Trump's missing guard rails will lead to disaster

An aide during Trump's first term has described the White House at the time as like living in a house that was "always on fire or in an insane asylum where you couldn’t tell the difference between the patients and the attendants or on a roller coaster that never stopped."  Another, Miles Taylor, said Trump engaged in "repetitive rants, and his impulsiveness results in half-baked, ill-informed and occasionally reckless decisions that have to be walked back." That was when he was surrounded by sensible people forming the guardrails that only ever succeeded in frustrating Trump, who has spent a lifetime without any such restraints. Now, he has arranged his administration to dispense with guard rails, and the results are as we see.  Nobody walks anything back and often encourages him to double down.

Reform UK: The cost of chaos

The cost of exposing the charlatans keeps increasing.  The Americans failed to learn about Donald Trump in 2016-20 and are learning an even more expensive lesson with his second term. We had a dose of Boris Johnson and Liz Truss over here. A new 'mega poll' from Yougov now appears to show that Nigel Farage is on his way to Downing Street after the next election. The United Kingdom has already suffered serious economic and reputational damage at the hands of the Reform UK leader, since he is largely responsible for Brexit. It seems we must now suffer a catastrophic collapse to show that Farage is actually incapable of doing anything with the slightest trace of competence.  

Hannan Day: rewriting history

Roland Smith was once a fellow of the right-wing think tank, The Adam Smith Institute, and an advocate of Brexit although I think he has now changed his mind.  His vision was of a soft Brexit with Britain exiting the EU and rejoining EFTA and eventually the single market and (I assume) also the customs union. It seems he was seduced by Richard North's fantasy Flexcit. You have to understand this before reading his Substack blog semi-defending Daniel Hannan for his laughable 2016 predictions about how post-Brexit Britain would be in June 2025.  Smith says Hannan had a “genuine belief that Britain outside the EU would move to a Swiss-type position. In other words, outside the EU but still very closely aligned to the single market.”

Has Trump brought peace to the Middle East?

Donald Trump is claiming a stunning success from his bombing of Iran's nuclear sites at the weekend. He tweeted that a ceasefire was now in effect between Israel and Iran, although the BBC say neither side has commented yet. The Iranians seem to have launched a token attack on the US base in Qatar on the western side of the Persian Gulf with the Qataris being warned by Iran that the base was about to be targeted, enabling the missiles to be shot down before any damage was done or personnel injured. That may be enough to satisfy honour, it may not. The regime’s parliament has called for the Straits of Hormuz, through which a significant percentage of the world’s crude oil passes, to be closed. If this is done, expect oil prices to rise.

Is AI the new South Sea Bubble?

Artificial Intelligence is likely to end up as the 21st-century equivalent of the South Sea bubble. In the early 1700s, the South Sea Company, initially formed to manage some of Britain's national debt, offered investors a guaranteed 6% return. The company later began lending to investors to buy its own shares, driving up the price until the business collapsed, and everyone who had invested was ruined. AI has also attracted phenomenal amounts of cash. Billions and billions of dollars have been invested in the hope of seeing great returns at some point in the future, which I think will never materialise.

More encouraging polling news

Even as Reform UK continues to ride high in the polls, other surveys show public opinion in the UK is increasingly turning against Brexit. It’s a real paradox, isn’t it? Nigel Farage practically invented Brexit. If you cut him in half, you would find the word written all the way through him. He’s the epitome of Brexit and what is almost certainly the greatest self-inflicted foreign policy mistake this country has ever made in its thousand-year history. Yet, currently, he has more support than Labour, and the Tories, who actually delivered Brexit, are basically nowhere under the lacklustre Kemi Badenoch.

Support for the EU in Europe reaches all time high.

The EU conducts regular polling to gauge public attitudes towards various issues in its member states. The European Parliament also publishes surveys of its own, that monitor public opinion in Europe on political or social matters, known as the Eurobarometer.  The latest fieldwork took place between 9 January and 4 February 2025 in all EU Member States (the survey is known as Winter 2025) and shows that overall, support for the EU is at an all-time record. To quote from the document: "More than ever, people appreciate what they get from Europe: 74% think that their country benefits from EU membership - the best result ever recorded since this question was first asked in 1983."

Trump is fuelling conflict in the Middle East

Israel’s latest attack on Iran is something that Prime Minister Netanyahu has been itching to do for decades. However, successive US presidents prevented him from implementing a strategy that poses an extremely high risk and has the potential to drag America into military action. Trump has now effectively given Israel the green light. Iran has already promised to launch strikes against US and UK targets in the area. If that happens Trump will be under enormous pressure to respond with more force, adding fuel to an existing and long-standing regional conflict. He has talked tough on Iran and made extraordinary claims that it will be “easy” to make a deal with the Ayatollahs based on increasing trade with the USA.

Did Donald Trump steal the 2024 election?

Donald Trump to this day continues to claim the 2020 US presidential election was 'stolen' by Joe Biden and the Democrats. This is despite him bringing 62 legal challenges against election results in swing states across America, all of which failed due to the total lack of evidence. His own attorney Rudi Giuliani was forced to pay damages to two women election workers after making baseless allegations that they had helped to falsify the result in Georgia. Now, in a little-reported court case in the USA, there is clear evidence that some inexplicable things occurred in certain areas of New York and elsewhere in November 2024, which appeared to benefit Donald Trump. The case is in its early stages and there is nothing definitive yet, but all the evidence points to some, let us say, very unusual results. 

In short, it’s possible that he and his supporters stole the 2024 presidential election.

America is in for a long hot summer

Events in the USA are rapidly spiralling out of control. Agents from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) are sweeping across the nation arresting undocumented immigrants and shipping them off to detention centres for eventual deportation somewhere. The BBC reported on one such raid in Los Angeles where a law-abiding Hispanic named Jesus working at a car wash was detained and is now being held without being able to contact his family or lawyers. The whole exercise is sparking terror among the population which is said to include 900,000 what the administration calls illegal immigrants, 10% of the LA population.