John Humphrys asks: will 2012 go down in history as a forgettable or resonant year?

Years come and go. Some are memorable; some are not. So how will 2012 go down?

Think back a hundred years and the date 1912 will probably ring few bells with most of us. Any distant peels are likely to be drowned out by the heavy tolling that was to come two years later in 1914. Think back two hundred years, though, and our first thought at the mention of 1812 will almost certainly be Tchaikovsky’s rousing overture to commemorate the defeat of Napoleon in the snowy wastes of Russia. If you’re an American, the date will summon up the phrase ‘the War of 1812’, when the United States declared war on Britain and the Brits ended up burning down the White House. Will 2012 join the camp of forgettable years, like 1912, or of the resonant ones, like 1812?

The year that is just ending seems much more likely to become an also-ran of history rather than a year that will have changed its face. Or at least it will for the British. If you are a Syrian, it will look rather different. We here are fortunate to live in an era in which the way we measure these things no longer has much to do with war and more to do with how prosperous we are feeling. And by that yardstick, little has changed over the last year.

The economy has been stuck in a rut. Whether we are in a triple-dip recession or are just managing to avoid that fate by scraping together the tiniest bit of economic growth is little more than a technical, statistical matter. The basic fact is that the British economy isn’t growing and we have still a long way to go even to restore the economy to the size it was four years ago before the financial crash turned hopes of perpetually growing prosperity to dust.

Meanwhile, living standards are falling. Although there are more people in work than ever before and our unemployment rate is far lower than that among many of our near neighbours, those in work have had to accept pay deals that don’t match inflation. For many people, 2012 has been a year of make-do-and-mend.

This notion that 2012 has been a year of little change and of simply drifting along seems to fit other aspects of our national life. Even in relation to the old yardstick of war that is the case, for Britain still is, technically, at war. Little has changed in Afghanistan, except that more of our service personnel have been killed without any significant alteration in the prospect of where it will all end up. It is just a question of how soon we can get out (with the Prime Minister announcing this week a speeding up of troop withdrawal) rather than of whether we will win or lose the war. What happens afterwards is anyone’s guess: we can only wait and see.

‘Waiting and seeing’ (a phrase, incidentally, associated with the man who was Britain’s prime minister in 1912, Herbert Asquith) characterises other huge political issues which have simply drifted along during 2012 without being resolved one way or another. It’s true, for example, of the euro. Several times during the year the eurozone has seemed on the verge of terminal crisis, or at least of being about to kick out one or other of its members. But it has bumbled along, making do and mending, indeed, without anyone seriously believing that its deep-rooted problems have been sorted out. We wait and see what will happen.

We wait and see too on what will happen about Iran and the ambitions virtually everyone agrees it has to possess nuclear weapons. At one time it looked as though 2012 might be the crunch year when Israel would decide it could wait no longer and would take military action that the United States would be forced to endorse. But the year has passed without that happening and we are left waiting till after the Israeli general election early next year for the issue to come to a climax.

Perhaps on all these issues 2013 will turn out to be a more eventful year than 2012. But it may be that by comparing one year with another we are missing changes that take longer to develop but are no less momentous in their effects. Two that have been in the headlines this year come to mind.

One is the shift in the balance of economic power between the generations. As younger people have found themselves having to pay for their university education, facing a labour market in which competition for jobs is intense, confronting a property market where rents keep rising and home ownership recedes further into a fantasy future and realising that the prospect of a decent pension is increasingly a pipe dream, the gap between their world and the affluence enjoyed by many older people has got wider and wider. 2012 hasn’t suddenly revealed to us this trend but it hasn’t done anything to reverse it either.

The other is the issue of trust. It would not be fair to say that 2012 turned a blind eye to the problem of decreasing trust in society. After all, regulators have been hard at work trying to make sure the financial world can be trusted once again and politicians have been trying to get their heads round the issue of how journalism can be prevented from misbehaving. Nonetheless, the breaches of trust have gone on. The revelations about Jimmy Savile rocked people’s faith in a figure who had until recently been regarded as a national treasure and has shaken (though for how long we don’t yet know) faith in the BBC. And the full story of how banks manipulated the Libor interest rate and thus the costs that all of us face in paying off our loans or servicing our mortgages has to still to come out.

Maybe, though, we should look elsewhere in trying to answer the question of whether 2012 will turn out to be memorable or not. Put aside politics, the economy, the state of the world and suddenly 2012 looks to be a year worthy of celebration. Take sport alone, for example. Wasn’t it the year when the English cricket team beat the Indians in India for the first time in nearly thirty years? Didn’t a Brit win the first grand slam tennis title in over twice as long? And weren’t the London Olympics universally lauded as a huge success?

There’s one more thing about 2012. If the excitement of change is not your bag and if stability and continuity are what you value above all else, then 2012 was a very remarkable year indeed. Diamond jubilees don’t come round very often. It’s almost certainly the case that no one alive in Britain today will ever see another one. For the Queen and all those who admire her, 2012 was as memorable a year as they come.

So how was 2012 for you?

Let us know.

And have a merry Christmas and a very happy new year!

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