As the war in the Middle East rages on, showing ‘no signs of abating’ as the BBC keeps saying, the unconsidered collateral damage is wreaking terrible effects on the global economy and environment. Although Trump is claiming the war is ‘militarily won’ he clearly doesn’t understand the strong constitutional infrastructure underpinning the Iranian regime so ‘winning’ will take a lot more than killing layers of leaders. What has clearly mattered here is Trump’s need to deflect from the Epstein Files and Netanyahu’s long held ambition to drag the US into a war with Iran. But cracks are starting to show in this misalliance. Trump insists he didn’t know in advance about the hugely damaging Israeli attack on theSouth Pars gas field but the optics are terrible either way. If he had known he should have stopped it and if he didn’t it rather shows him up as an owned Israeli leader pawn. US and Iranian threats to blow up more energy facilities are gravely escalating the war, resulting in massive disruption to energy supplies. The Independent suggests that UK energy bills are set to rise by over £300 this summer as the war and attacks on oil and gas fields continue to drive up wholesale gas prices. ‘Wholesale gas prices have more than doubled since the US launched strikes on Iran at the end of February, with further rises expected. The rate is a major influence on energy costs in the UK and the level at which Ofgem sets its energy price cap’. It’s now suggested that household energy bills could reach £2000 by the summer – very alarming.
But could we be misunderstanding what this war is really about? I’ve not heard this in the general media but an article by Haviv Rettig Gur in the Daily Mail (one that can be taken seriously) suggests that it’s actually two wars: a regional war involving Israel and its adversaries but also one about the US/China rivalry. Iran is allegedly completely dependent on China for its crude oil exports and China has been integrating Iran’s military systems with its own including weapons which would penetrate US defences. The suggestion that the US is actually addressing the terrible (for them) spectre of China effectively controlling global oil supplies is quite convincing.
Many thought Keir Starmer had done very well in a difficult situation, standing up against right wing pressure by resisting Trump’s demands to use UK air bases. As we saw last week he withstood the lies and insults for a while but has now capitulated and it seems to me the government is having to dance on the head of the PM’s lawyerly pin in order to forge a distinction between ‘defensive’ and ‘offensive’ use. It’s widely believed that we’re being further sucked into a Middle East war. Certainly an international row – we now hear that a British military base in Cyprus hit by an unmanned drone strike at the start of the Iran war will not be used by the US to counter Tehran’s missile sites after a significant dispute about it.
Meanwhile, Spain remains defiant and Sri Lanka has ruled out the use of its own bases. Historian Professor Timothy Garton Ash, in an article titled ‘Love Actually? Washington’s current relationship with Britain is more like Contempt Actually’, suggests that ‘if the UK wants to regain serious respect in the world, it needs its European leg as well as its transatlantic one’. Quite so and perhaps this would involve admitting that the so-called ‘special relationship’ has long been dead in the water despite the sanctimonious spouting of some politicians.
‘It must be 40 years since I first heard former West German chancellor Helmut Schmidt say: “The special relationship is so special only one side knows it exists.”An American critic of Trump recently asked me the obvious follow-up question: “Why does your government keep grovelling?” More fundamentally, we must ask why so much of official Britain, and especially its security establishment, keeps clinging for dear life to the United States, behaving for all the world like someone stuck in an abusive personal relationship’. Of course there’s been the historical dependence on the US for defence but the Professor opines that ‘there’s a particular, rather pathetic desperation about the way the British cling to Uncle Sam’. He attributes the one-sidedness to several factors including, of course, Brexit. ‘It’s just blindingly obvious that the UK is less important to the US than it used to be because it’s no longer part of a larger bloc. In Blair’s time, for all the long-term waning of influence, Britain still had two relatively strong legs: the transatlantic one and, as a member of the EU, the European one. In 2016, in what we can today see even more clearly was an act of monumental stupidity, Britain chose to cut off its own European leg. Now Trump is cutting the American one… For anyone who loves this country, it’s painful to see how it has reduced itself to being an object of contempt – or at best, pity’..
The shock waves of Trump’s war are not surprisingly being felt in other areas besides energy: Moneyfacts tells us those taking out a new home loan face paying almost £800 a year more on average than before the Iran war as “Trumpflation” pushes up UK mortgage rates. ‘War in the Middle East has added almost £800 to a typical annual mortgage bill in just two weeks, which will be unwelcome news for anyone currently seeking a fixed-rate deal’. Also breaks and holidays could even more be seen as luxuries as the price of jet fuel rises and some air fares go way beyond what’s affordable. It’s to be hoped that airlines and travel companies don’t try to slap surcharges on products already paid for. How long before supermarkets and retailers bump up their prices, too, without taking any of the hit themselves?
World events weren’t good for our mental wellbeing before all this and many now will be feeling seriously disturbed by the inevitable disruption and intensification of the cost of living crisis. Trump’s demented rants and the appalling warmongering of his ‘Secretary for War’ Pete Hegseth (did he feel he didn’t have a proper job without an actual war?) have led to calls for Trump’s impeachment. But he’s still surrounded by sycophants ignorant of diplomacy and statesmanship and seems to think he no longer has to consult Congress before taking decisions with far-reaching consequences. Hegseth came across as particularly unbalanced when lambasting the press for reporting the facts and suggesting they should be praising the administration, even suggesting forms of words for potential headlines. It’s truly alarming when a government tries to control the media in this way, except Trump already does in a way. It seems he has form on what he’s done to the BBC, disadvantaging US media companies which don’t dance to his tune and taking legal action against them. Rather than go to court some have coughed up hefty sums as a kind of damage limitation.
What’s especially noticeable is the Trump administration’s assumption of our stupidity: they constantly resort to specious logic to ‘justify’ this war, which was completely unnecessary given that we now understand the nuclear talks to have been going quite well. One of the main offenders, Hegseth, reckons that they’re going to honour the servicemen who’ve died by ‘finishing the job’, apparently oblivious that such an ill-considered strategy will produce many more dead servicemen to ‘honour’. Another is Trump’s dimwit press secretary Karoline Leavitt, who said in all seriousness that steps the President was taking were necessary and justified eg to open the Straits of Hormuz when such steps were only ‘necessary’ because Trump started the war in the first place. Just on the Straits, we hear that over three thousand ships are stranded there but there’s been no consideration of the crews’ plight.
On Question Time the excellent Caroline Lucas said: ‘I think this is an illegal reckless war with Iran that is being waged by Trump and Netanyahu. They have massively underestimated their enemy. Trump is a bully and a blackmailer. He has no plan for an exit strategy, says he will exit when he feels it in his bones. This is a President said who said he would bomb Kharg island just for fun. He suggested he might attack Cuba as well. The type of language Trump and Hegseth are using is just so disgusting. I’ve got their words: ‘watch what happens to these deranged scumbags today, what a great honour to kill them”. This is not Grand Theft Auto, this is real people, real lives. And yet you get the sense from the White House that this is some big game. And all of us are suffering from it’. Not half. Veteran journalist Paul Taylor observed: ‘I fear we are not witnessing the liberation of Iran or Iranians, but a repetition of the cycle of foreign interference that has blighted Iranian history since the British were granted trade monopolies in the 19th century’. Now we hear that Trump is thinking o f ‘ending the war’, the Iranian intransigence clearly being beyond his attention span, and is now thinking of acting on Cuba.
Here we’ve just seen a number of local election party campaigns launched and some of the accompanying posts and videos are embarrassingly bad. You have to wonder who on earth is advising the Tories and Reform, the former leading with a highly curated composite of Badenoch in various macho poses and addresses, adoring sycophants surrounding her, despite her well deserved reputation as a complete failure in the Opposition leader role. ‘The Conservative party is BACK’, it shrieks unconvincingly, wheeling out its alleged policies to get Britain working again and to cut stamp duty, things they notably avoided doing despite 14 years in office. For their part, Reform’s usually show Nigel Farage in full demagogue mode, reminiscent of the 1930s, making all manner of impossible promises and wheeling out gimmicks like a prize of having your gas bill paid. Reform also recently threatened, if elected in a general election, to remove top civil servants and replace them with people more in tune with Reform policies. A disastrous approach, as the US found when it sacked so many experts, leading to a severe weakening of key institutions. Anyway, the policy would run counter to the principle of not politicizing the civil service.
Journalist John Crace has form in very amusingly and pertinently taking Badenoch down and he described her launch as not only ‘a mean-spirited version of Britain but also positively deranged’. ‘We are a party renewed. We are the only party with a plan for Britain. We will make things better. I’m not sure that’s how the rest of the country see it. She was going to drill in the North Sea to make sure our energy supply was not interrupted by the war she had supported. Logic is not her strongest point…Bad people would be punished. There would be 10,000 extra police officers on every street corner. There will be no drugs in public spaces’ etc etc. When the Tories were the ones who cut police numbers dramatically and closed police stations but still get indignant about insufficient police on our streets. The very things she blamed Labour for are the very things the individuals on Kemi’s stage, like Mel Stride, were responsible for during their 14 years of misrule. But what most of us have been more aware of is changing her position on the Iran War and lying about it. ‘The cheek was breathtaking. As was her amnesia. As though she has literally no recollection of anything she said three weeks ago and has the revisionist right to re-edit her life to one that suits her better. She is the sole arbiter of her own reality’.
It’s really not a good idea to take your audience for complete idiots. Crace’s summary of this campaign launch: ‘It had been an exhausting hour. A time of fantasy. One in which it had been easiest to locate the truth by latching on to the opposite of everything Kemi had said. On leaving the building, everyone gave their head a gentle wobble. Just to make sure the world was still the right way up’.
Rivalling some politicians for non-stop embarrassingly bad social media posts and videos are the royals: you could almost suspect that more Epstein Files revelations are on the way (they are). Following the publication across the entire media of THAT photo (of Epstein, the then Prince Andrew and Mandelson sitting around a table in their bathrobes) we’ve seen endless eulogies and bigging up of any royal event, notably the huge waste of money that was the State Banquet for the Nigerian presidential couple’s visit. Possibly the most outrageous of recent ones is the news that Charles has been ‘on a mission’ to track down for Camilla the jewellery collection of Alice Keppel, especially a tiara priced at $140k. Apparently it amuses the King that Keppel was Camilla’s great great grandmother, who had an affair with his great great grandfather, Edward VII. Being amused by drawing attention to another adulterous relationship is hardly a good look but no surprise for these hugely privileged, entitled and tone deaf people. Nevertheless, whenever the media, especially the cowed BBC, cover the royal links to Epstein the same mantra is trotted out: ‘There is no suggestion that appearing in the documents implies any wrongdoing’.
At present it seems the Palace PR machine is prepared to do anything, however silly, to keep the royals in the news for what they consider good reasons, except these efforts often fall flat on their face, like today’s about William’s ‘quiet faith’- so quiet it’s effectively silent. One X user got it in one about the tone deaf royals and the hangers on who depend on them: ‘Ever wondered why the “news” feels like a sanitised fairy tale? Because the Royal Rota isn’t journalism, it’s a pathetic, sycophantic PR wing for a redundant institution. These vetted hacks spend their lives grovelling for a nod from taxpayer-funded parasites, spinning one-hour “charity” cameos into Herculean feats of service. It’s a choreographed circus of choreographed smiles and hollow pomp, specifically designed to keep the peasants distracted while the coffers are drained. They don’t report the truth; they protect the brand. The monarchy is a dying gimmick on life support, gasping for its last bit of relevance’.
What’s increasingly striking is just how far Epstein’s tentacles reached into societies’ elites and what an insidious hold he still posthumously exercises over them. The Guardian has analysed more than a million emails (begging the question why more so-called journalists aren’t doing the same) ‘and identified over 150,000 unique emails between Epstein and a select group of elites and influential people (including those sent to or from assistants or close associates). of all the high profile individuals featured, the investigators focus on seven: Andrew Mounbatten Windsor, Mandelson, Trump’s former chief strategist Steve Bannon, the Emirati billionaire Sultan Ahmed Bin Sulayem (yes, the one who co-founded and funded William’s performative Earthshot project), film director Woody Allen, the former head of Barclays Jes Staley, and the economist and former US treasury secretary Larry Summers. ‘In July 2018, Bannon forwarded Epstein an article detailing his plans to launch a rightwing foundation called “The Movement” in Brussels. The text explicitly mentioned Bannon’s courtship of “nationalists of the right from East to West’… Bannon has not been accused of criminal wrongdoing in connection with Epstein and told the New York Times that his relationship with the disgraced financier had been strictly professional’ (Of course he’d say that).
Sultan Ahmed Bin Sulayemapparently told Epstein ‘I consider you a close friend and I don’t have anyone I can call a close friend’. Ring any bells? Almost exactly what Sarah Ferguson had told Epstein and it probably applies to many more of these people who allowed themselves to fall under the spell of this poisonous Svengali figure. The thousands of emails show how he connected elites across finance, tech, politics and the arts world and was valued for his networking abilities.’ Seriously, didn’t anyone question this at the time, sense the danger or listen to their intuition, assuming they had any? ‘As Summers put it in a 2017 email introducing Epstein to the editor of a scientific journal: “I know people who circulate among the powerful, among the wealthy and among the brilliant. Jeffrey does all three to a unique extent.” To most ordinary people outside these hallowed circles it will be horrifying that so much corruption and political interference have resulted from this Machiavellian figure and the elites’ abject stupidity and vanity in falling prey to him.
There’s been no confirmation so far but it’s thought there will soon be a new BBC Director General – Matt Brittin, a former McKinsey consultant who seems to have no tv experience. ‘Brittin, who led Google in Europe, the Middle East and Africa for a decade until stepping down last year, had already emerged as the strong favourite to replace the BBC’s outgoing leader, Tim Davie. Brittin’s potential appointment comes with the BBC battling to cope with huge changes in media consumption driven by the rise of digital platforms such as YouTube, which is owned by Google’s parent company’. Will he prove the right man for the job? We can understand why the rapidly changing media landscape could have led to such a choice but will someone with only private sector experience understand what should still be the ethos of the BBC as public service broadcaster? ‘Brittin has told TV figures that he has long admired the British television industry. Picking up a Royal Television Society fellowship last December, he said it was an industry “I’ve been trying to get into for a very long time”. So this is a good reason to appoint someone, because they’ve been trying to get into the industry for a long time? If his appointment is confirmed let’s hope it won’t prove yet another BBC mistake, although the hopeless Culture Secretary Lisa Nandy will have had a say too. Finally, an interesting article about punctuality drew attention to the common but rarely (if ever) discussed phenomenon of stopped clocks in our communities. There’s actually a Stopped Clocks organization and they say almost one in six town clocks are broken due to councils giving them low priority in their budgets. But it could have wider repercussions than the cash-strapped councils think: one of the founders recalls his mother saying ‘It’s a small thing but when I see a stopped clock I feel somehow uncared for’. I know what she means- seeing these can feel disconcerting and jarring, that something’s not quite right about a place.
Politics and mental health - the missing link? 