A complete version of this post is available on The Thursday Briefing, including exciting economic indicators.

I guess this is how traditions are established: one is a one-off, two is a repeat, but more than three is a tradition. So, welcome to my fourth annual New Year post. I think it was at the start of 2008 that I first noted the financial turmoil, which makes it nice to see that as 2010 looms over us, the coming year might end in a rosier state than it starts.

Still, there is more to hope for next year than simply the alleviation of economic problems. Something that marked 2009 with a great big grimy smudge was the success had by the far-right, especially the British National Party in the North West and Yorkshire, where the good Lancastrians and Yorkshire-folk are now represented in the European Parliament by fascist MEPs. The problem though, is not that people are thinking horrible things about anyone who is a little bit different, but that they have little alternative but to think that. I firmly hold the opinion that the vast majority of the BNP’s voters are not nasty people, but simply forgotten people. Every major political party has neglected these constituents, and every major political party has been on the back foot in the debates on the far-right’s core issues.

I’m not just talking about immigration and racism, the BNP, with its new, clean image (laugh if you want, but not everyone is a liberal lefty with a built-in disgust of the BNP), champions a distortion of traditional values and morals that are just similar enough in image, though little else, to the traditional values that used to form part of British society in the ‘50s. Guess where the political mainstream is (and I include the green movement in this)? Nowhere is the answer; Mr Cameron might make some inconsequential moves to offer financial incentives to getting married, and Mr Brown and Lord Mandelson might talk about Britishness in a few speeches, but the debate on values, morality, and the question of what it means to be from Britain has been firmly grasped by the likes of Mr Griffin.

Morality has, of course, traditionally been the realm of the Church. I think the best way to describe my attitude to religion would be “actively agnostic”: I don’t currently believe in any particular god or religious structure, and I don’t think it is really possible to prove the existence of God, or even of gods, but I would never say for definite that these things cannot exist; I might one day be struck with a spiritual revelation, leading to a belief of the religious kind, so it would be foolish to keep a closed mind. The advantage of this convenient fudge is that I can do stuff that atheist can’t do, while not feeling guilty for being half-hearted as an apathetic agnostic might: in short, I can go to the Watchnight Service at St Giles Kirk on Christmas Eve, and pay attention to the sermon, without a Dawkinsian complex of any kind. In this particular sermon, the Minister took the time to praise Atheists and decry agnosticism: to paraphrase him, atheists present worthy opponents in debate, whereas agnostics are responsible for the downfall of society. I’m sure he didn’t mean to present such a sharp message, but I think it goes back to what I wrote about the far-right’s grasp on debates. For a debate to be had properly, all sides must be confident enough to make pronouncements on all ideas. Bad ideas must be exposed for what they are, and good ideas must be brought forth on sturdy legs.

In the Green Party, and indeed, in all major political parties, we need to grasp the debate and say what we think about Britishness, morality, and all the other issues which are held so tightly in the fists of fascists. We need to truly talk with all of the electorate, and we need to realise that the way that we can prevail in our political ambitions is through honest and fair discourse, not through aggressive confrontation with English Defence League, or by sneeringly mocking the BNP.

For all the apparent futility in the campaign to push Rage Against The Machine’s Killing in the Name to the Christmas number one spot (sure, the profits from sales of the song went to the same musical multinational that McFabricated’s profits would have gone to, but did anyone notice that the Facebook group used to orchestrate it also managed to raise over £90,000 for Shelter?), it did raise my hopes for 2010, simply because it demonstrated a desire for a more honest and less fake way of doing things. If we can keep that spark of dissatisfaction with plastic society, then I’ll be a lot more confident that debate can be had.

Here’s to 2010, an honest, argumentative, real, and better year!

Click here for an archive of past new year posts.

Being a foreigner in the Netherlands at this time of year is great; not only can I celebrate my own Christmas and winter traditions, I can also join in with the Dutch Sinterklaas festival. My coursemates had, what I think is termed, a Sinterklaasavond last night, from which I received a teapot and a lovely poem written by Sinterklaas and his helper, Zwarte Piet, which is reproduced below (the poem, not the teapot—though I’m sure there is a computer scientist working hard somewhere to develop a hyper-teapot transfer protocol):

“I’ll sing you one, Ho
Green grow the rushes, Ho
What is your one, Ho?
One is one and all alone
And evermore shall be (it) so”

But Tom,
You’re not alone
Though, in Leiden, you’re hardly seen
Dashing off to some conference green
With gay abandonment
Saving the environment
Cars and trains cross the land
So we can all understand
The dreadful warning
On the effects of global warming

But please, Tom, take a little hint,
As for earth you do your stint:
You see:
Hitchhike
Take a bike
Or, of course,
Like me,
Take a horse
But please, leave a carbonless footprint.

It always seems to be the case that I go along without doing much for ages, then everything happens in one week. This weekend I’m in Malmö for a European Greens meeting, then all next week I have exams and a parental visit. Still, I can’t complain, Sweden is lovely, and I’m pretty confident about the exams.

Well I’m not getting anything out of this economics lecture, so I may as well break my blog silence. Since my last post left off with the line, “…tomorrow I’m emigrating”, I have indeed done just that, so here’s a post in a similar grain to my I Live In Manchester! post from 2006. I now live in the beautiful Dutch city of Leiden, with a masters course on European Union studies at the oldest university in the Netherlands to keep me occupied.

The city itself has a little bit of an ‘Oxford’ feeling to it, with the ancient university dominating things, and plenty of old-fashioned bicycles everywhere; the rest of Holland, at least what I’ve seen of it, seems to be rather Dutch, much as one would expect.

The experience of becoming an expat is an interesting one, quite difficult to prepare for. The wonders of the European Union have made things a little easier, what with my right to live, work, and study anywhere in the EU, and all; Dutch bureaucracy seems to be determined to hinder me though. Despite being here for over a month now, I’m not, officially speaking, a student of Universiteit Leiden yet, nor do I have the luxury of a bank account. I have faith that it will all work out though, so eventually I’ll be properly settled; hopefully I’ll still be here when that happens. Thankfully, I think the worst thing I was warned about before moving here has already happened: culture shock. It’s difficult to measure whether it has or hasn’t happened, but I certainly know that I had the feelings of novelty about the Netherlands for a few weeks, followed by an unexplained dislike of the place, and now I’m pleasantly indifferent to it, much as I am when I’m in the UK.

Anyhow, since I started writing this, the professor seems to have been able to draw four complicated economic graphs on the blackboard, and somehow chain them together with baffling dotted lines: am I allowed to fail this course?

I suppose it is obligatory to write a post about my holiday if I’m going to retain any pretence of having a proper personal blog. I headed down to London for a few days before moving on to Cornwall. In the interests of curiosity, I decided that I’d go by sleeper. In fact I can now say that I’ve used all the sleeper train routes in the UK; there only being two of them, that wasn’t too hard. It’s quite an experience to use them though. It is as if the companies operating the Caledonian Sleeper and the Night Riviera have forgotten that they are running them. Almost all the cost cutting measures that passengers on all the other trains in Britain have grudgingly got used to, just haven’t happened with the sleepers. On the way to London, I supped a glass (yes, a glass, made of glass!) of Deuchars IPA while sitting comfortably in the lounge car, and at Paddington before departing for Cornwall, I relaxed in the First Class Lounge, awaking with breakfast in my cabin the next morning.

London was fun, I did the obligatory touristy stuff: the British Museum; Kew, where I seemed to be the youngest visitor without a parent in tow; Trafalgar Square; Buckingham Palace; &c. The highlight was probably a tie between the tour of the Palace of Westminster and eating dinner in Greenwich Park, overlooking London as the sun set.

The true highlight of the holiday was waiting for me a few hundred miles away. The YHA hostel at Golant was my base for three nights as I pottered around Cornwall using the local bus services (I would not want to have to rely on those services). I was particularly taken by Fowey. It’s a bit like St Ives, but smaller and nicer—which is probably my code for ‘insanely middle-class’, as most of the children there seemed to have names along the lines of Isobella or Tristram, while the parents appeared to be competing in their skill of using received pronunciation. The other place I made sure to visit frequently was the Eden Project. I’ve been going there for several years, so it feels very familiar. It’s nice to see it develop and settle as a garden, but also to see the constant new stuff that appears.

So anyway, I’ve wittered on for quite a bit too long now. I think I have just about managed to write a text-book style holiday post. I’m sure it won’t be too long before I have more to write: I’m emigrating tomorrow!

I’m getting quite excited about my two little holidays that are coming up. After graduation on Wednesday (how fast the past three years have gone by), I’ll be getting ready to board the train to Brussels. I’ve visited the city quite a number of times, but never really spent time as a tourist, so I’m looking forward to visiting the Atomium, and making use of the air-conditioning in a couple of museums and galleries.

Once I get back from that trip, I’ll be preparing to visit the UK’s number one tourist city: London. A couple of days sightseeing with the other hordes, and I’ll be ready for the Night Riviera to Cornwall to relax in a favourite hostel of mine near Fowey.

I never really believed people when they said that moving house is one of the most stressful things that one can do but—having just had to condense the contents of my flat into an already full house—I’m starting to change my views on that. The simple fact is that I have too much stuff, and it’s mostly in the form of newspapers and scrawled lecture notes, so I’ve decided to sell what I can on eBay, and unfortunately bin as much of the rest as possible.

Anyway, aside from shifting the contents of my flat to Edinburgh (a feat that required three Edinburgh to Manchester round trips in a row), I’ve been trying to decide what to do with the limited amount of my summer holiday that I have left. Annoyingly, my EU Studies masters course at Universiteit Leiden starts in mid-August, so I’ll miss the Edinburgh festival, but I’ve planned a few days in Brussels to see friends, and about a week later I’ve booked a trip to London then Cornwall by sleeper train. It isn’t as exotic as the trip to Barcelona that I had to give up on due to limited time, but I can’t wait to see what UK sleeper trains are like. I somehow doubt that I’ll be woken in the middle of the night by a police officer with a gun, dismantling my cabin to search for drugs, as happened on one of the last sleeper services I used in Serbia; having never used the Caledonian Sleeper or Night Riviera before though, who knows what could happen?

I wonder how many people are pressing the “Check for Updates” button in iTunes only to be presented with this notice today. Engadget is reporting that the 3.0 software might be scheduled for release at 18h UK time. I can’t wait! Oh, and I’ll get my exam results later. But naturally my priority is copy-and-paste on my phone.