OH FOR SCHUCK’S SAKE : THE UK HAD TO LEAVE THE EUROPEAN UNION OR THE “MANDATE” DERIVED FROM CRIMINAL INTERFERENCE IN THAT FAMOUS OPINION POLL BACK IN 2016 WOULD NEVER HAVE BEEN FULFILLED. WE ALL KNOW THIS. Mostly because John Humphrys shouted it at everyone for a few years before retiring from the Today programme. Democracy dies if lies don’t thrive. Isn’t that how it goes? Who cares? No one in the UK political or media landscape much. Because we’re better than all that.
And we all know what we were voting for.
Remainers were voting to remain part of the most powerful trade bloc on Earth, to protect the minimum standards that guaranteed equality in human activities and protected the environment, to maintain the valuable FOM rights that the EU enfranchises members with at birth – regardless of the wealth of the family someone is born into, and vitally, to continue the peace project of the EU on a continent that for thousands of years previously, routinely, slaughtered one another.
And Leavers were voting for a bus.
Because of the industrial scale of lies and false promises some were susceptible too. Say it quietly…some were racist. Some were oblivious. Some just wanted to give David Cameron a kicking. Some were stuck in the 1970’s in terms of labour relations, and still are. So genuinely believed it would improve their lives.
And because one of the UK’s most prominent and powerful Conservative politicians fronted the campaign to leave they were wooed. He talked their pants off, as he’s talked many pants off in the past. Who cares what comes next? It’s the gratification of the moment that counts.
And no one’s overalls were more successfully talked off than the fishermen of the UK.
And now they’re stuffed. Because now they can’t sell into the market on their doorstep in a timely enough fashion to satisfy their customers, which they were warned repeatedly would happen before the UK triumphantly left the EU. If the EU became the third country it demanded to be.
But a negligent media and a dishonest political class didn’t care about all that. They just kept up the pillow talk all the way through until they’d finished screwing the fishing industry senseless. Pumped and dumped.
And now, for now, the fishing industry is well and trully schucked.
But it’s not all bad. It’s becoming an unintended environmental windfall. And later today Britain’s biggest environmentalist, Boris Johnson, is rumoured to be planning to celebrate it by declaring – the “UK is now leading the world in shellfish preservation!”
But nobody will be buying that either…so what’s next? Re-join the single market? Re-join the customs union? The fishermen should retrain as ballerinas maybe? Ballerinas who are retraining in digital?
No one can say. But what all can agree on is that the catch that has landed is not the one everyone was promised was in the net. Maybe the oysters are happy as clams though? Still on the sea floor? Maybe that’s the only tangible benefit of Brexit.