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.

Apocalypse Not Now

Parliament goes off on its holibobs and Project Fear has a spring in its step, I see. When will all the wailing end? You’d like to hope that when the sun rises, as surely it will, on Saturday, 30th March, 2019 the Remainers will rub their eyes, blink and decide to take those first few bold steps into the future, but I fear it won’t be so. Dominic Grieve has been warning of famine and fever; that food and medicine will run out within weeks and pestilence will stalk the land. Death will surely follow... Others, such as John Major have preached that we should confess our sins that we be forgiven and allowed to re-enter the Kingdom of Euro-Heaven via a ‘second’ referendum. The prodigal will be received back into the fold and fêted as a returning hero.

It’s all sounding terribly biblical – Old Testament, naturally - and they are warning of nothing less than the coming of the Four Horsemen and the end of days. Abi Wilkinson (yes, her) now exiled to Washington DC, has literally tweeted that very sentiment, although I couldn’t tell and really couldn’t be bothered to find out whether she meant Brexit or Trump. But have no doubt, evocation of those pale riders still has the power to chill malleable minds and you can be sure Theresa May will be busily picking away at the first of the Seven Seals during the Parliamentary recess.

But, being good old, stalwart, bloody-minded Tommy Atkinses we will pick up our rifles, recover our phlegmatism and soldier on. The Remainers are whipping themselves up into a frenzy, sensing blood and victory, but we’ve been here before and when the vainglorious projects of our ‘betters’ become shitstorms of iniquity and finger-pointing failure, somebody has to steer a course to calmer waters. Because we Leavers know that our shared world will need rebuilding and we may need to offer kindnesses to the Remainers whose longed for Armageddon will not have occurred. The-Day-After-Brexit will be just like any other day for all but a tiny few.

But they will be furious and cognitively dispossessed when they discover no great calamity has befallen them. They will be distressed that no mayday call need be issued. They will be bereft yet strangely numb that their beloved EU survives, albeit weakened and that it makes not one jot of real difference to them. And in order to realign the evidence with their beliefs they will become – for a while at least (and possibly forever in the case of the Soubry-Graylings) – even more manic in their insistence that the world did, in fact, end and that we are merely waiting in purgatory for the final descent into hell.

10p on the price a loaf of bread will bring them out in ecstatic hives of misery and every single new pothole will be proof – proof! – that we cannot survive Brexit beyond Tuesday. The Queen will pass on the crown, due to Brexit and the lengthening of days as we progress towards the increasingly annual event we call ‘summer’ will be greeted with alarums and the rending of garments. I would not be entirely surprised if some of the more invested resorted to human sacrifice to reverse the horror of... of what, though?

I expect Brexit Day will not even be a bump in the road for most. Millions will awake and not even realise as they carry on in their jobs, their kids continue to go to school and the rain still comes sleeting in. The long history of this bejewelled fortress isle will record Brexit not as the cataclysmic, seismic extinction event the Remainers portend, but simply as the time that Britain went mad and then, just like George III, went un-mad again.