You don’t need to be a trained economist to know that the model of economics the world uses and the way economics is revered like work of the gods today is wrong.
In fact, it is probably better if you aren’t, and that you aren’t involved in economics, banking or corporate wealth creation either. As you are much more likely to be objective and untainted by ‘being in the tent’ in some way.
The misplaced ingenuity of the economic system and how it works has made it as complex as it is mind boggling. But that doesn’t give any surety or guarantee that how it works and what it achieves is in any way good.
For those actually thinking about why money is the common factor in everything across the world that is now going wrong, the complexity of the economic system is being exposed to light as the smokescreen that it is giving the hallucination of credibility to all the darkness and malevolence that has been so cleverly hidden within.
How can something so clever and complex not be real, is a question that many would employ as a riposte to counter the suggestion that there is absolutely no legitimacy to the FIAT monetary system, MMT, Free Markets, Globalisation and Neoliberal Orthodoxy that we have been subjected to for 5 decades or more.
But isn’t it the case that any good game that feels good to play is only good for those playing, because of the complexities and therefore levels for ‘the players’ that are involved?
How many carrots does it cost to buy a wheel?
To really understand why the world now has got the relationship with money so wrong – even though it was deliberately made this way by corrupt interests who have changed the laws so that their crimes have been legitimised and wiped clean – we really do need to stop for a moment, count to ten and think about what money is, or rather was really intended for.
In so far as the accepted narrative of human history goes, the whole pathway of our development has been progress that moved towards today in a linear fashion, stepping off from very primitive times when man couldn’t even speak, let alone farm for food.
The point here is not to argue whether or not any accepted version of the evolution of man is true. But to set the first picture back at a point when everything was considerably more simple. Long before more and more of those complex ideas or complexities became involved in how people trade.
Then, as now; different people did different things and produced different foods, goods and services to others as the direct result of whatever it was that they did.
For the purposes of this explanation, let’s assume that there are already fishers, farmers, growers, millers, bakers, saddlers, farriers, blacksmiths, cheese and butter makers, butchers, water carriers and pretty much someone or some small business providing all the different forms of foods, goods and services that we need to provide for life, from around a village green.
Some days a baker doesn’t want fish and a fisher certainly doesn’t want a saddle or leather goods daily. Even though they probably need something made to protect them against the elements from time to time.
However, everyone needs something regularly. Whether it’s for their own consumption, or it’s there to help them complete and provide output or goods from their own work.
Bartering and exchange, or swapping goods or even hours of work are of course a very straightforward and sensible way for two parties to make a transaction when one has something available that the other needs.
But the real benefit of bartering and exchange comes from being localised. And its weakness soon showed when the transactions were required to take place over distance, or for items – like that saddle or something equally special – which in day-to-day terms, are rather obscure.
Money, or coins of some kind used at first, created a transactional value, or to be more accurate, a medium of exchange.
The creation of a medium of exchange meant that one person’s goods or efforts could be exchanged for coins that could then be exchanged for whatever that person wanted themselves. All without there being any excessive delays or the need for a very complex or convoluted chain of different transactions to be involved.
The beauty of the system, at that point, was that the money in use could only relate to the agreed value of the transaction.
It would have been good for everyone, once the related practicalities involved were ironed out, if that system had continued without further ‘progress’. The relationship we all have with money could then have remained the same in relative terms – as that unit of exchange and nothing more.
Unfortunately for mankind, progress very quickly created wealth disparity or what we call wealth inequality today.
This imbalance was itself made progressively worse by the inter-generational transfer of property and wealth (and the power it buys) which has snowballed over time. Quite literally meaning that people can be advantaged or disadvantaged by birth, even before any one of the many other factors that skew life opportunities can come into view.
One of the most unfortunate elements of the human condition is the innate desire to always possess and accumulate more. For no better reason than the basic fear we all have of experiencing lack. With the rather perverse dimension that those who have more guard it more jealously than others, probably because they believe they have much more to lose.
The power and influence that money has given people who really weren’t fit to have the responsibility they had over the lives of others, has only got worse over time.
As industry and technology has improved and made it easier and easier to avoid genuine consideration for the consequences of their actions upon others, the human cost has become increasingly irrelevant, whenever the opportunity to make more profit was involved.
When promissory notes or what we know as cash came into being, a giant leap forward was taken towards the system that we have now, where the accepted wisdom is that the value of the money – or what we are agreeing to exchange as being representative of money – is being exchanged under a mutual understanding of trust, that is shared across society, and not just between the people where the specific transactions are involved.
Trust is of course belief. And as those with power and influence at the centre of the banking system realised that having currencies pinned or anchored to anything meant that they could only ever use or suggest they were able to use the money or sensible multiples of the money that they knew they either held, were owed or could earn within a certain time frame, they knew that they would have to create a new system that would release these chains. So that in terms of the money that they could create and use in the future, the only restraints would be dictated by them.
We should be under no illusion that this process of creating an economic system that could lead to limitless wealth and the control of everything for those who controlled it, wasn’t a plan that developed overnight.
The economic system that we have today was created and implemented over decades and carefully constructed so that it would make life much easier for the interests and in particular the politicians who needed to be bought. So that the useful idiots who gained power under the illusion of democracy would obligingly pave the way with system changes that have legitimised this otherwise criminal system at every step of the way therein.
When everything is about money, the answers to every question can only be found in monetary terms.
The money we have today and the way that it comes to and is taken from us – the economy – is the direct result and design of this massive, corrupt and inhuman game that the worlds wealthy, powerful and influential – the elites, decided to play.
The money we have in our pockets, bank accounts and have the ability to earn changes value quickly at the will or as a result of the actions of others.
Meanwhile, the direction of travel for the general population has always been that we are and always would become increasingly poor, as the value of the money which is typically what the poorest in society have only been able to hold, decreases faster than the rate at which our skills and experience develop or there is any chance to earn more so that we can keep up with or counteract the fall.
It was always intended to be this way. As those with wealth always knew that the real wealth was the control of assets and anything and everything that could then rented out to everyone. All as the world became increasingly poorer and their ability to grow control and rent out everything the money they created had bought them gave them even more.
It is ironic that billionaires now have so many zeros on their balance sheets. As everyone who has been a victim of what is probably mankind’s greatest con is now beginning to realise that they have been left with zero. Or if they are lucky, a diminishing amount of liquid capital that isn’t worth a lot more.
I would like to add at this stage that this essay is not an attack on any individual for whatever it is that they may believe they possess, control or have influence over today. Many of those with excessive wealth, power and influence today have just played along with the rules of a very clever game. One that has removed the balance, Justice and morality from every part of life and has done it so successfully that the poison it has replaced values with is embedded across cultures and normal life to the point that even the academics and leaders in finance and economics believe in the legitimacy and correctness of an entire system which is bewilderingly anti-human at its very core.
In simple terms
The simplicity of the mechanics of an economic system and more specifically a monetary system that revolves around private banks creating money from nothing – a process which is carefully hidden from view – so that government always looks like it is borrowing or rather selling bonds to private interests to finance everything, whilst those banks also lend money that doesn’t exist to us through loans, finance, credit cards and even pay day loans, really do make it horrendously difficult to accept that this is one massive confidence scam. Especially as everything is hidden in plain sight by little more than the disinterest that we typically have in anything that goes beyond having our perceived needs met.
However, let’s think about it as if we were reading a story about two friends at the start of their working lives; one with the motivation to work hard and deliver through their own industry, whilst the other has had life easy and just wants to find another easy way to get more, and we can then perhaps see how this gargantuan scam rolls out when exposed to light.
The diligent and easy living friends talk one day, looking at property that they would both like to own.
The diligent friend commits to working hard and earning the money to buy what they would like to own and leaves, promising to catch up when this outcome has been achieved.
Meanwhile, the easy living friend knows that he has the contacts and ideas necessary to go away and print enough of the money he needs to buy that same property today. And that he can do this from nothing, which will work out well for him but not his friend, so long as he doesn’t speak openly about what he’s doing. Uses his contacts to change a few rules so that what he’s doing is legal. And he doesn’t keep printing more money to buy everything else so that it becomes obvious what he’s been doing all along. Afterall, nobody will know if he uses the money he then earns from renting out that property to pay all that money back…
The money that the easy living friend has created, has just increased the amount of money that exists.
This means that because there isn’t actually any more property, production or anything else with ‘real’ value that corresponds to the increasing pool of money, all of the money that’s available is now worth much less than it was.
The real world impact of this fantasy being made reality is that the diligent friend will have to worker harder, longer or both, to pay for the property that the easy living friend has just taken without effort.
What is more, the easy living friend is now offering to rent the property he’s bought to the diligent friend who now realises that he may never be able to afford to buy it.
If you can see and understand the basic mechanics of how this situation works, you only need scale up the same principles to understand how the massive, growing amount of money – and the ridiculous inflation and the growing cost of living problem we are all facing, has been created and is now growing at a ridiculous rate.
It is an unavoidable, inescapable fact that if one person or set of people are able to buy real, tangible things that have value to us – whatever those things might be – with money that doesn’t actually exist, they can take lawful possession of those things and do with them whatever they so choose – as any legitimate owner would be able to do so.
However, the illegitimate creation of the money and the legitimised theft of assets, businesses, infrastructure and everything else imaginable that it has financed means what they have been doing is just one part of a multifaceted crime against everyone else.
The crimes that follow the created money pathways include the impoverishment of the masses.
Yet they become even worse when we consider that public services and infrastructure such as utility companies have been bought up with fake money.
Entire business sectors like the pub trade and small, local shops have also all become unviable because fake money has financed industry expansion of big retail and all their centralised supply chains, that would not otherwise have been possible.
To cap that all off, markets and the practices of big business and finance have been deregulated through the drive for ‘Free Markets’. So that those making money can make more and more, because the rules that once protected us all and small independent businesses have been removed, whilst regulations that cost us, exclude us and disqualify us from our own independence and from taking part have instead been imposed under the pretence that they help and protect us.
The whole pathway of illegitimate money creation using the FIAT system leads or rather has led to the doorstep of nothing less than worldwide system control.
The only thing that now gives us the opportunity to save ourselves from a very challenging fate is the reality that those with their hands in the till have already broken too many of the rules of their own game.
The whole system is starting to collapse before the great reset or imposition of the next new world order has conclusively been imposed.
The Future of Money
I could stop there. But in lifting the stone or exposing what lies beneath it to light I am certainly not alone.
Before continuing further, I would encourage anyone who has read this far to do their own research and use as many different sources and mediums as they can to uncover and draw their own conclusions about all of this and what is really going on.
My real interest and passion is what happens next for us and for our future. Once we have got through this horrid time and whatever turbulence and challenges that we now face, once we have got to the other side and left them all behind.
What we should perhaps all be able to conclude – once we have dealt with our own addictions and attachment to the way that endless money supposedly works for us all now – is that money should never hold its own value. Should never be speculated upon, and the power of its creation and policing should never be under private control.
What is more, the value of legal currency should never be pinned to anything that can itself vary in value, especially when whatever that currency is pinned to is in short supply or can be controlled manipulatively or otherwise at will.
People are the only legitimate economic constant
If everyone did what they do, only took what they need and were happy to share or exchange what they didn’t with whoever needed it in return for something they did in return, there would never be need of money of any kind, ever again.
Whilst I can see that to many the idea that everyone just does what they do today for nothing and that in return, they get just enough of what they need of everything else in return might seem fanciful, this suggestion does nonetheless make a very important point about everyone only taking or expecting to have access to what they actually need.
Need is NOT the same thing as want.
Too much want is what has led to a situation where there are people right across the world today who don’t have access just to the things that they need.
An economy – a legitimate economy – will function only to provide for the needs of people within it.
There isn’t an argument that can counter this legitimately. Any argument made against this, no matter how compelling or well elucidated, is inevitably built upon one person being able to obtain or accumulate more things than others. Because the alternative system favours their interests more.
These are the fundamental basics of greed.
Locality based economies and economics
Everyone who can, should play their part or contribute to the function of a legitimate economy, in whatever role they are able. So that everyone who is active, then comes together to become the sum of all the parts – with the sum of those parts being the community, which because of what members can do together collaboratively, will be greater than what everyone would be able to do by working alone.
The value of a legitimate economy should therefore be based upon the number of people who are active within it and include what they input or contribute to that economy individually and therefore collectively.
If every member of the community does what they should be doing, and the needs of everyone being met are always prioritised and planned for or budgeted for as they should be, the whole system will move closely towards self-containment, with the amount of money in circulation always being closely related to the number of heads within the population.
A localised and online local market exchange system that focuses on bartering and exchange for foods, goods, services and work being made universally available alongside cash and digitally transferable money, should also exist so that everything works in a circular fashion and everyone’s particular needs are always met in ways that favour everyone.
The needs for public service, infrastructure, community activities and everything beyond should be met by everyone who is able to work volunteering the equivalent of 1/10 of their working week and their skills or experience to the community. Thereby meeting whatever needs and community income generation requirement there may then be.
Excess goods produced, surplus service capacity and over production which is specialist to the community would also be traded with other communities and traded where any additional requirements beyond the scope of community production exist.
The blight of greed-driven thinking
The only reason that an economic system that will work like this, which promotes freedom and financial independence of the masses, would not work, is because those who would no longer be able to define themselves as being different to others through the accumulation of additional and unnecessary wealth will argue that it isn’t practical and cannot work.
Even within a genuinely egalitarian approach to economics based along these lines, it is a fact that some could always do better, because they choose to do so through their own industry. Whilst many others – and the majority at that, would be happy to just make the contribution that was absolutely necessary, knowing that they would be happy, healthy, safe and secure because all of their basic and essential needs were being met.
It is part of the capitalist myth that entrepreneurialism and creativity in commerce cannot exist when the ability to earn or rather profit is capped.
The real truth of the matter is that everyone will be productive and make a valuable contribution when anything that goes beyond what it takes to look after themselves and those who depend on them is a choice and the ability to just live a normal life without dependency on anything beyond themselves hasn’t been denied by the actions of others.
Nobody has the right to take or have more than they need and certainly not when it can only come to them through the exploitation and infliction of pain and suffering of any kind upon others.
Whilst so-called socialists and capitalists alike will continue to argue that their destination would have been different, until whoever is in power takes the rap for destroying everything at the time – and then the other tries desperately to convince everyone that there’s still time for them, just to be sure, the very perverse and somewhat disturbing truth that is now coming into our view of reality is that the direction of both left and right political thinking takes humanity to exactly the same place.
What all these ‘philosophies’ – the ideas of academics, thinkers, economists, industrialists, tech moguls, agitators, the aggrieved, life’s bitter victims, entitled shirkers, greedy and selfish bastards – have in common, is the centralisation of power into the hands of one or just a select few – who for whatever purpose intended – control everything, so that they can enjoy their own lives and positions more than anyone they see as different to themselves and therefore as being a threat.
Verging on enlightened thinking, as many will surely argue their heroes and inspirations to have written these works will have been, enlightenment doesn’t revolve around creating environments that centre purely on a beneficial vacancy at the top. Which the design of these solutions surely was the intention, resulting from whatever experiences the authors had themselves experienced up until the time of writing.
None of these accepted visionaries were wrong. Or at least they were not wrong in the sense that we all are the sum of our experiences and our position looking upon or perception of life in any given moment will be correct, for us personally, in terms of what those experiences have taught us and what we have therefore concluded that they should be, right up to that same moment in time.
Let’s face it. The world is a very shitty place to be. Whether you have nothing and cannot escape poverty because of the boot that rides rough-shod over you; or at the other extreme you are as financially wealthy as it is possible to be and all you quietly worry about is protecting yourself, your wealth and how you are going to accumulate even more.
The pain that hides behind our eyes hasn’t changed over decades and centuries in human time.
Yes, the surroundings, clothes, transport, technology and everything else may seem different. But the nature of the experiences we are all having on our different pathways are in relative terms very much the same.
Wherever we may sit across this spectrum, 200 or more years ago at the dawning of the Industrial Revolution or right now as we are being prepared for the AI takeover, we all have an idea of what the perfect world for us would be.
It is regrettable that only some of us find ourselves able to share those ideas and thoughts and have them taken seriously by enough others for them to be seen to matter – which itself doesn’t mean they are genuinely enlightened or of benefit to greater humankind.
It’s simply the case that even when complete idiots or utterly selfish bastards are heard, their thoughts and views are swallowed up like nectar by people who themselves have a back catalogue of difficult experiences that identify with what they read or hear.
They pick those ideas – those philosophies – up and run with them, no matter how twisted or damaging in the longer term they might be. Leaving ideas behind in the dirt that the chaos they unleash leaves behind to fester for years and possibly centuries, that would otherwise deliver for the good of everyone when implemented.
We must be clear that all the ideas and philosophies for the world, whether they fall under the socialist or capitalist umbrellas or not, are without fail just ideas and suggestions.
Whether well intended or not, these philosophies were all packaged with the pretense that they were the ingredients, nuts and bolts or technicalities of a model of the perfect working world, for all people.
As history has demonstrated only too well, the actions of those underneath these umbrellas lead to both the imprisonment and oppression of the masses under the yoke of world elites.
We are fooled into believing there is a difference in outcomes because one system gets straight to work by enforcing its ideologies on people and the systems of the world as it tightens its grip and pushes those who are left into the cage. Meanwhile, the other drugs everyone with every conceivable high that they believe they like, creating mass addiction to ways of living that mean there is little hope of sobriety for anyone who has bought in and become addicted, until the very heavy jail cell door will have already slammed shut behind us all.
Centralisation is the flaw in all of these philosophies. Because it is impossible to centralise every part of life, for every single person across every country and across the entire world, without life, values, happiness, health, wellbeing and all the mechanics of essential function and civic society collapsing in their wake.
The clever tools and devices used by capitalists, globalists and neoliberals are ultimately no different to the level-playing-fields, street revolutions and guns employed by communists and socialists to enforce and police their point.
The painful outcomes that these forms of idealistic thinking inflict upon the masses always have agendas behind them, and none of those paying the real cost of these ideological-turned-material crimes ever agreed to the world being run this way.
The elites and those behind all of this have of course been aided by technological advances and the many different ways that the world has opened up and the distances between us all have been bridged.
Yet the point has always and pretty much systematically been missed that humanity and our morality based values system do not need and never needed to change to keep up with the material changes in the world, which have always been about the things that appear to be important beyond and outside of people.
Indeed, the changes that have been made to our frameworks for behaviour have always been made to suit those in power, with influence and who are directly benefitting from those changes. Those who perceive that the only way they can benefit more is for the old ways or ways that benefit others with fairness and balance must be left behind. Because they will otherwise get in the way.
So, was there ever a point in history where humanity genuinely got the whole thing right?
There is good reason to believe not. Or that if that moment of genuine balance has ever existed so far, it was momentary and could only really have been so, because the opportunity didn’t actually then exist to end the self-interest, anger, frustration, greed and every other dark part of the human condition that drives generation after generation to ingeniously, creatively and ignorantly to exactly the same things over and over again.
We may not see it, nor appreciate nor even find value in the suggestion. But a centuries-long pathway of humanity being led and controlled by interests that are not in any way genuinely shared, has led us all to a place where those who have benefited from that control and the generations following behind them, can no longer maintain that control. Because the whole pathway is about to have gone too far, before that door can be slammed shut and the final adjustments to the oppressed fate of humankind can be made.
The intention underlying of all these ideologies was that everything and everyone would be controlled throughout the journey, until that control was necessary no more.
Yet the systems we have been conditioned into accepting, like the out of control value of money, the rules that are supposedly there to protect and help whilst they disadvantage us, and the process of making very intelligent people doubt themselves or force them to believe and support ideas which run contrary to common sense or that are completely untrue, have all contributed to a situation where many already know the world is out of balance. People know that whatever is behind all of this has gone too far.
Natural, universal, unspoken rules have always existed that require each and every one of us to have the freedom to learn, to grow and to develop if we so choose to do so.
Because of the persistent actions of these patriarchal few and those who have followed them, that freedom for everyone to learn grow and develop, no matter their background or position in life, no longer exists. Because the way the system of the world has been developed now means that many no longer have the opportunity to experience the personal sovereignty to which every man is entitled. No matter how, where or to whom they were born.
A collapse is coming. That collapse is already underway. We are all within it and experiencing it at subjective levels that keep us from the objectivity that would make it much easier to define.
The critical point that is now approaching will be the moment that something happens, that could be civil unrest, financial collapse, the extension of foreign wars, civil war or something else, when each and every one of us realises and accepts that we have a Choice. And that we no longer have to be passengers or passively accept whatever someone else has engineered to be our fate.
The curse of overcentralisation is the never-ending desire of those who are at the centre of that centralisation process to centralise even more. Simply because of the greater rewards and control that they believe it will bring.
The outcome of the overcentralisation is that nobody ever has enough of any of the things they really need. When in a world and time when we have so much available to everyone, this has become a first-hand tragedy for us all to experience indeed.
The only centre that we need and that we should ever seek is the community, locality and to share responsibility for everything amongst the people we see face to face and interact with each day.
This is real life that doesn’t come to us through media channels, digital technology or through rules that have been made by some name without a face.
This system is the only resource and ecosystem that we need to sustain us, that we need contribute to and that can be relied upon to create frameworks and governance for life that will always be in our best interests.
It is the only system that will provide and leave us with the genuine freedom necessary to enjoy every aspect of a good life, as the majority of us would want and like to experience.
The decision to make this change and embrace the power to do so is ours already, if we actually want it.
There is no need for hierarchies, for top-down systems and procedures, for political parties, financial markets and devices, globalised business and supply chains, or anything else that makes life cheaper. When life being cheapened any further is the very last thing that any of us need.
Local communities that are genuinely local and locality driven, and the ecosystems and self contained economies that they will create, offer us everything that we will need to have to experience valuable lives, where the basics and essentials are always in place.
Locality driven communities offer a system of governance meaning that no matter the life choices any one of us makes, we can all live independently of help – and therefore will not experience the forms of lack that are responsible for so many of societies social problems as their root cause.
The value of every one of us is exactly the same and nothing can change this.
No matter what we do, wear, what we have or how we are seen to be, not one of us should be positioned to advantage ourselves by disadvantaging others.
This is where the fundamental basis and genesis of a new world philosophy must be able to begin. One that is designed by us all for everyone rather than by a few who want everything controlled and for that control to be in the hands of one.
***
Over the past 3 years, I have been writing about the different aspects of what is happening; what is likely to happen and how we can all get from here to a much better place.
Whilst the rules and frameworks that govern a new world that will genuinely be of benefit to everyone, must be designed and agreed freely by us all, we still need an idea or vision of the outcomes that we can expect.
Our Local Future is a model for future life that I believe to capture this, which I would invite you to consider. Before someone else has considered and though out an alternative, that when the time has come to make the choice that is genuinely good for us, will instead steal that opportunity and take its place.
Whatever you do next, please remember to beware the many false prophets who are shouting the attractiveness of populism and anarchy now.
Don’t listen to those who tell you they are putting people first.
Keep watching for those who are doing so.
The only centre we need is within our communities themselves. Everything will make sense when everything important throughout our lives revolves around everything we can experience daily at first hand in this way.
Published as an eBook for Kindle on Amazon on 31 March 2022, Levelling Level follows here in the form of the original text, with some minor editing principally to allow publishing in PDF form and this online format.
Much has changed in the political environment over the 3 years since the original publication and it is important for the reader to bear this in mind. Not only because of the 2024 change in government and change of name for the ‘Levelling Up’ Agenda, which certainly still exists. But because only 8 months on from the end of the Tory government, many have already forgotten what the Conservatives did.
The one thing that will become clear, if it hasn’t done so already, is that the answers, solutions and outcomes that will solve all the problems will not come from any of the political parties that we know in their current form (as at 3 March 2025) and it is just as likely, if not certain that a better future will only be reached under the stewardship, guidance and leadership of something that doesn’t resemble anything we recognise in today’s political terms at all.
Levelling Level has been written to discuss the need for change so that life actually works for the poorest and most disadvantaged in our society, and how we will achieve that change by making the very best of events and circumstances that are out of our control to do so.
It is the ability of the poorest and those on the lowest incomes to be self-sufficient, without external intervention or without their situation having a negative impact upon wider society, that reflects just how healthy we are as communities, as a nation and how together we operate and work.
To achieve the aim of real equality, there are many problems that our society faces. Problems that must be fixed.
You cannot fix any problem unless you understand both the effects of it and how the problem was caused.
You cannot fix any problem unless you have people in charge at the top of Government who know what to do to fix that and every problem, and are prepared to do it too.
Creating a balanced and fair society, where everyone has access to what they genuinely need, but not necessarily all that they might actually want, cannot and will not be achieved by a process of levelling up or by levelling down.
Levelling down or levelling up are the only solutions that the politicians we currently have can offer as solutions to the problems that increasing numbers of us have quietly been facing for decades, and that many more of us are beginning to experience now.
As someone who reads a lot of very different material, I understand how appealing it can be to have a quick look through the index and then cherry pick the bits that I think I might like to read, when there is a specific topic or answer that I’m trying to find. I would ask you to resist doing so if you can.
Levelling Level, or what Levelling Level will really mean will only be achieved as a whole outcome by those with the leadership skills and power to influence change for the better.
The power within that influence can only come from fully understanding the real problem, or rather, by gaining complete fluency of the real causes of the problems that we face, and the relationship with other problems, that each of the problems we face really has.
The problems that we face today have been created by taking a bit by bit, step by step or piecemeal approach. We can only deal with the problems that this has created by dealing with every problem that has been created as a whole, in a joined-up and wholly comprehensive way.
Levelling level is an outcome that will only be achieved by considering the types of solutions and options that will be open to us under good leadership, and then drawing conclusions of our own, before we then seek to work together as a community with everyone who feels the same way as us.
The subject matter of Levelling Level is massively complex. So complex in fact, that the technical intricacies that have developed which allow such a broken system to exist and function are, or will seem to many, too elaborate or even illogical to believe.
The best way to get the value from this book and the proposed outline of Levelling Level as it is intended, is to read it right the way through, and look at the trees before drawing any conclusions about the whole wood.
As a blogger, I have frequently fallen into the trap of writing with the aim that the reader should reach the end and have a clear understanding of the message that I conveyed.
To some degree, depending on the audience, this is always likely to be a fool’s errand. After all, every reader views the subject through the lens of their own experience – even if the topic is completely new to them.
Nonetheless, it has meant that the length of the blogs I write are often 800-1000 words long, instead of the 400-600 words that is regarded by some to make the generally accepted blog-style of writing accessible to all.
In the case of Levelling Level, the topic is complicated to say the least. Yet it is one that everyone will soon need to understand. Regrettably, people are going to understand it very well – once circumstances have made everyone look at the world around us all in a very different way – when the messages of Levelling Level will make a lot more sense.
For this reason, I have deliberately written a long story into the shortest book possible.
Whilst I have suggested solutions to many of the problems we face, they are in no way as comprehensive as the coming changes will require. They are a starting point, not the end.
If you find yourself focusing on sentence structure, spellings, grammar, absence of some detail or conclusions or solutions that in isolation don’t seem to work. Or you are getting upset because Levelling Level proposes a way of thinking which opposes any comfortable and accepted thoughts of your own, you may be falling into the trap of missing the point.
This book is not intended to be perfect. It is not here to offer up a polished political manifesto or golden age philosophy that tells everyone what they now need to do. It contains messages to help and guide as changes in the world around us force us all to have a very big rethink.
Please do proceed through Levelling Level with the Principle of Charity in mind as you do so.
Levelling Level is intended to be nothing more than a lighthouse, switched on now in an attempt to try and stop the ships that represent our different journeys hitting some very perilous rocks.
Levelling Level gives enough of the detail to identify the real problem and warn everyone of what we need to be aware of in the dark that lies ahead and within the storm around us.
Together, collectively, as a community and as the grassroots up, we must now create the daylight that removes the darkness around us and brings awareness to the detail of the new world, new normal and the future that lies ahead and begins immediately in front of us all.
Each and every one of us are the captains of our own ship; a ship that must be navigated.
Yet even within a framework or directional choice like that which Levelling Level proposes in the pages to come, the way we respond and navigate around the experiences that life provides always gives us two choices.
In the spirit it is intended, I would ask that you read Levelling Level, come to your own conclusions and then reflect on what has happened, what is happening, and what will really work best for us all as we journey through very turbulent times into the world that lies ahead.
The so-called success of our politicians revolves around the use of soundbites.
It’s been a problem since the time of the Blairite New Labour Government of 1997-2010. There was an identifiable shift from politics being about the end result (when at least some of our politicians had the wherewithal to get things done themselves), to becoming all about the message itself.
So bewildered was the Conservative Party by the (New) Labour landslide victory of 1997, they decided the only way to beat them was to play them at their own game.
As power has shifted back from the Blairite years (1997-2010) of the left-wing wolf dressed in right wing clothing, to the Johnsonian Conservative Party of the right that today is even more left than the left, a new low in the meaninglessness of what our political classes do [to us] to retain their power in this Country has finally been reached.
As I write in early 2022, one such soundbite in daily use is that of ‘Levelling Up’.
Suspicions that Boris Johnson and the current crop of Parliamentary Tories are pushing the Levelling Up agenda just as one way to survive, the element of truth that makes the term feel valuable to anyone with ears to listen, is that our political classes do at least appear to know that there is a problem.
All the while, the Labour Left pursue an agenda and way of thinking that through the changes and implementation of public policy achieve nothing but levelling down.
Levelling Up or levelling down; it doesn’t matter. Unless there is balance and fairness in the form of a level playing field at the point where we all step off, there will always be too many of us who lose out, whilst the same old few will end up with a win.
Regrettably, the truth that sits beyond that knowledge, is that none of the MPs sitting on the green benches in our Parliament know or understand the breadth and depth of the problem, or how the problem actually works.
That is why they are playing around with a soundbite that suggests the problem can easily be fixed.
None of the politicians that we have today either understand or want to understand how the real problems that create an unjust and imbalanced society can or will be fixed.
The greatest travesty is that those we have elected to deal with such problems on our behalf are failing to do so.
Our politicians cannot deal with the problems that we face, because they are incapable of fulfilling the roles and responsibilities that they have been given, or self-interest leaves them wilfully blind to actually doing so.
Politics has become the end, rather than being the means to the end.
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.
For as long as this broken political culture and way of thinking in UK governance is allowed to continue, no soundbite or promise that it contains to us all, will ever end up delivering in any way as we believe it was intended, or indeed in any of the ways it really should.
In the pages of Part 1 that follows, I will cover the real problems that have led to the Johnsonian Tories pursuing their ‘Levelling Up’ agenda, whilst over recent decades, the influence of the Left has been the pernicious approach and impact of ‘Levelling Down’.
I will discuss why the nebulous policies of both Left and Right end up making the problems that society faces worse for everyone – if they actually help in any way at all, and why the problems that nothing more than political tinkering around the edges creates only serves to obfuscate and hide the real causes of the problems that we all now face.
With the changes to the world and the way that we live now coming, In Part 2 I will then move on to talk about the issues that the next generation of politicians will face.
I will offer some solutions and ways to begin addressing the imbalances that exists across society, and the early steps that must be taken if we are all to experience a future that is fruitful for all, is sustainable, healthy and above all actually works.
*The qualified hairdressers are the government officers and civil servants, or people who like to ‘nudge’
In so much as it has been possible to do so, given the very complex nature of the problems that we face and the solutions that will necessarily follow, Levelling Level has been split into two main parts.
Part 1 covers the fundamental breaks and flaws of the existing system that we have in the UK and discusses why things have become this way and why things don’t work as they should.
‘Levelling Up’ is a clever term – and it’s meant to be so.
For most of us, levelling up sounds very much like we are going to see everything we experience being pushed upwards. It suggests that the point of balance in our lives is somewhere higher than where our current experience actually is.
Before anything, it’s important to understand just how important the Levelling Up agenda really is to the Conservative Party today.
Politics in the UK has changed from what it was. The European Referendum or ‘Brexit’ Vote in the summer of 2016 was a watershed moment. One that tells anyone paying real attention to the change that nothing in British Politics could be the same again – that is even before the arrival of the Covid Pandemic, the invasion of Ukraine and everything that happens next.
Up until the summer of 2016, the tried and tested methods of creating and controlling us with an establishment narrative had always worked.
Those methods were expected to work with the European Referendum Vote too.
Lies and stories were concocted and mixed up with a few threats and a little fear. It was all focused on maintaining the easy way of living and the nice experiences that normal people would otherwise lose if they didn’t conform to what the establishment wanted to achieve from the Vote.
Yet the script that had been written for even greater integration with the European Union didn’t work.
The majority of the British People found instead that they identified with a different way of interpreting the future and voted democratically for the UK to leave the European Union.
The result of the Referendum set in motion what was to become a three-year battle between the democratic will of the people and the unwritten agenda of an establishment and a perceived loss that it still refuses to understand.
Three years of political infighting and undemocratic behavior in our Parliament began the process of lifting the stone and shining light on everything that is wrong with politics in the UK today.
It meant that those amongst the General Public who were most frustrated by the ineptitude and contempt shown by our politicians were ready and waiting for the opportunity to change things.
Normal, everyday people became wide open to soundbites, whether they spoke to certain truths or indeed contained the sweetest lies.
With Prime Minister Theresa May unable to convince anyone that she could lead objectively enough to keep her Remain and EU Member heart at bay, the summer of 2019 saw the arrival of Boris Johnson.
With him came what we can now argue has been a whole series of whoppers wrapped around soundbites such as a deal with the EU that was ‘Oven Ready’.
Soundbites that not only emboldened him to go to the Country, but they also saw him win an 80-seat majority in the General Election the following December and secure his tenure in No.10.
The dynamics of that General Election win were very different to what anyone had really expected.
Of the constituency seats that gave Boris an overall working majority win, many of them were gained in areas that had previously been Labour held. It was because of this that they are now known as the Red Wall.
Whilst an 80-seat majority is something not to be sniffed at, anything-for-an-easy-life Boris found himself with a list of new MPs that in Tory terms were never supposed to be there.
These new ‘Red Wall MPs’ had been the candidates that were never expected to win. They were certainly a long way from the A-List mentality that sees Conservative Central Office parachute ‘beautiful’ people into so-called safe seats where the chosen few are guaranteed entry to Parliament and will do absolutely everything they are told, and everything they can to toe the party line.
The Red Wall Tory MPs typically represent areas where the working class and financially poorer demographics dominate.
Suddenly, avoidance of issues like social mobility, food poverty and the imbalance across society were no longer an easy choice for the Tory hierarchy and strategists to avoid.
We will talk about the role of money as part of the crisis that we face in more detail later.
For now, it is important to understand that the Tories of today believe that every problem they face can either be fixed by using money, or by moving money around.
Levelling Up is literally the plan that Tory High Command has come up with, using money to try and cement the non-existent bonds between an out of touch political elite and the realities that people who lent them their vote in 2019 face each and every day.
It relies primarily on buying communities and constituencies lots of nice things, or what in political circles are known as sops.
The success of the Johnsonian Tory Levelling Up plan is built on the premise that problems disappear when people can be bought.
Buying people or being bought might work for the Tories who have got to the top. But for those at the base of the pyramid, it’s a very different world that exists.
If you were looking for a lesson or demonstration of how out of touch our political classes really are, there probably would be no better example than what the Tories are employing with their Levelling Up Agenda.
Contemporary ‘Conservative’ thinking (which is arguably not in any way ‘conservative’ at all’) in terms of tackling financial and income inequality hinges on a massively fallacious belief:
This ‘conservative’ Government operates on the belief that poverty is synonymous with unemployment. Or, rather, Johnsonian Tories believe that being poor and having no job is exactly the same thing.
As this brick is thrown into the societal pond, the tidal waves ripple out with ridiculous suggestions that our politicians genuinely believe, such as all jobs are the same and everyone with a job will be fine.
Then, the tsunami of their unreal world thinking hits: The Tory strategists and the leaders they influence conclude that life can be improved for the poor if government buys the things that their communities would otherwise be unable to afford.
Never mind the reality that spending other people’s money to solve problems with solutions that only make sense to Tory strategists and politicians is a travesty of public representation in its most tragic sense.
With the Levelling Up Agenda, the Conservatives have quite literally banked on maintaining and consolidating votes that will keep them in power by using our own money to buy our communities gifts.
The Conservatives believe that they will achieve this and win the next General Election by building new roads, creating new tiers of government with new Mayors or by gifting deprived communities’ new sports centres, school buildings and swimming pools.
Yes, all these things look nice, and they sound great. But they don’t change any of the deep-seated issues that are really at work.
In fact, if anything, for those of us experiencing the problems within our society that should really matter to any politician, these hollow acts of abusing the power we have gifted to these so-called public representatives, in order to help us, just make our problems even worse.
Through the implementation of the Levelling Up plan, people without the lives we all deserve are being conditioned to think that everything is improving in the world around them.
But Levelling Up will leave them with the rather troubling question; Why is nothing really improving for us in life, or how we really feel about everything – despite what everyone is being told?
To say that our political classes do not understand the lives of the people they represent would be a massive understatement.
It is a situation that would perhaps not be quite as bad if the ‘experts’ politicians rely on to advise them and dream up the strategies they then implement, had an understanding of life that would make up for the lack of life experience of their own.
Political Philosophies and textbooks are the go-to advice guide, where both our politicians and the people who advise them are concerned.
The people leading the UK are all led by the nose, by ideas and ways of thinking that appeal to them only because of what they offer as the suggested result.
Yet those results were usually written about or defined in very different times.
Whilst socialism has been pursued to the point of human and societal destruction by communist leaders such as Stalin and is then written off by socialists in the west with words that suggest it only ‘failed’ because it wasn’t executed in the right way, the right have also been pursuing a social experiment of their own.
For the past 50 years or more, the right has led what is in reality a socio-economic experiment based on an alternative set of ideas called Neoliberalism.
Yet for past successive UK governments of that time and from all political sides, Neoliberalism is the foundation upon which all of their legacies are defined.
Neoliberalism perpetrates the lie that egalitarian living can be achieved by letting the ‘knowing few’ run riot with minimum restraint. That by allowing them to control everything through their own interpretation of any rules, everyone and the public good will be truly well-served.
Yet the reality is that by deregulating markets and financial activities to the extent that they already successfully have, the power that should be in the hands of legislators and policy makers on behalf of us all, has been passed to private interests whose priority is profit and not the public interest instead.
The extension and growth of Neoliberalism is dependent upon reducing the reach and impact of government at every level.
It doesn’t matter what process is followed or becomes necessary for the outcome to be achieved.
Smaller Government is a Neoliberalist aim. The outcomes for the people who need good governance most will only get worse under the Neoliberal view of smaller government, as even the status quo will no longer be maintained.
‘Smaller Government’ or what is in fact much less government or what is interpreted as the reduction of the restrictions that prevent so-called wealth creators from creating wealth are the fundamental basis of what Neoliberal thinking is about.
The Tories really do believe that by pumping money into schemes and infrastructure across society, that the investment encourages an uplift in commercial and capitalist activity that will benefit the poor – because that’s what Neoliberal scholars tell them it will do.
It all comes under the guise that free markets and free flowing money look after the public interest when they are left unhindered by the state.
Regrettably, our Politicians are too stupid to understand what the ideas underpinning neoliberalism are really all about.
Neoliberalism and free markets are all about bringing more wealth to those who are wealthy already and nothing more.
Neoliberalism when adopted at the state level is a tool to sanitise and legitimise selfishness at the highest level.
Neoliberalist thinking has helped make it ok to do anything that is legal, even when that legality exists because it has been created only by and for those who benefit from it.
The end result is that others suffer at incalculable number of levels or degrees of separation. Because ethics have been replaced by the idea that you should do things because you can and not because you should.
Neoliberalism is basically a philosophy of creating misery and exploiting others so that those who are able, can benefit from that choice.
Neoliberalism is the modern form of mass slavery, where oppression and suppression has been sold to everyone as freedom and choice.
The words that the Tories don’t use to describe what they mean about change tell us that they believe that they can simply drag everyone up to a better life by changing the environment around them.
It’s as if politicians believe they have the power to dictate and then control how we think by changing only some of the things we can see.
They don’t.
Whilst both the Left and the Right share the same ridiculous idea that lack of, or absence of money in life are the only problems people face that any government need to fix, the Left are also blissfully unaware of how many problems the policies they have implemented and pursued over recent decades have actually created, made worse and continue to create for us each and every day.
The damage that the Left have inflicted on the UK has developed around their obsession with rights and how they operate.
The left creates, pursues and implements policy based on the idea that those who appear to be ahead or in a position of advantage must be restricted or held back so that others can succeed.
It is a wholly naïve view of the way that the world works.
Instead of succeeding by bringing everyone up to a better level of existence as they suggest, their philosophy has only ever succeeded in levelling down. Culminating in a process which can only be described as putting the lowest common denominator first.
The process doesn’t stop there. In fact, the process has become so very skewed that the policies that the Left pursue actually defy practical reality.
The Labour Party and the left-wing today display and live by a lack of understanding not only of how people think, but how businesses and operations must operate not only to exist, so that they can succeed in achieving just the basic aims or purposes that they exist for.
A hundred years ago, the work and existence of the Labour movement made a lot of sense. The inequality that existed between the working classes and the elites that existed then were stark.
But the differences and inequalities that existed across society in the early Twentieth Century are not the same as they are today.
The problems within the working environment for people were far worse. But they were addressed.
This was in no small part due to the Labour movement and the work of the Labour Party.
The good achieved by what we now know as the Labour Party and the Left that surrounds it came to its natural zenith decades ago, when businesses and organisations accepted the duty of care that they have to all staff, their safety and welfare at work.
But like most things political, when that point was reached, the practicality that had driven meaningful change was replaced by impractical idealism. Probably for no better reason that the movement needed to find reasons that justified it continuing to hold the position it had and gave it a legitimate reason to exist.
Whilst there should always be a system of checks and balances to ensure that benchmarks for acceptable management practices exist, what few have realised is just how damaging it was when the Left adopted a new path which was the pursuit of rights.
Rights of any kind, but employment rights in particular have always been a popular cause.
It is after all pretty normal to be happy if you feel you are being given something for nothing, no matter that at a very different level, no such equation for employers and their bottom lines exists.
People are now literally led to believe by the Left that their job and their conditions are more important than the objectives of the business or the organisation that they work for.
Businesses and organisations exist only to provide the services, produce the goods or achieve the very specific aims that they were set up for or developed to do.
Job creation is literally a happy coincidence or consequence of this process.
Creating employment never was nor never could be a meaningful strategic aim for any organisation or business that has a real purpose, unless that purpose is itself simply to keep people employed.
When appreciated, the reality that businesses exist for a purpose other than being an employer begins to shed a lot of light on the lack of understanding and cynicism of politicians when they spend so much time projecting out soundbites about creating jobs.
Ironically however, the rights culture mentality that the constant narrative has created has on one hand made people afraid of their own shadows – as they begin to question whether their normal behaviour is actually right, whilst within the workplace, employees – particularly within the left-wing dominated public sector, have increasingly refused to accept responsibilities that are not within the confines or parameters of their own jobs.
This process has itself heralded the creation of ‘non-jobs’ such as human resources, and many additional posts that were never previously necessary and carried out as part of general management responsibilities, before the situation began to exist where employees may not explicitly say it, but through their actions, they are telling their employer and customers that ‘this isn’t my job’, and opportunists have been more than happy to step in and fill the gaps.
The culture shift from practical reality to idealism in the workplace has been exhaustively counterproductive.
Within the NHS alone, the creation of non-jobs and a mind-boggling array of roles that have been invented so that more and more responsibility becomes specific, means that the whole emphasis on what hospitals and health organisations are there to really do has been effectively lost.
Not only this. All of these jobs attract massive additional costs to manage. Not least of all the very generous pension schemes that jobs right across the Public Sector attract.
The point should not be ignored that each and every public sector organization has to use our money to pay for all of these additional and in many cases unnecessary employment costs BEFORE any of their real work actually begins.
Government and the Public Sector exist to allow every part of our wider community to function in ways that are beneficial and considerate of all.
Yet it is in no small part due to the policies of the Left and through the actions of levelling down, that the entire public sector and structure of government functions as a sclerotic monolith.
Protectionism exists right down to the personal level of the employee or worker.
This means that in terms of priorities or what the true purpose of the public sector is, the end user or customer – that’s us – in many ways simply no longer exists.
It is too easy to overlook and forget just how much impact and influence the Public Sector has on our lives.
To put the impact of having a completely dysfunctional Public Sector in perspective, it is perhaps best to try and provide at least some context by providing a list of how the work the public sector and the structures of government does, touches our lives:
Hospitals
Ambulances
Schools
Fixing Roads
Building Roads
Police
Fire Brigade
Parish & Town Councils
Borough & District Councils
County Councils & Unitary Authorities
Driving Licenses
Passports
Vehicle Licensing
Tax
Planning
Alcohol Licensing
Health & Safety
Flood Management
Environmental Health
The Courts
Jobcentres
Social Services
Emptying the bins
Erecting bins and dog bins
Bus Stops
Public Transport
NGOs (Non-Government Organisations)
[Army]
[Royal Navy]
[Royal Air Force]
The list goes on. Not least of all because even the functions that I have touched on here are managed by a wide range of different Public Sector bodies. They are all managed by organisations that have offices, structures, hierarchies and in many cases operational service departments to manage beneath and beyond them.
The bill to the Taxpayer (That’s us) for all of this is massive. In fact, it is currently thought to be the case that you actually work until late May or early June each year, just to pay the bill for all of this through the taxes that you pay.
Yes – that means you aren’t actually earning a penny for yourself for around five to six months of each year that you work.
Before we even consider the financial cost of maintaining the public sector as it is today in financial terms, it is important to begin thinking about what it really means for us when not just one employee, not just one individual organisation, but the entire Public Sector is not doing its job with its true purpose in mind.
Although it is now 20 years since I worked professionally as a Local Government Officer myself, I recognised then that without the pernicious culture that had already taken over at that time, one person should be able to do the work of four others and be four times as productive, IF they were allowed and encouraged to actually do their jobs properly.
Over 12 years of being a Councillor and in the years that have passed since, I have seen nothing that has changed my mind about this, other than to say that the situation or problem has increasingly gone from bad to worse.
Public service delivery – and the people who actually deliver the public service to us – are not the priority.
It is the frameworks around those jobs that have become most important to Public Sector organisations and the Public Servants who work within them. For us, that only results in loss.
The Public Sector costs far more than it should because of the culture that the Left have instilled within it. And it is not even carrying out the work that it should.
Having created a situation where the public sector literally can no longer do its job with the income it has because of its wages and pensions bill, the very rights and employment laws that Labour, the left and the EU it championed have created and have culturally installed, has made it impossible to function efficiently.
The irony is that Public Sector organisations such as the NHS can therefore no longer function without the use of contractors and employment agencies.
In the first instance or at the first level, this is the real so-called ‘privatisation’ that the Left continually shouts about and so loudly blames the Right for.
The burden that the Left has created is at first glance the polar opposite of the light-touch approach to government that the Tories would like us to believe works better.
Yet for reasons that are completely self-serving, this whole political class overlooks the consequences of their own policies and actions. Then when problems arise – which they inevitably do – they play around with the effects of the problems they created, without ever accepting or having the sense or indeed taking the risk to deal with the cause.
We previously discussed the Neoliberal purposes and motives to create smaller government that underpin what the Johnsonian Conservatives, the Right and even New Labour Policy does.
In the context of the ongoing damage that the Left has done, the argument certainly exists to support cutting back on many of the dysfunctional aspects of Public Sector delivery that their idealistic ideology has helped to create.
But the true purposes of the Right and the Left when it comes to public service provision and government itself must never be confused.
The reason that public services existed are as good now as when they were created.
Yes, the needs may have changed as different aspects of the way we live have changed too. But addressing the need for there to be a proactive and responsive approach to the needs that we collectively share across our communities is an intrinsic part of what makes a society fair.
However, that provision is not fair when any or all of the functions of the Public Sector are not working as they should.
That extends right down to the way that an entry level employee thinks about the purpose and the responsibilities of their role.
There is no doubt that the structures and the functions of the Public Sector have to be comprehensively reformed.
But Levelling Level is also about changing the way that Public Servants think.
The underlying reason that our Politicians talk about reform and change of public services, but then just throw more money at the public sector is because of the legislative complexities that will be required to be reviewed and changed in order to deliver that reform.
To be able to make services such as the NHS operate and function as they should, and for the priority and emphasis to be returned to front line delivery and the staff that deliver it as it should, it will mean unpicking and rescinding much of the legislation and the crippling rights that have been created and instigated by politicians of the Left.
It will also mean removing the private interests and the laws that facilitate profit-making opportunities from public service delivery for the friends of those on the Right.
Neither ‘side’ of the political divide as it stands today perceives there being any benefit to tackling the real issues that lie behind the problems that the Public Sector faces.
This entire political class believes that it would be electoral suicide to do so.
Changing the way that politicians see the issues that stop them – because they have a habit of being issues that we have no reason to tackle too – are a big part of the dilemma that we now face.
The issues with the rights culture that the Left has created that I have already covered relate to the creation and changes in Public Policy in their most basic sense.
But the changes that the Left have made on the basis that rights can fill the gaps where those without can quickly become those that have, took perhaps their most profound turn, when Blairite New Labour decided to turn the education system on its head.
Given that the Labour movement was built around the needs of the working class, there is plenty of irony in the approach that the Blairite Labour Party pursued in its attempt to create an environment where everyone could achieve an undergraduate degree.
Whoever you are and whatever background you are from, you will know from experience that academic learning and attainment is not a process that works for all.
In fact, recognising, accepting and indeed celebrating the benefits that come from understanding and then harnessing the reality that in educational terms, both practical and academic learning has equal but different value, is something we should really see as being highly advantageous to a modern economy.
Yet for Labour and the Left, the obsession with ‘equal rights’ have also made them blind to the reality that different learning pathways not only have the potential to be very good for business and the economy. They are also much fairer and considerate of the individual learner too.
To be fair to the Blairites, Labour and the Left had previous form. Their assault on our formally word-class system of education began with the assault on Grammar Schools or so-called ‘elite education’ over a period of decades before.
But their new and more advanced form of imposing idealistic equality on the population took the meddling of the Left into an entirely different league when in their obsession with imposing a solution over the right to a higher education for all.
In fact, they overlooked the reality that the reason so many people didn’t have degrees wasn’t just because of their background, where they come from or how much money they had.
In the majority of cases, lack of academic attainment is down to many other factors. Not least of all that perhaps 50% of the population or many more are not academically inclined.
In one stroke of Labour-defined genius, entire generations of young people in this Country had their futures compromised.
The higher education system itself became focused on the bottom line rather than the quality of teaching as money became the focus, rather than the quality of what anyone learned.
New graduates were condemned to at best begin their professional working lives saddled with what for some will be never-repayable debt.
An educational system that was once envied across the world, found itself forced to create more and more worthless degrees and dumb down the process of academic attainment as schooling was commercialised and we forgot what ‘universal learning’ was really there for.
All so that students who should never have needed to walk through the doors of a university to ‘qualify’ themselves in someone else’s idealistic eyes, would always be guaranteed a pass.
Perhaps within all of the policies that the Left have inflicted upon people and communities across the UK, levelling down standards in education may well prove to be the worst that they have done in time.
Never mind that Industry is now facing a crisis based on the reality that a degree-level education can no longer be relied upon as the educational benchmark that it once was.
We are now facing a situation where young people leave university with degrees, they believe will entitle them to opportunities and riches that simply do not exist in the real world. Simply because the world of business employs staff to carry out the functions that they are able to, and not what a piece of paper tells the world they can do.
The lie that qualifications solve all social problems is indeed one of the sweetest from the Left that we have heard. But it has been a massive contributor to the disaster we now face.
Today, as things stand, this legacy of the left is destined to last.
The chances are that as you read this today, your perception of money is that money is a thing. That is 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.
I’m guessing that your immediate response to the question ‘what is the money problem’ is likely to be ‘I haven’t got enough!’.
But why do we need more of anything when so many of us have already got so much?
The relationship that people have with money has been changed by the way we have been and are being conditioned to think.
We are programmed by just about every stream of information that comes at us to believe that there is always something better that we can have and that what we really need is the money to get it.
The truth is that right now, we are all part of a society that functions upon and is driven by envy. We live and breathe the mantra that more wants more.
The fundamental problem with money today is that we believe that the value of everything can now be calculated or measured in financial terms.
The value of our time or the time that it takes to carry out work or a job, the goods, food, clothes, phones, computers, bikes, cars, houses, holidays, professional services and even the education that we can buy is now considered by us all in terms of what it will cost us – or in monetary terms alone.
We have quite literally moved from valuing effort, experience and the end result or outcomes, to what cost or income the process will generate.
We do so in such a way that we now overlook or simply forget the qualitative aspects of any process, and this is why so many of us so often find ourselves questioning why the customer service or the way that we are treated by anyone we buy a service or goods from, seems to be increasingly poor.
When we have reached the point where money is the only thing that is important, it naturally follows that whoever controls money, the rules that govern money and the supply of money itself, will be the person or the people who are ultimately in charge of EVERYTHING – right down to what we do, think and say.
Because we revere money and wealth in the ways that we do today, the very democratic system that we believe to be in place to serve our best interests, doesn’t really exist.
Contrary to conspiracists talk and views, there is not some hidden world power that lies at the heart of everything and all public policy decision making, with someone sitting in a bunker on a mountainside pulling every world leader’s strings.
Yes, a simple look at the way money rules everything, does make it seem logical that such a power exists. But the real power and influence that now lies in the hands of others who have or control money, and therefore have control over us all comes down to the way that we ALL think about money.
It is the way we think about money that surrenders our own power and control over life and everything else.
Life isn’t working fairly for all, because those who control money and therefore the lives of everyone are not thinking fairly. They think only of themselves.
It is important to understand that freedom, as we perceive it in the world today, doesn’t actually exist.
Our so-called freedoms are all dictated by money and the systems that manage money. Those money systems are managed and controlled by people who do not have our best interests at heart.
Each and every part of our life is controlled by the actions of others, as is even the way that we think – IF we accept the validity and credibility of every information source that we choose.
This isn’t freedom.
If we do not question the information we are given and then live or go about our lives acting upon whatever we have been told, we have accepted someone else’s truth or narrative as our own.
This isn’t freedom.
Everything that we need and that is made available to us so that we can live our lives comes into our lives under someone else’s control.
This isn’t freedom.
We should not be fooled into thinking that because we are able to buy a nice car or an expensive house, we are the ones who are in control, when to do so we have had to ask someone else for a loan and they have then told us that we can afford to do so.
This isn’t freedom.
We should not fool ourselves with the idea that a qualification of any kind makes us different to anyone else. It only makes us different in someone else’s eyes.
This isn’t freedom.
In fact, if we conduct ourselves in any way that reflects the impression we will make on others or the world that lies beyond our doors, or we qualify anything we do or say by the way that others react or we believe that they will see us, we are not the ones who are in control.
This isn’t freedom.
If we are not free to be, say and do as we please without cost or impact upon others, life for us will never actually be fair.
In the doublespeak of politicians that we hear today, the Tories have made unemployment synonymous with poverty.
Yet in today’s world, not having a job and not having enough money do not correlate in any way. They are massively different things and are not even sat on the same page.
With the political class being as obsessed with labels and soundbites as they are, politicians have somehow managed to pick up and run with the rather cynical idea that everyone will be ok and can get on with their lives, as long as they have got a job.
Yet no two jobs are the same.
We will return to the question of what it costs to live and how a benchmark minimum wage should really work later. But for now, it is important to recognise that under the way legislation in the UK currently works, there are jobs that just don’t pay people enough to live self-sufficiently in the current business and economic environment. But there are also jobs that aren’t really jobs on even these terms at all.
One of the most sinister and indeed cynical aspects of industry today, is to look at the laws that exist using highly paid legal professionals, and then find the gaps or loopholes that are not covered, and then identify the opportunities that they can exploit.
Under the guise of being self-employed, many people who want to work are drawn into ‘employment’ that may appear to pay well in terms of hourly rates. But the companies hiring them – who are actually just dodging the additional costs associated with employing people frequently fail to make clear that the rider, courier, driver or whatever trendy name their role has been given has to cover the costs of carrying out whatever work they do from whatever they are given too.
What the media don’t tell us – as good investigative journalists operating without fear of the consequences would do, is that many of the companies that function within or are wholly dependent upon the gig economy can only exist because they have found these loopholes to exploit people legally and therefore make their platforms profitable when they wouldn’t be in any other way.
Many of these companies are now very well known. They may well be bringing something you have ordered using an app to your door today. Yet the people coming to all of our doors to provide these services are being exploited in potentially many ways, whilst our politicians champion such ‘opportunities’ as being ‘jobs’.
Regrettably, the reason the gig economy exists is a) because the people behind them have a lot of money and influence over our politicians and b) because we like having easy and quick access to whatever we want and especially so when we believe that for us its ‘cheap’.
The creation of the minimum wage – which was another Blairite policy that was implemented in April 1999 – heralded the arrival of what we were told by the government would be the end of the days of old, where unscrupulous employers would be able to get away with paying their staff whatever they liked.
Once again, a policy based more on the successful impact of the messaging and the soundbite in the media, to the employee, the implementation of a minimum wage always has and probably will always sound good.
But there was also a flipside. The Labour policy was once again no more than an act of tinkering around the edges that ended up creating many more problems than the one that it never really fixed.
This particular way of benchmarking gave employers a moral get-out clause. So, if they could demonstrate that employees were always in receipt of the minimum wage or its equivalent, they simply didn’t feel obliged to worry about anything else.
Salaries have been used to hide the fact that employees were being paid less than the minimum wage when things like the hours actually worked were calculated, making what appear to be generous levels of pay turn out to be anything but.
By creating more and more laws in an attempt to cover every eventuality, our politicians just give the unscrupulous more and more loopholes to find.
I should probably be a poster boy for the Social Mobility cause:
I grew up in social housing in a very troubled household, received free school meals and clothing vouchers and didn’t spend any time with my dad until I was 13.
I left school at 16 with no qualifications and then talked my way late into the GCSE year at the local technology college when I was 20 – and ready – for the academic part of my lifelong learning to begin.
I was a Regional Manager for a National Charity in my late 20’s, Managing Director of my own specialist transport business contracted to a National Newspaper Group at 30 and Chair of a Licensing Authority where I was also an elected member, all before I was 40.
I laugh – sadly for all the wrong reasons – whenever I hear self-aggrandizing politicians regurgitating the term ‘Social Mobility’.
I know, only too well, that very few, if any of them, understand the real and many different reasons that so many of us do not achieve our real potential – if they should actually choose to try and do so.
The people we have running the Country certainly don’t appreciate that there is a lot more to the solution than the so far futile idealistic attempts to impose a fix
What many do not understand is that the Social Mobility issue is one that sits along the same road travelled by all of the different prejudices that have become such great celebrity causes.
The only difference is that the prejudices that create barriers to social mobility have been ringfenced by the reality that it is not fashionable for those who are rich and popular with public voices to challenge public thinking by championing the fight against poverty and the boundaries that surround it as a cause in any meaningful way.
Sadly, like many of the ills that society faces, tackling Social Mobility issues requires decision makers to actually understand the problem and then use the tools at their disposal to affect change surrounding a range of interconnected problems that are not and never can be directly in their hands.
It doesn’t matter how many initiatives that Government or the Social Mobility Commission come up with on their behalf.
It doesn’t matter how many rules or laws are created or changed to force what politicians believe to bethe doors of opportunity wide open.
There is not one initiative that will work for everyone who needs help, until we have all accepted and learned to change the way that we think about anyone of anything about them that is different to what we consider to be normal – in the sense of how we see ourselves and how we were brought up or conditioned to be.
Replacing negative prejudices with positive prejudices is just swapping one set of prejudices for another. So, the result will always be unfair.
So, there’s a young couple, let’s say in their late teens or very early twenties. They are unmarried, left school with nothing more than a token GCSE each. They haven’t worked a day since they left school. They already have a baby, and another is on the way. They are in a flat provided by the local social housing association. They both drink and smoke cannabis.
If I ask you to visualise the future of those two children in your mind, what do you think?
The chances are that you, or if not you, then the majority of people you know who are like you will immediately think ‘They are totally f*****d’ – or something equally obtuse. Nonetheless, it will be VERY conclusive in terms of how that future will be defined.
And that response – or indeed anything like it in terms of Social Mobility for those children, their parents and indeed anyone else who needs help to achieve and to be the best that they can be – is a real problem for us all.
The really challenging aspect of the answer to the Social Mobility question is the acceptance that we all have a part to play in helping others to get on.
More often than not, the part we have to play is resisting the innate prejudices that we all have – that call on us to obstruct people from progressing or accessing opportunities who we identify as being different and therefore a threat to us in some way.
Yes, the term ‘innate prejudices’ is yet another term that has and is being actively misused by the rights lobby today, simply because you cannot legislate to change the way that people think.
The spurious attempts regulate against innate prejudices are counterproductive. They make light of the reality that every one of us has innate prejudices that affect everything we do and every interaction that we have.
It is basic programming or software that constitutes the way that we think. Without modification through life learning and broad experience, it will have either been there, have been created or have been developing since the day that we were born.
The reality is that everyone has a part to play in being more considerate in the way we think about and therefore respond to others.
Social Mobility is an issue that affects people of all ages. Contrary to accepted thinking, Social Mobility is also an issue that affects people from ALL backgrounds too. Yet again, we fall into the trap of believing that Social Mobility issues only affect people that society classes as being financially poor.
For example, at one end of the spectrum:
A schoolteacher, early in their career, who lacks self-awareness and perhaps confidence too, can easily create challenges for a student that they find difficult, that they wouldn’t create if they had the benefit of understanding that wasn’t available to them that day. That student could indeed be one of those children who had come from a very challenging home environment, where the support for academic learning simply wasn’t available. Their poor behaviour was nothing more than a behavioural cry out for help and support, when they had neither the maturity nor the ability to elucidate what was going on for them. They probably worried about what the reaction of other students or the teacher would be if they even tried to do so and then when they are punished or singled out, they just have the feeling that they are not worth anyone’s time confirmed, and the whole process just becomes one further step entrenched and yet another step away from them ever finding a way out.
Then:
A senior manager is interviewing external candidates for a junior to middle management role in a corporate environment. The shortlisting went well and there are 5 candidates that on paper all achieved score levels against each and every part of the Job Description that indicates they are good for the job – subject to who comes first on interview day. The manager is looking forward to meeting one of the candidates, as beyond the scope of the questions he believes that she has experience that would bring added value to the role and has the potential to make him look very good. When the candidate walks in, the first thing that the Senior Manager notices is not the smile, or the effort that the girl makes to greet everyone with the confidence that reflects her qualifications and experience that was acknowledged by here invitation to attend interview, it’s the fact that she is tattooed from head to toe. The manager sees and hears nothing else apart from the internal dialogue that’s suggesting what an animal and source of trouble this woman could now be. It didn’t matter that the girl would have taken the Managers sales targets into a different league by the end of month 3, or that he would have had a promotion after six months because of how good his recruitment had been. It certainly didn’t matter that the girl had broken every societal shibboleth to get to that interview, having been the first from her family to even get GCSEs or A Levels – let alone the postgraduate degrees that had taken years of extra working part time jobs. His decision based on nothing but that innate prejudice against tattoos and what being tattooed actually means, meant that the company, all the people who worked there and all of their customers had lost out on years of growth and innovative product development, because instead of recruiting the best candidate because they looked different, they recruited a man who looked the part, but would not seven years later become the divisional head and later Company CEO.
Okay, so the two examples I’ve just provided may have been a little long-winded. But by now you are probably beginning to get the point. If you had not been some of the way there already.
But there is another dimension to the Social Mobility question that is a very long way from the list of populist issues.
It deals with people who are in the jobs market already, rather than the pathway and barriers they experience on their journey to get there.
This problem MUST be addressed if we are to achieve the outcome of Levelling Level and treat everyone in every situation just the same.
In terms of those who have completed their education and are at any point of their careers, the social mobility barrier that many people face are the systems that business, organisations and industries now use to recruit people and get them into interviews.
Methods that are leaving businesses and organisations short-changed in terms of their talent pool, keeping exceptional candidates out of roles they would be perfect for, and giving people who are unsuited to the role they are given, opportunities which just end up being everyone’s loss.
The issue that I am referring to is the tech-based and light-touch methods that companies, their HR people and the agents they employ to recruit people for them now use.
Software tools take the effort out of reading CVs in a way that never allow for the nuances relating to how every individual writes differently – based upon their experience. It makes no allowances for the subtleties that may be as simple as one or two industry terms being absent from a CV or covering letter, therefore not allowing all of the preprogrammed tick boxes to be completed when it comes to setting the search word terms.
The mindset across the recruitment sector has, like everything else, become obsessed with the bottom line too.
When it is not uncommon for fees to be in the range of 20-40% of the salary for the role they are recruiting, the desire to reduce risk whilst maximising profit means that using a tick box system basically guarantees that the results for the recruiter are assured, with little effort being involved.
All industries now recruit on the basis of looking for reasons to rule people out of a recruitment process, rather than looking for reasons such as the added value they bring to rule them in.
That must change if Social Mobility is to be achieved and the way we are all to be treated at every stage of our lives is both balanced and fair.
At some point in the very distant and historic past, somebody somewhere recognised the need for some kind of service to be provided for everyone in the community, on our collective behalf.
Through a process that probably began under the control of those with money, power and influence, the pathway of civilization brought us to a place where instead of there being services that everyone needed that were maintained under the control of specific or vested interests, services like sewage and waste management, the provision of water, looking after our roads and even our policing came under public control in the form of elected bodies that were there to represent the interests of us all.
Whilst it is staggering to know this, it is only within the past one hundred years or so that we finally reached the point where services that everyone needed every day or that everyone needed access to in the very same universal way, became fully under ‘public control’. In no small part due to the impact from and because we had to fight the Second World War.
Yes, the NHS was only born and created as a universal public health service just after WW2. An act that probably saw the zenith of public service provision, in terms of our system of government having full control over all of the public services.
It ensured that everyone had the same access, opportunities and support available to them both as individuals, but also in terms of anything -such as looking after infrastructure, where our collective interests were involved.
With a public services system or ‘public sector’ that had by this stage become so big, it was perhaps inevitable that it would take on a meaning or persona of its own.
That was of course, before politics became involved.
The behavior of our MPs, the political class, the establishment that sits behind it and activist movements such as unions are the key or common components of all the problems that we now face.
Some will choose to see the last two years of our political history as the only contributing factor in terms of all the problems that are set to come.
But the uncomfortable truth for many is that the kinds of problems that society faces today are born of a rich tapestry of poor decision after poor decision, made by the wrong people being in positions of power and influence for all the wrong reasons.
Rather like the whole being greater than the sum of the parts, together all of these bad decisions have had a cumulative effect, we are now in the early stages of experiencing the related disaster unfold.
To overlook the causes of problems, or to pursue policy of any kind because of bias or influence – even because it’s the way politicians think or because of what politicians believe – rather than making decisions simply because those decisions are right for people they represent – are a massive abuse of power. It is as if a totalitarian dictatorship had been formed.
Our politicians may actually believe that they are doing the right things. But if they are not aware of themselves and their own thinking to a level where they can see where what’s good for people starts and where their self-interest ends, we are, as a Country, as communities and as individuals, pretty much damned.
And that, I am afraid to say, is where the UK finds itself today.
The top-down system that thrives on a culture of assumed deference to those in positions of influence, power or roles that traditionally attract cross-community respect is broken.
Our system of governance is now dysfunctional to the point where many of the people who we should be able to trust for their integrity, purpose and ability are in fact imposters.
Yet we still have this ridiculous and illogical respect for those individuals by default – simply because of the way we have been conditioned to perceive their role.
There is no example of this problem that is more profound than the way that the British Political System and access to every level of choice and decision making with any real meaning in government across the UK is in the hands of just a few political parties that together monopolise the system and have effectively made it a closed shop.
Taking the situation as it stands today and changing the system to one that works fairly for all as it should, cannot be achieved if it remains in the hands of anyone who either benefits from the system as it works today, or indeed believes that they could.
Politicians cannot deliver balanced policies that are fair to all if they are not balanced and fair in the way they look at the tasks and opportunities that face them.
Political Parties
We face a situation today where there will be no real choice for any of us when and if we choose to vote at the next General Election.
Conservative, Labour, Liberal Democrat, it doesn’t matter. They are all cut from the same cloth and have all played their part in creating the problems that we have got.
Without change – and that means having an alternative to all of them to vote for which isn’t just the same as any of them but with a different name, things will certainly change as it is inevitable that they will do so, but in terms of the societal injustice and unfairness that we are all now beginning to understand, the imbalance will simply go on in the same ways, hitting us very hard, all over again.
Because of the way that the system currently works, the political parties that we know, effectively have a monopoly on who gets into Parliament and onto local Councils too.
That means it is the political parties that decide who is best to represent us, not us. And that means that when you vote for any Conservative, Labour or Liberal candidate, they will be speaking with their party’s voice – not yours.
With the majority of us having a level interest in politics and the quality or background of the people we vote for in elections being little more than surface deep, the political parties have been able to develop a system where politicians ranging from local councillors right up to the ministers who effectively run the Country today may have no relevant understanding or experience.
They offer the public nothing that makes them suitable as leaders or qualifies them to hold the responsibility that they have been given.
Whilst they may quickly move home to a constituency when they become a ‘candidate’, the reality is that few of the MPs we have in Parliament today, really have any real interest in the areas or genuine affiliation with locality they represent – other what they have created – so that they can obtain and then keep the job.
The political system today does not work on the basis of us being able to elect the best and most able public representative to serve on behalf of our community and serve our collective interest – as it should.
The people we are able to choose from on our ballot papers at elections are selected only on the basis of how likely they are to serve the purposes of their political party.
The interests our politicians represent today are not our own.
When the going gets tough, the tough get going was an adage long before the arrival of the Billy Ocean pop song of the same name in the 1980’s.
Regrettably, it alludes to the reality that when times are difficult, we need strong leadership to see us through.
What it doesn’t suggest, is that the flip side to this two-edged sword is that in times of peace or stability, it is very easy for poor and weak leaders to do anything they want to try and make themselves look tough.
Until the Russian invasion of Ukraine (Which is underway as I write) the UK and most of the world had experienced and enjoyed over seventy-five years of continued peace.
Sadly, whilst challenging times – and by this, I mean genuinely challenging times, such as a World War – have the capacity to bring out the best in leadership. Whereas for us all, a period of peacetime – when circumstances and the accepted narrative suggest that our every need is taken care of – lead to complacency for anyone and everyone who is not being touched by problems that to everyone else remain unseen.
Birds of a feather flock together, and a system filled with the poorest leaders only attracts more of the same with diminishing quality that makes everything get progressively worse.
We have forgotten to value everything that is important
In the period of time immediately following the Second World War, people in this Country genuinely appreciated all that they had. Not in terms of material wealth – as rationing continued to exist into the 1950’s – but in appreciating others, their sense of community and in simply just being alive.
This didn’t last long. As the consumerist drive of the 1950’s and beyond took control, life lost the real meaning that it had.
This societal change was reflected in the development and evolution of post-war British Politics too.
The prolonged period of peace without anything but easy options being taken by the political classes – because genuine leadership has only been seen in peacetime as an option, rather than a requirement – has led to the present-day political system that has thrived on ‘easy’ being the only thing to do.
In fact, so long has the Political Party system been furloughed away from the need to provide what we would recognise as real leadership at a challenging time or within a period of National Crisis, the political class has managed to make it impossible for genuine leaders to come through and join their parliamentary ranks.
The darkness that surrounds small-minded and self-interested control freaks in public offices has led them to do everything they can to prevent light of any kind shining through that will expose them for the charlatans that they really are.
Weak leaders don’t take tough decisions. They lead by taking easy decisions and then tell us that we should believe they are tough.
Weak Political Management
Management or rather good management is not a skill that can be taught in a school, college or university.
Good management skills are based on experience that can only be gained by managing others in a real-life environment where people can only fully utilise their own skills when outcomes are clearly set, and the frameworks are policed so that delivery is achieved.
The political system that we have today doesn’t value this reality as it should.
MPs are typically drawn from the ranks of activists, think-tankers, people working in Westminster or on the Parliamentary Estate. They are people who have probably chosen to pursue politics as a career, when in reality, public service and public representation cannot be and should never be treated as any such thing.
The people we have leading us today, in the majority, have no real experience of life. They have no real experience of managing others. They certainly do not have the understanding of looking at the way an organisation or operation functions, and then being able to delegate through instruction to others, what they need to do in order to achieve a result or to just make a service work.
This has regrettably led to a situation where we have MPs and people running the Country who do not have the wherewithal to ‘make things happen’. They certainly do not know what to do other than to say yes, when a civil servant, government officer or an advisor says no.
So long has this process within the wheels of government now been at work, that civil servants, government officers and advisors are now able to dictate the direction that public policy goes.
This is undemocratic. It means that decisions are not being made for all.
Without good leadership and the oversight that goes with it, the public sector – or rather the executive, administrative of operational functions of it, have effectively been allowed to run riot.
Indeed, it is no accident that the public sector has become the sclerotic money pit that it has. The situation now exists where public sector organisations take a view on the public policies that are generated from above, and then interpret this in the way that it works best for them (the managers).
The complete lack of commerciality means that there is no reference point or incentive to find more cost-effective ways of operating. Instead, the public sector has been actively encouraged to become bloated on the staffing side, with the bill to the public purse being again and again massively enlarged.
Without the system of checks and balances that political leadership with real-life and real-world experience offers, the mentality of the public sector has become very much that ‘we are the ones who are in charge’.
We have a public sector that runs and operates for all the wrong reasons. We have a political system that sits above it as its political master, that is filled with politicians who will not tackle the issues or take the decisions that they are there to take.
When politicians and public sector organisations aren’t doing their job or rather have nothing to do, they feel obliged to justify their existence, simply so that they can continue doing whatever they actually do, rather than what we are told they do.
This process inevitably leads to the creation of problems or even the division of existing problems to create new ones. Processes exist that literally go in search or more problems, so that politicians and Public Sector organisations can find new ways to justify why they actually exist.
As all of these functions are established on the basis of public policy, it therefore becomes necessary that more public policy or more laws are created to enable them to continue to exist.
If politicians and public servants were being completely honest about their jobs and responsibilities, they would already be doing a lot more than they already do.
They would also recognise that they don’t need more responsibility than they already have.
They would in fact understand that they would be better giving much of that power back.
However, once again there is a complete avoidable battle between the ideology of the Left that created this mission-creep culture, and that of the slash and burn approach adopted by the Right
Earlier, we discussed the approach or philosophy that drives the Right that we know as Neoliberalism.
One of the tenets of this highly flawed and self-serving philosophy is the removal or reduction of rules, laws and red tape – or what is commonly known as the process of deregulation.
In context, the push from the Right would see not only the unnecessary rules and regulations that have been created by the Left-wing rights culture destroyed. It would also see the removal of many of the regulatory tools and devices that provide genuine checks and balances across society – the ones that are actually serving us right.
Politics, the politicians that we have and the way that they do politics are the root cause of the problems that we have.
But they are closely aided and abetted by the role that the monster they have created in the form of the public sector plays.
Government provides services through the public sector, and it legislates or sets the rules that provide the framework for how everything else works too.
Whilst so many of our problems have been created by Government and the Public Sector through their obsessive fervor to try and control everything by creating rules on top of rules, their approach to business and money has been very different.
In the case of business and in particular the UK Financial and Banking Sector, successive governments have stepped further and further away from legislating to govern how the money men behave.
They have done so to the point where this massively overvalued sector is basically allowed to set its own rules.
Neoliberalism, Free Markets and Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) are only able to function if government is involved as little as possible. This is achieved through the spinning of the myth that everything that bankers and financiers do is done with our best interests at heart, and that their increased freedom is balanced by the altruistic nature of unbridled market forces which replace the need for government intervention and care.
(SPOILER: They certainly don’t)
When our political classes have bought in to the lie that money is the only thing that can really solve any problem, and those same politicians are basically blind to the way that the money system works, it means that we have money men not only able to exert such influence on politicians that they actually have a different set of rules for them than those we have for us, they are also able to set the rules that govern the value, our access to and the way that money works for all of us.
Money is nothing more than a medium of exchange or what began as a very practical way to create a universal system of exchange that meant we were only two transactions from offering what we have in exchange for what we want.
Up until 1971, a system called the Gold Standard existed. Any money that we had in our hands – whether it was in the form of notes, or coins of whatever value, actually corresponded to the same amount of gold, which was then held in the vaults at the Bank of England (or wherever the safest place at any particular time to store a very large amount of Gold actually was).
At the behest of people with big ideas who knew better, following many of the ways of thinking that ultimately have dictated the way that we now live, the Gold Standard was effectively abolished and the money in circulation was no longer tied or anchored to anything of real value.
The removal of this anchor or tie, gave the money men the scope to invent more and more elaborate and complicated ways to create, hide and multiply the value of the money they managed. Even though and especially so, that to all intents and purposes, the money they use to buy things, pay each other and yes, lend to all of us at substantial rates of interest – doesn’t actually exist.
The world we live in revolves around the value that we attribute to money.
We have made our way of living all about belief in something that doesn’t actually exist.
And we have got to this place because we are all victims of what is likely to be the greatest confidence trick that the World has ever seen.
The reality that money not only doesn’t exist, but that bankers and financiers actually create it out of thin air is so troubling that for many of us, even the suggestion of this is too ridiculous to believe.
If that is hard enough, the next twist of the knife that the few have been cutting and abusing us all with is that they also manage, control and police credit ratings, credit checks and the rules that govern your credit worthiness too.
In a world that we are conditioned to believe revolves around money, this means that the people who create money are the very same people who control everything that relates to what we believe to be our wealth and financial status – right down to the value of the smallest thing that we own.
If you have never had to worry about paying a bill, paying the balance of your credit card off at the end of every month, or had to go to a bank (if you are one of the lucky ones) or a loan shark (if you are not) to get a loan, I can only really say that’s great, have a high-five and good for you.
Regrettably, very many of us have and do have those worries.
Right now, the number of people having to look this experience in the eye is growing, more and more each day, as the impact of the cost-of-living crisis comes firmly into sight.
The pernicious irony of all this is that the people who have created or played key roles in the creation of the cost-of-living crisis are the same people who are setting the terms and requirements of credit and loans.
As a society that overtly prides itself on fair play (or historically has done so), we recognise that balance and fairness is not normally achieved when the beneficiaries of a system are also the managers of that system, and the rules have been developed so that it appears to be legitimate for them to ‘self-police’.
The good news is that the money lie is coming to its end. In fact, the purpose of this book is to discuss what happens next and the good we will all have the power to do both for ourselves and for others, after the lie is fully revealed and this damning chapter of our history comes to its end.
The bad news – or at least the temporary bad news – is that we all have to wake up from the drug addiction that we have to wealth and money. The change that our politicians and leaders have made inevitable is change the change that we need. But the circumstances that accompany the process of that change will require that we all do cold turkey, and that will be painful for a period of time.
Yes, events happening around us are dictating change and the pace of that change. It is our experience of those events and the light that they will shine on how politicians, decision makers and influencers really behave and how they have been behaving, that will expose the corrupt system that we have to thought-changing truth.
The incompetence of our politicians would not have been the success that it has been, without the media having had the role it has and having been there to tell us that it is so.
So little of the news that we see and hear on so-called mainstream channels and stations is actually news, that propaganda should really be switched with news as the recognisable term for all that well known current-affairs mediums actually do.
Whether it is the agendas of the owners or political masters of the channels and platforms that set directional agendas, or just the personal motives and the experience of life that drives then journalists and presenters themselves, the reality that we face is that opinion and news have long since become a wholly interchangeable term.
The irony is that the opinion which is probably as much as 90% if not more of what the content of mainstream news and current affairs commentary really now consists of, is in reality a sanctioned or legitimised flow of fake news.
The only thing that makes mainstream sources any different to the content which comes from YouTubers, TikTokkers and social media commentators who are attempting to share helpful programming – other than the fact that the 10% news is even less that the alternative – is the fact that the programming is seen as reliable BECAUSE it is the mainstream.
Of course, as individuals looking out on the world as it is today, we can too easily be led to believe that it is only us – and strange as it may seem, the few people around us that we care to talk to – who see everything that is wrong in the world around us and with the narratives that we continually hear.
What I can tell you now is that this is a very long way from being the case. It is only the way that we are surrounded by a flow of information, coming at us from each and every direction in the information technology age – that tells us and then repeatedly confirms to us – that the narratives which override our own common sense and what our instincts tell us – are able to thrive and continue to exist.
Bullshit really does have its own sound, and the sources and perpetrators of the lies that have made life so unbearable for many, in so many different ways, – whilst suggesting that we are the only ones who think that way or even worse, that we are actually alone – are in the process of being uncovered and shown to us all for what they really are.
Within the narrative that has slowly but surely been tearing British culture apart, whilst giving just about every one of us an identity crisis as we try to fathom out the question of whether we should feel guilty for simply being the people that we really are and should be proud to be, there is a self-serving and self-propagating process at work.
Actually, it’s a rather large elephant that sits in this room, and it’s the reality that whenever we focus on any difference between anyone, we are highlighting or amplifying that difference, and creating division or further divisions between us or between members of society as we do.
We are all different to each other, whether those differences are physical or just in the way that we think. And the damage that wokeism and political correctness is doing only fails to be evident, because the success of this subversive culture is less than surface deep and championed only by sleepwalking groupthink.
Part 2 covers the realities of dealing with the changes that the collapse of everything we know will bring and how the changing world and the need for very different processes and ways of living will make this necessary.
We will look at how we can use these experiences positively to improve our own lives and as the benchmark for the process of Levelling Level to create a system that doesn’t allow or tolerate involuntary disadvantage for anyone and creates a system that is balanced and fair for all.
As I write, two years of the Covid Pandemic, the impact of Government Covid Measures and even the Partygate scandal that was looking more and more as if it was about to unseat Prime Minister Boris Johnson, all seem to have disappeared or somehow morphed straight into the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
The Media are already beginning to create or rather craft a new narrative around what the politicians are doing that will frame the Ukraine Crisis as the real reason for what will soon become a systemic and financial collapse that touches just about everything that we know.
The problems that we will have to face will be so big and so profound that there will be no narrative that even the cleverest of the people working on ‘nudges’ and manipulation of the kind used on us all during the Covid Pandemic will be able to use to cover their political masters’ tracks.
The Government will not be able to make people look at the problems they face differently. Because we will have moved from being manipulated by the fear of what could be, to dealing with the pain and impact of what already is in our lives.
The Great Correction will not be a single event that we recognise as being what it is that has arrived in one moment or we woke up to following its arrival overnight.
The Great Correction is already underway. Kicked off by the handling of events that will prove to have been catalyst because of the way they have been handled, they are the culmination of many other events and hinge on decades of bad decisions being made before.
We are experiencing the first stages of the Great Correction in the price rises, cost of living crisis and everything that is beginning to happen around us. Each and every part will add up to change which when we look back many years from now will be seen in a way that we will not believe that we have lived through and experienced ourselves.
Together, it doesn’t matter whether it’s the cost-of-living crisis, energy prices, the way that Covid was handled, food poverty and hunger, social mobility issues, climate change, housing shortages, immigration or indeed any other problem that we can see.
These problems have been developing, growing and creating even more issues through their knock-on effects over a period of many years.
Today, more and more people are asking questions about why things really are the way that they are, rather than simply accepting them as being normal, as we have been doing – and have been encouraged to do so by narratives – for a very long time.
Regrettably, bad decision making can take a very long time to work through and can remain unhindered up until the end result. It can and will cause a lot of pain to innocent people, before it finally does.
No public policy – or the effect thereof – that hurts people or is unfair to anyone is sustainable in the long term. And the long term can be a very long time indeed.
Even then, when vested interests benefit from the existence of that policy or that approach, they will do all that they can to keep that opportunity open – or to maintain that narrative, often being consciously unaware of or blind to the pain that they cause to so many others by doing so.
Many different things haven’t been working as they should – and have been hurting people as a result – for all that time.
So many, in fact, that there is very little public policy that now exists or works proactively to create or maintain a balanced way of living in any genuine way.
What is remarkable about this situation is just how ridiculous the situation has become, where so much has been wrong about the way that we live, but at the same time, because of just how bad things are, the wrong people have been able to succeed at keeping things as they are, or indeed actually making them worse.
The fact is that the wrong leaders give us the wrong results.
Perhaps the most critical dimension of writing Levelling Level, has been the challenge of putting on paper what some will read or perceive as being predictions at best and complete nonsense at its absolute worst.
However, all of the information and evidence that now makes Levelling Level necessary has been hiding in plain sight for as long as the decisions and actions creating the need for change have one-by-one, taken place. The direction of travel is very real indeed.
People are very comfortable with the way that the world has been working for a period of time that for many equates to the same thing as living memory.
Let’s face it. When things are good, why would you believe that they could ever change?
Of course, just like the enjoyment of alcohol and the massive influence that it holds on the lifestyles of so many of us, when we are enjoying something, we rarely think about or acknowledge the harm that it may also be doing us too. Yet these are real harms that far outweigh what are only the perceived benefits that we only believe to be making us happy, but are in fact storing up disasters for us in a myriad of other ways.
The obsession with material wealth and the use of money and finance as the benchmark of life that it has become, revolves around the very worst and self-serving aspects of capitalism.
Through the manipulation that underpins consumerism and fashion, unchecked capitalism has effectively taken control of our lives – even dictating the pain and punishment that arrives by default, at the doors of those who for whatever reason cannot afford to actively take part.
To many, this is just the way things are, or what some see as ‘Business as Usual’.
Yet what those of us are so heavily invested in this way of living and what we believe to be the benefits it gives us don’t yet accept or understand is that Business as usual is already over.
The collapse that will lead to this all changing is already underway.
Many of us scoff at or simply do not like the idea that there are forces at work that are out of our control.
The reality is that the reason that terms such as ‘The Hand of God’ or The Invisible Hand’ make a lot of sense to those who observe how events come together and then create particular results, is because there will often be no logical reason or excuse that can be seen to explain how things ended up the way that they did, or the chain or events or decisions that made them so.
Our default setting is to look for the first excuse or reason that makes sense of anything.
That is why in an age when our leaders, the establishment and the media don’t normally speak with sincerity or truth, many of us are both open and vulnerable to the idea or suggestion of conspiracies that come from what we consider to be any credible voice.
Yet, the reality is that the unsustainable way of living that greed and the obsession with money has imposed across the world, has, under the guidance of the wrong politicians, come at a considerable cost to us all. Not just because of the end results like you and I experience. But because their actions have pushed everything about life and the world we live in out of balance.
It is natural that the balance has to be restored.
Ironically for our leaders, it is their own way of looking at the world and the decisions that they make in each and every moment, that has created the circumstances where all of the problems that they have created and maintained are coming to a head.
Not everyone understands or accepts the principles of the Butterfly Effect or the Ripple Effect.
But as I wrote and discussed in my e-book Small Decisions have Big Consequences, the significant issues that we face today will have come about as the result of many different decisions that those taking them would never had such consequences in mind.
At the time of writing, most of the voices that I hear or read have become obsessed with the invasion of Ukraine.
Yet their obsession is about the now, and what it means in the future for them.
There is little in terms of thought being given to what the events we are experiencing in Ukraine really signify. Or more importantly, what influence the Ukraine Crisis and how it is handled by our politicians will mean in relation to what happened before, and where the world and how we live will go next – once the immediate crisis has itself disappeared from the news.
David Cameron led to the EU Membership Referendum. The EU Membership Referendum led to Brexit. Brexit led to Theresa May. Theresa May led to the near three-year Parliamentary logjam. The near three-year Parliamentary logjam led to Boris Johnson. Boris Johnson led to the unnecessary Covid Measures. The unnecessary Covid measures precipitated the coming collapse and cost of living crisis. And then Vladimir Putin got involved…
These are events that are in public view. They are happening at the ‘macro level’. But their implications and consequences, along with the influences that guide their next steps, are happening concurrently at the ‘micro level’ – that’s in all of our lives – too.
As this book is about the process and outcome of Levelling Level – and what we will experience in the coming years or during what comes ‘next’, I will not dwell on the mechanics of Brexit, Covid, or even todays Crisis in Ukraine – especially as I have covered these in other Books and within my Blogs.
However, Brexit was the first stage of what in future is likely to prove to be a trilogy of key events, that through the actions, responses and decisions of our politicians, through the Covid Pandemic and the Covid Measures that they imposed, and then on to the way they have handled Ukraine and used it with other purposes in mind, they have effectively sealed the deal on the Great Correction – that bit by bit will change life as we know it, probably for many years to come.
Reset might be an easier word to use when it comes to discussing a review of everything that changes every part of the system so that it works better than it has been doing.
But as I have come to realise as I have been writing about the coming correction over a growing period of time, the term reset also suggests keeping the same system that we have – and with it comes the suggestion of keeping the same system of government and leadership, with just the levels or the measures within the system being reset.
That simply will not work. It will not benefit us in any way.
As Einstein said, ‘Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results’, and this, without question, applies to the top-heavy hierarchical system and the people we today have at the top.
Everything quite literally needs to be corrected, so that we are once again back on the right path.
The right path is about appreciating and feeling good about the things in life that are really important.
It has got nothing to do with what we own, what we earn, or what we have.
There is little doubt that to many reading this book around the time that it is published, the content will reflect what looks like an entirely different world to the one that we see around us.
Yet our lives continuously revolve around acts and events that create change. It’s just very difficult to see and appreciate – with the way that the world works today – that the kind of change that is now required – can only come about through a series of events or experiences that are equal to a complete systemic collapse. A collapse that causes enough pain that we all accept that we have to act.
That collapse is already underway. It is reaching us through the experiences that we have had through the Covid Years. It is reaching us through what we see happening in Ukraine. It is reaching us through the cost-of-living crisis that is unfolding around us.
It is now time to accept that things will never be the same again.
As the impact of these events that are happening on our TV Screens and on our social media feeds begin to physically touch our real lives, more and more of us will realise that what has been happening is wrong.
We won’t only accept we need it, but we will also actively encourage and then embrace change.
The biggest change that we will have to encounter and travel through will be in relation to the way that we think.
Once we have again learned to value what is important and value each other as we really always should, then we can begin the process of rebuilding the world around us, correcting everything that touches our lives and the lives of others, so that the system we live in works as it really should.
Every problem that has been discussed in this book alludes to ways of being, laws, regulations, policies and the actions or activities of politicians that have either allowed or encouraged these problems to exist.
They are the apparent causes of many of the problems that we face, yet they themselves are in many cases only the effects.
Many of the problems that exist have been made worse by the fact that politicians and leaders have treated the effects of problems as if they themselves are the cause.
We have literally found ourselves in the mess that we are now, because the effect of one problem has been addressed as if it’s the cause, leading to another or more effects which have then been treated the same. Meanwhile, all the time this has been happening, nobody has ever dealt with the real or root cause.
The suggestions I have made all relate to where the root or real cause of all the problems lie.
When it comes down to it, the real change is one for all of us and that change is about our approach to life.
Like just about everything in this world, even ‘doing the right thing’ is a term that is open to interpretation, depending on way you think, or the priorities in your life that are involved.
In fact, so ridiculously grey is the area or cloud that surrounds ‘doing the right thing’, that if you were to sit down with the politicians running the UK today, or the journalists and commentators reporting on it in the media, and then ask them, ‘do you always do the right thing?’, the chances are that they could look you straight in the eye and honestly answer you yes.
And they wouldn’t be lying either. The difference is that they would always be doing the right thing for them. They wouldn’t be doing the right thing for everyone else.
Yes. There is a massive difference. But the two get massively confused.
Doing the right things for them is how politicians and people with influence and power got us all into the mess that we are in.
They have made decision after decision, based on the consequences they foresaw for themselves as a result of doing whatever they have then done, rather than basing those decisions on what would be the effect or consequences for us all.
The problem has always been that no decision is made with isolated consequences, particularly at public level. And every decision that has been made to benefit specific rather than the public interest, has been made with consideration only for the impact or consequences for that specific few and without any consideration for the impact upon everyone else – who will inevitably also be involved.
Actions always have consequences, and we all need to adopt a way of thinking that enables us to discern between whether the actions we are about to take have consequences for anyone other than us who may directly or indirectly become involved.
Whilst many may try to do so, we can never guarantee the options or choices that will be made available to us even two steps down the line.
In fact, there are no guarantees that even the consequences of the next decision that we make in the here and now will turn out exactly as we had anticipated or as we would like.
If we learn to take each and every decision in life based only on what we know our best judgement on what the impact of that specific choice in the moment will be, and then make the right choice for everyone who will be touched by that decision, we will always end up in the best place that we can be – no matter how hard we anticipate that choice will turn out to be for us personally.
It’s difficult to talk about the change that is already underway, without acknowledging the story of the ‘Great Reset’ that has been propagated by people within organisations such as the World Economic Forum (WEF).
The problem with the conspiracy theory about a world takeover that accompanies it, is that at present, the model that the WEF is promoting is likely to become reality. Not because these people have any real power. But because they have enough about them to predict what the public reaction to change of the kind we have already begun to experience over the past two years, and what comes next will be.
Hats off to them, the elites know that we are now in a period of significant change. But no matter how much they may desire to manage and own that change, so that they can remain in control of the ‘new world [order]’ that is to come, the Achilles heel that will down them is that they are the architects of all of these problems and the problems they have created are too big for small minded and selfish people to control.
Just remember that in a system that works for them as it now feels it always has, the elites will always appear to be in charge until the very moment that everyone else accepts that they are not.
As I have just touched on the WEF and New World Order conspiracy, it’s only fair that I mention not only the apparently large number of conspiracy theories that are around at the moment – particularly in relation to Vaccinations and the ‘Covid Measures’, but also the question that surrounds the reasons why people we would otherwise believe to be sensible and grounded, appear to have jumped right in.
If you have read this far into Levelling Level, you will almost certainly have begun to appreciate how different things really are in terms of the way the UK is managed, as opposed to how they either appear to be, or how we are told they are.
People are not stupid. In fact, even those without big words, technical understanding or the academic or experiential grounding that it often takes to be able to take public policy apart, know and understand at an intrinsic or visceral level that something is fundamentally wrong and that things simply don’t add up.
In the absence of good leaders who have built their foundations and messages on truth, people awakening to the presence of a government culture built on spin, messaging or outright lies, begin looking for alternative voices and information that feels credible and explains or gives some logic to why things are happening the way that they are.
The most regrettable part about the rise in popularity of conspiracy theories is that many of those looking for answers or someone to blame in an environment like we have right now, find it too easy to believe that many of the voices on social media that offer an alternative route to the one our current politicians offer, are leaders who can be trusted.
Circumstances will dictate the changes that lie ahead.
The changes we face will not be dictated by politicians or the elites as we know them in any form.
The Ideas and ideologies, often written by people who have never even experienced the times we are living in, that have previously driven our system of leadership and the direction that it then takes all of us, will be replaced by public policy and a way of living that based on practical need, rather than the impractical idealism that our current political culture represents.
That isn’t to say that we will not always be looking for ways to improve our lives and the world around us.
It will simply be that the motives and reasoning for doing so will be based only on improving life for everyone, rather than because of the benefit to self-interest or profit margins as is predominantly the case with everything now.
It is important to not get hung up on the terminologies being used.
Words have different meanings and different uses for different people, and in no industry or situation have so many esoteric terms been in use with the deliberate intent of suggesting that magicians are at work as there are today within the financial or banking trades.
Money behaves as it does today and the goods and services that we need and used are priced as they are, because it has been in somebody’s interest – usually making profit – for them to work in that way.
As we established earlier, a reset in its most literal form will not help anyone as we go forward.
It would simply mean that we have the same players and influences sat at the top of a system where nothing works as well and in fact gets progressively worse for every level of the hierarchy, as you travel down.
The collapse of everything that is underway will, through a chain of events, reach a place where we will all accept that the financial system that we have and the way that money is managed and used to control every part of life, cannot continue as it has.
The prices of everything that is essential to live and to survive will have to reflect its true cost to produce or provide, with the least number of separate interests in that system of supply – or the supply chain that is involved.
This inevitable process or correction of prices will result in what appears to be a devaluation of the Pound.
But as a process that compressively corrects the pricing of everything and takes it back to a level that reflects its true value, the value of everything that we own will remain exactly the same in relative terms.
It is just the case that the way we calculate costs, profitability and how we are taxed on what we have or possess from that point onwards that will no longer be the same.
In the future, prices will reflect what they really cost to produce and get to you, with only an appropriate layer of profit added at the minimum number of stages of the supply chain that are necessary for any essential goods or service provision to reach you.
For instance, you buy a loaf of bread from the baker. The baker buys the flour from the miller. The miller buys the wheat from the farmer. That’s three necessary points in the supply chain that get you a loaf of bread.
What we don’t then need is a broker buying the wheat from the farmer that he hasn’t even grown yet, and then selling it on to a grain merchant when it has actually been produced, with both of these two stages themselves adding unnecessary work and additional profit for themselves, all adding to the end cost for you.
This example is a very simplified view – and deliberately so.
Try to visualise just how many different interests have and are able to become involved with the process or supply chain providing goods and services, where global and even UK-wide supply chains are at work.
The prices of everything have been massively overinflated without any additional value being added to the end product.
This is one of the key reasons why we will return to supply chains that are as local as it is possible for them to be, and a system where only recognisable players – who are adding value to the end product – are actually involved.
Within the Great Correction, the change from a system that has been skewed in the favour of the money men and the belief in money and wealth, will require the way that everything we own is also valued. This necessarily means reevaluating how we see and manage past debt.
The best way to ensure fairness – in a system where money lenders have been lending out money that has no value and charging interest for it, is to reimagine that debt and recalculate it so that it no longer exists.
This isn’t a suggestion that we all embark on some giant game of musical chairs where we all suddenly own outright what is in our possession when the music of the old system stops.
But it does mean that ownership of everything must be revalued to be proportionate.
Where major assets such as land and resources are concerned, if they are not to be returned to or held in public or community hands, the new system of taxation will reflect the benefit to the private owner, so that the benefit from its utility is shared via the community for the benefit of us all.
Whilst there are many problems that are being caused by the impact and reach of social media, the availability of information and the evolution of how it is affecting life is a process that politicians are unable to control.
The example of Vladimir Putin’s attempts to tell the West that the bombing of Ukraine was fake news being the case in point.
No matter how hard any controlling politician tries, they will not prevent the dissemination of information within audiences that they wish to control.
Ironically, whilst fake news – or what in mainstream media terms is the publishing of opinion that we are then told is news – is causing governments around the world all sorts of problems, the end destination of what we are witnessing will be a new reality for truth and openness. One where leaders will only be able to function by telling is the truth, as the sheer weight of numbers of information sources will make it impossible for them to do otherwise.
If you are reading this from the perspective of one of so many of us who are today feeling the pinch and are becoming more and more aware of just how expensive it is becoming to live, the fact is that a rise in your income level – whatever that income might be – is probably the one thing or the one solution for you that will make immediate and overwhelming sense.
Whilst a rise in income is always dependent upon factors that are external to us – for instance how much we can get our employer to raise our weekly wage, we nonetheless feel that it is directly within our control, because our income is directly linked to what we personally do or what assets or investments we personally control.
Income is within our personal bubble or sphere of responsibility. So, when we believe we have enough income to cover all of our costs and all the things that we want, we can easily – and happily – conclude that all is ok in terms of our relationship with the world.
Yet the problem with us only thinking about money in terms of whether we have enough of it to pay for whatever it is we want to bring into our lives, means that our state of happiness is constantly and continuously being dictated by the prices – and therefore the decisions made by others out in that world.
In reality, we do not have control over our happiness, because the affordability of everything that we need and want is inevitably under someone else’s control. And what is more, our ability to afford all of it is also set by someone else too.
OK, so I can almost hear the thought bounding back at me here that says, ‘that’s just how the world works’ or ‘that’s just the way things work’. And yes, on the face of it, that is how it is.
But ‘that’s just the way it is’ exists, only because that’s what we have so far been prepared to accept.
We accept it because that’s how we have been taught, conditioned or programmed to think.
It was or would only ever be safe to think this way, IF we could trust the people who are in power to ensure that all of those influences and the power that dictates the prices we pay and the income that we receive were fair. That they were genuinely representative of what things cost, and that the ‘system’ was being managed in exactly the way that it should be.
But the people we trust who we have trusted with OUR power are not doing their jobs. In fact, they either don’t know how to do their jobs or are deliberately not doing them – because it benefits them in some way to turn a blind eye.
Life must be affordable for all
Prices and the cost of living are out of control because nobody is running a system of checks and balances that actually works or operates on the basis that life actually needs to be affordable for all.
Just because you can, doesn’t mean you should
Furthermore, those who are able to dictate prices are not doing so on the basis of taking only what they need. For the same reasons as that absence of checks and balances, they charge whatever they want and take whatever they want not because they should or because they need to, but because they can.
It is the responsibility of government to create and police a framework for an affordable life that works
The people whose responsibility to make sure that we don’t have to worry about prices, inflation and why everything inexplicably costs as much as it does, are our politicians – nobody else.
Our politicians are the people who put themselves forward to all of us for election on the basis that they are qualified, have the wherewithal or that they possess the experience, understanding and skills that are necessary to interpret everything that is going on in the world that impacts each and every one of our lives. They also do so on the basis that they have the vision and leadership skills to then come up with solutions and changes in the form of public policies that are not only fair and balanced for everyone – but they also actually work.
With the existing political culture that we have in power and occupying seats in our Parliament, within the devolved Administrations and within every Council across the Country today, none of the issues that are having a real impact on our lives that could be addressed, are being tackled as they should.
In fact, the majority of the politicians who have been elected by us have no idea or concept of the power that they actually have and are entitled to use on our behalf.
Others willfully choose not to do so, because for reasons of self-interest or because they have been influenced wrongly by others, taking action that can actually make a difference to the people they are supposed to be representing is something that will not help them, themselves.
Nobody has the right to make a profit
Nobody has the right to make a profit. They certainly do not have the right to make a profit by exploiting others, or by forcing them into arrangements that they simply cannot afford.
Yet this is the situation that exists in this Country today, simply because our MPs and Politicians – the people we have trusted to look after us – are not doing and are not up to the job.
Prices are at the highs that they are and are now rising all the time, because it is in the interests of others for them to do so.
The prices that we are being asked to pay, simply do not reflect the real – and much lower costs.
Self-interest is a powerful influence, because those who are driven to do everything that benefits themselves are more than happy to bring others into their plans so that one becomes just a few who benefit from the result.
I am acutely aware that those particularly on the right, which will include those who are keen exponents of Neoliberal thinking and policy, will deliberately see the drive and direction of this book as being socialist.
Yet socialism has already failed, despite the ridiculous protestations from the Left that it only failed because it’s never been done right.
The whole drive and direction of this work is the creation and implementation of what will be nothing more than a level playing field. So that those who are creative, hardworking and entrepreneurial can ethically thrive, whilst those who are driven differently and for whatever reason are just happy to exist, can do so, without those who are in a dreamed-up race to the top continually changing the rules of the game so that less ends up being even less, whilst more just adds more.
Contrary to current and unethical capitalist thinking, you do not need to attain or maintain excessive personal wealth in order to thrive.
If the rules of the game are fair to everyone, the players in the background can still enjoy taking part, whilst those who have pushed themselves will always have the opportunity to cross the line and feel like they have achieved a win.
It doesn’t matter what goods you buy, or what services you need to hire in. There isn’t one industry that exists now that hasn’t had the desire the people within it have to be the best at what they do and deliver the best they can for the customers they serve, replaced by the prioritisation that work is all about what they can make (£).
People used to think about careers in terms of the enjoyment, satisfaction and sense of personal achievement that it would bring them. Now, young people look at qualifications, courses, careers and social media in terms of what money, glory and celebrity will give them instead.
Money and wealth are the motivation and underlying aim in all that we do. So even the few who do desire to continue working ethically are now restricted from doing so, because the community or industry that they function within no longer operates in the same way that they wish to.
In a world where all systems and ways of working will be brought back into balance – which is what this document here proposes – there will be no reason for anyone to not function and to approach their work ethically, always looking at what they do in terms of the effect, consequences and benefits not just for them, but for everyone.
The reality is that profit should always be the happy consequence of doing any job well.
Profit or personal gain should never be the sole aim of doing anything.
Whilst not everyone chooses to broadcast the fact, increasing numbers of us see ourselves as being Spiritual rather than religious, and within that bandwidth, follow a wide range of ways of thinking that have basically replaced the place that faith in a religion previously held for us all in some way.
Like religion before it, new age thinking has created a ringfenced system of piousness where talk of great awakenings, raising consciousness and personal journeys, encouraged by astrology, tarot and ‘enlightened thinking’ still encourages people to completely miss the point.
The point of getting life right for us as individuals is that our own progress is about playing our part in getting life right for us all.
We cannot run away from the role that we have to play in creating a new, balanced and fair world for all. by only focusing on what is good for us. This is just another way of prioritising our own self-interest in what only looks like being a different way to what everyone else has been doing or already does.
The events and the changes that are happening around us will inevitably be interpreted in many different ways.
But in practical terms or objective ways of thinking, the new way of living or the new world that we will experience once we come out of the other side of all this will overtly look and feel very much the same.
The key is finding peace and acceptance with who we are in all this, rather than who we believe we should be.
Taxation is one of those things that everyone hates but accepts under what is perhaps the most ridiculous use of the shibboleth, it’s just how it is’.
In a response to one of my blogs I wrote a few years ago, a student suggested that taxation was a ‘voluntary’ process. I replied that the reason people paid their taxes without any apparent friction, was because it is the law for them to pay tax and to do so – not because it’s a voluntarily act.
At a deeper level, the student was arguably right. Because the fact that we don’t question the ridiculously extensive nature of the UK Tax Codes does indeed mean that in a counterintuitive way, we have voluntarily accepted the complexity and therefore the unfairness of the system that we have got.
Of course, it is the complexity, and the sheer volume of the UK Tax Code which stands at over seventeen thousand pages (17,000) and over a million words in length, demonstrates perhaps uniquely well how the more detail you have in legislation, the more holes you create for an entire industry of highly paid accountants to get their wealthy clients through.
The fairest way to pay tax, is for everyone to be treated exactly the same, and that means that everyone pays in the same way – which will always be the simplest way.
We occasionally hear talk of a ‘flat tax’, that is known to be a topic that our politicians avoid like the plague. They avoid it because of the upset it would cause the people who currently have so much influence over them and do so well from finding their way through those complexities that we have just discussed.
But a flat tax – which would mean everyone, and everything is taxed at the same rate, will not in itself go anywhere near enough to achieve the outcome of Levelling Level itself.
For reasons – which yes, once again, only benefit the rich and those with considerable wealth – the whole direction of Taxation in the UK today, is skewed towards productivity and output, rather than what anyone owns, manages or has sat idle in some form that is stashed away.
Taxing work and effort is a foolish thing to do, that contributes greatly to the difficulties and challenges that those on lower levels of pay face. It also works against social mobility, as it restricts the money available for people to ‘better themselves’ – perhaps by investing or starting a business – that would allow them to achieve and realise the aims they have – which should then be the focus of a much fairer and balanced system of tax.
Because the UK doesn’t currently tax land and resources that are held in private hands but provide the raw materials that are essential to daily life, those few that ‘own’ them suffer no discouragement from charging exactly what they like – and making no proportional payment back into the community pot as they do.
Equally, as public investment in infrastructure such as roads, railways, airports bring business to new areas and adds value to premises those private interests own, there is currently no system in place to tax the benefit to the company or the individual that they have gained for no reason other than it being the right time and the right place.
The argument that taxes are too complicated to overhaul holds no water. Like everything else, the only reason for arguing against change or for our politicians refusing to do so when they understand, is because there are powerful vested interests that benefit from not being taxed on capital and land, and an entire industry or profession exists that was created and developed to make the tax burden less and less painful, depending proportionately upon how much you are able to pay.
Adults, working a full working week in any job at any level, must be able to feed, house, clothe and provide adequately for their own transport needs, whilst providing basic necessities such as communication themselves, without the need for credit, loans, benefits or third-party support of any kind.
This Basic Living Standard Statement provides the benchmark that politicians and government must pursue in order to achieve and deliver on the aim of providing a societal and economic structure for the UK which is genuinely fair to all.
Those who tell you this aim is impossible have reasons for not wanting to have a fully balanced society with systems that are fair to all.
The reason they don’t want this may be as simple as they believe that such an aim is simply too hard or too difficult to deliver. That the way things are today are the way that things have always been done.
More likely however, it will be because they are comfortable with the way things work today, because there is a benefit or pay off for them in some way.
Such thinking is in itself a big part of the problem.
It is the complexity that the self-serving have created over a very long period of time, that now has to be unpicked so that everything outside of life itself is there to serve life and the way that we live. Rather than how it is now, where everything in life is focused outside of ourselves and dictates that we exist rather than live.
Levelling Level is built on the foundation of life being affordable for all.
The key step to achieving this is recognising that it is both the influences around life that are the problem and the influences around life that will also provide the solution.
Both the Tories Levelling Up and the Lefts Levelling Down are obsessively focused on addressing the perceived needs of the individual, literally looking at the problem from the top-down.
Levelling Level is the process of creating a level playing field by ensuring that the stepping off point in our lives for everyone is exactly the same – in terms of the practical circumstances that we are in or would be in, IF everyone started off with nothing or no advantages of any kind.
Anyone, no matter their beginning, always has the potential to achieve the best they can do for themselves, provided the environment and circumstances around them do not obstruct them or disadvantage them in some way.
However, when the environment or circumstances around anyone place them in a situation where their priority is simply to exist or to survive, and every part of that system around them is set to work against them in ways that suggest the disadvantage they are experiencing is wrong, the people in that situation are effectively damned from the very start.
Whilst laws and regulations may make the many factors and behaviors of others who in many cases unwittingly control this process technically legal, there is nothing good, ethical, or morally right about the way that this works.
The real change for us all that leads to Levelling Level must be the change in the way that we view the problems of others.
We must accept that creating the level playing field so that nobody has to fight just to exist is the most beneficial way that we can come together to help others. Only then will everyone have the choice between existing happily – which should be everyone’s right to do so, or alternatively to take every step that they can to thrive – in so far as their own abilities and outlook at any time will allow.
The role of government or the community in all of this, is quite literally to become or provide the system of checks and balances to create this level playing field, so that Levelling Level becomes the change in the way that we all think, and we really do have a system that is genuinely fair to all.
To bring parity or income equality to all, isn’t to ensure that everyone is being paid the same to do the same job. It is to ensure that the lowest paid are able to function self-sufficiently, without any kind of additional support.
Attempting to define what the UBW would be in today’s terms is of course possible. But the rate that it would be, would be higher than any business leader or politician would be prepared to consider. Because they would see that wage being in terms of what the financial or price levels in the UK at the present time now are.
They would also assume that in order to accommodate such a change, they would then be forced to raise the prices of everything, so that their own margins and way of operating remain relative on par – and in real terms just the same.
This is why the price correction (rather than reset) that we have already discussed is an essential part of the mix. So that the way that we price and value goods and services – or rather the way we allow them to be priced and valued, is brought back to a correct level in monetary terms (where prices are no longer ludicrously inflated).
Once the price correction has been implemented and legislated for as it should be, we then have the technical and policy devices in place to ensure the regulatory measures exist that move the focus of all transactions away from the bottom line, to being about the quality of the experience that every transaction provides.
It is at this stage that the rate for UBW can be set, based proportionally against the cost of a Basic Living Standard, relative to true cost and the amount that must be earned by the lowest paid for the equivalent of a full working week.
The aim of the economy should always be to provide all of the goods and services that the people and businesses that operate within it need. Its aim should never be focused primarily on what people want, and it should certainly never be driven by the whims of just the selfish few.
To ensure that UBW cannot only exist, but then be maintained, it will be essential that certain goods and services have their pricing levels corrected and then maintained. These ‘essential’ goods and services should be provided and supplied by entire supply chains that operate within the exact same set of rules.
Suppliers of these essential goods should always have the option to provide the same offerings in a more ‘luxurious’ form, but this process itself should never come at the cost of the quality or experience of what they offer to end users in the essential form.
As envy or seeking to make others envious is a critical driver of the problems that we already face, no supplier should only be able to focus solely on the production or supply of luxurious goods or services, if indeed an essential form of those goods or services exists.
The provision of essential goods and services that are accessible to everyone must always come first.
As I begin to write this chapter, I am chuckling at the thought of those who read this and will immediately conclude that I am advocating nothing less than a fully legitimised nanny state.
After all, if you are telling people what foods, goods and services are deemed essential to live, you are by the very act of doing so, telling them that they live frivolous lives, aren’t you?
Well, in some respects yes. But very few would be able to look you in the eye and not acknowledge that fact that we should always prioritise what everyone needs before what an individual wants if you were to put them on the spot and ask.
The point is not about bringing anyone down to a poorer person’s level. We would all like to have the best of everything that is readily available.
It is about creating a benchmark level for what our society accepts that it takes to live and function self-sufficiently in the most basic way(s) that are possible.
Be under no illusion that the Basic Living Standard and UBW are benchmarks for life that we would all very quickly want to have in place and available to us personally as a safety net, if and when we should for any reason find ourselves down on our luck.
The process of everything changing around us that is now underway will lead to what some will recognise as a wartime economy – whether or not we have by that stage become involved in any larger conflict that has been set off as a result of the response to the Invasion of Ukraine.
The availability of food and goods and the prices of those foods and goods that are available to us in anything like the way that we are used to will diminish and this will quickly lead to empty shelves. Shelves that will not be replenished with the same products that they previously held.
The twist to the evolution of this situation is that it will in effect recreate ground zero for the provision of what we actually need to live. Rather than what we believe that we need to obtain in order to maintain the type of lifestyle that we believe that we are entitled to.
Whether it is food, water, waste care, communication, clothing, housing, transport or anything else, circumstances – that have been created by the long-term mismanagement of life by politicians and influencers with vested interests – will create the experience that will demonstrate what is actually important for anyone to have available to them as a basic standard.
This real-time demonstration will prove to be a genuine reminder to everyone of what people really need available to them to be able to function and exist at a time when they are down on their luck.
This demonstration will show us what everyone needs to be able to have as a basic requirement to live and will illustrate in a very practical way just what anyone should be able to buy or pay for without debt, support or subsidy, on a basic full-time wage.
What will in effect be a return to rationing will indeed have a significant silver ling in terms of the process of Levelling Level.
The outcome of Levelling Level will only be achievable because the majority of people will have no choice but to experience the basic hardship that is now inevitable, before they will understand, accept and then embrace the change that will ultimately benefit everyone fairly and in a very balanced way.
The days of unnecessary food production and manufacturing, prioritised only on the basis of repeat financial turnover and profit-making are done – even if that doesn’t appear to be the case right now.
As we experienced being the case in the early days and weeks after the first Covid Lockdown was called in March 2020, foods and goods such as flour, some vegetables, some fruits and toilet rolls are likely to be in short supply. The reality is that they will be the first of a growing and ultimately extensive list.
The rationing that will quickly become a necessity, will also be a sign of things to come. Our industries, production and manufacturing will have to be redeveloped and reestablished to support UK self-sufficiency in its most comprehensive and practical form.
Yes, rationing sounds horrible to anyone who has never been without or has never known what it is like to not be able to eat a meal, because the food that they need is something that they cannot afford.
Yet there are real people – possibly people that you or I pass in the street each and every day, who are already living what to you might see your own worst nightmare AND they are forced by the way that the system = works now to make the best of it. They literally have no choice but to accept it and do whatever the world requires of them to at least try and get by.
The silver lining of the situation that we all face, where the foods, goods and services that are essential to daily life will be rationed at least temporarily for all of us, is that it will provide us all with a real-life understanding of what we and therefore everyone needs as a basic standard in order to ‘just get by’.
This level, or the accumulation of the different basic foods, essential goods and services that an adult needs to be able to obtain in order to survive and maintain their exitance, is the benchmark level to which a basic full-time or weekly wage should thereafter correspond and then be maintained, once the Great Correction is complete.
Whilst we will discuss the need for UK self-sufficiency elsewhere, circumstances that will demand that we are limited only to what is available and what we genuinely need, will encourage those of us with access to gardens, allotments and even window boxes, to start growing our own food.
Real localism is set to take off (and return) in a way that we have never known before, and whilst the way that commercial farming will have to be refocused to provide foods in the most efficient and cost-effective way possible ‘from farm to fork’, the new localised marketplace and economy will provide opportunities for everyone to sell or exchange foods and goods that they have grown and produced.
Greedy influencers hate price controls, because they effectively tell them how much they can earn.
Indeed, it would be rare for anyone who reacts with stories of how everything goes wrong when prices are controlled or set by a government, to acknowledge the impact on end users and just about everyone that sits within or at the end of a supply chain, when prices are unrestricted, ethics have gone, and greed is in control.
During the period of change that lies ahead, price controls and rationing will be necessary too.
However, once we emerge on the other side, it will only be the factors that influence prices that will need to be controlled by legislators – as it is their responsibility to do – and not the prices of the goods themselves that will directly need to be controlled.
The point we shouldn’t miss is that a Financial and Systemic collapse of the kind where everything we know changes, will result in everyone having to share what is available. Access will not be based on what anyone can or cannot afford.
The coming changes will necessitate not only restrictions on what we have available to eat and to use, but in some cases will remove access to them altogether.
The experience will enable everyone to understand the difference between what we need and what we want. It will define what each of us needs as being what each of us should be able to afford.
The collapse around us will precipitate changes, not only to what is available to us, but also what we should no longer think of as goods and services that ‘we need’ – and which we actually just ‘want’.
We do not need the wide range, nor the wide variety of foods that are available to us today, in order to survive.
In fact, the majority, if not all of the food that any of us require to have a very healthy and nutritious diet, can be produced, provided, or is already available to us all from not only within the UK, but in all likelihood from within the local areas around our homes.
The prospect of a ‘meat and two veg’ kind of lifestyle may sound abhorrent to many. But if you are hungry and have very little of anything, a good meal of anything will make you happy – if it is something that you can afford to buy and to prepare.
The thing that will surprise many, is that the issues we face with obesity, food allergies or food intolerances and the rise in many of the illnesses that people suffer as they go through life, are all related to the foods we eat and the way that we eat them. We have been actively encouraged to move away from very simple and straightforward foods, to highly processed versions that rely on many additional ingredients and that often involve massive supply chains in some way.
If food is grown or produced locally, and then only preparation which is strictly necessary is carried out locally too, the need for packaging, preservatives and further processing is VERY limited indeed.
We may not be living in a time where life can be put in a time machine and literally transported back to when we had a butcher, fishmonger, baker, saddler, blacksmith or any other specialist provider of the basic goods or services we need, located in shops or premises around the village green or in the Town Marketplace. But the reality of what we actually need AND what will be good for us all, will be a result that in 21st Century Terms, ends up being practically the same.
As quickly as possible and in order to alleviate the unnecessary pain that will come from delays, we need to refocus the priorities of food production to the shortest journey and shortest time possible ‘from farm to fork’.
Where possible, farms and farmers should be encouraged and supported to become able to make the foods and goods they produce available at either their own gate, or to work closely and collaboratively with other local producers and retailers through localised cooperative systems to ensure that any necessary supply chain is a local as it can be.
The technology and understanding exists for all ancillary services such as abattoirs and such like to exist at the highest standards possible on a much smaller and much more localised scale than ever before, and it is here that the real support for UK Farmers, Growers and the Fishing Industry from government and our communities should now be.
Contrary to current Housing Policy and the obsession that the political classes today have with building new homes as being the answer to solve all ills, we do not actually need to be building new homes of either the kind, or of the number that we have been or that we have been told that we need to be building.
The only reason that the obsession with new housebuilding exists is because our politicians are not prepared to manage existing housing in a better and fairer way, based on the reality that nobody needs or requires more than one home in order to live or exist.
As part of the whole process of restoring values and creating a system that achieves Levelling Level so that life for all is where it should actually be, we must recognise that homes are essential for all.
The provision of homes is therefore and should never be the basis upon which massive profit-making industries should be able or allowed to exist.
When we value what we really have, and value the important things in life, we do not need additional homes in the country, by the sea or in places around the world – wherever they may be.
Just because some of us can afford second homes and in many cases pay more than they are actually worth to buy and maintain them, it doesn’t necessarily follow that it is right to do so.
In these circumstances, it is the unnecessary use of the advantage we have that disadvantages others. This is what is leading and enabling others to create a push for housebuilding and a whole set of avoidable circumstances that makes those who need housing they can afford, easy to exploit.
Taxation can and must be used as an effective tool to immediately make better and more effective use of the housing stock across the UK that we already have.
It is not a question of taking from those that have and giving it to those who don’t. It is just a question of ensuring that excessive and unnecessary ownership is priced out of fashion, so that lives are not being disturbed or even ruined on the basis of what is no more than a whim.
We have become culturally obsessed with the idea that homes are something that we need to own.
We don’t.
We should all have the opportunity to rent homes affordably.
But as homes are essential to our Basic Living Standard, home rental should only be available through not-for-profit and ideally community-owned providers, with there being no opportunity for any form of profit to be made from the transaction being involved.
The age when every member of any household owned and ran a car is over. Inflationary price changes are telling you this right now, even if you don’t want to think about it yet.
We do not need to travel in the ways that we have been doing so.
It is extremely costly for us both personally and for the world to be travelling around as we have been.
As it is only large corporate interests that now really profit from our being able to do so – whether it’s through the provision of fuel, energy, roads, cars, insurance or anything else associated with their purchase, running or maintenance, the need for personal transport that may have existed at one point no longer exists.
It is inevitable that our perceived reliance and love affair with having our own car must stop.
The way forward for us all – where any kind of longer journey is required – is to focus on better, more efficient and more reliable public transport – that MUST be in public or rather community hands.
Where transport by car (or small commercial vehicle) is the only sensible way to undertake a journey, because of the destination, purpose or time of the day, we should be using shared environmentally friendly vehicles through community lending or carpooling rather than commercial rental services, so that any profit-making element is removed from the provision of transport services that must be available to us all.
Community lending should extend to the loan or non-profit rental of electric bikes too.
The most effective way for every community to go forward would be for parish & town councils or their equivalent in local areas, to own and manage their own personal transport hubs.
Petrol and Diesel will only remain essential for personal use as long as we maintain the unnecessary use of cars that run on these fuels.
As we reduce the number of cars that households own, the practical need or requirement for the use of fossil fuels for vehicles that cannot be used efficiently or reliably using emerging technologies – such as buses, trains, agricultural vehicles, heavy goods and delivery vehicles, will quickly become a lot more sustainable than it currently is.
Perhaps one of the most challenging areas covering basic needs provision will be that of the supply of affordable shoes and clothing.
If there is one area of industry that has been outsourced to other Countries more than any other, it will surely be the production of clothes and shoes.
Whilst many today look scornfully at shops such as Sports Direct, the reality is that retailers of this type are today providing goods at a price that keep people on low incomes clothed.
The irony is that whilst cheap and cheerful, the price reflects the quality of the materials and the manufacturing. It is not uncommon for such items to require regular replacement and over time, for the customer to have paid out much more on multiple purchases of the same items at a lower cost, than it would have done over the same period IF they had been able to afford a better-quality version of the same thing.
Whilst cotton will always be imported to the UK as a raw material, wool and other materials are not. There will be a need to redevelop the British Textiles industry with a primary focus on the materials that we have readily available from our own production, or which can be supplied without significant reliance on international supply chains from our traditional trading partners.
Fashion is of course a commercially driven concept that promotes the perception that it is important to obtain and use the latest versions of goods. We buy fashion that we envy in the possession of others or buy it to make others envious of us.
Buying clothes purely for the purpose of how they look is not a sustainable practice. The types of clothing that have made fashion possible in the very extensive way that it has reached will not be available to the few who may be able to afford it, without compromising the requirement to always address everyone’s needs too.
Rationing of the materials to make clothing is a clear possibility. Just as our forebears did during the Second World War, we are going to have to embrace a culture of Make do and Mend, where we are literally making the best of the clothing that we already possess through repair, reuse and recycling, enjoying the prospect of upcycling as we do.
For those occasions when a special outfit is required, we will need to develop clothing libraries, lending or rental services that work to support the cultural shift to making the very best use of everything that everyone has already got.
The need for basic entertainment for anyone can be met without the need for any paid-for streaming services, visits to the cinema, ticketed gigs or any other form of live entertainment that attracts heavy one-off gate fees.
The only recognisable need to maintain a basic standard in access to entertainment for anyone will be the provision of broadband quality internet services, along with the minimum amount of appropriate equipment to view and access it.
Communication is changing and evolving all the time. It is the one service that has bucked the trend in terms of price explosion and in order to ensure that the new localised and community driven world can function adequately for all, it is essential that everyone has access to a universal basic package.
As discussed earlier, public services have become a political football and plaything for politicians, public sector workers and those with a financial interest in them alike.
Man cannot have two masters, just as you cannot put two saddles on the same horse. Services that are provided for the benefit of the public must have the benefit to the public as their primary aim and their overriding priority. As soon as private interests are involved, profit is the master, so public services must always be in public or community hands.
In order for everyone to have unfettered, affordable and reliable access to services that should be accessible in the same way for everyone, no matter where they live, it is essential that certain public services that are currently ‘owned’ and managed by ‘private’ and therefore ‘profit making’ interests are returned to public – or rather community hands.
The caveat is that legislation enabling unions to influence working practices at any level within public services of any kind must be rescinded.
Any responsibility for complaints relating to public sector employment practices not covered elsewhere by the Levelling Level proposal must be addressed by a third-party body, that cannot influence day-to-day operations and public service provision in any way.
The entire utility infrastructure must be returned to public and preferably community hands. So that issues such as repairs and the impact that they have on other areas of life are managed in a far more thoughtful, responsive, localised and therefore intelligent way.
The rail network must be fully returned to public or community led operating companies, holding responsibility for all activities on the most localised basis possible.
Each local County level authority should become a bus operator, ensuring that service coverage is universally provided by a system that allows equal basic access to everyone, whether they live in a city, town or village location.
Parish and town councils (or their equivalent) should be supported to establish community bike and carpool hubs, providing access to those of us who have a legitimate requirement to access personal transport.
They must, on behalf of the local community, be able to set by-laws which govern their access and use.
Many of the foods, goods and services some currently see as being essential are in fact luxuries that we do not need.
They would not be essential to any of us, even if and when we can easily afford to pay for them.
These non-essential foods, goods and services must be recognised and defined as being the luxuries and lifestyle choice that they are, as part of the process of identifying what people need, as opposed to being the things that people simply want.
Likely to be the most controversial part of Levelling Level, the following list that covers the food, goods and services that we actually need, will look and sound alien to many reading the contents right now.
However, what we need and what we want or believe that we should have are two very different things.
This list outlines what we need as a basic standard for ourselves, and therefore what we should recognise as the benchmark level for anyone else to be able to provide for themselves without going into debt or without the requirement of support of any kind – when they are able to live and function with a normal life.
In reality, people need no more than two (2x) meals per day.
Clean eating may have become a recent fad. But clean eating is also prescient and a precursor of what necessarily lies ahead.
Contrary to what all the commercial and big money interests will keep telling us for as long as they can, we do not need rich, heavily processed foods in our diets. In fact, it would be much better for our own health if we did not.
A healthy adult requires no more than two (2x) meals per day. These should consist of basic foods of an origin that is as a rule, identifiable once prepared from its original form – i.e. you can see that a meal is made up of fish, meat, potatoes, carrots, greens or whatever, with only light-touch (manual or traditionally-based) production methods being used to provide ancillary foods such as butter, cheese and bread, which will clearly look different to what it would to in its original form.
The basic standard for any accommodation would be that its warm, dry, safe, secure, accessible to local amenities and public transport links (or appropriate alternatives), with an environment that facilitates and allows healthy living and provides appropriate space and facilities for the number of people who are permanent residents within the household.
The basic standard for transport would be access to regular public transport services that will not place restrictions on accessing employment during normal working hours, with access to electric bike hire from 14 years and to community carpools as appropriate.
The basic standard for personal clothing provision would be to be able to maintain 2/3 sets of clothing for general use. To have 1 set of all-weather clothing and to have 1 set of clothing for special events.
Beyond this, all communities should have their own lending library or service for clothes.
The basic standard for personal healthcare will be for any person to have access to a minimum of two different healthcare providers (either public run service and/or commercially provided under fixed per head premium), that everyone is required to pay their contribution towards at their source of income.
The basic standard for personal healthcare would necessitate that dentistry is provided in the same way as general healthcare.
The basic standard of utility provision for each person would be electricity to provide light and power for all basic requirements and no more. Gas for basic heating and cooking requirements and no more. Water for basic consumption and hygiene requirements and no more:
The basic standard for communication requirements would be to have unrestricted access to broadband quality internet provision. To have one (1x) computer or combined PC/TV device that can be used to complete personal administration, shop online, access job applications and free to view TV/News Services/Digital Radio/social media.
As a basic standard, everyone should have access to a community sports hub within a short distance of home, where the widest range of different sports clubs should be available for that location.
Everyone should have unlimited access to free to view TV and Digital Radio.
As the basic standard, everyone should have access to a basic non-contributory pension scheme (Employer administered when working), paid into the community ‘pot’
Hopefully, by now, you will understand that one of the underlying messages about Levelling Level is that you and I are as important as each other. It’s the way we think that gets in the way.
Earlier, within the chapters where we discussed the Left-wing approach of levelling down, we covered the problems with today’s education system and where the myth of intellectual genericism has resulted in nothing but loss, the lowering of standards and yes – the removal of opportunities for some of those that need them the most, resulting in a net downward spiral for all.
So here comes one of those highly controversial moments. Yes, I am going to say that we really need to embrace and make the very best of the differences in the way that we learn – just as we did without really thinking about it in the past.
People really are either heads or hands. I.e., people are either more academic or they are more practical in the way that they learn.
Whereas the current Education System is skewed to academic attainment and learning – even in what we are told are its vocational qualifications – we must return and redevelop a genuine twin or parallel educational pathway with an academic route and a genuinely vocational route for learning and attainment that begins at the age of 14.
One of the things that the Left-wing takeover of education since they began the attack on Grammar Schools has resulted in, has been the growing assumption that the educational basics (language and arithmetic) just arrive for everyone at the same time. That life skills are only something that poor learners (the more practical) or those with special education needs should be given focused time for – as everyone who is ‘able’ just picks these things up as they go along.
Sadly, they don’t.
We have arrived at a point where the idea that everyone can have a degree has reached a critical fork in the road where graduates – yes, that’s young people who have already gained a degree – don’t have the basics. They are, as such, therefore not fit for work.
Pre-14 education has simply become too diversified for it to treat everyone fairly and in a wholly balanced way.
There needs to be a shift back to ensuring that every young person achieves an acceptable level of fluency in English and Math’s – but more importantly a basic understanding of how life works and how they can function effectively in the world of today by being taught real life skills such as critical thinking, so that everyone can support themselves adequately in the 21st Century UK.
Whilst we may no longer be experiencing a time when a young person can or should be indentured in the way that an apprentice blacksmith, saddler, farrier, wheelwright or cabinet maker once would have been, the reality is that history has a lot of good things to teach us about the way that our system of education can and should now operate.
No, these trade crafts may not reflect the opportunities en masse that are available in the modern age.
Yes, the industries we have today may look and sound very different. But if we have brought the priorities of why businesses exist back to providing for life for all and away from providing profit for the few, we will soon find ourselves with genuine opportunities to create a parallel vocational apprenticeship pathway alongside the academic route from the ages of 14 to 21, that will be good for the apprentice, good for business and good for the wider community and the UK too.
A seven-year apprenticeship would allow young people of a practical orientation to literally learn their skills – with light touch support from tertiary or technical colleges, whilst their training could easily involve additional training such as driving licenses and industry standard qualifications. All the time providing a low-cost source of basic labour for industries in return.
At the age of 21, the parallel pathways would both end at the same time. And whilst degrees would have had their real value in the eyes of industry restored, there would also be an equivalent pool of candidates who were just as valuable, but qualified differently, with skills and experience that could only come through the process of being ‘time served’.
Sold as beneficial, because it makes everything we want ‘cheap’ to buy, ‘globalisation’ and the ‘global economy’ have always been a myth that only appeared to work out well for us because that was what we were being told by the people and companies that benefitted from us all believing so.
As the impact of employment and working rights created and pursued by the Left have hit harder and harder and impacted further and further on company bottom lines, closely followed by the piles of red tape that went into a different league when EU Membership became involved, many companies made the commercial choice to begin buying or producing goods of their own in Countries, and therefore environments, that provided conditions which were much more conducive to growing and extending profit margins.
Focused only on what the things we buy actually cost us, the only people to notice this massive industrial shift were those of us directly touched by the change. And in this case, it was always local British workers who immediately felt that pain.
No longer able to exploit British workers in the way that they wanted to do so, there was effectively a cheaper option to do so abroad. But what we were not told about this move was that the obsession with the bottom line that drove this change also meant that the companies would be exploiting much lower paid workers who this time didn’t – and in many cases still don’t have a voice.
It was a double whammy. Because the savings and benefits from paying ridiculously low wages that in some cases even offset the need to invest in newer cleaner technologies, was also consolidated by the reality that many of the countries that these companies had moved operations to, simply had few or no considerations on the impact on the environment that these industrial processes involved.
So, as the Left have steadily driven us to become obsessive about rights that go way beyond anything that benefits anyone or any industry or sector at all, the real problems facing workers that they had successfully dealt with here in the UK long ago, were simply shipped abroad or even recreated for very poor people abroad, so that the money orientated could just keep on making their money at an increasing cost to us all.
All the time, the growing problems have been out of sight and out of mind.
Whilst we were told that the cost of everything would be lowered by Globalisation and the economies of scale that centralisation of the kind that naturally follows then presents, the reality of building a global economy was that it hasn’t been helpful to the UK or to any of us in any way.
Purchase prices have never really fallen. But the prices of production have. And it was this very small truth hidden within what has been a very big lie, that has created difference in the views of the benefits and disadvantages of globalisation, and what has made the perpetual myth work
The move to globalisation was never based on the reasoning that it was supposed to be. It was and still is only about profit and nothing more.
Yes, the driver was always the increase in profits for every company that played or that plays a role in the supply chains that are involved.
But the true cost of globalisation has been the loss of jobs, the loss of skills, the loss of training opportunities, the loss of businesses, the loss of communities, the loss of self-sufficiency, the impact on the environment, the impact on quality of life. And yes, the list goes on extensively to cover all of the impacts and consequences related to every part of that list which is involved.
Globalisation was seen to work because we have all been fed the story that it benefits our self-interest in some way.
Yet the only beneficiaries from the process of globalization were and always have been the people and corporate interests that have created, developed and directly profited from an unethical system that exploited everyone in some way – and that includes even those directly involved at every part of the chain.
Globalisation and the model of global business and supply chains that existed at the end of 2019 – before the Covid Pandemic hit us, no longer exists as it did then in functional or operational terms.
In the same way that our system of government and the political system that supposedly drives it has built itself by putting sticking plaster on top of sticking plaster when it comes to public policy and building it into the dysfunctional system that exists today, the way that industry and the global business system has been developed also been without thought for consequences or impact at even the closest degrees of separation.
What we have ended up with is a so-called global economy that is in fact a house of cards that has little in terms of foundations and is already on the verge of collapse in many different ways.
So obsessive has the motivation of greed for profit been, that those driving this way of doing business have come up with ever more creative ways to defy the practical realities of business and production.
These have included the development of ‘Just in Time’ methodologies and ‘Lean Manufacturing’, which are heralded as brilliant ways to manage profit driven commercial business. But pay very little heed to world events or what any kind of unforeseen circumstance might have in store.
The response of different governments around the world to the Covid Pandemic, quite literally brought many parts of the global supply chain to a halt.
The massive costs and margins of this ridiculously fragile system had been dependent on every part of it continuing to work endlessly – as it was always expected to do so – with only what we would consider to be the minimum of contingencies having been planned for.
So, when a worldwide virus that inept political leaders completely overreacted to and used fear to make populations think that it was much worse than it actually is became involved, the global supply chain was exposed in a way that was rather like the first of a squillion dominoes that had been set up to knock each other down being flicked.
And so has begun a process of destruction. Beginning slowly with those dominoes falling one by one.
Covid set off the power within a latent chain reaction that anyone who understood the fragility of the global system was waiting for.
The reason the global supply chain hasn’t just stopped overnight – which to be quite fair is exactly what many onlookers would naturally expect – is because those who have a vested interest in it are doing all that they can to try and rescue it in order to make it work.
For those invested in it, the invasion of Ukraine came along at what they believe to be a very fortuitous time.
In the Terence Trent D’arby (Sananda Maitreya) song ‘If you all get to Heaven’, sits the immortal line ‘Old men’s cigars puff up the wars to protect their fuck ups again’.
Whilst one of the alternative truths growing considerable traction in recent years has been that the United States has in effect created wars around the globe, simply so that the corporate interests that fund the politicians can keep profiting, the reality is that war has been used as a very costly distraction and as a way of taking attention away from the public, from what is really going on around us all at home.
As I write this in early 2022, Russia has just invaded Ukraine. It is already clear that Western Governments are going to use the crisis as a way to cover up the damage that they are responsible for. Prolonged mismanagement that has led to all the problems that we are facing now.
When people at the top have gained so much through a system that exists on the basis that it exploits the greater part of the population without them realising that they are being used, it is in the interests of those people at the top to ensure that the truth never comes out a) so that they don’t get blamed when it fails and b) so that no one will attempt to stop them doing all that they can to return the whole system to how it previously worked – even when they are too stupid to realise that it is now impossible to do.
Perhaps the biggest cost of globalisation that has never been factored into the equation (or more likely it has deliberately been left out), has been the issue of what happens when a Country becomes dependent upon supplies of goods or services that come from another Country, or Countries that may not always have interests that are mutually aligned or have like for like benefits with the UK at their heart.
The best example of where dependency can compromise the security of a country or of the interests of that country is very current and comes in the form of the dependency that Germany has on Russia for its supplies of natural gas.
During the Ukraine crisis (late February 2022), Western Countries excluded Russia from the SWIFT International Banking System as a punishment (also known as a sanction) for invading Ukraine. Yet Germany had a special dispensation to not do so, as it would not have been able to continue paying the Russians for gas supplies, if it had continued to be involved.
Whilst Germany was most compromised by becoming dependent upon Russia for energy supplies, the reality is that as a Country, the UK is far too dependent upon other Countries for the supply of essential goods and services too.
For as long as this situation exists, and for as long as we have politicians in control of the UK who either cannot or will not take tough decisions on energy supplies or the supply of anything that is essential to us as a matter of course, we will remain at risk of high-level compromise with countries that supply us and can therefore bribe us, as our security as a Nation will remain exposed.
Of all the myths created by those with an interest in building and maintaining an alternative narrative, the one that our changing world now requires us to completely rethink is our dependency upon any essential products or foods from anywhere abroad.
The UK possesses the basic resources and environment necessary to support and provide for all of our basic needs. We require very little and can make do without minimal ongoing input from supply chains that are not localised or our own – if that is, we really even need it at all.
We only believe that we have to continually have new things all of the time, because it has been in the interests of somebody else to create and propagate the myth that this is so.
Products of all kinds that we use daily or very often could and should last much longer than they do. In fact, they could even be repaired or renewed, if the companies that produce them didn’t have regular repeat sales – and therefore profits always first in their minds.
The process behind this is called Planned Obsolescence.
Planned Obsolescence is one of the most cynical, exploitative and unnecessary processes that industry and big business has ever designed. All with making money in mind. It’s not green or in any way environmentally friendly, and the knock-on effects over decades have been massive amounts of production that we didn’t need, that we have had to pay for and that has used inestimable levels of resources around the world, for no genuine cause.
I have not specifically focused on climate change, going green and the fallacious government policy they call ‘Net Zero’ itself for a reason.
That reason is that by addressing or embracing all of the changes that the Levelling Level process will require, many of the issues relating to the damage that our unsustainable way of living has been causing the environment will be addressed.
Yes, many changes lie ahead, and we will have to embrace new technologies and habits as they arrive. However, the changes to the way that we live and think that may not seem to be linked to green issues today play a much more significant part in the problem than it has been in vested interests to allow us to be aware of or to think about.
As we divorce ourselves from the system of old, the changes will buy us the time to take a much more realistic and practical approach to adopting any changes that are then left for the UK (and the World) to embrace.
If you want people to forget who they are, what they want or what they need, give them bread and circuses.
Surprisingly, these words have been around since Roman times. They reflect one of the key ways of thinking that cynical and poor leaders use to prevent people from revolting and engaging in civil unrest, when things are not going well or as they really should.
During the Covid Pandemic, we were repeatedly misled by the Johnson Government and its ‘nudge unit’, that used behavioural science, to play around with the basic fears that operate often at an unconscious level inside our heads.
By keeping everyone, or rather, the majority distracted from focusing on their own inability to lead, by keeping everyone focused on what we were being told was everyone’s duty to fight for everyone else’s life whilst putting our own lives on hold, they have so far managed to walk away from crippling the UK financially and destroying many people’s futures scot-free.
The programming that the government and the media use only works, because of the way that our society now works.
People don’t interact with others from an early age in the many different ways that they used to. So, when it comes to learning what’s real, what’s unreal, what makes sense, or what it’s in our best interests to do, unless we listen without question to family and the people who are close to us when we consider everything, the politicians and the media that support them have within all of us, an open book.
We learn the value of everything through what we consider ‘real experience’ to be. Life works best and most beneficially for all, when the interactions that we have with everyone and with everything have real meaning and have real value for all of those involved.
Over time, politicians and our system of government haver worked progressively to take the power and influence that we had or should have further and further away from us, so that the social learning and opportunity to understand other people and different people in our neighbourhoods and communities are longer available to us as they once were.
This ‘progression’ has meant that decisions are always made from the top looking down. Often at great distance and in a way that helps those same vested interests to get away with doing all the things that they do, without ever having to see or experience the end results which by now you will be beginning to understand are always painful for us.
Another area of life today that must change so that we can achieve a workable Basic Living Standard for all, is our relationship with charity giving, how we pay for services in the community, and how we all give back or contribute in a way that gives us ownership or a stake in the success of the society that functions around us.
The fairest, most sensible way to achieve both a buy-in for us personally and a pay-off with impact on the world around us that we can actually see, will be for us all to give the community 10% of our working time or income – or the equivalent of one-half day working per week.
Most of us could use the specialist skills and experience that we have to offer three and a half hours of massive impact and contribution, or just volunteer to support charities and public organisations with whatever help they may need where we cannot.
Alternatively, if we believe that it would be more helpful to do so, we could donate 10% of our income too.
By providing such help and support, through a new local community services hub which is linked to the revamped and localised system of governance, we will easily reduce the cost of the local public services that we still actually need, reduce the reliance on ‘professional’ government staff, and all be able to play a part in improving the experience that we all have of our local environment, which will help us all to regain a healthy amount of pride.
As you read through this book, you are increasingly likely to see that there is a vein of commonalty running through many of the issues or policies that Levelling Level looks to unpick.
That commonality is the mechanics of a top-down, or centralised structure.
We have been conditioned historically to give what is an assumed deference to anyone who we consider to be in a position of influence or power.
No matter how ridiculous the people we find ourselves showing that deference to may seem be, the fact that they are in those positions of influence or power, somehow and for some reason unknown makes us willfully blind to quite how stupid such people can be. It certainly obscures the reality that underpins how self-serving and focused upon themselves they actually are.
Yes, we have had some great leaders and great people in positions of influence across society in the past.
But as time has gone on, more and more have them have been all about themselves. It naturally follows that when you have that many insecure people with power who simply shouldn’t have it, they will work together to consolidate that position and stay exactly where they are.
The easiest way to consolidate the power that poor leaders have when they are the top, is to bring more and more of that power towards the centre and to them – or what is in reality the top. They deliberately take it away from the people who they condescendingly believe aren’t equipped to handle that responsibility properly, but in reality, they see it as a distinct threat to their power, their control and to themselves.
Top-down or centralised hierarchies depend on everyone other than those who benefit from the structures not being interested in the real detail of what is going on. They thrive when we aren’t asking the right questions about who really are the main beneficiaries of the process that is unfolding round us.
We quite literally have a rather dangerous habit of simply accepting that the changes around us are actually needed, and that they will be beneficial or work better for us all.
The best example is that of how we are all being manipulated into thinking that power is being given back to us when it isn’t, is through the creation of Metropolitan and Regional Mayors.
In reality, the levels of government already exist where the decisions that these very political roles will be gifted with should in fact be taken. That is what parish and town councils, borough and district councils, and what county councils are already there for.
The big budgets will always be controlled from above, and the function of these unnecessary roles relies on sucking power and influence away from the lowest tiers of government, where the most risk to politicians from being exposed to real democracy is involved.
More layers of government mean more layers of insulation to protect those at the top.
You may have seen how messages get changed if an instruction or information is given to one person, and then passed on to another who didn’t hear the first conversation, with the process then being repeated several times.
The way that a multilayered system of government works when it is as highly politicised as the structure of government in the UK now is, means that it is incredibly easy for the real purpose or intent of overarching public policy to become confused – not always intentionally, but through stupidity – with something that will actually work, once it is implemented at the bottom of what in some cases can be a long and convoluted chain.
Rest assured that if those at the top are being insulated from risk to themselves and their positions by how messages can be obscured on their way down, whilst being taken up passionately by those who believe they are doing their job, the reality is that the information and feedback that should be informing public policy and really making a difference through public structures that comes from the bottom, is certainly not reaching the top, or being taken seriously on the rare occasion that it does.
Government is a complicated business. But it has become far more complicated than it should be, and that is because it suits the needs and purposes for those involved, and specifically so at the top.
What they don’t tell you is just how much of that complication isn’t really needed, and what the cost of that complication really is.
The only argument that gives any legitimacy to the operational structure of government and the public sector that we have today is the cost and keeping the cost as low as it can be every day.
Obsessed with money as we now are, our collective viewpoint plays straight into the unworthy politicians’ hands. As we allow that obsession to make us focus on the cost of public service provision, rather than the quality of it, or in many regrettable cases whether it doesn’t even need to exist – if we don’t actually use that service ourselves.
Contrary to what our political masters would like us all to believe, we do not have people leading us from London who have a better understanding of how life works, or how we see, experience and feel about the lives that we live.
Yet the way that government works and the way that the public services and structures that support our lives operate, would suggest that people not only in London, but in a range of different public sector organisations do actually know better than we do when it comes to everything that we deal with and face each and every day.
Whilst there will always be decisions that not only need to be but also must be made at the relative collective level – for example, our National Defence, the reality is that far more of the decisions that affect our daily lives are made further away from us than they either should, or actually need to be.
Defence is of course a subject that we hope to never have to think about, and it is certainly not one that we expect to face in daily life (unless of course we are employed by or within the military, or there is a base of some kind located close to where we live)
And this is very much the point. It is only decisions that don’t touch us – or more importantly any of those like us – at the relevant level of our community or what it is we have in common – that should rest in the hands of anyone beyond.
There are always going to be sensible exceptions to every rule. When it comes to governance, we should always strive for unity, cooperation and collaboration when it comes to working together with others to achieve mutual aims – even to the degree that we might work globally to deliver help or outcomes that will be of benefit to the entire world.
What there is no need to do, and what we should never do, is accept that such unity is dependent upon the surrender of control.
We cannot all be politicians. In fact, very few of us would even want to be politicians. But that doesn’t mean they shouldn’t be accessible to us, especially when they are making the decision on our behalf that affects us all.
We all have an equal stake in society. In our communities. In our Country at large.
Contrary to what those who benefit from us thinking otherwise may believe, money, wealth and power do not make anyone more worthy than anyone else, and they certainly should not have access to more power or control.
The argument that we can no longer have free access to top politicians because it is not safe for them, underpins the reality that power has now been focused and concentrated too far away from us and towards too few for the decisions that affect us every day to make any real sense to those who are supposed to be solving our problems.
When decisions that have meaning in our life are taken by people we can access and talk to, we feel and have a much greater sense of responsibility and of being in control. Yes, there will always be exceptions, and there will always be people at every level of government or who have responsibility who will be intoxicated by any power and influence that they have got.
But by bringing every decision back to the level of community or the relevant level where people and businesses can actually see and feel their influence at work or see the real-life stories and experience that give them the opportunity to learn and think differently, society will work better for us all.
We quite literally need to look at every part of government and what the public sector does, and rethink who should be making the decisions about how they function and what they do, based on the who, the why, the what, and with only the delivery itself becoming an issue of cost.
The technology now exists to ensure that even if operational delivery is implemented at a broader level or by a service delivery organisation of some kind, the decisions about that delivery can now be taken as locally as it is possible for them to be.
With so much that needs to be corrected and changed for the better, it may seem a little trivial to go full circle back to the issue of how politics works, where Levelling Level first began.
However, we are in the mess that we are in, and we are faced with the huge challenge of addressing that mess, because we have had the wrong people in politics for such a long time.
We have touched on the reasons for this issue in different places throughout this book, but the problems that poor leaders create for the rest of us will not be solved and will just be changed or transformed into a different form of those problems, for as long as we don’t set values-based rules or boundaries around the quality and ability of the people that we choose to elect.
Like everything else today, too many politicians are recruited by the existing political parties based on how their candidacy will look. The majority don’t have the life skills or experience to make decisions that will have an effect on other people’s lives, and even those who could offer something useful don’t have the conviction and confidence to stand up to a system that rejects or ejects those who do not conform.
Politics or rather public representation is NOT a job. Despite having a system or accepted career pathway for wannabes who have decided they will be Prime Minister when they are children and then do degrees and early career jobs that line them up as perfect tick-box candidates for the existing political parties, public representation or being an MP is NOT a career too.
We have fallen into the trap of thinking that things like popularity, the ability to speak or argue in public and being able to stay on message are the attributes that make a politician good.
But they are not good for anyone, when the key attribute of a good politician is having a real understanding and appreciation of how life works for different people in very different circumstances, and what strategy looks and feels like for others, when it is implemented and then put to work.
If our political system is to be healthy and work on behalf of us all, rather than be maintained by people who are only out for themselves, we must only elect people who see the role of being a public representative as a vocation or calling based on rich and meaningful life experience, and not on personal agendas in any form.
The often-unrecognised strand and dynamic of top-down politics is the reality that the people we currently have at the top are usually at the end of their career (or beyond), and that those even in the lower stages of this perverse hierarchy are themselves in or approaching middle age.
Yes, there are exceptions as there are in anything. But when you have a system that maintains itself and functions by using the same thinking continuously – and that thinking reflects only the selfish wants and needs and outlooks of the older people who are at the top, it stands to reason that there is a massive gap not only in policy, but also within the messaging that makes sense to or can be identified with by the young.
The issue of life experience and the impractical idealism of the young will always run contrary to policies and practical solutions that consider everything and work as they should for all. But that doesn’t mean that the outcomes and aims that Younger People have in mind shouldn’t be heard, or indeed incorporated into wider policies that reflect practical reality and therefore become solutions that can and do actually work.
Just as power must be restored to the level of government and decision making that is most relevant to the collective voice, Young People must be considered within that process too, with youth or young people’s councils meeting as part of and feeding into each tier of government and being used as an effective tool to influence and inform.
Whilst I have made a big thing of the need to both regulate and monitor the ethical conduct of any industry or service that provides any goods, services or has an influence on the factors which are essential to a Basic Living Standard, we must in general terms step back from the culture of having laws for laws sake.
A basic framework for everyone’s conduct is of course essential. But the laws and regulations that do exist must only be there because they are essential for good order and good conduct to exist. Not because weak minded leaders are attempting to control.
People must be treated as the adults that they actually are. People must be allowed to live freely and able to exercise common sense in as many areas of their lives as possible.
The principle that we should all be guided by is that:
We should always be free to exist, to do, be and think as we may want, provided that our actions and influence do not impinge on the right of any other person to be exactly the same.
One area of public service that could easily become a book all of its own is the future and direction of the Law Courts across the UK, whether they are dealing with Criminal, Civil or Family Matters.
Both the judiciary and the legal profession have been overtaken by self-interest.
In terms of the judiciary and of magistrates there has been massive blurring of the lines between what standing law actually is, and what they themselves want to see – or feel influenced to allow for there to be, depending upon their own innate prejudices or the fear that currently comes from the culture of group think or the populist voice of what they see as being the relevant crowd.
In terms of the legal profession, the desire and aim of providing the best service possible based on the understanding and knowledge of law that the lawyer, solicitor or barrister has to ensure the least pain possible to the client, has been superseded by the desire to provide the most expensive service over the longest time possible, without any consideration for the qualitative impact that unnecessary, emotive and highly polarising human misery that court cases cause.
In recent years there have been steps to temper the direction of this evolution by the introduction of mediation as a step-requirement in the case of family law, but its success has and will always be dependent upon the commitment and motivation of the primary counsels or solicitors within the process, and so it has been doomed never to reach the height of its potential and do the good that it can for any civil or family law process, for as long as the prioritisation of the bottom line continues to exist.
For a fair and just society to work in a balanced way – as it should – for all, it is essential that we have a healthy and robust court system, supported by a legal profession, which facilities an unquestionably impartial decision-making process and a legal advice system that always puts the interests of the client – and not the bottom line – first.
Such change will be greatly supported by the removal of laws for laws sake, as the Levelling Level approach provides, but it is nonetheless essential that the whole legal system them operates without self-interest of any kind, and that once fixed, it is fully funded as locally as possible, so that it can function as expeditiously as it can in every way.
Good Policing exists when you are surprised to see a Police Officer, or you don’t have reason to regularly have them in your day-to-day thoughts.
Clearly, I am not talking about what we see or hear on our news streams every day or each night. But the reality is that we have lost confidence in the police, and like the courts and legal profession we have already discussed, we now have good reason to doubt the impartiality and motivation of the decisions that police officers make.
The responsibility is not one that falls on the shoulders of police officers themselves.
The Police are only carrying out and following the instructions that they have been given by our broken political leadership after all.
The responsibility for the problem lies squarely at the feet of politicians, who have instigated and forced targets on a public service to measure the success of the Police, when that success should be defined only when there is nothing to measure at all.
A Police Officer or Police Constable should have the ability, responsibility and power to act using their common sense with the law itself offering the only framework that they use as a management tool.
The processes that have been added to uphold the rights of people who have at the very least temporarily surrendered their right to enjoy the full rights to which any member of society who doesn’t infringe the rights of others should enjoy, have made the laws which govern our response to and the punishment of criminal behavior nothing more than a joke for real criminals. Meanwhile they have cast a very dark shadow for those who have been caught up in very little and instead of losing massively, should have just been told off and then sent home.
Like the many who are practical in their awareness of life and their approach, good Police officers do not need degrees to understand and enforce the law efficiently and very well. They just need a lot of common sense and the moral grounding in any situation to discern what’s wrong or right.
The fear of the controlling few that others cannot be trusted to do such a responsible job without rules that account for every thought and for every action, is reflective of how sclerotic and neurotic our whole society has become.
The Police need the freedom to do their jobs. So that people respect the law again and then fear the sight of a Police Officer, as it was before all the political correctness began.
As with the case of taxation, the benefits system in the UK is far more complicated than it either needs to be or should be.
Yes, we should certainly have a system available to support those who cannot work, or for whatever reason cannot genuinely get a job that they are experienced or able to do.
What a benefits system should never do however, is just to provide an alternative way of living, or a way of living that is in effect a lifestyle choice for those who see it as an option.
With The Basic Living Standard functioning and in place, work and the self-sufficiency that goes with it will make the benefits and welfare bubble a very different place to exist.
Those who are there and need benefits of any kind must be supported and supported to the level of the Basic Living Standard. But that support must be given on the terms of wider society and not on the terms which makes that dependency feel like an attractive choice.
The only obligation of wider society to those who are in need of support, is for them to be able to maintain a basic lifestyle during their period of need to Basic Living Standard Terms – with the support being given, being itself the only obvious difference.
By making all payments or rather the equivalent of payments using a smart card, or a bank card from the Community Bank that we will move on to cover next, the community can ensure that support is being spent and used as it was intended, and support to cover costs for anything other than items such as food – which even when rationed are a personal choice – should always be paid direct to the supplier, removing the risk of debt that will limit peoples next steps, at a time they are most vulnerable.
Nobody needs anything other than the essentials for living when they are in real need.
If anyone down on their luck has a problem with not being able to eat at McDonalds and having to buy the essential goods that they need, rather than what they want, the chances are that they are taking help and support from others as a lifestyle choice, and not because they are in genuine need.
The additional benefit to the wider community using smart card technology is that a supplier list can be defined that ensures card users make purchases from local businesses. This will ensure that money from the community is used within the community and therefore supports the community at large.
Whilst we have a ‘Bank of England’, its role as a so-called central bank is a long way from where it could or should be.
The fact that banking in the UK is completely in private hands means that there are no public-centric influences at work across the range of financial services that are essential to life. There are no rules, guidelines or working examples that provide a benchmark in terms of either ethics or fairness and demonstrate to commercial finance houses and banks how financial ‘products’ should actually be.
It is essential that a new ‘Community Banking System’ is created that reflects the genuine and service-based needs of personal banking and small business banking needs – with the need for real start-up and development lending for what is the engine room of UK industry too.
In recent years, the digitisation of money and financial transactions and the reducing reliance on cash, coupled with the obsession with profits rather than customer service, has seen many retail bank premises close.
This process – yet another example of the top-down, profit-before-people approach, must be reversed. It must be replaced with a system that clearly focuses on genuine support for the customer and their financial needs first (service first, profit is the happy consequence)
The UK (government) already owns significant shareholdings in banks that were bailed out (wrongly) around the time of the Great Financial Crisis of 2008. The remaining shareholding of one of these could easily be bought up by the government on our behalf, and then re-tasked for the purpose of being the Community Bank.
Alternatively, a new Community Bank could be established and started from scratch.
Either way, having a public bank that provides all of the services that the current private banks do not, will quickly help the mentality within ‘retail’ banking to change, and probably answer the question of why one doesn’t already exist right now.
Money is a unit of exchange that doesn’t hold any value of its own.
However, we have been conditioned to think that it is the money itself and not the goods or services that we use money to exchange with that have no value until such time as they are bought or sold.
This way of thinking only serves the rich, powerful and governments that have an unhealthy desire for control.
In the period of change or transition – or the process of correction that lies ahead, the financial system and the way that money and our currencies are valued today will inevitably change.
The process of that change itself is likely to involve and be driven by inflation of a kind that will at least temporarily make money worthless in every practical sense.
It follows that during a period of turmoil such as the one that we face, the joined-up thinking and continuity of the way that money and finance work that we have been used to and taken for granted will break down.
The successful transition to a new financial system that works fairly and appropriately, and in the right way that it should for everyone, must not become an aim that can be compromised in any way.
Like politics and the system of government structures around it, it is because of the role that money plays – as it will continue to do so, even in its correct form, it is absolutely necessary that the monetary system and the way that financial systems work are dictated and governed from the grassroots up.
To do otherwise, puts all of the power and utility that money and its use as a medium of exchange provides into a third party’s hands.
The point has regrettably long since been missed that the real function of money was to make bartering or the exchange of goods or labour much easier.
For instance, when there was no money: if a fisherman had fish spare but wanted his horses saddle repaired, he might have to exchange the fish for bread with the baker, the bread with the butcher for meat, and then the meat with the saddler for the time and materials from the Saddler – who might have gone through a similarly convoluted route to secure whatever he needed to live, but also to work.
Like the goods used in this example, labour, skills and the experience that each of us has are also a commodity which has value for others.
It is only because our experience tells us that it’s the money that we receive for providing our labour, skills and experience to others that holds the real value, that we have accepted the way that prices escalate at rates that others decide.
In a period of massive change, when everything that we know or take for granted has stopped, and the great correction is underway, one of the key areas of change will be our relationship with money and the way we pay for the things that we need – and if we are able, that we want.
The refocusing on local production and localism in its truest sense that we will have to embrace will enable a much healthier relationship with money to exist. One where money will be seen again as the unit of exchange that it is, rather than the must-have or endgame in everything that it has sadly become.
Much of Levelling Level has focused on everything that we know around us changing – and the way it will require us to change the way that we think.
With money being the key driver or lifeblood of the system we know; a system that is already in freefall, it is inevitable that the value of the money we use will collapse.
Money as we know it will become worthless in terms of daily use, until the new system is fully operational and the use of money as a functional tool has replaced the role of money driving every part of life and thinking for all.
Whilst there will always be a need for a common currency at National Level, the new way of doing business will like everything else with meaning coming and being created from the grassroots up.
Circumstances really will dictate the need for a correction with money – and what money is really about, to the level of ground zero.
Like everything of value, its people and not the technology of the system itself, that must be used to define what it is all about
When no amount of cash or currency we have available can secure the goods or services that we need, practical need will step in and demand that we exchange whatever we have or can offer to secure whatever we need.
Ultimately, as real creativity, innovation and entrepreneurism begin to thrive at the community level, one thing will again become apparent to us all:
The real base currency is the element that is common to every exchange: The time it has taken somebody to grow, produce, manufacture and transport whatever it is that the end user wants.
In other words, the real base currency is (or will be corrected to become) the value of input that an individual can make themselves, as the basis of an exchange to provide everything that they need to meet the requirement of being self-sufficient.
Fortunately, we have moved into an age where it will be incredibly easy to develop easy to use exchange or system of exchanges that can operate or be restricted to geographically defined areas.
Every member of a community will be able to exchange the goods they have, or the labour, skills and experience they can offer whoever needs them directly for goods, or a common online unit of exchange that can be added if there is a shortfall or received as change if what provided or offered into the exchange is agreed as being worth more than what the other party has to exchange in return.
Yes, I can hear you thinking ‘well that’s why we need the pound we’ve already got!’ – and I agree that on the face of it, that’s what most people would think too.
The problem is that the Pound IS ONLY A UNIT OF EXCHANGE – no matter what anyone tells us or what anyone thinks.
The only reason the Pound works as it has done until now is because of the belief that people like you and I have placed in it. Our currency and financial system is basically a money system built on trust.
That trust has already been broken. But the break and the lie are only now being fully revealed so that all of us can see.
To make any currency work again when there is change of the kind we are facing, its foundations must be based within a system of a size and type where people can actually trust what money is, and what it actually does.
Digital or crypto currencies will not survive in their current form.
Like the system that cryptocurrencies were created with the best intentions to try and override, it is simply the belief that people have, or the way that people think about cryptocurrencies today that appear to make them work.
The cryptocurrencies that you can buy or trade today may be worth a lot of money. But like the money they might replace, they have absolutely no value at all.
In reality, digital currencies that exist today are as flawed as the FIAT money system itself. They are based on no real value or tangible holding.
It is literally the belief of those who invest in or use the existing blockchain currencies that make them work.
The moment anything happens to shatter the belief in today’s versions of digital currency – as you can be certain that it will – these cryptocurrencies will return to their intrinsic value. That value is zero or nil.
The new ‘local’ way of living will allow the creation of new digital currencies based on real value that is defined by the community that runs it.
That value will be pinned or anchored to the value of input and output (labour, skills, experience) and the true value of the locally produced goods that people genuinely need to live.
We cannot and must not even try to return to a pyramid or hierarchical system that is skewed to allow prices at the foundation of our society to be dictated by actions at the top.
We could very easily and very quickly come to experience a fully functioning system of digital currencies that are locally linked. Currencies that become interchangeable and exchangeable with others, because of how the basic value of input and essential goods are defined.
Whilst many question the validity of the mainstream media today, very few really question or analyse what our mainstream news mediums really do and how they actually work.
As with the case with money, or the new unit(s) of exchange as we go forward, the great correction will define that media sources with influence must tell the truth and therefore be a medium that the public can trust.
We are already at saturation point when it comes to other people’s narratives, and we desperate to hear leaders and influencers speaking the truth, demonstrating that they are sources that we can trust.
Trust in the media will only be achieved when there are no agendas at work.
Once again, the best way to achieve this will be to keep channels, platforms or mediums as local as it is possible for them to be.
That way, the interests and motivations of the journalists and managers will be to prioritise the needs and benefits to the community and people within that community they are working for. Not some commercial power that sits above.
Many of the societal problems that we have today exist in the way or at the level that they do, because of the way that the media focuses on sensationalism (bad news for somebody else).
The whole model functions on a strange kind of vicarious state of being. One that provides people with an instant high when they are able to witness someone else’s pain (All the time being thankful that it’s not them in the frame).
Problems in life, such as crimes will always exist – even if they are thankfully very few. But the way media has been working has been to expand stories of every kind that aren’t a threat or in any way likely to become real for any of us to a disproportionate and overwhelming level where they take over real life – simply because dishonest media has been abusing the trust we have in them and pumping nonsense straight into our front rooms.
People are far more tolerant and understanding of anything and anyone else, when the story they encounter is one that has only come to them as a part of their own journey through normal life, and they are literally ‘looking it in the eye’.
For a genuinely healthy society to exist, we need only to have exposure to news that is based on what is or what has been, and NOT what could or someone else believes should be.
Despite a Bill already working its way through the UK Parliament that is overtly designed to deal with issues surrounding how big tech platforms operate and work, the reality is that as is the case with most things, our politicians have only been making lots of noise about the specific issues they believe help them to play to the current crowd. Meanwhile they have deliberately avoided creating, developing or changing any legislation that would be truly fair and beneficial to everyone whilst providing a level of functionality that actually works as it should in real life.
With corporate interests and the role of money as the motivator being dealt with as part of Levelling Level in many different ways, there are three key areas in relation to the role of the Internet, where legislators will need to legislate thoughtfully and effectively.
These three areas are key to Levelling Level, so that the new internet – an internet that is unlikely to resemble what it does today, in a just few years’ time, is a safe place for everyone. One that supports and benefits real life, rather than providing an alternative that is open to abuse and is currently a danger to just about everyone.
Right now, at the time of writing, the internet is not a terribly nice place. In fact, it can and does literally destroy people for no good reason at all.
Echo chambers and the realities of misperceived influence aside, it is the dehumanising of relationships that every part of the internet enables and creates – illustrated at its very worst in the way that trolling, cancelling and piling-in is facilitated through social media – where many of the societal ills that we face today have exploded into what feel like uncontrollable forms.
There is an immediate need for a code of conduct that reminds everyone to behave in the same way online as if they were interacting with whoever they are communicating with in person face-to-face.
However, this aside. The biggest issue that must be dealt with is the ability for anyone to be able to create an online personality and behave in any way they wish too, without apparent threat or risk to themselves, whilst creating untold harm.
Neither the platform providers nor the government are best suited to managing the solution to the problem. As the requirement for registering personal details to a level that will become a real deterrent to harmful and dangerous behaviour, will enable the user to be tracked in ways that could prove counterproductive and in the wrong hands actually do them harm.
We must have either one or a series of independent agencies that are governed and maintained by their impartiality. Hubs that provide a registration system for everyone who wants to engage and communicate openly on internet platforms. A process of registration that will allow them to do so using their own name – or to speak anonymously, but to do so knowing that they are effectively licensed by that register and the rules that govern it. And that they can be identified if they attack others or behave in any way beyond what communities agree should be acceptable online norms.
One of the greatest travesties of so much information and history now being stored and publicly available online, is that the history of anyone that has no meaning to anyone other than the individual concerned or to those making mischief or looking for ways to do that person harm can easily be found.
People can be unnecessarily cruel and have little regard for the consequences of their actions when they want to counteract what they see as a threat to them personally, or punish someone else for what they see as a crime against them or someone they care about subjectively. Objectively their targets were more than likely doing nothing wrong and should be dealt with by the appropriate authorities if they were. Indeed, to a fresh set of eyes and ears would more than likely be in the right.
As people travel through life and gain more experience as they live that life, most become well aware of the damage that can be caused when the misperceptions that others have of a stupid or foolish act from the past can have when turned into a crime by being framed or dressed up as such in contemporary thought.
If there has been no crime or act against the community or against others as the law provides for on the part of an individual, or the responding punishment or restrictions of any court they have been given have ended or been spent, that individual should have the opportunity to wipe the slate clean or to have their past forgotten.
Every web page or platform that carries information that an individual believes to their detriment online should be required to remove any related information – once they are aware of the requirement – for someone enacting their right to be forgotten – not continuously or on an ongoing basis. But at perhaps one or two career-changing or life-changing points.
Whilst an alarming lack of care is still being shown by todays politicians in regard to the way that people behave on the internet, they are effectively comatose when it comes to what the so-called Metaverse has in store.
Levelling Level will address many of the reasons why so many people find themselves living alternative realities online today, in so many dangerous forms. However, that isn’t to say that the Metaverse and the creation or exitance of an alternative online world that can provide healthy social interaction that reduced travelling, working from home and positive localism does not.
However, like the internet, no matter how ‘real’ it feels or becomes, the Metaverse must always be used as a tool to support the needs and functions of life, and not become an alternative to life in itself.
Successfully creating and maintaining a societal benchmark that prioritises the ability of everyone to be able to sustain themselves and their life and calling it the Basic Living Standard, doesn’t mean that it will be impossible for the circumstances that some people find themselves in to enable them to fall through.
Achieving Levelling Level as a standard should significantly reduce the number of people who find themselves homeless simply because of being in debt, unable to find work or being able to pay for accommodation.
But like anything else anyone does to help others; Levelling Level will not cater for the people who find themselves in difficulty because of addiction – which a fully corrected system should also cater for without being seen.
No system, however well thought out or constructed, will be able to cater for every need of those who become homeless because they quite literally feel they can no longer conform in any way or do not wish to continue ‘taking part’.
If we have achieved the Levelling Level and created a system that is balanced, fair and maintained as such to benefit us all, the people who will find themselves at odds with that system will be remarkably few. But they will always exist.
We therefore need communities to have facilities that are open, without question or the perceived heavy hand of any authority or control to provide sanctuary for those that need it, when they need it without anything – even personal care – being required in exchange.
We also need to create a system where for whatever legitimate reason they might have to do so, any individual can effectively begin all over again with a new identity, in a new place, and without any ties to their former existence, at least once in their life – if they should choose.
The days of being able to choose a monastic or convent-like existence may be over or no longer exist as they once did. But alternatives already do and should be encouraged, so that one way or another, if life has become so unbearable for anyone for any reason, they are not left with living on the streets or taking their own life as the only choices they have, simply because nobody else can understand the pain they are in, because that pain which is very specific to that individual, and is an experience of pain that they themselves have never had.
When a system exists that is balanced and fair for all, many of the societal problems that exist and that nobody seems to be able to fix today, will simply vanish or quickly go away.
Poverty, debt, inflation, knife crime, antisocial behaviour, the cost of living, educational standards, drug abuse, theft, restricted social mobility, prejudices, political disenfranchisement, fake news, the lack of community, the failure of public services AND many other issues will be addressed, when enough people understand, accept and are ready embrace the inevitable change that will allow us to help others as we go through a process of helping ourselves.
Levelling Level is all about creating a system that takes care of every individual, every person in the same way no matter how many degrees of separation lie between us.
When we get it right for everyone else, it all comes full circle, and we get it right for ourselves.
No, this is not wishful thinking. It is about giving everyone at every age and from every background the reason to rediscover and give them back a sense of value and self-worth.
Values and self-worth reflect in the way that we interact with others and how we come together with respect and care for others as a community.
Levelling Level is a way of being that recognises the only way to achieve and maintain the outcome of having a system that is fair and balanced for us all as individuals and as a community, is to create and secure a system that is fair to the poorest and most vulnerable individuals within our society before anything else.
This is not about trying to create a system that is perfect.
It is part of the human condition that some of us will step outside the framework of any boundaries that are placed there to help us.
In a society that is fair to everyone, it is essential that it is only when an individual steps outside the framework of that society, that the community then seeks to intervene.
When society does intervene, it must be with the lightest touch possible. Rather than try to regulate against every eventuality – which is how our world around us has now become.
You cannot make life better for anyone by only attempting to improve the environment around us, calling it levelling up.
You cannot make life better for anyone by attempting to force everyone to believe they are exactly the same, when you cannot change the way people think and so, the only way that you can make everyone appear to be the same is by levelling down.
In the pages of Levelling Level, I have attempted to lift the large rock that covers all of the problems within ‘the system’ or the way that the UK currently operates, that so many of us feel and experience in our daily lives, but at the same time, cannot seem to see.
I have talked about some of the key solutions, new ways of working and new ways of thinking or ways of living similar to them that we will soon have to consider and are likely to be forced by circumstances to adopt anyway.
That is, IF we genuinely desire things to change and wish to experience a world that is as fair to us as we perceive it being fair to all.
Levelling Level has been written from the perspective that it will be read only by you. However, the conclusions, solutions and suggestions are intended to benefit everyone as individuals, as neighbourhoods, communities and collectively as the United Kingdom that together we are.
As the reader will already be aware, we are experiencing and navigating our way through very challenging times.
The problems discussed here are not new. They have been getting progressively worse over a long period of time. They have been hiding menacingly in plain sight.
There has been no self-serving incentive for those who have the responsibility and power to take any meaningful steps towards finding genuine solutions to the problems that society faces and to do everything that is necessary to sort them all out.
Whilst change is happening around us all the time, it often does so without us being consciously aware.
The kind of change that is now required is so profound that it is only a unique set of circumstances that touch everyone and causes pain to each of us in some way, that will provide the incentive for us to think differently.
Only then will we be open to a change in thinking that will create a much healthier way of living for us individually, as well as making fairness and balance a part of everyone’s life.
Such a unique set of circumstances or events now exist and are underway.
A series of events, that began with Brexit, then The Covid Pandemic and now the Invasion of Ukraine, have become the catalysts that have precipitated and accelerated everything that we know to change around us.
They are the first steps of a Financial and Systemic collapse that none of the current political elites have the power to control.
Somewhat ironically, it is the decisions that these same ‘leaders’ have been making in response to these events that are the real cause of all the problems that society faces today. This same malign influence has been at work, not only for the past six or seven years. But for what we must recognise as being decades of time.
These same few are using the term ‘Reset’ or ‘Great Reset’ as a forewarning that we will ignore at our peril.
Their misuse of these terms is a forewarning that the existing elites intend to use the collapse that is underway as an opportunity to reboot the existing system that has benefitted them so well, so that it will work even better for them – all under the auspices of what will be much tighter control.
However, what the elites haven’t banked on, is that things are set to change in such a way, and to such a degree, that all of the reasons and motives that drive these people – at considerable cost to us all – are going to be exposed to daylight. The actions and motives of the elites will then be seen and understood by all.
The unsustainable ways that we have been living under their manipulative leadership will come to an end.
We will be forced to revalue life and what the important parts of it are.
Times ahead are likely to be painful for us. But the pain of experience is how we really learn. And as we learn and realise what the basic essentials for life – in both a practical and mentally healthy way – really are, we will also understand what any of us would need if we found ourselves in circumstances where we were having to ‘just get by’.
Right back in the early pages of Levelling Level, I referred to this being a very long book, delivered in a very short form.
Okay, so forty thousand words isn’t all that short.
But the point I was briefly attempting to make then and to which I am returning now is that the technical detail and complexity involved in delivering the wholesale changes to public policy that we MUST have, so that the world around us really is fair and balanced for us all, is so spectacular in its nature, that to many, it just resembles the very worst kind of fog.
What I realised as I wrote and worked on Levelling Level through late February and for most of March 2022, was that almost everything I was writing about, was a topic that I had written about in some isolated way before.
If you have found yourself focused on any of the topics and would like to read more, I would encourage you to visit my Blog www.adamtugwell.blog and use the search facility to find more about what interests you most, or alternatively read my other e-books that are available via the links within the Other Books by this Author list.
I’m always happy to help where possible and can be contacted by e-mail at levellinglevel@gmail.com .
Levelling Level was the first part of a series that I began writing about three years ago in early 2022 and also provided the main body of work for the updated version of the book Days of Ends and New Beginnings which was published in April 2024.
Each of the following Books is a variation on a theme, but works very much under the principle that it is not only possible but actually healthy to be able to understand, value and even hold different views or perspectives of the same situation or set of circumstances at the same time, whether that be in the Past, Present or Future tense.
Equally, it is also important to be able to consider different pathways for the future that sit beyond what many consider to be the obvious, simply because the obvious itself is usually inextricably linked with what has already been done and what sits in the past.
All of the following titles are available to purchase as complete eBooks for Kindle from Amazon using the links provided.
Where indicated, titles may also be available to download FREE as PDF Copies from my Blogsite in different forms, using the links provided.
If you would like to discuss any of the works listed, please get in touch.
The one true religion of the West and therefore by default, the entire (Old) World as we know it is Money and the accumulation of the wealth, power and influence, that are inextricably linked to it.
Many still disagree with the suggestion that every part of life is coin operated.
Think about it carefully and you will soon see that monetary value for now, for tomorrow, for the long-term future and how the impact of money or the lack of it will effect us, governs our lives in every conceivable way.
Once you can see this, you may appreciate that money is the driver of everything; that money is the basis of our entire broken value system, and that as such, we are all citizens or constituent parts of a Moneyocracy – whether we like it or not.
Inflation is a word we hear lots about. Not least of all because every month, the government uses the term to gaslight many of us into believing that because the inflation rate is dropping, we will once again be able to experience a life that everyone can afford.
Unfortunately, it’s a con and for as long as inflation of any kind exists within an economy, prices will continue to rise, and they certainly will not fall.
The way that money works today is an even bigger con. Not least of all because Money doesn’t have any value of its own.
Yet we have been conditioned to believe that everything in life has a monetary or financial value at its essence or core.
Money is a unit of exchange and nothing more.
But we have been led to believe that money or currency is the only thing that has value. And that everything that once had real value, doesn’t have value anymore.
The Money system is corrupt. We live and exist in a Moneyocracy.
This Moneyocracy is controlled by private interests rather than governments (As we have also been deliberately led to believe). And the most rotten part of the whole deal is that those in control of money don’t borrow money or sell anything to make money when there’s a shortage.
They simply press a button or quite literally go through the process of printing more.
Money is quite literally created from nothing.
The Moneyocracy is the closest thing you could have to the whole economic system being one giant game of Monopoly being played with the entire World as a board. With the only difference being that the lives, wellbeing and futures of real people are involved.
The money myth is a problem for anyone who:
Doesn’t understand it, and
Doesn’t have a constant flow of money finding its way to them beyond what they can themselves physically earn
For those who don’t understand The Moneyocracy, money is a problem. Because the creation or printing of money devalues the money that already exists.
So, anyone who relies on their earnings or what they are given every month and doesn’t have assets or property that they themselves fully own, will then find that the value of their money goes down whilst they sleep. Because someone has created more of it.
The ‘ad hoc’ creation or printing of money means that the value of the money available in proportion to property and assets available that accumulate exchangeable value has automatically gone down.
We could easily go down a rabbit hole here, and those who gain from the way that money works would happily push us down one by suggesting that the money system isn’t that simple.
No, the money ‘system’ isn’t simple. And it’s because the money system is deliberately complicated that the unethical behaviour that underpins and drives it can be hidden as easily as it is.
The money in circulation IS devalued every time that the government borrows, banks lend, financiers speculate in some way and the whole system ends up with more.
Let’s look more closely at the detail to see how the creation of money devalues the money that you earn and the money that you already have:
How money Printing effects the money that lower earners and those without property and assets of their own have:
Let’s say that everything that has value which increases such as property, resources, assets etc, always has a fixed value.
We will call these Value Accumulating Goods, Resources and Assets (VAGRA)
For the purposes of this example, we will say that this list doesn’t grow (As we are looking at the role of money and we will look at VAGRA elsewhere)
Let’s say that today, all of the VAGRA available in the World is worth £200.00 and there is also £200.00 in money in circulation that directly corresponds to it.
Of that £200.00 available today, you hold £1.00 of it in your pocket as cash or in your bank account as a digital entry on your online banking app or a monthly bank statement.
At 1am tomorrow morning, the government ‘borrows’ another £100.00 which it will tell us is being used to pay for public services or similar.
Myth Buster 1:
Banks do not lend out money that they have piled up or that they hold for other ‘customers’.
To lend the government this ‘new’ £100.00 means the banks create or print that additional £100.00.
The new or additional £100.00 is then added to the money in circulation so that there is a total of £300.00.– including the £1.00 you possess.
Myth Buster 2:
The value of all the money in circulation today is not tied to anything with real value.
What many don’t realise or see at this point is there was no change to the amount of VAGRA whilst the amount of money in circulation was extended by 50%.
This means that in direct relationship to the VAGRA that exists – which very few of us own, there is now £300.00 that corresponds to it, instead of the £200.00 that was there only today.
In one moment, whilst you were sleeping, the face value of the £1.00 you possess, hasn’t changed. But the true value or purchase power of the £1.00 you possess has dropped by 1/3 (a third).
Meanwhile, the face value of the VAGRA that the few and the elites own has just risen by 50%.
Please Note: Technically speaking, if an economic system was working without constant manipulation, the value of the money in circulation would ‘naturally’ grow as assets and resources are added. However, there would also be ‘natural’ loss, as assets are destroyed, become unusable and are replaced or resources are depleted.
However, FIAT or the money system that we have today, bears no relationship with a system where money or currency directly tied to the ‘real value’ in ‘the system’. That’s why it was always destined to hurt some and not others by being out of balance and why it was always going to go wrong.
The impact of ‘new’ money that isn’t linked to existing ‘Value’
The additional money that is created from nothing has knock on effects in many ways.
Not least of all because every financial transaction where goods, property and assets are concerned is pushed up. Before the next part of a very big problem begins to unfold.
Myth Buster 3:
Businesses now charge more than they need to, to increase their profits. Not because they have to. But because they can.
Yes, businesses of all kinds really do believe that it’s ok just to push prices up and use the news and narratives that politicians survive on to justify price rises that very few of us can actually afford.
The BIG problem is that this process of profiteering is also accumulative and with everyone in unnecessarily long supply chains adding more to already artificially inflated prices, the real cost of everything is significantly less than any end customer is required to pay.
Prices rise. That means the government and everyone else needs to print more Money, with the net gain or benefit from all that printing going to the same few and the elites who own everything.
Worse still, these are the same people who are charging all of us massive amounts of interest for mortgages, credit cards and other forms of borrowing money that they didn’t even posses in the first place. Before they pressed a button or switched a printer on and then gave it to us in the form of a loan.
The Truth IS Stranger than Fiction
The whole situation seems incredible and hard to believe. Because money does appear to buy things when we use it.
However, many regrettably still believe that governments, big businesses, banks, financiers and the people who own or influence them can be trusted to do the right thing for everyone. Rather than doing the right thing just for them.
Myth Buster 4:
Money flows to those who control it. Money flows to the top.
We have a hierarchical or top-down power structure. Fueled by the way that money is used to manipulate everything.
Money is at the heart of everything that is wrong with the way that the World works today.
Our Ignorance is Their Power
The biggest problem we have is that so many of us don’t understand how money really works.
To a certain degree, our governing and political classes also don’t understand how money works.
Where they do, they have completely lost sight of what printing or creating money means for those who don’t have a lot of it.
Because printing money it is an easy way for politicians to appear to solve problems, and when it comes to winning elections – to make it sound like they are doing good.
When politicians being seen to be doing good means more and more of us are having an experience which is very bad, it should be clear that the system is broken, is unsustainable and is getting nearer and nearer to a complete collapse.
In Our Local Future, People are the ONLY Economic Capital
We recognise that People, Community and The Environment are far more important than profit, power and influence for the few.
Adam Tugwell 