What happens when you turn your back …

Having returned from my luxury three-week river cruise down the Danube, during which my iPad broke down and I couldn’t be bothered to seek out alternative means of keeping in touch with world events, still less those occurring at the Rust, I was somewhat surprised to discover that ‘the management’ has decided to explain my absence via the gauche, not to say hackneyed, ruse of referring to The Spectator’s ironic Jeffrey Bernard device.

You’d have thought they could have at least come up with something original but then that’s the Establishment for you – arrogant, lazy and unimaginative.

Speaking of which, please allow let me begin my resumption of normal cynical service by having a pop at the political equivalent, albeit that they’re doing a pretty good job on their own of making a self-destructive spectacle of themselves at the moment.

When you begin as I do from the viewpoint that the strong, rich and powerful – and increasingly their hangers-on (professional advisers and enablers to the fore), plus their own, less-able, descendants … you’ll have to pardon my sweeping generalisations and bucket-chemistry here … always rise to the top, and furthermore that Western-style democracy is simply a sop to the masses rather than its self-styled public presentation as the ‘least worst’ form of legitimacy, whatever occurs in ‘current affairs’ is all pretty much business as usual as it has always been down the ages.

In any society or system, inevitably there are winners and losers, whether you’re living in the Soviet republics, the good old US of A, or even the former Belgian Congo.

Take the UK. In political terms, looking back, we tend to laugh at the era of pocket and rotten boroughs in the 18^th and 19^th Centuries as if we somehow regard our 2017 version as a paragon of virtue and indeed the culmination of a never-ending process of higher evolution.

However, if you talked to any political academic of your choice for more than three minutes, they could point to great swathes of the country in which, for example, the Labour or Tory parties could put up a chimpanzee or a horse as a candidate for Parliament and still gain a thumping five-figure majority.

Switching for a moment to the USA, they’ve just done something very similar in their Presidential Election.

In the world of business, supposedly the engine of most revenue – and therefore tax – generation, it is a matter of fact that 90-plus percent of all start-ups eventually go to the wall, some of them eye-wateringly quickly. Most businessmen I know work bloody hard, plus they shoulder huge responsibilities and risks on the way.

Some of them hit the jack-pot and thereby become mega-rich. A surprisingly large proportion of those who do, irrespective of their visionary zeal or individual brilliance as entrepreneurs – at the bottom line – manage this via either a single huge slice of random luck, or even an entire goddamned illogical series of them.

For good or ill, that’s the way of the world, folks.

Let’s quote here those two old chestnuts from the world of sayings “To win the game, you have to be in it” and (as Harold Macmillan famously offered in a political context) “Events, dear boy, events …”

So here we are in the UK in late June 2017, apparently wallowing in a complete bugger’s muddle.

It is surely ironic when you think about it that – in a world in which ever-hurtling-onwards modern technology is shrinking the world and bringing humanity in all its varieties together in one giant sludgy gloop of God-knows-what (multiculturalism at the core), here in the UK we’ve got the supposed universally-accepted concept that ‘Devolution is Good’ striving to rip us apart and giving rise to all sorts of stresses and tensions that are rendering the citizens of our respective ‘home nations’ left collectively trying to throttle each other and wondering whether – if either the disposal or subjugation of the other was ever to be achieved – the perpetrator might get off the rap on the basis of ‘justifiable homicide’.

Let’s move our attention to Brexit and the UK’s relationship with the EU.

Somebody has to.

It all began, of course, with the Referendum and a stack of huge errors of judgement by David Cameron.

Was it not madness, fuelled by panicked expediency caused by the rise of UKIP, that prompted him to commit to a Referendum on the EU?

Was it not stupidity that caused him to imagine that if he only bought a frequent-flyer ticket and bounced round the capitals of the EU countries, he could get the vast monolith of the EU to cough up concessions spectacular and attractive enough to persuade the average non-committed UK voter it was worth the UK continuing its membership?

On top of that, as previously aired on this website, what I fail wholly to understand about the political Establishment’s (or to be precise, it’s ‘Remain’ faction’s) position – i.e. that being ‘in Europe’ is better than being out – is that its basic thrust necessarily involves acceptance that by remaining in the UK’s sovereignty is not its own, but will forevermore exist only at the whim, beck and call of the EU central – federal-aspiring – politburo-style elite.

I would have thought there’s a fundamental illogicality involved here.

It starts with the view that, for the good of ‘the economy’ and ‘our general welfare’, it is better to cede control over our island’s affairs to Brussels than it is to run them ourselves.

Well, if that is the case, why didn’t our plainly-intelligent and-very-experienced-and knowledgeable Remainers simply say so? It might have saved us all a lot of bother.

Oh … wait a minute … if they had been so bold, they might not have won the Referendum – that was probably the thinking, wasn’t it?

So, let’s get this straight – they couldn’t admit the primary logic of their argument.

And also, presumably they weren’t too keen to admit the second either, because – if you’ve admitted that you’re more than happy to give away control over your own affairs to the EU, there’s certainly no need to have as many as 650 MPs in Parliament, or quite possibly even have a House of Lords at all, all paid for by our put-upon taxpayers.

Why don’t we just get a bus and splash the entire annual cost of running the House of Parliament and all who sail in them in bright lettering along the side … and then promise to put that said amount straight into out much-troubled and under-funded NHS when we’ve abolished the Houses of Parliament circus?

We could then also put up a whizzo fairground with mega-sized roller coaster rides on the now-vacant site off Westminster Bridge.

What’s not to like?

Let’s not even get started on the ongoing ramifications and ‘fire-roofing’ scandal arising from the Grenfell Tower fire; Jeremy Corbyn wowing them at Glastonbury; the emasculation of the Maybot regime; the disarray in the Tory Party; the Brexit negotiation shambles; or the news of the ‘hot-favourites’ England cricket team going down by 35 runs to India in the opening match of the Women’s World Cup at Derby.

We could be here for some time if we got into any of those … and I might need to take another holiday.