Everyone can see the world is going through the biggest political and economic change of weather since the end of the Cold War and the advance of globalization. But nobody is sure what this means or where we are headed. There is now more uncertainty out there than I can recall, ever. So I am not, as the year draws to its close, willing to predict what 2017 may bring. What I will do is look back and see where we thought we were going in 2016.
As the New Year received its ecstatic welcome all across the globe (more or less) Cameron was safe in Downing Street for the duration of this Parliament, Trump was a nutter who was unlikely to survive the early primaries, the In Out Referendum to finally put to rest the wild notion that we could leave the EU was set for mid-year, Corbyn was settling in as the unexpected Labour leader and in Europe the main preoccupation was the never ending diaspora of the hopeful streaming up from the south.
Well it did not quite happen as expected. The referendum was lost and cost Cameron his job. There was a rebellion against Corbyn which failed very badly. Trump was elected US President. The Italian government lost its own reform referendum and the EU’s most reformist national leader, prime minister Renzi resigned. Hollande threw in the towel and announced he would not stand for a second term as president of France. Merkel will stand in 2017 but may not win.
Trump is, in a year of big ticket items, probably the biggest ticket, for 2017. This is because he is undoubtedly the biggest wild card the Americans have elected since Abraham Lincoln and he will set about changing the very essence of the United States, just as Lincoln did. But how, in what direction and with what result is far from clear. It is also unclear whether Americans will let him deliver his vision of a greater America. It is also unclear how the world will react.
The next biggest ticket is Brexit. Here it is difficult to know where to begin. So I will just plunge in. We do not yet know by what constitutional process Article 50 will be triggered and await the Supreme Court. We do not know for sure if Article 50 is reversible (it is supposed not to be) as this is now about to be challenged in the Irish courts and will end up at the European Supreme Court. We do not know whether on leaving the EU we are actually in or out of the European free market and this is subject to another legal challenge. We do not know what the government plan is, perhaps because it does not have one.
There is talk of hard Brexit, soft Brexit, clean Brexit and no Brexit. The last is a no, no. So on current form it may very well happen, not least because the whole legal spider’s web was never meant to be unpicked and the only way might be to shut down the whole thing and start again with something less prescriptive which we would be happy to remain in. With the political uncertainty in both America and Europe we will have to wait until the middle of the year, before we can even get an inkling of what comes next, both politically and economically.
If you ask me to predict whether the May government will survive the year I cannot. If you ask me what might come after, if she falls, I would once have answered Boris. But now I am not sure about even that.