Month: February 2024

The Advocacy and Lobbyist Organisations involved in food policy today are all about the interests of those Organisations

Whilst I am hesitant to say anything that places advocacy and lobbyist organisations like the NFU and any of the representatives who speak for them in a bad light, because I don’t intend to, it has to be said that no matter what meetings they have, what promises they receive or whatever headlines they make, lobbyist organisations like them will not achieve the results that farmers need.

Because for them, the approach that would be needed and the perceived risk to the relationships that they have with politicians, government departments, NGOs, business and retailers, or many other organisations by doing what needs to be done, is perceived to be too high.

This isn’t a criticism. This is how established and well-known lobbying organisations work, right across every area of public policy.

They value the relationship that they have with the establishment more than they do the need to do whatever it will take to achieve meaningful solutions for the people and businesses that they represent.

That results in compromise, fudges and being grateful for nothing more than politicians, business and public sector leaders paying lip service to the idea that the change they offer is the same thing as a genuine outcome being achieved.

To be fair, one of the myths that too many of us have bought into is the idea that politicians and the establishment do actually know and understand what they are doing. That they have integrity with the responsibility they have to the electorate, and that they are therefore people we can trust.

Few have a real appreciation of the interconnectedness of every problem that exists within the realm of Public Policy, and I’m afraid that I speak from experience when I say that this very much includes the politicians who are supposedly in Westminster and within the devolved Administrations who are there to legislate on our behalf.

This post has been taken from Food From Farms Guaranteed, Published on Amazon 16/02/24.

To read in FULL online, please click the link immediately below:

FOOD FROM FARMS GUARANTEED | Full Text
Who controls Our Food controls Our Future (Full Text)
The need for a collaborative approach to the UK Farming and Food Security Problem

Why No Farmers No Food won’t help. But could certainly cause UK Farmers and Food Security a lot more harm instead

Like many with a careful eye on the problems our Farmers are facing and the massive issues that currently surround everything with UK food production and the access that everyone has to food, I had a moment of hope when I first saw that simple but effective ‘No Farmers, No Food’ yellow badge and black tractor, on social media just a few weeks ago.

What I saw next or rather what I couldn’t see concerned me. That was the absence of any detail about who was behind this Twitter account that was quickly gaining followers, and most importantly who and what the people behind it are all about.

For anyone who did a basic search on Google around that time, it would have been quickly obvious that no organisation in the U.K. with that name exists. But that there has been a very similar campaign built around No Farms No Food No Future in the USA since at least 2018.

It wasn’t long before a scattering of the people who represent not only farmers, but also different areas of the massive range of issues that are tied up in U.K. agriculture’s problems, began to openly question the populist nature of the account and what were its real intentions.

Regrettably, however well intended, populism can create a lot of buy in from vulnerable people very quickly. But then has a habit of hurting those same people very badly just as soon as it’s clear the hollow words don’t actually work.

It wasn’t long before the ‘founder’ of No Farmers No Food finally outed himself. For those watching the political terrain and current affairs with an eye on social media, it wasn’t any great surprise to see that James Melville was that name.

I only know of James because his posts are almost continuously hitting my timeline. I may have even briefly followed him when he first appeared there some months after the first lockdown in 2020. When dissent against lockdowns, social distancing and all the madness suddenly became popular to talk and publish about ‘out loud’.

To be very fair, James is clearly a very talented marketing specialist. He knows how to rack up followers, likes and a lot of popularity online.

But follows, likes and hundreds of thousands of people nodding their heads in agreement as they sit down to have a poo, a successful political campaign with real tangible, life-changing outcomes does not alone make!

Everyone is capable of change and as George Bernard Shaw once said, ‘Those who cannot change their minds cannot change anything.’

So, the growing promises and popularity of the No Farmers No Food ‘campaign’ certainly hadn’t been a subject I’ve wanted to tackle directly by name, before there was any documented outline of what they intend to do and what really underpins their cause.

Last night, No Farmers No Food released a document that not only outlined what they see themselves about and what they see their value as being. It also leaned heavily on the words and feeling of farmers of different kinds who are desperately looking for change across the U.K. (A copy of the NFNF Press Release from 19 February 2024 can be found at the bottom)

There’s nothing wrong with anything that has been said. Other than the fact that Farmers and those that support them are even having to say it.

However, just because there is strength of feeling  and so  many within the industry and within the communities that surround it who are looking for solutions and someone who is going to instigate change, it  doesn’t mean that the first few people with a visible loud haler and some words that everyone  thinking about these issues can relate to, will be any different to anything or anyone who has come before.

This is where the real danger of what looks and sounds like something new and different presents. I’m afraid to say that I have not read anything in the release that I haven’t seen attempted or even being worked on by existing organisations, right now, or even before.

Farmers don’t need another group or organisation, that has a louder voice and gets more follows, but doesn’t get anything done. Even though good marketing plans and clever words will make it look like they have or that they can.

Regrettably, clever words, clever marketing and clever narratives are everything that’s already wrong with how the establishment, the respective UK governments and the politicians within them operate.

No organisation or groups of organisations are going to win friends by putting out adverts about the margins that farmers receive that might mention profit, but leave the scanning reader with the impression that after selling a kilogram of apples to a supermarket, the grower actually only receives 3p, when the pack price on the shelf is over £2.

This kind of approach is no different to scoring an own-goal. Not because the detail is technically wrong. But because mirroring the actions of those who are already blind will achieve absolutely nothing, whilst it also shows the same kind of sleight of hand or manipulation used by politicians that many members of the public are now desperate to move away from.

Strong, effective marketing from people with the skills and ability like James, have massive power to help and to create the change that is now necessary, IF Farming across the UK is to be saved from a destructive fate that many suspect, but very few really see. However, marketing is only a small part of that formula, because there’s a lot more than simple but effective messaging that needs to be achieved.

What the people heading popular campaigns say and what they represent isn’t the pathway to change itself. Even if they appear to be able to open lots of doors.

Yes, It’s nice to know that there are all sorts of people from all backgrounds and industries who are able to hear stories and compelling lines that they can all identify with when they are unhappy about a world that is giving everyone plenty to be unhappy about.

But where’s the purpose?

Where are the solutions that actually work?

Where is the real recognition that the problems aren’t about the subjects themselves, but rather how politics, the political system and the establishment itself works?

The only way to win against politicians who are incompetent, self-interested and only listening to advisers and so-called experts (with their own agendas), because when it comes to their real responsibilities they are massively out of their depth, is to play the political game even better than they and the people who support them can.

That doesn’t begin with any kind of strategy that relies on the politicians, their advisors or the establishment being the ones who are going to change.

Whilst it continues to be in some kind of ascendency, No Farmers No Food could very quickly win what appear to be concessions from the Sunak government and from whatever will follow. But the realities that underpin that and the direction that this entire political class are committed to taking UK Food Production will soon again begin to show – after Farmers and everyone who supports them will have been misled again into wasting what is now becoming invaluable time.

The reason that the many organisations that include big names such as the NFU and Food, Farming and Countryside Commission – who are covering so much of the ground that the wish list published yesterday mentioned already, aren’t achieving the results we all know they should be, is they are either too big, too London-centric, or like so many of us still believe that there is some kind of gentlemanly set of rules at work within the establishment that guarantee that as long as you do things the right way, the right things will end up being done in return for you.

Sadly, those days are long gone.

The power that farmers have to change much more than the destiny of farming itself, isn’t something that anyone can waste time waiting for permission to use.

Everyone is looking for solutions and answers from people who really don’t care about UK Farming.

People who are certain that they are right and farmers are wrong, because they genuinely believe that food will never be a problem, as it will always be available from elsewhere.

Please don’t continue to make the same mistakes. Boxing clever is the only way UK Farming can now succeed.

The need for a collaborative approach to the UK Farming and Food Security Problem
FOOD FROM FARMS GUARANTEED | Full Text
Who controls Our Food controls Our Future (Full Text)
nfnf-press-release-190224Download

The one thing we can be sure of at the coming General Election is that we cannot be sure of anything…

During a meeting about a month ago, I was asked what I thought the outcome of the coming General Election would be.

What I said, as I began my response, was that I think it unlikely that the General Election will turn out how anyone is expecting it to be.

I said I thought that the result would probably be a lot closer than the polls suggest and there was unlikely to be the Labour landslide currently expected. That Reform’s performance would depend upon whether or not Nigel Farage comes into play, and despite the rhetoric, they wouldn’t be forming a government anytime soon.

However, I also added that with the current terrain, Reform could certainly pick up 10 seats or enough to place them in a role, not unlike that which the DUP played where they became power brokers after the 2017 General Election debacle called by then Conservative prime minister Theresa May.

After the results of the Kingswood and Wellingborough by-elections this week, and an ongoing series of Tory blunders that emphasise just how out of touch with real life the ruling party has become, I’m not sure that I continue to see the possibilities in quite the same way.

What I do see the same is the offering that all of the political parties that appear on the current U.K. political route map provide us, as the choice of direction we will be taken by public policies, should any one of them win an overall majority.

With the neoliberal orthodoxy that ALL of them appear to have embraced, the paths they follow will remain closely tied to the same ‘growth’ myth.

Shared between them exists a slavish belief that to survive they must increase the amount of money in circulation. Whilst doing so often unwittingly means they shackle themselves to the ideas and direction of people with too much money and influence, who regularly hang out in Swiss resorts.

People who have nothing in common with the masses but nonetheless believe they have a god given right to rule.

Yes. Labour, the currently out-of-the picture Lib Dems and the apparently now electorally-explosive Reform all appear committed to the same economic and therefore political ideologies that under the Tories have been hurting everyone who cannot profit from what they appear determined to inflict upon us all.

However, that’s only what it would be well reasoned to expect, IF any one of the political parties running at the General Election is able to secure a working majority.

Any Party heading for government will need a good working majority in parliament to stop everyone else saying no to everything and being able to create a log jam. Just as we saw over a period of years from 2016 when so many MPs decided that it would simply be ok to resist anything to do with Brexit.

Sameness is not Oneness. And politicians are only one in the sense that they have doing everything wrong, or rather doing everything the same in common

We have very high expectations of the people we elect. Not because we pay attention and reach conclusions of whether they are fit and proper persons to be public representatives. But because that’s what we’ve been taught to think.

We quite literally have an inbuilt system of deference, to anyone with a platform or a position of public responsibility.

As such, we are all trusting the wrong people and getting our relationship with politics and the establishment completely wrong.

In the absence of a political alternative that really is akin to None of the Above, this means that we remain on a downward spiral of trusting whoever is next on the list. No matter what track record they have for doing all the wrong things, or what is really hidden behind all the talk and stories that sound very much like everything we need to hear about who we are about to vote for, right now.

The most likely outcomes (Please note, there really could be more!)

As I write this blog in the middle of February 2024, it looks increasingly likely that the next General Election could be called and held as early as the beginning of May.

After that, October or November is most likely. But in terms of the longest this Parliament can survive until the next vote must be held, the Tories have until the last week of January 2025 if they really want to drag the last remnants of what is left of their time in power out to the very end.

Whilst the polls look very bleak for the Tories – and the results of those two by-elections certainly make it sound like they will be proven to be right, it’s the unexpected problems and unforeseen events that could unfold within the coming months that could really blow the outcome apart.

The end result when the General Election comes, could easily look very different to how it is expected to be now.

The biggest problem for all the politicians that we have is that politics for them is all about the politics, being in politics and having power in politics.

The rest is just talk. None of it is about public representation. Which is what democracy and the process that facilitate democracy should always be about.

This basically means that no matter what promises any of the parties make to us as voters, when the results of the next General Election are in, what the politicians who made those promises will be able to do will come down to a range of different things that include:

  • Whether they actually have a working majority that means that they can push the public policies they have promised that are actually possible through parliament
  • Whether the outcomes that they have promised are actually achievable, given that most areas of public policy either effect or are affected by many different and complex things.
  • Whether they have the will to do anything that could make them look bad in any way – which is where the political will to achieve anything meaningful with policy usually ends.
  • What the policy requirements would be as a trade off with any coalitions partners, if they cannot achieve a working majority in any way
  • Whether they can print enough money to be able to buy off everyone with quick fixes and the white elephants which has become the standard way that recent generations of politicians have managed to get around, ignore or pretend that they don’t need to consider any of the above.

Once we can appreciate the absurdity of this list in itself, it’s probably best to then consider how anything could happen and how the result of the General Election could play out, once the votes have been counted.

An outright Labour victory

Ok, so let’s go with what most people thinking about politics today are banking on, which will be an outright Labour victory, with a 1997 Blair-level landslide majority. All under the leadership of Keir Starmer.

Labour have historically been the pioneers of the “money solves all problems’ approach to government. It’s a flawed principle that has only ever temporarily been sustained – If you can even call it that.

The odd thing is that whilst the ‘let’s splash it on the masses’ and wealth redistribution approach to public representation arguably has morality built in for anyone who still believes that money is actually real, it’s a way of managing money that has become more and more aligned with the inherent need for growth that forms the core Neoliberal government myth.

Indeed, ‘growth’ has been an increasingly used mantra in politics, ever since the real genie was let out of the bottle, when under Richard Nixon, the US did away with the gold standard and the FIAT monetary system was shoehorned in from 1971.

For those new to neoliberal economics, the system hinges on government and the banks, and financiers they dance with, being able to print money at will. Allowing corporations and big money to run riot with few or no regulations, so that they can keep generating money. The public sector then measuring everything that is judged to have an economic output, so that the overall figure each year – known as GDP, can be used to hide growing debt and the financial deviance within the whole system.

The big problem that Labour now has, is that with the quality of politicians on all sides having now reached an arguably all time low, the Tories who have been in power as Brexit, Covid and the war in Ukraine have passed by, have responded to problems that should have been fixed by good public policies and genuine leadership, by spending so much created money, that the time left between now and when the wealth divide has grown so wide that the system collapses, means that the opportunity for a post election free for all has pretty much already been had.

Hence the recent shouting about ‘salting the earth’.

A Conservative majority (Now VERY unlikely. But not impossible by any means)

However implausible it might seem, there is, even now, the chance of a Conservative working majority at the next General Election. For no better reason than we are journeying through such uncertain times.

A change in leader, perhaps to Nigel Farage or even bringing back Boris Johnson, could disrupt absolutely everything and help lots of people to experience overnight amnesia. IF the Tories were to do something about Rishi Sunak’s tenure now.

The reality, however, is that the best that the Tories can hope for, as things currently stand, is Labour managing to do something which reminds people that they could be about to vote for a party that is not in any way different to the one that we have in power now.

Just take a very quick look at the Labour Party debacle underway with their candidate in the run up to the By-election that’s coming on 29th of February.

The numbers from last weeks two by elections could easily be read as Labour voters coming out to vote in the same or similar number to the General Election of December 2019, when Boris Johnson gained an impressive 80 Seat Majority. Whilst the people who voted Conservative then, have this week mostly stayed at home.

It’s not impossible that on the day of a General Election, many more of them will hold their nose and come out to vote.

A Liberal Democrat majority

Anything could happen. But as things stand, with the Liberal Democrats appearing to be currently off the political map, a turn around that would take masses of seats from both Labour and the Conservatives, of the scale that any third Party would need to achieve an overall majority that wasn’t Tory or Labour, would be extraordinary indeed.

However, it would be surprising if the Lib Dems didn’t have a good showing when the General Election comes. And the prospect that they could play a big role in a Labour-led Rainbow Coalition is one that could be very real indeed.

The big question for the Lib Dems, should they experience a revival in fortunes, is what it will take for them to go into coalition as they did under the leadership of Nick Clegg in 2010 with Tory Leader David Cameron as Prime Minister. When in 2015, the electorate arguably rightly, treated them as if they had completely sold-out…

A Reform majority

Richard Tice, the current Reform Party Leader, may believe and have gone on the record to suggest that his ascendency and rise to the position of UK Prime Minister could just be a matter of time. However, the one thing that we can be sure of – unless there really is some kind of imminent Black Swan event, is that when the result of the next general Election is in, Tice (Or more likely Farage) could have the role of Kingmaker. But neither of them will become the next PM.

Whilst Reform have scored results in the two by-elections that suggest they are ‘on their way’, the more that they become an electoral risk or threat to the three establishment political parties, the more questions are going to be asked about who Reform really are and who they really represent.

Little is said about the real history and political genealogy of Reform. Yet the fact remains that this is a political party constructed from the ashes of the Brexit Party, UKIP and The Anti-Federalist League that came before and evolved into all of it too.

The rich irony is that as the Brexit Party became Reform and has worked hard to leave the anti-European Union focus behind, building policies that take a more generalist theme, the language they have embraced and the affiliation with neoliberalism and free markets they have adopted has more in common with the EU and the scion of globalisation that it was, rather than the messed up and never completed version of ‘Brexit’ that we haven’t ever really had.

Indeed, it could be said that Reform is either just another set of wannabe imposters who will say whatever it takes to get elected, not unlike the Tories, Labour and the Libe Dems before. Or the real agenda at play is about gaining power, just so that they too can facilitate the dying globalist agenda, just doing it differently and with them feeling like its something that will work better for everyone, if it’s them in control.

A Labour led ‘rainbow’ coalition

The funny thing about the 1997 Blair majority and the period running up to the General Election that gave it to ‘New’ Labour, was that for months before the Election that early May, you could genuinely feel that the coming change was inevitable. The only question that remained uncertain was ‘By how much?’

No matter what the polls say, it really doesn’t feel that way now.

Whilst a Labour majority is certainly possible – and it could be a sizable one too, the strength of the uncertainly and the long list of variables at work, along with not knowing when the General Election will actually come, lead me to wonder if a Labour-led ‘Rainbow Coalition’ – which will be a government made up of all the left-leaning Political Parties, is a more likely outcome.

With a fleeting or arguably non-existent respect for democracy and democratic process that this whole political class now has, I’m afraid that the cost of what will be required to buy off the support necessary to create a political structure that could run as a government, even temporarily, would for us, as voters, likely come at an incredibly high price.

The biggest price that any ‘Kingmaker’ could exact as a price of giving Labour and Kier Starmer the keys to No. 10, will be the same as it will be for Reform in the next section.

The one that will give them all more power in the future: Electoral Reform.

A power broking arrangement with the balance of power in the hands of Reform

If I were going to make a bet on anything as we look ahead to the next General Election with the political terrain as it is today, it would be that as things stand, Nigel Farage will be back, in the mix. And if Nigel Farage stands for Reform or for the Tories, this will be the General Election when his influence will really come into play.

To be fair, the chance of a Tory Party that replaces Rishi Sunak with Nigel Farage as a leader ‘Peer’ (which is much the same as what they would now need to do with Boris Johnson if they were to bring him back into that role, this side of the Election) – is pretty remote indeed. Not least of all as there are already at least four different names of very ambitious and well supported Tory Politicians who believe that their name is top on the list of Conservatives that will next hold the keys to the No.10 Downing Street door.

Leading Reform is a different matter.

If Reform under Tice can already reach 13% in a By-election result, as they did last week, the polling bounce that would surely come with Nigel Farage at the helm, could certainly push those percentages up to a level where they could pick up a few seats.

Perhaps that would be as many as any would be Kingmaker with his eye on the prize of future elections would need, to negotiate a straightforward switch from the current electoral system of First Past The Post (FPTP) to Proportional Representation (PR) as the price a desperate would-be PM will pay as he hovers on the doorstep of No.10. A result that would mean the smallest and typically third, fourth or fifth placed parties in an FPTP race where they never gain seats, would then become a permanent presence after any election thereafter.

The true cost of uncertainty, lack of accountability and the absence of good leadership

Minded that this blog has already become a lot longer than the 1000 words I had expected, I will leave the detailed discussion of everything that is wrong with the politicians to all the material that I have published elsewhere. However, these are the things that we all should bear in mind:

  • PR isn’t doesn’t change the politics, the ideas or the mismanagement of the politicians. It just means even more people with ideas that the majority of us don’t identify with, will be guaranteed a platform and therefore a disproportionate level and influence and media voice.
  • FPTP would always be the most democratic way to elect politicians, IF the politicians are actually there to represent the best interests of the electorate and the voters who elected them – which nowadays, they really do not.
  • The UK (and much of the Western World) is already bankrupt; paying bills with created or arguably pretend money, and running financial systems that are basically on borrowed time. (That is why the are so keen to create new devices such as CBDCs that will allow them to create more ways to hide the massive fractures in the system – whilst giving current leaders the benefit of many more lies that will at the very least secure them more time.
  • Public Representatives are elected to become the legislators who hold their seats and the offices that they are then given, so that they can legislate on our behalf. MPs of the quality we have and with the motivations and ambitions that they all have today, either cannot or will not use legislation to change life for the better, by addressing and putting restrictions around the way that businesses and money works, just to stop problems from growing which in their most simple terms relate to what we recognise as greed. Many of the problems that the UK (and the World) faces today, could be stopped tomorrow, IF the politicians we elect would grow a set and do all the things that they are supposed to do!

There isn’t time to provide an alternative to everything that is wrong with the political choices or options that we have before the next General Election comes. Which as I say, could be as early as the beginning of May.

Without there being either that option, or a massive change in the way that some or all of our politicians, and those who are MPs after that election comes then think, the problems that we are experiencing now will only continue and, in all likelihood, continue to get much worse.

Food From Farms Guaranteed (3FG) – A new farmer and consumer led UK food chain assurance scheme

UK Farming and food production is in crisis.

Latest figures suggest that the UK only produces around 52% of the food that we consume. Yet we are increasingly reliant on trading relationships threatened by war and the collapse of global supply chains, making the supply of imported food increasingly vulnerable and insecure.

Despite the risk to UK food security, Politicians and big business keep pushing UK Farms and Food Production towards profit making systems. This approach increases consumer reliance on unhealthy and highly processed foods and manufacturing, is quickly leading to the destruction of Agriculture and our ability to grow food naturally in the UK, and it uses organisations and standards like the Red Tractor scheme to exert ever more influence and control, knowing that significant change can be achieved without question, if the guidance comes from organisations that farmers and growers trust.

The short-, medium- and long-term future of UK farming and food production now hangs in the balance.

If UK Farmers don’t begin to take risks to save their own industry today; there will no longer be anything left of UK Farming worth taking a risk on in just a few tomorrows.

However, the risk taken to secure the future of UK Farming needs to be measured and considerate of all the ingredients necessary to secure permanent change, putting locally grown, healthy and nutritious food back at the centre of consumer and community life.

This cannot be achieved through populist protests and civil disruption that will damage the relationships that we now need to cement.

The creation of a new Food Chain Assurance Standard, led by Farmers, with the help of consumers and everyone who genuinely believes in and champions UK Food Production, offers the opportunity to achieve change that will not be possible in any other way.

This is 3FG.

If you can measure it, you can control it: Has GDP been the most dehumanising tool that humanity’s so-called leaders have ever created?

Just before Christmas, I published an e-book called ‘One Rule Changes Everything’. Within it, I identified the common theme of all the problems that society faces being built on the reality that the value of money is the benchmark that we use for everything in life and that the cultural selfishness that is now prevalent across mankind has become the greatest obstacle to us moving forward into a much healthier and happier way of living. Not least of all, because to do so would allow us to address all of the problems we have at their root cause.

The fact that we exist within a money-based paradigm today and have lost sight of values and what being human really means isn’t an easy idea for anyone to grapple with. After all, even those who can see and fully appreciate how ‘The System’ works, cannot escape living within it and being touched by the impact of it at each and every turn.

For the whole of humanity to reach this point without even realising it means that there has been a process at work that we have not seen or have been unconscious of.

Because so few are able to recognise that process, it is safe to assume that we have been steadily conditioned, in ways that could have been as simple as each of us accepting changes and leaps in money-related technologies, how we buy things, what products are available to us and what we have to do to get access to them. All without ever taking the time or making the effort to question any of these things and what they mean.

Experience changes our expectations. So, the true impact of technology like the internet has been far more significant than the ease of shopping or borrowing money. It has actually changed our values set, and how we think about our relationship with other human beings too.

But where did this process of unacknowledged change really begin? What were the building blocks that really started to make it that ‘life is all about money’, and nothing else?

The Human Condition

A reality that we all need to face is that a default setting of being human without being self-aware, is that we behave as an individual and as if we are separate to anyone and everything else. Therefore, we consider every interaction that we have in terms of how it will affect us, whether it will ultimately be a benefit or a cost to us.

Few will consciously place themselves in any situation where they believe that the costs of doing so  will outweigh the advantages. Even when they are fully conscious of all the facts and consequences of what they have the choice to do.

This is how selfishness works at its basic level, and there is an argument to be made that it is certainly a healthy way to be, IF you cannot be sure that anyone or everyone else can take a fully altruistic approach to every interaction in life. Which there are many arguments available to suggest that they cannot.

If humankind were able to police itself and ‘keep itself honest’ by being content that everyone should always be aware of the facts before they are expected to make any decision that could have a negative impact upon them in any way, the world would already be a much happier, much healthier, much more equitable and much more human place.

But for some, the basic ingredients of life have and never will be enough.

Ideologies and Hidden Truths

As soon as a process of any kind is invented or introduced to ‘create value’, whether that’s income, efficiency or anything else that can be considered to be advantageous at any level to the end user or to the recipient, without that end user or recipient being aware of the process that’s involved or why it’s really being carried out, the doors are immediately opened up to breaches of trust and for the confidence of anyone without full knowledge of what’s happening to be abused.

Historically, that abuse of trust could be based upon something as simple as the distribution of power and how certain people found themselves in control whilst others did not.

More recently, and particularly into the 20th century, that abuse has been based more upon the accumulation, distribution and creation of money and wealth. Manifested through wealth inequality or the wealth divide, which paints those who have much as being special, when those have less or very little, are most certainly not.

The most frightening thing about the way that ‘The System’ works and how it creates the myth that only those with wealth and power are special, is just how simple the ingredients or technical aspects that allow such stories and lies to exist, really are. So simple, that for anyone questioning how money and finance works for the first time, the simplicity itself makes the truth very hard to believe.

The most effective of all those ingredients is the framework of measurements that put figures against everything that ‘The System’ values, and gives the lie that ownership and direction of those measurements is what constitutes the real power over everything, therefore surrendering our control, because it’s what we believe.

GDP: The Tool of Measurement for a corrupt, self-serving and dehumanising ideal

It’s easy to think that the problems facing the Country have been caused by and are the sole responsibility of  whoever is in government at the time. Attributing blame in that way plays no small part of the way that our broken political system actually works and its why so many of us believe that the choices of political parties that we are given will result in change, whenever the next General Election comes.

What Politicians (from any side), The Media and all the public figures sprawled across social media don’t tell us, as they whinge and make out they are the only ones who really understand the injustice and pain that everyone faces, is that everything collapsing around us today has come from an accumulative effect of policy after policy and decision after decision, that has been taken by multiple generations  of politicians – from all sides, pretty much since just after the end of the Second World War.

Built on an economic idea or theory called Neoliberalism, there has been push after push to deregulate everything that was once regulated by government – on our behalf in some way, and for trust in the markets to be allowed to work beneficially on behalf of everyone and for the idea of ‘Free Markets’ to be embraced in its place.

Regulations that were once there to restrict , encourage and maintain certain behaviours of those private or commercial interests with the power to affect others lives have been steadily removed. Measurements relating to productivity, output and ‘growth’ have been inserted in their place, with little or no attention being paid to the way that the driving interests have increasingly used civil and corporate law to create their own system of checks and balances, regulated or enforced by expensive lawyers across what should still be an open or ‘free space’.

Every bit of the economy, or rather every product made, grown, produced, transported and every service carried out is measured by the financial value of each and every transaction that follows it through supply chains.

Meanwhile, this system of measuring everything in terms of the outputs generated has perverted just about every part of the public sphere. So that measurement, rather than the experience of  the end user, has become what everything in business, not-for-profits and worst of all, the public sector is all about.

Measurement drives behaviour because behaviour is driven by measurement

What few have realised is that measurement offers or rather appears to offer something concrete outside of ourselves that just knowing we have done the right thing or done the best job that we could do does not.

The ability to measure, record and document also gives poor leaders, who do not trust the people who they lead, the opportunity to control those people and to increase the ways that they do so. Right up to the point where politicians and the establishment believe it right to police the way that other people think.

Yes, it seems hard to believe. But GDP and the Neoliberal obsession with measurement to ensure performance, productivity and therefore growth has actually influenced and conditioned workplace behaviours and service to the public is not what public service is now actually about.

Removing value from real life

Measurement of everything that can be measured has created and encouraged a process where people have increasingly forgotten to trust each other. In turn, ‘experts’ and ‘professionals’ rely on figures that can be illustrated, and more often than not manipulated in whatever form they can then be laid out and presented on a page.

Real life and human interaction cannot be measured in any kind of quantitative form.

We have unwittingly and therefore foolishly allowed an economic system, derived not for the benefit of the people, but so the selfish could become even more selfish, to use measurement to blame us for the flaws in ‘The System’  the few manage and the mistakes they keep making. Bringing us ever nearer to a situation where we, the guilty masses can only be saved by surrendering the few freedoms that we have left, so that we can be saved from ourselves from this ever more greedy few.

Growth

For those needing evidence or a way to understand that we are today welcoming in a form of totalitarianism that once across the threshold of daily life will then be very quickly imposed, you only need listen out to the obsession that so many of the politicians and media bods we are forced to listen to by the ‘credible’ mainstream media has with growing the economy and specifically the word ‘growth’.

In whatever context it comes at us, the fact is that the ‘growth’ people made credible by their position and platform talk about, always relates to growth of GDP or ‘Gross Domestic Product’.

GDP is the Neoliberal ethos of continually growing the amount of money in circulation, so that public debt and all the other damage that the proponents of this twisted ideology create that keeps hurting us, can be covered up and hidden from view. Until the time that it is impossible to hide it from view any more.

Our politicians, many of whom are either too greedy, too stupid or too ignorant to understand how the mechanics of ‘The System’ they are supposed to be there to legislate upon even works, only know and understand what their advisers and the people who control them tell them.

This is likely to be something along the lines that politicians can only keep spending money for as long as everything they do with the power we gave them keeps on allowing big money, big business and big everything else to grow, through a process that is steadily breaking us all.

If it cannot be measured, it doesn’t exist

The harm that having lunatics in control who have placed a financial or monetary value on so many aspects of human life, is that is has genuinely affected the way that every one of us thinks.

It has progressed to the point where the unhuman aspects of ‘The System’ we are being led under has now corrupted just about every part of life.

The fact is that deep down, we all know that the work we do, the food we grow, the products we make, the services that we provide are all about providing the things that each and every one of us need for life. And that’s what many of us still unconsciously think.

However, the hard reality we face is that a life based on values – which is where every function we carry out is about people, communities and the world we live in, is no longer what life is really about.

Life has been changed, manipulated, reformed and redirected so that money, wealth and influence is all that matters.

Anything that cannot be measured has no financial value to those who want to measure and control it.

So it becomes worthless. Because what anything is worth is what everything is now all about.