I feel devastated, but not at the result of the vote.
I feel paralysed by the result of Brexit. Nowhere can I find a grain of consolation. Much was talked of ‘getting our country back’. The country we have got ‘back’ is not the one that existed two days before the vote, and I doubt it will ever be restored.
I voted ‘Leave’ not to win but to moderate the ‘business as usual’ model dressed in fear, blinkered by monetary self interest, and draped in complacency. I was not influenced by any bribe or promises.Sovereignty seemed important but that’s about it. I hoped that ‘Remain’ would be sufficiently warned (by breathing on its neck) to take some heed of their lemming pursuit of corporate, global solutions that ignored people, injustice, marginalization simply because they stood in the way of profits. My vote was my misguided hope for the recognition that the world is moving too fast for outmoded structures without flexibility or compassion. How wrong I was. HSBC and the corporations are already threatening to head away from this sinking ship, before waiting to establish that it is indeed sinking. Their exit will probably ensure that it does.
Overnight I do not recognise this country. I am just an immigrant but I loved it as my own.
I admit I did not foresee the opportunism that would move swiftly to exploit anger in its lust for power. Lady Macbeth in Scotland, (That which hath made them drunk hath made me bold; What hath quench’d them hath given me fire.… ‘Infirm of purpose. Give me the daggers, the sleeping and the dead’) decapitating the wounded country before it rises to its feet to appraise the view; ignoring the affections or historic loyalties, and jumping for independence from the UK. Strange that she fought so hard against UK independence from the EU, an artificial cobbled state of bloated bureaucracy, but loses no time in an independence from an organically rooted tree intertwined in shared history, island identity, genes and close co-existence.
The Sturgeon is planting the Saltire in every willing eu-ear no longer spilling caviar. Her fellow fish Salmond is bottom feeding on frothy outrage and anything he can dig up to warrent another Independence Referendum. All the things Sturgeon is gonnie do to the hated Toories will secure hatred throughout.They need not vote for independence. Emotionally it has already been achieved. We are already fractured. After the 2014 Independence Referendum, the columnist Matthew Parris made that point, the holding of a referendum created a different country.
Hatred is now the currency everywhere. Jeremy Corbyn, the much fêted ‘decent man’ with his ‘new politer politics’ has his Gauleiter, McDonnell to stoke the fires of revolution, and is ‘going nowhere.’ Mugabe with a beard. He would rather see the country burn, than resign. Revolution is always the hope of the hard left looking for violence. It feels like watching the trickling streams of new possibilities and embryonic hope coalesce into the most polluted, poisoned well which overflows in every direction, calling out the power- crazed to seize any flag. Watching the Sein Fein MEP’s hysteria in the European Parliament invoking the EU’s protection was beyond parody. Martin McGuinness seeks to shepherd a reunited Ireland from the rout. In this post-war zone the generals will be the least savory of all, backstabbing and garroting in full view.
This xenophobic, hating and hateful Britain is the underbelly exposed by so called liberty. We have forgotten what it means, liberty, although we created it by withdrawing from almost everywhere else. Interesting that we can’t withdraw from the EU but managed ( admittedly somewhat persuaded) to extricate from India and much of Africa who still play cricket, and speak the English now to be removed as an official language of the EU? The French have now their excuses to pay back which started with de Gaulle blocking our accession to the EEC.That does say rather a lot about our so called membership- once in as binding as being born a Muslim! A one way ticket to subordination: and beheaded for apostasy.
Nigel Farage who thought he had achieved this single handedly (undoubtedly a lonely man for twenty five years) cannot take his reward with grace or manage magnanimity. Instead he crowed from the top of the dung heap. Another humiliation, grotesque to witness.
The anger expressed by the so called ‘youth’ accusing people like me of betraying their hopes ( when only 35% could be bothered to vote) is the squealing of those who took their entitlements for granted, and now believe them gone. They were busy dancing and drugging in Glastonbury along with the Deputy Leader of the Labour Party and creating the sea of mud that now engulfs us. Now their fury is available for any rabble-rouser to harness- a mob in search of a cause. The demos is dissatisfied with the ‘cracy’ forged by their indifference, and want another referendum!
Having despised electorates who meekly re- voted until the EU was content, for once I think it a good idea. Not because we should not have left, but because the reaction to the collective temper tantrum ( aka Referendum) shows we are unfit for self government, without the energy or courage to take the blows. We knew there would be blows, but since whimpering and whingeing seems nigh universal, let us meekly return and play safe in the kennel of Juncker. He will re-chain us with alacrity and offer reduced rations.
It strikes me that the outrage of the defeated ‘Remainers’ is precisely because they assumed that the lunatic fringe ( the Leavers) could never win. I confess I assumed that too, which is why I lent them one single vote. As a forlorn protest. Had the leavers lost I believe there would be an unsurprised disappointment (as well as some relief), but some sense of the value of speaking out, a sense that Europe would have to take account of the deep disquiet that grows daily in many eurosceptic countries who waited for us to make their case. Instead we have chaos and possibly the end of Britain, and perhaps the need now to be over-ruled by the discredited Parliament that have broken all the windows and fused the lights for whom we voted new powers. One leader cannot be dislodged by anything, one resigns with alacrity, and the rest are tearing chunks out of one another.
Let us reverse democracy by the means that remains. The Parliamentary Labour Party has already begun. Thank God they have. It will never reverse or recover the Britain we believed existed. All illusions are gone. Even personal friends and my daughter lost no time in sticking in a knife, and seem to enjoy reminding me daily that it’s ALL MY FAULT.
So will ‘sorry’ cover it? Probably not, but I am. I really am sorry that I believed British honour, tolerance and good humour would survive whatever the outcome. I hope that this protest post will seem absurd in a few years but suddenly untrammeled immigration seems a very good option. Bring in the hardworking and stoical Poles! No other nation has suffered and survived as they have. We need their daily example among us.
Images Courtesy of Creative Commons- Delacroix; Leon Maxime Faivre and Mechior de Hondecoeter
PHI lippa. Letters of Love 