Six months in... why I still have nine reasons to be optimistic about 2026

At the start of the year I wrote a column listing 10 reasons to be optimistic about the world in 2026.

- Steve Bloomfield

We had just lived through the horrors of Donald Trump 2.0’s first year, Russia’s war in Ukraine was grinding on and, from Gaza to Sudan, war crimes were still being committed on an almost daily basis.

It was perhaps a touch quixotic to search for the positives; even more so when, hours before that weekend’s edition of the paper went to print, the US invaded Venezuela and kidnapped its president.

Six months on, the world is in an even darker place. One of my hopes was that Iranians, who had begun protesting against their government in great numbers in late December, would continue to push for change. Instead, those protests were crushed. More than 30,000 people were reportedly killed. The US and Israel then launched a fresh war in Iran that led to turmoil across the Middle East. Elsewhere, the far right is on the march and Elon Musk is trying to incite civil war in the UK.

But without hope, we are lost. We need to know that better days are coming. So, six months on, it’s worth revisiting those remaining nine reasons for optimism.

1 Trump is deeply unpopular