What does Russia want? Some reports in recent days have suggested that Mr Putin may be open to a truce under certain conditions. But the game unfolding may well be more sophisticated and cynical than that. A highly-placed source close to the Kremlin suggests Russia intends to demand a Ukrainian declaration of neutrality, and that foreign peacekeepers be ruled out. It is probably impossible for Ukraine to even consider such conditions—at least not before real negotiations have even begun. Kurt Volker, who served as Special Representative to Ukraine in Mr Trump’s first administration, says Russia will twist any truce proposal. “They’ll say: we can’t agree to that, but let’s do something else. Putin is smart enough not to just say no.” A former Ukrainian diplomat says American and Russia have been mirroring each others’ tactics, “salami-slicing” concessions from Ukraine before substantial negotiations begin. Any subsequent talks will seek to move further into Ukrainian red lines. The American end game has become a moving target, he says.
Any successful and enduring peace deal would require America to put pressure on the Kremlin to comply and then continue to do so. On March 7th Mr Trump did threaten to impose major sanctions on Russia. But most of the evidence suggests that he is sympathetic to Mr Putin. Hours later Mr Trump said “I’m finding it more difficult, frankly, to deal with Ukraine…In terms of getting a final settlement, it may be easier dealing with Russia.” Mr Volker says that “Trump is trying to keep Ukraine on a short leash because he wants them to accept whatever peace he can get…the Ukrainians are the obstacle because they’re not surrendering.”
A senior Ukrainian security official says he has seen no evidence that the Americans are contemplating a complete exit from Ukraine, yet, let alone Europe. “The hope is that as soon as we have a truce, we’ll be on a more rational track again,” he says.
Others are less sanguine. The dangerous prospect looms for Ukraine that failed talks could trigger even more pressure from America. Another Ukrainian official warns that America’s approach, if it continues, could leave Ukraine in a “grey zone”. That would force it to use more vicious military tactics for its survival. Already, he says, strong personalities dominate the negotiations, adding a Ukrainian proverb: “Yake yikhalo, take y zdybalo” (like attracts like). The stakes of Tuesday’s talks could not be higher. If they collapse, Ukraine is unlikely to get another chance: “The Americans will double down on instructional mode, and force whatever they and Russia decide on us.” ■
Editor : Reader please note that actors in this portion of this ‘Economist Report’, are Vladimir Putin,Kurt Volker, Donald Trump and ‘and various unidentified Ukanian officials’ ! and a Ukrainian proverb: “Yake yikhalo, take y zdybalo” (like attracts like).
Editor’s note (March 10th 2025): This story was amended in order to make clearer that Ukraine occupies only a part of the Kursk region.
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Mr. Colvile is/was a child of wealth and priveledge, he is not quite as obnoxious as Jacob Rees-Mogg, but he is close!The first paragraph of Mr. Colvile’s essay offer a mild scolding:
With defence spending rising, growth weakening and headroom shrinking, Rachel Reeves is having to wield the axe. Her chosen target? The welfare bill, which reportedly faces cuts of at least £5 billion. Already, this plan is hugely controversial. And rightly so. Because it falls laughably short of what is needed.
Editor: in seconds Mr. Colvile is at full gallop:
That may sound harsh, or exaggerated. But there is a compelling — and appalling — case that incapacity and disability has become Britain’s biggest growth industry.
Let’s look at the facts. Today, 9.3 million people of working age are economically inactive. Of those, 2.8 million are inactive through illness — up from two million before the pandemic. The proportion of the working-age population who say they have a disability has risen to an extraordinary 23 per cent.
The human impact of this is dreadful. But so is the financial impact. Over the past decade, spending on incapacity and disability benefits has increased by 40 per cent above inflation. By 2029-30, the Office for Budget Responsibility expects this bill to rise even further, from £64.7 billion to £100.7 billion. The overall welfare bill, including pensions, will swell to £378 billion. To put it another way, the rumoured £5 billion cut would represent just one sixteenth of the expected increase.
Editor: Mr. Colvile asks aquestion, while The Reader tries to regaine her equlibrian:
What is going on? To simplify greatly, the non-pensions welfare bill is being driven by the incapacity bill — and the incapacity bill is being driven by the mental health bill.
Editor : In sum Mr. Colvile attacks what is left of Clemet Atlee’s Welfare State and its NHS. The grifters who remaine on the dole. The Growth Rate of Britain was 1% when last I inquired. And that utterly anemic 1% Growth Rate has become the political property of Keir Starmer’s New Labour! After 14 years of Tory incompetence!
Editor: a collection of “Colviles Laws’
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Yet in a recent report on the alarming rise in spending, the House of Lords economic affairs committee stated that it had “received no convincing evidence that the main driver of the rise in these benefits is deteriorating health or high NHS waiting lists”. Similarly, the OBR judges that “only a minority of the recent rise in incapacity benefits onflows reflects a higher number of people initiating claims”.
The Lords and the OBR, in other words, think that the rise has more to do with the nature of the benefits system itself. And they’re almost certainly right.
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A recent freedom of information request from my colleagues at the Centre for Policy Studies think tank showed that in the year to November 2024, just 10 per cent of work assessments and 5 per cent of disability assessments were done face to face.
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And the Times columnist Fraser Nelson, who has campaigned tirelessly on this issue, points out that even if those on disability benefit want to go back to work — as hundreds of thousands do — they risk either cutting their income (or at least believing that they will do so) or jeopardising their disability benefits.
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And, of course, the judges are only too willing to stick their oar in: in January the High Court struck down Tory measures that would have cut £2 billion from the disability benefits bill because the (eight-week) consultation process was “rushed” and “unfair”, and ministers had focused more on cost-cutting than the impact on the vulnerable.
Editor: Here is where Mr. Colvile proves to the reader that he is Mrs. Thatcher’s brat, with an Anglican turn!
There will always be many, many people in this country who need our collective help. But there are many, many more who would best be helped by moving off welfare and into work — not least because active, engaged, fulfilling employment is central to mental and physical wellbeing. Instead, we are not just paying these people off but writing them off, creating a cycle of dependency that afflicts generation after generation.
As soon as the European Council ended, Vladimir Putin and Emmanuel Macron launched into history lessons from a distance. “There are still people who want to return to the times of Napoleon, forgetting how it ended,” said the Kremlin chief. Without naming him, he targeted the French president, who, after the green light from the 27 member states to beef up their defense and support Ukraine, repeated in Brussels on Thursday, March 6, that “Russia is an existential threat to us. Not just to Ukraine, not just to its neighbors, but to all of Europe.” On Russian social media in Moscow, Macron was quickly mocked as a powerless Napoleon. And, on television, Putin responded by reminding him of the catastrophic outcome of the Russian campaign in 1812.
“All the mistakes of our enemies and adversaries began in the same way: with a profound underestimation of the Russian character,” said Putin. A history buff like the master of the Kremlin, Macron was quick to respond: “Napoleon carried out conquests. The only imperial power I see today in Europe is Russia,” said the French president. He accused Putin of making “a historical misreading” by comparing him to Napoleon, and described him as a “revisionist imperialist of history and the identity of peoples.”
Following the announcement of Macron’s plans to strengthen European defense, reactions in Moscow oscillated between irony and skepticism: He is suspected of trying to frighten the French by stirring up the Russian threat to better divert attention from domestic problems. “In Moscow, however, there is a palpable touch of anxiety about this new, more war-mongering Europe, at a time when the Russians were hoping to get out of it thanks to Donald Trump in the US,” according to Tatiana Kastouéva-Jean, director of the Russia-Eurasia Center at the French Institute of International Relations in Paris.
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Editor: Reader, compare and contrast this Macron commentary from Benjamin Quénelle, with this Duran commentary by Alexander Mercouris and Alex Cristoforou. To put it mildly Benjamin Quénelle writes a kind of political apologetic, where Mercouris and Cristoforou offer a realistic appraisal of Macron and Macronism. My thought is that Macron, and his politics have proved that Neo-Liberlism in its French iteration has been toxic and that Macron himself is an abject failure on all counts !
Putin’s loyal foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, described as “absurd” and “delirious” accusations of Moscow wanting to attack Europe and said that Macron’s comments on the possibility of Europe being protected by the French nuclear umbrella amounted to a “threat.” In three years of war in Ukraine, however, the Kremlin has never ceased to wave the threat of nuclear blackmail.
Newspaper Reader:
As I approach my 80th Year, I grow weary of the journalistc hacks of the The Political Present, who act ‘as if’ the Cold War of The Post War Era, does not supply stunning object lessons for the political present! Allied to its toxic & malicious attacks on Dissenters of all stripes and hues: Quénelle contiues this malign tradition!
Editor: in three paragraphs ZMB presents her case for Zelensky , that loses it’s political energy as the sentences unfold.
Four days after being accused of rejecting peace with Russia and thrown out of the White House, Volodymyr Zelensky bent the knee before Donald Trump on March 4th with a mollifying letter: “Ukraine is ready to come to the negotiating table as soon as possible to bring lasting peace closer. Nobody wants peace more than Ukrainians. My team and I stand ready to work under President Trump’s strong leadership to get a peace that lasts.”
The Ukrainian president’s genuflection brought him no respite. Mr Trump did not restart deliveries of weapons, halted on March 3rd. Instead he intensified the punishment. American battlefield intelligence stopped reaching Ukraine around 2pm local time on March 5th. “If Mr Trump wants a thank-you, we will be writing it on the gravestones of dead Ukrainian soldiers,” seethed one Ukrainian officer.
Such brutal coercion in wartime is a warning that America may abandon Ukraine permanently and, more broadly, undo the decades-old NATO alliance. Shocked European allies are scrambling to help Ukraine on their own, strengthen their defences and present America with a peace plan that, unlike Mr Trump’s, avoids capitulation to Russia.
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Editor: Even ‘Time Magazine’ presents Zelensky is a Yousuf Karsh pose: April 28, 2022 6:00 AM EDT
Paragraph 4:
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The interruption of intelligence has more immediate and serious consequences. Ukrainian sources say America has stopped an intelligence link used to communicate alerts about suspicious Russian activity as well as targeting data for HIMARS rockets and real-time information for long-range drones. Other feeds controlled by NATO remain operative, at least for now. Ukraine is presumably still able to hit large static Russian targets, such as oil refineries. But finding and destroying fleeting “dynamic” targets, such as mobile air-defence systems, may prove more difficult.
Paragraph 5 :
Mike Waltz, America’s national security adviser, said America was “pausing and reviewing all aspects of this relationship”.
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Paragraph 6:
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There was no invitation for Mr Zelensky or anyone else to conclude a framework deal with America to extract Ukraine’s rare-earth and other minerals, which was supposed to have been signed at the ill-starred White House meeting.
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Paragraph 7:
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In his address to Congress on March 4th Mr Trump declared that Russia had sent “strong signals that they are ready for peace”, but offered no evidence.
Paragraph 7:
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At the same time they have to hedge against the prospect that America will stop underwriting European security or, worse, become a hostile power.
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Paragraph 8:
“We must recognise it: we are entering a new era,” declared Emmanuel Macron, the French president, in a televised address on March 5th.
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Paragraph 9:
Sir Keir Starmer, the British prime minister, rejected accusations that America had become an unreliable ally. He has spoken with Mr Trump repeatedly, seeking to bridge the divide with Ukraine.
Paragraph:10:
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Britain and France, Europe’s biggest military powers, have hosted separate European summits to draw up a coherent response, but their efforts do not always seem fully joined up.
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Paragraph 11 :
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Britain says the “reassurance” force—a coalition of the willing expected to number 20,000-30,000 troops behind Ukrainian front-line units—would need a strong American “backstop” to deter Russia. Mr Trump has demurred.
Paragraph 12 :
After his address Mr Macron hosted Viktor Orban, the Hungarian prime minister and a staunch Russian ally, to urge him not to block moves by a European summit the following day to boost European defence, not least by setting up a €150bn facility to help buy weapons.
Paragraph 13:
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The expected fiscal boost pushed up the DAX index by 3.4% and the shares of Rheinmetall, a defence firm, by 7.2%. German ten-year bond yields jumped by 0.3 percentage points in expectation of higher borrowing.
Editor: here is the point at which ZMB becomes……….?
Paragraph14:
Yet there is a dangerous tension in Europe’s response. It seeks to show it is pulling its weight by strengthening Ukraine and keeping it fighting if necessary, whereas Mr Trump wants to bend it to his will and end the war. In trying to stop the rift with America, Europe may hasten it.
Editor: Reader look at the numbers in the German Election:
With vote counting finished, preliminary results show the conservative Christian Democratic Union (CDU) led by chancellor candidate Friedrich Merz and its sister Christian Social Union (CSU) won the election with 28.6% of the vote.
The far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) , which has been designated in parts as extremist, came in second with 20.8%.
The Economist sings parises for Friedrich Merz! It readership and its writer/editors need a coaching to realize what? Is it possible that the Economist writers and editors of this newspaper, ignore the fact that 28.06% of the vote compared to 20.8 % of the vote represent less than a stunning victory for Friedrich Merz.
FOR YEARS Germany’s aversion to debt has been a millstone, leading to crippling underinvestment in defence and infrastructure and weighing down both the domestic economy and that of Europe as a whole. But, although he will not become chancellor for some weeks, Friedrich Merz, who won Germany’s election on February 23rd, has just transformed his country with a stroke of commendable boldness.
On March 4th Mr Merz revealed plans for two changes to the debt brake, a constitutional provision in place since 2009 that lets the government run only minuscule structural deficits. Next week parliament will be recalled to vote on them. In a sign that change is genuinely under way, long-term German bond yields leapt, as hard-nosed investors began to price in higher borrowing.
Editor: The Reader might think that Mario Buatta,The Prince of Chintz, had returned in a political guise! Such are the decorative floriches and faux imbroidery of its political enthusiasms!
Paragraph 1:
The first reform will establish a brake-exempted infrastructure fund of €500bn ($535bn) over ten years, a boost worth around 1% of GDP each year. This should get the economy moving, and not before time. Germany has been in recession for the past two years, and is bumping along with roughly zero growth this year, too.
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Paragraph 2 :
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It is to exempt any defence spending beyond 1% of GDP from the debt brake altogether. This opens the way for Germany to do what it should have done a long time ago. It can now start to rearm to a level where it can play the full part in the changed landscape of European defence that its size and geographical position demands.
Paragraph 3:
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Currently Germany spends only a bare 2% of GDP on defence, just about meeting a target that NATO first set in 2014, but one that the government did not take seriously before Russia launched an all-out invasion of Ukraine in 2022.
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Under Donald Trump, America no longer appears to be a dependable ally; so Europe must look to its own defences. That will need Germany to spend a lot more cash—and to spend it effectively, which has not been the case in the past.
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Paragraph 5: The Oxbridger Faux Chintz has lost its power to beguile the Reader, as it faces the fact of AfT !
Because the debt brake is a constitutional provision, amending it requires a two-thirds majority in the Bundestag. Hence the urgency. The hard-right Alternative for Germany party opposes any change to the rules, and the radical-left Die Linke opposes any extra defence spending. Both did well in the election; together they will have over a third of the seats in the new Bundestag, a blocking minority.
Paragraph 6: Faux Chintz fades into the shopworn: ‘Germany was a slumbering giant. Mr Merz is waking it up’.
And there may be more to come. The potential new coalition is also talking about further reforms to the debt brake, which implies yet more spending on other underfunded areas. Germany was a slumbering giant. Mr Merz is waking it up.
The present day Apologists for the 2014 Ukraian Coup have elided from History this document authored by Neo-Con Timothy Snyder, and his fellow travelers, named in the section named ‘Locations’!
Ukraine: Thinking Together Kyiv, 15-19 May Manifesto
The Kyiv-Mohyla Academy is located in the Podil’ neighborhood, on Kontraktova Square; the entrance to the Center for Polish and European Studies is on Voloska Street 8/5; the Culture and Arts Centre is on Illinska Street 9. The Diplomatic Academy is in central Kyiv, at Velyka Zhytomyrska Street 2. The Hotel Ukraine is on Instytutska Street 4. The InterContinental Hotel is on Velyka Zhytomyrs’ka Street 2A. Practical solidarity: This gathering was the initiative of Leon Wieseltier of The New Republic and Timothy Snyder of Yale University and was made possible by the willingness of colleagues to heed their call and agree to participate in great haste, and by the creativity and hard work of Tatiana Zhurzhenko and Oksana Forostyna. A number of partner institutions helped transform an idea into an event: the Batory Foundation, the Embassy of Canada, the Embassy of France, the Embassy of the Federal Republic of Germany, the Embassy of the Republic of Poland, the Embassy of the United States of America, the European Endowment for Democracy, the European Forum for Ukraine, the Network of European Cultural Journals Eurozine, the Goethe-Institut, the Institut Français d’Ukraine, the Institute for Human Sciences (IWM), the International Renaissance Foundation, the Ukrainian cultural journal Krytyka, the National University “Kyiv Mohyla Academy,” the Ministry of Culture of Ukraine, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Ukraine, the National Endowment for Democracy, The New Republic, the Open Ukraine Foundation, the PinchukArtCentre, the Ukrainian Institute for Holocaust Studies “Tkuma,” the Ukrainian Jewish Encounter, and the Visual Culture Research Center.
Editor: Reader here is the latest iteration of Neo-Con Propaganda
Since Donald Trump’s call with Vladimir Putin on 12 February and a series of other diplomatic moves aimed at kicking off Russia–Ukraine peace talks, the war in Ukraine has returned to the top of the international media agenda. For outsiders, observing the war from a safe distance like an increasingly monotonous TV series, the plot has acquired finally a new turn, reviving flagging interest and sparking intense debate. But for Ukrainians, Trump’s ‘peacemaking’ initiatives are just another reminder of their subaltern, ‘pawn’ role on the geopolitical chessboard. The writing was already on the wall after Trump suggested that Ukraine ‘may be Russian someday’ (a reason to exploit Ukrainian rare earth minerals in advance); after vice president JD Vance insisted that ‘this war is between Russia and Ukraine’ (and that US military interference would not ‘advance American interests and security’); and after defence secretary Pete Hegseth stated that Ukraine should abandon its push to reclaim all Russian-occupied territory and forget about joining NATO. To add insult to injury, the US responded to Volodymyr Zelensky’s earlier offer of privileged access to Ukraine’s rare earth minerals in return for support with a virtually colonial demand for almost everything for almost nothing in return. The Daily Telegraph, which obtained a draft of the pre-decisional contract, called it ‘a new Versailles’: ‘If this draft were accepted, Trump’s demands would amount to a higher share of Ukrainian GDP than reparations imposed on Germany at the Versailles Treaty.’ Volodymyr Zelensky in Munich, February 14, 2025. Official State Department photo by Freddie Everett. Source: Wikimedia Commons Normally, the paper pointed out, such terms are imposed on aggressor states defeated in war. But Trump ‘seems willing to let Russia of the hook entirely’. Besides the purely economic issues, there was also the moral question whether it would be ‘honourable to treat a victim nation in this fashion after it has held the battle line for the liberal democracies at enormous sacrifice for three years. Who really has a debt to whom, may one ask?’
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Editor under the rubric of : ‘A new Molotov-Ribbentrop pact’, at the least ‘The Munich Agreement’asso often used by Neo-Cons of the ‘West’ is absent! Mykola Riabchuk essay lends a more nuanced Historical tone?
Unsurprisingly, Trump’s ‘peacemaking’ initiatives were met in Ukraine with a mixture of anger, despair and black humour. Zelensky cancelled his visit to Saudi Arabia, scheduled for 20 February, two days after the Rubio–Lavrov meeting in Riyadh. He stated openly that he did not want to legitimize that meeting and its ‘decisions’. The fact that he was not invited to these talks, nor even consulted by the American partners beforehand, does not bode well for Ukraine’s eventual role in ‘big boys’ conversation. As an old saying goes, ‘if you are not at the table then you are on the menu’. While Zelensky tries to keep a brave face in bad game, Ukrainian media are overwhelmed with sarcasm, metaphors (the copulation of a frog with a snake might be the most graphic) and caustic cartoons. One of them – featuring Trump as a bride and Putin as a groom – bore a striking resemblance to cartoons showing a newly-wed Hitler and Stalin in 1939. As a Ukrainian publicist put it succinctly: ‘It’s not Munich 2.0. It’s more like a new Molotov-Ribbentrop pact.’ ‘We are entering a difficult, surreal state’, declared Olga Rudenko, the editor-in-chief of the Kyiv Independent. ‘Our key ally, led by Donald Trump’s new administration, is turning against us and siding with our enemy.’ But the danger of Trump’s reckless cowboy diplomacy goes far beyond the fate of just Ukraine. His susceptibility to Putin’s arguments (partly because of ignorance, partly because of affinity) threaten the whole European continent if not the global order as a whole. After Vance’s speech in Munich and Trump’s arrogant and nonsensical statements the day after, Europeans can no longer neglect a responsibility that they have habitually outsourced to American partners. How far and how effectively this motley crew of thirtyplus nations will move remains to be seen. But at least it gives Ukraine a chance to survive in the new environment, even though it would require even more painful efforts – both diplomatic and military. So far, the Ukrainians have not blinked – as both Zelensky’s and society’s reaction to the mounting challenges indicate
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Editor: The final paragraph of Mykola Riabchuk essay is a daming repudiation of ‘Western Values’! Is there a possible cutural, political affinity between Mykola Riabchuk and Aleksandr Dugin?
“The Globalists are the Racists:” Russian Analyst Aleksandr Dugin on the Loss of Cultural Identities”
Ignorance about Ukraine and the region in general is something that Trump shares with most international politicians and intellectuals educated in the framework of Russian ‘imperial knowledge’, which is normalized in both international academia and popular culture. A much bigger problem, however, is Trump’s mindset, which has little to do with rule of law and liberal democracy and a lot with the realpolitik favoured by dictators confident that might makes right, and that international politics is primarily about accumulation of power and wealth. Ignorance can be enlightened and mitigated, but cynical authoritarianism is very unlikely to change. This means that moralistic discussions with Trump and his lieutenants will not help Volodymyr Zelensky and his European partners. Instead, they must speak from a position of strength. This is perhaps the only point on which they fully agree with the American president.
Editor: the reader might wonder at the opening paragarph of Mr. Colviles broadside of the NHS. A member of The Gentry opines via a sterotype !
Here’s a very old joke about an Irish yokel giving directions to a tourist: “Well, I wouldn’t start from here.” It’s so old I hesitate to use it. Except that it also happens to be the best possible description of how you’d reform the NHS.
Editor: The NHS has been under attacks by Thaterites and the acolites of her Deity Hayek yet…
An offhand Twitter joke and some pushback I got led me to look up what Hayeks’ The Road to Serfdom says about universal health care. Some interesting stuff on Page 125 of the edition that’s in Google books:
Nor is there any reason why the state should not assist individuals in providing for those common hazards of life against which, because of their uncertainty, few individuals can make adequate provision. Where, as in the case of sickness and accident, neither the desire to avoid such calamities nor the efforts to overcome their consequences are as a rule weakened by the provision of assistance, where, in short, we deal with genuinely insurable risks, the case for the state helping to organise a comprehensive system of social insurance is very strong. There are many points of detail where those wishing to preserve the competitive system and those wishing to supersede it by something different will disagree on the details of such schemes; and it is possible under the name of social insurance to introduce measures which tend to make competition more or less ineffective. But there is no incompatibility in principle between the state providing greater security in this way and the preservation of individual freedom.
What might The Reader make of the above? The Reader in regaled by Mr. Colevile’s remaining 1110 word evaluation of the failures of the NHS. Yet what of the following from 1985?
Britain’s National Health Service (NHS) has encountered difficult times under the government of Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. A conservative who shares many of the philosophical tenets that guide President Reagan, Thatcher has sought to force the NHS to make tougher choices. She also has told the electorate bluntly that the health service does not represent a free lunch. Thatcher declared herself pointedly in this regard during the Conservative Party’s annual conference in October 1983. “Let us never forget this fundamental truth: the state has no source of money other than the money that people earn themselves…. Let me take the subject on which there has been so much debate —the health service. People talk about a free service. It isn’t free. You have to pay for it.” Nevertheless, Thatcher and her party colleagues, not unlike all successful politicians in the United Kingdom, seem duty-bound not to be seen as attacking the NHS. After her support of it became an issue in 1982, Thatcher declared at the party’s annual conference that year that the service is “safe in our hands”—a comment that helped her win reelection by a landslide. In 1982, the NHS consumed 6.3 percent of Britain’s gross national product, compared with 10.6 percent for personal health services in the United States in the same year. On a per capita basis, medical care expenditures in the United Kingdom were $390 versus $1,265 in the United States. Rudolf Klein, a professor of social policy at the University of Bath, explains in this essay why so socialistic an instrument as the NHS enjoys the support of the Conservative Party. Klein, a former journalist, has written widely on the NHS and is regarded as a leading British commentator on the health service. His recent book, The Politics of the National Health Service , is a primer on the evolution and status of Britain s most popular social program.
The book is the result of a quest by the researcher and author to answer the question: how much of the UK is owned by the USA?
The answer is difficult to answer (the UK government does not keep statistics), but it is possible to piece together because the US government and European governments do.
The purpose is not to reject American values and democracy, which helped us fight two world wars and keep the peace (mostly, in the UK that is) but to act as
“a call to action to stop further transfers of parts of the economy to powerful and unaccountable American owners and to reset Britain on a course for more economic independence”
Hanton points out the dominance of US business in public discourse. When we talk about “big tech” we mean “US tech”. When we talk about private equity we mainly mean US private equity. When we talk about multinationals, it’s in the main US multinationals.
Plus, when we talk about the ‘special relationship’ and partnership he asks ”What sort of partnership is it with the mightiest superpower in history, which holds an overwhelming stake in the UK economy?”
It is a paradox that having rejected the EU as a strategic partner in the name of ‘taking back control’ the UK has willingly foregone control over vast swathes of the UK economy. It is unusual for countries to allow such penetration of their home markets to a single country, located thousands of miles away.
In table 1 of the book, he compares figures about the sales of US multinationals in the UK and other leading European countries. It’s 25% in the UK but only 5-9% in Italy, Spain, France and Germany. The net result is a significant amount of profit is extracted, and repatriated to the US, and tax is routinely avoided on these sales. 1,256 multinationals with sales of over $850m operated in the UK in 2020.
It’s a further paradox that the US itself will oppose other countries buying and owning strategic industries, whereas the UK government has seemingly willingly presided over the sell-off of the UK economy. Ex-Chancellors and prime ministers earn good money by facilitating this according to the book.
When even Joe Biden endorsed putting America First the possible consequences of a further Trump Presidency must surely call for a re-think.
How does this affect the NHS?
This question is answered in a Chapter entitled “the NHS Cash Cow”. It covers how US multinationals maneuvered to obtain the vast majority of Covid funding for its vaccines when cheaper UK vaccines could have been used.
Half of all Covid contracts went to US companies. The contract for PPE storage was given to a US company in 2018 and was sold in April 2020.
According to the sources quoted in the book however, it was not just around Covid that NHS reliance on US suppliers became evident. Tony Blair’s Labour Government started outsourcing elective procedures in 2002 and the aim, according to the book was to increase private provision to up to 40% of operations. The book states that US companies have obtained the lion’s share of these new and existing contracts for this work.
Three of the biggest UK private hospital operations are US-owned, American suppliers now provide one in seven psychiatric beds, diagnostics supplies come from predominantly US Companies, the major drug companies are predominantly American – as are seven of the top ten medical device companies, including Medtronic, DaVita, GE Healthcare, Stryker, Johnson & Johnson and Cardinal Health.
The US Portman Dental Care organisation owns 350 clinics. In IT, Oracle, Palantir, eMed, Apple, Alphabet, and Amazon are poised to scoop up contracts that can never be removed once the supplier is embedded in the business processes of the NHS.
In the words of Hanton,
“It will be easy for these and other companies to click into the NHS network because it has already been reshaped to fit more neatly with American business models”.
This includes preventative overprescribing of drugs, excessive testing, and excessive intervention according to the ability to pay.
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Editor: Mr. Colvile is a Political Opportunist and Political Romatic infatuated with Mrs. Thatchers romance with her Hayek, made to measure !
Mr. Ganesh is my favorite flâneur! He can write a feuilleton, the rhetoric of the Sunday Supplement’s decorous chatter, like no other writer in America or Britain. His only possible competition is James Wolcott , once of Vanity Fair. As a person born in Los Angeles, two months before the Bombs fell on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, I long to drive its Freeways, boulevards and streets: and see its skyline as it presents itself from all its possible angles of view.
I recall my mother driving up Alameda, with the City Hall building (featured in the Superman T.V. Show, as The Daily Planet headquarters) in full view, all the way, to pick up my dad, to take him to his second job.Once the tallest building in the skyline -the Industries that lined this street, with railroad tracks all the way, with the strong odor of fuel oil and ozone. Just looking out the window…
Or driving past Al Jolson’s ostentatious grave site at Hillside Memorial Park, Culver City , sick with the flu, in the back seat of my mom’s old two door sedan. On the way to visit Aunt Rela in Culver City, right by the Culver City Airport.
Mr. Ganesh is quite unsurprisingly confines himself to the West-Side, the would-be Hipster’s measuring stick of what L.A. is ! South L.A. , East L.A. , Hermosa Beach, Manhattan Beach, Redondo Beach, Long Beach, and points south to Orange County. Or over the Canyon Streets into The Valley, its Ventura Blvd. an answer to Melrose Avenue? All these are elided from Mr. Ganesh’s essay!
Mr. Ganesh loses my interest, as a reader with his speculation, about the fate of the Metropolis in the Age of Covid -19. Recall Fuentes’ beautiful metaphor/simile of ‘The Great Rotting Meat Pie of Madrid’ ?
I was born in L.A. in 1945 and moved to San Diego in 2007. So I was long term resident. I lived in the City of L. A. moved to Willowbrook, then Lynwood, Downey, Long Beach, Orange County: Costa Mesa, Lakewood and Long Beach again.
Your description reads like what one of those gorgeous Color T.V. advertisements, complete with evocative musical soundtrack, riffing on the latest pop music. Yours, a collection of cliches, that evokes that advertisement, reduced to leaden prose. Or a trailer for a series based on the ‘L.A. Lifestyle’. I can almost hear the voice-over by Robin Leach!
L. A. is a city of neighborhoods held together by Freeways. But make no mistake, each that manifests its own unique brands of provincialism, or race and ethnicity : Fairfax, Watts, East L.A. etc…
I have driven by and around ‘ Frank Gehry’s sumptuously garbled house in Santa Monica’ at least three times. I was a delivery person on the West-Side, for years, and I think ‘garbled’ in the proper term! It is utterly out of place of the vernacular architecture of the other homes. Raw Plywood and cyclone fencing makes it look like a cheap knock off of the Post-Modern Style. His buildings like Disney Hall are monuments to his love of the ‘sumptuous curve’.
In the Calculated/Manufactured Historical Haze of the Ukanian War, what stands out to the Reader of The Economist, is its ever growing Political Hysteria. The Reader need only look to Zanny Menten Beddoes appearence on the Dailey Show of Feb 12, 2024
Zanny Minton Beddoes – The Economist | The Daily Show:
There is a piss poor transcript so the reader is on her own. Yet The Daily Show is or was once about comedy and satire not about Political Propganda!
Editor: Reader turn your attention to this from Feb 28th 2025
Editor: Note The Economist Party Line is consistant over time, whose pitch reaches verifiable intensity and levels off , in a kind of rythemic point and counter point. Trump and JD Vance are the villians of this execise in political/idiological reportage! Reader this turged political melodrama reaches its end, here framed by the first sentence’s political fatalism!
The road ahead for Ukraine is now unclear, but strewn with danger. It seems likely that internal and external actors will increase the pressure on Mr Zelensky to resign, hold elections or both—though how that can happen during wartime without cancelling martial law and thus tipping the country into chaos is not clear. “Getting into a dialogue with Trump in this way doesn’t leave him a chance,” says an opposition MP in Ukraine. “He is going to have to destroy Zelensky now. I worry the price will be our whole country.”
Even deputies from Mr Zelensky’s inner circle agreed that it had been a disaster. Some reasoned the president had been tired, three years into war and a long transatlantic flight. He had been provoked into a manufactured fight. “J.D. was the problem,” said one of them. “Zelensky had to show strength to be credible for negotiations, but the emotions were too much.” A senior Ukrainian security source said Mr Vance seemed to be pleased that the negotiations never even happened. “As a wrecker, Vance had been well prepared,” he says. “He did his thing professionally.”
At the end of the shouting match, Mr Trump quipped, “This is gonna be great television.” The president of Ukraine scowled as he sat with his hands clasped. Mr Vance smirked. His work was done. ■
Editor: For The New Republic to publish a long critical evaluation of ‘The Technological Republic’, after the Clintons, Obama and Biden Neo-Liberalism & War Mongering as deeply toxic as ‘‘The Technological Republic’ this review resembles self-exculpation writ large. !
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1
And for all Karp and Zamiska’s self-styling as critics of Silicon Valley, much of the book is dedicated to proclaiming the tech industry’s salvific qualities. Only a “union of the state and the software industry,” they claim, will maintain American dominance in this century, and this techno-governmental fusion will require the state to adopt the “engineering mindset” that has fueled Silicon Valley’s world-bestriding success. Karp and Zamiska blandly describe this mindset as involving a “disinterest in theater and posturing,” an “abandonment of grand theories about how the world ought to be,” and, via a quote from the American pragmatist philosopher John Dewey, a resistance to “sweeping and easy generalizations.” Aside from being meaningless abstractions, each of these qualities is betrayed practically every time Karp gets in front of a camera and utters the words “America” or “the West.”
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It’s hard to picture him acting otherwise. Mythmaking, bluster, and hype are practically job requirements for the CEOs of the defense tech world. Justifying ever-frothier valuations—as of mid-February, Palantir’s market capitalization was worth about half that of the five traditional defense primes combined, despite it reporting barely 1 percent of their combined revenue last year—requires telling a convincing story about a future world in which your product is the deus ex machina for the potential problems you claim are impending inevitabilities. For Karp and Co., this means boldly announcing that the United States is already in a “hot Cold War” against China; forecasting an impending three-theater conflict with Sino, Russo, and Perso fronts; arguing that autonomous weaponry will soon eclipse the atom bomb in geostrategic importance; and claiming that U.S. superiority in militarized AI will usher in a new Pax Americana.
3
Given these grand pronouncements, it is clarifying to discover that the section of the book that actually describes the virtues of Palantir’s “organizational culture” is laughably prosaic. Palantir employees, Karp and Zamiska say, are encouraged to apply the lessons of a book on improvisational theater to their work, and to digest the insights of the philosopher Isaiah Berlin’s 1953 book on “foxes and hedgehogs.” These supposedly sui generis workplace policies are barely more sophisticated than the standard nostrums of the business press. (“What Startups Can Learn From Improv Comedy,” advises The Wall Street Journal; “Mature Entrepreneurs Know When to Be a Hedgehog and When to Be Fox,” counsels Forbes.) Striking one of the book’s many bathetic notes, Karp and Zamiska write that the best start-ups operate like “artist colonies, filled with temperamental and talented souls,” where status is fluid and nonconformity encouraged. The upshot of this unique structure? “The benefit of it being somewhat unclear or ambiguous who is leading commercial sales in Scandinavia, for example, is that maybe that someone should be you. Or what about outreach to state and local governments in the American Midwest?” This, apparently, is the future we are rushing toward: one where a $200 billion tech company enacts violence in the name of Western civilization while waxing poetic about how building lethal software is just like making great art.
4
Toward the end of the book, Karp and Zamiska pause to linger on an episode that briefly shook the German cultural world of the late 1990s. In a speech accepting a major literary award, the eminent German novelist Martin Walser criticized Germany’s culture of Holocaust remembrance. It was a “moral cudgel,” he argued, wielded by the liberal intelligentsia to repress a newly united Germany’s nationalistic revival. Referring to plans to build the Berlin Holocaust memorial, Walser invoked Hannah Arendt: “Probably there is a banality of the good, too,” he said.
5
What Karp and Zamiska don’t mention in their recounting of this episode is that Karp was a doctoral student at Goethe University in Frankfurt at the time, and that he made the controversy the central case study of his dissertation. As the Harvard professor Moira Weigel noted in a fascinating exegesis of the document, which has yet to be officially translated into English, Karp’s thesis examined how certain speech patterns allow for the expression of taboo wishes, especially those produced by human drives toward aggression. Walser’s speech, Karp argued, performed such a function. By letting his audience express their taboo desire to throw off the yoke of public Holocaust remembrance, he wrote, Walser convinced them that “these taboos should never have existed.”
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