Communication is......?

(This post is intended for a specific audience who already possesses knowledge of the concepts I am referring to. If you do not know what these concepts are, this message is not intended for your consumption.)

INFORMATION

All modern computation is based on calculating the amount of information that can flow through a communication channel. Some information is lost in the system, i.e., through friction with the internal walls of the system. The amount that can be communicated successfully is often referred to as the carrying capacity of the system, while the part that ends up being lost is often called entropy. This computational theory essentially posits that information is the opposite of entropy, and that these two properties are situated at opposite ends of a scale of probabilities. If the interpretation of a message completely matches the intended meaning of a message, then the conditional probability of the message being received = 1, whereas a complete mismatch = 0. Thus, any error rate expressed as a conditional probability between zero and one is attributable to either: a) the random noise of the communication channel; or b) differences between the knowledge structures held by the sender and the receiver, that are being used to encode and decode the information being communicated, respectively. 

However, the binary nature of the units used to calculate the accuracy of any interpretation of a message presents something of a philosophical paradox for people who believe that truth and falsity are something that exists independently of the observer. If you think about it, a conditional probability of one renders the communication of the message completely redundant, because it adds nothing new to what was already known by the receiver before the message was sent by the author. On the other hand, where the conditional probability of the message being received is zero, the intended meaning is completely lost, and the message will be indecipherable, as in the case of total randomness. This effectively means that as our understanding of any communication starts to reach absolute truth or falsity, the communication of the message becomes a completely meaningless waste of energy. Thus, the target for maximising a communication's utility, or usefulness, to human beings as biological entities, must be a partial understanding, that has only a 0.5-0.75 conditional probability of being correct. Thus, anything between a 50:50 or 75:25 split between recognising existing knowledge and inferring new knowledge into a message must be the most desirable state for any of our communication channels to be in.

This position assumes that all forms of communication require the expenditure of energy. This is a branch of science that involves the thermodynamics of conducting materials. It has led to the evolution of 'quantum computers' and materials that can transmit electrical impulses (quanta) at superlow temperatures. This is necessary to eradicate any interference from the noise of the entropic heat bath that normally surrounds us. This science tells us that any form of organised energy is information. And the amount of information being held within a system is referred to as its kinetic energy, which may be different for different systems at different times within the evolution of the communication process. Where a potential gradient exists across the threshold of two different systems, the laws of thermodynamics tell us that the energy will flow from the higher to the lower energy level system. Thus, the ability of living organisms to maintain knoweldge structures that reproduce themselves through verbal communication, presents us with something of a paradox: according to the laws of thermodynamics, everything should end in an entropic soup of total randomness, but as human beings, we appear to be consistently heading in the opposite direction, towards greater and greater forms of organisation and understanding.

In the 1970s and 80s, scientists began to realise that the randomness we perceive may not always be the entropy we try to defend ourselves against. Chaotic dynamics may also appear within a system. Chaos looks like random bits of information, but actually, chaos is a higher order of organisation. Chaotic dynamics only appear when the drivers of the system force more information through the system than the carrying capacity of the communication channels allows. It doesn't break the system; in fact, it can create new capacities that didn't exist previously. Because chaotic dynamics only appear in systems that have amplified/damped feedback within them, we can control them in the same way feedback is controlled through the amplification system of a rock guitar. This means it can be decoded by those who possess the codes for its encryption. Unfortunately, for anyone else, it might just look like randomness and be ignored or excluded from their conscious attention. As a super-organised state that is incredibly hard to decipher, Chaos can be used to encrypt really valuable things like Bitcoin. Given that the evolution of encoding and decoding systems goes hand in hand, it may not be long before Bitcoins start to go missing in the ether, but we probably won't know where, or how, or why for a long time after that. 

LOGIC

Regardless of the mathematics involved, when we want to understand what communication is, the information flow between a sender and receiver becomes the starting point for further understanding. So here is my logic, or philosophy, for understanding communication as a process in nursing theory. To understand this process, it is not necessary to understand the carrying capacity of a communication channel; we can leave that area of mathematics to the computational scientists.

1. According to one interpretation of the wave-particle conundrum of quantum physics, the Observed Reduction (OR) of otherwise irreconcilable superpositions can occur at a cellular level. Conception might therefore be the point at which the possibilities of quantum mechanics become the embodied actualities of classical physics, and consciousness (within a simultaneity plane) becomes possible

2. Communication cannot occur without consciousness, and consciousness cannot occur without communication. Thus, the two phenomena are identical processes: the limit of our consciousness is the limit of our ability to communicate.

3. Where communication between two or more points occurs, a mutual consciousness can be inferred between two or more identities, where an identity is defined as being a position, occupying a specific time and place in space-time.

4. Identity Work is defined as a geometrical translation of one position through another position and back onto itself. This process is carried out by healthcare professionals in the form of autological research that is commonly referred to as "Reflective Practice"

5. Identity Work begins at the Mirror Stage of development and becomes a hardwired process after puberty, which enables an observer to perceive themselves through the reactions of others to their communications

6. Communication involves energy being transmitted as information in a message between an author and an audience in a process that crosses a potential gradient, at rates that depend on the medium but always less than instantaneously, causing a cusp catastrophic change of state, that is equivalent to a lightning strike, or the behavioural impulse of a living organism

7. All transmissions of energy as information occur within the same simultaneity plane (where information is defined as negative entropy, i.e., non-randomness)

8. Some of the fastest impulses in the animal kingdom are the behavioural reflexes. These occur during the activation of the autonomic nervous system and can spread in a communication flow through Emotional Contagion. This is how a flock of birds and a shoal of fish can move in unison.

9. Behavioural reflexes occur within the context of emotions that may be differentiated via a basic palette of six facial and body signals that Darwin originally identified as happiness, sadness, disgust, joy, anger, and fear.

10. Beliefs (expressed as a subjective probability) prioritise one emotional reaction to a set of circumstances over all other possible emotional reactions

12. Empathy allows the intransigence of a belief system to be challenged by considering other possible emotional reactions to the same set of circumstances

13. Empathy involves the meaning of a message being interpreted according to the relative positions of the other identities involved in the communication of a message, i.e. the author(s) and their audience(s) 

14. Because of empathy, simple collective cultural interpretations prioritising one emotional reaction to a set of circumstances over others will always eventually conflict with the majority of complex individual autobiographical ones

15. Empathic social systems will always evolve towards more complex emotional states, from simple ones 

16. As evolution moves beyond the basic palette of the six elementary emotions, its belief systems must become less universal, more species-specific, and more idiosyncratic to the complexities of the individual emotional experiences involved

17. The brain evolved to bridge the simultaneity plane through the development of memory capacities

18. Memory capacities have learnt how to store sensory information long enough for it to be integrated into meaningful conceptual categories and rule-based routines called "algorithms"

19. Language probably originated as a means of communicating between members of the same species as they move relative to one another, through space and time

20. Language will probably always lag behind the development of more complex emotions, and facilitate their construction into more stable belief systems

EMPATHY

All of the above are involved in the evolution of our capacity for empathy. Empathy involves the non-verbal communication of emotions. It is fundamental to the delivery of all healthcare processes because not all patients are able to communicate the source of their suffering at initial inspection, so clinicians rely upon the non-verbal communications of the patient to infer the meaning of their symptoms correctly. Individual clinicians may possess more or less of the trait of empathy at the start of their training. This may change over time. 

More risk-averse, stress-intolerant organisations tend to hamper the communication of emotions by constantly relying on the suppression of negative information to manage the power differentials within their hierarchies. This may be effective in the short term, but it is a counterproductive strategy for the longer-term management of stress and emotions. It causes a dissociation between our emotional experiences and the narratives the organisations give us to explain and explore them. This generally leads to systemic malfunction and eventual collapse of individual clinicians, ward teams, and the care pathways they operate within.

The ability to record our thoughts and convert our feelings into words has helped us externalise our memory processes and regulate our emotions. Narratives that are passed down through generations become an important part of our cultural myths and symbols. They form an integral part of our identities, and the promisery notes we trade as the symbolic representations of trust and truth. The inability to identify and restructure our emotions through the use of our language is called Alexithymia. This deficit is higher in our more neurodiverse communities, where it could be argued, emotional dysregulation has been selected for, as a means of survival.

LANGUAGE

Language conforms to the laws of thermodynamics in a statistical way. In English, the more common words we use - pronouns, logical operators, articles - use a smaller number of digits because they have a much higher frequency than the less common words - nouns, verbs, etc. Thus, in German, it is common for a noun to be represented by the combination of nouns from a lower level of conceptual specialisation; the more complex concepts therefore, have a longer representation in terms of the number of digits. In English, the dividing line between structural and content words is about 5 digits. Perhaps unsurprisingly, 5 plus or minus 2 is also supposed to be the size of the short-term memory's capacity for remembering a series of objects. Research suggests that when people verbalise their thoughts and feelings, the combination of high and low frequency structural and content words they use tends to balance out to a relatively constant homeostatic average. This represents the 50:50, or 75:25, balance referred to earlier, where the maximum amount of new knowledge that can be imparted through a communication channel ultimately depends on the carrying capacity of the system. 

In this context, the formal thought disorder (FTD) of schizophrenia would appear to be an expression of the same pressure of speech that is seen in bipolar disorder, only at a higher or lower level of organisation than normal speech would allow. During a manic phase of information processing, more information is being forced through the language system than it can manage. The capacity can be reduced by many different factors, all of which could eventually cause a chaotic form of language to emerge, that is referred to as FTD. FTD references the lack of a coherent structure, or grammar, that can knit together loose and overlapping conceptual categories that have fluid/permeable boundaries. This system is driven by a need for survival, and/or a deficit in the capacity to communicate needs/risks. The processing demands on the brain create a dissociation between the mind and the body. At this point, there may be a loss of empathy within and between identities. This is what we refer to as 'madness': It represents a breakdown in the normal structures and processes that we rely on for the performance of the identities that have been constructed by and for us, through participation in the organisations that we exist within. 

As proof of concept, it is possible to consider pronouns as linguistic tools that are used to position identities, relative to each other, within their respective geo-political and socio-temporal hierarchies. Pronouns, singular and plural, appear in English so frequently that the number of letters is restricted to between 1 and 3, and occasionally up to 5 characters long. If the pronouns identify the subject of the sentence, adverbs and adjectives are added next to link the subject with an object. They have an average length of 5 characters with a fairly modest range around that of between 3 and 7 characters. Most of these words code the identity, the subject, as having, being, or doing something to something or someone else. The object of the sentence is then realised in a noun or verb phrase, that contain an average of about 5 to 7 characters, but with a long, long tail, up to about 10 characters. Anthroplogical research suggests the average length of these words has increased over time, with the evolution of more and more complex ideologies. These words are essentially symbolic labels for learned concepts, that exist as memories in the minds of their users. They are used to provide the meaningful content of a sentence, rather than the shorter words that provide the majority of the structure. 

This organisation, of nodal content within a structure of relational arcs, together facilitate the transfer of information as networks of interconnected knowledge. Add to these basic subject-object sentences, a grammar that embeds the author of the message, the actors, and their audience, within a past, present and future, with a history of possessions, and obligations, relative to each other, and suddenly the social logic of the linguistic framework is complete. Violations of this logic, violate the spatial, temporal, and social relationships upon which the audience base their collective understanding, and cultural perspectives. Thus, any transgression of the logic incurs a loss in believability, a loss of faith in the authenticity of the author, and the value of their constructions. Whereas, the author who adheres to this logical framework, continues to make sense, and they command an authority and truth that accumulates value, because it can be trusted in, implicitly by their audience.

MENTAL HEALTH

Obviously, the absence of resources that we need to maintain our mental health is much harder to identify and quantify than the presence of the physical resources we need to maintain our physical health. But this is the job that mental health nurses have to do, and a lot more of us will be required to do a lot more of in the future. As we progress to ever greater levels of human understanding and civilisation, hopefully we will start to understand more about the origin of any 'errors' within our communication systems, and those we currently stigmatise and label, with harmful words and narratives, in a misguided attempt to lock them out of the perfection that we endlessly crave for ourselves.

Accumulating Human Capital: Things Being 'In Their Place'

Between the triggering of our Neuroticism by a stimulus, 

And our Conscientiousness and Agreeableness suppressing a response, 

A certain amount of Identity Work must take place, 

That involves the ‘Internalisation of the Aggressor’, 

Where this does not take place, you are likely to find, an increase in Psychoticism, 

Although this can be expressed/suppressed differently in different populations, 

Depending on the cultural boundaries that have evolved, 

Keeping the social matrix of all other identities, occupying their positions, 

And the ‘relationships of production’ that exist between them, 

In their place. 

  

Whereas cognitive behaviour therapy normally only relies on an analysis 

of self/other, good/bad, whole/part, general/specific, object relations, 

The addition of an internal/external impulse into this matrix, 

Creates the context for opposing interpretations of a/the master/slave complex, 

Precisely because when/where a/the ‘internalisation of the aggressor’ takes place, 

Preserves a/the adult/child relationship, within broader/deeper social dominance hierarchies, 

Unconsciously triggering and suppressing each others' trauma memories, 

In a double-bind construction of artificial/social imaginary-realities, 

Pending the accumulation of more and more socially desirable personality traits, 

In their place.

REFERENCES:

Jarvis, G. Eric. (2025). Cultural variations in psychosis: Recent research and clinical implications. Transcultural psychiatry. 13634615251324088. 10.1177/13634615251324088. This article introduces a thematic issue of Transcultural Psychiatry dedicated to understanding the role of culture in the expression and treatment of psychotic symptoms. While many clinicians and researchers view psychotic disorders as brain diseases firmly rooted in neurological processes and requiring medical treatments to resolve, the papers in this issue propose something different: that psychotic symptoms are refracted through the lens of culture with the result being socially and culturally constructed disorders that have as much to do with the attitudes and knowledge systems of the observer as the lived experience of patients. Hence, expression of psychotic symptoms and disorders represent the result of a negotiated space between individual distress and the values and norms of the wider society. This thematic issue touches on several important points: critical perspectives of high rates of psychosis in migrants, the lack of culturally adapted research and clinical tools in psychosis work, new methods to engage people with psychosis from diverse backgrounds, and cultural issues related to the etiology of psychosis, interpretation of symptoms, and help–seeking. There remain many important topics at the intersection of culture and psychosis not covered by this thematic issue, including stigma and psychosis, delusion formation in cultural context, the history of psychosis concepts, and insight in psychosis. Yet, despite these omissions, the articles in this issue, as a whole, foster recognition of the limits of standard approaches to psychosis and advocate for culturally adapted assessments and interventions, which if implemented from a position of cultural humility, carry the long–term potential of revolutionizing the field.

Xavier, Salome & Iyer, Srividya. (2025). Reflections on the explanations of higher psychosis rates among migrant and ethnic minority populations: A critical discourse analysis. Transcultural Psychiatry. 10.1177/13634615251326020. A growing number of studies suggest that migrant and ethnic minority populations are at higher risk for being diagnosed with psychosis. However, the reasons why have been disputed. This study aims to explore different interpretations of the observed higher rates of psychosis diagnosis among immigrants and ethnic minorities in some parts of the world. We sought to examine these interpretations through a critical lens, acknowledging the social underpinnings of discourses and their power to shape real-world practices. Peer-reviewed editorials, commentaries and letters regarding the topics of interest were retrieved from database searches and subjected to a pattern-based critical discourse analysis. Across a 30-year span of literature, conceptualizations and explanations of higher psychosis rates amongst migrant and minoritized populations evolved in relation to the larger social context, at times opposing one another. Three discursive themes were identified, reflecting intersecting explanations: institutional racism in psychiatry; psychiatry as a scientific discipline that sees and treats all patients equally; and the social locus of high rates. Tensions surrounding psychiatry as a field, including issues of evidence, biological reductionism, and the conceptualization of psychiatric nosological categories have played out within the evolution of this discourse. Exploring how discursive constructions in relation to psychosis and minoritization have been shaped by historical and social factors, we consider the role of local and global dynamics of social power in favouring one explanatory model over another and how these may have affected efforts to prevent and better treat psychosis amongst immigrant and minoritized groups.

A Dialectic for Community Mental Health Services

Men who sell sex to men

Men who sell sex to women

Women who sell sex to men

Women who sell sex to women

Men who sell violence to men

Men who sell violence to women

Women who sell violence to men

Women who sell violence to women

Love Sex, Love Violence, Love Fear

Love Sex, Love Violence, Hate Fear

Love Sex, Hate Violence, Love Fear

Love Sex, Hate Violence, Hate Fear

Hate Sex, Love Violence, Love Fear

Hate Sex, Love Violence, Hate Fear

Hate Sex, Hate Violence, Love Fear

Hate Sex, Hate Violence, Hate Fear

Good Love, Bad Love

Good Hate, Bad Hate

Love Good, Love Bad

Hate Good, Hate Bad

Good Good, Good and/or Bad, Bad Bad.

Labour's Monetary Policy?

Labour has prioritised growth but not fully explained how that will be achieved. Previous governments have used monetary policy to do the heavy lifting but there is a lot of conflict amongst Economics Professors at the moment about the best way to do that. I am no economist but as a psychologist I am interested in how two opposing monetary theories are contesting the same small set of uncontested facts. For me, this process provides the sort of evidence I need to test a theory that I have been developing for a PhD. That is that Hegel's dialectics and Gadamer's hermeneutics can usefully be combined to explain an underlying opponent process of interpretive perspectives that occurs within the history of a culture that can be used to trace the evolution of the human mind at a macro-economic, if not meso- and micro-economic, level.

From 1979-1990 the official Thatcherite theory of Monetarism assumed that the government's finances should be run like household finances. It stated that a government must borrow money from the private sector in order to fund public services. The debt to the private sector would paid through general taxation of the profits. Thus, the economy was set on course for a 'smaller state' which was diametrically opposed to the 'planned economy' of the Soviet Union. Monetarists believed that the amount of money that the Government printed should be restricted; this would have the net-effect of increasing the value of their currency on international markets; leading to lower interest rates and higher growth; with a tolerable level of unemployment being maintained to keep inflation down. 

Thatcherite economics were largely credited at the time with winning the Cold War. From their stubbornly high 8%-18% levels up until 1989, UK interest rates dropped to 4%-8% after the fall of the Berlin Wall. The expansion of the European Union eastwards, and stable inflation rates of 2%-5% in the US, ensured a plentiful supply of high quality cheap labour for private investors to exploit. The UK lost its industrial base as the City of London led a period of steep growth in the UK. 

This period of prosperity came to end with the Credit Crunch in 2008. The crunch started in the US where the low paid, low skilled, workforce were provided with huge amounts of credit, with very little security, that they were never going to be able to repay. The US lenders sold this debt on to private investors around the world who only realised that they had bought into ahuge pot of 'negative equity' when the US workforce started to default on their repayments. This led to a fall of confidence in the stock market the collapse of the financial system: all the investors wanted to take their money out of their investments at the same time, with no-one willing to pay anyone else back, so all 'promises to pay the bearer of this note' became devalued. UK GDP per capita has not risen above 2007 levels since then. 

The pendulum had now swung against the Thatcherite model of growth. The currency owning democracies of the World came togther to take control of the debt through a temporary rebalancing of the World economy that was referred to as Quantitative Easing. The worst affected private lenders were nationalised thus ending any further speculation of their stock, and the Government's Central Banks took on the markets, printing vast quantities of money at the same time as droping their interest rates to 0%. This effectively set-up a pincer movement against Monetarism, balancing any inflationary pressure on their currencies because of the debt devaluation with an increased supply of private investment to replace the devalued stock. To almost everyone's amazement, Quantitative Easing worked, but the elecorate were either unconvinced or did not understand. Despite the devaluing of Monetarism the shadow of communism was still used to win the next election.

In 2010 a coalition centre-Right government seized power by the narrowest of magins, which meant that by 2015 the Thatcherite narrative that had caused the crash was returned to power unchallenged. Civil society was led to believe that the previous centre-Left government had relied on a 'magic money tree' to fund unproductive public services. It now appears that the reverse of this narrative was probably true: growth in private sector capital could not be sustained indefinitely through the exploitation of cheap labour at home and abroad. The swing to the Right from 2010 to 2019 resulted in an increasingly hostile enviroment towards immigrants and foreign investments, with a protracted period of asset stripping of public services, to pay-off the debts that were consistently being amassed by failure in the private sector. When the pandemic hit in 2019 the UK along with the rest of the global economy was ill-equipped to meet the demands of a public health crisis that many scientists and business leaders had been predicting for a long time. Fifteen million people died unecessary and painful deaths. 

On the retreat, the Right-Wing carried out a 'slash and burn' rear-guard action, blaming all their victims, until they could find no-one else to blame but themselves: from 2016 to 2020 they blundered through an exit from the European Union, promising the electorate it would reduce net migration, only for it to soar to record levels. In 2022 the dying swan of Thatcherite politics named 'Trussonomics' promised billions of pounds worth of unfunded tax-cuts to stimulate growth. But it did exactly the opposite. The markets lost confidence in the lack of detail and disposed of their government assets, devaluing the currency to its lowest ever level against the US dollar. Two-years later the electorate voted for change. Fourteen years of Monetarism had left the UK broken and bleeding. And yet, large numbers of the electorate still put their faith in the Monetarist model.

Now, the unenviable task of plotting a course out of the financial bomb-crater has fallen, once again, to the centre-Left. The tail-end of the centre-Right givernment have done a reasonable job at stemming the initial bleeding, as UK inflation rates have been reduced from their initial peak of 11%, to meet the Bank of England target of 2%. However, the new administration has still inherited a flat-lining economy, with massive investment needed in public services. Rather predictably they have made growth their number one priority. With few other means of leveraging it, probably the single most attractive option open to them now is a repeat of the sort of Quantitative Easing that proved so successful in the last recession. But doing this unilaterally comes with risks.

The Modern Monetary Policy (MMP) that lay behind the success of Quantitative Easing assumes that governments do not need to run their balance sheets in the same way that households or businesses do. As long as they are in charge of their own currency, and their currency is not anchored to the price of any other commodity, i.e. their gold reserves, then the value of their currency is solely based on the trust. This is the trust that their investors have that the government will do what they promised the electorate that they would do or be voted out. 

Thus, the new administration can request the Bank of England to print as many pounds as they need to make the new investments in inifrastructure that they promised the electorate in 2024. The government can then spend its money, by paying sub-contractors to deliver its projects. The payment can even be in the form of guaranteed interest through government bonds. This would stimulate growth through innovation within a 'planned economy' - taking a lesson from the People's Republic of China, with some important caveats that come with being a liberal democracy. As long as the government is making the right calls, it permits any dissenting voices are heard, and the currency continues to become popular in new markets, then the main threat to its succes - inflation and inactivity - should remain under control. There are three main regulatory mechanisms the government can use to stay on target. If inflation starts to go up, taxation can be increased, thereby reducing the amount of credits available to private speculators within the economy. If the value of the currency starts to fall, more government bonds can be issued, to soak up any excess credit from the supply chain. And if inactivity increases, then the planners need to create some room for more speculative investments. 

So MMT is effectively the mirror image of Thatcherite policies that have become the orthodoxy for Western markets. This is mainly because MMT says that there is no limit to the deficit a government needs to run against its GDP. However, if I understand its critics correctly, then the weakness in this system is its inability to regulate any falls in the value of government bonds, and the interest paid on the sale of these bonds in the government's currency. If the private investors remain outside of the government'seconomy they will have no need for the government's plans to succeed,  or the currencyvyo hold its value. Thus, the private investor, not the government remain in control of the value of the country's assets in the bond market. This may be true, however, the counter-argument is that as long as the private investors still believe that they can increase their rate of return on their bonds, over and above the interest the government is paying them on it, then there is no reason why they would want the value of these assets to fall. 

Thus, my view is that govenrment bonds should really only be sold to raise funds for specific projects that the government has invested its human capital in. These would be projects that the private investors and sub-contractors believe they can make a profit on, in addition to the baseline the government is offering as a security on their investment. Thus, both the MMT proponents and their critics can be correct. But only when they factor in the most important element to this whole debate, that is the intentions and purpose of central government, in their commitment to grow the human capital of the Nation State, over and above the financial interests of any specific market.

In conclusion, there is consistent and coherent historical evidence that monetary theory has evolved since the Cold War era. Political extremes have started to centre on a hybrid model of Monetarism and Modern Monetary Theory. This supports the application of Hegel's dialectics and Gadamer's hermeneutics to western liberal democracies. If the proposed synthesis of positions, is correct the hybrid model may prove the way forward for this country as it seeks to stimulate growth by stealing fruit from another one of its magic money trees. But, the value of the credit notes that the government issues in the form of money will have to be regulated in order to avoid inflation or devaluation. By assuming that the goal of a government is to increase the human capital of all who trade in its currency, we can see that only if it fails to keep its promises will the value of its currency, relative to the price of other goods and services, ever be likely to decrease. Promises that a government makes generally involve creating new products and services, or health and wellbeing, for those who accept its currency as good tender, and so the value of a currency is linked to the value of the government in the eyes of the people, in a self-fulfilling prophecy. Likewise, the value of the currency will increase if demand for the currency increases, as any new markets the government creates begins to soak up it's monetary supplies. Perhaps we should start to think about Pound Sterling as a digital currency that can be used to fund massive infrastructure projects in developing economies. Targetting a net increase in the human capital of other countries should legitimise the printing of money to stimulate growth in new markets, but only if the private investors and sub-contractors, along with the rest of the taxpaying electorate, believe that we can all work together to maximise a return for the UK on those initial investments.

Labour's Growth Plans?

Although Labour's budget has started to rebalance the inequalities between rich and poor neighbourhoods, public and private sectors, and male and female pay structures, their strategy for growth has yet to be set out. This is becoming increasingly important because it is unlikely that Kier Starmer will win a second term as PM without achieving significant growth: he has idenitified it as the single most important factor in his plans, but it will not be able to deliver itself. So how do Labour hope to achieve it? Most people would probably agree that growth will come from the use of information technology to drive increases in productivity. But few have recognised that this just creates an additional inequality, between high-tech and low-tech users. So unless a regulatory mechanism is written into Labour's plans, growth is likely to be based on one group of society exploiting another, in the same way it always has been.

SUPPLY CHAINS

The single most important factor in the slump we saw during Covid was a breakdown in global supply chains. This was due to a popular high-tech concept called 'Lean Six Sigma'. This attempted to reduce waste and increase profit margins by treating the hugely complex and international supply chains as one long conveyor belt. This was only made possible by information technology. When one product was sold to a customer at one end, another product was automatically ordered from suppliers at the other end. This reduced the need for any expensive storage capacity in between, making the whole process maximally efficient, thereby increasing profit margins.

For a while this system worked perfectly, but when Covid hit, smaller parts of the supply chain began to break down. They had very little spare capacity with which to flex to meet gaps in the supply and demand for materials and labour. This led to a catastrophic collapse of the conveyor belt as a whole. My theory is that 'building back better' has meant organisations have attempted to reduce the risks involved in resourcing their components internationally, by resourcing them from suppliers closer to home. This may have reduced the risks of the chains breaking again, but has meant that labour costs, and therefore the cost of products to the consumer, have remained relatively high. This is because manual labour in the high-tech EU and UK economies is relatively expensive. So the profit margins for many parts of the manufacturing process that used to be outsourced to lower wage, lower-tech, economies around the world, have been squeezed.

This change in global manufacturing practices is nowhere more obvious than the automotive industry. During the pandemic, no-one needed a new car. The reduction in demand was balanced by a parallel break down in the supply chain, so the net effect on pricing was that cost of purchasing a new vehicle remained about the same. However, the reduction in volume of new cars passing into the second hand car market led to demand for second hand cars outstripping the supply. The price for purchasing a second hand vehicle then rose steadily, by an estimated +30% year on year, from 2019. In addition, replacement parts were harder to source, so the cost of repairs increased to extortionate levels. Many people reverted to using public transport, which created problems for the aging public transport networks. The virus spread quickly across commuters who were largely employed in low-tech sectors. So it can be seen that huge inequalities began to emerge in the death rates of the high-tech and low-tech transportation sectors and their associated workforces. Now, it just so happens that cars are the biggest export of the EU and UK's the high-tech automotive industries. America's biggest export is the petrol that fuels our cars, and China's is the electrical products that go into making them, so the GDP of all the major economies in the world were interlinked in this same supply chain. 

Now, a second blow to the UK economy emerges. Recent figures suggest that while the EU's was able to adapt its Lean Six Sigma supply chains to source more of its parts from an internal market the UK has not been able to keep up. This was probably because of Brexit and the fact that we have basically just isolated ourselves from all our nearest trading partners. So the first thing the UK government will now have to do is fix its supply chains and this is not going to be easy. Unless the EU suddenly has a reverse of its policy on the internal market, it is unlikely to allow any of its member states to do deals with the UK independently. Thus, UKGDP looks like it is going nowhere very fast, and that Brexit has well and truly sunk the UK economy.

DEFENCE INDUSTRY

So this is where the defence industry comes in. The UK has developed its defensive capabilities around trade. It knows better than anyone else that trade is not possible without securing the passage of goods by force, if necessary. The EU pays NATO for these services, but the Trump administration is likely to demand more and deliver less. Thus the UK has a unique position in NATO due to the 'special relationship' it has with the US, and the strategic position it has for the trading routes in and out of Europe. For example, whereas Ireland is not a member of NATO it still benefits massively from all the protections that NATO offers the EU as a whole, including those afforded it by the UK's continuing presence in Northern Ireland. 

So there is potential for the UK to use its unique position within NATO as a bargaining chip to secure a better deal with the EU on trade. This would be based on it increasing its commitment to the defence industry, through the R&D it already shares with the US and EU. NATO has always been very active in the R&D. It is interested in all sorts of scalable healthcare products and industries. The pandemic showed how agile the UK is as a world leader in the conversion of genomic intelligence into world-beating pharmaceutical products, with Pfizer and Astra-Zenica leading the pack in these fields. 

It may therefore be in the EU's and UK's interests to create a super-national defence industry that is similar to the one that the US had during the Cold War. That is where the nation state commissioned innovation from the private sector, but because the private sector was not tied to any particular nation state, it was able to adjust more easily to innovations, and was more efficient that the Soviet Union in keeping costs down. And if a super-national industry like this was looking for a place to base itself, for legal and ethical business purposes, then nowhere could be better placed than Northern Ireland, from a geo-political and military point of view. 

HUMAN CAPITAL

The pandemic proved the worth of many areas of the economy that had been under-valued for many years before. Genomics, for instance, is just one branch of Human Capital management and exploitation. With greater knowledge of the interaction between genes and environment on the horizon, this is likely to be a hihgh growth area. In addition, the hierarchical structure of a centralised NHS, in association with its local Higher Education, Public Health and Adult Social Care partners, makes it perfectly placed for investment in R&D that has scalable potential. 

However, weaknesses have been exposed in its data storage, data sharing, and data security architectures that need to be worked out, probably at the level of the new Integrated Primary Care Hubs. That is, if the public sector will be able to take full advantage of the private investment in R&D that is now available in the synergy between Big Data, Artificial Intelligence and Large Language Models. For example, a local authority could set the expectation that a drone will be able to deliver a defibrilator anywhere within its geographical area within five minutes of a 999 call being received. It would be up to private providers to compete for the contract, but up to public services to run it.

This could help prepare the ground for more innovative social housing, that could be purpose-built by the private sector to meet commisioning objectives set out by local public services. They might, for instance offer telemedicine services to retirees, with remote sensing capabilities, through state-of-the-art infrastructure, that would be agreed for individual tenancies, that may or may not attract public funding, following the appropriate needs led assessment. 

The facilities would have to meet local standards of quality and inter-operability, so an element of licencing woud have to be involved. But the model for these sorts of facilities already exists, and could easily be extended to many different demographics, many who are currently unable to secure even the most insecure types of tenancy in the current housing market, providing some certainty and return on investment, for landlords and tenants alike.   

The NHS also needs to provide more assurances to local businesses that workers will receive an appropriate occupational health service at the point of need, regardless of ability to pay. This would be alligned with DWP benefits and would be aimed at reducing the number of unemployed who become inactive. This number increased dramatically during Covid and has remained very high. Demographic factors are significant, and may require a public health approach to accommodating the needs of different cultures, in order to improve access to health. For example, blood testing for Vitamin D levels among immigrants, testing for male and female hormone levels at specific age points, and analysing MRIs for white matter lesions for anyone suffering concussion, should be reviewed by NICE for their contribution to quality adjusted life years. 

In addition, anyone who contributes their own personal and provate data to a givernment run public health programmes should be able to get an estimate of their life expectancy in return, through an app delivered by their GP. This will help establish the sort of risk-reward calculations that healthcare professions need to embed in their patients, and help patients can be empowered to take control of their healthcare plans for themselves. It should also help stimulate the private healthcare prividers to provide a suite of psychological and physiological assessments that can be fedback to the GP for R&D purposes.

ENVIRONMENTAL ASSETS

Advances made in the health and social care sector through R&D needs to feed into an information revolution in other sectors. Evidence already exists in the energy, mining and agricultural sectors that more and better knowledge infrastructures can make them more competitive, scalable, and profitable. Unfortunately, these industries are currently extremely exposed to exploitation by financial services which is a high-tech industry that has no interest whatsoever in promoting UKGDP or reducing the gap between them and more low-tech economies. Government could help small and medium sized businesses to access the same Big Data, Artificial Intelligence, and Large Language Model resources that the multi-national conglomerates do. This should facilitate more routes from cottage industry to mass market, and provide some assurances regarding risks to investment capital. 

Recent history in Lithium Mining, Electric Vehicles, Fertilisers, and Flooding show that the more exposed the UK comes to global forces outside of its control, the more adaptable it has to become. The need for us all to 'Think Global & Act Local' is demonstrated by organisations like the 'Farming Forum' operting at the grassroots of international collaboratives like the 'Agricultural Market Information System'. These platforms prove the value that information sharing amongst competitors has to all businesses within a sector, in terms of: sourcing raw materials, predicting trends, setting prices, managing waste, sharing knowledge, and collective bargaining. Government have attempted to plug some of the barriers to scalability through websites like www.custom-declarations.uk. But more could be done with this data. If the information revolution is about anything, it is about government providing the environmental conditions for individual aspirations to grow and accumulate wealth. 

At the heart of this information revolution is an investment in human capital. This means new technology will likely be deplyed in exploiting human capital. But we must not repeat the mistakes of the past where exploitation means depriving individuals of their liberties and whole communities of their identities. Our public services have only survived because of the contributions our Commonwealth partners have made to them. And because of their contributions, our public services have become hot-spots for the creation of new forms of cultural and identity capital. We should be ready now to export some of that learning to the rest of the world. 

The easiest way to do that is through knowledge transfer and cultural exchange activities for our Commonwealth students. Once they have graduated from a UK Higher Education Institutions they should be offered an opportunity to work on an International Development Programme of their choosing, in return for having their student loans paid off. Only in this way will we be able to repay the debts of the past, and continue to look forward to their help in the future. It is in the interests of the Commonwealth that we work together to create these new markets, markets within which the information revolution can continue to grow.    

CONCLUSIONS

There is plenty to be optimistic about when it comes to the UK's growth prospects. It may take strong leadership to see it through, but a vision and set of values is already in place by which we can plot a course through some of the most difficult obstacles we face in the current economic climate. We must build an infrastructure that can accelarate the information revolution, that creates a feedback loop between the UK Government and every Commonwealth Citizen, if we are going to be able to participate in the global economy in the way that we want to. New technologies make this possible, but implementing the lessons we have learned from our not-too-distant past is the only way we will be able to make it real. We are on the threshold of a new age, with unknown potentials and dangers, but with good planning, some trust, and a commitment to each other, I am sure we can all pull through. A Happy Thanksgiving to all!

Labour's Social Housing Plans?

NHS bed blocking currently causes even the best run and well designed pathways of care to grind to a halt. But there are two sides to this coin. Finding placements is an adult social care problem, and constructing them is a social housing problem. Either way, the NHS ends up paying for the widening gap between the two. The solution could be found through Labour's local planning strategy. 

We are informed by their conference this week that the details of their strategy to reform local planning laws are still being worked out; but I think it could give the green light to projects to start providing social housing 'on prescription'; i.e. to residents on NHS risk registers according to their demographic identity and type of unmet needs. 

Yes this sounds like a form of ghettoisation but, as anyone who has ever lived on a council estate will know, it can also be a necessary part of protecting vulnerable people in society from abuse, not just dumping them all in the same pot of misery and poverty. 

After all, access to Council Housing already involves a threshold that is effectively controlled by the Local Authority and NHS anyway. So why not involve these authorities in longer term public-private contracts where the private money gets paid off through the appreciation of the material assests, and public investment accumulates wealth through developing the knowledge and skills of a local commuity and ensuring continuity of care.  

The conceptual infrastructure already exists go make this dream a reality. If the private investment in the housing stock is met by government investment into training staff to run the new primary care networks as virtual wards, then we could see the 'over 55' warden-controlled housing model being rolled out to meet the needs of other 'at risk' groups. 

Anti-social behaviour legislation already exists to make these tenancies subject to a series of conditions which are used to promote the sort of secure and structured pathway to recovery that the evidence base tells us they need. 

The business case also seems feasable. The accelerating tax burden is only going to be reduced through developing solutions at sufficient economies of scale to impact on the number of quality of life years we can buy with each pound of our gross domestic product. And access to 24/7 care would suddenly become a lot cheaper for the most resource intensive cases on NHS waiting lists.

I believe these sorts of local infrastructure projects are now necessary to free up GP resources and the meet the needs of the working well. Only in this way can we get a real return on the investment we make in this country through paying our taxes. Thus, it seems like a good deal for everyone, but will the public buy into it? Only the politicians will be deciding that.

Has Universal Credit made People Sick?

The Conservatives have announced new policies to manage a recent increase in economic inactivity (Centre for Social Justice 2024).

“Since the pandemic, total spending on working age disability and ill-health benefits increased by almost two-thirds from £42.3 billion to £69 billion and we now spend more on these benefits than our core schools’ budget or on policing.” (Rishi Sunak 2024)

Official statistics suggest that there has been an increase of something like 850,000 (43%) of economically inactive claimants since the start of the pandemic in January 2000. Successive reports (Kirk-Wade and Harker 2023; Powell 2024) have highlighted the link to long-term sickness absence, and suggested that older-age and ill-health have interacted to cause this trend, with “long Covid” and “Waiting lists” cited as evidence.

“The number of working-age people who were economically inactive, which means they were out of work not looking for work, reached its highest level since 2012 in December 2023 to February 2024. The number of people who are inactive because of long-term sickness increased to a record high of 7% of the working-age population.” (Powell 2024)

 

Source: Office for National Statistics (ONS), INAC01 SA: Economic inactivity by reason (seasonally adjusted), 16 April 2024

The Government narrative is that after the pandemic arrived in the UK on January 30^th 2020, successive lockdowns in March - June 2020, September - November 2020, and January - July 2021 caused damage to the labour market by acceleratinging economic inactivity from which we have never recovered. 

However, official reports from 2022 suggest that while the lockdowns differentially impacted vulnerable people in unpaid and insecure employment at the time, the labour market recovered quickly: 

“Coronavirus: Impact on the labour market

Most affected groups

Some workers were disproportionally economically impacted by the pandemic.

Unemployment rates for minority ethnic groups were higher than average before the pandemic and saw a larger increase between January-March 2020 and January to March 2022. People from minority ethnic group were more likely to experience a loss of income at the beginning of the pandemic. While unemployment rates have risen more for minority ethnic groups over the pandemic, employment rates have also risen due to decreases in economic inactivity rates.

Employment among men has fallen slightly more than among women over the pandemic. An increase in economic inactivity for men means that women made up over 48% of the workforce in January-March 2022, a record high.

The youngest and oldest workers were most likely to lose their jobs or be furloughed at the beginning of the pandemic. Youth employment recovered quickly from spring 2021, and had nearly returned to pre-pandemic levels by January-March 2022. Many older workers opted to retire early.

Low paid workers were more likely to work in sectors most affected by the pandemic, particularly hospitality and non-essential retail, so were most likely to be put on furlough or experience falls in income at the beginning of the pandemic. However, the rise in vacancies in 2021 and 2022 was driven by low paying jobs and by February 2022 unemployment rates in low occupation had almost completely recovered.

The employment gap between disabled people and people without disabilities widened during the pandemic, before returning to close to pre-pandemic levels.” 

(Francis Devine et al 2022)

 

Thus, while the lockdowns may account for things like the small but significant (1%) rise in “discouraged workers” during this time (@86,000) it cannot account for the massive rise in long-term sickness absence, particularly as there is no increase in unexpected deaths that might accompany it.

In addition, the Government narrative does not explain the significant ‘churn’ within the economically inactive figures that begins six months before the pandemic. The Centre for Social Justice data shows that starting in April/May 2019 there was a 4.3% (@370,000) swing in the reasons being given for economic inactivity, from “looking after family/home” to “long-term sick”. Although the swing does not account for new claimants, it could account for the link to ill-health, but this has not been addressed in the official narratives. 

 

April/May 2019 was the start of a period of “managed migration” conducted by the DWP, to switch people from individual “legacy benefits” to the household-based Universal Credit system. Reports from DWP concede that the “managed migration” process differentially affected single people on tax credits, which seems to confirm that vulnerable workers were affected by these changes. However, because the change to Universal Credits has been overseen by the Centre of Social Justice, any damage it has done is likely to be suppressed by the current Government. 

Thus, contrary to the Government narrative, there is an alternative theory to the one that says the NHS is responsible for the recent increase in sickness-related economic inactivity: Rather, the evidence is that the group of people who were on "legacy benefits" have been made ill by transferring them onto Universal Credits starting in 2019. 

This group seems to have included very vulnerable people: single-parent families, unpaid carers, young adults, ethnic minorities and retired people, in insecure employment; who may have been cohabiting with relatives, extended family, or friendship groups as the most viable low-cost housing option. This group's employment had already been affected by lockdown and the imposed changes to their financial circumstances could have been enough to trigger a long-term sickness episode that has been recorded by GPs as something to do with their mental health.

“There were 2.9 million lone-parent families in 2022, accounting for 15% of all families. This is not significantly different to 2012, when there were 3.0 million lone-parent families, equivalent to 17% of all families. While the majority of lone-parent families are lone-mother families (2.5 million, 84%), in 2022, 16% (457,000) were lone-father families. Lone-mother families are more likely to include one or more dependent children (66%) than lone-father families (48%).” (ONS 2024)

“Our results indicated that: (1) British adults with intellectual impairments were more likely than their peers to be exposed to non-standard employment conditions and experience job insecurity; (2) in both groups exposure was typically associated with poorer health; (3) British adults with intellectual impairments in non-standard employment conditions were more likely than their peers to transition to economic inactivity; (4) among both groups, transitioning into employment was associated with positive health status and transitioning out of employment was associated with poorer health status.” (Emerson et al 2018)

There does not seem to have been any consideration within Parliament of the impact of the Government’s changes to the benefits system. The situation is of course complex, but local counsellors within more deprived areas will be well aware of the sorts of families who are being affected in this way. Unless this information is aggregated at the macro-economic level of data analysis, it is unlikely to become part of the official narrative, unless or until there is a change of Government.