It’s been a long time since we have had government in the UK that has been competent enough to look proactively at changing things for the better, if that change would itself compromise the desire of politicians to endlessly keep increasing their control.

For decades, since the seismic changes that accompanied the end of Empire and the onset of the Cold War age following the end of the Second World War, the incompetency of generation after generation of Westminster politicians has seen power hoovered up and removed from the hands of local people. However, rather than holding on to it themselves centrally, politicians have passed more and more of their responsibility onwards to an outside power called the EU which has successfully indoctrinated the political classes across an entire continent into thinking that the creation of a supranational state is the ultimate tool of localism.

SPOILER ALERT: It is not.

I have been a Eurosceptic since I was a teenager, but gained no pleasure from seeing the debate unfold in public and the damage that was done from the moment that David Cameron committed the UK to a Referendum on Leaving the EU. It was unexpectedly won by those who identified with the localised side of the argument rather than the nebulous way of thinking that big (and centralised) is always best for everyone.

Remainers often cited the inability of Leavers to tell them what benefits there would be to Leaving the EU as clear evidence that there was no question to answer and that the UK should Remain a Member. Yet they overlooked that they couldn’t give a plausible argument that it was in our collective interest to stay.

The argument for Leaving the EU that was never heard and which should have underpinned everything, is power should be kept as local to voters as possible. Then decision making is kept real, in touch with the issues and our local communities are always kept at the centre of what politicians do.

When people can access decision makers easily and see that they themselves have the power to influence the decisions that are important to them, they are much more likely to be and to remain engaged. They will be much less likely to be disenfranchised from a political system that in its current form today is seeking to remove the power that remains in local hands and move it further away into the hands of highly political regional mayors.

The genuine change or reset that is coming in the near future (rather than the one that some are falling into the conspiracists trap of believing has been created by deliberate design) will create a massive opportunity to restructure, reform and relaunch government and the public sector comprehensively across the UK. It will be the chance to get every kind of pubic service working as they should for us all.

The real opportunity for improvement in the way that decisions on public policy are made in the future will be the voluntary return of power to the lowest tier of government that it is possible to do so, thereby ensuring that genuinely local decisions are locally made.

By local, this means a real shakeup of Town & Parish, District & Borough and County Councils with the disbanding of so-called Unitary Authorities and the list of powers these lower tiers of Government have redirected to the lowest level possible.

The responsibilities lower tier authorities have now should be topped up by the return of everything that has a very localised impact. Power must be returned to the local government structure and directed away from Westminster where it has been sat and used without appropriate care and consideration for too long.

It is no longer acceptable that laws effecting the lives of everyday people locally that were created by bureaucrats in London (or Brussels), who have a one-size fits all mentality are made and then only interpreted by officers and rubber stamped by councillors – who often believe they have no other choice – even though it is the will and needs of voters that they are there to respect.

The contrary argument is a good one. That there simply isn’t the funding available for these lower tiers of Government to exist and function now as they once did.

Yet the economic argument is now a hollow one as the technology that we have available dictates that very local authorities no longer have the need to retain the massive administrative or executive functions that they once did.

Whilst cost cutting means that pooling technical delivery services such as environmental health services or bin collections make sound economic sense, there is absolutely no reason that decision making has to be run or modelled in the same way.

That is before you cross the Rubicon and tackle the question of the what the financial impact of the local Government Pension Scheme on local Council Budgets involves and the savings and therefore money it would provide for services to be resumed that have been stopped today.

If we have a Westminster government that treats the whole of the Electorate as the adults that we are, it stands to reason that the same government must also treat the politicians within the localised tiers of government as adults too.

The additional powers that local Councils would have right down at neighbourhood and village level would immediately see people and more suitable candidates for elections becoming reengaged.

The real change that must come to make the difference at local level (at the very least) is the removal of political parties from the electoral process and action taken to prevent outside influence and money from holding sway.

It is not only possible and practical for independent candidates to run their own election campaigns, but would also be a highly democratic step to require that those seeking election to Councils of any kind are able to communicate and connect with the electorate during a campaign without the support of a national brand.

The current approach only ensures that we have too many people representing themselves and the interests of ‘their people’ instead of us all throughout government at every level.

We must take the coming opportunity to work to elect the right people to public representative offices of every kind and support this process by removing all of the tools that make it easy to place power in the wrong hands with the massive cost to us all that then involves.

Regrettably, at the time of a National Crisis, it seems that the only thing original about the Johnson Government, is its ability to repeatedly mess things up.

I would like to be able to say that they have a legitimate excuse for doing everything that they have done since the Covid Pandemic came into view. But they don’t.

Whilst many still believe it right to support the Government because that’s what you should do, the real story and the different truths that have ridden shotgun with the creation of this chaos will come to light, either when the public files are opened or this stupid political clique is replaced by people who know what politicians are actually supposed to do.

Of all the mistakes Johnson and his cronies have made so far, the one that illustrates the abject disconnect from all forms of decision-making-responsibility, that is endemic within this political culture, is that of using an algorithm to produce grades for our 18 year old, end-of-school students, who inevitably see their A ‘Level grades as a pivot point where the success or failure of their entire lives is mapped out.

Before school closures that were neither necessary and certainly weren’t thought through, the GCSE and A ‘Level exams process in the UK was already arbitrary in the extreme, overlooking the reality that many students are not academically inclined and of those who appear to be, some will never be masters of exam technique.

But to then completely dehumanise the process and use an algorithm to make decisions when another flawed political choice meant that exams in the summer of 2020 could not be completed, is injustice of an extraordinary kind.

Algorithms are great for working with numbers and sifting data of a numerical or quantitative kind. But they are next to useless where qualitative data or the real idiosyncrasies and circumstances of life and human existence are concerned.

The only shortcut this route was ever going to provide was one treating all A ‘Level Students as if the history or chronology of the events leading them here; what they did and how they did it, was identically the same – not to mention anything already discussed above.

Yes, the Universities application and offer process is constrained by numbers every year. But Covid and the ridiculous steps that the Government has already taken meant this was never going to be a ‘normal’ year, and factors such as foreign student numbers no longer being as certain as ‘normal’ would have meant there are vacancies that our commercially focused Universities need to fill to make the sums add up – no matter the usual grades requirements involved.

There is no algorithm that can fairly explain or make account for the peculiarities of any individuals circumstances. It is both lazy and distinctly harmful to surrender human decision making to a machine when that machine can only ever account for the level of detail or data that it was programmed with.

Parents are naturally beside themselves right now and many have good reason to be. Young people who were about to break free of the perceptual barriers and ties of their background have been binned just because our politicians are not up to the job and incapable of thinking in a different way.

But the real travesty beyond that we can only hope public pressure will force Johnson to fix, is the reality that algorithms are already playing a massive part in the formal electronic or -online’ relationships that we have everything. From our use of social media, to how our job applications are managed – giving recruiters an irresponsibly easy time to check that boxes are ticked, but nothing more.

Algorithms and the people who use them to cut corners to make business processes ‘more efficient’ to cut costs, are not only playing a massive part in the dehumanisation of relationships that has accompanied the internet age. They are also rejecting people whose circumstances a computer code will inevitably overlook, whilst denying the benefit of added value to businesses that were always a major consideration of the employing managers before the created quasi sectors of HR and Recruitment evolved – and still would be if they realised what a con and all-round injustice these algorithms and employing the services of the people who use them involve.

This corner cutting is pernicious and whilst the improvement in technology to improve the user and end user experience is always something that we should aspire to, it should not necessarily mean that the advances are used to cut costs and jobs if that is what it can do.

The quality of the relationship with people, the product and the all-round experience will always be compromised if not lost by prioritising Tech above all things.

Money or cost-saving should never be the basic law governing business, when everything that we do in any business is ultimately always and universally about people and thereby the human relationship.

Paying attention to the different schools of thought that exist on the Government handling of Coronavirus, the Lockdown and Social Distancing provides an invaluable insight into how people are really feeling about everything right now.

No matter what side or position people have taken, all are talking and hinting of increasing desperation as the search begins for some kind of plan that will get us out of this wholly avoidable mess.

Sadly, the common theme is a lack of confidence in there being any clear way to deal with the problems the Government has created – all of which are set to get considerably worse.

There is a way to deal with what happens next, along with everything that will continue for the UK and us all thereafter. But the solution and its application doesn’t offer the surety that desperate people believe that they need in the time of a massive crisis.

The perceived need for any kind of immediate relief leaves many vulnerable people at the whim of any charlatan with a platform who starts preaching that they have a plan of some kind.

Meanwhile, there are very significant injustices present within society. But the establishment and mainstream media narratives that things are good for everyone simply because we have had peace for a long time and our lives have been improved by the advancement in technology facilitate the rather convincing argument that we have never had things so good.

The flipside or dark side of this cultural two-edged sword is a level of complacency and taking what we have for granted that may never have been seen before.

This regrettably includes a complete absence or lack of regard for what good or genuine leadership from the political class should look like and what will happen without it – as it now is – when things go wrong.

Peace and the apparent stability of the neoliberal age tells us that plans can either be created or that they already exist in the form of systems and processes to cover everything. This is where the Government response to Coronavirus has gone so tragically wrong with no guide to managing this crisis for politicians existing on record or being fixed in place.

What we need as we go forward through this horrid situation and face the coming reset, is a method, an approach or a way of doing things that works without the false security provided by having or identifying some kind of plan.

Plans are simply the projected method of doing something. They are the anticipated route map of how to reach the end of a journey before we step off. Yet our cultural default position has for too long been to reframe plans as the aim itself and to develop them as if we begin every journey from a standing start.

We have lost the ability to collectively visualise what we want as a Country. We no longer understand or relate to what it feels like to be inspired or to have faith and therefore be motivated to accept hardships, to take steps or to have them taken on our behalf to get there.

The facilitation of such inspiration is what genuine leadership is all about. It has been absent from Westminster for a very long time.

Influence, bias, self interest and myopic thinking have led the political circus for decades and as one set of self-serving politicians has been replaced by yet another, the rot has become institutionalised to the point where even the cleverest and most empathetic amongst them have no idea how to use or harness the power and responsibility they have to help and guide the lives of others.

Decisions are made with no respect for the basic law that governs the reality and consequences of what happens when any decisions are made; that the power of any decision lies only in the present and we cannot now make the decisions for choices that will follow thereafter.

The myth of assumed respect for politicians, government and those with public responsibility that we gain through conditioning is suggestive that at government level, the simple laws of life that affect you and I as we make daily decisions are different when they are taken with official responsibility for others. That they affect us all and that as such they would never work in the same way as they do when they are taken just for you or I.

Yet they do. The ways decision making works is just the same for everyone. The politicians we have are not special in any single way.

So when we consider what we want to happen next, whether it be for the Lockdown and Social Distancing to come to an end, for businesses to immediately go back to work, Schools to return full-time without restriction in September, or decisions to be made on the basis that life for us all can be improved, these decisions must be based only upon the factors under the decision makers control at the very moment in time they are made.

It simply defies all the rules of logic to think or believe that a plan can be made that cannot be influenced by the passage of even the smallest amount of time and that events and the actions of others that take place within that tiny time frame do not have the power to impact events in some way.

When we can and do accept that this is what real leaders do when they lead, and that the gift of any good leader is their ability to weigh up all of the information that they have at their disposal at that very moment when each and every decision is made, always making the decision that is right – not for them – but for us all, that is when we will have people running this Country who are suitable, qualified and above all READY to be in control.

That is when we can all have confidence in the future of this Country and won’t need the security of any plan.