ARGUMENTS rage in Britain on whether or not there is a shortage of petrol.

Are we really running short or has the sight of motorists going round and round in circles trying to find petrol fuelled or even created the crisis – mind the unfortunate pun?

The answer is: it really doesn’t matter.

A crisis that is ‘real’ due to natural causes or ‘fake’ and manipulated behind the scenes leads to the same outcome: motorists can’t go about their usual business and the same economic and social consequences result.

I suspect here the same kind of manipulation we have been reeling from for 18 months, indeed many years. We underestimate at our peril just how predictable human behaviour when set under the microscope of technology and artificial intelligence in particular.

Ok, most of us are subject to some random acts but the mass of information collected about us on a minute-by-minute basis provides a very reliable guide to how we as a collective react and behave.

Yes, we are still embroiled in a health crisis. Even the most sceptical must accept that.

But the way we have reacted to the problem was entirely predictable.

Shortly before the name of Covid 19 first came to mass attention, the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security in partnership with the World Economic Forum and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation hosted Event 201, hosted a high-level pandemic exercise on October 18, 2019, in New York.

At that elite gathering, all aspects of the current crisis were discussed including the entirely predictable towing of the mainstream line by the media and how the public would respond. They knew long before the first harrowing pictures were broadcast from China how many would comply to subsequent restrictions and the likely size of the protest group.

It mattered little to them how virulent ‘the virus’ was, the response of government, scientists and media would groom the public to react in fear and cause the crisis to grow and grow.

And so it is this week. The public were always going to respond in the way we are now experiencing when triggered by reports of a possible shortage.

We continue, I fear, to be played……