…October 2025

Trick or treat – something broke in October and now the days are getting shorter. All the usual ghouls have haunted the news cycle this month but the story remains the same; move fast or get slimed.

In this strange topsy turvy world the lies are the new truth, reality is fake, war is peace. Yet an uneasy and very fragile peace has broken out in Gaza, a rare bit of good news. The Israeli hostages have been returned and most of the fighting and bombing has stopped, though there is still much uncertainty about what comes next.

Naturally the American president Donald Trump has claimed credit for this but it’s hard to be a peacemaker when you’ve armed and aided one of the combatants and generally helped prolong the war. It’s more likely that the Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu calculated that with Israelis hungry for fresh elections a deal to return the hostages would be more helpful to him personally. Many countries played a part, most notably France, Saudi Arabia and Quatar with contributions from others, including Britain. But Trump is so fragile, and so brutal, that everyone now has to pretend that it was all him. 

Trump has openly campaigned for the Nobel peace Prize, though it’s hard to see how he could qualify. Trump isn’t really ending wars and bringing peace. It’s more accurate to say that he has threatened some countries with heavy economic penalties, which has led them to temporarily suspend hostilities and to lavish praise on Trump in a bid to escape even harsher economic penalties. This approach works with poor countries like Thailand and Cambodia, both heavily dependent on US exports, but has failed completely with more industrialised countries like Russia.

That said, Trump has announced sanctions on two Russian oil companies, Rosneft and Lukoil. This will ultimately hit Russian revenues from oil sales. It will also raise costs for India, and to a lesser extent China, which have both benefited from importing cheap Russian oil. Trump has also matched Russia’s dangerous posturing with nuclear weapons, announcing a new round of nuclear weapons tests though it’s hard to see how this is going to lead to the Nobel peace prize he so openly covets. The Norwegians should worry that eventually Trump will resort to punishing tariffs on Norway, but the Nobel committee must be aware that caving to Trump’s bullying will destroy their credibility and render any future Nobel peace prizes as worthless. 

Meanwhile, King Charles, who must wonder about his own credibility, has finally dealt with his younger brother Andrew over his friendship with the late American paedophile Jeffrey Epstein by stripping him of his royal titles. Parliament has rules preventing MPs from asking awkward questions about the Royal family, which was a surprise for many Britons, but newspapers are now openly asking questions as to how much the king knows amid a wider interest in royal finances. That prompted Charles to move Andrew to the Sandringham estate, which is owned by the Monarch so there will be no further scrutiny of who’s paying for Andrew’s upkeep. The risk is that attention may instead switch to where Charles gets his private income from, and whether or his taxpayer-funded grant is good value.  

And no-longer-prince Andrew has also been caught up in a second scandal over the suggestion that he was close to a man since revealed to be a Chinese spy. Separately, the UK’s relationship with China has come under the spotlight thanks to the collapse of a court case against two British researchers accused of spying for China. The case collapsed ostensibly because both this Labour government and the previous Conservative administration refused to classify China as a national threat, mainly because they both saw enormous economic opportunities in China. And the reality is that Britain and other countries have been pushed into greater reliance on China by Trump’s erratic trade war. 

However, the head of MI5, Sir Ken McCallum, stated that “Chinese state actors” presented a threat to UK national security and that MI5 had already disrupted Chinese activity of national security concern in October. In a witness statement Matthew Collins, the UK’s deputy national security adviser, stated that China was carrying out “large scale espionage” against the UK and was “the biggest state-based threat to the country’s economic security”.

China prepared for its own tariff showdown with Trump by imposing new export controls on rare earth minerals. Trump replied with his trademark diplomatic skills, promising a “massive increase of tariffs on Chinese products” but then embarked on a tour of Asia to sign a flurry of deals that are aimed at improving America’s access to the 14 rare earth minerals that the west depends on heavily. Actually these minerals aren’t that rare with deposits in many countries. But the Chinese are decades ahead of everyone else in processing these minerals.

That’s the weakness in the West’s free market approach, which relied on the corporate world too much, forgetting that private enterprise will always prioritise profits and just do deals with China. That’s left governments suddenly realising that they squandered the peace dividend from the end of the Cold War and forgot about strategic interests. Britain realised in the nick of time that the more strategically-focussed China had control over its strategically vital steel industry. The Chinese company Jingwe still technically owns British Steel because the government is still wondering who’s going to pay for it. 

So Trump has tried to strong-arm foreign governments into paying for the rare earth processing capability and giving free access to US companies. As always with Trump, it’s not clear if these deals will survive for long, especially as most countries are looking at ways to diversify away from the US after Trump’s trade war.

The bigger question is what sort of underlying trade model is best suited to the world situation? Since the end of the second world war the developed – mostly western – countries have pursued free trade policies that have led to remarkable industrial and economic growth. This really blossomed in the last 30 years with the end of the cold war. But now the world is an a much more dangerous phase, and the free market approach looks out of date. Ironically, although there is much that we can blame Trump for, his trade war policies should be seen as a symptom of this change, not the cause. 

Trump cancelled trade talks with Canada and then raised the tariffs on Canadian goods entering the US by 10 percent, all in response to an advert run by a Canadian state politician who is not part of the Canadian government. So much for free speech. Trump can call other leaders names, criticise their policies and stir trouble in their countries, but can’t take any criticism back. If an Australian journalist asks a legitimate question of him, or a Canadian state politician questions his policy then those entire countries are made to suffer. This is playground bullying and if we in the West can’t stand up to it then we are not living free and nor do we deserve to.

Trump followed this up by threatening to punish Spain with higher tariffs for not following his instructions to raise defence spending to 5 percent. And he attempted to interfere in the Argentinian mid-term elections by threatening to cut any funding if the Argentinian President Javier Milei had not triumphed in the mid-term elections. Trump has already promised $20 billion to help prop up the struggling Argentinian economy, though he has struggled to answer critics at home that such foreign aid does not fit his America First policy. In the event, Milei scored a resounding victory. 

Meanwhile, in Ireland the veteran left wing politician Catherine Connolly has won the presidential election. She is quite capable of calling out Trump but the presidential role wields no real power in Ireland. However, she does support a united Ireland, and can lay some of the groundwork for this, which does have the power to make life quite uncomfortable for the British government.

the collapse of two US companies

– car parts supplier First Brands and subprime car lender Tricolor –

could be a sign of a wider financial crisis

Andrew Bailey, who as the governor of the Bank of England also occasionally makes life difficult for the government, has warned that the collapse of two US companies – car parts supplier First Brands and subprime car lender Tricolor – could be a sign of a wider financial crisis in the US along the line of the 2008 crash. Both companies were involved in the private credit market with loans from non-bank lenders. Sarah Breeden, the Bank’s deputy governor for financial stability, told the the House of Lords’ financial services regulation committee that the Bank would be examining the private finance sector, adding: “We can see parallels with the global financial crisis.”

UK government borrowing in September hit its highest level in five years, at £20.2bn, up £1.6bn from the same month last year according to the Office for National Statistics, or ONS. Borrowing over the first six months of the financial year has now reached £99.8bn. A rise in repayments on the interest of this debt wiped out the additional money the Chancellor Rachel Reeves raised through tax. Consequently most analysts assume that she will have to raise taxes further. This fear, coupled with the long wait for the budget, is causing a lack of confidence and further damaging economic growth. 

Indeed, Reeves’ economic analysis is now at the heart of a battle for the Labour Party. The party members and its voters want to see a rapid economic improvement for those at the bottom of the economy, and not just the promise of crumbs if there were further growth for the those at the top. So altering the taxation system to make the economy fairer would be a good place to start, but Reeves has so far resisted this. 

However, the prime minister Keir Starmer has now lost two elections that will force him to rethink. The first was the deputy leadership of the Labour Party, where he will now have to accommodate the more left-wing Lucy Powell. The second was the Welsh Senedd seat of Caerphilly. Labour has dominated south Wales for decades but was beaten into a distant third place, suggesting that Wales might have fallen out of love with Labour and be looking towards the Welsh nationalists Plaid Cymru.

Just to help Starmer, Zack Polanski, the leader of the Green Party, outlined the policies that most Labour voters would like to see. He told his party’s conference that taxing the assets of the richest 1 percent would deal with the cost of living problems that are holding back the country as a whole, adding: “You cannot be an effective environmentalist without talking about the deep inequality in our society.” It’s the kind of radicalism that drove the formation of the Labour Party, that Labour’s voters desperately want to see but which is beyond Starmer. 

The Conservatives held their party conference though it appears to have been more of a wake than a rallying call. The problem for the Tory leader Kemi Badenoch is that she is trying to move the party further to the right to challenge Reform’s five MPs, instead of back to the centre, which has allowed the Liberal Democrats to grow from 11 to 72 MPs. Besides, those voters that like Reform’s policies will just vote for Reform. The conservatives will have to put in the time to develop new policies and a new identity if they are to survive. The majority of voters are in the political centre and those party leaders from either side of the political spectrum that realised this have gone on to be prime minister, including Blair, Cameron and Starmer. The party is just marking time with Badenoch until someone with more vision emerges; that would rule out the obvious challenger, Robert Jenrick, who can only offer more of the same failure.

But the real question is, are we seeing a meaningful change in British politics, away from the dominance of the two main parties and towards a more European approach of many smaller parties? Starmer certainly fears that Nigel Farage’s Reform might use this moment to break through, and is doing his best to pin the blame for Britain’s economic woes, and any tax rises, on Brexit in the hope of tainting the Farage brand. 

That shouldn’t be too hard to do. The independent Office for Budget Responsibility is expected to publish figures showing that the relocation of bankers and financial assets that followed the Brexit vote in 2016 made it harder for Britain to recover from the effects of the 2008 global financial crash. Up to now the OBR has consistently over-estimated growth in the belief that the UK economy would eventually bounce back but the upcoming report is expected to forecast productivity of just 0.9 percent.

This is blamed partly on a lack of investment on those business sectors with close EU ties, but mainly on the exodus from the banking sector – since the UK economy is disproportionately reliant on financial services. This can’t be overcome simply by improving productivity to create economic growth. The only way around this is to restructure the UK economy to more closely match the post-Brexit landscape.

Elsewhere, a study published in the journal Ambio that surveyed 57,000 people in 61 countries, found that people living in Nepal were the most connected to nature while Spain ranked bottom. Britain came 55th, slightly better than the Netherlands, Canada, Germany, Israel, and Japan. Research has indicated that better nature connections promote psychological well-being and protect biodiversity. The study found that the World Bank metric for how business-friendly a country is – ease of doing business – was matched by less nature connection. But then we already knew that you could have spirituality or wealth but rarely both.

A problem with Amazon Web Services’ DNS resolution – which translates URLs like nessancleary.co.uk to the appropriate servers – led to worldwide outages affecting Snapchat, Reddit, Lloyds Bank and even the UK’s HMRC tax service. It also took out the Premier football league’s automated offside system, but even that couldn’t save West Ham United on the night, which continues to demonstrate that it’s possible to lack both spirituality and wealth.