Ten stories that won’t make the political weather this year – but should

1)     Mental illness

2)     Food banks

3)     Rough sleeping

4)     Children in care

5)     Prostitution

6)     Disabled hate crime

7)     Sexual violence

8)     Polio eradication

9)     The ‘end of AIDS’

10)  Child survival

January’s newspapers have already been full of prediction pieces with SW1’s scribblers letting it be known what they’re planning to write about in the months to come. This piece is the opposite – a set of guesses about what will not dominate the front pages and PMQs of 2014. None of these areas will make the slightest bit of difference to the general election but they make all the difference in the world to someone and so are topics we should fight to get a hearing for.

The first is mental illness. If any other issue affected the same number of people or cost business as much money, we’d never hear the end of it. The reason we don’t is simple: it’s hard to get sustained political attention on an issue people are reluctant to admit they experience.  Despite high profile disclosures from pioneers like Alastair Campbell and John Woodcock, better mental health services is not the sort of thing resident associations organise petitions for. If you want to help tip the balance, organisations like MIND need your support.

Stigma also helps explain why the explosion in the use of food banks is a national disgrace, but not yet a national priority. Working people queue for charity food in one of the richest countries in the world, but how often are government ministers asked about it on Question Time or Today? Part of the reason is users’ understandable reluctance to broadcast their hard times, so this story lacks a human face. The Trussell Trust is doing heroic work addressing the symptoms, but this is just crying out for a savvy campaigning organisation to unite those who use food banks and those who donate to them in a shared effort to address the causes.  I can’t be the only one banging my head every time I’m asked to give a tin of beans but not asked to contact a policy-maker to signal my disgust that it has come to this.

Thankfully, other issues do at least have an infrastructure ready to capture people who want to redistribute their political power to those whose voices get ignored. For example, if you think it’s outrageous that the number of young people sleeping rough in London has more than doubled since 2010, Crisis wants to hear from you. Or if you feel it’s a disgrace that children leaving care can be asked to fend for themselves at 16 when more and more people are relying on parental support right through their 20s, then Barnados is a good place to start.

Many of these neglected but important issues are going undiscussed simply because the people they affect lack political clout. But others are staying in the shadows because the topics are so personally distressing and socially awkward. Do you really want to consider which of the first ten men in your address book buys sex? Or whether someone you know is contributing to the verbal abuse experienced by 8 out of 10 people with learning difficulties?  Or that if 85,000 women in England and Wales are raped every year, someone you know is a likely victim or offender?

But not every issue which is important but neglected is a miserable one.  Here are three pieces of news you might have missed, but which serve as a reminder that progress is both possible and worth fighting for. Earlier this month, India (which just five years ago had half the world’s new polio cases) was officially ruled polio free, an outcome Bill Gates has called “one of the most impressive accomplishments in global health, ever”.  Likewise, in ten years we have gone from talking of an AIDS apocalypse to debating whether we face the ‘end of AIDS’, with 10 million now on life-saving treatment. And finally, if you ever have a down day in 2014 I want you to remember that the number of children dying every year has almost halved since 1990, a feat of human progress rightly called the most important statistic in the world.

Someone asked me this week why I was still involved in politics. I think these 10 issues reflect my answer: the world is in a pretty rubbish state, but the people who live in it are capable of the most extraordinary things together. Happy new year.

Kirsty McNeill is a former Downing Street adviser and a strategy consultant for campaigning organisations. She tweets @kirstyjmcneill.