Express & Star comment: A year to forget

Highlights have been few and far between. And even when England’s cricketers managed to win the World Cup after a 40-year wait, the Government managed to mess things up by revealing the home addresses of those who featured in the Honours List.

Brexit, an unfolding climate crisis, rampant nationalism across the world – including here, in the UK – and an agenda dominated by the divisiveness and fragmentation of our political discourse has made the past year memorable for all of the wrong reasons.

While our gaze has been diverted, the NHS has been plunged into a deeper crisis, our economy has stuttered, communities have been torn apart and Britain is a country that has fallen from grace. While it still has one of the largest economies of the planet and remains one of the richest nations, it is no longer revered nor respected in the way that it once was. It has been fighting too hard with itself for that.

And so as we look towards a New Year and new decade, we must hope for better. We must put the differences of recent years behind us and work together for the greater good.

On the defining issue of our time, Brexit, we finally have certainty. Boris Johnson is taking us out of the EU, following the mandate issued to the Government in the 2016 referendum. And he has already set the clock ticking on issues surrounding our future trading relationship.

While Theresa May’s threat that no deal was better than a bad deal always had a hollow ring to it, there is every chance that Mr Johnson will walk away from the EU with a clean break Brexit at the end of next year’s trade negotiations.

We must also hope that more people sit up and pay attention to the unfolding climate crisis that has brought freak weather events to our planet, that has caused higher temperatures than ever before, then has set ice caps melting and that has set Australia on fire. While such figures as Sir David Attenborough have been banging the drum for decades, new voices, including the inspirational Greta Thunberg, are now being heard.

At home, we must work hard to save our precious United Kingdom. Scottish independence has never been closer, while the effective post-Brexit border with Northern Ireland will raise questions over the prospects of a united Ireland.

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In the not-far-distant past, New Year’s Day would be a day of shopping. Huge numbers of people would rush to the sales to see what bargains were available. More recently, that sale period migrated earlier to Boxing Day and crowds would gather in high streets and at shopping malls.

Now, anything goes. The savviest customers were buying their Christmas sales gifts when online sales opened on Christmas Day. And many were not simply restricting themselves to offers in the UK. We now live in a global market place and people can buy from all corners of the earth with the click of a mouse.

The certainty that New Year’s Sales gave us has gone. We are in a new era where change is the only constant. And yet our high streets rely on a spike in trade at certain times of the year, not least at Christmas and New Year. While the lure of online sales is clear, we must be sure with ourselves what price we will pay for abandoning traditional retail outlets. If we do not shop locally, local shops will close. And then high streets in which we once took pride will disappear from the map.