31 May 2025
The tragedies in Gaza have moved Rabbi Jonathan Wittenberg, a leading authority on Judaism who feels the people of Israel are “like an extended family”, to write an impassioned article about Gaza. Their people, he says are “caught between the contemptuous nihilism of Hamas and Israel’s attacks” and that Israel’s blockade, threatening many thousands of people with starvation, “runs counter to Judaism’s values of justice and compassion. It contradicts what we have painfully learned from our long history as victims of persecution, pogroms and mass murder: that, despite the hatred to which we have been and often still are subject … we must endeavour not to treat innocent others as we have been treated.”
Shalom Aleichem, Rabbi Wittenberg.
Which? magazine has recently drawn attention to the closure of two thirds of the country’s bank branches since 2015. The banks claim that they’re no longer needed as more people rely on online and mobile banking but the Financial Conduct Authority found that three million people in the UK continue to rely on money. As a result of these closures, if I want to pay cash into my account, I have to drive 10 miles to the nearest branch, pay for parking, and then walk to the nearest branch to do this. How do people with disabilities cope?
Another banking wheeze that seems to have been given little publicity is that the security given by ‘chip and PIN’ cards has largely disappeared. Beg, borrow or steal somebody else’s card and you can spend up to £100 just by swiping the card without needing a PIN, and you can continue to do this in different places until either the card’s credit limit is reached or the owner realises it’s missing and cancels it.
Other triumphs of the banking sector include Fred ‘The Shred’ Goodwin, the disgraced former boss of the Royal Bank of Scotland who was forced to surrender half his pension payments and had his knighthood stripped from him after he’d run up record-breaking losses and allegedly shredded a whole heap of incriminating paperwork. The ‘wealth manager’ Quilter estimates that Goodwin’s now having to scrape by on an annual pension of just £598,000, poor old sod, how he suffers for his sins.
In March 2023, while he was trying to convince people that, this time, he’d make a good president, Donald Trump said of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine that “There’s a very easy negotiation to take place. But I don’t want to tell you what it is because then I can’t use that negotiation.” In May that year, he added that he’d stop the war in Ukraine “in 24 hours” if he was elected.
Well, he was elected and more than four months after he took over, Trump still has to prove this while Vladimir Putin is trying to establish what he calls “a buffer zone” by invading Ukraine’s north-east Sumy border region. If Putin wants a buffer zone, why doesn’t he create it in his own country?
Meanwhile, the Financial Times writer Robert Armstrong has created an acronym to describe Trump’s policies – TACO, from ‘Trump Always Chickens Out’. Particularly apposite when you look at his repeated U-turns on import tariffs. I wonder if his brain’s big enough to grasp the information he’s been given about the climate crisis rather than encouraging companies to “drill, baby, drill” and actually accelerate the collapse?
One of its symptoms is the increase in the number of endangered species, even those we’ve taken for granted all our lives. We haven’t seen swifts, swallows or martins here for many years although a few swallows have nested a couple of miles away in the town by the river; however we do have greenfinches, which are supposed to be getting rarer, but nobody’s told ours who are aggressive little buggers and control other species’ access to the birdfeeder.
Now the Labour government has withdrawn a provision in the planning bill to require housebuilders to fit at least one hollow ‘swift brick’, which provides nesting space for swifts, house martins and other birds to help boost their declining numbers. Well, it would have cost housebuilders about £35 per house and we couldn’t expect them to pay that, could we?
Other companies just poison wildlife (and humans) by pouring untreated sewage into our waterways but at least Thames Water, the UK’s largest water company, has been fined £123m by Ofwat with a condition that it’s to be paid by the company and its investors, not by customers. This total includes an £18.2m fine for continuing to pay dividends even though they’d failed to meet the required minimum financial and environmental standards.
Thames Water’s response was, naturally, to plead to be let off the fine because the management that had run the company to the brink of bankruptcy and renationalisation where it is now poised thought it would make it harder for the company to find a buyer. Did the directors admit their guilt, return the money paid to them and resign en masse? Is the Pope a Muslim?
Scotland is currently debating a bill that would criminalise environmental offences classed as “ecocide” and allow company directors who caused severe or reckless danger to be imprisoned.
In New York, there was an explosion on board a barge carrying raw sewage to the works where it is treated. One worker died and one was injured and the clean-up afterwards can only be imagined. It calls to mind a popular saying involving fans …
Better news comes with the White House’s official confirmation that Elon Musk will be leaving Donald Trump’s ‘cabinet’ and the Department of Government Efficiency.
If we had a DOGE over here, so many services have now been privatised and made their buyers’ fortunes while they bankrupted their companies that there’d be nobody left to run them if they were renationalised. Ideologically justifiable, privatisation has (broad generalisation coming up) proved unworkable in practice. Remember even Maggie Thatcher thought privatising the railways was a step too far.
Lesser Mutterings 