vivweb01blog

Making long term predictions about political outcomes nationally is a risky process indeed. In some ways it’s comparable to weather forecasting – the earth’s atmosphere is a chaotic system and trying to predict its behaviour locally more than 2 or 3 days ahead with any degree of accuracy still presents us with many uncertainties, despite all our advances in predictive technology (including even AI!). And we’ve all seen recently how long a week is in politics nowadays, let alone a month, or indeed 3 years - chaos seems to reign there, also. Although 2029 is thus a very long way ahead from a political point of view, and Labour's leadership and cabinet teams will be focused on more immediate policy decisions, their advance planners will already be thinking hard, and I suspect with some trepidation, about their electoral prospects…and not solely for the next general election. After the hammering both major parties took in the May 2025 local elections, largely at the hands of Fa...

 Editor's note:  This summer's outbreak of hostilities between Israel and Iran sadly bears out the prediction made in the previous revision of this blog for the eternal Middle East 'powder keg'.  Some might say it was inevitable that this particular conflict would come to a head this year, given Iran's determination to get a nuclear bomb, and the Ayatollah's openly declared intention to use it to destroy the state of Israel. The speed at which it happened does seem to have taken many by surprise, though. Arguably the Iranian regime has, by its actions over the last 40 years, brought its own inevitable destruction on itself. Unfortunately it's the Iranian people who will probably bear the brunt of the suffering that arises from its death throes, which now promise to be quite protracted...... The smart money now seems to be on eventual regime change, although the hold the regime has on its populace does seem to be progressively weakening.  Hopefully, the Teher...