NEW Year prompts us to consider changes the previous year has brought and to ponder on what the new year may hold for us.

The sense I have of 2016 is that change has taken place more speedily and dramatically than for several decades.

We accept that some measure of change is inevitable but this reality does not eliminate its possible social and emotional cost; it is a matter for sadness for many of us that we see in current changes the erosion of a humane and decent society.

The emergence of Russia as a main player in the Middle East has seen vicious fighting in Syria, often directed against the civilian population, escalate in an unprecedented way; the movement of vast numbers of displaced people, almost Biblical in nature, has contributed to an ideological shift towards the far right in a number of European countries and to some degree in our own country.

Two major political upsets; the referendum in Britain resulting, against prediction, for a vote to leave the EU and the Presidential election in America giving that country a president whose expressed views are an anathema to most decent people have added to the sense of threatening change. There is little doubt that a justified sense of unfairness here and in the USA underpins these major upsets.

Changes locally and nationally which will continue to have a seriously detrimental effect on our lives include the undisguised dismantling of the NHS into private hands; the destruction of local government leaving central government to shape our local society in ways few of us would choose; the accelerating rise of corporate power with its freedom to act solely in its own interest and the government’s decision to increase this power by allocating the responsibility for civic service to these same corporations; four companies, Atos, Serco, Capita and G4S receive between them 4 billion pounds a year from taxpayers.

Private companies are now fully or partly responsible for schools, roads, prisons, GP surgeries (a private organisation exists to vet GP onward referrals), the Royal Mail, tax credits, care homes, welfare assessments, detention centres and many more vital services.

If our children and grandchildren are to inherit a world we would want to live in ourselves, our duty must be to make a stand against what is happening rather than quietly capitulate.