Looking down the storm drain of 2025

H appy New Year! and not so happy higher energy bills. On New Year’s Day, the media gave extensive coverage to the higher energy bill price cap, which came into effect on the first of January. What was not mentioned, and certainly was not mentioned on the Scottish news-where-you-are on the BBC was the promise made by Anas Sarwar that the election of a Labour government would result in lower energy bills and that Labour would work to reduce bills “quickly”.

In fact Labour did indeed take very quick action on energy bills when it took office. It acted to increase the energy bills of pensioners by axing the universal winter fuel payment.

At this point it’s hard to escape the conclusion that Keir Starmer is just spectacularly bad at politics. Like Gordon Brown, the last Labour prime minister before him, Starmer spent years plotting and scheming to get himself into the highest office in the land, but having got there he had no clue what to do with all that power he’d so greedily amassed. Now he’s even less popular than Prince Andrew, quite an achievement for a man who thinks that vanilla is a spice.

As we enter 2025 the world feels like those kids in the movie It, peeking into the storm drain and catching a glimpse of the scary clown who lies in wait.

Six months prior to an election, they will pledge, promise and vow everything and anything, and will not mean one single word of it. Six minutes after the election, they do not give anyone so much as a second thought. Your vote is in the bank. Labour got what it wanted.

And well, here we are … again. Every generation has to find out the hard way, it seems.

Keir Starmer released a New Year’s message. It can be summarised thus: Keir Starmer is very upset that the public has lost confidence in Keir Starmer and the government Keir Starmer leads following a series of confidence-cratering actions by Keir Starmer and his colleagues and, therefore, would like everyone to be assured that none of this is Keir Starmer’s fault. Also, there will be lots of jam tomorrow.

This deceit is why we are faced with the rise of the far-right. People have lost faith in politicians who lie to them and take them for granted, so they feel they have nothing to lose by taking a punt on a far-right populist grifter who gives them simple answers to complex questions, blaming everything that is wrong in their lives on immigrants and ‘the woke’. A party like Labour, which got into office promising change but which panders to the corporate interests of its donors once it gets into power, only increases the susceptibility of people desperate for real and meaningful change and who feel they have nothing to lose to the dangerous racist snake oil of Farage and his billionaire backers.

My prediction for 2025, BBC Scotland’s attacks on the Scottish Government will grow even more hysterical and strident as 2026 the Holyrood election gets closer, and support for Scottish independence rises with the looming threat of Farage and the far-right taking power in Westminster after the next general election.

Support for independence will continue to get a boost as people learn the hard way that voting Labour will never deliver the meaningful change that was promised. Support for independence is also growing due to the demographic shift in Scotland since the 2014 independence referendum. Recent polls have demonstrated that with the right offer from the independence campaign and the continuing descent of the UK into a right-wing dystopia, it is not at all inconceivable that support for independence could reach or exceed 60%. 2025 could be the year of the tipping point and support for independence when it finally breaks out of the roughly 50-50 doldrums in which it has languished for the past few years.

A new poll has shown that voters are decidedly unimpressed with Starmer’s government. The YouGov poll for The Times found that over half of those polled described the Westminster government as “incompetent” and “dishonest”. That’s a damning indictment of a party which came to power promising to restore honesty and competence to government after the chaos, corruption, and dysfunction of the Tories. Starmer is rapidly running out of time to turn things round, once set, public perceptions of a government tend to become fixed and hard to shift. Starmer would now have to do something dramatic and unexpected in order to change things, but since an analysis has found that he is more right-wing than the great majority of Labour MPs, who are themselves members of the most right-wing Parliamentary Labour Party in history, don’t go expecting Starmer to do anything unexpectedly left wing. Starmer doesn’t do drama; this is a man who thinks beige is a loud colour and who is perfectly capable of denying point blank that he said something we all heard him say and he was recorded saying.

Farage and Reform UK will continue to make advances, especially if Elon Musk makes good on his promise to donate millions of pounds to Farage’s fascist snake oil project. The far-right will continue to be platformed and promoted by the British media, often covertly. There was an example of this on Sky News yesterday morning; a professor – whose name I did not catch – was brought on to discuss the New Year attack in New Orleans, which killed 15 people.

The attacker, who was shot dead by police, had a Muslim name but was born and brought up in Texas and was a US citizen. He apparently had Islamic State sympathies. The fact he was American and presumably radicalised in America, most likely online, did not prevent this professor from speculating that migrants and asylum seekers crossing the English Channel in small boats could potentially contain Islamic State terrorists amongst their number. There’s no evidence for that, but he was allowed to spout Reform UK talking points uninterrupted. It is also possible, indeed more likely, that the small boats might contain individuals who become valued and productive members of society in Britain, but saying that doesn’t grant you talking head status on Sky News.

In other likely developments, Operation Branchform will continue to be spun out for months longer. If and when it does finally come to a conclusion without any prosecutions and convictions, the story will be begrudgingly covered on BBC Scotland in less than thirty seconds, if that, probably with some video footage of a murder tent.

Over in the USA, anyone with a functioning social conscience is nervously awaiting the trumpster fire of the next presidency. Billionaires Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy have been tasked with slashing $500 billion from US Federal budgets because it always works out well when you let the super-rich decide how much gets spent on social security for the poor, disabled, and elderly. Trump – regarded by some on the left as the ‘anti-war’, ‘anti-imperialist presidential candidate has not taken power yet but has already spoken of his wish to annexe Canada, Greenland, and the Panama Canal. He has appointed as US ambassador to Israel a man who believes Israel has the right to annexe all of Palestine and that Palestinians do not exist as a nation. Look out for further attacks on the rights of women and minorities, turbocharging US support for Netanyahu, and attempts to silence Trump’s critics. We are in for a bumpy ride.

Sources:

▪ This piece was first published in Wee Ginger Dug and re-published in PUBLIC SQUARE UK on 3 January 2024 under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International licence. | The author writes in a personal capacity.

▪ Cover: Flickr/Number 10. (Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.)