EACH Christmas, I devote one of these columns to good news. It seems only reasonable, in a journalistic culture steeped in negativity, to occasionally accentuate the positive. Only this year it’s a bit different. For I’ve had to confront the uncomfortable reality that many people seem to believe just talking about things getting better actually makes things worse.

For some, the very idea of human progress is an illusion – naïve optimism, right wing complacency, corporate greenwash, colonialist apologetics. This was brought home to me forcefully by the response to a book I reviewed in 2018, Enlightenment Now by the Harvard psychologist, Steven Pinker.

Pinker is a long-haired, Jewish, liberal child of the 1960s. Yet for claiming in his books that on almost every index of human progress - health and safety, longevity, diversity, poverty, war, crime – things are broadly-speaking getting better, he has been subjected to widespread criticism and even abuse. Pinker has been accused of being a sympathiser with the “alt right” by commentators and fellow academics.

Yet, most of what he says is undeniably true, even commonplace. Not only has absolute poverty fallen globally by nearly two-thirds in the last three decades, people across the world are generally living longer, eating better, becoming happier and getting better education. Improvements in the quality of life testify to the long-term achievements of progressive movements of the mid 20th Century, like social democracy, women’s rights, civil rights and anti-colonialism.

World poverty continues to decline far faster than anyone could have imagined back in 2005 when white-clad demonstrators encircled Edinburgh aiming to “Make Poverty History”. Absolute poverty, meaning life below the World Bank’s level of $2 a day, may now be eliminated entirely by the end of the next decade.

We think of this as an age of terrorism, with events like the Westminster knife and lorry attacks and last year’s Manchester bombings. But while there were 238 terrorism deaths in Western Europe last year, there were nearly twice as many, 440, as recently as 1988. The reduction is largely down to better policing and intelligence (though neither seemed to be in much evidence after the Gatwick drone attacks).

The vast majority of terrorist deaths occur in the Middle East, though even here the number of fatalities has dropped by nearly 40 per cent in a year. The number of terrorist deaths globally last year, 45,000, is less than the number of Americans killed by drug overdoses, according to the University of Maryland’s terrorism research centre.

UK road accidents have declined by two-thirds since the early 1980s even though there are far more cars on the roads. Workplace and domestic accidents and other “acts of god” are down by similar amounts. ‘Elf ‘n’ safety may be a standing joke – but it has worked.

This doesn’t, of course mean that people are not starving, being killed in wars or are experiencing health problems. Governments need to reduce road accidents even further, and perhaps self-driving vehicles will do precisely that. Nor is talking of progress a reason to ignore modern scourges like domestic abuse, opioid addiction and mental illness. In western countries, wealth inequality has been allowed to grow alarmingly in the last three decades, and needs urgently to be reversed to prevent social dislocation.

Climate change remains one of the most serious threats to the future of our species, as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change warned in October. Nor has the threat of nuclear war receded – indeed, America’s abandonment of the INF intermediate nuclear weapons treaty in 2018 has made the world a more dangerous place. But recognising that problems exist should not preclude recognition of actual progress. Some problems, like the depletion of the ozone layer or plastic pollution, can and will be resolved. Climate change can be tackled, but not if we wallow in catastrophism.

Remarkable things are happening. Last month, Scotland produced 109 per cent of its electricity from renewables, mainly wind – something that would have been inconceivable 10 years ago. One of the largest energy companies, ScottishPower, has promised to end all fossil fuel generation. CO2 emissions last year in the UK were lower than in the 1890s, even though population has more than doubled. Market analysts like Blackrock are forecasting big losses in oil and gas stocks as the world moves towards green energy. The world’s biggest polluter, China, is emerging as a leading force in renewable energy.

Remember Band Aid? The country that sparked the conscience of the world, Ethiopia, is now one of he fastest growing economies in the world at 10 per cent annually. There are signs that sub-Saharan Africa could be on the brink of the kind of development revolution that turned China into the second largest economy in the world in only 20 years.

Some may fear that the belated development of Africa will only lead to more pollution and population pressure. But that needn’t be the case. We learned in 2018 that the populations of half the countries in the world – the richest ones – are now declining quite rapidly, easing long-term pressure on the environment.

Of course, we shouldn’t be complacent, but it is a perverse politics that wilfully ignores what has been achieved. That just leads to passivity and public apathy: nothing ever goes right; the poor are always with us; the system always wins. It’s important to recognise that things can change if we want them to change further.

Despite Brexit we live in tolerant times, vastly more civilised than even in the 1980s, when racial discrimination was widespread and homosexuality was still illegal in Scotland. By winning elections and defending progressive policies like the NHS, the welfare state and public ownership, enlightened governments have immeasurably improved the lives of millions of ordinary people.

So things aren’t as bad as they seem. Look around. In the UK, the freeze on wages has finally come to an end and pay is increasing more rapidly than at any time in the last 10 years. That doesn’t mean that capitalism’s debt problems have been solved. But for thousands of ordinary families, it’s a good note on which to end the year