Allan Massie: After the storm, a shaft of sunlight appears

In the worlds of politics and economics, everything seems grim, but even the fiercest gales blow themselves out. Calm will return

A COUPLE of days into the new year and a great gale blowing, two handsome silver birches in the garden down, and I suppose the winds are far too strong for the First Minister’s beloved wind machines to be producing any electricity. Bits of them may be flying off too.

In some parts of the country, there are so many of these machines that anyone venturing from home on a windy day would be wise to wear a hard hat.

Well, there are gales blowing through the world of politics too, and doing much damage. Iran has been firing off missiles – officially to test them; actually, we may suppose, as a warning. What, I wonder, is the Farsi version of nemo me impune lacessit or “wha daur meddle wi’ me?” Meanwhile, Israel’s Benjamin Netayanhu continues to huff and puff, blood is still being shed daily in Syria, and there are elections due in Egypt, Russia and the United States, all of which may produce the sort of result we don’t want to see.

Here, even David Cameron, though a professional PR man, can’t promise any economic upturn or softening of austerity. We may expect unemployment, especially among the young, to continue to rise, while household incomes will be squeezed.

Uncertainty as to the future of the euro will also continue, while highly-respected economists and journalists, like our own Bill Jamieson, prophesy doom for the single currency. That would cheer up all these Tories who hate the EU, some of whom think it just about as bad as the old Soviet Union – but anything that cheers these chaps up must be cause for further and deeper depression to many of us.

“Stands Scotland where it did?” “Alas, poor country! Almost afraid to know itself.” An exaggeration perhaps? Nevertheless, we still wait to be given the opportunity to know ourselves in the form of the promised referendum. Consequently, we may look forward, though not with eagerness, to yet another year of speculation about a) the date of the referendum, and b) the form of words on the paper and the number of questions. Meanwhile, the Scottish Government will shrink from any measure, however desirable, that might prove unpopular, lest it dent support for independence.

Yet, even as the gale continues to howl around, as if one had got mixed up in the storm scene from King Lear, a shaft of sunlight has made its way through the wildly waving branches of the Scots pines I can see from my study window. The storm will blow itself out. Calm will return. The future, even the near future, may not prove as bad as now seems likely. Even today, there are things for which we may be thankful.

We may be enduring the worst economic times since the 1930s. Nevertheless, this is not the Thirties rerun. There are no dictators rampaging about Europe. There is no Hitler threatening the war that sensible people feared from 1936 could not be averted.

Then, recalling the Thirties, we should recognise that even in the depths of a depression, not all is bad. There were many for whom it was a good decade, with inflation and interest rates low. It was not only the south-east of England that prospered as the new light industries, directing their products to consumers, took off. In Scotland, Edinburgh and Aberdeen did well enough as rows of bungalows spread out in suburbia, evidence of individual, if not national, prosperity. Aberdeen even built from its own resources a thoroughly up-to-date – state-of-the-art, we would now say – hospital at Foresterhill.

It is not only insolvency practitioners who prosper in times of recession or even depression.

Then, though another year and more of constitutional talk and frequent opinion polls – as we wait and wait and wait (like these unfortunates stranded in Casablanca) for Mr Salmond to summon us to vote in his referendum – will be a frightful bore, at least we can be confident that his government will not do anything outrageously stupid in the meanwhile. Small comfort, you may say, but some comfort all the same.

What else may one look forward to? Well, despite the banging of the war-drums, I might, if I was still a betting man, put money on there being no attack on Iran, either by Israel or the US. Jaw-jaw will resume, at least between Iran and the EU – Iran has just expressed a wish to resume negotiations – and jaw-jaw, as Churchill said, is better than war-war. While talks continue, we may even avoid a new oil crisis.

Domestically, George Osborne will still be able to borrow at low rates, as long as people are confident that the Bank of England remains ready to print more money to buy up 40 per cent or so of any new bond issue – to the profit of the bond dealers. He may even reduce the current account deficit a little, though I hae ma doots about that.

Will the eurozone hold, or will its weaker members fall out? Informed opinion – or at least the opinion of those who said from the start that the euro would never work – holds that it is bound to break up. My own guess is that it won’t; that if Greece or Portugal or whoever, was going to default, it would have done so by now. There is no sign that the admirable Angela Merkel’s nerve is cracking. So I think the eurozone countries will muddle through and that in 12 months’ time Mr Cameron’s veto at the last summit meeting will not seem to be the masterstroke his admirers now proclaim it to be.

Then – another hazardous prediction – this time next year Barack Obama will be getting ready to be sworn in for a second term as president. He may have disappointed many who voted for him four years ago and unemployment may still be horribly high, nevertheless, even though the Republicans will probably pull back from nominating a candidate who appeals only to the party zealots and will reluctantly pick Mitt Romney as the man with the best chance of unseating the president, I think it may be 1948 all over again, with Obama, the underdog, fighting back like Harry Truman, and voters turned off at the last moment by Romney, a smoothie like Governor Dewey, who entered the race as red-hot favourite and flopped on the run-in to the finishing tape.

So there it is. Happy 2012 and remember: gales blow themselves out.