United Kingdom 2018

The United Kingdom (UK) is located in the Northwestern European region with an estimated population of 66 million people. The economy is largely based on services, with other sectors such as manufacturing and agriculture also contributing significantly. In terms of foreign relations, the UK is a member of the United Nations and other international organizations such as the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), European Union (EU) and Commonwealth of Nations. According to extrareference, the UK is a unitary parliamentary democracy with an elected prime minister who serves as head of government while the monarch serves as head of state. In 2018, Theresa May was re-elected to serve another term in office as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom.

UK. The Brexit agreement that Prime Minister Theresa May negotiated with the EU during the year was clear in its first draft in November. On November 14, the government had approved it and now only an endorsement was passed by Parliament, which would vote on it in December. At the last moment, however, the prime minister postponed the vote to be carried out by January 21, 2019. And it is high time: March 29, the UK is expected to leave the EU, with or without an agreement. Thus, even at the end of the year, Britain had no exit agreement. With us into 2019, there was only one crippling political 2018 behind them – all energy had been put into the Brexit negotiations.

• According to Abbreviationfinder: GBR is an three letter acronym for United Kingdom.

The 585-page agreement was approved by the EU on 25 November. This means that the UK will remain in a customs union with the EU for a transitional period until 31 December 2020 – a period that can be extended if necessary – and that Northern Ireland should be subject to rules that apply to the EU internal market until a settlement is completed. But for the rest of the Kingdom, the EEA Agreement on the EU internal market does not apply, as it does for example to Norway (which is not a member of the EU). The exit agreement also regulates the rights of the 3 million EU citizens currently living in the country.

According to Countryaah.com, London is the capital city of United Kingdom, a country located in Northern Europe. May’s major problems during the year were not only opposition (Labor is opposed to the Brexit agreement and would like to see a new referendum). It was also grunted in its own ranks. Several departures from the ministry followed the approval of the agreement. In November, the very same Brexit minister Dominic Raab resigned, after only a few months on the post, because he could not accept the agreement. He was replaced by Health Minister Stephen Barclay. Raab’s departure was followed by, among others, Labor and Pensions Minister Esther McVeys (who said the agreement does not “honor the outcome of the referendum”), second Brexit minister Suella Braverman’s and other Northern Ireland minister Shailesh Varas. The disagreement within their own ranks led to the Tory Party requesting a vote of no confidence in December. May managed by a wide margin – 63% of MPs voted to give her continued confidence. But the result was a clear indication that nothing has been won yet. Theresa May said after the vote that she will not stand for re-election in 2022.

Another problem concerns the referendum itself on leaving the EU in 2016. Opinion polls in November showed that 55% of respondents want a new referendum and that 54% would then have voted to stay in the EU. A possible scenario if Parliament votes against May’s exit agreement could therefore be a new referendum. However, the Prime Minister believes that this would damage the confidence of the British people and give democracy “irreparable damage”.

A third problem for Prime Minister May is that the EU will not agree to any renegotiation of the Brexit agreement. The message from the EU was clear in December: “We have an agreement on the table. We will not renegotiate. ” In short, this means that Theresa May was at the end of the year in a fox scissors – and what if the parliament in January 2019 votes no?

In June, after many trips, Parliament approved the so-called exit law, which will allow the country to leave the EU. It was approved by Queen Elizabeth and replaces a 1972 law which stated that the country was a member of the EU. According to the letter, the country will leave the EU on March 29, 2019 at 23:00 local time.

In July, Brexit Minister David Davis and Foreign Minister Boris Johnson resigned as they no longer support Prime Minister May’s proposals in the Brexit negotiations, including the proposal for a continued but limited customs union with the EU. According to Johnson, this would give Britain “colonial status” in relation to the EU. They were replaced by Deputy Home Minister Dominic Raab, who became a new Brexit minister, and Health Minister Jeremy Hunt, who became Foreign Minister.

Following a nervous gas attack in Salisbury against former Russian double agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter Julia in early March, Britain expelled 23 Russian diplomats. It was also decided that no British royals or ministers would visit the football World Cup in the Russian Federation during the summer. The Russians, who denied involvement in the nerve gas attack, responded by expelling 23 British diplomats, some 50 more employees at the Moscow embassy. The consulate in Saint Petersburg and the British Council in Moscow were forced to close. Julia Skripal was able to be discharged from hospital in April, and the state of Sergei Skripal announced the same month is no longer critical. In December, unconfirmed sources announced that the 23 Russian diplomats would return to the UK in January 2019,

At the May elections, things went better than feared for Theresa May’s Tory Party – despite the loss of 35 councilors (councilors) and the loss of power in two councils; it is now governed in 46 municipalities. Labor did not really achieve the success they had hoped for. It won 79 new seats and, as before, had power in 74 municipalities. The Liberal Democrats went ahead with 75 new seats and gained power in nine municipalities. It went worse for UKIP, which was given only three terms; In 2014, the right-wing populist and Brexit-friendly party received 126. The percentage of votes was evenly distributed between Tory and Labor – 35% each.

In May, royal wedding acid prevailed. On May 19, 33-year-old Prince Harry marries 36-year-old American Meghan Markle in St. John’s. George’s Chapel at Windsor Castle. Queen Elizabeth announced that the bridal couple will be titled Duke and Duchess of Sussex and that Prince Harry will be Count of Dumbarton and Lord Kilkeel.

In March 2018, the highly politically debilitated and unpopular British Prime Minister Theresa May tried to stiffen its popularity by expelling 23 Russian diplomats. The background was the poisoning of former Russian spy Sergei Skripal and this daughter in Salisbury south of London. May immediately placed the blame for the poisoning on Russia, expelled 23 diplomats and then put pressure on the EU and other Western countries to have them expel Russian diplomats as well. The United States was in the lead with the expulsion of 60 and the closure of the Russian consulate in Seattle. Also Albania, Australia, Canada, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Ireland, Italy, Croatia, Latvia, Lithaun, Macedonia, Moldova, Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Romania, Spain, Sweden, Czech Republic, Germany, Ukraine and Hungary expelled Russian diplomats – at the request of the United Kingdom and the United States. In addition, NATO also showed 10. A total of 150 were expelled. Meanwhile, the rest of the world watched in wonder. The United Kingdom had not provided any evidence of Russian interference with the Salisbury poisoning. A week later, Russia responded again by expelling numerically as many from each country as it had exhibited. However, another 27 British diplomats were asked to leave Russia, and the British Council in Russia was closed. While in most countries – including Denmark – there was no reflection on the circumstances, the Russian counter-reaction caused Germany to falter. Leading Social Democrats criticized the government’s expulsion of 4 Russian diplomats when no evidence was presented for Russian interference. The reason for the expulsions was the suppression of IS in Syria and Iraq. The West has historically needed to define external enemies to legitimize its massive spending on military, and with the IS downturn, militant Islamism willingly offered in 2001 was removed – except for Saudi Arabia which had financed militant Islamism from the outset. The United States was at the forefront when, in the fall of 2017, Secretary of War Mattis issued a report appointing Russia and China as the strategic strategic enemies of the United States. Russia had, in fact, been on the road since 2011, when it refused to continue the role of western vassal state and blue-collar Western war against Syria. That was the reason the CIA carried out the coup in Ukraine with subsequent fragmentation and conflict in the country. Despite the fact that Russian military spending was 1/10 of NATO’s, the country was now picked up by the Cold War freezer and made a new enemy. The West once again demonstrated that peaceful coexistence was not its peak competence. Conflict and the threat of war benefit the armor industry better.

It was therefore also quite inconvenient for the politicians interested in conflict and diplomatic war with Russia that it was also revealed in March that it was not Russia but the IT analysis company Cambridge Analytica there with funding from the Republican party in the US had raised 60 million. Facebook profiles and directed misleading propaganda to the $ 60 million Facebook users. The discourse had hitherto been that Russia was behind the deceptive propaganda (against Hillary Clinton) in the United States. But in reality, the backers were Republicans. The case once again confirmed that the main source of ” fake news ” in the West is the Western media’s own media.

President of the United States Trump visited Britain in mid-July 2018. This was not a state visit which would have otherwise led to him speaking in the British Parliament. With his stated support for British right-wing radicals, he was simply too unpopular. People’s organizations conducted extensive demonstrations against him in London and other major cities, and during the second part of his visit – in Scotland – no official wanted to meet with him at all. Shortly before Trump’s visit, British Brexit minister David Davis had resigned and after him Foreign Minister Boris Johnson. It was therefore a severely weakened Theresa May who accepted Trump, who acknowledged by rubbing salt in the wound and declaring that he was in favor of a “tough Brexit” in which Britain broke with the EU without trade, finance,

In June, a parliamentary intelligence and security committee published two reports on British participation in torture and “Renditions” during the first 10 years of the Western world’s so-called “fight against terror” in 2001-10. The reports revealed that Britain’s MI5 and MI6 were far more involved in the massive human rights violations than have been published so far. The reports raised a host of questions to then-Foreign Secretary Jack Straw and to Prime Minister Tony Blair.

In August, right-wing protesters attacked the socialist bookstore Bookmarks in London, destroying exhibits, books and magazines. The attack occurred while other right-wing radicals were demonstrating in London that the North American right-wing conspiracy theory-oriented Infowars had been excluded from Facebook and Twitter. Right-wing radicals and their supporters in Europe and the United States are diligent in shouting “violation of freedom of speech” when others refrain from relaying their utterances, while they are diligent in even violently attacking others. It was the Nazis who in the 1930s staged the burning of Jewish books and writings.

In September, the European Human Rights Court in Strassbourg issued a ruling on the UK intelligence agency GCHQ’s mass surveillance of Britons and people in the rest of the world. The Court ruled that the British State’s mass surveillance program was in violation of the European Convention on Human Rights, which guarantees privacy. It was Edward Snowden who in 2013 revealed that GCHQ had a Tempora program that was used for mass surveillance. Snowden himself, human rights organizations and advocates welcomed the ruling. The British state was silent as the grave. A week after the ruling, fragments of a secret stamped report from the Belgian Prosecutor’s Office confirmed what Snowden had revealed in 2013 already that GCHQ had been spying on Belgian telephone company Belgacom. However, the Prosecutor’s Office found at the same time that no charges could be brought against individuals. The country could only see that their NATO and EU partners had been spying on them.

In October, the Guardian and Undercover Research Group revealed that the British state had infiltrated 124 left-wing groups and organizations over a 37-year period. These were both peace, anti-racist, anarchist and environmental organizations but also parties. The group that had the greatest attention of the authorities was the small Trotskyist organization SWP. For a period of 37 years, it was almost constantly infiltrated with one or more agents. The police went to the case with great zeal. Four agents initiated boyfriend relationships with women in the SWP, and one of them had a child. One of the SWP’s national secretaries, Charlie Kimber, stated that the degree of infiltration confirmed the state’s fear of the left: “The whole way the police operated was abhorrent. The most repulsive aspect of it all was the women who were tricked into relationships that they believed were right ”. London police stated that the two now disbanded espionage divisions Special Demonstration Squad and the National Public Order Intelligence Unit will be subject to public investigation.

In early November, the right-wing North West Frontline Patriots group had to give up demonstrating in Liverpool. In the old workers’ village, Merseyside Together and Unite Against Fascism had organized hundreds of counter-protesters and headed the city of Labor Mayor Joe Anderson, who declared: our town”.

In November, it was revealed that despite several years of denial, the British Ministry of Defense is supporting the development of autonomous armed drones – so-called killer robots. The UN has worked for several years to ban such weapons systems, but this has always been counteracted by Britain. The month before, Google had withdrawn from Pentagon’s Maven project, which involved applying “Machine Learning” to video clips from drones. Part of the development of autonomous killer machines.