Politics stole Christmas 2019 thanks to the election – let’s hope personal interests are put aside this year

There’s no hiding the gruesome statistics of 2020, let’s look forwards and rebuild our country in an honest, positive way

We are no longer allowed to let some memories go into storage: nowadays our phones wake us up to a photograph of this day through all the years that we have handed over our data to the cloud masters.

My artificial memory informs me how consistently on this weekend through the years I have put up a near-identical Christmas tree. The 2016 tree looks a carbon copy of the 2017 and 2018 tree, I am clearly a creature of habit.  

The images of this week in 2019 are a jarring reminder of how very unfestive December was for my family last year. Instead of images of me and the kids placing a threadbare Sixties robin taken from my parents Christmas decorations on to the mantelpiece, there is a video of me in a messy office, papers piling up around me, looking knackered appealing for volunteers to help us to get out the vote on polling day. 

The jarring difference in the images a firm reminder of how crackers it was holding an election on 12 December, and of how for the political class, politics stole Christmas.  

The level of urgency for the December election was sold not dissimilarly to the urgency of the snap general election in 2017, as the only way to break a parliamentary deadlock and move the country along in its Brexit stalemate. Well that went well. 

A year on from an election that delivered Boris Johnson more new MPs than doors on an advent calendar we are here again in deadlock, with uncertainty over what will happen to our car industry, and worries over cross-border security and food prices still very much our nation's reality. The Ghost of Christmas Past seems to reveal the exact same story as the Ghost of Christmas Present.  

While Brexit remains our country’s constant, much else has changed in the year since my worst Christmas. If only last year the Ghost of Christmas Future could have knocked on the door of No 10 and told our premier to pay a bit more attention to what was happening in China this time last year. If only the spectre of years of austerity cutbacks to our emergency contingency of PPE supplies, or the annual warnings of winter pressures on an understaffed NHS could have jangled the ghastly chains a little louder.  

This year has been a one where the word “unprecedented” was bandied about daily. If I had been told last year that my children would be out of school for six months, that the British people would compliantly shut their front doors and stay inside, or that I would have to buy condolence cards in bulk, I would have never believed it. 

If I had been told that Johnson’s allegedly rousing bluster and rhetoric, and Donald Trump's arrogance, would smash headfirst into a wall of grim reality I would have predicted that it would take more than a year to destroy their schtick. The Ghost of Christmas Future is telling me that politics will have another transformative year in 2021. A year that asks for representatives who take a calm, consensual and measured approach to sorting out the long tail of a crisis.  

Slogans like “take back control” and “make America great again” ring hollow and feel cold as we head in 2021. Pithy attack lines will not rebuild our economy, they will not deliver educational equality for a harmed generation of schoolkids and students. Messy hair and blethering about whiff-whaff will not deliver just-in-time logistics to protect jobs in heavy industry, nor will they offer comfort to the thousands of children who have lived in frightening homes where no one could reach them. Next year has got to be the year of the grown-ups and a year where governance and the boring necessary detail trumps the desire to win an argument on Twitter.  

In 2021 we have to rebuild our country in an honest, positive way. The government will fail as it has done this year if it seeks only to create slogans and be defensive about what went wrong. You cannot spin the gruesome statistics of 2020, there is no sheen we can put on this year and how it has been handled. Let’s face it and get on with fixing it.  

In my constituency, four in every 10 people are currently not in work. More than 10,000 people remain on furlough with little or no certainty that they will return to their jobs. People’s lives and livelihoods need proper attention. 

The greatest gift we can give to the people I represent and people across the country would be considered politicians who did their homework, combed through the data, admitted when things were wrong and worked out how to fix them rather than looking at how to push away blame.  

The coming year will inevitably be better than 2020, my tree will remain a consistent facsimile of the trees that went before, let's all hope that we can rely on some considered consistency and measured approaches from our government. It may be a Christmas wish too far to expect them to put aside their own interests for the sake of everyone else’s, but I guess this is a miraculous time of year.  

Jess Phillips is the shadow minister for domestic violence and safeguarding and Labour MP for Birmingham Yardley