Politics has for a long time relied on the occurrence of unforeseen events to let blagging politicians get themselves off the hook for problems they created that would otherwise be exposed and visible for the whole world to see.

When Covid arrived on the political scene, the scramble to cover up and utilise the dubious promise of an umbrella to hide all previous sins appears to have been too good and opportunity for our political classes to miss. In fact, so much so, the chronology of events makes me wonder if Boris rubbed his hands together at the first emergency Cabinet Meeting and declared ‘ladies and gentlemen; go ahead, go and do your absolute worst’.

Ok. So, the reality might not have been quite like that. Let’s give them the benefit of the doubt here and say the response might not have been conscious or openly calculated at all.

The reason I say this, is because of how important it is to understand just how politics works in the minds of those who supposedly lead us. Especially when there is an entire Parliament full of MPs who should never have been elected and are incapable of really leading anyone. So, at the first sign of a crisis, they are inclined to reach out for any dead horse and flog it in the hope that it will work.

No, I realise that some of you reading this blog are convinced that there is a much more sinister plan at work that underpins everything during the Covid Pandemic that the Johnson Government has done. But we really do have a Government constructed of politicians who are so stupid, unread and inexperienced, that they will willingly embrace any philosophy or set of ideas that any overconfident SPAD or advisor confidently convinces them will work – that is, if they hadn’t found the same textbook first.

Oddly enough, the point I’m going to focus on here is not about the misuse of statistics and behavioural science to manipulate and coerce people to doing whatever or politicians so ruthlessly want. Enough has and will be said about that elsewhere.

No, the area of policy that I want to think about more clearly, is the financial remedies that our Chancellor Rishi Sunak invented. The printing of non-existent money to back the whole lockdown policy up. And the disastrous time bomb waiting to go off that has been building in size for decades but was turbocharged the moment that the Chancellor and the Johnson Government began its massive cash giveaway.

Contrary to the thoughts of many, the events of the past 18 months really are not isolated, other than there being the all-covering veil of a Viral Pandemic underway. The focus that Covid has been given created a cloud of fear and misdirection that has allowed an inept and irresponsible Government to hide or avoid many other troubling public policy issues as if they have simply been removed from the frame.

But money, the way it is created, legislated, revered and actually worshipped – like it is a god, isn’t just a problem making the rich even richer, whilst making life increasingly hard for the middle classes and poor. It is also the elixir of extended political life and longevity of power for gutless politicians with little or no wherewithal who believe there are no problems that cannot be solved if you just produce the public cheque book and don’t give a shit about the real cost.

In the decades up to the beginning of the Covid Pandemic, the recycling of this particular idea and the philosophy that underpins government economic thinking has been quite incredible. Based on flawed neoliberal thinking and the post 1971 FIAT money regime – where FIAT literally means ‘let it be done’, the bizarre approach to money and governance that ‘it will be this way because we say so’ has grown and grown in popularity with the political classes and has appeared to work effectively for 50 years. Incredibly, it even failing to be derailed when private banks that had been let loose from legislation as part of the same ‘free market’ thinking were bailed out with public money following the 2008 Financial Crisis – simply because politicians are so invested in the idea that the system cannot fail and therefore must be ‘helped’ to work.

To anyone who takes these things completely at face value – as the political classes have done – and says to themselves ‘it worked for 50 years, so it cannot possibly go wrong’, there clearly was no limit to what solutions could be conjured up in a crisis and sold publicly as beneficial to all. Whereas what politicians have really been doing with all this invented money – and particularly since the Pandemic began – is place massive bets on everything coming right if enough money is thrown at the problem for long enough. They literally believe that what they are saying, rather than what they are doing, will ultimately prove to be the truth, by faking it until they make it be so.

The money that the Government has been using to prop up non-existent jobs through a continually extended furlough scheme; the money it has used to underwritten crippling loans to businesses that will never be able to afford them, and the money it is now fire hosing at every public policy it thinks will get it out of trouble and win votes is all created – just like successive governments have been doing for decades before.

The money they are using simply doesn’t exist. Yet the politicians are so drunk from drinking at this poisoned well, all they can think of doing is printing even more.

Yes, there really is a philosophy behind all of this that the economists and academics that our politicians listen to insist really works.

You may even be thinking that if this is all true, what is the problem if it works?

The problem is that it doesn’t. It is imagination, dreamworlds and a visit to fantasy land writ large.

Whilst it is certainly true to say that neoliberalism has worked out well over 50 years for the few, it really hasn’t been working out very well for the majority of people. And if the economy were to be viewed as an engine – as it very often is, then just like keeping your foot down on a red-lining engine might see it keep going for longer than expected, the question is always when, not if the engine will blow, and when it does, it will be the whole vehicle that breaks.

Rishi Sunak, Boris Johnson, this Government and the whole Parliament that has enabled them, have literally gone too far with a very dangerous approach to money and economics. One that may have been good whilst it lasted but is about to blow up and create a financial disaster of such epic proportions that not even the WEF are going to know how to pick up and rebuild the pieces so that they can press ‘restart’.

The public debt that is a real legacy of the Johnson era is simply too big for all of us to be expected to pay off this time. No amount of clever accounting and rebranding in terms of future GDP or other ways of calculating national economic output will make this ridiculous level of debt go away.

And Boris & Co. haven’t even done this on their own. Governments right the way around the world have been doing exactly the same things for all this time and have also gone into overdrive to finance an overkill response to a flu-like virus that was never necessary, could and should have been handled very differently and has now made it inevitable that we cannot go on as we have been.

We must rethink everything. And for us to get there, we are about to experience an incredible period of financially derived pain.

If you take the time and watch all the media available to you closely, the signs of what is coming are already beginning to unfold. But they are being covered by the mainstream media only in isolation – that is if they are even being covered by them at all.

The USA economy and the US Dollar’s collapse as the World’s Reserve Currency are looking increasingly likely to be the point where this dreamt up system can no longer function and the whole economic system explodes.

But that’s not to say that it couldn’t all kick off in the UK first. And stories like energy price hikes this autumn that they are that massive financial upheaval for us all is queued up and is about to start.

The biggest problem that we face today, isn’t finding a way to take a foot off the gas and calm the engine. Johnson and all of his chums have already driven the vehicle to the point of destruction and the momentum their policies have created will take this all over the point which was too far.

The problem we have is that when the engine blows, the wheels fall off and everything crashes – as we can now be almost certain that it will, we will still have the same politicians or politicians who will behave just like them left in charge.

The emperor has no clothes. You’ve seen what Boris and this whole sorry excuse for a Parliament did with their response to Covid. Just wait until the real trouble starts.

The term Woke feels new and as confusing as it is overpowering. It is presented by those with an agenda to push it as being the unescapable zeitgeist.

It is not. But that isn’t to say it doesn’t feel that way. Especially as there is so much going on across society and politics in particular, which is aligned with arguably the same thinking, ending up with impacts and consequences for us all in a surprising number of very similar ways.

If you took the time to ask everyone how they would like their lives to be and how they would like to experience the world, you would get as many answers back as the number of people that you ask.

In the majority of cases however, what they would have in common would be that they are based on idealism, rather than using life experience as the basis of making an informed choice.

This is how society increasingly thinks about everything today. If you were able to jump into a time machine and talk to people of the same ages and from the same kinds of backgrounds in the years that followed the end of the Second World War, answers would reflect a very different kind of choice. It would be informed from the experience that life can really be dark and terrifyingly hard. Many would have been very practical in their reflections, and the common message would simply be ‘it is great to be alive’.

Hardship is a reliable teacher for those who think they have nothing to learn. And as we approach nearly 8 decades passed since the end of that horrific war, it is a regrettable reality that many from within our younger generations are now obsessed not with what they have, but with how they believe their lives should be – without any respect for the rather large gap that sits between.

To be fair, idealism is a very powerful and passionate motivator, and the real reason why so many of the younger generations are left leaning or more socialist in their outlook. People become more right-wing or conservative in their ideas as they gain more experienced of the real world and adult life.

Today, things have gone much further than that. Many simply do not reflect upon what they have already got, overlooking a vital part of the process that helps us to become self-aware, instead focusing ever outwards for the answers to the questions about life that they have, whilst failing to understand how other people think, because they don’t even look at themselves.

People literally don’t live in the present, but have their thoughts focused in a semi-permanent state of anticipation about where things could be or should be, then falling into the trap of thinking that the desired state or experience is something that can simply be ‘imposed’ either by telling, or coercing people to live or behave this certain way, using rules or peer pressure to see the desired result imposed.

As time has passed since the 1940’s, the mindset that is the approach of dealing with life how it is with practical appreciation and understanding of how it works has been left behind and replaced with the approach of everything can be as it should be, simply because we say that it is – and what happened before doesn’t matter, because this is how its going to be right now.

The switch between the two was for a long time very subtle. It quickly began to affect decision making right at the top, but it wasn’t until the practical realities of decades of public policy being based on impractical idealism rather than practical reality was going to bite back, especially as we reach a point where those pushing this thinking hardest are literally punishing people with a different outlook for simply being who they are.

Even today, some 5 years since the European Referendum where ‘Brexit’ was ‘won’, even the political class itself cannot recognise that the whole European Union ‘project’ was based on a collective of ideas aimed at creating the ideal model of a European Superstate, with systems, procedures and governance not built upon the foundations of how life is for the communities, cultures and whole different Countries that the Bloc is made up of, but literally wiping that all away under the premise of how life should be with the only concession being a slow process of deliberate mission creep that hides the practical reality that imposing impractical reality was the strategy all along.

Brexit was won by the votes of people who have a clear understanding and experience of how life really is, as opposed to the alternative, which was always about endorsing a process which was always going to have serious consequences for the unnamed and unrecognised majority, because you cannot run an entire continent on the basis of how things should be.

At a time when the Government response to the Covid Pandemic is speeding up the arrival of a perfect storm of problems that have been in the making for decades, we are being forced into a culture war between what is and what should be, with seemingly no room left in-between.

Somewhat ironically, it is because we have had so many decades of everything being so good, that the impractical idealists championing woke thinking are able to behave as dangerously as they are doing so. The problem is that without respect for the practical realities of life and how the world really works, we are being set up for a massive fall, just as soon as the bubble bursts, and young people and those who are not appreciative of a more practical way of thinking are going to find the impact of the drop and the changes that it will require particularly hard.

There is nothing wrong with wanting life to be good, fair and the same for all. But the idea that this can be achieved by erasing history and anything distasteful, then making every part of life exactly the same for everyone is a recipe for disaster being cooked up and sent into a hurricane on a ship of fools.

We cannot escape the reality that we are living and experiencing – no matter how hard we might pretend otherwise. Changing it all for the better can only be achieved by looking at it, interpreting it and approaching it all differently. We will not do this by looking outwards and by hiding behind what should be. We have to look at ourselves, our history and the lives that we all live and move forward accordingly. It is we that must be the change.

Perhaps the greatest travesty of modern politics is the overwhelming desire that our political class have to keep interfering with the management of services which are paid for out of the public purse.

It is easy to fall into the trap of thinking that’s exactly what we elect politicians to do. But we don’t elect them to do that. It’s just what they want us to think.

Overall strategy of public services and how they are paid for is the domain of politicians. Operational management and day-to-day decision making are the preserve of those best suited to address the need or the problem. Operational management is not and should never have become a political choice.

The NHS is in serious trouble today. Not just because of the Covid Pandemic – which has had a big role to play. But because the whole organisation and framework has been a political football for much of the time that it has existed – simply because cynical, self-serving politicians have identified that it is easy for them to use the NHS to big themselves up and ‘win’ votes that way.

On the left, the Labour Party keeps shouting about privatisation. Yet the kind of privatisation that exists has come as a systemic response to the burden of employment rights and unaffordable working conditions that they and their love of EU rules so idealistically but impractically imposed.

On the right, a penchant for throwing money at all problems because there is neither the motivation or principle at work to tackle uncomfortable challenges head on (in case they result in a loss of votes) has meant that the Tories have just poured petrol onto a fire of increasing problems, making the greed and profiteering that drive staffing agencies and contractors legitimate. The most obvious result being that NHS staff don’t get paid as they should, whilst their contemporary temporaries cost more than the organisation or the public purse can normally afford.

It doesn’t stop there. The NHS, like all public sector organisations has become highly protectionist in nature, leaving staff to devalue the use of common sense and stick to the most basic requirements of their job descriptions in a way that would resemble the most effective type of superglue.

Passing the buck to someone whose specific job it is to do anything outside this Public Sector framework is commonplace. And when that doesn’t work, a new job is created, taking even more money away from the frontline and meaning that jobs that were once done by frontline staff or by their immediate managers may have now evolved into multiples of backroom staff or contractors in addition to that one original post.

To be fair to the left, there is no argument that can easily be made to justify the presence of private interests in the provision of public services that are paid for by the public purse. However, the stranglehold that the rights lobby, public sector pensions (and the damage that Gordon Brown did in 1997) and devices such as the EU Working Time Directive have made, make it feel much easier for those obsessed with avoiding difficult management decisions to avoid employing staff directly in a convoluted process that ends up looking like privatisation by choice.

The rich irony is that the NHS is on a precipice, but could be saved from going over, if we had leadership from government and politicians not obsessed with easy options and avoiding all risk to themselves and their position.

We need a Government that is ready to take on the many different agendas that are not patient centric right across the NHS, and replace self-centred thinking with prioritising what’s best for the patient and in the best interests of the public at large.

Otherwise, we could very quickly find ourselves in a place where healthcare provision either becomes tiered in its availability or becomes only accessible at a variety of levels based on ability to pay.

Once this happens, the NHS will be a service that will neither be universal nor public, because it is not something that we can all afford.

At a time when the issues that we face seem so pressing, and we are feeling so desperate for change and release from all of the blunt ended policies that the Johnson Government is inflicting upon us, the last thing that anyone wants to do is step away and start thinking and working proactively for what comes next. Especially not when it comes to a General Election, which could still be over 3 years away.

We are looking at everything the Government does in the moment, without considering the chain of events that led here, and certainly not with any great thought for the steps, processes and events that will come along in a random order that will look ordered but will be very random in terms their impact and effect.

Regrettably, because the way that our Electoral System works, it means that we elect a government to lead us and take care of our collective needs for a period of four or five years. But that decision is based only on a snapshot of policy promises made to us for perhaps 2 months leading up to a 15-hour opportunity to go and vote on that one day.

Using electoral promises and nothing else to determine which way we vote, is a decision-making process that is almost entirely flawed. Because no matter what any of the mainstream Political Parties promise us, they may not have enough seats in Parliament, once the votes are all counted, to deliver on any of those promises they have made to us anyway.

There is another, far more troubling flaw that we really should be giving more thought to. By voting for specific policies – no matter what they are or how good they might be for us personally, we are being short changed.

Rather than thinking about what we are being offered in terms of leadership, values and the way that our MPs and their party behave and think – In times of a national crisis, like now, we end up with leaders who are not suited to making big decisions or of being reliable enough to continually keep doing the right thing and what’s in the best interests of everyone rather than themselves.

If politics and the British Political System worked as it should, this type of thing really shouldn’t be a problem. Because real leaders and public representatives would be able to adapt to circumstances and would be prepared to do their very best for us in every way.

Unfortunately, the way that the British political System works today means that the three main Political Parties effectively control which person gains entry to Parliament and which person gets elected in each and every Constituency Seat. This means that the Conservatives, Labour and the Liberal Democrats determine who sits in Parliament and runs the Country by their rules, not ours.

As the Political Parties are themselves flawed and all about what works best for them, the whims of their current leaders and what will gain and then keep them in power, rather than anything else, there is simply no way for us to get the kind of leaders that we now need in Parliament and running our Country. The next vote is already completely sewn up!

Counterintuitive as it may be, now is the time to be working on the alternative to the problem, so that when the next Parliamentary Constituency vote comes, there will be a credible alternative in place that people will want to vote for.

The importance of creating, developing and building an alternative political movement, constituted and led to work for all, cannot be understated in any way.

There are great problems coming and the Covid Pandemic was just a steppingstone along the way.

When those problems come – like a financial crisis of a kind that may never have previously before been seen, we will need leaders in place who can lead and deliver without a manifesto commitment to guide them, simply because they possess the qualities, life experience, values and love for all others that anyone facing the challenges of doing what’s right for 68 million People in a National crisis will feel normal and not something that can be influenced by the loudest or most threatening voice.