I might be a doomer, but convince me I'm wrong

Predicting what issue Anas Sarwar will go on at FMQs has become a long-running joke between myself and my colleagues.

Mystic Meg-style, we foresee that the Scottish Labour leader will ask about the NHS. Most of the time, we’re right. On the very rare occasion he asks about something else, shocked emojis are pinged across Teams – and then Sarwar inevitably returns to his pet topic the following week.

That’s not to give the impression that the state of the National Health Service is not a worthy topic. Rather, it is a sign that we’ve become immune to how bad things are. The NHS is at breaking point, and everyone knows it.

It begs the question: is there anything that could shock us anymore?

The same could be said of so much of the world right now. The fact that 2024 was the first year to pass the 1.5 degrees global warming limit; the slaughter of innocent people in two bloody conflicts in Ukraine and Gaza; the quarter of children growing up in poverty in the UK; the failure to prevent the killing of three young girls in Southport by a man known to the police; the inauguration of a US president wholly unfit for elected office. The list goes on.

The overwhelming sense of apathy is pervasive and palpable

Even a supposedly positive news story, the opening of the Thistle safer drug consumption facility in Glasgow, is overshadowed by the fact that it will do little to address the wider problem of drug abuse. Its opening may be welcome and may prevent some deaths, but celebrating it as anything other than an admission that we have lost control of the battle against addiction, to me, feels uncomfortable.

All of this has now become normal. But it is not normal.

And as everything continues to get worse, there is a growing malaise – not just from the public, but also apparently our politicians, those we entrust with providing solutions. The overwhelming sense of apathy is pervasive and palpable.

It is little wonder that against this backdrop a party like Reform UK is polling so well. They may not be anti-establishment, as they would like to claim, but they are very much not part of The Establishment – and that’s what makes them a tempting option.

Governments have repeatedly failed to get to grips with the big picture and are now having the firefight on multiple fronts, all at once

I’ve recently seen calls to create a ‘populist left’ party to rival Reform on the other end of the spectrum. I’d welcome one, so long as it brought fresh thinking. But I don’t think most voters, even Reform voters, consider themselves to be left or right. It is more a case of, when all others have failed, why not take a chance on something new?

Perhaps this is the shake-up that the mainstream parties need. But then again, even the most sensible voices in America thought the same about Trump 1.0 – only to be lulled into a false sense of security by the 2020 election, and here we are again.

We are in an era of reactive policymaking, where governments have repeatedly failed to get to grips with the big picture and are now having the firefight on multiple fronts, all at once.

I believe Keir Starmer gets that, and knows he has to look beyond what is immediately in front of him – but to an electorate constantly bombarded with the dire state of the world, that can look an awful lot like inaction.

And so, Labour finds itself also dragged into reacting, and it is far easier then to rail against what came before, and to condemn and to criticise, than to reckon with the fact that there are no quick fixes.

Once upon a time, I was an optimist about politics. These days, I’m more likely to be accused of being a doom-monger. But honestly, I’ve yet to see anything to convince me that it’s not entirely the right response.