Britain managed to expand its GDP by 0.1 percent during the first three months of this year, matching the growth rate in 2022’s final quarter.

The growth rate matched that of the Eurozone, which also eked out a 0.1-percent expansion in the first quarter.

The U.K.’s economy grew despite a continuing cost-of-living crisis created by stratospheric energy costs over the past several months, a series of labor strikes, and an inflation rate of 10.1 percent in March. April’s figure has not yet been released.

Food prices inflated at an annual clip of almost 20 percent, the most in more than 45 years, The Wall Street Journal said. There is no reason to expect food inflation will slow soon, the Bank of England (BoE) warned.

It also grew despite the U.K. economy contracting by 0.3 percent in March, casting a shadow over the nation’s economic performance in the months ahead.

“The core issues affecting British businesses, such as unprecedented inflation, energy price shocks, and record tightness in the labor market have not gone away,” David Bharier, research chief at the British Chambers of Commerce, said in a public statement.

As expected, the brunt of the U.K.’s financial crisis has been borne by the lowest-earning 20 percent of the population, whose living standard has plummeted 20 percent from pre-COVID norms, equivalent to about £4,000 or roughly $5,000, according to the National Institute of Social and Economic Research.

In contrast, the richest 20 percent of Britons have seen their living standard slip only 5 percent.

The situation is not likely to improve soon, the BoE warned.

On May 11, it raised its key rate a quarter point to 4.5 percent and said that the British economy will flatline this quarter.

The nation’s economy will grow 0.25 percent this year, the bank predicted, and by 0.75 percent in 2024 and 2025, tamped down in part by the BoE’s 12 interest rate hikes in as many meetings.

TRENDPOST: While the nation is going broke and the citizens are suffering from continual 10 percent plus inflation month after month, yesterday, the near multi-multi-millionaire clown playing U.K. Prime Minister, Rishi Sunak, said their country would send countless hundreds of attack drones and other military hardware to keep bloodying the Ukraine killing fields.

Since the Ukraine war began, the U.K. has sent nearly $2.5 billion of weaponry and brags about being the first country to send Kyiv tanks to fight the Russians. 

As the Financial Times reported, “The U.K. said last month it had completed the delivery of a “squadron” of Challenger 2s, thought to amount to at least 14 tanks, along with other weaponry including armored vehicles and self-propelled guns. The U.K. has also trained 15,000 Ukrainian troops in Britain since Russia’s full-scale invasion last year and had previously helped train the country’s armed forces in Ukraine, alongside other Nato members, after Moscow annexed Crimea in 2014.”

No, Moscow did not annex Crimea! The Russian military already had a presence there. Under a lease agreement (which did not expire until 2047), its Black Sea Fleet was based at Sevastopol port in Crimea.

And after the U.S. led coup d’etat of the democratically elected president of Ukraine Victor Yanukovych (see “Washington is driving the world to the final war,” 28 Apr 2014)—by 95 percent—to rejoin Russia.

Crimea had been part of Ukraine only since 1954, when then-Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev, a Ukrainian, designated it as such. In fact, Crimea has been part of Russia longer than the United States has been a country.