“A round up of 2024 would be good”, said the editor of the Canary, no doubt before they jet off to the Dominican Republic via the Seychelles for a three-week, five star winter sunshine getaway while the rest of us dream of a wet weekend in Margate via Cobham Services on the M25.
That’s what media barons do, right?
I can just picture our editor, in their finest leopard print Speedos, sipping on poolside cocktails with Rupert, while you and I are contemplating if it’s okay to start on the Quality Street, at 6am.
To be honest, there’s a better chance of the editor pushing the coffin-dodging wart, Murdoch in the pool face-first, with sandbags tied to his matchstick legs to make sure the old ballsack-faced-bastard stays down.
Think of a British Luigi Mangione, minus the Ivy League education and with a much better hair-do.
*checks outside for blue flashing lights*
So. I have been tasked with a round-up of the year 2024, and whilst this probably sounds simple to most people, I’ve never been one for doing simple.
The first thing that came to mind was it being a bit like getting The Beano being delivered once a week throughout the year, then along comes Crimbo and you get a Beano Annual.
So let me introduce to you, dear Canary reader, the official Swindon A to Z of 2024. Factual, opinionated, and we might even stray outside of the political comfort zone. But I hope this will serve as a useful reminder of what has been the most incredible year, geopolitically, since, erm… 2023.
2024 has been a year of global unrest and historic elections. Almost 50% of the world’s population went to the polls in 2024 while war raged on in Ukraine, Russia, Lebanon, Syria, and Gaza.
So let’s crack on.
A to D: Biden and Corbyn in 2024
Starting with the letter A, we have apathy.
In the UK’s general election of 2024 voter turnout was estimated to have been just 60%, the lowest turnout since 2001, when it was 59.4%.
So the biggest winner of the 2024 general election was apathy, scoring around 40% of those eligible to vote, and almost 10% more than those that delivered a Labour government.
Something has to change. Politics has to change. How can we possibly call ourselves a functioning democracy when four in ten voters feel like there’s nothing worth voting for?
Moving on to the letter *checks notes* B.
Step forward, Joe Biden. While it hasn’t been particularly pleasant to watch Biden stumbling and mumbling from one press gathering to the next, it’s been a damn sight worse watching innocent Palestinian children being ripped to shreds by American made and supplied weapons of death and destruction.
If I was being kind to the outgoing US president I could describe him as forgetful, confused and easily manipulated. But it’s said that sometimes you need to be cruel to be kind, so I will put on record that I think Biden is as mad as a box of genocidal maniac frogs and should’ve been withdrawn from frontline politics several years ago.
Some of my favourite words begin with C.
There’s cake, Christmas, coffee, cocker spaniels, cats, celery, curry, Come Dine With Me, and that four-letter-word. But there was one particular C that performed political miracles – again – and that is none other than the independent member of parliament for Islington North, Jeremy Corbyn.
The race for Islington North meant choosing between a longstanding affinity for Labour and a politician who had represented the area for more than 40 years and was a deeply familiar presence in the community.
Corbyn rose to the challenge, of course, and he comfortably defeated the amoral sham of a party that he once led and continued with his FIFTH decade in the House of Commons.
Moving on to the letter D, it was this time last week we witnessed a monster of a storm named Darragh, uprooting trees and leaving thousands without power across our tiny islands.
The devastating extra-tropical cyclone saw winds of nearly 100mph battering into Britain, but with the world now being a couple of degrees warmer than it was a few decades ago, we are going to have to start getting used to the consequences of the man-made climate catastrophe.
E to H and Gaza in between
Now we make our way to the letter E and the short thirty mile trip across the English Channel to Europe and the deeply worrying rise of the ultranationalist far-right.
Seven EU Member States – Croatia, the Czech Republic, Finland, Hungary, Italy, the Netherlands, and Slovakia – now have far-right parties within their governments and a political party viewed as potentially ‘extremist’ by the German government has won a state election in Germany and immigration-driven far-right parties gave strong showings in the summer’s European Parliament elections.
If it is small boats full of refugees crossing the channel that keeps you awake at night, you will absolutely shit yourselves when fascism creeps up your street and arrives on your doorstep.
F? Don’t tempt me.
Poverty is rife, disabled people are persecuted by a LABOUR government, our streets are lined with rough sleepers, and Jeremy fucking Clarkson wants me to feel the anger of multi-millionaire farmers?
See, I was tempted.
The letter G gets two outings in just two words: Gaza genocide.
Israel has been committing the act of genocide with roots that extend way beyond the Hamas attacks on 7 October 2023.
“Israel’s genocide of Palestinians in Gaza is an escalatory stage of a longstanding settler colonial process of erasure.”
— UN Special Rapporteur on Palestine, Francesca Albanese.
You don’t even need to take my word for it. Israel’s far-right government makes absolutely no secret of their plans to turn Gaza into Greater Israel.
H? Dig out your hammer and sickle, seize the means of production, and raise your fist in solidarity with the American Mao, Comrade Kamala Harris.
Okay, Harris is as much a communist as I am one of those libertarian weirdos, but it worked for the giant tangerine tantrum so I thought I would give it a spin.
What an awful joke of a politician and a dreadfully weak candidate to put up against a populist danger with a habit for pulling off the unexpected.
I to L: obviously Israel in 2024
It’s just gone 1am and the letter I is next up on the A to Z of 2024.
Having another pop at Israel is a bit like picking the low hanging fruit, but I don’t fancy giving myself a nasty backache in the days leading up to Christmas.
The corrupt child killer, Benjamin Netanyahu, has destroyed Israel’s reputation in a remarkably dangerous and ultimately pointless attempt to protect his own.
If the people of Israel haven’t yet worked out the ongoing genocide of Gaza isn’t just a colonialist ethnic cleansing project, but simply being dragged out to protect Netanyahu from charges of internal corruption for as long as inhumanly possible, there’s really not very much hope for them.
If the deranged fugitive Netanyahu really wanted to ‘free the hostages’, he only had to stop the bombing so it was safe for them to be freed.
I do not condone the taking of any hostages, and that also applies to the thousands of Palestinians being held hostage in Israeli prisons, often without charge or trial under Israel’s administrative detention laws, and often raped, tortured and beaten to a pulp by their TikTok army captors.
Fuck Israel, and all those that support the American’s favourite colonial outpost.
Okay, I admit our J should really be an A, but what’s a few letters between friends.
The 25th June, 2024 was a day of massive celebration for the family and supporters of the journalist and Wikileaks founder, Julian Assange.
Assange should never have been imprisoned in the first place. We kept him in UK state custody for FIVE years. Why aren’t we more concerned about the type of journalist that hacks the voicemail of a murdered child than the type of journalist that shines a bright light on some of governments darkest corners?
Looking back, what a fantastic victory for Stella, Julian, and all of the activists that stood by him and the fundamental principles that should govern society’s right and access to information and justice.
Keith? King Sausage Fingers? Nope.
I don’t know if anyone actually noticed, but the Tories chose the anti-woke, hard-right Kemi Badenoch to continue on the dreadful work of the useless half-billionaire drip that was deliciously routed at the general election of 2024.
As dead-in-the-water as the Tories might well be, I really wouldn’t be too shocked if we end up with a Tory/Reform UK coalition government in 2029, unceremoniously booting Keir Starmer out of office after just one term in power.
Badenoch, who likes taking donations from racists, may not last until 2029 because the Tories love a leadership contest, indeed, she may not even last to the end of 2024 if the backstabbing Tories — or whatever is left of them — aren’t particularly keen on the new leaders first Christmas card.
We arrive at the letter L as we steadily make our way through my A to Z of 2024, and I ask you this one question: when is a landslide not really a landslide?
Labour’s ’landslide’ election triumph, nearly six months ago now, wasn’t really that much of a landslide by any stretch of the imagination. If our archaic electoral system was modernised to become representative of how people actually voted we wouldn’t end up with one unpopular party seizing 100% of the power with a little over 30% of the share of the votes from those that actually voted.
The system is made to look even more bizarre when you consider Keir Starmer secured his ‘landslide’ victory with less votes than Corbyn’s Labour picked up in 2019 — often touted by the establishment media as Labour’s worst election defeat since the beginning of time.
M to P with some Oasis thrown in
We arrive at the letter M and only need to cast our minds back a couple of weeks and head to New York City when United Healthcare’s chief executive Brian Thompson, was fatally shot.
The accused, 26-year-old Luigi Mangione was allegedly motivated by resentment at what he called “parasitic” health insurance companies. Mangione ‘allegedly’ makes a bloody good point.
Do I approve of the brazen and brutal assassination of multi-millionaire Thompson? Of course not. But I do understand the potential motive and the immediate reaction to the shooting also exposed a simmering rage against the trillion-dollar private healthcare industry.
On to letter N and we have the Russian anti-corruption activist and politician Alexsey Navalny, who achieved international recognition as one of the most prominent domestic critics of Russian President Vladimir Putin, who died at the ripe old age of 47 while in prison.
Britain and its allies were very distressed by the death of the ultranationalist-turned-pro-European-centrist Navalny. Me? I thought he was a famous tennis player, to be honest.
O takes us away from politics, almost, as you may remember millions of thirty and forty somethings selling everything from a kidney on eBay to their family heirlooms at Cash Converters in the hope of being able to afford a ticket to see the return of Oasis.
The Gallagher brothers reunion was overshadowed by the Ticketmaster dynamic pricing scandal which saw fans paying more than £350 for tickets that were originally advertised at £148.50, and in some cases paying more than three times the face value.
Between you and me, I will be attending one of the Oasis reunion gigs. My husband was a huge fan back in the 1990’s, and with a bit of good fortune we ended up with a few tickets at face value to the opening night in Cardiff.
Mad fer it.
Now we arrive at the letter P.
Between 1999 and 2015, more than 900 subpostmasters were convicted of theft, fraud and false accounting based on faulty Horizon data, with about 700 of these prosecutions carried out by the Post Office.
The British Post Office Scandal is up there as one of the greatest miscarriages of justice in our nation’s history. People who worked hard to serve their communities had their lives and reputations destroyed, through absolutely no fault of their own.
On Wednesday 13 March, legislation was introduced to ensure hundreds of innocent sub-postmasters who were wrongly convicted as a result of the ‘Horizon scandal’ will have their convictions quashed.
Whilst justice is something to treasure, we cannot overstate the human cost that came with these wrongful convictions. There’s no justice to be had for the dead.
Q to T – of course the chancellor is in there
Q was never likely to be an easy one, although it would’ve been very helpful if the Queen could’ve held on for a couple more years.
But November did see the death of a music titan, Quincy Jones, aged 91.
Jones worked with many of the biggest names in jazz, rock, R&B, pop, and hip-hop and is especially known for his work on Michael Jackson’s blockbuster 1982 album, Thriller.
R is a whole lot easier than Q. In fact, Britain’s first female Chancellor of the Exchequer can give us two R’s in one name.
Nobody expected Rachel Reeves to be a chancellor for the people. If you asked her for thoughts on Chairman Mao she is likely to ask you which FTSE 100 corporation they head up and if you wanted her opinion on Engels she will tell you she likes most of Robbie Williams songs.
Married to an ex-DWP executive and on record as saying Labour isn’t a party for people on benefits, it didn’t take a genius to work out who Reeves will be expect to cover the bulk of the cost of filling this magical £22 billion black hole that appeared within hours of a Labour election victory, on 4 July.
Reeves is unlikable, untrustworthy, and an absolutely ideal link to the letter S, which comes in the shape of her boss, the equally unlikable and untrustworthy prime minister, Keir Starmer.
Sure, I could’ve picked that stupid little shit, Streeting, but Keir Starmer is on another level of his own.
Dull, unpopular, uncharismatic, unrelatable, and overseeing the worst start to a new government in living memory.
Despite Starmer being a loyal columnist for much of the establishment media, they still hate the impossibly awkward human colonoscopy as much as you and I.
The broken promises of years gone by are beginning to hit Starmer where it hurts. The latest milestones are yesterday’s ten pledges and the day before’s five missions. We’ve heard it all before, Keith.
Question: How did our subject of the letter T, Donald Trump, manage to go from being found guilty of 34 felony counts of falsifying business records — becoming the first former U.S. president to be convicted of a crime — to President-elect Trump, in the space of just six months?
Only in America?
The perceived weakness of his opponent, the aforementioned Kamala Harris certainly played its part in this remarkable but worrying turnaround for Trump.
But, it is imperative for us to understand why poor and working class people are happy to give their vote to characters like Donald Trump, and to a lesser extent, Nigel Farage if we are to ever learn how the left can have a meaningful impact on our politics in the years and decades to come.
U to X: who remembers Blockbusters?
The letter U leaves me posing another question for you.
Do you remember Bob Holness on Blockbusters? You need to adopt his questioning style for this one.
Which U was guaranteed at least £3 BILLION A YEAR, for “as long as it takes”, by then-new British Prime Minister, Keir Starmer, whilst people on his own country, such as veterans and disabled pensioners, are sleeping in fucking shop doorways?
Ukraine is the correct answer.
I know the comedy President isn’t ever going to read this, he’s far too busy flying around the Western world to see what else he can get out of the global community before Trump begins his second term as President.
But I can assure Mr Zelensky, support for the West’s proxy war with Russia is minimal. We’re sick of sacrificing our human lives for other people’s wars, and if we cannot afford to feed the poor and needy in Britain we certainly cannot afford to fuel a conflict in Ukraine, the Middle East, or anywhere else.
The letter V leads us to a chap by the name of Vivek Ramaswamy, a tech entrepreneur who is said to be worth at least $1 billion. Mr R will join forces with Elon Musk to spearhead a newly created department of government efficiency, already known by its acronym Doge, whose mission is to cut waste from public spending.
This means huge cuts in services and funding for the very people that delivered Trump back to power just last month, or as Musk puts it, “temporary economic hardship”, which always sounds a bit off when it’s coming from the richest person in the world, don’t you think?
We move on with haste to the letter W, and we arrive just in time to see the end of Justin Welby.
Just last month, Welby was forced to resign as Archbishop of Canterbury following allegations that he failed to handle and follow through on allegations of child sexually abuse in the correct manner.
What is it with the church and nonces? I’m not saying Welby is an abuser, but his failure to follow the abuse claims gave the alleged abuser a further ten years to sexually abuse children, and that is a very serious matter for Welby and the Church of England.
X isn’t a difficult one. I think I still only know one other word beginning with the letter X, and that is xylophone.
Back in August, Brazilian authorities decided to block X (previously Twitter), largely because of rampant disinformation on the site. The ban was lifted in October after X agreed to various requirements, including the removal of certain accounts.
Y and Z of 2024
We are now at the penultimate letter of the 2024 review, Y.
The genocide of Gaza has seen an incredibly muted response from Arab and Muslim nations that traditionally support the Palestinian state.
But one state didn’t just roll on to its back and open its legs for the Israeli war machine, and that was Yemen.
While the Yemeni Houthi’s own style of government isn’t something that would appeal to most sane individuals, they cannot be faulted for having the balls to stand up to Israel and the United States.
And so we reach the end of my A to Z of 2024, which just leaves us with the letter Z.
Zuckerberg is still a weirdo, and we spoke about Zelensky just a few paragraphs back, so let’s finish with a few words about Zionism.
Be in no doubt, Israel’s war on Gaza and Lebanon has exposed Zionism for the genocidal dealt cult that it is.
Since its inception, the Zionist movement has always set out to ethnically cleanse Palestine of the country’s indigenous Palestinian population.
I cannot see how it is possible for both Zionism and Palestine to exist on the same planet when the former is hellbent on terminating the latter.
So on that basis, Zionism must be dismantled. It might not happen in my lifetime, but when it does happen it will be the best Christmas gift for the Palestinian people.
Fuck Israel, fuck Zionism, fuck Trump, double-fuck Starmer, and have a peaceful and fulfilling festive season.
See you next year.
Featured image via Rachael Swindon
