2022 PREDICTIONS (I'm not confident. At all.)
From politics to sport to literally whatever the hell I feel like talking about, we are now going to look at my predictions for 2022.
OK, we are now about 2 weeks into 2022 and it is about time that we looked at my predictions for the coming year. If I am mostly right about 50% of these, I will be shocked. Outside of US politics, I have all the skill in predictions of a demented goat. This will be fun to look back on this time in 2023!
United States - mid-terms, economy, foreign policy, Biden & Trump’s wellbeing, covid-19
Let’s start with the most obvious prediction ever. A 3 day old goldfish could probably get this one right. The Republicans will take back both the house and the Senate in the mid-term elections.
The polls are telling us this. Joe Biden’s approval rating is at a dismal average of 43% recently, with his disapproval at over 50%. Kamala Harris is doing even worse. Even though neither of these are up for election, they are the leaders of the Democratic Party, and because they are doing so badly and are so unpopular, their fellow party members are fucked in their bids for re-election.
On the generic ballot, to have any chance of winning, Democrats need to win by 3 or 4 points to stand any chance because of gerrymandering. And because pollsters, for whatever reason, seem to favour Democrats by another 3-4 points, they need to be polling 6-7% better on the generic ballot than their Republican opponents. And they are 1.6% down, according to the RealClearPolitics average. That spells disaster, at least for the house.
I would guess that, of the 435 seats in the house, Republicans will win 250-260, giving them a massive majority. Democrats aren’t going to be helped by the fact that 26 of their Congresspeople will be retiring. I’d argue that this is a good thing because the Democratic caucus is ridiculously old - older than the Republican one by far - and, as a result of that, they are very out of touch with regular voters. There is a slight chance that younger representatives might be more in touch with the economic populist beliefs of younger generations. I’m not confident that would be the case, but there is a better chance.
In the Senate, Republicans will pick up seats in Nevada, New Hampshire, Georgia and Arizona to give them a 54-46 majority in the Senate.
The Republicans will also pick up 4 gubernatorial elections, meaning that they control 30 states nationwide, compared to 20 for their Democratic counterparts.
This looks like it will be even better for the Republicans than their infamous TEA party wave of 2010 after Barack Obama’s first 2 years, and that’s purely because of how shitty Joe Biden has been, which we have in the past and will continue in the future to detail.
The economy will not get any better, but it won’t get too much worse. Inflation will continue to be the major issue in the economy, and while it will not be as bad in 2022 as it has been in the last year because the supply chain crisis caused by the shipping container backup in LA.
Corporations will continue to take advantage of the inflation crisis as they have this year, and they will reach more record profits like they have this year, while using inflation as an excuse to raise their prices, just like in 2021.
On the other, more positive hand, workers will continue to fight for better wages, and will probably see another 3% or so rise in general wages. The striking workers will continue to be heroes for the working class.
In terms of foreign policy, there will be no major changes from current foreign policy. We will continue to see terrible sanctions on Afghanistan causing massive starvation and confusion on both the Russia/Ukraine tension and the China/Taiwan possible problem. We will look at those both in more detail at a later date, although I would be surprised if tensions get too much worse this year.
I would be surprised if none of Joe Biden, Donald Trump or Nancy Pelosi spend less than 5 nights in the hospital this year. I take absolutely zero pleasure in their suffering, but one of them is an obese 75 year old man who eats too much McDonalds, another is a 79 year old with evident cognitive decline who looks and sounds half dead most of the time and the 3rd is an 81 year old woman who seems incapable of talking like a normal person. Again, I take no pleasure in any of this, but the fact is that none of the 3 leaders of the country are in rude health. It’s a shame but it is all true.
Fauci, the CDC and the rest of the public health establishment will continue to lose even more of their clout and respectability with the general public. They have lied time after time, and more and more people - including liberals who took their word as literal gospel during earlier stages of the pandemic - are beginning to mistrust them. Finally. As even more of their lies are exposed, more people will continue to see them for what they are: bullshit artists.
United Kingdom - Boris, royals,
Boris Johnson has reached peak unpopularity. His repeated flouting of his own ill-fated lockdown laws while the public were constrained to their homes and he sipped wine with his colleagues has resulted in the vast majority of UK citizens beginning to disapprove of his performance and his party (and parties).
It has got to the point where the bland woke neoliberalism of Keir Starmer’s Labour - a party with none of the economic populism of Jeremy Corbyn and enough social justice warrior rhetoric to turn off the vast majority of UK adults - are somehow leading the tories by more than 10 percentage points in the polls. They are polling at roughly the same number that Jeremy Corbyn’s party got in 2017, but Corbyn lost then whereas Starmer would probably win now just because of how bad Boris is. Even Theresa May was more popular, and that’s saying something.
For these reasons, I would be extremely surprised if Boris were to make it through the next month, let alone the whole year. However, if he does make it until the end of February, he will survive until at least the next election. And if anyone can survive, it will be Boris, purely because of his cartoonish personality.
The most likely scenario is that either Michael Gove or Rishi Sunak take the reins from Boris, who moves temporarily to the back benches before making his return to the cabinet in late 2023. I’d suggest that Sunak is more popular within the tory caucus - and the general populace - than Gove is, purely because Gove comes across as a precious stuck up little bitch.
Some people are suggesting that Boris might favour a general election because there would be some chance of him keeping his job, whereas if he were to resign there would be no chance.
This is just unlikely. The Tories have an 80+ seat majority. They won’t let that slide easy. The only way that a general election happens is if Labour, the Scottish Nationalists, the Liberal Democrats and every other opposition member (except the abstentionist Sinn Fein) + about 42 Tories launch a vote of no confidence in the government, forcing Boris to call another election. I don’t think that will happen. Nor do I think he calls an election of his own volition, simply because he wouldn’t want to risk an embarrassing election defeat to the worst Labour Party since Tony Blair’s warmongering disgrace.
Quickly moving on, I reckon that Prince Andrew will be found guilty on Epstein-related charges, simply because US prosecutors need to be seen to be convicting someone and better a foreign elite than a domestic one.
Prince Harry and Meghan Markle will continue their slide into irrelevance as they realize that nobody likes and/or cares about them, and therefore their plan to ‘live independently’ will fail unless corporate advertisers come to their defence.
Australia - ScoMo’s future, lockdowns
Australia is probably the closest that the West has got to an authoritarian, tyrannical government, and that is quite chilling to say given that I, a New Zealander, have always looked upon our cousins across the ditch as laid-back, easy going, free-spirited and democratic. Their government, at present, is none of those things.
Scott Morrison, or ScoMo, as he normally goes by, has come under significant global pressure for his countries’ extreme, covid-zero policies. He has claimed that he is now opposed to covid-zero, but that hasn’t stopped his government and state governments from offering lockdowns over minimal case numbers, closed schools for elongated periods of time, closed state borders (especially to Western Australia), and mandates for a medical treatment that Pfizer is now telling us we need 4 doses of to get any benefit from when we were originally sold that we needed 2. These policies are authoritarian.
There have been a number of protests and international concern over the situation in the country down under, especially after videos such as the one below and the saga over Novak Djokovic’s visa after he arrived in the country unvaccinated (full debrief in another article probably).
This is simply not tenable for the current federal and state governments to uphold these positions. Something has to give at some point. My prediction is that by the end of the year, at least 2 state premiers will lose their jobs, either by election (in Victoria) or by resignation/vote of no confidence. ScoMo will go too.
We will also see some of these restrictions lift as more and more Aussies, including those in government, begin to understand how ridiculous they are.
SPORTS - European football (soccer for the wrong among us), tennis (Djokovic’s future included) and cricket (t20 world cup)
This is the bit that is definitely going to go wrong. There is no chance I will get all this right, and many of you will probably be thinking that either I’m weird for caring about these sports or that my brain is made of cereal for holding the predictions I do in these events.
OK, football-wise, to start with the serious affairs, people will continue not to care about the human rights abuses committed by the new owners of Newcastle United, because their money and willingness to spend way too much money on players who simply aren’t worth that much, a 30 year old kiwi Chris Wood from Burnley for £25 million. He is not good enough for that much to be spent on him. But he will probably manage to keep them away from relegation, so it’s worth it.
Onto proper football predictions, Wood’s old team, Burnley, will be relegated, alongside Norwich and Watford. Only one of those is a surprise.
Manchester City, also owned by oil-rich Middle Eastern sheiks with awful human rights records, will, unfortunately, win the Premier League this season, ahead of the mighty and wonderful Liverpool (2nd) and the less almighty and much less wonderful Chelsea (3rd). Arsenal will shock everyone and manage 4th spot, just ahead of Spurs, West Ham and Manchester United (haha).
Liverpool, Bayern Munich or Real Madrid will win the champions league, hopefully the former, as those teams seem the most able to win one off big games.
Chelsea will win the Carabao cup, while Manchester City will achieve another FA cup victory.
Bayern Munich, Real Madrid, PSG and Inter Milan will be the other winners in the top 5 leagues.
Onto cricket, where the only major event in the coming year really is the t20 world cup, set to be in Australia, where the home nation will probably win. They won in 2021 in conditions that don’t suit them, so God knows how easily they’ll do it in conditions that do work for them.
Tennis. Novak Djokovic, who had his visa to Australia cancelled, will suffer a similar problem in France, where President Emmanuel Macron has promised to “piss off the unvaccinated.”
The Aussie Open will be won by Daniil Medvedev, as will the US open, while Raphael Nadal and Novak Djokovic will win Roland Garros and Wimbledon respectively, the latter of which will be Roger Federer’s last tournament.
That’s it in terms of my predictions. God knows how bad they’ll be. I’d better be close enough on AT LEAST half of them. If I’m not I might, might, pledge to drink expired milk from an unwashed sock. Might (you know I won’t do it but I’ll dangle the proposition in front of you).