Tag: hunger

Politicians are unaware of the impact of the decisions they make, because they have no understanding of the lives that the majority of the population live

The reality of how the UK Political System and how British Politics is broken, can be more than adequately explained in the difference between having Politicians who are effectively unconscious or ‘asleep at the wheel’ as they are today, and the very distinct alternative of having Politicians who are fully conscious of the reasons for and the implications of everything they do.

It cannot be emphasised strongly enough, just how real the different consequences are and will be between what we already have and what we could have and should have in terms of decision making in the best interests of everyone and everything.

These differences will continue to exist for as long as we fail to embrace the necessary process of change, rather than continue to seek what look like easy alternatives.

All of the Public Policy decisions being made today and the decisions that have been made for decades have been made with highly subjective aims.

The aims or desired outcomes that led to these decisions may have been to appeal to the Voters who typically support the Political Party in or seeking power. They may have been to keep the Banks, The Markets and Big Business happy. They may have been to maintain or gain favour with the EU or the Government of a Country such as the USA. They may have been based upon what the government of the day decided that ‘they’ could afford (£).

Whatever the motives or drivers behind the decisions may have been, those motives have become preferential influences or biases.

This means that the decisions have been made without consideration of all the facts, impacts and consequences in mind – as they always should be.

Poor decisions made by Politicians, influenced by biases or fears that favour one thing or the aims or wants of certain people always disadvantage something else or other people in some way.

There is no in-between – irrespective of whether the result is publicly seen or unseen.

This Blog is part of the e-book ‘The Way of Awakened Politics for Good Government’. Please do download a copy for your Kindle from Amazon, or alternatively, read the whole book FREE online once it is available at www.awakenedpolitics.com

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No Energy Company has the right to Guaranteed Profits #costoflivingcrisis

The story that we are repeatedly being told is that the price of wholesale energy is shooting up because of supply issues, not least of all our relationship with Russia over Ukraine.

We are told that we have to do our bit. That Ofgem has no choice but to raise the ceiling of the prices that energy companies can charge. Even though government cash handouts aren’t going to help within the much wider price rises within cost-of-living crisis context. And a ridiculous number of us are already borrowing, or going to foodbanks in the middle of summer, just so that we can have access to food.

And then we are told that the energy companies are enjoying profits that aren’t just wafer thin, but are actually obscene when put in the context that the government regulator Ofgem, is facilitating nothing less than a system that is clearly not only covering any genuine supply-side cost rises that might exist, but is also ensuring that the profits and dividends paid to the private interests that own what should be public services are being continually guaranteed.

Words cannot explain just how wrong and unjust this system and the processes that our politicians have allowed to be created and that are now punishing us all, really is.

Our politicians could stop this madness now and have the power to do so. But they won’t, because they don’t even understand how the system they are responsible for actually works.

What horrific. What terrible. What unnecessarily unjust times we are living in. Just so idiots can look good in public, create a place for themselves in Wikipedia and shout to everyone ‘don’t I look great in my elected job!’.

The UK will go hungry as the food supply collapses. But Boris and all the political buffoons seat blocking our Parliament will continue to have their day…

It’s difficult to imagine that anyone in big business or government has any real concern about supply chain security, when the Conservative-friendly Daily Telegraph carries a story about the CEO of the UK’s Marks & Spencer retail chain now being on a 4-day week for a salary of £750K. Meanwhile, the real people at the other end of the wealth divide are working every hour they have and cannot even afford to buy food from one of the stores.

I will leave the timing and reasoning for this announcement, along with the raft of announcements from No.10 suggesting that our self-regalvanised PM is only now ready to his job to the reader.

But to say all of these deliberate distractions overlook the many elephants in the room and particularly the questions surrounding what happens to us all next would be comical, if it were not the fact that for the majority of us all, shit is about to get very real indeed.

Call me dramatic if you like. But few of us will accept that we are already in the process of a massive financial and systemic collapse until it actually hits us and we can feel the pain pushing into our own existence or life bubble in some way. Regrettably, that day will soon come.

However, whilst things like the housing market collapsing, or small businesses going bang because they simply cannot raise employee pay will inevitably hit or touch the lives of us all differently, there is one very profound and potentially very hard-hitting way that the collapse of the systems we currently take for granted is going to touch all of our lives in the same way. That’s the production, supply and the availability or shortages of food.

Before I go any further, it is important to get to the point that the supply of many of the foods that we probably all enjoy at home, from takeaways or when we go out to a pub or restaurant for a meal, are simply not going to be available in any of these ways anymore. Furthermore, this change to our lifestyles could well be pushing its way into our lives in perhaps just weeks or months from now.

The ingredients, the processing and the transportation of the foods that contribute to what might best be described as our very exotic, but nonetheless unhealthy diets aren’t just sourced from right across the world.

The foods we eat and the ingredients used to make them are processed here there and everywhere too.

The journeys that make up the pizzas, pies and puddings that we have all been conditioned to love crisscross continents and countries in various and accumulated forms. All before they finally reach the shelves of our local supermarkets or distribution centres, usually wrapped in a load of packaging that will immediately be thrown away, just as soon as they have come through our doors.

That the global supply chains that support and provide for all of this are collapsing right now is problematic enough.

But the real problem for us all that accompanies this collapse, is that even the majority of our most local producers (that’s local farmers and growers) buy the materials they need and then supply the meat, milk, cereals, vegetables and fruit that they produce into what is in effect part of this highly centralised operational business model.

Farmers and growers in the UK and across Western Countries do not produce or supply in a way that means that any of us could simply walk up to the local farm and buy or trade with the farmer to get the basic foods that we need, when everything that we know and take for granted about the supply of foods and goods today breaks down.

The processes that take raw foods from farms and turn them into the products that we love to eat and buy are massively complicated.

This complication has itself been encouraged and legitimised by the creation of many different industry-serving laws and rules. Not least of all by our friends in the European Union, that became just another way of dressing up greed-driven globalisation, but in a more politically acceptable continent-wide way.

What we or rather more importantly all of our seat-blocking politicians in Parliament are failing to grasp right now – whilst they keep on attempting to distract us with soundbites and other hollow scheme imaginable, is that we have a massive food crisis ahead of us. A food crisis that is looming large that will not be temporary. And that in terms of re-tasking, repurposing, redirecting, and reimagining the most essential forms and mechanics of our basic food supply chain – we are now critically unprepared.

Its not as if Farmers and Growers aren’t trying to make our politicians aware that there is a crisis coming either.

The issue with the politicians we have today is that everything they stand for, have bought and dragged us into and has been motivated by or is tied up in the money or greed based system that we currently have.

By even acknowledging that the focus of food supply must immediately become local, as part of the now essential drive to make the UK self-sufficient in all basic foods, goods and services in the shortest time, our politicians will be admitting to the wrongs of the part that they and many others before them have played in contributing to this mess over decades.

That however, is not an excuse for those in power and in our Parliament not to act now.

When we are all facing a change to our reality and a process of transition where there is a growing possibility that British People are going to starve, the public representatives that we have elected to look our for our best interests should be prioritising this change to local supply and UK self sufficiency in every possible way.

The pressing need for Local Market Exchanges and Local Market Exchange Platforms

One of the reasons that we should all feel confident that we can survive and thrive through the coming years and months, and that we can all play an active and positive part in creating the new system that is balanced and fair for all, is because much of the creative and innovative thinking is already out there that will build every part of it.

It is just the question of what, why and who people will be doing these things for that has to be settled before work on our new world and The True Economy can begin.

When money doesn’t work for the majority of people, we will have reached a point where things could go a number of ways.

Please look kindly on anyone who loses their shit in these circumstances. Desperation doesn’t excuse poor behaviour of any kind. But it does provide good incentive to organise anything and everything that we have available to our community and the people within it, as quickly as we can.

The first step to maintaining order, is to pool everything that the community has available and to be fully transparent about what the community has, and how it can and will be shared.

If it comes down to a situation where people are going hungry, transactions cannot be based on exchange, and must be based on the simple act of sharing what we have and don’t need for our own immediate requirements, and not on what others can ‘afford’.

The next step is to create a system of fair exchange, that functions on what everyone can give, or what they can trade or barter.

The principle value of this exchange system, or Local Market Exchange, will be based on the time, skills, experience and basic labour that it took to provide whatever the essential foods, goods or services being exchanged might be, or what it would be when the complete process of putting that food, those goods or services would be, when considering the process from end-to-end.

The creation and development of the Local Market Exchange will take place in two primary stages:

  1. Bartering & Exchange of goods, supplies and services that the community already has available, or which it has the ability to grow, manufacture or provide, and
  2. The creation of a new localised currency linking, anchoring or pinning transactional value of foods, goods and services directly to the number of people and/or the contributions (input to the system) that they make.

Surviving The Great Reset | Shortages of Food & Goods

In the coming weeks, months and years too, we are going to experience shortages of everything that we are used to being able to buy.

The shortages will not only affect the things that come from outside of this Country. And many of us will be surprised by just how many of these there really are.

The shortages will also affect the things that are still made and produced in this Country – such as very basic foods that are produced and grown even very close to our homes.

The reason for these shortages is that the system that we have become used to and that we take for granted, is now beginning to break.

Once we have accepted that the collapse of the system is not a problem that will be fixed – which will take us all a period of time, there will be a further period of time where necessary changes have to be made to everything and a new system of supply is developed that can be relied upon and that is balanced, fair and works in the best interests of everyone.

Some of the shortages will be temporary.

In some cases, the shortages will be perhaps as short as just a few days.

But in terms of many of the things that we believe we need, but actually want, the shortages will be permanent.

Production resources that we have available here will be re-tasked to growing and producing the foods and the things that we all actually need, as opposed to the things that some of us think we need, but only want.

Think of the first weeks of Lockdown, when ‘panic buying’ left people unable to bake things or wipe their bum.

Roll that idea out across everything you really need to eat, drink and take care of yourself each day, and that is a reflection of the experience we will all have, that is to come.

What will happen during the acute stages of The Great Reset?

Whether it’s the supply chains that bring us our food, clothes and the things that we need just to survive, or the utilities, fuel, transport and other services that we are used to having access to, the chances are that they we will not be able to access them completely, or that access will be reduced to a rationed or irregular form.

For some things, the experience of shortages or going without will just be temporary, simply because they really are the things that we actually need.

Where the things that we only believe we need but are things that we only actually want are concerned, we are likely to find that the supply of many of these ‘things’ will never return.

It is during this ‘acute’ stage of ‘The Great Reset’ that things will be very uncertain.

The acute stage of ‘The Great Reset’ is when we will have to make do in ways that we have never experienced. It will be a time when we will not only have to do our part, but also rely upon the goodwill and a sense of community around us in a way that we have never lived our lives before.

The acute stage of ‘The Great Reset’ will be a period of time when we will need to learn to survive.

Thank you for your support – Here’s the best way to get value from Levelling Level:

Before anything, a big thank you to everyone who has visited Levelling Level here (in its Blog form) or has already downloaded the Book.

Since I began to publish the Book broken down into blogs last Tuesday, the number of visits has been more than I had expected. I have really appreciated the likes received from some of you, that have reflected a lot of interest in pages such as Food: What we need and The Basic Living Standard. This has been rather heartening, bearing in mind that creating and then maintaining The Basic Living Standard is what Levelling Level is ultimately all about.

Clearly, many of the ideas and suggestions I have made in Levelling Level stand up on their own at first glance, to those of us who are already receptive in any relevant way to the need for change.

Yet I am acutely aware that the complexity of the problems that we all face together are such that we cannot and will not succeed in fixing them or implementing real solutions that will work, unless we take a very different approach to the one that has led us here. We must seek to address each and every problem in its own right, but also in relation to each and every other problem, one-by-one and one-and-all, as never before.

The fact that even people who have a vested interest in rejecting a Basic Living Standard do at least unconsciously appreciate how it would work was illustrated very well to me just yesterday, when I went out for an early morning walk. Bumping into a very successful business owner who I have got to know by passing the time of day, the subject of us not meeting over the past 6 weeks came up and I told him that I had been writing and publishing the Levelling Level Book.

Their rejection of the idea that everyone should have a fighting chance of success as a stepping off point, instead of so many of us having lives that revolve only around a lifetime of fighting to keep our heads above water (and in many cases failing, as the system has developed to so easily allow us to do) was palpable, just because they had experienced a very challenging start to life.

Once we had passed the accusation that I could only propose such things because of the privileged position that I now had, and that had been put to bed by referencing the back story that I have had, we very quickly moved into a number of suggestions that they were making – which are a natural follow through of where we really are all now heading – but which from their current perspective, they were adamant would never be practical or work.

As things still appear to be for many people today, they certainly appear to have a point. The intrinsic values crisscrossing society are all based on what we have or what we can get after all.

In fact, before starting only to touch the nuts and bolts of what Levelling Level is really about, I had already warned them that they might find what I was about to say controversial in some way. And that’s why I have written the whole proposal, suggestion or philosophy that is Levelling Level in the way that I have.

Levelling Level is about the present, immediate and longer-term future of my Country, The UK. But the principles and suggestions are relevant to wherever you live or may be.

Levelling Level is written as a book that journeys through how we got to where we are today. It covers the role that events such as Brexit, Covid and Ukraine have played as the catalysts of a massive change that has been in development over decades. It then discusses how we will have to change the way that we live and everything that we are used to in order to survive and manage through the challenges and difficulties that we will experience in many forms as events force everything we know to change.

Levelling Level reaches its conclusion discussing how we can harness the learning from the experience that this challenging time will provide us to mould a better way of living for ourselves, whilst ensuring that there is a genuine safety net in place to ensure that nobody is from that point ever left behind.

Through the lens of the very material and money-oriented world that still surrounds us, the numbers of people receptive to the change now required may be growing. But for the majority, that need for that change will not be accepted or real, until events have led them personally to experience the pain that lies ahead.

When that pain arrives, it is essential that we harness the power of an opportunity to change life for the better that can only come at that flashpoint or seminal moment. A point in time when everyone will know and accept that the way we have been living and treating each other is unsustainable and can no longer go on.

From this perspective alone, I will make a suggestion: That any of you who are already receptive to the level of change that events and circumstances will soon force us all to embrace, will benefit most from reading Levelling Level in its original book form.

Sharing Levelling Level has never been about making money or charging any fees. The Book for Kindle is modestly priced, and I will be happy to provide a PDF copy of the text by e-mail, Free Of Charge, in receipt to any legitimate request. (Please email levellinglevel@gmail.com )

To get the best value from reading Levelling Level in its blog form without charge, please visit the web version using PC/Mac/Laptop. Please use the index on the right of the page to navigate from top to bottom, what are the equivalent parts/pages/sections of the Levelling Level Book.

Levelling Level is linked on Twitter (@levellinglevel) and Facebook (@levellinglevel) and I would really appreciate your follows, likes, shares and your taking the time to ask questions or make comments that might be helpful to all of us in some way.

Thanks again for reading. I’m looking forward to hearing from you.

Best wishes,

Adam Tugwell

Sat in a Starbucks in Cheltenham, UK. Monday 11 April 2022

The Cost-of-Living Crisis: Why we can’t afford to live

The chances are that as you read this today, your perception of money is that money is a thing. That because you can save money in a piggy bank or look at the bank balance that you have, money exists and is definitely real.

You might believe that money is the key to everything, and that with enough of it, money can solve any problem.

If this summary sounds familiar or would be a good description of your own view, it may be of comfort to know that you are certainly not alone.

To be fair, this is pretty much how the whole world thinks and how everyone perceives money today.

What you may not realise, is that whilst this may be representative of majority thinking today, it certainly hasn’t always been this way.

In fact, the relationship we have with money and the way it now runs our lives isn’t that old at all.

Overview of Levelling Level

The Tory Right named their latest response to it Levelling Up. For decades, Labour and the Left have responded to it with public policy that adds up to levelling down.

But what is ‘it’? Do our politicians actually know what ‘it’ is? What is ‘it’ they don’t understand?

Today, we find ourselves in the early stages of a cost-of-living crisis and a fall in living standards that is the worst since records began. But these are only some of the issues we now face.

Social mobility, debt, housing, energy, inflation or stagflation, healthcare, climate change, education, wealth inequality, fake news, crime, wokeism and many other problems join the list that’s fast growing into this out-of-control crisis that is touching everything we know, too.

Change is happening around us in ways that make very little sense. Yet the messages we hear in the media and from our politicians suggest that everything is as fine as it can be. It is leading many of us to assume that we are alone with our views and feelings; thinking that we must be going mad.

The UK is the person with major health problems. It’s in a beauty salon, where every wannabe politician must be seen as top dog by everyone. But this political class are just the Saturday morning trainees, only able to sweep up and comb hair*. They smile sweetly and tell the Country that having a great look is all it takes to fix the problems experienced by all. Meanwhile, what the UK really needs is every form of medical surgery known, with the mental health care and physical rehabilitation necessary to make every part of our system work together, returning the UK to full fitness and providing fair and balanced lives for everyone in the shortest time possible.

With an establishment obsessed with sound bites and messages, rather than public policy that has real depth, Adam Tugwell unpicks the realities of Levelling Up, levelling down and decades of mismanagement and self-interest from a political class that simply isn’t up to the job.

Adam demonstrates that the broken tools of a flawed political age will always leave someone, somewhere behind, and shows that our politicians are repeatedly failing to create the social backstop that the UK needs to stop anyone being avoidably disadvantaged.

Levelling Level focusses on the inevitable process of change affecting everything around us that underway today. It discusses how we can harness the experiences that will accompany the challenges that we face to make life better by establishing a Basic Living Standard for all.

Levelling Level proposes that it is not money and financial wealth, but people and the way that our society treats its poorest and most vulnerable that underscores our real value, success and health as communities and as a Nation.

Levelling Level is a solution to the UKs problems that works for all.

*The qualified hairdressers are the government officers and civil servants, or people who like to ‘nudge’

Levelling Level

The Tory Right named their latest response to it Levelling Up. For decades, Labour and the Left have responded to it with public policy that adds up to levelling down.

But what is ‘it’? Do our politicians actually know what ‘it’ is? What is ‘it’ they don’t understand?

Today, we find ourselves in the early stages of a cost-of-living crisis and a fall in living standards that is the worst since records began. But these are only some of the issues we now face.

Social mobility, debt, housing, energy, inflation or stagflation, healthcare, climate change, education, wealth inequality, fake news, crime, wokeism and many other problems join the list that’s fast growing into this out-of-control crisis that is touching everything we know, too.

Change is happening around us in ways that make very little sense. Yet the messages we hear in the media and from our politicians suggest that everything is as fine as it can be. It is leading many of us to assume that we are alone with our views and feelings; thinking that we must be going mad.

The UK is the person with major health problems. It’s in a beauty salon, where every wannabe politician must be seen as top dog by everyone. But this political class are just the Saturday morning trainees, only able to sweep up and comb hair*. They smile sweetly and tell the Country that having a great look is all it takes to fix the problems experienced by all. Meanwhile, what the UK really needs is every form of medical surgery known, with the mental health care and physical rehabilitation necessary to make every part of our system work together, returning the UK to full fitness and providing fair and balanced lives for everyone in the shortest time possible.

With an establishment obsessed with sound bites and messages, rather than public policy that has real depth, Adam Tugwell unpicks the realities of Levelling Up, levelling down and decades of mismanagement and self-interest from a political class that simply isn’t up to the job.

Adam demonstrates that the broken tools of a flawed political age will always leave someone, somewhere behind, and shows that our politicians are repeatedly failing to create the social backstop that the UK needs to stop anyone being avoidably disadvantaged.

Levelling Level focusses on the inevitable process of change affecting everything around us that underway today. It discusses how we can harness the experiences that will accompany the challenges that we face to make life better by establishing a Basic Living Standard for all.

Levelling Level proposes that it is not money and financial wealth, but people and the way that our society treats its poorest and most vulnerable that underscores our real value, success and health as communities and as a Nation.

Levelling Level is a solution to the UKs problems that works for all.

*The qualified hairdressers are the government officers and civil servants, or people who like to ‘nudge’

Buy Now, Pay Later is no solution to cost-of-living crisis. It is another device that will be disastrous for the poor and the depths of greed the rich have now reached have become a menace for us all

People who lack the essentials of life – because they cannot financially afford them – are vulnerable to anyone who has a clever way to exploit that need.

It is a lesson from centuries of history that we should all be able to rely on that those who lead us will have learned. But regrettably, we cannot.

Indeed, government was created as a way for us to all collectively help others in a time of need. But the time when mechanisms such as the Welfare State and even the NHS were able to operate and fulfil their function without being exploited in some way, have sadly long since gone.

Like me, you may have noticed that so-called ‘Buy Now, Pay Later’ ‘opportunities’ have started to appear and are available to cover the cost of some of the least expensive items that we have gone online and even to the high street or local shops to buy.

To those who have been fed the unscrupulous line that taking out credit and paying it off before you are charged interest is a good thing AND can do so, it is likely that just adding another way to delay paying bills with free money will be seen as no more than an added bonus. But what happens when these offers and the growing number of Buy Now, Pay Later apps are used to pay for food, travel or even energy that the people buying these goods and services don’t have the money to afford?

The willful blindness to a situation that politicians themselves have directly and indirectly created is not just a problem. It is fast becoming a damning indictment of how as a society we have become obsessed with quick money and the status that its fluidity affords us, when we believe we can afford it, whilst this obsession has picked up speed and just about enslaved us all.

The debate over whether the £200 relief on energy bills should be a Tory driven Loan or a Labour derived subsidy fails to even scratch the surface of the dreadful realities that increasing numbers of British people now face.

Food and the essentials that each of us need to survive and remain healthy each day are going up in price aggressively, whilst the value of the money we earn or are given is rapidly going down.

To add to the torment and human misery that little more than political stupidity and the greed of big business and bankers have created, the latter are now exploiting what is left for those who already have nothing left with this Buy Now, Pay Later trap.

They are doing little more than exploiting the vulnerability that accompanies need. All so they can continue to raise already bloated profit margins for themselves.

The travesty of this all, is that the money being ‘loaned’ to the people who will become debt ridden and then ostracised, by the very same commercial credit scorers who qualified them, doesn’t actually exist.

Our politicians have literally given these sadists a license to print money that they then loan out, charge interest against and simply destroy lives without any further thought, when it’s not paid back.

It’s all done as if the money was real, and they had been put at a genuinely loss and have reason to be aggrieved in some way.

This travesty is made worse, only by the reality that our Politicians either don’t understand how the perversity of this system now works, or that they do, but overlook it all on the basis that it either helps them to do so, or that it is too difficult to deal with.

To say that we are on our way to hell in a hand cart would be bad enough, if it weren’t for the fact that to say all this was avoidable for a very long time is the absolute truth.

Instead, we have politicians who are scraping around trying to fix life-changing problems for everyone by printing even more money whilst making them even worse.

Making life fair and affordable for all was always within our Politicians power.

They have either deliberately ignored the problems or are just too stupid to be aware of and face up to the true cause.

The Cost-of-Living Crisis that our Politicians have caused: How can it be that we have less when we receive and spend exactly the same amount, whilst others seem to have a lot more?

To deal with the Lockdown and the related issues which were unnecessary and of their own making, Chancellor Rishi Sunak and the Johnson Government embarked on a profligate money printing bender.

It has been an obscene public spending spree that has not only led to the explosion of public debt. It has accelerated all of the deep-seated financial and economic problems that the UK already had before the Covid Pandemic arrived.

So, what has this all got to do with me, you might ask?

It’s a good question. Especially if you didn’t get any free Furlough money or didn’t have a grant of some kind that you didn’t really need or weren’t expecting to be fire hosed via the local council into your business.

Money is money and its value stays the same, doesn’t it?

Well, the answer is no. The value of money doesn’t ever stay the same – because money only represents value and is not the value of anything itself.

This is a crude example of what is happening, but it will hopefully illustrate the point:

  1. Let’s say that £1000 is all the money that exists. Alongside, there are £1000 worth of goods, £1000 worth of property and £1000 worth of services that have that have value, but that value can only be exchanged by using the £1000 that exists.
  2. You own £100 of the money that exists and that money is sat in your bank account or in bank notes in your hand.
  3. One day, you go out and buy £20 of property, £20 of goods and £10 of services and still have £50 left in your bank account or in banknotes in your hands, which at any time on that day will buy the same things all over again.
  4. The next day, you wake up to find that the Government has printed another £1000 of money and put it in someone else’s bank account or straight into their hands.
  5. But whilst the government printed twice the money, only the same amount of goods, property and services or ‘output’ exists.
  6. Because the total amount of money has doubled overnight, the value of those goods, services and property that exist have also doubled over night.
  7. Now, when you go out to shop for the £20 of goods, the £20 of property and the £10 of services you find that the prices have doubled, and you can no longer buy or afford the same that you previously had.

So, increasing the amount of money in circulation whilst there is no corresponding rise in production, goods manufactured in sold or service output simply means that there is more money available in proportion to everything that can be sold.

What makes the situation worse, is that most of the money that has been printed by the Government has gone into the hands of people and companies that are already very rich, who see and understand what the government is doing and then push up prices, knowing that the government will turn around and print even more.

Meanwhile, throughout this process, those on the lowest wages have effectively gained nothing. They instead find that the same amount of money they earned as last month, will no longer cover the cost of the same foods, goods and services. Sooner or later, they will have to borrow or go into debt, secure a higher income or apply for benefits. Or if that’s not possible, go with out in one or many different ways instead.

To call money printing to solve problems that could have been avoided and the Politicians themselves created is a travesty borne of ignorance, stupidity and self-interest, is only made worse by the reality that the political classes have colluded with the finance sector to allow banks to do exactly the same things, not just over the past two years, but for decades of real time.

Printing Money doesn’t solve problems – it just creates many more by helping the rich and punishing the poor.

The cost-of-living crisis our Politicians created: Can they fix it? No, they can’t

Inflation, cost of living, fall in living standards, foodbanks, debt. These are all terms that we are set to see and hear regularly on the news and across our social media feeds from now on.

In the past few days alone, we have had mealy-mouthed responses from the establishment to the news of skyrocketing inflation across prices and the cost of the goods and services that are basically essential for people to live.

On one side, we have had celebrity Kirsty Allsopp telling young people that dropping their Netflix Subscription will make buying a house something they can afford.

We have heard former Tory MP and Minister Edwina Curry evangelising that green living is easily affordable because a battery powered car only costs £249 per month.

Then we have the Chancellor and would-be-world-king, striding to the rescue of the very people he threw overboard with a solution to the obscene energy price hike, dressed as a subsidy that is in fact no more than a loan.

In amongst all of this sits the reality and truth. It has been these very same Politicians and the establishment that supports them who have created and facilitated everything that is now going wrong economically for normal people, our communities and the UK as a whole.

They are from amongst the team of architects who have built or paid lip service to the economic house of cards that is now crumbling. And we must ask the question, ‘Can the people who created this and the problems that are coming really be the people with the solutions that will ultimately put it all right?’

It is perhaps a little too easy to see everything that is happening today within the frame of the Covid Pandemic. In fact, our Politicians – who are proving themselves to have a rather distant relationship with the truth – are relying on it.

Yet, Covid itself has very little to do with the problems we now face.

Whatever the real genesis of the Covid Pandemic turns out to be, time will tell us that it was the Lockdowns and the Covid Measures that the Government imposed in response that were our real undoing.

These wholly avoidable Measures have proven to be the catalyst that brought together systemic problems with the way that our economy works that had been building up for years, creating a perfect storm that is set to explode.

The house of cards that I refer to, is one that has been building for decades. One that has been established on self-serving ideas. It does not have a foundation upon fact.

The ideas come under the guise of terms such as Neoliberalism, Modern Monetary Theory and FIAT Money and in all likelihood many other esoteric terms.

Yet they all funnel into just one thing: A system that works expansively to favour only the rich, adding money to their pile, whilst continually taking the value out of everything for everyone else.

The pivotal moment or crossing of the Rubicon came when the last Labour Government bailed out the mistakes of privately owned banks in the Great Financial Crisis of 2008. It set the precedent and created the false belief that Politicians could print just as much money as they liked to get out of trouble, without fear of any consequences. And it is this that has brought the situation to where it is today.

OUR FINAL BILL for this Government’s management of the Covid Pandemic is not even in. But in September 2021, the National Audit Office projected it to be a total of £370 Billion.

Without adding a penny more, this is rather troubling figure. As the fact remains that this expenditure and the National Debt is has created was unnecessary, and it was stupidity and mismanagement at the highest level that was its direct cause.

Its important to know and to understand this. Because, contrary to what our inept Political class believe, no decisions on public policy can be made without consequences.

When a Country prints money of an amount so big, the consequence is to push the boundaries of an already unequitable and broken system to breaking point that is set to make life unaffordable if not unliveable for many and potentially for us all.

That’s why the prices of everything that we need are now spiralling out of control.

Einstein said that “Insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results”. Yet that is what our Politicians are doing now, each and every time that they reach into the UKs empty pockets and try to solve an escalating inflationary problem – where people can’t afford to live, by printing money that neither exists, nor can it be tied to parallel production or economic output of any kind.

Our Politicians, the advisors, the experts and the establishment behind them don’t have solutions or answers to the problems they caused or contributed to and what is coming next.

They have got away with so much for so long, that when it really mattered, they simply went too far.

The question now is not if there will have to be change both at the top and how we do government and politics in this Country. It is merely the question of when.

When we’ve had enough of the pain that self-serving interests have caused that we will be collectively ready to decide.

When the basic wage pays for everything anyone needs without them needing benefits or taking on debt, workers will be happy and jobs that people now avoid will be enthusiastically filled

The Cost-of-Living Crisis that our Politicians and Mainstream Media are now being forced to recognise is a life experience for many that is nothing new.

In fact, it is only because of the current circumstances that the Politicians and the Media have unwittingly encouraged that the situation is now beginning to become acute. The price to survive is starting to touch so many different areas of life, that the establishment can no longer avoid the truth that they find so unpalatable. The consequences of years of self-interest and inaction can no longer be kept out of sight.

Last Friday morning, Interviewers on BBC Breakfast News talked to paid carers and homecare companies struggling to find and provide staff to deliver a service that we may not want to accept that many of us at some point may need daily or perhaps more when we reach later life.

Social Care a political hot potato that is the subject of debate in its own right. But as an industry predominantly led by private profit-making companies, it offers perhaps one of the very best examples of how wage levels for staff in frontline hands-on roles are disproportionately low when considering the purpose that they fulfil.

Indeed, many of those who carry out this work require benefits or what are effective subsidies from the public purse in order that they can both work and survive.

Like many of the roles fulfilled by the people who are now beginning to struggle with the Cost-of-Living Crisis first hand, employed healthcare workers are being paid the Government set ‘National Living Wage’ or Minimum Wage, which from April will be £9.50 an hour, or £380.00 for a 40-Hour working week.

£19,760.00 per year simply isn’t enough for anyone to survive fully independently without support, benefits or going into debt on today’s terms.

There is a very important question that needs to be asked of our politicians: ‘Would you want to do, and would you enjoy doing a difficult and physically demanding job for a whole 40-Hour Week and then go to the shops and realise that food is a luxury that you cannot afford?’

The answer would of course be an unmitigated NO.

Whilst the rather obvious answer we would receive from our current Politicians would be sure to be accompanied by comments about all the benefits that are available to low wage earners to support them, there is another very important question the people ruling this Country should answer all of us too: ‘Why does the situation exist where Taxpayers are topping up millions of wages with benefits so that big and otherwise dysfunctional businesses can profit at levels which in most cases are absolutely obscene, given what they pay their frontline staff?’

Paradoxically, the work and effort that it takes those who are able to achieve wage levels that cover the cost of everything that they need is not something that a great many people really cherish or enjoy.

In fact, the quality of life that simple jobs with fixed hours without excessive travel would offer, would be something that many would choose to take – IF that kind of occupational lifestyle could achieve self-sufficiency with the security that everyone deserves as a minimum to achieve.

Despite what anyone with an interest in maintaining the perverse status and rules that allow all of this to exist will tell you, it is not impossible to change things and create a capitalist-based system where everyone can thrive and enjoy their lives fairly – rather than everything being funneled at the few and being maintained at the cost, expense and pain of everyone else who exists.

It is just a shame that we have a political class that is fixated with its own existence rather than seeing the real ills that society faces as something that can actually be fixed.

Sadly, for us all, in their obsession to maintain their positions, our Politicians have bolted shut the democratic doors.

Right now, there is no way we can get real leaders into Parliament who have the ability, wherewithal and commitment to do everything necessary to make life affordable and fair for all.

Poverty and hunger will not be addressed in the UK until politics is the means to solve our problems rather being accepted as the end

Balancing news input has become an unwitting challenge for a great many, simply because of how polarised and partisan the mainstream media has become. Whether it be to champion the right, the left or to further the destructive and forceful narrative of wokeness, there is very little that really encapsulates all or does a good job of sitting in between.

The environment that a world of echo chambers creates wouldn’t be quite as problematic in terms of societal problem solving and the legacy that it bequeaths if it were not for the seemingly population-wide absence today of critical thinking skills. The troubling truth is that we are navigating a phase of our history where real life problems are elevated or suffer scorn within the public view, depending on where the story was broken and the following assumption that the readership will be voting one way or another depending on who’s who.

Over the weekend, I read the article written by Jack Monroe in The Observer / The Guardian ‘Were pricing the poor out of food’ (which I cannot link at the time of writing as it appears to have disappeared). Beyond the timeline and list of things that Jack has arguably achieved by drawing attention to the realities of what it costs to eat when you are either temporarily or long-term poor, it was striking just how obvious that for the past decade, a failure to gain real traction in the fight against food poverty in the UK is in no small part because it is a subject championed only by the left.

That this Conservative Government has been out of touch with the uncomfortable realities that people right across the UK face is a given. Not because the Tories are consciously cruel. But because in the minds of the people who write their policies – who are unlikely to have had a free school meal, hand-me-down clothes or even experienced the joys of playing outside in a housing estate street – they genuinely believe that poverty and unemployment are one and the same thing – and the wannabe yes-men that follow them do not have the integrity to question what they are told.

This reality is borne out in the news even now. Public figures such as Chancellor Rishi Sunak champion the number of new jobs created and the number of people back at work, whilst forgetting to mention that the non-jobs that have been created pay the absolute minimum. That the ‘work’ is in all likelihood part-time or similar. Worst of all, that in many cases securing a ‘job’ just creates a minefield for those who were beguiled into signing up as self-employed only to find that overtly reasonable pay also includes all of their expenses and that the real hourly rate is a lot less than anyone can or should be expected to afford.

It’s a brutal reality that the people leading this Country are in a shocking state of denial about the circumstances and experiences of the poor. Their lack of appreciation is bolstered by the self-righteousness they fool themselves with as their head hits the pillow each night, hiding behind measures such as the minimum or living wage; all the time believing that this is as far as the legislative powers of the legislators need to extend in order to make life affordable for all.

At this point, it might be easy to read this Blog as a left-leaning. Labour and all of the left-wing pretenders such as the Liberal Democrats talk a good story about poverty and hunger and the unfolding cost of living crisis too. But their words – and actions – when their time in power has allowed, also shower them with something a lot less shiny than glory and that leaves behind a very redolent cloud.

The solutions the left offer, based on money and levelling down, don’t actually solve or even begin to address many of the wider issues that their own impractical and ideological approach to policy making have created. And this issue today has never been more relevant as we collectively stare into an abyss of what could genuinely become a financial Armageddon where throwing money at all of these problems will not be something that even a new Labour-led government elected in the coming months or years could now afford to do.

The problems which leave people unable to afford the food to feed their children – even if they starve themselves are massively complex in nature.

The cold, hard reality is that giving people more benefits or throwing money at charities such as the Trussell Trust – which really shouldn’t have to exist in 21st Century UK, is no better than coming up with creative schemes and misleading headlines that suggest everything is alright if you are ‘officially’ classified as having a job.

Wilful blindness on the part of our entire political class has contributed to a situation where politics is no longer the means to solve societal problems. Politics is now the end in itself.

The evidence that any good politician needs as the basis to start building the list of questions, the arguments and the recognition of how many areas of public policy are actually involved just to begin the process of dealing with these problems is there for all to see.

Hiding ominously in plain sight is the truth that no one with a public voice speaks and no one with the public gaze upon them will dare open their eyes to see.

We need politicians to be dealing with the questions that arise when people earning the basic wage that they have championed can only afford to live if the public purse continues to subsidise them.

How did this happen?

Why is it continuing?

Who is responsible?

How much do people need to earn to be able to support themselves without help?

When production is now arguably more efficient than it has ever been, why is any food on a supermarket shelf a luxury that one person earning a full-time wage cannot afford?

The truth is that the politicians we have would not like any of the answers to just these few questions and many, many more. That’s why they don’t listen. Its why they don’t look. Its whey they look for quick fixes and highly disingenuous soundbites that are there only to mislead and to hoodwink the very people that they should be helping into thinking that it is a problem of their own making.

Yet the reality is that the people who should and could be dealing with these problems are not.

These are problems that we have elected people to deal with. People who have taken our votes and our trust that they fulfil their responsibilities to us and always put them before their own.

They are there to find and deliver the solutions to the difficulties in life that we cannot do so ourselves – such as making sure that we all have the basics that we need available.

Instead, we have the wrong politicians. Politicians who are in politics for politics sake. And because they are completely unsuited to what they do, we have a situation where the fat and bloated are getting richer and richer, whilst everyone else has less and less whilst even having their status devalued as those in power play games with what it means to be poor.

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.

Some workers want this amount of money whilst others want more. But our needs are the same and government support is favoring some over others when we should all be getting exactly the same – not just in money but also support

If you dare to look at the headlines or glance across the editorial of any of the national newspapers that might be worth reading, you will see today that there is talk within Government of there being Ministers who are doves and others that are hawks.

The growing argument between them is the subject of when the COVID-19 Lockdown should end. The so-called Hawks want the Lockdown to begin to end at the beginning of May, whilst the so-called doves want to wait until the Whitsun Bank Holiday at the end of May before even a loosening of the current restrictions can be allowed to begin.

When you have been writing about the massive holes and inadequacy of the financial support that the Government is providing since the Lockdown began like I have, as well as questioning the cost of the Lockdown vs. the benefit too, you might think it would be natural for me to be happy that at least some of our MPs are looking at all of this in the same way too.

I’m not. And the problem is that they are not even in the same room.

Whilst certain Ministers are clearly aware of some of the issues already being caused by the Lockdown – as they are being flagged by Civil Servants within their Ministries, they are not aware of others whilst many MPs are clearly unaware at any meaningful level of the real crisis that has been started by the Lockdown.

A personal and costly disaster is now starting to unfold in front of more and more of the people just like you and I and it is going to slowly but surely soon come into full view.

We have been conditioned to think and view certain behaviours as acceptable by the world around us. The behaviour of self-serving politicians, an Establishment that cares not for anyone other than its own, and a media that is so obsessed with the sound of its own voice have all contributed significantly to the selfish approach to life that we have which we don’t recognise as being wholly self serving – because right now its just the ways that life tells us things should be done.

As we look at the Locked-down COVID-19 UK, our thoughts will inevitably be about how the Lockdown is effecting us personally and the people around us, whether it is our jobs, source of income, the business we own and operate or any one of the large number of ways that each and every one of us has had our life affected or compromised in some way since life as we knew it changed in March and the Lockdown got under way.

No, it isn’t wrong to think about any of this chapter of our lives in this way. But as we fall over ourselves to shout about treating gig-economy workers the same as employees or to sign petitions to specifically tell the Government that we want directors of small limited companies to receive the same money as if they were an employee, we are collectively falling into the trap of thinking that different help and support for different people based purely on how differently they are employed will equate to the same thing. It won’t.

What we are overlooking is that all people share something very distinctive in common that makes us all the same. We all have regular bills that we need our incomes to pay and  the amount we pay is relative to what we normally earn.

It doesn’t matter what they are or how much those bills are for. Whether you are young, a Millennial, middle aged, retired or very old, there will be bills that you have to pay or have paid on your behalf.

Beyond the fact that we are human beings who live and die, what we all have in common is our shared reality that we always have to pay a bill each month and in some cases many of them. That’s how we are all the same.

If we were to genuinely be treated the same by the Government and a situation were to never to exist where any individual, social group of business sector were to fall through the gaps, the Government would by necessity be targeting the help they can give at us all in a way that was proportional to what we earn or the situation that we are in – but in a way that would actually treat us all fairly because it would support and help us in the very same way.

The very same rules apply for businesses and business owners whether they are limited companies or sole traders too.

For us all, the flow of money into and out of our bank accounts is what makes life turnover. And for business – who in this sense are exactly the same as people, cash flow is king – unless of course you are the bank or finance house which creates all the money and to where all the money we pay out in the form of each and every bill we pay will ultimately flow to and end up.

We pay our bills to a service provider or company that has provided us with goods or the finance to do it. It might be a mortgage, rent, for a car, our phone, TV, electricity and gas or many other things that we might either want or need.

The company, person or business to whom we pay that bill and the money we use to do it will be in exactly the same position as you and I are. What we pay them is their income, just like our job or business is ours. From all the combined income they receive, they too have to pay their bills.

In many cases, this payment of different bills and transfer of money happens over and over again at different levels in what might be a very long chain, until the flow of the money ends up in the same place: the banks and finance houses.

If the Government really desires to treat us ALL exactly the same as it should – that’s equitably and in a way that is completely fair – it would temporarily stop the need and requirement for that money to continue to flow where the chain is no longer complete or simply has no start, so that none of us have to earn anything at any level or any stage of that chain to keep paying bills to the people, businesses or companies that are in the next link of the chain above us.

With the need removed to pay our bills for items that we wouldn’t order or commit ourselves to having during a time that we couldn’t afford to or would be willing pay for because they are a luxury and not a necessity, the only problem for the Government would then be a question of how people pay for food and essential items that we simply need to meet our real everyday needs – not our ‘wants’.

If the Government did this, it would create a genuine level playing field in a time of National Crisis that would benefit us all.

Stopping the need for monetary flow would significantly reduce the chances that businesses will not reopen and that more and more people will lose their jobs and income permanently once the Lockdown actually comes to its end.

Be under no illusion. This action would prevent misery for many and save a significant number of lives.

Without a universal financial support solution of this depth and breadth in place to counter the effects of the COVID-19 Lockdown, the problems and very challenging life experiences that many people would not have been suffering before it began, are going to get much worse. The impact of what the Government hasn’t done will affect more and more of us as the length of the Lockdown rolls on.

The Government should End the Lockdown right now. But if it refuses to do so, it must at the very least change direction with the financial support that it is giving all of us and do it right away.

  • Job losses
  • Suicides
  • Hunger
  • Business Closures
  • Evictions from homes
  • Administrations
  • Domestic Violence
  • Abuse and safeguarding issues
  • Debt
  • Insolvencies
  • Repossessions
  • Loss of custom and business
  • Debt and borrowing
  • Bankruptcies
  • Mental Health issues
  • Depression

And the issues that are the cause of any or all of these horrific life experiences are already on the rise as a result of the COVID-19 Lockdown.

No considerate and caring person would ever wish any of these experiences upon another human being. But the Government’s decision to implement the Lockdown, then failing to treat us all in the same way will ensure that a rise in these real-life horror stories is exactly what the UK is going to get.

No matter what the Media messages tell you or how unpopular TV presenters and Journalists may insist that the alternative to what the Government is doing will be, the Government MUST change direction and handle COVID-19 differently by bringing the Lockdown to a decisive end as soon as it possibly can.

If the Lockdown continues for any further time at all or not, the current system of financial support that the Government has issued doesn’t work as it should. It is creating many problems for individuals that not only include those mentioned or referred to above, but will in time be known to have caused many more whilst creating a national financial crisis and the accompanying personal hardship that none of us alive today will consciously remember having ever seen.

These wholly inadequate measures MUST be removed and replaced with a system that ends the requirement to pay bills for anything that has not been ordered or committed to during the Lockdown – with the exception of things like car insurance if you are continuing to use your car.

Despite the complication of doing so, the system should also be backdated to the start of the Lockdown (at least 23rd March 2020) and those who have been paid some or all of the £2500 per month average wage equivalent excluded from any weekly essential goods and food payment scheme until the equivalent of what they have already been paid through the current payments system from the start has been reached.

A £100 per week payment per person is enough for food and essential items for those who have lost all their income, have been furloughed or are not being paid during or as a direct result of the Lockdown.

Everyone who has been able to continue to work is doing a great thing to keep the Country moving when everyone else cannot. For them, having their bills stopped would be a payment holiday nonetheless. It would therefore be a financial bonus for doing their bit that would be fair and acceptable both to them and to all.

The damage that the Lockdown has already done to lives and businesses is already on target to be very severe indeed. But the cost of the Government failing to treat us all equally and in the same way will be catastrophic for us all.

Beyond a financial depression that is likely to be worse than the Great Depression of nearly a Century ago, the patience upon which civil order sits is already painfully thin, and the moves by the Police and even Supermarkets to behave like we have already become a police state does not bode well for the future of the UK if the Lockdown continues or continues without meaningful change to the system of financial support that is currently in place.

The lack of care and consideration for the impact of this Lockdown that has been driven by the advice of medical specialists, and measures to counter the impact that have simply not been thought through tell us that there is already a vacuum or absence of leadership at the top of the Government. This absence will help even less if that wafer thin patience is broken and the leadership void could easily be filled by alternative leaders who would happily expand and assert that police state deliberately.

Please don’t allow this to happen whilst we still have influence and a choice.

Let’s join together and tell the Government that the measures they have been taking aren’t helping us all in the same way that they would if they were fair.

Let’s also join together and tell the Government that its time to End the Lockdown now and treat everyone like we have the same value, whether or not we get talked about a lot on TV!