Feck them all
Loathe as I am to add yet more Brexit angst, pain, boredom and what I’d term “Huh? So bloody what?” to Rust readers’ lives, let along my own, I’m afraid the desire to do so overtook me in the wee hours of this morning when – by habit I’m afraid – I went to the website of The Independent during my daily post-waking routine.
I was immediately confronted by two reports that on the face of it add fuel to the metaphorical conflagration that has been dominating our national political discourse and debate ever since we all first sat down at our breakfasts to consider the result of the EU Referendum on the morning of Friday 24th June 2016.
See here:
The Indie’s political editor Joe Watts reviews the results of a new poll by BMG Research whose main finding is that the British public are now in favour of remaining within the EU by a margin of 10 points – POLL RESULT
Chris Haines reports upon Tony Blair’s latest attempted meddle in British politics: he’s now saying that (for the greater good and in Britain’s national interest) it’s more important that the Referendum result is reversed than that Labour should be returned to power at the next General Election whenever that might be held – BLAIR SOUNDS OFF AGAIN
Here I’ve ought really to make a standard ‘declaration of interest’ before I go any further.
It’s not so much that I have a dog in the fight (as the expression goes) but it is a fact that I broke habit of a lifetime on 23rd June last year by casting a vote in the EU Referendum.
It was the first time I’d ever voted in any political election or contest since I became first eligible to do so upon my 18th birthday in 1969.
If I’m being honest, part of the reason that I did so was that – at the age of 65 at the time – I had become sufficiently aware of time flying by that I sensed (if you like, in a ‘bucket list’ sort of a way) that if I was ever going to vote – even if it was just the once – it might as well be in something like a ‘once in a lifetime’ EU Referendum as anything else … and on top of that, of course, I’d reached the stage in life where more and more contemporaries of my acquaintance, if not those a decade younger, were pegging it left, right and centre and (you never know) I might not get another chance.
And so I voted to Leave.
Ever since the EU Referendum result became known there have been persistent allegations aired that all Leavers were either so terminally thick – or indeed so ill-informed, gullible, racist, contrary, clearly on drugs or drink and/or deranged – that they didn’t appreciate either what they were voting for and/or how it was going to affect their lives. And that (obviously), had they not been so deluded, there was no way that they – or indeed anyone of sound mind – would have voted anything but Remain.
Which was so plainly the ‘right’ thing to do that actually the Referendum need not – indeed should not – ever have been called.
[As it happens, I agree with the last part of the above statement but only because – if indeed the so-called Establishment is ever united as to what the only proper ‘answer’ should be to a question or issue – in theory and logically they should never give the voting public the chance to have a say. They did (and do) that on the issue of capital punishment, so why on earth did they not also do it on the supposedly-fundamental issue of whether or not we should stay in the EU?]
Anyway.
The real reason that I voted Leave in the Referendum was that at the time I saw it as the best, quickest and simplest way of ridding the United Kingdom of the Scottish nation.
This simple expedient would leave the UK free to march into the Promised Land of the future without having to endure any more of the constant belly-aching of our needy and dependent appendage situated North of the Border with that pompous, self-opinionated ninny Nicola Sturgeon at the helm, filling our airwaves and screens with her indignant and ill-informed nonsense.
Before the EU Referendum she had repeatedly promised that the Scots would have a second ‘independence’ Referendum if the UK ever left the EU – and, when a metaphorical boxer drops his/her guard like that and effectively invites you to unload your best right hook to their jaw, why should you ever think twice about accepting?
I don’t know about you – but, in the context of the post-Referendum debate (both in the country and on the benches of the House of Commons), my general ‘sense’ of the national mood was that hey – we’d had the result – now let’s just get on with it.
Almost the detailed controversies that have come to the fore since seem to me to have stemmed from nothing more than resentful Remainers moaning about the result.
They can sound off about retaining Parliamentary sovereignty and such like, but they’ve kept jolly quiet about that over the past forty years as hundreds of thousands of EU laws and edicts have been imposed upon us by unelected and unaccountable bureaucrats based the Continent.
I had felt that – like me – most voters had simply reacted to the question put to us in the Referendum – i.e. would you prefer the UK to be in or out of the EU?
If it was left to me, I’d prefer both me and my country be out. I wasn’t thinking about the economy, or my own self-interest, or (being racist, sexist or indeed anything else) wanting to reduce or eliminate immigration … I would just like my country to ‘be in control of it’, whatever than might mean, i.e. rather than that drunken idiot Junkers and his pals.
What’s so wrong, and/or offensive about that?
And so here we go again. The one aspect of the latest developments that bothers me remains the issue of the desirability of all nations ‘being in control of their own affairs’.
We all know that democracy as a concept is offensive to – and derided, and ignored wherever possible, by – the Establishment (after all the Establishment always knows better than we, the Great Unwashed voting public) but what irritates me is that – if the Establishment purports to be merely the servant of the people whilst in fact believing nothing of the sort – the Western World is only about a metre away from imitating if not emulating Russia’s President Putin whom, by instinct and tradition, it likes to hold up to ridicule as a modern version of a Stalinist-like dictator.
Mind you – if like me you detest hypocrisy – if the truth is that we are living under a dictatorship of the Establishment anyway, why don’t we – and the Establishment – just admit it?
The Establishment could then just get on with doing whatever it likes, without the inconvenience of having to ask us – the people – ever to endorse or vote for any of it.
Furthermore, it would also save us all from having to worry about – or be bored to death by – endless and costly future General Election campaigns and/or the issue of whether the ‘right’ political party has ended up in control of Number 10 or not.
Instead – echoing Jeremy Paxman’s famous response when once asked to characterise his approach to interviewing politicians: “I begin by asking myself why is this lying bastard lying to me?” – we’d know that by definition they’d all be lying bastards (as usual).
Which at least would be honest, transparent and true.
