They’re off!
Tuned to Up All Night on Radio Five Live overnight, about 3.30am I think it was, I caught what I’d describe (possibly erroneously) as the regular “Brexit Podcast” produced by the BBC’s political correspondents sitting around and just discussing the latest developments in Parliament.
During it I think it was Adam Fleming, the BBC’s Brussels correspondent, referring to the date of the General Election just announced, who offered “You know what that means, don’t you? The result will be announced on Friday The Thirteenth …” [cue the horror film music of just a few notes that supposedly heightens audience tension].
Ah yes, Friday The Thirteen does somehow seem appropriately sinister.
As things stand – as I understand it – none of our politicians, pundits, political soothsayers or pollsters have the slightest idea of what the outcome might be and thus we can presume the current mood of uncertainty will continue unabated during the forthcoming campaign.
It is a fair assumption that the political fray will involve parties and campaigners adopting polarised positions untroubled by nuance, responsibility or even logic. And that the winners (if any) will claim that common sense has prevailed – and the losers will claim the opposite.
We’re in that sort of hole at the moment.
Austerity, if it ever went away, will be re-introduced as an engine of deliberate policy to make things progressively worse for the average working man and his family (because that’s what the sadist Tories love to inflict – that is, when they’re not pursuing their other preferred blood sports like hunting, shooting or fishing).
Coming the other way will be the time-honoured Tory propaganda that every time Labour get into office, an economic nose-dive inevitably results as they splurge taxpayers’ money, plus that which is borrowed, on endless public service sector expenditure, thereby perpetuating horrendous institutional inefficiencies which inevitably end up making everyone progressively poorer.
Which mess the Tories – as is their lot every time – will have to sort out when they get back into office.
On top of that, of course, can anyone seriously imagine Jeremy Corbyn installed at Number 10, with all that would follow, e.g. the security services questioning whether they dare give him any ‘top secret’ information in case he immediately sends it on to China, North Korea, Russia, Cuba, Venezuela, Hamas, the Provisional IRA and the so-called ISIS jihadist group.
Jeremy with his hands hovering (or more likely, not) over the nuclear red button?
Or that Marxist git McDonnell in charge of the Treasury and the economy?
Come on – be serious!
It would be like waking up and finding ourselves trapped in the juvenile madness of an episode of 1970s sit-com Citizen Smith, with Robert Lindsay starring as Wolfie Smith imagining that he can change the world with ‘right on’ political slogans suitably laced with arrant hypocrisy and a complete absence of common sense.
Next to the Liberal Party, with new (sixth form debater) leader Jo Swinson having nailed her motley collection of no-hoper MPs – combined with other-Party refugees who’ve jumped ship to find a more palatable temporary berth from which to draw their Parliamentary salaries – to a policy of reversing Brexit altogether.
It’s either going to go very well for her – if enough Remainers vote tactically – or very badly indeed.
Ironically, things could turn out much better for those of us who would like to see Scotland go independent as an end-game.
Just think of it – 59 House of Commons seats that would never need to be replaced and would also make the business of Parliament infinitely more efficient!
The Scottish National Party could quite easily win a near-shut-out north of the Border, if their own confident assertions are to be believed.
Let’s hope so. I’d love to see their faces if ever the UK did achieve a Brexit.
At one point in the past few day their ‘bag of wind’ House of Commons leader Ian Blackford sought, as a condition of SNP support for something or another, that voters aged 16 to 18 should be enfranchised in time for the General Election “because it’s their future that we’re talking about …”
It’s crackpot thinking by a archetypal lunatic fringe.
Firstly, a scientific survey reported recently that human brains don’t mature fully until they’re 25 – which to me seemed to suggest (logically) that, if the voting age should not immediately be raised to 25 as arguably it should, then keeping it where it is (at 18) is more than sufficient.
Secondly, and here again logically, why stop at the age of 16, Mr Blackford?
My nephew George has just reached 18 months and its his future we’re talking about just as much as any sixteen year-old’s, if not more so because he’s possibly going to be around on the Earth at least ten years longer than any spotted-faced gawky teenager!
[Rusters and others who would like to sign up to my campaign to get a “Yes/No” voting option – exclusively for English and Welsh voters – to indicate whether they’d like to get rid of Scotland from the UK added to the ballot paper of any future national “Second EU Referendum/People’s Vote” can do so by sending a £45 postal order made out to me personally to me at the usual address.]
