Category: Health

The introduction of Price controls on foods, goods and services may become essential as this cost-of-living crisis develops. We would be fools to rule out rationing becoming necessary too

Yes, it does feel a bit like being the voice of doom and gloom as I write and produce videos about all the things that are going on and talk about what we can realistically expect as being likely to happen next.

The point is, that if someone like me can see what is happening and what is likely to happen next, the people we have elected as MPs have absolutely no excuse not to do so too.

In fact, our public representatives should be well ahead of the curve in both their horizon scanning and thinking than most.

Regrettably, they are not.

To be fair, the complexity of the growing problems and how each and every one of them interacts with the others is mind bogglingly scary to say the least.

Yet it is the culture of ‘let’s always take the easy option’ that exists, top to bottom within the British Political System, that has made the difficulties that are only just starting for us, significantly worse.

There are many people in this Country today who cannot afford to feed themselves, home themselves, clothe themselves, transport themselves or function normally in any way on the wages or income they have, without debt or benefits – or what is really a subsidy from the Government and therefore everyone else in some way.

Prices of the foods, goods and services that provide the basic essentials for life are spiraling out of control. Living at the standard we are experiencing even today, will soon become unaffordable for most.

Yet the complexities I mentioned above, all come back to just one thing: That the economic system we have today has been developed to benefit the self-interests of the few. That those driving it have continued to push prices up in the pursuit of ever-growing profits for as long as our stupid politicians have printed money and kept handing it out. When instead good politicians would have faced up to reality and dealt with the problems for wider society that have been caused by that same greedy few.

The Covid Pandemic has caused stupid politicians and greedy business and financial leaders to overplay their hand.

In fact, the inflationary spiral they have created together is now out of reach of any form of control they possess. Indeed, the only actions our weak-minded politicians have to address the issues are only serving to make the whole problem worse.

Events, or a coming chronology of them – which will have been caused by so many different profit-driven people with influence behaving in the same way, will combine to make basic food unaffordable where it is available. It will be absent from the supermarket and shop shelves where it would otherwise be not.

Food riots, as the system collapses and the old order makes way for a new one that will work for all will settle the mind of many. Especially the politicians that we have for the time that their waning power remains.

Greed, hoarding and any kind of self-driven prioritisation will have to go out of the window.

That will mean supermarket rationing as we experienced during the early Lockdowns. There will be an immediate need for Government to step in and fix prices along the entire food and essential goods supply chain, so that nobody can use this time of crisis to profit off the backs of us all.

Some of the more economically minded will baulk at the idea of any kind of price fixing, price regulation or price controls, because of its non-capitalist and non-market-friendly nature.

But the reality is that the epoch of easy money and making massive profits by exploiting the many to benefit the already bloated few, is now reaching its end.

A new system will emerge that will be fair to all. But it will not resemble anything that we’ve seen or experienced before.

As we walk the pathway to get there, it will be necessary to ensure that what we still have available – which will plenty for all of us without the influence or intervention of ongoing greed – will be made available fairly to all.

Money as we know it is likely to become only one of many different ways to make payment as change takes place. And it is therefore just as likely that rationing of the essentials that are available will also be necessary for everyone.

The times ahead may prove to be painful. But it’s the future which is possible for everyone once the change has been completed that we should look forward to.

The opportunities for a fair and just way of living, where everyone and everything matters are not just a pipe dream. They really exist and are there for us all.

After the pain, we have much happier times in store.

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The Minimum Wage Paradox

The most obvious and apparently most simple way to deal with the Cost-of-Living Crisis is just to put the National Living Wage Rate up, as the Tories have planned for the 2022/23 Tax Year that begins in April.

Most low wage earners will jump at the opportunity to earn 50p an hour more, which works out as £20 extra for a 40-Hour Week and £1000 over the course of the year.

The problem that we now face in this respect alone is that prices of everyday items and energy on their own are likely to swallow up that amount from the pockets of many before the changes have even come into effect.

Whilst a Minimum Wage requirement seems like a very logical rule to have, the rather depressing and counterintuitive flip side of the National Living Wage is that it gives big employers a get out of jail free card when it comes to setting a realistic wage level for frontline roles within their business.

Greedy owners, shareholders and managers – often themselves being paid many times more than their frontline staff – are very happy to use the Minimum Wage benchmark because the Government has set the standard. And it works very well for them because there is an assumed belief that Government control is as far as it goes.

Companies are quite literally using the reference point of the National Living Wage as an excuse not to pay more, when in many cases there is no doubt that they could.

The dilemma is that without the Minimum Wage – as was the case until 1999 – businesses will always pay the lowest paid workers the absolute minimum that they can. They would surely return to this way of employing staff in minimum wage levels were to be scrapped.

Just because employers can get away with anchoring wages around the level of the National Living Wage, it doesn’t follow that they actually should.

Many larger businesses could afford to pay staff more right now by reducing their profits. But as so many of these companies are now shareholder-led, there is an expectation that the bottom line and the dividend payouts will always be prioritised above employees instead.

When the basic wage pays for everything anyone needs without them needing benefits or taking on debt, workers will be happy and jobs that people now avoid will be enthusiastically filled

The Cost-of-Living Crisis that our Politicians and Mainstream Media are now being forced to recognise is a life experience for many that is nothing new.

In fact, it is only because of the current circumstances that the Politicians and the Media have unwittingly encouraged that the situation is now beginning to become acute. The price to survive is starting to touch so many different areas of life, that the establishment can no longer avoid the truth that they find so unpalatable. The consequences of years of self-interest and inaction can no longer be kept out of sight.

Last Friday morning, Interviewers on BBC Breakfast News talked to paid carers and homecare companies struggling to find and provide staff to deliver a service that we may not want to accept that many of us at some point may need daily or perhaps more when we reach later life.

Social Care a political hot potato that is the subject of debate in its own right. But as an industry predominantly led by private profit-making companies, it offers perhaps one of the very best examples of how wage levels for staff in frontline hands-on roles are disproportionately low when considering the purpose that they fulfil.

Indeed, many of those who carry out this work require benefits or what are effective subsidies from the public purse in order that they can both work and survive.

Like many of the roles fulfilled by the people who are now beginning to struggle with the Cost-of-Living Crisis first hand, employed healthcare workers are being paid the Government set ‘National Living Wage’ or Minimum Wage, which from April will be £9.50 an hour, or £380.00 for a 40-Hour working week.

£19,760.00 per year simply isn’t enough for anyone to survive fully independently without support, benefits or going into debt on today’s terms.

There is a very important question that needs to be asked of our politicians: ‘Would you want to do, and would you enjoy doing a difficult and physically demanding job for a whole 40-Hour Week and then go to the shops and realise that food is a luxury that you cannot afford?’

The answer would of course be an unmitigated NO.

Whilst the rather obvious answer we would receive from our current Politicians would be sure to be accompanied by comments about all the benefits that are available to low wage earners to support them, there is another very important question the people ruling this Country should answer all of us too: ‘Why does the situation exist where Taxpayers are topping up millions of wages with benefits so that big and otherwise dysfunctional businesses can profit at levels which in most cases are absolutely obscene, given what they pay their frontline staff?’

Paradoxically, the work and effort that it takes those who are able to achieve wage levels that cover the cost of everything that they need is not something that a great many people really cherish or enjoy.

In fact, the quality of life that simple jobs with fixed hours without excessive travel would offer, would be something that many would choose to take – IF that kind of occupational lifestyle could achieve self-sufficiency with the security that everyone deserves as a minimum to achieve.

Despite what anyone with an interest in maintaining the perverse status and rules that allow all of this to exist will tell you, it is not impossible to change things and create a capitalist-based system where everyone can thrive and enjoy their lives fairly – rather than everything being funneled at the few and being maintained at the cost, expense and pain of everyone else who exists.

It is just a shame that we have a political class that is fixated with its own existence rather than seeing the real ills that society faces as something that can actually be fixed.

Sadly, for us all, in their obsession to maintain their positions, our Politicians have bolted shut the democratic doors.

Right now, there is no way we can get real leaders into Parliament who have the ability, wherewithal and commitment to do everything necessary to make life affordable and fair for all.

Removing Plan B is one thing. Doing away with Border Checks is another

Polarised thinking and its accompanying actions being the measure that they are, for lack of thought, understanding, and generally being open to the idea that none of us either know or are aware of everything, often shows itself rather obtusely in the knee jerk reactions that our current crop of politicians use.

It’s not a good look. And with Boris Johnson still apparently unaware that he is in the middle of the fight for his political life over draconian lockdown measures he imposed that he was not prepared to adhere to himself, it is more than alarming that as we say goodbye to Plan B Restrictions on Thursday, the Transport Secretary is removing all Border Covid Testing as well.

Whilst the Government’s Covid Response, the Covid Measures that it imposed and the behaviour of all of our MPs throughout the Pandemic has been fear-driven and without objectivity, the existence of the Covid Virus has never been in question (even if its origins are).

We should never doubt the trouble that variants of Covid can and will continue to cause until fear has been replaced with practical reality and acceptance, and the illness Covid can cause is treated rationally and proportionally – as it always should have been. For a start, we are not helping ourselves by allowing the treatments, suppressants and interventions that we are being coercively given to be called vaccines when their use is neither stopping the spread of infection or eradicating Covid in any form.

There is a euphoria at work today, being fuelled by our ever-irresponsible mainstream media. One that in its fervour for a return to ‘freedom’ is denying the continued risk from variants coming into our communities from outside of the UK, where it is very easy to believe that the position we are in today with Covid and the variants that we know are in the UK are the same everywhere else.

Things are not the same with Covid everywhere else. And the headlong rush that politicians are now in to get ahead of the tide in public opinion that is turning against them just to save their seats in a future election, is putting the stability that has been hard won through the unnecessary repression of the British People at serious risk.

There was nothing rational about the way the Government responded to Covid, as Boris’ behaviour behind ‘closed doors’ suggests they quickly found out. But neither is there anything rational about trying to pretend that the Pandemic and the consequences from the way that it has been handled are over, and that we can just switch all of it off and skip blithely along the other way.

The damage done by the immoral use of behavioural science to control the general population of our Country by politicians who were themselves driven by fear is very deep indeed.

The mental anguish for individuals and the harm that permeates out from it will continue for a very long time. Indeed, without the arrival of events that touch lives in a way that puts all of the Covid nonsense in practical perspective, we now find ourselves at the whim of potential mass hysteria, each and every time a new variant is found in the UK and then defined.

The uncomfortable truth for many, is that even though our leadership panicked and imposed ‘Plan B’ before Christmas, we were very lucky this time.

We should not therefore, be taking for granted the situation as it currently is. We should be taking every step possible to provide a practical level of security and protection against the external introduction of new variants.

Checking the Covid Status of people entering or returning across our borders from outside the UK is therefore a very small price to pay.

It is very likely that we will live to regret the Tories jump from one polar approach to dealing with Covid to the other extreme – only with the aim of saving their own political necks.

Freedom is hard won and must be protected. The day-to-day freedoms everyone who lives in the UK may be reliant on restricting freedoms that may currently be open but only used by choice and by some of us, so that life can really be returned to ‘normal’ in the majority of other ways.

Levelling Up: Throwing money and shiny gifts at a societal problem won’t change the way people think about each other

‘Levelling Up,’ much like the Cameron Tory ‘Localism’ before, has become one of the Johnsonian Tory watchwords at which the Government funnel every problem outside of London, with a particular emphasis on their forward electioneering across the unexpected 2019 wins across the areas misappropriately named ‘The Red Wall’.

But what is ‘Levelling Up?’ – Do the Tories themselves even know?

On the face of it, the answer to this question is a clear and hearty yes. Yet the confused crossover with ‘Build Back Better’ – which may well be a cynically deliberate move, along with actions such as Culture Minister Nadine Dorries suggesting recruitment at the BBC needed to include more people from working backgrounds instead of using ‘tokenism’ as a recruitment tool when the two things are exactly the same thing, instead tell us that the Conservative Party is clutching at straws when it comes to the question of what real ‘levelling up’ across society is really about.

New infrastructure that improves any community’s way of life, rather than white elephants or the pet projects of out-of-touch politicians that nobody outside of the sphere of government ever accepted as being needed, will always be a good thing.

But the barriers to personal development and the issues of social mobility that come together to tell us that equality in its truest sense does not exist across British society today, cannot be addressed by the quality or existence of a road, railway track or building.

The problems certainly won’t be cured by rejecting left-wing labels for positive discrimination that favor and promote so-called diversity, then replacing it with another set that are only more acceptable because they badge the problem in ways which are more palatable for those on the right wing.

The problems that we have across society; the problems that are stopping people from different backgrounds, races, locations, demographics, sexes, genders or whatever way you want to identify them from ‘getting on’ and achieving a good standard of living as a minimum is simply about the way differences between us are perceived by those with power and influence.

It is a process that exists right from the very start in the way that teachers behave with us as very young children and extends right through every area of life or every activity that prepares us up to how Universities recruit and then how recruitment decisions are made by hiring managers throughout our entire careers.

The ‘discriminatory’ decisions and choices we are talking about here are not the ones that can be catered for or eliminated by rules that are published and made available for reference in any kind of handbook.

These are the innate prejudicial decisions made by those individuals at a level below active consciousness.

They are decisions and choices informed by the prejudices that exist because of personal experience and conditioning. Ways of looking and perceiving the world around us that many people are simply unaware of because they do not self-analyse, reflect or enjoy their reality at the level of self-awareness. And self-awareness is a force for our collective good that in many cases can only be achieved through life experience, rather than it being a skill for life that can be taught.

No, there’s nothing wrong with not being self-aware. But in an age where everything available to us is teaching us that life is ridiculously easy and getting easier all the time, it should come as no surprise that we have a culture where teachers, academics, public servants and even managers across industry mark down, work against or rule out candidates for jobs, opportunities and progression based simply on a feeling or resistance about someone that they do not consciously understand. It is a travesty that they are actively aided to do so by the procedures and rules that years of rights and diversity promotion have created that actively allow bad decisions to be covered up by simply following procedures under umbrella terms such as ‘due diligence’ or ‘good practice’, therefore hiding these inherent wrongs in plain sight.

It is clear that the people who lead us – and by that, I mean the politicians on all sides of today’s political divide – either don’t understand or don’t want to understand the real depth of the problem that faces the UK as far as the realities of anything synonymous with ‘levelling up’ under any political model or leadership is concerned.

This is a reality that should be troubling for us all. It suggests that as a Country and as the Communities that are together part of that Country – right down to our neighborhoods and streets, we are moving further away from a place where people are being actively encouraged to understand and help each other.

It tells us that the measures being taken to address a problem that these people do not themselves understand are quite perversely making the situation worse. And the solutions being touted are at best no more than sticking plasters being applied to what are the ones of many problems that are only effects of a problem that will keep multiplying outwards until such time as we address the actual root cause.

The politicians that we have today are simply not equipped with the ability, understanding or motivation to deal with the problems that we face in a different, meaningful and beneficial way.

Like many of the issues facing society – many of which are interlinked to the issues surrounding real equality in all things, the complexity of the issues and the determination and resolve that it would take just to begin the process of turning this decline in our personal, cultural and community wellbeing around, is just too big for these people to tackle or to risk dealing with – if indeed they do in any way understand.

The seemingly endless march of greed and the reverence for wealth, luxury and money now feel like we are on an unstoppable date with destiny where it will not be politicians, but events that are out of their control which will ultimately turn the tide.

Community and simple living are the key to returning us to a place where we have the values and the willingness to learn about, understand and accommodate the differences that are inherent in all others – no matter how they might otherwise look or be perceived.

This is the real ‘levelling up’.

A vaccination programme using vaccines that do not vaccinate is no vaccination programme at all

As one of the few writing about what the Government was getting wrong with its response to the Covid Pandemic since before even the first Lockdown began, the subject of vaccinations and their use as the anchor upon which our ‘freedom’ laid at rest was one that I covered early on.

Given that we are continually told by the media that we are a significant way into a ‘successful’ Covid vaccination programme, it may seem a little odd that my greatest concern now is that the indefinite period of time it would take to create, test and roll-out an effective vaccine – if one could actually be found, then, is the very same one that I have today – some 17 months later, as we are continually bombarded with Government propaganda that keeps telling us that the so-called vaccines that are available, are being rolled out and are the only way.

The dictionary definition of a Vaccine is ‘any preparation used as a preventative inoculation to confer immunity against a specific disease, usually employing an innocuous form of the disease or agent, as killed or weakened bacteria or viruses, to stimulate antibody production.’

Yet The injections that we are increasingly being coerced into receiving under the pretence of immunisation are not immunising us at all.

People who have received two jabs are still carrying and spreading the Covid Virus. They are falling ill with it, and in some cases are even dying from Covid after being ‘immunised’ – meaning they have not actually been immunised at all. The latest research released into the mainstream even tells us that those who have been vaccinated can carry the very same viral load as those who have not received any jabs.

What we appear to be experiencing, from all of the ‘Covid vaccines’ that have come to market, is the roll out and use of an injected agent that may only reduce the symptoms of any illness caused to the recipient by exposure to the forms of the Covid Virus that were known at the time the formula in use was created.

Reducing the risk of illness caused by the Covid Virus is of course a worthy aim in itself. As such, there remains significant potential value to the health of individuals from receiving medication of this kind if these ‘medicines’ have been fully tested and all of the potential outcomes are identified and known.

What we are actually being given and what the Government is telling us that we are being given as part of this so-called ‘vaccination programme’ are two very different things. Yet the Government’s ongoing approach and the legislation they are considering using, such as ‘vaccine passports’ and the requirement for health workers to be ‘vaccinated’ makes clear that they see them as being the same thing in every single way.

At this stage, it may be useful to make clear that I am not an anti-vaxxer. I have had two Pfizer jabs myself and did so because I believe that consideration for how the Government Behavioural Science programme has impacted people around me and the people I care about is just as important as how I might feel about all of this if I were able to look at it as if I were living in an isolated bubble and completely on my own.

However, we have been coercively sold the need for everything to hinge around the covid vaccine in the sense of it being a vaccination programme in the established or accepted sense. One that has fitted with the Government’s ‘Zero Covid’ approach, with the whole equation only having real value if both parts work exactly how they should.

With the so-called vaccine not being a vaccine and not doing what a vaccine should do in the accepted sense, it is clear that we are taking part in a vaccination programme using vaccines that do not vaccinate and are as such not part of a vaccination programme at all.

The Government Zero Covid approach is an absolute. With their commitment to it, it necessarily follows that any medical intervention they implement across the population to achieve this outcome safely must provide an absolute solution to the problem in order to achieve that outcome too.

Otherwise, it is regrettably all too easy to conclude that the result or aim that the Government are working towards could never have been the objective of their ultimate plan.

The alternative to this would be that the products the Government has invested so much public money in already are not suitable for the purpose intended. As such, the Government must either end the reliance on the ‘vaccines’ that already exist or come clean and make clear that this focus on a vaccination programme that can never deliver, will continue indefinitely until we reach the point where it does.

The situation that the Government is in and the danger or risk to us they have created is absolutely ridiculous.

Clinging to the wreckage of their flawed policies and committed as they are to the implementation of Vaccine Passports – when the vaccines aren’t actually vaccines at all – piles fuel on to the fires of the conspiracy theorists who are interpreting the chronology of events as all being part of a worldwide takeover or ‘The Great Reset’ under the auspices of the WEF.

The reality is, however, that the highest and most responsible public roles in this Country have been nothing but empty chairs since the beginning of the Covid Pandemic.

Boris Johnson, Rishi Sunak and all the other overly ambitious wannabe Ministers and MPs who covet the top jobs – but never the responsibility that it will give them, have been chasing their tails throughout and have been led by a full range of false prophets since this whole sorry saga began.

The whole response to the Covid Pandemic has been delivered on the basis of providing solutions that tackle everything that Covid could be, rather than what Covid is, or what it has already become.

Whilst a working, fully tested, fully researched and fully immunising Covid Vaccine should always have been a part of any long-term government plan, the reality at the beginning of the crisis was much then as it is now. The focus should be on doing everything to maintain normal life and the real economy throughout the UK, by making the response to illness and the support of those who become ill the very best that it can be, rather than making a virus that by its very nature is subject to continual change the god around which all thoughts on life must operate.

The choices the Government have made can only reflect a deliberate choice (conspiracy) or reflect that those making the decisions are doing so because they are incapably stupid (In the circumstances might be classed by some as insane).

There really is no conspiracy at work on the scale that a great many people who share the view that this Government must go, so ardently believe. The conspiracy that does exist is the way that our political system and access to the seats that are available for MPs to sit in our Parliament are being controlled by just 3 Political Parties. It literally means that the ideas and aims of just a few are being rolled out, repackaged and continually resold to us as if we are participating in and being cared for within a real democracy, when it would be accurate to use dictatorship as the better-informed name.

You cannot fix a problem until you have identified and accepted the real cause. What we are going to witness time and time again, often and as the coming weeks and months unfold, is crisis after crisis. Because we are being led by people who are unfit to lead us. People who can only be replaced by other people who are just as unfit to lead us. All because we will not collectively accept that it is only by creating an alternative to these people and the political machines that enable them that we will be able to finally unleash the yoke of government by stupidity and assume the rightful power to define life and ways of living that are fair and in the interests of everyone involved.

UK self-sufficiency and localisation of food supply chains from British Farms should now be the Government priority. Not vanity-led trade deals that undermine them

Globalisation as we knew it before the age of Lockdowns is over. We may not feel it, understand it or in most cases even see it. But the World has been changed by the chain reaction that was set in motion by the COVID Pandemic.

Daylight is now beginning to shine upon all the hidden, self-serving and myopic powers that influence our way of life. They are coming together in a concert of chaos with COVID conducting the orchestra – right at the fore.

It may sound dramatic. But the subjectivity and focus we have on everything beyond our own lives and the bubbles we unwittingly live in make it easy for us to ignore how things really are at the objective level. We are and have been living through significant National and World events that have consequences neither we, but even more importantly our politicians, can or now will avoid.

Loss of the realism that a genuine overview provides leaves us out of touch with the reality of what is happening. We take for granted that daily life will always go on as it has and that everything continues in the same way.

Yet the assumption that an encyclopaedic range of foods and products will always meet us when we walk through the supermarket doors or click online is a storybook waiting for a bad ending. And that ending is now almost certain to emerge.

Whilst the Government, media and the establishment they serve tell us that everything will return to the pre-COVID ‘normal’, concocted narratives cannot change nor head off the impact and consequences of the decisions they made, the money they created then spent, and the stories they have told to control people during a pandemic.  

The change is already underway. We can already see it in the questions over home working and many revaluating where they wish to live. Change will touch everything, and this will include even the most basic parts of life, including the clothes we wear and the food that we eat.

We simply don’t need all the things that we buy, eat or drink, and many of us already know and understand this. Whilst it may sound moralistic to say so, it is certainly no coincidence that as a population we are becoming so unhealthy when we are happy sleepwalking through life in the way that we do.

The good, wholesome, locally and ethically produced foods that we genuinely need to live and feed ourselves would not be expensive if we prioritised production using the most localised supply chains possible. It could mean the ingredients of the meals we eat have not travelled outside of our own County boundaries or been carried much further on their journey from farm to fork.

Some may snort at the mere suggestion of returning to a world where butchers, bakers and every kind of traditional village shop or business sell you the produce and goods that have come to them for preparation from local farms and producers.

But this is the way that the world we know will go if it is again to begin making any kind of sense, and we do not need the Government or ambitious Ministers attempting to open up trade flow to Countries that will undercut our own farmers and producers. Indeed, the Countries that Trade Ministers are now talking to should be actively and demonstratively encouraged to develop their own enhanced forms of productivity as we all work towards the level of national and localised self-sufficiency that the post-COVID World and the collapse of global Supply chains will soon demand.

In the simplest terms, the rise and threat of what has been called the ‘Indian variant’ of COVID demonstrates some of the starkest lessons of how this virus works. The ZERO COVID solution that this Government has tied itself to will at some point have to be flipped to become one that we learn to live with it and treat it the same as we do the Flu.

Whether we continue going forward under the premise that COVID control is the only priority or change and accept that there are other ways to live, we can no longer allow or encourage the mass movement of people or encourage unnecessary international supply chains just for the sake of making profit in any way.

Borders will literally have to become borders once again. No matter how much we might we deserve that foreign holiday, we are no longer living in a world where there will continue to be one rule for ‘wealthy’ countries and another for all those that the ignorant and greedy thumb their noses at and call poor.

Viruses and the impacts of ill-considered human behaviour do not recognise boundaries. They have consequences for us all.

For better or worse, COVID is a virus that is here to stay. Global eradication is not possible with the political mindset that the world currently has, and we will soon have no option but to learn and act upon the realities that the spread of a respiratory disease through an interconnected version of the World presents.

Meanwhile, the decision making and behaviours of politicians, banks ad big business as they have struggled to maintain control during the Covid Pandemic has led them to supercharge the growth of the many problems that greed and profiteering have created.

Going local, real localism and putting our communities at the forefront of everything we build our lives around will now become key to addressing the change that events will create and to become happy and content in ways that we have culturally long since forgot.

Farmers, producers and those who run and maintain very local services and cottage industry businesses are going to be key. Allowing any foreign country to undercut local production of any kind – no matter our historic ties – will quickly become one of the greatest acts of economic self-harm in the post-COVID world.

This is not about having a downer on Australia, New Zealand, Canada, the USA or any Country with which we might have once found it desirable to extend trade with. All Countries across the World are going to have to face up to the realities of the step away from globalisation to closed borders and what this really means for prioritising local production too.

Self-sufficiency for food and essential goods must become both a National and Government priority for the UK. Within this, we must look to promote and encourage everyone to shop and focus what they do and the lives they live locally in pretty much the complete opposite way that globalisation and the greed that underpins it has done.

Government must guide and support the development of truly local cooperatives. Legislators must embrace and utilise the freedom we have following our unshackling from the EU to legislate in ways that mean it is both practical and cost effective for every service that businesses require to produce and manufacture locally will not only exist but will thrive in such ways that lead to local products and services being made available to everyone at prices even the poorest in society can afford.

Local Enterprise Partnerships or alternative bodies like them should be used to join up the dots and encourage this growth locally.

Instead of encouraging agriculture and food production to become ever more focused on ‘cost effective’ production that means they increasingly only become viable with the economies of scale and size, our legislators must look at regulating and restricting all of the malign influences that take money out of the supply chain, thereby increasing end-user cost. They are currently adding no value, as part of an equation that increasingly leaves heathy food being a luxury that only the financially wealthy can afford.

Farm shops, farmers markets and the systems of local production that can and must feed into them must be the direction of travel. We must reject the reliance upon retail giants and a system where shareholders and financial speculators make ridiculous sums of money after the companies they ‘own’ can appear to move goods around the planet more cheaply than our own producers can make them. The practice where supermarket buyers crush any farmers ability to both supply them and remain profitable must come to its end.

British Farmers are some of the most innovative and entrepreneurial members of society that we have. There is little doubt that if we both embrace and support the role that they can and will willingly then take within a new and diversified platform for UK food growing and production, the true value to us all of the wider rural and agricultural sector and the community that underpins it will come into its own and be good for us all.

Social Care Reform: Damn-the-consequences, easy options don’t exist like they did for Covid. It will take a very different kind of politician to accept and see the complex solutions through

The god-like status that government deliberately engineered for the NHS and its frontline workers to silence, then de-popularise one set of problems that Lockdowns created, served only to create many more. Just one of them is the further complication of issues surrounding Social Care Reform that will make even the wisest politician think twice before embracing it as a necessary cause.

Just yesterday, the front pages of newspapers carried headlines telling us that while politicians have blustered, lack of action to address the Social Care problem has already cost individuals and families some £14 Billion to support our elderly. Meanwhile it has long been accepted that with the exception of cases where people could afford to do otherwise, the public sector should make provision and cover the cost.

It is important to recognise the creation of the cult-like status of the NHS within this debate. Dua Lipa’s intervention at the Brits earlier this week aside, the way that healthcare professionals are paid and the service they provide is managed and funded is no small part of the problem that makes up the Social Care question.

Until those that lead us are prepared to face up to both the complexity and counter-popularity that a range of very significant issues wrapped up in the way that care for the elderly is paid for and managed, the only solution on the table will continue to be the fire-hosing of public cash at a black hole. This comes at a time when both the British and the World Economies are moving perilously close to crashing over the edge – despite Establishment statements suggesting that we are about to experience the most rapid period of growth since the end of World War 2.

The word-twisting that has become today’s cultural norm has enabled many left-wing and labour progressives to argue that the problems facing the NHS are merely about privatisation. But it has allowed them to deviate away from using the other side of their forked tongues to acknowledge the role of employment rights and incendiary threat of industrial action that has made the private-sector provision of so many of the staff that allow the NHS to function such an easy, popular, yet very expensive way to prevent our prized health service from otherwise closing its doors.

It is the protectionist culture that exists at the very heart of all parts of government and the public sector that has led to the creation of a complex and disparate system of diversified responsibilities for the key area of healthcare for old age. It sees hospitals burdened by bed-blocking, whilst local authority based social services glare at the seemingly ever-smaller size of their budgets and work on the basis that they simply have no choice.

This itself Is just the tip of a very large iceberg, looming large across the depths of public policy, whilst reaching out in many different directions like an octopus, giving self-focused and fearful politicians excuse after excuse and reason after reason to believe that if they want to remain an electoral force, all these issues can be talked about, but never actually touched.

The Social Care problem will not be solved until it is something that government can afford.

The government cannot afford the Social Care bill without there being top-to-bottom NHS and public sector reform.

There will not be top-to-bottom NHS and public sector reform until employment rights, union influence and policy governing the terms of private contract services and supplies for public services have been unpicked and appropriately revised.

Employment rights, union influence and policy governing the terms of private contract services and supplies for public services will not be unpicked and appropriately revised until politicians focus on carrying out their responsibilities instead of keeping their jobs – no matter the cost.

Politicians will focus on keeping their jobs without care for the cost for as long as they believe that dealing with complex problems like Social Care is something they can avoid.

We will not have politicians or leaders in government who see the issues otherwise until events force the issues or better still, we have proper political reform.

There simply is no quick fix. The nebulous Social Care problem has been created because successive governments and generations of politicians have continually sought to take the easy way out.

Politicians have been and continue to be motivated only by vote-winning policy making whilst they avoiding facing off the different forms of self-interest that are ever present in these issues that should always be addressed honestly and in the way that considers the wider consequences and what’s best for everyone – as public policy always should.

COVID-19 has exposed just how sick the NHS and ALL public services were BEFORE this emergency began. Their future is YOURS to decide

The flipside of so much focus on support for the NHS and frontline staff is the spotlight that has been shone on its supply chain, lack of resources and specifically the serious lack of PPE being stockpiled for a medical crisis before the COVID-19 Pandemic began.

Today, in the middle of the Coronavirus emergency, it would be hard to find anyone who wouldn’t agree that this really is not how things should be within our Health Service. Yet at any other time, the same people are more likely to nod politely and walk away thinking little more about it than that you were just having a whinge.

You won’t feel the blast from a bomb until the bomb has gone off and the NHS has suffered from a serious lack of urgency and attention because things like PPE have simply been one of those things that it seemed easy to put off until another day.

The lack of planning and consideration within the NHS for the ‘what ifs’, along with the serious staffing shortage that has now been highlighted too are pretty much the tip of the iceberg of the problems and difficulties that affect just about everything else within it too.

But it doesn’t stop there.

In fact, as perhaps the most recognisable face of public service provision in the UK, the real problems that the NHS is facing and the reasons that it is facing them are also being faced and experienced just the same across all parts of Government and the whole of the Public Sector too.

No. I’m not referring to a shortage of PPE across bodies like the Environment Agency, Highways England and local councils too – even though it could very well be the case. I am referring to the cultural rot that exists within all of these public-serving organisations that causes all of the problems that we only experience when they deliver their effects.

This isn’t a new problem and it has been building for a long time. Whilst they appear to be very different outcomes, the Rotherham scandal and the mechanics of the Grenfell disaster are sadly the outcome and effect of all the very same causes that have set the NHS up to struggle at the very time and in the very places that everything should feel like it has come together seamlessly as one.

Political correctness, the push for diversity, EU-derived employment legislation, protectionist culture where the buck gets endlessly passed to none of the above, political interference with ridiculous schemes like PFI, the creation of a massive backroom structure of managers with titles that were never needed before and a complete lack of understanding of how money being thrown at problems at the very top of Government only make the problem worse and push the problem into the lap of the next government or generation of politicians to skirt around another day.

These and others are all contributory factors to a public-sector-wide malaise where managers and those with responsibility have been conditioned to avoid doing anything that reaches beyond the confines of their own contract and job.

Some would call it a failure to use common sense. Others, that it is basic lack of appreciation of what public services are actually there for. But in many cases the whole lack of interest in really serving the public and tax payers that all of these jobs were created to help is made distinctly worse by the reality that the wages of those in these jobs will alwaysget paid.

The problems that the NHS has will not be solved by simply upping the budgets for any of the parts of it. The money will get spent, but it will never reach the parts that it really should do whilst the culture remains the same. Ultimately without top to bottom and above all cultural reform, the Key Workers and Frontline Clinical Staff throughout the NHS will not ever be valued and given the opportunities that they should have and we would all want them to.

Beyond the effort to ‘protect the NHS’, the Lockdown has began to cause massive problems that are set to reverberate throughout our society in the coming weeks, months and years. The impact of what this Government has done will cause harm to people and the country in many different ways that could have been avoided if we had different politicians in charge.

These are not the people who will put everything that is wrong in the NHS and the Public Sector right. Not now, not after the COVID-19 Pandemic is over, not at anytime thereafter.

The politicians we have today simply don’t and will not try to understand what is actually going on.

So if you love the NHS, the nurses, the doctors, the surgeons, the therapists, the healthcare workers and all of the key staff in our hospitals that make the real part of the NHS work, remember them at the next General Election or when this Government collapses – whichever happens first,  and bear in mind that is the point when you can help to make things different for all of them by making a different choice to the one you normally would, and choose an option that will not be available from any of the existing political parties that we know.

 

 

 

 

The only genuine protection for the NHS is meaningful reform

red-herringFive weeks until the General Election and there’s so many red herrings around, you could be fooled into thinking our MPs are trying to sell us a smokery.

The biggest pool of them all surrounds the Labour-led debate over privatisation of the NHS – a topic which is a continual source of dishonesty for the Labour Party, the Conservatives – now the SNP too, and very much a political ball.

The issue was in many ways fuelled by the recent Channel 4 Dispatches Documentary about big pharma and the USA’s probable attempt at assault on the way that the NHS buys drugs as part of a post-Brexit Trade Deal with them.

However, what Labour’s push of ‘we are the only Party who believes in the NHS’ fails to so spectacularly address is the real level of the problems that exist within our National Health Service, how those problems became manifest and have to be addressed, and how fire hosing money at this Public Service might keep the wheels turning, but in the long term it will not save the NHS and in fact could be making all of  the problems significantly worse.

The principle of the NHS is a very good one. We should ALL continue to have access to free healthcare at the point of access. But we cannot continue onwards thinking that its existence can be assured in the future simply on the basis of how much We spend.

Privatisation in its most literal sense is – on the face of it – a very big part of the problem of cost attribution within the NHS today. So for Labour to even suggest that they can stop privatisation when it is already present, is either disingenuous on their part, or demonstrative of their ignorance of how the service actually works.

Many of the problems with cost have come about because of deals that the Blair and Brown Labour Governments constructed under the guise of PFI. Others have snowballed because of the cultural steer towards the use of private contractors or consultants to undertake backroom management functions and the excessive use of temporary staffing agencies that were never required before all good sense in employment laws and conditions was excessively overstepped and the door was opened to unbridled levels of profit making which has gone on for so long now that it is simply the way rather than individual choice.

Fixing this problem so that the NHS once again becomes sustainable isn’t easy. And with politicians who don’t even understand how it all works, real or meaningful reform is not  even currently on the agenda, let alone being a political choice.

The MPs that we have had, their Parties and the People who lead them have no incentive to really get to grips with what is really going on. Their lack of knowledge and understanding is self evident each and every time they are interviewed – which during an Election Campaign is pretty much every time that we turn the radio or TV on.

Until this changes, none of the problems that we as People within this Country face will be dealt with.

Yet we don’t even have the option of Political Parties or Candidates on 12th December who even have an idea of what is really going on.

 

image thanks to unknown

Don’t blame the Americans for doing what the Americans do. Worry about the people who have been appointed to negotiate with them – because it’s their ineptitude and self-interest that will cause us hurt

So we are straight into the 2019 General Election Campaign and somebody in the Labour Policy Office watched the Channel 4 Dispatches Programme earlier this week on the Americans hoping to leverage open the pharmaceuticals market as part of a post-Brexit Trade Deal.

Should we be surprised that this is what US business interests want? No – of course not. This is exactly what they do.

All the concerns that the C4 Documentary flagged are real. But they are also replicated in the approach and mentality of big businesses across the world covering all forms of services and goods. It is inevitable that if the people going into negotiations with others have money as their god, they are not going to care about the fallout from any deal they make or the consequences for others, no matter what they are and no matter how many times removed.

What we should be more concerned about is the lack of understanding of big business, global markets and the impact of their actions on the economy on the part of our politicians, and just as importantly the people who they and the Civil Service may appoint in future to negotiate on our behalf.

We witnessed how high level negotiations go wrong – or rather how their direction goes to a location it shouldn’t – with the negotiations over Theresa May’s failed Brexit Withdrawal Agreement.

The process was carried out by people who were purposefully looking to frustrate the Brexit result. They were working with others whose main aim was to frustrate the Brexit result. It was all was overseen by a PM who ultimately wanted to frustrate the Brexit result. That’s why we still haven’t had Brexit.

Good negotiators usually get whatever they are aiming for or walk away.

But what they are aiming for will either be overt or hidden. It will never be both.

And that’s the biggest problem we now have as we look into a world of opportunity – once a meaningful Brexit has been delivered.

If negotiations between the UK and Countries such as the USA are always carried out on the basis of considering all consequences and knock on effects – as part of the process of negotiating deals which only work in our best interests – there will never be a problem – and in this specific case, pharmaceuticals are unlikely to ever be put on the table or involved.

But if negotiations take place on the basis of simple political expediency or just the benefits on the table for the negotiators involved, we will ALL be in a depth of trouble post-Brexit, like we have never been in before.

 

 

 

 

Government should be ensuring that people can afford to live on a basic income, not make cheap headlines from a non enforceable wage

Our MPs are so busy getting drunk on their own power and glory, they really have lost sense of reality with the policies that they continue to propose.

The problem is that without looking at the detail more deeply – as the people we have trusted to run this Country really should – the soundbites that they keep pumping out in isolation sound all so very good.

In quick succession, we have had the Liberal Democrats. the Labour Party and now the Conservatives throwing out policies from their Conference platforms that have been designed as nothing more than cheap tricks to buy voters off.

Promising the earth and then failing to deliver has very little cost for the unscrupulous politicians involved.

But policies like simply cancelling Brexit, reducing the working week for everyone to 32 hours and raising the ideal hourly rate for the Living Wage has a real impact that will not deliver the beneficial experience that these politicians are suggesting they can control.

Pretending that Brexit and the vote that led to it can simply be cancelled as if it never happened would be beyond stupid and would have very serious consequences for everyone – no matter what fairytales those obsessed with Remaining in the EU would like us to be told.

But what we earn and how we earn it not only has an everyday effect on how we live our lives, it is also all about what we can afford.

Politicians on all sides are completely out of touch with what it actually costs us to live. The reality is that even on a 40-hour-week paid at £10.50 per hour in 5 years time, thats only £420 per week or £21,840 per annum. It’s not enough today for a single adult without children to be self sufficient, let alone tread water or basically survive.

The cost of living in this Country is stupidly out of control.

The way that we measure the health and success of our economy should not be wage rates and rises, GDP or statistics in any other form. But whether the poorest amongst us can look after and completely fend for themselves on the basic minimum wage without going into debt, claiming benefits or having to look to charities to someway get involved.

The way that a more enlightened government or MPs who actually know and have respect for what they are doing would achieve this is to actually use the power and responsibility that they have been given to make changes the the framework that business and finance operates within. Not to tinker on the edges by applying sticking plasters that will have already lost their ability to heal anything by the time that they come into use.

Too many businesses, financiers and property owners are taking too much value out of every product and every service that is provided in this Country, without putting like-for-like benefits back in.

The system is complex and complicated and few of us really understands how finance, markets and supply chains work. But the benefit is all going one way right now and continuing to take the most from the people who can least afford it. All so the people at the top of the chain can keep adding to a cash pile they have no genuine need to use, whilst looking at the ease with which they can work the system and concluding that they can take even more.

Politicians should not only know, but be acting proactively to address this. Not to eliminate the financiers, business people and economists like Labour might like to do so. But to introduce a considered set of ethics and regulation in every aspect of business in this Country, so that end users are only ever paying whats fair for the basic products and services that are essential to live and survive. But above all, is no more than what they can actually afford.

Until we have politicians prepared to take the steps necessary to address the real cause of the cost of living problem, the way that economics work means that the people who are now having to go into debt, look to the government or charities just to get by and stay alive will continue to see life as something that they simply cannot afford.

 

 

The Welfare covenant is broken and Universal Credit is not the answer when it already creates victims

Basic Standard of Living Q

It is regrettably all too easy for some to overlook the realities of life for others when  everything is going well and there is no need to look to anyone else for help.

Sadly, this is not the case for many. At one time or another during our lifetimes, there is every chance that we will need a safety net in place for when plans don’t work out quite as we thought they might, and we find ourselves in need of money, food, clothing, transport, warmth and maybe even a home.

State provision of such a safety net within a civilised society is not only right. It is also necessary when government is convened, managed and operated with the greater good, benefits and consequences for all are firmly in mind.

However, our Welfare and Benefits system has and is being continually abused.

It is being misused by those seeking help. But it is also being mis-purposed by those who have been given the responsibility in Government for providing that help on behalf of us all.

The Welfare covenant between those helping and those seeking help has been broken. And for the benefits system to work beneficially again for all, there must now be a new way of thinking.

No form of Government provision can truly be beneficial to all if victims have been created of any kind.

Universal Credit has therefore proven itself flawed before it has even began operating fully.

With many struggling recipients identified already, we should all be asking questions about the many more who are yet to come and the consequences that will surely follow.

This doesn’t mean that the system we have had until now is good. That it is working. Or that we should just stay tied to the same old thing.

We shouldn’t, because the current DWP Benefits regime really isn’t working for anybody, and we are all in desperate need of a solution which really can be seen and experienced as a ‘win-win’.

Now before we get lost completely with how Politicians are getting Benefits and Welfare wrong, there must also be an acceptance on the part of us all of what it is fair to expect to receive, how we receive it, and under what circumstances that help will actually come from the State if we should ever find ourselves in the position where we genuinely need it.

As we look at what is really wrong with the system as it is, we must also understand and accept that if the Law allows certain types of behaviours to exist, it is inevitable that there will be people who will employ them.

It doesn’t make their behaviour right. Their actions are not inevitable. Everyone has free will and can choose how to behave, even when a rule covering that action or behaviour may appear to be absent.

If the system doesn’t accommodate for the misuse of Beneficiaries and those affected, it is the people who are responsible for its design and implementation who are equally responsible for identifying what is wrong, putting it right and ensuring that either good or bad, nobody who should be receiving help gets missed or is able to slip in between.

Why the benefits system isn’t working, isn’t simply about something structural, the technology used or the people who administer or receive Benefits of any kind.

Like most policy failures today, it is a combination of factors which are not being considered. Many of them overlooked for the cause of political expediency, or because their place and influences sit outside of the specific or central theme – in this case the Benefits regime.

The real cost of a Basic Standard of Living is not understood by Government

The greatest injustice visited upon the unemployed, is the Government and DWP assertion that in 2018, one person can live on a basic income of £73.10 per week.

They can’t.

And when the Government itself has set the Minimum Wage at £7.83 per hour, which at a 40 hour week would be the same as £313.20, who exactly do they think is going to step in and replace what for some will be the destitution-busting £240.10 per week which sits so ominously in between?

Yes, there are many other Benefits other than and beyond the scope of Jobseekers Allowance.

But Universal Credit is being sold as a method of simplification by rolling everything into one, when the true aim of saving money will not stop a similar way of allocating money to the very same things from then existing, just under the umbrella of being just one application.

Government must provide a Basic Standard of Living income to those who qualify and need it.

If it is too expensive to do so, those in Government would do well by beginning to ask themselves the question ‘why?’

Government has surrendered responsibility for setting the prices of goods and services essential to a Basic Standard of Living to the private sector

Sadly, little attention is paid to the elephant in the Benefits room. That being the escalating prices of goods and services which provide for everyone’s basic needs in life.

That’s food, clothing, accommodation, transport and utilities.

Not First Class or on the upper side of ‘Taste the Difference’.

Just the stuff that anyone would need to be kept fed, clothed, warm, able to get themselves to a job and home again, and knowing that at night they will have a roof over their head.

Control of all of these goods and services is now completely under the infuence of commercial interests which have money as their one and only god.

Free Marketeers and Neo-Liberals will tell you that the Markets will look after everything when they are completely free to do as they choose. They don’t, they won’t and they will continue to do everything to make profit from every opportunity, for as long as they are gifted with the freedom to choose by gutless Government. Government filled with Politicians who see ethical intervention in the Markets and Financial Sector as a problem because they believe that they have too much to lose by doing so.

No service which is essential to the public good should be placed in private hands or under the undue influence of any self-serving cause.

No food supply essential to basic, healthy survival should be subject to the whimsy of the Markets where multiple traders, agents and handlers are seeking to add one profit margin on top of another, just on one item supplied within any one producer-to-plate supply chain alone.

If the Government genuinely wants the Benefits system to work, it has to find an effective way of controlling these two essential areas of daily life so that once a system that does work has been identified and implemented, it is then not rendered useless by private interest, based on nothing but profit.

We are culturally conditioned to assume that all Benefits Claimants are in some way bad

Mud sticks, as anyone who spends any time on social media or reading the news will know.

But the phenomenon of people assuming the worst of others based on the first story they are told is nothing new. And when it comes to the unemployed, being work shy is basically the accepted view.

The truth is not as straightforward and anyone at any stage of their career can find themselves out of work and having to ‘sign on’ in order to get help.

The problem with the ‘accepted truth’, is that the system itself, both mechanically and culturally treats everyone who comes through the Jobcentre door as if they don’t want to work, cannot be trusted in any way and that they all fit into the same mould as each other.

This approach overlooks the fact that people find themselves knocking on the door of the Jobcentre and the administrative centres of the DWP for very different reasons.

Some are poorly educated. Others have grown up in conditions that reinforce a world view that this is all they are worth. But there are others too who have landed themselves with significant debt to gain degrees that have proven to be of no use. People suffering illness and mental health problems which restrict the work that they can do. And even highly experienced and very well-educated professionals who cannot provide anything like as simple an explanation for what life has put them through.

Sit in a Jobcentre for long enough and you will hear claimants complain about having to wait for the money they are entitled to. You will see others lose their rag because they have not conformed to the regulations that they are supposed to. You will also witness the presence of so many security guards, it clearly suggests that behaviour of this kind is not only possible, but actually the expected constantly and all of the time.

But not all Benefits Claimants are a burden. Many want to work. But they are branded as ‘no-hopers’, instead of gaining the help and support which reflects them individually.

It is little wonder that those outside of the expereince of having a ‘down period’ in their lives take what they have for granted. Then look on and see all these people as being worthless and occupants of society’s bin.

Taking this approach is little more than deliberately setting up Benefit Claimants to fail.

It is not the action of a Government which respects and fully fulfils its role as the representative body of a civilised society. Nor is it illustrative of a Civil Service which is fully considerate of its role.

We can hardly expect the general population to think differently when the system so demeans.

A significant element of Claimants consider themselves entitled to what they receive

Because the system has been so poorly thought through and has not evolved positively in a way that sees its role strategically and as a way to raise expectation from the ground level upwards, it encourages the belief that it can be used as a substitute for real life. For not taking part. For resenting the success of others and as such seeing Benefits as an entitlement or a worthy redistribution of wealth from others.

The Benefits system only works for those who surrender themselves completely to it, leaving no incentive to escape and provide us all with that so far mythical ‘win-win’

Because the Benefits system has been so poorly thought through and has not evolved positively in a way that sees its role strategically as a way to raise expectation from the ground level upwards, it encourages the belief that it can be used as a substitute for real life. For not taking part. For resenting the success of others and as such seeing Benefits as an entitlement or a worthy redistribution of wealth from others.

The Benefits system only works for those who surrender themselves completely to it. It  leaves no incentive for Beneficiaries to escape and benefit anyone but themselves.

With restrictions placed upon how many hours a Claimant can work without losing Benefits, and the process of reinstatement being long and arduous – even before Universal Credit begins, there is zero in terms of incentive for people to take on more hours and work towards self-sufficiency.

Because the 6 Benefits together are so very complicated for one person to qualify for already, the further any Claimant journeys into this portfolio of direct and indirect income streams the less and less likely they are then to leave.

We can only ask ourselves the question if we were to find ourselves in the very same position. When everything is taken care of already, what serious advantage is there to be gained by going out and working for a wage which might never come to anything near the total that becoming subservient to the system and therefore being a Benefits slave can achieve?

Again, we cannot blame people for responding this way when the system itself not only allows but facilitates behaviour of this kind.

Help should always be given to those that need it.

For those who currently choose to be beholden to the system, there must be a process of incentives which doesn’t leave them without all the basic essentials.

It must also encourage them and accept and appreciate that they have responsibility for themselves as well as the wider community. A community which is ready to help, but is itself entitled to see those who voluntarily choose a life on Benefits as a drain on resources that we desperately need focused to provide other Public Services and that they are as such disadvantaging others on little more than a whim.

As taxpayers, we are effectively subsidising the employers of low paid workers by providing the in work benefits which allow them to survive

I have already mentioned what it costs to live and the need for a basic standard of living above.

Yet the conversation and discussion needs to go even further than the power of commercial interests over the essential goods and services for life.

The debate and the action that follows also needs to recognise the role which our Government is playing in keeping wages low and propagating a system where profit margins for large companies are exploding, whilst the millions of people on low incomes are now being farmed for the debt they have to carry, just to survive.

The money that lower income workers receive is in many cases too much to allow them to be on additional Benefits, yet not enough to allow them to be self sufficient. It keeps them ‘functioning’ at the behest of others, somewhere within the ‘in between’.

If we could freeze the prices of goods and services right now, so that they no longer rise, and we could focus in on what it actually costs a normal person on their own to live, self sufficiently, to feed, clothe and take care of themselves, put something by, have a holiday, a realistic pension and have a life which reason would tell us would make a normal person happy, we can soon begin to see the disparity between where wages sit and where right now, in these ‘static’ circumstances they would need to be.

At £10.20 per hour in London and £8.75 per hour outside, without the help of Government with Housing Benefit and Tax Credits too, even the Living Wage Foundations advisory level for a basic income doesn’t come close to what self sufficiency – that’s what complete independence from Government support –  would actually require.

Such a reality where Government support for the growth of small business is concerned alone would probably make the whole thing more palatable.

But the real beneficiaries of this State-sponsored in-work poverty are the big Companies making significant levels of profit that would in reality only dip slightly if they were to pay wages to front-line staff which would allow those employees to function within the overpriced society which their Employers have helped to create.

That this situation has been allowed to exist is beyond questionable.

That successive Governments of all kinds have allowed a situation to exist where the Taxpayer is paying over the odds for products in services in their face value alone is simply wrong.

That customers are then paying again to subsidise the wages of the staff serving them would be funny, if its implications and the reality which surrounds it not so very serious indeed.

This whole process has only been possible because Government has either borrowed incredible amounts of money, or has cut other and arguably more essential Public Services in order to allow them to provide this massive giveaway. A free-for-all that has broken the Country financially and is one of the key reasons why unfettered immigration of low skilled workers from Europe has been possible. Itself an issue which is seen by many Remainers as key to the majority vote for the UK to leave the European Union and the one which they are still obsessively attempting to resolve.

There would be some sweet irony in this if this financial mismanagement had really been helping people and UK communities, rather than being overtly beneficial to commercial interests, private profit and yes, the EU all along.

But there hasn’t, and in terms of management of expectation, this and previous Governments would appear to have hamstrung any future Government which wants to take a stand and do the right thing.

Be that as it may. Doing the right thing, is the only way that all of this is going to end up working right for everyone involved.

The solution

Like almost everything that Government and Politics touches, the key to delivering change in the Benefits and Welfare system is thinking differently.

And it’s the thinking and ideas at the top of British Politics which needs to change first before it can change anywhere else.

The responsibility of Government

Before the Benefits problem can be fixed, the understanding of what the problem actually is, must be broadened to include the wide range of factors which feed and influence the issues which those claiming Benefits experience.

Right now, there is an obsession on the part of decision makers. One which leads them only to attempt to address the effects of any problem, rather than to tackle each and every one of the causes.

Until all of the causes of problems are addressed, the Benefits system will only ever work temporarily at best, until those factors which are outside of the scope of that consideration inevitably change and then exert their negative influence once again.

A Basic Standard of Living level or the real Living Wage will only be achieved and maintained when all contributing factors fall within the reasoned influence of non-idealistic Government that considers the consequences of policy making upon ALL.

Politicians simply do not understand the power they have to change things. They do not see the scope of their roles and they have no appreciation of the influence that they could really have if they were to put the interests of ALL the people who have elected them first, rather than themselves, their Political Parties and whatever ideas or interests sit around that self-serving mix.

It will not matter how simple or complicated existing of new systems like Universal Credit might be. If they fail to consider and be considered as part of the bigger picture, they will always fail – and our Politicians have both the ability and responsibility to ensure that this is no longer the case.

It is their choice to now decide and it is their choice which must come first.

The responsibility – and acceptance of Claimants and Beneficiaries

For any solution to gain traction, it is also vital that ‘being down in your luck’ is accepted as a normal part of life, rather than being a condition which renders any of us as being sub-standard to it – the position under which Benefit Claimants are often perceived.

Those claiming Benefits fall into two predominant groups. Those who are or should be  temporary claimants and are able and willing to work. And those who are longer-term or permanent claimants who are unable or unlikely to be able to consider working again because of disability, illness, or other genuine debilitating circumstances.

All of us as beneficiaries must accept that there is and never has been a magic money tree of any kind. That the support that is given can only be provided through the act of others contributing through taxation on earnings, whether they themselves earn little or some extraordinary figure that might blow our minds.

Whilst it may currently behave as if it is, and some Politicians continue to seek election on the basis of perpetuating this myth, Government and the Public Sector is not a separate and ‘benevolent’ entity which doles out cash to Welfare recipients on the basis of being kind.

Government exists to represent the best interests of ALL British people. Government is there to help us all to succeed in whatever way that might be possible for us as individuals. And on  behalf of us all, it is there to help and provide support to those of us who cannot do so, in such ways that we may never feel like an after thought or something that others have in some way been left behind.

Government is the formal community power which represents and is therefore ‘for all of us’.

Those of us receiving help should therefore be mindful that the help we receive comes from the people next door, up the street and across our Cities and Towns.

As recipients, we are not ‘entitled’ to anything. It is simply that looking after those in genuine need is the basis upon which our civilised society can be found.

 

 

 

 

 

Politicians must acknowledge the problems within the NHS before any serious steps can be taken to save it…

David Cameron And Jeremy Hunt Visit A Hospital To Mark The 65th Anniversary Of The NHS

It is because we can all identify or agree with the principles of our healthcare system – to meet the needs of everyone; to be free at the point of delivery; and that it be based on clinical need and not the ability to pay, that it has become such a focus and play thing for successive Governments and the politicians within.

It is also why the NHS now finds itself at a point in its history where these very Principles may have now placed it at the most significant risk.

In time, the size of the milestone which was the creation of the NHS, may be fully appreciated for the very rare moment in time that it was when the political classes delivered a set of policies and principals which were genuinely created to be in the best interests of all.

Such moments are extremely rare. Governments such as those led by Churchill and Thatcher created and determined legacies which still affect us now and which their successors may only ever hope to emulate.

But the arrival of the NHS, much like the formalisation of working democracy through the creation of our Parliament following the Civil War, has the power to touch us all – even if we don’t or won’t openly acknowledge it.

Sadly however, once the principles upon which the NHS was formed were agreed and indeed became cornerstones of both our culture and society; what were soon to become the long-term political arguments over how their processes should operate soon began.

Today, the NHS might be best described as a series of industries within industries; of silos within silos; business unit lapping up against business unit; as an entire ecosystem where ideas, concepts and yes – even Jeremy Hunt’s ‘innovation’ [aka ‘commissioning] are actively competing against and ultimately all working against each other with the regrettable endgame firmly in sight, when some future Government will have no choice but to admit to no longer being able to afford it. Funny perhaps that it’s never this particular one…

Generations of the political masters of the NHS do themselves carry much of the blame for the crisis which the Organisation is in, with it having become the ongoing vogue to stake ideological claim to ensuring the future of the service.

Ideologies are all well and good, but it is such a cultural reliance upon specialists for every function outside of medical practice itself that has bloated backroom functions and created an ideal climate for non-clinical managers to lay claim to the most important responsibilities within what should have always remained a predominantly clinical-led world.

Add the performance-choking and burdensome elements of protectionism which have been fuelled by European red-tape and employment legislation; litigation culture and the motivation of many to look for almost any reason to create blame, and you can soon see why temporary staff, commissioning and the recruitment of managers who can surely only manage if they have a degree or an MBA has become the norm.

The pseudo-sciences do indeed have a lot to answer for not only within the NHS. Somebody somewhere will soon need to realise that blue sky and out-of-the-box thinking are reflections upon the ability and understanding of an individual to apply what they know. It is something which itself can rarely be taught, and the way in which qualification is prioritised above experience is really quite perverse in the age of equal opportunities. The text book technocracy which is now populating all tiers of middle and upper management threatens whole industries, and not least of all the NHS.

As discussed in a previous blog about Government, the NHS is not a business and should not in any way be treated like it is one.

One of the greatest ironies of Jeremy Hunt’s plans for making savings by cutting the hire of temporary staff, is the fact that many of them have and are being employed to manage and grow the processes of commissioning which he himself is stewarding – attracting daily rates for self employed ‘consultants’ which can easily reach £400-500 per day; plus expenses; plus the fees which the Recruiters and Agents who facilitate their ‘employment’ will be charging themselves.

Whilst sold to us as the way to streamline and make healthcare more affordable, commissioning is not only an extremely expensive process to manage, drawing funds, staff and resources away from areas where they are needed most. It is also a major step in the direction of privatisation.

Health service providers – government, NGO, not-for-profit and privately owned alike – are invited to bid to provide services, and all of them will be primarily thinking about the bottom line, and not the holistic level of care they will be giving the end user – i.e. you and me, as they do so.

The Government itself usually recognises a bottom line from fee generation as profit, whatever the legal status of the organisation behind it. The biggest question about the future of the NHS must therefore be how it can possibly be so that other organisations can now provide better services at lower cost whilst they are also making a profit, when the Government itself cannot deliver the same directly and without the need to pay an additional premium fee?

The NHS, like Local Government and many of our NGO’s is in serious trouble, not just because the Country is now effectively bankrupt and cannot actually afford to continue providing the services that it already does. But because it is also incapable of addressing the fundamental need for transformation and use innovation in its real sense to enact top-to-bottom change in working practices and the legislative areas that support them.

Politicians are not prepared to talk about the real issues that the NHS faces, even when they are themselves cognizant of them, because they fear the electoral implications of actually being seen to do so.

Meanwhile, the default approach to making savings is being employed yet again, and whilst savings can almost certainly be made, the decisions which lead to them should be based on the knowledge and experience which comes from the clinical end of the scalpel, and not from the money-counters and political theorists that populate the very fat end of the other.

image: blogs.spectator.co.uk

 

NHS and the predicted £30 Billion deficit: It’s time for change, but change is about much more than simply saving money

A NHS sign is seen in the grounds of St Thomas' Hospital in London

You can’t really help but admire the audacity of Sir David Nicholson, the outgoing head of the NHS, for his latest attempt to sidestep and cover the tracks of his questionable tenure by shining a light on what could become a £30 Billion deficit within the NHS.

His failure to fall on his sword over the Stafford Hospital outrage was beyond what many will agree as being in good taste and was compounded yet further by his indignant refusal to accept any form of responsibility, despite being the Executive Officer at the very top of the tree and arguably placed within the one position where there simply is nowhere to run or hide when it comes to carrying the can for mismanagement on what appears to have been an unprecedented scale.

The most regrettable facet of this latest twist is that the lack of respect which Nicholson holds with people now will surely deflect attention away from the cold reality of his message, which in a perhaps more capable set of hands would have not only been brought to public attention much sooner, but effectively acted upon too.

Many of us already realise and understand just how serious the problems throughout the NHS actually are. In local politics, where we closely scrutinize the real-world impact of ward and department closures; the centralisation of services, and the amalgamation of GP’s practices into so called ‘community hospitals’, there has been little doubt for us all of the real purpose of such changes for a considerable time.

Cost aside, the principles upon which the National Health Service were created and the application of universal care are still however very much valid even today.

But it is the continued compromise of those very principles at their heart which has led to the seemingly insurmountable financial and management problems that we face today.

These were principles that were intended to prioritise the care of the end-user; not the interests of managers, union leaders and politicians, who have all had something to gain at various points by moving those priorities elsewhere; often at everyone else’s cost.

Any commercially run business or ethical organisation is created and run to efficiently provide a particular product or service to its customers. It is not created or subsequently evolved to disable itself by prioritising the working conditions of its workforce and certainly not run for the benefit of harvesting statistics as part of some politically expedient mind warp which is simply designed to spread the message that things are running far better than they actually are.

Tragically, this is pretty much in a nutshell what the NHS represents today and evidence would suggest that people are dying needlessly as a result of it.

It’s not as if health professionals are oblivious to the realities of the situation either. Talking to a career nurse only a few weeks ago who freely admitted that she had been a lifelong socialist and Labour Voter, even I have to admit to my surprise when she clearly told me ‘Adam, I love the idea of socialism and what it stands for; but in my experience, it simply doesn’t work’.

Herein lies the greatest problem with the NHS; Its culture.

The culture within the NHS is the base issue which much be faced, understood and addressed if the Organisation as we have known it and the services that it provides are to be saved and our society is to be protected from the arrival of either tiered health provision across the board or UK-wide service which is only made available to those who can pay as they use.

Right now, we are all witnessing the preferred method of dealing – or I should say – avoiding reform throughout the NHS, NGO’s and the tiers of Government, which presents itself in the form of privatisation. Privatisation of any Government funded service has arguably become nothing more than avoidance of the need for reform at its worst because services are never the same when profit is the master. Furthermore, recreating public-run services once they are lost will be a whole lot harder than the reform which most Politicians already seem to see as impossible.

The only way we will keep and maintain the NHS as we have known and appreciated it in terms of what it offers the public will be the result of transformation and change which must begin with Government and work its way right the way through.

The NHS is strangled by the culture of workers’ rights, tiers of managers who barely understand what practical patient care is, Europe and the rise of the blame culture, where practitioners are increasingly forced to consider the bureaucratic pathways to treatment first, before addressing the urgencies and acuteness of clinical need. Ironically, such delays may of course be little hindrance to treatment for the people who will be looking for an opportunity to sue them either.

Government must act now to change and support the whole working culture of the NHS and put patient care back at the forefront of everything they do, rather than putting everyone else and the profit hungry ambulance chasers first.

It’s not an easy job by any means and most of us do appreciate that. But Governments get elected to take responsibility for big problems just like these; not so they can talk up the delivery of results when what they seem to be doing is looking for the easiest way out of problems they just aren’t responsible enough to face.

The patients of today and tomorrow don’t care about statistics or the money that providing treatment costs.

What they do care about is trusting that they can rely on getting medical help when they need it; where they need it and without worrying whether or not they qualify for it. Every day, the number of people who simply don’t have that trust are growing rapidly, and each new day is a sorrier one than the day before.

If Government keeps treating the problems in the NHS as if they all revolve around money, the cost of running the service will probably lead to its end.

It’s time for change throughout the NHS. But real change is about much more than simply saving money.

image thanks to http://www.channel4.com

Without Legalising Assisted Suicide & the Right to Die, it is an uncomfortable truth that in terms of our approach to ease of suffering, we are selfishly kinder to our animals than we are to other human beings

The debate on Assisted Suicide

Without realising that we even do so, it is quite normal for us to look upon any situation or perhaps even the content of a conversation in terms of how its content could or does affect us personally at some level.

Fear permeates the decisions that people make at a very deep level indeed and whilst this can unwittingly prove to be a very self-destructive trait, it can also lead to what are arguably selfish acts in the extreme when considering the distant impact that these decisions have upon others.

Because most of us grow up conditioned to think this way, it is possible to become quite blasé about the way we talk about issues which may not seem to affect us directly, but nonetheless have the effect of pushing a deeply buried emotional ‘button’ which twangs our personalities just the same.

Death is of course one such issue and one that provokes all kinds of responses from people, probably because of the unknown issues which surround it and the very definite nature of its existence for us all as part of our human experience.

When I myself suffered the acute stages of a serious illness which nearly killed me and I was forced to look my own mortality in the face, I quickly became aware of just how self-focussed and personal the issues surrounding death can be for those who are close by who are not actually in the process of going through it themselves.

This experience perhaps gave me an invaluable insight on the whole issue when dealing with the terminal illness and decline of my own father, whom I like to think may have been at some advantage by having such nearby support.

Sadly, others do not receive that same level of understanding and selflessness that they need from us all in times that we may ourselves never personally have to experience, or at a time of their life when their perspective on mortality may be dramatically different from what it may be right now.

The deeply ingrained fear of death and our lack of control over it does mean that for many the issue of Assisted Suicide or Right to Die is actually a personal one, rather than a matter of ethics as many in the world would prefer that we were to actually believe.

Very few people are likely to covet death at any time; even those who commit suicide without any form of premeditated suggestion that they are readying themselves to do so. It is a matter of escape and release at a very personal level and it is unlikely that any other person will ever understand the complexity of issues, emotions and pain that such a person is experiencing at that time.

It is the same for those contemplating the need for Assisted Suicide or their Right to Die and we as a society now not only need to recognise this; we must put personal feelings and perceptions aside and provide help to those who need it, without any threat of recourse or stigma being attached to those who have provided or would willingly facilitate that help.

Our fear of Legalising Assisted Suicide and the taboo of the subject are borne from the concern that through illness or debilitation, we could find ourselves or loved-ones unable to communicate with or have influence with the outside world as we now know it, and that subsequently, the decision will be made to end our own or their life in that situation whether we like it or not.

Such perceptions have been helped very little by Health Authority Policies such as The Liverpool Pathway. But this should not prevent us from dealing with the subject as we now should and if anything is evidence enough that everything must now be done to get this difficult subject dealt with right.

Government and the Medical Profession could and should with Legislation put the necessary stop-guards in place which will provide assurance against abuses of a Right to Die, such as consultation with 3 independent Doctors and/or Psychologists who will quickly know if such a solution is best if they are genuinely allowed and are able to selflessly put the interests of the patient in question first without any other influences coming in to play.

There is no doubt that those suffering with horrific and terrifying conditions such as Locked-in Syndrome or those who have such low quality of life because of their physical conditions should have the right to end their lives with help if they so choose. We must all now be big enough to put our own fears aside and make it as easy as it can be for them to do so.

Without Legalising the Right to Die, it is an uncomfortable truth that in terms of our approach to ease of suffering, we are selfishly kinder to our animals than we are to other human beings.

image thanks to http://www.sunnewsnetwork.ca