I have been working very hard trying to get a government backed “Coronavirus Business Interruption Loan” for the music festival. It has been like banging my head off a brick wall, with a huge batch of documents and accounts to be in your hands before you are permitted to smash your head. Before the pandemic really took hold, I had written about the challenge of making music festival finances work and the need, given infrastructure costs, to reach a certain scale to become viable. At that stage my main worry was how to maintain the non-commercial, community vibe as we expanded; selling the tickets was not proving problematic.
The pandemic has obviously been a huge blow to the entire live music industry and to festivals in particular. Very large amounts of both money and effort had already been sunk into this year’s festival, which is now unable to go ahead. We had, just to give one of scores of examples, built a new entrance to the estate to reduce traffic backing up on the roads.
A music festival is obviously very genuinely affected by the pandemic, so I did not imagine there would be trouble qualifying for the much touted government Coronavirus Business Interruption Loan Scheme (CBILS) for small and medium enterprises affected by the virus. We applied, and at the request of the bank produced records and a business plan showing cashflow going forward and how we would recover the financial position and repay the loan.
Last week we received a definitive rejection of our application from RBS/Natwest and I wanted to recount the reasons in detail to you, because they explain very well why the CBILS scheme has been a failure, which is going to cause a great deal of economic damage. I would add that I was dealing throughout with bank staff who really were lovely, and desperate to be helpful. Their computers kept saying no, but they did not relay that with satisfaction or indifference, and indeed went out of their way to alter the input to their computers again and again to try for a different answer. But the answer was ultimately no, and here is why.
The CBILS scheme specifies that is must be applied by the bank using the banks’ normal lending criteria – which were referred to as “policies” by the staff. The government guarantees 80% of the amount and has made available 100% of the funding, but as the bank is still theoretically 20% at risk, individual applications still have to be accepted by the banks’ underwriters as insurable. This was the rock on which our application continually foundered.
One individual phone call lasted over two hours with a “business manager” who was trying very hard to get the application through the underwriters. The application was being blocked by three bank “policies”.
1) There was an absolute bank policy against loaning for refunds to customers. We had explained this was one of the things that we needed the loan to cover.
2) A number of payments (deposits etc) made for this year’s festival were irrecoverable. These were therefore trading losses and it was bank policy not to loan to cover losses.
3) Going forward, we could give no guarantee that the festival would take place in 2021 or 2022 if coronavirus persisted.
To be plain, this was the government’s much vaunted CBILS scheme for which we were applying, which has the stated purpose of helping viable businesses survive coronavirus. Yet it is being applied by the bank in such a way as to rule out providing funds to cover losses directly caused by the coronavirus. To compound this ludicrous situation further, you cannot get a loan if there is a risk your business will be affected in future by coronavirus.
This particular manager had studied our accounts, business plan, sales growth and narrative and said that he accepted we had a good viable business plan going forward. He went to discuss the matter with his director. His director reinforced the refusal on all three counts, and added a fourth. The company, which was set up to finance the necessary expansion of Doune the Rabbit Hole, has been trading for less than two years and, like most startups, was yet to show any profit. We therefore would not be eligible on
4) Lack of profit history
The CBILS scheme has been supplemented by a special scheme for startups, “the Future Fund”, but this only applies to the Tech industry.
The friendly business manager told me that he had found the CBILS scheme particularly frustrating as it was not doing what it claimed to do. His sector was the hospitality and leisure industry, and the bank’s policies actively precluded him from giving loans where they were most needed. He said that the vast majority of CBILS loans he had seen granted were to larger established enterprises and were related entirely to covering their fixed costs – eg rents, mortgages, utilities, insurances etc. Large landlords have readily received loans from the CBILS scheme.
So I can tell you definitively that the government’s much vaunted Coronavirus Business Interruption Loan Scheme to “save” the country’s small and medium enterprises cannot be used to borrow money to cover in the short term any loss you are making due to coronavirus. You can only get the loan if you are a wealthy company that is not making a loss from coronavirus, does not actually need the loan, and could have got a loan under the bank’s own commercial lending criteria anyway. It is in short, like every Tory measure, a way of funneling government resources to the benefit of the wealthy.
The bank have referred us to the new “Bounce-Back” loan scheme, which is designed to address some of these issues with the CBILS scheme. In particular, it can help non-tech startups, with no need to show a profit for companies in their first three years of trading, and there is no exclusion for companies making a loss due to coronavirus. The problem is, that the loan limit of £50,000 barely scratches the surface of our immediate requirements. But the festival has always been a confection of community spirit and sweat; we will find a way to make it work. I shall let you know how the Bounce-Back application goes in due course.
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This ‘failure’ of the CBILS needs more publicity. MPs should be asking questions in the house at least. That said – I think it is not a failure since it does as intended – funnels money to the wealthy. The UK is becoming ever more kleptocratic.
AAMVN, you are so correct. The situation is identical in Australia, where govt “aid” is structured to be available only to those who don’t need it. The economic consequences of this are dire.
I’m looking forward to the BBC’s Gordon Brewer skewering Tory Alistair Jack, Secy of State for (The UK in) Scotland, on this scandal, on Politics Sunday or any other MSM politics show or even hearing all about it on the Scottish news.
Oh wait, it’s a ‘Torybad’ story and they prefer ‘SNPbad’ stories.
‘Deader Together’
Zero coverage
Huh.
Craig, national politics is fcuked, just hopelessly corrupted. We need to start afresh from the ground up; precisely nothing is going to come from the top down. Local bodies have to take control of social restrictions; applying restrictions nationally is madness:
https://www.ons.gov.uk/visualisations/dvc811/multimap/index.html
Lambeth council rebelled against national government when they gave the Vauxhall Pleasure Gardens over to Extinction Rebellion last October, and local rebellion is what’s happening in Brazil:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/apr/01/brazil-bolsonaro-ignored-by-state-governors-amid-anger-at-handling-of-covid-19-crisis
Also the way some US states are opposing the Trump administration’s insanity.
Could there be a way around the national Coronavirus Business Interruption Loan Scheme whereby local authorities apply collectively on behalf of all businesses in their area, and then administer it themselves? Can a legal framework be devised for that? It looks like this will going on for a long time.
None of these things are going to happen.
There is an iron determination in place to take from the poor and give to the rich. Absolutely nothing is going to get in the way of this plan. You are dealing with economic suicide bombers and these people would rather pull the pin than to leave a single cent in the hands of the poor.
It has been an odd marriage of convenience between Extinction Rebellion and the kleptocratic class – both saw an advantage in crashing the system but only the kleptocrats were playing to win. Soon it will be time for Extinction Rebellion to fade gently into that dark goodnight. If they don’t go peacefully then all of a sudden someone will discover that Extinction Rebellion is full of terrorists and vile child molesters – and the entire (dis)organization will promptly be declared enemies of the people.
If terrorists and child molesters don’t exist within Extinction Rebellion then the state will place them there and then unveil them to a shocked and outraged general public.
You’ve been had – and it was never going to turn out any other way.
Think you’re right Loony. The only way the system is ever going to be allowed to crash is when the owners have something even better (i.e. worse) to put in its place.
Loony, the first has already happened, the local rebellions are already happening in the US and Brazil and who knows where else, and my concluding suggestion might just give some clever lawyer an idea. Still, “Resistance is Futile!” eh? Now who might want us to believe that?
You are not resisting anything – you are in lockstep with the kleptocrats.
You are either being played or you are active collaborators – neither explanation is complimentary.
Greta Thunberg is no less an enemy of the people than Jamie Dimon – but Dimon is slightly more honest.
Loony, breathe steadily and regularly while you count slowly to ten, and when you have achieved a sense of inner calm try reading my comment again. It is about local and state authorities defying their national governments; the XR bit was merely incidental. And if you can hold that inner composure for thirty minutes you’ll be able to read a scientific report with objectivity similar to Greta Thunberg’s xx
I agree with you on the localism thing Clark. One of the interesting features of China’s COVID response is that it is local authorities that have been tasked with assessing the level of risk and the level of response required to mitigate it. As a result, they don’t have lockdowns in locations that are not in the slightest danger of seeing any Coronavirus outbreak (places like remote villages in Galloway).
Clark: will you attend Doune?
As a human tragedy unfolded at a meatpacking facility in Colorado’s Weld County in early April, the county’s chief health officer unwittingly found himself at the center of a coronavirus-driven storm that exemplifies the political, business and health priorities that bear on local officials in the eye of the pandemic, according to email correspondence seen by MarketWatch.
The health official, Mark Wallace, faced a barrage of questions and demands from sometimes competing interests including unions, business owners, state politicians and national media, the emails show.
In one early April email, after a TV station interviewed him about an outbreak at JBS USA, a Greeley, Colo.–based subsidiary of Brazil’s JBS S.A. BR:JBSS3, Wallace wrote to the head of human resources at the meatpacking company: “They were not going to let up on me. ‘The cat’s out of the bag’ is what all health-care providers are saying — too many sick people already, too much spread already.”
I’ll go if I can. Craig said that it has been cancelled: “…this year’s festival, which is now unable to go ahead”.
Craig, as the virus will be probably still be around next year and maybe the year after, it will surely be very difficult to put on a festival next year as well, in which case the government should be offering some form of grant rather than a loan.
I am not surprised at this financial ‘snake in the grass’ -the plandemic is built to further big pharma: https://dcwhispers.com/must-read-robert-f-kennedy-jr-accuses-bill-gates-of-vaccine-genocide-coronavirus-related/
Couldn’t agree more Mark. There are now several very good videos out there all pointing to the current virus crisis as being a means for big-pharma to make big bucks.
The economy is so screwed in all countries, with massive job losses and many that will never return, the only way I can see we can survive economically is Soviet-style centrally planned command economies, within fascist states, where the top management of big corporations call the shots. I am not suggesting this is a good idea, I think it is now inevitable.
dear Minority Of One,
a Soviet-style economy is a good solution when your country was ravaged by war, when every free penny was directed to the needs of defense, and every pair of working hands was used for the needs of the civilians.
This works good when you lose 27 out of 150 million people in 1945, when you need to rebuild the bombed roads and factories, and in 1957 launch the first Sputnik in the world.
In the case of a stupid virus, the Soviet-style economy is completely unnecessary severity.
Boris Johnson has said we might have to live with this virus for a very long time, he said we may never have a vaccine, that works.
Indeed ‘michael’; if you can entangle with the mind of Dominic Cummings that statement makes perfect sense.
Boris Johnson is f*cking clown, whose handled this pandemic appallingly. I wouldn’t trust him to look after my dog let alone England. Whatever comes out of that fools mouth, it should be taken with a pinch of salt.
Westminster is jam packed with Etoninans, and other Public school attendees who just because they speak in an authoritive manner and wear a smart suit, doesn’t necessarily equate to that they’re smarter than you and I or that they know how to run a country.
Its all smoke and mirrors to fool into thinking they are, and that they can run a country better than other non public school attendees ever could.
“Boris Johnson says” that must be one of the least credible starts to any sentence.
It seems strange to me that in all the time that Covid-19 has been a threat and in all the articles written about the subject, very little has appeared in the main stream media as to what we might take to ameliorate the symptoms of the infection.
A great deal has been said about the need to test and to find a vaccine, however people do not die from having Covid, they die due to the bodies reaction to the infection – the cytokine storm.
I am not medically qualified, but it is quite easy for me to reference articles which propose a rationale as to why BAME, old and obese individuals might be more susceptible to Covid.
A common factor might be low vitamin D.
See below.
Is ethnicity linked to incidence or outcomes of Covid-19?
https://www.bmj.com/content/369/bmj.m1548/rr-6
We know that lessons have already been learned about the treatment Covid infections in ICU.
Dr Matt Strauss
The underground doctors’ movement questioning the use of ventilators
2 May 2020, 8:00am
https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/ventilators-doctor-movement
Any lessons we can learn now will help in any inevitable future pandemics.
It probably would be a surprise to most people that the 2014/15 flue epidemic killed in excess of 28,000 with excess winter deaths of 44,000.
These pandemics are inevitable – we must learn and constantly evolve our responses.
Hello Tatyana,
We seem to have differing opinions regarding the nature of the mess we are in. Over the coming months, the international tourist industry will vanish, and millions of jobs with it. The car industry seems to be tanking. Air travel has tanked and I do not see how it can possible recover. The housing market will crash due to the number of people that don’t have a job, or money. With oil and natural resource corporations paying out little or zero in dividends, it is just a matter of time before retirees find their pensions getting slashed. Eventually banks will hit the skids again with all the pending bankruptcies, and again the government will try to bail them out (possibly owning them outright). On top of all that, government expenses are rocketing whilst income from taxes is falling off the edge of cliff.
What do you think is the solution to all this?
Yes, we have differing opinions. The decline of international tourism or car sales is undoubtedly a decline in living standards, but it’s not a disaster. Suspended air traffic or decline of the housing market is not a life-threatening situation. The loss of a habitual job will only entail the search for a job-in-demand (and I’m afraid many “keyboard pushers” will have to master physical labor). But this is not a disaster at all, it is just discontent due to a drop in comfort.
Today we know about the virus much more than 2 months ago and now we are ready to exist with it, to some extent. No need to panic, everything will work out. You ask what is the solution? Common sense, as it always is.
The people you trust to manage your state must be smart. Manage your resources rationally. You have everything intact – infrastructure, industry, population – all in stock :-), you just need to make it work effectively. It’s not a start from the scratch.
Ask for help from other countries, maybe.
Minority of One, to your list of those sectors facing tough times ahead, could also be added, Oil production. It has I believe been widely reported, that although the black stuff is in plentiful supply, and cheaper than it has been for years, storage capacity is not, and may well run out by next Monday, 18/5. Apparently, the knock on effects are considerable if Wells have to be capped, and some operations abandoned or moth-balled as there’s no point getting it out of the ground, if you’ve nowhere to put it, and nobody wants to buy it, because they’ve nowhere to keep it either. Around here Petrol is widely available at £1.06 per litre, and has been for weeks, the forecourts are empty whenever you drive past.
Pyewacket
You are correct, I forgot about the UK and global oil industry. I doubt the UK offshore oil industry is making any money at the current $30/barrel, or rather, I suspect they are losing money on every barrel produced.
A week or two ago the International Energy Agency estimated that global oil consumption has dropped by about 30 million barrels / day (from about 100 m b/d to 70 m b/d), but production has more or less not changed, not much anyway. Prices could well drop to zero or go negative once all storage is full up – that is what happened to West Texas Intermediate prices last month. I mentioned it before but it is worth repeating. The UK offshore operators club Oil and Gas UK themselves forecast up to 30,000 folks losing their (well paid) jobs, and those will be mostly in Scotland and in particular Aberdeen.
Coal Industry is also taking a nosedive.
Iron and Steel Industry will be taking a nosedive.
Holiday Industries are taking a nosedive.
Cruise ship Industries may never come back.
I think holiday/entertainment/eating out/pubs is about one third of all the economy of the world, now hitting the buffers
I recall someone predicted a food shortage and mentioned that Russia has already imposed a moratorium on grain exports this year, so maybe holiday and cruise employees will go to grow food?
Growing chickens out of eggs is nearly zero cost, or, growing vegetables requires only your own labor. Just in case someone gets fired from the cruise business. Food will be on demand and you can live on it.
The Scottish oil industry is already in meltdown. I personally know of 12 oil sector workers who are at this precise moment working out of peterhead on fishing boats and trawlers because they have no work. And possibly no job to go back to. And Tatyana is right about keyboard pushers. These guys are rough necks and roustabouts not shy of hard graft. The office class will struggle as they will not get taken on.
‘..big corporations call the shots” Yes Minority; well said; my information is we are being driven towards the ‘virtual’ rather than ‘physical’ – by that I mean online transactions that can be monitored and controlled in precise detail with a variety of corpocracy tools.
I think those big corporations, world wide,. had a few words with those political puppets hanging on their strings, ‘urging them to start up those economies, however and regardless of the risks to life, as storage capacities are all full’; this country has no long term energy storage for emergencies such as the 1973 oil crisis, whatsoever.
Time to find a large salt stock underground somewhere and get some energy storage capacity of sorts, time to create energy storage in every house, time for a green ecolution!
If the chancellor wanted to massively support the drive towards sustainable technologies and change, he would encourage expertise to migrate here, encourage fair wages and labour conditions, establish a system of shadowing expertise whilst in education, learning at work and at school, for years to come.
I can’t see any plans for a sustainable future coming from anywhere, despite the many positive suggestions from Greens, NGO’s economists and or international organisations such as the UN.
This is the time when this Government should come out with comprehensive plans on how to restructure our economy away from linear fossil fuel based development towards a long term goal of active change to a circular development based and powered by alternative energies.
Wake me up when you can see it, or when you ready to give your polished pitchfork a public outing.
The 2007/8 recession taught me that financial crises are constructed to reward those who have the resources to buy cheap, and sell at the peak. Those in the know were completely confident that assets that were hit by the crisis would recover in a relatively short time.
So the larger loans help people who are the loop of knowledge about when things will return to normal.
By it’s very nature , government only shares this kind of knowledge with its closest friends. And these friends can make fortunes outof hedge-funding, I.e. reward for failure. Craig’s post now adds important information to this highly selective process. If he had been in the know, and quietly told the helpful manager he knew a vaccine was going to be available by October this year from inside information, the computer would have suddenly pinged the jackpot.
Certain pieces of vital information might assist the PTB:
1/ foreknowledge of who was going to win the election
2/ foreknowledge of the timing of the catastrophe
3/ foreknowledge of the resolution of the problem, a cure
4/ foreknowledge of the mitigating resources, loans.
In the rush to replace Jeremy Hunt’s missing NHS PPE, this government has refused to source PPE from companies that are not ois friends, or through channels that , in a competitive world, are tendering for the first time. What’s that funny noise? Oh , scratching of backs and pressing of QE into palms.
I also find it particularly sinister, the donning of funeral director black for his presentations by our PM. The last time we saw this was at the highly suspicious last terror attack on a London bridge. It’s difficult to stay uncynical about MI5 catastrophes when MI5 holds all the cards on release of dangerous people.
The huff and puff of US senators queuing to pretend to rant about something 99% of the normal population have remained totally cal about tells me there’s more than a whiff of Hollywood about Trump’s insider knowledge of Cov19., as well as the funeral Boris Johnson.
It’s called inside knowledge and it’s illegal, and of course its desperately frustrating for those sitting on the outside of the plate glass windows protecting the ” chartered streets ” of the wealthy, when we are living in those exact same Blake-ian slums.
@Giyane – Yes, from the rulers’ point of view the Baconian “knowledge is power” can be replaced with “knowledge is money”.
“It’s called inside knowledge and it’s illegal“. And nobody does a big trade without inside knowledge.
N_
The most graphic example of insider knowledge for me was the fact that the Mercedes Coaches to Kurdistan from Istanbul continued to run for 10 years through the entire width of NATO’s Turkey when for half the journey the road was either near or exactly adjacent to the Syrian border.
They then ran through Daesh territories inside Iraq with impunity for a further 7 hours, on a daily schedule.
What follows Craig’s experience here , piecing together the dare I say it jigsaw, is that
1/ Proferesor Godfree Roberts was correct in saying that the US made cov19 and despatched it by means of its troops on a visit to Wuhan in October 2019.
2/ Thierry Myessan is correct in saying that 30,000 troops recently sent from the US to Italy and Croatia were already vaccinated against this disease.
3/ Craig was correct in his early prediction that government money would subsidise only the wealthy.
Obviously in any government scam when the resources are available to sort out the problem from before the beginning of the scam, the scam has to run its course through the economy, bankrupting weaker companies and being scooped up by larger ones.
Smaller companies who take the £50 K loans should bear in mind that , UNTIL the process of routing the economy has been allowed to wreck almost everything worth having, so that it can be scooped up for nothing, economic conditions are going to be terrible. So unless a small business has a fail-safe plan to turn the loan round, the improvements made with the capital will accrue to the vultures, not to them.
The absolutely first priority is to demand an autopsy on democracy after the patient died of algorithmic heart disorder. To establish how a lifelong Conservative Peter Lilley, was given total control over the UK electoral system enabling a lost cause government to achieve an 80 seat majority.
This is the root of the Cov 19 problem, both here and in the US, where the Potus is selected for what they can do for outside interests and not for the inside interests of the US.
If they were unable to rely on being in power, either directly or through having subsumed their opponents like the SNP and Labour into themselves, then there would be no way to benefit themselves as they were able to do under Bilderberg Brown.
I personally think Crsig should ask supporters of Doune to help him out . Hopefully God will send another cockroach to tickle his nose and get this democracy issue changed.
I couldn’t quite see why the fact that the Istanbul-Erbil bus continues to run is evidence of nefarious insider-dealing. I happen to have driven that road, well most of the relevant bits you talk about. Inside Turkey no problem. In Iraq, well, you know, all over the world buses continue to run in the most unstable political circumstances. You just take your chance. A Syrian friend of mine was hauled off a bus (or perhaps taxi) on the way to Aleppo by Da’ish, a trip demanded by his employer. It was only by the mereest chance that he survived.
The insider-deal of the century in that area, which astounded even me, was the deal between the Damascus government and the jihadis (2012 or so), and later Da’ish (2014 +) to continue to supply Damascus with oil from the Syrian oil-fields. The supply only stopped when the Americans took over – indeed it’s the main reason the US is there today, as the supply is small, and not profitable.
The 2007/8 recession taught me that financial crises are constructed to reward those who have the resources to buy cheap, and sell at the peak. Those in the know were completely confident that assets that were hit by the crisis would recover in a relatively short time.
“To cause high prices all the Federal Reserve Board will do will be to lower the rediscount rate producing an expansion of credit and rising stock market, then when business men are adjusted to these conditions, it can check prosperity in mid career by raising the rate of interest. It can cause the pendulum of a rising and falling market to swing gently back and forth by slight changes in the discount rate, or cause violent fluctuations by greater rate variation and in either case, it will possess inside information as to financial conditions and advanced knowledge of the coming change, either up or down. This is the strangest and most dangerous advantage ever placed in the hands of a special privilege class by any government that ever existed. The system is private, conducted for the sole purpose of obtaining the greatest possible profits from the use of other peoples’ money. They know in advance when to create panics to their advantage, and they also know when to stop panic. Inflation and deflation work equally well for them when they control finance.” – Rep. Charles Lindbergh Sr. (R. MN), 1914
“Whoever controls the volume of money in any country is absolute master of all industry and commerce. And when you realize that the entire system is very easily controlled, one way or another by a few powerful men at the top, you will not have to be told how periods of inflation and depression originate.” – President James Garfield, 1881. He was assassinated just weeks after making this statement.
“If the American people ever allow private banks to control the issue of their currency, first by inflation, then by deflation, the banks…will deprive the people of all property until their children wake-up homeless on the continent their fathers conquered…. The issuing power should be taken from the banks and restored to the people, to whom it properly belongs.” . . . “Paper is poverty. It is the ghost of money and not money itself.”– Thomas Jefferson, 1743-1826
That’s capitalism. Some businesses go to the wall. Oh diddums. How my heart bleeds.
Incidentally to guarantee 80% of all the “business interruption loan” money the state must have signed an enormous contract with banks.
The “structural adjustment plan” that the banks impose to make sure they get their money back won’t leave many people in the mood for going to music festivals.
Why the spiteful little comment here – think you’re sticking it to the man or something? The guy is trying to save a music festival, and you’ve got to say “oh diddums” to him? What an unpleasant piece of work you are.
This is not capitalism, this is kleptocracy.
This time around banks have no intention of getting their money back – why would they want money when they are acting to destroy the value of money via the mechanism of money printing.
What they are looking for is to destroy asset values and then acquire those assets for pennies on the $. Music festivals don’t qualify as an asset and so no-one is interested. Now if the music festival was to be hosted on prime agricultural land and festival organizer was willing to put up the land as security then you could borrow as much as you wanted. Pretty soon the music festival promoter would be evicted from his land as the bank moves in to repossess it.
Yes and before they go to the wall, running away with the assets is the game, hallo Virgin Australia and others who do not want to pay money paid to them for NO FLIGHTS AT ALL. I will not be sad to see this fossils of fossil fuel clearing the sky’s and making way for electric/biofuel driven airships, flying can be greener as time is not of the essence anymore.
I wish you well, Craig. Doune the Rabbit Hole deserves to survive, it is old school, run by good people for the right reasons.
Unfortunately I doubt it or any other music festival will survive. Our government and its masters are preparing us for a new normal of strict control with 24/7 total tracking and surveillance. We will be kept in a never-ending state of fear to ensure we obey and self-police. Music festivals engender feelings of freedom, mutual support, love and trust. Our government is striving for the opposite effect.
Sorry, but it’s all over.
You sound like a stuck record. You may be in a never-ending state of fear, the rest of us are not.
He didn’t say he was in a constant state of fear he was clearly referring to the population at large, and in the context of what’s to come.
Hardly a particularly controversial claim considering the Government have published advice in which they advocate instilling fear in the populace to control them and ensure adherence to social distancing instructions.
Such as:
‘The perceived level of personal threat needs to be increased among those who are complacent, using hard-hitting emotional messaging.’
‘Social disapproval: Social disapproval from one’s community can play an important role…’
‘Use media to increase sense of personal threat.’ Acceptability: HIGH. Practicability: HIGH. Effectiveness: HIGH IF ACCOMPANIED BY OTHER OPTIONS
See that? That means using the press & BBC deliberately to frighten people. You OK with that?
https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/882722/25-options-for-increasing-adherence-to-social-distancing-measures-22032020.pdf
It’s quite comical really. The document is dated March 22, the day the government eventually overcame its complacency and its odious habit of sacrificing the majority to the economy. Projecting, do you think? They woke up with a start? Something finally put their occasional wayward jihadist in perspective? As for the news media I don’t usually watch such nonsense but I was visiting friends in the week up to March 22, and the BBC certainly didn’t need any encouragement; hours and hours of it, I don’t remember any other “news” at all.
Meaningless words presumably.
Financial support for businesses during coronavirus (COVID-19)
Find out what financial support you can get for your business.
https://www.gov.uk/government/collections/financial-support-for-businesses-during-coronavirus-covid-19
The latest BEIS Secretary of State is Alok Sharma. There are five ministers including the Iraqi born oil billionaire, Nadhim Zahawi. He should be good for a bob or two.
https://www.gov.uk/government/organisations/department-for-business-energy-and-industrial-strategy
The scheme was always nothing more than a way of throwing tax payers’ money at the finance capitalists, again.
If that is how th scheme works then it’s a bit of a joke. Not unexpected but nonetheless indicative of the real purpose behind these schemes.
I have been to WOMAD and Cornbury festivals over the last few years. Both of these have asked people who have already bought tickets to allow them to carry over money paid for tickets for next year though they will refund if that is what you want. Perhaps you could contact other festival organisers and ask how they are managing this problem. Maybe they are all having similar problems. Maybe organise a lobby if they are?
I think festivals in general were having problems due to soaring security costs before the pandemic especially the smaller ones. It’s a real shame.
Very sorry to hear that but not surprised.
“It is in short, like every Tory measure, a way of funneling government resources to the benefit of the wealthy.”
As soon as I was aware of the potential of Covid, long before any emergency measures were discussed, I would have made a bet on it. I hoped it wouldn’t be but I genuinely expected as much from any measure put forward by this government (any government really but particularly this one.)
Reading Shock Doctrine was so in tune with everything I have ever experienced but described in great detail a reality so much worse than anything I feared that it ruined any remaining optimism forever. I may have once have believed that the public good can be a feature of government policy but I no longer believe it to be possible.
Public good can be a government policy, J. I lived in NL for a couple of years, and was constantly surprised at how the government – local government in particular – was actually keen to serve the interests of citizens. Never seen that before, not in the UK and certainly not the US.
The Shock Doctrine is a very good read, and more people should pick up a copy. What confuses a lot of people is that governments and various interests tend to take advantage of a crisis, but that doesn’t mean that they engineered the crisis, or that the crisis is not real. Seeing the advantage being taken, some conspiracy theorists will see this and confuse cause and effect.
Yeah of course public good can be a government policy. Just take a look at all the good governments have done. World War 1, World War 11, the development, production and storage of nuclear bombs, the periodic destruction of far way lands (Iraq, Syria, Libya et al), genocide, torture, deliberately infecting people with hideous diseases, the deliberate starvation of vast swathes of their domestic populations etc. etc.
But hey they pass a lot of laws which stops people from saying mean things about me in my little protected corner of the world- so that obviously outweighs the hundreds of millions of corpses they have created.
Thanks to governments I can live in a world where I have no idea about the egregious brutality of governments and where I actually believe narcissism to be a virtue.
Why don’t you try Somalia or maybe Libya then, Loony? No government there to speak of. Let us know how you get on.
Loony is partly right. When Gov says its acting for the public good it’s either masking something else or these is a law of unintended consequence – every stick has got two ends.
It should be possible for people to co-operate for public works such as education, water, roads, power , hospitals, drug research, prison and defence and somethings are best not left to the market. What We don’t want is to be worshiping public state controlled works like their are some sort of new state god. It’s just that it’s sensible to do somethings in this way or else eg drug companies don’t research unprofitable drugs and water companies don’t keep the supply pure etc
Unless businesses are mostly small and local it is necessary to have some degree of anti-cartel law and consumer, employee, tenant protection against bad big businesses who corner the market and ruthlessly impose unfair practices whenever they can but one always have to remember that when you give people expect more and are rarely satisfied. Gov has to avoid going too far and also to avoid ending up wrapping it up in too many laws, regulations and statutory instruments, which only special interest groups can afford to understand, apply and litigate over and which benefit larger businesses, who can cope with the regulatory burden.
We want politicians to have some degree of public spirit. They should be paid circa £250K and have boiler platted defined benefit pensions and should be imprisoned for any corruption.
When libertarians persuade the Supreme Court as they did in the US that they should be free to buy an election (or at least try to) then that is a freedom which has gone too far.
………etc etc
Excuse my poor grammar above. May start proof-reading before posting one of these days, or mesbe not.
Can’t you apply for a bounce back loan? Better be quick though, the rampant fraud is going to see the whole scheme withdrawn soon
Ross
Repayments are £ 850 ish per month starting immediately, so even with low interest, they are incredibly short term. Unfortunately, the problem is long term.
There are no payments or any interest for 12 months with the bounce back loan scheme.
Ross
Thank you for correcting me . So repayments start after 12 months and only 25% of annual turnover is availalble for the loan.
Correct, 25% of turnover or £50k, whichever is lower. No forward viability tests, repayment period of 6 years (no payment for first year on capital or interest) and no director guarantees. A scheme that seems to have been created to funnel large cash payments to anyone with a business, and more specifically Tory voters, who are by a considerable majority the ones who own the businesses. If you look on Twitter there are some pretty sickening boasts from people who having claimed their cash prize, are winding up their businesses (many of which were dead or dormant long before Coronavirus appeared), and waiting to hoover up distressed assets at fire sale prices.
Making the loans a percentage of turnover is a nonsense, because turnover is not profit, and we have many zombie companies which turnover considerable amounts, but don’t generate any profit. This scheme offers the owners of these businesses an opportunity to cash out.
The banks are laughing all the way to…well the bank. £500 fee for every ‘loan’ they arrange, and 100% of the capital backed by the state. They are actually better off lending to people who will default (and let’s be clear the default rate is going to be upward of 80%) because that way they get the capital and interest owed repaid immediately by the state, rather than having to wait. Absolutely crazy scheme, of little use to people with genuinely viable businesses, with real asset value in the business, who are understandably not keen on loading up with debt. Very appealing though to people who fancy a big chunk of free money from Uncle Rishi.
This is to Tories buying the loyalty of one of their key voting contingents.
Craig will almost certainly qualify, and he will be amongst a select group who actually avail themselves of the funds for the ostensible purpose.
Why companies that have never made a profit ought to be helped by the government because their directors think they have a great “business plan” “going forward” is unclear.
That money has been made more easily available for “tech” companies sounds like a big scam.
Covid-19 is clearly all right for $ome,
Case fatality rates are as follows. These rates are skewed by many factors, including classification criteria and testing, but here we go:
World: 7%;
Britain, Italy, France, Belgium: 14-16% (no country with >100 reported deaths exceeds 16%)
Sweden: 12%
Brazil, Indonesia, Ireland, USA, China: 6-7%;
Germany, Portugal, Japan: 4%;
Russia: 1%
So just for the moment taking these figures, full of lies as they are, at face value, we get:
Britain, Italy, France: double the world level of deaths per cases;
China, USA: about average;
Germany, Japan: slightly better than average;
Russia: far better than average.
N_
very optimistic about Russia, we are just getting to the top of the hill, about 11 thousand infected every day, and the second place after the United States in total cases. Our measures worked well in the beginning and gave us some breathing space and time to prepare. Now the epidemic is in full swing.
Peskov, Putin’s spokesman, reported today virus positive.
In my employ with the Civil Service I saw hundreds if not thousands of companies in the same position as yours. If you cannot find a way to take this forward through any of the government’s schemes feel free to contact me and I will recommend a company to you who will be able to resolve this for you. I crossed swords with them many times, they know their business.
One wonders if you could somehow get in touch with other business folk who’ve also hit this wall of red tape with regards to CBILS, I’m sure there must be many, who will lose their businesses due to this terrible self preservation bureaucratic policy by the banks.
There’s strength in numbers, as well as having a louder voice and a greater reach.
Just a thought.
Believing that the banks will create a better world one day is believing that painting your room white is going to make it brighter.
Capitalism is the religion of greed. It is a rebranding of feudalism. A few people own everything and the rest are serfs. As long as you keep believing that giving it another name is going to turn it into something else, as long as you look away from the fact that it was never meant to be anything but pitch-black ultimate selfishness, and keep hoping for something nice to grow from it, you are in for some serious disappointment.
We are heading into the most radical change in human history: from a society based on greed and ego to a society based on love and unity. That will mean changing the root of our society, changing communal life as we have known it since our birth. It means changing the way we look at the world, our understanding of human interactions, and every part of the paradigm that we grew up in and of the dogma we so unquestioningly soaked up and built our lives and our selves on.
Yes, it’s a big ask.
But the blue pills have run out.
Welcome to a rude awakening.
I swear I wrote “painting your room BLACK”. I’m willing to swear under oath in court!
—
[ Mod: All edit actions by moderators show up in the WordPress logs. In this case, the only entry occurred when you posted your comment, showing that it was automatically approved by the spam checker. Accordingly, we can deduce that the text was displayed as originally typed.
We have normality. Anything you still can’t cope with is therefore your own problem. ]
Love,
Love is a verb,
Love is a doing word,
Fearless on my breath.
Love and Rage, Lev Ke. Let’s start building.
Only when you start ‘loving’ do you get involved with gerunds.
? ? ?
The ‘lock-down’ is a pre-cursor to UK state control enacted through fear and state rule, restriction and regulation of risk. The British people have happily endorsed and sanctioned government lock-down actions with approbation and loyalty. Now Brexit is weary, Corbynation is dead. We have become a bunch of lambs, locked up in our own homes, a population atomised, driven to entertain the obvious without the courage to put up a fight through a need for protection.
Pointless to enlighten an impotent society with detailed game plans going forward. Yet expect and wait for increasingly stringent laws to suppress those who incite people to action and cause widespread agitation, social rebellion, or large-scale disorder. Expect rolling austerity, Hobson’s choice government and zero option NHS health care. – Fools…
What a difference between west and asia, the latter have been quite good at stopping the virus in its tracks, in the west they dont know what to do.
I believe Russia, US, UK will be dealt a huge blow coming weeks, months, Belgium, Sweden too.
SWEDEN: A tale of how a government, a scientist, and a health authority gaslighted the world to hide the truth behind a disastrous COVID-19 strategy
https://medium.com/@kebe_21648/sweden-a-tale-of-how-a-government-a-scientist-and-a-health-authority-gaslighted-the-world-to-37cc18a2f4a0
>>I believe Russia, US, UK will be dealt a huge blow coming weeks, months, Belgium, Sweden too.
I think you are correct. With millions out of a job and having little money, there will be a spike in poverty-related deaths, from hunger, malnutrition-related diseases and suicides. But we won’t notice because they will be reported as COVID deaths. We will be stuck at home for a long time.
Yes suicide is a risk, bankruptcy too that is why it is so important for a state to act strongly and not sitting by doing nothing because that is just prolonging the crisis in my opinion.
By leaving the bank with a 20% responsibility, the bank incurs the odium of refusing applications.
The level of naivety is astonishing.
Pretty much all of the government “support” packages have been carefully designed with one aim in mind – to funnel wealth to the already rich and to remove economic autonomy from the rest of the population.
This is a rerun of 2007/8. In 2007/8 the excuse was that enriching the powerful was a necessary side effect of saving the masses from monetary collapse. Today enriching the powerful is a necessary side effect from saving millions or tens of millions or hundreds of millions or billions of people from dying of Coronavirus.
The hope is that fear and panic will act as an effective fog of war so that no-one realizes what is going on until remaining wealth has been irrevocably transferred to the kleptocratic class.
I’ve been saying this over at phoney Tax Justice campaigner Richard Murphy’s blog (he’s an angry little man who tolerates no dissent or contrary opinion) He is against mass payments to the population, and against a UBI.
My take is that everything that has been done thus far has been about making sure that landlords, banks and big businesses (who are the supplies to SME’s) get paid. The only reason there is a furlough scheme, is so the worker bees can service their credit card, mortgage and other debt. The bounce back loans as I have described in another post are in fact a cash gift to people who are predominately Tory voters. It is very noticeable that there hasn’t been any talk of banks and other credit providers taking write downs, or landlords having to accept lower rents; they it seems, must be paid, and paid in full.
It’s going to be fascinating watching the clown car of late stage capitalism fall apart in the coming months. Meanwhile, the pied piper of the phoney economic reform agenda, will still be banging on about a green new deal.
“It is very noticeable that there hasn’t been any talk of banks and other credit providers taking write downs, or landlords having to accept lower rents; they it seems, must be paid, and paid in full.”
The Tories are not complete idiots. They know that any government that is in power when house prices go down will be chucked out at the next election, unless they can win a war in the meantime. It is almost impossible that, with the population having less money to spend as the looming recession effects earnings and jobs, house (land) prices will do just that and so will rents. This is just an attempt to stave off the inevitable. Expect a lot more initiatives like Help to Sell, sorry Buy, as the whole housing market seizes up.
I wouldn’t go that far but he’s certainly unwilling to think outside his profession. Last year he got in a snit because I laughed at the idea that Britain is a democracy. The more I contradicted him the bitchier he got. I still put the odd comment on his site but they tend to disappear in a puff of rancour.
If the company is destined to make profits in the future, because it’s got such a lovely “plan” for “going forward” (biological environment permitting) but it hasn’t made any profits yet and it can’t pay its costs right now, you should be able to find a moneylender who will stump you up some cash.
Why expect a state guarantee, paid for by the rest of us? It’s not a charity.
Exactly. Banks are still lending to business, these schemes are not a safety net, they are a trampoline for certain preferred parties, to make out like bandits buying up distressed assets on the cheap.
Where’s the opportunity for the average worker to take part in this bonanza? You know, the people who will be fighting for work in a decimated employment market, pensions gone, pay rises off the agenda for another decade, and stripped of what few employment rights they have in the service of creating an economic recovery.
What’s going on is a scandal, but people don’t seem able to see it, and the MSM isn’t at all interest in giving the game up.
Ross, the printed media certainly don’t have any interest in giving the game up at all, and will continue to benefit for as long as this crisis lasts. Having heard that the billionaire, off-shore newsprint owners were being given £millions in support grants and other benefits via the News Media Association. So I’ve just had a look by typing the name followed by ‘grant’. This produced a piece dated 20/3 by them, outlining the very valuable, ney, essential service they provide in disseminating critical information, to the extent that they be considered as the Fourth Emergency Service (I kid you not), so vital is their contribution. In return they get quite a goody bag. Business rates holiday on news premises, similar holiday for NI contributions, PAYE, £25,000 grants for smaller news outlets, Supermarkets to be mandated to buy as many newspapers as they did before the lockdown. Quite a package, sorry can’t provide a link.
You really are a nasty, spiteful wee guy aren’t you?
BTW that is not how a sovereign state with its own currency finances the economy. A charity? You are having a laugh..
Being devil’s advocate, no one knows if such festival events will be allowed to go ahead next year. Is it wise to take on further loans? You may be saddled with repaying that loan with no prospect of income. I wouldn’t know the costs already incurred in running the festival but might it be better to cut your losses and wait and see what happens?
If the business folds there is no liability on the owners of the business. Plenty of people have taken these loans and bought new cars, foreign property, you name it. The government intends for the money to be misappropriated.
This story is just a very small taster of what is on its way.
John Pilger was talking today about the corporatocracy. There is still a pretence that “we the people” elect politicans who then pass laws designed, inter alia, to keep corporate power in check. That has been a nonsense for decades, with the revolving door between politics and business. It’s quite remarkable how hack career politicians who have never run anything more complicated than a bath suddenly become imbued with talent invaluable to big business when they’ve had enough of the HoC. Another example this week with Randex Laboratories (Advisor: Tory ex-cabinet minister Owen Paterson) winning a no-tender £133 million COVID testing contract.
There will come a tipping point where they don’t need to even bother to pretend any more, and the lockdown could bring it about. Thousands of small independent businesses will go to the wall. Afterwards, people will still need jobs to earn money to pay for the stuff they need. Where will the jobs and the money and the stuff come from? Step forward the Corporatocracy.
I can see the return of the “Company Store” – serfs toiling for corporate behemoths, from whom they’re forced to buy the stuff then need in order to survive, which always costs just a little bit more than they earn. Meanwhile the political arm runs the law and security, making sure everything is in place to prevent any dissent, or nip it in the bud should it ever threaten to emerge.
How meekly people have accepted the current situation. Why wouldn’t they? They’re fed whatever narrative the megaphones of TPTB want to feed them, and they have no access to any voice to broadcast alternative narratives. It must be very tempting to keep this goijng just a little longer and see just how much further they can be pushed…
Donald Trump is king atop the dungheap of Corporatocracy. Used a public health emergency as cover for transferring Trillions of dollars to giant corporations.
Meekly? Have you forgotten the 60s and 70s? It has taken two generations of intensified class war and North Sea oil for the fascist pigs to get this far. The craven capitulation of Corbyn means that the only constraint on the state is fear of the public. The state doesn’t seem all that frightened.
Have you considered some sort of counter culture music and alternative festival online – might not be so much fun but who knows it might lead to some interesting developments and interest a world wide audience. Doune the Rabbit Hole does sound like a great name for a cyber festival
Hay-on-Wye literary festival is an online festival this year (might be a bit like Ted talks perhaps), but worth a thought.
Eh? No legal loopholes to exploit for loans thereby affording greater transmission of disease?
Group Hug!!
I realise Craig has a lot on his plate. And I agree that it must take priority over general commenting. However I see others are posting using similar arguments to mine and I am pleased to see they are. I would not like to see their comments removed.
“You can only get the loan if you are a wealthy company that is not making a loss from coronavirus, does not actually need the loan, and could have got a loan under the bank’s own commercial lending criteria anyway.”
I suspect it is just an extension of the policy banks have been applying for decades: all loans over a few thousand pounds must be secured against land.
This story reminds me of the old saying that a bank is like a man with a lifebuoy who stands on the shore watching another man struggling in the water. When the swimmer finally manages to get to the shore and is crawling up the beach exhausted, the first man goes over to him and offers to sell him the lifebuoy.
That’s the trouble with loans, the banks always want their money back!
Indeed, but they are supposed to take just a tiny bit of risk against that not happening. That’s what the interest is for – and the rate is supposed to reflect the level of risk. This is why government bonds tend to pay only a small rate, while lending to a more speculative venture gets a higher rate.
Here, though, the banks want absolutely no risk at all, preferably with a loan backed by assets they can seize in the event of a default.
That is not fulfilling the function that is agreed upon for them to do business, when they get such favourable treatment and backing by society.
Indeed, risk against interest is the question. This appears to be a business which made a loss when times were good and now wants to borrow when times are the worst they have been in living memory. The probability of any revenue, let alone a profit, has become pretty much nil. Banks have no appreciation of music and don’t go to festivals.