As the end of the year approaches my thoughts turn to what next year might bring. However, I won’t be making a lot of predictions after the abject failure of my forecasts over recent times.
It started in May 2015 when I confidently predicted that there would be a hung parliament … clearly, I was wrong and David Cameron’s Conservatives won an, albeit small, majority and he formed a new Government.
Moving on to this year and in June the long-awaited EU Referendum took place. I felt sure that the people of the UK would vote to stay in the EU despite its many obvious faults. I had always believed the view of Winston Churchill “to jaw-jaw is always better than to war-war”, would prevail, and we would continue in membership, to ensure peace and seek to find political solutions to our disagreements with our fellow Europeans. Not to be: a majority of those voting decided we should leave.
The referendum result prompted the rapid departure of David Cameron and a leadership election in the Conservative party. I knew this would be a shoe-in for Boris Johnson; after all, he had been a popular London mayor and had led the Brexit campaign.
Wrong again; in fact, he did not even stand and Theresa May moved into Downing Street in July without much further fuss.
Then came the challenge to Labour Leader Jeremy Corbyn at the end of June, following criticism of his allegedly weak support for the Remain campaign in the referendum on membership of the European Union.
Hilary Benn, then Shadow Foreign Secretary, was sacked and more than two dozen members of the Shadow Cabinet resigned, a no-confidence vote was supported by 172 MPs in the Parliamentary Labour Party, against 40 supporting Corbyn.
Corbyn refused to resign and after a couple of nominations fell by the wayside Owen Smith emerged to challenge Corbyn for the leadership in a head-to-head race. It was clear to me that Owen Smith would win. Clearly, I failed to take note that, along with most other people, I had never heard of him prior to the leadership election. Surely Labour party members would realise that Corbyn had little support in Parliament and would elect the challenger…
Wrong again! In September Jeremy Corbyn won the election, actually increasing his share of the vote.
November 8th saw the election of the President of the USA. Many people thought both candidates were as bad as one another. For me it was very clear cut as much as Hilary Clinton, while a long way from a dream candidate, had to be preferable to Donald Trump. Trump has been labelled as a racist, misogynist and religiophobic: he appears to be against any beliefs other than his own, and he could count on the white supremacists of the Ku Klux Klan for support.
Surely he was not going to become the ‘leader of the free world…’ Ooops! I’m not sure what all this proves other than it is a good job I’m not much of a betting person.
However, a couple of days after the US election my luck changed when I predicted that England would be victorious against Scotland in the World Cup Group F Qualifier. I think next year I’ll stick to sporting predictions.
Now who’s going to win the Premier League… well, it could never be Leicester… it must be another City….
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Michel de Nostredame (1503 – 1566), usually Latinised as Nostradamus, was a French physician and reputed seer who published collections of prophecies that have since become widely famous. He is best known for his book Les Propheties, the first edition of which appeared in 1555. Since the publication of this book, which has rarely been out of print since his death, Nostradamus has attracted a following that, along with much of the popular press, credits him with predicting many major world events. Most academic sources maintain that the associations made between world events and Nostradamus’s quatrains are largely the result of misinterpretations or mistranslations (sometimes deliberate) or else are so tenuous as to render them useless as evidence of any genuine predictive power.
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