End of Year 2025

As 2025 draws to a close, I’m gobsmacked at how quickly it seems to have passed.

I have fond memories of my childhood when twenty minutes seemed like an eternity, while now entire years pass in the blink of an eye. This sense that time passes more quickly as one ages is something I’ve never enjoyed. Even so, this year feels like the worst of it.

Perhaps it’s because I turned forty this year, a grim milestone on the march toward death as the cruel ravages of time take their toll, or perhaps it’s because it’s been a non-stop year of break-neck pace and stress. Whatever the cause, it really does seem to have passed more quickly than any other.

I’m left feeling genuine regret. There were things I wanted to do this year, and I’ve done none of them. I feel like I barely had time to take a breath and look around. I’ve all but quit photography, barely written a word, built nothing but a few toys, and found myself constantly wounded by the weariness at the end of the day that robs all those things from me.

Yet alongside regret, pride. The truth is I didn’t lose those things in isolation. Rather, my energy and wakeful hours went into my work instead, where I accomplished far bigger things than I ever could on my own in my free time. It feels strange to say that, to be able to recognise my company’s accomplishments as my own, but that’s where I am now — and in this year I did more with more impact than I have in any other year of my life.

Turning forty roughly coincided with my decision to mostly cease drinking. I have MASH (formerly NASH), a form of non-alcoholic liver disease that I’ve been combating for the last six years. It doesn’t require total abstention, but alcohol is aggravating — now to the point where drinking causes me days of pain and distress.

This feels cruel to me, to someone who loves wine. I’ve always taken a deeply romantic view of it: that virtually every society in recorded human history has revered the fruit of the vine, that it’s one of the great joys in life, and that it’s a universal enhancement — it enhances food, conversation, company, creativity, romance, everything. That it’s now so painful to me feels like a deeply cruel wound.

My choice now is to reserve it for special occasions — this evening included — where the value of the experience will outweigh the discomfort it’ll bring.

More generally, it fits with my other major realisation born of turning forty: that I value my clarity of mind. Once, I valued wine in part for its dulling of the harsh edges in my head, for its smoothing and calming effects. Now, older as I am, I feel that old acuteness more rarely, and crave it when it eludes me.

I think a lot about my earlier years, back when my mind was more active, and where I’ve ended up now. Back then I was surrounded by people with a lust for life, students and academics who had a colossal arrogance and a certainty that they were going to change the world, whatever route they chose to take. They and we devoured art and knowledge, hungered for the exceptional and intellectual stimulation, and viewed the whole forefront of human knowledge as a vast playground.

Now though, much of my life revolves around having the same conversation over and over again, either about children, mortgages, pensions, or tax. It gets worse when folks try to steer it toward cars or watches — or, heaven forfend, Bitcoin — but all of it reeks of a stale mediocrity I can scarcely believe I at some point embraced.

Where once I’d argue over the minutiae of the latest piece of science or tech news or pseudo-scientific nonsense doing the rounds, I’ve instead somehow built a life where it’s not uncommon for me to be around those who believe outright nonsense — conspiracy theories, pop-science, alternative medicine — or who have staggering hyopcrisies in their beliefs and actions, particularly in politics.

(Incidentally, my favourite occurrence of such nonsense appearing in my life this year was this one, the absurd notion that sunscreen — which helps prevent cancer — causes cancer. It came at a point where I was flabbergasted that some of my friend group who watched Apple Cider Vinegar were more amazed by the character who faked having cancer than they were by the character so absorbed by pseudo-scientific nonsense that she killed her mother and herself by refusing medical treatment in favour of ‘natural’ remedies.)

That’s the first of my major reflections for the year. I want to be more like my younger self — bolder, more alive in my own head, less bland, less basic. There’s a fullness to life that I used to occasionally enjoy and always aspire to. Somewhere along the way I lost it, likely in the pursuit of happiness as I battled depression, but now that threat has subsided I aim to revive that better part of me.

Despair

Before writing this piece, I read over my two end-of year pieces from last year: the first on my despair for the state of things and the second a more personal and optimistic view of how I felt.

The latter made me smile. One or two missed predictions aside, it was a good telling of how I’d viewed 2024 and how I then viewed things as I entered 2025. I have far fewer things to note this year — I’ve become enamoured by Rust and my self-hosting journey continues to grow wildly — and firmly stand by my main point: that we must cherish the longer forms, and my hope that we can all find an antidote to the despair this stormy present brings in the form of good writing, good journalism, and good thought.

The former piece though made me reflect on just how horrid I thought things would go and just how much worse I imagine things will still get. We’re barely a year into Trump’s second term as President, in which he’s entirely debased the office while inflicting more grief, pain, chaos, and evil on the world than perhaps any other president.

There are still three more years to go, yet even in this one year we’ve seen the world turn drastically for the worse. To recount every wound would require a thesis longer than my abortive PhD, but the democratic backsliding resuming under him (after a brief respite through 2023 and 2024) is likely the most consequential. His championing for regressive far-right populists across Europe and South America threatens ever more to accelerate our decline into a new dark age — particularly as he brings the immense power of the US state to bear with his foreign policy, his trade negotiations, his tariffs, and occasionally even his military to bring foreign nations, including partners and allies, to heel.

The chief long-term threat is in the disgusting approach he and Vance have taken toward European states’ regulation of speech, the web, and tech giants. The tech billionaires who so gracelessly and repugnantly bent the knee to court Trump’s child-like ego are getting exactly what they paid for as he essentially blackmails states into enabling the conditions that let regressive movements like his thrive.

More immediately, his courting of Putin and consistent mistreatment of Zelenskyy continue to invite a heartbreaking future for Ukraine and the rest of Europe. Again, Trump’s many crimes and follies here are too numerous to list, but the soul aches seeing and knowing what Ukraine is going to have to endure — on top of everything they’ve already endured.

More than that, compounding the various movements clawing at the soft underbelly of our international institutions, threatening to rip the EU apart and separate and divide the powers of NATO, the world has emboldened Russia and China. We’re inviting a future in which military conquest by authoritarian states will feature prominently, and even as Europe rearms and begins shifting to a war footing, it looks to me ever less likely that all this can be averted.

Closer to home, the despair comes in the form of our own battle with populism. We face a twin threat from two movements, Zack Polanski’s Greens on the left and Nigel Farage’s Reform on the right. Neither believes in the great virtue of parliamentary democracy. Both wish to radically reform and lay waste to our state rather than to responsibly manage and govern it.

One wields wildly infeasible promises to try to win support at any cost, while the other wields wildly reprehensible promises appealing to voters’ most base, most cruel instincts and grievances, convincing people that everything is terrible, that they’re victims of some great conspiracy to keep them down, and that only their party can rescue them from it.

It’s a wildly chaotic and terrifying state of affairs more reminiscent of the early part of the 20th century, and the long consequence of every step in this direction taken since 2016. Those going along with it don’t even realise they’re taking part, viewing the Greens and Reform as being more faithful representations of what they truly believe than any of the more politically sane parties that came before.

Political philosophies hold no sway with these people, nor does the practicality of actually running the government. The personal absurdities of their leaders don’t impact them at all, be they Farage’s racism and Putin apologia or Polanski’s views on NATO, on decarbonisation, on nuclear power, or on hypnotism. Those absorbed in these populist movements are able to ignore the scruples they heavily focus on in other parties so long as they get their way.

My Faint Optimism

Optimism is hard to come by at the moment, but after reading my despair post from last year, I do have a faint hint of it this coming year. In that post, I outlined my view on how these modern populist movements deconstruct truth and facts to win support, that the goal wasn’t to advance a specific ideology but rather to tear apart the very idea of ‘truth’ and political philosophy so that their vacuous movements can fill the gap left behind.

I was gravely concerned by that last year, and still am in a global context, but I am less concerned by it here in the UK now. My reasoning may seem tenuous, and let me begin with the most tenuous part of it: I genuinely do have a small modicum of faith in the British electorate.

I used to greatly admire how much more sensible we were as a country than, in particular, the Yanks. We used to be able to scoff at whatever nonsense they were doing over there and just get on with it over here. We seemed to have this sort of national sense of being sensible, of cutting through the bullshit. That quality has declined a ton since 2016, but we still have a small amount of it present, I think.

I think that quality is one of the reasons why we’ve generally done okay as a country despite our rabid right wing press — who are, incidentally, more rabid and less professional right now than they’ve ever been — and I think there’s cause to think it’s on display even now, even after the ruinous impact of Boris Johnson and Liz Truss, and even amid this seemingly terminal downward spiral into Polanski- and Farage-shaped populism.

We are now in a five-party political landscape comprised of Labour, the Tories, the LibDems, the Greens, and Reform. In this new world, any point above or below 20% is a measure of how well or poorly a party is doing. Ignoring the consistent outliers from Find Out Now, the polls generally have Labour a little bit over 20% and the Tories a little bit under 20%, while the LibDems and Greens lag behind and Reform run ahead. Labour are generally lagging 5-8 points behind Reform.

(I notably left Your Party out of this listing due to their polled support being negligible — but I have a huge amount of appreciation for the joy and humour they bring every day to anyone serious about politics.)

A 5-8 point lag four years out from the next election isn’t a worry. Aside from anything else, Labour has the most fierce campaign machine in British electoral politics. Even in the disastrous 2019 election campaign, Labour shot up more than 10 points in the closing weeks thanks to their outstanding campaign machine and the army of dedicated canvassers.

Combine that with the work this government is doing at the moment. Virtually none of it has short term impact, while virtually all of it has long term impact. NHS waiting lists continue to improve, public sector pay continues to rise, public services continue to be better funded, the grid continues to be decarbonised, the railways and rail operators continue to be nationalised (and thereby improve service), GB Energy continues to fund new energy projects (including the nuclear reactors on Ynys Môn), and new legislation on renters’ rights and employment rights has just been passed that’ll yield tons of benefit for tons of people over the coming years.

On top of that, the latest budget has gone down much more positively than last year’s and ended market volatility, just as interest rates and inflation are coming down and the economy is starting to look very healthy — particularly when including the massive investment in digital infrastructure we’ve won as we become a global hub for the next computational revolution.

Put simply, things are going pretty damn well — if you ignore the media circus.

I’m not one to ignore how important the media circus is in our electoral politics, but it’s a lot less impactful than it used to be. Boris Johnson beat it by ‘flooding the zone with shit’, throwing out so much ludicrous nonsense that nothing would stick. Keir Starmer beat it by ignoring it — albeit much more successfully earlier on, but still to a degree today. I do think he makes some mistakes in this area that I’ll likely write about at a later date — basically, this government suffers unduly from its terrible approach to PR and communications — but neither the voting intention polls nor his political position are greatly affected by it.

Combine this with Reform’s position. They’re losing councilors at an astonishing rate due to their incompetence and inexperience. They’re getting beaten in ways that defy polling when they actually have to face voters, and they’re getting jailed for what should be considered treason. They have severe weaknesses on Russia/Ukraine and the NHS, and their constant embrace of American culture war issues and ridiculous focuses on things like DOGE and DEI are the sort of thing the British electorate sees right through.

Finally, they have a severe weakness on immigration.

This is where I feel like a good number of analysts miss the wood for the trees. In among the frantic furore of folks contending that the most left-wing government since Wilson that’s decarbonising the grid, nationalising the railways, empowering workers, and renters and such is actually right wing (I have absolutely zero time for such people), it’s often missed that Reform is a party that’s strong on only one single issue. That is immigration, particularly unlawful immigration, and because they’re so intently focused on it any progress at all that the current government makes on it weakens Reform.

That’s why this strategy of taking the issue away from Reform is a focus for this government, and though it angers a lot of people, it’s likely to be highly effective. Immigration is dropping at an unheard of rate, and there are signs that the small boat crossings are dropping precipitously too, likely due to the one-in-one-out policy, the negotiated changes in French policy toward policing departures, and wider border enforcement activities.

All this combines to a wonderful crux that speaks to the heart of our elections. The first rule of politics is: learn to count. The UK electorate is about ~50 million people. About ~13 million of those are from Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland, and London, where political trends are very different from the rest of the country — meaning that the ~37 million remaining voters across the rest of England are where elections are won and lost.

British electoral history is the history of how those people leaned, and it’s mostly uniform over the last hundred years. England is largely a nation of centrists ranging from the centre-left to the centre-right. The fringes to the far left and right make the noise, but most people vote around the centre, and the only time the fringes ever win are when the centre-ground is abandoned — as with Thatcher against Foot in 1983 and Johnson against Corbyn in 2019.

Labour have — bafflingly — been allowed to take complete control of the centre ground. The Greens don’t want it any more and the Tories have defied any conventional political sense by abandoning it in pursuit of Reform. The LibDems are still there, but have made minimal inroads since the election last year. That space is largely uncontested.

Putting that all together with one final point, that up to a third of Reform voters consider Labour their second choice, and I think there’s a strong likelihood Labour will hold Parliament in 2029 — just so long as the party doesn’t stupidly pursue some unlikely route to oust Starmer in May.

I’ll close this section with a real point of worry though: the Welsh election in May. It’ll be our first under proportional representation — which many folks misinterpret as being a weapon that aids the left rather than the right — and my expectation is that Reform will do very well. I’m terrified of what that may mean, particularly since they’ve flirted with the policy of abolishing the Senedd and ending Welsh democratic self-governance. I’ll write again on that at a later date though.

Happy New Year

Last year, the optimistic part of my end of year post was oriented around reading good words and finding comfort in good ideas and the good people who share them.

This year, I find it hard to conceive of anything that’d improve upon that sentiment. Misinformation and propaganda is worse than ever. Our political discourse is in the gutter. Social media continues to circle the drain as it destroys any semblance of truth and goodness and threatens liberal-democratic principles all over the globe.

I think if I had a wish, it’d be for things to take a turn toward scepticism. Not the sort of scepticism that leads to conspiracy theories, but rather the sort of scepticism that demands evidence. All of these regressive populists rely on this new era where vibes trump truth, where one’s beliefs and ‘lived experiences’ trump data, evidence, and facts. I spend an inordinate amount of my time watching and reading about RFK Jr deconstructing the medical and scientific structures of the US federal government, and reading about how he approaches scientific matters is enough to make me want to vomit.

So if you’re able, I hope you find it in yourself to treat the claims of charlatans and populists with a bit more scepticism in the year ahead. If we could all be a little bit more appreciative of science in this era where vaccines are being maligned by morons and where tylenol/paracetamol is being held up boldly by non-scientists as a great evil, perhaps we can have some hope for better things ahead.

Happy New Year.