Turkey was the main topic of conversation for my family over the Christmas break. Not in the usual way, when we discuss which celebrity chef’s turkey roasting technique we’re faddishly going to mimic this year. (The blessed bird always tastes exactly the same, without fail.) On the day my family was first reunited for the holidays, news came of the assassination of Russia’s ambassador to Turkey. “You don’t want to mess with the Turks,” my youngest brother offered, predictably. “Or the Russians, for that matter,” he said.
The room was heavy with worrying about global politics. With peace in the world so fragile, my father was looking around at his sons and grandsons and thinking of the young men of his 1940s childhood. A week later we shared the announcement of the ceasefire in Syria, brokered seemingly against the odds by Turkey and Russia at the UN. Let’s hope that my brother is right and that no one will mess with the Turks and the Russians, and that the Syrian people, whose lives and losses haunt us all, can have a glimmer of hope for 2017. No one in my family is convinced that peace is on its way, but we made promising noises nonetheless.
Wish upon a star
As I’m sure he will be doing for the next six years, my son demanded a family outing to watch the latest Star Wars flick. Rogue One did not disappoint. We’re a bunch of Star Wars fanatics. My brother Luke was named by our older siblings in homage to Mr Skywalker. My mother vetoed calling me Leia.
The news of Carrie Fisher’s death hit us hard, but none more so than my eldest son, who took to YouTube (as all of his generation do) to watch every interview with her. He sat down at breakfast and said: “Carrie Fisher had a mental health problem, Mom, and she was a really big feminist, did you know?” “Yes,” I answered, “I did know, and the fact that she was willing to talk about it made her pretty special.” “She was pretty ace, wasn’t she, Mom?” he said.
Yes, bab, she really was.
Straight to video
Perhaps until this year I lived under a rock, or was a normal person who didn’t seek out the New Year messages of political leaders. My metamorphosis into a Westminster bubble-dweller must be complete, though, because this year I watched the offerings of both Jeremy Corbyn and Theresa May. Next year I mightn’t bother.
I watched Mrs May’s at 1.15am on 1 January – after returning from an evening out dancing and drinking with my mates. Perhaps this set it up for a fall, because I felt she wasn’t really grabbing the New Year spirit. It left me thinking that although the message of unity wasn’t bad, she could have cheered up a bit.
Jeremy’s offering was hampered by the version I watched sounding as if he was on a building site. I think expectations let this one down, as it had been trailed as the beginning of a new move to grasp the populist nettle. I was expecting the pizzazz of a slogan such as “Make Labour great again”. Aside from mentioning the establishment, the text of his message could have been written by Ed Miliband’s speechwriters.
I think neither of these videos will launch a thousand ships and, alas, the privileged few chided in both videos will, I am certain, be resting as comfily in their establishment beds in 2017 as they were in 2016. I’m not pleased about this, but I am more of a realist than a populist.
All’s fair in love and war
I like to poke fun at the idea of resolutions, and to pretend that I’m a cynic who can’t be won over by the endless “new year, new you” lifestyle articles about losing weight or becoming a better version of yourself, which are all so heavily gendered in tone. I’ll be the same shape and size and as good as I’m going to get at the end of 2017 as I am at the start. In 2013, inspired by the Boney M hit (“Ra-ra Rasputin”), I made a resolution to become Russia’s greatest love machine. Had I put in the effort, perhaps geopolitics today might be in better shape.
Land of hope and glory
Despite my cynicism, I find myself looking forward to 2017 with hope. I’m as terrified of a Donald Trump presidency and the unknowns of Brexit as the next person, but I spent the break with my friends and family, who range from political nerds to people who don’t vote and couldn’t name a single member of the cabinet. I find that most people are just crossing fingers for the best in their own lives. They don’t give a toss about half the stuff that haunts us in Westminster, but they do give a toss about each other.
French connections
My brother and sister-in-law are classic examples of what Theresa May calls the “just about managing”, or Jams. When we chatted about it on Christmas Day, they rolled their eyes at being the new Tory target audience. They want things to be easier and better for them and their young son, but they wouldn’t use their vote to damn other people. My other brother and his family live in France and, for them, 2017 brings an impossible choice between a Continental version of Thatcherism and the BNP. They are both convinced that liberté, égalité, fraternité will remain in their lives and in those of their neighbours, regardless of the vote.
Critical events
This year could see a huge crisis in the world, for all sorts of reasons. My mother used to say, “Never waste a crisis,” and I hope we won’t. If we do our best, 2017 and all the possible macro horrors will be counteracted by simple British shrugging and getting on with making sure that the way we live does not look like the crazy hate fuelled by figureheads like Trump.
I expect that most people wouldn’t call themselves socialists, yet deep down we all believe that we are all better off when we are all better off – and I hope that in 2017 we show it. It’s the only chance we have to clear out the gloom.
Jess Phillips is the MP for Birmingham Yardley (Labour)
When the UK voted to leave the EU, many assumed that Scotland would soon vote to leave the UK. In contrast to the rest of Britain, Scots backed Remain by 62 per cent to 38 per cent. On the day following the referendum, Nicola Sturgeon warned: «It is a significant and material change in circumstances — and it is therefore a statement of the obvious that the option of a second referendum must be on the table. And it is on the table. »
But six months later, the SNP leader is striking a notably different tone. She told the BBC’s Good Morning Scotland programme that she was prepared to «put aside» her «preferred option of independence» if a «hard Brexit» could be avoided. «Am I going to stop arguing for independence or believing in independence? Am I going to stop believing that Scotland is on a journey to independence?
«No, but we’re talking here about the particular context and timescale of Brexit — and I’m putting these proposals forward in good faith. I’m deliberately saying, ‘put my preferred option to one side’ and asking people if we can find a consensus and compromise option. »
What’s Sturgeon’s game? It’s unsurprising that the First Minister isn’t rushing towards a second referendum. Contrary to expectations, polls have shown no rise in support for independence since the Brexit vote. A BMG/ Herald survey last week put the Yes side on 45.5 per cent, almost identical to the 2014 result. As long as the polls remain static, the SNP will not stage a second vote. Party strategists believe that they would need a 20-point lead to be confident of victory (owing to the likelihood of a Unionist swingback). Mindful of the fate of Quebec’s secessionists, the nationalists will not re-run the battle under current conditions.
But if Stugeon is not ruling a referendum in, she is also not ruling one out. As the First Minister well knows, a «soft Brexit» of the kind she seeks is unlikely. Theresa May has consistently vowed to achieve control over immigration, a demand that would force the UK to leave the single market. The EU 27 have long made it clear that they regard the «four freedoms» (of goods, people, services and capital) as indivisible.
The rise of nationalists such as Marine Le Pen, Alternative für Deutschland and the Dutch Partij voor de Vrijheid (Party for Freedom) has made the EU less, rather than more, amenable to British demands. In this hazardous climate, the UK cannot be seen to enjoy a cost-free Brexit.
For Sturgeon, then, the reasonable demand for a «soft» withdrawal is a tactical ploy. Its likely rejection offers her a new chance to maximise nationalist support. If Sturgeon has taken one step back, it is only, like Lenin , in order to take two steps forward.

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Downs won club of the year‚ Pitso “Jingles” Mosimane was coach of the year and goalkeeper Denis Onyango took Caf’s local-based player of the year.
Mbalula said in a statement: “In the year 2016 we saw the crowning of our own Mamelodi Sundowns led by coach Pitso Mosimane as giants of African football.
«Their story of hard work‚ dedication and excellence speaks for itself. It is with great excitement we see the affirmation and recognition of such hard work through these accolades.
“I congratulate Mamelodi Sundowns‚ its coach and goalkeeper on these accolades and thank them for their continued hoisting of our flag with nothing but pride and excellence.”
The PSL said in its statement: “Mamelodi Sundowns‚ who were voted as the Caf African club of the year‚ beat the likes of TP Mazembe of the Democratic Republic of Congo and Zambian side‚ Zesco United to win the top prize.”
Sundowns were crowned Caf Champions League winners in October‚ beating Egyptian club Zamalek 3-1 on aggregate in the final.
They were 2015-16’s Premier Soccer League champions and competed at the Fifa Club World Cup in Japan in December.

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Thoughout his career the forthright‚ witty‚ cheeky and‚ at times‚ combustible coach has delighted the press and public with his colourful quotes.
Here are seven of Jingles’ finest one-liners:
1. After Sundowns were thrashed 5-0 by Bloemfontein Celtic at Lucas Moripe Stadium in 2015:
“I have seen nine‚ I have seen eight‚ I have seen seven against AmaZulu. So in my life I have had eight and nine also‚ and so why can’t we also accept that will get five?”
“Sundowns showed integrity‚ Sundowns showed tactical discipline. My players were sweating blood tonight. They were eating grass.”
“It was a nice‚ dimmed‚ parked bus – you can’t move the bus. But I understand Boebie [Solomons] needs the points and they needed them more than us. That’s why their central defender was man of the match.”
4. After winning a Q1 Q-Innovation prize for leading the PSL in the first quarter:
“This Q-somethings‚ they don’t mean a lot hey. Okay‚ it is good‚ it is motivation‚ but it is sardines.
“You can win Q1 and Q4‚ and you don’t win the league. What is that? You must catch the big fish.”
“SuperSport United and Mamelodi Sundowns coaches don’t play for a draw. We opened the floodgates. It was not a Floyd Mayweather fight‚ it was a Mike Tyson fight. We kill each other. Everybody got the thrill.”
6. Referring to Orlando Pirates winger Daine Klate after a defeat to Sundowns in the Nedbank Cup:
“But there is a player who is always on the floor. You touch him a little bit‚ he rolls like he’s been shot from the top. The next minute‚ he continues to play.
“No – this is a man’s game. Let’s all play. Look at [Oupa] Manyisa‚ look at [Thandani] Ntshumayelo – these boys are strong‚ they play‚ they are not on the floor every minute‚ every second. What is this?”
7. After Anthony Laffor’s goal against Chippa United put Downs into the last year’s MTN8 final:
“I always ask Anthony Laffor: ‘Why can’t you be in the starting line-up? I mean‚ you’ve got so much speed and technique’.
“He’s such a good football player – why should he be coming from the bench. But‚ somewhere‚ somehow you play him in the first XI from the start of the game‚ and you don’t get much.
“I end up substituting him after 45 minutes and then I’ve lost a sub. So he comes up at the right time.
“Against Tuks [in the PSL game where Sundowns wrapped up the title in 2015-16]‚ I asked him: ‘Laffor‚ we have a big game and we need to win the league. I don’t want to have to wait to go to Wits and fight for it there.’ And he started and scored a hat-trick.
“He’s been a very difficult player‚ trust me. Anthony Laffor and [Downs right-back] Asavela Mbekile are difficult people. Forgive me.
“No‚ it’s not easy. I don’t know if today‚ ‘Are you playing or are you not going to play?’
“I think Mbekile’s a fine right-back. But one day he’ll give you a wonder game. At Zesco he did very well when he came in.
“And it’s the life of a coach. We’re dealing with very difficult characters. You’ve got 25 characters.”

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I think that it has become clear that the golden age of television drama – we might even say its classical age – was finite. It extended from season one of The Sopranos through to season seven of Mad Men. There is increasingly a deadening slickness about the output, from the cod-Gothic, neo-noir soap opera of Bloodline to the sphincter-loosening sumptuousness of The Crown , and there has been a tonal move towards the middle ground and towards safeness. Deadwood , which ran for three seasons until 2006, now looks a little jerry-built, a little shonky around the edges, but in the imaginative reach of its language and the ambition of its vaulting narratives, it seems, in contrast to contemporary shows, positively Shakespearean.
I bring the Swan of Avon into this advisedly: much has been made of the largely Elizabethan register that Deadwood ’s show-runner and lead writer, David Milch, used for the language of the series. It is utterly inauthentic to the show’s setting – the eponymous gold rush town in South Dakota in the 1870s – but its layered cadences, its jivey poetics and its mad lurches between the sacred and the (very) profane seemed to give to Deadwood a sense of deep, almost uncanny emotional truth.
It helped greatly to have magnificent, scene-chewing performances from the likes of Ian McShane, as the saloon and brothel-keeper Al Swearengen, a hard Machiavel with a mouth on him like a glorious sewer, and Paula Malcomson, as the magnificently dead-eyed prostitute Trixie. But more than anything else, Deadwood was carried by the megalomaniacal force of Milch’s verbal energy; he may be the greatest dialogist alive and his brand of inky, night-black comedy is savagely appropriate to our era.
Deadwood is about uncomfortable things: the birth and death of capitalism, the queasy insistences of greed and ambition and the orgiastic sex charge of ultra-violence. Unlike most contemporary film and television productions, it is not afraid of words. There are mad swaths of dialogue, just reams upon reams of the crazy stuff, and it’s almost all wonderful, so funny and tragic, so sad and true.
Deadwood would not be made today. The executives wouldn’t even read the scripts – they would just see all that writing and run a mile. It may be the last great TV show to run on the engines of purely literary technique. It may be one of the last great expressions of televisual eloquence.
Turkish newspapers were not a pretty sight in the days after the New Year’s Eve attack on an Istanbul nightclub that left 39 dead. We didn’t even know the identity of the gunman who rampaged through Reina, a glitzy venue on the European bank of the Bosphorus, but the blame game had already begun. “The prime suspect is America,” one conservative, pro-government paper declared. An ultra-critical opposition title blamed the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) for tolerating “fundamentalist propaganda”. This response was no surprise to anyone in Turkey. Last year was a disaster, a long string of bombings, escalation of an internal conflict with Kurdish militants and a coup attempt.
In a country where rival political and social camps seem to expend much energy on loathing one another, each calamity provoked another bout of bitter argument. As 2016 drew to a close, many were already long worried that Turkey – a member of Nato, a key Western security partner and technically still a candidate for EU accession – was falling apart. The Reina attack, claimed by Isis in a crowing statement, aimed to give the country another kick even before 2017 had got going.
Foreign observers often blame Turkey’s woes on Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the rabble-rousing president who has dominated the political landscape for the past decade and a half. He has not helped with his fiery anti-Western rants, or his provocative outbursts about women and religion. A huge crackdown after the failed coup in July has focused not just on those with clear links to the plot but also critical journalists, activists, Kurdish opposition politicians and civil rights groups. Yet despite his reputation as a strongman, Erdogan at times seems more like the daredevil driver of a speeding go-kart whose brakes have failed.
Perhaps the single most important factor in the new state of permanent crisis here is the Syrian conflict, which has raged for close to six years on the southern border. It has been deeply destabilising. Ankara’s opposition to Bashar al-Assad, and its support for those who took up arms against him, have left the country increasingly isolated. Kurdish militants in Turkey were emboldened by the successes of their Syrian counterparts. The war sent vast numbers of refugees across the border and spawned Isis. For a time, Turkey was criticised by Western security agencies for failing to take the threat of the jihadis sufficiently seriously. But it has since tightened its borders, cracking Isis cells on Turkish soil and launching military operations against the group in Syria. The country has slowly shifted in the eyes of Isis – from being just one target in a long list of enemy states to its latest primary focus. In mid-2015, the bombings began.
The attacks appear calculated to exploit Turkey’s weak spots. Suicide bombers have targeted Kurdish political gatherings and struck at the heart of the tourism sector. With the attack on Reina, where women in short skirts hit the dance floor clutching glasses of champagne, Isis has amplified tensions between Turkey’s socially conservative Muslims and its secular liberals. The mass shooting also exposes the cracks and contradictions in the stance of Erdogan’s AKP, which rallies supporters with Islam-infused rhetoric but has not shut down or banned venues such as Reina.
By targeting a nightclub, Isis is “taunting” the government, says the Ankara-based analyst Selim Koru. “Isis has the luxury of calling them out and saying: ‘You’re compromising. We’re not,’” he says. “There are these existential questions about what Turkey is. Isis attacks just that spot.”
In public, the country’s leaders prefer to sidestep the Isis problem. On 22 December, when the group released a gruesome video that claimed to show two captured Turkish soldiers being burned to death, the government imposed reporting restrictions and throttled access to YouTube and Twitter. A reporter for the Wall Street Journal was detained for two and a half days after sharing a tweet about the clip. The crackdown on freedom of speech is one of many knee-jerk measures that have made European leaders increasingly critical of Turkey (though not sufficiently angry to cancel a €3bn deal with Erdogan to stop refugees from turning up on the EU’s shores).
Meanwhile, Washington is coming under daily attack from Ankara for backing Kurdish forces in Syria and harbouring the exiled cleric accused of masterminding last summer’s failed coup. Into this melee has stepped Vladimir Putin. The Russian leader has worked increasingly closely with Erdogan since accepting an apology for Turkey’s ill-fated decision to shoot down a Russian jet near the Syrian border in late 2015. The assassination of Moscow’s ambassador to Turkey at an Ankara art gallery last month did not stop the two countries from thrashing out a deal for a Syrian ceasefire later adopted by the United Nations.
Behind the scenes, Turkish officials insist that they are not about to sever long-standing ties with the West. But stoking conspiracy theories about CIA meddling in Turkey’s domestic affairs is one of the few hobbies that appeal to a broad spectrum of citizens. It is easier to blame the plunging value of the lira or the deteriorating security climate on foreign plots than it is to ask probing questions. Erdogan needs to deflect such inquiries as much as possible as he gears up for a referendum, expected to be held this spring, on deep changes to the constitution that would result in him becoming a kind of “super-president”.
Erdogan argues that this overhaul will bring much-needed stability to Turkey, yet the referendum campaign seems likely to exacerbate tensions in an increasingly unhappy country.
A few days after the attack at the Reina nightclub, I received a despondent message from a Turkish friend. “I’m tired of being sorry,” he wrote. “I’m tired of feeling upset.” With the evening news bulletins filled once more with images of weeping mothers and fathers slumped over coffins, the bad feeling is almost universal among Turkish citizens. Just don’t ask them to agree on how to make it stop.

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