 The lettuce has won. Now, this is not a sentence you would expect to begin a show with, but this is 2022 and we have been seeing all kinds of political developments, some of them quite farcical, taking place across the world. The latest is the resignation of Liz Truss, the former British Prime Minister, after just 45 days in power. Now, Liz Truss is not just one politician who became intensely unpopular among her own party members, but is part of a larger structural trend that has to do with many things, including the war in Ukraine. We'll be discussing these issues in this episode of Mapping Fortlines. We're joined by Prabir Purkhaisa. Prabir, so jokes aside, I mean, there were a lot of memes, a lot of jokes about the resignation of Liz Truss. It always seemed for quite some time at least that Liz Truss was a doomed politician living on borrowed time and some of the policies she kind of implemented were pretty much what exactly led to her resignation in the first place. So, could you maybe first take us through the situation in the UK right now, which first brought out a politician like Liz Truss to become Prime Minister and then led to her unceremonious departure? You know, Liz Truss modeled herself on Magi Thatcher, except that Magi Thatcher was taking on the unions at a time when capital, global capital, was much stronger and so was British capital at that point of time. Let's not forget the European powers and the United States were the major trading partners of the rest of the globe. They were manufacturing power and in fact Magi Thatcher's attack on British industry and the coal mining workers. In fact, the larger unions, that was what led finally to the demise of the of UK as a major industrial power as well. And UK shifted much more to a financial center, a global financial center London becoming the unwritten, you know, unacknowledged but known for by all as the center of the global hot money or what is called the Treasure Island Syndrome. But the riches or the surpluses of the big capital, big capital in the world were being siphoned away and not taxed going into this treasure havens with London acting as one of the major centers of supplying, controlling this kind of capital flows that were taking place. Now this whole, what is called the financialization of the world of capital, it wasn't. It was really transfer of resources into capitalist pockets and while Magi Thatcher was the one who starts all of this, people like Listeras thought that there is further way to go and they could do it even more. So therefore, do away with national health, which is very important in UK still though it has been weakened considerably, do away with all kinds of social services, reduce taxes on the rich, which has always been very popular with the certain section of the Tories as well as, you know, the United States and republicans as well in the section of the Democrats. All of this was the her basic mantra, if you will, that there is still much more that can be done by giving concessions to capital, cutting down on social welfare budgets drastically. And then even if there is a deficit, somehow magically capital will be able to surmount all of this. And then hey presto, you'll have really again the growth of British economy. That obviously is not the way even the rich in UK seem to have reacted. There was collective consternation that these people don't know what they're doing. They're mounting a set of slogans. They're not backed up by any understanding of the economy, financial world, any of that. And the net result was a steep dive of the pound and therefore loss of confidence in the British economy. This is the immediate context, but the larger context is why did it happen so rapidly and why did it happen now? And the answer to that is the underlying crisis of global capital, particularly a Western big capital has always been there. And it is also the loss of manufacturing over the last 40 years. The shift of manufacturing both to China as well as to a lot of other countries and the loss of therefore the pole position of European, West European capital as well as UK, United States capital in really become remaining as a manufacturing power and becoming increasingly just financial power. And I think that is something which the world of finance knows and knows that it is built essentially on a manufacturing base now of China and cheap energy from Russia. So both these wars that have now been unleashed by the United States, of course with endorsement support, cheering by British capital as well, United Kingdom as well is the war against Russia in using Ukraine as a theater. And of course now using Taiwan, the war on China, which Trump started, which has been endorsed by Biden in fact ratcheted up. So both these two wars are also acting in the context of what you see today. And United Kingdom is essentially the canary in the coal mine which will tell us what is in store for big capital in the world and whether the structural shift which is supposed to be taking place over the last 40 years with production shifting increasingly away from the financial powers which still remain as European Union, United Kingdom and the United States. Will that be reflected finally in the economy, the global economy that is taking shape would or would finance capital still be able to conquer. And the portents for both United Kingdom with least trust not being able to outlast the daily star, lettuce competition, the lettuce one, Tristan least trust had to resign before it wilted. She wilted before the lettuce did apparently. But leaving the jokes aside, the problem is that they don't seem to have understood that there is a we are approaching really a tipping point at the moment and both European Union as well as United Kingdom are seeing really the crossing over to the tipping point into a scenario of crisis. The United States is still a little out of that because it still has energy at least if it doesn't is no longer a manufacturing power. But European Union, United Kingdom are not. So I think this is a test case for both of these powers, both the sections of global capital. What is going to happen to the world in the next few years provided we survive a possible expanding the war and maybe the nuclear war as we hear from really media, particularly Western media that somehow nuclear war is what Putin is going to launch. We have no evidence that he has said anything of this sort. But nevertheless, this campaign is on that Putin is going to do nuclear war. What should we do? We perhaps should prepare accordingly and and and this answer always extremely risky because it's really in terms of talking about a nuclear war. Is it trying to normalize it is also the other question. Absolutely. Well, probably in this context, since you mentioned the Ukraine war, we know that this is a crisis not only in the United Kingdom. We've seen protests by workers in the UK, of course, against the high rates of inflation, high energy costs and across the rest of the continent as well. People in Germany very upset, France, again, my huge national strike taking place over the past week, protests in Belgium and all in so many countries. So are we also seeing as a war also brought things to a position where the ruling elite in all these countries is pretty much unable to handle the extent of the crisis on the one hand is massive inflation. On the other hand, their political aims and their economic policies are in the exact opposite direction and not able to address these issues. I think the calculation that the western western countries had the United States, the European Union, as well as United Kingdom is that the kind of nuclear sanctions they're imposing on Russia would make Russia crumble. Russia's economy would crumble and they would have more staying power than Russia would have. Now, unfortunately for them, the energy sector is something that Russia still controls in Europe. And Europe has no substitute for gas that it was putting sanctions on, saying we will not buy rubles, we'll buy this, we'll do that. We'll keep your money with us after having actually sees their money. Which was in the Russian money, which was in their banks and roughly about three hundred billion dollars, not a small amount of money. So that that was seem to have been based on the understanding that Russia is a very weak economic power and therefore it's possible to crush it within a month or two with such sanctions. Once Russia overcame that and it did it because European Union no longer has the kind of economic cloud to think they have along with the United States. So you saw that Russia was able to sell its gas, sell its oil and the price had gone up to the extent whatever cuts that they had to make was more than compensated by the price of oil or price of gas. But for the European Union, the price of gas goes up by six times. Unfortunately, the way they have structured the grid, the energy prices also go out by six times, even if oil and gas are say not more than 10 to 20 percent of the cost of energy on the grid. So this is a very peculiar part of the energy policies that the European Union has followed with respect to the energy power grid. And we can talk about it on a separate day. The essential part of it was part of the privatization of the electricity sector in Europe, Western Europe. So that was really the consequence. But that has also meant the burden of the cost of the sanctions on Russia have fallen not on Russia, but on the European Union consumers. And that huge price rise of the electricity costs that have taken place have been accompanied by a whole bunch of industries which depend on a certain price of electricity or gas. That those industries have seen taken a huge hit. A lot of them have shut down or reduced consumption drastically and therefore their outputs as well. So you have a fall of the industrial production in Western Europe coupled with the price of gas and other things rising, electricity prices rising and accompanied by that the threat of what's going to happen this winter. Therefore, you are seeing unemployment, industry shutting down. They cannot meet the cost of energy that they are being asked to pay and still produce competitively in the market. And then this is being accompanied at the same time that your prices are rising, your essential consumption, which is energy and food, these prices are rising. And therefore, European Union seems to be really following the same path and we discussed about the United Kingdom just now. But all of them are following the same path, except the least trust healthsmanship of the United Kingdom and whatever might follow her, whether it's Boris Johnson, etc. They all seem to be cut from the same cloth. So all of this means that they have no really way of getting out of the crisis they put themselves in and they seem to be doubling down rather than backing off and therefore the rising anger of the people. Now, unfortunately, a lot of it may go to the right. We don't know because they would say it's nothing to do with us. They might also because only once in some of these countries are right wing politicians who are saying we before Ukraine. And it's all the fault of the migrants is another. Yes, yes. So all of that should be. But, you know, a lot of this is accompanied by essential the nationalism of that we should look after ourselves. OK, therefore, why are we doing so much for Ukraine? Now, this is also coming out essentially that section of the right saying it, but take Germany, for example, you know, they this this is more the right saying it while the erstwhile social Democrats, they have sort of become now relatively more gung-ho about sanctioning Russia. And it is accompanied by the Green Party, who believes that they should really shut down gas, oil, coal all altogether, including nuclear. So this for them is an ideological opportunity, maybe to switch complete to green energy without knowing whether it will really work. What are the economics of it? What does it cost now? When can we make the switch over? All of that seems to have been given up. They seem to be the most hawkish in terms of sanctions on Russia. So this is what is taking European Union down the tube. But at the same time, it's not affecting the United States, who actually do not import gas. They don't import oil, except for some of the crudes which the refineries need, but that's a swap. So this is not affecting the United States. It doesn't seem to be affecting Russia that much either. China, it's biggest trading partners. It can probably switch to other countries. It's a very healthy balance of trade. So given all of that, the ones who seem to be in really staring down the barrel is actually European Union. And as you've discussed, United Kingdom. And let's not forget also Japan on the other side. So these are the advanced economies who have hitched their wagon to the United States, deciding that war with China on one hand and a war with Russia on the other hand, two-sided wars are OK. So now if you see, if you have, you would fight both Russia and China together, you are falling into the trap with both Kissinger and Brzezinski has warned about and warned the United States about, let's not fight two together. We have to keep them apart. Now you brought them two together and you're sanctioning both of them at the same time. So I think the world is in for interesting times provided. We don't end up with a nuclear war or a war which nobody really wants. But because they're upping the ante continuously, we don't know which way it will go. Thank you so much for being interesting. You mentioned nuclear war in both your answers since we talked about it last week also. And it seems it is really on all of our minds because this the media discussions about it, the kind of upping the ante is not a good sign for us at all. That's all we have in this episode of Mapping Fortlines. We'll be taking a look at many such issues in future episodes. Until then, keep watching Newsclick.