Get over it in Brexistential Breakdowns

Much like the Renegade Master, I’m back once again, and I’m bringing a not-insignificant amount of ill behaviour with me.

I stopped for a while, for a bunch of different reasons, but to be honest I’d always thought entries would slow down after the initial impact of the result had sunk in and everything had entered the period of time I’m now mentally referring to as “the Summer of Trump” - the two or three months of not much going on domestically that means American events can take a higher billing on the nightly news, and we get to watch our friends over the pond challenge us, the current reigning champs, in the depressingly popular Olympic event of “voting to do something incredibly stupid based on your media-stoked paranoia over immigration”. If there had been two leadership campaigns going on I might’ve updated more frequently, but given how things panned out the Brexit diary ran the risk of becoming nothing but running commentary on the Labour leadership race (along with bitter missives about how socialism is the way and the truth, and everyone else is a neoliberal shit), so I defaulted to doing what I always do whenever I hit a writers block on my keyboard, and simply waited for it to feel right again.

Which took a little while longer than I’d have liked, because the truth is it’s also really fucking exhausting. I’m antisocial enough when I’m in a good mood, but having to immerse myself in what I can’t help but think of as “the real world” and trying to make sense of events, along with their causes and consequences, is something that just utterly drained me mentally; primarily because this one political event seemed to unleash a piercing shriek of unabashed racism and rampant xenophobia that swept over the nation and rippled through the world. Immune to such things as “criticism”, “facts” and “the truth”, it grew in power with every lie it told, every Daily Mail headline it inspired, and every halal butcher’s shop it firebombed, heralding the dawn of a new age in our world - the start of the Post Fact Era - with a yobbish chant echoing around the country and a story on the front pages of 80% of our papers.

That relentless torrent of shit ends up drowning you. The hatred and lies and untruths and downright fucking wrongs, the beliefs that inspire them, the social systems that enforce them, and the unbelievably depressing ease with which they spread and take hold, all of it, it just fucks me off. There’s seemingly no way to stop it, no matter how many lies you correct and no matter how much evidence there is to disprove a claim (such as, oh I dunno, 7 million Turks waiting to swarm us once they join the EU, or that number on the bus that literally everybody pictured in front of has now said wasn’t actually a claim at all) it doesn’t stop the lie repeating or change the views of those who believe it. Britain is committed to this act of folly, this jamming a brick onto the accelerator and steering towards the nearest cliff, for no reason other than just over 30% of the electorate believed the shit that the few who stood to gain from our complete removal from the union shovelled down their throats for fucking years.

I’m seriously fucking fed up of hearing that “the nation has spoken, and we must respect that” line, it actually makes me seethe with hatred, because it’s such a huge amount of bullshit that it should be printed on the side of a big red bus driven by Iain Duncan-Smith. Let’s take a quick look at some numbers: there are over 64 million people in this country, of which 46 and a half million were eligible to vote, 33 and a half million did, and ultimately over 17 million of those voted to leave. Those 17 million people are now “the nation”, and they have spoken for the other 47 million, and that must be respected. Why? Why does that wail of projected xenophobia get to be respected? Why does it get to get away with the blatant fucking lies it told, and have its wilful ignorance actively encouraged and normalised? Because it’s “the nation” and must be respected, despite the fact that two of the actual nations in this seemingly sarcastically-named United Kingdom spoke differently, but who gives a fuck about Scotland, Northern Ireland, or Gibraltar, right? They’re not “the nation”, they’re not “the people of this country”, they don’t have to be respected, their will doesn’t have to be carried out by those in Parliament who are too scared to stand up and say “no, not like this, not on the backs of lies and a four percent swing”, so fuck them. Let them crow and caw and cry for independence, the nation has spoken.

And we’re all supposed to just accept that, with nary a complaint nor raised voice, because that scant scraping of a barely-majority result said so; if there’s one sentence that inspires anger and resentment within me more than “we will respect their decision”, it’s “we won, you lost, get over it”. Fuck you. You do not get to tell me that I should accept that decision and you do not get to demand that I do so with silent acquiescence and yielding consent. It is a decision made based on xenophobia and paranoia, a foolish endeavour carried out by an irrational minority that utterly fucks up the futures of generations both now and to come, in numerous ways both subtle and obvious, and you fucking dare to tell me to just accept it and get over it? Fuck you, every Leave voter who has ever said this, fuck you all; you do not get to stomp unopposed over the rest of us. You would not have accepted it with the willing compliance you expect of us had the result been the same margins in the opposite direction, that fucking petition was created by one of yours before the referendum had even taken place for that very fucking reason, and you have the fucking gall to demand that we lie down and go silently into that dark night? Fuck you. I’m supposed to accept so significant a decision being made by that tiny majority, that 4% of a difference, and not protest the impact it will have, or the sheer madness of actually following through with the damned thing? Fuck you.

This entry’s been sitting here for around a fortnight now, because I didn’t really know how to carry it on; just reaching that previous paragraph had bummed me out so much that I didn’t want to keep at it, so again I backed away, gave it a little while, watched the madness of the US Presidential debates instead. The insanity of another nation as a distraction from the mania consuming my own, a remake adapted from the British version, the same script on a grander stage. Facts don’t mean shit because the Romanians Bulgarians Turkish Mexicans are lining up at your borders, and literally the only difference is our series didn’t run long enough to descend into sexism. It’s still the same mechanics of nationalist rhetoric and blatant racial profiling with an overdose of pure, outright made up bullshit to give it a soundbite-friendly sheen, with just a few localisation tweaks to adjust for the American audience, and seeing it everywhere is just fucking depressing.

But back to a recap of the original British series: Cameron leaves, literally nobody ends up standing against Theresa May so she rolls into No. 10 with a grand total of zero votes and checks that Larry the Cat has been fed. Angela Eagle spends more time threatening to run against Jeremy Corbyn than actually running against Jeremy Corbyn, leaving Owen Smith alone to push the boulder up the hill challenge his leadership, which promptly leads to Corbyn securing an even larger percentage of the party membership. Some MPs immediately started bitching, because the man elected to his position twice in just over a year is inherently unelectable, whilst others sucked it up and rejoined the shadow cabinet, thus proving me a modern-day Cassandra. In the meantime, May’s cabinet has done its best to deconstruct the traditional image of the Tories as being “old fashioned” and “out of touch” by seizing the modern zeitgeist and really ramping up the “burgeoning fascist tyrant” look that’s so hot right now. From refusing to guarantee the status of EU nationals currently resident in the country to requiring companies to publish the numbers of foreign workers they employ and even proposing that pregnant women must show their passports at hospital in order to be treated, May’s government has not wasted their time in giving the ECHR the finger and rolling back the years of progress, and they’ve done this primarily by announcing that Article 50 will be triggered by the end of March 2017.

Talk begins to turn to the terms of our exit, or rather the lack of them as, despite the PM’s continued reassurance that “Brexit means Brexit”, nobody’s actually proposed anything beyond reiterating the pre-referendum bucket list - controls on immigration, parliamentary sovereignty, access to the free market and all that jazz - and dismissing literally every attempt to seek further clarification by shrieking that “the will of the people must be respected”. So, on the one hand we’re facing what’s known as a “hard Brexit”, and on the other is a “soft Brexit”, which one assumes is either suffering from performance anxiety or has had a little too much to drink. Our language is archaic and obtuse, so I should take this opportunity to clarify that a hard Brexit is the full on nuclear option - no more single market access, complete control over our borders, the ability to negotiate our own international trade deals with other nations, etc - whilst a soft Brexit is closer to the concessions people make after several sessions of relationship counselling, mainly consisting of us leaving the EU and losing our seat on the European Council yet retaining single market access by conceding immigration controls. It’s the fairly popular choice amongst what I’m begrudgingly referring to as “moderate” Leave voters as it allows most businesses to continue trading as normal, along with guaranteeing continued freedom of movement and consequently not fucking up the workforce of many industries and our national health service, but a vocal amount of dickheads the more fanatical Leave voters aren’t happy with it, which I suppose you wouldn’t be if your primary reason for voting was “we’re full, fuck off”.

The problem I have with the idea of having a soft Brexit is, well, why fucking bother? We can’t have single-market access without freedom of movement, so if we concede that point, what’s left? Removing ourselves from the council means we will have absolutely no say at all when it comes to making the rules (which we have to abide by if we want to trade with the EU) and we will still have to pay tariffs and taxes (at a much higher rate given our pre-existing (and pretty sweet) conditions would now be invalid). It’s basically cutting off your nose to spite your face, as demanded by the editorial board of the Daily Express. There is literally no way that a soft Brexit would leave us in a better global position than where we were on the morning of June 23rd, we would gain nothing from it that we didn’t have before the referendum, and we would only be lowering our standing amongst the rest of the world whilst actually losing influence both inside and outside the EU. Assuming that the general population ultimately wants something beneficial to the country to come of this whole clusterfuck of a bad political gamble, “it’s sort of like still being in the EU, only we’re not as influential and we have to keep paying (more) too” will be a result not happily received by the blatant and empowered xenophobes more vocal Leave proponents. Likewise, the full-on “fuck you, got mine” alternative won’t be greeted warmly either; along with its own financial risks and the complications it throws up for global businesses currently using the UK as an access point to the European market, it also has the added sociopolitical complications of, well, what do we do about immigration? What happens to those already here? What happens to our citizens living overseas? And can we sort it out without another halal butcher’s shop being firebombed? (hint: no)

So I find myself asking the same question again - why fucking bother? Why bother if we’re only gonna be worse off one way or the other? Why not just, y’know, not leave the EU?

Because it’s the will of the people, all 17 million of them. Because they won, and everyone else just needs to get over it already. Alright, it means that we’re now in the position where a Prime Minister nobody voted for is currently denying Parliament the ability to have a say in the proceedings because those 17 million people voted to “take back Parliamentary sovereignty from the unelected bureaucrats in Brussels” and we’re going to respect that, damnit! Leavers are going to be pissed either way, as a soft Brexit will undoubtedly nark the ones who voted primarily on their anti-immigration beliefs, and a hard Brexit will ultimately put the wind up those who didn’t want to see the economy tank and somehow genuinely believed that the NHS would be getting more money (admittedly some may also care about things like the forced removal of foreign nationals, but I doubt many of them do). Many areas that voted to Leave will be financially shafted as a not-insignificant amount of these areas benefited greatly from EU funding, and with the value of the pound tanking despite us not actually leaving the European Union yet they’re unlikely to receive a similar amount of funding from the government once we’re actually gone. The economy hasn’t completely plunged its way into the shitter just yet, but that’s primarily because exports have suddenly become much cheaper for literally every other nation on the planet and everybody’s rushing to buy our shit on the cheap, whereas importing anything is now somewhat more expensive than it was in June and consequently we’re probably not going to be doing much of it in the near future. But don’t worry if you’re a Leave voter, you can simply blame this on the Remainers for “spooking the markets” by predicting things like the economy stumbling and the pound devaluing itself quicker than an original Star Wars figure being removed from its packaging, and demand that they put in the effort to come up with a suitable plan for extricating ourselves from the EU, as the majority of Leavers have been insisting since July because they couldn’t be arsed to think of one themselves.

More people need to step up and say “let’s not do this”. I mean, it’s not enough that we were all basically lied to on an industrial scale by media that refuses to accept any responsibility for the creation of the hostile environment of unashamedly blatant racism that’s resulted in a massive increase of hate crimes in the not even four months since the referendum, and by politicians who have since distanced themselves so thoroughly from the actual claims they actually made on as many TV shows, newspaper columns and fucking busses as they could plaster their shit over that they’ve even wiped every mention of every pledge from their official website. It’s not enough that going through with it will result in between ten and fifteen years of economic hardship that totally invalidates the last six years of brutal austerity measures we’ve had to endure that actually, genuinely, provably resulted in the deaths of many poor and sick people thanks to savage cuts in their benefits. It’s not enough that literally anyone with a strange accent or slightly darker skin now faces abuse and violence on the streets, having their businesses and properties burnt to the ground, their graves desecrated and their places of worship vandalised for the crime of not being some arbitrary measure of British enough. It’s not enough that the actual union of our kingdom that’s stood for over three hundred years might not be worth the velum it’s inscribed on as Scotland are now actually going to have an independence referendum, and to be fucking honest I’d be wanting another independence referendum as well if Theresa had promised me that my voice would be listened to before going on to declare “we voted as one United Kingdom”, thus shitting over the voices of half of that kingdom and an overseas territory. It’s not even enough to cause some tiny fucking measure of self-reflection that the man who sold a significant amount of people on how great fucking off the EU would be is the sort of person who is now actually appearing at Donald Trump rallies and defending his admissions of sexual assault “locker room talk” as “Alpha-male banter”. It simply fucks me off that none of this is enough to make us say “this is a really bad idea, let’s not do it, eh?”

Because that 17 million spoke for the nation. That tiny scraping of a majority has a voice that must be heard, a will that must be done, and fuck the remaining millions whose lives this unfettered lunacy will affect regardless of whether they voted or not. I mean, I don’t doubt that a pretty decent chunk of the general population believes as I do, and wants what I want, but they’re not important. They couldn’t stop the country following obediently into Iraq and Afghanistan, they’re not going to stop this. But the people in power, the MPs and the Lords, those with the ability and the means to actually prevent this from happening? Yeah, none of them are saying it. They’re bickering over hard or soft, like Brexit is a fucking Trebor mint, not whether we should actually follow through with this insane act of needless folly, and all their bluster will probably be as useful as Virgin Media’s tech support as Theresa May’s the sort of barely-restrained authoritarian (unelected) Prime Minister who’d tell Parliament to go fuck itself and kick the whole thing off herself.

There’s no round up of other events in this entry about to follow this paragraph, no BONG! or picture of Big Ben crying, surrounded by half-arsedly-pasted-in pictures of quintessentially British things like a cup of tea and two very different but very British Bulldogs. This entry’s basically an editorial, an opinion piece and a eulogy rolled into one, because Brexit has broken me in so many ways, and so many things about it fuck me off, but none more so than being told that I should get over it and move on. If the one last act of defiance I have against the direction my country’s being turned in is to bitch and moan and scream that we were all lied to, then I’ll do so until the day I die, and emblazon it on my gravestone so my obstinate prickery will outlast the generations yet to come who’ll be suffering the consequences of this isolationist madness and right-wing hysteria.

Fuck the 52%.

Their voice is not mine, and they will never speak for me.

Last updated October 14, 2016