Brexit: How to lose friends and alienate people

So….It’s been a good long while since last there was a post from this very rusty guerrilla news agency. I apologise of course but I’m still hoping my reader(s) understand. Training has been intensity in ten cities and in the middle of that madness, the world kept turning and spinning in a kind of out-of-control gyre that Yeats wouldn’t have made much poetry out of if he was being completely honest….

So, what’s happened since last I put pen to paper?

Well, nothing I hadn’t predicted in my darkest days. The coup continues. Brexit was never anything other than an attempt by the selfish right to take control of the sections of public life that hadn’t already been sweated and rendered down to private control.

In that scenario, the human stories don’t matter. It doesn’t matter that I'm Irish and about to complete paramedic training and that my partner is French and my daughter is German. It doesn’t matter that I grew up experiencing my first bombing in Ireland at the hands of the British Government at age 4 (Dublin-Monaghan, May 17, 1974).

It doesn’t matter that alienated EU citizens make up a huge proportion of the NHS staff who don’t seek UK payment for their training and education.

It doesn’t matter that people of colour who spent their lives in this questionable country are now being sent home because they can’t prove how their parents came here in the 40s, 50s and 60s….

It doesn’t matter that children die in refugee camps because a British Home Secretary felt there was more political mileage in denying a radicalised mother her child’s birthright than saving the life of an infant.

None of this matters…apparently.

Well…actually it does and if you don’t like that, you can kiss the back end of my coin purse. We (Black and Irish) rebuilt this country post-war and showed tremendous dignity even when your small-minded populous were happy to put out signs that said “No Blacks, No Dogs, No Irish”.

And we (Blacks, dogs, Europeans and Irish) remain here: maintaining the health and transport infrastructure of a country which is still chronically and pathologically unable to acknowledge the significance of our contribution.

It’s not my country but I do care about it and I wish it wasn’t going down the fucking toilet.

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