Jeremy Corbyn will remain as leader
Jeremy Corbyn started the year in a position that was stronger than it appeared, something the doomed attempt to remove him proved.
Now he looks unassailable, which probably slightly overstates his strength.
Party members are worried by what they see as the party’s right-turn on immigration, and those worries will grow more acute if the pattern of Richmond and Sleaford – where the party suffered an exodus of Leave-backing voters to the right and of Remain-backing voters to the Liberal Democrats – continues in by-elections and elections next year. There is also growing concern about what is seen as the Labour leadership’s frequent silence and inability to make news.
Neither of these worries will cohere into viable opposition to Corbyn, however. It’s easy to imagine a candidate who could displace Corbyn: pro-European, pro-immigration and popular in the country at large. But there lies the problem: no such candidate exists in the parliamentary Labour party. The leadership is Corbyn’s as long as he wants it.
If there is an early election, it won’t be at a time of Theresa May’s choosing
Next year will continue to be marked by questions of an early election. One reason being that the government has been forced to abandon or delay key planks of its agenda already, thanks to its wafer-thin majority – but is also in possession of a double-digit lead in the opinion polls.
An obstacle to such analyses is the Fixed-Term Parliaments Act, which means that the Prime Minister cannot secure an early election without either a two-thirds majority in the Commons or her government losing a vote of confidence. At that point, if a new government cannot secure a vote of confidence in itself, there is an election.
Theoretically, the government could put forward a motion of confidence and instruct its MPs to abstain and, seeing as it is unlikely that the opposition parties would declare their confidence in May’s leadership, secure an early election that way.
There are some problems with that approach though – as the Institute for Government’s Cath Haddon explains , it’s not at all clear who the Prime Minister would be in the intervening 14 days – would it still be Theresa May? Someone else from within her party? Or Jeremy Corbyn?
All of those ambiguities mean that I think it is highly unlikely that May will call an early election out of choice. But the same arguments for calling one at a time of her choosing are all the arguments that may force her hand. So while I don’t rule out an election next year, if there is one, it will be as much of a shock to May as to everyone else.
Angela Merkel will continue as Chancellor, but her power will be diminished
Angela Merkel’s standing in Britain is odd. In regular times, she’d be seen as a fairly dull centre-right politician. But the leftwing achievements of the SPD, her coalition partner from 2005 to 2009 and again from 2013, mean that she is seen as cuddlier than she is, while her decision to allow a million refugees into Germany has made her a hate figure on the uglier parts of the right.
That means her success in the German elections next year has become a proxy war among Britain’s elites, with the success of the far-right party Alternative for Germany (AfD) a subject for celebration among Britain’s own nativists.
The reality, as I’ve written before, is that what will decide Merkel’s future is how well the parties of the left – the Social Democrats, the leftist Die Linke and the Greens – do. If they can cobble together a working coalition, they will likely force her out. Far more likely – unless Martin Schulz can give the Social Democrats an unexpected boost – is a more fractious repeat of the coalition of left and right that she has run since 2013.
Barring a terrorist attack, Marine Le Pen won’t win
We’ve known since early 2013 that Marine Le Pen, the fascist candidate for the French presidency, had a strong chance of winning the first round of the presidential elections and a puncher’s chance of winning the second. (Under the rules of the French system, unless a candidate secures more than half of the vote in the first round, the top two go through to the run-off.)
But the victories for Donald Trump and Brexit – plus the fact that, as far as Britain’s Brexit deal is concerned, elections on the continent matter to the United Kingdom more than ever – mean that here in Britain, people are waking up to the possibility that Le Pen could be France’s next president.
I’m not convinced that she will. For all the far right is gaining from sharing best practice between its activists, it is losing through the association with extremists abroad. Most of the four million people who voted for Ukip detest Donald Trump, and that goes even more so for the perhaps three to four million voters who didn’t vote Ukip in 2015 but could potentially be persuaded to do so in the future. Don’t forget that allies of Norbert Hofer, the far-right candidate in Austria, believe the association with the anti-EU politics of Nigel Farage hurt their candidate.
The comparison between Le Pen and her cheerleaders abroad risks hurting her. But more important than that is that the victories of Trump and Brexit – and I should emphasise that the differences between Brexit and Trump are more important than the similarities, in my view – both ran with the grain of their respective political cultures. In the case of Vote Leave, euroscepticism is part of the warp and weft of British politics, just as white reactionary politics are part of the story of American politics.
It’s worth noting that while the Brexit vote, Trump’s victory and Matteo Renzi’s defeat in the Italian referendum were cheered by Le Pen, they were all the work of forces that were to her left. One of Vote Leave’s successes was largely in keeping Nigel Farage away from the cameras, Trump hijacked the party of the centre-right (albeit in the disturbingly right-wing context of American politics), and Renzi’s defeat was an alliance of much of the political spectrum against his government and him personally.
Le Pen’s assault on the French presidency has two problems. First, she has not hijacked a centre-right organisation, and she is pushing against, rather than towards, the cultural headwinds of French politics. There is a long tradition of voting against the anti-system parties in French politics, and my expectation is that the left and the centre will lend their votes to keep Le Pen out again in 2017.
If Westminster is, as Andrew Neil termed it, “a tiny, toy-town world beyond the reach of most of us,” then the House of Lords is that rare, discontinued train set, whose eBay bidding chain is made up of collectors with money to burn.
Arriving at the peer’s entrance – of course it has more than one entrance – the tall man in the tailcoat on the front desk asks: “If sir wouldn’t mind waiting in the lobby, please.” His sentence structure is as strange as his use of the third person. Several coat pegs have «reserved» written above them and the ceremony of the place is forthright.
Lord Ashdown, though, appears unfazed.
After a brisk march through a few echoing corridors, during which not one person says hello to him, the former Royal Marines captain gestures towards an enormously long table flanked by just two leather chairs. Ashdown was created a Life Peer in 2001 and has been an outspoken constitutional critic of the second chamber ever since; which begs the question, then, why did he accept the title in the first place?
He prefaces a confident answer with a shrug. “I came into this place to get rid of it. How else can you get rid of something unless you’re in the right place to vote to get rid of it, or at the very least for its reform? I think it is an affront to have an undemocratic second chamber. The principle of democracy is that those who make the laws have the power to do so because they have been conferred through the ballot box.”
While Ashdown might resent what he calls the “creature of the executive”, he isn’t entirely against all of that creature’s comforts. “I suppose if you want to keep it then alright, all this gold-plated stuff isn’t too uncongenial; but far too many of their Lordships get their feet under the table and lose whatever radical principles they had before. They get so seduced by being called Milord every other second that they want to keep the place going.”
So what should the second chamber look like, according to Ashdown? “My view is that it should be elected as it is elsewhere in the world. It should be geographically based, it should be based on regions, and it should be elected on a term different from the House of Commons. It should be elected by proportionate representation and if it was then it would have a wider diversity of people.
“Of course, the Commons has primacy but that doesn’t mean that it should have absolute primacy. This place does some of its job well; it’s a good revising chamber but it’s very bad at holding the government to account.”
The investment manager Gina Miller told the New Statesman last year that in campaigning to block the Conservative government’s move to invoke article 50 without reference to the Commons, she was “doing the Labour party’s job.” If reformed, as Ashdown insists is necessary, can the Lords provide an effective opposition when one is absent elsewhere? He explains: “The House of Commons is supposed to be the watchdog of the government, but in truth it’s more like a lapdog. You see it now, Labour failing to oppose the government on things that really matter – the interception bill, Brexit for example, where their position has been so weak. The House of Lords does, then, compensate for the failings of the Commons, but nowhere near as much as it should, and would do if it was elected. If you had a second chamber that successfully did its job in holding the executive to account, I would argue that you wouldn’t have had the poll tax, and you wouldn’t have had the Iraq war.”
Ashdown says that the second chamber should be elected but retain its power of veto; couldn’t that be viewed as a contradiction in terms? What would stop the Lords from preventing something that had been decided democratically in the Commons? What if the Lords wanted to block Brexit? Ashdown takes a deep breath. “I would caution against that. The people have voted and whether you like it or not, that is superior to both Houses. We must allow the government to enact Brexit, but that doesn’t mean that it should be allowed to go through completely unamended.”
In a democracy, the principle of a popular mandate ought to be sacrosanct; but if we restrict the second chamber’s role to scrutinising and amending legislation, are we missing an opportunity for better governance? Why not let the Lords have an originating function? Ashdown suggests that some degree of competition between two elected chambers could be healthy, noting the positives of plurality. “If you look at the model of other second chambers around the world — there are 84 by my count — only four are not elected. These are Belarus, Ukraine, Britain and Canada. Not very good company, is it?
“I think they all have a limited power of check. Now take, for instance, treaties. The government has the ability to introduce treaties, part of their own prerogative, not subject to parliamentary scrutiny at all. The Nato treaty is one, Brexit is another. I think that the House of Lords should have a particular role in the ratification of treaties. The present Salisbury Convention, which isn’t bad, could simply be translated into law very easily. In any case, I accept the primacy of the Commons, but it must not have total primacy.”
Ashdown’s politics are decidedly centrist, informed by the habit of compromise and in favour of coalitions. All things considered, his views on the Lords are perhaps unsurprising. But in a political climate that is so obtrusively partisan, how optimistic can he be about recovering the centre ground? Ashdown is emphatic: “There has never been a successful government that has not been of the progressive centre. Extreme governments, on either side, lead you to disaster. If you will not be receptive to the idea of coalitions then you can’t provide sensible government.”
Britain’s duopoly, Ashdown warns, is a dying concept. He adds with a finger wag: “The truth is that democracy is not divided in two. I mean, what do you know in the internet age when people have multiple choices? They want to have a bit of this and a bit of that. The world is not divided into Conservatives and Labour. There are people with a whole range of views and it is one of the remarkable things about our time. If our lives are pluralist, then how can you make our politics binary?”
This article originally appeared in the New Statesman’s Political Studies Guide for 2017.

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Hundreds of thousands of Charlotte-area residents who went to bed Friday night, expecting to see snow-covered yards Saturday morning, awoke instead to a crust of ice over an otherwise-barren landscape.
The National Weather Service predicted snowfall of 4-8 inches across Mecklenburg County, but less than an inch was on the ground at Charlotte’s official reporting station, Charlotte Douglas International Airport, when daybreak arrived.
What went wrong?
“Storm shifted northwest at last minute,” WBTV meteorologist Al Conklin tweeted to one area resident Saturday morning. “It happens. It’s weather.”
Or, as Conklin told viewers, “Weather is not a perfect science.”
Charlotte’s loss was the northern Piedmont and foothills’ gain. Places like Statesville, Hickory and Lenoir, where 3-5 inches were expected, instead got double that amount.
The busted forecast was similar to a storm in February 2015, which was expected to bring 4 or more inches to Charlotte – and didn’t. In both cases, the rain-snow dividing line was 25 to 50 miles farther north than predicted.
Meteorologists base much of their forecasts on computer models. Those are programs that take atmospheric data, add in results from past events, and produce forecasts.
Earlier in the week, computer models showed a major winter storm affecting the Carolinas. The models also showed cold air from an arctic mass reaching the Carolinas before the precipitation arrived.
By late Thursday, one model – the North American (or NAM) – began predicting the low pressure system would cross Florida near Jacksonville. That is farther north than other models were forecasting. In addition, the NAM showed colder air not arriving as quickly as the other models showed.
Throughout the day Friday, the NAM stuck to its guns, showing a lot of rain and sleet for places like Charlotte and Raleigh. The other models predicted heavy snow.
Charlotte’s TV meteorologists began preparing residents by late Friday afternoon, cautioning that snowfall totals south of the city could be much less than earlier predicted.
On Saturday morning, meteorologists like Conklin and the National Weather Service’s Trisha Palmer noted that the cold air was playing catch-up with the precipitation to the southeast of I-85.
As Palmer noted, “I’m guessing that probably half of the residents across the area are happy with us right now, and the other half not so happy.”
The air finally got cold enough for a final area of precipitation from the storm to fall as snow Saturday morning in Charlotte. But the overall impact of the system was far different than expected.

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But it was the realisation in the late 1970s and early 1980s that the world was in the throes of previously unrecognised pandemics of genital herpes and AIDS, that really propelled the term into the mainstream.
The causative agent of genital herpes was type 2 herpes simplex virus (HSV-2), a pathogen that was reasonably well-known at the time, but whose capacity for explosive spread had been underestimated. AIDS, on the other hand, was a completely new infectious agent – one which we now know had been spreading unrecognised since the early 20th century.
Since then, emerging diseases have been appearing at an accelerating rate. Part of the explanation for this may simply be that we are much better at detecting them now. On the other hand, population pressure, climate change and ecological degradation may be contributing to a situation where zoonosis – the movement of a disease from a vertebrate animal to a human host – is more common.
Whatever the explanation, hepatitis C (1989), West Nile virus (1999), SARS (2003), Chikungunya (2005), swine flu (2009), MERS (2012), Ebola (2014) and Zika (2015) have all since had their time in the media spotlight. A further 33 diseases have featured in the World Health Organisation’s Disease Outbreak News since its inception in 1996. Of the “big eight” listed above, six are known zoonotic diseases – and the remaining two (hepatitis C and Chikungunya) are assumed to be so, although the animal reservoir remains undiscovered.
So what other new infectious diseases are on the horizon? These are the ones to watch for in 2017.
Leishmaniasis:. Historically known as “Aleppo boil”, this parasitic infection has recently, as the name suggests, become a problem among Syrian refugees. Producing disfiguring skin ulcerations, and occasionally spreading to internal organs with fatal consequences, the increase of cases turning up in Europe among migrants has made it the subject of considerable media interest. Leishmaniasis is spread by the bite of the sandfly, however, which means it has a northern limit to its range.
Rift Valley Fever:. This virus is spread by a variety of biting insects but fortunately does not transmit from person to person. Humans appear only to be infected by mosquitoes that have previously bitten livestock. Nevertheless, RVF has been expanding its range in Africa, most recently pushing north-west into the Sahel region.
It often turns up in travellers returning from affected areas and one of those could be the carrier that takes RVF out of Africa and into new continents. Beginning, as many viruses do, with a vague fever, aches and pains, RVF can progress to internal bleeding, liver failure, brain inflammation and blindness. The death rate is only 1% but rises to 50% if bleeding occurs.
Oropouche:. Another virus that has recently been expanding its range and which is spread by mosquitoes of the genus Culex. This is always bad news (as was previously found for West Nile virus), since Culex has a far wider distribution than the Aedes mosquitoes that spread Zika or the sandflies that spread Leishmaniasis.
Whether Oropouche’s recent expansion out of its Amazonian heartland to neighbouring parts of South America is just a local fluctuation or the beginnings of a Zika-esque global tour, remains to be seen. Oropouche is normally a self-limiting fever with loss of appetite, headaches and vomiting, but the occasional meningitis complication is more concerning.
Mayaro:. Characterised by fever, aches and pains and a rash, Mayaro is distant relative of Chikungunya, and spread by biting Aedes mosquitoes, Mayaro made a recent surprise appearance in Haiti and beat its Amazonian rival Oropouche to the coveted title of “the next Zika”. Mayaro, like cholera, may be just another infectious disease that took advantage of the degradation of Haiti’s already impoverished health infrastructure by the 2010 earthquake.
This illustrates a general point that emerging diseases tend to flourish where wars flare up or the breakdown of civil society occurs. Syria’s Leishmaniasis and the expansion of Rift Valley Fever into areas of West Africa beset by decades of insurgency are probably far from coincidental.
Elizabethkingia: is the sole bacterial pathogen on the list – the only one that isn’t spread by biting insects and the only one that is found worldwide. So Elizabethkingia won’t be expanding its range but may be expanding its clinical impact in a world where antibiotics can no longer be relied upon to save our lives from bacterial infections.
Unlike the others, Elizabethkingia isn’t in the “possibly coming soon” category but is already here. Its variety of presentations – from pneumonia to meningitis to sepsis – together with recent increases in virulence and antibiotic resistance, make it a potentially formidable adversary.
This article was first published in The Conversation

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