BREXIT hasn’t happened yet. Not at the time of writing this piece. If you’re reading this after the United Kingdom has left the European Union, then you know more than me, and I’m very jealous of you, future person.
October 2019 brings a great deal of tension with it. This is after all the critical month for Brexit delivery, or so we are told. Prime Minister Boris Johnson and Chancellor Sajid Javid have both said that the UK would leave the EU on October 31, deal or no deal. That’s great, and I want to believe it, but it is something I admit fills me with a degree of scepticism.
Parliament has done everything it can to block Brexit, and there are no questions that Boris has an uphill battle. While it isn’t Mount Everest at this point, it’s undoubtedly a Snowdon, and the Remainers in Parliament are frantically carting dirt to the summit like the residents of the fictional village of Ffynon Garw in The Englishman Who Went up a Hill but Came down a Mountain.
For over three years since the Brexit referendum, Remainers have been quick to blame Brexit for anything and everything. From real troubles in the present to supposed future events, Brexit takes responsibility for all of it according to them. But Brexit hasn’t happened yet.
Remainers blame this phantom Brexit for a long list of ills but could it be that the spectre of Brexit has done something for us?
Brexit has already provided something very important. It has ripped the mask of decency from the face of the political establishment. While many of us suspected the downright dirty nature of the establishment, it is one thing to suspect it and another to witness it every day in (in)glorious high definition.
The Remainers in Parliament have done everything they can for the past three years to delay and impede Brexit. Now we see the Liberal Democrats endorse a policy of stopping Brexit and ignoring the result of the largest democratic exercise the nation has ever seen. Even Jeremy Corbyn, a left-wing eurosceptic, has caved into the Remainer element in the Labour Party.
We see former Prime Ministers lining up to stop Brexit. John Major and Tony Blair, like a strange WWE tag team taking turns every alternate week to spew anti-Brexit nonsense on the national media. Their gimmick? Hypocrisy. John Major, the man who prorogued parliament early to hush up a report on the cash-for-questions affair on the cusp of the 1997 General Election, attacks Boris Johnson’s proroguing of parliament. Tony Blair, the man who ignored over one million people marching to stop the Iraq War, says we should listen to the anti-Brexit marchers and stop Brexit.
As writer Brendan O’Neill astutely observed, this is the phenomena of a class of people used to getting their way all the time.
Getting your own way all the time and then suddenly not has a profound psychological effect. We know of the concept of the compulsive liar, but I think a new classification should be added to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders – the compulsive hypocrite. But this psychosis isn’t limited to individuals – it plagues an entire social class with destructive consequences.
David Cameron gambled on the referendum and lost. The British people were supposed to say no. After all, the government spent £9million of taxpayers’ money to send an anti-Brexit leaflet to every house in the nation just before the EU referendum of June 2016. But the establishment kept fighting.
Cameron was replaced by Theresa May and her senior advisor; the Goldman Sachs alumnus Olly Robbins. They proceeded to concoct a surrender document that achieved something once thought impossible. They managed to unite Brexiteers and Remainers, albeit against them. Then May finally resigned to be replaced by Boris Johnson, a man who knows that he could go down as a national hero if he successfully delivers Brexit on October 31. But the establishment keeps fighting.
Through the old media, the new media, parliamentary procedure, think tanks and charities founded on government largesse, the establishment fights tooth and nail to stop the people getting their way.
It is this exposure of the establishment as snobby self-appointed social supremacists which has done the country a great deal of good. We can thank Brexit for that. This revelation of the method will mark the people and how they vote for the next few decades – with a new healthy scepticism and distrust of the political establishment.
Brexit will be achieved eventually and hopefully very soon. If it isn’t, then the nation risks facing a tide of reaction that it hasn’t seen since the English Civil War. Either way, Brexit will happen – it’s already started paying dividends.
