Category Archives: United Nations

Britain, Economic, G7, Government, History, Human Rights, Politics, United Nations

Standing up to the global panjandrums

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.

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Health, Science, Society, United Nations, World Health Organisation

Global cases of cholera are on the rise

CHOLERA

CASES of cholera are increasing, with 22 countries around the world experiencing an outbreak. After many years of decline, incidences rose in 2022 due to vaccine shortages, climate change and escalating conflict. It is a trend that is expected to continue.

. Science Book

Some 26,000 cholera cases were reported in Africa during the first 29 days of January 2023. This is already 30 per cent of the continent’s total in 2022. At the end of February, the World Health Organisation (WHO) said that more than 1 billion people across 43 countries are at risk.

Overall, Malawi appears to be the worst-hit country, with the highest number of deaths. It reported just under 37,000 cholera cases and 1,210 fatalities from 3 March 2022 to 9 February 2023.

This was triggered by a cyclone that hit in March 2022. This led to wastewater contaminating drinking water supplies.

Cholera is spread by the ingestion of food or water that is contaminated with the bacterium Vibrio cholerae. When it enters the body, some types of V. cholerae release a toxin that interacts with the cells lining the surface of the intestine, leading to diarrhoea.

In some cases, this can result in severe dehydration and death. In Malawi, 3.3 per cent of people with cholera die of the infection. With treatment, this is typically around 1 per cent.

In 2022, Malawi vaccinated millions of people in districts that were facing cholera outbreaks, but the cyclone has allowed the disease to spread to all of its districts, putting unvaccinated people at risk.

Extreme weather, driven by climate change, means many more countries are at risk of wastewater contamination. Cyclone Freddy, which hit Mozambique on 24 February, is expected to exacerbate the country’s cholera outbreak.

Climate change-driven droughts in countries such as Kenya and Ethiopia have also forced people to rely on water sources that may be contaminated with V. cholerae, according to UNICEF. Many people in these regions are malnourished, which affects their immune health, leaving them more vulnerable to severe cholera complications.

Displacement, whether due to conflict in countries like the Democratic Republic of the Congo or disasters such as the earthquake that hit part of Syria on 6 February, can also play a role in cholera outbreaks if people are forced to move to less sanitary areas, or if already infected people take the bacteria with them.

The destruction of health facilities and infrastructures [in Syria] that bring water to people could lead to more cases. According to the United Nations, the country reported more than 37,700 suspected cases in the cities of Idlib and Aleppo from 25 August 2022 to 7 January 2023 – 18 per cent of which were in people in displaced camps.

The unprecedented scale of the cholera outbreaks in 2022 – with 30 countries reporting cases, compared with an average of fewer than 20 in the previous five years – has also depleted global vaccine supplies. Only 37 million doses are available.

The International Coordinating Group on Vaccine Provision, which manages the WHO’s global vaccine stockpile, therefore recommends that at-risk people be vaccinated with a single dose of a cholera vaccine rather than the typical two doses. The one-dose regimen gives only about one year of protection, compared with three years with two doses. If the outbreaks continue as they are, this year of protection might not be enough time to get them under control.

Cholera has always been an issue, which prompted the UN to publish a road map in 2017 to cut 90 per cent of cholera deaths globally by 2030.

Several countries have made progress. The fact that Malawi has detected cholera outbreaks so quickly points to the work that officials have done to increase health surveillance.

But with just seven years to go until 2030, many aren’t convinced that the UN’s target will be reached. They say there hasn’t been enough investment in water infrastructure around the world to reach those goals.

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Aid, Arts, Government, Society, United Nations

It is the poor who bear the brunt when calamities strike

SYRIA-TURKEY EARTHQUAKES

Intro: Far too often, “recovery efforts” and international aid do not reach those who need it most

THE massive earthquakes which struck southern Turkey and northern Syria on February 6 inflicted ghastly damage across a geographic region that has already borne a great deal of earthly devastation in recent decades. The ongoing war in Syria has produced millions of refugees, many of whom find themselves victims of seismic activity in the Turkish south.

The death toll from this week’s quakes quickly jumped into the thousands and will no doubt soar to far more. An untold number of people remain buried beneath the rubble. Traumatised survivors contend with frigid temperatures and the aftershocks, and refugees contend with the loss of any semblance of refuge.

The natural disaster has served once again to underscore what should hardly by earth-shattering news: that life for the global poor is extremely precarious and plagued by multiple, simultaneous crises from which recovery is often futile.

The dwellings inhabited by the have-nots are structurally less reliable and potentially more vulnerable to tectonic tumult – as was seen, for example, in the Peruvian earthquake of 2007, when homes collapsed across impoverished neighbourhoods in the province of Ica. But in a world structured upon capitalist foundations, precarity goes much deeper than shoddy construction materials or a blatant disregard for building codes.

For a start, capitalism’s insistence on acute inequality and the tyranny of an elite minority means there are major global fault lines between rich and poor – ones that are becoming ever more pronounced in the era of climate change and ecological calamity. And while aid pledges and donations inevitably pour in after high profile disasters, they often only exasperate the divide by lining the pockets of the aid industry rather than benefiting the disaster-stricken areas themselves.

There is also the stark realisation that, for much of the world’s precarious population, life constitutes more-or-less a continuous disaster, but one that generates no attention. In June last year, The New Humanitarian news agency noted gross disparities in disaster relief, with almost half of all emergency funding for 2022 “going to only five protracted – and largely conflict-driven – crises”. Citing a recent United Nations estimate that the number of annual disasters will increase to 560 by the year 2030, the agency described how victims of under-the-radar disasters are often forced to remain in unsafe locations – thereby setting the scene for new crises.

Let’s take the case of Afghanistan, where an ongoing dependence on aid has done nothing to make the country safe. Last August, floods killed more than 180 people, just two months after an earthquake had killed more than 1,000. Save the Children, an NGO, reported that the country was suffering its “worst hunger crisis on record”, with nearly 50 per cent of the population going hungry on account of a raging drought and continuing economic breakdown.

Such are the toxic legacies of more than two decades of a US-led “war on terror” that devastated the lives, livelihoods and futures of millions of Afghans and sucked in billions of dollars of “recovery funds”.

For a further illustration of how politics, greed and mismanagement overlap with and compound environmental catastrophe, we need look no further than the Caribbean nation of Haiti, where in 2021 a devastating 7.2 magnitude earthquake was followed by a deadly storm and landslides. More than 2,200 people were killed and some 130,000 homes destroyed, in addition to a number of schools and hospitals.

This came just over a decade after a 2010 earthquake killed 220,000 people and rendered 1.5 million homeless. Only a smidgen of the billions of dollars that flowed in to rescue Haiti actually reached poor Haitian earthquake victims. The bulk of the aid went to aid organisations, security forces, and other supposedly competent bodies – like the UN peacekeepers who promptly unleashed a cholera epidemic upon the nation.

During the ensuing years, US support for official corruption in Haiti has made the terrain extra fertile for political crisis, while further eroding the country’s ability to respond to natural disasters.

Things are getting more precarious by the minute, as capitalism breaks new ground in the field of obliterating all aspirations toward a common humanity or planetary wellbeing – and the “disaster relief” industry concerns itself with maintaining its own viability while poor communities lurch from one disaster to the next.

While the rich insulate themselves from the fallout, the poor bear the brunt of military conflict, economic upheaval, climate-related havoc, and the coronavirus pandemic. It has left the have-nots on even shakier ground.

As with all other present earthly afflictions, this week’s quakes in Turkey and Syria will hit the poor the hardest. A total seismic shift in a world where profit for the few means precarity for the many is urgently needed.

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