So, I was wrong. Again. I was wrong about Brexit, wrong
about 2015 and wrong to have underestimated the passion in some quarters for
what they honestly think is doing the right thing. I admit it; I was wrong.
Being a natural conservative – both big and small ‘c’s – I will do what we
always do and get on with it. To be fair, very little in political life
directly affects me anyway as, being as big a C as I have just declared, I have
made it my life mission to look after my own affairs and never expect anybody
else to care a fig. Long may that continue.
That said, where do we go from here? Theresa May has
little option but to cling on, at least for a while and hope that when the
clamour dies down she can carry on getting us out of the EU. The last thing
anybody (except Labour) needs right now is a Tory leadership contest. But I’m
fully prepared (and partially expect) to be proved wrong again. Unlike the
rabid hordes of Momentum, however, I refuse to rip up the streets and threaten
people with personal violence if that happens.
In the short term at least as far as my life is
concerned, it makes little difference. I expect I’ll get by whatever system
rules over us. In the longer term as well it won’t really affect me very much whether
we’re in or out of the EU, whether we collectively pay 2p more or 2p less in
tax. Whether or not our population is 80 million or 800 million, whether we
join the German Army or become a caliphate etc, etc. But if this marks a shift
towards a Corbyn-style of Marxist regime the people who will be adversely
affected will be the children of the children who have just voted for a change
they may not like very much when the money runs out.
Oh yes, a gentler kinder politics may be what’s on the
masthead, but when you see how very, very angry the mobs can get even a newly
minted Labour voter must, surely, have qualms about what sort of society we may
become. Will the tendency to restrict freedom of speech intensify yet further?
Will the ever-expanding and contradictory lexicon of human rights prevent us
from actually having meaningful human rights? Will profligacy replace prudence,
to the financial downfall of us all?
What of business confidence? Voting to pragmatically
leave a restrictive union with 27 other squabbling nations might have been the
very thing that would bring a new prosperity; will a new dawn of socialism
bring about a return to the misery of the 1970s? The prospect of a future left
wing Labour government is not likely to encourage investors to spend money in industries
which could be swiftly nationalised. The drying up of tax revenues and the
fleeing of the entrepreneurs will inevitably end in said government borrowing
still more to fulfill promises made in opposition.
Theresa May adopts a new look... wrong.
Unless the Conservatives get their act together and shore
up the breaches the future does not look very bright at all. The British, by
their very nature, are conservative at heart; minor corrections, left and
right, to a steady and unexciting course. But maybe we’re going to approach
things in an increasingly less British manner over the next few decades? Has
anybody taken the pulse of Venezuela lately? I really can’t see any of that
going well at all, but I could be wrong. Please, let me be wrong.
