The threat to UK Farming, Our Food Security and Food Production: Either deliberate intent or outright stupidity is destroying our own ability to feed and support British People

Whilst I have been focusing on public policy issues across the whole spectrum of politics, government, charity and business, the one issue that concerns me more than any other is the question of UK Food Security.

My concern led me to study a Postgraduate Course at the Royal Agricultural University in Sustainable Agriculture and Food Security. But doing so just raised many more questions about the seriousness and the UKs vulnerability to a very broad set of issues, which even some of our best academics have a myopic view of and still believe – like many farmers – that the answers and solutions will come from politicians and an establishment, that are responsible for the mess that we are already in.

I write books, publish blogs and make videos which cover these issues. Yes, I discuss the problems, but I also focus on solutions too – and this is where there is little or no helpful discussion taking place – and where the unavoidable revolution in UK Farming, Food Production, Food Security and the relationship between British People and our Food Supply must surely begin.

My Amazon Bookshelf can be found by following THIS LINK.

You may also find my website Our Local Future interesting to explore too.

Below is a list of all the Blogs on this site that cover topics about UK Food Security and Farming:

The Growing UK Food Problem

I’m a fan of Clarkson’s Farm. It’s doing a lot for farmers and consumers. But it could do even more

Is the 2024 weather a bigger threat to long term food security and the future of farming than it is to this next years’ food supply?

Universal Basic Income won’t genuinely help anyone, least of all our Farmers

Fresh Food is the foundation of a happy, healthy and productive life. So why would anyone think humanity can survive by leaving the basic building blocks of good living behind?

No Farmers No Food may be a wasted opportunity for UK Farming in its current form. But personal attacks on those leading it are no better than any one of us shooting at our own hand

Why No Farmers No Food won’t help. But could certainly cause UK Farmers and Food Security a lot more harm instead

Populism will not save Farming. But practicality can and will

Sustainable Agriculture is part of the pathway to UK Food Security. But it wont work well for anyone until it works for everyone in the same way

The priority of Farmers today is money. But farms cannot run profitably with profit being the priority anymore

It’s not just British Beef at stake: the future of U.K. food production and our food security is on a knife edge

Is anyone reading the deeper messages from the Red Tractor dispute?

Home Growing is essential to achieving Food Security and the aim of the UK becoming Self-Sufficient in Food Production

The role of British Farmers has been neglected at our peril. Sadly, the politicians won’t see it until it’s too late, so it’s the Farmers who will have to begin the localised food supply chain revolution instead

Understanding Society’s Struggles: The Cost of Self-Interest

We need a new party in British Politics, yesterday. But it won’t be another that’s only been Reformed

One of the greatest ills of not for profits, charities and the workings of government, is that it is ridiculously rare that organisations, projects and services stop, are wound down or brought to their end, if and when they have achieved whatever it was they were designed, set up or launched for.

An excuse to repurpose such entities and vehicles is rarely hard to find and those involved then have no reason to go in search of a new purpose, agenda or job.

The story of the political parties, all playing their part in the downfall of the today’s UK is very much the same.

The Conservatives know and understand so little about what it is to conserve anything, and have progressively overseen a 14 year gateway of what resembles irreversible societal damage and ill-considered cultural change.

The only discernible legacy of this sorry period are circumstances where an incoming Labour government has shown the true colour of its hidden ideologies, its incompetence and the quantum leap it has jumped from the days when the working class and truly beneficial change was their purpose ‘to be’, much before most of those who watch these things more closely would have bravely suggested.

The most surprising part of the uncloaking of Labour isn’t that it has happened or that it has happened quickly. It’s that Labours uncloaking has happened as quickly as it has.

The Liberals have evolved many times in the century since they were known to be a party of power. Using the gift of being within the misperceived and misplaced leftist peripheries of the centre ground to regurgitate and nudge policies that sound great to the idealistic. But have very painful consequences for anyone when their plans meet the practicalities of normal life experience as they hit the road.

Whilst the outcome now is as predictable as the general unwillingness to accept that everyone has a role to play in genuine change, the reality the UK faces is that we are now in a perfect storm of many factors and ingredients, that none of the politicians we currently have understand or are equipped in every way necessary to disperse and therefore solve.

The begrudging growth of an awareness that the UK really is now in deep shit is leading to increasing numbers of those who voted against the Conservatives in the July General Election, wondering how the Electorate can rid itself of a new government in less than 2 months. A system of below par management dressed as leadership that is already proving itself significantly worse than the desperate experience we have just had, rather than being anything like the anticipated change that was somehow considered worth embracing, because there was simply no way that different politicians could be anywhere near as bad.

Only the Tories themselves have failed to realise that people are not going to vote for them just because they are the alternative, or because they are the Conservative Party anymore. For no better reason than even those of us with minds that couldn’t be further away from politics than it would be possible to be, already intrinsically know and understand that it will take something akin to a revolution just to get the U.K. back to anywhere near where everything was when the last period of inept and self-serving leadership kicked on the understanding that they would conserve and therefore know how to preserve.

With the Greens, Lib Dems and all other players at the table likely to say and continue to do whatever is most likely to win them votes, seats and power, a politically-fatigued population is certainly entertaining the idea that the noises in the media suggesting that Reform could be a party of power in 2029 may not be as far-fetched as previously thought.

Yet this same party appeared as The Anti-Federalist League, as UKIP, as The Brexit Party and now, as what is being described as the ‘new party’, but is parading the real truth from its name, ‘Reform’.

Like the other UK political parties of today, the core essence of what Reform was all about has long since ceased to be the purpose that it once so genuinely was.

Or was for at least some of those who rallied behind or supported the anti-European Union Membership movement when it was distilled into its own recognisable forms.

The purpose behind Reform died when the European Referendum was ‘won’ and Brexit was born. And no matter how much of a mess the establishment has made for all the wrong reasons ever since, the People had their vote and decided.

The intransigence of the governing classes ever since has just exposed a whole other raft of issues that really does require a very different form of activism to address it.

A workable solution can only be a movement built around the genuine grassroots that functions from the grassroots-up. Rather than what Reform now appear to be embarking upon, which is yet another variation on the theme that has created all the problems we have: The current system where everything functions around hierarchies and the decisions that matter – whether seen or unseen, are always made and enacted from the Top-Down.

That the EU as we know it may be ending, but isn’t yet over, gives the false pretense that Reform and all those aligned with it still have unfinished business and therefore a genuine purpose. All in ways that are being carefully communicated to suggest that the Party is different than the others we have. Because it’s rolling out viable policies that will touch other important areas of life and that they really do represent reform.

They don’t. And whilst the debate over the missed opportunity that a reform of everything that The Anti-Federalist League, UKIP and The Brexit Party can actually deliver may be a long one, it only serves to create a potentially highly damaging delay.

In the case of Reform – as its seems to be with everything else, the more things change, the more they stay the same. Instead of changing the way that they do politics – as any party or movement serious about societal change will really need to, Reform are instead busy Re-Ukipping themselves and calling what they are doing ‘new’.

So many of us fail to recognise that the solution to our political, public policy and therefore our social problems MUST come from outside of the way we have always done politics.

The solution MUST be created in its very own original form and can only come by engaging and including people who have been drawn from and been supporters of all the parties and movements across the whole of today’s political Smorgasbord.

However, there can be no option for any of them to bring whatever has failed us along with them for yet another try.

It’s only through the genesis and roll out of something very new, that everything in the UK that needs to change for the better, can genuinely and meaningfully be reformed.

Why we need a Good Dictator, and our phoney democracy should take a rest

In the immediate run up to the December 2019 General Election, I wrote and published The Makeshift Manifesto, here online and as an e-book that’s available on Amazon.

Even though the political terrain was different, from the point of view that the British Electorate were days away from trusting Boris Johnson with an Election Result that very few saw coming because the Conservatives promised to get Brexit done, the truth of the matter was that many areas of the UKs public policy had already gone massively wrong.

Regrettably, it had been doing so for a time that has spanned many different governments, led by different political parties, before.

Within months, we were all subjected to the stupidity and poor leadership that manifested itself in the form of both the Government and the wider political response to Covid 19 and the Covid Pandemic.

We are unlikely to have experienced all the fall-out and consequences of such levels of incompetence and political delinquency that were set in motion, even now.

However, back in early December 2019, I decided to commit all the things a ‘good’ government would actually do to paper. I then shared it with the world.

Since then, The Makeshift Manifesto seems to have been a popular read. So, earlier this year, as I contemplated the run up to the coming General Election, I began to question whether I should revisit the book and update it to reflect what has changed and where the further problems with Public Policy have developed over the 4+ years of time since the first edition was published.

With the original work set up on a screen and being sat ready to dive straight in, it didn’t take many moments for me to realise that if ‘good’ policy was no more than a wish list at the time of the last General Election, because of the quality  of the politicians we had back then, the uncomfortable fact is that with the political options we have available today, such suggestions would be pretty much impossible to deliver through the current structure of government, in any meaningful way.

I’d written about the concept of and asked the question ‘Is it possible to have a Good Dictator’ before.

But at this point I realised, that without people being open to the change that is possible now and which I covered in the book Officially None Of The Above, or there being some kind of Black Swan event that has the power to change everyone’s minds, the only way that meaningful change could be delivered throughout government, the public sector and within every area of Public Policy itself, would be with pure single-mindedness. The kind that could only be achieved if it was driven and directed by one person with the power necessary to command and dictate that massive scale of change.

I worked this thorough as briefly as it was possible to do so.

Leaning on different books that I have written and published over the past two years that included A Community Route and The Grassroots Manifesto, I also added a policy wish list that would be good for everyone, but that in today’s reality, it would only be possible for Good Dictator to deliver and achieve.

There remains a very big question about whether the individual exists who:

  1. Would have the knowledge and experience necessary to change such a massively broken system for the better
  2. Has the desire, drive, motivation and public spiritedness to see it through
  3. Possesses the ethics, morality and principles to stay true to the public cause, when there would be so much temptation to cast what’s in the best interests of others aside

After completing and publishing the book, I concluded that in times as we face today, where politicians and those who aspire to be politicians don’t see any route other than their own, and the public itself has surrendered to the idea that all ‘public’ problems are the responsibility of someone, somewhere else, if nothing else should change in the way we view the importance of the things that are common to us all, the solution of having a Good Dictator, might end up being the only way forward for us all.

The stupidity of our politicians and the void of leadership they created has opened the door to a very dark reality. Will it step in?

We were once free to ignore or mock the presence of voices such as Katie Hopkins and Tommy Robinson. We jumped on the let’s-call-it-extremism bandwagon that the mainstream narrative afforded us, regrettably at the expense of precluding different opinions that could have done us a lot of good, if we had the good sense to listen and hear them long before now.

We don’t have that luxury anymore. Anyone would be a fool to ignore the danger of some ‘new’ movement quickly being fashioned across the restless and frustrated corners of our society, that will be more than happy up step into the void that has been created by the absence of genuine political leadership for such a long time.

The decision of our politicians not to listen, rather than using public office to do whatever the hell they and their political party’s want hasn’t come without a heavy, steadily accumulating cost.

The ignorance of a brewing undercurrent of very normal people who are sick and tired of being the butt end of every public policy our politicians now deliver, whilst policies that run contrary to what would be good for everyone are relentlessly pursued, means that we may soon reach a tipping point when everyday British people will simply say ‘no more’.

Whilst it has become popular to blame racism for any view or thought which can be considered contra-narrative, the problems caused by the failure of the progressive multicultural project are only part of a much bigger, quickly growing problem.

It has become a cultural norm for politicians to engage in what is probably best called political gaslighting, where the mainstream media adeptly help them create the idea in our minds that anyone who suffers from any one of the growing injustices of our time is suffering alone and that everything is rosy for everyone else.

However, the victims of useless politicians are not alone. People are realising this in ever greater numbers and those responsible are on a fast track to being found out.

Even more of us are going to realise that the cost of living crisis, explosive inflation of the prices of the essentials and basics that everyone needs, the collapse of public services, and everything that real people believe to be wrong, but the narrative tells us is right, are definitely wrong and have been created deliberately, through someone else’s incompetence or design.

These things didn’t just happen to any of us in a way that politicians suggest. These are wrongs that weren’t unavoidable. And even the merest hint that we brought it all upon ourselves is not only unjust; it is an outright lie.

As more and more realise this, people are going to join the groups and movements that some very angry people lead, with consequences that could quickly be disastrous for us all.

Not least of all, because there isn’t currently any kind of sensible or reasoned choice that actually represents anything different to what we have already got.

Regrettably, it would take much bigger politicians than the ones we have already got, to recognise their own folly and for them all to step aside so that they can be replaced by genuine public representatives. Good politicians and leaders who genuinely understand, accept and are motivated by the reality that we elect politicians to make decisions which will have outcomes that are always in the best interests of us all.

It’s anyone’s guess how long we have got and what event or issue will prove to be the last straw.

However, change is coming. And when push comes to shove, we can only hope that Lady Luck is shining, and we have leaders available who will step in and do their best for us, rather than doing only what is best for themselves.

Image created with Microsoft Designer

The control of money is where the true power lies – but only because of the way we think

When we have reached the point where money is the only thing that is important, it naturally follows that whoever controls money, the rules that govern money and the supply of money itself, will be the person or the people who are ultimately in charge of EVERYTHING – right down to what we do, think and say.

Because we revere money and wealth in the ways that we do today, the very democratic system that we believe to be in place to serve our best interests, doesn’t really exist.

Contrary to conspiracists talk and views, there is not some hidden world power that lies at the heart of everything and all public policy decision making, with someone sat in a bunker on a mountainside pulling every world leader’s strings.

Yes, a simple look at the way money rules everything, does make it seem logical that such a power exists. But the real power and influence that now lies in the hands of others who have or control money, and therefore have control over us all comes down to the way that we ALL think about money.

It is the way we think about money that surrenders our own power and control over life and everything else.