One of my most urgent new year wishes is for austerity to finally be shown the door.

I will never forget watching George Osborne announce his plans to deliberately decimate our social safety in his ‘emergency budget’ speech of June 2010, flanked in Parliament by his Lib Dem coalition ministers Nick Clegg and Danny Alexander.

Setting out deep cuts to welfare including child benefits, working parent benefits, disability benefits and housing benefit, while giving bonuses to businesses through reductions in corporation tax, he claimed in that speech that: “all parties in this House now accept that spending needs to be cut.”

But this was just not true.

Brighton Pavilion’s newly elected Green MP in 2010, Caroline Lucas, called the Chancellor’s budget: “neither unavoidable nor fair,” and labelled it an ideological choice not an economic inevitability.

Caroline had of course been pushing for recession-busting Green New Deal investment in green jobs and a more resilient society (something I continue to do with progressive economists and campaigns led by young people including Green New Deal Rising), and said the budget was “a massively failed opportunity to shift the economy onto a fairer, greener pathway.”

Now we are in the 16th year of this false choice.

Young people turning 20 this year, who were just starting school as the coalition introduced its austerity budget, will have been aware of literally nothing but cuts and communities forced into hardship for their whole lives.

Older people too have suffered horrifically.

The length of time we have endured this policy of pushing down on people’s prospects means academic research has now had time to uncover real and robust evidence of austerity’s effects.

The results are genuinely horrible.

The London School of Economics estimated in 2024 that 190,000 early deaths had resulted from the period of cuts up to 2019, with poverty and health failings bringing down life expectancy, and an increase in what they call ‘deaths of despair’ such as drug-related poisonings and the results of mental ill-health.

The research puts particular emphasis on the impact of welfare cuts, which is one reason it was so shocking to see the exact same playbook being rolled out by the Labour government this time last year, and why it is so important that MPs including Greens, SNP, Plaid, LibDems and a strong rebellion within Labour helped mitigate these plans during 2025.

And of course, 2026 will also mark the 10th anniversary of another ideological choice that has harmed our prosperity and resilience as a society: the Brexit referendum.

With a decade now of evidence that our national spirit and the prospects of young citizens have been harmed severely by being cut off from Europe, I believe we need to look again at considering not just closer ties but a genuine reversal of what happened ten years ago.

Democracy matters, and respecting that initial choice also means respecting the rights of younger generations to have their say too now.

Leave’s winning margin in 2016 was 1,269,501 votes, and today there are 4.3 million people in the UK who were under 18 at the time of the vote.

If we include the 16 and 17-year-olds who will soon gain the right to a democratic vote on all aspects of our future, this makes a total of 5 million new people who deserve a chance to have a choice on the future of our country.

One of the ways in which austerity has hit hardest is in local public services, with so many local councils being forced to make even more cuts to already squeezed social support and infrastructure.

It is so frustrating therefore that 2026 will not see the planned local and mayoral elections in Sussex after all.

Not just because polling shows support for Green values is soaring amongst those under 50, but also because these campaigns would shine a further light on the problems caused by austerity and Brexit and onto the different choices that are possible.

My biggest wish for this new year is therefore that young people, and all those who want to push for more hopeful ideas and policies, will join us and make their voices heard in whatever ways they can.