Race to the bottom in Brexistential Breakdowns

It’s been one week, and one fucking hell of a week too. It’s also been 100 years since a million men were killed or injured during the battle of the Somme, in a world-wide conflict that was so devastating - and inspired such a thirst for revenge - that the punishments inflicted on one of the nations responsible were so brutal that they directly lead to the rise of the far right and the industrialised mass slaughter of more than seven million men, women and children, and I can’t help but feel that I’m watching history repeat itself.

Granted, a million men aren’t dying along the banks of a river in France right now, but the age of the atom put an end to warfare on that scale, pushing us down the slippery slope that’s lead us to sporadic terrorist atrocities and retaliatory drone strikes, so we’ll likely never see a massacre on such a scale again. But you don’t need a war to lead you to fascism, you just need a certain blend of politics; a recipe that mixes social, cultural and economic fears into a heady cocktail of reactionary anger, and an erudite iconoclast with an incendiary propaganda campaign behind him to serve it all up to the thirsty public.

The hate that empowers fascism does not come from a single incident, it is always underneath the surface, virulently spreading through a country as its symptoms manifest in countless minute - almost innocuous - ways. Racism isn’t always overt, it’s not something that’s the exclusive domain of people with shaved heads and swastika tattoos, white England football shirts straining over Carlsberg-gifted beer guts. It’s not just vandalising community centres and giving a sieg-heil as the police kettle you in, it’s far more subtle than that; it’s in your media, in depiction and representation (or the lack thereof) in the creative arts, it’s in your language, all those slang terms you think are harmless that describe the sort of take-away you feel like for tea, it’s in your high streets and local communities, preventing integration and almost ghetto-ising poorer areas as struggling residents see failing stores becoming nail salons and the local newsagent’s turns into a polski sklep.

You don’t need to buy a newspaper to read the headline, and countless millions nationwide will read those headlines as they walk past them in supermarkets and newsagents and petrol stations. With constant exposure, those headlines will sink in, and start to influence and affect the beliefs and prejudices of the people. After all, that’s their job: to attract attention, and convey a message quickly. Saturate people enough, and their mindset will change, the narrative they look for to explain their lives and the world around them can and will be distorted, twisted beyond reality, by the right words repeated often enough; £350 million a week, 7 million Turkish immigrants, take control of our borders, take our country back. Goebbels could never have dreamed of propaganda so effective.

(Also, before you all rush to shriek “GODWIN’S” at me, please read the damned thing first. Not every Nazi comparison is an intellectually empty retort, but it is frequently used to shout down legitimate ones, which kinda fecks me off a little…)

And it’s so powerful a force, that works so subtly, that many people aren’t even aware it’s going on. For a week now, the defensive protestations from those who voted Leave have been “I didn’t vote based on immigration” and I’ve just heard it too many times. I’ve struggled to see any argument for leaving that’s actually anything to do with the EU; I can maybe-sorta see some businesses finding certain rules and regulations too bureaucratic or restrictive, but I can’t see much beyond that, and even then many of those problems can be laid at the door of our domestic government instead. Like, say you’re in the construction industry, and you’re fed up of importing steel from overseas instead of using domestically-made steel. It’s just that the steel industry - like the majority of manufacturing industries in this country - was utterly decimated by the Thatcher government, and steel factories have either been completely shut down or at least in managed decline in the years since. Deprived of domestic investment, cast off as moribund and left to die, slowly broken down into nothingness, because of our governments. And yet, it’s the EU’s fault somehow. Regardless, even though I can’t agree with the reasoning behind it, and similar arguments, I can at least see them as arguments against a continued union membership; everything else is vague and obtuse, the taking back of control, from a group we were the second-largest member of, a member that everybody else fought for the attentions of because we carried such weight in that group.

But this argument will still be prefaced with “I didn’t vote based on immigration”, because they know why they have to say that. Everyone who’s said that knows why they’ve had to say it. Voting to leave carries a weight, a connotation, and you all know damned well what it is, yet, people who voted leave get really defensive, upset even, if that implication might actually be made. However, the problem isn’t that voting to leave makes you racist, the problem is that racists voted to leave. Your views allied, you were on the same side, and they’ve seen your agreement as vindication of their beliefs, empowering them to speak out in public where normally the social view of their beliefs kept them silent. Knowing full well that you were now on the same side as racists, you still voted leave, so forgive me for not pitying the trauma you’re currently going through as the other half of the country starts wondering just how racist you are.

And how can they not? How can half the country not wonder if the other half is more racist than they’re letting on, when it’s barely over two weeks since an MP was killed in the street by a man shouting “put Britain first”? It utterly crushes me that even that wasn’t enough to make this country go “hey guys, do you think our attitudes towards immigrants and ethnic minorities might be a little fucked up?” Who knows, we might get to have that conversation at some point in the future; when our leadership squabbles have finished and our courts finally get round to dealing with Thomas Mair, we might all be able to look at ourselves as a nation and question how things came to be this way. But I doubt it, I think that, collectively, we’re nowhere near capable of that level of introspection. Too many people have a demagogue now, throwing their full weight behind one of the sparks that ignited this fire, committed to the cause that’s going to burn us all. That they carried us here on the back of lies won’t change a thing, because we’re now in the post-truth era: facts met lies, and lost. They won’t change their minds, the power they hold now will easily grow, and now because of the referendum they could be anyone.

We’re here now because people lied; people like Boris Johnson, who fell on his sword rather than rule with it dangling over his head, Nigel Farage, a quintessentially British Trump, less overt, but far more insidious, and Michael Gove, who makes his bid for leadership - and therefore power - with the backing of the media magnates. They lied, and lied, and lied again, and no matter how many times the truth was held up in front of them they just brushed it off and kept on lying. Just over half the nation - half the fucking NATION - believed them, they have brought us to the edge of ruin and, in full view of the chaos that has followed, the rest of the political world grits its teeth and prepares to jump. Instead of saying “no, you were lied to and mislead on an almost industrial scale during the lead up to the referendum, and consequently we don’t believe you were all informed enough to make such a significant decision,” the main players in the big parties are all going to see this decision through. The people have spoken, after all.

I never thought I would find myself in this position, where I actively want Parliament to ignore the voice of the people, but when the alternative is this strikingly similar to the world of the 1930s I’ll happily take a Parliament telling the people to go fuck themselves. Of course, nobody will. Would you, politically speaking, be the one to ignore the will of over half of the nation, no matter how mislead they may have been? It doesn’t matter, because racism wins either way: Leave, and when the miracle cure we’ve been promised never comes the right will blame the government for not negotiating a better deal and say they could’ve done a better job, Remain, and the right consumes the flood of outrage that follows from those who voted to Leave like Popeye eats spinach and with a similar result. We are here, damned and doomed, thanks to a tangled web of interconnected threads that have run through our society and our history, but in the most immediate sense we are here because David Cameron thought he could quell party dissent and secure himself another five years in office, without considering first that he was appealing to a public that had been lied to and mislead for so long that they no longer cared about trivial things like “facts” or “the truth”.

BONG!

The past few days have been a whirlwind of the words “leadership bid” and “stepping down”, and with the Tory party contenders now officially announced and Jeremy Corbyn still refusing to budge despite everybody’s best efforts, it’s unlikely things are going to change any time soon. Personally, my money’s on May winning it, and Corbyn forcing an(other) leadership election that he’ll go on to win. After that though, fuck knows, it all depends on how petulant the Parliamentary Labour Party MPs end up being.

BONG!

More light-hearted news now, because fuck me we need some, and Sun editor Kelvin MacKenzie has published part of an email sent to him by Blair’s spin doctor Alastair Campbell, in which Campbell absolutely tears into him. MacKenzie, you may remember, expressed “buyer’s remorse” after voting Leave and Campbell took great offence at such sentiments coming from the man responsible for front pages like this

which is not an entirely unreasonable view. I’m no fan of Campbell, but I’m also no fan of MacKenzie, so I’ll happily sit back and watch them savage each other. Hell, the only way it could be more perfect is if they were both UKIP members at each other’s throats…

BONG!

Speaking of which, UKIP’s only elected MP may soon be out of a job thanks to his criticism of his party’s “Breaking Point” campaign. You know the one that looks like actual Nazi propaganda

that was promptly reported to the police for “inciting racial hatred” (in breach of UK race laws), the one that Farage refused to apologise for whilst claiming an ad aimed at encouraging ethnic minorities to vote was actually the more racist poster of the two. Because he called it “morally wrong“, Douglas Carswell may find himself being expelled by the party (thus prompting a by-election, just like when he left the Conservative party to join UKIP two years ago). As mentioned, Carswell is the only MP who represents UKIP in Parliament: despite gaining nearly four million votes during the general election, they won just one seat, and this is so far the only thing I can find that’s ever made me glad we use First Past The Post in this country.

BONG!

In other UKIP news, this picture’s very popular in the Philippines

where “puki” means “vagina”.

Even in these dark times, there is still beauty in the world.

BONG!

Somewhat related, a thing that I keep forgetting to mention: Someone has uploaded to Pornhub a video of Boris Johnson’s victory speech after the referendum with the title “Dumb British blonde fucks 15 million people at once”.

Beautiful.

That’s not the only Boris video that’s doing the rounds though, as this footage of him being followed by hecklers and journalists is quite popular these days:

Though, personally, I prefer this classic of him leaving his house in the immediate aftermath of the referendum result:

So good, it has to be fattening!

BONG!

Of all people, former Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott eclipses Lohan and Barr to become the new
Best.
Twitter.
Ever.
On my deathbed, I shall tell my children that the one regret I have in life is not following him sooner.

BONG!

And that’s all for today, hopefully the weekend will be a little quieter but given how unpredictable the last week has been - and that the Labour leadership debacle’s still ongoing - it’s hard to say for sure. Still, if nothing else I’m settling into a bit of a groove with these entries, and people seem to like them so I’ll keep up with them as much as I can.

Seriously, I’m really flattered that people are actually reading these, it means a lot to me and I’m happy people are enjoying them. Thanks for making me feel a bit better about things, everybody; as a token of my appreciation, here’s a picture of my cat underneath a blanket.

Stay positive, and enjoy your weekend.