When you wish upon a star

There never was a star to represent each country in the European Union, but both Brexiteers and Remainers like to pretend that the UK had its own. And depending on which side of the argument you stood it either represented freedom, the reclaiming of our own national stardom, or it served as a token of our membership of a club of friends. Forget about the star; the star is not going to save you.

Clinging to an idea is not the same as making that idea come to fruition. Having a vision, no matter how grand, how aspirational, how very admirable, is not the same as realising that vision. The world as we knew it is pretty much fucked and there is no going back. No amount of petty pontificating is going to get us out of the harm we have inflicted upon ourselves. Not as a result of Brexit, but as a result of weak politicians leading pampered electorates. Now that the heat is on, it turns out that very few can stand to be in the kitchen.

We used to be an industrial powerhouse. To a great extent Germany still is. But no, successive governments decided that we should abandon that which had allowed us to bestride the word as an industrial Colossus and instead become a ‘service economy’. How did we allow ourselves to agree that we could build wealth and future happiness on diversity and the hospitality industry? Oh, and greedy bankers, money launderers and City crooks.

Now, because of the Green agenda, we can’t even contemplate a return to manufacturing, reduced instead to offshoring our emissions by buying everything from overseas in a dismal attempt to claim net-zero credentials. Our high streets are awash with money transfer shops, bookies, fried chicken outlets and modern pawn brokers. We are broke, busted, brassic… screwed.

Boris Johnson and others like to talk about the thousands, nay millions of jobs in the Green economy, but where are they? Not in manufacturing, the bit that brings in the big bucks, but where? Designing and commissioning green energy systems requires talents we hold in only scarce quantities, having sent generations of school leavers to study how to be offended by everything. And installing such systems requires aptitudes and abilities we squandered by telling kids they were above such menial labour.

So we have to import our intellectuals from Eastern Europe and our grunts from anywhere where the minimum wage is three shekels a day. There is no grand vision to do otherwise, no plan to recover our national dignity. Instead we will simply allow the overthrowing of all that this country once stood for, and for what? So that we can pontificate from the World Cup sidelines about our record on LGBT rights? So that we can stand proud of our bi-monthly Black History Months? So that we can recite, over and over again, the mantra that diversity built Britain until people actually come to believe it?

Whatever you think this represents, you're probably wrong.

I might once have said ‘not on my watch’, but it was never up to me. Governments have failed us. Our judiciary has failed us. Education produces so little of realisable value that we may as well just offer degrees in finger painting. Our infrastructure is crumbling, our services shot to hell and our borders flung wide open. We have already welcomed in the Barbarians, we may as well just do as they tell us.