Whilst I may not be following or even have spoken to as many of them as I might like, I have been watching the problems that UK Farmers are now experiencing as they have unfolded, since way before the first openly anti-UK Farming Budget in October 2024.
Whilst the fear, frustration and anger within the community is becoming clear for most from outside farming and its allied industries who understand the real value of traditional food production within the food chain, I find myself feeling numb.
Not because of any indifference to what the Farmers are experiencing. But because there is a direction of travel at work within what is now a growing crisis for British Agriculture that many Farmers still refuse to accept and open their minds to working around. Despite the growing trail of evidence and the most recent list of events that have now broken into the open, after everything previously having been manipulatively hidden in plain sight.
Many people, including business leaders and politicians, as well as farmers themselves, genuinely believe that government and the public sector are there to serve the public interest. That they will always deliver against the requirements of what most of us would recognise as being the public good.
But the government and the public sector aren’t there for the public good. Anymore.
Government and the public sector haven’t been there for the public good, for a very long time. And certainly not since the early 1970’s, when at least some will be able to recognise the beginning of a chronology of events that has slowly but surely caused havoc across communities and industries alike – and particularly for UK farmers.
If you can step back, see the history and impact of the European Union and the role that it has played in supporting globalisation; then consider the added political dimensions, set against the practical implementation of neoliberal economic policy across the West, which basically meant that the existence of money and the value that we attribute to it all boils down to what politicians’ and bankers say (or rather agree behind closed doors), you may be able to begin picking out at least some of the milestones that are leading towards an imminent fall or collapse. Not just for UK farming, but everything that the UK or Great Britain once was.
A general appreciation or overview of the wider context under which politicians are now operating is necessary to understand what successive governments have been doing and what the next ones will almost certainly do. Up to the point where the system they have been steadily destroying breathes its last breath and everything we know could be in an inescapable mess. Whenever that might be.
Regrettably, it’s much more than just being a case of managed decline. We all need to recognise that whatever the establishment has in mind, farms and independent food production do not have a place within the agenda they are working with.
When we can also then accept that the advocacy organisations that we have believed to be there to serve the best interests of the industries and sectors that they supposedly represent, have instead become no better than being licensed franchises of the establishment, because they work on the basis that the relationship with public officials and politicians is more important than anything else, it can be seen that farmers are today, effectively on their own.
Over a year ago, when the Red Tractor question came into daylight for what now feels like a very short period of time, I wrote and published Food From Farms Guaranteed (3FG).
Food From Farms Guaranteed is a suggestion or proposal for how farmers across the UK could begin to rethink, reimagine and rework the question of quality standards within the UK food chain and use it as the doorway of opportunity to reclaim control of everything that UK Agriculture should never EVER have lost control of. Whilst at the same time taking steps towards giving the UK population back the genuine levels of Food Security that an island nation like ours ALWAYS needs.
To read a copy of Food From Farms Guaranteed, please click and follow the links below.
The coming weeks are likely to be a bleak time, not only for those on benefits who receive payments that could be cut. But also for growing numbers of the low paid, whose employment is likely to be at risk because of national insurance changes and yes – the April rise in the National Minimum Wage.
Appropriate credit should of course be given where it is due and the Labour Government certainly do appear to be digging themselves further and further into a hole with every policy decision that they make.
However, nothing is as straightforward as it looks in politics. And as I wrote in a blog in early December when I asked if Labour has been set up as ‘custodians of the collapse’, there is much to suggest that when it comes to the quality of politicians that we currently have in the UK today, the group filling the government benches are the unfortunate ones who have been left to carry the can.
I say this, as the collapse that there is very good reason to believe the collapse that is now underway, could, in theory have began at any time, since the decision to bail out the banks during the Great Financial Crisis of 2007/08.
The chances that a collapse would arrive sooner and more severely has grown significantly as a result of the Government response to the Covid Pandemic, the War in Ukraine, and basically everything that the politicians in power have been printing money to cover the cost of, ever since.
A collapse is and has always been inevitable. Because the financial, economic or monetary system that we have had since 1971 is to all intents and purposes little more than a massive game or perhaps what we might call man’s greatest confidence trick.
The financial, meonetary and economic system that we currently have was put together, successfully implemented (adopted) and pushed so that those ‘in the tent’ would become rich beyond their wildest dreams.
Meanwhile, control of the greater population has slowly but surely been passed to the same set of interests, using all manner of manipulation and incentives that mean people have effectively been surrendering their freedom – usually through financial means.
Hard as the reality may be to swallow, many people have been unaware of what has been happening to them; how their approach to life, relationships and everything has changed and in real terms, what a small set of very selfish and self-serving interests have so-far successfully done to everyone else, just so that they could become very rich.
The big flaw in ‘the game’ and with it the source of the greatest risk – which is the loss of control when that flaw inevitably becomes too obvious to hide, is the only way that money can be created or printed in the increasing amounts that it has been and still is, is for the value of the money that normal people possess or are able to earn to lessen much quicker than wage rises or the value of property they have the ability to own to rise and offset it. Let alone go beyond in the wealth creating sense that any does who is part of the clique who ‘rigged the game’.
By now, you are probably wondering what any of this has to do with welfare, benefits or the National Minimum Wage.
The National Minimum Wage, which was conveniently brought into being by the Blairite Labour Government on 1 April 1999, was of course sold to us all as a tool to ensure that everyone received a fair wage for every hour worked.
And as far as that story was sold, the people who the establishment needed to believe what was being suggested, almost certainly did and have done ever since, not least of all as the National Minimum Wage has increasingly become known as the National Living Wage too.
The problem is that even at the rate of £12.21 which will be the hourly rate of the National Minimum Wage from this coming April, it is and will continue to be nowhere near enough for any single person to live independently, self-sufficiently and without the help of benefits, charity (like Foodbanks), by going into debt or raiding savings – or falling back on them all.
The National Minimum Wage is certainly nowhere near enough for anyone to live on!
Done properly and with the intentions that should have underpinned its implementation, the National Minimum Wage could have performed and impacted lives very differently to the way that it has.
However, what it has actually done has been to serve as a wage suppressant. Keeping the wage ceiling deliberately low for significant numbers of people within a system that has been funnelling money in one direction only.
Let’s be clear. Not having the guarantee of taking home enough to ‘pay their own way’ makes it near impossible for people to feel in control of their own lives.
However, the legal requirement to pay the National Minimum Wage itself has the perverse consequence of ensuring that small businesses can no longer succeed. Because the margins that big global businesses are working to have made it impossible to keep paying the same number of people they could previously afford to.
Meanwhile, those big businesses themselves could actually afford to pay what it costs their lowest paid employees to live, but too often don’t. Instead choosing to move everything that they possibly can to countries where they can pay exactly what they want to, whilst everything we need is quickly becoming a luxury that more of us can no longer afford.
Guaranteeing that everyone on the minimum wage earns enough to live without help would solve problems that many simply wouldn’t believe
In my recent Paper ‘Is Poverty Invisible to those who don’t Experience it’, I talked about the experience of being on benefits today. What that actually means to those unfortunate enough to find themselves claiming them, and what it is like for normal, decent people to step through a door where only the most resilient could ever maintain the levels of confidence and self-surety needed to navigate a system where anyone who cannot fend for themselves financially is treated like a pariah, at each and every turn.
To put it bluntly, most people who find themselves within the benefits system today, without a career background or experience that makes them employable in a way that almost certainly guarantees they would never be there anyway, are damned. They are unable to escape, because the most basic of jobs that are readily available do not offer an income level that is genuinely realistic enough to provide anyone with the kind of independence and freedom that only a genuine wage that links directly to what it costs to live can afford them.
For those who need it to be spelled out; the number of people who are on benefits because they want to be there or because they cannot function in any way without benefits is very small and much smaller than any of the statistical evidence that is available would suggest.
However, working a ridiculous number of hours per week, to only then have to rely upon benefit top ups and the bewildering experience that goes with it; to struggle enough that you have to ‘qualify’ for an emergency food package from a Foodbank or to have to go into debt or use money that was put aside for living rather than to simply stay alive, holds no great incentive for anyone. Especially when the work itself usually attracts scorn and ridicule from others who see themselves as better and look down on those they see as beneath them or without the same value.
Solving the benefits problem should be as simple as government telling every employer that they have to pay everyone whatever it costs to live.
Yet we have long since passed the time when this would have been possible without collapsing the economy. Even if it would only have made a difference for a short period of time.
People are on benefits and living with less than what anyone needs to live, in this day and age, because for many of them it really is the lesser of the evils. Even though the evils that they are being subjected to still hurt and reach very deeply indeed.
The Government ‘view’
At the other end of the problem, the growing welfare bill is fast approaching a cost that simple mathematics has long since told us that the UK can no longer afford.
However, politicians have continued to do ‘find’ or create the money to keep covering the welfare bill (even though they talk up the mean actions that they do take), as the political fall out from exposing the truth, that there is a significant and growing underclass of people whose incomes are nowhere near what it actually costs to live and that businesses of ALL sizes are effectively having wages subsidised by the state, whilst vested interests are pretty much taking every bit of available wealth from everyone, would mean a confrontation and battle with the system itself that only a very rare breed of politician would be big enough to tackle.
The cost for everyone is the society and culture we were once proud of now crumbling around us, having its destruction accelerated by those in power who have become so desperate that they are turning everything to ash, just so that they can be seen to remain in control.
The reality is that politicians no longer have enough legitimate or morally workable options available to them to justify creating enough money out of thin air to save them now or to ensure their re-election, when the UK has for a long time already been technically broke.
What so few can or are prepared to either accept or to see, is that money doesn’t work for people in the system that we have and never did. Even though generations have regularly been conditioned to believe that getting wealthy or having everything would come quickly to all of us on the cheap. Just as long as we all went along with the lie.
The UK is now caught within a whirlwind of parallel death spirals. Where the poor and those with less can only become even poorer. Whilst the ability of government to do anything meaningful has been hollowed out.
The situation leaves the entire political class on the edge of a precipice where government is about to become unable to do anything. And all of this has been inflicted upon us so that a few could become wealthy and obtain power, always knowing that they would have to achieve oppressive levels of control over society, before anyone who would be brave enough to speak out and be believed by enough people had worked it all out.
If you are able to overlook the impact and outcomes that come from such a chaotic mess, the current political environment and the media circus that surround it can certainly provide a lot of entertainment.
Sadly, growing numbers of us are either feeling the pain of many years of political incompetence or at the very least having our breath taken away by the constant flow of unbelievable actions and decisions that politicians are taking not just in the UK, but across the world.
In the UK, many who had been hoping that the Reform UK party would prove to be our saviours when the next General Election comes (whenever that might actually be) have found themselves awakening with a jolt this week as the real character and depth of the Party has been exposed by the expulsion of MP Rupert Lowe and the allegations that have been made, after he openly questioned the prime ministerial credentials of Nigel Farage.
However, behind the ‘let’s back whatever we can see as being different’ facade – which is regrettably just a second attempt at what the UK basically voted into No.10 last July – there exists the rather unsettling reality for everyone that Reform offer nothing that is fundamentally different to any of the other Political Parties that we currently recognise.
The Reform MPs and active members who are working towards elections and seats across the Country are motivated like the majority of the political class that exists in and across the UK today, in the very same way. And doing more of the same, isn’t going to deliver change, no matter how different the choice may seem or look.
A good example of the many problems that any political movement or group that has a genuine desire to change anything that the UK government and public sector system faces, can be illustrated by how well people (especially on the political ‘right’) have been responding to DOGE (Department of Government Efficiency) in the USA, since Trump returned to Office and Elon Musk began his ‘job’. As it demonstrates just how out of touch with the way our own system of government and the public sector in the UK works, and how little regard there is for the consequences and impact of doing anything with public policy in isolation, without considering the interconnectedness and links between all policies and how everything works.
Regrettably, it is unlikely that even a Parliament filled with 650 of the best MPs that we could identify as being available and willing to take on the real responsibility that each of them has to the British Public would be able to deliver the kind of change that we need in the UK today, because they wouldn’t be able to agree on the way to make change work, without having to reach compromises and going down the same routes where all of today’s problems could be viewed as having began.
Whilst the idea conjures up all sorts of negative parallels, the reality we face is that achieving the type and level of change that decades of the wrong politicians has given us now requires a level of single-mindedness that can only come from having one person at the very top.
Yes, that one person would have to be a very unique kind of leader, who not only understands the true realities and depth of all the problems alongside how everything works; they would also have to be incorruptible and driven with a sense of public service and selflessness that we simply haven’t seen in politics as we know it at any time before.
No, it’s not impossible. But it’s certainly a lot to ask.
However, with things going as they are and in the circumstances we are already experiencing and where many of us are now realising where everything is already heading, there may never before have been such a need for a Good Dictator and the leap of faith from us all that would back them to do what it will take to get everything done.
The coming weeks are likely to see increasing talk of benefits, unemployment and what it costs to live as the government makes budget cuts and then as the reality of the changes to National Insurance contributions really begin to bite in early April, alongside the rise in the Minimum Wage.
Whilst the current government is very much the focus of blame, the difficult truth that many still cannot see and politicians will not talk about – IF they actually understand, is that the Minimum Wage is the benchmark that is used by everyone as the ‘accepted’ level of what it costs someone to live.
However, although the Minimum Wage will rise to £12.21 in April, this level of pay – even for a 40 hour working week, is nowhere near enough for a single person, living alone to cover the cost of everything they need to pay for each week, without seeking benefits, help from charities such as Foodbanks, going into debt (or using savings), or a mixture of them all.
Regrettably, the way that our economic system works and has deliberately been developed and evolved over a period of more than 50 years means that money and everything related to it can only make some people fabulously wealthy in the way that they are now, by many others being financially left behind.
Although this unbalanced financial system has appeared to work for a very long time, and long enough that it means most of us cannot picture the world we live in working any other way, the reality is that it could only work for a period of time, because it has developed around the growth of what we all know as the wealth divide.
Money has been created in such volumes, especially since the Great Financial Crisis, the Covid Pandemic and the War in Ukraine, that the shelf-life or end-date is arriving even more quickly than those who understood and benefitted from the system imagined, and it is the reality that the impact and consequences of decades of having this system in place which are now proving very difficult for politicians to hide and why we are now experiencing so much that people in power are either avoiding or simply refusing to explain.
Money is the centre of everything. It’s the reference point for the value of all that we have, want, need and do, and its presence and influence has reached the point where the role that money now plays in our lives is dehumanising everything – and being helped to do so by those who are benefitting from what we believe about money (that isnt actually true), and what we will accept from them as a result.
However, the world could be very different. And to be very different, we need to put people, community and our locality and environment back at the heart of everything.
The Basic Living Standard is the radical proposal to change the way that economics and money works, so that everyone working a full working week would be guaranteed a level of pay that would ensure that they could be completely self-sufficient, and live independently, working in the lowest-paid employment, thereby giving EVERYONE the same benchmark for life and minimum human value in all and whatever they do.
The Basic Living Standard would require everything in business and across society to change, so that we all recognise the value of people and what living a good, healthy, happy, safe and secure life within a genuinely fair, balanced and just system, in every part of life and in everything that we do – as it should be – rather than the focus always being upon profit, greed and advancement, as it is right now.
Please follow the link below to read the Full Text of TheBasic Living Standard, download the FREE PDF version or buy the Book for Kindle.
With the polls appearing to have settled or even calmed in recent days, indicating that there is some kind of status quo manifesting around the current public view of the political establishment, and Reform apparently failing to pick up any one of 9 seats in council by elections this week, it is reasonable to believe that the momentum that the seemingly unstoppable party has had since last July’s General Election is already beginning to cross its peak and that this will have began to ruffle feathers within what exists of the Party hierarchy.
Rupert Lowe has been making demonstrable waves in the form of being the kind of representative presence that all voters should be able to expect of their MP as an absolute minimum.
In itself, this has been shining a light on the shadows created by what much of Nigel Farage actually does, and it would appear that the fragility of the egos that have been driving the 4th evolution of what at its core was always an anti-EU movement, have finally began to wrestle with the reality that the model of politics that they wish to pursue isn’t in any way hard hitting enough.
Fundamentally, the motives and drive of Reform appear to be just an echo, mirror or parroting of what drives all the politicians in Westminster, who have already been written off for their incompetence and self-serving ambitions.
Doing what we’ve always done with our political system is no longer going to wash.
Labour are sinking in every way. Not just because they are Labour. But because everything touched by public policy has been heading this way for decades, and the current crop of politicians on the government benches are really just the unfortunate fools who found themselves without a comfy seat as the music begins to stop.
Solving the growing list of problems that the UK now has will need adults back in the room and most people are waking up to this. So, one party getting a whopping majority, just because they are a different choice, isn’t all that likely to happen again.
Whilst the Reform rhetoric has been like sweet music to the growing number of politically disenfranchised from around the UK, who come from across all political and demographic backgrounds, and the movement of big names and former Tories to the Reform ranks, together make it appear that the right is really going the Reform way, the reality is that in terms of policy, outreach and wider public engagement at the very least, the talk and the stories being shared are direct messages that reflect how those choosing to follow them today now feel, and little more.
Reform policy suggestions give no indication that the party strategy is based on anything real or that connects with the realities that ANY political party in the UK will now face IF it gains power and is then determined enough to do EVERYTHING necessary to achieve all that needs to be done.
Whilst the end result may end up being about what can and what will change in Westminster, IF and WHEN the next General Election comes, no political party and certainly not a new one (or one that calls itself new) is going to create the seismic change and win the cross-tribal support and mandate for what will be very painful and far-reaching change, without turning everything political on its head.
At the very minimum, this means putting the relationship with voters and what life experience is like for everyone, first.
Yes, Reform could still do this. But the chances are that with what we have seen already, the Party is already too entrenched with a philosophy that tells their active members that they are not only different to everyone else, but their cause and what they are doing is right in a way that makes everyone who disagrees, wrong.
If you take time to look at the social media streams this morning, you will see the suggestions that Rupert Lowe join up with people like Ben Habib, Katie Hopkins and other names who any number of different people might currently see being the kind of person they would like or see best to lead.
The problem is that whilst some cannot see and many others simply will not accept it, the world has changed even since July. It is also continuing to change very quickly and that’s before we take into consideration any one of a number of possible events and outcomes that have the potential to unfold in the days, weeks and months that lie ahead.
Anything new and meaningful that has the genuine capability and structure to gain enough credibility to win outright at the next general election, MUST forget the personalities, the loud voices and the great media players and focus on what people need and what is best for the people, first.
There’s no question that people many would already recognise nationally and locally too will have a role to play in our political future.
But the way that politics today is politics for politics-sake, and everything is all about some agenda that is out of touch with real people and something that nobody apart from those who are ‘in on it’ will ever see, is over. It just hasn’t ended yet.
Adam Tugwell 