Here, there and everywhere today, logic has been twisting, turning and flying off in all directions like a snake caught in a rotary mower. It seems that 90% of Britons want to keep tariff-free access to the EU after Brexit, but 70% would also like to see freedom of migrant movement stopped. About half of those who voted Remain agree with the latter opinion, so that means 35% agree with the 52% they appear to find so loathesome. Further, if we take 52% of 90% (46%) and add them to the 35%, we get 81% of all Brexit referendum voters agreed that they want free trade with the EU. And if we go back to the 70% wanting migration controls, we get to the real Brexit result, viz:
7/10 of us want immigration controls, and 8/10 free trade with the EU
Now, according to the SNP, the Labour Party, the Lib Dems and the Tory Remoaners, the referendum outcome was a very close run thing. But it was only that if the EU retains its bonkers position on migration and federalism, with the Corbynistas insisting that there’s room for the entire EU in Britain if that’s where they want to be.
So it was predictable bordering on inevitable that Theresa Mayormaynot would tell us today – in yet another of her ‘keynote’ speeches – that Brexit will necessarily involve our complete withdrawal from the single market.
Which is precisely what 4 out of 5 of us don’t want.
Lloyd George remarked that the mark of a great Prime Minister was getting 90% of people to agree with him 100% of the time. Women were as likely in his time to make it to Number Ten (most of them didn’t have the vote) so we should excuse the old boy’s toootallyyy unacceptable sexism, and simply recognise his point: with 22 Cabinet members, 630 other MPs and 20 million voters to drag along with him, it was indeed a remarkable person who could achieve the batting averages to which he thought they should aspire.
With Theresa May, it’s almost as if she demands the right to get away with such statistics the hard way – that is, by suggesting one thing and then doing another.
For example, she tells of a Britain in which all shall share in success….but then allows a tiny percentage of the privileged to escape Scott-free from criminal behaviour. Rolls Royce has been found guilty of bribery and corruption on an epic scale, but if they cough up 671 million quid in fines, nobody shall go to jail. This represents, says the ethically unguided FT, “a major success for David Green the SFO director, who has sought to make such agreements a key weapon in his armoury”.
It’s a very odd measure of success, is it not, to grab money by promising not to prosecute the human beings who committed the crime. Personally, I’d love to be able to argue, having killed Rupert Murdoch or George Soros, that if the meat cleaver employed paid the judicial system 10% of my income (£2,5000) I could hold my head up high and walk free forever afterwards.
But May and the other slugs around her will never be willing to point out the blatant destruction of equality before the Law in the last two decades. So people who are awake will always know that she is just another whore lying through her private dentistry.
Across the Irish Sea, the epidemic of surreal logic is equally virulent. Sinn Fein has refused to nominate an Ulster power-sharing successor to Martin McGuinness, who resigned because the power-sharing doesn’t involve enough sticking to the script, as such. This means there will now be a snap election in March…..and unless my own soundings are entirely wrong, a stalemate will ensure. Thus power-sharing will stop, and it could well be that the power itself will migrate back to Westminster.
It seems odd to have come this far, and then lose the very thing one supposedly wants – a share in the region’s power. Unless, of course, you’ve decided that what you’re getting isn’t enough….and “enough” is never going to emerge from democratic politics.
The situation is complicated by Mr McGuinness’s rare genetic illness, a calamity that is likely to dramatically shorten his life. But it’s being turned into a crisis by Sinn Fein’s unwillingness to nominate a successor. Apparently he and First Minister Arlene Foster don’t get on; which is fine, but who is there of any stature after McGuinness?
I sincerely hope May doesn’t decide to look to Ireland for a legacy. She is wrong for what Ireland needs on almost every level. Writing that is not so much a hostage to fortune as a warden of misadventure.
Probably the best closing example of May’s dangerous illogic is a daft phrase she used in her all-the-bum-notes speech today….greater still than the intrinsic illogicality of writing a speech, leaking it before you make it, making it, and then studying the post-speech reactions.
She said that we should not dance about on “the cliff-edge of disruption”. Cliff-edges in and of themselves are not in any way disruptive unless idiots jump off the bloody things. And if one does jump off a cliff-edge, it is likely to do considerably more than disrupt one’s falling body. But in the end, talking about edges of cliffs in the first place only serves to feed my disbelief in this woman’s commitment to an economic, social and ethical escape from the European Union. I sensed that her Freudian slip was showing.
Meanwhile, I earnestly hope we can avoid the Cliff Richard of Eurovision, while remaining firmly in favour of Vera Lynn looking over the white cliffs of Dover in safety without ever returning to the dangerously Wuthering Heights of our 1971 Heathcliff experience. And as we steel ourselves to our task, let us sail to freedom upon the Morning Cloud of adventure such that, if Cruel Britannia should fast for a thousand years, Pepys would have said, “Music and women I cannot give way to, whatever the business at hand might be”.
The Slog 