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    The small price of sticking it to Putin Archived Message

    Posted by Keith-264 on March 2, 2023, 5:08 pm

    https://consciousnessofsheep.co.uk/2023/02/28/the-small-price-of-sticking-it-to-putin/

    With tedious predictability, the people – politicians, journalists and keyboard warriors – that David Graeber referred to as “the extreme centre,” are blaming Britain’s vegetable shortage on Brexit, even though three-quarters of the foods involved are usually grown within the UK, where free movement still exists for European pickers. Indeed, even the tighter regulation of the movement of fresh foods between Europe and the UK do not come into force until January 2024.

    So why are so many of these extreme centrists blaming Brexit? In a word, hubris. As Graeber said of them:

    “It strikes me that what’s called the moderates are the most immoderate people possible. And the reason why they are so uncompromising, I think, is because they realise they don’t have a lot of positive arguments. Because they’re not really for anything.”

    On Brexit, and on all of the big decisions since 2016, the fact is that the extreme centrists have got it wrong. They forgot to campaign in 2016 because they were so certain they were going to win. But when they unexpectedly lost, they blamed everybody but themselves. Their position was best summed up by former Tory remainer Anna Soubry:

    “Soubry admits that, because she voted for the Referendum Act, she shares some of the blame for the constitutional fiasco we now find ourselves in. She had been in favour of holding a referendum – ‘Only because I thought we would win. Obviously I wouldn’t have been if I thought we would lose, let’s be honest!’”

    And at every turn since, they have thrown temper tantrums when presented with compromises which might just have salvaged something from the Brexit debacle. Theresa May, for example, presented them with transitional arrangements which would have become permanent if she had got them through parliament… remember “nothing is agreed until everything is agreed?” Instead, these “remaniacs” – accounting for less than 15 percent of the population, but over-represented in Parliament, where just one minor party (the DUP) supported Brexit – lined up alongside the hardcore Brexiteers to vote down the best outcome on offer. Not content with that, they engineered the Labour U-turn to back a second referendum and then once again lined up alongside the Brexiteers to vote through the early election in December 2019 – the one where leading remainiacs like Jo Swinson lost their seats even as Johnson won a massive majority with which to push Brexit over the line.

    More recently, and in the same way, they supported every extreme authoritarian measure promoted by an increasingly deranged global technocracy to fail to tackle what turned out to be a relatively mild virus. While those of us who pointed out that lockdowns and restrictions would cause untold damage to the economy were accused of “putting money ahead of people’s lives” and of “wanting to let the virus rip and kill granny.”

    One might have expected a degree of humility when, after two years of lockdowns and restrictions, a combination of locked-in production – especially in energy production – and broken supply chains erupted into the stagflationary crisis that we will be coming to terms with for years to come. But no, because the extreme centrists have their Brexit get out of jail free card:

    It’s the same with the National Health Service – which lockdowns were supposedly going to protect. Years of people being unable to access routine medical services – which are the gateway to diagnostic and specialist services – has led to the NHS being overwhelmed by severely ill people whose conditions might have been prevented or at least more easily treated had it not been for lockdown… Again no, the extreme centrists maintain that it is all the fault of Brexit.

    And then, about a year ago, these same people enthusiastically added yellow and blue flags to their social media profiles and rallied behind the West’s economic war on Russia in the belief that this would both end the war and lead to the overthrow of the Putin government. They assured us that the Russian military was going to run out of munitions by the end of March, and their economy would be in freefall by Easter. Once again, they were wrong. And once again, those of us who cautioned that and economic war against one of the most resource-rich states on Earth might backfire on us, were dismissed as “Putin apologists.”

    In March last year, I warned that:

    “The less obvious food crisis though, stems from the fact that Russia is the world’s largest exporter of nitrate and potash fertiliser. Industrial agriculture – without which currently, six in every seven humans would die – has so drained soils of nutrients that crop yields can only be sustained by pumping these artificial – natural gas based – chemicals onto the land during the planting and growing season. But because of last year’s gas price spikes, fertiliser was already too expensive for many farmers to afford. And so, just at the point when all of that Russian grain is diverted elsewhere, crop yields around the world will be far lower than required. Moreover, if sanctions continue, widespread food shortages could continue for years to come.”

    In truth, Britain has fared reasonably well in only experiencing temporary shortages of certain foods over the past year, with the current shortage of salad vegetables being the most pronounced. And while Tory Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Minister Therese Antoinette managed to upset everyone with her “let them eat turnips” comment, in both economic and environmental terms, a return to seasonal vegetable consumption is only a hardship to people born since about 1985. For those of us who grew up in the years prior to supermarkets, not having salad vegetables in February was entirely normal.

    It goes without saying that the extreme centrists are blaming the current vegetable shortage on Brexit. But this time, it is difficult to find any way in which Brexit even contributes to the shortage. Even the rabidly pro-EU BBC had to concede that:

    “Extreme weather in a number of growing regions in southern Europe and North Africa has been cited as the key reason for the shortages. In addition, producers in the UK and Northern Europe have been badly hit by high energy costs – because crops are grown in heated greenhouses over the winter. Fertiliser costs have also risen.

    “However, importers, wholesalers and retailers have played down the idea that Brexit is a factor. That is partly because the full impact of the Brexit changes have yet to be felt when it comes to fresh produce entering the country from the EU. Customs declarations are required, but border controls are not due to be implemented until 1 January 2024.”

    The reality is that vegetable shortages are a part of the price that we – or at least the political class – have chosen to pay for the West’s economic war against Russia. As Emma Haslett at the New Statesman warned last April:

    “The UK is sleepwalking into a food crisis. Fertiliser, fuel, feed: prices of agriculture’s three key ingredients are shooting upwards and farmers are warning of disaster.”

    In response to the current food shortages, Ed Conway reinforces the point:

    “Most of the tomatoes grown in the UK are cultivated not in the great outdoors but in vast greenhouses such as this one in the Lea Valley just outside London. They are mammoth structures, most of them built using designs and materials pioneered by the Dutch. Fly over the Netherlands and what you see is much of the countryside covered not with fields but with these glasshouses, many of them lit up with LED lights.

    “The advantage of growing plants in these places is that you can control the environment in almost every respect: the temperature, the humidity, the amount of light. You minimise the chances of parasites and hence the need for chemical intervention. And while spraying fertiliser on open ground is an inherently inefficient business, with much of the stuff draining off into rivers, in a hydroponic greenhouse you deploy far less fertiliser and it does far more.

    “So what has all of this got to do with energy? Actually, rather a lot…”

    Conway goes on to explain how the massive hydroponic glasshouse businesses in England’s Lea Valley – where 75 percent of our salad vegetables are ordinarily grown – are entirely dependent upon a supply of cheap gas both to power the lights and heat the glasshouses, and – less obviously – to provide a high concentration of carbon dioxide to promote accelerated plant growth:

    “But it doesn’t end there, because the nitrogen fertiliser which is dissolved and then piped into the rock soil substrate upon which the vines are growing is also a fossil fuel product. The vast majority of the world’s nitrate fertiliser is made via the Haber Bosch process, probably the single most important chemical process in the world.”

    The reason UK supermarkets had sourced salad vegetables from Morocco and Spain in the first place, was because UK growers had warned them last year that the high price of energy and fertiliser would make this year’s winter crop unprofitable. And even when growing begins in spring and summer 2023, prices are going to be much higher than we have become accustomed to.

    Russia, it turns out, is not only the last source of cheap natural gas for Europe, but is also by far the biggest exporter of both nitrate and potash fertiliser… without which, our crop yields must fall. And so, food shortages were a baked-in certainty in the package of sanctions that the West imposed on Russia a year ago. And here we are… growers have stopped growing and prices are becoming unaffordable.

    For those who support the war, accepting food shortages – along with inflation, unaffordable energy, and the gradual de-industrialisation of the European and UK economies – in order to bring down the Putin government is an honourable – although strategically misguided – position, so long as those advocating it are prepared to be held accountable for the consequences… particularly for Britain’s growing precariat. Indeed, compared to the thousands of Ukrainian men and women being killed on the West’s behalf on the front lines every month, occasional food shortages are a small price to pay.

    What is thoroughly despicable though, is for those who were so vocal in their support for the west’s economic war on Russia a year ago, to hide behind Brexit now that the price of that economic war is falling due.

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