Britain in 2010

'Tis the season to be making inaccurate forecasts.  Here are mine.

1. The year will begin with more optimistic news about the economy, then there will be a double dip recession - including house prices falling through most of the year.
2. British debt will become more expensive than Italian debt within weeks, and will fall just short of exceeding the price of Greek debt by mid-Spring.  This will create political near-panic, forcing the Budget to be more austere than Brown hoped, but there will not be a financial crisis.
3. The Conservatives will win a General Election held in May, with a majority of about 100.
4. Within three months of the Conservatives taking office, unemployment will exceed 3m.  The Conservatives will try - but fail - to pin the blame on Gordon Brown.
5. Within three months of taking office, the Conservatives will announce the largest cuts in UK public expenditure of the modern era.  Financial market commentators will say it is not enough.
6. Meanwhile, the war in Afghanistan will go badly, and the government will come under pressure to withdraw as American public opinion starts to turn decisively against the war.
7. Ongoing recession, high unemployment, falling house prices, large spending cuts, and discontent with the war will lead to wildcat strikes and large-scale marches that turn into riots in the autumn.
8. Backbench Conservatives will be less disciplined than any Conservative administration since the 1920s, defying the whip on many issues.  By year's end, 40 MPs will have formed a group calling openly for withdrawal from the European Union.  Many others will call for more rapid progress on renegotiation and the implementation of Cameron's EU relationship reform plan.
9. Cameron and Osborne will not buckle under pressure, but will proceed calmly and with flinty resolve to carry through their programme.  Despite this, by late November, the spending cuts plans will start to seem on the point of unravelling, with many departments claiming that the scale of cuts imposed upon them will be undeliverable.
10. In response (though it will not be expressed this way), plans will be announced in the late Autumn to break up the Department of Health and reorganise spending allocations within the NHS, with certain areas of health spending being integrated with incapacity benefits and sickness benefits.  It will be eighteen months before integrated data series will be available that allow anyone to say, definitively, whether the pre-Election pledge to keep NHS spending rising in real terms has been honoured in substance or merely in precise wording.
11. The Labour Party will choose between Cruddas, Harman, and Ed Miliband for leader.  Neither Ed Balls nor David Miliband will garner sufficient support to stand, formally.  Ed Miliband will be victorious.  This will be largely irrelevant, as Labour will be polling consistently less than the Lib Dems before the end of the year, and will face a month of polling consistently less than 20%  The Conservatives will be polling in the high 30s to low 40s throughout the year, but those that do not support them will be starting to dislike Cameron and Osborne intensely - including many Conservatives.
12. By year's end, the economy will be recovering strongly, house prices will have troughed, and though the crisis over how to deliver spending cuts will not have been fully resolved, it will already be clear that Cameron and Osborne will stay the course.  Equity markets will be rallying strongly, unemployment will be falling and many commentators will be writing about the financial, economic and political crisis in the past tense.  They will have pronounced too soon...