Foreign affairs
The only thing that can be predicted with absolute certainty about Donald Trump’s second term as US president is that it will be unpredictable. Trump does not really know what he wants to do on a range of issues. He talks a good game, which is how he got re-elected. But he often seems to decide policy on the basis of what the last person he spoke to told him. Is he serious about mobilising the military to carry out mass deportations of “illegal” migrants? Will he use the justice department to hunt down political enemies and media critics? Will he impose sweeping tariffs on foreign imports and trigger a global trade war? Or will he act with greater circumspection, using these threats as bargaining tools? Who knows? He doesn’t yet.
In Ukraine, it’s a fairly safe bet that some form of negotiations or talks about negotiations to halt, if not end, the war with Russia will begin. European governments appear to be preparing for a Trump-led effort to force a reluctant Kyiv to the table, with the price of peace being territorial concessions involving Crimea and the large chunk of eastern Ukraine currently under Moscow’s control. Any such deal may be preceded by a ceasefire and the separation of opposing forces along a line of control or demilitarised zone. Ukraine will want security guarantees against future attack. Vladimir Putin will want assurances Ukraine will not join Nato. A lot could go wrong. Amid rising tensions between Russia and the west at the year’s close, it remains possible the conflict will expand into a wider European war.
It’s hard to believe that things could get any worse in Gaza and the Palestinian territories than they were in 2024 – but they could, and probably will. It can be assumed that an elusive ceasefire in Gaza will eventually be agreed, but at a high cost. It may leave hundreds of thousands of Palestinians permanently dispossessed and homeless, and Israeli forces occupying a large area of northern Gaza. Emboldened by Trump’s re-election, the hard-right Netanyahu coalition may move to annex much of the West Bank in pursuit of a “Greater Israel”. Iran and Hezbollah in Lebanon, having taken a beating, will be hard-put to stop it. So, too, will the international courts. Joe Biden’s hopes of a two-state solution and a wider Middle East settlement will lie in ashes along with his presidency. Simon Tisdall
Technology
A few themes will dominate the year. The first is the AI bubble into which the tech giants have been pumping unconscionable sums of money with, at the moment, no conceivable or proportionate return. The two big questions then are: when will it burst – and when it does, what will be the consequences? Investors will lose their shirts, as usual, but the impact will be more significant than the dotcom bust in 2000, and stock markets will feel it first, as tech stocks have a disproportionate impact on the key indices.
There will also be a consummation of the shotgun marriage between the tech industry and US politics. From now on they will be inextricably mixed – as the tech moguls intuited when they decided to endorse Trump. Elon Musk and X will thrive, as will Trump’s Truth Social. Bluesky will become the last redoubt of liberalism. And LinkedIn will follow the corporate herd. It’s not clear how Trump will vent his spite against Meta, but he will. The company may eventually decide that it will have to split into two entities: Meta US, which conforms to Trumpian decrees, and Meta EU, which can operate within EU jurisdiction and elsewhere.
As far as Google is concerned, just about the only Biden initiative the US justice department will continue is the antitrust case against Google. This will end only when the company is forced to divest itself of Chrome (and maybe some other bits too). Elsewhere on the regulatory front, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), under the chairmanship of Brendan Carr, will pursue fruitless attempts to amend Section 230 of the 1996 Telecommunications Act to bring social media under the governmental heel. Carr also has fantasies about trying to ensure the first amendment protects only speech that is congenial to the Maga regime.
Under Trump, cryptocurrencies will be liberated from the fear of oversight by government authorities, with societal consequences that will make current levels of grift and fraud in the industry look like a Victorian tea party.
And finally, Global Britain will remain an interested but impotent onlooker on all of the above. John Naughton
Food
Food in 2025 will become like everything else in 2025: more extreme. There will be a superabundance of everything you like and everything you hate.
YouTube channel TopJaw will be supplanted by an AI-generated definitive list of the “world’s best things” updated every hour and delivered in an editing style designed to be medically addictive. Simultaneously, the urge to experience individuality in an age of conformity will see an upsurge in those seeking out more organic recommendations from micro-influencers, and nano-influencers, and micro-nano-influencers (or, as they used to be known, “other people”).
People will eat more – queueing outside whichever unsuspecting neighbourhood eatery has been anointed/cursed by the latest viral TikTok trend, a la Queen’s Wood Cafe in London (although they’ll also, inexplicably, eternally, continue queueing outside The Breakfast Club, for reasons unknown to modern science). They’ll also eat less – with the cost of living continuing to encroach from one side and the march of Ozempic on the other.
Restaurants will somehow become more prohibitively expensive and more inaccessibly fully booked. Burgers will continue to become more smashed (see Supernova) and students will continue to become less smashed. We will crawl, terrifyingly, towards the era of the £10 pint.
Everything will become fermented, raw, biodynamic, locally sourced, artisanal, vegan and three new things none of us have heard of yet but which will be a core part of our identities by March and passé by August. Consumers will know more than ever, but be beset by the perennial worry that they’re lagging behind on whatever the latest fad is, or was, or might be.
And perhaps there are predictions to be made about things that won’t change. Tradition still means something in London’s restaurants. Neil the dessert waiter will continue to tread the boards at Oslo Court, fabulously diagnosing diners with the puddings they deserve, Brasserie Zédel will continue to offer remarkable value for money in its billion-seater dining room and Chinatown classic Wong Kei will continue to show the Yellow Bittern what it really means to be an unreasonable cash-only restaurant. Max Olesker
Culture
It is hard to ignore an exhibitionist, but it will be harder than usual in 2025 as a string of cultural figures with main character energy are placed centre stage. In February, Tate Modern kicks off its 25th anniversary year with a salute to the late Leigh Bowery, the influential clubber, designer, muse and performance artist of 1980s London. Bowery arrived from Melbourne, Australia, and his eccentric outfits promptly stole the limelight on the underground party scene. Those in Bowery’s orbit – regulars at London’s famed Blitz club – must wait until later in the year to get their own moment of cultural attention in a Design Museum show dedicated to the nightclub.
The equally bold and alarming artist Jenny Saville will be showcased in her first major British exhibition, The Anatomy of Painting, at the National Portrait Gallery from June. Saville’s unconventional portraits focus on startling ways of seeing the body, much like Bowery’s images. A Royal Academician since 2007, Saville made headlines in 2018 when Propped, her painting of a large nude woman on a stool, sold for £9.5m at Sotheby’s. It’s still the record price paid for a work by a living female artist.
But it is the queen of scene-stealing extravagance who will dominate from September, when the V&A examines our lasting fascination with Marie Antoinette. The exhibition will look at the lavish style of the ill-fated French monarch and her role as an emblem of unbounded excess.
Publishing has its own exhibitionist moment coming up in celebrating the fictional extravagance of Jay Gatsby, F Scott Fitzgerald’s enigmatic antihero of The Great Gatsby, now 100 years old. An American literary landmark, the novel will be four months into its centenary when a Tony Award-winning hit musical based on the book opens at the London Coliseum. From May, however, publishing headlines are likely to concentrate on Laura Bates’s new study of misogyny in the AI era. The New Age of Sexism will tackle the swift feminisation of our obedient smart-speaker “servants” and examine how deepfake technology and virtual girlfriends all pose new threats to real women everywhere.
Showbiz, of course, has already embraced the digital future, and so the race is on to roll out the next convincing hologram or avatar stage show. The mega-success of Abba Voyage, revealed earlier this month to have contributed £1.4bn to the UK economy, has increased efforts to create another attraction. Pophouse, the Swedish firm behind Voyage, has pushed Presley rights owners to collaborate on an Elvis spectacular and has already bought up the back catalogues of glam rock band Kiss and 80s star Cyndi Lauper. Elsewhere, commercial negotiations are under way to set up an event based on David Bowie’s live shows, with the formal trademarking of a brand that includes rights to an avatar of the star. So watch this Space Oddity. Vanessa Thorpe
Sport
While there are no Olympic Games or World Cups to look forward to in 2025, there is still plenty of big sport to whet the appetite – led by England’s women football team defending their European title in the summer.
A record 17.4 million people watched Sarina Wiegman’s side lift the Euro 2022 trophy with a 2-1 victory over Germany, and three years on they are among the favourites for the tournament, which takes place in Switzerland from 2 to 27 July.
World champions Spain look like the ones to beat, however, with France and Germany also capable of going all the way.
The US will also host the hugely controversial football Club World Championships on 15 June. Almost all the top European clubs are against the tournament, which has expanded from seven teams to 32, as they believe it will lead to competition overload and risk players’ health, as they will barely have a break all summer. Fifa, however, is pressing on regardless.
England’s women will strongly fancy their chances of lifting the Rugby World Cup, which takes place on these shores between 22 August and 27 September. While women’s rugby has not broken through the same way as women’s football, that could start to change given the spotlight on the sport and the fact that the Red Roses have not lost since finishing runners-up to New Zealand in November 2022 and will be strong favourites.
Finally, the global sports agency, IMG, predicts that 2025 will start the “era of wearables”. True, people have been wearing Apple and Garmin watches for a while to record their data while exercising. However, IMG believes that augmented reality glasses such as Meta’s Orion AR, Apple Vision Pro and Snap’s fifth iteration of its SPS spectacles will start being worn by more people to watch and engage in sport.
“This will be the year when wearable tech finally starts to truly compete with the phone for our attention,” IMG says.
“And soon, with a glance of an eye, users could find themselves connected to music, their fitness stats or the internet.” Sean Ingle
Film
Concrete provides the foundations for some of 2025’s most intriguing films. January sees the release of Architecton, a dazzling documentary by visionary Russian filmmaker Victor Kossakovsky which explores humanity’s relationship with our environment through the medium of, you’ve guessed it, concrete. The ubiquitous grey stuff also takes a starring role alongside Adrien Brody in Brady Corbet’s Oscar-tipped The Brutalist, the sweeping, epic story of a mid-20th-century architect who flees the Nazis and finds a wealthy but demanding patron in the US. Finally, there’s the wonderfully weird Canadian comedy Universal Language, set in an alternative Persian-speaking version of Winnipeg – a city that, according to the film’s quirky vision, is almost entirely built of concrete.
Fans of gothic horror will have plenty to sink their teeth into (pun entirely intended) in 2025, starting with the release of Robert Eggers’s remake of the vampire classic Nosferatu on the very first day of the year. The film, which stars Lily-Rose Depp, is gloriously creepy and a sumptuously sensual visual spectacle. Mexican director Guillermo Del Toro (Pan’s Labyrinth) has teamed with Netflix to bring his vision of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein to the screen. The cast includes Oscar Isaac as Dr Frankenstein and Jacob Elordi in the role of the Monster.
Animation isn’t just for kids this year, with some of the most anticipated animated features exploring adult themes. Take Memoir of a Snail (out in February) from Australian Oscar-winner Adam Elliot. The film deals with depression, bad marriages, compulsive eating and hoarding, all tied together with Elliot’s trademark mordant humour. Gints Zilbalodis’s Flow, a dialogue-free animation from Latvia, explores a climate emergency through the eyes of the animals that find their world destroyed. Finally, there’s Wildwood, the latest from Laika, the studio behind Coraline. Wildwood looks set to reprise the same winning formula: like Coraline, the film is described as a “stop-motion fantasy horror”. Wendy Ide
Money
It looks as if 2025 will be a pricier year for UK consumers than anticipated. That is partly because many experts and policymakers agree that Rachel Reeves’s budget package unveiled at the end of October will push up inflation.
Dozens of retailers, including Tesco, Sainsbury’s and Marks & Spencer, have warned that higher prices in shops are a nailed-on certainty because, they say, of the decision to boost the national living wage and raise billions of pounds by increasing employer national insurance contributions from April 2025.
Meanwhile, Britons face slightly higher energy bills in January, putting more pressure on household finances, despite earlier hopes that prices would fall back. The Ofgem energy price cap for the period 1 January to 31 March 2025 has been set at £1,738 a year for the average dual-fuel bill – up from the current £1,717 a year.[
However, some consumers look set to receive cash windfalls that could help with the cost of living or go towards a deposit on a house, financing a big trip or paying off debts. We have all heard of “the bank of Mum and Dad”, but 2025 could be the year that “the bank of Grandma and Grandad” also starts dishing out cash in a big way.
This relates to an announcement in the budget that unspent money left in a pension plan after your death will be included in inheritance tax calculations from April 2027. Experts have predicted that, as a result, many well-off older people will increasingly pass on money to grandkids, children and other family members while they are still alive (known as giving a “living inheritance”).
They are also likely to withdraw more of their pension cash and spend it in order to reduce the value of their estate. That could make 2025 a good year for companies specialising in cruises, long-haul trips and home improvements.
Talking of windfalls, during the coming months we will hear more about the billions of pounds of compensation that could be paid to consumers because of an unfolding scandal involving the alleged large-scale mis-selling of car finance deals. The UK’s main financial regulator is due to provide an update in May.
Yet another budget announcement could mean that 2025 is a bit of a topsy-turvy year when it comes to housing market activity. Nationwide building society has predicted that the chancellor’s decision not to extend temporary stamp duty thresholds put in place by the previous government will lead to a “jump” in property sales in the first three months of 2025, especially in March, as buyers rush to complete deals, then a “period of weakness” for the next three to six months.
Meanwhile, as with Taylor Swift’s shows, we can expect a flurry of news reports as analysts speculate on the scale of the spending bonanza that next summer’s Oasis reunion concerts are set to unleash.
The reunited Gallagher brothers are playing 17 sold-out shows in UK stadiums and parks between 4 July and 28 September (more dates could be added), so that’s a lot of pints, parkas and bucket hats on top of spending on food, travel, accommodation and merch. One economic consultancy has predicted that each fan will spend £406, thereby boosting the economy by almost £500m. Rupert Jones
Environment
One small step for Trump. One giant leap backwards for humankind. Brace yourself for a flurry of grim environmental news when the climate-denying businessman returns to the White House in January.
As was the case last time around, Trump is likely to kick off his administration with a series of decrees that roll back many of the nature protections and renewable energy incentives of the Biden years, particularly the Inflation Reduction Act – the most ambitious US climate plan in history.
Globally, the biggest impact will be felt when Trump pulls the US out of the Paris climate agreement. The new president’s appointments will include Chris Wright, a fossil fuel executive, as energy secretary and Lee Zeldin, a former congressman who voted against wildlife refuges and oil drilling moratoriums, as head of the Environmental Protection Agency. They will be charged with promoting an “America First” agenda, which means taking a wrecking ball to any regulation that holds back fossil fuel interests and extractive industries – and unlike during Trump’s first term, they will face fewer legal and legislative hurdles because the Republican party controls both houses and Trump appointees dominate the supreme court.
Renewable energy may well weather the storm because wind and solar prices are now cheaper than oil, gas and coal. The biggest impacts will be on nature, people in the global south and international efforts to tackle the climate crisis. Rightwing parties throughout the world are likely to be emboldened to step up their campaigns against net zero targets.
Political denials will make no difference, however, to the physics of the climate crisis, which will grow worse as long as emissions continue to rise.
Expect another year of supercharged extreme weather and more intense drought, fire, flooding and storms. As usual, this is likely to be felt most strongly in the northern hemisphere summer. After two years of record global heat, the expected arrival of cooling La Niña conditions would normally be expected to bring some respite. But nobody is betting on that, because the world’s climate is now so disrupted by human activity that past patterns are no longer a reliable guide to future outcomes. If next year is another record hot year, it would be an extremely worrying sign and push fragile ecosystems, such as polar ice sheets and the Amazon rainforest, closer to a calamitous tipping point.
The world’s attention will be on the latter in November, when the Brazilian city of Belém hosts the first ever UN climate summit in the Amazon. President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva has called this conference – Cop30 – “our last chance to avoid an irreversible collapse of the climate system”.
This ought to be the moment when all the countries of the world submit updated national climate plans that respond to the growing severity of the situation. But the gathering will start under a cloud because of doubts about future US participation, the hostility to the process of Argentina’s president, Javier Milei, and the host nation’s internal contradictions when it comes to nature and climate.
On one hand, there are extremely progressive forces inside the Brazilian government, such as environment minister Marina Silva and Indigenous minister Sônia Guajajara – but on the other is the powerful agribusiness and mining lobby, which dominates congress. Belém will struggle to cope logistically with the tens of thousands of Cop visitors. It may have even greater trouble preventing the system of global climate governance from straining beyond breaking point. Jonathan Watts
Politics
If 2024 delivered a landslide victory and a return to power for Labour, 2025 has to be the year in which signs of national recovery become visible: the party has to show its reason for governing.
Keir Starmer and his party can afford to be unpopular at this point in the political cycle, even to be seen as error-prone in their first months in power. Tony Blair, after all, had difficulties after May 1997 and went on to win two more elections.
What Starmer’s Labour cannot do, however, is continue to be perceived so negatively for much longer.
The omens are not good. Labour put most of its eggs in the economic growth basket in its election campaign. Starmer promised to deliver the highest growth in the G7 by the end of this parliament – an almighty hostage to fortune.
Rachel Reeves’s October budget then hammered employers by raising their national insurance to repair damage done to the public finances by 14 years of Tory rule. The result, the Bank of England says, is that growth is now all but nonexistent. Reeves will explain next month how she plans to kickstart economic activity.
Public services, the NHS, social care, education, the courts – all desperately need more investment so that people can feel improvement. But an economy heading in the wrong direction means tax revenues will be below expectations, giving less to spend in areas of need.
Dangers loom everywhere. Donald Trump’s return as US president threatens a global trade war, with tariffs of 20% on UK imports into the US, and 60% ones on those from China. The UK remains outside the EU’s single market and customs union – so it is horribly exposed. 2025 will see preparations laid for a renegotiation of the post-Brexit trade and cooperation agreement (TCA) with the EU in 2026. But Brussels is not keen on big changes, and Starmer’s government does not want to risk an overtly pro-EU stance that might boost Nigel Farage and Reform UK or benefit Kemi Badenoch’s chances of establishing herself more firmly as Tory party leader. The only move that would make a big difference – UK re-entry into the EU single market – will not happen in Labour’s first term. In many ways the government’s economic and political requirements are at loggerheads as Reform UK climbs in the polls.
Abroad, the UK needs to chart a difficult course with Trump’s Washington, the EU and China, and seek progress – showing UK influence – on intractable conflicts in the Middle East and Ukraine.
A road ahead for Starmer’s government at home is not easy to see. It needs visible successes on the economy and on immigration too.
Leader of the House of Commons Lucy Powell says a packed legislative agenda will show wider societal change is already in train. A planning and infrastructure bill in 2025 will sweep away restrictions that prevent the construction of new houses and stifle the economy. A crime and policing bill and a border security, asylum and immigration bill will tackle antisocial behaviour and people-smuggling. Renationalisation of train services will continue apace, as will reform of workers’ rights. Free breakfast clubs will be introduced in every state primary school.
But with growth scraping along the bottom, evidence of improvement to living standards is likely to feel incremental at best. Labour’s best hope is to demonstrate that it has something approaching a coherent plan and that it might just be competent enough to deliver it. Toby Helm
Lifestyle
By now you might be familiar with what can only be described as “treat culture”. A bouquet of tulips on a Tuesday, a fancy skin mask for the weekend – it’s giving yourself something completely unnecessary yet cute by dint of the fact that you might deserve it.
This is growing alongside the “glimmer”. Put simply, this is the opposite of a “trigger” – small moments of joy which have a positive impact on your mental health (the smell of fresh bread, the feeling of your cat lying on your feet on a chilly night). What’s more, the best glimmers cost nothing.
The cool kids are hunting down vintage Stone Island and CP Company on eBay while the rich ones want Moncler’s ultra-technical one in cream, but whichever way your income is skewed, there is no question that the parka has undergone a huge cultural renaissance this year. This is in part because of the return of Oasis and in part because high fashion – particularly Burberry, Rabanne and Filippa K – has become so adept at rebranding something practical and warm as red carpet chic. Chioma Nnadi, head of British Vogue, recently wore her Loewe parka over a Simone Rocha dress at a fancy Vogue bash.
The relationship between fashion and books will grow in 2025. Designer Marc Jacobs posts “reading hour” selfies on Instagram, Bottega Veneta’s Matthieu Blazy has this month created a collection inspired by Richard Scarry’s seminal 1985 kids’ book Biggest Word Book Ever using intrecciato leather, and German designer Daniel Del Core gave models a copy of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein to carry down his spring 2025 catwalk. This year, Saint Laurent opened a bookstore in Paris, while Alaïa opened a London cafe, run by royal cakemaker Violet Cakes in partnership with cult bookseller Claire de Rouen. Now you can be well dressed and well read. Morwenna Ferrier
