9 August 2025
The news from Britain last week was pretty feeble compared with what’s going on elsewhere in the world but I was pleased to see that the investment manager Neil Woodford has finally been brought to book and been fined £5.89m by the Financial Conduct Authority who have also banned him from holding senior manager roles and managing funds for retail investors. The FCA has also fined his company, Woodford Investment Management £40m.
Woodford used to have a very close relationship with the investment platform Hargreaves Lansdown who used to plug his funds to their customers so it’s comforting to hear that thousands of the people who invested through Hargreaves Lansdown are now suing them.
I muttered about him several years ago when it became clear that his star had fallen, primarily because he made some stupid and irresponsible decisions. I was also disappointed that, when Woodford resigned in October 2019 and subsequently closed his company, Hargreaves Lansdown responded with a deathly hush and didn’t comment on their own failures of due diligence.
However, the FCA rulings are provisional and Woodford’s company has appealed the judgement to the upper tribunal. And why not, what have they got to lose? (Apart from £40m.)
In the streets, police are bracing themselves for racists planning protests against asylum seekers and anti-racism activists planning counter-protests but what’s more worrying is the approach that the police are taking. For example, Norfolk police will have the power to remove from the area anyone committing antisocial behaviour (sounds fair) or who might commit antisocial behaviour (whaaat?).
Who could they tell what I might be thinking if I were going to be there? “What are you thinking, sir?” / “Wondering what’s for supper, officer.” / “Oh no you’re not, you’re thinking about committing anti-social behaviour. Gitart of here.” / “But …” / “Right, you’re under arrest for refusing to obey a lawful order.”
Other people protesting against the ban on Palestine Action, including 300 left-leaning Jewish figures such as the film director Mike Leigh and the author Michael Rosen, have written to the prime minister saying that the ban is “illegitimate and unethical”.
The ban was introduced after protestors inflicted an estimated £7m of damage to RAF jets at Brize Norton. Of course, the people who damaged the planes should be charged but a blanket ban implies that an organisation is responsible for the actions of its members. Imagine the precedent this sets. Suppose a male MP harassed or groped a woman? I know it’s unlikely that any MP would ever dream of doing such a thing but, if they did, their entire party could be banned.
According to a report in the Daily Telegraph, it’s all part of a plot led by Defend Our Juries to overwhelm the police and court system. Their response said “It’s great the Telegraph is helping us to spread the word but there are serious inaccuracies in their story.”
With Benjamin Netanyahu’s latest dreams about his plans for Gaza City, the pro-Palestine slogan “From the river to the sea” can now be used as a pro-Zionist chant.
Still, compared to the ravings of America’s head honcho, we’re not doing too badly. Somebody has clearly told Donald Trump about the ancient Greek habit of shooting the messenger who brought bad news because he fired Erika McEntarfer, commissioner of The Bureau of Labor Statistics, after jobs numbers for July were weaker than expected.
But Trump’s golf game gets better and a video clip that went viral shows one of his minders dropping a golf ball in a good place – see https://x.com/patriottakes/status/1949496947808637164
There’s no attempt to conceal the action and Trump then played the ball so it’s obviously common knowledge that he cheats – the minder didn’t even bother to drop the ball down his trouser leg to make it less blatant.
What frightens me most is that Trump holds what is arguably the most powerful position in the world and, wherever he goes, is accompanied by the little red button that could destroy the world. I know that it isn’t actually as simple as that but I just hope there are plenty of checks and balances between the president and the missile launchers.
His behaviour has become increasingly erratic and John Gartner, a psychologist and author who spent 28 years as an assistant professor of psychiatry at Johns Hopkins University Medical School, said in June that Trump exhibits “the classic signs of dementia”. He said “If you go back and look at film from the 1980s, [Trump] actually was extremely articulate. He was still a jerk, but he was able to express himself in polished paragraphs, and now he really has trouble completing a thought and that is a huge deterioration.”
Last weekend, at a meeting with the European Commission president, Ursula von der Leyen, he suddenly stopped talking about immigration and said “The other thing I say to Europe: we’ve – we will not allow a windmill to be built in the United States. They’re killing us. They’re killing the beauty of our scenery.” Followed by him rambling on for 2-minutes about wind turbines.
This seems a good time to be taking a break from the news.
I’ve been doing these mutterings every week for ten years, though only the last seven have been posted on WordPress. My first muttering here was published on 19 August 2018 and talked about my mother’s suicide and the need for assisted dying to be legalised.
Over the years, I’ve returned to this from time to time, as I have to my other hang-ups about such things as the distribution of wealth, and I’ve gathered and retailed bits of useless knowledge. I haven’t yet written about many of these; I still have them on file – things like whether canine brainwaves synchronise with those of the humans when they interact – but it’s time I slowed down a bit and stopped hammering stuff out every weekend.
So thank you for reading, and for your ‘likes’ and comments. Keep an eye open (bookmark this site, or subscribe to it if it doesn’t cost anything) and I’ll be back, but not quite as frequently.
Lesser Mutterings 