It's Brexit, stoopid!

Brexiteers were accused of looking back with rose-coloured spectacles at an imaginary perfect Britain before the EU. The generations which came after the second world war rebuilt the country and cooperated with our neighbours in trade and regulation long before the EU came about. It was hard, but we did it largely by ourselves. By the time John Major signed the Maastricht Treaty the anti-integration movement was already blooming, because the overt interference with national governance had become obvious.

Today, I notice, it is the Remainers who are looking back through those rosy-specs at the halcyon days of free school milk and council houses, and full employment and growing prosperity and somehow in their weird dissonance accrediting all that to the Glorious Make Freedom Socialist Friends European Union Sovietska! In their view everything bad is the fault of Brexit: the climate, the value of the pound sterling, Donald Trump, Haiti… everything.

Ah, ‘twas ever thus. While, undoubtedly, decoupling ourselves from our lawmakers and rulers over the last forty years was always going to have its downsides, the saboteurs have done their utmost to turn a bump in the road into an insurmountable climb. Just when we needed all hands to the wheel, to rediscover how to manage our own affairs, meddling hands were busy throwing spanners into the works. The same old miserable quisling faces.

Having steered Theresa May into fumbling Brexit, they harassed Johnson over the most trivial of issues until he, too was ousted. Now, with Liz Truss within days of picking up her P45 they can see the next cabinet becoming a council of Europhiles with every sympathy for returning, cap in hand, to our masters. What a despicable trade politics is. Just watch people like Andrew Adonis sneering at the ignorant masses and saying, “We told you so!”

They insist that Brexit was because of inherent racism, fascism, insular, inward-thinking among the backward peasants, who were whipped up to a spitting fury by Führer Farage and his brownshirts. Yet it was the forces of remain who were deployed, time and again, to mob Brexit gatherings and hurl foul-mouthed abuse. What a way to win hearts and minds, eh? Those voting to leave the EU were the objects of hatred, not the spreaders.

I saw Matthew Syed putting forward the theory that Brexit was the product of a cult, whose unthinking acolytes had no ability to draw their own conclusions and would double down on their beliefs in the face of all the contrary evidence. Yet again I was intrigued at how those who so readily sling around accusations of cognitive bias seem unable to recognise it in themselves. No leavers were expecting an immediate upturn in our fortunes, yet everybody voting remain seems to believe they were.

Angel or devil?

Our current tribulations are the result of many things, and many of those things are out of our direct control. And yes, admittedly, we seem unable, currently to even control those things over which we most certainly do have jurisdiction. But I can’t see how more than a small portion of the blame attaches to Brexit. I can, however, see how pretending it does plays right into the hands of those who would wish us to embark on the biggest u-turn of all.