Not sure where to begin with this, as thanks to my operation(s) the last Brexit entry - or “Brentry”, if you will - I did was well before Article 50 was triggered so there’s some catch-up to be done regardless, but now Theresa May has announced there’s going to be an election in six weeks which is significant enough to write about so she’s kinda forcing my hand here. Of course, there’s always the chance that it won’t happen because it’s not something she can just decide to do, two-thirds of Parliament has to agree to it and that’s what they’ll be debating later today, but honestly it’ll happen because for it to not happen would require Jeremy Corbyn and Labour to vote against the Government, something they’ve not got a great record of doing in recent weeks. So yeah, later today Parliament will debate (and pass) a motion to hold a general election early, and on the 8th of June we’ll have that election (and on the 9th, as many witty and original Twitter users political pundits have commented, we’ll see Corbyn’s resignation).
So, the triggering of Article 50: a landmark event that happened on the 29th of March, officially starting the two-year negotiation period that the UK has to extricate itself from the EU, conclude all business and trade deals, pay back all owing debts and payments, and hand back the box of the EU’s stuff that’s mostly some books, a few albums and that one shirt that they never wore and left round the UK’s house ages ago but are now suddenly desperate to have back. This was promptly followed by the passing of what’s known as The Great Repeal Bill, which basically repealed the European Communities Act of 1972 that originally took us into the EU and allowed EU laws to take precedence over ours wherever the two conflicted. This has been the contentious thorn in Nigel Farage’s side for the last 45 years, and the mechanism by which all sorts of outlandish claims about burgundy passports and bendy bananas have flourished in our society. Shortly after that, the Government published its own white paper on its plan for Brexit, its plan for what we can achieve and the things we’ll do after leaving the EU, and right now I’m going to break for a new paragraph because this next bit fucking deserves all the emphasis I can give it.
The Government’s own white paper contained the line “Whilst parliament has remained sovereign throughout our membership of the EU, it has not always felt like that.”
Read that again.
Parliament has remained sovereign throughout our membership of the EU.
All of this is happening because someone, somewhere, didn’t feel like we were.
Even though we were.
And it’ll be a Tory. Sure, Farage is the one everyone thinks of, but he’s not even an MP, his party’s weight isn’t worth shit in Parliament, fuck even the Greens are treated more seriously than UKIP. No, it’ll be some shit in blue, one of the backbenchers Cameron was worried about losing, kicking up enough of a fuss and prompting Pig Big Dave to propose the referendum in order to shut everybody up and get a bit of party unity, to help ease the worries that governing with a majority of just 12 was bringing. Despite actually being sovereign, despite us actually having all the control that they shrieked and screamed we needed to take back, despite us never actually being ruled by unelected bureaucrats in Brussels, someone in the Conservative party felt like that, and thus all this has happened.
And nobody’s stopping it.
Talks began with a fairly conciliatory tone, with some discussion about allowing UK citizens who wished to remain part of the EU to apply for EU citizenship, but any remaining goodwill was pissed up the wall the moment the UK started kicking off with Spain over Gibraltar, an overseas territory we care so much about that we’re completely ignoring their wants and wishes and forgetting the fact that 96% of them wanted to remain. There had been some fears that Gibraltar would be a source of conflict during the negotiations - much like the status of EU nationals living in the UK, and the status of UK immigrants nationals resident in EU countries, has been - but comments by former Tory leader Lord Michael Howard that Theresa May would take the same stance that Thatcher took towards the Falkland Islands were seen as not fucking helping somewhat inflammatory. The Sun, in their usual calm and rational manner, ran this headline (that they’d later project onto the side of the Rock itself)…
…directly underneath an ad for cheap holidays in several EU countries, including Spain.
Oh, and this was just six days after Article 50 was triggered.
Six days.
Shortly after that the country took part in the annual tradition of “freaking out about the word ‘Easter’ being dropped from Easter Eggs and shit to avoid offending Muslims because it’s Political Correctness gone mad”, an event so significant Theresa May condemned both Cadbury’s and The National Trust for removing Easter from the promotional material for their Easter Egg Hunt, despite refusing to condemn Trump’s travel ban, Saudi Arabia’s Human Rights record, and this overwhelmingly sexist Daily Mail front page:
Naturally, the fact that the websites of both Cadbury’s and The National Trust still contained the word Easter, as did many eggs, didn’t stop a histrionic nation from having its shitfit, and the incident warrants mention as it serves not only as an insight into the mindset of the general public, but also an example of the amount of power a certain wing of the media still has over the country, and the volume at which a certain demographic can still speak. This is the nation, remember, that the government trusted enough to make a decision over something as significant as our continued membership of the European Union, a country that still freaks out this much - yearly! - over Easter Eggs dropping their first name.
As the number of businesses and industries that would be negatively impacted by us leaving the EU continued to grow, and as England continued to squander any remaining good will the rest of the EU might have had for it, the voices calling for an independence referendum in Scotland grew louder. Wanting to hold a second referendum between 2018 and 2019 would give Scots a clearer choice between the terms of Brexit they’d have to accept, and continued membership of the EU as an independent nation, argued Nicola Sturgeon. Now is not the time for Scotland to have a second referendum, argued Theresa May, before deciding that now was the time for a general election instead.
And so, we find ourselves here, on the day that Parliament will debate and vote on the issue, all it needs is a two-thirds majority, a somewhat larger majority than actually fucking leaving the EU apparently needed, and it will probably pass because Jeremy Corbyn’s response to Theresa May’s announcement was “I welcome the Prime Minister’s decision”, words he’s quite fond of saying these days. Also, to refuse to agree to an early election is seen as political suicide, interpreted as it will be as the Labour party seeing itself as unable to win a general election, so it’ll pass despite the added weight the doubtless opposed to the idea SNP would’ve added to Labour’s numbers. Remember, we’re not talking a simple majority here, two thirds of Parliament have to agree to this, just one person more than one third is all you’d need to stop this blatant attempt to take advantage of an opposition currently being seen as ineffective, and to lumber the public with whatever deal you can come back from the EU with (assuming Theresa “No deal is better than a bad deal” May’s Government comes back with a deal at all).
It won’t happen though. This’ll pass, Parliament will be dissolved, we’ll have a general election on the 8th of June, and on the 9th Jeremy Corbyn will proclaim that the real fight begins now. And I just know this is going to happen, because this is the front page of the Daily Mail today:
In which people taking part in the democratic process because they’re concerned about the impact that leaving the EU will have on their lives are labelled “Saboteurs” by the newspaper that once published this:
And that’s, y’know… About right, really. For the Mail, at least, there’s nothing really unusual about that front page.
That’s normal.
That.
It’s normal over here.
And that’s why we’re fucked.
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