22 March 2025
Is the news getting worse or is it just me?
For example: we’ve learnt that a terrorist, or anybody living under the flight paths, can close London’s largest airport by burning down one electrical substation.
Israel has broken the ceasefire and started killing Gazans again followed by a court agreeing that, “due to the renewal of the war”, Benjamin Netanyahu’s criminal trial for corruption, which could land him in prison, should be postponed. I wonder if he thinks it’s better to start killing women and children again than risking going to jail.
In Ukraine, civilians are also still dying while hopes of an amicable settlement, never high, are receding. Valdimir Putin has “demanded” that Ukraine demilitarises (Demanded? He’s supposed to be negotiating, not bullying), while allied European leaders are deciding how best to support Ukrainian forces.
What Ukraine remembers is that, in 1994, it had the third largest nuclear arsenal in the world and relinquished all nuclear warheads as part of a move towards complete nuclear disarmament. In exchange, it received security guarantees of its safety from America, UK and Russia.
When Donald Trump was elected, he had boasted he could bring peace to Ukraine in 24 hours but, amazingly, he’s failed to do this. (I wonder if Trump’s a Russian mole?)
Just look what Trump is doing to his own country. The biggest single worry is his obvious commitment to destroying the rule of law. He only appoints people to the highest court in the land if they’ve had their noses stuck up his backside so he can tell them to overrule anything he doesn’t like. Anywhere else, he’d be a dictator and, if the country had valuable mineral resources, America would be invading it to remove him from power.
He’s even targeting law firms which have done work he doesn’t like by threatening to suspend security clearances of their attorneys and terminating contracts the firms already have.
Trouble is, his Tweedledum and Tweedledee act with Elon Musk leaves the two of them bolstering each other’s judgement, beauty and business incompetence. Musk has ‘done a Gerald Ratner’ in sucking up to Trump, causing Tesla’s shares to fall by 50% in three months. He’s even been reduced to pleading with his employees not to sell their shares.
(If you own a Tesla, you can apparently now get stickers saying “I bought this before Musk went into politics”.)
Tesla has been missing its sales targets, still hasn’t produced the autonomous vehicles it promised a decade ago and is now facing increasing competition: the Chinese manufacturer BYD will soon be selling electric cars that will take only slightly more time to recharge than a ‘regular’ car takes to fill with fuel.
Still, the collapse of Tesla’s share price made a lot of money for hedge-fund managers who had been busy short-selling Tesla; the Financial Times estimated they made $16.2bn from the collapse.
Musk has even beaten his own record with X / Twitter which one academic has described as the worst-performing business in history (outside wartime) and, earlier this month, SpaceX’s latest Starship launch ended with a loud bang a few minutes after taking off, the second consecutive launch failure this year for the attempts to send Musk to Mars.
But, to be fair, it was Musk’s SpaceX Falcon rocket that got a replacement crew up to the International Space Station to relieve the two NASA astronauts who’d popped up there for a week and got stuck on it for nine extra months after the failure of the Boeing Starliner capsule that was supposed to bring them down again. Their landing was marked by a pod of dolphins which swam round them, possibly looking for the fish they’d been eating before the splash frightened them away.
Actually, being weightless in space for long periods isn’t good for people. The lack of gravity causes bone density loss, muscle wastage (including the heart because it doesn’t have to work as hard to pump blood round the body), reduced blood volume and a build-up of fluids that change the shape of their eyeballs and give the symptoms of a constant cold while accumulating in the brain. So, by the time he gets to Mars, Musk will be a snuffly 9-stone weakling.
Next week, our very own snuffly 9-stone weakling, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, is expected to cut benefits that primarily affect disabled people while not increasing taxes on those who actually can afford it. I thought this was a Labour government. Where did I get lost?
After Labour said they wouldn’t be increasing any taxes, Kemi Badenoch, the opposition leader, accused the government of planning to introduce a stealth tax by not increasing the threshold above which tax is payable, something that her own party did for years while they were in power and digging themselves still deeper into their financial hole. Not the sharpest pencil in the box, Badenoch, but she’s lucky that even the prime minister doesn’t seem to care very much about anything.
My Conservative friend believes that self-made business owners shouldn’t be penalised for their success (or, as we cynics call it, their luck). For the sake of peace and quiet, let’s accept this for as long as they’re still running the business, then charge them 100% tax on everything over a certain level when they sell shares to outsiders, or die.
I’ve just had a letter headed “About the general increases in benefits” telling me how much my pension will be from April. Benefits? I’ve spent a lifetime buying my pension, it’s not a “benefit”, it’s my money they’re now giving back to me. Talk about weasel words trying to make me feel grateful for getting my own money back.
But there is a little good news: the Royal College of General Practitioners has voted to drop its longstanding opposition to assisted dying and joins the Royal College of Physicians, Royal College of Surgeons, Royal College of Anaesthetists, and the British Medical Association in taking a neutral position on the subject.
Lesser Mutterings 