British Blue

Six weeks on from the referendum result and many of those who voted remain are still hurt and angry and lashing out. They accuse those of us who voted to leave of ‘wrecking the economy’ of lying to the electorate and then running away, of abandoning the future to fickle fate and having no plan to extricate ourselves from the EU in an amicable way, without sabotaging international relations or starting the third world war in Europe. They boo and hiss and jeer and do all the things themselves that they accuse us of doing, such as surrendering absolutely to confirmation bias.

Not all remainers, of course; many are quietly going about their business and for most of them that business has not changed. They still have their family homes and nobody has died or succumbed to life-changing illness as a result of the vote to Brexit. The same applies to the majority of those who voted to leave. Of course there are going to be, have already been, repercussions, but it’s how we deal with them that is the mark of our character, not how we continue to bemoan the result and berate those who brought it about.

A charge often levelled, as they flail about in their prams, going blue in the face and screaming the house down, is that had the result been the other way around, Brexiteers would be doing just the same. True, to an extent, but they forget an important thing. Joining the EU was never put to a vote and at the time of the first referendum the world was a very different place, there was no internet and nothing to counter the combined power of the media and the establishment and their message of doom should we leave.

Since then our time in the club has been one long litany of dissatisfactions, beginning with the loss of sovereignty and culminating in where we are now, with a world-wide distrust of those in office. Our collective vote to leave wasn’t because of any campaign of lies, it was because of the opportunity to call ourselves British once more and reject the slide towards becoming just another bunch of regional Europeans. Much as there can be no such thing as British muslims – the domineering ideology of islam being in direct confrontation with almost every aspect of Britishness – the British national character resists the idea that you can be truly loyal to two masters.

Yes, if the referendum had gone the other way we would have minded. And we would have pointed out every bit of creeping legislation which took further power out of our hands. But I’m pretty sure we wouldn’t have maintained a barrage of insults in the way the bitter remainers are doing, locked into a loop of antipathy that has more in common with obsessive mental illness than rational thought. After all, we have been ignored for over forty years; we’re used to it. It’s still funny, though; for a bunch of illiterate, narrow-minded, xenophobic, low achievers we did pretty well against the slick, cosmopolitan, highbrow, rightful rulers of the world. I can see how that would smart.

I'm only wearing this to flush out the remainers...

And while, unlike many remainers, I hold no grudge – it is, after all, a free country – I can’t help being amused by how quickly these sophisticates are to revert to base emotion. So imagine the shade of puce they will turn if in the future they must travel the world clutching a solid, blue British passport. It was a thing of beauty, that document and should the Sun campaign be successful we might once again see a generation of young people becoming proud to possess one. But it would be worth it alone, just to see the swivel-eyed loonies in the Europhile ranks holding their noses as they apologetically presented 'ze papers' at the German border.