Plain Words

Had you been keeping a watching brief over the Brexit discourse– and many other issues, such as the filthy racism of anybody not brown, or the hideous austerity which barely keeps the unemployable in tribal tattoos – you may have noticed a certain paucity of originality. ‘They didn’t know what they were voting for’, perhaps, or ‘they fell for lies on a bus’, possibly sowed ‘the politics of hate and division’ or one of my favourites, ‘the referendum was won by illegal means’. (I think they mean ‘voting’.)

People in general are pretty poor at expressing themselves and they rely on others to do the heavy lifting, to provide the pithy phrases for their placards, to make their chants loosely rhyme and to demonstrate to all the world their vacuous lack of any joined-up thought. In the process a certain mangling of the language occurs whereby linguistics shortcomings are revealed, words are tortured into a shape they were never intended to fit and the overall impression is of a disorganised rabble making it up as they go along. If only they had some sort of quality control to avert the grammar crimes which do so much to undermine their cause.

Six decades ago, Sir Ernest Gowers decided that these would not be failings of the civil service and he gave to the English-speaking world the marvellous maxim: ‘Be short, be simple, be human’. Since then his best-selling guide, Plain Words, has never been out of print and never out of relevance as our ability to communicate in our mother tongue is increasingly relegated to the second division of desirable attributes to include on a curriculum vitae. (In fact, short, simple, human CVs are thin on the ground these days.)

So relentless has been the assault on educational standards and particularly linguistic competence that Jacob Rees-Mogg’s styleguide has attracted exactly the type of impotent derision we have come to expect from the perpetually offended. So quick, so obvious and so vociferous has been the opposition that, were one a cynical soul, it could easily be imagined that Jake was trolling, as the usual suspects lined up to take the bait. I even happened upon a highly amusing radio discussion where it was claimed that an insistence on competent English disadvantaged those who could not demonstrate it. Well, duh-er!

Once again, then, the response of the left to declining standards is to lower the bar. What are  now routinely referred to as ‘vulnerable groups’ were once the most covetous of a good education. It used to be a badge of honour for the working class, especially immigrants, to acquire fluency because, without language, all other learning is at risk. But with rigour removed from our English teaching and fewer students going on to study the language at an advanced level, it is no surprise that, instead of addressing the shortfall, Labour seeks to close the gap by plastering over it.

The lefty style guide seeks to play down excellence and revels in removing language from daily discourse. Words are banned and meanings altered to fit an agenda which is so determinedly focused on equality that it matters not how low we have to sink to achieve it. The approved text teaches that insistence on good English is colonial; it perpetuates a servant and master society; it advantages the ‘posh’ boys; it is a form of white privilege and grammar is a tool of empire, etc, etc, etc. But grammar, as we all know is the difference between knowing your shit and knowing you’re shit.

But, as ever, the one word to which the left – famously possessing no sense of humour, irony or self-awareness – routinely demonstrates a near total blindness is hypocrisy. After the book burning, after the elimination of ‘unhelpful’ words. After seeking to control the language for so many years and in so many ways, who would have imagined that the left would get so very upset over somebody seeking to do exactly the same. And as for the scorn poured on his affinity for imperial measurements, before you criticise Jacob Rees-Mogg perhaps you should walk 1.60934 kilometres in his shoes.

Howling

The next full moon this year is not until the 15^th of August but to see the distressed state of the perpetually offended you would be forgiven for imagining we were experiencing a full-on, extended super-moon phenomenon. So maybe it’s the heat which is making all those mad dogs parade their inadequacies so openly? No, of course not; it’s Boris. Boris, for all his demonstrable faults, is a force of nature so powerful it has its own gravitational field into which are sucked the political detritus; the also-rans, the unemployables, the gibbering loons, orbiting chaotically at his command, responding to his every syllable. They think they have agency but ‘Britain Trump’ is playing them like a shrill penny whistle.

I’m talking about people like Steve Bray and the other idiots who practically live outside Parliament to register their individual and collective disgust at the exercise of democracy. Donning the flag of a non-country, swearing allegiance to cynical political appointees, ignoring the hideous and non-human technocracy of their new church, they look like adult children, complete with tantrums and tears. Bray in particular has stood there, chanting ‘Stop Brexit’ and shoving his facile placards in the faces of all who would pass his way, year after year. Somewhere in his captive mind is a belief that he acts of his own free will, but he is clearly in thrall to a peculiarly 21^st Century delusional madness.

This isn’t dedication to a cause; this isn’t helping anything; this isn’t a decent person’s opposition to enacting the wishes of a majority with whom he happens to disagree. This is mental illness, plain and simple. It is a wish to be thought relevant; by these actions he shall be remembered… and quickly forgotten. All he has achieved is to show every potential future employer that if he doesn’t accept what you have decided to employ him to do, he will refuse to do it. He has rendered himself a laughing stock, a braying idiot and an embarrassment who will forever have to live on the kindness of others or the charity of state.

But he is not alone. One could argue that, as a private citizen, he has fallen prey to a temporary madness and without wise counsel has naively exposed his inner thoughts to an unforgiving world, but such excuses don’t apply to many prominent others. Alistair Campbell, Jon Snow, Adam Boulton, Anna Soubry, David Lammy, Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, Owen Jones and many others – name after well-known name pops up to openly demonstrate their lack of perspective, judgment and temperance in demeanour. Imagining themselves somehow ‘better’ they use their platforms to bleat far and wide exactly how disturbed they are. And how wrong we all are.

Bray by name...

And it is becoming a concern because this has gone beyond anything to do with Brexit, the country or whatever newly minted grievance you happen to have dreamed up. This isn’t about protest, is about them, the individual and their need for validation in a world that really couldn't care less. “But, look at me!” they cry, “Look at me, damn you. I am anti-Brexit and you are all racists and have but a fraction of my moral worth!” Like a child acting up the only effective response is to just ignore them and hope that one day they realise that they are nobody.

British Standards

Of course Boris Johnson was going to beat Jeremy Hunt and no matter how the media tried to spin the fact that Hunt was making ground in the last two weeks of the contest, once it was whittled down to those tow they may as well have just have had the vote and be done with it. But at least it gave the whiny brigade the opportunity to have a run-up to their garment-rending, self-harming tantrum and prepare themselves for an but highly public irrational meltdown.

Irrational? Of course; Boris being Prime Minister is hardly surprising, given all the assistance afforded by the Remain campaign. Not recognising that their brand ethos of lecturing, hectoring, browbeating and generally abusing the general public for their ignorance, xenophobia, causal racism, Little Englander mentality and all the rest is largely what lays behind the Brexit vote in the first place. The British – the true British – are phlegmatic. We are not quick to hot temper; rather we quietly absorb the insults, then defy you.

So, by so emphatically screeching from the rooftops how Boris must never become Prime Minister you were, effectively, endorsing his candidacy in the eyes of those you hold so low. And now, by yelling your impotent howls of pain into the void, all you are doing is feeding our sense that we were right all along. Mediocre comedian-muso Mitch Benn is a near-perfect exemplar of the genre, with his small-minded, hastily composed anti-Brexit, anti-British ditties and his insistence that those who would swear the UK’s fealty to foreign powers are the true patriots. An idiot doesn’t know that he is an idiot.

An idiot used to be something you tried not to be, but nowadays it seems that in the bizarro-world of leftist equalitarian nightmares, idiocy is the moral equivalent of intellect; one man’s inadequacy is the equal of another’s excellence. And now that the idiots are in positions of power the acceleration towards the age of idiocracy is almost palpable. They are everywhere; in the classroom, the courtroom, the boardrooms and woven through the very fabric of our national administration.

Our armed forces rightly bemoan the loss of competence; if we no longer have experience in all theatres of warfare, how can we adequately train future soldiers to fight for our freedoms? If we scale back on rigour in education, is it any wonder that the school- leavers of today are less well-equipped for the world of work? And if our public discourse is so poorly degraded that any idiot with a grievance believes their poorly framed and intellectually bereft grudges are as equally valid as honouring a national democratic referendum.

The rage has barely subsided; if anything, it has intensified since 2016. These people are not only not going away, they are growing in self belief and self-righteousness even as their argument becomes weaker and their former supporters desert them. They are not even embarrassed now by their, frankly, embarrassing tweets, pronouncements, press briefings and articles. Boris has begun to lance the boil and he hasn’t even lifted a finger yet.

Time to be the bulldog

He has a small window of opportunity to stop the rot, drain the swamp and show up the flimsy ambitions of Parliament. They wish to remain under the thumb of a supranational junta; have our standards set by others; subjugate ourselves to a project which does not have our interests front and foremost. He has to start hard, maintain the pressure and insist that the only standards to which we should all be held are those our predecessors spent blood and treasure establishing. Is it too soon to hope that the Battle for Britain has begun?

Gunboats!

Gunboat diplomacy without the gunboats is how our inability to defend shipping in the Strait of Hormuz has been described. As the deliberate and not so gradual winding down of Britain’s once world-bestriding Royal Navy now shows, in stark relief, Britannia no longer rules the waves. No longer and not for some time, as the US Navy took over that role in the middle of the last century. Still we could – and did – hold up our end of the deal until relatively recently.

Now, of course, the powers are calling for an international joint task force to take control of the region, much, it can be assured, to the chagrin of the Arab powers who seek to burst free from the restraints that more, shall we say civilised, nations have applied. The region needs to be kept in check, possibly more than ever before, now that an impending nuclear dawn for islam draws nearer. But there it is, the Royal Navy is neutered, shackled and brought to heel along with the British Army and the Royal Air Force, victims of an ideology of defeat.

Meantime, civil society has been under its own siege as manners, conduct and general behaviour have been eroded to the point of near anarchy. London appears to be the stabbing capital of western Europe, overrun, it seems by lawless gangs, drug runners, people traffickers and the like, many of whom spring from the unaccounted population of what are now termed ‘irregular migrants’. Even the language has been controlled so that such meaningless terms make it nigh on impossible to call a spade a spade and thus address the recurrent theme.

That theme is decline and retreat and surrender and  beg for assistance and there is no logic to it. No logic unless, you desperately conclude, it is deliberate. But surely, it couldn’t be deliberate, could it? Britain barely contributes its commitment to NATO and it is obvious to all – serving and veteran, like myself – that even that is nowhere near enough. Events in the Gulf confirm it. We are no longer independent economically, militarily and even culturally; we have been diminished, diluted and to what purpose?

To sell the notion of supra-national governance, where no one state can exist without the help of all the others; where no actions may be taken – militarily, economically, culturally – without the consent of all the others; where no flag assumes an importance greater than the flag of the mother ship; where we are all citizens of the world and wards of state. In an earlier age this was called communism, but now they call it the EU. Those who plead to stay are those who have accepted the loss of British identity; those who are convinced that ‘progressive’ is derived from progress, when it is really spawned from helplessness.

Boris channels Churchill? He will have to.

So, tomorrow we will have a new Prime Minister and the EU rats are already deserting the government midden. If Boris has the balls he could turn this evacuation into a rout, and in the very brief window of opportunity before they try to bring down the government, he has the ability to reach out and demand more. Not from him, not from Parliament, but from us. More optimism, more hope, more determination to recover what we threw away some decades ago. If we have even the smallest glimmer of a hint of a sliver of a chance, we need to get behind Boris and push like fuck.

Last Week

I just watched the very last This Week with the incomparable Andrew Neil. What a loss to everybody this is. It will be missed by its devotees and its demise makes the BBC significantly poorer in terms of political balance. Complained about by ardent lefties as being driven by Neil’s aggressively right-wing agenda it was, of course, nothing of the sort. Rather it was a last bastion for independent thought and free expression without taking itself too seriously.

The last show was a masterclass in self-effacement and the willing participation in the kind of ritual embarrassment the show claimed as its own as commentators and politicos from left, right and right-on made utter tits of themselves, then showed up to be shown up in front of a live audience. Forget the ‘reality’ shows where former back-benchers pose as ordinary human beings for the edification of a thoroughly non-discerning public, This Week’s pastiches had none of the dignity of the bush tucker challenge or ‘real housewives’; they were amateur hour personified and what better portrayal of the frailty of the position of those with power or influence.

Naked under the Andrew Neil spotlight, This Week allowed for the widest possible set of views and woe betide those without the depth to back up their claims. Nobody was safe and many a pomposity was pricked as the expounders of lies and bent truths spluttered and stalled before the master interrogator’s inquisition. Neil was uniquely well-prepared and attacked all false claims, from either end of the spectrum, whenever falsehoods were being promulgated or out-of-context ‘facts’ used to support false theses.

To the left, Neil must have seemed like a right winger but ask any right winger who has been placed in those thumbscrews how much mercy was shown and they may well shudder at the recollection. Legion are the social media clips showing the evisceration of the high and mighty and the self-proclaimed champions of unworthy causes. Livid were the bruises and scars of battle as hypocrisies were exposed, bullshit batted away and crap countered. And he did all of this with a smile and a cheery, cheesy line.

We may never see its like again, yet we have never needed a sense of perspective so much. The opening monologue alone was worth tuning in for – a catalogue of catastrophic, comically inaccurate predictions, forecasts, earnest proclamations and plain dodgy prophecies presented earnestly over the years. If only some of those just as earnestly forecasting doom and disaster over Brexit could see just how foolish they appear to the rest of us. If only the never-Trumpers could give just an inch of grudging ground.

Let's face it, Jonesy, you're a bit of an arse...

But the fight goes on and Andrew Neil’s spirit will still stalk the corridors of power. Political discourse may have lost one of the few people keeping it grounded, but there are plenty of we amateurs on social media. Keep taking the piss, keep knocking them off their lofty pedestals. Before we can clean up politics we need to sling a whole lot more mud.

Fond O' Lying?

Ursula von der Leyen has, as expected, been shooed into the position of EU Commission President by the faux democratic process of voting, from a shortlist of candidates including herself and… er, herself. The result has been loudly touted as 52% to 48%, mirroring the Brexit referendum and therefore as equally valid. After all, sayeth the righteous remoaners, if 52% is an ‘overwhelming majority’ (something leavers have never actually claimed) why all the belly-aching?

Why? Well it’s as if Keith Vaz were to chair the committee for standards in public life for some time after the cocaine-fuelled rent-boy episode. Or as if renowned anti-white racist Yasmin Alibhai-Brown were to appear on our televisions almost every day to berate us for our skin colour. Or – and you’ll have to admit this is something of a stretch – as if unelected advisors were given titles so that they could take seats in the House of Lords and thereby bypass the election procedure and end up being cabinet members.

It’s all a question of legitimacy and the Brexit Party, among others, are in the EU Parliament precisely to try and open your eyes to what is really happening. To suggest that a disgraced German politician – under investigation for insider dealings in defence contracting – and utterly unknown outside her home country is a fit person to lead the commission is risible at best, sinister if you tend towards darker imaginings.

“But she was voted for!” They cry. Narrowly, yes. But no alternative was given. This wasn’t a contest, it was a rubber-stamping exercise, exactly as Nigel Farage has been saying for years. The majority of MEPs in the chamber are paid up EU devotees and yet they only just managed to get sufficient ‘yeas’ to pass the appointment. But where were they in the selection process? Where were the Euro-hustings allowing the ruled to see who would rule over them? Where were the preliminary voting rounds?

“How did Farage get to be leader of the Brexit Party, then?” they demand, “That’s exactly the same thing!” Is it? Did the BP suddenly take over the country? Is Farage the Prime Minister, or is he, in fact, simply the very popular leader of a party he founded? It is normal, indeed it is healthy, to question nepotism, secret committee selections, graft, corruption and abnormal voting outcomes. It is right to question polls limited to specific cohorts. And it is also right to question the current Tory Party system, but at least its members have had a say and all the selections have been highly public; embarrassingly so.

But the closed-door shenanigans of the EU’s ruling elite are not properly held to account. They aren’t even properly held to the light.  This is the entire point of Brexit. We have enough trouble being informed of the intentions, the motives, the reliability of our own, usually directly elected ‘representatives’. But how can we be represented by people we have never heard of, who often come with political or even criminal baggage and over whom we have no power to deselect?

Me? My, what a surpise!

At a time when more transparency is being demanded here at home; when higher standards are being demanded of our governors; when people are demanding a greater say in how our country is run; it is ludicrous for those who shout “Who funds you?” at Nigel Farage to be cheering on the farce of this ‘election’. There have always been crooks and low-lifes in positions of power, but why should we stand for a system in which this is not a regrettable exception, but an entry requirement?

Mending the Roof

A stitch in time saves nine, they say and how wise they were. I have been spending my annual leave fixing up the house and as with all such projects you realise, too late, how a little regular maintenance can avoid wholesale refurbishment. As you strip back the layers of emergency patching you eventually reach the point where the rot began and belatedly begin to put the underlying structure straight. It takes far more effort than it should, costs way more than if the damage hadn’t been just concealed, but ultimately makes a home fit for the future.

During the week it has struck me what an apt metaphor for our country this is. When the great liberalisation of society began, the minority voices agitating for change were relatively small; a drip-drip-drip of barely acknowledged protest which was ignored for years. But as ‘people power’ grew and the ability to promulgate your grievances far and wide meant that more suggestible, recruitable people heard the calls, change gradually came about. The criminalised became legal, the marginalised mainstream. These were durable patches and they kept out the rain.

But underneath all of that, the foundations supporting the whole edifice were beginning to crumble. The rod was spared and the child spoiled rather more often than was just and necessary. The desire for government to represent the make-up of the people was accelerated and its champions were recklessly vindicated as brick after brick began to spall and was left to crumble, the cracks painted over and a fresh coat of bright, vibrant diversity applied. And as one house flouted the planning rules, others followed suit. The rainbow squat, held together by gaudy paint and the flimsy glue of peace and love, maaan, became the norm, rather than the mildly tolerated exception.

Uneasy at the rapid change the authorities pointed to neighbouring countries and implied that not to follow where they led was a mistake. In fact, they decided, we should go further. If gimcrack shanty towns were good enough for the French, they said, it would be xenophobic to demand we restricted the rate of change and insisted we lead the charge instead. And when the cracks appeared? Why, they papered over them as well, with whatever inferior materials they had to hand.

If you build a shed on uncertain footings and weatherproof it with wallpaper it will soon disappear into the mud when the rains come. But a shed is a simple and not too costly matter to replace, wholesale. You may have lost some of what you kept in it and you may have had to endure the ribbing from your wiser neighbours, but build it back, properly and harmony will return. But how do you set about rebuilding the whole street, town, city... country?

We're going to need more gaffer tape...

For those hard of comprehension this is, of course, an allegory, a somewhat tortured metaphor for the current and future state of our civilisation. While the Gilets Noirs run riot in Paris, while millions agitate for supranational control of our ability to keep our own house in order, while anti-democratic movements demand that borders be broken down and the rule of law be misapplied to allow it, some of us – hopefully more of us each day – see that it cannot continue. The rain is coming and we are far from ready.

Elite

Oh, the old globalist conspiracy reared its head again recently, although I expect the job of the conspiracy theorists is never just part time; more of a mission than a one night stand. The ‘global elite’ goes the trope, seek to keep us in poverty. Really, they seek to keep us in poverty do they; why would they do that? Surely they would be far better elite global conspiracists if they sought to make us just wealthy enough that we don’t whine about it and dangled just enough gewgaws in our acquisitive little faces that we kept recycling that wealth and in the process made themselves all the richer still.

But such logic can never surface above the film of envy which cloaks every leftists manifesto for their perfect world, filled with perfect humans who never want more than they need. But think about it, really, if your serfs are happy and fed they are less likely to agitate too strongly for change. What would and does make all of us poorer, however, is an insistence on a nebulous, unobtainable ‘equality’ which seeks to restrict those who do better and advance those who don’t. When every little setback is given its own special place in the pantheon of grievance we end up punishing thrift and rewarding indolence and fraud.

Conspiracy? We don’t need conspiracy when so many people have brains hard-wired to see injustice and conclude, therefore, it must be Tory injustice. People being killed off by austerity? Deliberate policies to punish people for falling ill? Seriously, you think that Tories (spit that word, son, spit it) actually, deliberately, wish to cause people harm? Wish to push people into needing expensive treatment which they then deny them? How sick must your mind be to come up with stuff like that? And in any case it’s what you would denigrate as ‘Tory types’ who will foot the bill; it always is. (And you can bet it isn’t Tories who are currently defrauding universal credit recipients to the tune of millions.)

If you want a simpler theory, here’s the evolution-versus-divine-creation comparison: What if making everybody wealthier made the rich wealthier still? What if, people actually having money to spend better serves the globalist ambitions than keeping them in poverty? Steal from people and soon they have nothing left to steal [give a man a fish]. Or allow people to amass spending power of their own and let them buy stuff from you forever [teach him to fish]. Which is the more likely? Which is the least trouble? Which of them requires the least amount of collusion and contorted conspiracy?

Meanwhile we keep on researching poverty and in doing so introduce ever more measures to tell people how badly done by they are when we should be explaining to them how to best participate in the only economic model that has ever really worked – western capitalism - a system in which output has increased 100-fold, work days have been halved and lifespans doubled in the last two hundred years. But all this is wasted on those who would rather wallow in grievance and believe the world is set against them. Now, excuse me, as I must go and skin another poor person for the pot.

Indifferent

In the past few days, several senior Conservatives, including Jeremy Hunt, have warned that leaving the EU without a deal would pose a major threat to The Union, with Nicola Sturgeon already ploughing ahead with plans for a second referendum on Scottish independence. David Lammy tweeted out – in a break from his usually ceaseless anti-white tirade – “I don't remember seeing the break up of the United Kingdom on the ballot paper in 2016”. Meanwhile, Nigel Farage has suggested that while regrettable, the break-up of the United Kingdom would be a price worth paying to deliver Brexit. 

From whence has come this shirt-rending angst over the precious union? Teflon Theresa, it would seem, in her latest attempt at leaving office without her only ‘legacy’ being that she could not deliver what the British people demanded. British, did I say? I no longer feel British, but I feel - more fiercely than ever - English to the core and it is the English who have the axe to grind with the EU. May has pledged (though it is hardly in her gift) to keep the United Kingdom together. Boris Johnson has gone so far as to state that preservation of this uneasy union is more important than leaving the EU. I beg to differ.

May’s deputy, David Lidington has gone on record to talk about English indifference to the union, as reported in The Scotsman newspaper. But in doing so and just like all the others he does not, or rather refuses to, grasp the reasons why. The Union? Yes, I – we – can see it as a strength and yes, as an island it is preferable not to allow foreign powers to have a border within our shores, but I’m not sure that indifference is the right word; frustration might be closer. What we are certainly not indifferent to is the way in which being English has virtually become a punishable offence. If, as many believe, Scotland should be governed by the Scottish, then why should governance of England not be exclusively the preserve of the English?

Recognising that London is no longer an English city, as John Cleese so rightly remarked, can you imagine the backlash if we were to hold an annual English Pride celebration? Even better, a whole English Pride month; a month in which we could come out of the closet and wear St George emblems and declare ourselves openly English without fear of censure. Well of course it won’t happen; as with the Conservatives, Englishness has been sacrificed on the altar of precarious union and must now only be practised behind closed doors.

Will Boris bring back English pride? Will he strengthen or – as is more likely – widen the divides that exist inter and intra-nation? Whether or not we leave the EU and whether or not the countries of the former United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland go on to peacefully coexist as independents or maintain close union is, at the moment, simply not germane to the pressing urgency of actually delivering Brexit. Indifferent to Scottish independence? If I’m honest I’m just not that bothered.

Are YOU the Baddies?

A frequent demand we hear from Remainers, confused and afraid of a future without anybody to tell them with what they may wipe their arses, is to name one tangible benefit of leaving the EU. Just one they cry; and then, when a dozen perfectly respectable reasons are presented, they dismiss them as unicorns. ‘You don’t know’, they insist, to which we all chorus, ‘neither do you’. But there is one very real benefit which we receive every day, even before we have extended so much of a toe into the greater world beyond.

It is a benefit which brings me joy unconfined. Forget the execrable dirge, Ode to Joy and give me, every time, the true Brexit anthem – the massed weeping, wailing, gnashing of teeth and garment-rending of those with such poverty of ambition they wish to cling onto Mutti Europe’s apron strings forever. Oh, how flat the Libdems jolly ‘Bollocks to Brexit’ tee-shirt jape fell as they just looked like kids on a massive sulk. And even better, Molly Scott Cato – Green MEP – announced on Twitter that they had actually stopped Brexit. Ah the innocence of the fresh-scrubbed mind.

But oh, the wrath of the media and the self-righteous cheerleaders for supranational governance. No masked thugs of Antifa, no hysterical TellMama lies about non-existent offences, no milkshakes, no braying idiots with megaphones, no face paint, no 30-year old idiot children in shorts and overly-tight tees, no idiot in a cape; just a quiet, dignified refusal to honour the undemocratic de-facto country called the EU. That was all. The Brexit Party had intended to sit for the odious anthem, but when it was insisted they stand they simply turned their backs.

No bricks were thrown, no fists were raised and not a single reputation was impuned. They didn’t even say Bollocks to No-Brexit, or Fuck-EU; they just quietly turned away from the tune which Hitler, on more than one occasion, chose for his birthday celebrations. Remember Kubrick’s Clockwork Orange – the ninth was used for that very reason. You’d have thought that the association of Beethoven with some of the world’s more extreme ideologies would have been food for thought when selecting an anthem for a supposed peace project.

Anyway, the FBPE hashtags were in a froth right out of the gate. Then they decided to double down with the incessant Nazi Party comparisons; ‘you know who else turned their back?’ etc... Oh, the irony of the fan-boys of the Hitler inspired German dominance of Europe fabricating equivalences were there were none. Even the recently self-nonentitied Gavin Esler tweeted out that very foolish and very easily demolished post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy.

Esler: the search for relevance continues...

Unlike Nazism and Communism and Socialism and Corbynism and islamism and all the other isms inspired by political thinking and deep-rooted desires to re-shape the world, ‘Brexitism’ is not a cabal of power-crazy conspirators whipping up the crowd. There is no ideological kernel, no plot by supposed rich backers or rogue states to destabilise western society and rake in profits. With the Brexit Party what you see is what you get. Ordinary people, dismayed at how their voice is ignored, fighting back; fighting for survival; fighting to be heard.

If you want to dress that up as the resurrection of Hitler himself that speaks volumes about your poverty of empathy, your inability to accept simple things at face value, your refusal to face facts, your loathing for individualism and most of all, your impotent rage at losing a vote. Because, for all your pretending you are the only ones who see the light, you are the ones who are being played. Like a cheap violin. You want to see Nazis? Look in the mirror.