New Year resolutions are a mug's game so here are my hopes - Bernard Ingham

Vladimir Putin invaded the Ukraine and we got through three Prime Ministers in as many months, even deposing Boris Johnson who rallied the world in support of the Ukraine and freedom. We emerged from the pandemic with a bill for £400bn, a cost of living crisis and a weakened economy which has not stopped the public service unions from callously mounting a new “Winter of Discontent”.

As if that were not enough, we lost our revered Queen of 71 years. And just to make matters worse, King Charles found himself taking over while his younger son and his wife, the Duke and Duchess of Sussex, delighted in throwing bricks at the Royal family for all the world to see on Netflix.

New Year resolutions are a mug’s game, even if I probably owe my longevity to stopping smoking on January 1, 1968 and stopping drinking to reduce my weight on January 1, 1993. So for a change this year I am – probably just as unproductively – going to let you know of my fervent hopes for 2023.

I am positively willing a new and surging interest in self-responsibility and duty to our fellow citizens. This and genuine tolerance are going to pot.

We are becoming a hopelessly self-centred country with a damaging list of entitlements which have junior doctors and nurses demanding 26 and 19 per cent pay rises respectively and very un-Civil Servants working from home despite the continued failure of essential services. It is time the opportunist shirkers acknowledged that the Covid panic is over and they buckled to.

I place this hope ahead of everything else because if we do not rapidly come to our senses the UK will go into steep decline. Things are bad enough when law-abiding people are threatened and abused for telling us what they really think, too often banned by organisations for their views and even hounded out of their jobs.

This is not the Britain we knew nor one in which anyone looking for freedom of thought and expression would want to live.

Worse still, it has infected most national institutions – especially universities – who feel compelled to issue directions about their members’ approach to race and gender. This in turn has led to the re-writing of history and even, God help us, editing the bloody bits out of Shakespeare. If my parents were to return to earth, they would not recognise it. It is certainly not progress. It is a peculiar insanity which if not treated will convert our democracy into a totalitarian state.

There are already enough of these in the world for the good of mankind.

My second hope is that democratic governments the world over will urgently combine to control the anti-social media so that here in the UK it has to observe the laws of libel and decency within which our terrestrial media have to operate so that they cannot corrupt our children at will. And all contributors to its outpouring of vile abuse should be required to give their real name and address so they can be held to account.

I believe that if we make progress on this agenda of freedom with responsibility under the law in the year ahead we shall begin to restore our nation’s values. Many of our ills stem from their erosion in the cause ironically of compassion, tolerance and “inclusivity”. It is not very inclusive in the trans-gender debate to hammer those women who are seriously concerned about their sex’s welfare and safety in a world where you can defy biology and self-identify as female.

Rights are demanded regardless of reality. If ever a nation were in need of self-discipline it is Britain in its present state. The acquisition of that self-discipline and regard for the consequences of our actions would solve many of the problems that assail the country today. It might even persuade the Tory Parliamentary Party to support its government and give it a fighting chance of preventing the calamity of a Labour government by 2024. It might even convince Labour MPs that appearing on picket lines during the rash of strikes is counter-productive and stirring up trouble for themselves if they do get their hands on government.

It is unlikely to end the EU’s vindictiveness over Brexit, depose Putin, enlighten Xi Jinping or wash away our economic woes. But Britain will be infinitely better for it.