Tag: brexit

So with domestic issues back in the mix and honeyed words like ‘you’re unbearable – if you don’t fuck off – I’ll hire a JCB to get you out’ jokingly bandied about, I decided to try my hand at conflict resolution.

Arriving in Brussels – I stopped in for a quiet pint with Donald Tusk to see if we couldn’t iron out some of this backstop nonsense. Suggesting that a statue of Churchill with a squadron of Spitfires flying out of its arse in the middle of the European Parliament might help nudge things along, I found his vision profoundly lacking, so there was nothing for it but up the game.

Kidnapping Jean Claude Juncker, and wrapping him head to toe in a French maid’s outfit, I stuffed him into the back of a Nissan X Trail and delivered him to Boris Johnson’s office, hoping to reawaken his Continental spirit – and to his credit – Boris redrew his red lines all over Jean Claude, until JC’s gag fell out and suddenly it was all ‘managed catastrophe’ instead of ‘Bonjour Cherie’.

Slipping some acid into Jacob Rees Mogg’s port and whisking him through the 19th century section of Madame Tussauds looked like it had real potential – especially when I hid behind Napoleon and said ‘We surrender to ze magnificent British’ in my most Allo Allo accent – but the wheels came off shortly afterwards when Nanny finally tracked his mobile phone and gave me a good thrashing with a hairbrush that once combed the privates of Henry V’s favourite courtesan.

Really struggling by this point – I flew in a team of IT engineers to try and reprogram Theresa May’s soundbite function, but it was apparently more of a hardware than a software issue, so on to Jeremy Corbyn who was found trying to purchase a viable Brexit policy from his local charity shop but had to settle for a new cardigan. He seemed confused bless him – so I accepted the Werther’s Original he offered in the spirit of unity.

Next stop Ireland – where suggestions to just sail the whole place a bit closer to the UK and make the Good Friday agreement an Easter Egg hunt fell on deaf ears. After one final call to Donald Trump pretending to be the Russian Ronald MacDonald – he just kept repeating ‘Iran bad. Saudi Good. No Collusion’ after his latest intelligence puppet show….. at which point, I finally abandoned hope.

Limping home in despair – the final insult is that the wife doesn’t believe a fucking word of any of this and there’s a fucking JCB en route as we speak.

I have rarely been more emotionally damaged by a political event as I am by Brexit. As we turn our face away from the world and bury it in jingoistic fantasy, two profoundly dangerous currents– nationalism and a flexible relationship with reality are swallowing us whole.

Xenophobic rhetoric has become mainstream, validated by a May government that makes me long for the cuddly warmth of Thatcherism. The dynamic melting pot of cosmopolitan ideas that made me proud to be British is being strangled while academics, scientists, creatives, and the hard working migrants on whose back our boom was built are leaving.

Our negotiating position is a poorly constructed fiction, our negotiators are a testament to glib delusion, every last independent study demonstrates both the net benefits of migration and the economic damage that awaits us, and businesses are already looking elsewhere for a stable future.

I am an immigrant who has only ever called Britain home. Throughout my years abroad I have always felt a direct connection to the spirit of openness that Britain represented to me, but today I am strangely lost, despite feeling a citizen of the world – an ideal that Mrs May went out of her way to mock.

And for all those on the left who voted to leave – I hope you’re happy. Thanks for voting an abstraction when we had a reality to deal with. Jeremy Corbyn is very fucking far from my savior. I value strategic nouse alongside principle, because principle alone is no match for the forces we face.

He’s a nice bloke and I agree with much of what he says – but he is way out of his depth in this pit of vipers. And blaming it all on the ‘mainstream media’ doesn’t wash for me – someone truly competent would be communicating far better than this. Yes there is bias. No he isn’t equipped to outwit it.

So here we are. A one party state with fascist tinges as the latest prime minister in a long line of mediocrities opts to pander rather than lead.

I have been told to get over it, not least by my family, but I just can’t. I’m nearly 40 and this is one of the most painful blows to my identity that I have ever known. Strange – because I never fully realised what being British meant to me until this moment.