I don’t think I believe anything any more. I stopped
believing ‘in’ things many decades ago – things like deities and the
possibility of humans co-existing in everlasting peace and the like - but I was
always open to facts and accepted truths. Later I began to judge all such facts
– statements, statistics, reportage and the like through the microscope of my
own widening experiences and disappointments. It turns out that most of it is a
crock.
For instance, I thought science was the bedrock of all established
understanding of the known universe. But then along came ‘climate science’ whose
acolytes and adherents bear more resemblance to the faithful, bowing and
scraping at the altar than the sceptical ‘prove it’ monkeys that rigorous research
needs. And a whole lot of other fields of conjecture also queer the factual
pitch by masquerading as ‘science’ – economics, psychology and pretty much the
whole of the humanities.
In the end people believe what they want to believe and
most of us come to trust our own nose before the nasal appendage of others.
Right now the biggest field for fake science, guesswork and general mountebankery
is, of course, the state of Britain post-June 23rd. Nobody knows
what a post-Brexit world will look like, but we all know that, despite David
Cameron’s feeble fiction about some specious ‘special status’, remaining a
member of the EU will not satisfy a majority of the public; even many remainders
are deeply suspicious of the EU’s direction of travel.
When the facts are absent the feel of the campaign takes
on a greater importance and just lately it has been feeling dirty. The Remain
campaign’s Project Fear is starting to yield returns and alongside their
prognostications of doom is the belittling of those who wish to leave. How long
will it be before they start referring to the Leave camp as fruitcakes, loonies
and closet racists?
They say we are fantasists and dreamers who would put the
common good behind some vainglorious hankering for a long gone Britannia.
Little Englanders who would return us to some backwoods existence, grovelling
for scraps from the world trade table. But we saw last week what sort of a man
turns from a lifetime of opposition to grovelling subservience. Once dubbed a ‘Labour
firebrand’ Jeremy Corbyn’s wooden performance in sackcloth and ashes showed a
beaten man.
The beaten man of Europe
Forget about what ‘facts’ turned him. Corbyn’s lacklustre
surrender to a hated higher authority had all the hallmarks of an orange-suited
hostage forced to read statements on YouTube shortly before their bloody
despatch. Convert or die, convert and die; I didn’t believe a word of it.
If this is the true image of the new European count me out.
