, World Bank, OECD, et al, have never forgiven the British people for blithely ignoring their advice not to vote to leave the European Union in 2016.

The current chief economist of the IMF, Pierre-Olivier Gourinchas, rushed into print two days after the referendum with a posse of other disgruntled economists to warn of all the dire consequences which lay in store for Britain. A year later, he was forced to admit none had materialised – but still thought our future prospects were grim.

Having found a comfortable berth in the IMF, the Frenchman is typical of the socialist-leaning types who now dominate the global power structures of the higher echelon. Previously, he was economic adviser to the failed French socialist government of Francois Hollande.

Yet he’s a veritable moderate compared to some of the people who produce reports about Britain that comes out of the United Nations. Its “special rapporteur on extreme poverty”, Olivier De Schutter, recently visited these shores to opine that poverty in the UK was “simply not acceptable” and insisted it violated international law. Welfare payments, he concluded, were “grossly insufficient”. You might think his time would’ve been better spent in Somalia or North Korea. The UN has a strange way of acting.

It is not clear exactly what qualifies this Belgian lawyer to pontificate on British welfare policy, but his remarks were nothing new when it comes to UN criticism of us. His predecessor accused the UK Government of implementing a policy of “systemic immiseration” when it came to the poor – this in a country which spends over £265 billion a year on welfare (over a third of all state spending). De Schutter claims it has got “worse” since those remarks were made.

To get the full flavour of his global Leftist mindset, we must consider what he said: “We should stop focussing on creating the macroeconomic conditions that will stimulate growth… and focus instead on providing support to low-income households… to create a much more inclusive economy rather than one that creates wealth for the elites and particularly for the shareholders of large corporations.”

And there it is in all its unalloyed, anti-growth, anti-capitalist glory. Put aside the fact that most shareholders these days are pension funds whose investments we all depend on for much of our retirement income. Just look carefully at what is being proposed: do not look to economic growth to help lift up the impoverished, look instead at greater redistribution of wealth from the better off to the poor (as if that isn’t already happening). The better-off in Britain already account for a huge chunk of tax revenues. The generous slicing of the cake has more than found its balance.

Force middle-income earners to pay even more tax in a no-growth economy and they’re likely to up sticks and head for friendlier climes, as Scotland is about to discover, undermining the very foundations of the tax base in the process.

These days there is no end of nonsense coming out of the UN about Britain. No more so than on human rights. Another rapporteur, dealing with such issues, recently complained about the “severe” sentences ordered on two Just Stop Oil protesters.

They were imprisoned for scaling the Dartford Crossing Bridge and causing traffic chaos for 40 hours. The UN saw this as an attack on the “right to freedom of expression”. It might want to look more closely at those currently languishing in the gulags and forced labour camps of Russia and China if it wants to see a real denial of human rights.

But no, its rapporteur doubled down, claiming new legislation in 2023 was a “direct attack” on public protest. I guess we’re just imagining the pro-Palestinian protests that have been commandeering central London almost every Saturday since the horrifying Hamas attack on Israel in early October.

But perhaps the greatest recent absurdity was the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) claiming that Government plans to send asylum seekers to Rwanda was wrong because Rwanda was “not a safe country”. Fair enough, you might think. Like many people in this country, I’m not a great fan of the Rwanda scheme either. But the UNHCR has recently been relocating vulnerable migrants from war-torn Libya to Rwanda itself.

This didn’t stop the High Commissioner from accusing Britain of a “general disregard for human rights”. This of a country in which, even if your asylum claim has been knocked back multiple times, it is well nigh impossible to be deported.

Despite the global elite never forgiving us for Brexit, the more the Left consolidates its grip on powerful world bodies, the more we are likely to hear this sort of nonsense about Britain.

There’s one other factor at work too.

We live in an age of identity politics in which the sins of the past, from slavery to colonialism, need to be atoned for. As a country complicit in the trans-Atlantic slave trade, which also presided over the largest empire the world has ever seen, Britain is in the crosshairs of the new global elite’s agenda.

It doesn’t matter that we were also the first to abolish the slave trade or that so many citizens of the old empire now want to come and live on these shores. We have sinned and we must be made to pay, through reparations and being cast down in ignominy.

There is only one remedy: to stand up for ourselves.

We know our past mistakes, but we also know the great contribution we have made to world progress. We don’t need lectures from the global great and good.