My maternal grandfather once tried to discourage my grandmother from coming to this country by telling her that the end of the apartheid regime was just around the corner. That was in 1966.
Which puts my claim this time last year that ‘the coalition might last to the end of 2012, but it will be over before the end of 2013’ into some perspective. I am, after all, likely to only be two years out as far as the fall of the coalition is concerned, and at least I called the American election right, spotting the flaw in the Romney electoral strategy a whole month before the man himself did: ‘you can’t win an election if your only support comes from angry and uneducated white men’.
Unfortunately, my predictive abilities closer to home enjoyed what a kind observer could only call limited success. ‘The universal credit will be scrapped,’ I declared in September, ‘there are enough Liberal Democrats who have thought seriously about poverty and welfare reform that it will struggle in parliament, and ultimately the tactical loss of a U-turn is less damaging than actually implementing a system that is both crueller and more expensive than the current one.’ That said, don’t expect to see me reincarnated as a genius pundit on the other side of the Atlantic; the morning before Obama’s landslide, I wrote that we would ‘hopefully’ see a Democratic victory at the polls.
I’m not sure if my woeful record should cheer or depress progressives. It comes down to which Stephen Bush you least believe: the one who trumpeted that ‘barring an act of unforgivable self-immolation from the Labour leadership, “Cameroonism” will be a strictly one-term proposition’ or the one who warned that the election cycle that 2013 called to mind was not ‘1994-7 or even 1990-2, but 2003-5’.
There were, in my defence, some things I called dead right. I still think it was a moral failure on the part of the Labour leadership not to hold a whipped vote on equal marriage, and that Boris’ accession to the Tory throne ‘is a question of not if or when but how’; it’s not as if Theresa May can deport Abu Qatada every week, after all. That said, I was too quick to judge Len McCluskey, who I believed would fight tooth-and-nail against Ed Miliband’s reforms, but now seems to have become something of a Blairite himself.
My biggest mistake over the parliamentary year: until very recently, I didn’t understand the extent to which, for the Liberals, ‘coalition’ is a value. I thought they’d threaten the coalition over universal credit, and actually bring it to ruin over Europe. But – and I think this is true, too, of those who loudly decry them for having betrayed their values – time and time again, I have underestimated their overriding sense that the art of coalition is a core principle as much as anything else that gets a cheer at Liberal Democrat conference.
My biggest struggle, though, was Syria. It took me a decade to come up with a semi-coherent opinion about Iraq so reaching any form of conclusion about its neighbour within the course of a weekly deadline was always going to be a stretch. I changed my mind three, perhaps four times during the whole process, only submitting when it became a choice between that and doing a law conversion.
I still don’t know what I think. I struggle with what I wrote, and I struggle with John Hutton’s piece in the Telegraph and David Aaronovitch in the Times. So perhaps that’s my real takeaway from the parliamentary year: that I am mostly wrong or confused. Probably that’s why my best piece of the year was all about poking fun at insufferable people who think that they are always right.
Till September.
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Stephen Bush writes a weekly column for Progress, the Tuesday review, and tweets @stephenkb
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Photo: Isobel T