Ah, Billy Joel. The piano man who once sang of an unstoppable blaze that’s been burning “since the world’s been turning.” Little did he know, decades later, we’d be taking frantic notes on how to handle the ever-growing conflagration.
As we step cautiously into 2025, it seems the heat has been turned up several notches, and all our attempts at controlling the flames have fallen somewhere between dire and dismal. If the political prognostications are to be believed—and they’re looking depressingly accurate these days—we might just need the world’s biggest fire extinguisher to keep this incoming year from resembling a global bonfire of sanity, sensibility, and solvency.
Let us begin across the pond at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, where, incredibly (or inevitably), Donald Trump will be reinserting himself behind the Resolute Desk on January 20th. The question, as always, is: who is he more resolute against—foreign adversaries, the US Constitution, or the hapless staffers caught in his crosshairs? He’s made it crystal clear he’s back, and he’s bigger, brasher, and bolder than ever. This is his re-coronation, after all. There’s something perversely admirable about the man’s chutzpah—like a pantomime villain who insists on returning season after season to rapturous boos from the stalls.
His supporters, of course, are more enthralled than ever, vigorously chanting about rigged elections and building new (or perhaps bigger) walls. They never stopped singing, “We didn’t start the fire,” because for them, The Donald is but a lightning rod. The fires are always someone else’s fault—China, Mexico, or the dreaded “mainstream media.” So pass the popcorn. This 2025 reboot of Trump: The White House Years might just be the box-office smash we’re all too exhausted to endure.
Meanwhile, back here in Blighty, it’s New Year’s Day, and the weather forecast is bleak— both figuratively and economically speaking. Whispers from the City suggest Rachel Reeves—the Labour Chancellor, or “the Iron Chancellor with rust around the edges,” depending on whom you ask—has been busy with her own brand of economic fireworks. We all prayed for grown-up economics: fair taxation, sensible spending, a balanced budget by the end of the century, maybe? Instead, we got a pyrotechnic show of tax hikes, missed targets, and the near-extinction of small businesses the entire UK farming community plus a potential brain-drain of entrepreneurs and income generators.
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