Aug
2025
I’m So Bored With the USA: “Blowin’ in the Wind”
DIY Investor
1 August 2025
“Yes, and how many times must the cannonballs fly
Before they’re forever banned?”
Trump seemed to enjoy his few days golf at the expense of the British taxpayer, and, like the sun(bed) king he is, received his supplicants.
One of those was PM Starmer, who, depending on your opinion, either brownnoses Trump, or allows the great narcissist to hog the spotlight whilst diplomatically getting what he wants.
The big, and somewhat unexpected news, was the PMs belated decision to recognise a Palestinian state if the crisis in Gaza is not brought to an end, with the UK promising to recognise Palestine’s statehood in September, before a major UN gathering.
The balls in Israels court, as we will only refrain from doing so if they allow more aid into Gaza, stop annexing land in the West Bank, agrees to a ceasefire and signs up to a long-term, peace process.
In addition, Hamas must immediately release all remaining Israeli hostages, sign up to a ceasefire, disarm and “accept that they will play no part in the government of Gaza”.
Trump, after initially being non-committal about our decision, criticised the plan, saying: “We never did discuss it”, adding: “You’re rewarding Hamas if you do that. I don’t think they should be rewarded.”
Whatever Trump might say, some of his most prominent supporters are becoming increasingly critical of Israel’s conduct, and polls show that American voters are losing sympathy for them.
Steve Bannon, Trump’s former adviser and still one of his leading cheerleaders, told Politico:
“It seems that for the under-30-year-old Maga base, Israel has almost no support, and Netanyahu’s attempt to save himself politically by dragging America in deeper to another Middle East war has turned off a large swath of older Maga diehards,” Bannon said. “Now President Trump’s public repudiation of one of the central tenets of [Netanyahu’s] Gaza strategy – ‘starving’ Palestinians – will only hasten a collapse of support.”
Another Trump supporter, the far-right Georgia representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, posted on X: “It’s the most truthful and easiest thing to say that Oct 7th in Israel was horrific and all hostages must be returned, but so is the genocide, humanitarian crisis, and starvation happening in Gaza.”
A Gallup poll showed support among Americans for Israel’s actions in Gaza down to 32%, the lowest since the organization began asking the question in November 2023.
Thom Tillis, a Republican senator for North Carolina, said: “I think that the American people at the end of the day are a kind people. They don’t like seeing suffering, nor do I think the president does. If you see starvation, you try to fix it.”
‘A Gallup poll showed support among Americans for Israel’s actions in Gaza down to 32%’
Uncle Benny, the Israeli PM reacted with predictable vitriol, saying the decision rewards “Hamas’s monstrous terrorism. Appeasement towards jihadist terrorists always fails.”
At home, support for Netanyahu’s action is falling, with a group of 31-high-profile Israeli public figures, including academics, artists and public intellectuals, calling for “crippling sanctions” to be imposed on Israel.
The signatories of a letter to the Guardian include an Academy award recipient, Yuval Abraham; a former Israeli attorney general, Michael Ben-Yair; Avraham Burg, a former speaker of Israel’s parliament and former head of the Jewish Agency; and a number of recipients of the prestigious Israel prize, Israel’s highest cultural honour.
The letter accuses Israel of “starving the people of Gaza to death and contemplating the forced removal of millions of Palestinians from the strip. The international community must impose crippling sanctions on Israel until it ends this brutal campaign and implements a permanent ceasefire.”
In the UK’s largest Jewish organisation, the Board of Deputies, has called for a “rapid, uninhibited, and sustained increase in aid through all available channels” in Gaza in a rare implicit criticism of the Israeli government.
In a statement, Phil Rosenberg, said:
“The suffering we are witnessing in the Gaza Strip demands a response. The new measures announced by Israeli authorities to address the humanitarian crisis are essential if long overdue.
“We need to see a rapid, uninhibited, and sustained increase in aid through all available channels, and we need to see all agencies cooperating in this endeavour. As we have been saying for months, food must not be used as a weapon of war, by any side in this conflict.”
Netanyahu, despite the images of hungry children, continues to deny that anyone was starving in Gaza.
‘Netanyahu, despite the images of hungry children, continues to deny that anyone was starving in Gaza’
Asked if he agreed, Trump said: “Based on television, I would say ‘not particularly’, because those children look pretty hungry to me. There’s real starvation, you can’t fake that.”
Also, more reports are now starting to expose what appears to be a deliberate strategic blockade by the Israel leadership.
On 9 October 2023, Israel’s then defence minister, Yoav Gallant, announced “a complete siege on [Gaza]: no electricity, no food, no water, no fuel”, justified on the grounds: “We are fighting human animals and we act accordingly”.
The next day, the Israeli general charged with humanitarian affairs in Gaza and the West Bank – Ghassan Alian – declared that the “citizens of Gaza” were “human beasts” who would suffer “a total blockade on Gaza, no electricity, no water, just damage. You wanted hell, you will get hell.”
The following week, the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, promised “we will not allow humanitarian assistance in the form of food and medicines from our territory to the Gaza Strip”.
The then Tory government had some knowledge of these actions as, in March 2024, the then foreign secretary, Lord Cameron, wrote a letter setting out many ruses used by Israel to block aid from entering Gaza, yet Britain took no action.
In April 2024, two US government departments concluded that Israel was deliberately blocking aid, which legally required the administration to stop supplying weapons. This was overruled by President Biden’s team. Later that year, that same administration sent a public letter detailing Israeli aid obstructions, but Tel Aviv correctly calculated this was political posturing during the presidential election, largely ignored the demands and suffered no consequences for doing so.
More specific detail can be found at:
Moving on, the UK, the cost-of-living crisis shows no sign of abating, and, as I wrote in “Hate to Say I Told You So”, remains a major issue for many families.
The crisis started in February 2022, when Russia invaded Ukraine, and supply-chains were still disrupted by Covid.
Now, some 40-months on, the crisis is impacting a greater cross-section of the population, including the so-called middleclass, with food costs to the fore.
According to the latest snapshot from the British Retail Consortium food prices rose by 4% in July from a year earlier, up from 3.7% in June and above the three-month average of 3.5%.
The BRC said that, whilst fresh vegetables and fruit inflation remained at 3.2%, cupboard food prices jumped by 5.1% compared with a year earlier, up from 4.3% in the year to June.
Official figures earlier this month had shown that meat prices jumped by 17% in the year to June. Butter, which was falling in price between 2023 and 2024, had increased by 18.2% over the past year.
‘how do we get more money into the pockets of those most impacted?’
As consumers know, prices rarely fallback, the new price just becomes the norm. The issue then is, how do we get more money into the pockets of those most impacted?
Since Thatcher came to power in 1979 supply-side, free-market, neoliberal policies have dominated. Cutting taxes, cutting regulations, encouraging entrepreneurialism to drive growth with the benefits trickling down to everyone.
Only it hasn’t; the benefits stayed at the top creating ongoing inequality, and enabling hard-right chancers to have a totally unrepresentative impact.
Cutting tax, whilst never unpopular, only works if is targeted.
Neoliberals talk about the Laffer Curve, an economic concept that says there is a perfect tax rate that brings in the most revenue, and if rates are higher, the revenue might drop. Supporters of this theory push for lower taxes saying tax cuts can boost the economy and increase total tax income.
Research also suggests that once the top-rate of tax dips below 50% the economic impact diminishes. This appears to be supported by the Thatcher governments who cut to 40%.
Clearly, tax cuts across the board disproportionately favour high earners, therefore substantially raising the threshold at which tax is payable, would positively impact many low earners.
This was a solution proposed in their 2024 election manifesto by Reform, who proposed lifting the income tax personal allowance to £20,000 per year and the higher rate threshold to £70,000
Another part of Thatcher’s revolution was focussed on the City, although this did come an after her actions had largely decimated our industrial base .
Chancellor Reeves, perhaps with an eye on her next job, or because she can’t think of anything better is doubling-down on Thatcher. Going for broke, deregulating the City in the hope it does the impossible – benefits everyone!
We already have an oversize financial centre with assets worth £27tn, 10x the value of everything produced in the UK each year. As we saw in 2008, this has serious risks. Labour should know this better than most as they were at the helm the last time the ship ran aground.
‘Labour should know this better than most as they were at the helm the last time the ship ran aground’
BoE governor, Andrew Bailey, remembers, warning the Treasury committee last week: “There isn’t a trade-off between financial stability and growth. We’ve had that experience.”
In case anyone has forgotten, in 2008 taxpayer guarantees worth more than £1tn were required to stop the banking collapse turning into a second Great Depression. Despite this, millions of businesses failed, unemployment hit 2.7 million, and tens of thousands of homes were repossessed.
Besides the obvious financial stability risks for a small, open economy, reinflating the banking industry could also hurt the government’s other priority sectors if handled poorly.
Alongside finance, the government’s industrial strategy is based on seven other sectors: advanced manufacturing, clean energy, creative industries, defence, digital, life sciences, and professional services. To grow they all need access to capital, and, in theory, a strong banking sector makes sense.
As we have seen before, the banks are likely to use whatever newfound freedoms they are granted to further finance property lending, rather than supporting businesses who produce goods and services. This is exactly what they did in the lead-up to the GFC, inflating one of the biggest property market bubble in history
Mortgages still account for >50% of all UK bank lending, whereas outstanding credit to non-financial corporations – and for manufacturing in particular – is modest in comparison.
If the economy cannot grow to a level were it generates sufficient revenues for the government to improve the public sector, especially the NHS, the other option is tax increases.
The question is, as always, who pays?
Whilst, along with other commentators and politicians, I have championed the idea of a wealth tax, I fear that, in practise, it fails, because it will be inefficient, and trap the least able whilst the most able escape.
To better explain, the real issue for many is the burgeoning wealth of the uber rich. Everyone will have their own definition of that term, for today I will use $1bn+.
The issue is that billionaires can be transient, relocating to tax jurisdictions that best suit them. Secondly, they have financial muscle to afford the best tax planning.
If, as is suggested, the UK levies a wealth on net assets over £10m, it will catch a lot of people who cannot avoid it, whilst the uber rich do just that. Also, the definition on “net” is clearly important.
A similar point has been made by Ray Dalio, a US billionaire who founded the hedge fund Bridgewater Associates, who said that the UK government’s need to increase taxes was “driving people away. They move for their capital reasons.”
“A deterioration in conditions, as the financial problems and the social problems worsen, [is] having the effect of causing people with money to leave. That’s a problem because – I don’t know the exact numbers in the UK, but they’re analogous to the US – 75% of income taxes are paid by the top 10%.”
“So if you lose 5% of the population in that category, half of those people, you lose 35% or more of the tax revenue.”
The actual figure in the UK is 60% (Source: IFS).
So, the uber rich will avoid tax by leaving. Then who pays? Those that can’t afford to leave? Ideal, inequality will just keep on growing because the uber rich do as they please!
Ultimately, some has to pay, a subject I covered in more detail last year in “No One Wants to Pay”.
There is a simple reality in you want better services then someone has to pay. As in war, when it’s “the poor bloody infantry”, it will be those with the least who suffer, whilst those with the most hide in plain sight from frightened governments and self-interested politicians
“He really wasn’t where it’s at
After he took from you everything he could steal?”
‘This week we look in greater detail at the humanitarian crisis in Gaza, triggered by Israel’s inhuman treatment of noncombatants.
As a result, more and more countries, ourselves, France and Canada are preparing to recognise the Palestinian state.
As a result, over in Orange Country, Trump is intensifying his trade war with Canada, posting on his Truth Social platform:
“Wow! Canada has just announced that it is backing statehood for Palestine. That will make it very hard for us to make a Trade Deal with them. Oh’ Canada!!!”
Trump is set to impose a 35% tariff on all Canadian goods not covered by the US-Mexico-Canada trade agreement if the two countries do not reach an agreement by the deadline.
Domestically the focus is on the NHS, which, as I highlighted “Hate to Say I Told you So”, is a key concern for the electorate. Unfortunately, it looks set to become a battleground over the summer as both resident doctors and nurses seek pay rises.
A vote among members of the Royal College of Nursing showed that 91% rejected the offer of a 3.6% rise.
A poll by YouGov this week found that 47% strongly or somewhat supported nurses going on strike over pay, while 43% said they would strongly or somewhat oppose that.
The Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC”) said: “After receiving two above-inflation pay rises from this government, new full-time nurses will earn £30,000 in basic pay for the first time this year so it’s disappointing that RCN members are dissatisfied with this year’s pay rise.”
Unfortunately, stats for the full year from 2024, show that the median UK salary for full-time employees is £37,430 per year, (Office for National Statistics).
As I have written many times before we can either have the NHS we want or the NHS we are prepared to pay for!
Who will pay? No one wants to … .plus ca change. It’s called austerity!
Lyrically, its Bob Dylan week. After all, if you want protest, who’s better. We start with “Blowin’ in the Wind”, and finish with Like a Rollin’ Stone”.
Enjoy, it’s summer! Philip.’
@coldwarsteve
Philip Gilbert is a city-based corporate financier, and former investment banker.
Philip is a great believer in meritocracy, and in the belief that if you want something enough you can make it happen. These beliefs were formed in his formative years, of the late 1970s and 80s
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