THOSE WHO FAIL TO PREPARE PREPARE TO…: The script is going to change in the Brexit debates, now that the UK’s star has finally been scraped off the flag of Europe by the busy hands of nostalgia freaks and kleptocrats.
Over now are the debates about just in time supply chains, Boris doesn’t need those (or respect the jobs of people involved in them), whether or not the EU can measure the curvature of a British banana (they can’t, we’ve taken back control of tropical fruits), or whether or not it’s democratic to use a cooked and crooked advisory referendum as a political mandate. It shouldn’t be, but thanks to FPTP and a curious alignment of Brexiters and Lexiters in positions of power, it has been.
Now the debate will focus on why life as we know it in Blighty has neither become an instant nirvana nor the entire show collapsed into the sea like a Yorkshire cliff.
“That’s because we’re in the transition,” our resident Brexit expert opines, already wearily, “we’ve legally left the EU, but nothing changes until the start of next year. It’s to give people and businesses the time they need to leave the UK before Brexit happens on the ground. Judging by some of the comments by Brexiters, laughing like drains over the failure of project fear to materialise, you’re going to spend a lot of time this year explaining this fundamental, obvious and easily accessible point of fact. Get over it.”
A battle was lost for want of a nail…
“A democracy was lost for want of enough people spending thirty seconds on Google finding out facts. Get over it. It was never about facts, it was about leveraging a wedge of the electorate’s uncertainty at a changing world to validate returning the UK to a feudal state.”
We’re in transition now, but transition to what?
“Hopefully a time when a debate can be won or lost on the participant’s grasp of the facts.”
That doesn’t sound very Brexit to me. Let’s do that.