Out of touch, out of reach, and out of ideas: the referendum delivered a damning judgement on the British Establishment
I’m very grateful to Slogger Rhys for sending me a fascinating analysis of where the main density of Vote Leave occurred in the UK. Among several other stunning insights, the study shows a high correlation between old Labour heartlands full of long term unemployed, and very high levels of Brexiteer support. The authors talk of feedback suggesting strongly that many people in these areas accepted that in or out of the EU would make little difference to their plight, but they relished the chance to ‘stick it’ to an Establishment responsible for decades of political failure.
As so often happens in this game, the email plonked into my inbox at a time when I was struggling to make several strands and dimensions of the referendum – division, ideology, bitterness, tribalism and so forth – add up to something. I now see that what it added up to was a condemnation of failure.
Boris Johnson was busy yesterday intoning in that pompously affected manner he has when dishing out undeserved praise for “this great nation of ours”. He did it throughout an Olympic games during which almost everything he got involved in produced a private sector cockup, and his guest of honour slot was disgracefully given to Rupert Murdoch – perhaps the single greatest malign influence upon our culture over the last half century.
He droned on about “not being hasty” on Article 50, about “democracy having prevailed”, and “the confidence of the British People”. Like almost every Westminster pillock during the campaign, BoJo was awarding himself points for the high turnout.
Democracy did indeed prevail, but its main objective was to say to pcers, Thatcherites, Blairites, neoliberals and other misguided ideological High Priests, “You have failed”.
In both this country and among those who unwisely intervened from abroad, the charge of failure is richly deserved.
Every fresh hope for a brighter British future since 1975 has been dashed. Thatcher turned out to be an anti-social, destructive force for commercial dishonesty and rampant materialism, Blair a smiling psycho who enriched himself at our expense, Clegg an empty apparatchik who got into Number 10 and fell asleep, and Cameron a soi-disant One Nation Conservative whose definition of The Nation was anyone with a white collar criminal record. Corbyn burst through after Labour’s 2015 LGBT débacle, but went in six months flat from breath of fresh air to a man farting right-on platitudes with the repetitive skills of a latter-day Monsieur Petomain.
Obama ended eight years of Uncle Tom arse licking by flying in to tell us there was no loyalty on offer from Washington. George Osborne rounded off six years of recreational sniffing with appalling tax-increase threats. Guy Verhofstadt gloated as the Pound fell, all the while carefully stuffing some more Greek carpertbagger dollars into his capacious bum-pocket. The generally effective and peace-enhancing EEC Jekyll drank some Juncker potion and turned into a foot-stomping EU Hyde. And Hillary Clinton went to State and became a drone-using, bomb-dropping witch.
And all the while, the more the great neoliberal experiment turned out to be alchemy in search of phlogiston, the more it was praised to the heavens. The more people went to University, the less likely they were to have a job. And the more the “recovery” was declared to be on the way, the further away it got.
Sixty years of failure were encapsulated for me in the rape of 1950s womens’ State pensions under Camerlot. It wasn’t just that successive Governments had preferred venal promises to preparation: it was the slimey, rewritten “history” they spun forward to put the blame on those who’d been mugged; the way they insisted there was “no alternative” when Whitehall State pensions were 15 x bigger than those for the citizens; the arrogance of Stephen Crabb in refusing to even meet the WASPI representatives; and above all, the unwillingness of one single person in the political class involved in the heist to accept responsibility for the destitution of women promised a pension at 60 for nearly 50 years of their lives.
Harking back to the report I quoted at the start of this post, I would estimate that – in the light of what they experienced – 200+ extra WASPI votes went to Leave to my personal knowledge. That such was typical is backed up by the demographic bulge of support for Brexit among those aged 55-75.
Political waste and incompetence – and Whiteminster’s 0% awareness of responsibility for it – has removed hope from the lives of vast swathes of Britons. It has been achieved via an injudicious troika of redundant ideology, personal corruption, and uncaring sociopathy.
When Boris Johnson talks airily about “a bright new future” he is as usual full of the smelly stuff. A huge proportion of Brexiteers voted Leave to reduce the number of leeches on their backs. They voted out of anger at the Left’s inability to discuss immigration without making it a race issue, and the Right’s lies about creating real jobs. They voted, to be crude, as a way of fucking up those whose consistent stupidity and spin has fucked them up. They didn’t vote for a better future, Boris: they voted knowing they have no future. They voted to record your failure.
I love it when the Leninsparts come onto the Slog’s comment thread to inform me of how stupid, blind, naive and terrible we all were for voting Brexit. I laugh at their patronising “warnings” about how I’ve let in Johnson and Murdoch and the Barclays. A swift perusal of this site would reveal in under five minutes that I’ve been vilifying all three for the last seven years.
They too simply cannot grasp how out of touch they are, and how far behind the music their cacophony of wounded intolerance is. Because they are incapable of doing what I and millions like me did: engage with people we might not like much, in order to create a united Front against a far greater evil.
We are now over the first hurdle and on the way to ridding ourselves of one evil. The assumption of the Murdochite Gove-Johnson fanatics is that they will walk into that void with consummate ease. They are already trying to freeze Farage out of the transition process of Brexit, and delaying things on Article 50 in order to get their ducks in a row for a Tory Party leadership election. The VoteLeave mob never had any intention of giving the UKIP leader any power: we all knew that too. They think they have used UKippers and others among the Disenfranchised to enable them to continue doing God’s work. They could not be more wrong: already, many in the Tory ranks are preparing to show Boris that Naughty Uppity Fags shall be caned.
But the hurdle having been cleared with a fraction of a hoof to spare, that United Front must be declared null and void. The gloves – and all bets – are off. If you think I knocked my nuts off over the last five months just to let Newscorp and Wall Street take over the running of Britain, then you need psychiatric help. Or put another way, you’re a Labour Remaindeer.
In the last few hours, the dam of drivel seems to have burst. Platitudes about “uniting behind our new direction” are being floated upon those swollen bilge-waters, including a remarkably insane effort from Diane Abbot who thinks the country “should now unite behind Jeremy Corbyn”. Dear dippy Diane, she’s in danger of becoming a national treasure: Jezzer voted remain, Di ducky…and faces a No Confidence motion from his own Party. Asking us to unite behind him is on a par with asking Britain to unite behind Napoleon in 1815.
The reality – as I and thousands of other bloggers predicted – is that Britain is about to have at least six months of anarchic political bun-fighting. Labour and the Conservatives are each split three ways. VoteLeave and LeaveOfficial have fallen out. Farage is incandescent with rage about being bounced out of the transition, and ignored by Johnson. Osborne has lost his biggest ally. Hunt is already sucking up to the Tory Brexiteers. There are petitions for this and petitions for that. And the first stage of globalist revenge – the world’s stock and Forex markets – will begin on Monday…that alone could change everything.
Bring it on. And while you’re at it, mention to the WASPI Executive that there has never been a better time for them to hit the Treasury/DWP Empire hard. I’m not sure the ladies on it keep up with events to quite the same extent as the rest of us.
The Slog 