2016 will be remembered as the year that solidified our divisions and killed ambition

A barrister I met at a party this Christmas put it in plain language to me. 'Half the country is existing on an extreme low wage economy. To have this in Britain, in 2016 is something nobody forecast, wanted or expected. It is unsustainable'

The nation has remained divided following the vote to leave the EU in June (Getty)

This Christmas Eve, I was on Oxford Street joining in as the nation spent an estimated billion pounds in the closing hours of the festive dash which, to the delight of shopkeepers, took place on a Saturday this year. £1bn. In one day. I have to say, everyone looked pretty pleased about it in John Lewis. No evidence of a recession here; the place was packed.

And yet 2016 will be the year of the great divide. Two divides, actually. First, there was divide between the living and the dead, whose roll call, certainly of the famous and celebrated was monumental to say the least. Right to the bitter end, with even the seemingly eternal Rick Parfitt joining the great Top of the Pops line-up in the sky.

But it was also the year when the chasm between the haves and the have-nots was made crystal clear, via polling booths across the Western world. A barrister I met at a party this Christmas put it in plain language to me. “Half the country is existing on an extreme low-wage economy. To have this in Britain, in 2016 is something nobody forecast, wanted or expected. It is unsustainable.”

His two eldest children, he told me, were both City lawyers; unlike him, their career choices had been made with a clear-eyed forecast on their financial futures. Neither of them particularly wanted such careers. They were simply being realistic. “My children – they look around them and they want what I have,” he told me. “They want their own houses. In London. They want to send their children to private school. They want to go on nice holidays in the summer, and ski holidays every Christmas. And they have worked out how much they will have to earn in order to afford all of that, and what sort of job delivers it. I never thought about salary when I chose my career.” He shrugged. 2016 marked the death of Bowie, Victoria Wood and Prince, but it also marked the death of ambition, at least old-style ambition, by which I mean a vision of a future untrammelled by pecuniary concerns.

Another night, another party. Another person trying to summarise this complicated and confusing year to me over a glass of prosecco. “Imagine you live in the basement of a house. And the basement is damp, and leaks, and not only that, but it leaks sewage onto you, and there is rubbish everywhere. You are obliged to live there, and so you do. Until the chance comes when you can burn it down. So you do. You burn down your house. That’s Brexit. That’s what happened this summer.”

It wasn’t specifically about Europe or the single market, or even immigration. 2016 happened largely because people in one half of the country are fed up with earning a pittance and looking the other way while the other half of the country prance around in ski suits and get giant bonuses. The much-vaunted stability and wealth of the country doesn’t matter to them because their lives are unstable and they are skint. The same thing has happened in the States.

What has to happen? End the low-wage economy, for starters. The tax loopholes and hideouts for the wealthy; the zero hours contracts; the weasel words of employers such as Michel Roux, who keep their staff on illegally low wages. Wishing for a fairer world isn’t just a line from Miss World. It’s what has to happen in order to stop one’s house being burned down.