Thoughts on the Future

No-one in the Old Kingdom period of Ancient Egypt (2700BC), from the labouring slave to the grand high priests, could have predicted that their cat paradise would be conquered by a Macedonian king almost 2400 years later. Just as no one in Britain in 2019 could have predicted the ramifications of a novel Coronavirus pandemic or in the early 2010s predicted that, by the end of the decade, the UK would have left the European Union. Therefore, before I continue on with my own predictions, bear in mind, the future is impossible to predict, and anything can happen.

Exactly a year ago, at the time of writing, Prime Minister Boris Johnson gave an extraordinary address to the nation telling people that they must “stay at home”. I had thought that it would be over in a few weeks, the high death toll in Italy had been largely attributed to multi-generational households and very old population, something that was not common in Britain and China had seemingly weathered the storm in a few months. It also looked as if we were becoming more united as a country, the government had tried to revive the spirit of the Second World War complete with Captain Sir Tom Moore, a war veteran, walking around his garden to raise money for the NHS. It all felt like a spirit of national unity with people putting aside their petit debates about gender and sexuality and coming together to defeat the “invisible enemy”. However, this was not to last.

A year on and the nation is now more bitterly divided than ever, there are those like me who want to get back to the old normal as it was before March 2020, that means no masks, no social distancing and everything open, we failed to defeat the virus with last year’s lockdowns and now its time to move on but there are still those who still want to keep lockdown going until we get to zero new cases, which is not possible. Within the older population this tends to reflect the old left and right divide, with the left going for the needlessly cautious approach and the right going for the “get back to normal” approach.

So, I will start with my predication for what will happen with the Coronavirus. The Prime Minister had promised to remove all limits on social contact no earlier than June 21st, I am sceptical as to if this date will be met, this summer will be more similar to last; most businesses will be allowed to reopen but there will be capacity limits, mask wearing and social distancing with on the door testing for larger events. Next winter, while masks will no longer be required by law, many people will still wear them and some shops will still enforce them under government recommendations. Chris Whitty has said there may be restrictions next winter and while this will not be a full lockdown, it may take the form of a ban on large gatherings and capacity limits indoors. Even if there are no restrictions, the societal damage done by lockdown will be so huge that people will feel uncomfortable doing the things they used to do such as being indoors in a public place without a mask or getting too close to people, unfortunately it looks as if we’ll be living voluntarily socially distanced lives for the next 5-10 years. Vaccine passports will also be mandatory for travel to some countries, others will accept a negative test instead, they are unlikely to be mandated for domestic use, but some venues may require proof of vaccination, but it will cost them a lot of business. Around the end of this decade, barring another major disaster, people will begin to disregard masks and social distancing and we will move back to the “old normal” but it will take some time due to the heightened public fear and anxiety.

The high street is also likely to become a thing of the past. This week it was announced that John Lewis will close its Aberdeen branch permanently, it has done so alongside other household names such as Debenhams and Topshop due to the rise in online retail which is dominated by Amazon. While I think there may be some competition from other retailers who will move online, however, the traditional shopping experience which often involves family outings or outings with friends and possibly a meal afterwards will be lost. Instead, we will just sit in front of a screen and order our shopping for delivery, unable to properly browse, sample or try on products, instead we’ll just send them back if we don’t like them. Retail assistant jobs will become much less common than before and be replaced by jobs in warehouses until the process is inevitably automated.

The divisive question of Scottish independence is also one I would like to address. SNP activists have become more and more restless in their demand for a second independence referendum. With the UK government refusing to allow one to be held, I believe that the SNP will win a majority or be the largest party and propped up by the Greens or Alex Salmond’s new Alba party. They will claim this as a mandate for a second independence referendum but the UK government will say no (if Boris Johnson were to say yes then he would lose the backing of the Scottish Conservatives), Nicola Sturgeon will not hold an illegal referendum but this will lead to her removal by a leadership challenge, the new leader of the SNP, possibly Humza Yousef, will attempt to hold an illegal referendum as in Catalonia, the referendum will be boycotted by unionists and cause the SNP’s popularity to plummet and may cause the Scottish parliament to be dissolved by the UK government and fresh elections called which the SNP will lose, putting an end to hopes for independence for the time being.

Alternatively, if the UK government did grant the Scottish Parliament the right to hold an independence referendum, it would be under the question “leave” or “remain” and only those eligible to vote in UK elections would be allowed to vote. The “leave” would win, very narrowly, but independence would never happen because the economic damage will become so apparent and the negotiations for splitting up a 300 year old union with one part of the island of Great Britain inside the EU and other outside the EU that it would quickly unravel. Hardcore nationalists will demand a no-deal “Scexit” and this will be put to an election which the SNP will lose as they will have alienated the majority of the population by this time.

Political correctness and wokeism will also get much worse, thanks in no small part, to social media, with people stuck inside all day they will not get angry over Twitter and Facebook. In Scotland hate-speech laws have already been introduced and are likely to get worse, forbidding anyone who believes there are two genders or who shows some pride in Britain losing their jobs and potentially facing imprisonment. We have already seen historian Neil Oliver lose his job because he is a unionist and being a unionist in Scotland will end up being enough to get you branded a “racist”. The good news is that there will be a significant backlash in the North of England and other places that will prompt the UK government to intervene and amend the Equality Act to ban gender or ethnic quotas and “positive discrimination”. They may also take more direct control of

Despite all the talk of a ‘‘V shaped’’ recovery, the economy will not recover to pre-pandemic levels until 2023-24, with mega corporations like Amazon, Facebook and Microsoft having a much larger share in the world’s profits than they did previously. Automation will mean less jobs available and the economic fallout from lockdown will mean fewer small or medium sized businesses to employ people. In response to this a Universal Basic Income (UBI) will eventually be introduced and paid into everyone’s bank accounts leading to far less use of cash as we will have got used to contactless through the pandemic. While I would support a UBI in principle, I think that it gives the government a huge amount of power over people’s finances, they already have the power to sanction people on benefits for breaking their “claimant commitments”. There would have to be sufficient legal and practical safeguards built into the system to prevent the government from doing this with a UBI. It will also become commonplace for people to enter a shop take what they need and leave without having to check out as contactless payments will be taken from them as they leave. Amazon have already tried this in a new store in London.

The economic recovery will come just in time for the 2024 election which will be between Prime Minister Rishi Sunak and Labour leader Clive Lewis who will have moved the party to a more radical left platform after the removal of Sir Kier Starmer by a motion of no confidence in the Labour party conference in autumn 2021. The Tories win a majority of around 60 seats keeping most of the red wall and gaining around 10 seats in Scotland due to Rishi Sunak’s personal popularity in Scotland and he will take credit for the economic recovery post COVID.

On the international scene, tensions with the far east, especially China and North Korea, will heat up. President Trump’s unconventional means of diplomacy yielded dividends when it came to North Korea. Although many criticised him for striking up a friendship with the dictator Kim Jong Un, he understood that this was part of the art of the deal, the result was that there were no ballistic missile tests for four years until last week. The Biden (or soon to be Harris) administration will return to old normal diplomacy which will deny Kim Jong Un the direct level of access to the President that he had before, this will likely create a sense of grievance that North Korea is not being treated with respect on the world stage, but I do not envisage that there will be a nuclear exchange.

On the point of China, it will overtake the US to become the world’s largest economy around the middle of this decade. Whatever one’s views on the origins of coronavirus, China has certainly used it to its advantage. China only ever had a lockdown in Wuhan and the surrounding areas that seemingly made the virus disappear and China has been fine and open since, a result that has not been replicated in any other country. The West’s voluntary economic destruction through lockdown will play into China’s hands allowing their economy to continue to grow exponentially (they were the only economy in the world to actually grow in 2020).

The USA will also be far more divided between the “woke” democratic states and the conservative republican states. It’s entirely possible that states such as Texas and Florida may choose to secede and become independent nations or left leaning states such as California will also do the same. It’s unlikely Biden will start any new wars for the simple reason that he’ll be dealing with enough trouble at home with riots caused by groups such as Antifa who will be dissatisfied with his more moderate leadership, this is likely to make the storming of the capital incident look like child’s play. President Trump will run again in 2024 and is likely to win but by the end of the 2020s the United States will no longer be the world’s superpower.

At the start of the twentieth century there was a sense of optimism, advances in technology had made life easier for millions of people and nations were mostly at peace with trade liberalised but the First World War put an end to that and ushered in an era of previously untold horrors from the trenches to nuclear weapons and the atrocities of Hitler, Stalin,

Mao and Pol Pot.

I fear that our era of relative peace and stability in the western world that we enjoyed since the fall of the Soviet

Union may be coming to an end and a bleaker future may await us. I hope however that I am wrong and that we will take back our freedoms after COVID and usher in a new era of free thought and free markets.

Anything is possible.

Composed by,

Derek Gardiner, Postgraduate of Law from the University of Aberdeen