…August 2024

August has been hot, so hot that several towns in England burst into flames, though this was mostly due to a rash of riots, led by far right activists initially spreading misinformation to exploit a tragic triple murder in Southport. The violence then spread to other cities, including Southend, Sunderland, Hull, Hartlepool and London, pulling in a range of people including neo-Nazi thugs as well as mothers and grandpas that just happened to be passing.

This violence was largely blamed on poor regulation of social media platforms, which themselves largely rely on promoting outrage to drive further engagement and hence ad revenue. Sadly, many governments do not have a good reputation for protecting free speech but who could have guessed that relying on the foreign owners of these tech platforms, like Elon Musk, would prove to be so effective? Musk himself has been accused of promoting misinformation alongside making a prediction that civil war would break out in the UK. In reality most British people settled for some mild-mannered disapproval. 

Britain does have the Online Safety Act, which is designed to force the social media platforms to regulate themselves, but this won’t come into effect until the end of the year. The London mayor Saddiq Khan has already said that the social media role in the recent riots have rendered the act obsolete. Meanwhile, the EU’s Digital Services Act, which does the same thing, is already in force, with the European Commission having launched a probe into X, formerly known as Twitter. Brazil has temporarily suspended X as it attempts to rein in Musk’s brand of free speech, which appears to include the right to disseminate lies and hateful content alongside undermining facts. In the US, Musk is suing Media Matters for daring to exercise its free speech and suggest that neo-nazi content might not be a good advertising fit for some brands. 

The underlying reason for the riots is that for the last 20 years governments from both sides have dumped migrants into the poorest areas, leaving it to local government to pick up the bill and making those communities even poorer. This has fuelled the riots, the Brexit vote and the rise of populist politics. Add to this the austerity economics unleashed by the Conservatives after 2010, which hollowed out much of the infrastructure of the country, and the damage done by Brexit, which has wrecked the country’s manufacturing base.

The new prime minister, Keir Starmer, has responded by promising that things will get worse and then appeared somewhat aggrieved that more people have not appreciated his ability to state the blindingly obvious. It’s not clear yet if he has any actual solutions. The Labour chancellor, Rachel Reeves, has continued to claim that Britain’s economy is riddled with problems created by the Conservatives. Yet her solution appears to be following the same Conservative policies, ruling out rises to Income tax, national insurance and VAT, in favour of more cutbacks – totally failing to understand that the Tories lost the election because people want different policies. Instead, she appears to be mainly afraid of uncosted expenditure leading to another Truss-style crash and burn. Yet, for an economy the size of the UK, and the borrowing options available, there should be other alternatives to prioritise growth. 

The Bank of England cut its base rate at the beginning of August by a quarter of a percent to 5 percent, the first cut in four years. But economists are warning that we are unlikely to see a return to the very low interest rates from before the pandemic. Instead the base rate is likely to settle around 3-4 percent, meaning real world interest rates of around 4.5 percent. This was followed by news that the UK’s inflation rate, which had been falling steadily, rose for the first time this year to 2.2 percent, following the release of the July figures. This is largely due to prices of gas and electricity falling by less than they did a year before. The Bank of England has said that it expects inflation to rise further this year before falling back again. This has dampened any hopes for a further cut in base rates in September. 

Britain’s economic problems are further hampered by having to pay some £47 billion in compensation for various scandals, ranging from infected NHS blood supplies and the Post Office Horizon coverup through to unequal pay claims for some women.

Fortunately the Conservative Party has recognised that its main role for this parliament is to provide comic relief, starting off with the election campaign for a new leader. So far all the dingbats – none of them quite rate being referred to as candidates – have decided that the best way to appeal to an electorate that has just handed a thumping victory to a centre left party, is to move further to the political right. 

August has also seen the Olympic Games play out in Paris, France. There has been much here for Britain to celebrate. Firstly, it rained heavily during the opening ceremony leading to a general consensus that the French party wasn’t quite as successful as the London games. For the aquatic events, the French spent some €1.4 billion to clean up the sewage in the Seine, with limited success, vindicating the British policy of just learning to live with lots of poo in our rivers. Oh, and Great Britain picked up a few medals as well and is continuing to have success in the paralympics with a number of gold medals.

The Royal Mint has opened a factory in Llantrisant in south Wales to recover gold from e-waste. The gold will be taken from components in circuit boards using a patented chemistry system from Canada that dissolves the gold and which is said to use less energy than other approaches. The recovered gold will be used to produce luxury jewellery. 

A US court has ruled that Google exerts two separate monopolies, one in general search services and the other in general text advertising, both heavily dependent on deals with browser and device developers such as Apple. Google will almost certainly appeal this, which could take years, but eventually the US Department of Justice will seek to break these monopolies to restore competitiveness to the search market. This will likely have a huge impact on the adverting and publishing industries.

China has begun an anti-subsidy investigation into European dairy imports that are widely seen as a tit-for-tat response to the EU revising its tariffs on Chinese electric vehicles. The EU is also looking into Chinese-made solar panels and wind turbines. This has sparked fears of a trade war that could spill over into other areas. 

British airways has cut its direct flights to Beijing, a further sign of the downturn in business with China. Part of the problem is that Western airlines have to avoid Russian airspace, meaning longer journeys and higher fuel costs. That makes it harder to compete on price against Chinese carriers which can fly directly over Russian territory. In addition, Chinese customers prefer to use Chinese airlines. But another reason is that there are simply fewer customers making this journey. 

The continuing Chinese threat to Taiwan and its strategically vital semi-conductor industry is forcing western governments to look to other bastions of semi-conductor production, including…Wales. The Centre for Integrative Semiconductor Materials (CISM) at Swansea university and the Compound Semiconductor Centre (CSC) at Cardiff university are part of a cluster, known as CSconnected. Recently, the governor of Queensland, Australia visited to discuss the potential for joint ventures and knowledge exchange between Wales and Australia. However, Reeves’ review of spending, as part of the new government’s cutbacks, threatens the funding for CSconnected.

The Middle East crisis continues. The hopes for a ceasefire and the release of more Israeli hostages at the beginning of the month have evaporated and been replaced by relief that a war has not yet broken out in Lebanon. At the same time, Israel has started a new military campaign in the West Bank amidst growing evidence of settler violence against Palestinians, while polio has broken out in Gaza, bringing a new horror to the Palestinian civilians. 

The Ukrainians have struck a bold blow, capturing part of Russia’s Kursk region and prompting outrage from Russia at the very idea that one country would dare to invade part of another country. However the Ukrainians have not made any progress in freeing their own country and it increasingly looks as if Russia’s sheer size, intransigence and industrial might well ultimately prevail.

The Russians might even take some solace from Afghanistan, where the Taliban have now all but criminalised being female with women now forbidden from making any sounds in public. There has been no response to this outrage from other countries, largely because the NATO countries have already tried and failed to defeat the Taliban, who now have free rein to do what they want. How did the West, with its combination of military might and moral certitude lose to such a ragtag group?