Khaydock/CC (Click to enlarge: opens in new window)
OK, here’s the annual opportunity to check your brain’s neural connectivity and recall what happened in 2021.
1) In January, what surged past the two million mark?
2) Whose extradition to the US was blocked in January, but then approved in December.
3) Who was ousted from office in February?
4) Who said: “When Kermit the Frog sang ‘It’s not easy being green’… I want you to know that he was wrong”?
5) Why was Kim Raisner expelled from the delayed Tokyo 2020 Olympic Games?
6) Name the three women UK trade union general secretaries elected in 2021?
7) Name the left-wing former teacher and trade unionist elected president of Peru.
8) Where did Ryanair flight 4978 from Athens to Vilnius end up?
9) Name the neighbourhood in East Jerusalem where clashes between Palestinian residents and right-wing Jewish settlers escalated into an eleven-day war between Hamas controlled Gaza and the Israeli state.
10) What global minimum corporate tax rate was agreed by the G7?
11) In July and August, which human-induced extreme weather events led to over 1,000 deaths?
12) When the last US troops left Kabul airport, what was the estimated financial cost of the 20-year ‘war on terror’?
13) Which country became the first to accept Bitcoin as an official currency?
14) What colour designation describes the new German government?
15) Name the latest batch of revealed secretive financial documents incriminating the world’s tax dodging capitalists and politicians.
16) Which three-word phrase did Greta Thunberg use to describe ‘greenwashing’ by the world’s leading politicians?
17) Name the military chief who headed the coup in Sudan this October?
18) Who announced the scrapping of three agricultural laws?
19) Name the PM who succeeded Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s longest serving premier?
20) Who said: “You’ll never take back our country with weakness. You have to show strength”?
21) At COP26, Chancellor Rishi Sunak said that by 2050, 450 corporations, controlling $130 trillion of assets, will be ‘aligned’ with net-zero emissions. What percentage of total global assets does that represent?
22) Name the two Socialist Party bus transport workers and union reps unfairly sacked by bosses
23) What did the newly launched libertarian right TV channel GB News achieve in July?
24) Who said: “We’ve transitioned away from coal in my lifetime. Thanks to Margaret Thatcher, who closed so many coal mines across the country…”
25) Name the group of workers whose nearly 50-year-old convictions for ‘conspiracy’ were overturned.
26) What is the title of home secretary Priti Patel’s anti-protest bill?
27) According to Boris Johnson’s former special advisor Dominic Cummings, how did the PM describe his then health secretary, Matt Hancock?
28) Former Tory PM David Cameron lobbied for lucrative government contracts on behalf of which now bankrupt company?
29) What dividing line was agreed 100 years ago?
30) Name the group of workers who defeated the bosses’ ‘fire and rehire’ ultimatum after 85 days of strike action?
31) What was Tory minister Thérèse Coffey’s helpful advice to claimants losing the £20 a week Universal Credit uplift?
32) In May, where was an attempt by immigration officers to deport two migrant workers thwarted by a mass blockade?
33) Who said: “The one thing I object to in this whole farrago of nonsense is I love John Lewis”?
34) What was Labour’s majority in the Batley and Spen by-election on 1 July?
35) Which trade union disaffiliated from Starmer’s Labour Party?
36) Where was the then Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab during the Afghanistan crisis in August?
37) In May, the government announced a botched railways reorganisation. According to the RMT transport union, how much have the train operating companies paid out in shareholder dividends since privatisation in 1997?
38) Which politician’s memes were the most searched for on Google in 2021?
39) Who told the CBI conference: “Yesterday I went, as we all must, to Peppa Pig World. Hands up if you’ve been to Peppa Pig World!”
40) Which group of workers defeated the bosses’ attempt to deskill their trade?
41) What is the estimated cost of extreme weather events in the last 50 years?
42) Why did Netflix’s smash ‘Squid Games’ prove expensive?
43) What will be the national minimum wage rate in April 2022?
44) How much did former Tory MP Owen Paterson pocket for moonlighting as a consultant for two companies?
45) How many US dollar billionaires are there in China’s National People’s Congress (parliament)?
46) How much was the Tory party fined by the Electoral Commission for failing to report a £52,000 company donation for Boris Johnson’s 10 Downing Street flat refurbishment?
47) What did President Joe Biden say after white supremacist Kyle Rittenhouse was acquitted over the murder of two Black Lives Matter protesters?
48) How many patients were awaiting NHS treatment at the end of October?
Answers
1) Global deaths from Covid-19
2) Wikileaks co-founder Julian Assange
3) Aung San Suu Kyi following a military coup in Myanmar.
4) Boris Johnson, addressing the UN General Assembly in September
5) The German coach punched showjumping horse Saint Bay after it refused to jump.
6) Unison’s Starmer-supporting Christina McAnea, Unite’s left-wing Sharon Graham, and Northern Ireland Public Services Alliance’s Carmel Gates, a member of Militant Left (sister organisation of the Socialist Party)
7) Pedro Castillo
8) Minsk national airport, after being skyjacked by the Belarus regime in order to detain passenger and oppositionist blogger Roman Protasevich
9) Sheikh Jarah
10) A pitifully low 15%
11) a-Wildfires in Western Canada; b-Unprecedented floods in Europe and China; c-Hurricane Ida in the USA.
12) $8 trillion according to Brown University, as well as 900,000 deaths.
13) El Salvador.
14) ‘Traffic light’, ie Red for the SPD, Yellow FDP, and Green, the Green party.
15) The Pandora Papers
16) “Blah, blah, blah”.
17) General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan
18) India’s right-wing Hindu nationalist PM Narendra Modi, following a year-long mass protest struggle by unionised farmers.
19) The equally reactionary Naftali Bennett. Extra point if you named alternate PM, Yair Lapid.
20) Defeated US president Donald Trump, addressing his motley crew of supporters before they stormed the Congress Capitol building in Washington DC on 6 January.
21) 40% – illustrating the super-concentration of capitalist wealth.
22) Moe Muhsin Manir and Declan Clune
23) Zero viewers after presenter Guto Harri’s on-air gesture of taking the knee in solidarity with England’s racially abused black footballers
24) Boris Johnson, disingenuously claiming the Tories are ideologically ‘green’.
25) ‘The Shrewsbury Pickets’ unjustly convicted and jailed following a national building strike in 1972.
26) ‘Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill’, under which police can ban protests on the grounds of being a “public nuisance”
27) “Totally f****** hopeless”
28) Greensill Capital, headed by his former senior advisor Lex Greensill.
29) On 6 December 1921, the Anglo-Irish Treaty, it created a border between Northern Ireland and the Irish Free State.
30) Manchester bus workers, Unite members, employed at Go North West
31) Work longer hours! Coffey claimed £201,000 in parliamentary expenses between 2019 and 2020.
32) Glasgow. Attempts to detain chef Sumit Sehdev and mechanic Lakhvir Singh prior to deportation provoked a massive community mobilisation.
33) Boris Johnson when confronted with a possible expenses scandal over the lavish refurbishment of his 10 Downing Street flat
34) 323. Compared with 2017 under Corbyn, Labour lost 16,500votes
35) Bakers, Food and Allied Workers Union
36) For two weeks, on holiday at a 5-star luxury hotel in Crete
37) £3.2 billion
38) Disgraced former health – ‘death’ – secretary Matt Hancock, beating Bernie Sanders› US presidential inauguration pose into second place
39) Boris Johnson, who else?
40) Construction electricians in the Unite union following a six-month long industrial dispute
41) $3.64 trillion, according to the World Meteorological Organisation and United Nations
42) Investors in ‘squidcoin’ cryptocurrency were conned by fraudsters
43) £9.50 an hour – less a hike in National Insurance and a cut in Universal Credit
44) An estimated £100,000 a year, on top of his £82,000 a year parliamentary salary (+ expenses)
45) At the last count,100
46) A measly £17,800
47) “The jury system works”
48) A record 5.98 million
