Analysis by two top accountancy firms issued yesterday predicted that a quarter of a million workers will lose their jobs by the middle of next year as a result of the US-Israeli war on Iran.
These massive job losses will drive UK unemployment to over two million for the first time in over a decade.
According to the EY Item Club, an economic forecast group, the closure of the Strait of Hormuz trade route and the Iranian retaliation for the illegal, unprovoked war launched against the country on 28th February, has caused the biggest economic hit to the global economy, tipping world capitalism over the edge into recession.
The effect of the imperialist war on Iran on Britain, the weakest of all the so-called ‘advanced’ nations, will be a huge increase in unemployment.
According to Matt Swannell, chief economic advisor to Item Club, unemployment will soar as the UK ‘flirts with recession’.
He said: ‘The recent spike in energy prices and disruption to supply chains will be the biggest jolt to the jobs market since the pandemic. Faced with higher costs and soft demand, we think businesses will reduce headcount, causing almost 250,000 people to become unemployed.’
Swannell went on to say that this ‘will push the UK to the brink of a technical recession in the middle of this year.’
The Daily Telegraph noted that Item Club’s forecasts are treated seriously as its economists use the same model for their predictions as the Treasury, adding: ‘It means Rachel Reeves, the Chancellor, can expect to see a similarly dire outlook’ from her own government department.
A separate report issued yesterday by the giant accountancy company Deloitte found that finance chiefs at the biggest UK businesses are already cutting back spending plans and taking actions that will cut back on economic activity and hiring.
According to this report, chief executives are already more pessimistic than at any time since the start of the Covid 19 pandemic, and ‘geopolitical developments’ – a polite way of describing an imperialist war to reorder the world that has rebounded with a vengeance on the US and global capitalism – represent the greatest external risk to their business.
With their profits threatened, the bosses are determined to make the working class and youth pay for the catastrophic crisis of capitalism through mass unemployment and wage cutting.
These reports follow equally dire predictions from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) that warned that the weak British economy faces the biggest economic shock of all the advanced economies in the world as the war on Iran triggers a global recession.
This barrage of dire warnings and predictions of a massive surge in unemployment and the UK plunging headlong into a recession from the IMF and leading capitalist economic analysts, has met with a deafening silence from the TUC.
No attempt has been made to even warn the working class that British capitalism is crashing under the impact of this crisis and that the ruling class will be demanding that the Starmer Labour government inflicts all the pain on the backs of workers and youth.
Instead, the TUC leaders are sitting back and acting as if this crisis has nothing to do with them or the trade union movement.
The powerful working class will not accept the TUC passively allowing its wages, jobs and all the gains of the Welfare State to be sacrificed to keep a decaying bankrupt UK capitalist system from collapsing and taking down the working class with it.
The working class has shown its determination never to be driven back to the conditions of the ‘hungry 1930s’ or the poverty of the 19th century.
Now is the time to force the TUC to immediately call a special conference to mobilise the entire working class in a general strike to bring down the Starmer government, and bring in a workers government and a socialist planned economy.
Join the WRP and Young Socialists to build up the leadership required for the victory of the British Socialist Revolution.
This is the only way forward.
