In 2022 and 2023, global economies are experiencing inflation due to many factors; in the case of the UK, it is England and the United Kingdom as a whole leaving the European Union and since the United Kingdom leaving the European Union in the Brexit referendum in 2016.
The United Kingdom officially left the European Union on January 31 2020, and the transition lasted until December 31, 2020.
This means that the politics of the United Kingdom and the reason it is leading to inflation is due to financial markets, according to geopolitical analyst and author Peter Zeihan running out of patience with the United Kingdom.
So, the question is, what does this mean in practical terms? Successive UK governments from David Cameron, who led the United kingdom’s Conservative party and the nation during the referendum to leave the European Union, made no plans after the referendum if the British people voted to leave the European Union.
Again, there was no planning under the Theresa May government from 2016 to 2019, the Boris Johnson government 2019 or 2022, the present Prime Minister Rishi Sunak 2022, and his brief predecessor Liz Trust 2022 seven weeks government being the shortest serving Prime Minister in British history.
The lack of decision-making inside Westminster and number 10 harkens back to the Cameron and Clegg government coalition of 2010 to 2015.
During this period, decisions like building a new nuclear station were cancelled because, allegedly, the Deputy Prime Minister and Liberal Democrat leader Nick Clegg were concerned that the power station would not be activated until 2023.
During this period of the coalition government and successive governments, a committee culture and avoiding making tough decisions became the new no due to government ministers gaining experience through the coalition period.
From their experiences in the Cameron and Clegg Conservative and Liberal coalition government, the new generation of conservative leaders ginned knowledge of government from that period of government.
It’s essential to be mindful that the last time the Conservatives were in power was from 1979 until 1997, and then they were out of government from 1997 until 2010.
This means that the Conservatives new generation of leadership only gained experience in government during the 2010 to 2015 coalition, informing this batch of members of Parliament, government ministers and prime ministers on how to conduct themselves in government.
Another excellent feature shift happened during the Boris Johnson government of 2019 to 2022, with the importance of ministerial responsibility eroding due to Mr Johnson, the former PM, from a non-Conservative and moral ground. Due to the erosion of morality and social conservatism linked to duty and personal responsibility, no longer being part of a Conservative government and future governments means ministers are no longer doing the honourable thing by resigning from their offices of government should they be involved in a scandal.
Culture, Population and Investing in the Future
From the paragraph above, the reader may be thinking, how is this related to inflation and population levels?
What needs to be highlighted is the cultural shift in UK politics and the culture change that has occurred in society from a Conservative, religious society towards a liberal and consumer-based society wanting more after the Cultural Revolution and Sexual Revolution brought about in the 1960s.
The invention of the Pill, which liberated women from pregnancy and their biology, was in the 1950s. The Pill was available for married women and then to all women in the 1960s.
The liberation of women means that people now have families later and later in life. Still, a woman’s fertility window is from 18 to 35 years old; this is a very brief time for women to have children with a man in a traditional heterosexual dynamic.
It does without explanation that for transgender people, lesbian people, gay people and possibly gender nonconforming individuals, this could be most likely a lot more complicated.
With society having a more significant focus on having more material well, successful careers and being highly educated, by the time a woman or a man finishes higher education, they could be anywhere in their age range from 24 to 30 years old.
After that, they may wish to spend four or five years focusing on building their career success, pushing the childbearing age into later life.
It may sound and maybe is incredibly unfair to women. Still, we are a sexually dimorphic species meaning women have to carry children, which makes them vulnerable and may also imply they’ll have to spend a decade more or maybe less focusing on childcare and raising.
It has been found that 80% of couples that can’t have children wanted children, but for several reasons such as work, education, finances or other reasons, they never got around to having their first child.
This is relevant to inflation because most of the developed world, such as the United Kingdom and Europe, apart from France, don’t have replacement levels, their population being below the 2.1 mark for replacement levels.
What this will mean in practical terms is a national crisis which has now been seen in Japan with older people dying with no family to take care of them during their old age, and during their funerals also, there aren’t enough young people to take care of the elderly.
An extreme example of this will be seen in the People’s Republic of China, with a population of around 1.2 billion. Still, with the population at the end of the century being approximately 500 million, this demographic collapse is partly due to the one-child policy and people not having children.
People do not have children because many factors, such as the economy, culture or several other factors, lead to this. Still, the topic of having children or not having children will not be discussed in this article, with the main focus being on its effects on inflation.
When people retire, they no longer invest money into the system that pays for roads and pays to look after people during their old age. With society becoming elderly and not enough young people taking care and looking after the elderly, this will lead to more inflation and more taxes because governments will buckle under the pressure because there are not enough people paying taxes to keep the system running.
There has never been an economic theory that answers the effects of the global population and what this will mean for the global economy and society.
The only places with populations not in sub-Saharan Africa are Pakistan, France, the USA, Argentina and New Zealand, according to geopolitical analyst Peter Zeihan.
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