Sovereignty: the debased currency of Brexit

Guardian 2019

For those who like their ‘freude’ liberally leavened with ‘schaden’; having a ringside seat on the slo-mo implosion of English political life that is Brexit has surely got to be the equivalent of riding Space Mountain on mescaline while being enthusiastically pleasured by [insert name of favourite actor/porn star/neighbour about whom you fantasise, here].

Yes indeed, the omnishambolic clusterfuck of the bodypolitic here on Airstrip One continues to confound, exasperate and stupefy in seemingly equal measure. From an objective viewpoint, I’d probably find it genuinely hilarious if it wasn’t happening in a state where I live while also having profound ramifications for the country where most of my family are resident.  Still, I keep finding myself trying to look at the bigger picture and I guess that’s where the ferrous content of this whole sorry saga goes way beyond being irony.

If we chose to ignore the grassroots reasons for a ‘Leave’ vote, we could blithely sidestep a thorny issue like the fact that it was sending a heartfelt (if manipulated) ‘fuck you’ to an obviously out-of-touch media and political class cosseted in the Westminster village. And even less palatable than that was the prospect of facing up to a long-unheeded wellspring of xenophobia that only needed to be tapped by the divining (lightning?) rod of weaponised Euroscepticism.

So, once we had trotted out some glib, superficial and supplicatory exposition on these trifles we could go on and explain how this whole grand project actually had the noble ideal of sovereignty at its beating British heart (did I say British? I meant English. Apologies: it’s just that the alliteration and the power of the unreliable narrator got the better of me #Empire2.0).

Ah yes, sovereignty…Apparently it used to reside in Parliament. Well, it’s been that way at least since the Dutch Invasion (I mean, The Glorious Revolution) in 1688. In 2016 however, those mendacious rapscallions the Tories (named for Irish robbers and highwaymen…feeling any ironic twinges yet?) decided to take their private civil war over Europe on a nationwide tour in big battle buses covered in blatant falsehood. 

Imagine their surprise when they won that silly old (erm advisory) referendum. Actually, you don’t have to imagine, you could see their fat, stupid, surprised (yet still bafflingly entitled) faces all over the news the morning the result was announced.

It’s the law of unintended consequences writ really large. The hubris of a snap election in 2017 to try and wrong-foot Labour only compounded the clusterfuck. Reliance on the Presbytaliban was the price May -- who looks more and more like a Ralph Steadman grotesque as the days go by -- paid for clinging to power. A century after the Tory party gambled on Loyalist support to prop up a slender majority and partitioned Ireland in return, it’s the same old Conservative and Unionist party, relying on the same old political wing of the 17^th century to prop up a morally bankrupt government.

Only this time round, the support of these short-sighted fundamentalists is leading almost inexorably to the break-up of that same union they keep wanging on about preserving. Ignoring Ireland has been the stock in trade of successive UK administrations and that is currently proving to their cost. But the failure of this particular band of self-serving careerists to recognise that England’s difficulty is Scotland’s opportunity may yet prove even more costly. If the Dunning-Kruger effect was a government, it would be this Tory administration. 

Calls for moderation mean little any more. Rhetoric from these zealots on the hard Brexit side has turned apocalyptic (yet at the same time, almost wilfully arcane) with Bofo and Lord Snooty (excuse me, the right honourable members for Uxbridge and South Ruislip and North East Somerset) opting respectively for ‘Carthaginian terms’ and ‘Dies iræ, dies illa’ respectively to characterise their heroic struggle to deliver poverty to the UK on behalf of the financial privateer class. The former presumably being a reference to sowing fields with salt after the Punic Wars while the latter is the opening of a medieval Catholic poem/hymn and means ‘Day of Wrath’. Public schoolboys? You gotta love’em (well, you do if you grew up in a culture of obsequious deference to patent fuckwits on the basis of their improbable accents and overweening sense of entitlement).

At this stage, I feel compelled to throw in a pseudo-erudite and crypto-prophetic reference of my own (and appropriately hackneyed and shopworn to boot): ‘Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold’…That not working for you? Hell, I’ll even give you another one from the same poem: ‘The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity’.

But rather than leave things all gloomy and portentious, I’d like to leave you with my favourite quote of the day and it comes from Marina Hyde at the Guardian who describes our ‘first among equals’ in terms I think we can all appreciate: ‘It’s as if someone has popped a grey wig on Munch’s The Scream, then cast it in an ITV drama about the female governor of a category-A prison.’