Accumulated UK government debt has now passed £2 Trillion [£2,000,000,000,000] – an all-time record. This figure reflects the insanity at the heart of thinking in government, politics and media today. In this mindset, reality and honesty are displaced by selective thinking to prop up the delusion that Man can definitively control events. He cannot, of course.
Firstly the current, persistent distortion. One report I read [link below] opens with the words:
Public debt has topped £2 trn for the first time on record as spending soared to prop up the economy in the face of the coronovirus pandemic.
Previous pandemics did not result in any noticeable economic crisis – whether you take AIDS, or the 1968/9 flu epidemic or the so-called Spanish flu of 1918/19. Nor does this one.
This crisis is actually caused by governments trying to control the pandemic with unprecedented mass quarantine measures. It is a man made crisis caused by men playing God. It is not caused by a disease whose actual effects were limited to causing a crisis in health care management and to raising the annual death rate x %.
To August 10th this year 728,000 deaths were recorded worldwide due to Covid 19 out of 20 million recorded infections [Reuters link below]. What is not reported is the perspective. These figures represent a death rate of 3.64% among those infected. Those infected to date, ie 20 million = 0.2857% of a world population figure of 7,000,000,000.
In 2015, 57 million people died globally, while 141 million births took place, a net world population increase of 84 million.
[update am 30th August 2020: BBC news reported 840,000 deaths out of 25 million infections to date; again no perspective made: this is a death rate of 3.36% of those infected while 25 million of a world population figure of 7 billion = 0.3571% infected]
The question must be: what sense of proportion is being adopted by governments today ?
The virus causes death in the elderly and the vulnerable, by and large. Yet the young and the middle aged are having their lives, their liberties and their economic welfare trashed by dubious and dangerous government interventions.
This complete failure to address the broad strategic reality is symptomatic of a mindset trained in focusing on the immediate, on hype and on what is going to make you look good [or at least not too bad] instead of addressing overall realities and absolute needs, realistically and practically.
Totalitarian China drastically locked down its population after months of officially denying the virus existed: they let it run rampant not just in China, but circulate around the globe in late 2019. They refused to acknowledge what they had allowed to develop. They then recognised the problem created for their image and sought to correct it by imposing a severe lockdown. The people paid the price.
Western governments then copied and pasted Chinese policy, clueless as to the proportionate reality but tenderly conscious of their own reputations [we cannot be seen to allow people to die; we have to be seen to be doing something].
Then there is the gross misrepresentation in UK politics and media over the last ten years concerning Austerity.
We must bring down government debt otherwise Armageddon will follow. Yet now they are openly embracing – albeit reluctantly – the very Armagedon they told us we must avoid.
The misrepresentation played on a refusal to distinguish between annual budget borrowing and the accumulated UK government debt. Government was allowed to claim austerity was working by citing reduced levels of annual borrowing. Rarely did anyone mention THE FACT that the accumulated debt was still increasing and had never diminished.
Now, of course, they can blame it all on Covid 19 – not on their disastrous quarantine policy generating massive economic problems; nor on the fact that as a nation we want it all yesterday but won’t pay the price for it today – we push it off onto our grandchildren.
This is the mentality which causes politicians today to create even bigger and more inextricably difficult problems for all of us, tomorrow. Coronovirus left to itself would disappear in months – this man made crisis is far more profound and far-reaching, likely to cause problems for years.
The mentality has been with us a long time. But its grip has been growing – which explains such unprecedented government over-reaction. Television has done its part to diminish both our mental faculties and our moral sensibilities. The constant diet of suggestive advertising and politically correct programming is reducing people to addictive behaviours and unquestioning acceptance of atheistic values and perspectives . Material possession, personal comfort and assumptions that the State knows best are now held to be normal.
That’s what Marxism inculcates and the lessons of history are sobering when we look at the consequences of Marxist Materialism in Leninist/Stalinist Russia, in Maoist China, Khmer Rouge Cambodia or modern Venezuela.
Simultaneously, Christian teaching about personal responsibility, self reliance and concern for your neighbour have been ridiculed and jettisoned in every area of life. We now have a generation in key positions who know nothing of our nation’s cultural heritage and whose religious outlook is totally Materialist.
Ergo, God does not exist. I am my own god: my appetites and desires come before all else. I am just a collection of atoms without a soul or any accountability to my Maker. The State must protect my health, my retirement, my job, my welfare.
The State has effectively replaced God as our reference point for values, our needs and our welfare.
A State run by people steeped in a man centred mindset which prizes personal position, reputation and ambition above
- all sense of public duty, public trust and traditional Christian morals,
- above all sense that mere human beings have their limits and cannot control their destiny,
- above the sense that if each of us individually meets our moral responsibility for our lives and for society, then all will work out for the best
On that basis, governments would ask people to respect public health guidelines – NOT demand, regulate and enforce State centred diktats authored by a faction of obsessively focused experts. Government would recognise that there are limits to government action – that people must be respected and treated as adults capable of social responsibility towards others.
People in government might even realise that it is better to face the truth and tell it, than to invent an illusion that they can make death and fundamental issues go away, pain free.
Ray Catlin
Debt report at https://news.sky.com/story/borrowing-hits-record-150-5bn-between-april-and-july-as-covid-19-spending-soared-12053514
For global stats and death rates to August 10th, see https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-global-cases/global-coronavirus-cases-hit-20-million-reuters-tally-idUSKCN25629N
figures for 2015 are derived from https://ourworldindata.org/births-and-deaths
Conservatism Institute 