To deal with the Lockdown and the related issues which were unnecessary and of their own making, Chancellor Rishi Sunak and the Johnson Government embarked on a profligate money printing bender.

It has been an obscene public spending spree that has not only led to the explosion of public debt. It has accelerated all of the deep-seated financial and economic problems that the UK already had before the Covid Pandemic arrived.

So, what has this all got to do with me, you might ask?

It’s a good question. Especially if you didn’t get any free Furlough money or didn’t have a grant of some kind that you didn’t really need or weren’t expecting to be fire hosed via the local council into your business.

Money is money and its value stays the same, doesn’t it?

Well, the answer is no. The value of money doesn’t ever stay the same – because money only represents value and is not the value of anything itself.

This is a crude example of what is happening, but it will hopefully illustrate the point:

1. Let’s say that £1000 is all the money that exists. Alongside, there are £1000 worth of goods, £1000 worth of property and £1000 worth of services that have that have value, but that value can only be exchanged by using the £1000 that exists.
2. You own £100 of the money that exists and that money is sat in your bank account or in bank notes in your hand.
3. One day, you go out and buy £20 of property, £20 of goods and £10 of services and still have £50 left in your bank account or in banknotes in your hands, which at any time on that day will buy the same things all over again.
4. The next day, you wake up to find that the Government has printed another £1000 of money and put it in someone else’s bank account or straight into their hands.
5. But whilst the government printed twice the money, only the same amount of goods, property and services or ‘output’ exists.
6. Because the total amount of money has doubled overnight, the value of those goods, services and property that exist have also doubled over night.
7. Now, when you go out to shop for the £20 of goods, the £20 of property and the £10 of services you find that the prices have doubled, and you can no longer buy or afford the same that you previously had.

So, increasing the amount of money in circulation whilst there is no corresponding rise in production, goods manufactured in sold or service output simply means that there is more money available in proportion to everything that can be sold.

What makes the situation worse, is that most of the money that has been printed by the Government has gone into the hands of people and companies that are already very rich, who see and understand what the government is doing and then push up prices, knowing that the government will turn around and print even more.

Meanwhile, throughout this process, those on the lowest wages have effectively gained nothing. They instead find that the same amount of money they earned as last month, will no longer cover the cost of the same foods, goods and services. Sooner or later, they will have to borrow or go into debt, secure a higher income or apply for benefits. Or if that’s not possible, go with out in one or many different ways instead.

To call money printing to solve problems that could have been avoided and the Politicians themselves created is a travesty borne of ignorance, stupidity and self-interest, is only made worse by the reality that the political classes have colluded with the finance sector to allow banks to do exactly the same things, not just over the past two years, but for decades of real time.

Printing Money doesn’t solve problems – it just creates many more by helping the rich and punishing the poor.

With an eye on the stories in the media over the weekend, it would have been difficult to miss the crisis of his own making that Comedian Jimmy Carr is now facing, as he begins talking up fear of his own ‘cancellation’ over a ‘joke’ he made involving Gypsies and The Holocaust in a show of his being streamed on Netflix.

The fact that Mr Carr has actually been here before – when he found himself on the end of public disfavor over Tax evasion in 2012 – should perhaps be raising more of a smile than it actually is.

But then again, the whole matter raises the rather valid question ‘When is comedy funny, and when is comedy not funny at all?’

Don’t get me wrong. Some of the programmes that Mr Carr is involved in, such as the Great Big Fat Quiz of the Year are very funny. As are other shows and programmes that comedians of the same genre take part in. Because put in context and without exercising an obsessive desire to make everyone guilty for being a complete cock, the more general humour that comedy shows contain is usually a lot of fun.

That general humour I refer to here is observational comedy. Humour and comedy where the jokes are made about life experience which relate to the absurdities of existence that is experience by us all. They are not being directed at individuals or in anyway being unkind.

Sadly, Mr Carr is not the only comedian who has come to either rely upon or regularly test the water when it comes to victimising others to gain popularity. They quite literally up their wages over a joke that comes at someone else’s expense.

The problem is that it isn’t just real humour that makes people laugh.

When you have a captive audience that can come in many different kinds, the sad truth that many people will laugh at a comedian because of wishing to be seen as being part of the group or because of what they relate to being like the stupidity of some of the people they meet in normal life.

Regrettably in this case, it is knowingly being brought to the stage or to a public platform where it is being used to be deliberately unkind.

Funny or not. It would be better for all if we were to encourage each other to think and see comedy and any kind of joke made in poor taste for what it is, rather than doing the ‘group thing’ when it comes to pretending to take offence. It certainly doesn’t mean that the source of it should be ‘cancelled’ out.

With an unpayable level of national debt that this Government created, our Politicians have zero understanding of the chaos that massive inflation alone is already unleashing upon real people whose lives they have never even attempted to understand.

They cannot see the harm that the companies and big money they created a deferential system for have done and are still doing through an unending greed for ever greater profits and bank account balances that they will never be able to spend.

Because they are stories that cannot and will not help them keep their seats, those same charlatans, masquerading as public representatives, blithely ignore world events and the behaviour of foreign leaders. That is, unless involvement and association with their ‘power’ can in some way enhance their own.

The funny thing is, that as we tumble into the dark depths of a cost-of-living crisis and fall in living standards that is going to affect us all, we are still allowing the same people leading us to pretend that they and their kind had nothing to do with the chain or events, the choices or the decisions that brought us here.

As the UK faces problems that are unprecedented in modern times, we must face a chilling reality; The architects of all the difficulties and challenges that we face in the months and years ahead, are the very same people who are in charge of the Country right now.

Those politicians who have gone before them or will come and replace them, may look, sound and tell us they are different. But if we stick to what we know and recognise today, they will be exactly the same.

Sooner or later, and probably a lot sooner than anyone can imagine today, the circumstances that surround us will have changed unrecognisably and we will be experiencing pain, hardship and change that affects us all.

When that time comes, as a growing number of us know and accept that they will, we must ensure that the change in the way that we do politics across this Country is no longer top-heavy and dictated by the interests of the few. But is instead, led by the views, feelings and needs from our communities and the grassroots – where real life experience can be used to create a new way of being that is as good for one as it is for all, rather than what’s works to benefit one being forced upon us all to the detriment of the many.

The lies, glory-seeking, self-interest and complete lack of awareness of this political class would be massively entertaining, if the outcome of their absence from any form of reality – other than their own – weren’t so serious for us all.

We are, after all seemingly predisposed to mock or scorn those people we meet socially who talk absolute rubbish and get tired very quickly of those who behave stupidly in the workplace. People whose inability to join up the dots in their work or life can very quickly have an impact on our own.

It’s a rather odd situation we find ourselves in, where for some reason we believe that the people we have elevated to positions of authority will always be different and could never be the same.

The problem that we have, is that they most certainly are. In fact, in terms of just how stupid and out-of-touch anyone can really be, the people we have in our Parliament and running the Country today take the somehow accepted view that stupid is only stupid, depending on who or where you are into a completely different league.

Politicians from all sides of a very broken system have created the mess that we are now in and the problems that we are only now beginning to face.

They have done so over a period of decades – and not only since the Covid Pandemic began, with self-serving-decision on top of self-serving-decision slowly creating more and more problems with a cumulative effect.

The writing is on the wall, yet they remain oblivious to it all.