Banging on...

The press is full to bursting with precious, self-fulfilling depictions of hate. All around us, Britain has ‘suddenly’ become a terrifying place to live. Brexit is to blame, they say, because until June 23^rd 2016 Britain was ‘the most tolerant society on Earth’, welcoming with open arms the glorious diversity of multiculturalism. Then, overnight, the brownshirts took over, looting Jewish businesses, painting yellow stars on the front doors of Jewish households and herding the Jews into labour camps under armed guards. Oh, wait...

The usual suspects have been writing for months now about fictitious surges in hate crime, to the point where this fable has gained traction. And now every naïve occasional contributor to the Guardian-led morality press has his or her story to tell about how they have personally observed the extremes to which our society has been dragged by the ignorant, racist, seething Nazis of the Brexit-voting underclasses who have tried to sabotage a thousand years of civilisation brought to us, of course, by the French. Without Europe, Great Britain is just an island of wode-wearing savages to them.

In painting this picture they are assisted by various EU officials, doing their level best to threaten punishment on our disunited kingdom and suggesting that negotiations be carried out in French to maximise our disadvantages. And as Canada concludes that the EU is impossible to deal with and other countries line up to offer support for the simplicity of trade with the UK, more and more worms crawl out from the wainscoting of our own mother of parliaments. They are, it seem, frit.

Both sides have their own narratives, of course. On the Leave side it is one of subjugation to a foreign and unfriendly power and subsumption to a future uniculture celebrating nothing so much as uniformity and conformity and supressing free expression. But even in seeing the EU as an evil empire, we wish it no great ill, indeed the more prosperous, the more they will spend with us. You see, we are pragmatic; let’s leave and settle our own affairs without having to please many masters.

But there is something in the mindset of those susceptible to socialism that needs to be fed with dread. They cling onto stories which tell them of the small-mindedness of Brexiteers and how those feeble intellects must resort to violence and hatred of the other. And they really believe this guff, as they tell tales round their campfires in fashionable suburbs where the Union Flag never flies. But it is all bollocks, isn’t it?

They should travel with open minds to the regions lost by the British long ago. To the former industrial towns which now in parts resemble the downtrodden wastelands of the third world. They should view with de-rosed spectacles the migrant ghettoes where integration was never even considered, let alone attempted. They should speak – and listen – to the deep-rooted local inhabitants who have found themselves displaced by the ideology of diversity. And they should check the timelines of these events.

Set course for Little Britain?

Far from there being any sudden change, this creeping rejection of Britishness and national pride has been deliberately supported for years. And those leave voters you despise so much have been side-lined for the best part of half a century, without any meaningful incentive to adopt the EU ‘solution’. There has been no sudden rise in hate; it’s been simmering away for decades. So before you decry this imagined explosion of bigotry and loathing and try to blame it all on Brexit, don’t forget, you started it.