7 June 2025
The Child Poverty Task Force is recommending the government reincarnates the SureStart service, first introduced by Labour in 1998 and mostly closed down after under-funding due to George Osborne’s austerity cuts. It used to offer child health clinics, breastfeeding support, groups for new parents, sleep and weaning workshops, speech and language therapy, drop-in physio sessions, parenting courses in child development and mental health, stay and play sessions (including specifically for dads and male carers), music therapy classes, support groups for women and children who have suffered domestic violence, a housing clinic, groups for children with SEND and cookery courses. Bring it on!
While they’re at it, perhaps the government could have a look at the report of the independent commission that researched cannabis regulation in London. The report finds that reclassifying cannabis as a Class B drug was disproportionate to the harm it can cause and that penalising people for possession of the drug for personal use “cannot be justified”, recommending that, while its production and supply chains should remain illegal, “natural” forms of the drug should be reclassified.
London tried this in Lambeth in 2001 when a Scotland Yard borough commander told his officers to caution rather than arrest people carrying small amounts for personal use. The scheme was inevitably controversial but popular in the borough where, in six months, more than 2,500 hours of police time were saved on processing cannabis arrests while arrests for in connection with class A drugs rose by almost 20% and non-drug-related crime fell by almost 10%. Almost two thirds of people thought the scheme had improved relations between the community and the police.
The experiment was ended after a year when some of the media made allegations about the commander’s private life which they later admitted were unfounded but, by then, the commander had been transferred elsewhere.
Some American states have already legalised some forms of cannabis and a recent survey showed that wrinklies have taken advantage of this: cannabis use by the over-65s increased by nearly 50% in the two years 2021 to 2023. The increase was mainly in wealthier groups and it has become so much more acceptable in helping people cope with chronic pain, stress and other conditions that medics have to remind users that its use is not without risks and daily use of skunk, a strain of cannabis with high levels of THC, can dramatically increase the risk of becoming psychotic. However, they say a couple of joints at weekends are unlikely to do much harm …
I do wonder if the increased use among older people is because they are the generation who spent much of their youth stoned, then stopped while they were working, and are now happy to enjoy cannabis once again.
I also wonder if some could be slipped into Vladimir Putin’s and Donald Trump’s favourite drinks to help them chill a bit.
Putin was so embarrassed by Ukraine’s destroying heavy bombers at an airfield in Siberia that he ordered a nighttime drone attack on Kiev, not renowned for housing Ukrainian military bases, to show what a big willy how powerful he is.
In America, the two Trusk protagonists have parted and are posting acrimonious tweets about each other. Elon Musk has called for Trump’s impeachment because he was (Musk claims) named in the sex offender Jeffrey Epstein’s files that are still withheld.
With his usual maturity and compassion, Trump responded by calling Musk “crazy” and saying he was “wearing thin” at the White House. This spat could prove interesting.
Jacinda Ardern, the former prime minister of New Zealand, has just published her memoirs and one critic described her style as being “gently funny” about Trump, saying he was “taller than [she] expected, his tan more pronounced”. She also describes a moment when her mike was still on and she called the ultra-right-wing New Zealand politician David Seymour, “an arrogant prick” but, when she heard that she’d been recorded, she said she was relieved to hear what she’d actually said because she thought she’d called him “a fucking prick”.
Over here, the chair of the Reform UK party, Zia Yusuf, has resigned because the party’s newest MP asked the government to ban the burka. Yusuf, a Muslim, said this was a “dumb” thing to have done, even after Nigel Farage had said on GB News that it was time for a debate about the burqa.
All Farage really needs is the chutzpah of somebody like Raman Bhatia, chief executive of Starling Bank. The bank was fined £29m by the Financial Conduct Authority in October after the watchdog discovered “shockingly lax” financial crime controls at the bank (which the bank admitted were inadequate). It also admitted it had to write off £28m on injudicious loans to businesses made without proper checks which, in the words of the FCA, “left the financial system wide open to criminals and those subject to sanctions”.
So Starling’s board of directors increased its staff bonus payments from £5.3m last year to £24.6m this year, including £6m to themselves, to reward their incompetence.
Another rip-off is apparently practised by record labels who do not let unknown artists own their recordings and then, if the artist becomes famous, sell these rights to a third party for a large profit. Until they encounter someone like Taylor Swift; she re-recorded all six of the albums whose rights she didn’t own, calling them “Taylor’s Version”, thereby devaluing the original recordings and becoming huge hits in their own right.
She has now bought back her rights to the early albums from Shamrock Capital, who had bought them from Big Machine Records who first recorded her, and thanked the private equity firm for being “honest, fair, and respectful”.
I haven’t heard much of her music, which seems pleasant enough though it doesn’t seem to justify the (to me) incomprehensible fame and adulation she’s achieved worldwide; but I have to admit I admire her determination to recover what she should surely have owned in the first place, perhaps opening a door for less powerful artists.
Lesser Mutterings 