If you are following the Conservative Leadership ‘race’, even from a distance, it is easy to fall into the trap of believing that things really will change for the better. Just as soon as the new incumbent (aka Prime Minister), has been appointed by Tory Members, the world-famous door to No.10 has opened, and they have very publicly walked in.

SPOILER: It won’t.

In fact, if you have been listening, hearing, and really thinking about all that the two wannabes and ALL of the politicians across Parliament are telling us – that is, if you feel genuinely able to keep engaged – you will quickly realise that there is nothing new in anything that we are being told.

In fact, all of the bullshit we are having pumped at us from every direction only confirms that what we can expect is just the same and nothing more.

ALL of the politicians, the parties and the people who have held their seats and roles before them have been doing exactly the same things as today’s politicians are.

Our politicians are motivated by ambition, by wealth, by celebrity and basically by anything and everything that they can secure for themselves. It doesn’t matter the party or tribe to which they belong.

The divorce from reality and the real world that you and I live in, which even the most well-intended of these politicians inevitably suffer – because they are so committed to doing what they are told – has meant that those behind the scenes, at the top of business and across the establishment, the people who have agendas, have been able to influence the legislation that controls just about every part of life and the way that public policy works.

The elites have literally been aided and abetted to create a system that filled their pockets. Whilst the helpful idiots that have infested our political system, keep peddling the myths that everything is being done in our best interests and that we should accept it all as being right.

The slavish way that our MPs are motivated and behave, means that whoever is in  power, forms a government or is sat in No.10, there will be no meaningful deviation or change in policy that moves us away from the very same narrative that overrides and feeds into the way that the UK has been disasterously  for decades.

Tory, Labour, Liberal Democrat and other politicians have managed and made each and every choice, decision, action and event which has led to the problems that many of us are already experiencing now, along with the even bigger issues that we now inevitably face.

It really is already ‘baked in’.

This whole narrative has regrettably played continuously to the darker side, desires and wants of human nature. Sadly, we have all, at some level, bought into the money focused world.

Even now, we all continue to bear responsibility for the damage that is being done by selfishness and greed at every level of society. Even when increasing numbers of us recognise that the process of an horrific crash of our system and everything that we know is already underway.

Good, responsible politicians, who are genuine leaders and public representatives, would have anticipated and stopped the fall that humanity is now going through, long before now.

Instead, we have people running the Country who quite literally think leadership is as simple as being the one who has the title and the job. That everything else just falls into place. That everything will work better and as it always should have done, simply because they as individuals are better than everyone else. And now it’s their turn.

After all, how could anything fail when everything in the whole world is just about them?

If you can stop and find a moment to reflect on what some of the people you may have already passed in the street today are already going through in terms of going hungry, not having enough money and looking at unnecessary price rises that are weeks away that are going to destroy lives. If you can start to visualise how events and the challenges we face are going to get worse and worse for a rapidly growing number of people from all areas, all social groups and all colours. If you can see that this is the greed of corporate monsters filtering through, whilst our MPs do nothing more than create more money for them, whilst continuously devaluing everything that we have. You will soon realise that the frustrations and anger that is brewing will very soon go beyond a problem that can be reconciled by the establishment politely suggesting that everyone outside Westminster should do no more than bite their tongues and count to ten.

The politicians that we have today will not change their path, nor their direction. Not until the situation and circumstances for us all are seen and accepted by everyone to be outside of their control.

It doesn’t matter that many of the problems manifesting around our lives now tell us clearly that this has already happened. That this political class are already well and truly out of their depth.

Whilst the narrative tells us this is normal. Whilst everything continues to look like its working. Whilst we continue to believe that this system is still working for us. The downward trajectory and process of destruction that our politicians started to facilitate decades ago will continue. The only change being that it will pick up more and more speed.

When you have no money that anyone wants. When you cannot buy the food that you need just to eat and survive. When you understand what the real value of caring for and about each other and the world around us, rather than how people see us, or what we have is what life is really all about. Perhaps then you will be ready for the change that we not only need, but which these people who have run the Country (and the world) into the ground have now made inevitable.

For as long as these very stupid and selfish people or anyone like them remains in control, it is only after everything has crashed and the system has completely collapsed that we can begin to look at anything getting better, of us all taking back our control and of building our new world from the grassroots up.

Over recent weeks, Secretary General of the RMT Mick Lynch has solicited a paradoxical feeling of respect towards a union baron, simply because in interviews he has appeared to take the Government position on wage rises clinically apart.

Whilst many commentators and journalists have been fawning over the eloquence of his speaking skills, the reality that few accept is that Mr Lynch’s greatest asset is his comparative ability to speak truth to power. Especially when the powers we have today do little more than obfuscate with invented truths, diversions and lies.

Like any good sales pitch, the union patter on the need to strike in order to force ‘reasonable’ wage rises has indeed contained some certain truths. Truths that many of us can relate to, as we watch prices rising exponentially almost by the day.

However, just as the politicians we have running the Country, who fail to consider the law of consequence and the bigger picture – rather than just responding to headlines or whatever is on the table today, fail to look beyond themselves, this union push to secure explosive wage rises can only fuel the speed of the race towards a complete financial and systemic collapse. Indeed, it is likely to cause the very people it is supposed to be helping the most pain.

Yes, the simple and most obvious answer to the cost of living crisis would be to give everyone a pay rise that matches the rate of inflation. A wild rate that is currently heading for ten and may even go as far as twenty percent.

Yet just as would-be Prime Minister Rishi Sunak’s massive and unnecessary spending spree in response to the Covid Pandemic put inflation and the price rises of essentials on crack, raising wages continuously to meet what will likely now become constant price rises, will just make an existing problem and the pain it causes the people who didn’t create that problem even worse.

Few can and even fewer want to see or understand the real causes and the history of the problems that the UK now faces. It is just too easy to blame someone they don’t agree with or don’t like at a very shallow level, whilst making the fundamental depth and breadth of the corrosive issues and practices that are institutionally still at work, significantly worse.

Greed, or rather the drive to make money, accumulate wealth, ambition and attaining power, are the seedbed and growth accelerator of each and every problem that the UK – and much of the World – is now experiencing.

So long has this addictive malaise been at work, our whole system of governance and the systems, procedures, regulations and laws that relate to everything, now support the funneling of wealth towards those who already have more. Just so that they can obtain even more.

Politicians have always had the ability to stop this and to rebalance the system so that it works fairly and equitably towards everyone.

However, to todays weak-minded and glory seeking politicians, public representation is not what getting themselves elected is about.

If our politicians were to use the power and responsibility that they have – as they proved that they can do, when they took the massively damaging steps to shut everything down during Lockdown – they could stop the escalation of prices that do not need to rise in just one day.

They won’t. Because they are all in it up to their bloody necks.

Our politicians believe that their future depends on maintaining the status quo and continuing to do things the same way that they always have been.

With inept and incompetent politicians who lack even the basic ability to lead, and union barons who have been gifted circumstances that those who can change things now refuse to control, we find ourselves within a rich mix of events and circumstances that together with all the very different problems that we individually face are now adding up to a very dark, but nonetheless perfect storm.

The failure of those to act whose responsibility it is to act, coupled with the failure of others to show restraint whilst neglecting the responsibility that we all have to consider each other, does indeed foretell that the only destination we can reach will be an unmitigated crash or complete system collapse.

It is sad indeed, that none of these people who have the power and influence to do things that will help us, can see, value or appreciate what we all truly share in common. And that instead, the only thing that defines and unifies them is the commonality of their selfishness and greed.

Fake news is a term that we have heard an awful lot of. But is it really all ‘fake’? Can we really trust journalists because they appear to be credible or represent a media outlet that appears legitimate from the outside? Are influencers and public personalities credible just because they have a platform with a ridiculous number of ‘likes’ or ‘follows’?

Speakers & ‘Influencers’ who need to invent credibility because their arguments have none:

Like most subjects being knocked around in the forums of public debate today, fake news is just another ridiculous umbrella term that has been coined by someone who wants to dismiss the arguments or facts being given by someone they disagree with, and they felt the need to be able to hide the inadequacy of their own views or ability to engage in a sensible debate by hiding it behind terms that people go along with – because the term sounds credible and they are afraid of what will happen if they don’t.

In this specific sense, throwing around terms like fake news just to dismiss someone else’s point of view is not only lazy; it is pretty much the same resorting to being nasty or calling people names when you are desperate to hide the truth in what they have to say.

Alternative Truths or Perceptions of the same experience or things:

OK, so fake news is a broader church. But that broader church is most often the difference that exists between one person’s truth, and the truth or true perspective on the same situation or topic as observed or experienced by someone else.

It doesn’t matter how persuasive an argument from one side can be. From the perspective of the individual, none of us experiences the same thing in exactly the same way. Indeed, even in an accident where only you are involved, there are always at least two truths: what actually happened, and then there’s how you experienced it yourself – ie your own.

Opinion presented as News:

Finally, there’s news which is actually opinion. And no, opinion is certainly not news in itself. Unless that is you were quite literally reporting something very subjective such as a story about a celebrity making a public statement about which political party they are going to support.

Regrettably, journalism within the mainstream has either become so poor or so corrupted by the wishes and aims of media platform owners, that very few of the so-called professionals that we access through supposedly credible channels every day, either don’t have the self-awareness to discern between what is the news and their own opinion, or they are deliberately pushing their opinions and abusing their position to influence the public in any number of different ways.

Learning to be a Critical Thinker:

Any one or all of the above may be at work within the news sources that you watch, read or listen to. It is therefore very healthy for us all to watch, read and listen with care.

Pick out the facts. Acknowledge and respect the content and presence of the opinion. But above all, do not let the opinion you have heard then influence how you feel about or how you have interpreted the news.

The easiest way to learn critical thinking – if you have not been taught and you don’t have the time to study the skill by reading a book or studying a course – is to follow and where possible read as many different sources on the same topics as you can.

Just by following different journalists and media platforms from right across the spectrum, you can quickly begin to appreciate the common themes – which on a universal basis will probably be the real news – and then begin to see the opinions, biases and yes – the propaganda at work.

Whatever you do, don’t let tribal thinking stop you from watching, reading or listening to media sources that are outside your ‘bubble’ or sit outside the mainstream. This is how echo chambers are created. It’s how we easily fall into group think. It’s how the destructive processes of relying on confirmation bias to legitimise views and perspectives is born.

It would be fair to say that even the most objective of writers will present their stories with a little bias – even if it really is the lightest touch. Simply because we communicate outwardly with the world based upon our past experiences and what information and interpretations of everything we have experienced we have then taken within.

However, once you can break down the structure of a news report, an interview or even a Facebook Post or a Tweet, you will soon realise that all forms of news and information about current affairs can be a much safer place that we are being told or than it would immediately seem.

https://youtu.be/rjLCQ95Dfvc

Uncomfortable as it may be to accept, the whole of the UK is on a downward trajectory and has a date with destiny that is going to touch everyone’s lives and will be very painful for most.

Many of us look at everything happening as if the problems that we are facing are only the result of or are related to other things that are happening right now, today.

In fact, that’s what politicians and the establishment want and like us to think. Because it distances them from any of the responsibilities from everything that has happened, is happening today, and what will happen in the days, months and the years to come.

Yes, there are a lot of very greedy and self-centred people out there who are making the race into not only a cost of living crisis but a complete systemic collapse that will accompany it a lot worse than it should be, by deliberately exploiting watered  down rules and the incompetence of our politicians to stop them for doing all that they are doing.

It doesn’t matter whether its fuel prices, the obscene profits that energy companies are making when they complain that prices need to go up to cover wholesale costs, of the prices of food and essential goods in supermarkets that are jumping up purely, because the people responsible have nothing to stop them doing any of this, and they sleep at night with the idea that the government will simply fire more cash at us all to keep covering the incendiary cost.

They wouldn’t be able to do any of this, if we had politicians who held the responsibility of being our public representatives who were actually up to the job.

Instead, we actually have the complete opposite. So inept, incompetent and absorbed in their own race to obtain public glory by obtaining jobs that hold a level of responsibility, that our politicians do not understand and certainly do not want, the 650 people who ‘lead’ us don’t have the wherewithal to understand the consequences of anything they do.

Our politicians do not know how the systems of business and government really work. Worst of all, as they are not even leaders. Politicians do not have the ability to get all of the information and the wise heads together that they need to make decisions on our behalf in one room. And so, management of crisis after crisis by specialists from the most obvious sector, industry or area was born.

It is because we have had such levels of ineptitude running the UK (and in Countries across the World) for so very long, that we are in the mess that we are today. It’s why life for us all is now set to go very, VERY wrong.

Don’t be lazy and try to blame this on Brexit, on Covid or even Ukraine. Because by doing so, you are simply playing into these ridiculous people’s hands.

All of this mess was created by the people who are pretending to lead us today and by the people just like them who have been masquerading as our leaders from across all of the political parties for decades.

What is more, we really do have only ourselves to blame.

We have elected these people and every politician just like them. And if we want politicians to change, it is us and the approach that we all have to politics that cannot possibly remain the same.

Change starts with the way that we think about politics. The top-down hierarchy, the destruction it causes and the lives it is wrecking just so that the few can be happy has to stop.

Power must come back to our communities and reflect the lives of real people. Its time for grassroots up!

The story that we are repeatedly being told is that the price of wholesale energy is shooting up because of supply issues, not least of all our relationship with Russia over Ukraine.

We are told that we have to do our bit. That Ofgem has no choice but to raise the ceiling of the prices that energy companies can charge. Even though government cash handouts aren’t going to help within the much wider price rises within cost-of-living crisis context. And a ridiculous number of us are already borrowing, or going to foodbanks in the middle of summer, just so that we can have access to food.

And then we are told that the energy companies are enjoying profits that aren’t just wafer thin, but are actually obscene when put in the context that the government regulator Ofgem, is facilitating nothing less than a system that is clearly not only covering any genuine supply-side cost rises that might exist, but is also ensuring that the profits and dividends paid to the private interests that own what should be public services are being continually guaranteed.

Words cannot explain just how wrong and unjust this system and the processes that our politicians have allowed to be created and that are now punishing us all, really is.

Our politicians could stop this madness now and have the power to do so. But they won’t, because they don’t even understand how the system they are responsible for actually works.

What horrific. What terrible. What unnecessarily unjust times we are living in. Just so idiots can look good in public, create a place for themselves in Wikipedia and shout to everyone ‘don’t I look great in my elected job!’.