Today, the establishment offers us ‘The Minimum Wage’ and ‘The Living Wage’.
However, neither the Minimum Wage nor the Living Wage are genuinely representative of what it costs a single person to live independently, without having to rely upon Benefits or Welfare, Charity such as Food Banks, or going into Debt of some kind, in order to meet the real Cost of Living or threshold for independent living.
The reality that government subsidises low wages through income support, housing benefits, tax relief is overlooked by many, because the ‘official’ or ‘establishment’ narrative is that if you received the Minimum Wage or its equivalent, you have enough money to live.
Sadly, the many truths that surround life experience where there is lack, reliance upon others and a culture that looks down upon anyone who needs financial help in ways that too often suggest guilt is overlooked by the very people who should know better.
Every Person should have the ability to live and support themselves independently in the lowest paid work, irrespective of background, qualifications, experience or any factor that could be used to excuse some form of prejudice on the part of others.
Creating and implementing A Basic Living Standard would provide an equal financial or material footing for Every Person is both a necessary and required foundation for the Just, Balanced and Fair society, that we all deserve.
The Basic Living Standard
“Adults, working a full working week in any job at any level, must be able to feed, house, clothe and provide adequately for their own transport needs, whilst providing basic necessities such as communication themselves, without the need for credit, loans, benefits or third-party support of any kind.”
To work effectively and as it should, The Basic Living Standard would become the key requirement of all business and economic activities.
Every economic activity and transaction would be made and progressed with The Basic Living Standard in mind and no economic activity would exist that does not place People and the impact and consequence to People at its core.
The Basic Living Standard will help flip the value set across society and address every wider social problem that society faces, leaving the Public Sector to take care of those who have genuine problems that have not been caused by societal conditioning or environmental factors, as it always should.
The Basic Living Standard could either be adopted as a voluntary change, or as the way to move forward, should the unthinkable happen and we experience some kind of system collapse, where a new form of governance is finally accepted as being essential for change.
From the position where I am looking at everything UK Farmers and the supporting businesses and sectors around them now face, I regrettably believe that a collapse of UK Farming and our Food Chain is now inevitable.
The accelerating downward trajectory of UK Farming will not be stopped until events take over, or the majority of UK Farmers step back and see everything they face differently.
Quite a statement I know. Not least of all because it flies in the face of a great many names that the industry respects, whom I have no personal quarrel with.
Somewhat disconcertingly, despite the bubbles of different interests that exist across the industry; when it comes to the answers, solutions and whatever we can expect to happen next, everyone – other than perhaps just a few like me – is looking the very same way.
Expectation vs Reality
Farmers, Farmers membership and advocacy organisations and even No Farmers No Food expect the problems the industry has to be solved by the same people and organisations that not only caused them, but are accelerating the problems being experienced right now.
Few Farmers agree with what I have to say. Because those who are Farming today typically see Farming, the role of Farming and how Farming is being treated by industry and government in a very different way.
To be fair, I wouldn’t expect anything else. Farmers are far from being alone when it comes to the questions over what we know, what we believe and what is normal to expect from the businesses and organisations that we have relationships with and most importantly, the people that we elect.
However, it really shouldn’t be hard for anyone to stop, step back and remember that what we see and what is happening can be very different things.
Power of the political and financial kind has always been open to abuse. Many will have heard the expression ‘Give them bread and circuses’ that dates to Roman times and demonstrates how the public have always been ‘played’. So that those in power can reduce the risk to their position, no matter what might be going on.
Unfortunately, we are navigating a period of human history where manipulation in the forms of marketing, narratives and fear rolled out in many peculiar forms, is used very effectively to create a situation where any one of us can find ourselves questioning our own common sense and what we actually believe.
The internet, smart phones and the arrival of the most recent forms of Artificial Intelligence have made the problem all the more severe.
The reality that we do question what we can trust at least peripherally has the rather perverse outcome for many of making it even more likely that we will trust people and organisations, because of who they are and how their roles are presented to us, when we really shouldn’t be doing anything other than steering a wide berth from anything they say or compel us to do.
In real terms, this means that anyone, including Farmers, no matter how well educated or experienced, is likely to believe and accept as truth whatever those benefitting from whatever is happening to each and every Farm want us or that Farmer to believe.
The attack on UK Farming didn’t begin on 30th October, when The Chancellor unveiled the assault on Inheritance Tax Relief on the generational transfer of working Family Farms.
What it did herald however, was the step of taking the war to destroy UK Food Production as we have known it, into the open. Instead of the whole thing being hidden in plain sight, as it has been for decades before.
They have done this:
Either because the politicians we have and those who advise or influence them are now confident enough that the industry no longer has the clout or leverage to stop them.
Or more likely, because they are now desperate to contain the threat of power being returned to the Farmers themselves.
(Because the whole system that has been working and undermining everything for greed, profit and control since the early 70’s has now reached a point where the economic system that underpins it could collapse, and they could lose their control at any time.)
The outcry from the general public over Farmers IHT has taken the political classes more than a little by surprise.
They believed that the accompanying narrative that ‘Farmers must pay their way like everyone else’ would very quickly resonate with the general public. Given that the left has always happily propagated myths like ‘You never see a poor Farmer’.
What the establishment didn’t expect was a predominantly visceral response from so many different people. Where instincts have told even those not consciously thinking about it that any attack on Farming isn’t about Farming. It’s actually an attack on our Food.
Is Farming really about self-interest or public interest?
Regrettably, this is where maintaining the momentum for supporting Farmers becomes tricky. Because many Farmers see their businesses as being all about income and profit. In a similar way, if not in the very same sense as the politicians do.
With what seems impeccable timing and within a month of the Budget announcement, an initiative landed on social media that informed anyone watching that a new methane-reducing feed supplement initiative is about to be launched and underway using Farms that are contracted into the corporate system.
The relationship between Farms and a processor suggests that this isn’t a matter of choice.
So, it didn’t come as any great surprise that the issues raised by the implications of ‘playing god with natural processes’ would immediately create a new division between those who ‘cannot’ say no to such ‘trials’, because of the financial implications of doing so, and those who see and are at least beginning to question the vein of commonality flowing through every attack on UK Farming.
The last minutes of a VERY long game
Whether its supermarket prices, chemical additive use required by processors, the freeing up of capital that invested in Land and Farms through new punitive taxes, the disintegrating financial support from government and the public sector, or the bureaucracy that has steadily transformed everything since our membership of the deliberately flawed Common Market and latterly The EU began, they all have a war on the ability of the UK and more importantly our communities to run and thrive independently with Food in common at their very core.
In the world we are now being shoehorned into, Money talks and bullshit quite literally walks.
Food Production as we traditionally know it, is the antithesis of everything that those controlling our lives and businesses want and represent.
Who am I and why am I presenting a different understanding of the status quo?
I realise and understand why few can see or even agree with what I am saying here and what I write, speak and publish about Food, Farming and Food Security – amongst many other public policy related things.
Before 12 years in frontline politics, roles in professional charity leadership and years of being an entrepreneur and living the highs and traumatising lows of being in and around businesses, I began my career in farming – where I always had a strong affiliation with the Dairy Sector and made many friendships as a Young Farmer that I maintain to this day.
Farming and specifically Agri-contracting is a big thing within my wider family and beyond the proud heritage of my grandfather being a highly skilled wheelwright and pioneer in hydraulic farm trailer manufacturing, my great grandfather was a steam ploughman too.
My active interest in politics, or rather my driving belief in something better for everyone, in public service and for community working has been at the centre of so much of what I have done and what I still do.
That interest has taken me on a path that led me to appreciate how important the independence of local Food Chains to Our Future will now be. But also, to spend time completing a Postgraduate Certificate in Sustainable Agriculture and Food Security at the Royal Ag, where my fears about the position and outlook of the industry and where it is being led were starkly confirmed and amplified.
The watershed UK Farming is now within
It is difficult for anyone thinking rationally or logically to believe the realities and mechanics of the position that Farming and the wider economy now find themselves in.
Not because of the expertise and knowledge that is there to be tapped into by those who need it suggests otherwise.
But because nothing that is happening to Farming, to people or in politics at any level across the UK as we know it today, is in any way that which it seems.
I’m sure that you will agree it is more than likely that anyone questioned would at least admit that they believe something is going very wrong. Even if they cannot or would not try to identify what that something is.
In the few days after the Budget bombshell was dropped, I began writing ‘Who Controls Our Food Controls Our Future’, in an attempt to open up the reality of what is happening and why within the UK Food Chain.
I did so in what does today feel like the forlorn hope that at least some of the people and businesses that I care so deeply about would at the very least conduct a review of what they currently believe to be true.
Within ‘Who Controls Our Food Controls Our Future’, I discussed the strange but nonetheless compelling ‘situational bias’ that is holding us back from looking at anything and everything differently to what we already know and do.
Because we have trapped ourselves with the belief that we can only trust the sources, systems, procedures, businesses, organisations and news channels that we already know.
It is this situational bias that today presents the greatest risk to the future of UK Farming and with it the UKs Food Security and our Food Supply.
All of which should quite rightly be placed at the heart and function of our Local Communities and everything that we know.
Sadly, most of us still believe that the mind of Politicians can be changed politically. When the game that they are playing and which the politicians and those who control them have framed, isn’t politics at all.
By continuing to engage in any way that shows deference to them and their system and their way of working, rather than just sticking to the basic level of adherence to the rules which the current way of working requires that we all respect, the power of change and control over our future remains firmly in their hands.
The option to save UK Farming and with it our Food Security and a future that will give us all much more besides exists.
But it is also a journey and process where there isn’t politics of the kind that Westminster controls involved.
Play it their way or play it our way.
The Food that UK Farmers can produce is a key part of Our Future. But the choice of whether Farms end up at the centre of that future, or die without anyone other than the politicians themselves knowing why is for Farmers to decide.
Like everything. Its all about the way that we think.
One destination can yield two or more different outcomes. Depending upon the reason and the motivation for being there.
This statement sums up the dilemma that we all face in terms of how different parts of our lives and how our collective life experiences are going to play out for us over the coming months and years.
The different or alternative outcomes we can expect depend upon choices that we make that we may well continue not to realise that we are even making.
They could as easily be made by the impact of an event or a series of events that make a certain destination or a range of different destinations inevitable. Rather than any of them being either a conscious or unconscious choice.
So, what are the choices we face?
The choices we face are quite literally about the way that we live. The lifestyles we have. The food we eat. The houses we live in. The way that we work. The way that we are entertained and that we entertain ourselves. The ways that we value education and life skills. The way that we see, respect and value others. The way that we interact with our community and the services and resources that we share. The way that we travel. The way that we treat nature and the environment. The way that we consider the future. The way that we think about others and the way that we think about ourselves.
The list is indeed long. But those who can see this will also understand that we are always making a choice.
What many don’t yet realise is that some, if not many of the choices that we have to make will not be based upon the things or the experiences that we have that are outside of ourselves.
Rather, the choices that we have to make will be about how we choose to interpret the value of the things or experiences that are outside of us, how we think about them and how we respond to them within.
Examples of these choices in life are already being presented to us to make. But the way that we are experiencing them today does not materialise in forms that we recognise as being a conscious choice.
We are experiencing critically important choices like a decision or a change that is being imposed upon us by those with responsibility over our lives. And these changes are being implemented in ways that make it feel like we don’t have any choice.
The reason that this is happening to the majority of us today is it is only the people who are controlling the lives of others who have any real reason to think and plan ahead for the way that society and the system or way of doing things will work for the future that lies ahead.
However, these same people have been planning ahead and making decisions that now affect every part of our lives for decades past. And we are all paying a very heavy price.
Decisions constantly made to benefit and enrich the few at the cost of the many do not come cheaply.
Today, the ‘powers’ that control everything are only too well aware that time is running out for the system that has progressively hurt and impoverished everyone else, whilst they and their kind have become increasingly rich.
They are making attempts to mitigate the impact of the decisions that they have already made by creating and implementing public policies that we have never consented to and have never even discussed.
We experience what is being done ‘to us’ and ‘to our lives’ as if we are being controlled and are heading into a world where we will increasingly be told what we can and cannot do.
The reason that this approach is so offensive to us is regrettably simple. It involves the rather difficult relationship that we all have with truth.
Deep down, often unconsciously or without thinking, we realise that whilst it may never have been our conscious intention to live unsustainably and to cherish money and material wealth above all things and most of the people in our lives, this is exactly what we have done.
Those who control everything today are well aware of what they have already imposed upon everyone. Because the addiction to money and material living that many of us don’t even realise that we have is also one that they share.
Guilt always likes company after all.
Servicing the addiction to wealth and the power and control that comes with it by changing the worlds of others, so that they help to feed the addiction of your own, is something that only those who are addicted who have power over everyone and everything else are able to do.
The actions of an addict who is acting to feed their own habit and the habits of those around them are never accompanied by any kind of rational consideration or feeling for the cost and impact upon anyone else whom their actions might involve.
For those whose lives have not reached the point of addictive compulsion, the process of waking up to or understanding what they are experiencing and then making the conscious decision to live differently and take back control, is where the pathway back to where sanity – and this case humanity – can begin.
The greatest ill that our addiction to money and material living has inflicted upon us is unsustainable living.
It’s what we might recognise as focusing purely on the things and the experiences that we ‘want’, rather than the things and experiences that we ‘need’.
All of the problems that the world faces today are wrapped up in the offshoots of unsustainable living.
Unsustainable living spans our experiences of life at world level, from the impact of globalisation and the way that money rules everything, to the personal impact of the dehumanisation of relationships and the diminishing value we place on community, the people who are around us every day, and the meaning that values have or should have across our lives.
Greed, selfishness, separation and everything we interpret as making us different are at the root cause of all the problems that we face. Yet we today fall into the trap of mistaking the effects of the problems as the cause themselves.
The mess that we are in has been developing for a very long time and the biggest issue that we all face is whether events will take the decisions out of our hands, or if enough of us can wake up to the reality we now face and change the direction that we are all going in time.
You’ve just been elected as an MP and your political group or party holds the majority of Seats in Parliament.
Your group or party now has power over everything. Can change anything. Can be anything. Can do everything that you all promised the people who voted for you when you were successfully elected, just the other day.
In the briefings and within the advice that was never available to you and your political colleagues before the election took place, you are told very clearly, that everything the last government was actually doing, no matter what they were saying publicly, was the only way that they were able to keep government and the public sector running.
The alternative was that the economy, quickly followed by the government and then all public services would simply collapse.
As you catch your breath, you realise that all the things that have been hurting people, whether it was the cost-of-living crisis, inflation, house building, immigration, the benefits crisis or many other of the other social issues you have promised to tackle are all connected to the economy.
You now understand that everything in The System relates to money and specifically to ‘growth’ and the GDP that sits behind it in some way.
People of all kinds, all ages and all backgrounds are struggling.
You saw it only too well as you campaigned before the election was held. Pain and suffering was lurking in just about every direction that you looked.
You are told that you can keep the economy running. Just as long as you keep finding credible reasons to spend.
‘Credible’ reasons are what you need to build and maintain the narrative that justifies the reason to borrow and print money. So that ‘growth’ hides all of the problems, and the money you have created keeps flowing in all the directions that The System demands that it should.
However, there is a cost.
The cost of ‘keeping the economy going’ will be that you cannot step back or away from any policy that already exists, no matter how you sell it to the public.
This will mean there will need to be a growing number of people within the population and reasons to spend on all the goods and services that they will need, so that you can justify spending more and more of that created money, and that money can keep being passed between all the different parts of the economy that provide goods and services to meet the basic needs of people.
This is the way that the problem and more importantly the size of that problem, can continue to be hidden from view.
You know what you promised. You know what you said.
You were going to be ‘The difference’, ‘The change’ and you are now faced with making things worse instead.
The question you now ask yourself; ‘Is it better just to keep managing things, in a state of ongoing but ‘managed decline’, or do you do the right thing and deliver on your promises, knowing that the immediate after effect is likely to be a complete ‘System Collapse’, that is probably now inevitable, but could be delayed if you ‘keep the plates spinning’ instead?
The biggest elephant in this economic room and probably the reason why Kier Starmer was falling over himself over the use of the term and definition of ‘working people’, is there is a growing underclass of the population who cannot earn enough money to pay for the basic essentials that they need to live each week or month.
The ‘Minimum Wage’ – even at the £12.21 it is expected to reach in April 2025, will not meet the basic cost of living.
The Minimum Wage is not enough for a single person, living alone, to be able to meet all of their basic or essential needs and expenses, without having financial help, receiving benefits of some kind, getting support from a charity like a Food Bank, or by going into debt.
The Politicians who do know and understand this – and please be under no illusion that those at Cabinet Level really should know what it really costs to live, also know that if they were to openly and publicly recognise that the National Minimum Wage isn’t anywhere near enough for a single adult who is living alone to live on, they would then be required to act.
Acting would require an immediate uplift of the Minimum Wage to a figure that is today likely to be around £15.00 per hour.
However, whilst the truth that this economic model can only make some rich by making many poor cannot be ignored, the imposition of a genuine Minimum Wage overnight would have immediate knock-on effects for everything and effectively bring the entire economy to a halt. For no better reason than the economic model that we currently have can only exist and function by exploiting people in this way.
When asked, most people who understand how business and money works will recognise that there is something very wrong with the way this economic model works. But will inevitably return to the response ‘It’s just the way it is’ and ‘Nothing can be done about it’.
This false position of inevitability or that it is impossible to change would be fine, were it not the fact that the people taking this position are typically not those being affected by it.
Adam Tugwell 