Forgive them

The scenes this weekend, of zombie EU drones stumbling around the capital, impromptu protests against ‘fascism’, ‘dictatorship’ and a ‘coup’ that the government has somehow mounted against itself, are starting to look desperate. Demands that we ignore the referendum and – ideally, it seems – keep on voting until Remain wins, abound and formerly respected public figures once more make utter fools of themselves. Having finally got a Prime Minister who appears to mean what he says, is the truth beginning to dawn?

The screeching is becoming frantic, the demonstrations more desperate. Paul mason, communist agitator for a bygone age of heavy industry and wildcat strikes, has been all over the news parading his own breakdown for all to see. Remainer politicians, still believing they can play both sides, are laughably claiming they stand for democracy while simultaneously trying to overthrow it. And of course, the clownishly clad, EU-flag toting, ageing hippies are out there, speaking for the young, whose ‘futures have been betrayed’.

What a hoot. They are reliving the Greenham Common peace camps, the Ban-the-Bomb marches of the sixties and their own experimentation with the discredited mind-altering ideologies of Marx and Mao. Democracy is one thing, direct action another and the ignoring of a democratic mandate is an abuse of both. The vote is won, but the war goes on and the lies, the misleading rhetoric and the abuse of gullible people is largely the work of the losing side. We are now in the fourth year of this war and the end feels like it really is coming this time.

But how will they cope after the armistice, if armistice there is? After the war is over, will these people quietly go back to the jobs they held before? And what of the overly vocal public figures who, mask-slipped, have berated the public for their gullibility, their naivety, their doltish stupidity? How will they fare post-Brexit and will they double down on their own public humiliation by continuing to lobby for a lost cause? Well, of course they will; there is nothing else left for them and obscurity would be unbearable.

The only thing worse than being talked about, said Wilde, is not being talked about. For those who have been made to look fools – Grayling, Miller, Campbell, Clarke (the list goes on and on and on) the lesser punishment might just be to look for scraps of funding from EU sources to continue the fight from their little intellectual archipelago of disconnected islands. As far as the rest of us are concerned, a period of silence from these hollow vessels would be welcome.

  

Remainers make their reasonable demands...

So, let them have their last few weeks of public displays of grief. Let them imagine their dwindling numbers are fighting a cause which has not – as it has, undoubtedly – already been lost. Let them rend their garments, shriek until they are hoarse, dance like loons draped in the flags of our adversary. Let them call us fascists and Nazis, despots and dictators one last time. And then, let us forgive them and forget them, for they know not what they do.