The political culture from the top to the bottom of government is covered with a blanket of political parties and is a train crash that nothing will now stop.

Democracy is as good as dead and the people elected to lead us simply have no idea what it means to be publicly elected, to be responsible and to lead.

Politics has been taken over by people who have no vision, understanding or concept of life and what it takes to live in 21st century Britain – beyond their own.

So when it comes to making decisions on behalf of others, they genuinely believe they are doing the right thing. But it’s the right thing for the world they see themselves in, that they consider to be their own.

Until we have a Parliament populated with MPs who can step outside of their own shoes, and not be bought off by self interest, their career or any other form of personal gain, the decisions that politicians make will certainly be the right ones, but not the right ones where all of us are considered to be the same.

It’s very easy to forget that most of us will become old, and that 1 in 4 of us will require care in the latter part of our lifetimes.

Whilst there is some resentment of the ability for older people to influence politics with their Votes ‘because they won’t be here to see it’, the reality is that every single person in this Country should receive care and support throughout their lifetime – should they need it, whether it be through the provision of education, access to the NHS, benefits or through more specialised support, that includes Social Care for anyone who needs it, when they become elderly and need care.

Most of us would agree with this approach. But right across the provision of services to people who need help and support in this Country today, too many are experiencing lower levels of service than it would be reasonable to expect from the Public Sector. In some cases, they are not receiving help at all.

Of these services, one of the hardest hit by changes in local Government Budgets and the way that Local Authorities are now run is Social Care.

There is no longer the level of consistency of service provided to guarantee that the support needed, wherever or however that need might require, will be the same for everyone.

This must change.

But we must also address the causes of the problems within Social Care and Public Services first.

When we hear Politicians talking about Social Care and how they intend to address the problem, they will almost certainly suggest that the solution is all about money or addressing a lack of funds.

Sadly, thinking that throwing money at every problem will solve it, is just something that current Politicians do.

Yes, in the short, but probably only the immediate term, additional funds can appear to make a problem like this go away.

But without looking deeper into the much wider problem and facing up to the changes that must now be made, the problems within Social Care and all forms of Public Service Delivery are simply not going to go away.

In a Country as wealthy as the UK appears to be, we should all have unhindered access to the Public Services that we need.

Those Public Services would be affordable, if they are managed and delivered in the way that they should be.

And we should all be happy that the contributions that we make through Taxes and National Insurance will be spent appropriately and that everyone will receive help and support to cover all their needs, if and when they genuinely need it.

A good Government could begin by:

• Reversing the European Working Time Directive and replacing any other restrictive working practices that make workers’ rights more important than the ability of the organisation or business they work for to perform economically.
• Creating new legislation to protect employees that works sensibly and fairly for both the employee and the employer.
• Doing away with any rules, regulations and laws that mean it is more cost effective for a Local Authority or NHS Trust to outsource or contract out any role, supply or service to a profit-making private contractor, than keeping the provision or service ‘in-house’.
• Removing gold-plated and disproportionate pension schemes that are being subsidised by Taxpayers and the expense of service provision.
• Creating new profiteering laws to prevent third party agents or middle men from taking profit from supply chains at any stage, without adding real value to the services or products offered.
• Legislating to prevent Councils and Health Authorities seeing Temporary Staffing Agencies as an easy option to overcome staffing difficulties.
• Undertaking sweeping Public Sector Reform to ensure that Officers and those employed by any Public Service are ready, able, prepared and unhindered in doing their job, without the influence of blame culture, or fear of doing wrong.

And there is definitely much more….

For many young people, access to the Internet, Smartphone technology and publishing every aspect of our lives online is already experienced as the way that things have always been done.

Yet for those who have lived through the arrival of analogue, then digital mobile phones; analogue internet with the dial-up tone, then broadband and streaming too, the whole process of change feels remarkably quick when looking back. 30 years really doesn’t feel like its been that long.

Unfortunately, a period of change that has been very short when considering what has been achieved in terms of technological development and access, has been remarkably long for the large wheels of government, which have moved at a rate that looks comparatively very slow indeed.

Like it or not, the way we interact with each other and with anyone with whom we have contact has been affected by this revolutionary change.

Social skills that we learned through basic interaction and conditioning with other children, with adults and with the people we met as children has been replaced within a cultural restructuring.

Children are now handed ipads or tablets at a very early age and quickly learn to use the tools that they have been given. Yet in so doing, they surrender much of the understanding and trial and error learning processes that can only come through human and community interaction. They do not develop a robust or rounded set of social skills as a result.

Likewise, the ease with which adults can order almost anything on the internet and the speed that once long winded processes are now bypassed, is for many, a new skill, outlook or understanding that simply cannot be unlearned.

Yet the changes that appear to have significantly improved our lives have at the same time created a strange and unrealistic dichotomy. Ethics or the rules of human interaction with others only seem to count in ‘real life’ when we find ourselves face to face with others. Even these now seem to be being eroded too.

A distance now exists between many people that was never there before. Not with the people we know and love. But the humanity is being lost from the way that we interact with each other in those situations beyond.

The internet has always been a parallel universe that we foolishly assumed would behave in the same way as the ‘real world’ in our lives outside. Instead, the dehumanisation of relationships that was latent within all online technology is now finding its way slowly, but surely into the way we behave and interact with each other in the real waking world.

We only see the tip of this iceburg through the removal of social barriers on the internet. A process that encourages people to attack, criticise and yes, troll other people as if their action will never create any harm.

More often than not, these are people who would never dream of talking to other people face to face in the same way. They do so because they perceive social etiquette to be different online.

Without government taking the steps to govern our use of the internet with a working, open, accessible, but nonetheless safe framework for social interaction and conduct with business, people in the online world are simply going to continue cherry picking what they want to take away from the rules of the real world where we are currently much better at accepting rules when there is an obvious human cost of not doing so.

The apparent ease with which internet giants can appear almost overnight doesn’t give them a free reign to ignore rules the unwritten principles and rules of relationships and human interaction that have developed and governed the way that people behave over a very long time.

If anything, the whole issue of online governance needs to be turned on its head. We must learn to respect the Internet as another part of our already complex lives, and ensure that the rules are no different and that what we do online and especially in the case of interaction with people we never have or may never meet are simply the same as they would be if we were meeting with that person face to face.

Government needs to do this before it too late.

Life is already becoming too cheap as a result of a system which conditions us to believe that we can quickly and easily get our own way.

We must embrace the positive aspects of the internet and smart technology for the benefits that it has and will continue to deliver for us all. But at the same time, we must also recognise the very dangerous and destructive side to this two edged sword and ensure that legislation is created and then evolved to ensure that the Internet really is a tool that benefits everyone and is not just there to be exploited at the expense of others by yet another ‘knowing’ few.

A good Government could begin by:

• Removing the ability of all to be completely anonymous on Twitter, Facebook, WordPress, Blogger, Youtube or any other form of social media where commenting and the ability to openly attack anyone or anything is openly involved.
• Ensuring that a system does exist where legitimate anonymity such as whistle blowing or helpful comment and dialogue from those with a genuine desire to help others whilst needing to protect themselves professionally can also exist.
• Creating legislation to ensure that no decision that could affect the future and wellbeing of any individual in any way, such as credit checks & authorisation or CV matching can be fully automated or completed by algorithms alone without human interaction on the part of all parties involved of some kind.
• Creating legislation to ensure that everyone is automatically ‘forgot’ after a period of three years, so that everyone has the ability to legitimately move on with their lives, and only appropriate authorities hold longer term records on any individual or business and hold the right in certain circumstances to disclose.
• Legislating to ensure that any social media or publishing platform builds in detection software that will automatically trigger an on screen flag when formulations of words or topics that might be offensive to others might be involved.

HS2 is an unnecessary expansion of rail infrastructure using public money. A lot of money that could be spent more wisely and more effectively in other ways. A final bill that is only set to grow like the cost of Crossrail has.

If a housing shortage forms the basis of the housing problem, why is it that every time a new estate is built, prices of those new-builds and the homes in the communities around them don’t simply go down?