A sensible precaution?

The only thing stopping me instigating a Rust poll or survey –  simply to find out the various ways that our UK readers’ have devised for themselves in order to cope with the never-ending Brexit crisis – is the prospect that it would only add to the general pain.

There’s a general strategy taught in some business schools that things are always changing and therefore ‘adapt or die’ is a useful watchword.

The thrust has innumerable examples. As soon as the ‘Amazon’ business model (customer buys online, purchases delivered direct from specialised warehouses) turned up, arguably the days of high street shopping were under threat, as night follows day; when multichannel set-top boxes and the internet became established as means of supplying screen entertainment to the home, it was time to wave goodbye to the hitherto successful chain of Blockbuster video-hire stores … and let’s just list Deliveroo, Just Eat and Uber taxis as other examples that to a degree have changed the game.

When it comes to keeping up to date with current affairs, again the internet has been a sea-changer, as has the advent of 24-hour TV news channels, Twitter, Instagram, politically-dedicated websites and radio stations and now podcasts.

The days of waiting until one’s butler delivered The Times to one at the cricket pitch-length breakfast table (as Her Indoors ate her half-grapefruit and flicked through the pages of Woman’s Weekly at the bowler’s end) in order to find out whether that dotty old cove Gladstone had managed to get his Irish Home Rule Bill through the House of Commons have sadly been consigned to history.

The point I’m getting round to make is that on a daily basis – irrespective of whether it has been heralded as a potentially significant 24 hours in the Brexit saga or not – it’s damned difficult to decide how to keep up.

As an example, let me explain that one of my weekend pleasures used to be buying the Saturday and Sunday broadsheet newspapers and spending my mornings devouring them from cover to cover accompanied by the daytime TV programmes burbling away in the corner of the room.

Not anymore. Last Sunday morning, in advance of live coverage of the Rugby World Cup quarter-finals beginning on ITV, I nipped across the road to buy my ‘usual’.

I never read them. Why not?

Well, because even before glancing at their front pages, I’d already been on the news websites and listened to Radio Five Live – and was therefore fully up to speed, not only with all the events and analysis of what had occurred on the supposed “Super-Saturday” in Parliament (which turned out not to be), but also with another six to seven hours’ worth of developments that had occurred since the newspapers I had just bought had ‘gone to bed’.

Yesterday I had something of a busy day and it was not until the evening that I was able to acquaint myself with the political events of the day.

You might ask why I bothered since currently, whether one dips in and out of the Brexit coverage every day – or, alternatively, every three days – it’s easy to gain the impression that it makes no difference.

I should estimate that at least 70% of those asked their ‘vox pop’ views of the current state of Brexit in the street tend to respond with variations on the “I just want it all to stop” frustration. One cannot not help but have sympathy.

Yesterday, watching Jon Snow, anchor of Channel Four News, inside the House of Commons interviewing two MPs – one a female Tory whose name I did not catch and the other being Sam Gyimah, the diminutive former Tory who recently joined the Lib-Dems – on the position now reached, i.e. that the Speaker John Bercow had denied the Government the right to have a ‘meaningful vote’ on Boris Johnson’s EU Deal.

Something struck me as Mr Gyimah trotted out yards and yards of standard politico-speak verbiage on the theme that having a Second Referendum (People’s Vote)  was the right, proper (and indeed only) thing to do because the 2016 EU Referendum only ‘went wrong’ because (1) those on the Leave side of the campaign lied, and (2) and at the time nobody really knew what a deal to leave the EU would look actually look like.

In other words, ‘the People deserve a second chance’ [that’s best translated as “to vote the right way this time”].

What struck me was this.

This morning I’m going to  be writing to Michael Gove – who seems to be in charge of practical Brexit planning – c/o Number 10 this morning, suggesting that the Government urgently needs to allocate a suitable sum (e.g. £4 to £5 billion) to setting up an online “Brexit Remainer Counselling Service” website and suicide-watch telephone hotline.

This would seem to be an obvious and sensible precaution to set in place just in case a Second Referendum does ever take place and another “Leave” outcome results.

I can think of no more unfortunate position to be in than that of any self-respecting Remainer, convinced that all those who ever vote Leave are either thick – or stupid, lacking in common sense, racist or mad (or indeed any combination of those) … and that, in contrast, he or she knows better and is ‘right’ on the Brexit issue … who wakes up on the morning after such a Second Referendum and find that the UK electorate has again voted to Leave.