UNQUESTIONABLY, 2015 has been a famous year for Scotland. No matter what age you are now, you’ll remember it forever, because finally, after decades of feebleness and failure, corruption and capitulation, we’ve seen the end of Scottish Labour. Scottish Labour, that is, as we’ve always known it: an intellectually soulless machine that uses fear of the Tories to bully us into sending fifty suits down to London.

If Labour want to regain any trust, never mind a modicum of electability, they can’t take that same form again. Every time-honoured New Labour habit must be broken, or the party dies in Scotland. Their New Year’s resolution must be: do everything differently.

Whatever your views on the SNP, for the moment Scotland feels like a liberated country. And of all the massive achievements of our broad independence movement of 2014-15, perhaps the most spectacular has been the rise of Jeremy Corbyn. I simply can’t imagine those Labour supporters daring to defy the Middle England consensus unless they’d seen a popular example of anti-establishment politics working in practice. It’s one thing when radical politics works in Greece; quite another when it’s in traditional Labour heartlands.

So without our efforts, chances are that Corbyn would still just be an old lefty backbencher heading for retirement. I’m glad he’s not. Whether you share my pleasure at this or not, his success is partly our creation.

Sadly, Corbyn has inherited a Labour Party that’s more dispirited, divided and defeated than ever before. Because the May election wasn’t just about Scotland; it was also about an unexpected, crushing Tory victory. Corbyn’s Labour now faces a double challenge: proving, first, that Labour has the ideas to confront the disasters of contemporary capitalism; and proving, second, that our future in Britain is anything but a long succession of Tory victories for decades ahead. With the media and the whole British establishment against him, it would help if he had just a little support from his own parliamentary party. But with friends like Labour MPs, Corbyn doesn’t really need enemies.

2015 was also the year when Britain discovered that its Prime Minister had allegedly molested a dead pig. And it was a year when we learned that molesting a dead pig makes no difference to your party’s popularity. Britain is now officially immune to scandal.

It’s fair to say that Britain is undergoing some weird political mutations, but in that sense Britain is very zeitgeist. Mutants are everywhere. Like a comic book cliche, 2015’s political mutants can be good, bad, or completely bizarre.

And the baddest of the bad mutants is also the wackiest. In Scotland, 2015 is the year of Scottish nationalism; worldwide, it’s the year where Donald Trump – yes, that guy with the wig – became a potential US president.

Everyone more or less agrees he’s a disaster and a disgrace. But his continued support deserves examination. Superficially, people support Trump because he breaks all the rules and voices the views of ignorant loudmouths that never get reported. But simply to dismiss him is self-defeating. He’s captured a certain vibe: paradoxically, by being a billionaire, he rises above corrupt, money-obsessed, establishment politics. That’s one reason why millions identify with him. It’s no accident that Trump, while being right-wing to the point of absurdity on racial issues, often talks like an old-fashioned protectionist on trade.

If Trump wins the Republican nomination, it represents the end of a certain American idea of globalisation. We’re seeing the crisis of cosmopolitan free-market politics everywhere. Unfortunately, so far most of the beneficiaries are the right-wing, anti-immigration parties.

There are, however, reasons for optimism too. Scotland is one of them. Greece and Spain also show that voters will choose an anti-establishment, radical left option when it looks credible.

2015 was a confusing year for Greece’s left party Syriza. They managed to achieve one of the biggest election results in history, winning a clear mandate to drastically curtail cruel austerity measures. After talks failed, they pulled off a second coup, winning a huge referendum result in favour of an anti-cuts position. But then the party split, with Syriza’s leader, Alexis Tsipras, leading the party to conciliation with the pro-austerity European Union.

I disagree with Tsipras, but I don’t blame him. Somehow, Greece epitomises a confusing year for politics in general. We know that something is broken. Decades of free-trade treaties, cheap money, and privatisation has left us broke, aimless, and facing an immense crisis of literally planetary proportions in the shape of climate change. So what’s the alternative? Can a broken system be changed from within, or do we have to start again from scratch? These are questions we all face in coming years and decades. Greece went through them in the space of months.

The Spanish elections are another sign of hope. The real problem is that the strong anti-austerity movements in Spain and Greece are isolated. Next year, we need to see more Syrizas and Podemoses on the horizon in Europe. Importantly, we need the parties that emerge after them to learn from their inevitable mistakes and false starts.

Increasingly, there’s a growing consensus that capitalism can’t go on forever. Climate change is important, but actually only one of many reasons to doubt capitalism’s viability. There’s also the end of a certain idea of old-fashioned labour, and the rise of ultra-exploitative precarious work. Added to that, there’s a new generation of women who are rejecting old-fashioned gender identities as well as taking up the ongoing battles against violence, sexism and unpaid labour.

Although racist forces made gains, 2015 was also the first year in memory where big sections of society showed overt compassion for refugees. Record numbers of Scots resisted the blackmail around the Paris attacks and said "no" to bombing Syria. More and more of us wore a white poppy and rejected poppy-shaming.

So there’s grounds for optimism. As John McLean used to say, "be cheery, comrades. You can’t get a revolution without being cheery". So, lets be hopeful about what 2016 might bring. My wish for next year is a Holyrood that gets well past the era of SNP-vs-Labour tribal warfare.

I’ll be supporting RISE: Scotland’s Left Alliance, which seeks to bring fresh radical ideas into the parliament. Who knows? Maybe this time next year we’ll have real opposition again in Scotland. That’s when we’ll know the New Politics is more than window-dressing.