And yet again, most of us are not celebrating the new year but shuddering with relief at having survived the last one.
We place too much significance on the changing of the year. It’s just a calendar marker – a human construct draped over time so that we can make sense of it.
Nevertheless, these things are important to us. Time and the unspooling of the universe is vast and, in practical terms for most of us, as close as it gets to unknowable without tripping into mysticism.
So every new year we look ahead and wonder what’s to come. Even the most hard headed of materialists. When I was actively involved in left wing politics we used to produce things called ‘perspectives documents’.
Basically these were attempts not to guess the immediate future but to work out what may lie ahead based on what we actually know, the real trajectory of events and based on a solid understanding of the material, economic motors of change.
Looking back, the results were often bollocks, frankly, and sometimes blatant and very un-Marxian exercises in wish fulfilment.
But I still think there’s some validity in the perspectives document, not least as an exercise in foresight over astonishment.
How might 2024 look for Scotland’s voluntary sector? The bigger picture is that it will be set against a world which is tipping into all out war. I’m writing this on the very day the US and UK have ordered a fourth round of strikes against the Houthis in Yemen, the continued slaughter in Gaza, Pakistani air strikes in Iran and reports of Jordanian missile attacks on sites in Syria.
These are all linked and form part of a wider and growing conflict – all overseen by the senescence of the world’s foremost imperial power.
War here, as well as the ongoing and deepening climate catastrophe, will be the big backdrop to 2024 – bigger than the frozen conflict in Ukraine – and it will have consequences for us all.
This might seem a grand setting for pondering what might happen to charity funding arrangements or the future of fundraising. But everything that happens in the world, especially economically, has an impact on us. The 2008 partial collapse of capitalism, austerity, the climate collapse, Covid, Brexit, the Ukraine war. All of these had and still have consequences for us, some primary, some secondary, and it was often charities and the voluntary sector who were left to help the victims and to keep going as resources dwindled.
Of more immediate concern will be a series of elections due this year – across the UK at one step removed and in US more distantly.
Devolution means that a change in UK government is felt less keenly in the voluntary sector here – but it will have impacts. Not least on the elections that primarily concern us – those to Holyrood in 2025.
What happens this year will impact on that poll – and we have to start looking at scenarios involving a change of government. What will that mean for our relationship with power? For policy making, for influencing? Here’s where all our work on funding arrangements come in.
Despite growing frustrations, I’d argue that we – I mean the wider sector – have grown fairly comfortable with how things have been since 2007. What will change mean?
Here’s a contradictory message of hope: do have nightmares. Because things really are that bad. Let that thought puncture complacency and be a guide to action.
Because the response is still largely in our hands, while there’s still a world to win.
Graham Martin is editor of TFN.
