12 April 2025
Lots of cheering news this week, including that wonderful picture of Donald Trump holding up his tariff board and looking exactly like a bookie on the hill at Epsom on Derby Day.
Amy Coney Barrett, a Republican member of the American Supreme Court has, for the second time in recent months, voted against her Republican colleagues in a ruling against Trump to put justice before politics. Who’d have guessed she still had the integrity to do that.
Trump did a Liz Truss by imposing a 10% levy on imports from Ukraine and the UK, and 20% on imports from the EU (and 0% on imports from Russia), financial markets worldwide crashed and he was forced into a humiliating U-turn, which just goes to show that if you say “Boo!” to a bully, they’ll chicken out.
Jaguar Land Rover had immediately suspended all further exports of their cars to America, thereby boosting the owners of ones already over there by increasing their second-hand values.
Trump’s tariffs also provided a wonderful excuse for our Labour government to rethink its economic policy and Keir Starmer has said “old assumptions should be discarded” so they can forget their crazy undertaking not to raise taxes.
All over America, there were demonstrations against Trump’s “authoritarian overreach and billionaire-backed agenda” with an estimated 500,000 people taking to the streets in Washington, Florida and about 1,000 other places, including state capitals.
There have even been rumours that Elon Musk will be leaving the Department of Government Efficiency, possibly because people have sussed that he thinks cutting expenditure must automatically improve efficiency.
Both Trump and Musk were started in business with inherited capital but, while Musk has increased his with some successful businesses, Trump has lost a large amount of his inheritance with his unbelievable incompetence in running businesses – remember his casinos were bankrupted, beating the odds that were stacked in his favour by the rules of the games.
Another millionaire who inherited wealth is Abigail Disney, one of my heroes, who has acknowledged she is rich “only because of some quirks in the tax system, some good luck, and some very loving grandparents. But nothing else.” She has for many years been giving large sums of money away and a member of The Patriotic Millionaires, an American organisation dedicated to changing the system so that its members and others with even more money pay more tax.
Last year, she wrote that “Extreme wealth concentration in the hands of a few oligarchs is a threat to democracy the world over.” She accepts that instituting a global minimum tax on the very rich will be complex, but not impossible, and she pointed out that, four years ago, 136 OECD countries “joined an accord to enact a 15% global minimum tax on multinational corporations”. She added that “If we can institute a tax floor for the world’s largest corporations, there is no reason we can’t do the same for the world’s wealthiest individuals”, pointing out that a 2023 survey found that even millionaires in G20 countries support the idea.
More good news over here is that the planning application for a deep coalmine in Whitehaven, Cumbria has been withdrawn after the High Court ruled that the permission granted by Michael Gove when he was in charge was unlawful. This follows another, earlier decision by the Supreme Court that quashed planning permission for an oil well at Horse Hill in Surrey on the grounds that the impact of burning coal, oil and gas must be included when the climate impact of a proposal must be included.
The Labour government is also proposing to extend restrictions on the burning of peatland which has led to the degradation of 80% of them in England. They are comparatively uncommon but, when they’re allowed to remain undisturbed, they store huge amounts of carbon – an estimated 3.2 billion tonnes in the UK alone. The Conservative government started with a small step in the right direction by limiting the burning to areas of ‘deep peat’ (over 40cm deep) in Sites of Special Scientific Interest in conservation areas and some even smaller sites.
Labour’s plans include reducing the definition of deep peat from 40cm to 30cm and would do away with the limitation to conservation areas, increasing protected areas by two thirds to a total of 368,000 hectares, but this still leaves almost half the total area unprotected.
Needless to say, organisations like the Countryside Alliance are up in arms. They don’t care about the wildlife, such as adders, toads, and ground-nesting birds, that are killed when land is burnt but they’re horrified that this will restrict the land where otherwise relatively normal people pay a lot of money for the sheer delight of blowing the heads off the grouse that live there bringing up their families.
I have no real problem with somebody shooting something to take home to eat (actually, of course, picking up and eating roadkill avoids the slaughter and is much cheaper, but remember fresh blood is good, maggots aren’t) but shooters don’t even get to keep the birds they killed without paying for them; and what worries me more is the thought that some people actually get pleasure from killing, and are willing to pay to be allowed to do it.
Still on the subject of corpses, I’m always fascinated by the facial reconstructions of Neanderthals and other people who have been for tens of thousands of years just from a skull that’s been dug up by an archaeologist. I know pictures are sometimes drawn using similar techniques in attempts to picture the faces of bodies that haven’t yet been identified but I wonder whether any research has been done reconstructing the faces from the skulls of people who’ve died more recently, and of whom there are photographs, to see how accurate they are?
They’re welcome to use my skull for a test when I’ve finished with it because I find it hard to imagine how they could guess where my wrinkles are from the underlying bone so it would be an interesting test of their system.
Lesser Mutterings 