Count me out

I don’t think I believe anything any more. I stopped believing ‘in’ things many decades ago – things like deities and the possibility of humans co-existing in everlasting peace and the like - but I was always open to facts and accepted truths. Later I began to judge all such facts – statements, statistics, reportage and the like through the microscope of my own widening experiences and disappointments. It turns out that most of it is a crock.

For instance, I thought science was the bedrock of all established understanding of the known universe. But then along came ‘climate science’ whose acolytes and adherents bear more resemblance to the faithful, bowing and scraping at the altar than the sceptical ‘prove it’ monkeys that rigorous research needs. And a whole lot of other fields of conjecture also queer the factual pitch by masquerading as ‘science’ – economics, psychology and pretty much the whole of the humanities.

In the end people believe what they want to believe and most of us come to trust our own nose before the nasal appendage of others. Right now the biggest field for fake science, guesswork and general mountebankery is, of course, the state of Britain post-June 23^rd. Nobody knows what a post-Brexit world will look like, but we all know that, despite David Cameron’s feeble fiction about some specious ‘special status’, remaining a member of the EU will not satisfy a majority of the public; even many remainders are deeply suspicious of the EU’s direction of travel.

When the facts are absent the feel of the campaign takes on a greater importance and just lately it has been feeling dirty. The Remain campaign’s Project Fear is starting to yield returns and alongside their prognostications of doom is the belittling of those who wish to leave. How long will it be before they start referring to the Leave camp as fruitcakes, loonies and closet racists?

They say we are fantasists and dreamers who would put the common good behind some vainglorious hankering for a long gone Britannia. Little Englanders who would return us to some backwoods existence, grovelling for scraps from the world trade table. But we saw last week what sort of a man turns from a lifetime of opposition to grovelling subservience. Once dubbed a ‘Labour firebrand’ Jeremy Corbyn’s wooden performance in sackcloth and ashes showed a beaten man.

The beaten man of Europe

Forget about what ‘facts’ turned him. Corbyn’s lacklustre surrender to a hated higher authority had all the hallmarks of an orange-suited hostage forced to read statements on YouTube shortly before their bloody despatch. Convert or die, convert and die; I didn’t believe a word of it. If this is the true image of the new European count me out.