⁵Put all your trust in the Lord and do not rely on your own understanding

Proverbs 3: 5 – The Revised English Bible

⁸Trust in Him at all times, you people; pour out your heart before him.

Psalm 62:8 – The Keys of the Kingdom Holy Bible

⁴Nobody calls for justice, nor pleads in truth; they trust in confusion and speak vanity; they conceive trouble and produce iniquity

Isaiah 59:4 – The Keys of the Kingdom Holy Bible

Trust, but verify

Russian proverb

La confiance ne se construit pas avec des paroles mais avec des actes

Trust is not built by words but by deeds – (French proverb)

O put not your trust in princes, nor in any child of man: for there is no help in them.The Book of Common Prayer

I keep hearing people say: ‘Why is it that nothing works any more in our country?’ It’s hard not to agree with this; generally, I’m finding that most organisations don’t even make a pretence any more. My most recent example was of trying to arrange for an important piece of kitchen equipment to be fixed. The internationally-known company in question did not see anything strange about closing their main telephone line for an entire day, with a recorded voice telling people to look up opening hours on their website, which still clearly stated 08:00 to 18:00.

But the more I think about this, it’s not just the fact that most organisations don’t make any pretence of offering any semblance of customer service anymore; I think it’s deeper than that. My own experience has been that almost all our major organisations, companies, government departments etc etc have been taking action that has destroyed trust – that most fragile of commodities – on an industrial scale. This has been so obvious that it’s almost seemed sometimes that it’s been done deliberately. But why would anyone wish to destroy trust deliberately?

If you doubt my claim, then I would ask you to consider the following examples, which are not listed in any particular order:

• Our Health System. During COVID, we were told that it was necessary to keep away from the NHS, to ‘protect it.’ We now find out – a considerable time after the events – that at its peak during COVID, the NHS was operating at way below its normal capacity: at 60% as opposed to maybe over 90% during an ordinary winter. During this time, not only have waiting lists increased to levels never seen before, but the service seems to have deteriorated. Most of us now must wait much longer to see a GP and some of us have even found it impossible to make a GP appointment at all. The level of suffering that’s obscured by this doesn’t bear thinking about. And is it only me that keeps hearing how totally stressed our GPs are, despite them offering a reduced service? What’s going wrong, do you think? And as for trust, one phrase I heard recently which has made me pause was that no-one studies health. What our doctors study is medicine, which is why the connection between doctors and ‘big pharma’ is so close. But is this a relationship that engenders trust?
• ‘Anthropogenic Climate Change.’ We’re constantly bombarded on all fronts by statements that we’re responsible for creating climate change; that there’s a climate catastrophe; that the world is ‘boiling’ (incidentally, it may just be me getting older, but this current winter seems interminably cold and wet). We’re told that in consequence, our lives must be made much worse, or the planet will burn up and everyone will die. The problem is that this so-called ‘evidence’ is not evidence at all from the real world, but it’s based on forecasts driven by mathematical models. These models in turn are fed with assumptions that create precisely the outcome that the modellers require, to prove ‘climate catastrophe.’ This is biased manipulation of data on a monumental and epic scale. We’re told that we must give up our cars and our boilers, stop eating meat altogether, cease taking flights and limit our purchase of clothing to three items per year, all within the next six years. These would be very serious demands on a populations, even during a world war, but to have to do these things, based on phoney mathematical models is scarcely believable. The more I read about this, the more I feel that the intention is to deprive the population of everything and anything that makes life more bearable. Why, given that the real-world evidence is so incredibly thin? With the level of CO2 in the atmosphere of 0.042%, almost a historical ‘low’ in the long history of the world, are we not entitled to ask why? Those promulgating this like to stress that ‘The Science is settled’, surely a phrase calculated to destroy trust?
• Vaccination. Probably like most of you, I had all my vaccinations through childhood, as did my children. I never gave any of it a moment’s thought; I simply trusted those who advised, it would never have crossed my mind to question. During the height of the COVID restrictions, we were fed the death figures daily; we were told by Matt Hancock: “We’ve tried to throw a protective ring around our care homes.” Not only has the data now shown that at worst COVID was not much worse than a bad ‘flu season, but there’s worrying evidence to show a very close association between the massive increase in the use of the death-row drug Midazolam and sharp increases in mortality in care homes during the first lockdown- see https://www.researchgate.net/publication/377266988_Excess_Deaths_in_the_United_Kingdom_Midazolam_and_Euthanasia_in_the_COVID-19_Pandemic
• Was Midazolam used as a form of authorised euthanasia, to clear the elderly out of hospitals and care homes, to make room for an anticipated tsunami of COVID victims that never happened? In other words, was state-sponsored murder carried out? In addition, there’s now a significant rise in all-cause mortality almost over the whole of the vaccinated world, at a time when it ought to be reducing, because of the lives lost in early 2020. Absolutely no-one wishes to investigate why this might be happening. If this happened as a result of a deliberate act, then the result will be a complete loss of trust in any kind of vaccination programme, even ones that have been around for decades. Why would someone want to risk such a loss of trust?  
• Statements and advice by the ‘authorities’. Which one of us can ever forget the instruction by the UK government during lockdown that alcohol in pubs and restaurants could only be consumed if accompanied by a ‘substantial meal’ and the subsequent ludicrous discussion about whether a Scotch egg constituted a ‘substantial meal’? Or the instruction that when seated in a restaurant, you were safe from being attacked by the virus, but if you stood up, you had to don a ‘face mask’?  One of the issues that I’ve been watching has been the legal status of the mRNA ‘vaccines’. They were introduced with a temporary use authorisation. What is the current legal status of the MRNA jabs? There are acres of papers on the gov.uk website, but none of it makes clear whether these products now have full approval. If they have, then there has been no release of long-term safety data or toxicology testing. If this has still not been carried out, then we’re entitled to know how the regulations have been modified to get round the normal requirement for medical products to go through many years of testing and trials. Despite this lack of long-term testing and data, only a few days ago, our Prime Minister described the products in the House of Commons as ‘safe and effective.’ Let me be quite clear on this, nothing, repeat nothing can ever be ‘safe’ and ‘effective’; there will always be exceptions. There is also a great deal of suspicion about how the ‘authorities’ decided to change the absolute requirement for ‘informed consent’ to be given before any medical product can be administered, to that of ‘assumed consent.’ After this change was mysteriously waved through, it meant that no-one was given any explanation about risks and benefits; the mere fact that they had turned up at a vaccination centre was taken to mean that they had given consent! This whole story is full of utterly ridiculous statements by the ‘authorities’. Its impact on trust can be summed up this way: If you were asked whether you trusted Boris Johnson or Matt Hancock, what would you say? So why would you trust any of their increasingly absurd injunctions during this period?
• Immigration. Whether you are in favour or opposed to the current level of immigration, it’s indisputable that for several years, both our main political parties have told the electorate that the intention was to reduce immigration to more manageable levels. In the case of the Conservative Party, they committed to reduce the flow to below 100,000 people per year, many years ago. They have since presided over this figure increasing inexorably towards 700,000 per year. And that figure is net of the 500,000 people who are leaving. Why would we trust anything that our current government has said, ever again?
• The Ukraine War. I’ve occasionally followed the progress of the war, mainly through maps that have been updated when territory has changed hands. Through these, I’ve seen that the Russian troops have been advancing, slowly but inexorably, from the very start of the conflict two years ago. The much publicised ‘Spring and Summer’ offensives by Ukraine have generally consisted of a few streets or villages being retaken, followed by the Russians then driving the Ukrainians back. Look at the maps for yourself – has the direction of travel been anything other than I’ve just described? Ask yourself how your TV screen has been full of stories saying that there is no question that Ukraine is winning, coupled with absolutely ridiculous claims by Western leaders that they would support Ukraine ‘for as long as it takes to win the war’? The message that Russia is winning the territory battle has only really been trickling out since October, with the reason given that the US has had bigger fish to fry in Israel/Gaza. Are you convinced by this? What effect does it all have on your level of trust, not just in NATO and government statements, but on the media coverage? And I need to make clear that I’m not exonerating the Russian invasion; I’m simply pointing out the reality of what’s been happening over the last two years, which has been almost completely ignored by the legacy media.
• Legal/Justice System/Police. We now have in the UK, apparently, a backlog of five years for judicial cases to be heard! In addition, we’ve had a number of cases where people who’ve been clearly caught breaking the law, and been recorded doing so on camera, have been let off because their cause has been considered noble eg Extinction Rebellion. Could there be a more effective way of destroying trust in our judicial system?
• Media/censorship/conflict of interest. Increasingly our legacy media is withholding information from the public, if it doesn’t support their ‘agenda’, and there are growing numbers of individuals and organisations that have been silenced by one form of censorship or another. Why would anyone choose to prevent debate, unless they had something to hide? It’s particularly worrying when people are not only silenced but have their right to earn a living removed, such as several doctors who’ve spoken out about vaccine risks and damage, having their licences suspended or revoked. I’ve found myself thinking recently that we’re lucky that we have a relatively benign government. But once these wide-ranging controls and silencing methods have become entrenched in our system (for example through the introduction of a Central Bank Digital Currency), how could we survive a future malign government?
• Church of England. I can’t finish this section without mentioning our national Church, which quite often behaves as if it’s impatient for its own demise. Locking church buildings during lockdown, against canon law and for the first time since the early 13^th century, was surely one example? Forcing communities into ‘mega parishes’ against their wishes and with not a shred of evidence that such a policy works, is another. There seems also to be a race to replace pastoral care and the traditional ‘cure of souls’ with woke issues and outdated 1970’s-style ‘management-speak’. Central costs among Dioceses are continuing to grow inexorably, support to parishes is shrinking and the ‘sharp end’ of the Church (the only bit that, at the end of the day, matters) thereby becomes impoverished, toothless and irrelevant. There’s still no sign of the number of Dioceses being reduced, despite the colossal reduction in church attendance since the number of Dioceses were allowed to expand, during the Victorian and later periods. But if you really want to look at a policy that can only be described as mind-numbingly ignorant and stupid, then consider Canterbury Cathedral’s recent decision to allow an alcohol-fuelled ‘Silent Disco’ in the nave of one of the holiest sites in these islands. Surely this policy must have been invented by someone who wishes to eradicate any remaining semblance of trust in the Church?

I’m left with paradoxes, which as those of you who regularly read my scribblings know, is a favourite of mine; it serves to underline that the world is often much more complicated than we imagine it to be, or would like it to be.

Traditionally, and historically, ‘Trust no-one’ would have been universally regarded as a negative, nihilistic creed. And a good case can be made, I think, that one of the Devil’s most powerful tools is to destroy trust. We’re made in the image of God, and one of the factors that makes us so, is that we’re born as trusting beings; we’re at our most vulnerable and reliant immediately after birth, which is what makes the Christmas story so powerful. Someone once wrote that God is the saddest character in the Bible, as he’s let down and betrayed, time after time. So, if we destroy trust, do we thereby become less God-like and more self-centred?

But the paradox is that we long ago reached a point where our natural trust in authority was abused beyond breaking point. How many of us has not had their trust in authority shaken severely over the last few maddening years?

Which is why I think that the only possible answer is not to put your trust in princes, nor in any child of man, for there is no help in them, as stated so poetically in our Book of Common Prayer, yet another key plank of our faith that our Church is trying to remove.

And it’s why I have no hesitation in stating that in view of what’s happened in recent years, if we go through a period in which we trust ourselves, trust our judgment, trust our intuition and our instinct, and trust in God and not human authority, then it can only help to start to reverse the destructive path that we’re now on, and restore some sanity.

Merciful and gracious Father, help us to challenge and question, as there’s so much trickery and dishonesty in the world that we can no longer trust in ‘princes.’ Help us to understand that checking and verifying what we’re told is not wrong, as it will support those who are telling the truth and help to expose those who, through dishonesty, manipulation and trickery, would wish to do us harm. Amen