The European heatwave is back, with records for the hottest day being superceded faster than British prime ministers. The UK may have started June with riots and division, but has ended the month united in that nobody wants Keir Starmer to continue as leader.
Europe has been heating up at roughly double the global rate of warning, gaining around half a centigrade every decade for the past three decades. The world is currently around 1.4º hotter than its pre-industrial temperature, with Europe around 2.3º warmer than that pre-industrial average. The arctic is warming at about three times the global average while land is warming faster than the oceans. The weather systems that circulate air around the globe are also changing, with hot air from Africa coming to Europe more frequently. In addition, as the arctic warms it weakens the Jetstream, that would otherwise have broken up those hot air patterns. Samantha Burgess, deputy director of the European climate change agency Copernicus, told the BBC that climate change “has shifted from being an abstract, statistical future problem… to a concrete present disruptive feature of daily life.”
For many Britons, the soon-to-be-former prime minister Starmer also remains an abstract statistical problem. He did rescue both the Labour Party from the left wing extremism of his predecessor Jeremy Corbyn, and the country in general from the right wing incompetence of the Conservative Party. However he failed to communicate any kind of hope to the people who voted for him, instead offering a series of political gaffes, policy u-turns and poorly explained tax rises that left voters and Labour MPs fearing for their jobs. Hope underpins everything, even more than faith and charity. Hope transcends the reality of poverty, of repression, of abuse. Take it from me, when you lose hope you lose all reason to exist.
There is no hope from extremism, right or left, only the promise of cutting to the chase with quick solutions but such dreams are just castles built on sand. For every democracy, hope in the political sense lies in strong economies with robust governance and that can only be achieved by bringing everyone together, right and left. Perhaps the best way we can get a sense as to how well that’s gone throughout June is by looking at the three kings that have led the headlines this month.
First there is the would-be king of the US, Donald Trump, who has finally managed to put the cork back in the bottle marked Do NOT break glass, by resuming talks with Iran to try and restore the status quo established by the Obama-era Joint comprehensive plan of action. In his desperation, Trump has hung the Israeli leader Benjamin Netanyahu out to dry in the midst of yet-another Lebanese operation.
As a result, oil prices have dropped rapidly with pump prices now back to pre-war levels in the US and most of Europe. However, it appears that a genie may have escaped and offered Iran several wishes, including a commitment not to interfere in the continuing oppression of the Iranian people, the end of sanctions and the establishment of a $300 billion fund to help rebuild the infrastructure the Americans destroyed. Trump now has a delicate balancing act to persuade extremists in his own movement that this is really a kind of victory; if he fails, then a return to hostilities remains a distinct possibility.
Then there is the actual King, Charles III, who has just become the first British monarch to publish his tax returns, revealing that he paid £12.9m for 2024-2025. He benefits from the taxpayer-funded Sovereign Grant, a cool £72.1 million in core funding for 2025-26, up from £51.8 million the year before, and due to rise to £99.9 million the following year despite every other part of government funding facing severe cutbacks. Charles also benefits from the Duchy of Lancaster estate, which effectively was handed over by the state to the monarchy, which for the 2025-26 tax year gave him a further £25.2 million.
In addition, he controls the Crown Estate, which includes the entire coastline of the UK and has seen huge profits generated in recent years by rents from offshore wind farms, earning £487 million for the 2025-26 year. Charles does give the Crown estate revenues back to the government but it’s not clear why it doesn’t simply belong to the British state. Instead it appears that Charles’ primary duty is as CEO of a large property portfolio, with being king as more of a side hustle.
This brings us to the self-styled king of the North, Andy Burnham, former mayor of Manchester and the man most likely to succeed Starmer as the next prime minister, despite there having been no actual challenge and so far little sign of any kind of contest or election. Burnham has said that he will stick to the fiscal rules established by the current chancellor, Rachel Reeves, in order to reassure the bond markets that determine the interest rates on government borrowing. Those rules allow for borrowing only to fund investment and not for day to day spending, and include a commitment to reducing debt as a proportion of the economy. Servicing that debt costs around 8.7 percent of government spending, which is more than the 5.5 percent currently earmarked for defence. So there are very limited options for borrowing more money.
Instead, most recent chancellors have talked about growth in the economy, which would deliver more tax income. There hasn’t been any really meaningful growth in the British economy since the first years of the century, way back when Tony Blair was prime minister. Ever since the 2008 financial crash, the country has been skirting recession, a little bit up, a little bit down, month after month. Successive Conservative prime ministers have masked this by cynically cutting public services and infrastructure so that there’s no room for further cutbacks.
Equally, the pandemic and subsequent supply chain crisis led to huge government borrowing, with crippling debts that now have to be serviced and little room for additional borrowing. And there are ongoing issues, from the economic fallout of Brexit, the costs associated with the Russian attack on Ukraine and subsequent war, to Trump’s tariffs and the economic shock from his attack on Iran. And then there are the massive increases in defence spending caused by fears of further aggression from Russia and the risk that China might seek to take advantage of that, all while Trump has effectively collapsed the NATO umbrella that has shielded the West for the last 77 years.
Despite all this, Britain remains the sixth largest economy in the world, based on Gross Domestic Product, so there is a lot of money tied up in Britain and not just in the King’s property portfolio. However, too many Britons are living with the costs but not the benefits of this. The fundamental question remains, where has all the money gone?
It will need a radical vision, and the economic policy to match, to overcome all these problems. One thing is certain. The global economy is not going to suddenly bounce back, so there isn’t going to be any significant economic growth, certainly not for the UK and probably not for most other economies. Any politician that plans on such growth is simply admitting that they don’t have the vision needed to deal with these problems. Instead, the only options are either to find a creative way to sell the idea of more borrowing or to increase taxes. Real leadership would be to reform the taxation system to force a redistribution of wealth, but how much equality can you have in a state with a constitutional monarchy?
June also marks the 10-year anniversary of the fateful Brexit referendum. None of the prime ministers since managed to stay in office much beyond three years. Instead they abandoned all hope and pursued the politics of division, leading to an economy that’s six percent smaller than it should have been and a nation of people that are deeply pissed off. Not surprisingly, there is much talk about whether or not Britain should rejoin the EU though no immediate prospect of this.
There is also much talk about the defence budget but few people have realised these two things are linked. The EU was born out of the ashes of the Second World War, and the realisation that the European nations would be better off working together than fighting against each other. Any serious talks about defence would have to include how to sustain the industrial manufacturing capability needed to rapidly build replacement munitions, and that would almost certainly mean reconnecting the UK to the EU’s manufacturing base. Eventually the political classes in Westminster will also realise this.
There’s no appetite in Europe to start a war, but if Europe is attacked and dragged into a war, then Britain will inevitably also be involved. But how will Britons feel about paying to defend a European vision that they are no longer part of? One thing is for sure, life in Europe – including the UK – is going to get a lot hotter, and not just the weather.
Nessan Cleary 
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