It is always a pleasure to watch Paris burning. On the surface a civilised country, but scrape a little deeper and France is revealed as a nation of kind of faux-Arabs (aside from that rapidly growing proportion who are actual Arabs): easily incensed into an incandescent toddler fury at real or imagined iniquities, things not working out quite the way that they had hoped. An inchoate existential rage, hilariously — in this case — exhibited by people wearing those absurd yellow fluorescent jackets.

They have latterly realised that their leader, Emmanuel Macron, is a smarmy, loquacious, incompetent idiot with strange sexual tendencies. We knew that all along. We told you to vote for Marine — but you wouldn’t listen, and instead, as ever, made your own histrionic descent into the abyss, following a mock-populist metrosexual snake-oil salesman. You can burn down the Louvre, the Eiffel Tower and the Moulin Rouge if you want — I’ve no sympathy. Protest at the ballot box and next time get it right.

This has been a year of protests, of shrieking and contumely and a disavowal of democracy. If you want a different government, or a different outcome — you leftie Americans, you incoherent Poujadist frogs, you arrogant Remainer bores — then when the chance comes, marshall your forces and vote. Otherwise shut up, because your demos mean nothing. And remember, your political opponents have skin in the game too, and may disagree with you. You can’t always get what you want: the signal lesson from this confused and fractious year, 2018.

In a democracy, People Power is what happens in the polling booth. The rest is just chronic flatulence. It would be cheering if, in 2019, this notion was taken on board a little by the furious, the psychotic, the terminally needy, the supposedly dispossessed. The notion that you cannot always have what you want because a greater number of other people may disagree with you. That’s my hope for 2019, that this lesson is learned. Here are a few others:

• A small issue, I know. But those yellow fluorescent jackets. Now worn by every stunted public-purse Napoleon as a means of getting you to do as he says. In future, you can wear a yellow fluorescent jacket only if you are tarmacking the fast lane of the M1. At midnight.

• Queer daleks. Transitioning cybermen. Marvellous and yet put-upon black people battling fascist white aliens. It is bad enough that adults are subjected to the BBC’s flaccid, hand-wringing and dated propaganda, but now they’re smothering the kids with it. Stop it. Better still, when David Attenborough pops his clogs, let the corporation follow him to wherever he goes. Led by its idiotic ‘fact checkers’ and the over–promoted, whining #MeToo presenters.

• Cyclists to be prosecuted if they don’t use cycle lanes when available, if they surge through red lights, if they undercut cars. Terms of imprisonment to be doubled if they commit any of these atrocities while wearing Lycra and goggles.

• Men dressed up as ladies to be afforded a life of equality, free from discrimination. And to be regularly reminded they are men dressed as ladies.

• The Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, to be mugged at knife-point by a gang of refugees so that a soupçon of reality intrudes upon his inane, virtue-signalling world view. And during his convalescence, a chance to flick through the Bible to see what it says about marriage, fidelity, hard work, discipline — and, indeed, other religions.

• The number of university places for British kids to be cut by 75 per cent, so that we no longer dupe legions of acned thickoes into thinking that their degree in Post-Marxian Gender Absurdities is worth the £40,000 they paid and will get them a job anywhere other than in Poundland. If that.

• Coppers to drag themselves away from their laptops and start pursuing real criminals instead of people who say something unkind on social media. All police chiefs who force their officers to wave rainbow flags to have those very flags inserted up their bottoms, so they might come to a closer understanding of what it is they are promoting.

• The only organisation in the world that proudly proclaims every day that it is ‘in crisis’, the NHS, to be replaced by a system that works. Politicians to grasp the reality that the NHS is knackered, instead of hunkering down behind it and pouring ever greater amounts of money into its ravenous maw.

• The Queen to announce she intends to retire in five years’ time and her successor will be Princess Anne. The younger royals to stop whining and emoting and hugging commoners. Have some bloody dignity, will you?

• Statues of elderly white male imperialists to be erected in a prominent place in every one of our universities. Chamberlain, Kitchener, Curzon, Rhodes, Rosebery, Kipling and Victoria herself. Defacement of these resulting in immediate rustication.

• The Tavistock to cease performing medical experiments on confused children and its resources directed to combating stuff like cancer.

• Vegans to realise that existing on a diet of goji berries and kale does not make them modern-day Che Guevaras. It just leaves them short of protein and with bad breath.

• Schools to abolish the legions of teachers engaged in ‘pastoral care’ and divert the resources to making sure the little morons can spell and add up.

• American luvvies to continue howling at the moon about their President. Every time Robert Junkie Junior or Meryl Streep or Taylor Swift open their gobs, Trump goes up a few points in the polls.

How’s that? If we can accomplish all of the above by, say, 5 January 2019, I’ll be a happier man.