The Banks, big business and the finance sector must be thinking that all their Christmases have arrived at once.
We are living through what in time will surely be seen as perhaps the biggest overkill in history of political leadership.
But instead of the same thinking, the same approach and the same rules being applied the same, equitably and with consideration for everyone, the Government is in the process of setting up the majority of us to fail, whilst it is creating the perfect conditions for the few or the usual suspects so that they can clean up and win.
The inequitable nature of what the Government doing looks more like a strategy to divide and conquer than a plan to bring people together in the way that it now should.
Yes there are grants. Yes there are subsidies. Yes there are loans.
But none of these responses are addressing the size, virility or indeed the longevity of what is already the supersize elephant in the room.
The best way to tackle a loss of income and trade for people, businesses and the self-employed during an event of this magnitude is to put the bills and interest that they ALL have to pay on hold.
EVERYONE who has lost out should then be given the same to pay for the food and essentials that won’t be covered. That way nobody gets less and nobody ends up able to take more.
For a hint of the undercurrent of what is going on around the world and who is happiest with the way that politicians are creating both unnecessary and avoidable pain, look how the US Money Markets responded yesterday when they heard that a $2 Trillion fiscal stimulus was on its way.
Making money or profit is a non-essential activity and no business whether it is purely financial or not shouldn’t be able to continue rolling on with charging and levying fees on the people who cannot. It certainly shouldn’t have these activities endorsed by Government by the public policy it promotes.
To be clear, we are not talking about cash handling, cheque cashing or card services which are essential to keep everyone fed in their homes. Its this ridiculous idea that an economy cannot stop or be mothballed – which the Government has inequitably already done to employees and many businesses – just because it hasn’t been done before.
By listening to economists and the people of influence who have their own agendas in every way, the Government is showing us that it is happy to store up a world of long-term problems for anyone who doesn’t have a name, and that it will continue to do so for however long it refuses to take a balanced and considered approach to EVERYONE involved.
If these Politicians want to remain credible and be forgiven for the unavoidable things that have gone wrong during the Coronavirus Crisis, the only way they can do this is by stopping bill payments for anything that is not itself essential to life or living.
They must put a hold on each and every form of interest too.
Above all, they must give EVERYONE who has lost income the same amount for food – and yes, £94 a week would be enough for one person if they don’t have to pay any of the other non-essential bills that they normally would.
The Government has the power to do this now and this is what they should do.
Social distancing markers taped out on the shop floor of Pets at Home, Gallagher Retail Park, Cheltenham. 23rd March 2020
Up until the last week, people looked upon the world around them without a thought, suggestion or the merest hint that things could ever change.
Yet in the space of a week, we have seen the shelves of supermarkets stripped so they resemble the pictures we used to see coming from Communist Russia in the 1980’s. Pubs and Restaurants have closed. McDonalds has voluntarily decided to shut down over 1000 of its sites. Stores like Pets at Home have marked out social distancing guidelines for customers on their shop floors, and we may only be hours away from any nonessential retail shops being closed and all of us being legally forced to stay within our homes.
This is already a level of change to our normal lives that is unprecedented in peacetime. Nothing like this has been seen as a result of wartime either for around 70 years at the very least.
If only the Government was doing all the right things and calling it all just right.
If they were, I would feel less inclined to write this and the content of all of the blogs I have published about Covid and how the impact of the Crisis is being mishandled over the past week.
That is had I not spent so much time as a frontline politician and business owner, and had instead had genuine confidence in what these politicians and the people advising them are doing, and what together their approach to tackling the Covid Crisis – for them – is all about.
I don’t. And here’s part of my reasoning why:
Back in 2007 and in the months following my election to Tewkesbury Borough Council as a Councillor for my first term (2007-11), Gloucestershire experienced one of the worst flooding events in the middle of July, that the County has ever known.
To be fair to those who have suffered in floods historically and in other areas since, it may well be the case that the impact of floodwater damage has itself been experienced in some ways directly as being worse.
What defined the 2007 event as being so bad for Gloucestershire and the area around it, was that a key water treatment plant on the River Severn was flooded and the water supply for many thousands of people simply dried up overnight.
One Sunday afternoon, calls from worried parents about water for their young children quickly put me to work. I found myself delivering and coordinating drinking water supplies around my Ward to supply and support the people who had elected me for the following 18 days.
In the days that followed the return to normality, I came to learn that the lack of effort and sledgehammer-to-crack-a-nut approach taken in other areas had meant that others had experienced much worse.
A local estate agent told me that people in our area didn’t realise just how good they had it. In other areas he had witnessed people fighting over the supplies that were being made available because nobody was taking a visible or tangible lead on the ground, and residents were not confident of further supply. They simply assumed that each supply was all they could get.
Unless you had lived through the experience, you wouldn’t have believed it had happened in this Country and certainly not as recently as 2007. And its just another tragedy in a long list of others that the real issues exposed by that Crisis have never since been addressed, just like the ones from Covid are being created as quickly as they are being missed.
What my own experience taught me about the behaviour of people who are being considered and supported in a crisis, as opposed to those who are not and are left feeling like they are alone, is that the feeling of being in it together promotes a unity of purpose, where privation and personal disadvantage are overlooked, often with a joke and a smile. Whereas those who feel on the arse end of it, and as if they are being treated differently, or as if they have less value than others, will quickly allow that feeling to come out in their interactions with others, whenever they have even the slightest feeling that things aren’t going their way.
Yes, we can pour scorn on the people who do this. But this behaviour is often involuntary and is not something people who are dealing with extreme emotions will often exhibit by making any conscious choice.
My experience becomes the basis of my concern over what we are now facing in the coming days and weeks. Not just because of Covid and how that is and will affect people – because the harsh reality is that it will effect people in whatever way it is going to effect them, without anyone having any choice.
The point was brought home to me rather starkly this morning when I spoke to the manager of a coffee shop who smiled as she told me the Government was doing a great job because she’d be alright.
The irony wasn’t lost on me that she was then able to regale a list of people she knew who have or had small businesses that were either about to go bang or would soon be in the process of accumulating debt that they would never be able or equipped to afford.
If the Lockdown is only temporary and lasts for just a matter of days or a couple of weeks at most, then all well and good.
People will be pissed off. But the inconvenience will be soon forgotten and the financial impact will not have gone on for so long that the gap has become impossible to cover.
Although it will likely be hard, the resourceful nature of the British People will mean they suck it and find a way to cover the shortage as many will have done so before once more.
However, civil order in this Country is actually wafer thin – as the 2007 water shortages illustrated only too well. And with the figures and timelines that the politicians and media are now discussing that could reach into many months or even two years before any sense of normality is restored, the reality is that many of the businesses that have closed this past week will not reopen. People who have not and will not be catered for by this Governments inequitable thinking will be thrown into an abyss of unpalatable and accumulating debt – all so that they can survive the fallout from an economic downturn which the Government had the choice to handle differently, but the people themselves had no option to avoid.
People simply aren’t going to wear being shut up, not allowed to function and to be condemned to what might become a permanent position of being in debt, just so fearful politicians who are scared of their own shadow can implement draconian rules to address one problem without any regard for the ones they are creating as they do.
This is very much a case of the solution being far more painful and many times more damaging to the lives and livelihoods of the many, than Covid will be for the few who will regrettably experience what the media and Politicians will tell us is the cause of the problems now and to come.
The complacency of normal, everyday people about the world that surrounds them that I talked briefly about above, is the same as the one in the rearview mirror of our politicians, where consideration anything other than the focus of their attention is simply never involved.
The good will that today gives people the will to cooperate with the measures currently being put in place will soon evaporate if the Politicians don’t wake up and nothing in their responses should change.
Whilst I sincerely hope that I am wrong about even the possibility of this, a breakdown of civil order that will eclipse that which took place across our cities over just one man dying from being shot by Police in London in the summer of 2011 will quickly come to exist.
It’s a good guess that if things continue on the current trajectory in terms of inadequate leadership, by May people who you would never expect to see there will take to the streets.
The people who are in charge of this Country have no imagination, concept of real life, or an appreciation of the painful truth and reality that there are always consequences for every decision they make.
When we reach the stage when all the reasoned options and choices for the politicians who lead us have been bypassed by going up blind alleys, have evaporated and are gone, they will have been found out, found wanting and found to be fake.
The findings from the court of public opinion loom larger and larger in the views of our Politicians. It has reached the point where the messages the media carries and have now become our leaders driving reality. Media thinking and the influence it has upon them is the alternative to what should be having genuine public service at their heart.
Good leaders listen critically to everyone, discount the chaff and rubbish that comes with any view or opinion and make use of all the facts.
But in an age when so much of the news is itself little more than opinion – and subjective opinion at that, our politicians are driven by a lopsided way of thinking that isn’t based upon any kind of foundation or understanding of the World that public policy by its nature requires genuine representatives of the people to be there and ready to embrace.
The constant noise and demands of a media that has been allowed to big itself up as if it is a real entity in itself, rather than being the conduit and carrier of information that it actually is or should be, has taken over the place where conversation and interaction with normal people on the list of an MPs or Politicians priorities should really be.
The media are there and in everything. They give legitimacy to bullshit and fake news at the highest level. They have a monopoly on influence that now goes too far.
Their relationship with both the public and our politicians needs to be reviewed and taken right back to the start.
The non-stop presence of the media has pinned the Government and our MPs in. Politicians believe that the messages these self-proclaimed celebrities are now giving is the only game in town that there actually is.
So when we all see the pictures of stripped shelves and stories of personal tragedy paraded in pictures every half hour with the intention that our fears will keep the journalists popular and in pay, the Government and Members of it are seeing it too, processing it and responding to it in a very similar way.
The difference is that the responsibility and power that our Politicians have, but don’t actually see for what it really is, is to shutdown industry first and then society as a whole as we are now on the cusp of being confined to our homes.
Nobody would find the decisions that those in the key positions of power in Government are now having to make easy. But when you cannot move for the scrutiny that the idiocy of a media that thrives only on the negative angles and spins that it can sell, it is inevitable that it would be almost super-human to be able to look beyond it and take the decisions that might not look or sound right – but are nonetheless taken in the best interests of everyone.
The Government has taken the first steps on the pathway to implementing ideas and decisions that are going to hurt the people of this Country in many unfathomable ways and potentially for a long time after the Coronavirus has been and gone.
When the dust has settled and we are all living through the impact of the hit on our economy and so many of our businesses and jobs, the question will have to be asked about the role of spin, news and what the media do to justify the insidious nature of the fallout from their jobs.
It doesn’t matter if it’s electricity, gas, water, credit card, a loan, a lease, rent, a mortgage, phone, broadband, TV streaming, contract subscriptions of any other kind, or anything else. It is the ceaseless demands of the private, profit-making interests in this Country being allowed to continue sucking money from our pockets that is the real problem people are facing now and will continue to do so long after Covid has been put in its place.
Subsidies, Loans and Grants from the Government make great headlines when politicians are obsessed with how things look. But these hollow actions are giving legitimacy to the continuance of profiteering and endless money making on the part of commercial interests and what we have come to know as ‘the few’. All at a time when there is no longer any excuse for the people we elected to provide opportunities for the usual suspects to carry on making money at our expense, whilst we cannot earn, and as if they are entitled to act, behave and continue doing so like gods.
By allowing the economy to unravel, pretending it can be propped up by giving people the means to pay bills that could otherwise be put on hold so that everyone is in the same position, whilst pushing many people and businesses into what will quickly become unserviceable debt, the Government is initiating a downward spiral for this Country and what should be a robust economy.
The outcomes of this political ineptitude will be far worse for real people and for businesses over the long term than the outcome from the temporary hit that the Government should be taking on our behalf right now.
The pathway that the Chancellor has taken so far indicates that the Johnson Government is either incompetent and doesn’t understand the reality that people like small business owners, Deliveroo riders, people on zero hours contracts and those simply laid off from jobs in cafes and bars face, or they are intentionally using a crisis to assist in shackling all of these people and many more into forms of debt and the emotional bondage that accompanies it, simply so the friends and supporters of the Government can look at the piles of cash that they already have and smile as they start making even more.
Whether deliberate or created by stupidity and ignorance on the part of politicians who should always know better, the situation that this Government is now facilitating for us all will quickly become little more than profiteering from the misery of the many, simply to line the pockets of the few.
No matter what anyone says – whether they are an MP, so-called ‘expert’ or specialist, journalist or anyone else who has fashioned themselves as part of the ‘celebrity cause’, the solutions that the Government are now offering up do not go far enough in just about every way.
The PM, the Chancellor he appointed, the Government and the Politicians around him have the power and therefore the means to do whatever is necessary to help all of us and keep the Country in the best position going forward as it is possible to do so. But that is not going to happen if politicians are misguided by the self-interests and biases of the people and influences around them, rather than the Public at large – which should always be any Governments one and only cause.
Extraordinary times require extraordinary measures on the part of the people that we have elected to lead us.
This means they must step up, read the situation for what it is in reality for everyone – rather than what they think it might be or what their advisers are telling them – and adopt a much bigger, realistic and worldly view.
Economic thinking is just another set of ideas that become real simply because it is the line that people choose to believe.
Current economic theory is one founded upon the idea that money must be kept flowing at all times, just as if it is a blood supply that cannot ever be stopped. It works and operates on the basis that money and the systems that support its generation and movement are the only important thing.
They are not.
What economists and the people who have been influenced into thinking this way are failing to consider, is there is something far more important than money. That is the people and the communities that we live in. Beyond the thinking and the ideas that the ‘money men’ and their supporters choose to accept, there is most definitely another and very clear way to approach this crisis which is an option.
As such our decision makers are currently making a choice. One that is all about profit or all about them.
It should be people first. Money only when its sensible to return to it thereafter.
To deal effectively with the Covid Pandemic and without long term fallout for the many, the economy as it stands can be and should be shut down and stopped from operating in its current form.
Interest accumulation should be halted, and a payment or repayment holiday imposed on everything – whether it is for domestic use or for business – so that EVERYONE is being treated fairly and just the same.
The Government should temporarily renationalise all essential utilities and services – that’s the ones that were sold off and should be in the hands of non-profit making management and ownership anyway – and simply take the steps necessary to underwrite supply to ensure that the essential services the public need are simply provided for the duration of the Pandemic without the need for anyone to worry about how they continue to pay.
For the people who have been laid off, have had to stop trading, have had their hours zeroed out or have had their incomes stopped by the Covid Pandemic in any way, there should be a basic income provided to cover the costs of food and essential items so that everyone is able to function in their homes and remain clean and healthy in every other way.
To do so would ensure that the people who have been left completely vulnerable and at the mercy of circumstances that they had no part in creating, are able to standstill and most importantly survive at the very least, without anything changing. They will therefore placed in the best situation possible to pick up and return their own lives to normality alongside those of everyone when the Covid Pandemic is accepted as being over and what will then become life as usual is once again ready to begin.
For the businesses and the workers who are able to continue working throughout the Pandemic, the payment holiday that they will then all inadvertently receive will itself be a bonus and for many of them thanks enough.
Yes, the Government could and should now be doing this.
MPs, Politicians, Government Officers and Advisors must start thinking outside of their very tunnelled and out-of-tune Westminster box.
Just to begin with, these are preventative steps the Government should now take:
Ditch the £Multi-Billion plan for Grants, Subsidies, and underwriting Loans
Stop Interest payments and accumulation of any kind
Stop Loan Repayments
Stop Mortgage Repayments
Stop Rent Payments
Stop Leasing Payments
Stop Utility Bill Payments
Stop Phone Payments
Stop Broadband Payments
Stop TV Streaming Payments
Stop Insurance Payments without penalty for any function not in use whilst maintaining ongoing cover for capital value without charge
Stop any other form of contract subscription which is non-essential in any form
And a here are some proactive steps that the Government should also begin by taking:
Provide a Basic Income to cover the cost of food and essential items for everyone, their dependents, and the people they care for, who has lost their income as a result of the Crisis
Provide a top-up for anyone, their dependents, and the people they care for who’s income has been reduced to a level below that which matches that above
Take all former public services that were privatised back into temporary Government control
Provide gas, electricity, and water to every household for the duration of the crisis without charge
Create legislation that outlaws profiteering or price gauging of any kind, with companies, their directors or the individuals fined heavily or jailed when charged
Create legislation that prevents any commercial or private interest seeking compensation or interest of any kind from anyone or any business who has not paid them for the duration of the crisis, in the future at any time.
Setting any of us up to fail in the long term as a result of implementing policies during a time of crisis that have not been through will not be in the best interests of anyone. Least of all the Politicians who are failing us by coming up with such stupidity or lack of foresight in the first place.
Fundamentally, the approach currently being taken is morally as well as practically wrong.
This National Crisis and the future of this Country of ours simply demands thinking from them that is new.
As someone who set up a successful distribution business by winning a contract with a large newspaper company and setting it up overnight, I’m well aware of how to make a delivery operation flow right for staff and customers in a time sensitive environment.
Of course, as a commercial provider to a business customer, my key considerations were very different to that of a supermarket supplying a weekly shop to a retail customer. Or rather they would have been in normal times.
One of the greatest inefficiencies of the way that supermarkets have been working, has been to give customers the freedom to choose their delivery time and fit the delivery of their online order around that specific requirement.
This in effect means that even with deliveries grouped as much as possible across the number of vans that any store has, they will be zigzagging across a district or suburban area most of the time, adding time and running costs to the journey which limit or short-change the extent of what the driver and vehicle can do.
With the landscape changing and the idea that the customer is always right having been exchanged for one where we will get what the supermarkets can give us at the location and time it is available, the retailers we use for food and essential goods have options to cover more ground in less time and extend their online delivery services during the Coronavirus Crisis in ways that at other times they never could.
It all boils down to just one thing. Telling customers when they will get their delivery rather than giving them options to choose in the way that they currently do.
People are working from home and not going far.
If customers want food and the goods that supermarkets can provide them they will be grateful to have them delivered during the crisis and won’t worry about what time.
By being able to group deliveries into the closest distances between a set of addresses in blocks over a few days, efficiency is certain to increase. Even one more customer per van per shift would help more people than the system currently is.
If the supermarkets start delivering around the clock on a 24hr basis – prioritising more social hours for the elderly, the vulnerable and reaching key workers between their shifts – the existing delivery system could be able to double deliveries and perhaps even more.
Yes, there will be a shortage of staff that needs to be filled. But there will also be many people willing to step into help where possible to do so. I for one would be happy to do a few shifts from a local store or even drive an artic from a nearby distribution centre to the supermarket back door if I can find a doctor to sign off the medical for my Heavy Goods Class 1 renewal once more.
In difficult and challenging times, business as well as politicians have to consider whats fair and best for EVERYONE. Not just those who pay, complain or can influence more.
But we ALL have an investment in the government, the public sector and the businesses working to keep us alive getting this right.
They cannot do it alone and need our support to get there – even if that means opening the door to an online supermarket delivery person at what feels like a very peculiar time.
Adam Tugwell 