Prime Minister Boris Johnson has said that the state will “put our arms around the British people again as we did during Covid” amid the cost of living and inflationary crisis.
The British prime minister was speaking at a conference of the Conservative (Tory) Party, which he leads, in Wales, where the devolved government — roughly equivalent to a U.S. state government — is led by the rival Labour Party.
“I am not going to pretend to you that we can magic aw ay every single expense that people are going to face as a result of the global spike in energy prices,” Johnson said of the fuel and home energy cost increases that have been driven in large part by the conflict in Ukraine and the sanctions war Britain and much of the wider West have engaged in with Russia — but also by the longstanding obsession of the Prime Minister and his immediate predecessors with pushing a green agenda that has seen coal plants closed down, fracking stopped, and gas and oil fields and new mines made much harder to open.
“Just as we got the most difficult challenges of Covid right, we got the big calls right, we will get this country through the big challenges now of the post-Covid aftershocks, the pressures caused in particular by the rise in the cost of living,” the Prime Minister said — his reference to supposedly getting “the big calls” on the pandemic right possibly an oblique reference to getting what he might characterise as the small call of obeying his own lockdown regulations wrong, with he and dozens of others in Downing Street being fined for breaches as part of the ongoing ‘partygate’ saga.
“Everyone can see what’s happening, the cost of fuel pumps, the price of food, the cost of energy, we all know how tough it is and how tough it can be,” Johnson went on, claiming: “Of course we’re going to get through this and the markets will eventually adjust and new supply will come on and prices will come down again.”
He added that “in the months ahead, we are going to have to do what we did before, we’re going to use our fiscal firepower that we built up to help,” with the statist promise that “[w]e are going to put our arms around the British people again as we did during Covid.”
Prime Minister Johnson also referenced the effect of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine on global food prices, with exports of grain from the country known as “the breadbasket of Europe” being heavily disrupted — and exports of Russian grain largely off the table due to sanctions.
The Tory leader had conferred on this issue with Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky directly as recently as Thursday, revealing on social media that they had “discussed how we can stem the global economic damage caused by Putin’s reckless blockade of Black Sea ports.”
“We’re looking urgently at options to open up critical sea and land supply routes for Ukrainian grain stocks,” Johnson added — although the former may be tricky without direct military confrontation, given Russia’s near-dominance of Ukrainian territorial waters and occupation of key port cities.
The Ukrainian war and associated sanctions, adding to natural issues such as a lack of rainfall leaving some European farmers expecting crop failures anyway, could result in a major global food crisis.
Not only are European farmers heavily dependent on Ukrainian and Russian animal feed and fertilisers, many countries in the Third World already in dire straits, such as Yemen, rely on imports for a huge percentage of their overall food supply.
“If you think we’ve got Hell on earth now, you just get ready,” said David Beasley, the executive director of the United Nations’ World Food Bank and a former Governor of South Carolina for the Republican Party, in late March.
“If we neglect northern Africa, northern Africa’s coming to Europe. If we neglect the Middle East, [the] Middle East is coming to Europe,” he said, insisting his agency would need “billions” in additional funding to prevent a renewed migration crisis.
Such alarm bells are not only being run by globalist technocrats, either: “The embargo against Russia will exclude Russian grain from the world market, the war will exclude Ukrainian grain, there will be famine in many parts of the world from which migrants have already arrived in Europe, and this pressure will increase,” warned Hungary’s national conservative prime minister Viktor Orbán earlier this month.