What's in store next season?

2011 was an action packed year. In Roman tradition, thanks to the God Janus, January is the time to take stock of the previous year. So in the coming weeks, we will be looking back at some of the political happenings of 2011 - and how these events sit in ongoing political narratives.

We will look at Conservative European policy - where the struggles between the coalition partners have caused strains at home.

We will look at green politics, a particular battleground for the Liberal Democrats & Tories - assessing how the Green Party in the UK has faired in its first full year of parliamentary representation.

And we will look at Labour in opposition - what the party's approach has accomplished and where it goes next.

Further down the road we will look into the role of semantics in politics - from the importance of being careful with words & meanings to what happens when those meanings shift over time.

Looking forward, in 2012 the UK is going to see the resolutions of several sagas, not least the ongoing investigations into newspaper reporting practices. The matters weighing heaviest will be the efforts to overcome the financial crisis - a matter bound together with the debate about who or what caused it and how to respond.

It will be of particular interest to see whether the latest Liberal Democrat policy proposal in this area will come to fruition. The Lib Dems have so far struggled to make their few policy successes capture the public imagination. But the success of proposals to give shareholders & workers more say over executive pay could improve their standing (Sparrow, 2011).

They will be aligned, at least temporarily, with the protests against global capitalism - that will have to move into a new phase in the new year - due to the clamp downs across the US and a lack of media time as the cycle of press coverage moves on.

In all it looks like 2012 will be the sequel to 2011, where the ongoing narratives will finally be tied off.

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References:
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+ Andrew Sparrow's 'Nick Clegg vows to get tough on excessive executive pay'; in The Guardian; 4 December 2011.