Speaking to an online teleconference today, Robin Chater, Secretary-General of the Federation of International Employers (FedEE) sought to answer the question “What has the pandemic done to the World?”

“If the pandemic had not arrived when it did, some kind of alternative global shock would have been necessary to bring down the old, decaying institutions and force everyone to recognise the reality of the way things have been heading for a great many years.

The lack of leadership shown by the European Union in handling the pandemic has perhaps finally demonstrated that it never was what it claimed. It was always going to be a temporary fix to establish some stability in Europe following two disastrous world wars. The fact that it went on to believe it was some kind of ‘United States of Europe’ was unfortunate and a huge mistake. The tiny states of Europe are an anomaly, but they were never going to paper over their illogical fragmentation by some bureaucratic overlay. Likewise, the euro has been mismanaged from the start, and finally it has taken the German Constitutional Court to expose the whole sorry and fraudulent way it has been bolstered up.

What the huge, largely inept over-reaction of governments to the pandemic has done is drive half the World back into abject poverty and also back too into the arms of a wider medical malfunction and disease. It is not that Trump, Johnson, Macron and Merkel are not aware that 60% of workers in Bangladesh and 25% in India have lost their jobs in the last three months – without a welfare state to protect them – It is just that they do not care. Even closer to home, the medical fixation over the virus has prevented proper medical care to be given to those who suffer from other life-threatening conditions such as breast cancer and lethal H32N influenza. In the USA alone, during March and April, over 80,000 people could not obtain cancer treatment – and around half of children could not be immunized.

If we all take a massive step back and look how things are across the World the truth is all too glaringly simple. The two economic superpowers are China and Germany, the biggest demographic threat comes from Sub-Saharan Africa, military superiority is still held by the USA (although there is no telling when America’s inordinate public debt and negative trade balance will catch up with it) and more than half the World believes that they are predestined by some pre-medieval creed – with an afterlife thrown in. The most likely consequence of this unhinged mess is that there will be a final coming to account between China and the USA within the next 3-5 years. We already know that America will be led there by someone not trustworthy enough to even walk your dog and that neither future President will have the wisdom to see the consequences of their actions. However, putting it another way, human life is probably going to be effectively limited anyway by the outcome of global warming to another five or six generations.

The pity is, that there is no ontological hand that is going to come and rescue the situation. All major disasters will do is bring us to a closer realization of our shared, hopeless state. The mountain of unintelligence, dishonesty, greed, self-interest, self-deception and parochialism is just too big for anyone to climb away from, let alone find the authority to put right.”