Here is hoping that 2022 can be the year that saves us all - Mark Casci

After the disaster that was 2020, this past 12 months saw us enjoying freedom for the majority of the year.

I have been back to meeting face-to-face, both for work and for pleasure, on a regular basis. All of my favourite restaurants have reopened. My family and I were able to go abroad. Even gigs have returned.

The economy is, or was at least until the last few days, bouncing back.

While trade may no longer facing much opposition from Covid, the wreckage it has laid behind remains a troublesome for many businesses and consumers.

And this is even before we begin to wrestle with the realities of life under the Government negotiated trade deal, a state of affairs that most leading commentators and analysts say has been a larger drag on the economy than a pandemic that has contributed to the deaths of more than five million people around the world.

Indeed it was the hopeless Brexit that the current Government pushed through that was concerning my contacts the most until just a few days ago.

The following week’s list of engagements has been substantially cut as concern over the new Omicron variant of Covid-19 has once again raised the prospects of increased restrictions on our freedoms and economy. The next two weeks will be crucial in establishing whether the new variant is as big a threat to public health as previous incarnations, and all at a time when Christmas socialising is at its peak.

In short we are on a knife edge as to what happens next. Let us hope that increased transmission is accompanied by decreased severity.

Whether or not we are done with Covid as an existential threat remains to be seen but what is clear is that there will still be disruption.

Prices are high and will stay that way for some time. Supply chains are still facing serious disruption. And vacancies are at an all time high as business leaders face a war for talent.

And, thanks to a two-faced Government, we faced the ignominy this year of being shafted with a massively watered down version of the high speed rail travel infrastructure we had been promised for more than a decade - including on multiple occasions by the current administration.

Things may be bleak my friends but I do want to leave 2021 on a positive note, or several notes actually (a melody or riff if you will allow me to stretch the analogy to breaking point).

Despite the myriad challenges, man made and natural, things are looking good in Yorkshire and on many fronts.

In the last 12 months the inward investment drive, briefly paused by Covid, has restarted.

The news that tech giant Utterberry is moving its manufacturing and innovation processes to the region is huge news and one that will bring many skilled jobs to Yorkshire that will be working on the technologies of tomorrow.

Pensana, Drax and the green energy revolution springing up in the region will make the region a world leader on sustainable power and climate change mitigation.

And by the time I write this column next year we will be preparing to enter Leeds 2023, in which it stages its Capital of Culture programme regardless of whether the EU wanted it or not, and hopefully have it confirmed that Bradford will be City of Culture in 2025.

So in the meanwhile, get your boosters, test yourself regularly and try and enjoy Christmas as much as you possibly can.

Life is so unpredictable and maddening at times that you can easily forget or lose sight of the fact that, as Ernest Hemingway once memorably wrote: “the world is a beautiful place, and worth fighting for.”

Let us keep up the fight in Yorkshire.

My very best wishes to you and all of your loved ones.

May 2022 be the year which delivers the future we all need.