After two and a half years of indecisiveness, secretive meetings, blocking, kicking the can down the road, arguing, gaslighting, throwing the subject off course, obfuscating, giving warnings of dire consequences if the vote is not respected, rejecting warnings of dire consequences if the vote is respected, we have now ended up with fewer than 60 days before we leave the EU, and we still don't have a fixed plan.
It could have been so much easier. If Theresa May had engaged with all parties in the negotiations to leave the EU from the very beginning, we could have had a much better consensus on our future direction. As it happened, she gave very little away and now we have a situation with less than 2 months to go where Parliament has had enough, is starting to get twitchy, and is attempting to remove the Brexit process from the government's responsibility.
Theresa May did nothing to consult anyone on the process. She just continually banged on in her robotic way about her wish to carry out the "will of the people" in the 2016 Referendum.
Firstly, a 52-48 outcome is not an adequately wide margin to accept even a minor change to the constitution of the local Women's Institute, let alone the destiny of a country of over 60 million people. Will of the people? Not to me, it isn't.
Secondly, I am furious with the opposition leadership. In fact, not just furious, I am monumentally enraged. I am incensed. Irate. Infuriated. Fuming. In short, Jeremy Corbyn's handling of the entire issue is at best misguided. At worst, it is the most blasé, nonchalant and unconcerned attitude any leader of the opposition has ever taken to a matter of such importance.
There was a time where I thought Corbyn was waiting for the PM to tie herself in knots. Now, I just think he's having some kind of 80s throwback fantasy, preferring to be in opposition, and loving this return to Tory rule where he can act out the fantasy of some Che Guevara-style action hero.
I never really warmed to Corbyn. I found him to be such a wet stick of celery. His parliamentary style, trying to take the poison out of debates with the PM, was a disaster. Theresa May, whose heart is so small and so deep black, despite not having a single idea of her own, manages to run rings around him every week.
Corbyn has spent the last two years being the "nearly man". When you consider, over a decade ago, when Gordon Brown took over from Tony Blair, it was like exchanging a Picasso for a rolled-up caricature of your grandpa made by a bloke in a tourist trap alleyway. Cameron, who is a snake oil salesman with a silver tongue and an empty soul, made Brown look like a total arse.
When Cameron won the 2010 election, and went into government with the contemplative nice guy Nick Clegg, I saw it as an opportunity to rein in the Tories' meanness. The public, with the goading of several hawkish newspapers, saw Clegg as "the guy who didn't see through his tuition fee promises", and wiped out the Liberal Democrats for probably ever. When Cameron narrowly won the 2015 election, much to everyone's surprise, he set the country on its current trajectory.
With the Lib Dems gone, that meant Britain could go back to being a 2-party state, to the delight of the dark forces in politics. With the Labour party infiltrated by left-wing entryists, its first act was to reject the statesmanlike David Miliband as leader and elect his nerdy brother Ed instead. Cameron tore lumps out of him. With the Labour Party's prodigious ability to choose totally unsuitable leaders in key areas (Michael Foot being one that springs to mind), and the grassroots membership's loathing of any leaders that actually do well (Tony Blair for example), they decided to choose someone who couldn't command a police-trained dog to sit, let alone half the House of Commons.
Step forward, Jeremy Corbyn.
Although I am by no means a Labour party supporter, it is to him I turned when I thought Theresa May was about to sell out her citizens overseas (including me). But he did nothing. All he did was waffle on about lost jobs and higher taxes, neglected communities and run-down town centres. Yes, I totally agree with the fact that the Tories have caused untold damage to poor people by ripping the soul out of their communities and flinging hundreds of thousands of poverty-stricken citizens on to the scrap heap known as Universal Credit.
But please, Jeremy, in the name of sanity, DO SOMETHING!!!!!!!
When I see dippy old troglodytes spouting nonsense like "Britain stood alone once before, and we can do it again!" or "Let's go to WTO rules!" I truly despair. These daft souls have learned nothing in the last 3 years, and don't believe any of the warnings raised by experts and those in trade and industry. One rather idiotic old git last week said it would do the country good to miss out for a while, to see what they once had. These people get airtime on the BBC. Yet Corbyn does not take the opportunity to put anyone straight, to the delight of the ERG and their supporters.
He deflects attention, doesn't stick to any point, answers his own questions, refuses to deny in a clear way that he is an anti-Semite, and lets the Tory press walk all over him.
We thought Gordon Brown was a terrible Labour leader. Then Ed Miliband came along and we realised there were even greater depths. Then Corbyn arrived, and it turned out the bottom of the barrel was in fact quite a lot further down. We wonder who will follow him - let's hope we don't discover a new nether region.
In my opinion, the Tories have capitalised on the "niceness" of leaders of other parties - they excoriated Gordon Brown, vilified Nick Clegg, ignored Vince Cable, patronised Caroline Lucas, laughed at Ed Miliband, but there is one party whose leaders they still keep at arm's length - the SNP. They seem to be absolutely terrified of them, and with good reason. Nicola Sturgeon seems to be the only party leader whose reach is wide enough to put a massive dent in the Tories' plans. In fact, there are anti-Brexit English and Welsh people who look to her, rather than Corbyn, as the person most likely to stick up for them in public discourse.
And right they are. Nicola Sturgeon is going to be the first Prime Minister of an independent Scotland. The recent developments in Westminster have set the country on a trajectory that cannot now be reversed. I have always been British, and if you look through my posts around the time of the last Scottish referendum, I was vehemently in favour of preserving the Union.
Now, though, I would totally understand if the Scottish decided they were going to cast off the English and set sail for European climes. I am quite sure they would be fast-tracked to EU membership. Then, the Northern Irish, who are currently having a bit of an existential crisis, may choose to reunite their island. Without the Scots, who have more to do with them than the English, they won't be able to call themselves "British" any more. (As an aside, I would hope the DUP would suffer the same fate as the Lib Dems by going into government with the Tories, but politics over there are deeply entrenched.)
This will leave the English and Welsh. The once great country of empire, cradle of the Industrial Revolution, birthplace of some of the world's greatest sports, now reduced to a friendless husk of isolationist reactionaries and Blitz-spirit circus freaks. The country has been sold off and broken up by disaster capitalists all for the sake of a financial dividend.
Yesterday's seven-fold vote in the House of Commons proved one thing: Theresa May can't find a way out of the impasse, so she is setting up the EU for a fall. When they reject her approaches over this idea to revisit the Northern Ireland backstop, which they have already done, she can blame them for their intransigence and inflexibility, whereas in fact they are just protecting their own (Rep. of Ireland). They owe Britain no favours.
So yes, I am bloody fuming. The Tories always seem to find a way to blame someone else and stay in power on the backs of the gullible and the easily-led. Funnily enough, I haven't met anyone who admits voting for them, but if I did, I will not be responsible for my actions.
They wasted valuable airtime telling everyone that Jeremy Corbyn is an IRA/PLO/Chavez/Argentine Malvinas (delete as appropriate) sympathiser whilst themselves cosying up to the Saudis and selling arms to some of the nastiest dictators around the world.
They trashed the reputation of the Liberal Democrats by inviting them to form a government then hung them out to dry by rejecting the Lib Dems' flagship policy on tuition fees, almost wiping them off the electoral map.
They profess to care about the less well-off and the needy, despite raging with indignation when the United Nations criticised them for their austerity politics.
They blame immigration, especially EU immigration, for causing wages to drop over time, hospitals to become overcrowded, adequate housing to become scarce and expensive, and schools to become saturated, yet refuse to introduce simple legislation requiring everyone who comes into the country to register with the local council, making it mandatory for those nationals to leave the country after 3 or 6 months of unemployment, and counting people in and out as they come, something other EU countries have done rather effectively.
Instead, they go complaining to Brussels that they won't let the UK have concessions on free movement of people.
They are about to do the same smoke-and-mirrors trick - they are lining up their cards. When the EU rebuffs their wish to renegotiate the Irish backstop, they will blame them and turn more people against the EU, even though it is their own fault. This is the ultimate sign of a coward and a cad - if you can't own up to your faults, you are obviously a dishonourable shyster and a cheat.
Finally, when this utter catastrofuck finally gets under way, I hope it ruins the careers and reputations of a lot of Quitlings and their acolytes. They will, however, probably find a way to escape the fate that should befall them, like some Bond villain that gets out of a burning factory by sending for a helicopter, leaving the rest to perish.
In any case, the next few weeks should be programmatic for the years ahead - maybe parties will split, or new ones will be formed. Maybe someone finally gets some balls and says what everyone else knows - that the referendum was fraudulent and unconstitutional. But that's a rant for another day.
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