Category: UK Politics

The harmful hidden meaning of ‘Growth’

We hear the term ‘growth’ coming from the mouths of politicians so often, the word really does sound like it’s all that government is about.

And yes, it IS true that growth today IS all that the government is about!

‘Great!’ say all the businesses and business owners. ‘The government are out to help us grow!’

And that’s exactly the kind of growth that most of us outside of Westminster think of and actually hear when politicians mention it. Rather than what ‘growth’ to the Politicians who are in the know, actually mean when they use this term.

GDP (Gross Domestic Product)

The growth that Politicians keep going on about IS NOT the kind of growth that most of us are thinking about when we hear them use that word.

Even though politicians and the people advising them are aware of what we are thinking and believing, as opposed to what they actually mean.

Growth for politicians doesn’t mean growth of business in the way that most of us think of it. Even though it includes the kind of growth that we think about it that meant a lot more to politicians in the past than it does now.

Growth for politicians is growth of Gross Domestic Product or GDP.

GDP is the size of the economy or the total amount of financial activity that has occurred across every form of ‘business’ or trading activity between businesses and customers that involves measurable financial transactions that are then recorded across the entire country from all the businesses and organisations that are being monitored by the Office for National Statistics.

‘Measurable’ is the important term here. Because it’s the process of measuring so much of everything in life ‘because it has a measurable financial value’ that has contributed so negatively through its influence in the way that we value every part of life in monetary terms.

The Devil is in the Detail

GDP is today critically important to politicians, because it is the benchmark figure that enables them to hide the true breadth and depth of public spending and public debt.

However, GDP is really about private sector or ‘commercial’ activity, rather than the financial activity of public sector organisations.

The public borrowing figures matter because of what we have been conditioned to believe is their direct relationship with the ‘economy’.

That is why they are always presented to us as a proportion or percentage of GDP.

Therefore, if GDP grows quickly or significantly, the true financial position of the UK becomes easier to hide.

Not only that, this way of applying ‘creative accounting’ can also be seen to devalue the amount of money that the government is spending, borrowing or creating.

This ‘sleight of hand’ works very well because the narratives we hear about the economy and economics from politicians and the media mean that public spending and public debt are always referenced today in terms of how ‘big’ the economy is, and how much the economy has ‘grown’.

Politicians and the money ‘creators’ are making our world unrecognisable whilst we are all being robbed

GDP is a very clever tool, and it was certainly meant to be. But it is also a two-edged sword.

A quick recap:

Politicians are able to hide or even extinguish public debt and ‘reduce’ the amount they are spending by ‘growing the economy’.

This is why politicians are obsessed with ‘Growth’.

‘Growing the economy’ in this sense means increasing the amount of financial activity or the total of money that is spent or transferred through measurable activities during any define period of time.

How ‘Growth’ works:

The politician’s ‘Growth’ is typically achieved through an increase in private sector financial transactions and the volume of money that is in circulation (Basically what all the money that can be found in every open bank account at any one moment in time would add up to).

Money is created by private banks and financial institutions. NOT by government.

Whilst each Pound is counted as it is created for the purposes of GDP figures, the real ‘magic’ or sleight of hand comes in the way that the same Pound will be counted again, each time it changes hands through a new financial transaction at each and every point in a supply chain.

Building houses is perhaps the very best example of a way for GDP and therefore ‘Growth’ to be increased so that large volumes of new money and the chain of financial transactions it will create in the associated supply chains can quickly be added to the UKs Balance Sheet.

A good example of ‘Growth’ – in the way politicians need it to be:

To build a house means private banks creating the money to lend to buy the land and then to pay for the process of building which will include the supply chains with all the different businesses that make house building products, the machinery that is used, the fuels, the specialist tradesmen, the surveyors.

Then the houses must be sold, which gives another private bank the opportunity to create the money for the mortgage, the mortgage lender to charge a fee, the removal company to get business, the landscaper to install a nice garden and so on.

Beyond this specific chain are the increasing requirements for the payment of council tax for each home that the local Councils automatically charge, the utilities accounts and requirement for bus companies, and the list goes on.

Each and every one of the businesses involved provide data to the Office of National Statistics about the performance and turnover of their business. And each set of figures is added to the Country’s ‘productivity’, no matter how many time the money which started off at the beginning has changed hands, meaning that its value in terms of GDP will be multiplied potentially many times over.

Things to bear in mind about The System

It is important to bear in mind that GDP works as the ‘credible’ measurement of economic activity that it does, because it hides the creation of money behind the walls of private banks and finance houses.

Most people still believe that banks and finance houses hold money for some people or business that they then lend to other people, businesses and governments in return for interest which they then share with whoever ‘banked’ the money with them.

Whilst this may have been in some ways true historically, money is created by private banks and finance houses today as simply as an employee entering digits into a spreadsheet, with all the rules that required these activities to be ‘regulated’ and kept within a framework either watered down or removed by ‘deregulation’ as part of ‘free markets’.

For The System to keep working, the amount of money available MUST keep growing and the number of recorded financial transactions MUST keep increasing.

This is why the use and increasing reliance on credit and now digital banking and therefore financial transaction tracking has become so important.

Cash transactions cannot be monitored or recorded in the same way that digital transactions can. This is one of the key reasons that cash is being phased out – because cash or any kind of non-digital transaction really is one of the keys to financial independence!

Private banks and finance houses also ‘buy’ the bonds that the government ‘sells’ when there is a requirement to ‘borrow’ money to pay for public policies and delivery through the public sector.

It is important to be aware that if the total amount of money in circulation were to remain fixed within this ‘FIAT’ based economic or financial system, the value of the transactions taking place would naturally fall.

The System was designed and operates on the basis that money ‘created’ by The System automatically flows into the pockets of the rich. From there it is invested in assets such as property, infrastructure and even business ownership, from where it is used to create even more ‘credit’ raising opportunities.

In the FIAT system, money flows back to its source and those who are already very rich – the bubble where it was all ‘created’.

Where our reality becomes VERY uncomfortable – just to support Politicians ‘Growth’

To counteract the perverse nature of an economic system deliberately created to enrich and benefit those who created, manage and understand it (The creators), it is therefore necessary for money to be created for new reasons and in an ever-increasing number of ways. So that money can keep flowing, ‘multiplying’ and being shown to result in ‘Growth’.

Deregulation allowed the same interests that create money to use more of that created money to buy up just about everything that they would not have been able to in any other way, because we have been duped into believing that the money they use is actually real.

Fake money has basically been used to buy up or gain control of everything that we recognise as being real, typically so that it can then be rented back to us, increasingly using more fake money that we have had to borrow and pay interest on.

Whilst the money used for public spending is ‘dead money’ because it typically pays wages and incomes, the government can no longer borrow enough to pay the existing bills because the UK has been stripped of its assets and ability to produce by the same interests that create the money.

More food for thought

Unfortunately for us, the creation of money for nothing doesn’t correspond in any way with the value of everything that people and businesses own and produce across the UK.

Our politicians have helped to make it this way, because the adoption of this system appeared to make life much easier for them.

This means that the real value of whatever money we possess, or we expect to receive in income each time even just a £Pound is ‘created’ by the Politicians or the Banks, the value of the £Pound in our pockets or in our bank accounts falls in proportion to all of the money that is in circulation.

The way that The System we have counteracts or addresses this fall in monetary value is through what we know as ‘Inflation’.

Inflation is the price or value rise that becomes essential for whoever owns or produces anything, so that they can keep up with how ‘growth’ is actually pushing the value of everything down.

How Inflation hurts us

Because we – the people and the consumers – are the end of the ‘supply chain’, we aren’t selling on what we buy to anyone else, and we are the ‘end user’.

This means we cannot recoup any of the losses which the government is racking up across the economy and therefore for us each day.

We are the end of all supply chains. And whereas every conceivable business activity should be about the end user – that’s us, or rather humankind, it is not.

EVERYTHING is about money, greed and profit and in real terms that don’t require too much further thought, we are experiencing loss in standards of living, because wages and incomes don’t (and cannot) go up, to match the deficit that GDP is creating for us at life level, in so many different ways.

Are we the victims of the biggest crime that mankind has inflicted upon itself?

If you can begin the process of unpicking the layers of the economic onion – which have been deliberately hidden and obscured by narratives that are designed to put the keen observer off, you will soon uncover just some of the uncomfortable truths that lie behind giant walls that have been hiding in plain sight.

The biggest of all is this:

The System can only function and deliver its rewards to the few by steadily impoverishing the masses. So that they become increasingly dependent upon every available form of credit, just so that they and the next people in the queue to become impoverished can continue to exist.

When MMT, neoliberal economics and the FIAT momentary system was conceived and implemented in the early 1970’s, it was inevitable even then, that people on the lowest levels of income would come to not be able to afford to live without help of some kind – which to benefit The System would always preferably be credit.

That credit or debt for the growing masses, would be the steady and growing supply of just more of the same fake money that those who created it and have increasingly used it to own and control everything then have then lent to us at interest, happily policing our credit worthiness – and therefore our growing compliance with The System – as they have done so.

That the government is being forced to instigate welfare reform now, in ways that go against the growing trend and an exploding welfare bill, isn’t a sign that any member of our society genuinely wants to enjoy a lifestyle that is paid for by either the taxpayer or the state.

The crisis that the government is now in tells us that the cracks are now appearing within this bogus economy and that the fissures have already parted to a level where it is no longer possible to keep creating ‘corporation friendly’ policies that bridge the gaps, give the same few the opportunity to create new credit lines where their greed can be hidden.

Although few trust the politicians we have got, most of us until have failed to agree upon why.

What we should all realise and understand is that whether deliberate or not, everything the politicians have been doing for the money ‘creators’ for a period of at least 5 decades, has slowly but surely led to the fabric of our society being destroyed.

All to the point where it is impossible for them to hide it now.

Originally published on 6 December 2024, this Blog was updated and republished online and for PDF download on 25 March 2025 – the day before The Spring Statement.

How the UK was led into the fiscal-driven Armageddon we are now within
Being on benefits isn’t a culture; for many it’s a living hell
Desperate Times – Desperate Resets
The Harmful Hidden Meaning of Growth PDF_Vers1_25Mar25Download

The Contemporary Politicians Dilemma

You’ve just been elected as an MP and your political group or party holds the majority of Seats in Parliament.

Your group or party now has power over everything. Can change anything. Can be anything. Can do everything that you all promised the people who voted for you when you were successfully elected, just the other day.

In the briefings and within the advice that was never available to you and your political colleagues before the election took place, you are told very clearly, that everything the last government was actually doing, no matter what they were saying publicly, was the only way that they were able to keep government and the public sector running.

The alternative was that the economy, quickly followed by the government and then all public services would simply collapse.

As you catch your breath, you realise that all the things that have been hurting people, whether it was the cost-of-living crisis, inflation, house building, immigration, the benefits crisis or many other of the other social issues you have promised to tackle are all connected to the economy.

You now understand that everything in The System relates to money and specifically to ‘growth’ and the GDP that sits behind it in some way.

People of all kinds, all ages and all backgrounds are struggling.

You saw it only too well as you campaigned before the election was held. Pain and suffering was lurking in just about every direction that you looked.

You are told that you can keep the economy running. Just as long as you keep finding credible reasons to spend.

‘Credible’ reasons are what you need to build and maintain the narrative that justifies the reason to borrow and print money. So that ‘growth’ hides all of the problems, and the money you have created keeps flowing in all the directions that The System demands that it should.

However, there is a cost.

The cost of ‘keeping the economy going’ will be that you cannot step back or away from any policy that already exists, no matter how you sell it to the public.

This will mean there will need to be a growing number of people within the population and reasons to spend on all the goods and services that they will need, so that you can justify spending more and more of that created money, and that money can keep being passed between all the different parts of the economy that provide goods and services to meet the basic needs of people.

This is the way that the problem and more importantly the size of that problem, can continue to be hidden from view.

You know what you promised. You know what you said.

You were going to be ‘The difference’, ‘The change’ and you are now faced with making things worse instead.

The question you now ask yourself; ‘Is it better just to keep managing things, in a state of ongoing but ‘managed decline’, or do you do the right thing and deliver on your promises, knowing that the immediate after effect is likely to be a complete ‘System Collapse’, that is probably now inevitable, but could be delayed if you ‘keep the plates spinning’ instead?

What would you do, if this was you…?

The Contemporary Politicians Dilemma PDF_Vers1_5Sep25Download

Were Labour set up to be ‘Custodians of the Collapse’?

One of the biggest myths in politics today is the suggestion that all of the Political Parties that we have on offer have some long-standing and credible philosophy that drives them from their base.

The Conservatives have forgotten what it is to be conservative. The Liberal Democrats are idealogues whose idea of liberalism has a very undemocratic form. Reform is at best Re-Ukipping and attempting to steal every Conservative Politician. Whilst Labour has nothing in common with the workers they once so fiercely represented, whose social and economic problems they now openly resent.

Whilst a large proportion of the UK population are very angry with politicians from right across the spectrum as it stands today, we still fall into the trap of believing that anyone who has become a politician or an MP is not only up to the job but should be treated with deference. Because being elected has made them special in some way.

Sadly, the days when we could rely upon any of the politicians or public representatives having the best interests of the public at heart in all that they do are very long gone.

The Political Parties select the candidates that we find on our ballot papers, meaning that we all have at best a ‘fixed choice’. And the choices that the Political Parties themselves make today represent a downward trajectory in leadership quality that has seen poor leader after poor leader surround themselves with even poorer leaders, which then makes up the pool from whom the next choice of an even poorer leader is inevitably made.

Even the best interviewers would struggle to uncover anything genuine or authentic about any of the people who are making the decisions that affect all of our lives. Yet we maintain the habit of taking everything these people say at face value, whilst too often falling into the trap that suggests going against the common or accepted narrative makes us wrong in some way.

What are today’s ‘politicians’ really there to do?

It has been said that if the general population understood how the economy and financial system worked, there would be a revolution tomorrow.

Yet we cannot even be sure that the Prime Minister really understands what this statement could mean. Beyond what he is being advised everyday by ‘experts’ and ‘special advisors’, who themselves also have myopic views of the world and are following their own agendas in many different ways.

The ‘growth’ that politicians obsess with isn’t the same ‘growth’ that normal people would typically think.

Yes, growing’ businesses does play a very small part.

But the growth that means so much to the political classes is the expansion of GDP or Gross Domestic Product. Which we might otherwise recognise as the financial productivity of the UK over a set period of time that can be measured in some way.

Growing GDP allows politicians to hide public debt and their expenditure.

Growing GDP and what they are referring to as ‘growth’, are the only tools poor leaders know how to use to solve problems, by showing the debt and expenditure as a percentage or proportion of the ‘economy’ for whichever period of time the reference point might be.

The entire economic and financial model that exists and which politicians are now struggling to maintain can only remain functional for as long as GDP and the money in circulation grows.

Because the same global model has already stripped the UKs traditional industries and tools of production from under us making the few already fabulously rich, there is very little left that can be used as a credible excuse for printing money.

This is why politicians are importing reasons to spend and create more money, whilst they use forked tongues to tell us they are committed to solutions that don’t face the same way.

Making us poor whilst destroying every means for us to solve the problems ourselves

As GDP and the money in circulation grows, the value of the money we have and the income we are expecting goes down and down.

The rich get richer whilst the poor get poorer and the whole system depends upon increasing wealth inequality so that those who already have more can keep getting more.

GDP came into being as the economic reference point at the same time that we lost the Gold Standard, and the FIAT monetary system took over in the period around 1971.

It is no accident that this was the same unhappy chapter of our history when UK politicians pushed us towards what was then The Common Market and what we now know as The EU.

As a localised global project, the EU ‘project’ was always about money and control being progressively handed to the world’s elites, whilst an ever-grimmer shit sandwich was all that was left for me and for you.

The neoliberal orthodoxy that underpinned all of this has been applied consistently and progressively over the past 50+ years to ensure that community and national identity has evaporated, whilst small, independent businesses of every kind are no longer viable, and any form of industry, service provision or the supply of food or goods that are essential to everyday life, have been placed under the control of fewer and fewer profiteering and controlling hands.

Puppet governance

None of this would have been possible without the help and commitment of generations of politicians who have been useful idiots for those who benefit from a system that is destroying our humanity, and everything good and of real value that we know.

Those benefitting have always been very generous to politicians and public servants in ways that appeal to the materially and glory-seeking weak minded, who have become corrupted by the system and the way that everything actually works, pretty much as soon as the votes that elected them have been counted or they have that plumb job, and the soundproof doorway from the real world into the Westminster corridors has closed behind them.

They quickly conclude that they are now the all-seeing, all hearing and all-knowing gods, amongst other gods who think exactly the same.

Dead Cats and indoctrinated amnesia

People have very short memories when it comes to politics, especially when things are feeling particularly bad.

Indeed, for many it seems easy to forget just how bad the Conservatives under Cameron, May, Johnson, Truss and Sunak really were.

So, it seems unfathomable that Labour could actually be picking up where the Tories left off, and that’s why things are just getting even worse, whilst it’s the Conservatives at whom Labour are pointing the finger of blame – whilst they continue doing exactly the same.

You may not believe what you are reading. And that we are not supposed to is the whole point.

There is NOTHING between any of the Political Parties that we have to choose from today. Conservative, Labour, Lib Dem or Reform.

They are all as Establishment as each other, and as things stand today will continue the pathway of UK destruction, no matter how the next government may be formed.

Further Reading

1. Understanding the Political Crisis

2. The Economic Foundations and Collapse

3. Governance Failures and Systemic Breakdown

4. Political Cycles and the Future

Custodians of the Collapse 4Dec24 PDF_Vers1_20Dec25Download

The reality of today’s Minimum Wage: The baseline of our Economic Crisis

The biggest elephant in this economic room and probably the reason why Kier Starmer was falling over himself over the use of the term and definition of ‘working people’, is there is a growing underclass of the population who cannot earn enough money to pay for the basic essentials that they need to live each week or month.

The ‘Minimum Wage’ – even at the £12.21 it is expected to reach in April 2025, will not meet the basic cost of living.

The Minimum Wage is not enough for a single person, living alone, to be able to meet all of their basic or essential needs and expenses, without having financial help, receiving benefits of some kind, getting support from a charity like a Food Bank, or by going into debt.

In October 2023, I calculated that the real hourly rate that a single person would need to receive for a 40-hour working week would be £14.00 per hour – and that figure will certainly have grown in the year that has passed since.

The Politicians who do know and understand this – and please be under no illusion that those at Cabinet Level really should know what it really costs to live, also know that if they were to openly and publicly recognise that the National Minimum Wage isn’t anywhere near enough for a single adult who is living alone to live on, they would then be required to act.

Acting would require an immediate uplift of the Minimum Wage to a figure that is today likely to be around £15.00 per hour.

However, whilst the truth that this economic model can only make some rich by making many poor cannot be ignored, the imposition of a genuine Minimum Wage overnight would have immediate knock-on effects for everything and effectively bring the entire economy to a halt. For no better reason than the economic model that we currently have can only exist and function by exploiting people in this way.

When asked, most people who understand how business and money works will recognise that there is something very wrong with the way this economic model works. But will inevitably return to the response ‘It’s just the way it is’ and ‘Nothing can be done about it’.

This false position of inevitability or that it is impossible to change would be fine, were it not the fact that the people taking this position are typically not those being affected by it.

Dear Farmers: PLEASE don’t mess with the Law of Unintended Consequences on Tuesday. A well-organised March in London will be enough to show how miffed you are

Watching developments since the 2024 Budget on the 30th of October has seen, debate, support and plans for the Farmers March in London evolve – which we have every reason to believe is being planned as well and responsibly as a protest can, by The Farming Forum.

However, as we near the 19th of November, suggestions of holding back food supplies to supermarkets, refusing to accommodate sewage sludge and bringing the country to a standstill threaten to take the whole crisis that U.K. Farming and our Food Security are experiencing, in a direction that could make this hidden Food Crisis considerably worse.

The growing strength of feeling really does risk giving those directly involved that Farmers have the power to solve every problem in one hit. And that they should therefore take it.

However, issues surrounding changes to Farmers Inheritance Tax do not stand alone in isolation. The breadth and depth of issues about how the entire UK Food Chain is being misused are both highly complex and considerably bigger than many farmers even realise.

And whilst any Farmer or Supporter may believe that headlines and commentary suggest the Government is ‘now on the run’ and will make concessions or change their mind if pushed hard enough, militancy of any kind at this stage, is more likely to lead to even worse outcomes for the industry than the drastic improvements and turnarounds that those banging drums and driving tractors may have on their current wish list.

Former Labour Advisor, John McTernan has told everyone, very loudly and very openly in an interview that that the U.K. does not need Small Farmers.

Whilst Starmer has attempted to ‘disown’ this suggestion, and whether our politicians are stupid and are doing stupid things or not, we would all be foolish to not accept and work with the reality that the people running this country until perhaps 2029, no longer see value in the UKs Small Farms.

We must all be very clear that if the Government believes that ‘Small Farms aren’t necessary, when they are not talking about Farms that are actually that small, the Government is not going to do anything to reward an industry for causing them problems, when they already have a picture of the future that surely resembles many if not all Small Farms being closed down.

We shouldn’t doubt that the Inheritance Tax move itself was a very big ‘tell’.

Politicians have now reached the stage in an ongoing process of UK Farming viability removal, where they no longer believe it necessary to show any care for Farmers.

With the belief that the only helpful thing I can do is to share what I know and understand, I sat down to write Who Controls Our Food Controls Our Future with the aim that anyone genuinely interested would have the option of a quick walk through the entire background of the hidden Food Crisis.

I had been writing about our politicians and why they no longer care, and had a jaw dropping moment when the very serious warning from the political classes which is the McTernan comment was so very quickly shared after the 30th October Budget.

Right now, the direction of travel for U.K. Farming as we know it is terminal. 3rd party interests right across the Food Chain – NOT just the politicians themselves – believe in a future where the Food we eat will either be a source of guaranteed profit for corporate giants or just another governance tool for societal control.

Such aims require that Food Production cannot be left in even the most isolated pair of hands. Because any form of independence in the Food Chain will be a massive threat.

The evidence is there and no longer even hiding in plain sight.

Politicians across our political sphere today do not fear losing Small Farmers. But they will be very fearful of even a moment of social unrest and are unlikely to respond well to any acts that create problems for them that might suggest to the Public that they are not in control.

Much like the follow-up to the unrest in Southport in the Summer this Government is likely to work like they are on steroids to achieve anything they believe necessary to stop Farmers from ever having the opportunity to make them look bad again.

We ALL need to realise that the dystopian nightmare is already here.

We just haven’t stood back to view the whole wood yet, rather than each of our different trees.

We all need to wake up quickly and begin playing a very different game, before it really is too late.

The next step, could regrettably come very quickly following any action or events that aren’t thought through properly. And such actions – even if only involving just a few, would be akin to the whole Farming Industry shooting itself in the foot.

Not only do People across the UK need OUR Farming industry to survive. WE ALL need UK Farmers to take back all of the control that they have lost, putting Food and Food Production back at the very heart of our Local Communities, as just the start.

No help and certainly nothing good will come now from anyone or any organisation that profits in any way from where UK Farming is heading today. Other than lip service, contractual devices, sops and incentives that will keep Farmers doing what those interests want Farmers to do and keep Farmers believing that things will get better at some unknown point in the future.

Meanwhile these interests will continue to rinse every last penny that they can from ALL of us, whilst systematically destroying the ability of Farmers, People and Communities to have Food Chain Independence at any level and of any kind.

Please don’t fall into the trap of giving any of them even the slightest reason to make things worse for Farmers, whilst they still can.

Otherwise, what is left of UK Farming may not be able to recover.

Food From Farms Guaranteed_PDF_Vers2_13Mar25Download
The need for a collaborative approach to UK Farming PDF_Vers1_25Mar25Download