Predictions
This year has been dominated by a convergence of authoritarian and illiberal governments, antisystem parties — typically on the far right — and sympathetic private actors coordinating their messaging and lending each other material support. Many people who would historically have recoiled from far-right politics have instead been drawn in through a constant churn of manipulative online content that bypasses reason and goes straight for emotion.
What links these actors is not ideology in the traditional sense, but their hostility to democratic institutions and liberal constraints: opposition to limits on executive power, contempt for civil liberties, and an open disregard for the rule of law.
The United States
Trump is unpopular, and on any normal reading of the numbers the Republicans should be heading for a heavy defeat in the midterms. The central question is whether Democratic voters will be allowed anywhere near the ballot box.
Throughout 2025, Trump has deployed troops onto the streets of major US cities to deal with largely imaginary unrest. This looks less like crisis management and more like rehearsal: normalising military presence in civilian life ahead of election interference, cancellations, or other forms of rigging should the Democrats look likely to win.
Even in the unlikely event that Democrats manage to vote Trump’s opponents into office, Republicans are preparing to hollow out Congress and the Senate, allowing Trump to rule as an autocrat in all but name.
Next year will see a major confrontation between Big Tech — and its allies inside the Trump administration — and UK and European regulators. How that fight plays out will matter far beyond competition policy; it will determine whether democratic states retain any leverage over the digital infrastructure that now shapes public life.
The dollar will weaken. Trump will replace the Chair of the Federal Reserve with a loyalist willing to slash interest rates. That will further undermine confidence in US Treasury debt, push up borrowing costs, and tighten the fiscal vice. The biggest losers will be Trump voters themselves, many of whom will lose healthcare coverage as budgets buckle.
US healthcare is already sliding toward crisis. As Republican states pass ever tighter abortion laws, doctors and nurses are leaving — unwilling to risk prison or professional ruin for making clinical decisions. Blue states benefit; red states spiral.
Falling staffing, rising costs and collapsing income from Medicaid and Medicare cuts are creating a perfect storm for rural hospitals. Congress has already allocated more than $50bn in bailouts. It will not be enough.
The US economy is now dangerously dependent on the AI boom. Trump and the tech barons operate increasingly like a zaibatsu government, echoing pre-war Japan. That did not end well.
The AI boom will eventually slow. It may not cause a total crash, but it will weaken growth significantly. Tariffs are already biting: Jim Beam closing its main distillery is not an isolated incident but an early warning.
Trump and his family will grow richer. Trump himself will grow more erratic. Republicans will pretend not to notice — until they don’t. The jostling to succeed him has already begun, and more Republicans will quietly detach themselves as the succession fight approaches.
The United Kingdom
Reform-run councils will be chaotic. Their voters will not care. Reform will be engulfed by scandals. Their voters will not care about that either.
Our potential next rulers barely bother with Parliament at all, ignoring the long-standing convention that future prime ministers prove themselves in the Commons. Meanwhile the current government — led by a diligent but uninspiring prime minister — is despised by large sections of the electorate with an intensity that feels historically unusual so early in a term.
Reform benefits from an enormous ecosystem of friendly newspapers, television channels and online outlets that shield it from accountability. It has no intention of governing competently. Its purpose is to generate chaos, discredit democracy, and act as a warm-up act for a more openly authoritarian successor.
There is a concerted effort to make Britain ungovernable. Reform councils are shambolic. Reform MPs rarely turn up to Westminster. Some do not even live in the UK. None of this appears to matter.
The local elections and the Welsh Senedd elections will be a major test. In Wales, Plaid Cymru is likely to win decisively, with Reform blocked by tactical voting. The bigger question is whether left-leaning voters will continue to vote tactically when Labour — not the Greens — is best placed to defeat Reform.
Runcorn and Helsby should be a warning: Reform won by six votes. Had Green voters backed Labour, Reform would have lost comfortably.
There are only two viable coalitions capable of stopping Reform:
- A broad democratic alliance of Labour, Liberal Democrats, social democrats and the remaining moderate Conservatives.
- A much smaller coalition of Greens and the far left.
The first is larger and more stable. The second is prone to splits, purity tests and internal warfare.
Voters in the first group will vote tactically to stop Reform — including backing Greens where necessary. The second group does not reciprocate. Under leaders like Polanski, the Greens understand that winning power outright is implausible; their route to relevance depends on presenting voters with a binary choice between themselves and fascism. That requires destroying mainstream democratic alternatives, which is why they refuse to back Labour.
This has been the far left’s logic for decades — and why, time and again, it ends up acting as a handmaiden to the far right.
In the locals, Reform, the Greens and the Lib Dems will all gain seats. The media will declare a Reform surge even if the Lib Dems outperform them by miles.
There will be attempts to manufacture a political crisis to force a general election. They will fail. Starmer will face a leadership challenge in June. It will fail too. Andy Burnham will wait patiently for a route back to Parliament.
House prices will continue to soften. Governments that preside over falling house prices struggle to survive, regardless of everything else.
Immigration will remain low. Small-boat crossings will continue to fall. The number of asylum seekers in hotels will drop further. Angry Reform voters will neither notice nor care. What they increasingly want is ethnic cleansing, and they are now comfortable saying so out loud.
Elsewhere
Iran will continue to fragment as major cities face water shortages severe enough to threaten basic governance.
The Bigger Picture
Familiar landmarks have disappeared: Labour–Tory dominance, predictable electoral swings, voter patience with new governments, clear red lines between mainstream and extreme politics, even Parliament’s central role.
There is now a concerted effort — in both the UK and the US — to dismantle democratic norms and replace them with oligarchic systems centred on personal power.
These forces will not fade next year. They will intensify.
Predictions from last year
What did I get right?
Trump’s attempted round up of millions will be violent and messy.
The boundaries between legitimate law enforcement and white right wing militas will become increasingly blurred, with a consequent increase in racialised violence.
Trump will do all he can to create autocratic one man rule; silencing critics in the media, using the judiciary to subdue his opponents, deployment of an armed and angry MAGA base against anyone who might stand in his way.
One of Trumps close circle will die of, or at least be seriously caught out with, drug problems
UK wages are increased faster than inflation
People are just a lot less patient than they were 40 years+ ago. They won’t judge the Government over 5 years; they will judge them much faster than that. The Dems delivered on the economy, delivering near 3% growth a year,, but voters didn’t get them credit for it.
The Government really needs to find some pro-growth ideas somewhere to get the economy sorted quickly, or it risks losing the next election in advance.
There is also a tricky dynamic inside the huge Parliamentary Labour Party. There are only 100 jobs in Government, and there are plenty of attention seeking plonkers happy to make trouble in order to get noticed. A few have already lost the whip. Expect more to join them hanging out with Corbyn on the Tory benches.
Andy Burnham and Sadiq Khan need to find a way back into the House of Commons in the next few years.
Reform will get loads of dark money from abroad.
Reform, the LibDems and the Greens will win loads of seats in the May Council elections. If Reform win enough Council seats to become the 5th of 6th largest party in local Government the media will declare that they are on course to win a GE. Dafties will believe them.
A handful of Tory MPs will defect to Reform, leaving the Conservatives with fewer MPs next Christmas than this.
Russia faces much worse economic problems with inflation and interest rates over 20%. Right at it’s great moment of triumph, electing a puppet to the White House, they look weaker than they have ever been..
The Russian economy has tanked, Syria is slipping away, and with it their only warm water port whose access to the world isn’t controlled by NATO.
Netanyahu will drag on war for as long as he can in order to avoid jail.
What did I get wrong?
Truth Social and Xitter will merge,
The new Superman movie will flop in a country which has just elected Lex Luthor as President.
Farage might not stay in the House if the new rules outside earnings are too restrictive.
Tories will almost certainly dump Badenoch for someone more bonkers.
Labour face a tricky by-election in Cheshire after a drunk back bencher lamped someone in a pub car park. They will mostly likely win, but it will be a test of how well Reform will do with infinite cash to spend.
Hard to tell either way
Trump will give Putin a victory in Ukraine,
A big spike in inflation and interest rates in the US, with economic chaos creating tension.
The UK also faces higher inflation, but is better placed than the US to deal with it.
Hard to tell. The Trump administration no longer publish unbiased economic statistics, so no-one really knows what inflation and unemployment really are