Between the self-congratulation of the conspiracists and the very distinct sound of die-hard Johnsonist bullshit hitting media and the airwaves this week, we should perhaps spare just a little thought for the apparent no-man’s land in between. The unreported wasteland where the fallout of covid policies and crisis mismanagement across the UK and the World are only just beginning to hit.
Being right – or being proven be right seldom results in anyone being happy. And whilst there are a great many people running around thrusting the front-page news that Boris has been properly skewered by a party of lies into the faces of those who have celebrated the Pandemic, the truth beyond all of this is that ‘I told you so’s’ are not going to change the Government. They are certainly not going to change anything that has already happened or will inevitably now happen as a result of dishonesty in No.10.
There is a serious debate to be had about the circumstances in which a lie or mistruth is acceptable on the part of any Country’s leaders and the times when self-interest of the speaker almost certainly rules that it is not. The line between what is right for that leader and what is right for everyone is multilayered and egotistically thin-skinned after all.
Whilst there are a growing number of anti-Lockdowners who would like to see all of those responsible for all the suffering that MPs and public servants caused with covid measures punished in some way, it seems that almost everyone is continuing to willfully overlook the real truths of the economic and social tragedy that is now beginning to unfold. A crisis likely to be of such great proportions that even Boris having a lucid moment resulting in open humility and a change in the way that current Government Policy is being made could make a difference to at least some in the alleviation of the pain that is coming for all.
NOBODY has grasped the magnitude of the cost-of-living crisis that is on its way, despite the reality that it is beginning to meet everyone as they go about their daily lives, buying coffees and sandwiches that are costing 5-10% more than a week ago wherever they are sold. We will not have to wait until April and the impact of the massive energy price hikes to know that trouble is on its way.
NOBODY is recognising the reality that unless we are insulated by the massive salaries, savings and incomes that have come to the few by exploiting us, we are noticing the changes in what it is costing us just to survive. Yet like an antithesis of the arguably immoral covid narrative that has repeatedly hurt us all, we are led to believe that this is just a problem we are experiencing alone, simply because the media has so far failed to make the right call.
NOBODY is looking beyond the safety of their own bubble and experiential thinking to see that the impact of each and every decision that the Government has made has already had very different and potentially far-reaching consequences. That no matter how just or correct our own personal or group-related views might be or what we see as the solutions to the problems as we believe them to be, this is isolationist thinking at a majority level that will only continue to hurt us all.
Neither Parliament, the Political Parties that make it up, or the many would-be political movements and groups that wish to be there are even touching the fuse that will trigger the critical mass essential to take public opinion away from the obsessive perception that what is good for me will be good for all, and replace it with what’s good for all will always be good for me.
The current way of thinking, working and doing – that makes it seem acceptable to lead the UK by telling all of us lies, has been welded in place by the existence of a political system that prevents access to independent, outside-the-box and genuine leadership thinking, working and doing at the very top.
With it being increasingly clear that there is no will within any part of the political system to embrace change so that all public policy is driven and influenced in a wholly people-centric or community-centric way, it may soon prove to be the case that this very denial of where real power lies will lead to that power being used and asserted by people and our communities in a very different way.
Whilst lip service has regularly been paid to the ‘concept’ of localism by politicians from all sides, public policy has continually been driven in the opposite way.
Even the arrival of metropolitan and regional mayors, police and crime commissioners and a push to merge local authorities is nothing more than political centralisation. It is part of a process that has served to take power further away from local people and community influence, by using the lack of knowledge and understanding that the majority of us have of how government really works cynically against us. It uses the promise of decentralised decision making to cover up the fact that it is taking away the much more local forms of decision making that have traditionally existed, but have already had their real power and influence sucked out and repatriated to the Westminster blob to such an extent that very few of us even know that they even exist.
The circumstances that have been created by years of political mismanagement based on self-interest, and the exponential speed-up of the whole process created by the measures implemented to tackle the covid pandemic that never needed to be used, are contributing to a coming collapse and will inevitably change the way that just about everything works.
A crisis is coming that will force everyone to reevaluate what is important in life. People will again value everything local and community driven like none of us alive today will have experienced at any time or in any way before.
Top-down politics and public policy making from London by people who do not understand or appreciate that we are all human beings with real lives simply isn’t working for us anymore.
Without massive and wholesale change across Government and the Public Sector, this model, paradigm or whatever you want to label this perverse system is likely to become redundant for the masses in what we see as its current form.
Local people will soon realise that both the Central and devolved governments and the planners who create policy have only been able to do all the things they have done with what many don’t value as being their own blind consent.
People will take that power back in order to be able to function and survive in a new, post-covid world. A world where globalisation in the sense of physical travel and the transit and production of material goods is at an end.
We will remember – and be revitalised – by the acceptance of what we will see as a new level of personal and community responsibility for governing our own lives – and creating happiness. All in ways that past generations and our ancestors used to do so, before greed and selfishness made doing only that which we need to – rather than doing whatever we like because we can – a lost cause.
Adam Tugwell 