Nothing about the traditional wish that friends and loved ones have a happy new year rings true this year. It jars against the reality we all know the country and its least well-off, in particular, are about to face.
Unemployment is already high with huge job cuts on the way and a certainty that the private sector will be unable to take up the fallout from the public sector.
The planned rise in VAT, fuelling the already rising inflation rate pressure on interest rates and universal cuts in benefits and services make for not only a grim outlook but for a social reaction which is unpredictable only in scale. The friction we have seen on the streets over education cuts so far may be the tip of a bigger upheaval in civil unrest. That is not to be wished for and the trade union-led-march planned for March must be the biggest and most disciplined ever seen in this country.
We end the year in a state of economic and political flux. Against the social engineering of the Government’s spending cuts the political mould is still being reshaped. This year started with former Cabinet members plotting their last damp-squib attempt to ditch Gordon Brown to reassert what was left of New Labour’s ragged project in a squalid attempt to hold on to a power the public long wished it be denied. After an election loss and a roller-coaster year, Labour has a fresh, inspiring new leader in Ed Miliband and is ahead in the opinion polls.
Under Nick Clegg, the Liberal Democrats are imploding under the internal contradictions of their principles and policies on the one hand and the ideology of their dominant Tory coalition partners on the other.
Mr Miliband has even felt emboldened to woo disaffected Lib Dems and succeeded in getting on board one of their foremost influential policy makers. The political kaleidoscope has been given a rigorous shaking and it is impossible to predict where all the pieces will eventually land.
The prospect of a new amalgam with defecting Lib Dems may not please many Labour activists but it is important to remember that many of them deserted the party because of their laudable disgust at the neo-liberal policies of New Labour.
Mr Miliband, under constant whispering attack by those who will not be reconciled to the passing of New Labour into history and the defeat of their preferred candidate for the leadership, has quietly been seeking to assert his authority behind the scenes in an attempt to avoid the factionalism that dogged the Tony Blair and Gordon Brown years.
The warm up is over. Early in 2011 must be the time for Mr Miliband and, critically, his silent Shadow Cabinet, to spring out of the starting blocks. There has never been a more auspicious time to hold a government to account – even the Government’s top civil servant urges a Plan B for the economy.
The first task is to persuade the country that there is an alternative to the coalition’s plans. The second is to convince it that Labour under Ed Miliband is the party to deliver it.
