2025 Remembered U to Z

As we are at the fag end of 2025, it's that time when we look back at what has happened and remember the good, the bad and the Ugly of the last 12 months.   

U - Utah - I guess hardly anyone outside of the USA would have heard of Charlie Kirk until September and then he got shot and killed at a campus event in Utah. By all accounts he was a conservative activist who championed right-wing ideas such as calling the Covid prohibitions a plot against Christianity, Trump won the 2020 election, called abortion murder that should be illegal, said women should follow the biblical model in relationships, called the Civil Rights Act a huge mistake and opposed gay marriage but gun rights is where he shone and was the topic of conversation when he was shot and killed. He had said that the gun deaths every single year in the US are worth the cost to have the Second Amendment. I assume he meant the death of other people and not his own.

V - Virginia Guiffre - Of all the many Jeffrey Epstein victims, Virginia Guiffre was probably the most prominent and she stood up to some powerful figures including the British Royal Family which resulted in Prince Andrew's downfall but acted as a sad reminder of the great consequences to anyone who speaks out about their abuse by the powerful as the weight of so much publicity must have been immense which is a reason why victims are not keen to speak publicly because of the tremendous risks and consequences they face pointing the finger but to her credit Guiffre did although in doing so it ultimately led to her suicide.

W - Weight Loss Jabs - Became very much a thing in 2025 and as a report from The World Health Organisation put 1 in 8 people in the world obese, very welcome.  The NHS recommended some and their figures showed that 500,000 people were receiving weight-loss injections but you could access the most popular, Mounjaro, for £122 a month privately. Pharmaceutical companies being greedy buggers then whacked the price up to £247.50 a month and so many users switched to the cheaper £75 per month Wegovy, they lost over 50% of their UK business overnight.

X -  X (Formerly Twitter) - Elon Musk was too busy filleting the American public service for his erstwhile buddy Donald Trump early in the year to pay too much attention to his personally owned media platform where usage dropped 13.3% from 148.5 million daily active users to 128.8 million as X went further down the toilet, with algorithms geared towards the bonkers far right and anti-immigrant sentiment and since Musk paid $44 billion for it in 2022, it is now valued at just $9 billion.

Y - Your Party - As a lefty i was happy to see  that Jeremy Corbyn and Zarah Sultana were cobbling together a Left Wing Party and with those two who were further left than the Labour Party running the show it would be proper Left Wing and although the roll out has been painfully slow, it has got 600,000 members and the Mission Statement on the new Parties website gives us a glimpse of what we can expect and while reading it my first thought was, wow, reads like something I had written because that pretty much hits every subject i have been raging against for decades so the Party ticks every box for mee and then at the Conference they voted on a name...and decided to stay with the awful Your Party.

Z - Zelenskyy - Nobody cares more about people than Donald Trump so when the beleagured Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy arrived at the White House in March, US President Donald Trump treated him like he would a Moscow hotel mattress. Credit to Volodymyr Zelenskyy as in the face of being ambushed by Vice President Ding-a-Ling who launched into the Ukrainian for being ungrateful and not saying Thank you to America enough. Trump, then joined in and berated the Ukrainian for not wanting to sign a peace deal and hating Putin while shouting down the Ukrainian President and Trump going off on one about playing cards while in Red Square, if you listened carefully, you could hear the sound of deranged laughter coming from the Kremlin and a voice saying: Agent Trump, you did good (and the Pee tape remains in the safe...for now).