The UK Has Fallen And It Could Spread Worldwide

Two of the oldest political parties in the world are in danger of being completely wiped out right now in the UK. Rate of change in the economy goes down, rate of change in politics can go way up. Both Labour and the Tories are on the ropes, especially Labour after the results of the last election, the local elections, were a complete bloodbath. A new system is emerging in the aftermath, but the aftermath of what? That's the thing, that's where all of this is coming from. No one is willing to say what this is truly about and that is a huge warning both to politicians in office as well as to politicians who would like to be in office. In the UK, the Tories, the so-called conservatives, spent the first part of the 2020s doing the same things everyone else did. They kept saying they've got the economy on the right track only to get their butts handed to them in 2024. So Labour came sweeping in, the so-called liberals, and they promised to do one thing, that was to fix the economy right at the moment when the economy, the globally synchronized economy, flat-beveraged, to use that term as a verb here, and it flat-beveraged worse than the UK than almost everywhere else. Not just affordability, unemployment, which certainly makes it far harder to afford anything than it already had been. The UK is a perfect illustration of this main symptom, but it's no longer the only obvious one. France, for example, just today put out some shocking unemployment numbers there too, as we'll get to. So this is a warning, a real warning, to Nigel Farage's brand new party as it ascends toward maybe a majority at some point and therefore the top role in the British government. Don't promise to fix an economy, you can't say why it was broken in the first place or what's really the biggest symptom to it. This is exactly what Labour did in 2024 as the Tories had done up until then, and it has buried both parties maybe for good. All over the world we see the same thing. The guys in office get thrown out, the new ones come in promising to fix the economy, only to do nothing for the kitchen table to get thrown out all over again. It's a warning to politicians, it's a warning from voters, it's a warning on the one thing that truly matters, which no one is willing to say. Because of the stock market and central bankers, we're supposed to believe everything is fine when voters keep telling you, rate of change in the economy goes down, rate of change in politics can and is going way up. So last week the UK held local council elections and the results were simply historic. There's really no other way to describe them, complete wipeout. So for anyone outside the UK who's watching, these contests are kind of like for the United States, the US midterms, though it's a very rough analogy. Basically, they're a chance to see where voters are in between the big national elections. The last one of those had been held in 2024, which swept the Labour Party back into the majority in parliament and Keir Starmer to the Prime Minister's office, ousting the Tories after more than a decade. Now Starmer and his comrades won on an economic message. We're going to do things differently than the other guys, they said. You know, Rishi Sunak and Liz Truss and Boris Johnson, we're going to actually listen to voters who keep telling us the economy's terrible and it's not getting any better. This is the basic setup we've seen all over the planet time and time again, including, if you recall, in the United States in that same year, 2024. The economy under the old guys was terrible and getting worse. We're going to do it very differently. That's really all they ever say, we'll do it differently. And to be honest, up until now, that's all they had to say because that's a better message than what voters have been getting before then. Whether the Tories or Joe Biden, Kamala Harris in the U.S., they kept saying the economy's fine, it's good, it's booming, or maybe it's improving. It's not great, but it's improving. Just look at the stock market. So this is already a warning. Voter dissatisfaction cuts across party lines. During that same critical year, 2024, the global pivot, the Brits tossed out the so-called conservatives to give the so-called liberals a shot, and the Americans kicked out the so-called liberals to give the so-called conservatives theirs. And it hasn't worked, so now both American and British voters are even angrier. What is a Eurodollar University membership? It's where understanding the monetary world isn't a mystery, it's a method. 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You can't be in position to succeed if you don't know how it all really works and fits together. So if you're ready to explore master monetary systems, both past and future, with structure, clarity, and confidence, click the link in the description to visit eurodollar.university.com to join us today. And the Brits just took out that anger on Starmer and Labour, but rather than handing power back to the so-called conservatives and the Tories, they pulled the lever in huge historic ways for a brand new party called Reform UK. The results were staggering, if unsurprising. Unsurprising in the respect of actually admitting the economy, therefore the kitchen table continues to be the driving force behind the upheaval. Rate of change and it goes down, rate of change in politics goes way up. So just look at the rate of change for the council elections in the UK last week. Reform, this brand new party, picked up 1,451 seats after having just two previously, from two to 1,453. Now Labour lost nearly 1,500, leaving them with still over a thousand, and the Tories, as I said, drubbed yet again, losing another 563, leaving the party with just 801. Now the Green Party of the far left also did well, gaining 441. In other words, big picture, the two main parties, or the two former main parties, lost 2,000 councillors combined, with 1,500 of those going to Farage and Reform UK, and the other 500 to the Greens and other left leaners. Quote, Labour are being wiped out by Reform in many of their most traditional areas, and what you're going to see later on today is the Conservative Party being wiped out in their heartlands. That's according to Nigel Farage. What he told reporters Friday morning is some councils were still counting the votes. He insisted his upstart party, which won just five seats in Parliament in Britain's last general election nearly two years ago, but has since climbed in the polls, was no longer a, quote, fluke or a protest vote, but a truly national party that was here to stay. What's happened is a truly historic shift in British politics, Farage said. He added that Reform's broad gains across England showed that his populist party could challenge the traditional dominance of Labour and the It's a big, big day, not just for our party, but a complete reshaping of British politics in every way. The fact that Reform won in Labour strongholds as well as Conservative strongholds is the most critical and damning piece of evidence here. As the guy once said, it is the economy stupid, and last week's results in the UK just speak for themselves. A historic realignment is currently underway as the old parties continue to pay lip service to the real problem. Voters are being left behind. Consumer prices, yes, they soared ahead in 21 and 22, but incomes never caught up now five years later, and they keep calling it affordability when it's simple, basic kitchen table economics. And worse for the kitchen and the table, the politicians who still don't get it, the lack of income over the last five years has been made a lot worse by the rise of unemployment that literally no one wants to talk about. This is just flat out astonishing in country after country. Joblessness is rising and it has been for years to the point some of these official rates on unemployment are just plain ugly, but you never hear about it anywhere, which is an enormous mistake. It's a mistake for a bunch of different reasons, but for politics, just as much. And the reason you never hear about unemployment, and instead only ever hear some politicians mentioning affordability, is simply because affordability doesn't sound as bad. It sounds like something that can be tweaked with just the right mix of government policies if you're so kind as to vote their way. Affordability sounds like it can be fixed with some tax cuts, or on the other side, maybe another kind of government handout, just some policy fine-tuning. And it is pure bullshit. If the prime minister or the president or whomever told the truth and said unemployment after income is getting to be very serious, how would people react? Quite differently. First of all, those politicians currently in office, they never ever want to use the word unemployment. Kiss of death. And for those opposing them, joblessness sounds a lot less like something a new political party might be able to fix. And we also have to consider just how much central bankers play a role in this too. Politicians, I mean, look, they have no idea what's going on in the economy, so they're told what to believe by a group of people who really don't have any more idea about what's going on in an economy, and that's central bankers. I mean, they all have the fancy degrees, the right pedigree, the impressive titles, and the flashy offices. Central bankers look the part, which, as I'll remind you, is the entire point, their only point. It's all about appearances. And they're all in on inflation, and have been, especially the past year to 14 months. Remember tariff inflation? They can't sell tariff inflation, and now oil inflation, and therefore the hawkish policy stance to politicians or the public when unemployment is running rampant. Calling it an affordability crisis makes it sound more like the inflation no one has, because it might also encompass the joblessness that everyone increasingly does. And politicians, as we know, they will defer to the central bankers when any truly smart politician would begin truly challenging them and all their assumptions, predictions, and forecasts, and their theories. Start by calling them out on how they keep downplaying this economic reality, or worse, by saying that rate cuts or lower rates will somehow fix everything. The evidence conclusively, conclusively shows, yet again, lower rates are only a response to weakness, not a cure for it. And the UK, as we'll see, shows this more clearly than maybe anywhere else, though that list is starting to get a little bit more crowded, as we'll also see. Politicians who want to actually succeed should criticize, and heavily, or even go further, blame those who unleashed this wave of decay and declared it a good thing. Those who said it was going to lead to widespread prosperity, rather than the near universal impoverishment that it has. Farage would do well to ditch the word affordability and start speaking plainly, which is one of his talents. The only economic words he should ever say are jobs and incomes, about why there wasn't nearly enough of the latter, and how increasingly, increasingly, the former are being lost, and I don't mean lost to the robots of AI. The unemployment problem is hiding right here in plain sight, even if no one wants to talk about it, and as I said, the UK is a perfect example of not just the economic part of it, but also the political response to it, the more and increasingly extreme political response to it. What happens when political parties refuse to be honest about the situation? Well, the situation is problems in the British job market showed up in 2024, even before the Labour election landslide. The economy's downfall isn't due to one party or another, or one party affiliation or another, it was the lockdowns and the supply shock, and before that 2008 and its aftermath, which absolutely still haunts the world today, just as China. The UK began losing jobs right around April and May 2024, same as we've seen flat beverage show up in the US or Canada and other parts of the world. Rishi Sunak, the last Tory Prime Minister, maybe the last Tory Prime Minister, kept saying the British economy was turning a corner, that's why voters should vote for him, and he was right, partly. It did turn a corner, just the wrong one, and it ended up being why voters voted so heavily against him and his party. But while Labour promised to fix the economy, it was their defining platform, by the way, don't forget this. Starmer made economic reform his centrepiece, and it backfired bigly, not because Labour focused on the economy, but because they had no clue why it was bad, and certainly no idea it was only going to get worse, and therefore no idea how to do something about it. After all, they thought they'd have the tailwind of central bank rate cuts, but then the rate cuts did them and Britain no favours, because rate cuts aren't stimulus, they only tell you when central bankers are reacting to weakness, whether central bankers say so in public or not. So jobs that began being lost in summer 2024, kept being lost throughout 2025, and then, shockingly to the mainstream, continue to be lost here in 2026, just not in a straight line. Every time it looks like job growth is returning, they all declare rate cut victory, only to be shocked when job losses come roaring back after only a couple of months at the most. And all the while, all the while, unemployment keeps creeping higher and higher and higher and higher and higher. The official rate in Britain had gotten to 5.2% as of January 2026, which was a new cycle high, and one that wasn't far from the 2020 peak. Now outside of lockdowns, it was the highest jobless rate for the UK since the middle 2010s, so unemployment and job losses are the biggest problems in the UK, yet no one will say it, even as frustrated voters continue to act on it. But it got worse in February. The latest data from the British government, even though the unemployment rate slid from 5.2% to 4.9%, for anyone paying attention to the US labor market or in Canada for the past six months, you already know why the rate dropped, and it is nothing good. Yeah, it's what they call idleness in the UK. Workers, now former workers, they see no jobs out there, no one's hiring, more people are firing, and they simply give up looking for work. They drop out of the labor force, therefore they drop out of the official jobless rate, even though their joblessness is economic in nature, and should be, and really should be reflected accurately in the major numbers like those on unemployment. But there are also those places, unlike the US, such as Canada and now France, where even official unemployment rates are getting to be too high to at least fully ignore as much as politicians and central bankers might want to. Despite the ECB, France's jobless rate just moved up to 8.1%, which is as bad as it sounds. And you might be asking yourself, gee, when did French unemployment really start to turn around and move higher? And the answer is, you'll not be surprised to hear, the middle of 2024. Though most of the damage was done in 2025, after the ECB had cut its policy rates down substantially and kept going right to 2% by the middle of last year. And yet unemployment unexpectedly keeps rising anyway. Quote, French unemployment unexpectedly rose to the highest level in five years. Five years, adding to signs the euro area's second largest economy was already on a weak footing when the Iran war began. And where have we heard this before? With joblessness increasing across all age categories, the rate reached 8.1% in the first quarter, data from National Statistics Agency, INSEE, showed. Economists surveyed by Bloomberg had forecast a slight decline, a slight decline, to 7.8% from 7.9% at the end of last year. And why did economists think the unemployment rate in France would improve early in 2026? Well, for one, they thought weakness was all about trade wars in 2025, rather than continuing the impoverishment and the consequences of impoverishment from back in 2022. Plus, let's not forget, economists who have no idea what interest rates are or mean, believe that their central bank policy rate cuts, especially all the way down to the 2% rate, right on the verge of ultra low, those were going to be huge, powerful support to the European economy. That's what we're told all across the media. That's what all the textbooks say. And that's what history shows is 100% completely wrong. Christine Lagarde said Europe was in a good place because of 2%. Yet here again, we see more evidence she was full of it. Stop listening to central bankers. It should be point number two for any aspiring politician or political party. And point number one is to simply be honest about the economic situation, including what is really going on and where it came from, and thus stop promising to fix what you really don't know how to fix. All they ever promise to do is keep throwing government this and government that at the economy when it has been drowning in government since March and April 2020. All that has done is impoverished the vast majority of people on the planet, and a good sizable part of that majority does not like it. This is really simple stuff. Prices went up much farther than incomes did, and that was in the early years of the decade up until 2022, early 2023. Since then, it has gotten worse because after not having nearly enough incomes following the lockdowns, hiring totally disappeared, and increasingly jobs that did exist are vanishing on top of everything else. It really isn't that hard to figure out why voters are so pissed off and why they are right to be. The economy is and has been a total ---- show for years. Sure, the stock market has boomed and central bankers have declared it a good place. So what? All those did was hide the truth, and you do not have to take my word for this. Take the increasingly radical votes from voters who keep proving this point to the point that two of the oldest parties in Europe have been brought to the brink of extinction. Rate of change in the economy goes down and stays down. Rate of change in politics goes way, way up, and then there are the political consequences from the energy shock and the fallout from that as well as what that's going to do the economy. That's something that Mario and I talked about in the video link below. As always, thank you very much for joining me. Huge thank you, Eurodown University members and subscribers, and until next time, take care.