The Impoverishment Index | Overview

The Impoverishment Index is a new analytical measure designed to capture what traditional economic indicators fail to show: the real‑world erosion of living standards experienced by ordinary people, even during periods of reported economic growth.

Where metrics such as GDP, CPI, and average wages describe the economy from above, the Impoverishment Index measures it from the ground – from the perspective of households whose purchasing power, security, and prospects are quietly shrinking. It provides a way to quantify the widening gap between the story the economy tells and the reality people live.

At its core, the Impoverishment Index asks a simple question:

How much poorer do people become as the economy “grows”?

The answer reveals a structural pattern of decline that has been largely overlooked.

Definition

The Impoverishment Index
A measure of the rate at which individuals or households lose real economic value – in earnings, savings, and purchasing power – relative to the rate of national economic growth.

It captures the difference between economic performance and lived experience, highlighting the extent to which growth no longer translates into shared prosperity.

Purpose of the Impoverishment Index

To provide a clear, accessible measure of real‑world economic decline.
To expose the disconnect between official narratives and everyday experience.
To help explain why the current system feels increasingly unstable and unsustainable.
To support wider systems analysis focused on understanding collapse dynamics and structural inequality.
To create a foundation for future reform by making the underlying processes visible.

Why the Index Matters

Traditional indicators increasingly fail to reflect the pressures people face:

GDP can rise while households become poorer.
Inflation measures often understate the real cost of essentials.
Wage averages can mask stagnation or decline for most workers.
Employment figures can hide insecurity, underemployment, and falling job quality.

The Impoverishment Index cuts through these distortions by focusing on net outcomes for people, not abstract aggregates.

Key Takeaways

1. The UK is experiencing systemic impoverishment

A slow, cumulative erosion of living standards is underway, compounding year after year.

2. Economic growth no longer guarantees prosperity

The economy can expand while households contract – and this has become normal.

3. The gap between narrative and reality is widening

Official data suggests stability; lived experience suggests decline.

4. Impoverishment is structural, not accidental

It is the predictable outcome of a system that concentrates gains at the top while distributing costs downward.

5. The lack of public discussion is itself revealing

Impoverishment is rarely measured or debated, even as it becomes a defining feature of everyday life.

6. The Index is a tool for clarity

It does not tell people what to think; it helps them see what is happening.

7. Understanding the process is the first step toward change

You cannot fix what you cannot measure. The Index provides the missing measurement.

The Impoverishment Index – Overview PDF_Vers1_29May26 Download

A Simple Guide to the Bond Market: The Power Behind the Government

If the bond market sounds abstract, intimidating, or like something only bankers need to worry about, you’re not alone. Most people never encounter it directly. You can live your whole life without buying a bond, reading a yield chart, or watching a gilt auction.

And yet the bond market shapes:

how much your government can spend
how much tax you pay
the state of public services
the cost of your mortgage
the stability of the economy
and the limits of every political promise you hear

It is the quiet force behind the curtain – the one that doesn’t appear on ballot papers but still influences the outcome of every government’s plans.

So let’s break it down, simply and honestly.

What is the bond market?

Imagine the government needs money – not for a rainy day, but for everything from schools to pensions to defence to the NHS. Taxes cover some of it, but not all. The gap between what the government spends and what it collects is filled by borrowing.

To borrow, the government issues bonds – IOUs that promise to pay interest over time.

These bonds are bought by:

pension funds
insurance companies
banks
investment firms
foreign governments
and large institutional investors

They buy bonds because they want a safe place to store money and earn a predictable return.

In other words:

The bond market is the place where governments borrow the money they need to function.

Why does the bond market matter so much?

Because the government depends on it.

If investors trust the government, they lend cheaply.

If they lose trust, they demand higher interest – or stop lending altogether.

This is why the bond market is often described as the “referee” of government behaviour. It doesn’t shout. It doesn’t campaign. It doesn’t issue statements. It simply reacts.

And its reactions have consequences.

What happens when the bond market gets nervous?

When investors worry that a government is spending too much, taxing too little, or losing control of the economy, they sell its bonds.

When they sell, the price of bonds falls.

When the price falls, the interest rate (the “yield”) rises.

When yields rise, government borrowing becomes more expensive.

This is not a gentle nudge.

It is a financial shockwave.

Higher borrowing costs mean:

less money for public services
more money spent on debt interest
pressure to raise taxes
pressure to cut spending
and a shrinking ability to invest in anything new

This is exactly what happened during the Liz Truss mini‑budget.

The markets didn’t “punish” her. They simply lost confidence – and reacted automatically.

Why can’t governments just ignore the markets?

Because the way government works today means that it needs to borrow constantly.

Not once a year.

Not once a decade.

Every single week.

The UK rolls over old debt and issues new debt continuously. If investors stop buying, the government cannot fund itself.

This is why no government – left, right, or centre – can simply “tell the markets to fall in line.”
It would be like telling your bank manager that you don’t feel like paying interest anymore.

The system doesn’t work that way.

Why does this feel so disconnected from everyday life?

Because the bond market operates in a world most people never see.

When you hear politicians talk about “growth,” “fiscal rules,” or “market confidence,” they are speaking to this invisible audience – not to the public.

And when they talk about “growth,” they mean GDP, not the kind of growth people actually feel in their lives.

GDP can rise while:

wages stagnate
services decline
inequality widens
and communities fall apart

So when politicians celebrate “growth,” they are often signalling to the markets that the system is still functioning – not announcing that life is about to get better.

This is why the public hears optimism while politicians feel fear.

So who really holds the power?

Not in a conspiratorial sense – but in a structural one:

The bond market holds more power over government spending than any manifesto ever written.

It doesn’t care who wins elections.

It doesn’t care about ideology.

It doesn’t care about promises.

It cares about one thing:

Whether the government looks like a safe bet.

If it does, borrowing stays cheap.

If it doesn’t, the system tightens like a vice.

Why does this matter now?

Because Britain’s fiscal position is fragile:

debt is high
interest costs are rising
public services are stretched
productivity is weak
and the economy is heavily dependent on imported energy and goods

This means the next government – any government – will face extremely limited room for manoeuvre.

Not because they lack ideas.

Not because they lack ambition.

But because the system they inherit is already at its limits.

The uncomfortable truth

The bond market is not the enemy.

But it is not a neutral observer either.

It is the mechanism through which decades of political decisions – outsourcing, deregulation, financialisation, and dependence on debt – have come home to roost.

And until the public understands how this system works, the gap between political promises and political reality will continue to widen.

Because the truth is simple:

The bond market doesn’t take orders.

It sets the boundaries within which politics now operates.

And any politician who cannot explain that – or refuses to – is not being honest about the world we live in.

A Simple Guide to the Bond Market PDF_Vers1_18May26 Download

The Triple Lock and Structural Crisis of the British Economy

The debate over the future of the State Pension triple lock is often framed as a simple question of fairness: should pensions rise each year by the highest of inflation, wage growth or 2.5%? But the timing of Reform UK’s recent pledge to retain the policy – announced immediately after the party removed its housing spokesperson over comments about the Grenfell tragedy – highlights something more political than economic. The announcement reflected the sensitivity of the moment, not a deeper understanding of what the triple lock represents within the wider economic system.

The triple lock itself, introduced in 2010 by the Conservative–Liberal Democrat coalition and applied since 2011, was designed to ensure the State Pension kept pace with living costs. On paper, it is a straightforward mechanism. In practice, it has become a symbol of intergenerational tension and a lightning rod for wider anxieties about the sustainability of the welfare state.

Yet much of the public debate rests on a misunderstanding – not of the triple lock, but of the system that surrounds it.

The National Insurance Illusion

A significant part of the resentment directed at pensioners – and at benefit claimants more broadly – stems from a widespread belief that National Insurance functions like a personal contribution scheme. The idea is simple: pay in during working life, draw out later if needed. It is a reassuring narrative, and one that shapes how people judge who is “deserving” of support.

But it is not how the system works.

National Insurance is, in practice, another form of taxation. It creates the impression of a ring‑fenced fund, but the money is not stored or invested on behalf of contributors. It flows into the wider fiscal system, supporting pensions, disability benefits, the NHS and more. The distinction between NI and income tax is largely psychological – a way of obscuring the true scale of the tax burden.

This misunderstanding fuels the belief that some groups are “taking out” more than they “put in”.

Pensioners are portrayed as receiving disproportionate benefits, while claimants are accused of drawing on funds they have not earned. Yet both groups are navigating a system shaped not by individual choices, but by structural economic forces that have made independent living increasingly difficult.

Few pensioners enjoy the “gold‑plated” incomes often imagined. And for many, the wealth tied up in property is not liquid wealth at all – it is simply the roof over their heads.

A Safety Valve in a Distorted Economy

The official justification for the triple lock is to protect pensioners from falling living standards. But its deeper purpose is more systemic.

It acts as a safety valve in an economy where wages have failed to keep pace with the cost of living for years, and where millions rely on top‑up benefits simply to survive.

Recent calculations suggest that the real minimum income required for independent living is around £14.92 per hour for a full‑time worker – far above the statutory minimum wage. In this context, the triple lock is not generosity. It is a stabiliser in an economy where the fundamentals no longer align with the lived reality of ordinary people.

The triple lock attracts scrutiny precisely because it exposes this gap: the distance between what the economy delivers and what people need to live.

The Extractive System Behind the Debate

To understand why the triple lock is under pressure, it is necessary to look at the broader economic model. Since the financial crisis of 2007–08 – when the Labour government bailed out the banks on the grounds that they were “too big to fail” – the UK has relied increasingly on debt‑fuelled growth. Public money, or rather public borrowing, was used to stabilise a financial system whose own excesses had caused the crash.

The result was an acceleration of an extractive economic system: one that draws value out of industry, infrastructure and natural resources faster than it replaces them.

Over time, this leaves the state with fewer productive assets and greater reliance on financial engineering to keep the system afloat.

The Covid‑19 pandemic and the war in Ukraine intensified these pressures. Government spending surged, supply chains fractured, and inflation returned with a force not seen in decades.

In such an environment, policies like the triple lock become both more expensive and more politically contentious – even as they become more essential for those who rely on them.

Reform UK and the Politics of Constraint

Reform UK’s pledge to retain the triple lock, while simultaneously promising deep cuts to welfare, illustrates the bind facing all political parties.

The party argues that reducing benefits will free up resources to protect pensioners. But most people receiving benefits are not living comfortably; they are surviving on the margins of a system that no longer delivers affordable housing, adequate wages or predictable costs.

The irony is that many of the people who would be affected by such cuts were encouraged to come to the UK in the first place to sustain a model that depends on population growth and consumer spending to generate GDP. The same pounds circulate through the economy, creating the appearance of growth even when underlying productivity is stagnant.

Reform’s position is not unique. Every major party faces the same structural constraints. None can deliver the full range of promises they make without confronting the underlying economic model – something no mainstream political actor has yet been willing to do.

There is, ultimately, no way to rob Peter to pay Paul when both are already struggling.

A System at Its Limits

The triple lock debate is therefore not really about pensioners. It is about a system approaching the limits of what can be sustained through borrowing, population growth and statistical measures of economic activity.

When the government can no longer create enough debt to paper over the cracks, policies like the triple lock become flashpoints.

The question is not whether the triple lock is fair. It is whether the economic model that makes it necessary can continue in its current form.

Conclusion

The triple lock has become a symbol of a deeper truth: Britain’s cost‑of‑living crisis is not a temporary shock but a structural feature of an economy that no longer aligns with the needs of its people.

Pensioners are not the cause of this problem, nor are benefit claimants. They are simply the most visible participants in a system that has been stretched to breaking point.

The debate over the triple lock is, in the end, a debate about the future of the UK’s economic model – and whether any political party is prepared to confront the realities that underpin it.

The Triple Lock and Structural Crisis of the British Economy PDF_Vers1_7Ap26 Download

The Harmful Hidden Meaning of ‘Growth’

We hear the term growth coming from the mouths of politicians so often that the word now sounds like it’s all government is about.

And yes, it is true that growth today is all that the government is about.

“Great!” say businesses and business owners. “The government are out to help us grow!”

And that is exactly the kind of growth most of us outside Westminster think of – and believe we are hearing – when politicians use the term. But it is not what they actually mean when they talk about “growth”, at least not the politicians who are in the know.

GDP (Gross Domestic Product)
The growth that politicians keep talking about is not the kind of growth most of us imagine when we hear them use the word.

Politicians – and the advisers around them – know perfectly well what the public thinks they mean, and they also know that what they mean is something quite different.

For politicians, growth does not mean business growth in the way most of us understand it. While it still includes the kind of growth we think of, that aspect matters far less to them today than it once did.

For politicians, growth means the growth of Gross Domestic Product, or GDP.

GDP is the size of the economy – the total amount of financial activity that has taken place across every form of business or trading activity involving measurable financial transactions. These transactions are recorded across the entire country by the Office for National Statistics from all the businesses and organisations it monitors.

“Measurable” is the key word here. It is the act of measuring so much of life because it has a financial value that has had such a negative influence on how we now value almost everything in purely monetary terms.

The Devil is in the Detail
GDP is critically important to politicians today because it is the benchmark figure that allows them to hide the true breadth and depth of public spending and public debt.

Yet GDP is really a measure of private‑sector or “commercial” activity, rather than the financial activity of public‑sector organisations.

Public borrowing figures matter because we have been conditioned to believe they have a direct relationship with the “economy”.

This is why they are always presented to us as a proportion or percentage of GDP.

If GDP grows quickly or significantly, the true financial position of the UK becomes easier to conceal.

Furthermore, this form of “creative accounting” can make the amount of money the government is spending, borrowing or creating appear smaller or less significant.

This sleight of hand works effectively because the narratives we hear from politicians and the media always frame public spending and public debt in terms of how “big” the economy is and how much it has “grown”.

Politicians and the money ‘creators’ are making our world unrecognisable whilst we are all being robbed
GDP is a very clever tool – and it was certainly designed to be. But it is also a double‑edged sword.

A quick recap:

Politicians can hide or even obscure public debt and “reduce” the amount they appear to be spending by “growing the economy”.

This is why politicians are obsessed with “growth”.

“Growing the economy” in this sense means increasing the amount of financial activity, or the total money spent or transferred through measurable activities during any defined period of time.

How “growth” works:

Political “growth” is typically achieved through an increase in private‑sector financial transactions and an increase in the volume of money in circulation (essentially the total of all the money sitting in every open bank account at any given moment).

Money is created by private banks and financial institutions – not by government.

While each pound is counted when it is created for GDP purposes, the real “magic” or sleight of hand lies in the fact that the same pound is counted again every time it changes hands in a new financial transaction at each point in a supply chain.

Housebuilding is perhaps the best example of how GDP – and therefore “growth” – can be increased, because large volumes of newly created money and the long chain of financial transactions it triggers can quickly be added to the UK’s balance sheet.

A good example of ‘Growth’ – in the way politicians need it to be:
To build a house requires private banks to create the money needed to buy the land and then to fund the entire building process. This includes the supply chains involving all the different businesses that produce building materials, the machinery used, the fuel required, the specialist tradesmen, and the surveyors.

Once the houses are built, they must be sold, which gives another private bank the opportunity to create the money for the mortgage. The mortgage lender charges a fee, the removal company gains business, the landscaper installs a garden, and so on.

Beyond this specific chain come the ongoing requirements: council tax for each home, which local councils automatically charge; utility accounts; increased demand for bus services; and the list continues.

Every one of the businesses involved provides data to the Office for National Statistics about their performance and turnover. Each set of figures is added to the country’s “productivity”, no matter how many times the same money has changed hands – meaning its value in GDP terms may be multiplied many times over.

Things to bear in mind – The System
It is important to understand that GDP functions as the “credible” measurement of economic activity precisely because it hides the creation of money behind the walls of private banks and finance houses.

Most people still believe that banks simply hold money for individuals or businesses and then lend that money to others – including governments – in return for interest, which is then shared with the original depositors.

While this may have been true in some limited ways historically, today money is created by private banks and finance houses as easily as an employee entering digits into a spreadsheet.

Many of the rules that once regulated and constrained these activities have been watered down or removed entirely under the banner of “deregulation” and “free markets”.

For The System to keep functioning, the amount of money available must keep growing, and the number of recorded financial transactions must keep increasing.

This is why the use – and increasing reliance – on credit, digital banking, and financial‑transaction tracking has become so important.

Cash transactions cannot be monitored or recorded in the same way digital transactions can. This is one of the key reasons cash is being phased out: cash, or any non‑digital transaction, is one of the few remaining tools of genuine financial independence.

Private banks and finance houses also “buy” the bonds that the government “sells” when it needs to “borrow” money to fund public policies and public‑sector delivery.
It is important to recognise that if the total amount of money in circulation were to remain fixed within this FIAT‑based economic and financial system, the value of transactions taking place would naturally fall.

The System was designed – and continues to operate – on the basis that money created within it automatically flows into the pockets of the rich. From there, it is invested in assets such as property, infrastructure, and business ownership, where it is used to generate even more credit‑creation opportunities.

In the FIAT system, money flows back to its source: those who are already very rich – the bubble where it was created in the first place.

Where our reality becomes VERY uncomfortable – just to support politicians’ ‘Growth’
To counteract the perverse nature of an economic system deliberately created to enrich and benefit those who created, manage and understand it (the creators), it becomes necessary for money to be created for new reasons and in an ever‑increasing number of ways. This ensures that money keeps flowing, keeps “multiplying”, and continues to appear as “growth”.

Deregulation allowed the same interests that create money to use even more of that created money to buy up almost everything they would never have been able to acquire otherwise – all because we have been encouraged to believe that the money they use is actually real.

This created, effectively “fake”, money has been used to buy or gain control of everything we recognise as real, typically so it can then be rented back to us – increasingly using more borrowed, created money on which we must pay interest.

Meanwhile, the money used for public spending is considered “dead money” because it generally pays wages and incomes rather than generating long chains of financial transactions that boost GDP. This creates a major problem for government, because running public services requires constant spending that does not produce the kind of measurable, repeatable financial activity that The System depends on. As a result, the government can no longer borrow enough to cover existing bills, especially as the UK has been stripped of its assets and productive capacity by the very same interests that create the money.

In contrast, large infrastructure projects are still politically attractive because they do generate the long supply‑chain activity that inflates GDP. Every stage – planning, contracting, materials, labour, machinery, financing, and eventual operation – produces measurable transactions that can be counted again and again. This makes such projects appear “affordable” or even “profitable” within the GDP‑driven framework, even when the government cannot sustainably fund day‑to‑day public services. Infrastructure spending therefore becomes a preferred tool not because it serves the public best, but because it props up the illusion of growth that The System requires.

More food for thought
Unfortunately for us, the creation of money out of nothing does not correspond in any meaningful way with the real value of what people and businesses across the UK own and produce.

Our politicians have helped to entrench this situation because adopting this system appeared to make life much easier for them.

This means that the real value of whatever money we possess – or expect to receive as income – falls each time even a single pound is “created” by politicians or by the banks.

The value of the pound in our pockets or in our bank accounts declines in proportion to the total amount of money in circulation.

The way The System attempts to counteract or mask this fall in monetary value is through what we know as inflation.

Inflation is the rise in prices that becomes necessary for anyone who owns or produces anything, simply so they can keep up with how “growth” is actually pushing the value of everything down.

How Inflation hurts us

We – the people and consumers – sit at the very end of the supply chain. We do not sell on what we buy, so we have no way to recoup the losses that government policy and economic distortions create across the wider economy.

Everything is driven by money, greed and profit.

As a result, we experience falling living standards because wages and incomes cannot rise fast enough to match the deficit that GDP‑driven “growth” creates for us at the level of everyday life.

Are we the victims of the biggest crime mankind has inflicted upon itself?
If you begin unpicking the layers of this economic onion – layers that have been deliberately obscured by narratives designed to deter anyone from looking too closely – you uncover some very uncomfortable truths that have been hiding in plain sight.

The biggest of these is that The System can only function by steadily impoverishing the masses, making people increasingly dependent on credit simply to exist.

When MMT, neoliberal economics and the FIAT monetary system were implemented in the early 1970s, it was already inevitable that those on the lowest incomes would eventually be unable to live without assistance – preferably in the form of credit.

That credit would be more of the same created money, lent back to us at interest, while our creditworthiness – and therefore our compliance – is monitored.

The government’s current push for welfare reform is not a sign that people want to live off the state. It is a sign that cracks are appearing in this bogus economy, and the fissures have widened so far that new “corporation‑friendly” policies can no longer hide them.

Although few of us trust politicians, most of us have not agreed on why.

What we should recognise is that – deliberate or not – everything politicians have done for the money creators over at least five decades has slowly destroyed the fabric of our society.

The uncomfortable truth is that we have all been robbed
The System has been created and maintained to benefit the few, while the many have been deliberately misled into believing that everything is fair, normal and simply “the way things are supposed to be”.

In reality, we have been robbed of our financial independence, our security, our opportunities, our communities, our public services and our ability to live without fear.

We have been robbed of the value of our labour, the value of our money, the value of our homes and the value of our time.

We have been robbed of the ability to live meaningful lives without being forced into debt, dependency or compliance.

We have been robbed of the truth.

We have been robbed of our peace.

And the worst part is that most people still don’t realise it.

Where we go from here
The harmful hidden meaning of “growth” becomes impossible to ignore once you understand how The System works. What politicians celebrate as “growth” is not the expansion of real prosperity, but the expansion of financial activity that extracts value from ordinary people and concentrates it elsewhere.

It is a cycle that demands ever‑greater debt, ever‑greater dependency and ever‑greater pressure on the real economy that people actually live in.

Growth is important to today’s political class because their political future depends on it. Without the appearance of growth, the economic narrative they rely on begins to collapse – and with it, the credibility of the system they defend.

Recognising this is the first step toward reclaiming what has quietly been taken from us.

The System only survives because we have been conditioned not to question it, not to challenge it and not to imagine that anything different is possible. But once the illusion is exposed, its power begins to fade.

Real change will not come from the same political class that helped build and protect this machinery of extraction. It will come from people who understand that a society cannot thrive when its citizens are reduced to consumers, debtors or data points in a spreadsheet.

We do not have to accept a future defined by insecurity, dependency or manufactured scarcity.

We can choose to rebuild an economy that values people over profit, communities over corporations and reality over the convenient fictions that have been sold to us for decades.

The truth may be uncomfortable, but it is also liberating. Once we understand how “growth” has been used as a tool of extraction, we can begin the work of creating something better – something fair, sustainable and genuinely human.

The theft only continues for as long as we fail to see it.

Awareness is the beginning of the end.

This Blog was first published on 6 December 2024. Updated on 28 April 2026 with minor revisions for clarity and relevance.

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If you can measure it, you can control it: Has GDP been the most dehumanising tool that humanity’s so-called leaders have ever created?

Just before Christmas, I published an e-book called ‘One Rule Changes Everything’. Within it, I identified the common theme of all the problems that society faces being built on the reality that the value of money is the benchmark that we use for everything in life and that the cultural selfishness that is now prevalent across mankind has become the greatest obstacle to us moving forward into a much healthier and happier way of living. Not least of all, because to do so would allow us to address all of the problems we have at their root cause.

The fact that we exist within a money-based paradigm today and have lost sight of values and what being human really means isn’t an easy idea for anyone to grapple with. After all, even those who can see and fully appreciate how ‘The System’ works, cannot escape living within it and being touched by the impact of it at each and every turn.

For the whole of humanity to reach this point without even realising it means that there has been a process at work that we have not seen or have been unconscious of.

Because so few are able to recognise that process, it is safe to assume that we have been steadily conditioned, in ways that could have been as simple as each of us accepting changes and leaps in money-related technologies, how we buy things, what products are available to us and what we have to do to get access to them. All without ever taking the time or making the effort to question any of these things and what they mean.

Experience changes our expectations. So, the true impact of technology like the internet has been far more significant than the ease of shopping or borrowing money. It has actually changed our values set, and how we think about our relationship with other human beings too.

But where did this process of unacknowledged change really begin? What were the building blocks that really started to make it that ‘life is all about money’, and nothing else?

The Human Condition

A reality that we all need to face is that a default setting of being human without being self-aware, is that we behave as an individual and as if we are separate to anyone and everything else. Therefore, we consider every interaction that we have in terms of how it will affect us, whether it will ultimately be a benefit or a cost to us.

Few will consciously place themselves in any situation where they believe that the costs of doing so will outweigh the advantages. Even when they are fully conscious of all the facts and consequences of what they have the choice to do.

This is how selfishness works at its basic level, and there is an argument to be made that it is certainly a healthy way to be, IF you cannot be sure that anyone or everyone else can take a fully altruistic approach to every interaction in life. Which there are many arguments available to suggest that they cannot.

If humankind were able to police itself and ‘keep itself honest’ by being content that everyone should always be aware of the facts before they are expected to make any decision that could have a negative impact upon them in any way, the world would already be a much happier, much healthier, much more equitable and much more human place.

But for some, the basic ingredients of life have and never will be enough.

Ideologies and Hidden Truths

As soon as a process of any kind is invented or introduced to ‘create value’, whether that’s income, efficiency or anything else that can be considered to be advantageous at any level to the end user or to the recipient, without that end user or recipient being aware of the process that’s involved or why it’s really being carried out, the doors are immediately opened up to breaches of trust and for the confidence of anyone without full knowledge of what’s happening to be abused.

Historically, that abuse of trust could be based upon something as simple as the distribution of power and how certain people found themselves in control whilst others did not.

More recently, and particularly into the 20^th century, that abuse has been based more upon the accumulation, distribution and creation of money and wealth. Manifested through wealth inequality or the wealth divide, which paints those who have much as being special, when those have less or very little, are most certainly not.

The most frightening thing about the way that ‘The System’ works and how it creates the myth that only those with wealth and power are special, is just how simple the ingredients or technical aspects that allow such stories and lies to exist, really are. So simple, that for anyone questioning how money and finance works for the first time, the simplicity itself makes the truth very hard to believe.

The most effective of all those ingredients is the framework of measurements that put figures against everything that ‘The System’ values, and gives the lie that ownership and direction of those measurements is what constitutes the real power over everything, therefore surrendering our control, because it’s what we believe.

GDP: The Tool of Measurement for a corrupt, self-serving and dehumanising ideal

It’s easy to think that the problems facing the Country have been caused by and are the sole responsibility of whoever is in government at the time. Attributing blame in that way plays no small part of the way that our broken political system actually works and its why so many of us believe that the choices of political parties that we are given will result in change, whenever the next General Election comes.

What Politicians (from any side), The Media and all the public figures sprawled across social media don’t tell us, as they whinge and make out they are the only ones who really understand the injustice and pain that everyone faces, is that everything collapsing around us today has come from an accumulative effect of policy after policy and decision after decision, that has been taken by multiple generations of politicians – from all sides, pretty much since just after the end of the Second World War.

Built on an economic idea or theory called Neoliberalism, there has been push after push to deregulate everything that was once regulated by government – on our behalf in some way, and for trust in the markets to be allowed to work beneficially on behalf of everyone and for the idea of ‘Free Markets’ to be embraced in its place.

Regulations that were once there to restrict , encourage and maintain certain behaviours of those private or commercial interests with the power to affect others lives have been steadily removed. Measurements relating to productivity, output and ‘growth’ have been inserted in their place, with little or no attention being paid to the way that the driving interests have increasingly used civil and corporate law to create their own system of checks and balances, regulated or enforced by expensive lawyers across what should still be an open or ‘free space’.

Every bit of the economy, or rather every product made, grown, produced, transported and every service carried out is measured by the financial value of each and every transaction that follows it through supply chains.

Meanwhile, this system of measuring everything in terms of the outputs generated has perverted just about every part of the public sphere. So that measurement, rather than the experience of the end user, has become what everything in business, not-for-profits and worst of all, the public sector is all about.

Measurement drives behaviour because behaviour is driven by measurement

What few have realised is that measurement offers or rather appears to offer something concrete outside of ourselves that just knowing we have done the right thing or done the best job that we could do does not.

The ability to measure, record and document also gives poor leaders, who do not trust the people who they lead, the opportunity to control those people and to increase the ways that they do so. Right up to the point where politicians and the establishment believe it right to police the way that other people think.

Yes, it seems hard to believe. But GDP and the Neoliberal obsession with measurement to ensure performance, productivity and therefore growth has actually influenced and conditioned workplace behaviours and service to the public is not what public service is now actually about.

Removing value from real life

Measurement of everything that can be measured has created and encouraged a process where people have increasingly forgotten to trust each other. In turn, ‘experts’ and ‘professionals’ rely on figures that can be illustrated, and more often than not manipulated in whatever form they can then be laid out and presented on a page.

Real life and human interaction cannot be measured in any kind of quantitative form.

We have unwittingly and therefore foolishly allowed an economic system, derived not for the benefit of the people, but so the selfish could become even more selfish, to use measurement to blame us for the flaws in ‘The System’ the few manage and the mistakes they keep making. Bringing us ever nearer to a situation where we, the guilty masses can only be saved by surrendering the few freedoms that we have left, so that we can be saved from ourselves from this ever more greedy few.

Growth

For those needing evidence or a way to understand that we are today welcoming in a form of totalitarianism that once across the threshold of daily life will then be very quickly imposed, you only need listen out to the obsession that so many of the politicians and media bods we are forced to listen to by the ‘credible’ mainstream media has with growing the economy and specifically the word ‘growth’.

In whatever context it comes at us, the fact is that the ‘growth’ people made credible by their position and platform talk about, always relates to growth of GDP or ‘Gross Domestic Product’.

GDP is the Neoliberal ethos of continually growing the amount of money in circulation, so that public debt and all the other damage that the proponents of this twisted ideology create that keeps hurting us, can be covered up and hidden from view. Until the time that it is impossible to hide it from view any more.

Our politicians, many of whom are either too greedy, too stupid or too ignorant to understand how the mechanics of ‘The System’ they are supposed to be there to legislate upon even works, only know and understand what their advisers and the people who control them tell them.

This is likely to be something along the lines that politicians can only keep spending money for as long as everything they do with the power we gave them keeps on allowing big money, big business and big everything else to grow, through a process that is steadily breaking us all.

If it cannot be measured, it doesn’t exist

The harm that having lunatics in control who have placed a financial or monetary value on so many aspects of human life, is that is has genuinely affected the way that every one of us thinks.

It has progressed to the point where the unhuman aspects of ‘The System’ we are being led under has now corrupted just about every part of life.

The fact is that deep down, we all know that the work we do, the food we grow, the products we make, the services that we provide are all about providing the things that each and every one of us need for life. And that’s what many of us still unconsciously think.

However, the hard reality we face is that a life based on values – which is where every function we carry out is about people, communities and the world we live in, is no longer what life is really about.

Life has been changed, manipulated, reformed and redirected so that money, wealth and influence is all that matters.

Anything that cannot be measured has no financial value to those who want to measure and control it.

So it becomes worthless. Because what anything is worth is what everything is now all about.