Schiller Institute President Helga Zepp-LaRouche today responded to the proposal made yesterday by British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, in his “Build, Build, Build” policy speech in Dudley, calling for Britons to “build our way out of this crisis,” in the style of FDR’s New Deal. She said, “Well, I think it sounds nice....[but] if the British want to change, they have to change all the way.”
Such an FDR development policy is absolutely required. The world is facing an existential crisis. Other leaders are beginning to realize this. Zepp-LaRouche agrees with Johnson’s identifying the FDR New Deal model, but she said that in order to work, the financial rule must be ended of the City of London. Nor can the FDR approach succeed in one country alone. But, she said, if Johnson means what he says, the obvious place for such a proposal is on the agenda of a summit of the great power leaders—Presidents Trump, Putin, Xi, Prime Minister Modi and any others willing.
Zepp-LaRouche has been calling for such a summit for months, for world leadership to confer at the highest level on initiating a new financial system, combatting the pandemic, and providing world security. In January, President Vladimir Putin similarly called for an early summit of the leaders of the P-5, the permanent five members of the U.N. Security Council: the United States, France, China, the United Kingdom, and Russia. The heads of state are willing, but the pandemic has intervened. Putin forcefully reiterated the call in the context of his June 18 article, “The Real Lessons of the 75th Anniversary of World War II,” to which Zepp-LaRouche replied, June 24, with the article, “Putin’s Discussion of the Second World War Can Prevent World War III!”
Zepp-LaRouche stressed that the timing is now urgent. There can be no “re-starting” of the old economy; and we can’t wait until next year. There are favorable portents. On April 25, Presidents Trump and Putin spoke by phone, and issued a joint statement on trust and cooperation, in the spirit of how the U.S. and Soviet forces came together 75 years ago at the Elbe River, in wartime collaboration. China would also be very favorable to conferring on a global “New Deal” approach, she said.
Meantime, opposition against the summit initiative is intense, with elements of British intelligence at the core. This is clearly behind the current coup plot to unseat Trump by claiming he let Russia get away with offering bounties to the Taliban to kill U.S. solders in Afghanistan — no proof provided.
On the question of the merits of the FDR approach for world leaders to follow, Zepp-LaRouche pointed out that statesman Lyndon LaRouche, her late husband, worked for decades promoting just this perspective, with programs for specific development projects, and a supporting financial system. The ideas are most well known as the “World Land-Bridge” or New Silk Road program, and a “New Bretton Woods.”
What Prime Minister Boris Johnson said yesterday, is that the U.K. would not go back to “austerity,” but would commit to building a new “platform” of infrastructure for “leveling up” all sectors of the economy. He said that, “too many parts of the country have felt left behind, neglected, unloved, as though someone had taken a strategic decision that their fate did not matter as much as the metropolis… It sounds like a New Deal, and all I can say is, that if so, then that is how it is meant to sound and to be, because that is what the times demand — a government that is powerful and determined and that puts its arms around people at time of crisis….”
In her weekly Schiller Institute webcast today, Helga Zepp-LaRouche said in answer to a question about Johnson’s remarks, “Well, I think it sounds nice. It sounds like the right thing to say, that he doesn’t want to go back austerity, that he wants to go for infrastructure, and go for an FDR ‘New Deal.’ I would caution it. If the British want to change, they have to change all the way. That means they would have to stop the ‘Global Great Britain’ game, this was the idea of what Britain would do after the Brexit; it would mean stopping meddling in the internal affairs of Hong Kong in order to go for regime change against China; and I would say that the test — it’s obviously good that this guy Mark Sedwill was kicked out; he was the head of the civil service and in that capacity was overlooking MI6, MI5 and the GCHQ secret services and all they did in the Russiagate affair and the coup against Trump. So, if this guy was kicked out—so we have to see how that plays out.
“But if Boris Johnson is serious, and that’s an interesting question, everybody should know that you can’t do a New Deal in the tradition of Roosevelt and leave the City of London intact. So he would have to do something about that. Furthermore, in the very globalized world right now, you can’t do it in one country, especially not in a small country like Great Britain; even if you go for all of the Commonwealth, you can’t do it, really, in an isolated way. If, however, Boris Johnson would be serious about it, and he would immediately agree to participate in the summit called by Putin, and would insist that the New Deal in the tradition of Franklin D. Roosevelt is being made the subject of such a P5 summit, then it could be taken seriously and would actually be a useful contribution. But I think that that needs some more mobilization.
“But I think that that would be the appropriate forum for such a proposal to take place. As a matter of fact, that is what our conference of the Schiller Institute was all about [June 27], because we want to create the kind of discussion which must be the one taken up by such a summit: And that is the full package proposed by my late husband, Lyndon LaRouche: A New Bretton Woods system, which includes naturally the cooperation of all countries with the specific aim to provide long-term, low-interest credit for the industrialization of the developing countries. This would be a complete reversal of British policy. It would mean Great Britain would have to work together with Russia and China to this effect, so stop geopolitics. So that’s the test.
“So before we jump to conclusions, and say ‘Hurray, how wonderful it is that Boris Johnson is now doing a New Deal,” we should put it to the test, and then we can see if it works out well.’”
