Beyond Brexit

I take a day off and what happens? I come back to find the opposite sides of Brexit still calling each other stupid. Or, to be more specific, the less eloquent Brexiteers are slinging mud and insults in a reactionary fashion at Remainers, while the intellectual big guns of Remain are aiming what they think are finely-honed arguments at anybody who voted to leave. And yet that ignorant lumpen proletariat refuses to back down. How dare they ignore democracy! But they each had a vote and Leave won, say the pragmatists. Then how dare they ignore ‘parliamentary’ democracy! They’re not happy.

Day after day the pro-EU lobby demands that its voice is the only one that should be heard. If only there weren’t so many babbling voices as  the entire country goes stark, staring, full-on, fruit bat bonkers. Feminists tear into women, the left tie themselves in knots over denying, yet shoring up their institutional anti-Semitism and over the pond the US election has become so bizarre that, whatever the outcome, you fear for the sanity of the entire country. The western world is one almighty fuck-up right now and this is not lost on dear old Uncle Vlad.

Decades of pandering to a self-destructive narrative about multifarious, yet nebulous inherent human rights has put the rights of individuals ahead of the rights of society, so that freedom and security and plain common sense have been sacrificed on the many altars of fractured idealism. Instead of the imagined rainbow of multicultural mores we have a straightforward divide of the old-fashioned kind. Not so much a haves against have-nots struggle, although that will never go away, but more of a righteous-versus-the-ungodly kind of affair.

Today we are split into the factions of want-to-be-led against do-as-I-say and it isn’t getting us very far. The would-be leaders, among which there is no clear consensus, squabble between themselves over the minutiae of their enormously disparate aims, while the rest of us (the thick ones, remember) do our best to keep the country going. If you had a clue, we would happily follow, but you don't. Where once we had the blitz spirit of keeping calm and carrying on, one nation against a common enemy, we now have the splits spirit which mitigates against any form of unity.

Seriously, who cares about your very specific struggle for recognition? The more you seek to define yourself as a rights-holder on the grounds that your particular needs are a unique subset of the modern holy grails of identity; gender, sexuality, race, religion, disability, etc, the more your majority tends towards one – zero if your problem is low self-esteem. In a way you should be grateful for the referendum; at least it’s given you a bigger family to belong to. But that sense of membership is illusory.

The big brains are all for remain?

We Brexiteers, we happy band of fruitcakes, loonies and racists, voted out for reasons the Bremoaners, despite their 'superior' intellect, don’t really grasp. We actually do want to keep calm and carry on. All we need from government is basic law and order and a state that works, which we can afford. When it comes to ‘empowerment’, give us the tools and we’ll finish the job. Despite all protestations to the contrary, the will of the 52% is actually pretty coherent. If it helps at all, the squabbling leave factions can continue with our blessing to think of us as thick, but at least we know what Brexit looks like.