- The far right have launched their last desperate fight back to preserve the old fossilised lifestyles. All the best scientists in the world are united in telling us that we have to adopt new technologies and new lifestyles at an incredible pace if we are to provide a stable and secure future. All the worst politicians are telling us that we must be selfish and we can burn as much carbon as we like. Throughout the year new evidence has emerged of the damage that climate breakdown is already causing in terms of increased frequency of droughts, floods, hurricanes and wildfires. Donald Trump’s US government in collaboration with Vladimir Putin’s, Saudi Arabia’s and Kuwait’s dealt with this by refusing to accept the scientists report to the global summit on climate change. The UK government dealt with it by nicer words and a determination to force through fracking.
- More plastic was produced and sold in the year than ever before in human history. Plastic particles were found in the guts of seafood across the entire planet and have rained down to settle on the bottom of the deepest oceans. In England we have a 5p charge on plastic bags and a promise to consider legislating on banning plastic straws. The gap between this tinkering and the wholescale changes to production, distribution and consumption that is required staggers the imagination. Meanwhile there is no beach anywhere in the remotest corner of the world that doesn’t get fresh plastic washed up every day and world production continues to increase.
- The plague of zero hours contracts and fake self-employment continues to grow. During the last General Election campaign May’s government made a big fuss of their determination to tackle this. Last week the outcome arrived. Workers have the right to request a contract containing set hours. Bosses have the right to refuse and to stop giving work to anyone who asks.
- Austerity continues to get worse. After the Chancellor announced it was over he proceeded to cut real income once again for local authorities. He provided almost enough funding for a standstill on real income for school teachers. And imposed the tenth year of real pay cuts on teachers in colleges. He boasted of increasing funding to the NHS. Whilst cutting real income per medical procedure. The government made working people on Universal Credits wait weeks for money and then placed every bureaucratic difficulty they could in the way of claimants. As a consequence of this policy and of ten years of austerity the number of rough sleepers is now estimated to be over 300,000.
- Wealthy property developers continued to announce record profits. The boss of Persimmon collected a £110 million pound bonus. Record earnings funded by a wasteful right to buy policy enabled the lobbyists for the industry to donate lucratively to the Conservative Party. As a consequence we have planning laws that enable developers to build large profitable homes on green field sites. We have no policies whatsoever to help redevelop properties in deprived inner city areas.
- The miserably run down areas of the UK that provided so many votes for change in the referendum have indeed seen real change as a result. They’ve become more run down and more neglected. The much vaunted northern powerhouse scheme has morphed into a rather sad little organisation called Transport for the North that is using much of what little money it has on the bizarre project of trying to revive the north by building a new motorway. Meanwhile commuters across the country trundle into work on overcrowded trains, paying some of the highest ticket prices in the world when they are fortunate enough not to have the service cancelled by inefficient private monopolies or the strikes that those monopolies have clumsily provoked.
- China has moved ahead of the UK on electric vehicle technology, solar energy, and the vast majority of areas of electronics. They train more graduates in a year than the UK has trained in its entire history. They have moved from being one of the poorest nations in the world to one of the richest. All this has been achieved by using a mixture of private enterprise and government planning. Positive as this economic transformation has been for them and for the world a dangerous lack of any serious democratic or legal controls over the actions of their national and local governments has emerged. Reports indicate that as many as a million Uighurs may be interned in re-education camps. Corrupt local officials are turning a blind eye to massive pollution problems in coal fired heavy industry plants in return for bribes.
- Saudi Arabia has bombed Yemen into a state of famine. Using weapons supplied by the US and the UK. Israel has shot dead hundreds of Palestinian youths and bottled up an entire people in a massive ghetto. Using weapons supplied by the US and the UK.
- Poverty and despair have continued to grow in Venezuela because an insufficiently democratic socialist government became corrupted by oil money. Poverty and despair also continued to mount in Zimbabwe also because an insufficiently democratic “socialist” government became corrupted and incompetent. Old fashioned authoritarian socialists continue to struggle to explain this. Incredibly some of them also continue to have illusions about Putin’s Russia.
- Putin’s Russia imposed the rule of the dictator Assad on Syria. Putin’s Russia built a bridge that restricted access to open waters for residents of a major port in Ukraine and then arrested sailors who tried to make the journey. Putin’s Russia was revealed to have been manipulating US elections and to have secretly campaigned to get Donald Trump elected. Putin’s Russia was revealed to have manipulated the UK referendum and have secretly campaigned for Leave. Putin’s Russia continues to cut down forests in Siberia. Putin’s Russia continues to be funded by oil and gas revenues generated by some of the dirtiest and most polluted drilling operations in the world. Methane gas trapped by frozen earth in Siberia was released at a record rate and is expected to be a major contributor to runaway climate change.
- Much of the money stolen from the Russian people by their corrupt politicians and businesses was laundered through London. Along with revenues from equally or even more corrupt governments around the world. This offshore money moving around the world has bought up huge quantities of property in London and corrupted the financial services industry across the world.
- Ten years after the financial crash a wall of footloose money is still sloshing around the world. Despite taking the entire world economic order to the very edge of complete collapse in 2007-8 nothing remotely adequate has been done to remove the dominance of semi-legal finance capital over the real sustainable economy. The risk of a second and more severe crash is a constant reality.
Here’s hoping we have a happy new year!