If you are looking for fiction, this is no story. But the snapshots, views and experiences that you are about to share will make you question much that you previously accepted as truth.
Everything you are about to read about the past, about what we are experiencing today and where the future could take us is certainly interconnected.
But the way that the world works suggests that every issue that has happened, that we are experiencing and that we will need to address in the future, sits in isolation in some way.
Until we see the relationship that exists between everything and the problems we face, then accept that we will only solve those problems by thinking differently, our future will continue to be written by interests that will never be aligned with our own.
Touching on everything that relates to the way this Country is run, from education to cryptocurrency, the true value of money, to growing food at home and rules for the internet and AI, Days of Ends and New Beginnings lifts the stone and shines light on many of the issues, motives and reasons for the problems society faces, that have until now been carefully hidden from view.
Repurposing the inevitable period of chaos and change we are now experiencing so the outcome is meaningful change that will benefit us all isn’t a certainty. But by considering what is likely to change, what positive change will look like, and how we can take steps to thrive and survive as we experience that change, the chances are that we can all become a positive influence on what our future will be.
If you are ready to embrace meaningful change, it’s time to look inside.
Forgive me if I am wrong. But I was under the impression that the run up to an election was the time for politicians to come up with the giveaways and promises that were designed to buy votes. Not turn potential voters away.
Yes, its cynical I know. But very few of us could honestly say that we expect anything from politicians of any of the political parties we know today.
Deep down, we all know, that the messages, soundbites and slogans are typically aimed at the many of us who aren’t really asking questions, in the hope that we will mindlessly walk to the Polling Station at some point in the coming months and hand our vote to politicians who really shouldn’t be anywhere near public responsibility of any kind.
However, without real alternatives, that’s exactly what the next General Election Day promises to be. The chance for us either to refuse to vote, because there’s no real public representation to vote for, or to vote for the Political Party that we currently believe is most likely to do us the least harm.
Yet Friday showed us all something different.
What we heard from the Prime Minister went way beyond the desperate words of someone leading a party that has been trusted with the responsibility of government for too long. Forlornly doing the best they can to limit the scope of the coming electoral disaster.
Rishi Sunak’s speech on Friday heralded a level of ignorance, cold-heartedness and outright hatred of others, who our politicians identify as not being the same as themselves, now being manifested in a way that we might not have seen in the UK since the Victorian era or perhaps even before.
Don’t be mistaken. The so-called attack on sick culture, those who supposedly live on benefits as a lifestyle choice and people with disabilities, whether they be physical or of the mental health kind, may indeed be a popular policy amongst those who are still earning enough to cover the unstoppable inflation of prices for every basic essential that every human being needs, to remain human.
But the number of those who have more than enough is dwindling all the time. And if they are not already, many who are already working full time jobs will soon be asking themselves how long it will be until they have to reach out to ask for benefits, charity from somewhere like a food bank, or most likely use a credit card or some other financial device like a loan and go into debt, just to pay the bills, have food on the table or sit on a winter evening with light and enough heat.
Creating the idea that nobody should take more than 12 months to get a job really would be quite an insulting suggestion – even if it were meant to be a joke.
But to suggest that the way to tackle the mental health issues that those claiming unemployment related benefits suffer is to push them into work, tells us all too clearly, either a) how ridiculously out of touch or b) how inhuman or actually evil, the people running the UK today really are.
Being in Poverty today
As someone who grew up in poverty, I experienced all the stereotypical issues that the majority of today’s politician’s actions would suggest qualifies someone like me for life’s dustbin.
Last Autumn I found myself at the end of a long journey, studying a postgraduate course in Sustainable Agriculture and Food Security and visiting a local Food Bank to undertake research and relate my own experiences from childhood in the 70’s and 80’s to what those with a comparable life experience have to deal with today.
What I found was extremely sobering, when put in the context of how poverty is considered by decision makers and those who formulate public policy.
Whilst a technical awareness and therefore systematic approach to provision for the poor has existed in some way for much longer than many realise, the dynamics of poverty are continually changing. Yet ‘the more things change, the more they stay the same’.
The only way that any of us and especially those who should be making provision to help those in need could do so in a way that goes beyond basic giveaways or cash handouts – as is how the benefits system really operates right now, would be to gain a direct understanding of what it is really like to be at the mercy of the welfare and benefits system today. And for as long as the problem exists, to regularly revisit and keep tangibly in touch.
Everything that government and the public sector provides through welfare and the benefits system today is focused upon dealing with the effects of the problem. Rather than doing even the slightest thing to address the causes of the actual problem itself.
Taking benefits away without addressing this will not encourage anyone to help themselves. It will just remove some of the help that is already nowhere near enough and condemn countless more to worse than anything anyone in living memory has seen before.
Being out of touch is no excuse for any politician. Least of all a British Prime Minister
The underlying message that anyone paying close attention would have understood from Sunak’s speech on Friday was This is the fault of the people who are in this situation.
They are the guilty bastards here and helping them beyond what we can get away with means we are throwing money away that we could spend on something that will help us get elected again.
That a Prime Minister of the UK could be a former banker and billionaire who has never wanted for anything and has absolutely no idea of the hell that people on the breadline experience every day, whilst politicians and the media gaslight us with messages like ‘INFLATION IS GOING DOWN’ is bad enough.
But to stand there and tell the Country that there is no excuse for not working when people cannot support themselves when they do, is frankly beyond absurd.
The problem that politicians helped create and won’t tackle. But are happy to blame on anyone else
It should be obvious to the political classes that anyone who can work and earn a wage that covers their costs without them needing to claim benefits, call upon charity or go into debt is usually happy and unlikely to cause any form of social problem for anyone else.
It should be just as obvious that when a benefits system that does everything that it can to devalue those seeking support, to the degree that claiming benefits is a cause of mental health issues for many in itself, that switching from being fully dependent upon benefits and other help, to then being dependent upon benefits, other help AND working perhaps full time, doesn’t offer a genuine incentive for anyone who is already feeling like the world is against them.
Working full time in any job that doesn’t pay the employee enough to survive independently and without support may be considered legal by today’s politicians and Prime Minister Rishi Sunak.
We need leaders. Not morally bankrupt politicians who see the workings of the world in purely financial terms
The majority of those on benefits today and the increasing number who are set to join them, as technology like AI takes over jobs, are all victims of the current system of governance and leadership which is wholly money-centric and facilitates a public sector that is financially and materially self-obsessed.
People and the humanity that governs real life no longer matter.
Because money has become god and an increasingly dehumanised set of values has been inserted and taken its place across our culture and within daily life.
If we remain on the pathway and the trajectory that politicians have set us upon, the levels of poverty that we are experiencing today are set to get exponentially worse.
It doesn’t need to be this way. It never should have been
Every function of business, or government and any not-for-profit organisation has benefit or service to people or human beings at its core.
The function of every action taken in the world should therefore always be with people and the benefit to humanity in mind. Rather than being the upside-down system that it has become, where everything every decision or action is based purely and unequivocally on what profit can be made or carrying out any necessary task for the absolute minimum that those in charge believe they can afford.
This is why prices, and the cost of living, are out of control. Everything else we are told is just another excuse.
The reason that politicians will not even acknowledge this, is because the blow-back or retribution that would come from the businesses and the elites that fund them, that they look up to and whom they wish to emulate or be, would be ruthlessly destructive.
Fulfilling the role that we are correct to expect of our politicians could easily lead them to being the future benefits claimant they are so happy to make it so difficult to be today.
That’s why no matter what they say, nothing they do will ever lead to meaningful change.
The Basic Living Standard
People on low wages and benefits cannot afford to survive or function independently and without help today.
Because making a profit for those who control and influence the system has become far more important than ensuring that life for everyone within the system is something that each and every one of us can afford.
Yet that is exactly the message that we can all see and hear just as soon as we begin to understand how business, money and government really work.
Facts are facts. And if we were to change, transform, reform, renew or reset the whole system, so that we put the ability of the lowest paid to support themselves independently at the heart of everything and what everyone does, rather than funneling everything towards wealth accumulation in a system that only ever works out well for the few, the problems that society faces – that the rich caused and now want to punish us all for – would quickly disappear. Along with the majority of the other issues that are causing such deep division and unrest within these very turbulent times.
Making it a legal requirement that everyone working a full working week must be paid enough to cover the costs of all essentials and basics, without the need for benefits, charity or going into debt does of course sound impossible at first glance.
But that is because the system has now reached the point where it is so skewed, the messages in every direction are screaming at us that real life is no longer something that everyone can afford and that by creating a situation where others gain, you will inadvertently create circumstances where you will be losing yourself.
However,for some to be rich doesn’t mean that others must be poor, and we now need leadership that is prepared to put the needs of humanity first. Rather than continuing to suck up to and pay homage to those who are obsessed only with the bottom line.
None of the politicians we have to choose from today are even in the room with the changes that now need to be made.
It is unlikely that they even understand the realities of what needs to be done.
It is highly regrettable that we have reached a point in human history where it has become culturally acceptable, and it is therefore considered ‘normal’, for others to be poor and that we overlook or just accept this as long as we continue to be doing alright for ourselves.
That’s how our leaders view everything today and how every one of us who isn’t being touched by the realities of the cost-of-living crisis and the explosive inflation that the elites have created but tell us in the same breath doesn’t exist, still believe.
Would it be better for us all to care about each other and enjoy the benefits of what it is to be truly human? Or spend every minute that remains of our lives building layer after layer of protection around ourselves and the fake money that only we believe in, so that everyone else exists in misery and pays a very real, but nonetheless incalculable cost for our greed?
“The world has enough for everyone’s need, but not enough for everyone’s greed.”
It’s nearly the middle of April and 2024 has been a washout. You don’t need to be a farmer to know there’s little that feels normal about the wet weather and I know I’m not alone in feeling like it’s been raining nonstop since Christmas.
Is there a conspiracy at work? Is the weather being manipulated? Is this all part of some concocted grand plan?
Well, in terms of the things we should really be worried about, getting lost in the debate over whether Mother Nature or some malevolent force is behind the growing threat of a failed harvest this summer is the only real rabbit hole there is to fall down.
Hopeful as I am for our struggling farmers, that the weather will turn around and put everything back on track, the sober way to start thinking about issues that should really be concerning anyone looking at the wider U.K. food security and production situation is to question how decision makers will frame what may soon be recognised as the 2024 harvest crisis and how they will then respond.
Of all the food security issues we are facing today, which include but are not limited to deglobalisation, climate change, retail profiteering, political ineptitude and anything that falls under the manufactured problems that need a logic defying solution too, weather should never have been the one problem that has the potential to end up making our fragile food security situation even worse.
The reality that we and our farmers face, is that a failed harvest across in 2024 will play straight into the hands of those who believe and advocate that the U.K. doesn’t need to grow its own food.
There is an unsettling belief at work within the establishment that our food supply can always be guaranteed to come from somewhere abroad, and that new technologies and factory foods – like ground up insects, lab growing and warehouse production – will solve all problems. This mindset results in the fallacious idea that there is little reason to continue pandering to farmers who can only be productive when they are a) told what to grow, and then b) are paid for doing so.
Farmers are being set up to fail
For an essential industry already in crisis and under attack from an establishment that views food security and all of the highly beneficial add ons that U.K. produced food can give British people as trivia they can do without, the ongoing storm is one that couldn’t have landed at a less helpful time.
The real risk to U.K. farmers is that government will make token gestures, but in truth do very little to help the industry in the immediate aftermath.
This is likely to lead to many more business exits for what should really be thriving farming businesses, and a situation arising quickly where the U.K. becomes perilously close to losing the ability to feed itself, even at emergency or wartime levels, using recognisable farming methods that are beneficial for everyone involved in the food chain.
Whilst there is growing unrest among farmers, a belief that the powers that be will eventually step in and save the day still regrettably persists.
It is regrettably fair to say that the misconception that government understands the risks to an already critically vulnerable food supply is easily dismissed when we consider that the equivalent of around only 54% of the food we eat is currently grown in the U.K.
Decision makers either don’t see the risk or they don’t want to see the risk. And whichever it is, the result for U.K. farmers, U.K. food production and U.K. food security is pretty much the same.
U.K. farming, the infrastructure that supports it and the legislation that facilitates it might not be anywhere near able to feed the uk population without help today.
But that doesn’t mean that it cannot. It certainly doesn’t mean that the industry shouldn’t redirect, reform and repurpose where needed, so that U.K. food sovereignty is no longer viewed as being pie in the sky.
The wide range of green, environmental, climate, food quality, nutrition, transparency and other farm and food related issues, that have different activists fighting each other for air would all be resolved by getting behind U.K. farmers and food production to refocus. U.K. agriculture will only be saved by moving away from the Globalist/EU production models to one that puts locality and traditional methods at the centre – albeit in a 21st century form.
The power for change sits within the hands of our farmers themselves and the trades that align around U.K. agriculture.
Although many still don’t see it this way, it would be wise for anyone and everyone with an interest in being able to grow or eat a regular, sustainable supply of good, healthy and nutritious food to watch carefully what the establishment does and how it responds if the realities of a 2024 harvest crisis begin to unfold.
If you lost your job and had no savings or help from loved ones to fall back on, how would you feel if you took any job you could to find that you still couldn’t afford to live?
If benefits put you in the same position, would you take the job or conclude it would be better to just ‘sign on’?
Without enough money to pay every bill, to eat, to stay warm, to travel and do everything else you need to do for yourself, would you feel good about selling yourself to a prospective employer – especially as the worry of the debt you are in starts to mount up?
These are all real questions that increasing numbers of people are asking themselves today and every day.
The real travesty is that too many others have been asking these same questions for a very long time and without the cost-of-living crisis and runaway inflation problem, had previously been hidden from our view.
Our obsession with money and the accumulation of material wealth has meant leaving increasing numbers of people behind. Whilst a broken and privately controlled money system has steadily funneled the volume and value that we believe money to have towards a progressively smaller number of ‘the few’.
We have been conditioned to believe that for us to experience material wealth, abundance and to be financially rich, that others must have the experience of being vulnerable or poor.
It is an equation that works well. Until we find that we ourselves are the ones who need the help – as many of us living in this broken system regrettably now are.
Everything wrong with society that we see whether it’s price inflation, crime, crumbling public services or out of touch politicians, are all symptomatic of the same thing:
We don’t value each person as a human being, and we don’t value every person in the same way.
The key to a better life, better future and a better world for all, is a return to values and humanity that can only be achieved by shifting the focus of everything to locality and to ensuring that every person is able to sustain themselves financially, without the need for support.
There’s no such thing as a free lunch. So, when it comes to giving away money, anyone who thinks that a Universal Basic Income is going to help anyone and in particular our farmers, either has an agenda they aren’t sharing, or they don’t have any real understanding of the true cost of making UBI work.
UBI is certainly well intended. A lot of research and thinking has gone into the trials and projects where a localised equivalent of a guaranteed basic income has been tried.
The problem is UBI is a solution that uses the creation or printing of money to enable it to work.
Money creation or printing is an essential part of the FIAT monetary system that we have today. The same system that is the root cause of all the money related and inflationary problems that we and our farmers are facing.
It is ironic that giving cash handouts to farmers would only build upon the culture of dependency that now exists, where the conditioned over reliance on subsidies and guaranteed contracts have made farmers vulnerable to the greed underpinning big money and profiteering retailers. Corporate interests that are not only taking all the profit that would be available from the food chain if it were accurately priced, but they are also using their market positions to inflate prices even further so that they can continue to take even more, without giving a damn about the impact and consequences for us all.
Minded that every one of us needs food every day in pretty much the same way that we need water and the air that we breathe, it defies sense or logic that British Farmers should be in a situation where they cannot have a secure, financially sound and fair-income-paying business, in return for providing a service which really should be considered a public good.
That farmers cannot survive and there are now organisations suggesting that UBI is the answer makes very clear that the working model or operational platform for British Agriculture is broken.
This reality is all the more alarming given the fact that in a time of growing world crisis, we only grow the equivalent of around 52% of our own food in the U.K.
Regrettably, the farming problem isn’t one that good politicians would be able to fix in isolation. Because the issues farmers are facing are interconnected with many other areas of public policy that are breaking down today. All for no bigger reason than we have now had decades of politicians and the political parties they represent that have become increasingly poor.
If good politicians were representing us all as they should be today, the focus on farming would be to use legislation to immediately end the profiteering, price manipulation and speculation taking place that keeps taking money from the food chain without adding any form of value.
The next step would likely be to provide financial support and other legislation to help farmers transform food production and the pathway to retail to a system which is a contemporary version of what we had historically, where food was produced and consumed locally and in much more original, unprocessed and therefore healthier forms.
However, we don’t have good politicians and when the eagerly anticipated General Election comes, we will not have the option of good politicians to choose from even then.
This leaves farmers with a very difficult choice. To remain at the mercy of poor politicians who say lots but do very little. Or step back from conformity with the current broken system, take the risk of funding change themselves and then taking the lead and working closely with consumers who are the other key stakeholders in the food chain, so that food security, healthy nutritious food, and viable food producing businesses supplying every one of our local communities are brought back.
Adam Tugwell 