DAWN OF A NEW HOPE
It’s been a turbulent and troubled year for Britain’s political giants. But 2018 sees a new wave of optimism on the horizon and (thankfully) not an election or referendum anywhere in sight...
Half-demolished turkey sits on the sideboard; one lunches, in a desultory sort of way, on satsumas, nuts and chocolate. The great strain of Christmas proper is done. in southern edinburgh, at least, boots crunch in quiet snowy streets, as the afternoon sky fast fades from azure to pink.
and we look forward to the gate of the year, to 2018, with optimism.
Yes, these have been turbulent times. so much happened in 2016, ran one journalistic joke, that there would be no news this year as we had used it all up. Certainly 2017 did not bring quite so many political shocks (though upsets there were) nor nearly as many celebrity deaths.
The biggest surprise was Theresa may’s decision to call a completely unnecessary general election, for which she and the Tories were sharply punished. in almost as great a shock, Jeremy Corbyn not only proved an affable campaigner but surprisingly popular.
Whatever the crowing on the left, though, Corbyn and his party still lost and, having made it safely to year’s end, mrs may may well survive for what could be a surprisingly long Parliament. and, in fewer than 18 months, mr Corbyn will turn 70.
so fashionable has it become to mock the ‘maybot’, and so unceasing and cruel are the jokes about her, that it is too easy to overlook her strengths.
she is a woman of prodigious industry and genuine humility; a politician of hard, dogged work and proven endurance; a lady of sober habits and modest lifestyle who detests gossip and cronyism.
mrs may not only came through months of sustained mockery (and much bad luck) but grittily – and against general expectation – accomplished the broad outlines of a deal for our departure from the european Union that had her peers on the Continent applauding; all the more remarkable a feat from a perceived position of great political weakness.
she is, in fact, more secure than you might think. There is no backbench Tory appetite for another general election in the near future. There is no obvious and universally esteemed candidate for the Conservative leadership in sight. and no one, right now, seems indeed to want her job.
let us be thankful – after the grandiloquence of the Blair years, or the insouciant essaycrisis style of david Cameron – that we once more have a modest Prime minister who has no ideas above her station.
MRs may is of an older and very different stamp: consciously a servant of the public, not glamorous, not easily star-struck, humbly and regularly attending church and who enjoys quiet, lowprofile walking holidays. We shall miss her when she goes.
The year was remarkable in other regards. for one, the more the assorted forces of Remain – in all its multitentacled luvviedom – tried to prevent Brexit, the more certain they made Brexit become. Parliament has once and twice now voted for it. Both labour and the Tories made plain their commitment to it at the general election.
and there are the first and early signs – after what one commentator has rightly mocked as the ‘assorted shenanigans from the moonbat stop Brexit tendency’ – that, our departure from the failing european project now but 15 months away, practicality and pragmatism start to prevail. (save for lord heseltine, but he is such a 1970s person.)
There have been pleasant surprises. as Remainer extremists start to sound not just silly sore losers but increasingly irrelevant, so do extreme Brexiteers.
Ukip is finished as a force in British politics. Nigel farage no longer enjoys traction or standing. for all the wilder claims of 2016, the world is a complex place and on a range of regulatory fronts, and a host of fiscal matters, Brexit will finally see much sensible and very British compromise.
it has been interesting to see our civil service emerge with new assurance. despite all the pessimism and confident predictions of failure, our public officials – as captained by olly Robbins in No10 and Jeremy heywood in the Cabinet office – negotiated with the eurocrats and with no mean skill, and brought us to the second, and far less fraught, stage of departure talks.
Parliament, too, has recovered much confidence from its nadir under long years of vast New labour majorities. There are many able new mPs, they are of much more independent mind and the Commons, in particular, is now far more assertive in holding ministers to account. again, as power is recovered from europe after so many years of the Brussels fiat, this is as it should be.
The new members, of course, for the first time in two decades include a significant group of scottish Tories, as a party for so long the pariah of politics this side of hadrian’s Wall made a dozen gains – several by large margins, some from third place and for seats that last voted Tory in 1983.
it is still too early to talk of ‘peak sNP’. scots like to dine on constitutional crises one at a time, thank you, and for the moment most of us would like to see the issue of independence set aside as we see what final settlement is wrought on europe.
What new powers are thus conferred on the scottish parliament – and the agonies of Nationalists as they debate whether to deploy them or continue, rather pathetically, to orate about handing them all back meekly to the eU – we may cheerfully wait to see.
The sNP has still not really processed the result of the september 2014 referendum or learned any lessons from it. There has been a wilful refusal to admit the central reason for Yes scotland’s defeat – the Nationalists’ risible policy on the currency of an independent scotland. We patiently await a better one.
The Nationalists still refuse to engage in any meaningful way with the majority of scots who voted No; they have no strategy at all for the media, save to demonise the BBC, the newspapers and everyone else; and they still cannot publicly acknowledge – even after an electoral bloody nose in June – that a third of habitual sNP support-
ers voted, in June 2016, to leave the European Union, and are weary of being insulted. Though we have not – yet – seen ‘peak SNP’, as a year ends there is now the general sense that we have seen ‘peak Sturgeon’, that there is nothing of significance left in the First Minister’s tank and that – still more disturbingly – there is no obvious replacement. Last Christmas, the return of Alex Salmond (yet again) at some point to the SNP leadership seemed a real possibility – and, occasionally, he seemed on open manoeuvres for it. This Yule, dumped from Parliament, reduced to passing Edinburgh vaudeville and signed to Vladimir Putin’s in-house TV station, the Salmond brand is diminished and his judgment questioned. Though many do not yet feel it, the wider economy is doing well. Orders for goods produced by British firms are at their highest in more than 30 years. At only 4.2 per cent, unemployment is at its lowest in four decades and, contrary to the apocalyptic warnings, the Leave vote was not immediately punished with a sharp recession. Our economy is growing at just under 2 per cent a year; public borrowing is lower than forecast (and falling).
Once Brexit is accomplished, according to one analysis, our national wealth will be boosted further by ‘free trade and world competition, home-grown pragmatic regulation and an end to subsidised, unskilled EU immigration. In the long term this raises our GDP by 7 per cent, brings down consumer prices by 8 per cent and boosts the living standards of the lowest income groups by 15 per cent…’
To touch on just one blessing, leaving the EU will see us, in a few years, enjoying significantly cheaper food. But we need not long dwell on such tractor production statistics – on a range of fronts, life is better and more cheering than it has ever been.
It is worth reminding ourselves that, 30 years ago, half of Europe was under the yoke of Soviet Communism, that the mass of South Africans suffered under a regime that denied most of them the vote because of the colour of their skin, and that we still endured a wretched civil war in Northern Ireland, with atrocities on a weekly basis and, on occasion, related outrages on the British mainland.
In December 1987, these miserable realities seemed intractable and permanent. Yet, only four years later, the USSR was history. By the summer of 1994, South Africa was a hesitant but genuine democracy (and has remained one) and peace was secure in Ireland by the century’s end.
Such thankfully rare horrors as the Manchester bombing in May shake us – but we hear little of similar plots stymied annually by the tireless efforts of our security services.
WE do not pause to congratulate ourselves that, unlike France, our political culture is remarkably stable, without frequent riot by the mob; that, by global standards, it is signally uncorrupted; and Scottish Nationalism – in contrast to the other side of the North Channel – has never sullied itself with bloody boasts of the ‘physical force’ approach.
Unlike Syria, people are not dropping bombs on us; unlike much of the world, we all have access to clean, safe water. Medical procedures daunting even in the 1980s – hip replacements, the treatment of cataracts – are assured and routine.
Though there are far more vehicles on Britain’s roads, far fewer are now killed on them annually than half a century ago. And for the past 30 years Scottish children have not had to brave teachers able physically to attack them. Things that have frightened us in prospect have not come to pass: President Trump, for instance, grotesque as he is, has been contained by the American political order and its ‘deep state’.
Things that once embarrassed us – the poor prowess of British sport springs to mind – are now cause for pride and rejoicing. Our athletes regularly fly home with much Olympic gold; football ground violence is a ghost of what it was in the 1970s – and a modest Scot has twice won Wimbledon.
And evil, on many fronts, flees and dies as it is unmasked. Thanks to the quiet power of the consumer, most eggs now bought in Britain are from free-range hens.
Scotland’s cities have never been so clean or as attractive and – as the people of Bute have so movingly demonstrated – refugees from the habitations of horrid cruelty can not only and with ease be absorbed in a given Scots community but, indeed, enrich it.
Now a New Year looms – with wonders, as well as terrors – with all its possible new beginnings. ‘With all its sham, drudgery and broken dreams,’ as a poet taught us, ‘it is still a beautiful world. Be cheerful. Strive to be happy.’
Especially as, for the first calendar year most of us can remember, no attendance at any referendum or election of any kind is demanded of us in anno Domini 2018…