It’s the Brexit, Stoopid!

I note with interest the growing EU fervour in the air. On the media, on social platforms, and no doubt in the usual talking shops, Brexit is back in vogue, or rather blaming everything on Brexit has become, once again, the cause du jour. It’s the catch-all to cover every ill. No doubt it is Brexit which caused your central heating to fail or made you slip on that wet floor. It is Brexit that created the storms because, muh, global warming, right? And we all know climate change was as a direct result of Brexit, so…

If you voted to remain and remain convinced that leaving was an enormous folly it is likely that your cognitive bias will happily let you nod along to every assertion of its evil. Project Fear, they said? Well just looky here now. When people point to the no-small matters of Covid and Ukraine… and incompetent UK governance such affairs are disregarded as mere deflections. The conspiracy theorists are having an absolute ball.

Andrew Adonis famously said “If Boris goes, Brexit goes” and he has made no secret of doing his damnedest to bring about a bid to rejoin, at any cost. Pretending to care about the little people, Lords like him have no interest in the fact that it was mostly those same people who voted to leave. Yes, they voted in their ignorance, cry the ardent remainers, who alone are vouchsafed the intelligence to make such a decision. But it’s the little people who felt they got nothing from the EU anyway and the smug middle-class remain rump who got the most.

As anybody with a few grey hairs and an observant eye will notice, everything else we could have voted for brought no change. For decades Britain has languished in a low-productivity, high aspiration, low talent, low wage world where second-rate politicians ascend to astonishing heights by the patronage of equally second-rate also-rans who seem to hold the levers of power. The leaders of powerful blocks are all Wizards of Oz; the tiny, feeble, uninspiring man behind the megaphone. What else was left but to vote for a game-changer?

The levels of bile out there for Brexiteers is quite alarming. Well beyond merely bordering on hatred, these pro-EU people viscerally detest and despise those who broke their precious thing. You just know that, given the power, they would cancel out all voting rights for anybody who disagreed with them. Which would be interesting because while they agree with each other that Brexit is very, very bad, they have no unified theory of just why Brexit is bad.

It’s a Tory plot. Cameron was played by the Kremlin. It’s the bankers and the hedge fund managers. (the only thing the Euro-intelligentsia seem to ‘know’ about hedge funds is that they positively thrive on economic downturns and do their best to bring them about) It’s the Nazis in the Tory Party, obviously. It’s, it’s, it’s…  a very, very ,very bad thing, and there’s an end to it.

There is no recognition that many have done their very best to throw spanners in the works, have encouraged the EU to negotiate in bad faith, have visited Brussels and promised we will return if only Brexit can be seen not to have worked. They never had a plan for Brexit, they cry, they believed the lies on a bus! It is relentless. Can they not entertain the possibility that the intransigence of Parliament itself has played no small part in our current chaos, that Covid brought to a halt all efforts to deal with anything but Covid, that the Boris Johnson witch hunt and subsequent Tory shitstorm may all have contributed?

Nope, because everything bad is because of Brexit. And despite their voice being the only bloody voice we ever hear about it, day in, day out, they think they are being silenced and censored in the press. They also still fervently believe that they alone have the answers; all of them different answers, obviously. But at the bottom of all of this is this deep, deep loathing for anybody they feel they can blame for ‘taking away their rights’, rights that few of them appreciated or understood, or even exploited. And yet they’re supposedly the good guys.

Got Brexit done? Hardly.

Maybe it will all blow over. Maybe the Sunak administration will stabilise things a tad and maybe the country will get back on its feet again. Whatever does happen I predict that few will be satisfied and after four decades of blaming the EU and its forebears for all our problems, we will probably spend the next four decades blaming our departure. I’m just pissed off that instead of actually getting on with the job, we seem to need all of our failures to be somebody else’s fault.

It's Brexit, stoopid!

Brexiteers were accused of looking back with rose-coloured spectacles at an imaginary perfect Britain before the EU. The generations which came after the second world war rebuilt the country and cooperated with our neighbours in trade and regulation long before the EU came about. It was hard, but we did it largely by ourselves. By the time John Major signed the Maastricht Treaty the anti-integration movement was already blooming, because the overt interference with national governance had become obvious.

Today, I notice, it is the Remainers who are looking back through those rosy-specs at the halcyon days of free school milk and council houses, and full employment and growing prosperity and somehow in their weird dissonance accrediting all that to the Glorious Make Freedom Socialist Friends European Union Sovietska! In their view everything bad is the fault of Brexit: the climate, the value of the pound sterling, Donald Trump, Haiti… everything.

Ah, ‘twas ever thus. While, undoubtedly, decoupling ourselves from our lawmakers and rulers over the last forty years was always going to have its downsides, the saboteurs have done their utmost to turn a bump in the road into an insurmountable climb. Just when we needed all hands to the wheel, to rediscover how to manage our own affairs, meddling hands were busy throwing spanners into the works. The same old miserable quisling faces.

Having steered Theresa May into fumbling Brexit, they harassed Johnson over the most trivial of issues until he, too was ousted. Now, with Liz Truss within days of picking up her P45 they can see the next cabinet becoming a council of Europhiles with every sympathy for returning, cap in hand, to our masters. What a despicable trade politics is. Just watch people like Andrew Adonis sneering at the ignorant masses and saying, “We told you so!”

They insist that Brexit was because of inherent racism, fascism, insular, inward-thinking among the backward peasants, who were whipped up to a spitting fury by Führer Farage and his brownshirts. Yet it was the forces of remain who were deployed, time and again, to mob Brexit gatherings and hurl foul-mouthed abuse. What a way to win hearts and minds, eh? Those voting to leave the EU were the objects of hatred, not the spreaders.

I saw Matthew Syed putting forward the theory that Brexit was the product of a cult, whose unthinking acolytes had no ability to draw their own conclusions and would double down on their beliefs in the face of all the contrary evidence. Yet again I was intrigued at how those who so readily sling around accusations of cognitive bias seem unable to recognise it in themselves. No leavers were expecting an immediate upturn in our fortunes, yet everybody voting remain seems to believe they were.

Angel or devil?

Our current tribulations are the result of many things, and many of those things are out of our direct control. And yes, admittedly, we seem unable, currently to even control those things over which we most certainly do have jurisdiction. But I can’t see how more than a small portion of the blame attaches to Brexit. I can, however, see how pretending it does plays right into the hands of those who would wish us to embark on the biggest u-turn of all.