“There’s a saying that all predictions turn out to be either lucky or wrong.” With those words, just over 12 months ago, I began a blog post for this site which looked forward to 2017 and committed forever to the internet some reluctant thoughts about what the year might bring in the world of politics…
In keeping with his “Spreadsheet Phil” persona, Philip Hammond’s Budget today was mostly boring. Many of the announcements had been expected, due to a tightly controlled drip-feed to the media over the last week or so.
Correctly predicting what’s going to be in the Budget is akin to completing the football pools or picking the lottery numbers, given the variables and levers that a Chancellor has to pull at any one time.
There was much focus on the Supreme Court last week, where judges upheld a ruling that MPs must be given a vote on Britain leaving the European Union. The result was that parliament remains sovereign.
There’s a saying that all predictions turn out to be either lucky or wrong. And there’s another one which says anyone who claims to know the future must, by definition, be either a fool or a charlatan. Nonetheless, the appetite for political forecasts is a thirsty one, so let’s take a look at the year ahead and hope I prove to be a lucky fool.
Although it was Philip Hammond’s first Autumn Statement, three spectres could be felt in the background: one of the past, one of the present(ish) and one of the future.
In the last fortnight, two very different party conferences have occurred; Labour’s in Liverpool and the Conservative’s in Birmingham. For the most part, Conservative attendees – finding themselves in a majority government, with an exit from the EU in the offing and a Prime Minister channelling a bit of their heroine, Mrs Thatcher – were by far the happier.
George Orwell famously wrote that in a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act. Except, of course, he never wrote anything of the sort.
Search for Brexit on Google and you can expect 165,000,000 (and counting) hits in just 0.33 seconds which is some achievement for a term that was first coined in June 2012, according to the online MacMillan Dictionary…