Tag: neoliberalism

The Truss Conundrum

There is no pleasure in seeing a British Prime Minister so far out of their depth, that even an author and philosopher who she says she is greatly inspired by publicly, announces that the Prime Minister does not understand what he was writing about.

The announcement that Truss has written off a multi-million Pound media campaign to advise people how to lower their energy usage and thereby save money is troubling.

Just these two examples suggest Liz Truss is incapable of thinking for herself. That the idealism talked up across the media consists of little more than whatever she happens to have read and taken away from a book, watched on a screen or heard somebody she likes whispering in her ear.

For those who are really thinking hard about the situation that not only the UK, but the entire world is facing, the reality that Liz Truss is not only slavishly following the economic philosophy of neoliberalism, but working tirelessly to take the whole thing into a new league, is very troubling indeed.

We have of course heard Truss talking lots about growth in recent days. Especially in her speech at the Conservative Party Conference, where she effectively drew a line between those who are pro-growth and those who are not.

Growth is of course one of the key mantras of the neoliberalism movement. Of free marketeers. Of all those who are driven by, motivated by, and intoxicated by the FIAT money-based system. The money-based order that is behind and at the basis of ALL of the problems that the world and the UK now faces.

An ongoing series of British Prime Ministers from different political parties have been very fortunate, in that the economic environment has allowed them to do pretty much as they liked without any great threat of repercussions.

Truss, however, is on the tail end of 4 Conservative Prime Ministers who have made decisions that have exaggerated and accelerated the demise and destruction of a dying world order. One that was always destined to collapse. It was only a question of when.

As the situation worldwide has become critical and we progress into the early stages of an economic crash, with deglobalization now fully underway, Truss’ inability to read any situation in real time for herself, whilst being surrounded by people who are doing exactly the same as they attempt to advise her, means that she has completely lost touch with reality and what the Country faces.

Truss does not understand that even the slightest move in the wrong direction or contrary to what is genuinely needed, will now have significant consequences for everyone.

On her current course, the Truss Government is destined to collapse quickly. But this does not necessarily mean that good news will follow if there is yet another change.

There is nobody in politics today who offers anything better than what Truss can. This means that the consequences of yet another change in Prime Minister, whether that be to another Conservative, or through a General Election to a leader of another political party – from any of those that we have on offer, will lead to consequences for all of us which are likely to be considerably worse.

A change in leader or leadership now, without genuine and universal change in approach to all areas of public policy will be a downward step that quickly proves even more disastrous. Much like the transition from Boris Johnson to Truss, which we have only Just undergone.

Dreadful as the prospect may seem, the UK needs stability. At least in terms of who is the incumbent at No.10.

However, whilst Truss may have modelled herself and wished to be seen as the new Thatcher, believing that it would be as simple as telling the world she is another lady who is not for turning, it is indeed turning that the UK now very much needs her to do.

The machinations and the philosophy of the dying world order, which has been harnessed by the world elites, organisations such as the World Economic Forum (WEF), and the establishment of which Truss and those around her are very much a part, has now reached its final phase of self-destruct.

But even now, as the chaos they are responsible for engulfs the world, those who are desperate to save their order, telling us that it will be something new, believe everything they are doing, controlling and pushing will ultimately lead to the continuation of their control.

It won’t. But the process they are following and inflicting upon us all will destroy many lives and with it much of what we already know, for as long as this disastrous approach continues to be pursued.

Truss has a great opportunity to turn away from this, reject everything she has pursued as an MP, and take all of us and the UK a very different way.

Whilst Truss may appear to be a frightened rabbit in the headlights, terrified of turning or doing U turns of any other kind, the Prime Minister has the choice to reject the narratives and the words of the people and the influences that currently surround her too.

She can begin the process of change by listening and taking information and guidance from very different people, very different advisers, and very different sources of influence who genuinely see people across the UK and what’s good for us all, as the right and common cause.

In times of peace, economic stability, and when there appeared to be no dangers coming over the hill, there would have been plenty of opportunity for any Prime Minister or political movement to develop, discuss and test strategies in public policy which after robust discussion and acting upon feedback could be then considered to be in the best interest of us all to pursue.

That time no longer exists. Indeed, such moments in time have been wilfully squandered and wasted by many prime ministers and different political parties in power that have come before Truss and her Government.

Strategies and the time for their development is always a gift. A genuine bonus of peacetime.

Everything that Truss faces now must be considered to be on a war footing. Nothing less.

The priority must be the people. Ensuring that everyone can rely on public systems and support that provides the basic necessities that life requires in order that people can get by and survive through the turbulent weeks, months and potentially years that now lie ahead of us.

Developing strategy in real time and on the hoof will be a necessary and vital part of this. Not least of all because onshoring of every conceivable type of industry and the redevelopment of very localised supply chains and local food production are an essential part of safeguarding the UK’s future.

Firefighting and dealing with the coming emergency must itself incorporate the stepping stones and building blocks of the UK’s return to National self-sufficiency, with the focus on doing all of the things in the UK that the UK can and will always do well.

There are going to be shortages. Shortages of everything. Shortages that cannot be avoided by any kind of media campaign or narrative aimed at fooling the people in anyway.

Britain now needs a wartime Prime Minister who can electrify the electorate with words of hope, motivating and inspiring people to look at and think about life differently.

Our Prime Minister must be able to harness and apply brutal honesty in a way that makes sense of difficult times in a way that resonates and is accessible to us all.

She may not realise it yet, but Truss could turn everything that has gone wrong for her and has been seen to go wrong with her, around.

But that opportunity only exists for Truss if she chooses to be a very different kind of Prime Minister to the one she is currently fixated on being within her own mind, rather than where she really is.

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When, Where & How did all the economic problems we have today really begin?

Okay, so we have to wind back the clock. Not just a little. But a very long way, before we can begin to start a whistle-stop tour of the key events and motivators that have contributed to or rather their impact on everything else have accumulated to create the situation that we are facing now.

Firstly, its important to understand that this is a story about human nature before anything else.

It’s a story about what happens when people obtain power, influence, wealth or a mixture of them all, and either don’t have the moral fibre, ethics or principles to always do the right thing for everyone at the start, or they end up that way because they have been corrupted by what they have experienced or gained along their life path.

Oddly enough, morality and values seem to become increasingly absent across society, the further from general hardship or real hardship that effects everybody within it becomes.

Without the experience of hardship, or ‘making do’, even the poorest members of society can quickly become mesmerised and emotionally tied to an obsession for what they could have, rather than really appreciating all that they have already got.

More wants more. And in 1971, with promises of benefits that could only be unleashed by so-called ‘market freedoms’, deregulation of financial systems and services, and the proposition that an economy unhindered by government will always look out for us all, Neoliberalism was unleashed upon the western world when US President Richard Nixon did away with The Gold Standard, and a world based on FIAT or rather created money was born.

Commercialism had been picking up great speed before 1971, particularly in the United States. The emotional fix of material possessions and the social benchmarking that became definable by ‘showy wealth’ for the masses played perfectly into the hands of those economists with an agenda. False prophets who were able to whisper their intoxicating poison into the ears of politicians and influencers who didn’t have the scruples to know or even suspect any better.

So, with the launch of the FIAT system – that the western world has all but since adopted – a cultural shift from values to ‘money is god’, through a process based on the success of media manipulation and brainwashing was well and truly unleashed.

The Lie About Balance & Fairness

We are told that the system we have is the fairest that we could have. That by having so much emphasis on ‘the markets’ and the role that money plays in everything, we can keep having more and more of the best things that we have ever had.

But the system isn’t fair, because it is driven and motivated by greed. But that greed is not just at the top. Those at the top have been able to do all that they have done to benefit themselves, because  they have used the system that greed has created to convince all of us that we can keep accumulating little pieces of all the things that they have.

The irony is that even within a system built on and servicing greed, there is a point of balance, which once exceeded, may appear to keep working. But it is in fact on its way – through increasing and accelerating disfunction – to ending in a massive and potentially epoch defining crash.

The true cost of Globalisation

The true driver of Globalisation 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 national 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 have changed life for everyone – enriching the few, whilst making life poorer in every way conceivable for everyone else.

Levelling Level is about genuine social justice, not pursuing socialism itself

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 its only failed because it’s never been done right.

Business & Finance: The tail that really wags the dog

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 set 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.

Neoliberalism: The intoxicating lies of the powerful

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 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 myth that less help results in there being more for the poor

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.

None of the philosophies and ideas that drive Left or Right have been proved successful in real life

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.

A systemic collapse lies ahead that results from years of political self-interest. It wasn’t planned, so trying to prove it’s all a conspiracy will just help the establishment make us believe it was

People are waking up to the wrongs that our Government and the establishment they represent have done in large number today, purely because the political classes have gone too far during the Covid Pandemic. The elites still believe that they are entitled to continue behaving the same way without excuse – all whilst they and their ideas are systematically driving our country and democracy into the floor.

Frustratingly for some, the growing number of people with their eyes open to just the some of the things going on is still a very long way from reaching any kind of critical mass. This means that whilst the few signs of change – marked by Government U-Turns such as the mandated jabs for NHS Staff turnaround – is looking good, the UK is actually remaining a very long way from where it needs to be. And that’s just looking at the situation right now, today, with things as we are experiencing them and as they stand.

The problem that we have and the difficulty for us all, is that with the diversity of opinion on how the Government is working and how it has behaved over the past two years very divided, the reality is that even with those apparent leaps backwards, the inept and draconian Johnsonian Narrative, and with it the very self-serving, yet rudderless form of leadership that we have had throughout the Covid Pandemic remains.

People genuinely believe that because Boris Johnson and the Tories remain in power, and continue to do whatever they like unhindered, because there must be some kind of conspiracy at work.

Furthermore, many of those same, very sensible people are buying into the idea that the words spoken by the World Economic Forum (WEF) that created the Great Reset Narrative, and with it phrases such as “You will own nothing and be happy” means that tangible evidence exists that everything happening now has been planned and that there is a worldwide, world-government-creating conspiracy well and truly underway.

To be quite fair about it, the stunts that the Johnson Government have pulled such as playing with the vulnerabilities of normal people by elevating the fear of Covid to that of instant death are very sinister to anyone who has taken a breath and taken a proper look. Continuing on to then implement many draconian measures just to keep their neck-saving narrative functioning and at work, does indeed look like the work of Machiavellian tricksters who are in no doubt about what they are doing.

Yet the real reason that the Tories and all of the political parties that are seat-blocking good leaders from being able to get into parliament and make our democracy work, is the wrong people have been in power and positions of influence for a very long time.

Indeed, those across an establishment of politicians, industry and banking leaders have made it their goal to assume more and more of the powers that should collectively be ours, whilst making every challenging situation that we face across the UK go from bad to worse. It just doesn’t look that way because politics is now the end in itself rather than the means, and the truth about the results that follow so many big words have a strange habit of never really looking all that good.

Every public policy or policy of any kind that affects the public has consequences for us all.

We have had decades of rules, regulations and laws made at the centre, by those in Government to benefit the MPs and Political Parties themselves, as a minimum to get themselves into power or reelected. But most of the time, it has been to benefit and support their friends and the people they want help from or want to impress.

Meanwhile, the results for everyone else outside this golden circle have been to create more and more pain, inequality, less opportunity, poverty and even hunger, when none of these problems have ever been necessary at all.

The unsustainability of the situation was for a very long time simply hiding in plain sight. But then Covid came along and put afterburners on a plane that was already on a downward trajectory and heading for a horrific crash.

It is easy to believe that a world that appears run in every way possible just to benefit the few at the expense of the many, is built upon bomb-proof strategic plans and systems that once in place are locked-in and cannot be undone.

But this is all a delusion. At best, the system they have built upon greed and the belief that money and material wealth are everything is nothing more than a house of cards.

The system they have created bit by bit is best described as being a massive chain of dominoes. One that was put in place, decision by decision, choice by choice, time after time.

There are no foundations or glue sticking any of those dominoes in place and as soon as the first one falls – just as if it were to be flicked by someone deliberately setting the whole chain in motion – they will fall one after one and the whole system will go.

Selfish, self-serving, greed and profit-orientated decisions have ruled the motives of the elites in politics, industry and banking for pretty much as long as anyone can remember. Everything they have done, everything they have changed or influenced any politician to do, every rule they have created to favour their sector, has put one of those dominoes in place.

FIAT money, quantitative easing, globalisation, neoliberalism, centralisation, lean manufacturing techniques, global supply chains, credit scoring, hedge funds, central banking, just in time, too big to fail, cheap money, endless debt, monopilisation of traditional (mainstream) media, minimum wages, complicated tax laws and regulations, life on benefits, privatisation of genuine public services, devolution, creation of the European Union and just about every system or way of doing things that has already or is contributing to making life feel very unfair, have all come into being because somebody with influence has changed the way that the world works for us all so that something somewhere works even better for them in some way.

Bit by bit, it has added up to wholesale change. But there was never any design, and it has been lucky for those benefitting and tragic for everyone else that it has taken this long for the end to be in sight in this rather troubling way.

The more savvy of those riding high off the power trip that this heavily funneled system gives them at the top know and understand the fragility of the system. They live in genuine fear of what happens next if the unsustainability of how everything works collapses, and their power to control us all goes.

It is no coincidence or accident that the announcement of ‘The Great Reset’ came from the WEF in the Summer of 2020, once the Covid Pandemic – and the measures that many different governments around the world imposed, were in play.

The self-serving at the top knew immediately that the myths of global trading and manufacturing, worldwide travel, cars for everyone, cheap energy, mass movement, low cost everything, cheap money were about to be exposed.

The self-serving at the top have realised that to retain their power and control over everything that happens next, their priority would have to be the creation of a narrative that makes everyone (who isn’t in on it) believe that the hell we are already starting to go through is all part of a plan.

The self-serving at the top have concluded that their future power and control is based on the very clever premise; That as and when we hit the bottom from the coming crash and begin to climb back up to whatever our ‘new’ world looks like on the other side, the changes in the way that we live and interact with each other – which their greed and stupidity have now made inevitable – have all come about because of their own careful design. And that successful buy-in of this message using their traditional media to convince everyone will mean they have the right to retain power and remain in control.

The conspiracy narrative therefore serves their purposes extremely well. Conspiracists do after all spend the majority of their time talking up and trying to convince everyone else that the conspiracy exists.

Meanwhile, none of the conspiracists are taking steps or any kind of action to focus on the opportunities that the now inevitable change will bring. They certainly won’t be doing anything constructive to start building up any kind of political vehicle or movement that the elites will know and identify as being a threat to any of the political parties that their influence owns.

Just as waiting for a bus for hours and then three turn up at once makes the passenger standing in the rain wonder what the hell they had themselves done to deserve such bad fortune, there are many different and very complex factors that have influenced all the things that are going on around the world today.

But it is chance – not design, that has turned them all towards the point in the same direction and to have created a situation where they all appear to have turned up on the very same day.

The only factor that really is random in all of this, is what will turn out to become the event or trigger that will be the one that proves to be the first domino to fall. The catalyst that then in turn pushes quickly against them all, one after the other, leading to the systemic collapse that comes when everything that has been built up for all the wrong reasons over many decades has come into play.

Will it be war in Ukraine or Taiwan. Maybe the collapse of Chinese Company Evergrande. Perhaps the collapse of the US Stock markets. Or could it be something else that the mainstream media isn’t even really talking about that will prove to be the straw that finally breaks the camel’s back?

We simply don’t know. And whilst it would be silly to try and even predict dates, the one thing we can be sure of is that this inevitable systemic crash is coming soon. Life as we know it even now after 2 years of Covid mismanagement will quickly begin to look very different for everyone, just as soon as it has.

The choice that we all have relates to what we do and what we accept from the people who lead us today, when that period of pain, revaluation and the time for necessary change comes.

If we accept the establishment narrative – or what we should perhaps more accurately call the truth of the elite, it is the same few and the same faces that will continue to hold all the levers of power. The self-serving at the top will be happy to dictate the rules of a new age. One that will continue to be all about them, what they can gain and how they can control us to keep achieving it.

However, if we snap out of this and refuse to accept the narrative that the establishment wants us now to believe to be our own truth, and instead accept that we have the power and the opportunity to create our own, we can build our new future together. We can make the best of the changes and difficult circumstances ahead that will return our sense of proportion, fairness and care for all others and use these rediscovered community values as the building blocks of a system that is there to help and look after everyone, but above all, a Country built on local communities that all work fairly for us all.

The future is bright for digital finance, but today’s Crypto Currencies are as worthless as the FIAT money system they intend to replace. Money must find its place and function without misplaced belief:

Whilst my interests, writing and commentary in the public sphere appear overtly political, I recognised long ago that every part of life feeds into the cauldron of politics. It’s what the more academic amongst us would colloquially call political economy.

Within a highly febrile environment that increasingly makes less and less logical sense, it makes sense to keep an eye on financial and economic commentary online amongst the channels where real news is still available. It is here that the utterly bizarre nature and the cold-hard reality underpinning trends which are affecting the UK and the whole world, seem to have completely escaped public consciousness and any form of collective rational concern.

We are experiencing a period of history where there are so many elephants in the room, it seems incredible that society hasn’t already been completely flattened by the now trampling herd.

That isn’t to say that a travesty of great magnitude isn’t on its way.

Amongst the dangers that 50 years of FIAT Money, its impact upon financial dealing, the markets, normal life and the Bitcoin-driven rise in cryptocurrencies that were supposedly created to counter it is where much of the coming chaos is likely to begin.

Money isn’t real. Money isn’t a thing. But the belief that we have been conditioned to have in it and the obsession we have with material wealth and the way our lives and status can now be measured by it all to facilitate profiteering and greed certainly perpetrates the myth that it really is.

Money is valueless. It began as a unit or practical means of exchange and up until 1971 when money was de-linked with the value of gold, it at least had a form of tangible value attached to it. Even if that tangible value was based on collective mutual trust to the existence of a precious metal in remote form that we all knew as The Gold Standard.

Creating a situation where that assumed trust in there being real value underpinning the transactional notes and coins in circulation was manipulated to allow people believe that every penny that they have in their pocket or bank accounts has a measurable value. However, in practice it has now been over half a century since it was any such thing.

A FIAT or ‘created’ Money system was always going to be open to abuse, once those ‘on the inside’ had figured out how to get any rules and regulations. Over five decades they have consistently influenced legislator change so that they could effectively create more money and malevolently creative systems to generate more of it whenever they liked. The Great Financial Crisis (GFC) of 2008 was just a taste of what is to come and was only perceived as not being worse than it was because Governments created money for the banks and therefore massive public debts for us that there has been a mysterious mainstream lack of will to talk about.

As this perverse system has increased a cultural belief that money is a real thing, with the perception that it is inherently more important than the product, service, employment or output that generated it, a process of addictive gambling has increasingly taken place. Finance houses, markets and central governments too have effectively created more and more money without that money itself having any practical (or logical) link to gold, products, services, employment or anything else. It has created a growing disparity between what people who have bought into the idea believe to be real and what actually exists. In terms of value, people literally don’t know or understand what is real anymore.

It is a system where the rich get richer and the poor get poorer simply because the rich get more and more of the money as it increases in circulation, whilst the money that the poor have loses value against the goods, services and property that have explosively inflated prices that continually remain easily affordable to the rich.

Whilst it doesn’t fit the narrative of the establishment, big business or the financial sector for everyone to understand that money is created as they see fit and that debt is effectively just a means to enslave the unknowing poor, those responsible have used the publics unwitting trust of historically revered occupations to engage in what beyond the safety of the rules they have created for themselves would be recognisable as criminal acts

No one openly talks about any of this, and the mainstream media leave the subject well and truly alone. The truth of what they have and what they are doing sits conveniently hidden in plain sight and anyone who questions it likely to be cast aside and awarded a tin foil hat as they are unceremoniously thrown back into the masses of the great unknowing.

Yet there are increasing numbers of very intelligent, often highly educated but nonetheless ethical people who are becoming aware of the mechanics of how the travesty of what we call money actually now works.

Indeed, it was one such person who saw the value in creating a finite or limited amount of a currency that sits outside of the influence of arguably corrupt central governments, big business and the financial sector. It was this whole sorry story that brought Crypto or Digital currencies into being primarily as Bitcoin and now in different guises that are growing in number daily.

On the face of it, the blockchain technology that underpins crypto effectively means that even the smallest fraction or percentage of one crypto coin or equivalent unit has or can have a unique identification. It appears to give tangibility or reality to cryptocurrencies that money in the FIAT system doesn’t currently have.

Such coding means that if all money were to be in circulation in that same digital form and no other, every coin or part of it could be traced, located and tracked at any moment in time. It is for this reason that our increasingly technocratic and tyrannical governments and the greedy big businesses that influence them are desperate to digitise central currencies and push all of the privately generated versions as we know them aside.

The flaw in the thinking, whether it be a private, untied crypto or a digital central currency run by the government instead, is that blockchain technology gives genuine value to this ‘money’ right down to the most microscopic level.

The reality is that blockchain, like money is neither real nor a thing. No matter how clever, these blockchain derived digital currencies are no more than a reference tool, a label, a system of measurement and like money intrinsically before it, it is no more than a unit of exchange

Tragically the value of both money and crypto today is still based on the same giant myth or a massively overvalued shared belief.

At some point – perhaps within the 12 months from the time of writing, a financial collapse will take place affecting everything that FIAT money has touched or relates to. Money, nor any other form of currency based on nothing other than thin air will continue to exist and the correction that follows as everything in life returns to its unmanipulated value will be a process most painful for those who have made their life revolve around money and material wealth, when they could and should have exercised more considerate concerns.

It sounds very doomsdayish I know. But many of those who lurk daily within the finance and economic bubbles and play or rather bet on the markets know that those with power and influence have now created far too much money – relative to all the goods and output that genuinely exists. Indeed, the patterns and behaviours associated with everything to do with money, how it is made and how it is managed are following little in terms of any kind of logic. They more savvy amongst them know that the figures and data that is available foretells a cataclysmic change.

In terms of corrections, the pendulum is about to swing wildly the other way from where it has been held for a very long time.

The real value of goods, property and output will be realised as it becomes set against the wild speculation and explosive inflation that printing money has allowed.

We are likely to find that money or new forms of digital currency will go right back to their basic function. One that allows what is in effect multiple-transaction bartering of all the things that are necessary for life such as labour, basic food and the things that we genuinely need to live, so that money becomes purely functionary again, rather than being revered as some perverse value store.

It will serve no legitimate purpose for only one form of currency to exist. All forms of currency will become very localised with perhaps umbrella versions that do link to government to allow the payment of taxes and facilitate travel and the movement of goods between different areas.

The reason this doesn’t make sense today is because it is in the interest of those with influence for it not to do so. Yet tomorrow might be the beginning of a new day for us all when it most certainly will.

It is events now that will decide.

Money: The dream is dying (If it’s not already dead)

You’ve gotta love the way that the mainstream media somehow manages to keep on missing the real news.

In a week when the plight of Geronimo the Bovine TB+ive Alpaca was creatively made to look like some 160,000 deaths of infected cows over the same period that his owner has been fighting Defra simply didn’t exist, the pillars of our information rich society managed to overlook the further £1.15Billion of Bonds that the Bank of England has bought, extending Rishi Sunak’s mammoth money printing and public spending spree into realms which really do now span into the complete unknown.

Don’t get hung up on who is buying or who is selling what to who, when it comes to any kind of financial ‘product’, when the Bank of England or the Government are involved. Either way, this is a process of injecting even more obscene amounts of cash into an already overladen economy – all of which is effectively debt being run up on the public tab.

The thinking that underpins financial jiggery-pokery of this magnitude isn’t only flawed; it is also exceptionally dangerous. The repeated bouts of money creation that the Johnson Government has instigated since the Covid Pandemic began are so high, there is no practical way that this Country can pay anything near the whole amount back.

There is talk that our children and grandchildren will still be paying the bill. But the Johnson Government really have gone too far.

What is more, they have done this not off the back of owning something secure like gold – that actually exists.

They have literally created all of this money out of thin air, all on the principle that the system will keep rolling, accumulating like a rolling snowball, and that as long as it keeps rolling in the same direction (That means the money available gets bigger and bigger), then those driving it and who are responsible for it will never suffer from a fall.

What this apparently bright idea overlooks is the stark reality that exits when the amount of money available increases exponentially, whilst products, land, houses and capital assets that we can actually own, increase at a significantly slower rate – that is, if the amount of them available actually increases at all.

Those at the top of the money chain – who always end up with the bulk of all this newly created cash, have increasing buying power that the majority of us can only dream of. Meanwhile, they push the value of everything up significantly – alongside all the others who are milking the system or taking out value without giving anything back – whilst those on the lowest wages and increasingly even the middle classes too, simply don’t get the wage rises that mean they can keep up with price rises just enough to stand still.

By now, you will probably have realised that this isn’t a Covid-related problem. In fact, this problem isn’t really that new at all. It’s been in the making for 50 years or more.

What’s different now, is the way that the Government and the Bank of England under its instruction, has upped and is continuing to spend.

It is a matter for debate whether the money pumped out to keep the economy moving during Lockdown should ever have been needed at all. But we are well past that point now. And if we go back to the snowball idea that I mentioned above, the reason that so much money is being created and pumped into the economy, is literally to keep the whole thing moving because the Government is terrified what will happen if the whole thing stops.

SPOILER ALERT: It’s going to stop. The snowball will stop rolling and will not be able to grow any more.

The financial system and the economy are going to crash.

It’s not an if. It’s a when.

And the only question that we and ideally the media should be asking, is which will be the straw that finally breaks the camel’s back.

There are a range of different ways, and the list is growing. It could be the escalation of cost-of-living prices, like the energy price rises coming in the autumn, or even the flattening of the additional £20 per week allocated to families on Universal Credit as part of the Covid ‘bounce’. It could be a shortage of food on the shelves being caused by a shortage of drivers (that has more to do with the ridiculous standards and licensing requirements that the EU imposed on the industry rather than any lack of EU drivers caused by Brexit) and the unadulterated greed of shipping companies that have created a worldwide shipping monopoly that is seeing prices for goods transport go stratospheric – not for any good reason other than that they can name their price, based on making obscene levels of profit alone. Then there are the issues that are out of our hands such as the precarious state of the US economy, which itself is on the edge of a precipice so large, that it could end the US hold on everything economic as we watch the position of the US Dollar as the World Reserve Currency simply implode.

Whatever tips the balance, it really doesn’t matter. The way that money and economics works today is already well and truly sunk.The neoliberal dream that money can be whatever you make it is dying. That is, If it’s not already dead.

Instead of using the borrowed time that the Bank of England and the Government has left to do anything that they might be able to try to mitigate or offset this coming disaster, they are instead upping the throttle and increasing the speed of compiling and contributing events, literally treating the whole thing as if a disaster is impossible and will never happen. They are working on the premise that they can literally fake it til they make it, by printing more and more money until they believe they will have completely weathered the storm.

Think very carefully about the relationships you have with the people, businesses and community members located around you. Do all that you can to cultivate and develop them in positive ways. Because a time will come perhaps very soon, when we will all have to trade, borrow, barter, help and support the people who are immediately around us – just as life for everyone in this Country once was.

Obsessed with big headlines and the powerful job titles that each and every one of them is sniffing out next, MPs and Government Ministers focus only on what bigs them up, rather than fulfilling the roles that they were elected for.

Foreign trade deals really aren’t going to help in a world that has to reject globalisation because of the fallout from covid and the fact that we are being woken quickly to the unfolding nightmare which is climate change.

Government should instead be investing the money it has available whilst it still has tangible value. Government should support the growth and sustainability of local economies and supply chains that really do away with every kind of unnecessary journey and make it both practical and cost effective for as much of the food we eat and the products we buy to have travelled next to no miles as possible.

We really should be taking this opportunity to focus proactively on going back to improved and better ways and models of working that value every form of human input equally, meaning that a happy debt-free, safe and healthy life is something that even the poorest members of our society and communities can afford.

These things can be done in ways that will remove a lot of unnecessary pain when they are done not by necessity, but by reasoned choice.

No Rishi: You and Your Party created this unmanageable National Debt. It’s time for YOU to own it and live up to the responsibility you coveted before more lives and businesses are needlessly destroyed on a whim

If you believe that the Johnson Government has handled the COVID pandemic in the best way it was possible for anyone to do so, please Please PLEASE think again.

No, I’m not laying out a stall to argue the merits or the wrongs of Lockdowns, social distancing, vaccinations for everyone or zero-COVID as an impractically myopic cause. All of the questions that exist covering the unnecessary whys will continue to grow in number and the answers will most likely be provided as the consequences unravel around us all over time.

With talk and media attention now refocusing and pointing towards tax rises and the public policy changes that might begin to tackle the phenomenal National Debt created by the Johnson Government, it is becoming increasingly important for people to know and understand that even if lockdowns, social distancing and population-wide vaccination were the only way to tackle COVID, the people who have been unable to work and the businesses that closed or had significant loss in turnover, could have been supported in a much simpler, more intelligent and more considered approach. One that would have been equitable and fair to everyone, but above all would not have created either the level of National Debt or the otherwise unimaginable situation where workers furloughed on ‘free money’ understandably have no desire to return to doing the work the Johnson Government has been paying them not to do.

At a time of national crisis, we have a right to expect that the people we elect to make decisions and act on our behalf will do so in the best interests of everyone – not just themselves.

People who have attained and actively coveted the level of responsibly that not only Ministers but all MPs have, should either possess the experience or understanding to reach high level decisions, or know how to bring all of the right people and different interests together so that all of the pertinent information is made available to them and solutions can quickly and efficiently be put together that will be beneficial to all whilst working in the best interests of everyone.

What we got when the Johnson Government response to the COVID pandemic kicked off in March 2020, was a ‘pic n mix’ or ‘pin the tail on the donkey’ approach. We have a Prime Minister and Chancellor who were simply not up to the task and were driven not only by their own self-interest and fear, but also that of the civil servants and advisors surrounding them. The net result was that with both eyes on legacies and the result of the next election, our so-called leaders simply picked up and ran with the most obvious solutions that worked for them, rather than first working the consequences for everyone else through.

They then backed this travesty of absent leadership with a dangerous narrative that even now they refuse to step back from. One that has destroyed lives and livelihoods without any reason at every step along the way.

In response to the financial and economic issues created directly by the lockdowns they chose to impose; the Government should have imposed a parallel and universal shutdown of the monetary or economic system. One where people and businesses that suddenly found that they were unable to service bills and expenditure through no fault of their own, would have no obligation to make debt payments or meet service charges for anything non-essential that they were not using for as long as needed – with Government stepping in to underwrite the cost and provision of services that are essential for life.

The only need for direct financial subsidy for ANYONE either without or with a reduced income would then have been the weekly cost for an individual and their dependents to be fed and for their basic needs to be met. A figure substantially less than the free cash payments that have now been made and already add up to £60 Billion in Furlough payments alone.

Those key workers able to continue working on the frontline to provide products and services that are essential and are for the benefit of all would have had the de factobonus of a payment holiday on all of the big living costs such as rent, car payments or mortgages. This would have been a very fair and equitable way to reward those continuing to work throughout the pandemic without favour and give them a proportionate and timely thank you for all they have done.

The impact and consequences of the choices that the Johnson Government made, are already far-reaching indeed. It just doesn’t appear to be that way as lack of meaningful media coverage means the real-life disasters that are already unfolding don’t sell news and will not see the light of day.

The impact and scope of the problems that eighteen months of lockdowns have caused at individual, community and social levels, came about through a complete lack of consideration for the consequences of the financial measures that the Chancellor imposed upon UK businesses. Such measures and the decision-making processes that underpinned them could only have come about as either the result of a mixture of stupidity and complete ignorance or by deliberate, malignant design. Neither demonstrate an acceptable way for a democratic UK Government to perform and raise many questions about the quality and suitability of the politicians we have.

To say or believe that nobody else could have done a better job or have done anything differently simply isn’t true.

Many were aware, right from the beginning that the choices being made by Government were flawed, based entirely on the wrong motivation and ideas, and that there were alternative ways to handle all of the problems that Covid created, rather than the approach that Johnson and Sunak have taken, facilitated by a Parliament full of MPs who should have understood what was going on and intervened much earlier on.

The size and magnitude of the problem the Johnson Government has created is so big and so far reaching that the consequences have not even hit many of us yet.

Without us being aware, much is already changing economically behind the scenes and the inevitable ‘new normal’ is yet to come. It will not look like anything we have seen in living memory before.

Some are already suggesting that financial burden of the Johnson Government’s handling of COVID will be placed in the hands of future generations, many of whom have yet to be born.

But the debt that is still being ratcheted up is so big that when the impact and consequences of what these unwitting totalitarians have done have been fully manifested, it will become painfully apparent that the economic system as we know it is done.

The way of doing things economically, financially and with money as we have been – whether consciously or not – can no longer go on and will cease to exist.

The UK might have been better positioned to weather the coming storm and deal with the fallout from what will be the significant financial and economic crisis that the Johnson Government has wilfully engineered, had it not been the case that governments around the World have acted in very similar ways.

The behaviour of our supposedly skilled worldwide leadership has given credence to the very strange and dangerous philosophy inappropriately named the Great Reset by the World Economic Forum – a wholly quixotic and dangerously impractical set of proposals that will only become prescient if people continue to behave and respond like the whole thing is a done deal.

Trying to explain the unexplainable to so many frustrated, bewildered and disenfranchised people who are now looking for answers – as less and less of what the Johnson Government does appears to make sense, leaves many vulnerable to the influence of conspiracies. The idea that there is some great plan at work to enslave society and put us all under the yoke of some Orwellian regime only becomes the dystopian nightmare we fear if we make that idea real.  

In truth, many of the things that Ministers are publicly saying and doing are fuelling this myth. Yet the truth is far more mundane.

Politics in the UK has become the preserve of the ambitious and of those seeking glory who have no care nor consideration for anyone but themselves.

Politicians have become self-styled wordsmiths and the manipulators of truth. They have reached far into the dark art of behavioural science to terrify and control normal people, whilst telling us that they are our saviours and that they and only they are the ones to get things done.

Real people, in an increasing number – if not already a majority – are now in the position where they cannot afford the lives that they already have.

Burdening us all with an horrific level of National Debt that we simply do not possess the means to service without further sacrifices that we cannot afford demonstrates a level of detachment from real life and day-to-day reality on the part of the political classes that is at best breath-taking and at worst borderline criminal to say the least.

The UK was already heading for massive financial problems before the COVID pandemic arrived. Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) and Neoliberal Policy has been the cause of much of the financial inequality that already exists across society.

Such theories are treated like they are a saviour by Rishi Sunak and his Advisors. Yet the impact of a philosophy or set of ideas that suggest the markets will look after everything if they are allowed to function on their own with minimal regulation would be a wholly inappropriate and misguided approach to managing the affairs of a country in peacetime. It is certainly not the way to lead us through any kind of national crisis and certainly not for fighting any kind of war – as tackling the Covid pandemic has been likened to by those seeking to big up their leadership credentials and prowess.

The real reset, reboot, redrawing or revaluation of everything that has become necessary is not one that self-serving, self-absorbed politicians and ambitious would-be leaders who have no respect for others can control. Even if for a period of time it looks and feels like they can.

The financial system that we have and the ideas that underpin it are completely broken. The Johnson Government’s mishandling of the financial response to the COVID pandemic has speeded up its destruction. Their actions are now shedding light onto just how poor and damaging the consequences for everyone are from a system that champions and promotes financial interests and profit above all else.

Money has no intrinsic value. It is a unit of exchange, nothing more. It is certainly not a thing, nor the ‘god’ that its use as a reference point for the value of everything suggests that it has now become.

If money were real, governments would not be able to print it or produce it in the quantities that they have done over the last 18 months – seemingly without consequence. Yet we are seeing money appear out of thin air.

Everything will have to be revalued, but not just in financial terms. It must be for the benefit of everyone and certainly not the same old few.

There is an ethical or moral deficit present within the whole of government and the financial system that itself needs to be completely and comprehensively reset. We can no longer continue on a pathway where those in power at any level within politics or business make decisions and act not because they have questioned whether it is right or wrong to do so, but simply because they can, and it serves their purpose to do so.

Indeed it is ironic that the actions of many businesses to now push up prices post lockdown to ‘make up for what they have lost’ – not because they should, but because they can – could easily prove to become the inflationary catalyst that will bring the whole house of cards down.

The decisions that must be taken to achieve the change that will address the massive societal and systemic imbalances on our behalf will be the responsibility of the Government, the Ministers, the MPs or whoever leads and runs this Country when that time comes.

However, it would be better for us all if the decisions were taken now and before any more damage is done. That way, many of the additional problems that normal people are going to needlessly face can be prevented before they even begin.

This would certainly require Rishi Sunak to choose to own his decisions now, rather than offload them or project them onto a public suffering with crippling financial fatigue.

As this class of politicians is responsible for creating many of the problems that we face, it is only fair to expect them to step up and fulfil the requirements of the responsibility that comes with the jobs they wanted, before inaction and ineptitude causes more damage than our society can sustain.

The Chinese Government’s ruthlessness is a strategic risk empowered by the cultural fear Johnson & Co created to help their own plans for control

Whilst conspiracists and even Governments see the suggestion that China deliberately unleashed Coronavirus on the World as a legitimate hammer to hit them with, there remain simply too many variables and unknowns for a Government as controlling as the Communist Chinese to indulge. That isn’t to say they are neither prepared nor are not already using their ruthlessness to gain a strategic upper hand against the West as our Countries go to pieces because of Coronavirus Policy.

Whilst our Prime Minister likes to think of himself as the Churchill of the modern age, he is presiding over what history is likely to record as one of the most destructive British Governments ever known.

Johnson’s Conservatives have turned a crisis into calamity whilst convincing a significant part of the population that it is no longer safe to live.

If every country around the globe were doing nothing other than dealing with Coronavirus, or rather pandering to the fear of it – as Boris and his Government deliberately are, it would merely be the financial chaos that they have unleashed without good reason in response to the Lockdown they created that would be the biggest problem we face today by far.

However, blame for the genesis of coronavirus, the Huawei 5G question and the South China Sea uncertainties aside, little attention is being focused on China, whilst it is pretty much steaming ahead with everything – like COVID-19 was a meaningless blip it has simply cast aside.

It’s as if China was on the pre-Covid world ‘ship’ with everyone, yet they have carried on accelerating output and enhancing both their economic and industrial situation, whilst all of the western ‘wet’, incompetent and self-serving governments have self sabotaged their own Countries and jumped overboard.

Why does it matter?

It matters because the world is not a happy place. The complacency that has taken over our lives has made both the UK and the wider world an increasingly vulnerable place.

Whilst political correctness and the woke age sees the lives of people cancelled simply for daring to express themselves freely, we have collectively entered a very dangerous time when we literally only see threats from people who dare to offend fashionable thinking and use their voice.

Regrettably, many of the people waking to the threat to our way of living that our own government has caused in their response to the Coronavirus Pandemic are falling into a trap of believing that there is some great conspiracy at work to create a deliberate reset that will enslave us all. Yet the real threat to the Western world is the new world order that the Chinese is already working strategically to impose and fully intends to head.

China is the industrial and economic powerhouse that we should fear, because the Chinese Government see no moral restrictions in their way to achieving anything they want.

Instead our gutless and inept politicians have spent years sucking up to the Chinese Government simply because our own politicians values revolve around money and China appears to be the one Country always ready to help out when there’s a need for ready cash with the seemingly bottomless pockets to go with it.

Beyond the responsibility and the guilt that growing numbers now wish to be attributed to the actions of Boris and Co. there is perhaps an even greater injustice than their catastrophic mishandling of the Coronavirus Pandemic: in terms of national security they and have been and are strategically asleep at the wheel.

There is no reason to not trade with any country if they have goods or services to offer, they we cannot produce in the UK.

Yet the globalist approach that has been part of this neoliberalist age has pushed manufacturing and jobs headlong into the lair of the dragon. Corporate greed and government incompetence have elevated the chase for profits into a different league, playing right into the hands of a regime that uses deception to gain advantage as its default choice.

As the UK and many other countries around the world begin their descent into an economic abyss that there was never a need for us to fall into, let alone be propelled there by the choice and actions of our politicians, the Chinese government is amassing strength in all manner of ways, aided exponentially by this now unavoidable demise of our own.

The Chinese are positioning themselves to exploit this situation to their advantage. They will quickly be in a position to militarily threaten us in the physical world as well as in the parallel cyber universe where their tentacles have spread far beyond our current national capabilities and probably even into our own homes.

Because of what our politicians have done or failed to do, the 1930’s age of appeasement under the threat of Hitler in Europe may well soon resemble a comparatively idle threat when you put in perspective what’s really involved.

Motivating an entire nation that has been brainwashed to fear death from a virus at every step will feel all but impossible to any genuine leader in itself. But having to face overturning the material effect of decades of Neoliberalism and Globalisation too, in order to restore our collective way of thinking, our motivation and our manufacturing capabilities – just so that we can actually respond when WE are the ones being threatened by war (and if the Chinese do not win without a shot being fired first ) – will be beyond compare.

We can only hope that the trajectory we now appear to be on turns out to be false or positively different than it appears. Otherwise the chances are, instead of being a great leader who preserved our freedom at all costs, Boris Johnson will he seen as the prime minister so obsessed with controlling people’s freedoms to preserve his own role that he gave away everyone’s ability to be free by choice.

What the Carillion collapse tells us about the unspoken truths governing public sector contracts

Carillion

Carillion is the big news this week, and is likely to remain on the media radar for some time, given the impact that the collapse of a Company of this size is almost certain to have on commercial relationships that are now an integral part of the public sector.

Moments like this are important for reasons which go way beyond the impact that Monday’s announcement is already having on jobs and the potential closures of many small businesses.

It is providing one of those very rare opportunities to glance inside the incestuous workings of contract delivery on behalf of government and gain an invaluable insight into why private interests working at any level within the public sector is in clear conflict with very ideals of what public service delivery is fundamentally about.

Regrettably, the clear focus of the media and political classes has already fallen upon the question and avoidance of blame. Yet if they were to begin to look just a little further and be open with what have for too long been the unpalatable truths, there would be just the merest hope that questions such as whether there can be a future for the NHS when it remains in a perpetual state of financial crisis could perhaps be genuinely answered.

So why are contracts going to private companies outside the public sector?

The best place to begin thinking about the contracting or privatisation problem is to look at why private business is really even involved in the delivery of government services of any kind, when government exists to operate for, on behalf of and for the benefit of only the public.

Man can only ever have one true master after all, and if money is the true motivator, then public service will at best become an oversight – the unwelcome relative left trailing way behind.

Whilst it may feel counter-intuitive to believe or accept it for many of us, the ‘privatisation solution’ has been in the main part created by Conservative governments in response to the consequences of policies created typically by Labour in order to enhance the rights, working conditions and influence of public sector employees.

Positive discrimination and rights, enhanced working conditions, gold-plated pensions and union indulgence within public sector organisations all cost an ever evolving sum of money in an increasing number of different ways, which usually create even more roles and dilute responsibility further and further still.

The cost of employing people within the public sector on conditions which exceed those of the private sector outside – even when salaries appear to be less, has simply made the delivery of services too expensive for government itself to provide.

Against this backdrop, all areas of he public sector have had to go in search of more cost effective ways to deliver services, and have had to do so in ways which also meet the rigorous requirements of providing services and employing staff as a government based organisations.

This has made the ‘marketplace’ fertile for the entry of private contractors who don’t have the same considerations as these former public sector based service providers.

When you consider that private contractors are providing arguably the same level of service, just without the same levels of bureaucracy – whilst making what in some cases is an outrageous level of profit besides, you can soon begin to see that something is inherently wrong with the way that the government system is now designed.

So how does public sector contracting by private contractors become a problem?

Business loves a contract. Contracts give surety. Contracts themselves can be used as a solid-gold guarantee – and particularly so when they are agreed and signed with government. This gives business confidence which can be misplaced, misused, abused and is almost certain to breed a feeling of complacency.

After completing what should be a rigorous ‘tender process’ – the company will sign a contract with the government organisation which agrees what, when and how the ‘contractor’ will provide a service, whether that just be 1 person to sweep a street or 32 bin lorries to collect your rubbish every fortnight for 5 years. On signing this contract, the company will know exactly what it will be paid, know what it will in turn have to spend, will have worked out its costs and borrowing, should have kept back a little for a rainy day and then know what it will make in profit – from which it will pay bonuses to staff and dividends to shareholders after it has paid any tax requirement.

Good managers know that some things change during the lifetime of a contract – such as fuel prices going up, which would be a real concern for a bus service provider or a private ambulance services. But contractual devices or clauses that allow for some variation in charges are usually built in to any contract to allow for this.

As such, genuinely unforeseen events or those which could not have been predicted by anyone within the contracting company itself are very rare to find.

What government contracts don’t allow for however, are lack of knowledge or understanding of the service delivery area on the part of those designing and agreeing a contract. They don’t make allowance for unmitigated trust on the part of either party. They certainly don’t consider the potential greed or indeed malpractice of a contractor or its decision making staff, which cannot be planned for or predictably defined even within the scope of a government contract process.

When a contractor has only a single contract, transparency is bizarrely much clearer and for the management, much more important and kept clearly in mind.

But when you have many more and perhaps and ever increasing number of contracts, the potential for complacency and overconfidence can lead to otherwise unrealistic opportunities, which in more focused circumstances would have been denied.

It may be as simple as paying senior executives massive, over-inflated salaries. But it has the potential to be much much more in terms of investment, questionable projects and big payouts for shareholders when little in terms of adequate checks and balances has allowed an adequate safety blanket to be retained from payouts and quietly put aside.

The overriding problem with a company which has grown to the size, reach and responsibility of Carillion is there is so much in terms of questionable financial activity that it has the ability to very easily hide.

The responsibility for contract design and management doesn’t just fall on contractors themselves however.

In the background to all this and within the protectionist culture in which contemporary public sector commissioning is currently enshrined, purchasing officers simply don’t have the motivation or willingness to do their jobs as effectively as they should. When the money you are allocating isn’t yours, public service and best value isn’t always the overriding priority. Sometimes it’s all about doing anything which proves to be easier, and who gets what doesn’t always work out exactly as it should.

Whether its building maintenance, bin collections, public transport, prison management, forensic services or interim and temporary staff services that contractors provide, contractors are all making unnecessary profit at the ultimate cost to us as taxpayers.

So what can be done to solve the problem and when will anything happen?

What has been outlined here provides little more than a simple snapshot of a very big and complex problem, which those in power are through their actions are continuing to deny.

For these problems to be addressed, it would first be necessary for politicians to accept that the whole system of government delivery is broken, riddled with management focused upon self interest, making decisions based on theoretical premise, and that there are simply too many people operating within the system who are ultimately being allowed to take us all for a ride.

The ‘too big to fail’ mindset has now permeated through political thinking to a level where contracts are being awarded despite very clear warning signals which would tell even very junior civil service staff that something is not right.

This is no longer a question of let’s bail them out so that they don’t fail like Labour did with the Banks in 2008; this is all about awarding contracts because there is a view that they never will.

Solving this problem is far from simple. It is not just about political thinking. It’s about getting the market’s to think differently. But just as much, it’s about getting employees to see their roles differently; to accept that they have a part to play too.

In simple terms, the free for all has to stop.

This bonanza based on self-interest is no longer sustainable.

The perpetuation of the lie that government genuinely works selflessly for everyone has got to be stopped.

No business can perform effectively on the basis that it prioritises the working conditions and needs of its staff before the priorities upon which it was created to deliver. Yet this is how liberalism and rights culture has manifested itself within all parts of government and the public sector.

Not only has the NHS become hamstrung by lack of staff and inefficiency, it is being cut up by the cost of the staff it hires through contracts – thereby being destroyed by the supposed solution itself; by the very respite that additional money is supposed to provide.

Meanwhile local government has its own substantive bogeyman too, finding itself tied up in knots by the cost of the local government pension scheme – the destination of the better part of our council tax, in many of the Boroughs, Cities and Districts where most of us reside.

Then there are the PFI contracts upon which the last Labour Government so heavily relied. A coarse, deceptive instrument designed to hide public spending, whilst fire hosing cash at private contractors over 30 year terms. Just another financial time bomb legacy like the raid on pension funds by Gordon Brown which we overlook daily on the basis that out of sight is very much out of our minds.

The power rests with government to change all of this, if only they would try.

Regrettably, the will doesn’t even exist to even begin doing so today, even if the Government could begin doing so – something that a hung parliament which could last until 2022 will simply deny.

With a good chance that the next Government will be based upon or built around a militant form of Labour, the chances are that politicians will only continue to try and hide the truth thereafter, because action which doesn’t just look responsible is not a pathway to which they are inclined.

As Jeremy Corbyn made clear in his questioning of Theresa May at Wednesday’s PMQ’s, the answer is just to do everything to return everyone to employment in government jobs. No doubt based upon further borrowing, which to those who don’t understand business or economics is a perceived as a policy which when sold looks bullet proof.

images thanks to independent.co.uk, bbc.co.uk, wiltshiretimes.co.uk

The ‘rent’ economy is enslaving us all, creating money for nothing for the ‘asset rich’ and progressively extending poverty to all the ‘paying poor’

download (10)Every day we are hearing and reading stories about wage stagnation, price escalation, homelessness of the kind where young people can’t afford their own place, spiralling personal debt and a whole range of stories which relate to the cost of living. Stories that are repeatedly telling us that maintaining a basic life in the UK is very quickly becoming a luxury that many of us simply cannot or will not be able to afford.

Alone, each tale told can and often is attributed to a range of causes which are nonetheless real, but also overlook a common theme throughout all of these issues. The commonality between them all is the economic concept of ‘rent’. The impact of third parties taking ownership of all or part of a product, the delivery of a service, or some other form of purchase at some point in the process from where it originated to where we use or in consume it in some way.

Rent is of course a term we use in daily life to describe paying to use something which belongs to someone else. The most common usage is that of renting of a house, where instead of there being a simple relationship between an owner occupier and their house or property, the occupant rents the property from the owner, essentially increasing a basic two part relationship into three.

In just this example alone, we can take it one stage further and add a bank or mortgage owner of a buy-to-let property (1) which is rented by the occupant (2) from the owner (3) who borrows the money and pays interest to the bank (4), which may itself have borrowed that money from another bank (5).

Whilst we would normally think of just the transaction between the occupier and the property owner as being ‘rent’, in economic terms, any additional party taking something from an overall transaction or supply chain between its origin and use who isn’t essential to the core process is receiving rent of some kind. They in turn may split their role between themselves and others, each adding their own profit as they do every time it happens. Ultimately each additional participant in the chain raises the price of whatever we as users or consumers will be expected to pay.

Sometimes, a number of stages appear necessary. For instance the food we eat might have to be grown by a farmer (1), which is bought by a manufacturer (2) who pays a haulier (3) to transport it to where they will process it. The manufacturer then sells the prepared food to a wholesaler(4) and pays another haulier (5) to deliver it to their warehouse. The wholesaler then sells it to a supermarket (6) and pays another haulier (7) to take it to their distribution centre. The supermarket then pays another haulier (8) to deliver the product to its store, where it sells the finished product to us (9). Do believe me when I say that the chains are usually much more convoluted than that!

Of course, we are all guilty of falling into the trap of forgetting how complex the process is which brings us our food and most of the items that we consume or the services we buy, because for us the process seems to be so very easy. But look closer and we will soon see that even a supply chain of this size may involve unnecessary parts and people taking ‘rent’.

So what does this all this talk of rent really have to do with the cost of living?

The real problem with the provision of goods and services is that the UK operates within what is called a ‘free market’ environment, which it has been since at least the time of the Thatcher Government (1979-90). Within this free market, reduced levels of regulation and influence from the government – who we expect to guard and protect our best interests – provides the opportunity for additional 3rd parties and in fact many more of them to involve or add themselves to the chain of many of our daily transactions. By doing so, they can make significant profits from what in some cases will be as simple for them as a click to buy and another to sell.

Whether it is food, clothing, fuel and oil, transport, communications, borrowing money, or just about anything we can imagine that we can buy, there are now speculators buying and selling products and services, sub contracting responsibilities to others, all of them taking additional profit by taking ‘rent’ which there is no practical reason for anyone needing to pay. They indirectly inflate the prices we pay for the end product, increasingly making those things which should really be quite affordable, simply too expensive for us to buy.

These speculators do this because they can. There are no real rules to stop them, and they are making as much money as they can without any consideration for the impact of their actions on the end users – that’s us. And they have little concern that they will have to stop doing so, because the banks simply continue to lend money to the people who have been forced by this process to borrow – if indeed possible – in order to survive.

Think about what really caused the 2007-08 Financial Crisis, which was the sale, resale and resale again of financial products or debts which became so complex, even the financiers themselves didn’t really know what they were buying and selling on.

Bankers were making massive amounts of money – all because nobody was monitoring exactly what they were doing, whilst their own ‘success’ blinded them to how value was being created by lending to people at one end of this elaborate chain who simply didn’t have the ability to pay back what they had been lent.

The Bankers didn’t care before it happened and they don’t care now. They are still not regulated in the way that they should be, and were actually saved from going under in 2008 by the Labour Government at the time by giving them Billions of Pounds of money in bailouts and rescue funds that the Government itself borrowed, and which we are still paying for through the accumulation of public debt.

These are people, banks and companies who are quite literally making money for nothing, and its all at our expense.

The ‘rent’ economy has been evolving as the reality in which we live for many years now. But it is only as more and more products and services have come under the control of those with the money and unrestricted influence to speculate, whether it has been through privatisation, the development of near monopolies or money simply being placed within unscrupulous hands, that the real impact of ‘farming everything for profit’ has began to become fully clear.

 

 

 

Cameron names his nemesis populism, but the Westminster set still refuses to accept that it was a rejection of self interest which was the key to Brexit

imagesAs I stepped into the polling booth at a local church hall on the evening of 23rd of June and looked at the voting slip in my hands, the feeling that crossed my mind couldn’t have been further from the thought of being part of something populist, even if I had been confident that my No vote would contribute to an unscripted win.

I know that I am not alone, and whilst the bizarre polarity which now exists between Remainers and Leavers has reached the level that you will find friendships broken and even online dating profiles telling would-be suitors not to waste their time if they voted the other way, it is certain that David Cameron continues to do a great disservice to all voters by now suggesting that such a momentous decision could be made under the influence of a populist cause.

It isn’t cool to be a Leaver for the same reasons that our former Prime Minister came to draw that very conclusion.

Labelling and the use of umbrella terms to cover a multitude of different interpretations make life easy for politicians and the media alike. But they mean different things to different people. They provide an ill-considered opportunity to stereotype, and there is a very dangerous assumption that everyone who voted one way or the other did so purely on the basis that it was a populist choice and that we therefore think alike.

We don’t.

One of the most significant errors being made by politicians from across our range of political parties and even the USA beyond, is to believe that workable solutions to the root causes of the problems which have created these inappropriately labelled ‘populist’ votes can be narrowed down to focusing upon or addressing these tent-like terms such as ‘immigration’. Indeed, as we now progress forward from the Referendum they believe it sensible to use the newly coined ‘soft’ or ‘hard’ Brexit with the inherent suggestion that there is again some kind of black and white choice which still provides an ‘in/out choice’.

It doesn’t.

Not only are these terms misrepresentative and wholly misleading about the life-experiences which people are having across the Country, they are exacerbating the level of confusion that the mishmash of issues surrounding our relationship with Europe actually presents. And that’s the end of the story only if you are prepared to accept that the Referendum result was itself only ever about Europe.

People are neither one thing nor the other as leave or remain has been darkly painted suggest. The majority of people are in the most part probably sat somewhere in between.

But even ‘somewhere in between’  would be far too specific a way to try and position the basis of a debate or the questions which support it, when the European question relates so differently to so many people, depending upon just how the plethora of issues involved may have impacted upon their own lives on perhaps a very meaningful basis.

The European Referendum arrived at the front of what we will perhaps look back upon as the beginning of a perfect storm. One which has been created in no small part by many years of neoliberalism in its ascendancy, and the evolution of a political and governmental culture of self-interest. A self-contained entity which has seen decisions and policy making made within bubbles of understanding about the life experience of others and a narrative of the world outside which in relative terms operates no differently to the insular online realities that so many disenfranchised people feel falsely empowered by, and as such enjoy.

Many voters do not themselves understand the true complexity of the issues at hand, such as the role of Globalisation in freedom of movement, nor the impact that new and improving technology is having on the decimation of well-paid jobs which are disappearing rather than being awarded to some foreigner who is always guaranteed to do the job for less. They certainly do not consider the unrecognisable role of the taxpayer in subsidising low paid jobs through the benefits systems for the corporate businesses that could afford to pay more along with the impact on small ones whose owners would genuinely like to do so.

It is correct that we should all be able to expect those who have been elected to represent us would properly do so. Not only should they understand fully the issues before them, we also have the right to expect that they would legislate with balance, fairness and the full reach of consequence in mind.

Regrettably there is scant evidence that they do, and with the secret now open that political parties work only towards the delivery of a beneficial result in the next election, Westminster should be in no way surprised by the fact that continuing to do things the same way that they always have, will continue to yield results which beat to a different drum.

No. Many people voted ‘No’ through the feelings of isolation which our political establishment has dealt us over many years and Governments, and it is the frustration building up inside which in one way or another to each of us said ‘No, I can no longer go with what I see as this hollow and populist status quo’.