Predictions 2024

Predictions

This is what I predicted this time last year:

There is a very serious chance that we are heading for another wave of Covid cases following huge increase in cases in China.   We still aren’t quick enough to spot problems like this coming and dealing with them

Even without a new wave of Covid the NHS wills struggle to cope and horror stories about conditions in hospitals will fill the papers.   Those parts of the press still loyal to the Government will blame Doctors and Nurses, but only the most partisan readers will believe them

Opinion polls might narrow slightly but not enough to save the Tories from a thrashing in the May local elections.   This will be the moment when panic becomes widespread among Government backbenchers, and the return of Farage will only make that worse. Sunak is a lot more sensible than Johnson or Truss, and will try and steady the ship, but being sensible and competent didn’t stop Tory backbenchers from making a mockery of Theresa May

The new era of austerity will bring about a public sector financial crisis – some Government departments are already on the brink of a Child Support Agency style collapse.   HMRC look the most vulnerable to totally falling apart.   This will add to the sense among investors that the institutions that made the UK stable can no longer be trusted. 

The PPE scandal and subsequent cover-ups and court cases will become a major scandal. The next 2 years will be an era of Tory sleaze just like the 90s.

Russia will continue to lose the war in Ukraine, and at home Putin will look weaker and weaker – he can’t stop young people fleeing the country and the rise of private militias are a direct threat to his rule.   He will become more desperate and dangerous. 

Russia has spent the last decade or more cultivating power and influence with the Tory party. Putin will fight hard to keep Labour out of power, using lots of cash and disinformation to change the outcome of the next General Election, just like he did with the Brexit vote. The Government will have no incentive to stop him.

Elon Musk will continue to use Twitter to cheer on far right conspiracy theories, and will continue to lose money at an unprecedented rate. 2023 could see him lose more money than anyone individual has ever done in the history of business.

I do think that it is possible that the UK will avoid a recession, and that there could be some better economic news in 2023, but that depends on families and businesses getting the confidence to spend and invest. A period of sensible, serious Government is key to that, but I am not sure Tory backbenchers are in the mood for that.

The Full Horror (for those who want the gory detail)

2024 is going to be a really shit year in politics.   A truly awful, depressing year. I wish I had better news for you, but it is going to be grim.

There will be a General election in the UK, and the Tories will lose it.   At the last 2 General elections labour presented fiscally regressive manifestos- their policies would have made the gap between the poorest and the rest of us worse.  This was a consequence of policies that put lots of money in the hands of people who were already well off through free tuition fees and lifting the means test on social care.   Despite that lots of middle class lefties angrily insisted that this was  true socialism at last, not that awful watered down version peddled by Blair.  

At the next election labour are very likely to put forward resdtributive polices that will make Britain fairer and more equal, and the same middle class politics botherers will tell me until they are blue in the face that Starmer is Tory-lite, and an insult to the true socialism, despite Labour today being well to the left of the Corbyn era.    

Starmer will continue to annoy middle class lefties by doing things to win votes, like this:

​For years the Tories have been allowed to own patriotism, to portray themselves as the only party who loves the UK.  In fact most of them hate the modern UK and treat it’s citizens with contempt. The country they love is an imaginary Britain some time in the past, less diverse and more heirachical. 

The middle class left are happy to let the Tories get away with it . To borrow from George Orwell:- Britain is a patriotic country, but there is a group of middle class (pseudo-) intellectuals who find any kind of patriotism distasteful and embarrassing.  They would be horrified to have to take part in any public display of patriotism or national pride.

This group of middle class snobs took over the Labour Party some time ago, and Labour became infected with the same disdainful attitude towards patriotism.   Anyone who displays patriotism or is happy taking part in displays of national pride is treated with horror, while a snooty squeamishness towards your own country is seem as a badge of sincerity.   

Starmer has seized his moment well, and has reclaimed patriotism for Labour.  In doing so he stands in the honourable tradition of Major Attlee.   After all if you don’t love the UK why would voters let you run it? 

I am afraid if left wing politics of the last 8 years have left me very disillussioned with lots of my fellow left wingers. For me politics is a pragmatic matter of policies and budgets, how to make the country a better place. Over the last 8 years I have encountered lots of people for whom being left wing is some kind of personal identity, full of assumptions of self righteous piety and unspoken snobbery.  For them voting is an expression of that identity rather than a simple choice about whether we allow a bunch of clownshoes to continue to flush the country down the toilet.   

This might seem very harsh to my middle class left wing chums, and if people are offended by this I am sorry, but a lot of the shit show of the last 13 years could have been avoided if people hadn’t ’treated politics as an expression of their personal identity.  Trying expressing your individualism through cushion covers instead.

The main beneficiary  of middle class snobbish disdain for Starmer will be the Green Party who continue to hoover up the cranks, creeps, gropers and racists who left Labour along with Corbyn.   For the last year the Green Party have been polling at 5%+ which gives them hope of holding Brighton Central and possibly gaining a seat in Bristol, a City that is emerging as a hot bed of middle class self righteousness.  

They are likely to be disappointed. This lovely graph from More in Common illustrates it neatly:

Labour are gaining votes from nearly all voter segments, sometimes with very big swings. The groups they are gaining support from hold the potential to win seats. Labour are only losing Progressive Activists in the Greens, but these votes are distributed in such away that this swing won’t bring any difference to actual seats.

The Green Party, and their mirror image Reform are the great enigmas of voter intention polling; between them they regularly get 10-15% of VI, but in real by-elections and local elections they get a fraction of that, and falling. For the Greens the Uxbridge by-election was a disaster – they polled enough to allow the Tories to hold the seat.  

We have enough by-election results this year to be able to test polling intention against reality – Labour are doing very well, but not well enough for a landslide.  The Tories are doing very badly, but could benefit from a swing back from Reform voters as the GE gets nearer

The Conservative Party is lurching into authoritarianism scared that they will be squeezed from the right by Reform/UKIP when in reality they hardly register with actual voters.   But it is hard for Conservative strategists to say to the right wing of voters that they should avoid Farage and Reform when Gert Wilders got 25% of the vote in the Netherlands – right now that is more than the Tories are polling in the UK.    It is hard to remember that when Sunak was appointed as PM he was supposed to be the return of sensible old school Conservative politics.   The last year has been a long slow march away from sensible, with Sunak dragged along by the right wing of his own party, to weak too lead  

The rhetoric towards minorities from politicians and the press reminds me of the years before the Stephen Lawrence murder, and I worry that we aren’t far from the return to that kind of violence. The ex-Home Secretary delighted in whipping up the far right to the same level of extremism that led to the murder of Jo Cox.  The events of armistice day were a shocking low – a failed home secretary summoning up a private army of coked up right wing thugs to fight the police.   

The government backbences are made up of endless cliques, made worse by multiple changes of PM, each change leaving damaged careers and frustrated careers. They are a rabble without a cause, beset by scandal and corruption that is directly related to their insularity and entitlement:- the sleaze that was meant to have been cast out with Boris Johnson instead lingers, another week, another arrest.    The Government may be Clowns, but they are the scary clowns from a Stephen King novel, not the funny kind with buckets of confetti. Nonetheless if a Tory MP asks you to smell their buttonhole I would decline.

If history repeats itself this isn’t the end.  People my age remember the 90s as a endless succession of sleaze stories ending in the 97 election, as John Major tried to clear out the mess he inherited from Thatcher. In fact the worst of the sleaze stories  – Archer and Aitken only came to their denounment after the election defeat.    Post a 2024 election defeat there may well be poisonous court cases for years to come. The next leader of the Conservatives will have to choose whether to help clean the mess yup, or whether they will double down Trump style, and claim it is all a political conspiracy. I am betting on the latter.

Sunak will call an election in May. He will want to avoid overlapping with the US election in case too many Tory MPs and activists want to publicly express support for jailbird Trump. He will also want to avoid another summer of record small boat crossings, and avoid the risk that a bad set of local election results will cause a leadership crisis. The backbone of an election campaign are local councillors who will door knock and canvas support- after May there will be a lot less of them and they will be much less inclined to help out.

 I don’t think the Tories can shift the polls enough to win. Voters have decided that they want the Tories out and that isn’t going to change. Sometimes there are inflection points in politics where voters views shift decisively; Winter of Discontent, Black Wednesday, the Credit Crunch. We have been through 2 such shifts in quick succession; Partygate and Liz Truss. It will take a long time to shift voters back.

The likely outcome of the UK GE will be a Labour victory with a small majority or even a Labour minority government.    There is a chance of a bigger win for Labour but not more than 1 in 4.

This will be the dirtiest UK election in history, and shocking click bait content is already circulating lies and manipulative content.The people who have benefited from 13 yeas of Tory rule, including Russia, won’t want to give up.  It might end with an underwhelming labour victory, but getting there will be toxic and awful. 

My assessment of Labour’s chances is much gloomier than bookies and pollsters, for some good reasons:

1. Starmers poll ratings – leadership ratings are very good predictors of election results. Stamer is well ahead of Sunak, but is nothing like as popular as Blair. We don’t know how much of that is a general decline in politicians poll ratings have been getting worse and worse and how much is a lack of enthusiasm towards Starmer. 

2. Boundary changes/incumbency – a record number of constituencies have no sitting candidate, either because of new boundaries or retirements/scandals. This will make results at constituency level unpredictable

3. Independents – we could see some really odd individual campaigns – I think Corbyn will feel honour bound to stand. Apsana Begum has a better chance in Limehouse for the far right Islamist Respect party. Elsewhere disgruntled MPs or former MPs will stand again; Peter Bone, Claudia Webbe, Keith Vaz

The US

The US has an even more existential decision to make in 2024.   The Republicans will stop at nothing, including violence, to prevent the Democrats winning, even though that is massively the most likely outcome.   Polls show Trump neck and neck with Biden or even ahead, but the polls have some serious problems.   Conservative candidates have done much worse than polling predicted for the last few years, and Trump backed candidates have performed worse of all.   There seems to be a systematic problem with phone polling in the US that means that they are picking up too many older right wing voters in their samples, made worse by pro-Trump on line communities rig polls in with the same glee that Sunderland fans rig polls against Newcastle United.

The US has a lot of emphasis on personalities, but for the first time elections are being won and lost on issues – of which abortion rights is the biggest motivator.  It looks a lot like pollsters are missing out on a chunk of younger voters who previously were less likely to vote, but now are turning out in big numbers over social justice issues in general, and abortion specifically.  

I am still certain that Biden won’t stand, and I think that he has already decided this.   I do sometimes wonder whether the constant attacks on his son might change his mind – he is devoted to his family, even when his son doesn’t not live up to his standards.  

He won’t announce his departure because that would make him a lame duck, and would make it harder for him to name his successor.   Gavin Newsome is already auditioning for the role, but I suspect that if Biden gets his way it will be someone like Raphael Warnock.

Trump’s chances of being found guilty of one or more serious offences before polling day are close to 100%.   This won’t bother the MAGA faithful, but will make him unelectable.   The question is whether the GOP have the balls to stand Nikki Haley as their candidate, and risk him being a 3rd party candidate.   Whichever way it is a mess, and it is likely that there will be multiple candidates on the ballot calling themselves Republicans.

What I got wrong throughout the year was the MAGA capture of the speaker of the lower house, this might still help the Dems long term, as it means that lots of GOP congressmen in swing states will have to face voters next year having backed a MAGA conspiracy theorist as speaker.

The GOP today is less a political party and more a jumble of cultural grievances, conspiracy theories and barely disguised racial animus.  Trump is a symptom, not the cause  of the GOP’s decades-long flight from reality.   Governing the country is no longer the means to to improve the lot of the American people but rather an opportunity to troll their oppponents and act our their supporters neurosis and grievances.

Conspiracies 

With elections looming in the UK and the US this will be a peak year for weird

For those who believe in conspiracies the truth is always out there, just about to be revealed.  We are forever on the brink of some momentous breakthrough; the final proof that the elections was stolen, that Covid was a hoax, UFOs are real, and why pretty girls don’t want to date them.   And even though these moments never come it doesn’t stop the fevered excitement, the latest crucial piece of the jigsaw falling into place.  Surely now the normies must see the truth?  Surely now the girl from down the road must notice them?   And all the time trying to avoid focussing on the real conspiracy; that they are wealthy and privileged for no reasons but their gender, skin colour and place of birth, and if the world really became a fairer place for good they would be a lot worse off than they are now. The system is rigged, but hugely in their favour.

This conspiratorial, paranoid mindset is at it’s strongest among US conservatives.   The US right have been on a long march into the lands of the lost for decades; McCarthy’s paranoid fantasies, Goldwaters suspicious conspiratorialism, Nixon’s lies and racism, Reagans retreat into a fantasy world where life and movies were the same.  W grew up in wealth and privilege on the East Coast, vanished for a few years and returned as a down home boy from Texas with cowboy boots and a western drawl.   Trump was just the last morbid symptom – the one who let the cat out of the bad.   And the US has lots of “lost people” who have latched on to Trump as some kind of saviour, someone who will punish their enemies on their behalf. Increasingly this group of voters are living lives seperate from the main stream of American life, consuming only a narrow band of culture and media which reinforces their prejudices.

There are 3 constant themes on the US conspiracy right – firstly that America is undergoing, or about to undergo a slow motion military coup in which Trump will be installed as the rightful President/military dictator.    The second is that some kind of judgement day is coming.   In some people’s mind there will be military tribunals for everyone from Hilary Clinton to Tom Hanks others think that the “people” will be the ones dishing out justice.  They dream of bringing the French revolutionary terror to the US, but with a much more heavily armed population.  One of the most common fantasies is feeding people into a wood chipper. 

The third is that any transnational body that limits the power of the rich and powerful to do what they want is part of a global conspiracy of evil embracing everything from plans to take over the world to international peadophila 

The obsession with conspiracy theories about elite liberal paedophile is an attempt to justify their violent fantasies of retribution and punishment.  The rationale behind the guillotine and the gulag.   There is now a proportion of the US electorate who want and expect that their political opponents will be rounded up and put into camps to meet a violent end.  They belong to a demographic  – white, non-college graduate, non urban – whose views are magnified by the US political system.   By themselves they aren’t enough to take power, but if enough mainstream conservative voters catch the contagion we have the circumstances for the kind of violent dictatorship that blighted latin america for decades.   

Trump is not the US Hitler or Mussolini.   He could still be the American Pinochet, or Duvalier.  

Those who are most inclined to violence are still “gravy seals” – fat old men in mismatched camo with over sized long guns compensating for some other lack of potency in their lives.   There are many potential trigger events for them; Trump being found guilty, a Democrat win at the next election or a new Tom hanks movie.  If Trump wins he will have to deal with the expectation, which he has whipped up, of violent revenge, if Trump loses the January 6th violence will be repeated.

Alongside the MAGA/QANON crowd a new threat to US democracy is emerging  – Dominionism – an authoritarian far right Christian movement that is using large amounts of cash to be power and influence at all kinds of levels in US politics – from school boards to Congress.   It is impossible to overstate who authoritarian their views are, nor how willing they would be to use conspiracy minded right wingers to create the circumstances in which they could seize power. 

In the UK Suella Braverman is preparing to lead a Conservative Party in opposition on a long march away from reality and into a wilderness of conspiracies, paranoia and anger, the same long march into madness that the US right have been on for a long time.   Just as the left kept themselves out of power by their own self righteous obsessions the same virus had infected the Tory Party. If Labour can maintain their discipline (not certain) they could keep the Tories out of power for a long time

I think that this will be the last year in which I will write about conspiracy theories separately from discussions of mainstream conservative politics.  In the US the conspiracy fringe has colonised the conservative mainstream, in the UK we are not that far behind.  Fox News and GB News have both embraced far right conspiracies theories, and present them as mainstream Conservatism.The Florida Attorney General has opened a criminal investigation into Anthony Fauci driven by nothing but QAnon conspiracy theories. Unless the Conservative Party and the GOP can rebuild the walls between themselves and the far right they will be tainted for a very long time

Europe 

The success of Geert Wilders shows that age of flatulent populists isn’t over.   

It seems daft right now to talk of British influence in Europe but not so long ago we were well respected in diplomatic circles – sensible and pragmatic.   We helped keep the centre of gravity in European politics in the realms of common sense.   Post Brexit British politics has drifted away from the centre into the badlands of fringe thinking and conspiracy theory.  But without Britain in the mix Europe is having it’s own trials – ideas, and parties from the far right are starting to become more mainstream led by Meloni and Wilders

Their successs shows that minorities of older, socially conservative voters, living outside big cities, can exercise just as big an influence in PR based systems as it does in FPTP systems like the UK and the US.   It is still a constituency in decline – Spain and Poland went the other way, the UK will too next year

The most positive thing about the UK and the EU is that an incoming labour government will do lots of boring trade deals, which individually will mean little, but taken together will fundamentally re-write Boris’s Brexit deal by stealth.    David Lammy has the new foreign secretary already has the connections to reset the UKs fractious relations with the EU. 

Israel/Palestine

The October attacks in Israel caught me by surprise, the brutality of Israel’s response didn’t.

The reaction of the middle class UK left was predictable and depressing.   There is a daft belief among lots of my fellow middle class graduate lefties that anyone who is fighting against the West or it’s allies are good guys, fighting for freedom.   Their sympathies automatically were with the Palestinian side, who they view as oppressed by the wicked Israelis.    

The war in Gaza isn’t a football match.  You don’t have to have a team to cheer.  You can dislike Hamas and Netanyahu.  Netanyahu faces prison for corruption, and keeping the war in Gaza going serves to keep him out of jail. 

But that doesn’t mean both sides are equally awful. Hamas aren’t fighting to free Gaza, they don’t want a free Palestine – the want an authoritarian Islamic Empire stretching from the Mediterranean to Kashmir, purged of all Jews and LGBT.   They aren’t anti-imperialist – they are overt imperialists who make no attempt to disguise it. At some point we need to talk about the A word – not antisemitism, but appeasement.

I wish I could give as much detail about Israels objectives and tactics, but right now it is hard to see anything other than brutal vengeance.  

And above all they aim is to finish what Hitler started.  

Of course killing all the Jews is a difficult task while Israel has diplomatic support from Western nations and is allowed access to their arms industries.   One of the key milestones on the path to the next holocaust is to diplomatically isolate Israel and make it politically too difficult for Western nations to give military aid.   

In the US they target Trump fans with content that doesn’t try too hard to disguise it’s anti-semitism.  In the UK identical content is pushed towards graduate left wingers, and sadly it contains the same strand of anti-semitic prejudice.   Among the people organising marches “for peace” and handing out “from the river to the sea” placards here are plenty of old lefties I remember from the 80s whose views of Israel are coloured by old fashioned prejudice towards Jews.  Angry confrontations with Keir Starmer over Palestine have more to do with his Jewish wife and Israeli family members than actual policy. Too many of my fellow lefties are still unable or unwilling to think too hard about this. 

There is a general rise in anti-semitism in Europe and the US.  This co-incides with attempts to promote far right authoritarian governments.  These 2 things aren’t a co-incidence, sadly too many of my fellow lefties are far too slow to make that connection. For a long time there was a widespread belief on the left that anti-semitism was somehow not really a problem anymore – the holocaust was a long time in the past and those remaining Jews in the UK were mostly seen as being white and rich.  This is one of the reasons why people were so slow to realise that there really was a problem within Labour with anti-semitism.

The United Nations continues to pass resolutions calling for peace sponsored by violent authoritarian regimes. Any ceasefire is pointless while Netanyahu rules Israel and Hamas’s leadership are alive and well in Qatar. The UN missed the huge opportunity to pressure Qatar to hand over the Hamas Leadership to a war crimes trial on October 8th, while the US should have made it clear it supported Israel, not Netanyahu. Had this happened a meaningful ceasefire might have been possible.

Russia

Elsewhere autocrats look like crumbling.  Putin faced an armed coup d’erat last year and faces the autocrats dilemma – he has stripped away the checks and balances that stopped him excercsing total power only to discover that he has removed the very safeguards that prevents someone even more brutish from deposing him.   

Russia was the last Empire.  it’s fall in 1991 and distinigration into individual states was faster and more brutal than the winding up of the British Empire.

When Britain gave up its’ Empire there was a long period of post colonial meddling – petulant conflicts in Kenya or Malaysia, ending with the disaster of Suez.   Russia didn’t choose to give up it’s Empire, it was lost in the collapse of the Soviet Union, and it has felt the loss of its Empire much harder than we did.

Post Empire Russia went through the same period of meddling  – Cheynia, Georgia, South Ossetia, Abkhazia.  Unable to solve their own problems at home they are exporting chaos and war to their neighbours. Their hatred of Ukraine is simply that they were doing well without Russia.    It is Russia’s Suez and Russia’s Vietnam.

As De Tourqueville predicted in a war between a democracy and an authoritarian regime the authoritarian need to win quickly.   Democracies will have plenty of people prepared to fight to retain their freedoms, the authoritarian regime not so much

I wish through all of this I had some better news. The left will make some gains from the populist right. Modi will face a serious challenge in India, Putin will win a landslide but is damaged and dangerous, clinging to power. 

But this is the kind of madness we are up against:

Review of 2022 | Will 2023 really be worse?