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Dave Brown
Politics, at the best of times, is an unpredictable game. Next year promises to be a vintage one for aficionados, and a pretty unstable one too.
With the general election coming, one thing we can be sure of is that our politicians will be more stressed than they have been for many a year. So that’s something the rest of us can look forward to.
Here are ten things that might happens in politics in 2015:
There will be a general election in May. Which no-one will win.
There will be a second general election before the year is out and before it gets too cold, so maybe September or October. No-one will win.
As a result during 2014 we will be governed by three different parties in various combinations, and two, possibly three, different prime ministers. You can imagine any combination you wish from Labour, Tories and Lib Dems. It will make no odds to anything important.
Because no-one won, the new governments won’t be able to do much anyway. This will be good because new governments tend to make mistakes. It will be bad because the financial markets, oddly, do not realise this. They will calm down in due course.
Whoever is in government will have to listen and pay heed to the wishes of Alex Salmond, who will return to Westminster as SNP MP for Gordon with lot of SNP mates, largely at the expense of Labour but also the Lib Dems, where Charlie Kennedy may be the last Scots Lib Dem MP left. Salmond will make the government(s) give Home Rule to Scotland.
Whoever is in government will have to listen and pay heed to the wishes of Nigel Farage, who will arrive as MP for Thanet South, and with a group of UKIP MPs, though probably smaller than the current hype suggests. He will try and fail to get us out of the EU, because the electors will very cleverly have given him a party big enough to make the others get tough on immigration, but too small to do any further damage, such as leaving Europe. Farage’s MPs will be of low calibre, prove an embarrassment every time they try to make a speech and become a laughing stock. His party will, by the end of 2016, implode under the sheer weight of its own ridiculousness.
Everything will be swamped by the MP VIP paedophile sex abuse circle and associated scandals. Such organised abuse of power will make the Jimmy Savile affair look small. The voters, already scornful of politicians, will demand reform, though what, precisely, that should entail will remain vague. Some MPs will be forced out.
Electoral reform and proportional representation will be back in vogue. Having seen random hung parliaments emerge from our first past the post system, the electorate will instead demand rational, logical hung parliaments, to come from a PR system. (But see also point 4 above).
Boris Johnson will implode under the sheer weight of his own smugness.
By this time next year someone we have never heard of will be prime minister. It usually turns out that way.
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