2025: The year of “stability”

2025 has been the first year since 2010 that has had a British government with a large stable majority and what do we have to show for it? Not much, to be brutally honest. The centre-left/centrists (delete depending on how charitable you are feeling) are back in charge for the first time in 15 years and things feel so shitty that Weetabix are running adverts themed around our national decline and a canal just gave up on life and collapsed.

In 2024, Tom McTague wrote in UnHerd, that Keir Starmer’s serious-minded Labour will now ditch all that student politics virtue signalling of the Jeremy Corbyn era and get on with helping people Well, it’s over a year later and I can’t find any evidence of Starmer’s Labour helping anyone despite a huge majority, support from his parliamentary colleagues and an opposition in disarray.

Yes, there are things that Starmer has nominally improved that I’m sure that the Tories would have made worse had they been in power (such as a new animal welfare bill that does go some way to recognising the care we owe other living creatures) but these are largely technical pieces of legislation making changes at the margins. The radical soft-left golden age, promised by the likes of Andrew Marr when Starmer was in opposition, has failed to materialise.

Threatening to nationalise the nation’s nans

Labour seems unwilling to spend money or stick their neck out for anything, which is stupid because everything is getting worse and the shallowness of Starmer’s vote means that his huge majority will evaporate faster than a puddle in one of those super-hot summers we are now having.

Here is where I do have to be a bit charitable to Labour. The economic conditions have been less than ideal, growth is slow, stagnation is the order of the day, and Donald Trump is ripping up the global trade order, while the right-wing press treat every Starmer decision as if he had dressed up as Stalin and threatened to nationalise the nation’s nans.

Still, no one said taking over the country in a crisis would be easy and if the problems of the nation could be fixed by tinkering around the edges in a way that upset no one then Rishi Sunak would have done it. Radicalism is called for if we’re going to reach the halcyon heights of growing real wages for most people. At least Tony Blair did serious work in power, from the minimum wage to education reforms to more money for the NHS.

Unforced errors and growth targets

Starmer’s Labour are more interested in making unforced errors, such as Deputy Prime Minister Rayner having to resign over a tax arrangement that had a bad whiff. This would have been brushed off had it been a Tory politician, and Labour play politics on hard mode (as opposed to insane mode for socialists), but surely these competent experienced career politicians knew that anything that looked even remotely like tax fiddling was going to explode in their face? Still Rayner did it anyway. Grown-ups back in charge my arse.

Aside from that, Labour are obsessed with a GDP growth target that is as outmoded as adopting Harold Wilson’s industrial strategy. Even if Labour can squeeze some growth out of the economy, then it won’t go towards helping anyone as the benefits will be gobbled up by the uber-rich who are already doing alright and won’t be voting Labour any time soon. Time for Labour to wise up about the bold steps needed to make things better for average voters.

Then again, all they seem interested in are welfare cuts, spending more on the military (as usual, there is always money for this but never for child welfare, social care or the NHS) and making tough but empty sound bites. Now Labour are in the undignified position of raising taxes (which they said they wouldn’t) to raise some money to actually do something. All of this pain could have been avoided if they had actually committed to doing something in the first place.

The radical position of making things better for people

Whilst Labour continues to be about as inspiring and proactive as an aging labrador napping by an open wood fire, the Greens have stolen a march in the polls with the radical position of making things better for people. Zack Polanski is getting attention in both new and traditional media with effective messaging and his charming personality. The messaging being “things would be better if we were just a bit nicer to each other” with an added side of “tax the rich” and “trans people aren’t monsters and deserve rights”.

Unsurprisingly, this sort of thing has gone well in Labour strong holds like London and Bristol but it is actually doing well across the board, showing that people can be inspired by a positive message and that voters outside the M25 aren’t all foaming at the mouth to vote for a politician who wants to use The Royal Navy to stop the small boats. Turns out, quelle surprise, that voters actually like hope and do feel that the rich should make more of an effort to improve society. We’re not all as selfish and cynical as centrist politicians would have us think.

On the downside, the far-right is surging in Britain with Nigel Farage’s Reform UK topping the polls. Currently, if there were a general election next Thursday then Farage would be PM with a large majority, but as the election is most likely in 2029 this is all theoretical and as likely to collapse on contact with reality as my chances of meeting Florence Pugh and her saying she likes my shoes.

The dangers of the far-right

Although, I shouldn’t be flippant about the degree to which the far right is on the march and how scared my LGBTQ+ and POC friends are. Hell, I’m scared that writing this blog and having a Tate membership will land me in one of Reform's re-education camps, and I’m as white as the driven snow. It is alarming how fast the far-right’s strongly anti-immigration, anti-woke, anti-trans, anti-mainstream political agenda has gained ground, largely as it has been laundered by the mainstream media into an acceptable position, whereas most of what Farage says now would have gotten you thrown out of Conservative Soc when I was at uni.

There are many things about politics and the future that scare me, but some of my most vivid nightmares involve Farage and his knuckle dragging cronies getting their hands on actual power, and centrist politicians and media commentators shrugging and saying “that’s just how things go” while hoping that they are the last people whose rights get trampled over. Let me make this clear: they are coming for you and your home and your friends, so we have to stop them.

Appealing to Graham

This warning will largely fall on deaf ears as the centrists are too busy hating on Muslims and trans people, thus fuelling the far-right’s support, so that they can win the vote of some mythical person called Graham from Workington who is apparently both filled with hatred and considering voting Labour.

As a craft beer drinking metropolitan liberal I have never met Graham and my views on patriotism are apparently toxic to him, but supposedly he does exist and all mainstream politics must be geared towards him no matter how much it leads to non-binary people being scared to go into the bathroom at Pizza Express and anyone with a vague tan getting yelled at in the streets about grooming gangs.

War and climate change

Speaking of things getting worse in the streets, the Labour government is engaging in a draconian clamp down on the right to protest, especially for climate protesters and supporters of Palestine. In regards to the latter, there are currently four Palestine Action members on hunger strike for being imprisoned without charge. I didn’t expect “centre left government has political prisoners” to be on the 2025 bingo card, but here we are.

The war in Gaza rumbles on with no end to the carnage in sight. The UN’s pleas that it really does look like Israel is doing genocide and certainly breaking all the standards for war that we have set, is getting increasingly desperate but still the moderate governments of Britain, France and Germany are able to ignore them. Much like the UN’s warnings on climate change, we are discovering just how ineffective standing on a chair and shouting “stop this horrendous insanity” is when it’s more politically convenient for people to pretend that there isn’t a problem. All I can say is that I really do hope that there is some peace for Gazans in 2026. That seems about all we can hope for.

Speaking of peace, the war in Ukraine has come to a gritty stalemate as human life continues to be fed into the meat grinder for way longer than anyone thought could be morally or realistically sustainable. Again, it seems that it’s impossible to get the powerful people of the world to stop being awful even when it’s in their best interests. I look forward to the historians and psychologists of the future writing a new version of “The banality of evil” explaining all this, if we don’t die in a nuclear war first.

Fear and hope in American politics

Of course, Trump is doing his part to make the histories of the 2020s more depressing reading. Everyone seems to have stopped paying attention to how corrupt, incompetent and unpleasant he is, which is only allowing him to get away with it. Meanwhile, the Republicans continue to indulge his every insane whim out of fear of his supporters, and the Democrats scratch their heads while trying to figure a way out of this that doesn’t involve taking any kind of risk.

At least Zohran Mamdani gave me some hope this year, by again standing on the radical “let’s actually do something to make things better” platform and winning, whilst also criticising Trump. Again, a less dystopian vision of the future is appealing to voters. Or at least a utopia for all rather than a utopia for a certain type of angry white man, which is a dystopia for LGBTQ+ people and POC.

Whilst America leads the way in being awful, someone actually decided to pick up a gun and shut up Charlie Kirk, one of the cold-hearted people who woke up every day and thought “how can I be awful to trans people on social media to get more attention.” As I said before, I don’t think we should do politics with guns but I have little sympathy for someone who said that school shootings are the price of having guns and then got shot in a school. He also said that empathy is weakness, so I am following his example and not being empathic for him or his friends and family.

One nation under tech companies

At the same time America continues to be “one nation under tech companies.” As the unstoppable march of tech companies to colonise and commercialise every aspect of life continues. Now it’s imagination, creative expression and the future with a host of AI products that are accelerating climate change and wiping out jobs faster than productivity YouTubers can create content of how you stay ahead of the rising AI tide.

In the perfect metaphor for modern America, the tech billionaires were in the rotunda when Trump was being inaugurated, and his supporters were left freezing in the January cold. If you voted for Trump to stick it to the Californians, then I have some bad news about where your new masters’ companies have their headquarters.

Trump may be Mussolini crossed with a reality TV show muppet, but it's the tech giants that have their hand up his arse making the mouth move and all everyone else is doing is handing them more power. While we’re here, please follow me on TikTok or Red Note, at least that’s giving power to China not Mark Zuckerberg.

Elections in 2026

I could write something about the climate here but you already know what I am going to say. It’s bad. It’s getting worse. No one is doing anything about it. This is all really dumb and shortsighted, I think as I throw all the Christmas craft beer cans into the recycling.

Well, I joined the Green Party this year and they might do well in the London council elections next year. Hopefully, that will make Labour pay attention, but I fully expect to be labelled an extremist and have to sit through vox pop shit in the middle of the day (when everyone other than Boomers are at work) going on about how all this Green voting is actually madness and we all have a god given right to drive a car to the shop around the corner 16 times a day to buy a huge beef steak, and to say anything otherwise is communism.

In 2026 we have US mid-terms, which will be interesting in a “may you all live in interesting times sort of way” as well as Scottish Parliament and Senedd elections, a serious test for Starmer, as well as elections in Denmark (the model for a left-wing party saying “tax the rich and kick out the refugees” - let’s see if that stops the far-right or not) and Israel.

Hope for the future

I won’t finish with saying something dark and cynical (too easy) so I will say that this year I got involved in a local co-op of artists and activists, and never have I met a group of people who work so tirelessly to make the world a better place. These are ordinary people, with jobs and families and all the rest (not rich nepo-babies on a poverty safari) who do everything from using surplus food to create a plant based kitchen that gives free meals to the needy, to craft sessions for families in school holidays, to instructions for small charities on the best ways to raise funds via grants, whilst also hosting informative talks on everything from modern trade unions to queer ecology.

There are people working hard to make the world a better place, despite being frequently demonised by the mainstream media for our views on Gaza or dismissed as hippies, communist or just plain mad, but to be honest we don’t care.

If you’re too cynical to get involved in the solutions to our problems, then you deserve to wake up to Fuhrer Farage one day. I know where I will be. It will be in the local community centre trying to raise funds for a space for underprivileged kids to hang out. If you think that’s communism then tattoo a hammer and sickle on my arm, and I will see you in the front line of the war against the Facebook killbots.