This crisis isn’t down to war... it’s the bill for our Covid panic – as I foresaw

CAN we afford to behave as we do? I don’t just mean the Government, which has debauched the currency with mad spending. I mean all of us. Are we going to be able to live as we have done or is this the beginning of a major permanent decline in our living standards?

I don’t think there has been anything like this since the forgotten crisis of 1931, which brought down the government and split the governing party. Nobody realised just how bad things had got until a large part of the Royal Navy

mutinied against pay cuts, and so forced a panic devaluation of the Pound Sterling. In modern Britain they don’t need to cut anyone’s pay. Inflation cuts it, and those who fight for pay rises to make up for it get called wreckers.

I warned clearly in March 2020 that the out-of-proportion reaction to Covid would lead to this crisis.

I said: ‘Our economy is still crippled, and the overpraised Chancellor Rishi Sunak, like some beaming Dr Feelgood with a case full of dodgy stimulants, seeks to soothe the pain by huge injections of funny money.

‘He will get this back from us as soon as we are allowed out again. Just you wait till you get the bill, in increased taxes, inflation and devastated savings.’

And it came to pass, just as I said it would. I needed no magic powers to see this. Anyone could have done the same, including Mr Sunak.

As it began to be obvious even to him, I wrote here back in May last year: ‘Most of the people in charge of this country can’t remember what inflation is like. I can. And it scares me.’

Now, ridiculously, persons such as the Governor of the Bank of England are trying to blame our problems on the Ukraine War which he says could not have been foreseen – an odd claim since it

actually began in 2014. No doubt our involvement in that war will make things much worse, and I am coming to that. But the main reason for the Western world’s plunge into recession is the ridiculous over-reaction to the coronavirus.

I am genuinely unsure what we can do to repair the enormous damage done to work, business,

education, health and the national finances. But may I put in a plea to our leaders, whoever they may be, to stop making a crisis into a catastrophe? It is time to end the Ukraine War before it sets the whole world on fire and wrecks what is left of our civilisation.

For some reason, the USA has for 14 years now been having a costly arm-wrestling contest with Russia in Ukraine. This turned hot eight years ago and has led to horrible numbers of deaths, and much destruction, in Ukraine itself.

I really cannot see what ordinary Ukrainians will ever gain from it. Nor can I see what interest Britain has in it, apart from our endless, rather pathetic desire to please the USA, which neither notices nor cares. Yet we pledge billions in arms supplies, so sustaining the horror. The same goes for all the other European nations now preparing for a chilly winter of fuel shortages and raging high prices.

Is there anybody out there with the wit and courage to bring an end to this idiocy? Or, in years to come, as we sit unemployed in our freezing houses eating bread and potatoes, while Ukrainians pick about in the ruins of their ‘victorious’ country, wondering how to rebuild it, and where all the young men have gone, will we comfort ourselves by saying that it was all worth it?