Once again, another embarrassing and tragic year for our species has passed.
Firstly, let us start off with the genocide in Gaza, where the death toll passed 70,000, which includes 20,000 children and not yet counted the many thousands who remain under 50,000 tonnes of rubble. We have a ceasefire where all the October 7 hostages, alive and dead, have been returned to their families. However, hundreds continued to be killed by the IDF, and no one in the international community seems to care, let alone our Human Rights Prime Minister, Keir Starmer, who seems to suffer from anomic aphasia, unable to use the word genocide, and no, I’m not going to give him credit for recognising Palestine. The so-called peace plan concocted by Witless and Kushner is more like a real estate deal, ignores the violence perpetrated by far-right settlers in the West Bank, and kicks Palestinian self-determination into the very long grass. The genocide in Gaza is a stain on the conscience of the international community and our so-called democratic leaders. If the so-called “Chosen People “believe that Netanyahu is their new Moses rather than an indicted war criminal, and it is he who is going to lead them to security and a new promised land by annexing Gaza and the West Bank, you are sadly deluded. Clearly, Israeli’s need their very own Road to Damascus moment; however, now only 20% of Israeli’s believe in the creation of a Palestinian State.
Ukraine, well, it took me a few weeks to get over the dressing down of Zelinsky by Trump and Vance at the White House, and quite frankly, nothing has changed. Trump embraces Putin with a red-carpet visit, threatens him with further sanctions if he does not stop the invasion and then does nothing. He promises Zelensky long-range missiles and then fails to deliver and tells Zelensky he has no cards to play. This footsy with Putin clearly feels like Putin has something on Trump, and maybe it is the “Pee Tape,” sometimes referred to as the “Golden Shower.” The peace plan (a Russian/Putin wish list) agreed to by Steve Witless (a real estate developer) is a surrender plan that asks Zelensky to capitulate. This so-called peace plan is also about what is in it for me, me being Trump and his oligarchs. This plan even sticks in the throat of many Republicans. Representative Brian Fitzpatrick, Republican of Pennsylvania and a co-chair of the Congressional Ukraine Caucus, described the plan as “Russia’s absurd wish list,” and called for it to be “shredded for the garbage that it is.” No sign of a Nobel Peace Prize yet. The problem remains that the Biden Administration, the Trump administration, the Germans, and others in Europe have singularly failed to give Ukraine enough and the type of military assistance to give Putin a bloody nose. We will talk about Europe and the UK later. The reality is that Putin will continue to accept casualties in the millions because he believes that European and the US’s support will begin to crumble, adding another client state to his list. Ukraine’s success on the battlefield is key to European security. Just a thought, Europe and the US should try and persuade India not to buy Russian at reduced cost, savings as reported in India Today, the country $17.0 billion, that is 5 billion per year, another way to use Russia’s frozen assets.
We also have the tragedy that is the Sudan civil war, which has seen millions displaced and millions killed over many years. The Rapid Support Forces have been accused of genocide and using sexual assault and rape as a weapon of war by the UN and Human Rights Watch. This is a war about who controls mineral-rich regions where oil and gold are in abundance. It is also a proxy war between Sunni and Shia, funded by the UAE and Iran, who care little about the millions who have been displaced and killed. We in the West focused on the dreadful plight of Gazans but cared less for the suffering of millions of “Black Folk “in Africa. This can be seen by the billions cut from foreign aid by the Trump administration and the billions cut by Sunak and a Labour Prime Minister who is allegedly steeped in the issues relating to Human Rights.
Europe / the EU has proved one important thing, its impotence on the international stage. Firstly, its inability to call out genocide in Gaza, something that any decent human could see, including Peter Beinhart, Omer Bartov and Jewish Human Rights organisation B’Tselem. In addition, its inability to supply Ukraine with necessary military hardware and is unable to agree on the use of €300 billion of frozen Russian assets to support Ukraine. Europe is way behind the US with no European companies in the top 10 in the development of AI, chip manufacturing, social media or cloud computing and where its share of global GDP over time has fallen from 25% to just 16% and spends only 1.9% of its entire GDP on defence, hard power, hardly. The EU, as currently constituted, is not fit for the future, and Germany has been part of the problem. Think of this, the market cap of Nvidia is the size of Germany’s GDP, which is $5.0 billion. If the goal of the EU is “strategic autonomy” as suggested by Macron, the question is not are we there yet, it is, when do we get the foot down? Like many democracies, the EU continues to see the rise of far-right populist parties that have no deliverable solutions for anything. In my personal view. Orban’s Hungary and his allies in the EU should be set adrift until their electorates wake up to their electoral autocracy and creeping authoritarianism. So, it is worth keeping an eye on next year’s Hungarian election. The current picket fence parties are unable to provide a new political narrative around social cohesion and are handcuffed by the mean-spirited and trickle-down Hayekian neoliberalism, and, funny enough, it is this that may be taking us on the Road to Serfdom.
In the UK, we elected a new Labour Government on the promise of grown-up politics and at the helm for the past year and a half has been a Prime Minister with no charisma, political nouse, let alone a vision for the UK in a multi-polar and changing world. He seems to have embraced the Peter Principle: you promote people to the level of their incompetence. Proof: Rachel Reeves and Morgan McSweeney, to name a few. U turn after U turn on the two-child limit, taxes on working people and giving those working people not fiscal headroom but a fiscal headbutt. Honestly, Labour would have been elected without a manifesto, though the one they produced was thin but stupid, saying that they would not increase taxes on working people, whoever the hell working people are. By the way, I consider myself part of the working people tribe. The UK is and has been in decline for some time, with its share of global GDP declining from 5% in 2004 to 1.7% by 2030, and the Office for Budget Responsibility predicting UK growth would be an average of under 1.5% over the next 3 years. His embrace of “Techno Continent,” which includes Nvidia, Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Anthropic, and Palantir, is worrying, as they have a combined market cap four times the size of the UK economy. Palantir, set up by Peter Thiel, wants to become the equivalent of a Central Bank for UK data, including all our NHS data, giving it demographic insights into our lives. This dystopian trajectory is being encouraged by Keir and his Clan, and they seem oblivious to the danger to democracy. Starmer and Reeves must go if the Labour Party have a snowball’s chance in hell of a second term. Badenoch and the Tories attack Labour as if they have been out of power for 15 years. Labour has such a flimsy and uninspiring policy agenda as if they were in opposition, and Reform has a policy platform that, without the word immigration, they would be speechless. Also, today, almost 60% the public believes Brexit was a mistake, surely an opportunity to make the case for closer cooperation with the EU along a range of fronts, economic, migration, defence, and strategic autonomy. Moreover, Starmer is attempting to remove jury trials for some offences, arresting 80-year-olds for protesting in favour of Palestine Action, and he seems like a man lost in today with no real vision for tomorrow. I would suggest he listen to Rutger Bergman’s Reith Lecture. The question that remains unanswered is, do any of our parties have the vision and the ability to explain to the electorate honestly, where we are as a nation, and what it would take to build a sustainable future? Whatever the answer, what we need as a nation is a grand coalition that updates Rousseau’s social contract, with social cohesion underpinning the way forward.
In the US IN 2024, we say the start of Trump’s second term, in which he had three goals: one, to use his status to rake in money for himself, his family and his acolytes through a variety of corrupt deals with the Saudi’s and others two, to practice on the American people his authoritarian instincts: implement the far right agenda under the guise of Project 25 and finally undermine the constitution and democracy itself. On this count, he has surrounded himself with a bunch of ass kissing oligarchs who, like him, do not give a dam about Trump’s voters. This cabal are billionaires who. want to be multi-billionaires and multi-billionaires who want to be trillionaires. What the American electorate fails to see, which George Washington warned against, is the unchecked influence of wealth and the rise of powerful factions, what we call today a plutocracy. Of the four, he is working the hardest on one and two and to my despair, both republicans in Congress and Trump’s MAGA cohorts seem to be blind to his abuse of power and let me remind you, the destruction of the East Wing. Another worrying aspect is the growing influence of the far and disruptive right people like Peter Thiel, Curtis Jarvin, and Michael Anton, a MAGA intellectual, which seems like an oxymoron. These guys believe that society should be managed between a Hobbesian monarchical view and fascism. The Supreme Court has assisted in this journey with a decision in 2024, which has given Trump carte blanche as president, free from any repercussions, in shielding the president from accountability by allowing him to claim immunity for a wide range of official and unofficial acts. Long live the King. The Democratic Party gifted Trump his victory, or should I say Biden and Klian did and left word salad Kamala with an impossible task in the weird electoral college system. To date, I have not seen a credible democratic challenger for the next presidential election, but wait for I may have found that person: Rahm Emanuel and not because he was Obama’s Chief of Staff, though his governing experience is important, but because he has local government experience as a successful Mayor of Chicago, and international foreign policy and diplomatic experience as Ambassador to Japan. My advice to the Democrats is that Rahm should be the Democrats’” shoo-in” presidential candidate to challenge JD Vile in 2028. In the interim, Democrats need to win the midterms and preferably win both the House and the Senate, please! If that is achieved, then the Dems need to reassess where they sit on the political spectrum, are they the party of the college-educated, or do they need to embrace and reinterpret for this century, the words of the founding fathers? Walter Isaacson’s new book “The Greatest Sentence Ever Written” lays this out: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.”
Russia is on its economic knees because it is steeped in a war economy supported by China, and Putin cannot survive if the war ends because transition to a normal economy would be painful, to say the least. Putin’s narcissism, his Machiavellian instincts, and the loyalty of his oligarchs will maintain him in power. He will be a threat to Europe, a Europe that is militarily weak and unsure of Trump’s commitment to Article 5 of NATO.
China has been punching back hard against Trump’s tariff war, which has led to exports to the rest of the world increasing by 10% and further strengthening its growing domination in EVs. Trade and accelerating its investment in AI and other technologies to become technologically independent. Sadly, it wastes its geopolitical influence supporting a tyrant, a strategy that remains baffling. Its aggressive stance on the South China Sea remains, hostility towards Taiwan is simmering, and now a widening fissure is emerging with Japan and its neighbours. China’s political strategy seems like that of a schoolyard bully. China has a long way to go to displace the US as the world’s strongest economic power. Its GDP is $17,000 per capita, and the US has a GDP per capita of $68,000, let alone trying to replace the greenback as the world’s reserve currency. On the military front, the US spends almost $1.0 billion, representing a 4:1 ratio to China. To finish, America’s isolationism is helping China increase its influence, but on China’s terms. Just to be clear, China is an aggressive one-party state that has created a 1984 surveillance state.
India grows as a counter to China in Asia, and thankfully remains a vibrant democracy, and will soon be the 4th largest economy in the world, irrespective of Modi trying to stoke ethnic divisions. However, size is not all that matters; despite this mammoth achievement, India remains a poor country, with a GDP per capita, as reported by the Economist, of just $ 12,000, and a third of the population surviving on less than $4 a day. On the upside, its middle class now exceeds almost 500 million and new infrastructure and shiny new buildings are going up everywhere. India needs to manage its rocky relationship with its neighbour, Pakistan, a military dictatorship dressed up as a democracy. Trump has damaged America’s long-term relationship with India as a counterbalance to China over the issue of Russian oil. This goes against the geo-political interests of the US, but the Commander in Chief does not care. China is Pakistan’s new best friend; they are conducting joint military exercises and have a shared strategic adversary, which, funny enough, is India. India is on a long journey of economic development; however, it should be proud of being the world’s largest democracy despite Modi’s Hindu nationalism.
Africa, a continent that remains in turmoil as the civil war continues in Sudan and the ongoing conflict in the DRC. Both conflicts are about the control of valuable resources; it would not be unfair to describe both conflicts as a battle between cartels to the detriment of millions of ordinary Africans trying to eke out a living. It remains a continent built on the extraction of resources rather than building a value chain. An economic structure ripe for exploitation by companies across the global north. Throughout the continent, there were sham elections in Cameroon, Gabon and Guinea, and there is no sign of change coming with another rigged election in Africa’s second most populous country, coming soon, that’s Ethiopia. Adding to this instability are the huge cuts in US, EU, and UK aid, which will cost hundreds of thousands of lives on the continent, but not to worry, you know what I mean.
The Middle East has two parts: the oil-rich and autocratic bit, which includes Saudi Arabia, run by MBS, Qatar, and the UAE. All are using their fossil fuel wealth to buy Trump planes and invest in his scammy business. This also includes buying military hardware and the MBS promising $1.0 trillion in investment into US-based businesses. The other bit includes the theocracy, Iran, which, even after bombing its nuclear facilities, seems difficult to dislodge; Lebanon is trying to break away from the clutches of Iranian-backed Hezbollah, which has been weakened by Israel, and then there is Syria, which celebrates the removal of Assad 12 months ago, but doubt remains whether the new leader Ahmed Hussein al-Sharaa former al Qaeda commander can unify, rebuild the country let alone create a democracy. Add to this Israel’s genocidal aggression and Netanyahu’s desire to undermine Israeli democracy and the self-determination of the Palestinian people. The only saving grace is if the Israeli electorate takes the opportunity to remove Netanyahu, Gvir, Smotrich and their ilk in October 2026.
A couple of thoughts about my home, Northern Ireland. Some 27 years after the Belfast Agreement, which ended violent conflicts and injected us all with the drug called hope, what as really changed? We have crumbling public services, political ineptitude on a terrifying scale where intellectual capital and vision are lacking, and a system of government called a mandatory coalition, a sort of forced marriage. Irish unity and fighting to maintain the Union are more important than the welfare of our citizens. This can be seen in the appointment of the language commissioners, costing us the taxpayer £400,000 per annum and an additional £25 million over the next 5 years. Now these public representatives want fiscal devolution; you cannot be serious. Paul Givan, the dipstick masquerading as our education minister, quite frankly, is a disgrace to this province, unable to grasp or understand the necessary changes in our education system that will ensure that our kids have the necessary tools to navigate a complex future. His pilgrimage to Israel was a disgrace only surpassed by a visit to a school in the occupied territories. We have a political system not fit for purpose, in which we are over-governed and poorly served, otherwise described as an economic and political basket case, unfortunately maintained by us, the electorate. Our politicians waste weeks talking about damage to a portrait of an unhealthy-looking man that no one has heard of. My answer to that would be “no portraits here.” Then we had the virtue signalling of Sinn Féin over flying the Palestinian flag. I have written extensively on the genocide in Gaza, and what the Palestinian people need is not Sinn Féin playing identity politics, but resources to rebuild their lives. The DUP and Sinn Féin continue to propagate the old myth that working-class Billy and working-class Seamus have nothing in common. What they do have in common is to retain the current structure of government that maintains their hold on power, an effective political duopoly, and use the old British policy of divide and rule to do so. To be fair to the DUP and Sinn Féin, the other alternatives, which include the SDLP, UUP and Alliance, are hardly capable of breaking you out of their political hibernation or maybe DNR. To my friends in the 26 counties, do you really want a 32-county Ireland, or do you not think that making the Brits suffer for decades of colonialism is fun? PS: Claire Hanna(described as a very nice person)got an opportunity to ask a question at PMQs. She could have asked whether water charges would illicit borrowing to replace crumbling water infrastructure, or about underfunding of public services like education and the NHS; however, she asked whether both the Irish and British governments should work together to prepare for constitutional change. In an article I wrote, I rebranded the SDLP the Sad Democratic and Lacklustre Party. I sadly overestimate them, which calls for a further rebranding to the Sad Dozy and Lacklustre Party. I am on the political left, a social democrat. What the hell is the SDLP?
We have had another COP out in Brazil, where big oil has won again, slowing down the transition to renewables. A conference that achieved relatively very little saw the setting of a “Just Transition” mechanism and a new fund to protect tropical forests as a victory. They have another new target of $300 billion for adaptation and climate finance. The simple reality this falls way short of the $4-5 trillion that is needed to prevent a 2-degree rise in global temperature. The US was not in attendance, which was expected after Trump’s climate hoax rant at the UN. Issues around global income and wealth inequality were not on the agenda, which defies its link to the climate crisis and the coming mass migration from countries where living and feeding your family will be impossible.
Today, 1 % of the world’s population holds over 40% of the world’s wealth, while the next 50% hold 2% and 80% of the world’s population could suffer crop failure. Our Prime Minister had the audacity to travel to COP and to express his commitment to the climate crisis while cutting the international aid budget by billions. I suppose I will ask the same question as I asked last year, but this time I will give an answer. The question “Is humanity as a collective agent an illusion?” The answer is NO. Has Cop had its day? The answer is yes, but until we have another mechanism, this will have to do, apologies to this and coming generations.
In am going to finish my rant with a rant about AI. This is simply not about the technology, but who controls it and how they wish to manipulate us, the product. It has been clear that we, the public, have been used, scammed and abused by platforms such as Facebook, X, Amazon and Google to simply make a profit, fill the pockets of shareholders and pay their executives tens of millions in salaries, bonuses, and stock options engage in the art of tax evasion. This is described by Yanis Varoufakis as techno-feudalism. Pichai, Google CEO, had a package in 2022 of $226 million. Nadella, Microsoft CEO, received a package just short of $100 million in 2025, and Musk’s package was agreed by shareholders to the tune of $1.0 trillion.
A new breed of AI companies, such as ChatGPT and Anthropic, have now joined the show. We have given away personal data, and they have stolen creative talent, centuries of human experience and knowledge to feed the AI beast and sell it back to us. These companies, including Nvidia, have significant global economic and political clout. A sort of clout that only developed economies had in the past. The fantastic Nvidia, Amazon, Microsoft, Google, ChatGPT and Anthropic and Palantir have a combined market cap of $20 trillion. The EU’s GDP is, wait for it, $21 trillion. The power that these companies have on a global stage is mind-blowing, feared by countries that are unable or scared to regulate them. The result the consumer suffers from due to the lack of competition. All these companies reside in the US, and if another tries to regulate them, US trade officials will screw them with tariffs. In a sane America, which feels like an era a long time ago, antitrust laws were used to break up monopolies to protect consumers. Biden did try to invoke antitrust legislation through an executive order, but with little effect; governments have been caught in regulatory capture. A few examples: Uber entered the taxi business without needing a taxi licence; Airbnb wants to convert all accommodation available to rent in a city into an unlicensed hotel; Fintech is another name for an unregulated bank. They are not properly regulated because they are only an app. I cannot go into the manipulation piece in detail, but read the book called Enshittification by Cory Doctorow, which will open your eyes.
The last bit of AI I would like to talk about is the future of work. There is a myth touted by tech bros that jobs lost because of AI, particularly general or generative AI, will be replaced with new ones. The problem with that theory is that no one to date has told us what these new jobs will be, and will jobs lost be replaced on a one-to-one basis. MIT McKinsey and others have suggested that artificial general intelligence (AIG) in a few short years could replace 40% of manual, middle management, and cognitively repetitive jobs. CNBC reported that Amazon is looking to replace 600,000 warehouse employees with robots. The US employs around 165 million people; even if 25% were lost, that would be 40 million lost jobs, and at an average annual wage of $65,000, taking $2.5 trillion of spending power out of the economy. The constant refrain from policymakers is productivity. Clearly, AGI will boost productivity, but at what cost to social cohesion, what Maslow calls self-actualisation, social welfare provision and democracy itself, or shall we coin a new phrase, corpocracy. AI and related companies are valued in trillions exclusively based on ideas, information and data provided by the human species, inadvertently for free. The CEO of Anthropic, Dario Amodei, said Tax us or, as Bill Gates suggested, tax the robots based on how many jobs they are displacing. I agree, however, governments can only do this if they have smart regulators and the balls to do so. What I have suggested is the best-case scenario, and no country is immune to these changes. I am no Luddite and understand that AI can be a transformative technology in healthcare and bio science; however, if we still believe in a “society,” we cannot ignore its disruptive capacity.
Finally, let us look ahead to 2026. Sorry to say, it will look much like 2025 with Trump, Putin and Ji jousting and India trying to work out who its allies are. Europe and the UK are shouting from the sidelines,” Can we play?” No route to self-determination for the Palestinian people, with only hopelessness for another generation. Sudan’s misery will continue and be ignored, other than developed countries saying, “That’s terrible,” and Stop the Boats.” “Africa’s decade” never seems to materialise. The so-called developed countries, in which I include China, have still not joined the dots between climate breakdown, consumption, income and wealth inequality, shareholder tyranny, migration, the $3 a day that takes you out of extreme poverty and the 80 billion animals we kill every year to fulfil our desire for meat so, as we prevaricate, the planet burns.
I will finish by quoting a couple of sentences from the current Reith Lecturer, Rutger Bergman.
He quotes Antonio Gramsci in 1926, whilst in a cell during the reign of Mussolini, “The old world is dying and the new world struggles to be born, now is the time for monsters”.
Historian Edward Gibbon wrote about the fall of Rome: “Politicians who lack seriousness, elites who lack virtue and a society that mistook decadence for progress.
Bergman goes on to say, billionaires avoid tax, politicians perform instead of govern, media barons profit from lies and hatred, and as the Roman elite fiddled while Rome burned, our elites live stream the fire and monetise the smoke.
Three easy questions: Do you recognise us in any of the above quotes? Do you believe that humanity as a collective agent is an illusion? Do you think that we need to redefine the meaning of human flourishing? A call to action: “The future belongs to those who prepare for it today.” —Malcolm X.
Have a great festive season and a healthy and happy 2026, and let us keep talking because I am not going away, you know and apologies for the year’s longest blog.
Suneil Sharma
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7th December 2025
The Gob 
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