WHERE HAVE ALL THE FLOWERS GONE?

So, it has been a while.

Three years since this blog last appeared – that’s quite a break.

But it wasn’t illness or anything.  There has been some useful activity going on, just in different directions.

Art of a different kind

The global lockdowns of the 2020-2022 coronavirus pandemic were devastating in many respects – not least to one’s sense of purpose.   Instead, we explored art of a different kind: painting, with acrylics and oils. Constructing landscapes and portraits. Like writing, the same degree of isolation, the same seeking the depths of one’s soul.  The same wondering whether anyone might appreciate it. 

Urban crime fiction

Literary crime fiction, with stories that touch on important topics, some political, some societal, some economic, continued to emerge cautiously.  Certain standards were maintained, even though none have become literary masterpieces. Interesting questions for readers have been posed, about human behaviour, man’s foibles and weaknesses. They have touched on some moral dilemmas of the modern age: policing, drug usage, kidnap, violence and political interference.

Completing books so often requires a state of slow social detachment, shutting out the daily noise for long periods of the day.  Which is why some writers thrived over the shutdowns, which created the perfect setting for them and gave potential readers so much more time to order books and to read.  But for some, it was more about losing the purpose, losing the point, lacking the focus.

However persistence and belief in one’s work and effort continued; with time, the enthusiasm returned. None of the books have yet succeeded in grabbing the great reading public and sales figures remain depressingly low.  The challenge for all writers, especially those in the self-publishing world, is to find one’s particular audience, with the belief there are always people out there who will like what we write, that it is simply a matter of finding them, enticing them out of their bewildering hiding places.

Lockdowns have ruined Britain

Covid lockdowns were one of the greatest political, economic and moral blunders of modern times. Three and half years after the first confirmed cases of the virus in Britain, there is now enough evidence to know that the costs of shutting down society massively outweighed the benefits.

It was a catastrophic error. Lockdowns saved or extended comparatively few lives but inflicted huge economic, social, health and psychological damage, and have left behind a ticking cancer time bomb, exacerbating most of the pathologies of contemporary Britain.

Yet, with staggering delusion and sickening hypocrisy, politicians are refusing to accept their mistake.  The lockdowns are the primary reason why the Conservative Party will be crushed at the next election, why our economy is in ruins, why the NHS has imploded.  

Lockdowns were directly responsible for wasting the historic opportunity that was Brexit and dashing any dreams of rebuilding Britain.  Lockdowns have beefed up our dependency culture, telling workers they were entitled to work from home, rehabilitating the idea of a magic money tree.  The public now demands a bailout whenever anything goes wrong, most recently, with higher mortgage rates, a direct consequence of the extreme money-printing that paid £7b for the never-ending furlough schemes.

Lockdowns have shifted the country to the Left and destroyed trust. Too much of the elite narrative turned out to be untrue, and its abuse of power too extreme. The state spied on citizens and encouraged the censoring of dissidence on social media, such as the view that Covid leaked from a Chinese laboratory in Wuhan. The ability of masks to reduce the virus’s spread was grossly exaggerated and the Government vastly inflated the risk from Covid to healthy, younger people in its propaganda campaigns.  Lockdowns signalled to the public sector, including the NHS, that it was fine not to deliver, that providing a service was optional.

The Feds have done something similar in the US

During lockdowns and since, the Federal Reserve Bank has rigged the whole US economy against the productive middle class.  They have pushed up asset prices with fake money lent out at fake rates.  They caused inflation so that ordinary houses were too expensive for ordinary people.  They lowered growth rates and productivity by discouraging real saving and investment.  They have loaded the federal government with $32 trillion in debt, so that next year the interest payments alone will take up more money than the Pentagon.

The pandemic was a hideous tragedy. It killed hundreds of thousands in Britain alone. We were unprepared. But it posed no risk to children or young people, and it wasn’t an existential threat to human civilisation. We panicked and overreacted. A pathogen that is predicted to kill 1 percent of the population should never lead to lockdowns.

The UK COVID Inquiry

Unless the extremely expensive COVID inquiry, which is proceeding at a snail’s pace through all the minutiae, by-products and processes, looks in detail at the economic consequences of the lockdowns it will produce totally inadequate conclusions.  Which will take Heaven knows how long (probably 5 or 6 years) to report, when it will have proven to be an utter failure, useless and irrelevant.  In fact, it may as well close down now. 

Our deluded leaders seem to have learned nothing.

There will be another pandemic, probably within the next decade,

and we will be led into lockdown all over again.