Well, here’s to 2008.

I wish everyone the very best prosperity for this year despite our shaky looking economy and the UK credit crunch.

I also wish that our politicians should make more moves towards domestic energy security so we don’t have to send our boys and girls to fight over dusty strips of land with oil underneath.

I wonder if we will see a correction or crash in house prices this year as so many hard working people in the UK are unable to afford to live in even the most decrepit of places. I fear that the situation will once again be engineered to protect the interests of ‘buy to let’ and property developers to the detriment of the already massively-overstretched normal mortgagees and to the exclusion of the ‘first-time-buyer’.

Finally, I’d like to remind everyone that in 2008, we can look forward to the first introduction of UK National Identity Cards giving the government never before seen powers of authoritarian control over the population and a unique opportunity to lose practically every piece of information known about an individual in one go. This as other nations have a sudden outbreak of common sense and scrap their ID Card programmes. If any politician should wheel out the damned lie that ‘biometrics’ is in any way useful for preventing the wholesale physical loss/theft of identity data this year, I’ll be inclined to swing for them.

Try to have a good year. Wherever you may find one.