“British defence executives are reportedly worried about being outperformed by German and French rivals

Senior British defence industry officials are discussing the possibility of manufacturing weapons and armoured vehicles in Ukraine under a local license, The Telegraph reported on Saturday. Some executives have already visited Kiev to explore options for setting up joint ventures, the newspaper wrote.

According to the report, British manufacturers are concerned that their French and German rivals could be the first to seal a deal with Kiev. One executive was quoted as describing the negotiations as a race to put London “at the front of the queue.” It was also said that such a licensing deal would likely require the approval of the British government.

The news comes as Ukraine’s Western supporters step up their military aid to Kiev amid its armed conflict with Russia. Britain pledged last month to deliver a squadron of Challenger 2 tanks for the first time. 

Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, who hosted Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky during his unannounced visit to the UK on Wednesday, instructed the Ministry of Defence to study the issue of supplying Kiev with fighter jets. “We take these decisions carefully and we do it thoughtfully. We are aware of potential escalatory risks,” Sunak’s spokesperson said this week.

Moscow has repeatedly warned that “flooding” Ukraine with foreign weapons would only lead to further escalation and that Western arms would be treated as legitimate targets. “These actions will not substantially change the outcome of the conflict,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters on Thursday. He added that military aid to Kiev would only make the conflict “more painful for Ukraine.”

Russia launched a military operation in Ukraine nearly a year ago, citing the need to protect the people of Donbass and Kiev’s failure to implement the 2014-2015 Minsk peace accords.”

RT 12\2\23

DC

Children fleeing conflict and persecution in other parts of the world should still be deported from the UK if they cross the Channel in small boats, according to hardline new proposals from an influential conservative thinktank, Policy Exchange, sometimes used as a platform by senior Tory ministers to trail new measures. It envisages the sidestepping of the Human Rights Act and Modern Slavery Act in order to eliminate legal challenges to removing men, women and children.

“The proposals will simply leave people living in limbo for months on end facing detention and then expulsion from the UK being treated as criminals without a fair hearing on UK soil, having their rights trampled on,” said Enver Solomon, the CEO of the Refugee Council. “It is an approach more akin to authoritarian nations that walk away from international human rights treaties, such as Russia or Belarus, and is no way to treat those who have lost everything through no fault of their own…”

It also offers legitimacy to far-right groups such as those who attacked a hotel temporarily housing refugees in Liverpool. 

Stand Up To Racism blamed the violence on the government’s “scapegoating of refugees”.

Far-right protesters clash with police at Merseyside hotel housing asylum seekers | Immigration and asylum | The Guardian

 In September 2022, Nicola Sturgeon announced a six-month rent freeze and an eviction ban, as part of emergency legislation brought in to deal with the cost of living crisis. For many Scottish housing campaigners – and indeed everyday tenants – the news was welcomed with enthusiasm.

The small print, though, of the Cost of Living (Protection of Tenants) (Scotland) Act 2022 contained important caveats. For one, the freeze would only apply to existing tenancies across Scotland – there was no cap on what could be charged for a flat put on the market. Social tenants with arrears of more than £2,250 could still be evicted. And a temporary freeze was assuredly not the same thing as long-term rent controls.

It was reported last year that average rents had increased above inflation in seven Scottish areas before the freeze came in. It’s fair to question the effectiveness of a freeze that simply locks in what are, for many, already unaffordable rents. This is in a country where about 37% of households live in rented accommodation.

Demand is at 2.5 times the UK average. To live in Glasgow when the average rent of a one-bedroom flat has jumped 48.3% between 2010 and 2022.

 At the start of the month, new figures showed that rents in Dundee had soared 33% in a year, putting the city having the second steepest increase in the UK, with the average monthly cost of a room in Dundee now £587.

Matt Downie, the chief executive of the homelessness charity Crisis UK. Though it welcomed the Scottish government’s decision to take action to protect tenant explained, “the rent freeze contained in the emergency legislation represents a sticking plaster on a much bigger problem”.

In late January, the Scottish housing minister and Green party co-leader Patrick Harvie announced that the legislation would be extended for at least a further six months, from April to the end of September. Only now, the private-sector freeze would be scrapped and replaced with a 3% cap (the freeze on social rents will also end in April, with the voluntary agreement that landlords keep any increases to below inflationary levels of 11.1%). Despite this fairly bold U-turn, broadly interpreted as a concession to the landlord lobby, there is still an extreme unhappiness among landlords.

In 2019, the Scottish house conditions survey showed that 52% of privately rented homes in Scotland were found to be in a state of disrepair.

What happened during Scotland’s rent freeze? Landlords fought back | Francisco Garcia | The Guardian

“UK households are suffering a “permanent” decline in living standards as wages lag behind double-digit inflation and families struggle to pay their bills, the National Institute of Economic and Social Research (NIESR) has warned.

According to a forecast by the UK’s oldest independent economic research institute released on Wednesday, 7 million households, which is the equivalent of one in four, will be unable to cover their energy and food bills once the government starts scaling back its subsidies program in April.

Energy prices remain high, while inflation is running above 10%, more than five times the Bank of England’s 2% target. NIESR said the target will not be reached until the second half of 2025.

Grocery inflation alone soared to a new record of 16.7% in the four weeks of January, taking the average annual food shopping bill in the UK to £5,504 ($6,781), up £788 ($974) from last year, according to the latest research by Kantar.

NIESR economists warn that middle-income households will be hit hardest by the cost-of-living crisis. While the poorest families receive additional state aid, the middle classes will face a decline of between 7% and 13% in their disposable income, or as much as £4,000 ($4,800).

“What we’ve seen is that the shocks that have come along have progressively made us poorer per person,” said NIESR director Jagjit Chadha.

Although the institute believes the UK will narrowly escape a recession, it predicts the country will see “anaemic” growth of just 0.2% this year before GDP rises 1% in 2024 and 1.6% in 2025. For millions of households it “will certainly feel like a recession,” NIESR warned.

“This malaise seems to be affecting large parts of the advanced world but on many measures the UK looks as though it’s towards the bottom of performance and I think that’s a great concern,” said Chadha.

Earlier this month, the International Monetary Fund said that Britain will have the worst economic performance among other major industrialized nations, and will become the only G7 member to face a recession this year.”

https://www.rt.com/business/9\2\23

Dave C.

 Added to the website as follows –

How to Read the Business Pages

Adam Buick, 21st October 2022

Communism in America

Bill Martin, 11th November 2022

What About the World Cup?

Alan Johnstone, 18th November 2022

 Boris Johnson, the former prime minister, declared income since leaving office last September is £4.8m.

The £4.8m in earnings that Mr Johnson has declared since leaving No 10 just over five months ago is more than 50 times his yearly £84,144 MP salary.

 Six days on after this tragedy rescuers are still finding people alive in the rubble.  Thoughts turn to the efforts being made to save other people.  

Rescuers are working 24/7, many are volunteers actively working in the finding survivors, while others are helping with aftercare.  Then there is the international effort by charities, worldwide the working class will be donating money and useful goods for others who have lost everything.  

17000 dead so far, many lives have been devastated and people urgently need help to stay alive.  The cooperative effort is to be applauded for the humanitarian effort, which socialists would endorse.

 Rescue teams and volunteers from around the world have made their way to Turkey, medical volunteer Obaida Rannoush called out the inaction of the global community when it comes to his country, Syria. In northwest Syria, the sluggish international response is a matter of life or death for hundreds still trapped under the concrete of collapsed buildings.

“I call on the international community, the Arab countries, and the United Nations to urgently help us,” he said, standing by the Bab al-Hawa border crossing. “More than 60 hours after the quake took place, there are still hundreds trapped under the debris. We cannot rescue them because of our meagre resources. We need heavy machinery, humanitarian and medical aid.” He went on to say, not a single humanitarian convoy has crossed the border. “We have not received any kind of assistance,” Rannoush said. “We are standing here by the border crossing to ask for humanitarian aid so we can save some of the people under the rubble.”

The lack of response has prompted dozens of Syrian journalists to stage a sit-in at the Bab al-Hawa crossing.

Mazen Alloush, head of media relations for the Bab al-Hawa border, said millions of Syrians have been affected by the earthquake and its aftershocks. “The crossing has been closed since the earthquake took place,” he said. “We know that the UN aid is stored in the Turkish city of Reyhanli, which is just one kilometre away from the border crossing,” he added.

“No aid has entered [north Syria] through any of the corridors,” Abdul Razzak Kentar, programmes manager at the Syria Civil Defence.

Is it politics first, aid second? 

Medico International’s Anita Starosta explained, “The aid that was being delivered before the earthquake was not sufficient and sometimes it never even arrived. Now it’s winter and very cold. That means that now, more than ever, people in the displaced persons’ camps here, and also in the areas in Idlib that have been destroyed, are dependent on international help.”All this will depend on one thing, Starosta added. “Whether Turkey opens a humanitarian corridor, to bring people who are fleeing the area to safety, or whether the country sticks with its political position and keeps the borders closed,” she said. “Unfortunately we expect the latter to happen.”

All those Syrians in the country affected by the earthquake simply have to wait — for help to arrive or political decisions to be made, even as time is running out to find survivors.

The U.S. made it clear that it was only willing to support some work carried out in Syria by NGOs, but that it would have no dealings with the al-Assad government.

The head of the Syrian Arab Red Crescent, Khaled Hboubati, has requested that Western countries, specifically the U.S. and its allies, lift their siege and sanctions on Syria so that rescue and relief work can proceed unimpeded.

“We need heavy equipment, ambulances and fire fighting vehicles to continue to rescue and remove the rubble, and this entails lifting sanctions on Syria as soon as possible,” Hboubati said.

Syrians denounce failed aid response after devastating quake | Earthquakes News | Al Jazeera

The five largest western oil and gas companies alone making a combined $200bn in profits. When the 2022 results for all publicly traded oil and gas companies are tallied the total profits are expected to exceed $400bn

The “big five” – Exxon, Chevron, Shell, BP and TotalEnergies – all revealed that last year was the most profitable in their respective histories.

Exxon, the Texas-based oil giant, led the way with a record $55.7bn in annual profit, taking home around $6.3m every hour that ticked over last year. California’s Chevron had a record $36.5bn profit, while Shell announced the best results of its 115-year history, a $39.9bn surplus, and BP, another London-based firm, notched a $27.7bn profit. The French company TotalEnergies also had a record, at $36.2bn.

“…built off the backs of working families who were victimized by oil and gas executives’ greed”, according to Claire Moser, deputy executive director of the US activist group Climate Power.

The big five oil and gas companies have already confirmed that most of the bumper profits will be going to stock buybacks and dividends. The $200bn in combined profits equates to around five times the US’s annual foreign aid budget. 

Last year, more than 1tn dollars were invested in fossil fuel infrastructure and extraction worldwide.

António Guterres, the secretary-general of the UN, was scornful of the industry in a speech, in which he expressed incredulity at the “monster profits” of fossil fuel companies at a time when the world needs to be rapidly slashing its planet-heating emissions to avoid climate breakdown. 

“If you cannot set a credible course for net-zero [emissions], with 2025 and 2030 targets covering all your operations, you should not be in business,” Guterres said. “Your core product is our core problem. We need a renewables revolution, not a self-destructive fossil fuel resurgence.”

The sale of oil and gas remains so enticing that BP this week announced it is scaling back its climate ambitions, retaining its fossil fuel assets for longer than it previously expected. 

 Said Bernard Looney, BP’s chief executive, “At the end of the day, we’re responding to what society wants.”

“If the bulk of your investments remain tied to fossil fuels, and you even plan to increase those investments, you cannot maintain to be Paris-aligned, because you will not achieve large-scale emissions reductions by 2030,” said Mark van Baal, founder of Follow This, an activist shareholder group. “The picture is clear now, no oil major has plans to drive down emissions this decade. Now it’s up to the shareholders. Together with major investors, we continue to compel BP to put its full weight behind the energy transition.”

‘Monster profits’ for energy giants reveal a self-destructive fossil fuel resurgence | Fossil fuels | The Guardian

Socialist Party of Great Britain rebukes Congressman who warns of the dangers of socialismSocialist Party of Great Britain claps back after a U.S. resolution in Congress condemned the political system