Category Archives: United Nations

Arts, Britain, Defence, Government, History, Politics, Russia, Society, United Nations, United States

Politicians are comparing Putin to Hitler

BRITAIN

Intro: Putin’s totalitarian regime and its war in Ukraine is synonymous with Hitler and Nazi Germany. As Churchill urged in the 1930s, that’s why we need to spend much more on defence. It’s woefully inadequate

IN May 1953, Sir Winston Churchill told a Coronation lunch being held in Westminster Hall, “Study history. Study history . . . In history lies all the secrets of statecraft.” One of the reasons Churchill was an historian himself was because he profoundly believed that a primary purpose for studying the past was to inform and encourage action in the present.

What are we to make then of Foreign Secretary David Cameron’s recent reference to history – his powerful speech to the United Nations in which he equated Russia’s actions towards Ukraine with the way that Hitler and the Nazis behaved in the 1930s?

Lord Cameron’s speech was precipitated after the Russian ambassador tried to accuse Volodymyr Zelensky of being a Nazi. The Foreign Secretary responded by saying: “The only people behaving like Nazis are Putin and his cronies who thought they could invade a country, take its territory, and ultimately the world would look away.”

There are serious political consequences that follow upon equating Putin to Hitler, and one of them is that you need to put your money where your mouth is. You cannot make such a comparison, and then not spend the necessary money to counter the threat that you have just articulated in front of the whole world.

You cannot act as Churchill did before the Second World War, which was to warn the world of the impending threat, but not then do what Churchill did, which was to call for largescale rearmament to deal with it.

There are absolutely no signs that the UK Government is prepared to do this. In last week’s spring Budget, the Chancellor made no commitment to spending more on defence.

Britain currently pays just 2 per cent of her national income on defence, and that figure can be reached only by adding the costs of such indirect defence expenditures like widows’ pensions and the intelligence services. Strip out the nuclear deterrent costs and Britain pays the equivalent of 1.75% of GDP on defence.

At a time when we are witnessing the worst war in Europe since 1945, the British Army itself cannot even fill its already-depleted ranks, the RAF is mothballing its fighter squadrons, and the Royal Navy can barely put a flotilla together to protect shipping in the Red Sea, while its recent Trident missile test was an embarrassing national failure.

Meanwhile, Moscow is threatening to put nuclear weapons into space.

In the 1930s, Churchill articulated the pressing need for boosting spending on all three services. That was pivotal in deterring the Nazis if at all possible, or to defeat them if not. Churchill started warning of the dangers the Nazis posed within weeks of Hitler becoming Chancellor, telling the House of Commons on April 13, 1933, that, “As Germany acquires full military equality with her neighbours… while she is in the temper which we have unhappily seen, so surely should we see ourselves within a measurable distance of the renewal of European war.”

By November of that year, Churchill was speaking of “the obvious fear which holds all the nations who are neighbours of Germany”. This also has modern parallels with the way that Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, and Poland view Putin’s Russia. In a 2021 essay written before the full-scale invasion in which Putin laid claim to Ukraine being Russian territory, he mentioned Lithuania in a similar vein no fewer than 17 times.

Yet the British Army is in danger of becoming merely “a domestically-centred land force” with no capacity for projecting force overseas to defend our allies. That was a view expressed in a leaked letter from the Chief of the General Staff, General Sir Patrick Sanders. There is no hyperbole in what he writes.

By early 1934, Churchill was saying the RAF needed far more fighter and bomber aircraft. Following the declaration of war by Germany, Churchill warned: “Within the next few hours the crash of bombs exploding in London and cataracts of masonry and fire and smoke will apprise us of any inadequacy which has been permitted in our aerial defences.” The nation was still mourning the Great War and refused to listen, fearing that rearming might provoke another, or by his own government which thought him an opportunistic warmonger.

Churchill recognised that far from provoking war, heavy Western rearmament might instead deter the man whom David Cameron has now compared to Putin. “I could not see how you could prevent war better,” Churchill said in July 1934, “than by confronting an aggressor with the prospect of such a vast concentration of force, moral and material, that even the most reckless, even the most infuriated leader would not attempt to challenge those great forces.” Instead, however, public apathy won the day, and British rearmament was postponed until it was almost too late.

“Moral and material.” Churchill understood that the demoralisation of the West, in the sense that democracies such as Britain and France were weak and divided, influenced the decision-making of the totalitarians in Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, and Imperial Japan. Similarly, moral vigour is desperately needed on the part of the United States, the G7, NATO, and Britian today in order to deter countries such as Russia, China, and Iran from ripping up the rules-based international order.

No message would be stronger, especially in the aftermath of the suspicious death in custody of Alexei Navalny, than if the West were to sequester the $300billion of Russia’s frozen assets presently being held in Brussels and give it to Ukraine for its defence and reconstruction.

That would be the Churchillian approach. But does our present Government have the anti-appeasing moral vigour to do it?

Fervently, we should all hope so. In stark truth, the Government needs to do far more than just this. It must increase defence spending to a minimum of 3.5 per cent of GDP. The Budget would have been an ideal moment to show it plans to do so, but – as we have seen – the Treasury continues to sit on its hands.

It’s not as if an increase to 3.5 per cent would be an earth-shattering break with custom and practice. Historically, defence spending was around 5.5 per cent of GDP during much of the 1970s and reached 6 per cent during the Falklands War in 1982.

Neville Chamberlain’s government finally woke up to the Nazi threat, and it was able to build the Hurricanes and Spitfires that saved Britain. The year of peace bought by the humiliating Munich Agreement was used by the Nazis to build much more weaponry and train many more soldiers than Britain, but nonetheless British air defences were in a much better state in 1940 than in 1938.

Modern defence industries require far longer research and development lead times today than in the 1930s, so if rearmament is to take place using new technologies, there can be no time to waste. Logistically, we currently have only enough 155mm shells – the standard type – in this country for one week of fighting at the rate experienced in Ukraine today. That’s how limited we are.

Churchill would be sickened by the brinkmanship being practised by Britain in the presence of a clearly growing global threat to democracy by evil totalitarian and murderous regimes.

Aldous Huxley, the English writer and philosopher, once wrote: “That men do not learn the lessons of history is the most important of all the lessons that history has to teach us.” Lord Cameron may have correctly used the Second World War as the analogy by which to judge our present dangers, but where is the clear counterpart to go with that, namely large-scale rearmament?  

Back in the 1930s, Churchill wrote in his war memoirs how his exhortations were ignored by fellow parliamentarians. “Although the House listened to me with close attention,” he said, “I felt a sensation of despair. To be so entirely convinced and vindicated in a matter of life and death to one’s country, and not to be able to make Parliament and the nation heed the warning, or bow to the proof by taking action, was an experience most painful.”

Are we to undergo something similar now?

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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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