…September 2025

September began the way that August ended, with the lead news item being the summit for bad leaders held in China to make the Chinese leader Xi Jinping look good. All the world’s top b*stards – almost all – turned up to showcase their poor fashion sense and discuss how to live forever.

There was no invitation for the US President Donald Trump, but he did win the consolation prize of addressing the UN general assembly. He mostly criticised other world leaders for trying to contain climate change instead of exploiting it, noting: “I’m really good at this stuff. Your countries are going to hell.” The UN did live up to its reputation for general evil-ness by sabotaging both his escalator and his teleprompter. 

Separately, a UN Commission of Inquiry has concluded that Israel has intentionally committed genocide against the Palestinians in Gaza. The same commission has previously accused Hamas of committing war crimes. The UN has accepted the figures from the Hamas-run health ministry that around 65,000 Palestinians have died in the Israeli military campaign, while the UN has previously declared a famine in Gaza City. 

Several Western countries, including Britain, France and Canada have recognised Palestinian statehood, and warned Israel not to annexe Palestinian lands in response to this. However, so long as the Americans continue to back Israel, this is just so much posturing. Nonetheless, Trump has proposed a new peace plan, though it’s more of a loose framework.

It calls for a ceasefire, for Hamas to release all of its hostages and disband, and for Israel to release some Palestinian prisoners and partially withdraw the Israeli Defence Force from Gaza. This would then be followed by the establishment of a local administration to run the day-to-day services in Gaza, which would be overseen by a new body, the Board of Peace, or BOP, with Donald Trump as the chair or big Bopper and the former British prime minister Tony Blair in a lesser role, more of a teeny bopper. This might ultimately evolve into some form of Palestinian government in five years or so.

The Hamas leaders are said to be reviewing the proposals though the last time they met in Doha to discuss an American-led peace plan, the Israelis bombed them. Then again, Hamas can’t really claim any right to exist as an organisation after the atrocity of the 7th October attacks. It’s not at all clear that Israel will accept this deal, with some Israeli cabinet ministers having already rejected parts of it. What is clear is that whatever Israel decides to do, America will back it.

But then as the Ukrainians have discovered, American backing isn’t what it used to be. Trump has utterly failed in his efforts to secure peace in that conflict, mainly because the Ukrainians refused to give in to him and he was unwilling to bring any pressure to bear on the Russians. Instead Russia is busy demonstrating that the country with the largest industrial capacity that can be militarised will most likely prevail. The Russians have ramped up their drone production and are now busy pummelling Ukrainian cities.

At the same time, Russia has also started aggressively testing European defences, flying drones into Polish airspace and fighter jets over Estonia. Denmark has also blamed Russia for a number of drones that have disrupted civilian airports and buzzed Danish military bases. All of this is adding to the growing sense of fear across Europe that war might be coming. And yet, Europe does not have unified control over its industrial capability; not in any kind of economic sense, and certainly not any meaningful military capacity. In this context, Trump’s continuing tariff-led trade war is making life extremely uncomfortable for European leaders and disrupting economies across the Eurozone, and to some extent, the UK. 

There were also disturbing reports that the US had attempted to pressure Taiwan to move half of its semiconductor supply chain to the US in exchange for some kind of security guarantee. Trump has threatened tariffs on semi-conductors and any products that contain them which would hit Taiwan badly since 70 percent of its exports to the US are related to semi-conductors. Taiwan has said it will resist any such pressure.

South Korea did promise to invest more into manufacturing in the US and was in the process of building new factories in America. But the South Koreans were shocked when America’s brutal immigration crackdown led to the staff it had sent to get these factories up and running being arrested and chained up. The US has now set up a visa waiver program for such workers but the incident did not go down well in Seoul.

Trump has managed to shock America’s business leaders by suddenly raising the price of a H-1B visa from $1000 to $100,000. The US has used such visas to encourage foreign scientists and engineers to bring their expertise to America. Naturally, Britain and the EU are hoping to capitalise on this.

The BBC has reported that Trump told American military leaders that he wants to use American cities as “training grounds” for the military. Trump has already sent troops into several American cities, including Los Angeles, Washington DC and Portland, Oregon, with threats to target more Democrat-led cities on the pretext of civil disturbances or crime. However, it’s possible that Trump is actually practicing for a military take over of the US, presumably as an option for when his elected term ends. 

If Trump is planning a coup, then the first step will be to lock up the comedians because its hard to take a dictator seriously when everyone is laughing at them. The Federal Communications Commission, through its chair Brendan Carr, pressured ABC and its parent Disney to take the TV presenter Jimmy Kimmel off air. After a few days the broadcaster found just enough vertebrae to reinstate Kimmel though it remains to be seen if they can build a complete spine.

Trump has gone further, publicly calling on his attorney general Pam Bondi to prosecute those he considers his political enemies. That appeared to lead directly to the arrest of the former FBI director James Comey. Others on his list include New York Attorney General Letitia James and Democratic Senator Adam Schiff, who oversaw his first impeachment trial. It is a dramatic turn towards authoritarianism, and yet there is no real pushback against this in the US. 

Luckily one American, Pope Leo XIV, has risen to the challenge, calling for more action on climate change and criticising those who minimise the “increasingly evident” impact of rising temperatures. His speech was a direct rebuff to Trump having called climate change the “greatest con job ever perpetrated”. The Pope called for citizens to put more pressure on politicians to “mitigate the damage done to the environment”.

Meanwhile, Trump, whose genius truly knows no bounds, has revealed his hitherto unknown medical expertise in claiming a link between pregnant women using Tylenol, also known as paracetamol, and autism. This link is largely unproven though it’s possible that the fevers the drug is used to treat might have some effect. Health officials around the world have had to counter this with the UK Health Secretary Wes Streeting saying: “I trust doctors over President Trump, frankly, on this.” 

Elsewhere in crazy land America, the Federal Reserve finally bowed to pressure from Trump, cutting US interest rates by 0.25 percent while warning that US inflation is rising and job numbers are falling. The Supreme Court has temporarily stopped Trump from firing the Fed’s deputy governor, Lisa Cook.

On the other side of the pond, the bank of England opted to keep base rates at 4 percent because of persistent inflation, which is currently 3.8 percent overall but 5.1 percent for food, with food prices still rising. There’s unlikely to be any further cuts to interest rates this year.

The British chancellor Rachel Reeves has postponed the next budget until 26th November, which just means that there will be several months of speculation and fears over tax rises. Consumers already fear rising energy costs while businesses also worry about further taxes pushing up labour costs. As such, Reeves has failed to learn lessons from last year, when this lack of confidence held back exactly the consumer and business spending that the government is relying on. 

The Office of National Statistics warned that the UK economy saw zero growth in July, having only grown by 0.2 percent in the previous three months. Reeves is continuing to bet that economic growth will fill the holes in the government’s finances but so far this bet is not paying off. Many people have called for a change in economic policy but so far Reeves has mainly opted to take to the airwaves to scold the economy like a school marm saying that she is not angry, just disappointed and we should all do better.

Plenty of other people are quite angry and there have been many protests, mostly directed against migrants. Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, who performs under the stage name Tommy Robinson, led 150,000 people at a rally in Central London where he called for the “dissolution of Parliament” and a “change of government” which is essentially a coup. Elon Musk chimed in, telling those assembled they should “fight or die”, which is going far beyond the right to free speech and shows his true agenda and that of his X platform. 

The British prime minister, Keir Starmer, has used his Labour Party’s conference to pledge that the government will fight against “decline and division” to counter the rise of the rightwing Reform Party. Oh dear. If ever there was a man deluded. Sprinkling words of wisdom means nothing without cold hard cash. There are many protests against migrants, fuelled by the political right, but this is really driven by fear that there won’t be any money left to help poor British people. 

Starmer reiterated his pledge not to raise income tax, presumably under the mistaken belief that people will reward him for not putting their taxes up. Every time I see Starmer I wonder who paid for his glasses. In reality he’s actually promising that there will be no change to Britain’s massively unfair tax system, which ensures that the rich get richer and the poor – who are Labour’s voter base – get poorer. It’s not exactly a recipe for electoral success.

Starmer’s problem is that Labour is haemorrhaging voters left, right and centre. Starmer is offering more of the same even as voters are clearly searching for alternatives. The majority of voters feel poorer even though Britain is one of the richest countries in the world; there is no economic growth so the only practical answer would be to take some of the existing money and redistribute it. 

Instead Starmer has decided to attack one of those political alternatives, the Reform party led by Nigel Farage, accusing it of being racist. That may be true, but it’s not the answer that Labour voters are looking for. Besides, Reform is perfectly capable of sabotaging its own efforts. Richard Tice, deputy leader of Reform, has had a go at that well-known group of spongers, the parents of children with special needs, who are holding the country back and preventing us all from getting richer with their neediness. 

The month ended with Starmer having successfully pushed his efforts to control migration to the front of the news cycle though there’s no evidence yet of any actual success in stopping this migration. Instead he is simply hoping that the winter weather will limit the number of people prepared to risk crossing the channel in a dinghy. Everyone else is fearful about the rising energy prices and the heating bills that the winter will bring. 

In amongst all this, September also saw the 200th anniversary of the birth of the commercial railway service. Way back, on the 27th September 1825, the world’s first fare paying passenger train service travelled from Shildon to Stockton via Darlington, in what was then the industrial heart of the UK. The modern railway is over-priced and under-funded. The flagship development, the London to the North HS2 line, will start outside of London and only go as far Birmingham in the midlands. It’s hard to escape the thought that we’re all on the track to nowhere…