OK. Winter break over. Back to reality.

You must be getting bored with the endless evidence of the capitalist crisis in what one FT columnist calls 'the high income countries.' But there are still some nasty surprises.

Unemployment in Spain is now 23% - 44% among under 25s as the government drives towards another austerity 'package'. Germany has 6.8% of its workforce unemployed just now.

"Far from pulling the euro zone apart" said an economist at Germany's Berenberg Bank,  quoted in the FT (4 Jan) "this divergence is the path to economic convergence and sustainability." This is somebody who understands that, with a common currency, you can export unemployment as well as BMWs.

The big new disaster for 2012 - at least one that we can predict with any certainty - is the next lurch in the race between economics and politics towards the bottom. We already have banker's rule in Italy and Greece. In 2012 elections will take place in the US, France, Russia, Taiwan, Mexico, Egypt, and S. Korea. (The North has already appointed its new Kim.) China's leadership is being reshuffled and the beginnings of a dictatorship is establishing itself in Hungary.

What will these leaders have to deal with? Besides the blindingly obvious capitalist crisis (or its shadow in the Chinese and Korean cases) they will have to manage the internationally growing hatred of inequality (most definitely including China) as well as what the former director of policy planning at the US State Department calls;
"Rolling protests across multiple countries that will morph into revolutions in many."

It is of more than abstract interest when we see major headlines in papers like the Los Angeles Times stating;
'Six Walmart heirs are wealthier than the US' entire bottom 30%'  But headlines don't make revolutions. And anger by itself does not produce new politics.

The political lurch we are more likely to see from the established political class of 2012 is towards protectionism. What other choices do voters and political fixers have - at this stage? In other words the new/old leaders will need to respond to, and channel, their peoples' anger. This will worsen the economic crisis - as it did in the 1930s, and it will build nationalist and xenophobic movements and increase the appetite for war.

In that context, and despite this wretched Coalition government, to see Doreen and Neville Lawrence beat back the London Police force, the legal establishment, a Tory and then a Labour Government, apathy, indifference, weariness and out and out racism, and win some justice - while retaining their strength and humanity - gives us all heart. Need different leaders? They are the type of leaders we need now.