IT’S said that evil never sleeps. While many people’s minds are on family and friends over the Christmas-new year break malign forces have been working to set the political agenda for 2026.

Listen to our leaders and world war is once again on the horizon — and the winter has seen a steady escalation of warmongering rhetoric.

The head of Britain’s armed forces and its MI6 spy chief have both been wheeled out with their Be Prepared pep talks; the latter’s mantra that “the front line is everywhere” ties in with Defence Secretary John Healey’s insistence, when announcing his new army gap year training scheme, that militarisation will embrace “the whole of society.”

No consideration is given to diplomacy, disarmament or detente as means to avoid world war, while the channels for dialogue and de-escalation painfully built up during the original cold war have — like the arms limitation and open skies treaties — largely disappeared.

Alongside war marches repression and the winter has plumbed new depths here too.

The surreal designation of Palestine Action as a terrorist group earlier in the year has already seen  mass arrests of hundreds of people at a time for the sinister crime of sitting down in public holding signs, behaviour that would see foreign countries dubbed police states in the British media.

But a December protest — itself called to highlight the outrageously extended pre-trial imprisonment of Palestine solidarity activists and the Ministry of Justice’s callous indifference to their hunger strike — saw officers take it upon themselves to deem use of the word “intifada,” meaning uprising, an arrestable offence.

Free speech is also threatened by the right-wing mob’s decision to use the Christmas season to demand a British citizen, only just reunited with his family after years in Egyptian prisons, be booted out of the country for things he posted on social media more than a decade ago.

The free speech warriors of the right — who lionise Lucy Connolly for having done time for calling for hotels housing asylum-seeker families to be set alight, just as a wave of racist violence saw murderous brutes try to do exactly that — are nowhere to be seen now the thought policing concerns people they don’t like.

Racism, repression and war: follow the monopoly media and they could be said to define this country.

But, as the late great John Pilger put it, “the Morning Star tells the story of another Britain: a Britain of struggle and resistance.”

There is a big left in Britain. Millions are disgusted by the ever more open racism of the right, alarmed at the loss of our liberties, determined to fight for peace.

If some episodes in 2025 remind us of the old adage that the British left never misses an opportunity to miss an opportunity, it is also true that we can see the building blocks of a formidable left-wing fightback, from the masses who will keep marching for Palestine (make your plans now for the next national demonstration on January 31) to the waves of enthusiasm for a new socialist party and indeed the shift left by the Greens.

The left lacks unity. There is no conceivable way this will be attained by negotiations between parties or politicians.

But it can be built up from below. That’s why it’s vital that we develop the united fronts of a democratic counter-attack: the new Together alliance against the far right, the Palestine Coalition, and a renewed push through trades councils and community campaigns to co-ordinate a politics of the labour movement at local level. This in turn will strengthen those fighting for a unified political alternative nationally.

We have the numbers. Can we make them count in 2026?