What a start to the dark days of winter.

The budget gave people in Northern Ireland little to be cheerful about.

The British Labour Party in power has reinforced its position that, while under Kier Starmer and Hilary Benn’s watch it is at heart a Unionist party. 

It has no intention of investing any hard cash in the project. The clear message was ‘That’s your lot, go sing for your supper'. 

Charges of discriminatory treatment don’t really apply where everyone is treated equally badly unless you view devolution from the viewpoint of imperialism and colonisation.

The same message applied to Scotland and Wales.

All the people of a lesser God than England are equally badly treated by a London-centric Government, including the good people of the North of England, whom the Government suspects are the offspring of illegal immigrants some centuries ago.

Israel, of course, will continue to get whatever it wants from a Government whose cabinet members are to a large extent officially signed up to the ‘ Friends of Israel’ lobby group. Keep your eye out for a mass exodus the nearer we get to the arrest of Netanyahu.

The Irish Government decided to make a run for a pre-Christmas election while Sin Féin are in diffs, to put it mildly, but couldn’t make up their mind on which day to hold it. It doesn’t say a lot about the current Taoiseach’s decision-making capacity.

A general election must be held within 30 days of dissolving the Dáil so if he had dithered any further, the people might have been voting on Boxing Day or else he would have just cut out the canvassing shenanigans and held the vote as soon as the list of candidates was published.

The election results in the USA will have a lot of politicians anxiously contemplating the potential shape of the next government south of the border.

Prepare for Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil to campaign bearing gifts, and enough right-wing Independents making it into the Dáil to keep fanning the flames of racism.

Unlike the North and the neighbouring island, the ‘Free State’ is currently rolling in cash not least because despite its best efforts to provide ‘Free lodgings’ to Apple Inc. they were forced by the mainland EU to accept the taxes properly owed to the State according to the EU but denied by Apple and Ireland.

Even before the first instalment of €3billion was lodged last week they had a stack of money to splash out on a budget to soften up the electorate.

A very long time ago, my granny used to give me a sixpenny piece which, relatively speaking was considered a fortune by both of us.

She would press it into the palm of my hand with her thumb while folding my fingers around it and telling me in hushed tones to spend it wisely and not all at once. We can but hope that whoever might be the next Taoiseach had a granny who provided similar advice and the additional financial ‘roughness’ of Apple’s belated €13billion will not be spent beefing up the already fattened calves but will be directed towards the homelessness crisis and enduring levels of poverty and in fulfilling their international obligations to refugees and asylum seekers. Don’t count on it.

In the week that was in it last week, with Mr. Trump’s triumphant return to the White House, readers may have missed the collapse of the German government.

The country which sees itself as the Strong Guy of the EU will probably also be unexpectedly holding an election before Christmas.

The coalition government has discovered it too has a multi-billion pound hole in the budget for next year and has fallen out over how to fill it.

With due respect to young Rory McIlroy (money and intelligence are not the same thing, Rory), it doesn’t require the genius of Simon Cox, who is a significantly ‘smarter’ man than Elon Musk, to figure out the cause of the hole in the money sock.

Like the US, both the UK and Germany spent a lot of money on weapons for Israel and Ukraine.

It has to come from somewhere to balance the books and minimise the borrowing.

Like the US and UK, the German government propose to take the money from those with the least ability to prevent them from doing so: children and parents dependent entirely or in part on social, welfare, low-paid workers who are immigrants; the elderly; the ill.

But who is to blame for Trump’s triumphant return to Washington as the 47th President of the USA?

Candidates are being lined up by the hour. The truth of the matter is that one by one, the people voted for him in greater numbers than for Harris because they believed they would be better off and safer with him than the Democrats. It doesn’t have to be true; it just has to be believed.

Harris asked people who knew it wasn’t true to vote for the genocide of Palestinians in order to protect the reproductive rights of women in the USA.

The women voters of the USA chose to stand with their sisters and brothers in Palestine.

Palestine mattered.

Some stayed home, some voted for Trump. Some voted for the Green Party candidate, Jill Stein.

I would have done that. New and better alternatives are needed to the two sides of capitalism.

Meanwhile, Zionism continues the 21st-century genocide relentlessly and with increasing malicious intent and hatred far beyond the bounds of insanity as an excuse.

The UN has effectively been expelled from Israeli-occupied territory and the most recent legislation being enacted is that surviving members of families where anyone is suspected of terrorism will be deported.

To where has not yet been announced. This is 1933-39 Germany. The difference being that the Governments of North America, Western Europe and Australia continue to finance and protect Israel, even to the point of impoverishing the common people of their own nations and denying basic humanity to the victims of the wars they are bankrolling.

It may be a hard winter coming, but still, we rise in hope of a better world.

It will come if we believe in it enough to build it. One person, one day, one act of human kindness and solidarity at a time, counts.