Still Winning

I love it when people who know so much better than me tell me why I voted to leave the EU. I have been, variously, an unthinking dupe of the Russians, indoctrinated and herded by rich ‘elites’ who ‘stand to make a fortune. I am a Little Englander who wants a return to the nineteen-fifties, shortly after we had stood up to Hitler and survived, battered and bruised… but I am also a Nazi myself; somebody who would deny others their freedoms. I am a brutal racist thug, under-educated fool, lower class canon fodder and all round idiot. Also, I am old.

The insults come quite soon after you have challenged a Remainer on the ridiculous things they are saying and often immediately precede a block. It is quite tiresome at times, trying to argue with these bricks in the propaganda wall of hate which has been carefully laid by pro-EU agitators. It is also amusing to see how many Remainers claim to know ‘many’ leavers who have changed their mind when confronted with ‘the facts’ and – of course – while Remainers endure forever, Leavers are dying off in their droves.

At yesterday’s losers march, the bias of the establishment was hard to avoid. While the dwindling numbers of referendum-deniers were pretty much allowed free rein to wander as they wished, those opposing the chosen ones’ show were kettled and frustrated by the police. When the self-declared communist Ash Sarkar took to the stage the first thing she tried to do was to goad these largely honest voters by screeching “Fascist scum – off our streets” and get a crowd chant going. It is all beginning to ring hollow.

The same old insults, the same old tired schtick. Remain voters are good, caring, intelligent, educated people with the best interest of humanity at heart. Leavers are, to a man, thuggish, sluggish gammon; thick, brutal, gullible and gulled. Remainers went to university, you know? Leavers learned their skills on the streets as muggers and conmen. Remainers care deeply about the world. Leavers want to plunder it. Yeah, yeah, yeah… you know the word ‘populist’ is just around the corner and – wait for it – Boris Johnson is, literally Hitler.

And so to the papers and the polls. The serial failure (and cabineteer most likely to elicit the question 'who?') Amber Rudd leaving the Conservatives is widely touted as a mortal blow to the government. But why would the jettisoning of ballast make Boris’s balloon fly lower? In fact, with every sneaky sucker punch the usual suspects try to get in, Johnson’s stock in the country rises. It is almost as if those so supremely in the know don’t really understand Britishness at all. Keep beating the dog and sooner or later we will step in and stand up for it.

Boris brings the house down.

So as we enter the end days of this struggle – if Robert Mugabe’s reign can be described as a heroic struggle, then Brexit surely can – let us hope that Boris keeps his nerve and sticks to his guns. The threat of prison for breaking the newly-minted and highly partisan law, if necessary, to take us out should only embolden him. If the left, the communists, the true forces of remain really want to make him a martyr, we will cheer him all the way to the metaphorical scaffold.