The one thing that many people in leadership positions fail to understand is that if they are having to look outside themselves for every answer,  they aren’t leading anything at all.

Events have led to reactions by the Police and Politicians which they all believe are examples of good leadership.

Two Metropolitan Police Officers ‘took the knee’ to show they were ‘with the crowd’ a couple of hours before their colleagues were attacked.

Keir Starmer and Angela Raynor provided Twitter with their fully choreographed version on Tuesday afternoon too.

Bristol Mayor Marvin Rees did a grand job of making an Interview with the BBC about the drowning of Edward Colston’s statue all about him, whilst Sadiq Kahn has pretty much picked up the phone and had a Slaver’s Statue in London’s Docklands removed overnight.

Since the weekend itself, Boris has rolled out Home Secretary Priti Patel to talk tough at the Despatch Box whilst he has provided plenty of the baffoonal bluster over the topic that he has now become renowned for.

Left or Right, supposedly impartial public servant or politician. What all of these actions share in common is they are not acts of leadership. They are the actions of people in positions of responsibility with a remarkable level of power to do something good, but are instead being led by the mob.

Covid-19, The Lockdown and Social Distancing has taken over life to such an extent since March that the Black Lives Matter protests feel like they have come completely out of left field.

From this point of view, some would argue that these actions are an appropriate response to the public mood. They are not.

As Boris did with the Leave Campaign, with the pre-Covid-19 phase of his Premiership and his response to the Coronavirus Pandemic too, these actions are opportunistic. They are responsive to events and what people are already doing, rather than defining a direction of travel and being used to inspire people to think differently before these supposed leaders then back up the words with action that can really deliver and get things done.

What we are witnessing through the absence of leadership during all the events that seem to be taking over our world is all symptomatic of a systemic rot.

The mealy-mouthed words and platitudes to Black Lives Matter haven’t been constructed with any great thought. These are not the sentiments of people with responsibility who care about the injustices within our own society, let alone any place else. They are about managing the fear that these individuals have for the loss and threat to their own positions, about the safety and reduction of risk to themselves, and in the case of the Politicians about ensuring re-election just as soon as they can.

Police Officers and Politicians are not appointed to demonstrate that they are one with us. They are appointed to show impartiality, integrity and an ability to think beyond us as they go. that will allow normal people to go about and enjoy their normal lives knowing that they are safe and being looked out for in ways of every kind.

We expect the police to watch over us and maintain the interests of the common good.

We expect the Politicians to translate the events that are happening into words and meaning that we all understand, make sense of it and then lead and inspire us to all be better in our relationships with others wherever we can.

We expect public servants of all kinds and at all levels to do the things for us all collectively that we as members of the public simply cannot.

Right now, The Government, The Opposition, Local Politicians and the Police are all failing us and failing the mob that wants to inflict its own form of justice on us all by erasing history as a part of what they do.

Nobody can lead when they are already being led. The people that we have elected to lead us along with those who have been appointed to watch over us are all being led by events.

It is the crowd and the media that sensationalises their actions that is leading our leaders today.

Those who are leading our leaders are being led not by any form of experience or logic. They are being led by emotions and responses to the events of a cruel world that with the right leaders in power for the right reasons, they should and would never have to try to understand.

The lack of leadership that is the result of a broken political system has just about circled itself once more. It’s anyone’s guess what will happen when all of this hits the floor.

 

 

 

 

 

The Financial Measures that the Government implemented as a follow up to the Lockdown are a piecemeal response to a universal problem.

Even now, organisations such as Forgotten Ltd are fighting for a response from the Treasury over the lack of provision for Directors of Ltd Companies forced to stop or severely reduce trading, losing their incomes as a result.

They are not alone. There are many people already suffering in silence from the impact of the Lockdown.

As the so-called help from the Government is reduced and then stopped, there are going to be many more.

Of the businesses able to apply for ‘furlough money’ under the Job Retention Scheme, many jumped in as quickly as they could, knowing only too well that if their turnover ceased or was severely reduced, it would be the jobs of employees that would be out of the door first.

In principle, the Scheme works well for companies employing significant numbers of staff who are paid around the average wage. Or at least that’s how it seemed before the realities of what the Government has created with the Lockdown began to actually sink in.

What is not being reported in the media yet, is that all sorts of unforeseen consequences are beginning to unfold for businesses.

One business I am aware of that employs around 750 people has began to end furlough, re-starting around 200 of their most qualified and experienced staff. They have already concluded they are achieving 40-50% of normal productivity and turnover with just 25% of the workforce and they are now re-evaluating their business model, even before the coming recession begins to kick-in.

However, the wider marketplace has changed overnight. Jobs that were needed and even considered critical until March no longer exist on the whiteboards in the boardrooms. But because the Government is paying the wages – or the biggest part of them, they will technically exist until October. That is unless Business Owners, Directors and Managers turn away the ‘free money’ that the Government is providing for those staff until and bring forward mass redundancies now.

At first glance, it is easy to conclude that if a job no longer exists and the Company knows this, they should make those staff redundant now and stop claiming the money from the Government.

But life is seldom as straightforward as it looks at first glance. We must be careful over how and where the answer to what is fundamentally a question of morality, wholly dependent and conditional upon where our own perspective lies.

With the Spectator Magazine, the dilemma that is at work was put into full force yesterday when Chairman Andrew Neil announced that they had done much better through the Lockdown than expected and had decided to give all their Government Furlough Money back.

Kudos to the Spectator as far as the fortune of their current position goes. But an elaborate form of virtue signalling like this – no matter how genuine the reasoning might have been, in itself helps no-one. Simply, because for too many other businesses, the decision they make over the money they claim and pass on to people who are currently on their books have real-life outcomes involved.

Yes, it is Public money that the Government is handing out. But the Government created the Lockdown in the first place.

No, an employer shouldn’t claim money from the Government that it doesn’t have to spend. But they are doing nothing legally wrong and after October, the many thousands if not millions of people living on furlough money today, may find themselves beginning many years without jobs.

What is very clear is the Government has entered a minefield of its own making where it could and should have made the effort to really think these things through.

A universal problem requires a universal solution.

We should have been given a a simple one, rather than the complicated one that we have got.

Nobody should be falling through the gaps in provision. Nobody should be made to feel wrong or guilty for taking any or all of the help that has been offered when they didn’t choose to stop trading.

Taking whatever is on offer is all that they – and many of their employees – have still got.

 

Very few things make me stop and think quite the same way that the video of looters in the US attacking a shop owner who pleaded with them to stop did so on Monday.

Yes, we can all understand how angry and frustrated normal Americans feel after seeing the way that George Floyd was treated by Police. But crowds making themselves judge, jury and potentially executioner over the proxy offenders they have appointed help no one, least of all themselves.

Nothing justifies an aggressive and violent response. No matter how bad in one particular moment of time those who feel they are being oppressed or mistreated as if they were the victim themselves might feel about what they have heard about or seen on TV.

Fear drove the actions of the Police. Fear drives the actions of those rioting and looting.

The reason that Government systems around the world aren’t working and people of all backgrounds feel injustices like they do is that the politicians in charge are driven by Fear too.

Put yourself in the shoes of a leader for a moment. If your aim is to maintain the appearance of control, which scenario is more likely to unsettle your mind, question your resolve and really make you think twice before you act next?:

1. Rioters across the US burning cars in showrooms, attacking police and shopkeepers, causing as much damage as they possibly can
2. Hong Kong residents continuing many months of protest against a regime set on removing their freedom without damaging anything
3. Thousands of Colorado protesters lying face down on the floor with their hands behind their backs for 9 minutes simply saying ‘I can’t breathe’.

Those that have taken the law into their own hands in the US have handed the initiative straight back to Donald Trump – who had until this week been on the back foot because of his handling of Covid-19.

No matter how broken the system might be, physical reprisal or retaliation at any level simply returns the power to those who appeared to have it all at the start.

Through reprisal, you simply hand your power back to them as you crash to the level below.

The alternative is genuine solidarity. But genuine solidarity is a thinking mans game.

Solidarity is not reprisal.

Solidarity is being the voice and the peaceful action that makes a statement without inflicting any kind of material or physical cost.

In Colorado what do you think the authorities who were in fear of a mob reaction were thinking when the violent protest they expected never came and they instead found themselves observing a peaceful protest that marched straight into their minds instead?

Solidarity has the power to make the perpetrators of injustice and oppression know that they are wrong.

Reprisal against them just gives them the opportunity to demonstrate to everyone else that they were right and you were wrong all along.

The World today is a fragile place. Peace, whether between communities, people and authorities or between whole Countries themselves is no longer a given – if indeed it ever really was.

The Coronavirus Pandemic is changing the field of play around us whilst we stand upon it. We must all start to think differently about what is happening and the roles we can and should play. 

 

As the ties loosen, shops open, horse racing returns and we dare to hope that the pubs will be open before the end of June, the questions that have been troubling many for the duration of the Lockdown are finally finding their way into the news.

It is troubling that only after 9 weeks of the Lockdown have senior Tories recognised openly that there may have been a related increase in abuse for children vulnerable in their own homes.

The voices speaking out against the Lockdown from the start are a comparative few to the number today. But the realities and consequences of a universally-applied Lockdown with a piecemeal response from the Chancellor were openly being discussed back in March.

What the suicides, job losses, bankruptcies, cases of abuse, evictions and a seemingly endless list of personal tragedies that have yet to unfold all have in common is that they will be suffered most often only by individuals, their families and the people immediately around them. These are not stories that will make the mainstream news.

Yet there is one story that is very different to all of the above. That is the question of the impact that the Lockdown is having on our children, their education and what home schooling for the better part of half an academic year is going to involve.

It was disturbing to learn that a Union boss has gone on the record over the weekend to evangelise that Teachers deserve their full summer holidays on the basis they have continued working ‘flat out’ to ensure that the children continue to be taught.

I dont know what parallel universe this so-called representative came from, because it is does not contain the same world where I and many parents like me are from.

Children of all ages and from all backgrounds are completely switched off to education today, and have been since the Lockdown began.

It is impossible for parents to replicate the school environment in the home – no matter how motivated they are to do so, unless there is ongoing proactive intervention from teachers and educators, sufficient enough to keep education and learning real for their students during a period that has been confusing, unnerving and completely strange for adults and children alike.

Some teachers are getting it right. They are using all the great resources at their disposal to get the messages and encouragement through. Yet in the majority, these diligent educators represent not the state system, but the Private Schools that the very same Unions would like to see destroyed.

The disruption to the learning process and backwards leap for children who will only get this one chance aside, the psychological damage that children are suffering from having the life they understood switched off like a light, taking their friends, grandparents and many others out of their lives in one stroke will be very VERY profound.

As adults, 9 weeks of this strange reality have passed very quickly. But to a 9 year old, 9 weeks are an eternity that makes what we perceive as a temporary change, one that feels very permanent indeed.

Parents are beside themselves. They can see what the Lockdown and the withdrawal from life is doing to their kids, but they are dependent on those with responsibility providing the way out.

The majority of parents know it would be much better for children to be back in school learning. Because the benefits of consistent education far outweigh the risks from Covid-19 that only Unions and those with a vested interest in pursing their own agendas are still choosing to see.