A bit late perhaps to discuss New Year resolutions, but I thought we might anyway. The Prime Minister – Rishi Sunak as I write – has laid out his government’s resolutions for the coming year, listing five issues he says they’re determined to tackle, with ‘no tricks’ and ‘no ambiguity’.

The five ‘people’s priorities’ as he described them were: halving inflation, growing the economy, reducing debt, cutting NHS waiting lists and stopping small boat crossings to the UK.
Critics observe that these are all vague aspirations, somewhat light – putting it politely – on details such as ‘by how much’, and ‘by when’. They also involve events that are likely to happen anyway to some extent, with inflation, for example, already forecast to fall and the economy to grow.
Some suggest that Sunak’s choices are aimed in part at pacifying the increasingly vocal hard right of the Tory party, in order to try and hold the party together and avoid a drift of voters to the Reform UK party.Remember UKIP spooking the Tories into the Brexit referendum? That went well, didn’t it.
Whether Sunak’s choice of priorities is appropriate, or whether his speech was good or bad – our MP Simon Hoare thinks it was ‘really good’ – there were two glaring omissions. There was no mention of the part played by the last 12 years of Tory government in creating much of the sorry mess we are in. Neither was there any mention of the worsening environmental situation, with ever more extreme weather chaos around the globe plus a continuing decline of our already severely depleted natural world.
Recent surveys show that a clear majority of people are now concerned about climate change, but the Government’s own advisers say they are still not taking all the actions needed. They are failing us, disastrously.
Examples include failing to ensure the rapid decarbonisation our economy, failing to stop the ever-increasing pollution of our waterways, failing to make older houses cheaper and warmer to live in, and failing to ensure that all new homes are fit for the future.

Instead they continue to do things like subsidising tree burning by Drax power station, encouraging more fossil fuel extraction and approving a new coal mine in Cumbria.
It’s not Resolutions we need, it’s Revolutions. Such as a revolution in the way we do politics – to be more inclusive and focussed longer term on the common good, rather than on short term narrow ideological imperatives that favour friends and allies.
And a revolution in the way our economic system works, so that our country’s wealth is shared equitably instead of relentlessly moving upwards to line the pockets of the already rich. That would be a Happy New Year indeed!