Lucky Wilbury, rapists, UK prisons, genocide, Trump’s latest gaffe, Brexit and dodgy lawyers

24 May 2025

Today’s biggest news is, of course, that Lucky Wilbury (aka Bob Dylan) has made it to his 84^th birthday.  Who said mind-altering drugs were bad for you?  They helped him become the greatest lyricist in the last 100 years …

Other goodish news this week (at least for us sadists) came when Shabana Mahmood, the Lord Chancellor, was reported to be considering chemical castration for the most serious sex offenders.  I know of two young women who were violently raped and suffered permanent damage and wonder if this goes far enough;  I’ve heard enough about these two people to be tempted to support the use of a pair of blunt bolt-cutters.

They’re also considering releasing and tagging killers and rapists half-way through their sentences.  Surely these are exactly the wrong people to release.  Shouldn’t they be releasing (and tagging?) non-violent offenders to release overcrowding in prisons and perhaps never giving first offenders custodial sentences if their crimes didn’t involve violence against people?

Talking of criminals inevitably makes me think of Benjamin Netanyahu who is committing war crimes in the name of Zionism and then accusing his critics of being anti-Semitic.  I don’t know enough about him to know if he actually is that stupid or if he’s intentionally manipulating the truth because he wants people to think he’s slaughtering Palestinians in the name of a religion rather than for political reasons.

Gary Lineker has been fired by the BBC after re-posting a pro-Palestinian video criticising Zionism on social media .  Unfortunately, it included a picture of a rat which was, apparently, used by the Nazis to associate Jews with vermin.  Lineker later apologised and said he would “never knowingly share anything antisemitic” and he’d deleted the post “as soon as I became aware of the issue”.

Still, it’ll save the BBC a fortune because they grossly overpaid him.

Even the UK is taking a stand and the Foreign Secretary David Lammy has suspended negotiations over a free-trade deal saying calls from some of Israel’s cabinet ministers to “purify Gaza” by expelling Palestinians were abhorrent, and he condemned their refusal to allow thousands of aid deliveries to reach starving Palestinians.

Israeli troops fired what they called “warning shots” at an international group of diplomats from 31 countries who had been invited by the Palestinian Authority to see what was happening in Gaza.  Israel’s explanation was that the group had deviated from the route they’d tried to impose on the delegation in a country which they’d invaded where they have no legal rights to impose a tax on bread.

The leader of the Israeli opposition has said Israel “kills babies as a hobby” and even Ehud Olmert, a former prime minister of Israel, has said what Israel “is doing now in Gaza is very close to a war crime”.  “Very close”? What haven’t they told him?

Netanyahu’s apparent lack of intelligent reasoning seems rather like Donald Trump’s more stupid outbursts which last week included accusing South Africa’s president Cyril Ramaphosa of “white genocide” which Trump ‘proved’ to his complete satisfaction with pictures taken in the Democratic Republic of Congo.  Ramaphosa himself remained dignified and stood up to Trump by drawing attention to his apparent attachment to far-right conspiracy theories.

Trump could, I suppose, have responded by saying that one of his latest ploys has been to suggest that women with more than five children should be awarded a National Medal of Motherhood in attempt to increase the population.  Doesn’t this sound like something Mao Zedung would have done if he hadn’t been encouraging people to kill flies though I don’t think even Trump would believe Mao was on the far-right so his at least his delusions are balanced.

Over here, my Conservative friend is trying to convince me that, because Brits voted for Brexit, it’s undemocratic for Keir Starmer to be negotiating with the EU to remove some of its daftest consequences.  However, he refuses to accept that an even greater majority of Brits elected Starmer’s party, which empowers the prime minister to reduce some of the inconveniences such as queuing with other ‘aliens’ to enter an EU country, and allowing EU citizens to be given visas and permits to work in the UK, a right that already exists for young Australians, Canadians, New Zealanders and South Koreans.

In a different arena, another friend recently discovered the unfairness and misleading claims of ‘no-win, no-fee’ lawyers.  They had a perfectly good case against their landlords (a housing association, also registered as a charity, with assets of almost £1bn!) who took 5 years to act on reports of damaged window frames.

Unfortunately, one of these firms managed to convince them they could get compensation from the landlords so they drew up a case which went to Court on the day before the Easter weekend when people wanted to rush things and get home early.  I accompanied her as a McKenzie friend and discovered that the solicitors, who are based in Liverpool, had instructed a barrister from Cardiff (well, Cardiff, Exeter, they’re all south of Crewe aren’t they) to represent her in court.

I know some KCs and this one didn’t impress me nearly as much as he impressed himself. He didn’t discuss either the case or what sort of compensation they would accept with my friend, instead talking about his personal life and showing us pictures of his house.  He also ignored a specific instruction that costs were to be in addition to compensation (since he didn’t know what the costs would be) but, after some to-ing and fro-ing with the other side, he announced that he’d agreed a settlement out of court, without saying what it was.

This turned out to be a lump sum which included costs totalling more than 80% of the total so the actual compensation was derisory and, so far, the lawyers have ignored the Court’s instruction that payment should be made within 21 days and my friend has so far received nothing.

I’m now trying to help my friend put this right but the main lesson I’ve learned is never to use no-win no-fee lawyers because at least some of them don’t know what’s written on their tin.

More ‘magic’, billions, water companies, justice and immigration

17 May 2025

After last week’s mutterings, a friend suggested migration could be added to the list of currently inexplicable things, which made me realise I’d inadvertently been anthropocentric and ignored insects, birds, fish and mammals that migrate for thousands of miles.

The best known is probably the arctic tern which commutes some 15,000 miles between summers in Shetland and summers in Antarctica but they have the ability to sleep while flying, closing down half their brain while the other half keeps the wings moving. 

Perhaps more impressive is the monarch butterfly which migrates annually between North America and Mexico and, though less well-known, the painted lady butterfly which travels between Africa and Northern Europe.  How do they do it?  It’s been suggested that they use the earth’s magnetic field to control their journeys but this is constantly changing as the magnetic poles move so they have to allow for the effect of the deviation if they want to get to the right place.

However, what I find most impressive is the fact that monarch butterflies don’t live very long and each migration is undertaken by newly-hatched butterflies that have never done it before so the route, and the allowance for magnetic pole movements, must somehow be genetically imprinted in their brains.

What will they do when the magnetic poles swap positions, which the alignment of magnetic particles in ancient rocks has shown they do?  It’s thought the swap doesn’t happen overnight and takes a very long time so perhaps the poles just drift away from the geographical poles until they reach the other end of the earth and the North Star becomes the South Star while the Southern Cross becomes the Northern Cross.  And, of course, half-way they’ll be the Eastern Star and the Western Cross, or possibly vice versa.

Many readers may remember my continuing problem with envisaging large numbers, like anything over 10.  Well, I’ve come across another example of just how impossible it is to grasp large numbers and the differences between them.  To help me picture the difference between a million and a billion, I was told to think in seconds:  one million seconds is about 12 days while one billion seconds is about 32 years.

Aaarrrggghhh!

I hope the people with more billions in the bank than they can ever spend will, if governments are too frightened to make them pay more tax, give it away to those people and countries whose need is so much greater.  I also hope that the wind is changing.  Last week, 40% of Centrica’s shareholders voted against the board’s recommended pay plans.  Chris O’Shea, the group’s chief executive trousered £4.3m last year and, yes, he took almost twice as much the previous year but the energy crisis encouraged them to impose huge increases on their customers’ energy bills, taking many of them even further into debt, while O’Shea (and other senior managers) get away with daylight robbery.

Thames Water (the one on the verge of bankruptcy) has a new CEO, Chris Weston, who took a £195,000 bonus after only three months in post and was asked by the Defra Select Committee to justify this.  “Because I’m worth it” he replied.  Can anybody can think of any sensible justification for saying this?

The government is now planning to block the payment of huge staff bonuses from a £3bn emergency loan to Thames Water, which claims these bonuses are vital to retaining its management and that they are its most valuable asset.  Whaaat?  Aren’t these the same managers that screwed everything up in the first place and led to the company being fined millions of pounds?

Down here, South West Water is owned by the Pennon Group and has increased our bill by 30% for the next year while chief executive Susan Davy generously waived her right to bonuses in the two years to March 2024 leaving her with a paltry £860,000 in the latter year (including the deferred reinvestment of shares).  My heart fails to bleed for her.

There’s also something wrong with our justice system when a peaceful Stop Oil protestor is sent to prison for 4 years and a violent child rapist gets 18 months.

And Peter Sullivan, 68, has spent the last 38 years in prison for a murder that forensic evidence has now decided he didn’t commit.

Another interesting comment came my way this week, something I hadn’t heard before, that the late Archbishop Desmond Tutu once said, “If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor.”

So which side should I take on Labour’s latest plans to curb immigration?  Keir Starmer this week spoke of a need to end the “squalid experiment in open borders” in what cynics might describe as an attempt to win Reform voters.  What self-respecting Respect member would be willing to support Labour?  It’s believed Nigel Farage celebrated Starmer’s comments with a bevvy and a fag.

Others saw a connection between Starmer’s view and the ‘rivers of blood’ speech given by the Conservative racist Enoch Powell in 1968.

Next week, all state benefits will be scrapped to encourage recipients to get on their bikes and find work (thank you Norman Tebbit, another ancient Conservative politician, for that suggestion) and the Isle of Wight will be declared an independent territory with 0% taxes through which all UK ‘earnings’ over £250,000 can be channelled tax-free.

And an old story to cheer people up.  The King of Sweden once visited Sir Paul Nurse, a Nobel Prize winner who holds 50 honorary degrees and is former President of the Royal Society and Chief Executive and Director of the Francis Crick Institute.  On the royal arrival, the receptionist rang Nurse’s office and said “Gentleman here, he’s … er … watcher say yer king of, mate?”