Category: UK Politics

The Growing UK Food Problem

In early 2022, I embarked on the writing project ‘Levelling Level’.

The initial aim was to provide a written view of the then Tory Government Levelling Up Agenda, its genuine purpose, and to discuss what is really going on.

The published work focused the social and public policy problems the UK faces. How they came into being, and what is likely to happen if politicians, leaders and the government and/or the public sector system that they ‘lead’, think and operate, doesn’t change its approach or ‘narrative’.

The direction of Levelling Level paid particular attention to the growing possibility of a yet to come black swan event. One that most likely includes or is triggered by a financial crash and circumstances that resemble a contemporary equivalent of The Great Depression.

With future outcomes and the potential need to ‘survive and thrive’ through a coming period of unpredictable change, I wrote extensively of the need to refocus and repurpose our approach to Food Production.

If we were to adopt voluntary changes to the UK Food Chain now, it could mean the provision and supply of basic or essential foods (healthy, nutritious and grown as locally as possible) would be available, pre-crisis.

But also, that the available infrastructure and resources could be repurposed as quickly as possible to ensure that communities are fed within a future emergency period that follow unforeseen events or be available to us all through a prolonged period of instability where the availability of imported food is reduced or stopped for any reason.

The suggestions tabled within Levelling Level included the use of allotments, gardens, window boxes and home-based hydroponic systems. As home growing could provide immediate and shorter turnaround Food Production support, whilst agricultural land and facilities are repurposed for localised production and a fully transparent, short-as-possible food supply chain is implemented, that will be necessitated by such a crisis.

Levelling Level, the series of books that have followed and its more recent version ‘Days of Ends and New Beginnings’ have covered a generalist approach to the causes of problems across public policy.

However, it is clear that no matter the approach taken towards change that prioritises People, Food should be at the centre of everything. But is nonetheless taken for granted just as the air we breathe and the water we drink are, today.

Ultimately, the Books I have written work towards the proposal of using the current electoral and democratic system more effectively and democratically, with the series then proposing an entirely different, locally centric system of government. One where citizen power is embraced fully or would resemble what some are now calling ‘grassroots up’ governance.

Whilst a key takeaway of Levelling Level and the following Books was the proposal of a complete  public policy related values or ethics shift, to pivoting future policy development around the societal and economic benchmark called ‘The Basic Living Standard’, it is the ability of people to feed themselves and to be able to access healthy, nutritious, basic (or essential) foods that will become the primary indicator of whether public policy is succeeding or has succeeded in alleviating food poverty.

It is fair to say that countless societal issues are likely to be resolved quickly, if and when governance is built upon the principle of ‘getting the right outcomes for Everyone’.

Food: The difficulties we see and the problem we don’t

Awareness of a ‘food supply problem’ certainly exists within the UK Farming Industry where the National Farmers Union (NFU) has been regularly championing the supply side issue.

However, the UK is now considered to be producing around the equivalent of around only 54% of the food the UK Population consumes.

Whilst it can be argued that the issue of Food Security fragility is now in the public consciousness, because the term has made it into the common lexicon via the ‘mainstream news’, a more discerning audience will understand that this statement indicates that the UK only produces the equivalent of 54% of our food.

Indeed, stating the level of ‘self-production’ of UK Food at 54% doesn’t consider or reveal that the UK supply chain could not supply even a fraction of the food that the UK Population would need to survive, if for any reason, UK borders were to become closed for any prolonged period of time.

The Challenge that we all now face

The perception of farmers and industry is one thing.

The Food Security ‘problem’ that the general public perceives and understand is another altogether.

This is well illustrated by the 2023 Report from the Food, Farming and Countryside Commission (FFCC) ‘Citizens are Hungry for Change’ which provided an accurate picture of public perception.

This work was researched from amongst those members of our society who are aware of a food problem. Whatever the specifics of that food problem might appear to be, to them.

Perception is everything. And certainly so, where the potential for societal change is concerned

Where the current narrative, economic or political paradigm are concerned, the views, experience and meaning that underpin the concerns of the Farming Industry, Interest Groups and the wider general public represent many different perspectives and priorities, and just as many different truths.

Different truths fuel very different agendas. And as pet agendas compete for oxygen, their champions do not take into consideration the bigger picture that is at work.

Those who are emotionally tied to furthering their own solutions and agendas remain oblivious to what really motivates, drives and creates the purpose underpinning ‘The System’ itself.

This means that work like that undertaken by the FFCC and lobbying pressure tabled by membership organisations like the NFU will only be used as a political football at best.

Nobody from outside Westminster is playing the same game that Westminster is playing and Westminster plays by rules which only it has so far framed.

Like many research projects that have been completed and published over decades, ‘credible research’ targeted at the political class of today can only result in token gestures which will only be about the creation of political capital. Rather than being about real, meaningful change or outcomes that are good for us all.

It is an uncomfortable truth we have yet to accept that the politicians and ‘leaders’ we have elected to represent us, cannot and will not rationalize the danger that the UK faces. Nor will they embrace the power that they actually have to change things for the better, today.

Learned helplessness: The foolish expectation that those with responsibility will do the right thing – because they are supposed to

The hard truth

UK Farmers and Food Producers have become reliant upon financial incentives from government and contractual arrangements from big businesses which have silently worked hand in hand to destabilize UK Food Production over a period now exceeding 50 years.

The issue of UK Food Security and Food Sustainability was never questioned during our Membership of the EU regionalized global political ‘project’.

Yet this is when the real damage to UK Food Production was done.

Everyone – including Farmers, were led to believe that globalized food chains would always meet the UKs Food needs.

Indeed, a constant flow of media reports about butter mountains, wine lakes and numerous other tales about ‘overproduction’ across The Common Market, European Economic Community and then The EU itself only served to endorse the myths that had  been created suggesting that UK Farming was in decline and that UK Farmers could only thrive by ‘going with the flow’, in effect, complying with whatever they were told to grow, to produce, or to any commercial offer that seemed to provide income security of some kind.

What many who understand the wider rural community across the UK will know, is this approach is very much at odds with real life.

The UKs Farming, Rural, Fishing and Food Producing communities are culturally entrepreneurial and very creative in their approach to business, and to operational management in particular.

However, UK Farmers and Food Producers have been reprogrammed to believe that no such thing as a viable, fully-independent Food Producing Business exists.

Even though every person alive needs at least two healthy, nutritious meals every day.

Meanwhile, the conditioned position of deference to elected representatives and establishment figures has created a situation where the general population realise and understand that there are significant problems and perhaps even risks to the UK Food Supply. However, they also believe that the creation of solutions and the action it will take to deliver them are something that someone, somewhere else has the responsibility to do, and that those with that responsibility will do it too.

We are in the potentially disastrous situation where Farmers and Consumers, the two key stakeholders in the UK Food Supply Chain, do not accept that there is an alternative way that would be much better for Farmers and Consumers alike. Because every information source that is considered to be credible continues to tell us all that there isn’t any other way than the dysfunctional one that we have right now.

The risk we are running is that neither the Public nor Food Producers will accept the need for change until People across the UK are going hungry and the UK Farming Industry has been reduced to a form where it no longer has the ability to function in the alternative way that we actually need.

‘The absence of proof does not mean proof of absence.’

There is massive a massive risk of Food Shortages, if the UK waits until change is necessary before taking action.

If the UK waits to be led by events, we run the considerable risk of there being a gap in UK Food Production and Supply that could effect well in excess of 50% of the UK population.

Otherwise, it could easily reduce the access to Essential or Basic Foods for the entire UK Population.

However, most likely, the Population of the UK will experience a mixture of both. (Without considering the influence of ‘black market’ activity and the explosive levels of inflation that would appear, allowing those who have enough money to continue buying whatever they like, for as long as that money continues to hold value).

How power and influence work across the UK Food Chain today

One of the most challenging aspects of the creation or instigation of meaningful change, is getting everyone to consider the alternative, an alternative system or an alternative way of doing things that doesn’t relate to The System that we all know and believe we understand.

The UK Population still expect ‘The System’ to provide the solutions to the societal problems that we have. Even though objective observation will almost certainly lead to the conclusion that it will not.

The majority of the UK Population, including experts, academics and many of those working in government departments or across the public sector do not understand that Public Policy is determined in ways that run completely contrary to what any of us should be able to expect.

Big Business and Big Retail have by far the biggest influence on both Government and the Food Supply Chain, either directly or indirectly. Because The System focuses on ‘growth’ as part of an economic model that prioritises profit for businesses over the needs of the Population itself.

Likewise, within the political and public sector sphere, those with influence who have ears to hear, give considerably more weight to fashionable activist and idealist causes (i.e., those with a louder voice), than the majority of the population or the Consumers themselves, who are the key stakeholders, alongside the producers themselves.

Most disconcertingly, whilst the relationship between Farmers and the Consumers they ultimately supply should be the most definable and robust of all within ‘The Sphere of UK Food Influence’, the relationship between the two Key Stakeholders is weakened to the point that it only genuinely exists beyond lip service where a local and direct farm-to-consumer ‘retail’ relationship exists.

And this itself will be subject to affordability and other accessibility factors that make it almost impossible to recognise in any meaningful way at all.

The Current Mindset or ‘Paradigm’

The System operates as it does because life is driven by the following key factors:

  • Money and wealth-based power and influence.
  • A cultural mindset that functions with a conditioned and steadily decreasing need for self-awareness and the respect for the law of consequence or law of cause and effect that this facilitates.

We are, to all intents and purposes living and existing within a Moneyocracy.

As the purpose of this work is to focus on UK Food Security issues, there is little to be gained from a diversion into the mindset or psychology that sits behind the leadership and influence-based problems that the UK faces here.

However, the distilled or filtered down version of every social and economic problem the UK faces relate to human nature. And specifically, how the majority of people without self-awareness and without an intrinsic values set behave when life revolves the financial value that can be attributed to every transaction or ‘thing’ outside of ‘the self’.

Forward Thinking and A Food Supply Solution for The Future

A Safe, Secure and Sustainable Food Supply that can service the needs of all UK Communities adequately, can only come from a refocused, repurposed, revitalised and above all Localised System of Farming and Food Production across the UK.

Regrettably, it is the case that beyond agenda-driven bubbles, of which there are indeed many, there is simply no interest in taking proactive steps to create an alternative and robust sustainable supply chain.

The need for the focus on outcomes and results is continually being lost on arguing about who runs things, or who’s solution and therefore agenda, is best.

Once we have stepped beyond the obsessive preoccupation of The Moneyocracy and are ready to embrace a People-centric economic model, we will be able to consider systems of Authentic Governance as suggested by my recent work ‘Our Local Future’. Also by The Glos Community Project, a proposal for a system of community owned and ‘franchised’ social enterprises, which I first published in July 2023, that had the creation of new, not-for-profit localised food production and retail cooperatives at its core.

The ’Glos Community’ Food Production model would sit between the two extremes that at one end is driven by regenerative, ‘sustainable’ and micro-farming principles and the extreme version where the current direction of travel is perhaps best described by bigger is better in every sense that this can mean.

The Sticking Point

The problem we face is that UK Farmers and all parts of the UK Food Chain are unlikely to embrace what is today viewed by the profit-obsessed as a backward way of thinking about advances in Farming and Food production.

This will continue until such time as the value set has shifted from money and ‘what’s important to me’, to one where basic values are restored and value is achieved in producing for the purpose of meeting basic needs, rather than what those with monetary power and influence want.

By adopting a public policy model based around Locality and Authentic Governance, all systems of business would ultimately refocus to a system that would see a localised and balanced Food Production and supply system as the most logical, sensible and practical to have. Because the motives, incentives and drivers will have fundamentally changed.

The barrier to change – that would be pivotal in so many profound ways, is that few will accept the need for this change or be willing to embrace the changes that will make it possible voluntarily.

The problems with Food Supply and Food Security are directly related to the current paradigm and the way that The Moneyocracy has effectively addicted everyone to measuring success, failure and happiness in terms of financial and material gain.

As with any genuine addiction, those addicted must accept that they are suffering an addiction before any action can be taken to address it. And when the majority of the Population are suffering from that same addiction to one or other level or degree, the voices that speak out or that are taken seriously when it comes to the process of healing, are very few and far between, indeed.

We face a reality where only an event of system-changing proportions or what would facilitate a genuine ‘paradigm shift’ will prove enough for business, communities and people to embrace the level of change necessary for a truly sustainable and secure system of UK food production to work.

How we will know when we have a Food Supply that works for us, rather than against us

The true health and wellbeing of society can be measured most effectively by everyone’s access to the supply of Basic and Essential Foods and the eradication of food poverty, where the eradication of food poverty is itself defined by access to an adequate, affordable, unhindered and properly prepared supply of Fresh, Basic, Healthy and Nutritious foods without recourse to using benefits, accessing charity or going into debt.

The current UK Food Paradigm

Whilst few will accept the reality that we currently face, we cannot and will not make progress towards the UK being genuinely ‘Food Secure’, unless and until we face up to some difficult truths:

  1. UK Agriculture and Food Producers are not capable of ‘feeding the country’ in an emergency.
  2. With the current dependence on government centric incentives and policy derived from specific interests, UK Agriculture and Food Supply will remain tied to the current narrative – no matter how destructive that will become at individual Farm Business level.
  3. UK Farmers and Food Producers will not embrace collective change voluntarily.
  4. The downward trajectory will continue until such an emergency or event takes place that makes change necessary.
  5. The immediate risk to us all is that the UK Farming Sector will reach a crisis point where it is incapable of being restored to a local supply chain model.
  6. Economic and societal change of the kind necessary to alleviate the social and financial issues experienced at the level of the individual require a values-based shift from money and profit, to one where fairness and equity to all individuals is prioritised.
  7. The most simple and effective policy tool to enable such a shift would be the implementation of a People-centric, Localised and Community-based system of Authentic Governance that places Food Production and Supply at the heart of everything.

The Future UK Food Paradigm

It is only with a realignment of values to those that will assure the self-sufficiency of every healthy, working adult, of all business systems and specifically those processes related to Food Production and Supply being Localised to support this that the UK can become ‘Food Secure’.

We must all become People-centric, rather than profit-centric, for sure.

Technological advances must not under any circumstances be allowed or encouraged to replace natural food growing and production and should be relied upon only to improve human life, health and experience.

The hard truth about UK Farming and Food Production we face today

We must regrettably consider and face up to the reality that whilst politicians, big business and the establishment will pay lip service to a growing crisis in UK Food Security, Farmers, Growers, other UK food producing sectors and those businesses aligned with them will likewise not accept that the solutions to a critical problem at both industry and Farm or Business level can come in any way other than from within the existing paradigm and mind-set itself.

The default position of the Industry today is: “it’s all about the bottom line. Government makes the rules and must therefore pay for the changes. Once they have accepted they are necessary.”

Sadly, this rather difficult truth can only lead to the conclusion that no matter how loudly those within and aligned with UK Agriculture sound the alarm and criticise those who we should all be able to expect to deliver on our behalf, Farmers and Food-producing business owners will neither accept and are not prepared to take the initiative and risk that will certainly secure the UKs Food Security, but will ultimately secure the future of many more of our farmers, and themselves too.

Economic and social change of the kind necessary that provide a safe, secure, happy and healthy environment, and with it a safe, secure accessible and affordable supply of fresh, local, nutritious and healthy food for the UK Population is therefore not possible without a paradigm shift that can only be created by a significant national or world event that ends both the ‘belief’ and with it the ‘addiction’ to the current money-based, profit-obsessed system that we are very unlucky to have.

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The UKs Public Smoking Cloud: The desperate need to feed confirmation biases and the unacknowledged reality that few non-smokers enjoy being forced to passively smoke

Since the UK General Election in early July, there has been a marked change in the way people are using social media and the messages they are sharing.

Don’t get me wrong. The questions over social media and the damage that its misuse and mismanagement has and continues to do is long held and there is much to be resolved.

It just seems to be the case that many if not all of what seemed to be ‘credible’ speakers across the political spectrum, have now got completely wrapped up in their own rhetoric and become sucked down by one or other of the many rabbit holes that seem to be giving so many some weird form of sanctuary whilst the world seems to be suffering from a madness storm.

The point is illustrated uncomfortably by the massive onslaught that is now underway in the UK against the proposals by the quickly aging Labour Government to impose smoking bans in pub gardens and many other public areas.

Following hot on the heels of the age-based smoking ban that the disastrous Sunak Conservative Government didn’t bring into being before their wipeout in July, the hypocrisy coming from the political right is as troubling as the countless ‘voices for reason’, who are now obsessively attempting to use everything the establishment does as evidence that confirms that George Orwell’s 1984 is as good as done and dusted, and is already taking over every part of life in just about every possible form.

If we look hard enough for evidence of anything, the chances are that we will find it. Not because it’s necessarily there. But because that’s the way that human nature works if you give it a green light to do so.

There is much to be concerned about by the way the establishment, the elites and the governing classes behave and how they approach the responsibilities that they no longer seem to accept they have to all others. However, the behaviour that they exhibit comes from much the same place and is founded upon their own biases, ignorance and an intoxication with power that few would be able to avoid. If they too were to suddenly find themselves in the same place.

Banning smoking in public places is not an attack on freedom. That is unless we are happy to agree that public policy should be based on the damaging belief that governance is about pandering to the minority, rather than doing what’s best for all. Or what the more sensible amongst us might recognise as being ‘The Common Good’.

The most recent figures from The Office of National Statistics tell us that 12.9% of the UK Population are smokers, which is roughly about 1 in 8 of us.

So why should those of us who do not smoke have no option but to inhale tobacco fumes, vape clouds or any kind of smoke that someone who smokes or vapes anything has chosen to discharge in any public place?

Whilst it is unquestionably a personal freedom of choice and should certainly remain so that anyone can smoke or vape if they so choose, it is also incumbent upon them not to do so in any way that compromises the freedom of others to make the alternative choice.

Like many, I enjoy a drink at a pub. And in the summer months like nothing more than to sit outside and enjoy the British Summer as I do so. If and when it decides to turn up.

However, what I don’t enjoy – also like so many others, is having that experience spoiled by anyone smoking or vaping, who clearly believes that simply being outside is the only thing they need to consider where the impact of their actions is concerned.

Dreadful as the Labour Government might be in so many respects, this is one rule that will probably have a lot more support than many would believe. Rather perversely, because once again, it’s the silent majority that are otherwise being forced to suffer because a noisy minority have no awareness of the impact of choices which are regrettably, all about them.

Food is as important as the air we breathe and water we drink. So why can’t we talk openly about the real threat to Food Supplies?

Regrettably, I long since realised that whilst many of us talk about change, kick and scream about the need for change, and talk about how we’re going to get those in power to facilitate change, very few of us are actually prepared to do what it would take to embrace and create the kind of change that all of us actually need.

This leaves writers, bloggers, commentators and thinkers either massively frustrated and in some cases falling into the trap of sensationalising their messages to get attention. Or like me, just accepting that people aren’t yet ready to accept that an unsustainable situation can no longer be sustained.

My back catalogue therefore quietly grows. The upside is I can at least say that through the 29 Books and the material now published and available to read on the Internet, I’m pretty sure I’ve covered all the bases when it comes to shining light on everything that’s wrong; what needs to change; what is preventing change; what will create change and of course what change might actually look like. Which is where I have just left the desktop, now.

I’ve been busy over recent weeks writing Our Local Future. Published both as a free-to-read website and as a book for Kindle which is now available to buy.

The reason change isn’t happening, isn’t because we don’t have the ideas, energy, guts, commitment and values present across our society to bring about significant change.

It’s because we are too busy arguing over the first step; who’s right; who’s wrong and who should be in charge.

Because of this, I felt it was time to leap into the future and commit to writing what the world would need to look like, feel like, and how it would need to function, IF we were to open ourselves to a way of living that genuinely works for the greater good and is beneficial to us all.

But doing so means dealing with some very uncomfortable truths, and those aren’t east to convey without being open about where things really are today.

Our Local Future is in the abstract. Because there’s so much about the world we live in today that we must leave much of it behind, including things that we thing are good but are actually hurting us. Rather than simply expecting that we can keep all the things we like and just leave the crap that it causes behind.

We leave the crap in our wake each and every day. And it’s the problems that wider society and the environment we live in now face that are manifesting as a result.

What we fail to see is that taking everything for granted and as entitled as we have increasingly become, means that the Basic Essentials of life are now at significant risk.

The issue of Food Security and the growing risk that the U.K. population could go hungry or experience serious Food Shortages are what concern me as a former politician and community leader myself.

So much so that I attended and completed a postgraduate course in Sustainable Agriculture and Food Security at a well-known UK university earlier this year.

Acknowledging the role of so many stakeholders in the Food Security problem remains important. But it’s not enough, as almost without exception, everyone on the problem end of everything still believes that the usual suspects will have a lucid moment of realisation, then change their approach.

The truth is simpler, and I believe it correct to be open about the reality that the empty shelves we experienced during the covid lockdowns could very quickly become normal in times ahead. Especially so when it comes to our level of access to Basic and Essential types of Food.

Never mind the heavily processed and unhealthy stuff that many of us mistake as being just that.

In publishing www.ourlocalfuture.com, I have lent heavily on the opportunity to use an AI Image Generator, and after publishing nearly 100 created images to accompany every published page, I was alarmed to discover that no matter how I instructed the software to create an image, there was no way that the programme would produce anything to illustrate what empty supermarket shelves would look like.

The words and title used were clearly also ringing algorithmic alarm bells somewhere in the Clous, as Facebook then also rejected the post after I had adopted a different approach to the imagery. Within seconds of publication telling me that I had committed a community violation and that the post had immediately been deleted.

We can only speculate upon why there is a refusal to allow open and honest discussion about the genuine risk to U.K. Food Security and how it is increasingly likely to affect the UK Population.

The harsh reality we face is that the Food Supply and Food Production is quickly becoming a key method of societal control.

Increasingly so, as British Agriculture – the industry that provides it – seems to be in what can only be described as a form of terminal decline that looks remarkably deliberate. Even to the untrained eye.

Many who still trust The System may well ask the question, ‘How could it possibly the case that someone wants to control access to what we eat, when food is as important as the air that we breathe and the water that we drink?’

To visit Our Local Future click HERE:

We need a new party in British Politics, yesterday. But it won’t be another that’s only been Reformed

One of the greatest ills of not for profits, charities and the workings of government, is that it is ridiculously rare that organisations, projects and services stop, are wound down or brought to their end, if and when they have achieved whatever it was they were designed, set up or launched for.

An excuse to repurpose such entities and vehicles is rarely hard to find and those involved then have no reason to go in search of a new purpose, agenda or job.

The story of the political parties, all playing their part in the downfall of the today’s UK is very much the same.

The Conservatives know and understand so little about what it is to conserve anything, and have progressively overseen a 14 year gateway of what resembles irreversible societal damage and ill-considered cultural change.

The only discernible legacy of this sorry period are circumstances where an incoming Labour government has shown the true colour of its hidden ideologies, its incompetence and the quantum leap it has jumped from the days when the working class and truly beneficial change was their purpose ‘to be’, much before most of those who watch these things more closely would have bravely suggested.

The most surprising part of the uncloaking of Labour isn’t that it has happened or that it has happened quickly. It’s that Labours uncloaking has happened as quickly as it has.

The Liberals have evolved many times in the century since they were known to be a party of power. Using the gift of being within the misperceived and misplaced leftist peripheries of the centre ground to regurgitate and nudge policies that sound great to the idealistic. But have very painful consequences for anyone when their plans meet the practicalities of normal life experience as they hit the road.

Whilst the outcome now is as predictable as the general unwillingness to accept that everyone has a role to play in genuine change, the reality the UK faces is that we are now in a perfect storm of many factors and ingredients, that none of the politicians we currently have understand or are equipped in every way necessary to disperse and therefore solve.

The begrudging growth of an awareness that the UK really is now in deep shit is leading to increasing numbers of those who voted against the Conservatives in the July General Election, wondering how the Electorate can rid itself of a new government in less than 2 months. A system of below par management dressed as leadership that is already proving itself significantly worse than the desperate experience we have just had, rather than being anything like the anticipated change that was somehow considered worth embracing, because there was simply no way that different politicians could be anywhere near as bad.

Only the Tories themselves have failed to realise that people are not going to vote for them just because they are the alternative, or because they are the Conservative Party anymore. For no better reason than even those of us with minds that couldn’t be further away from politics than it would be possible to be, already intrinsically know and understand that it will take something akin to a revolution just to get the U.K. back to anywhere near where everything was when the last period of inept and self-serving leadership kicked on the understanding that they would conserve and therefore know how to preserve.

With the Greens, Lib Dems and all other players at the table likely to say and continue to do whatever is most likely to win them votes, seats and power, a politically-fatigued population is certainly entertaining the idea that the noises in the media suggesting that Reform could be a party of power in 2029 may not be as far-fetched as previously thought.

Yet this same party appeared as The Anti-Federalist League, as UKIP, as The Brexit Party and now, as what is being described as the ‘new party’, but is parading the real truth from its name, ‘Reform’.

Like the other UK political parties of today, the core essence of what Reform was all about has long since ceased to be the purpose that it once so genuinely was.

Or was for at least some of those who rallied behind or supported the anti-European Union Membership movement when it was distilled into its own recognisable forms.

The purpose behind Reform died when the European Referendum was ‘won’ and Brexit was born. And no matter how much of a mess the establishment has made for all the wrong reasons ever since, the People had their vote and decided.

The intransigence of the governing classes ever since has just exposed a whole other raft of issues that really does require a very different form of activism to address it.

A workable solution can only be a movement built around the genuine grassroots that functions from the grassroots-up. Rather than what Reform now appear to be embarking upon, which is yet another variation on the theme that has created all the problems we have: The current system where everything functions around hierarchies and the decisions that matter – whether seen or unseen, are always made and enacted from the Top-Down.

That the EU as we know it may be ending, but isn’t yet over, gives the false pretense that Reform and all those aligned with it still have unfinished business and therefore a genuine purpose. All in ways that are being carefully communicated to suggest that the Party is different than the others we have. Because it’s rolling out viable policies that will touch other important areas of life and that they really do represent reform.

They don’t. And whilst the debate over the missed opportunity that a reform of everything that The Anti-Federalist League, UKIP and The Brexit Party can actually deliver may be a long one, it only serves to create a potentially highly damaging delay.

In the case of Reform – as its seems to be with everything else, the more things change, the more they stay the same. Instead of changing the way that they do politics – as any party or movement serious about societal change will really need to, Reform are instead busy Re-Ukipping themselves and calling what they are doing ‘new’.

So many of us fail to recognise that the solution to our political, public policy and therefore our social problems MUST come from outside of the way we have always done politics.

The solution MUST be created in its very own original form and can only come by engaging and including people who have been drawn from and been supporters of all the parties and movements across the whole of today’s political Smorgasbord.

However, there can be no option for any of them to bring whatever has failed us along with them for yet another try.

It’s only through the genesis and roll out of something very new, that everything in the UK that needs to change for the better, can genuinely and meaningfully be reformed.

The future is abstract. Because Today’s way of Life is the root cause of Our problems and We will only have a Tomorrow if we leave it behind

On Monday, I published ‘Our Local Future’, a new booklet that is free to read, broken down into page-based topics online, or downloadable as a Book for Kindle for less than the price of a coffee in one of today’s UK high street branded shops.

I’ve already had a number of conversations about Our Local Future.

Feedback from people on all the subjects I have been writing about, discussing and that I have continued to explore is always interesting.

Not because framing those conversations this way wraps up disagreement in some kind of polite and therefore palatable way.

But because by far the most common response – and a very quick one too, is for something to come back that says ‘This sounds like’, or perhaps, ‘I watched a video that mentioned that’, or ‘Isn’t that the same thing as’.

I went through a similar experience when I joined a postgraduate course at a British University last year so that I could look more closely at the mechanics of the UK Food Security issues and the many parts of life that the issues of Food Production and access to the Basic Essentials in Life really does reflect or touch.

In many ways, I was gobsmacked by how closed-down to anything other than existing work, publications or reference points the part of ‘The System’ where the thinking is supposed to be happening really is.

But I was, most importantly, deeply concerned, by how thinkers and visionaries seem able only to visualise the future of our world and how everything works or rather will work, in terms of what we already know and accept.

It’s a situation that is not unlike the whole of the post-European Referendum stages of the Brexit debacle that were handled so badly. Fundamentally because the stepping-off point was considered to be where the UK was or had been, rather than where it would actually be, whenever the genuine point of the UKs departure from Membership of the EU would come.

Nobody in government stepped outside of the accepted, backwards-looking paradigm and began to consider that you cannot have a new way of being, if you don’t leave the old one behind.

Perhaps they did. And that’s an important point for us all to consider too.

Having a future System for life that has solved all the problems that we have today; that runs effectively in the ways that it should and most importantly which creates and maintains an experience of life and living which is Balanced, Fair and Just for all, has very little in common with what we have and what we are experiencing in this ‘Old World’, today.

A Future that works for all is an abstract concept in todays terms. Not least of all, because experiencing the level of change needed, that will benefit everyone, AND taking the stuff from today that so may want to keep because they think its special and benefits them, are mutually exclusive pathways.

These are journeys that lead to two very different destinations, that will in every sense deliver alternative outcomes that are worlds apart.

The future is about empowerment, re-enfranchisement, sovereignty and the restoration of accountability and respect for everyone at the individual or personal level, all within the local community and environmental sense itself.

It is alarming, because Fairness, Balance, Justice and a world that gives everyone the ability to be Happy, Healthy, Safe and Secure does not resemble anything that the masses are genuinely experiencing beyond all the carefully crafted narratives, now.

Those who are ‘high on The System’ that we have in this ‘Old World’ immediately visualise such suggestions as being a threat to what they ‘have’ today.

And they guard what they have jealously too. Because they believe it is their right to have more and to be able to have even more.

So much of what is wrong for so many of us today is itself the direct, indirect and often many times removed impact of some having lives that work disproportionately well for them. Whilst the often-unseen consequence is very little that is good across all areas of an otherwise unnecessarily hard life for so many more of us.

We MUST put People at the heart of everything and leave all that is bad from today’s Old World Moneyocracy behind.

We cannot and will not achieve this, if those who have more than they need today, will not accept that everyone can have a great life, IF we all have unhindered access to all that we need too.

The Future that will work for us all, is about us all.

The Future will work for each of us in very different ways to how we see and experience the whole thing now.

The question is how we disentangle ourselves or what will happen that will disentangle us all from everything that is wrong with the world today, and stop us manifesting everything bad that will keep us in the darkest parts of the past.