So, that was 2025. Well, it still is (just), but you know what I mean. I thought I would do something a bit different and give you my A to Z of 2025.
Let’s get the snowball rolling, and start with the letter A…
The Canary’s A to Z of 2025: let’s start at the beginning
2025 heralded the emergence of austerity 2.0. Labour refused to bury Tory fiscal rules, with Rachel Reeves preaching “economic responsibility” while unemployment rose and young people got shafted. Isn’t this just a case of pain for the poor and champagne for the rich?
Welcome to Starmer’s Britain.
B in my A to Z of 2025 sees us move ever-so-slightly to the right to dedicate a few words to Kemi Badenoch. Who? She’s in charge of the Tories these days, by all accounts. She’s full of the usual imperialist sabre-rattling with stuff like slashing green spending to prepare for war, but will she still be ‘leading’ the Tories when the next general election comes around?
Not when there’s a super lucrative after-dinner speech circuit where the likes of JP Morgan will pay you an astronomical amount of cash for a few right-wing pearls of wisdom and a couple of jokes about that knob, Boris Johnson.
There are quite a few for the letter C, yes, but the comeback of cronyism and corruption has seen Labour drowning in an ocean of sleaze.
Rachel Reeves’ rent scandals, Angela Rayner’s tax shenanigans, and of course, freebies galore. After promising to be whiter than white, Labour has recycled Tory vices, eroding trust while the dark money keeps on flowing.
On to the letter D, and this takes us to defections.
Starmer’s centrist purge triggered a mass exodus, with five Brent councillors bolting to the surging Greens in December over Gaza complicity, welfare cruelty, and climate cowardice, while former North of Tyne metro mayor Jamie Driscoll joined the Greens, exposing Labour’s abandonment of real progressive values as rats flee the vile sinking Blairite wreck for real left-wing alternatives.
E through to H
E takes us to employment rights in my A to Z of 2025. The Employment Rights Bill eventually limped into law.
It might’ve been a watered-down win for unions, but zero-hour contracts lingered and fire-and-rehire persisted. These are typically pathetic and inadequate half-measures from a pathetic and inadequate government that is genuinely scared of big business.
No prizes for guessing which frog-faced-fascist takes the plaudits for the letter F. The Farage freak show has seen Reform UK top the polls for much of 2025.
But will this lead hold, following racism allegations from his school days, election overspending probes, and donors tied to Putin propaganda? Farage is a populist poison infecting politics. The way to beat Farage is born out of hope. You will not beat Reform UK by trying to out-Farage, Farage.
The letter G can only really be dedicated to the Green Party, under the leadership of Zack Polanski.
The Greens have surged on defections and local election wins, as progressives fled Starmer’s right-wing monstrosity. Real eco-socialism versus Labour’s tepid net-zero talk? There’s only one winner.
I’ll give the letter H to housing, although hunger strikes deserve a special mention.
Waiting lists continue to rise, rents skyrocketed and where is the desperately needed mass council house building? Labour tinkered while private landlords and speculators profited from the crisis they helped create.
I, J, K, L
Moving on to I, the first thing I think of is immigration and the intensification of the scapegoating of refugees and asylum seekers.
Labour toughened its rhetoric to chase Reform voters while far-right riots echoed. There is no challenge to the hostile environment – just more divide-and-rule, synonymous with fourteen years of Tory failures.
J takes us to the Junior Doctors in my A to Z of 2025.
The strikes are a righteous and necessary act of working-class resistance against a healthcare system ravaged by years of Tory austerity and now perpetuated by Labour’s timid centrism under Keir Starmer, who dares to label these actions “dangerous”. What *is* dangerous is drastically underfunded hospitals, staff burnout, and patient deaths from systemic neglect.
I think we can only give K to Keir Starmer and the staggering kapitulation that has seen his own personal approval ratings tank amid embracing fiscal conservatism, cuts to support for disabled people, and genocide complicity. Remember, Labour will be twenty points ahead under anyone but Jeremy Corbyn.
I won’t do the lazy thing and use L for Labour, particularly when we can talk about lobbyists.
Labour ministers met fossil fuel lobbyists from giants like BP, Shell, and Equinor over 500 times in their first year. The party’s conference was a lobbyist feeding frenzy, thick with representatives from oil, gas, defence contractors, big banks, and gambling firms.
This is no less than a profound betrayal of Labour’s progressive roots. And let’s not forget the Labour Friends of Israeli genocide, funnelling hundreds of thousands to senior ministers like Yvette Cooper and David Lammy, correlating with a shamefully muted criticism of the atrocities in Gaza and continued arms sales to the pariah state.
M is for…
M is for majority in my A to Z of 2025. Like many of us said at the time, Keir Starmer’s massive parliamentary majority was built upon quicksand.
There was no real enthusiasm for Labour, they only needed core voters to turn up and vote. The majority was all about a hatred of the Tories. Once everyone worked out Starmer was little more than a middle-manager, and a shit one at that, the majority crumbled quicker than a house of cards built on corporate bribes and centrist lies.
Starmer’s sleaze-ridden regime alienated its base faster than Thatcher crushed the unions. Imagine Cosplaying Tory austerity after fourteen horrific years.
That’s how to piss away a landslide.
Moving on to the letter N, and it’s NHS neglect.
Clinging on to Tory austerity like a fucking parasite, refusing to tax the filthy rich to pump real money into a service gutted by 14 years of Conservative sabotage, instead peddling pathetic “reforms” that shove more private profiteers through the back door while patients rot in corridors, mental health sufferers wait a dozen times longer than the physically ill — all as waiting lists barely budge — over a million endure humiliating corridor care, and burnout drives doctors to strike in desperation.
“Vote Labour to save your NHS”? Labour are not the saviours of public healthcare, but hollow managers accelerating privatisation, normalising a mortal mess of understaffing and death-by-neglect, selling out NHS workers and the sick and vulnerable to capitalist vultures.
We have arrived at the letter O, and I immediately think of Farage and Reform UK’s blatant election overspending outrage in Clacton, exposing the far-right charlatan’s “anti-elite” grift as nothing but a smokescreen for rule-bending hypocrisy while he pockets dark money from Putin-linked donors.
How ironic is it that the Trumpian toad has spent years railing against “establishment corruption”, only to embody it? I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again. Farage isn’t draining the swamp, he is one of the slimy creatures that are thriving in it.
P and so on in the A to Z of 2025
Next, I’ll have a P please, Bob. You probably need to be as old as me for that to make sense.
But someone that has made an incredible amount of sense in 2025 is the Green Party leader, Zack Polanski.
Sure, I have my reservations, and while I often forget what I had for breakfast yesterday, my long-term memory isn’t quite so shabby. But it cannot be denied, Polanski has turned the Greens around from being a local election protest vote to leading the Labour government in the polls by doing and saying the right things, and to me this means we will have at least one credible left-wing party to vote for at the next general election, and the local elections scheduled for 2026.
Q in the A to Z of 2025?. Hmmm. The Queen has been brown bread for a while, so there’s not much I can say for the old bird, but I can say something about Starmer’s quiet complicity on Gaza.
History will not be kind to leaders who showed moral cowardice in the face of genocide. Gently condemning Israeli barbarism on one hand while opening the front door of 10 Downing Street to Israeli government war criminals with the other epitomises what Labour has become under the stewardship of spineless Starmer.
R isn’t quite so tricky. Reeves’ rental racket, the rise of Reform UK, Angela Rayner, rebellions and resignations, an electoral rout in Runcorn, refusing to adequately tax the rich, imagine Jonathan Ross reeling through that lot!
2025’s R’s reveal Labour as rotten to the core, a Blairite revival selling out socialism for sleaze, repression, and Reform’s shadow.
Swiftly shuffling along to the letter S, and 2025 has proven to be the year of strike action.
From the hunger strike by Palestinian Action activists facing prolonged pre-trial detention as a deliberate tactic to silence dissent against Israel’s actions and UK arms sales to the NHS resident doctors (formerly known as junior doctors) who began their five-day industrial action this past week. London Underground also saw major industrial action from RMT workers in September, the bin disputes in Birmingham rumbled on, and sixth form colleges have seen ongoing action by National Education Union members in colleges over pay parity and funding.
T is for Tories in a tailspin
T isn’t going to be particularly difficult in this A to Z of 2025, at least all of the time the Tories continue to tailspin into an extremist cult.
Badenoch and her cabal think their best hopes of a recovery are hidden between culture wars and defence splurges, but in reality, the Tories are dying under the weight of their own ideology. It’s just a shame they have to drag political discourse so far to the right on their way out.
The letter U leads me to unemployment, which rocketed to a pandemic-era high of 5.1% by October, hammering young and low paid workers hardest in a grim echo of Tory cuts of years gone by.
Starmer’s Labour peddled fiscal restraint over job creation, leaving millions in poverty while big corporations hoarded their profits. Centrism always leads to the betrayal of poor and working class people.
We come to the letter V, and it’s the Violence Against Women and Girls strategy.
Starmer’s docile clowns finally coughed up their long-delayed, gutless VAWG strategy this month. This “national emergency” declaration was full of flashy talk of halving misogynistic violence in a decade, school lessons on porn vs reality for boys as young as 11, and cracking down on deepfakes. But in typical Starmer style, it’s a pathetic, seriously underfunded farce that campaigners slammed as falling “seriously short,” barely scratching the surface while austerity-starved refuges close and patriarchal poison festers unchecked.
You can probably think of a word beginning with W that perfectly describes Keir Starmer, but I can think of a few others that have graced the political scene in 2025.
Starmer’s cruel thugs slashed winter fuel payments for millions of vulnerable pensioners to save a few pennies, leaving OAPs freezing in fuel poverty amid soaring energy bills — only to U-turn in panic after electoral slaughter and backbench fury. Then there’s welfare whacks dressed up as “reforms”, waiting list woes for Wes, a windfall tax wimp-out, and watered down workers rights, just in case you wanted a few more.
What’s last on the Canary’s A to Z of 2025?
I remember when I thought the only word in the world beginning with X was xylophone.
But 2025 has seen an explosion in xenophobia with Farage’s dog-whistles and Reform’s anti-refugee bile normalising hate and Labour’s absolute failure to confront it head-on has allowed the poison to spread.
The letter Y brings us to a youth that is yearning for an alternative. Disproportionate unemployment and despair drove young people away from the Labour Party towards Polanski’s Green Party.
And that brings us to the letter Z, and the editor might just get home in time for New Year, once they manage to wade through this lot.
Z can only go to the Zionist lobby and their slimy tentacles that have strangled UK politics with more than £1 million in pro-Israel cash flooding Parliament to buy off one in four MPs who will happily parrot Tel Aviv’s genocidal playbook on Gaza.
That brings us to the end of my A to Z of 2025, and all that’s left for me to do is wish everyone a very happy New Year, and thank you for taking the time to read and share my thoughts and those of everyone at the Canary throughout 2025.
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