Some time ago, this column invented a tradition of devoting its first appearance of the year to negative predictions: foretelling things that would not (contrary to general expectation) happen in the following 12 months. In the past, I have tried to keep this fairly lighthearted but the past year has been marked by such terrible events that I’m afraid much of this instalment will deal with matters that are pretty grim.
First: the West (the United States, Britain, and occasionally France) will not succeed in formulating any clear foreign policy for dealing with IS and the threat of what identifies itself as global Islamist terror. This will not be due to incompetence or diplomatic disarray but because it is logically impossible to devise a rational policy for dealing with an irrational threat. There will be a wide (but not officially acknowledged) realisation that this phenomenon is not a systematic programme with methodical leaders in charge of disciplined forces, but a flag of convenience for assorted nihilistic fantasists for whom mass murder is an end not a means.
Because the invasion of Iraq and the forced regime change in Libya had disastrous consequences, and the non-intervention in Syria did too, there is now a general assumption that nothing the West does or does not do will be successful.
Second: the eurozone as we know it will not survive – but there will be a propaganda campaign of soviet proportions to persuade us that it has. The Greek elections at the end of this month will see the irresistible force of national popular will – the Left-wing anti-austerity party Syriza – in direct collision with the immovable object of the central authority of the EU.
Even if the immediate economic impact of Greece leaving the eurozone is manageable, the political consequences for the EU will be potentially catastrophic. If Greece restored the drachma in some reincarnated, devalued form, and then benefited from a huge increase in tourism and investment, the electorates of Spain and Italy, with their shocking levels of unemployment, would surely demand similar possibilities. Even if Greece does not manage a rapid economic recovery, the glorious prospect of restoring democratic accountability to its national government will be an incitement to restive dissident voices in the rest of southern Europe.
Third: the May election in Britain will not produce another coalition in the UK. Britain is unlikely to adopt a “more European” model of permanent coalition government in future. The experience of the current one has not been happy, having produced more recrimination and personal bitterness rather than less. More important, Britain has a very long tradition of adversarial parliamentary politics in which two major parties confront one another in cleanly delineated debate. Recently those differences have been of a Left-Right kind. In the past, they involved free trade versus protectionism, or the reform of the electoral system itself. But the causes were almost inevitably identified with fixed party loyalties, not the dealing and trade-off of fluid factions and transitory coalition partnerships. The politics of Britain (or, properly speaking, England) has been based on a contest between two big players for a very long time. It will almost certainly continue that way.
Labour hopes that its Scottish vote will come through in the end, for all the momentary excitement about nationalism, although remarkably few of its politicians actually seem to expect their party to win outright. All of which points to a small but workable Conservative majority, and a serious identity crisis for Labour in the wake of a defeat. The shape of that dilemma will depend on how much damage the SNP does to the Labour vote in Scotland. If its effect is massive, then there will be calls for the party to return to its working-class, further-Left historical roots.
And finally, what may seem a self-serving note from a journalist: the professional news media will not be displaced by social media. It is true that amateur public-participation reporting has become a very significant force in totalitarian societies and regions torn apart by sectarian fighting. Twitter and bloggers have formed effective, uncensorable samizdat networks of informants both within their own borders and with the outside world. But in open, democratic countries social media are too easily infiltrated by the unreliable, the pestilential or the downright insane to constitute a consistently credible alternative source of either information or analysis. There is really too much glib talk altogether about new forms of communication or media replacing established ones. I am old enough to remember the confident prediction that television would rapidly kill off cinema. (Who would go out to a theatre when he had a screen to watch in the comfort of his own home?) And television was going to finish off radio as well. (Who would settle for purely audio entertainment when he could have visual images?) Well, the cinema and radio seem to be with us for the foreseeable future. And I’m willing to bet that well edited and properly sourced news media will be too.