A new year column brings with it the unspoken obligation to strike some note of optimism and renewal. It’s a tradition, like a pagan ritual, respecting the sacred pause between one year and the next, and making an offering of resolution. To acknowledge that, despite all that seems crushing and overwhelming, there is still some measure of personal freedom to be better and do better.

It is harder this year, though, than previous ones, to strike that note. The war in Ukraine continues to grind with little resolution in sight, fading into a matter of fact rather than the sharp abhorrence that it was almost two years ago. In Gaza, children continue to be buried under rubble, as do the scenes of parents bidding them unfathomable farewells. Israeli hostages and their families are still caught in the bloody melee, as all hope for their release and a ceasefire seem to become more remote.

Domestically, our zombie government is absent at best, ghoulish at worst. It has become reduced almost entirely to a single policy – a fixation on immigration that restricts the right to love and make a family to only those who can afford it, and brings the government into conflict with its own judiciary in its effort to ram through a Rwanda deportation scheme that is expensive, impractical and unlawful. The prospect of a general election brings with it less a sense of relief, more a girding of the loins. The right will run the nastiest of campaigns, already trailed by the deputy chair of the Tory party as a mix of “trans debate” and “culture wars” – a plan that will probably do little to revive the Conservative party’s chances, but will nonetheless make political discourse even more unpleasant.

The Labour offering, both in tone and in........

© The Guardian