COVID-19: Public Blindness and a Depression on the Way.

Luckily I've been able to stay working during the lockdown. I've been able to go into work and we're able to keep 2 metres or more apart in the office.

We've closed the counter service and the workshop as per government advice (we're all old buggers with underlying health conditions) so we limit contact with others.

The point of this post is to point out how many people are demanding a full pre-COVID service when patently the goalposts have shifted.

Currently we are seeing lower than normal staffing levels across the country at postal and courier depots, parcel volumes are up as more people order online because the shops are closed and they're bored (one customer I talked to took his engine apart.. just because).

Even Amazon are not guaranteeing next day delivery. Things for them have improved slightly as they've recovered staffing levels, but things are still patchy.

So common sense would tell you that deliveries will be delayed. But really, the number of people that ask if parcels will be delivered next day is really, really wearing.

Don't they know there's a pandemic on?

But this blindness to the plight of others, or to the reality of postal services, or the pressures on care homes, or the NHS, garage services and other businesses that are struggling to cope after staff shield in place, or take 2 weeks off to self isolate or do any of the measures to ensure the virus doesn't spread is really staggering. It's like people have lost all common sense, or empathy for others.

This "clap for carers" faux sympathy is bollocks. People are only doing it so they don't look unsympathetic, just like the claps for the dear leader in communist countries, although we don't shoot people that don't clap.

The blindness extends to the financial impact of the lockdown. It's not been mentioned on the media (I assume to prevent a panic) but reality of the future going forward is it's going to make austerity look positively lovely.

We will enter a depression. There is no doubt about it. The government is trying to mitigate the effects on the economy, but the raw fact is the billions being spent now to try and save businesses and protect jobs will need to be paid for. It will add a significant dent in future GDP.

Of course the magic money tree leftists want people to be paid full wages for ever, which is unsustainable. Someone has to pay for it.

With a depression, it's questionable whether public services can survive in the form they were pre-pandemic. Austerity was bad enough at closing libraries and the like (even though council bosses keep awarding themselves ever bigger pay packets).

The post-pandemic world may herald the reboot of public services I've been asking for for the past decade or more. Exactly what should the meagre resources available to national and local government be spent on?

Luxuries like translating documents into a dozen different languages can be the first casualty, as can be the employment of translators. English-only from now on.  Six-figure salaries in public office should be another target. Nobody in public service should be looking to earn more than £100,000. Even half of that is a decent living wage. Any more than that is just an obscenity especially when you're depriving essential services of funds just to pay your inflated salary.

Welcome to the post-pandemic society.

G20: Its all about Ego.

Ok, now I've had time to have a think about it and go through what happened this week at the G20, I've come to one firm conclusion: Our politicians haven't reined in their Egos at all.

I blogged here that I thought the credit crunch was caused by massive egos. The same goes for the failure that is the G20 summit.

All it's been is a platform to massage the egos of 20 national leaders. So they can display and grandstand about how they "fixed" the credit crunch, without actually committing to any real new initiatives.

The credit crunch hasn't finished. Its reached a plateau, but the signs are that without regular injections of cash, things will start to slide again. I don't see any indicators of stability in markets, nor indicators of confidence anywhere that would lead me to believe we've hit the bottom.

Basically the world economy is on life support. What you have to ask your self is why. What are the motives behind pumping trillions of pounds, dollars or Euros into a sick, possibly terminally ill system?
What are the world leaders waiting for? Why the desperate measures (including printing non-existent money) to delay the inevitable?

Are they so stupid that they can't see what I see and fail to realise that splashing cash around isn't the answer? I really don't believe that. No, there needs to be a reason, a bloody good reason why they're doing it.

But I guess to the elite, Egomania is as good a reason as any.

Its like buying a Saville Row Suit, an expensive car, or a big house: its the feel-good factor. Its intoxicating to meet powerful people, eat good food, and delude yourself that it'll never end. so long as you can take money from your electorate, take more than you need in the form of salary and expenses, then hand the rest over to banks to squander and keep the system going, everything is wonderful.

But just how long before the people of the world wise up? I hope its very, very soon.