Category: Uncategorized

Labour’s misnamed ‘devolution’ is Regional Centralisation. It’s a blatant attack on democracy that tells us how desperate the establishment is to avoid what comes next

The Labour Government is in a hurry. Whether it’s desperation, overconfidence, stupidity or a mix of all three, they are quickly crossing rubicons of all kinds. Whilst fighting for life against the truth with what is looking more and more like an establishment-wide forked tongue.

Seeking to remove tiers of government in certain areas and to do so before the next local elections in May 2025 are due to be called in March, is an extraordinary misuse of power. Made all the worse because the ‘need’ and intended ‘outcome’ of their plans has nothing to do with democracy.

Angela Rayner has this afternoon been quoted in the media as saying ‘Our aim is to create an economy and a society that works for everyone’, and that Labour’s plans for ‘devolution’ will ‘Put more money in peoples pockets’.

But how on earth can creating new tiers of government, removing others and concentrating political power in fewer and more distant hands ever help communities thrive and make any of us feel as if life is affordable again?

Well, the quick answer is that it won’t.

When Harriet Harmen suggested during the weekend round of interviews that Reform are a threat to democracy, we should have perhaps guessed something that only a very frightened and out of their depth administration would attempt to use to stifle democracy would soon be on its way.

What Labour are offering isn’t ‘devolution’. It’s ‘Regional Centralisation’.

Genuine devolution would simply return power to the existing tiers of government like Districts, Boroughs and the Towns and Parishes, where people can typically access their councillors each and every day.

However, this particular truth isn’t nearly as troubling as the reality that what appears to be the race to create regional ‘spending vehicles’ that will be used as Westminster intends, rather than how local people would say, is all about helping to save an economic model that is on the verge of collapse.

And it’s an economic model that the government knows might only be saved if they can create what they are also misappropriately calling ‘growth’ by doing so.

The government desperately needs an excuse to create new money and free up as much of the value they can that currently sits in the property and bank accounts of British People and small businesses.

Using money or liquidising value that already exists is a more politically expedient way to find money, rather than simply printing the entirety of the vast amount they need. It sounds much more believable and is intended to delay the time it will take until the real truth about this economy is found out.

Either way, all of the money they take and print will then be multiplied many times over as it is spent over and over again in the right kinds of supply chains that add up to ‘growth’ and what we hear about as total GDP.

However. The whole thing is bullshit. We are being sold out for a self-serving myth.

When you are an incompetent politician and you are faced with carrying the can for a collapse that will change everything, steamrollering through a little bit of local democracy that has no meaning to you in the bigger scheme of things may certainly seem like a very small price to pay.

Few will believe the realities, trajectory and destination of the pathway that the UK (and the wider world) is now on.

But we have now moved beyond the last chance saloon where a lucid political moment could have turned the tide.

We are today at the mercy of incompetent and inept politicians on all sides.

Those who are ‘in power’ are themselves being very badly advised, and are now torching everything that makes the UK what it is, what it has been and what it could be.

All in the wild hope that they won’t be the ones who have to take responsibility for whatever follows next.

Who Controls Our Food Controls Our Future | Kindle Book Now Available

UK Farming is now in an endgame-level crisis, and UK Food Security, or the guarantee that we will always have enough Food for us to eat, has disappeared out of the door.

The problem is we don’t even know it. We are experiencing a kind of Situational Bias on a mass scale, and many of those who hear the term ‘Food Security’ believe that the subject is about something entirely different.

We certainly don’t accept that the problems our Farmers face are even bigger than the Farmers themselves accept them to be.

Written and Published between the UK Budget on 30th October 2024, when the now infamous changes to Farm Inheritance Tax were announced, and The Farmers March in London on 19th November 2024, Who Controls Our Food Controls Our Future unpicks the layers of truth that surround and influence The Food Chain.

Using the metaphor of The Food Chain Onion, Adam peels back the layers to expose the roles and motives of a significant list of People and 3rd party organisations that influence what we eat, how our Food gets to us, what we pay for it, when and if we can afford to access it.

Sharing the many Food Chain Myths, Narratives and Shibboleths that are gaslighting us into accepting the many carefully crafted stories that govern our relationship with the Food we eat, Adam opens the door to understanding that Food Production and Supply is now so complicated, The Food Chain has become the perfect place for greed, profiteering and other maligned interests to hide and profit excessively whilst reshaping OUR Future – all in plain sight.

None of us can eat money to survive. No matter how much money we might have.

There’s no such thing as a Poo Bag Fairy!

As both a dog walker and volunteer managing an online community picture and video journal for a local hill in Gloucestershire, one of my pet peeves is other dog owners picking up and bagging the poo from their pets, but then attaching the tied bags to a fence, tree branch or similar, or just tossing them on the ground and leaving them behind.

THERE IS NO POO BAG FAIRY!

We probably aren’t grateful enough that local council employees already empty dog bins that are often filled to overflowing.

But for some of us to then believe that our responsibility to clear up after our own pets in a public place or in the countryside stops as soon as it’s bagged and tied is as irresponsible as it is rude and inconsiderate to others and to the area.

Animals do pick these bags up and farmers have lost livestock that have eaten discarded poo bags in fields where they can reach and pick them up.  

As local authorities are only likely to pick up full poo bags as part of a litter pick on the rare occasion they have the resources to make these happen, it is left to community spirited walkers to pick these bags up and walk them to the nearest bin – as the owners should have done in the first place.

Because of the way that social media works, pictures are usually the best way to make a point.

Now that we have AI image generators, I thought I would give this one a try and see what happens.

I don’t know about you, but I think picturing the myth of the poo bag fairy turned out rather well!!!

I’ve just discovered AI Image Generator. WHAT KIND OF WIZARDRY IS THIS!!!

After a long time writing blogs, more and more e-books and a few attempts at vlog and podcast creation too, I’ve decided that its time to shake things up a little and start by changing my approach.

A new approach required looking at the images I use on posts and I finally decided that it was time to cross the rubicon this morning and see what would happen if instead of using a picture gallery online, I just stepped over the imaginary bridge and tried out image generating AI.

Being suspicious of anything that wants you to sign up or try a free offer, my digging around soon led my to Microsoft’s own version ‘Microsoft Designer’, and I have to say that I am admittedly stunned by what I have found.

I was writing a blog post or rather editing a page from a recently published book to put on my main blog this morning and wanted to see if I could illustrate the point about politicians only dealing with the effects of problems whilst ignoring the causes, and thought a ball of used band-aids or sticking plasters outside the Houses of Parliament might be just the thing. (You can see the result!)

WHAT KIND OF WIZARDRY IS THIS!!!

I confess, this shit is amazing – and the fact it’s available from Microsoft for free does bring with it some reassurance too, given that we should all be a little careful when giving away information that any sign-up requires from companies we have never heard of or don’t actually know.

The trouble is, the ‘wow’ response we are all having to using AI – in whichever form we are using it, is blowing minds everywhere, and we aren’t then giving our use of it or the implications of using it another thought.

To deal with society’s problems means dealing with the causes and not just the effects

Every societal problem that this country has, alludes to ways of being, to laws, regulations, public policies and the actions or activities of politicians who have either allowed or encouraged these problems to exist.

These problems are often just accepted as the causes of the problems that we face, in themselves.

Yet the problems that we see are in many cases only the effects of other problems and the real causes of those problems are hidden from view and treated as if they don’t even exist.

The solutions that politicians do come up with fail, because they rarely, if ever, address the real cause.

With the complexity of interconnectedness that exists between every area of public policy, the failure of politicians to address one problem because they’ve used nothing better than a sticky plaster to ‘fix’ it just leads to other problems developing, that successive parliaments and politicians then just attempt to fix in exactly the same way.

Imagine a big ball of used plasters that incompetent politicians just keep kicking down the road and you will have a good idea of what real problems mean to them.

We are in the mess that we are in now, because the effect of one problem has been addressed as if it’s the cause, leading to another problem or more effects of that problem which have then been treated the same. Meanwhile, all the time this has been happening, nobody has ever dealt with the real or root cause.

If we want things to change, we must elect public representatives who understand this and will take the risks necessary to fix all the causes of the problems that society faces – no matter who or what interests are involved, and how resistant they will be to changes that will be fair to all and ultimately benefit everyone.

Image created using Microsoft Designer