James Wilson Esq.

See those ex-smokers who are the most anti-smoking folk. That’s me, except I still smoke but I don’t Tory anymore.

[James Wilson Esq. @JimmyBobWilson]

@TrumpDailyPosts Apart from the capitalists.

[James Wilson Esq. @JimmyBobWilson]

The kids are alright!

[G.T @gingerrtom]

These kids from Clacton absolutely
cooked Nigel Farage here, and they speak more sense than any Reform voter I have ever heard. 🤣🤣🤣🤣

[James Wilson Esq. @JimmyBobWilson]

@FridoKala Good Evening!

[James Wilson Esq. @JimmyBobWilson]

Oh! The Humanity!

[LBC @LBC]

Solar power 'threatening to overwhelm electricity grid'- as households could be paid to use excess supplies of energy
https://t.co/XNunVDGtXd

[EuropeanPowell @EuropeanPowell]

Shakespeare spent a career inventing the worst people power could produce. Trump would have broken him.

Not because he’s more purely evil than Richard III. But because he’s all of them at once, and the play never ends.

Richard III charmed crowds while destroying rivals, performing populism as pure theatre. He was compelling, energetic, shameless. But Richard had a destination. He wanted the crown, got it, and then the paranoia consumed him. Trump has been running the same con for 40 years and is still adding acts.

Iago destroyed people as sport. Not for gain, for the pleasure of watching the wreckage. “I am not what I am” is his mission statement. When Trump casually posts about bombing a civilization back to the Stone Age, or throws his own most devoted followers under the bus for failures that are entirely his, that’s Iago energy. Pure, recreational destruction.

Macbeth climbed over bodies to reach the top. But Shakespeare gave Macbeth a conscience, the daggers, the ghost, the sleeplessness. Trump is Macbeth without the haunting. The bodies are there. The sleeplessness isn’t.

Lear demanded loyalty oaths and raged when the wrong people gave them. He surrounded himself with flatterers and called honesty betrayal. He humiliated the faithful and rewarded the sycophants, until the sycophants turned. Every MAGA loyalist who has been casually sacrificed on Truth Social knows exactly how Cordelia felt.

Falstaff gave us the blueprint for using buffoonery as political armour. “I’m just joking” as a force field. Bluster as strategy. The crowd loves the performance so much they forgive the con. Shakespeare eventually had Prince Hal reject Falstaff, the moment the crown got serious, the clown got banished. That reckoning hasn’t come yet.

And then there’s the collateral damage, which is where Trump genuinely breaks the Shakespearean model.

Shakespeare’s villains destroy people on the way to something. Richard needs enemies eliminated. Iago needs Othello ruined. The destruction is instrumental.

Trump’s collateral damage sees entire agencies hollowed out. Alliances of 80 years dissolved in an afternoon. Families separated at borders. Allies publicly humiliated. Economies destabilised by a 3am post. The destruction isn’t the means. Sometimes it just happens, because that’s the weather around him.

Shakespeare understood that great villains need one fatal flaw, the single crack that the tragedy pours through. Richard’s paranoia. Macbeth’s conscience. Iago’s obsession. Each man was brought down by the very engine that drove him.

Trump has all the flaws and none of the consequences.

That’s not a Shakespearean villain.

That’s something Shakespeare never wrote, because he wouldn’t have believed the audience would accept it.

And neither should we.

A villain who combines every archetype, operates at the scale of a superpower, and keeps getting more acts.

The play doesn’t end.

That’s the most terrifying line Shakespeare never wrote.

[Josh Hunt @iAmJoshHunt]

People have been telling me I’m being overly negative about this country. Too pessimistic. Too doom-laden.

I thought I was holding back. So let me lay it all out.

Welcome to the age of compounding crises.

Housing. Average home costs 8x the average salary. A generation locked out. Prices can’t fall without crashing the banks. Can’t rise without locking out more people.

Water. £85 billion extracted in dividends since privatisation. £70 billion in debt loaded onto companies sold debt-free. Victorian pipes leaking billions of litres. Raw sewage discharged for 3.6 million hours in a single year. Bills rising 36% by 2030.

Energy. Net importer. No sovereign strategy. One Gulf crisis and it costs the taxpayer £78 billion in emergency subsidies.

Pensions. One of the worst state pensions in the developed world. Trillions in unfunded public sector liabilities off the books. Median private pot £32,700. You need ten times that. 43% undersaving. The triple lock ratchets costs up automatically with no mechanism to bring them down.

NHS. 7.25 million on the waiting list. Staff leaving. Buildings crumbling. Cancer targets missed. Social care barely exists. A two-tier system emerging. A demographic wave about to make it all worse.

Transport. HS2: £66 billion for 140 miles. Spain built 2,500 miles for $70 billion. We pay 8.5x the European average and deliver a fraction of the result. Roads falling apart. The North still waiting.

Local government. Over half of councils expect bankruptcy within five years. Funding cut 29% in real terms since 2010. Libraries, youth services, social care… gone or going.

Public finances. Debt approaching 97% of GDP. Interest payments exceed the defence budget. Taxes at their highest since the 1940s. Spending plans include cuts the OBR says may be undeliverable.

Productivity. Flat for eighteen years. Worst record since the Industrial Revolution.
Economic inactivity. 1 in 5 working-age people not working. 2.8 million out sick, a record. The only G7 country with lower employment than before the pandemic.

Food. We import 48% of what we eat. 83% of our fruit. 12% of households are food insecure. One supply chain shock and the shelves thin out. We’ve seen it twice already and fixed nothing.

Education. School buildings crumbling. Teachers leaving. £267 billion in student debt, most of which will never be repaid.

Defence. Procurement Parliament called “broken and repeatedly wasting billions.” Equipment plan £19 billion short. A war in Europe and no money to respond properly.

Prisons. 72% overcrowded. Hit 99.7% occupancy. Nearly 40,000 released early because there was nowhere to put them. 23,000 cells don’t meet fire safety standards. Cost to fix: £2.8 billion. Allocated: £520 million.

Car finance. Biggest mis-selling scandal since PPI. 12 million agreements with hidden commissions. £7.5 billion in expected compensation. Another bill landing on an industry already stretched.

Regional inequality. London pulling away from everywhere else. A country where your postcode determines your life expectancy, school quality, job prospects and access to healthcare.

Underneath all of it, the same pattern. Sell the asset. Load it with debt. Extract the value. Defer the maintenance. Hand the bill to the next generation.

None of this is unfixable. This country has the talent and the people to turn every one of these around. But that requires a political class willing to be honest about the scale of what’s broken. What we have instead is a political class that would rather keep us fighting each other than confront the structural failures staring them in the face. Because fixing them is hard, unpopular, and takes longer than an electoral cycle. So they commission a review, blame the last lot, and nothing changes.

I’d love to be more optimistic. And the history and people of this country still make me somewhat hopeful. But our politics needs to drastically change if we’re going to get anywhere.

[James Wilson Esq. @JimmyBobWilson]

@skedeschi @a_abdulruhman Y tho?

[Canary @TheCanaryUK]

This is madness.

[Science girl @sciencegirl]

In your opinion what is the biggest threat to humanity

[James Wilson Esq. @JimmyBobWilson]

.@labourlewis bringing the goods on @BBCPM.
#Chapeau

[Ben Jennings @BJennings90]

Latest @guardian cartoon

https://t.co/ycPn4ttMyu

[James Wilson Esq. @JimmyBobWilson]

Excellent work this!

[Grizelda Cartoons @GrizeldaG]

Exciting political cartoon!
@PrivateEyeNews

[Matt Davies @MatttDavies]

Plane To See. https://t.co/AbvotV7qZk

[James Wilson Esq. @JimmyBobWilson]

"If you can convince the lowest white man he's better than the best colored man, he won't notice you're picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he'll empty his pockets for you."
Lyndon B. Johnson

[Ben Jennings @BJennings90]

Latest @guardian cartoon

https://t.co/rFopZVy8SJ

[James Wilson Esq. @JimmyBobWilson]

@JamesEFoster @KernowDamo Jings! That doesn’t even need any work by the excellent @wefail .

[Tjeerd Royaards @Royaards]

Shakedown. Cartoon for Trouw: https://t.co/OBmQkk8YE6

#Trump #Zelensky #Ukraine #mineralsdeal