Sweet Dream Scenario: As Vice-President Mike Pence is being sworn-in as the 46th President of the United States - following Trump's sudden resignation - he suffers a massive heart attack and dies. His constitutionally designated successor is the Speaker of the House of Representatives, Nancy Pelosi. By a strange twist of fate, the United States of America gets its first female president after all.
PREDICTING THE FUTURE is a mug’s game. If it could be done,
then gambling would be impossible and stockmarkets would crash. Not that these
and a host of equally strong objections ever prevented professional seers from
giving us the benefit of their prognostications. Some of them, by the simple
law of averages, will be correct. Most, however, will not. This is because, as
a wise woman once said: “We do not see things as they are, we see them as we
are.”
In that spirit, allow me to describe the coming year as it
might look – if we get lucky.
If we get lucky, then Special Prosecutor Robert Mueller will
present a report which damns President Donald Trump in ways unanticipated in
even his worst nightmares. Republican and Democratic legislators, alike,
conclude that his continuing occupation of the White House has become
untenable.
Congressional leaders privately inform the President that
there is more than enough support in both the House and the Senate to secure
his impeachment. The President reaches for his cell-phone – only to discover
that the Deep State has prevailed upon Twitter to shut down his account.
Realising that the jig is up, the President resigns.
As Vice-President Mike Pence is being sworn-in as the 46th
President of the United States he suffers a massive heart attack and dies. His
constitutionally designated successor is the Speaker of the House of
Representatives, Nancy Pelosi. By a strange twist of fate, the United States of
America gets its first female president after all.
If we get lucky, then the House of Commons decisively rejects
Theresa May’s Brexit Deal. Defeated and exhausted, the Prime Minister advises
the Queen to dissolve Parliament and call an early General Election. May then
resigns.
A Special Conference of the Labour Party votes decisively in
favour of making a Second Brexit Referendum the centrepiece of its election
manifesto.
With the Conservatives torn by all manner of political and
personal conflicts, Labour cruises to a landslide victory. For the first time
in forty years, the United Kingdom has a socialist prime minister and an
unashamedly left-wing government. The Second Referendum records upwards of 60
percent of Britons opting to remain in the European Union.
If we get lucky, then the Russian President, Vladimir Putin,
negotiates a general peace settlement and mutual defence pact involving Turkey,
Syria, Lebanon, Iraq and Iran. The Kurds secure regional autonomy within the
Syrian state, guaranteed by the Russian Federation.
If we get lucky, then the Politburo of the Chinese Communist
Party, fearful that President Xi Jinping is about to launch a massive purge of
senior party cadres, deposes him. A hastily-summoned National People’s
Congress, in a climate of unprecedented independence, elects a moderate
reformer as Xi’s successor.
If we get lucky, then the National Party responds to a sharp
decline in public support by jettisoning its current leader, Simon Bridges, and
replacing him with Judith Collins. The choice of Collins is itself a reaction
to the rapid rise of the right-wing populist New Conservative Party. Collins,
it is hoped, will staunch the flow of National support to the NCP.
Appalled by this dramatic shift to the far-right, thousands
of moderate National Party supporters swing in behind NZ First and Labour,
lifting their combined support to nearly 60 percent of voters.
The Coalition Government, buoyed by this sudden shift in its
fortunes, decides to reject the Tax Working Group’s recommendation favouring
the imposition of a Capital Gains Tax. The Prime Minister, Jacinda Ardern, is
persuaded by Winston Peters that such a tax would turn every farmer, small
business owner and landlord in the country into her personal enemy. Finance
Minister, Grant Robertson, resigns in protest. Jacinda replaces him with David
Parker.
If we get really lucky, then the leadership changes in the USA,
the UK and China produce a sudden and radical shift in the global approach to
anthropogenic global warming. Rather than relying on yet another international
conference, the leaders of the five permanent members of the UN Security
Council meet in secret and thrash out a concrete plan for keeping the planet’s
remaining reserves of oil and gas in the ground while they co-ordinate a
planet-wide “Green New Deal”.
According to the wise, the only sure thing about luck is
that it changes.
I’m counting on that being true.
Happy 2019!
This essay was
originally published in The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday,
4 January 2019.
