Well, here we are at the end of 2024, peering through the murk to try and guess what might be in store for the world in 2025. But what did 2024 bring us? On the political front, more democratic general elections than ever before in a single year; a mixed bag of results, giving us reverberating cheers and screams of anguish in equal quantities, I suppose.
Non-UK readers will, I hope, forgive me if I concentrate mainly on what happened in Britain. As a sort of rule of thumb, when asked to name the most incompetent government in British history, most amateur historians point to Lord North, the man who lost the American colonies; that may be slightly unfair, because apart from that (quite substantial failing), North did various other, more positive things, which I’m not going to list here. So perhaps we could look at H.H. Asquith’s tenure of power at the outset of the First World War. Certainly things went horribly wrong. It would be unfair to foist the entire fiasco of the Dardenelles campaign on him (and indeed Churchill resigned as acceptance of his error), but the shell supply crisis leading to the disasters of Aubers and Neuve Chapelle - and, really, Loos as well - can be laid at the door of that government and its leader. Those who have read Robert Harris’ excellent latest novel, Precipice, will have their own view on what was distracting Asquith when he should have been focussing on the running of the War. I’m sure others will have their own opinions on this, but let’s put competence to one side for the moment; we’ll come back to it.
What British voters were faced with in July was a Conservative government that had quite clearly reached its sell-by date, and a Labour opposition that was promising pretty much all things to all men - unless you wanted to educate your children privately, of course…… The result of that choice was a massive majority for a new government, based on a very low turn-out - after all, if both choices look ghastly, why not just stay at home and pretend it will all go away?
The following five or so months have demonstrated that we have a government elected on more deception than I can recall in my lifetime.
“Of course we shall maintain the pensioners’ winter fuel allowance.”
“Of course we shall compensate the WASPI women.”
“Energy bills will come down by £300.”
“Taxes will not rise for ‘working people’”.
“We know how important farming and food production are, and we will support farmers.”
I could go on, but I suspect readers can do that for themselves. All the reversals of election promises were predicated on the somewhat exaggerated “£22bn black hole.” I’m sorry, but anyone who was not aware that the UK’s public finances were a mess lacks something in the brain cell department; if you spend multiple hundreds of billions paying people’s wages during a pandemic, it doesn’t take a genius to work out that there will come a day for payment. And who wanted longer, harder lockdowns (and therefore greater cost)? Why, Keir Starmer, who was surprised by the “black hole”….
Then at the end of October, we were privileged by Rachel “Economist” Reeves’ budget. Just to be clear, there have been many highly effective Chancellors of the nation’s Exchequer who have not been economists; not so many who claim the name and yet appear unaware of the relationship of cause and effect in national economies. I’m not going to list all its clear mismatches of hope and reality, but just as an indicator, take a look at how many jobs are going to disappear as a result, how much inflation comes back, how high bond yields climb; but, of course, it was a “budget for growth….”
The last issue I’m going to point to is the levelling down of education (personally, I’ve always hated the expression levelling up, introduced by the previous government, but up is for sure better than down). First, we have the spiteful, politics of envy driven levying of VAT on private school fees. There is no economic logic to this. If you have parents who have paid their taxes - to help fund state education - then why on earth would you want to penalise them when they choose to pay separately for their children’s schooling? Again, it’s pretty simple to see that the numbers claimed for the money to be raised from this don’t add up. If you put something in the VAT envelope, then it works both ways - if it’s paid on fees, it is reclaimable on capital projects. That’s frankly a bonus for the major, well-endowed schools. The small ones, the special needs ones, the prep schools are where the pain will be felt, and I doubt very much that the state sector has the space to accommodate the inevitable numbers who will move.
Next, they want to ‘diversify the curriculum’. Mmm. Adding things is good; it gives the children a wider appreciation of the world. But taking away some of the pillars of western European culture because they are (delete as required…) imperialist/colonialist/racist/triggering/etc is depriving children of the generations of learning before them.
And then finally, there is the stupid intention to save the enormous sum of somewhere between £1million and £4 million by canning the initiative the previous government brought in to teach Latin in state schools. I know many will look askance at this view, but learning Latin serves as a wonderful base for European languages and English grammar; for such a paltry amount, why take learning away?
So here we go into 2025; a government driven by ideologues, where to be frank, pragmatism is what is far more effective. Which of them is most dangerous to our way of life? Answers on a postcard to your MP - perhaps we can help them understand that they serve the electors, not the other way round.
I’m sorry to sound downbeat, but I think we are just experiencing a real new contender for most incompetent government …….Happy New Year to all readers. Just believe that the best is yet to come, even though there may be some nearby wasteland to get over first.
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