Yes it is the traditional end of year rant...here's to 2025

During 2025 the British will settle down into an attitude best compared to the persistent drizzle of a typical English autumn. We simply don’t like anything or anyone in politics much at all.

So 2024 is all over bar the shouting and it is the time for everyone to post their looks backwards, forwards and sideways. As usual I’m going to dodge trawling through the archives so as to remind you of the terrible - or wonderful - things that happened over the last twelve months. I plan again to ignore the temptation to make predictions about the forthcoming year.

I guess I should stop there so you all can get on with planning your New Year festivities, with organising next year’s holidays and with signing up to a Christmas hamper scheme (if you know you know as they say). The last thing you really want is me explaining how forthcoming elections in Germany or Canada are incredibly important and worth watching. Nor should I go about making rash predictions about British politics beyond my usual, and essentially conservative observation, that things change a lot less than the pundits and experts would like.

During 2025 the British will settle down into an attitude best compared to the persistent drizzle of a typical English autumn. We simply don’t like anything or anyone in politics much at all but when the pollsters arrive and ask questions we are equally unable to tell them what we do want, except that it involves being a whole lot better off without us having to make any real effort. That and everything can be paid for by somebody else. It is hard to see a way out from this grey, overcast and slightly damp political climate because what our government can afford and what we believe they should be affording are simply miles apart. Meaning that the promises made by politicians are, without wanting to mince words, a pack of lies.

All this, of course, means that our politicians will be more excited by European Union rules on phone chargers than they are with the collapse of European industry, with the continuing war in Ukraine, or the extensive (and growing) efforts of the Chinese communists to suborn our institutions of education, business and culture. Enormous effort will go into explaining the wrongness of Donald Trump and Elon Musk plus we’ll see some complete melt-downs in Europe because a lot of Germans voted for a populist right wing party. That is until some celebrity chef or comedian puts his hand in the wrong place thereby allowing the media to do what it loves most - gossiping about people they know.

Some of us are rather more worried about the economic and social death wish of centrist and centre-left politics with its combination of regulating every economic activity to within an inch of its life while talking about public investment plans without doing any actual investment. All combined with policies of high taxes and high prices designed either to try and pay for one or two of those promises the politicians made, or else to pursue the hubris of saving the planet. For most ordinary people in Britain the chances are that 2025 will see them get a little poorer, in cash terms maybe, but definitely poorer as a result of our deteriorating physical and social environment. After 30 years of falling crimes rates the numbers are rising, the roads and paths, playground and parks will fall further into disrepair, and the health system slowly rots away because you can’t fit the infinite demand of “it’s free” into a cash limited, centrally-planned organisation and expect it to work.

Meanwhile lots of young bushy-tailed and bright-eyed men will talk excitedly about the prospects for planning reform (“agglomeration muh gentle density muh strategic planning muh grey belt muh new town policy”) despite there being zero evidence that these exciting reforms will result in us building the new homes we need to house our population. All while these same men explain that importing several hundred thousand new people every year has nothing to do with the housing crisis, usually with the patronising tone so common among clever, single young men who got elected to parliament in a landslide or who work for think tanks and live in a tower block in West Ham. Lined up in opposition to these townies are a bunch of neanderthal community campaigners who have £2m houses in London’s exurbs and don’t want any families speaking estuary English coming to live in their green belt idyll, I mean think of the bats, newts and house prices.

The Gaza war will drag on but the events there will continue to be used by people who simply don’t like Jews (many of whom seem to work for the BBC) as an excuse for promoting antisemitism. There has never been a more one-sided presentation of a war we weren’t directly involved in, but when this observation is made the result is more racist screeching from the wings while journalists present us with propaganda written by terrorists. There has not been a more blatant use of terrorist propaganda since Gerry Adams voice was dubbed by the BBC. But no action will be taken and the broadcasters will be affronted by any suggestion that their reporting is so one-eyed we’d be excused if we concluded that the BBC, ITV and Sky are run by antisemites and apologists for Islamist extremism.

It’ll all be fine though. Ed Miliband will continue to save the planet by pointing at windmills and waving guitars at solar panels while rabbiting on about climate leadership. Jeremy Vine will carry on posting video clips of him cycling dangerously so as to try and get another overworked delivery driver sacked. And thousands more articles - often featuring Van Tullekan, the Coco-Pops Man (as Chris Snowdon calls him) - lecturing everyone about the food industry killing us by making highly nutricious and calorific food really cheap. I do wonder whether Donald Trump appointing a bona fide dribbling lunatic as his health minister might cause a problem for Van Tulleken as he realises that his crusade against Big Food is at the heart of Trump’s health agenda!

Not a good year to be a smoker who wants to quit though. Britain is about to pass the stupidest piece of legislation in modern history, the Smoking and Vaping Bill. This is a lovely present for criminals, smugglers and gangsters but terrible for quitters as the idiots in public health make getting vapes more difficult and, with a massive new tax, much more expensive. Of course the result will be - check out Australia’s epidemic of firebombed stores - that crime gangs take over where the government has banned legitimate businesses. But the worst thing about this isn’t that people will buy less reliable products from criminals but that smokers will carry right on smoking rather than switch to safer products like pouches, vapes and heat-not-burn cigarettes.

The drizzle will continue because of these policies. Each one carefully tested with opinion polls (“middle class parents think parents of children at private school should pay more tax”) but really annoying a new group of voters. 2025 will be a year filled with shouting at TVs, moaning about everything, and telling your loved ones that voting is pointless the bastards still get in. The media will miss all this (except for the priceless occasions when the Question Time vetting slips and an actual grumpy voter gets into the audience) because they’ll be gossiping about their friends, having convivial lunches with political and think tank pals, and trying to get the government to regulate the Internet to protect legacy press and TV.

Still, I’ve got a couple of holidays booked and we’re looking forward to a couple of celebrations. There’ll be games to play, laughs and perhaps a tear or two. The economy won’t completely collapse and good people will carry on creating wealth and progress despite the best efforts of the government, media and bureaucracy to prevent them. Young people will pass exams, go to university, get jobs and do the things young people have always done, again despite the endless efforts of media and education to tell them everything is terrible. Sport and the arts will give us pain and pleasure and you never know, Bradford Capital of Culture 2025 might even manage a decent show or two.

Have the best 2025 you can manage. And thanks for reading.