Tag: Behavioural Insights

War would have been less damaging to our Country than the Government’s response to Coronavirus because people would at least still want to live

As a regular walker, I am now used to the process of getting to know the people I meet regularly. Smiles become hellos. Hellos become a moment sharing the time of day or a view. Sharing a view becomes a discussion on a life and experience that you would never otherwise have known about.

One such series of encounters led me to become familiar with one old guy in the Village where I live, and as he regaled me with stories of the nights that he and his brother would catch a train from Gloucester to attend dances in the Village pub, it wasn’t the romantic idea of steam and a train station lost under the Beaching Act that captured my imagination the most. It was his memory of the time in the years after the Second World War when he said ‘We were glad to be alive’.

This was a conversation that came before Coronavirus and it did of course stir my thoughts on the entitlement and ‘take everything for granted’ culture that has been so prevalent, where young people don’t want to become Police Officers because they don’t like working nights, and soldiers are more likely to be experts at protesting the technicalities of their human rights after capture on a battlefield rather than pick up a heavy gun and fight and avoid being caught.

Yet since the Government’s response to Coronavirus began, what started as concern has been replaced with the utter disbelief that in only six months of a Conservative Government handling a ‘peacetime’ national crisis, people have been deliberately manipulated and conditioned so effectively that they are now afraid to live.

What is clear is the Government’s response to Coronavirus has been more damaging psychologically to the minds and thinking of British People and our national psyche than our direct involvement in a war would be.

In the 1940’s Blitz, as bombs dropped, neighbours and friends died, and houses, pubs and schools were completely destroyed, people still wanted – and were prepared – to go about their daily business in as normal way as possible. They looked each and every day in the eye and wanted to rebuild and rejuvenate the world around them so they could grasp everything and every opportunity that was there to be enjoyed.

Death was a regular visitor. But death was never inevitable for as long as people respected and worked on the basis that we were in in together.

Yet today, as we supposedly fight disproportionately against a cold like virus that the Government itself fears more than it understands, we are being forced to believe that by being together at any time, our early death is inevitable, whilst death itself is not present amongst us in any way that is different to what would be the seasonal norm.

What the hell have our politicians done?

How did they do it?

Why did they do it?

What does it tell us about the World to come?

Whilst fear makes the world turn at some level for everyone, many do not possess the awareness either to accept or to understand this.

Fear is the power that drives everything in this world at the deepest, most intrinsic level. And if the fear button is incorrectly and deliberately pushed, fear can do untold harm to anyone and everyone, no matter how rational they might believe or understand themselves to be.

If you have access to Netflix, you may have taken the 90 minutes or so to watch ‘The Social Dilemma’ which is a very recent release. It is certainly worth a view as it puts in perspective the harm that can be done and the consequences for us all when people’s minds are played with in the pursuit of profit when the only thing intended (and considered) by the Social Media platform is a fee-paying result.

The cultural use of Facebook, Twitter and just about every social media platform you can think of is having an adverse effect of some kind on all of our upcoming generations. And this is what happens when there isn’t the use of fear involved.

Flip the coin of behavioural control to its other side and you will find the pseudo science of Behavioural Economics or ‘nudging’ in order to achieve specific outcomes with people.

It’s what unscrupulous politicians who are only worried about controlling people would see as the easy way to ‘get things done’.

Social Media is filling up with discussion groups focusing on what is little more than a drive to change people’s behaviour without those same people being conscious that they are being influenced and changing the way they behave in any way.

It’s been a growth industry in recent years with No10 even having its own Behavioural Insights Team.

It was these guys who were called on when the Coronavirus Pandemic kicked into full swing and the Johnson Government – forever committed to controlling the agenda – decided that it was time to use their mind manipulation unit to get the whole population, rather than the virus, under control.

What the impact of Social Media on young minds, Behavioural Economics (or Insights) and Boris’ Lockdown behavioural controls on us all have in common, is they have a defined and measurable purpose. But the consequences or side effects of the actions taken are also not being given a second thought.

It’s a bit like the stories that you may have heard about live theatre shows where a well-known performer conducts hypnosis on members of the audience to get them to do things like barking like a dog or pretending to be something that they are not, whilst all the time they are ‘under’ and not aware of what they have done. Just as the hypnotiser can programme the person being hypnotised to do something with a trigger word at a future time, they can also be sewing all sorts of damage to the individuals mental health which can impact heavily upon their life to come.

The objective of the Government’s mind games at the beginning of the Lockdown, was control of the population. The method of hypnosis that they used was fear. The intended result was a population that would do what it was told wherever the words Covid-19 or Coronavirus were involved. The unforeseen consequence and the damage done is that people are now too afraid to live.

Whilst Lockdown and Social Distancing Measures of any kind continue to exist, it will be all but impossible to snap anyone out of the mind-meld that the Government has created, as continuation of these measures in any form will give legitimacy to lie that a real population-wide threat from Coronavirus continues to exist.

We are literally in the situation that until a responsible Government or Political Leader stands up and says this was all a crock of shit and that Coronavirus is just another illness that has to be treated and addressed quietly and without fuss just like everything else, this Government-inflicted malaise will continue and it will continue at rabid pace.

As we don’t have such worthy politicians in Westminster today, we are in effect staring into a void where none of the damage done can be reversed.

The damage was avoidable and should have been avoided. But this is what happens when irresponsible politicians get their hands-on irresponsible toys.

Whilst the political classes complain of the risk to their idea of democracy from fake news, it is the very same susceptibility to misinformation that people have that makes everyone vulnerable to what politicians have themselves done, just so they could retain the control they believed they had.

Any form of manipulation conducted deliberately will have wider and unknown consequences. Its use is therefore wrong.

Profit or control. The aim simply doesn’t matter. The cost is simply too high for the lives of those People involved.

As we go forward and we leave the days of this kind of government behind, this misuse of power and the roll out of this 21st Century ‘dark art’ must be regulated and kept under strict control.

The Lockdown measures have taken beneficial ‘nudging’ like the fly stickers in the urinals of Amsterdam Schiphol Airport to a nefarious extreme. The ability to manipulate minds in this way is simply too much responsibility for politicians and business people without scruples to have.

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Unions must be stopped from using fear to make this crisis even worse. The problem is they are capitalising on what the Government did first

In the weeks that now feel like a lifetime since we officially left the EU, an even greater and potentially far more damaging divide has now been crow-barred throughout society than the Leave vs. Remain one that it replaced.

Today the UK is split between Corona-converts who see no value in anything other than having the whole Country led by fear of a very specific and low probability death, and those who want to be trusted by Government to be the adults that they are, to get back to work and to have a life worth living, knowing that they will deal with just another illness amongst many others, if that time should unfortunately come – as it often does.

This divide is the responsibility of Government mismanagement at its worst. Politicians and their expert advisors have rubbed the lamp of the mass manipulation genie to secure their wish of public compliance with the Lockdown. But what they have actually done is opened Pandora’s Box in its place.

Fear is much easier to install in a mind than it will ever be to remove. Like any bad case of confirmation bias or OCD will confirm, repetition and adding detail to the original message will often make it even worse.

What we didn’t need at a time when the Government has dug the Country into a hole that it doesn’t have the vision to get anyone out of is for the Unions to step in and exploit the emotional damage to the National psyche that the manufactured fear of COVID-19 has already done. Then for what are utterly self-serving reasons seek to make the impact of this completely unnecessary Lockdown even worse.

Threats to keep schools closed and now to shut down railways using the spurious suggestion that it isn’t sufficiently safe for their members safety to work, demonstrates that Unions exist today purely on the belief that employment rights are more of a priority than the reason for a service or a business to exist.

Be under no doubt, working conditions today are far better than the members of trade union movements that were genuinely needed a century ago could have hoped for in their wildest dreams.

This action or merely talking it up is malevolence in its greatest form. It demonstrates why the time has come for public policy covering industrial relations and unions in the workplace needs to be reformed with any right to strike being banned. Union barons should no longer be able to exploit opportunities to hurt commuters, parents and children under the dubious claim that they are standing up for something worthwhile when what they are doing is furthering their own cause.

Had the Johnson Government played the Coronavirus emergency the right way from the start, there would never have been the need to face down a difficulty like this that the Country wouldn’t have needed at any time and least of all now.

But because Boris and his Buffoons set the fear-ball rolling in the first place by creating such messages as ‘stay home, save lives’, then underscored it by putting social distancing measures in place that have highly questionable value when in use, it really should come as no surprise to him that the Unions that are the mainstay of his Labour Party opposition would jump at the chance to pick up that ball when it did come loose at the back of the scrum.

Desperate times ahead: Boris used clever slogans to scare us to death so we would stay at home. Now he has no easy way out

img_5850The anticipation that the Lockdown is about to end is more than palpable and has been for several days. People are in two groups: Those who want to be out, back at work and do get on with whatever it is that they want to do, and those who are too terrified to live because they have been scared to death with manipulative propaganda and now believe that the world can be stopped from turning until the Coronavirus problem has been solved.

The black magic that is Behavioural Insights should have come with a warning clause that using them in the wrong way can create far more problems than they will ever fix and particularly in an emergency when the instigator feels that their back is up against a wall.

The messages that we have become used to like ‘stay at home, save lives’, ‘protect the NHS’ and ‘social distancing’ have created a new, powerful and completely shit-scared demographic within our society that is now too afraid of dying from Coronavirus to actually live.

The problem has been compounded by the Chancellors knee-jerk giveaway which has created the misconception amongst many of the same people that they can stay at home and be paid at least 80% of their full wage to do so indefinitely, whilst empowering them to feel it ok to preach and project vitriol at anyone else who dares to break the framework of the social distancing measures that have been imposed or to speak up about the reality of the damage the Johnson Government has already done to an economy which is about facilitating everyones lives and not just their own.

With the Lockdown and the measures that Boris & co implemented to try and control a situation that can only be managed unleashed and now building up a momentum of their own, it is no great surprise that the Government is looking for some kind of release.

The problem is that they have created so much fear on one side and resentment of the damage they are doing and the control they are imposing on us all on the other, that there is simply no longer any happy median to be found in between.

Later today we are expecting Boris to announce that the Lockdown will be reduced in some ways, but probably not in any way as drastically as many of us had hoped.

But if the messaging Boris is now going to try and use to juggle the thoughts and actions of the disaffected vs those he has successfully manipulated and psychologically abused with replacement slogans like those that have appeared in the media today (pictured), you can be sure that this Government really is no longer in control of anything that is happening now, nor what happens next – that is of course if they ever actually were.

The Government has Bankrupted Britain whilst jumping into a trap that it will not climb out of if it continues to behave the same way

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Somewhere in London, a new kind of reality has dawned. We may note ever hear it spoken about or acted upon in any way or sense. But rest assured, a new era has now been born.

Six weeks ago, the Johnson Government took a series of decisions that are about to have seismic consequences for us all.

It began with the Lockdown. It was aided by the clever and manipulative messaging that was purposefully designed to make normal people too frightened to go out. It then culminated with a series of financial ‘support’ measures such as the so-called ‘Job Retention Scheme’ that has failed businesses, workers and the Country at large whilst addicting many to ‘free wages’ and polarising them against returning to work.

The Bank of England has today announced that the UK is officially now in recession, and this my friends is just the start.

The Lockdown itself was unnecessary. It traded all the certainties and regularities of life that we had like going to work, the pub, the gym, the shops, catching a bus or train or visiting whoever we might like to as and when we wanted to, for a gamble on what stronger leadership would have known would be a futile attempt to control a virus which they could only ever manage – not control.

The use of Behavioural Insights and mass manipulation, aided by an out of control media to install fear, purely on the basis of getting people to accept and adhere to the Lockdown and the Social Distancing measures that the Government imposed was a textbook example of both what to do and not to do all wrapped up in one.

Use of terms like ‘Stay at home, save lives’, ‘Protect the NHS’, and go outside on Thursday night at 8 and clap for the Keyworkers succeeded in securing such rigorous levels of buy-in to the Lockdown, Social Distancing and the measures taken, that many people genuinely and sincerely believe that acceptance of any and all measures that the Government dictates will be the only way that they can remain alive.

Many will not willingly respond to directives that go the other way, simply because the subject matter of the manipulation used has touched on the promotion of measures to avoid death.

Death and its avoidance is the primary fear that drives many parts of life and sits within the subconsciouses of us all. It influences so much in life, but rarely finds its way coming into our rational view.

The financial package that the Chancellor followed up the release of the genie with was much too clever for its own good. It over complicated matters when there was always a simple, fairer and much less damaging way to mitigate the fallout from the lockdown whilst addressing the issue of income for us all.

It is unlikely that senior members of a national government running the UK Treasury would not have known about or discussed the alternative options that were at hand. So we must conclude that the absence of real leadership at the top meant that the Government yet again went for what seemed to be the easy option rather than the right one, and in so doing laid out a giant trap for itself into which the Country is now about to fall.

In the coming days it is likely that the ties of the Lockdown will be loosened. But with the same ideas and mentality driving the direction now as we have experienced since the COVID-19 emergency began, it is likely that in only a couple or a few weeks from now, the Government will have to return us all to the full Lockdown again of not something even more punitive, because these so-called leaders have still not faced up to their responsibilities or the most salient facts.

That is of course if the majority of people still agree.

You cannot inflict absolutes on a population to resolve an emergency when no absolutes about the emergency like when it will end and how it will be ended are known.

It takes real leadership to go against the media and say that it is unavoidable that people will die, but we also have to maintain a level of life and functionality across everything that lies beyond the emergency so that we can make it possible for everyone else to live.

But that is exactly what we needed from Boris Johnson and Rishi Sunak at the beginning of the Pandemic, and even now, which such an incredibly damaging chain reaction for the economy now started and underway, it is the same thing that we need to hear them say.

COVID-19 is not going anywhere anytime soon and we cannot restrict every other part of life with Lockdowns and Social Distancing measures that are completely impractical until it has, just so the fearful believe that we have it all under control.

We don’t. We wont. And what the Government has been doing has been giving people they have deliberately worked up into a frenzy of fear false hope and a false sense of security. People genuinely believe that they will avoid death by following these measures without realising that they no longer have lives to live.

The Government needs to manage Coronavirus as the firestorm that it is. That means firefighting wherever the fire breaks out by focusing all the resources where necessary and not spreading them out so thinly that we will continually be overpowered by a Virus that they still don’t understand.

Only when the Government does this will they begin to be able to start addressing what is going to become the far more pressing crisis at hand: How do you manage an economic crisis when you cannot keep printing money and printing money is the only thing they can think of that will work.

 

Suing the Government over the Lockdown won’t solve the problems and end the crisis they have created for us all

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Lone voices shout against the crowd, trying to stop everyone walking onto the beach to see the spectacle of a disappearing sea before the overwhelming horror and force of the tsunami returns, overwhelms and destroys everything whilst it kills or injures people indiscriminately and at will.

No, this is not the tragedy and disaster of Boxing Day 2004 in the Indian Ocean. This is what we are experiencing and living through right now. Albeit within what feels like a parallel universe where it has become necessary to attempt communication in metaphorical terms because it has become too difficult to communicate with people who have been taken in by the Government narrative in any other way.

You will either get it or you won’t. But just because you don’t get it doesn’t make it untrue.

Those that do understand the crisis that the UK is facing and has faced from the moment that the Lockdown began and are prepared to speak or act publicly even now, some 6 weeks in, remain very few in number. But that isn’t to say that a great many more don’t agree at least in part with what is being said.

Yes, the momentum appears to be completely behind the Government.

So successful has their media campaign been based on propaganda and the misuse of behavioural insights, that terms such as ‘social distancing’, ‘stay at home, save lives’ and ‘protect the NHS’ have turned the general population into a zombie nation . One that has become progressively more fearful of catching this virus since the COVID-19 Pandemic began.

Not only has the Government imposed an unnecessary and dubious Lockdown with physical distancing measures that has seen social distancing becoming common parlance and accepted terminology for the 2020 police state in the UK. They have failed spectacularly to mitigate and insulate our businesses and jobs against the fallout from their mistake. They are now consolidating the problems they have caused and are in the process of causing by doubling down on the steps they have already taken, using lie after lie in the form of hollow advice and directives to give credibility to the giant ones they issued to coerce the British Public to accept the Lockdown in the first place.

Of those speakers and lone voices I have already talked about, names such as Peter Hitchens who writes for The Mail on Sunday and Laura Perrins who is co-editor of the website Conservative Woman have consistently questioned the actions or motives of the Government over recent weeks, often receiving much vitriol and scorn from the usual suspects on platforms such as Twitter in response.

Such commentary appearing on my own Facebook feed via a friend who was commenting yesterday drew my attention to the Court Action and related crowd-funding request that is being initiated by businessman Simon Dolan.

Mr Dolan has instructed Solicitors Wedlake Bell and Barrister Francis Hoar to begin proceedings to sue the Government over the imposition of the Lockdown and already drawn much derision for doing so.

Having seen it suggested by the twitterati that Ms Perrins was experiencing a mental breakdown when she Tweeted that (as an experienced barrister herself) she might well initiate proceedings against the Government in the future on a similar if not the same basis, its not difficult to picture how the court of public opinion is feeling about anything that goes against the official narrative that still remains in place – no matter how wrong or how damaging it is or will soon turn out to be.

The difficulty for Mr Dolan, Laura Perrins or anyone else who wants to tackle the ineptitude and ignorance of the politicians our system tells us we must call a government, is that the tide of groupthink that is carrying the establishment will continue to convince everyone who is travelling with it that both the Government and they are right until the very moment of impact when it is too late to head off the disaster that is now destined to come.

Suing the Government and its abuse of its responsibilities and powers to impose the Lockdown upon us all is certainly justified.

But when you are dealing with a Government and an establishment that is drunk on its own power and obsessed with the sound of its own voice, doing the right thing and in this case attempting to use the very legal system against it that we know it controls is not going to achieve the result that those of us who are awake already want, even though it is precisely what all of us – including those who are currently blind the realities of the Government’s actions – so desperately need.

Every day that this Lockdown and any form of the complete injustice that is ‘social distancing’ continues will be another day too many that has added damage to real lives, our economy and our Country.

It was avoidable at the start, but has for many already become irreparable harm.

The false populism that the Government created with the Media’s help has ensured that too many people believe everything they say. The same people will regrettably not see it differently until the tsunami hits them personally.

In the same way, the majority of us will not hear the alternative message, reality and truth – that opposes the one the Government is foolishly doing everything that it can to reinforce and to repeat – until the physical impact of that message has actually arrived in our lives.

Using the Courts to tackle a Government that is failing in its job whilst legitimising stupidity is neither playing the same game, nor playing by the same rules.

Court action will regrettably fail in delivering any beneficial purpose – even if the action wins, simply because it will come too late to turn that tide. It will only succeed in making an already inept Government lie to us again and say they will do things differently if the same thing were to happen again. It will not change the people we have in power nor the way that they think in any way.

With the Lockdown now having been running for 6 weeks already, the options for anyone who arrives in power to clean up the mess that the Johnson Government has created are becoming fewer and harder by the day.

Domestic abuse, suicides, evictions, debt, job losses, unemployment, abuse, safeguarding issues, divorces, anxiety, depression, long-term mental health issues, deaths, reduced standards of living, poverty, hunger and much more besides are already inevitable. They will not be changed or headed off in ways that they could have been if we had good politicians and a responsible Government from the start – One that would not have opted for the Lockdown as the route out of the COVID emergency in the first place.

To limit the pain from the problems the Johnson Government and the political culture they are part of has created, we need different leadership right now.

Democracy will not solve the crisis. Democracy cannot repair the damage that has already been done. Democracy will not put the UK back together and rediscover our place in the World once the fight against Covid is won. Because democracy in this Country has become a lie.

We need a government that will literally impose all the changes and direction across all areas of public policy that will be in the best interests of all, rather than trying to court public opinion and that of a media that will only appreciate the steps that have genuinely been taken in the best interests of all once we have weathered the storm. That can only come when everything has been fixed and the changes made have had adequate time to run their course.

The regrettable reality is that it is too late for this Government and the Politicians that we have to get any of this right. They are not wired the right way. We need people taking the lead who will weather this storm for us and on our behalf who really are ‘in the same room’.

Whilst we should wish Mr Dolan and his legal team all the very best with what they plan to do, the reality is that we will need the money that we have and our time and our support will be better spent placing focus and effort elsewhere.

We will only see the end of this narcissistic Government and stop the process of damage and harm this political culture is doing to us all once they are removed from power. They and the kind they represent must never given the opportunity to return to pay lip service to responsibility in the way that they are doing now.

Rioting, violence and public unrest will serve no purpose in the fight for our freedom and justice for all.

That doesn’t mean we have to continue to maintain our consent for the politicians we have to continue to lead.

We have to recognise and then break the herd mentality that we have all unwittingly become part of that has given legitimacy to the Lockdown and everything wrong with what the Government has done and will continue to do.

Their words mean nothing. They have no value to us all.

It is only by embracing herd immunity and the process that it will take to get us there that we can together again become strong.

So when you see local businesses reopening in whatever form the might choose, or see people out and about walking or in their cars in whatever way or at whatever time of the day they choose, support them. Applaud them. Encourage them to do more. Even if you are not yet ready to do it yourself.

The only way that we can be rid of this Lockdown, the police state known as social distancing and begin to turn all the problems in the UK around, is to ignore the politicians who no longer have legitimacy in power to lead us and ignore all of the ridiculous messages, actions and rules that this out-of-touch establishment continues to impose.

We need leadership that respects the realities of public consent rather than abusing it to extend their own purposes and selfish cause.

There was a time when it didn’t feel like it really mattered who was in charge because everything would always stay the same.

Now we know different.

We must withdraw our consent for politicians, who through a process of self-gratification, are masquerading as our leaders whilst getting way with treating us all like fools.

Let’s focus all our energies on doing what needs to be done to limit the damage before the tsunami that has swallowed the sea that is the Covid emergency returns.

The Johnson Government will not be forgiven for harm it has caused us that it had the option to avoid

The sunlight is now breaking on the damage that this Government has done.

Despite the protestations of the 1922 committee in recent days that many businesses are not going to survive, the Lockdown still continues as if the only game in town is those who are suffering with COVID-19 related illness and there is absolutely nothing else involved.

Whilst it will be foolish to try and blame the Government for the COVID-19 outbreak itself, the way that our Politicians have managed and continue to manage the emergency is a very different story and one that we will all become very concerned with in the coming weeks if we have not done so already.

Many suspect that things aren’t right. Other’s, that things don’t add up. Some already know that what the Government is doing is wrong.

When the questions start, these are the points where they are likely to begin:

Taking the Media’s lead

Whilst we can all see how difficult the media age has made it for almost everyone with the creation of the court of public opinion, we go to the polling booths at a General Election with the understanding that those who have put themselves foreword to represent the interests of perhaps 75,000 people in their own Constituency and many more if they accede to a role beyond that of just being an MP, will be discerning enough not to have their views and decisions swayed by those who make the most noise.

There is simply no doubt that many of the key decisions taken in the run up to the imposition of the Lockdown on 23rdMarch 2020 were heavily influenced by the noise that the media was making, which is driven by the most negativity that it can generate at best.

The weakness in leadership that the Government has shown by being led by the tone and approach of the media, at the most critical point of a national emergency when highly consequential decisions were made, has resulted in the UK being pushed into a dire situation that is set to get much worse – not because of the Coronavirus – but because of the impact of the decisions that were made in response.

Misuse of behavioural insights to ‘brainwash’ the population

Over recent years, the pseudo-science known as behavioural insights has become a population control tool actively used by Government at both National and Local Level, primarily through the use of messaging or marketing that encourages people to change their behavior in some way, usually without them realising what has been done.

Whilst this so-called science can be used to influence behaviour for the common good, it can also too easily be misused for non-direct aims and in the same way as decisions should be made on the basis of the immediate here and now, using behavioral insights with a view to doing something because you can whilst you have something else in mind means that those driving its use are likely to lose control of the result.

By creating the ‘stay at home’, ‘protect the NHS’, ‘social distancing’ mantras, the Government bought the participation of the masses in the dubious Lockdown by installing a level of fear of dying from Coronavirus for many of us like it has been installed like a programme.

What they have done is no better than brainwashing or mass manipulation – as illustrated best by the 8pm call to clap for the NHS on Thursday evenings and rainbow posters being put up everywhere like it’s the only fashionable thing, and that it would be somehow wrong for any of us not to be involved.

However, whilst many still think this all to be a good thing, the approach taken has been akin to letting a genie out of the bottle with the Government playing the role of an Aladdin that has no real concept of the trouble that it has made.

People may have accepted the unnecessary Lockdown on the basis of the manipulation as being the only way to deal with the COVID-19 emergency. But their reciprocation in going back to work as if the whole thing was done with an on/off switch will prove to be a very different thing.

It is highly irresponsible for a Government of a democratic country to deliberately influence people in this way.

In the coming weeks and months we will see the price that has to be paid.

A Lockdown that has caused many more problems than it could ever solve

So much has the Government and the Establishment bought into its own hype over the Lockdown and what it was important to do, the very people who should know better in an emergency have overlooked all of the out of sight things that needed to be considered as they rushed to show the media and the world around them what they were going to do.

On the face of it the Lockdown seemed like the ideal way to stop the spread of COVID-19.

The problem is that the spread of COVID-19 was not then, has not been since and never really will be the problem that needed to be the number one priority itself.

Responding to it in the way that the Government has done so has created a growing number of developing and already substantial problems that are far more serious than the Coronavirus emergency and are going to be very difficult to fix – especially if we still have the creators of that problem left in charge and running the Country.

  • Job losses
  • Business closures
  • Businesses becoming unviable
  • Shops refusing to take cash
  • Evictions
  • Debt
  • Depression
  • Suicides
  • Abuse
  • Safeguarding Issues

– are all issues amongst many more that are growing disproportionately in number as a direct result of the Lockdown, and would have been avoidable if the Government had not implemented the Lockdown by choice.

Financial ‘Support’ given in response to the Lockdown rather than imposing a corresponding Lockdown of the Economy 

The severity of the impact and the consequences of the Lockdown would have been completely different and arguably negligible if the Government had chosen to address the impact of the Lockdown on Businesses and workers who lost income – no matter their tax or employment status – by taking a blanket approach to all.

Instead of dolling out cash from the ‘magic money tree’ that the Conservatives have so mercilessly attacked the Labour Party over for years whilst stating that it doesn’t exist, the Government should have locked down the economic system for all those people and businesses who suddenly found themselves unable to earn as a result of the Lockdown and removed the need for them to pay any bills for goods or services that they have not ordered during the Lockdown itself.

As a temporary measure, this would have been the surest way to help and to be fair to everyone from the top to the bottom of the economy, whether they are a billionaire or they are unemployed.

Nobody would have had to pay the bills it would have been right to stop. So the only money that anyone would have needed help to find would have been for the basic necessities such as food and essentials each week.

Paying out something like £100 per week per person who had lost their income and for their dependents too would have cost the UK Taxpayer significantly less than the sums that have already been spent on a series of loans, grants and wage subsidies which hasn’t reached everyone and has left substantial gaps in the provision it was supposed to provide.

Businesses that couldn’t operate wouldn’t have had bills to service whilst they had no income and could have effectively been mothballed until life was ready to resume. The jobs they provide would then have still existed for all the many thousands of people who are now likely to have none to return to.

Some will argue that what the Government has done has literally been the way of the world in responding to the COVID-19 Pandemic in the way that it has. But that doesn’t make it right.

If anything, it demonstrates just how dangerous the mindset and culture of national leadership across the 21st Century World has become when so-called leaders are too afraid to overrule economists and bankers because they are more concerned with the risk to themselves than the impact of getting it all so very wrong on the people they are there to represent.

After the impact of the mismanagement of the 2008 Financial Crisis when politicians lived up to the lie that the banks were too big to fail and then saddled the UK with unnecessary debt whilst the bankers took bonuses and were allowed to roll on like nothing had gone wrong, the stupidity of this Government in printing money to solve a problem like this that could have been solved differently is not just going to go away.

The Government has committed us to a level of debt that will hurt us all first through the damage they have done to the National Economy. It will then trickle down and hurt us all directly through the loss of our jobs and an even greater dependence upon personal debt when we cannot afford the debt and commitments that we already have.

The only way that the Government of the UK and possibly all Governments of the World will be able to address the mess that has been created will be at the very least to go through a process of significant debt forgiveness. Alternatively, they will have to conduct a complete reset of our economic system and revise the way that money is made so that basic living is something that an average wage earner and someone on benefits can actually afford, and money is available where and when it is really needed, rather than automatically flowing back to the pigs with their heads in the trough where it starts.

Straightforward as it might sound, if these problems were to be left in the hands of the clowns that got us to where we are now in the first place, it would make it all but inevitable that they wouldn’t get the cure to the problem right.

The politicians we have simply don’t understand or appreciate anywhere near enough about the people, the businesses and the way of the world over which they have responsibility to get any of it genuinely right – that is if they were able to think beyond the benefits of whatever they do for themselves and however anything they do will look.

Doubling down rather than turning around and being big about the mistakes they have made

It would be ridiculous to think that good leaders don’t make mistakes. They do, and they make them often too.

The difference between good leaders and the ones that we have got in Government today is that good leaders accept and learn from their mistakes and are prepared to change course or direction as soon as they do – no matter what anyone or in particular the media says.

We have been burdened at a time of national crisis, with so-called leaders who are obsessed with controlling how everything looks, rather than focusing purely on the robustness, reach and impact of what it is they do.

Even the biggest mistakes that the Government has made during the COVID-19 emergency so far such as the Lockdown and the so-called Financial Support Measures that they followed up with could have had significantly less impact if the Government had changed direction and done a u-turn after they had been announced and gone a different way.

What is clear is that the political class that we have just doesn’t do things that way. They see changing their minds as a sign of weakness and so double down when they are questioned or challenged – no matter what will be the outcome or cost.

Like everything political since spin took over in the days of New Labour and Tony Blair, the politicians we have are obsessed with the words they use rather than their actions, when actions will always speak to us much louder than any of the words.

The ongoing irresponsible use of propaganda.

Propaganda is now being used as the basis for the story rather than the story being used as the basis for the Propaganda itself

Talking up vaccines, antibody tests, contact monitoring, PPE shipments, the Nightingale Hospitals – to name but a few. All of these topics are being used to manipulate and persuade people that the Government has, is and will be doing much more than it actually does.

Whilst it is a poor illustration of the political culture that we have got, its use during ‘normal’ times would be questionable. But its use during a national emergency is knocking on the front door of it being a real crime.

The Government cannot cope with the responsibility that it has because the politicians within it are not of the quality or outlook of the politicians that we as a Country should have at any time, let alone a time of national crisis.

If they were good leaders, they would be able to work with reality as it is and use it to inspire and encourage the people as genuine leadership always will. Instead, they have to use trickery to make us believe that we are being led by a group who know what they are doing and actually have an end game in mind whilst they have the wherewithal required to get there.

Our politicians might not actually be lying to us in the strictest or black and white sense. But they are being very economic and selective with the truths that they are telling us and using them as smokescreens to hide the growing proof that will eventually come out and hurt them – but only after they have caused significant harm to all of us.

It will be all the worse because if they had chosen to come clean and stop spinning everything at any point since the COVID-19 emergency began, their honesty could then have prevented pain and even death from happening for others – instead of for what for them has been all about nothing more than consolidating their position and personal gain.

Letting ‘Experts’ lead a specialist response to a medical emergency and including everyone when a general approach of facilitation was what was needed

One of the worst things of all that this Government has done has been to fall into the trap of believing that so-called experts and specialists are the best people to call on for solutions in a crisis that reflect on everyone, when their experience and knowledge is subjective and the response requires a wholly objective view.

The role of good political leadership is to be very much like a grand facilitator or chairman of sorts, bringing together, discerning and recognising the value that comes from all perspectives and then putting it all together and applying it in a formula or policy that actually works.

The Government has not done that and instead has been swayed by listening to the most obvious voices rather than all of those that should have and should now be being heard.

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An increasing number of activists, commentators and writers are being vocal about the real depth and breadth of the problems that the Government has caused and is causing, and the realities that people are now facing and will have to face just to exist.

Some are already advocating legal action against the Johnson Government at the end of the COVID-19 emergency – whenever that time should come.

Whilst we might wish them well in the process of getting to the bottom of what was clearly done wrong, it would be much preferable that we do everything to head off as much of the coming catastrophe as can be avoided – rather than waiting until the only thing we have power over is the decision of who to blame.

This means that the UK must now look to doing Government in a very different way.

We cannot continue with politicians of the kind we have left in charge.

A new world is now set to emerge from the era of COVID-19 and the politicians we have are simply not equipped, of the quality or possess the ability that the UK needs to see us through the crisis for the UK that they have created, nor the impact upon us that is coming from the crisis that is set to engulf the entire world.

We cannot wait for the end of the existing Parliamentary cycle before there is the opportunity to replace them, as even then the system is so shut down and closed to new influences it will be impossible to displace their kind.

We need new leadership in the UK now. That new leadership must come from none of the usual suspects, but from people who might be just as skilled and as intelligent, but also care, love others as themselves and above all have the humanity to understand how the world works in different people’s minds as well as within the systems that we can openly see and interpret at work.

When the time comes for that change, those in the Johnson Government will not be forgiven for harm it has caused us that it had the option to avoid.