We in the UK know all about the influence of oligarchs and the advice given by Steve Bannon to Liz Truss, the only Prime Minister to be kicked out of office before a lettuce could rot. In her micro-tenure as the leader of this nation. She and then Chancellor of the Exchequer, Kwasi Kwarteng, cost the UK economy £20bn overnight through unfunded cuts to national insurance and stamp duty (property sales tax) following a mini-budget. The economy then lost a further £10 billion due to higher interest rates and government borrowing. The housing market has still not recovered from the damage done.
Richard Partington from The Guardian noted on October 20th 2022, after a run on sterling, and the gilt markets were in freefall, all while £300 billion was wiped from UK stocks and bonds:
“Rarely has a budget caused such political and economic damage.”
Her monstrosity of a budget delivered the biggest tax cuts since 1972, forcing the Bank of England to intervene. Richard noted:
The Bank of England intervened, promising to buy up to £65bn of government bonds to save the funds responsible for managing money on behalf of UK pensioners from collapse.
If you were looking for ACTUAL evidence of how the Trump economic agenda works in real life, the UK is the perfect case study. Americans need look no further than the UK. In 2016, BREXIT saw the implementation of Trump’s isolationist policy under the slogan ‘Take back control’. Since then, a conservative estimate of the cost to the UK economy now stands at close to £1 trillion. The combination of BREXIT and Truss’s unfunded tax bonanza for the rich has incapacitated the UK economy, and it was ALL done under a right-wing conservative government using the Trump economic model.
If you have a moment, it would be well worth listening to the speech below from the former CONSERVATIVE Prime Minister of the UK, 1990 to 1997. He is no advocate for the left; indeed, his administration saw Tony Blair’s Labour Party win a 1997 landslide General Election as his own agenda collapsed.
If the goal was to take back control, it was about as successful as making America great. They were slogans to distract the people while the rich emptied their pockets and stole their children’s future, while pointing the finger of blame at ‘the other’. It’s a playbook as old as time itself. It was a state-sponsored Ponzi scheme, and every day, families at the bottom of the pyramid paid the price for a right-wing wet dream. The UK was not an experiment for Trumpism; it was a victim of it, yet for some bizarre reason, Nigel Farage has convinced millions to buy into a repeat performance. I’ve been around the block a few times and NEVER, and I really do mean NEVER, have I seen so many people punching themselves in the face as they are kettled into economic slavery by the rich.
As someone who lives in the UK, I have seen the real-life consequences of the unbridled greed of the rich. I have been witness to the societal collapse that follows such egregious acts by the ultra-wealthy, as they widen an ever-expanding wealth gap, touted as necessary for economic growth and prosperity. Tax cuts for the rich have NEVER delivered economic growth, nor have they EVER paid for themselves. It’s a fairytale sold by the rich who claim the bottom 90% should trust them because they know what’s best.
Wealth has always been concentrated at the top. The children of the rich attend the best schools, have access to gold-plated healthcare, and can leverage their wealth to finance the purchase of yet more assets. The process repeats itself over and over. But that’s not enough; they also want the government to subsidise this process with tax cuts and corporate welfare. It’s precisely how they can weather any storm of their own making and profit from the economic carnage they leave behind, as the bottom 90% fight to survive, with little hope of building a better life.
I find myself always circling back to this video from 13 years ago, noting that what you see here is now worse than it was then
I have repeated time and again, I have no problem with people making profit from wealth creation. Those who innovate and create a vibrant economy should be handsomely rewarded for their efforts. Where I do have a problem is when they roll out the age-old ‘I have worked really hard for where I am today, and I deserve the riches I enjoy’. My problem is not that hard work shouldn’t be rewarded, but rather the correlation between hard work and wealth. The inference is that the poor and those lower on the ladder owe their fate to the fact that they don’t work hard enough, despite many working two or three jobs to put food on the table. The failure of the rich to recognise that they would have no wealth without the labour of those in the middle and the bottom is nothing if not predictable.
When COVID hit in 2020, and the rich hid away in their sealed-off gilded cages, who were designated ‘essential workers’? It certainly wasn’t Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg or Jeff Bezos; it was doctors and nurses, truck drivers delivering food, and, oh, grave diggers, whom Trump was determined to make great again. The rich were far too busy making sure they bought access to vaccines and treatments that kept them safe, while politicians were making millions from awarding PPE contracts to their friends and donors.
The critical point here is, there is no political solution to the tyranny of Trump. All that stands between Trump and his rule as emperor is the American people, and we must come to terms with that. Democrats have proved they are powerless, even when they have leverage to effect change. However, on the upside, the people will be able to flex their power once again on December 2nd, when if Aftyn Behn wins in Tennessee’s 7th District, it could chip away at the Republican majority, which will already face a reduction as Marjorie Taylor Greene retires on January 5th 2026. There also appears to be broader discontent from Republican caucus in the House. Jake Sherman, founder of Punchbowl News, shared the quote below on X an exchange with an ‘exercised senior Republican House Member’:
“This entire White House team has treated ALL members like garbage. ALL. And Mike Johnson has let it happen because he wanted it to happen. That is the sentiment of nearly all — appropriators, authorizers, hawks, doves, rank and file. The arrogance of this White House team is off putting to members who are run roughshod and threatened…..”
In my mind, there is no question that the Good Ship Trump is steaming towards the iceberg and it may hit before the 2026 midterms. The situation is so bad that, from healthcare subsidies to Ukraine to Venezuela, Trump is flapping around looking like the the incompetent fool people now believe he is. That’s before we discuss the economy. There are no wins on the horizon for him, so he is forced to retreat to lies and making stuff up like a child caught with his hand in the cookie jar. Each day Donald the duck grows more lame as the threat of impeachment looms ever more large on the horizon.
This is not just a domestic politics issue; oligarchy-driven extortion is a global disease. The one thing extreme wealth does is expand the economic influence of these fiscal predators beyond national boundaries. This is what we are seeing with Elon Musk’s attempts to destabilise democracy in Europe and elsewhere. These people are not happy with just controlling the economies of the countries in which they reside; they are seeking global dominance, using their extreme wealth to influence elections and buy politicians worldwide. Few would question that Musk purchased the White House for Trump, and that this was the catalyst for the tyranny Americans are now being forced to endure.
I know how insular Americans could be, even before Trump, but what needs to be understood is that this is a global mission for which the US is the headquarters, directing the assault. The wealth of billionaires surged by $2 trillion in 2024 alone, and as noted in an Oxfam Report from January 2025
Oxfam predicts there will be at least five trillionaires a decade from now.
204 new billionaires were minted in 2024, nearly four every week.
Oxfam estimates sixty percent of billionaire wealth is now derived from inheritance, monopoly power or crony connections, showing that “extreme billionaire wealth is largely unmerited.”
The financial system extracted $30 million an hour from the Global South to the richest 1 percent in the Global North in 2023.
I really do recommend that you download the Oxfam Annual Report from the link here. The report is called ‘Takers, Not Makers, The unjust poverty and unearned wealth of colonialism’. In this moment of global peril, I think it’s important to understand the broader impact of US actions. There is no better example of this than the shuttering of USAID. Data now shows that, as a result of this clearly racist action, over 600,000 people have lost their lives, many of them children. It’s like 10 Gaza genocides, this despite Marco Rubio’s claim that nobody has died as a result.
I know I’m throwing a lot of links at you today, but this link to a vital report in The New Yorker, which includes a must see short film called “Rovina’s Choice” by Thomas Jennings and Annie Wong, text by Atul Gawande. It’s a tough but essential watch.
There are times when we need to step outside the familiar ‘US political bun fight’ to examine the broader impact of isolationist actions on the vulnerable around the world. As a longtime supporter of Oxfam, I need to give voice to the issue they raise. For example :
[Wealth extraction accounts for] vast sums of money flowing from the Global South to countries in the Global North and their richest citizens, in what Oxfam’s report describes as modern-day colonialism.
Low- and middle-income countries spend on average nearly half of their national budgets on debt repayments, often to rich creditors in New York and London. This far outstrips their combined investment in education and healthcare. Between 1970 and 2023, Global South governments paid $3.3 trillion in interest to Northern creditors.
I know people retreat into the mindset of ‘We have enough problems of our own without worrying about the poor somewhere else in the world. However, what you need to understand is that despite what Trump tells you, we live in an interconnected world, and the US withdrawal from the world stage is leaving a huge void which China is more than happy to fill, and that is a BIG problem for the US, not just in a geopolitical sense, but also economically. That’s what we’ll discuss in my next post.
When the Greeks created the concept of Democracy, about 3000 years ago, they understood the simple fact that
if everyone has a decent life, their society has less problems.
If every citizen has enough income for a decent living their community has less crimes, less suffering and people are willing to work better,
produce more, and in consequence become a wealthy country. The differences between rich and poor being smaller,
insure in fact a more equitable distribution of wealth, and less unmerited poverty that the lower classes are forced into, despite their hard work.
Capitalism as it is understood and proliferated by Americans is a self destructive society that has an expiration date self inflicted.
The huge difference between the poor and the wealthy cannot be repaired by any means today and it is only going to be worse.
I can only imagine a system where the very wealthy to be reduced to 1% of their money, and the rest to be confiscated
by the government as illegitimate accumulation of wealth, and reinvested in economy, creating jobs,
replacing the infrastructure with an efficient system that is working for the majority.
Socialism? No, but a fair practice to be applied to everyone making more than a billion, and even that is a generous amount.
We must also rethink the life of a politician and how they can become one! Age limit, over 35, a moral and successful professional
with proved results and feedback from employees about practices and behavior in a leading role.
No career politician allowed in government, only proved experienced people that have the character, and the education, leadership qualities
that can deserve to lead a country.
No private money involved in sponsorship, equal funds for all candidates and elected by proved merit not the money they have to pay for votes!