Friday 24 June 2016

What I woke up to this morning


The Leave Campaign won. Our economy tanked by 10% overnight with the pound falling to its lowest value since 1986 which is horrific considering that Nixon Shock in 1971, which was the effect of the US literally taking the Western world's economic model out back and shooting it, resulted in only a 3% drop.

Nigel Farage, the Pound Shop Own Brand Enoch Powell, has already tried to distance himself from his own campaign's promise that £350 million a week in savings from EU fees would be pumped into the National Health Service, claiming that he felt the promise was unwise even as it was plastered all over the Leave Campaign's buses.

Up in Scotland, Nicola Sturgeon politely points out that all Scottish authorities voted Remain, which I think is as good a reason as any to call for another independence referendum or, fuck it, just seceded right away.

Same basic result in Northern Ireland and Sinn Fein is already saying this makes a case for reunification with the Republic. I have absolutely zero time for Sinn Fein but again, fuck it, if we're pretending that direct democracy instead of representative democracy is a good thing then the Irish have voted to remain so it might finally be time to pull the plug on their relationship with a central government that has never cared about them and never will.

Senior members of the Leave campaign are already saying the government should hold off on invoking Article 50 of the Lisbon Treaty (the article that begins the exit process). I wonder why?

(By the way, according to Article 50, if we invoke it and ever want to return to the EU our re-entry has to be approved unanimously by all member states.)

David Cameron just resigned as I was writing this which presumably means we'll now have a Osborne as PM, a man who has outright stated that he thinks the NHS was a mistake. We have an emboldened extreme right and precedent from when Brown succeeded Blair that they'll probably call for a repeal of the fixed term parliament act and a snap election.

This country is going to have to bend over backwards to retain any of its EU trading partners. You can bloody bet that Spain isn't going to give an inch unless we hand them Gibraltar (and won't that be a wonderful moment for he flag waving nationalists who think leaving the EU will strengthen this pathetic little country).

Hell, we can't even go crying to the US who do far more trade with mainland Europe than us so who are they going to pick?

Huge amounts of our infrastructure, public transport especially, are owned by European companies who are now staring down the barrel of additional taxation once we leave and void our free trade treaties so who knows what that means for services.

2 million UK citizens permanently living in mainland Europe might end up having to come home, uprooting actual lives they've built up over years and far outnumbering the “bloody immigrants” the Leave xenophobes masturbate nightly to fantasies of expelling (or just, you know, murdering... no, wait, that's MPs!)

Its the first morning after the result and everyone is shellshocked either from the baffling economic suicide of the decision, the catastrophic immediate result, the uncertain future, or, as in the case of that the third generation bootleg recording of Oswald Mosley that is Nigel Farage, just from orgasming more times than the human body was designed to sustain.

And you know what? I chose to believe in my country. After two disastrous general elections that returned governments that any logical person should know would not represent their interests; after months of right wing press fearmongering and outright lying about how the EU works; after the Leave campaign literally ripped off a Nazi poster to scare people about immigration...

I chose to believe. I chose to believe that my country wasn't so suicidally scared of the Other, so small-minded and blind to their own self-interest, so easily taken for a ride but, most of all, that we were capable of believing in something beyond ourselves.

I'm done. I don't have any other choice than to live here. I haven't the money or the marketable skills to emigrate (though I do have a couple of friends in Scotland...) so I'm stuck here but I'm done believing in “us”. The British people are incapable of understanding that we aren't the British Empire anymore; we aren't a special little snowflake of a nation who can get anything they want through economic dominance and military bravado. It isn't the 1950s anymore, we aren't he saviours of the world who stood up for democracy, if we ever deserved that title. We aren't a major power and the illusion that we still were was because we glommed on to larger players like the US and the EU whilst speaking a very common language that made us an easy partner to negotiate with.

I'm angry. I'm angry at my country for being taken in and voting against their own self-interest the third time in a row. I'm angry because I have to concede philosophical ground to Charles deGaulle of all fucking people, who knew we'd fuck this thing up when he spent a decade stonewalling our entry to the EEC. I'm angry that the already uncertain future just got more uncertain. I'm angry that the side that had no costed economic plan and just played on the nation's pathetic delusional saviour complex managed to beat the campaign that ran on facts and pragmatism.

I'm just angry.


1 comment:

Bradley Jordan said...

Fucking Bravo Sir :)