To know...

In the oft-quoted sentiment of Voltaire, "To learn who rules over you, simply find out who you are not allowed to criticise." Well, on that basis it has to be islam. But that aside, I’m concerned about the way in which we are handling Brexit. After months of tense wrangling, deprecating descriptions of those who voted to leave, expressions of hostile intent towards a post-Brexit Britain and vainglorious pomposity from the burghers in Brussels, all of a sudden Theresa May is declared a saviour.

Heaping praise on her for her resolve – a characteristic for which she is certainly not known in the UK – the Eurocrats declare themselves ready to treat. I can’t be alone in smelling a rat. The process of the public political debate is, as has been observed by many, like a football game between evenly matched sides; the ball goes back and forth interminably and only after extra time and an unsatisfying penalty shoot-out is a result declared.

But like a rigged game we onlookers watch as open goal after open goal is left unscored. We watch as the arguments of one side are adopted by the other and new meanings are imparted to otherwise clear objectives. We want to leave, we said. This became “You voted for Parliamentary sovereignty”. No, we didn’t, we voted to end our thrall to representatives which no longer represented us. There has been no greater treachery than that of the Labour Party; once the great champions of the working class, now mere champagne swilling theoretical socialists, proposing policy for which few have asked.

For the many, not the few says Jeremy Corbyn, then swiftly ignores what the many are clamouring for. Meanwhile on the government side we get a great war of words and the repeated assertion that ‘we did not know what we were voting for’. The fictions of hard and soft Brexit have played out in mid-field, the players oblivious to our insistence that the flouted ‘will of the people’ was simply to rid ourselves of EU control. When one gambit fails the team captains appear to collaborate to confect another; thus Ireland now steps in to take a free kick.

And in all this the biggest casualties are truth, honesty, honour, principal, as one after the other is abandoned in favour of weasel words which obscure and obfuscate, delay and detract from the matter at hand. The language of diplomacy, or as we commoners prefer to call it, lying. We are taken for fools and called it openly. Those few in prominent positions who support our cause – the cause, remember, of the majority of working class people of Britain – are attacked and defamed as somehow working against our better interest; their better interest.

I hold in my hand a piece of paper...

The political class is in cahoots, if not by arrangement – for the sake of appearance – then certainly by instinct. They are united in believing that they know better than we who have to live with their decisions. And they are afraid because Brexit was about more than just leaving a sclerotic and corrupt supranational administration; it was about our rejection of the political status quo. They see their power base quiver and crumble and fight like tigers to keep it. Were Voltaire alive today he would be able to coin another bon mot: To know who they fear, simply find out who they are allowed to denigrate.

Brexit. It’s hard

The bonkers game that sees the Conservative Party try to match Labour’s fantasy football league of politics is breaking sinister new ground with Philip Hammond’s mooting of a generational tax divide; tax the old to bribe the young. While Labour can shift its stance daily – Brexit sunny-side-up, Brexit over-easy, hard-boiled Brexit – and hardly anybody cares, the government is like a flailing toddler trying to land a punch on a six-foot adversary whose hand is on its forehead. It looks foolish and useless.

I honestly believe that not even Labour voters now actually believe in Labour’s policies, for two main reasons. One, they have no firm, plausible, agreed and deliverable policies whatsoever. And two, they have no need to worry about anything so boring as how the debts get paid as long as the man in the top job keeps handing out the Werther’s Originals. Oh, Jeremy Corbyn, they sing, united in their mass delusion that Old Man Marxism is the answer.

But here’s the odd thing. Across Europe it is the right-wing, populist, nationalist movements which are making progress, shaking things up and giving the big-state, socialist rulers bloody noses. Whereas here in the country whose traditional national character is the very embodiment of Conservatism it is to the left that chunks of the electorate are turning. Because, to those who haven’t seen it in action, socialism sounds so... nice.

History will remember Tony Blair for one thing and it won’t be the war that all the left-wingers keep berating him for; it will be the bringing about of the very character change that is fuelling their rise. The left should be worshipping him. When he said he wanted to rub the right’s nose in diversity he wasn’t kidding. He took that puppy by the scruff of the neck and shoved its snout right into the great big pile of stinking multiculturalism he had deposited on the hearth rug.

So, at a time when Mrs May and her entourage should be circling the wagons and digging in for battle, they are distracted by leaks and leadership challenges and self-destruct suggestions like ‘let’s hike up the taxes on our most loyal supporters’. The EU team are laughing down their sleeves at us and frankly taking ‘le piss’, shrugging their shoulders and saying ‘non’ at every turn. And in this they are aided and abetted by a Labour Party willing to simply acquiesce and submit entirely to the EU’s demands.

Submission is quite a handy stance, too, when it comes to Labour’s love affair with islam. Under a Labour administration many more muslims will hold positions of power, the borders will be as porous as surgical gauze and the economy will be entirely controlled by Brussels. Corbyn won’t need any policies of his own as he will willingly accept whatever the EU caliphate dictates.

Stop asking the electorate and start leading them!

So what’s to be done? Aping Labour policies has never served the Tories well; they should immediately refrain from going down that track. Trying to buy off the student vote is pointless anyway because young people will always hate to hear the truth especially from the Tories. Instead Mrs May should take a leaf out of Europe’s book. Not the EU, but the people of Europe. Take a right turn, resurrect your Conservatism and give us a ballsy, what-the-people-voted-for, outright rejection of everything the EU stands for. 

If she could turn back time...

Well, they’re back. Tony Blair, Stephen Kinnock and their moribund troupe of Remoaners are popping up everywhere, determined to thoroughly piss on the chips of all who wish to release us from the deadly chokehold of the EU. Project Fear, despite several charges on many fronts did little to dampen our ardour and if anything strengthened the resolve to leave; especially when George Osborne’s dire predictions failed to come true.

When economic Armageddon didn’t materialise and the drip, drip, drip of bad business news items was regularly cancelled out by prominent figures breaking ranks and declaring bonanzas a different tack was required. So they waded in with charges of racism. Shame on you, they cried, tish and fie and away with your xenophobia. Surely, they reasoned, if we malign their desires for sovereignty as little more than open hatred for other nationalities, they will cease to clamour for independence.

It didn’t work. So they said: ah, but we can already control our borders anyway; we just choose not to. And think of the farmers, they alarumed – with no easterners to pull their carrots the crops will rot in the fields and a pestilence will stalk the land. Bollocks, we said. But, but they sound-bit back: ‘nobody voted to become poorer’. But, but, we said, we don’t care. Bummer, they said, we need to find another chink in their armour of indifference to our pro-supranational zeal.

So, with a stirring Teutonic chorus of Ode to Joy – for let us not be fooled that the EU is anything other than the Fourth Reich – on came the spear carriers and assorted supporting cast, with their handy one-liners to pour scorn on the very notion that the UK could even survive in any civilised fashion outside the work camps of greater Germany. Barnier, Verhofstadt, Juncker, Merkel and Uncle Tom Macron and all, merrily singing – for once – to the same tune.

Then came the disparaging claims on social media that, ‘funny, you don’t hear many leavers these days, do you?’ Accusations of buyers’ remorse flew thick and thicker as they challenged Brexiteers to prove they knew exactly why they had voted leave; we told them what we’d always told them and poll after poll showed a majority in the country was heartily sick of the whole debate and just wanted to get on with departure. ‘But how shall we leave?’ they asked, ‘hard or soft’. We just leave, we said.

And so, finally, slowly, some toe-dipping into the murky water of negotiation began, at which the EU team scoffed; whatever you want, we’re not letting it happen. We’ll walk, said the team; you can’t said the enemy. Well, offer us something, said we; nope, said they. Then Tony Blair began hearing the voices again; the messianic mania is strong in this one. Look, he opined, but nobody was listening.

They were too busy deploying Project Pity. The Tory Party is in disarray; they are briefing against each other; there are leadership challenges... the latest attempt to pour scorn is to go around telling any news outlet that will listen, that they feel sorry for Theresa May. Poor Tess, they say, she has no feeling but despair, no empathy save that for a faded old flag, no allies, no friends; beset by a sea of troubles. I bet she wishes she could turn the clock back; what a shame the new Doctor Who has already been cast.

Smell that?

Well, all hell’s been let loose as Theresa May does the job she is signed up to do and every bedwetting Remainer demonstrates why they aren’t fit to either hold office or seek it. The malign intransigents of the EU-phile ranks poured scorn on our Prime Minister for acting exactly like the leader of a country negotiating its independence. We British are not disposed to take shit from Johnny Foreigner and we’re not best persuaded by those who do. It’s become an out and out fist fight as the very same people who applauded the underhand Juncker leak are now berating Theresa May for openly acknowledging and standing up to the threats emanating from Brussels.

Having failed to shift the opinions of the millions of adults who voted for Brexit they are forever invoking the plight of the young who will ‘have to live with the decisions we make now, for the rest of their lives’. So what? When I was young we had the three day week, wildcat strikes, work-to-rule, go-slows, the brain drain and the constant, if overstated, threat of nuclear Armageddon. You’re telling us Brexit will not only be worse, but that the fallout from it - its own nuclear winter - will last forever?

Nobody knows what anybody else is thinking or even what will happen tomorrow, yet the bleating, garment-rending ranks of quisling remainers are privy to the inner thoughts of Theresa May, and the likes of tiny Tim Farron know for certain that your children will grow up in a weaker, poorer country with no job, fewer opportunities, etc. Listening to them preach their social insecurity, they sound like agents of unfriendly foreign lands; as Mrs May stresses a desire for civilised talks and mutually beneficial outcomes they are openly demanding that we be punished.

But it’s a simple truth that decisions made by the country now are merely a fork in the road. How you progress down that road is up to you and the younger generations will play – or will be able to play, without EU interference – a full part in shaping that progress. In fact, removing the stifling blanket of supra-governance should let in the fresh air of full participation in democracy. If young voters are unhappy with the way future UK parliaments govern they will have far more power now they have seen how the status quo can be upset.

The EU assembles its troops in the Battle for Britain

Far from disenfranchising young people, British independence actually places their future firmly in their hands... once they are old enough to take part. Far from threatening failure, Brexit promises to take us down a road to a better democracy; if detractors don’t want a part in that they are welcome to fork off elsewhere. As for Tim Farron, he might want to consider his own uncertain future as the rest of the country watches him lose his seat to a man dressed as a fish finger.