Dawn breaks on a New Year, at last! After Christmas and its celebration, time here in Scotland goes into a kind of presumptive limbo. Nothing is urgent, except of course there is the usual litany of impending disasters. These include an imminent rise of 2.5% in the VAT Tax in January, which will the rise of an extra penny will push petrol prices up towards £1.30 per litre. It was already at £1.24p per litre on New Year's Eve, which itself is some 33p per litre higher than it was in the summer.

The usual reasons are cited of course and I shall not waste time re-telling them. The fact is that the UK is already heading for a deep second dip in recession, with a spoof government pressing all the wrong buttons to avoid it.

Allowing, and positively encouraging fuel to rise to this extortionate level, plus the VAT rise, will feed through into much higher inflation, much higher unemployment, and much greater disbelief and in some quarters positive hatred of the government and its smarmy faces. Not even a Royal Wedding, that favourite distraction technique, will turn the general tide of antipathy and despair. The Unions are warming up for a wave of coincidental industrial action and demonstrations which will see the Royal Couple having to be escorted to Westminster Abbey by the Brigade of Guards whilst the police employ water canons to turn back the hordes of protesters. Having successfully alienated the students, and anyone seemingly under 18 who will have to pay their new £9,000 per annum tuition fees if they want to go to University, David Cameron and his poodles, the Lying Liberal Democrats, will have to introduce martial law before 2011 is out if they do persist in forcing their right wing political agenda on a country whose patience is very rapidly running out.

So that is going to be 2011's story. Street riots and massive increases in poverty, injustice, cuts to everything that have made the UK even barely bearable, and to add insult to injury, the Great British Public will be treated to a display of news manipulation that would make Ribbentrop applaud. It is ironic that the Olympics are to be held in London in 2012. I only hope that they can clean up the rubble by then.