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The economy is irredeemably cooked and there's no more copper wiring left to strip out of the public sector once the final round of NHS privatisation goes through. All the major political parties have completely collapsed and have functionally zero actual democratic support. The Starmer project has always been one funded and ran by American intelligence and the British establishment is desperately trying to carve out a future for itself the way it did with international financialisation after the loss of its empire.
What they've settled on is using Israel as a model to build a lean, AI-run, low tax, low spend, fascist country in name only, turning much of the country into 'free enterprise zones' for foreign capital and operating a perpetual privatised war economy. But they face three major problems:
Demand for weapons and military technology will fall if war doesn't continue in Ukraine or if Israel is forced to scale back it's genocide in Gaza and increasing numbers of wars against its neighbours.
The economy already cannot support the number of people who require a living and it's only going to get worse as they make this transition. The government doesn't want to be on the hook for social welfare spending for unemployment, underemployment, or disability and sickness. They need to shrink the population, starting with those people, and are doing so with a mixture of ultra-austerity to sanction and starve people out of the system, cut payments to remove disabled workers from jobs they're already in, and introduce a euthanasia scheme that allows for 'financial burden' being a criteria and can also be run at a profit. For the first time ever, the state's Strategic Defense Review listed as one of its needs for increased surveillance and military force as "dealing with demands for employment and income from politicians by the people".
Even considering the plans above, there's simply far too many able-bodied young people who are pissed off or nihilistic, and the state has absolutely nothing to offer them even in terms of future or aspiration. Currently they're trying to manage the problem by funnelling them towards fascism and the distraction of attacking immigrants and asylum seekers, whilst heavily investing in new private prisons. In the longer term, and related to this article, the plan is to use increased military conflicts to create demand for conscription or mandatory military service of other sorts (both have seriously been floated by military and political leaders recently) to thin out the numbers and control them.