The only tired I am this Christmas

I am usually exhausted by the end of the year and in need of a Christmas break. This year I feel different - and there are a lot of reasons top be more hopeful about 2026 than it appears.

I have a routine for my last article of the year; do something uplifting, pick a theme which is politics-adjacent but not too political, try to leave people feeling better about things. Undoubtedly less All the President's Men and much more Bedford Falls.

But this has been a strange sort of end of the year for me. October and November are generally among the busiest in politics and that along with the accumulation of the year's travails means I end up limping into the Festive Season, exhausted and in desperate need of two weeks sitting by the fire doing as little as possible.

This year feels different. I mean I'm pretty knackered, but I don't feel exhausted. Why? And despite the fact that it's usually the third or fourth of January before I'm starting to actually feel ready to go back to work, I am going into this Christmas actively looking forward to 2026. Not only unusual for me but, given the state of things, weird in itself.

So why? Well, it was crystallised by an article I read about Rosa Parks.

You know the story; tired after a long day and sick of being humiliated, when told to change seats on Alabama's segregated busses and get off the 'white people's seats', Parks had had enough and refused. It kicks off the Montgomery Bus Strikes, begun in protest at Parks's arrest for refusing to move, and this is the final straw which ends racial segregation in America.

I know the story well because I use it as my go-to to try and galvanise activists when the struggle feels like it is one you are losing or one you will never win. I also knew it wasn't true.

Many years later Parks describes the falsity in that version of the story succinctly; she said “The only tired I was that day was tired of giving up”. It suited the story told by white America that this wasn't a political act but just that of an ordinary, everyday woman who was terribly weary after a long shift at work.

It suited America that this story did not grant real agency to its hero. It made it much more comfortable, much more relatable that this was 'revolution by mistake'. It tells a story in which America knew it was wrong and was just waiting for a nudge to its moral compass to get round to sorting it out.

In reality the Montgomery Bus Strikes continued for well over a year and were policed not as a nudge to the moral compass but as a threat to the nation. And Rosa Parks wasn't some random weary woman just too damned tired to stand up, she was an activist of long standing who had been a member of the NAACP for over 12 years before that day she 'spontaneously' felt tired.

She'd led their youth wing, she was working on an investigation of systematic rape of African American woman in the Deep South. She was not some ingenue stumbling into history, she was a woman who chose to make history. And it wasn't easy.

I pick this story not to compare myself to Rosa Parks but because when I read that article I realised something that surprised me; I wasn't tired either. I mean, since the announcement of the independence referendum it has largely felt like tired is my default state. But I found myself looking forward to Christmas not as recovery but as pleasure.

There are a number of reasons for this. A simple one of these is that it has been a really great year for Common Weal. Our relaunch in the spring has worked wonders, we're reaching new audiences and our work is getting more attention than ever. We haven't had so many people approach us to want to do some work with us since the early aftermath of the referendum.

Another is what I was writing about last week; there are seismic changes taking place across the globe just now and yes, some of that looks threatening and worrying, but it also means enormous opportunity. There is such a widespread awareness now that 'more of the same' is not going to serve us well that the possibilities for change are greater than I can remember.

Another is the briefing we put out this week; forget what the right wing media and everything you've seen on social media says, there are also seismic shifts in social attitudes and, surprisingly to many just now, there is more reason for hope than for fear in them. There are ups and downs wherever there is human affairs, but on the whole we are becoming more liberal and more tolerant all the time.

“For a number of years now my work conversations have often featured the phrase ‘what the hell can we usefully do?’”

Another is British politics. I know, I know, it looks grim, but that's the point – it has been grim for a while and now it really looks grim. That's important because the struggle of the last decade and a half (basically since the financial crisis) has been to persuade people that we aren't 'nearly there'.

After the disruption of Brexit a lot of people felt like they'd got the change they needed and somehow 'getting Brexit done' would be the last step. Then a lot of the other group instead thought that a 'return to normal' would sort things. Johnstone and Starmer proved both wrong. We have been in desperate need of a new politics and the conditions are developing.

And in Scotland (which isn't a lot less grim really), we are at least reaching a pivotal moment. By the summer either the SNP will have won its gamble and have an overall majority in the Scottish Parliament which it using to negotiate independence or it will have reached the end of the road it has been driving us up. Either way, the reasons for perpetual prevarication will be gone.

Now I realise that some of this may not sound to you like a reason for me to be energised, but from my perspective it is. I've been off work this week doing pre-Christmas DIY. When I see a cleared room and a pile of plywood it doesn't scream out 'fun' to me but at least it gives me a very specific task, something I can get on with.

That is, I think, at the heart of it. For a number of years now my work conversations have often featured the phrase 'what the hell can we usefully do?'. There were always lots of things I and we could do – and indeed we did a lot of them. But we did them with little real hope that there would be much of an outcome.

Take for example our excellent work on a National Care Service. As we were doing it we were notionally quite excited because it was a really exciting vision, made perfect sense from where we were and was achievable. But at the same time we knew that it would mean the Scottish Government changing tack, focusing not on the management of services but their delivery and breaking its habit of relying on the private sector for everything.

Which is to say early on we knew that we had to keep doing the work but every signal we were getting was telling us we were being ignored, managed, kept busy doing nothing in endless meetings. We did it because it should have been done, but the more we did it the plainer it became that policy-makers are not interested in good government but easy government with vested interests kept happy.

There was little or no political dynamic to change this. The constitutional divide has made things far too comfortable – for both sides. There was very little public interest in the debate, fuelled I'm sure by a vague sense that this wasn't going to happen anyway. For us it wasn't a vague sense, we warned all along that it was going to fall apart in exactly the way that it did.

And this I am tired off. All of this. If you are involved in policy or campaigning circles at all you will know that every private conversation is the same – despair. Despair at the UK Government. Despair at the Scottish Government. The belief priced in that they won't try and if they do they'll water it down to nothing, and then it'll probably fail anyway.

It is exhausting working for no reason, pushing at doors you know are locked, trying to reason with politicians whose eyes are saying 'have you seen the state of our opposition? - we don't even need to be any good so can we get this over with?'.

That, I think, is why I'm feeling this surge of energy. It feels to me like this dynamic may break in 2026. It feels to me like the public mood and the realities of politics means that the rather smug and self-satisfied attitude to governing on both sides of the border (and in Europe, and the global south, and the US) are on shaky ground.

Even just that much hope has me feeling different. It feels like there may soon be something to do again, something worth doing. I'll take that for Christmas very happily indeed.

So whatever you're up to I hope you have a wonderful Festive Season. I hope you get to relax, and I hope you come back as energised as I am. Somehow I think it is going to be a big year ahead...