Not since 1946 when the immediate post-war years laid the foundations of the modern world have we known such turbulence and political upheavals as this year. The Suez crisis in 1956, the Cuban missile crisis in 1962, the financial crisis in 2008 created spasms of serious concern, but did not compete with or match 2016 for sheer revolutionary change and instability.
In June, Britain went to the polls on a vote which would have profound effects on hundreds of millions of Europeans, including 65 million Britons. Whatever David Cameron had expected when he pledged a referendum, it surely could not have been anything as unedifying, self-flagellating, potentially self-destructive and unnecessary as this.
It was a decision driven simply by the need to satisfy the whims of an internal party squabble, split down the middle by a right-wing cabal united by a visceral hatred of the EU, gripped by a collective madness, and hell-bent on committing a gratuitous act of self-harm.
The fact that this might also topple the European Union and would almost certainly break up the UK, jeopardise their country’s economy and inflict a generation of uncertainty on their fellow countrymen was seen as a price worth paying.
This act of hara-kiri was executed without any idea of what Britain’s economic and trading arrangements would look like in the event of a vote to leave. Six months later, no one has even begun to address the basic problem: that British voters were promised much more than could ever be delivered by Brexit. There is no plan (red, white or blue), no strategy, no roadmap.
On November 9, the world woke up to the stunning news of Donald Trump’s victory in the most dramatic insurgency in American political history. He was propelled to the White House by a white working class backlash against the so-called Washington elite.
A man who is notoriously cavalier with the truth, scornful of policy detail, with a short attention span, a total lack of curiosity about other countries or cultures and absolutely no grasp of the practical exigencies of governance, who is clearly temperamentally unsuited to hold the office of president, is the new leader of the free world.
We must hope for all our sakes that he will preside over a competent administration. He is showing pragmatism as he prepares for power. He has begun to backtrack on some of his more outlandish threats. A Trump presidency may yet not prove as awful as many thought. But the risk remains.
It has become commonplace to liken the triumph of those who wanted Brexit to the elevation of Trump to America’s highest office. But for all the similarities, there is an overwhelming distinction. In four years’ time Americans will have the chance to vote Trump out. Britons will find it impossible to claw their way back from beyond the Brexit brink for a generation or more to come.
A review of global events in 2016 cannot allow the agony of Aleppo to pass unremarked. The bombing and massacre of the innocents of Aleppo by President Putin and his puppet, Assad, has reflected the same ruthless strategy as Putin executed in his destruction of Grozny – a destruction without parallel since the end of World War II.
But the historical analogy goes back further. The Russians have done precisely what Franco and the Nazis did at Guernica in the Spanish Civil War 80 years ago. Just as the Nazis destroyed the Basque city in 1937 on behalf of Franco, so Putin’s bombers have helped to kill and destroy Aleppo’s citizens in support of the Assad regime.
Like the Nazi forces at Guernica, which inspired Picasso’s great cubist painting – a twisted, distorted nightmarish vision of what happens to the minds and bodies of defenceless human beings when bombs are rained remorselessly on them in a blood-stained man-made horror – Aleppo stands today as Putin’s epitaph to Man’s inhumanity to Man.
As for Malta, the issue which has dominated politics for the last year was the Panama Papers scandal. Malta was rocked by news that Konrad Mizzi, then minister for energy and health, and Keith Schembri, the Prime Minister’s chief of staff, had opened secret companies in Panama very soon after taking office in the new Labour government in 2013.
They failed to declare that they had opened this financial vehicle with the Maltese authorities as required under Maltese law.
Prime Minister Joseph Muscat set his face against any talk of ministerial resignation on the spurious grounds that nothing technically wrong had been proven. Schembri too remains in post on the specious basis that his is “a position of trust”.
If a minister has deceived Parliament, as Mizzi has, accountability for it must be his responsibility. And if the minister deceived the Prime Minister, the minister should resign. A Prime Minister who did not oblige him to do so would be culpable in the extreme because both he and Mizzi were guilty of a gross breach of the convention of ministerial responsibility and of conniving in the deceit.
The Prime Minister has mishandled the Panamagate debacle. Malta’s international reputation has been tarnished. The issue will haunt him throughout 2017 and beyond.
With another general election looming, the battle lines appear already to be drawn. Good governance versus good stewardship of the economy seem implicitly to be the grounds on which it will be fought.
The government will seek to allaypublic disillusion at its broken pro-mises, its corrupt maladministration and poor governance and the lingering stench of Panamagate.
Instead, it will underline the good financial management essential for Malta to have come through the continuing global uncertainties unscathed and stronger, with prospects for the future looking set fair. As the year ends, we find that the government holds a lead in the polls, with Opposition leader still trailing Muscat on “trust”.
The other issue which dominated this year’s Maltese politics, has been the government’s relentless assault on Malta’s environment. A Prime Minister who came to power promising “to leave behind a heritage to future generations so these will be better off than today” has instead embarked on a sustained and destructive onslaught on the landscape.
The Planning Authority in an act of grotesque environmental destruction agreed this year to the construction of five high-rise towers in a country where they are alien, unnecessary and unwanted. The decision represents in the starkest manner all that is wrong with our built environment and the planning blight that this government is actively inflicting on this island.
Environmental safeguards put in place between 1992 and 2012 are being dismantled without any regard to the long-term effects on Malta’s besieged landscape. Our environment is in acute peril as never before.
I must end this piece on a brighter note. Despite the tumultuous changes which have accompanied 2016, the central story of our era is that we are witnessing the greatest improvements in global living standards ever to take place.
Malta has made more progress in the last 50 years than in the first 7,000 years of its history. We are well-fed, longer-lived, better-housed, better-educated, healthier and wealthier.
Despite the shoals that await us in 2017, may I wish my readers a successful and prosperous New Year.