The End is Nigh!

There are people who believe in unicorns, ghosts, the afterlife, palm reading, graphology, various gods, faerie folk, genies, Jeremy Corbyn, hobgoblins and accurate economic forecasting. While there has been no proof over millennia that any on this list exists there is plenty of recent evidence that the last is but a figment of fantasy. If we knew what tomorrow would bring the world as we know it would become even more predictably unpredictable. It is a classic paradox: if you knew ‘for certain’ that the shares you buy today would double in value next month, so would everybody else. The ensuing rush would create a bubble and most would lose their shirts on the deal.

Predictions do not forecast the future, they shape it; at least they do if you believe them. The converse is illustrated by those who, having been told by their doctor that if they carry on as they are they will grow fat, become diabetic, go blind and die, ignore that advice and then go on to prove the prognosis. Why do we listen to some forecasts but not others? How do we react to forecasts we know are designed to alter our behaviour in a way we are reluctant to adopt? Do we ever believe the prognostications of those for whom we have little respect? And what do we make of predictions based on the unknowable, complex and entirely speculative machinations of financial and political institutions?

Let me see if I’ve got this right: According to the Chancellor of the Exchequer and the Governor of the Bank of England, if we leave the EU without a deal the economy will still grow and we will all be richer, but not as rich as we might have been if we went with May’s deal, which is a tiny bit less more-rich than Chequers, which is not as more-richer-still as staying in the EU, assuming we could do so retaining all rebates and vetoes, which is not an option and so can be excluded from the analysis, even though it wasn’t. The statements are riddled with ifs, coulds and maybes and hedged all around with disclaimers: Warning, the value of your country may go up as well as down...

It is clear to all (who voted to leave, at least) that these words have nothing to do with actual forecasting and all to do with scaring cabinet colleagues into capitulation. Whether the country at large believes any of it is irrelevant as the decision has been taken from their hands and their instruction ignored in favour of a politically motivated and manipulated future. If Hammond fully understands this and is signed up to it (and all indications suggest he is) then he is committing sophistry, if he doesn’t he is a fool.

Tory MPs stand by their principles

Fool me once, goes the saying, but if you keep on predicting Armageddon and it doesn’t happen, ‘Peter’, who will be there when the wolves finally come for you? The push to scare Tory MPs into caving in has begun in earnest and as Andrea Leadsom has surrendered, so will others. The future of Britain as a sovereign nation will be decided by the superstitious acceptance of an unproven philosophy. If you want to prove me wrong, Phil, Mark... just give me Saturday’s Lotto numbers.

Merder

Well, it’s official. British gravity, so-called, is under threat. Since it was our very own Isaac Newton who invented the stuff, just after he saved the country from the Spanish Armada at the Battle of Britain, you would think that this uniquely British commodity would be free from Brexit woes, but no. It turns out that under EC Directive 1066 citizens of the UK have only been held down to terra firma by licence since Tony Blair’s government effectively outsourced our boots-firmly-on-the-ground resource to the EU.

The planned Scottish space centre will also be under threat as vacuums, including the vacuum of space, are strictly controlled by EU directives. We would only have access to outer space via the inner space of the Earth’s atmosphere, continued supplies of which are also threatened by a no-deal Brexit if PF, the department in charge of putting the fear of god up us, is to be believed. The level of anti-Brexit hysteria out there is such that it would be just a small step to imagining that even oxygen may need to be stockpiled and rationed unless some ill-defined ‘deal’ is put in place.

But fear not, sanity is at hand. Forget the outlandish prognostications of doom and disaster, for there is a concern far more parochial and immediate at hand. It turns out that sandwiches and snacks are under threat and people are deeply concerned about a  potential avocado drought. What, we can’t even rustle up a sandwich now? Apparently all sandwiches – in a country which actually has a town called SANDWICH for fuck’s sake – must be made by cheap foreign workers, so that lazy British workers can afford them, with all ingredients sourced abroad. Worse than that is the realisation that our world is so screwed that we’ve allowed a British Sandwich Association to exist; can we do nothing now without a committee? 

The BSA is of course only the latest in a long line of inconsequential and unknown assemblies of nonentities who have been pressed into the Remain cause. It feels like this whole association was concocted purely to add to PF’s litany of impossible things you never knew existed which you only just realised you couldn’t do without. What next? It would hardly raise an eyebrow to learn that even the weather has only been on loan from Spain – I expect they’ll want Gibraltar back in exchange and reckon that after a prolonged period of downpours we’ll be so depressed we will agree to anything.

Well let me tell you, Johnny Foreigner, the British can handle depression. Hell, we were bred to disappointment. We are phlegmatic because that is the only way you can survive been reviled by all and winning nothing. You think we are in a froth over maybe not getting Brexit? Have you learned nothing? We never expected to be allowed to leave; that we’ve strung it out this far is a major triumph. But don’t think that we have lost our good solid British pessimism and if we end up remaining it’s only what we expected in the first place. We only did it for a bet. Here, hold my beer.

This is no more than we expected...

But we’re also bloody minded and if we’d realised how seriously you lot were going to take it we’d have played you harder from the beginning. If we’d known just how nasty you were going to get we’d have been nicer about it all, just to piss you off. When our backs are really against the wall Brits have a long history of fighting back. You think Brexit is a shit storm? Bring it on – our shit is smellier than your shit. Merde, the French call it; well ours is merder.

Mad enough?

Greed is good? That’s so eighties. Now it seems fear is fantastic, terror is terrific and horror is... well it’s simply huge, darling. Every day another little drip, drip, drip of malevolent poison is trickled into the nation’s ears. Unemployment up a tick? That’s entirely the result of even discussing the referendum out loud. Value of the pound, the FTSE, the deficit? Up or down, either direction is bad and all of it is caused by evil Brexiteers saying they don’t believe that leaving the EU would end world trade. They have no comprehension of the damage they do to society.

You see them in the park, hanging about outside schools, waving their – and I can scarcely say this without feeling a little sick – Union Flags - about. Do they not see how it might affect the children? Spreading their reprehensible lies about how that nice Mr Osborne was economical with the truth, or how the lovable Dave C just wants us all to be friends. And even now when that honourable man (Oh, don’t you just want to hug him?) Mr Juncker has said how sorry he is for not listening all they want to do is spread their nasty nationalistic fascistic hate.

Don’t they understand the age we are living in? You can do and say whatever you like, so long as you don’t hurt the superior yet delicate feelings of others. You can hold any belief as long as it is on the approved list. And you may identify as any race, age, sexual proclivity, gender or faith, just so long as you avoid the proscribed combination of middle-aged, straight white man with Christian values. If you do so identify, you’d have to be mad, although if you were actually insane you may well be treated better than if you were rational about reality.

Insanity is not just a modern malaise but it is enjoying a resurgence in popularity in a world where personal responsibility may be abrogated at the drop of a hat. Addiction is another favourite affliction; an addict is a poor sufferer of an uncontrollable urge. The jury has recently been out on whether Anders Breivik is A) Evil, B) Insane, or C) a helpless victim of the urge to kill – addicted to rage. Madness and addiction; maddiction.

In our bright new brave new world of course, the charge that you should be held to account for your sins is largely confined to normal, well-adjusted white people. In a way it is not their fault that they suffer from capability and mental stability, but relief is on its way. Under the EU scheme of things, everybody understands that the cure for what ails you is more of what ails you. As Juncker has explained, the cure for EU incompetence is always more EU incompetence. The cure for fear then, must be more fear and so they are piling it on in large daily doses.

Vote for aaaaaargh!

Of course, every action has unequal and mostly opposite reaction before you get your satisfaction. What happens when we all go a bit mad and become addicted to fear; how will we live without our fix of fright? As we get closer to Midsummer Madness day, June 24^th 2016, will we fear losing our new religion of dread and dismay? If fear becomes the new normal and the threat of disaster should we cancel our membership is the biggest provider of that fear, maybe voting to leave the EU will be an urge we cannot fight? Wouldn’t it be delicious if the reason we eventually left was because we were too scared not to?

Count me out

I don’t think I believe anything any more. I stopped believing ‘in’ things many decades ago – things like deities and the possibility of humans co-existing in everlasting peace and the like - but I was always open to facts and accepted truths. Later I began to judge all such facts – statements, statistics, reportage and the like through the microscope of my own widening experiences and disappointments. It turns out that most of it is a crock.

For instance, I thought science was the bedrock of all established understanding of the known universe. But then along came ‘climate science’ whose acolytes and adherents bear more resemblance to the faithful, bowing and scraping at the altar than the sceptical ‘prove it’ monkeys that rigorous research needs. And a whole lot of other fields of conjecture also queer the factual pitch by masquerading as ‘science’ – economics, psychology and pretty much the whole of the humanities.

In the end people believe what they want to believe and most of us come to trust our own nose before the nasal appendage of others. Right now the biggest field for fake science, guesswork and general mountebankery is, of course, the state of Britain post-June 23^rd. Nobody knows what a post-Brexit world will look like, but we all know that, despite David Cameron’s feeble fiction about some specious ‘special status’, remaining a member of the EU will not satisfy a majority of the public; even many remainders are deeply suspicious of the EU’s direction of travel.

When the facts are absent the feel of the campaign takes on a greater importance and just lately it has been feeling dirty. The Remain campaign’s Project Fear is starting to yield returns and alongside their prognostications of doom is the belittling of those who wish to leave. How long will it be before they start referring to the Leave camp as fruitcakes, loonies and closet racists?

They say we are fantasists and dreamers who would put the common good behind some vainglorious hankering for a long gone Britannia. Little Englanders who would return us to some backwoods existence, grovelling for scraps from the world trade table. But we saw last week what sort of a man turns from a lifetime of opposition to grovelling subservience. Once dubbed a ‘Labour firebrand’ Jeremy Corbyn’s wooden performance in sackcloth and ashes showed a beaten man.

The beaten man of Europe

Forget about what ‘facts’ turned him. Corbyn’s lacklustre surrender to a hated higher authority had all the hallmarks of an orange-suited hostage forced to read statements on YouTube shortly before their bloody despatch. Convert or die, convert and die; I didn’t believe a word of it. If this is the true image of the new European count me out.

Settle Down

We all expected Project Fear. We all expected the Remainders to embark on discrediting the character of any high profile supporters of Brexit. But I’m not sure we expected the desperate levels of depravity to which they have sunk. Plagues of boils, being overrun with African migrants from the jungle (in Calais), destitute, friendless and isolated; there is a gleeful apocalyptic pessimism behind every Remain prediction of doom for an independent Britain. Tory MPs in particular have clearly been ‘persuaded’ to abandon long-held convictions – perhaps they have been threatened with some new convictions?

The thing about the Remainders is they think it’s all over. For Britain. They think that a thousand years of history, of exploring and bestriding the globe, must be put firmly in the past and that we must settle for a common future in the European Union. They are behaving like old men finally accepting defeat and living out their years in the retirement home, staring at the fading wallpaper and forgetting about what they once were as they sip their tepid, greasy soup and gum their thin white bread into edible submission

That word, settle. Settling is what you do when you trade freedom and ‘settle down’ into a more mundane life, from which even the smallest adventures of the past look more glorious. It’s what you do when you think you’ve exhausted the optimism of the single life and imagine that together you’ll be better. For both sides, settling often means lowering your sights and putting aside what might have been. Settling implies an acceptance of less; the very word, settle, is loaded with compromise.

Settle comes from an Old English word meaning ‘to sit’. Sit down, know your place, stop fidgeting, be content with your lot, settle down... behave. It implies the end of joy and the onset of mundanity and in the case of settling for the EU, it is loaded with the same foreboding that marriage holds for men. There is, of course, the prospect of the settlement reached in divorce. It may be messy, we may come off worse, financially, but it’s better than settling down and waiting for the end, having your decisions made for you as if you weren’t competent... or even there in the room.

Settle down. Soon you will be at peace...

Remaining in the loveless marriage that is the EU is settling for less than we could be. It is giving up; giving up on our future, giving up on our past and the longer we stay, the less individual we become. The EU is the end of Britannia, indeed it is one of the very aims of federation. Voting to remain is voting for our wings to be clipped and for future generations to be taught to fear flying.

David Cameron’s campaign is based on his supposed settlement with our EU overlords. It’s a crock and I’m just not ready to settle; it feels too much like approaching death. So, “Do not go gentle into that good night. Rage, rage against the dying of the light.” And to the EU say, "Settle off!"

Finger Pointing

The wagging finger wags and having wagged, wags on. Listening to the arguments being stacked up on either side it seems clear to me that not only are the Remainders and the Brexiteers overstating their cases – the latest reports from government and their stooges show doom and disaster on the outside and Iain Duncan Smith has already called one such report a dodgy dossier – they are also preparing their defences for after the fact.

Whatever happens, in or out, for many years, possibly generations to come, the losing side will seize on any negative outcomes as a direct result of the decision. If we stay in then every single EU ‘ever closer union’ announcement, law, edict, etc will be pointed at and the tutting and the “I-told-you-so”s will ring around the choir. The Brexit crowd (I’m one of them) will not be swayed; the EU should have nothing to do with Britain apart from being friends and allies and should we stay in the hated project (sadly, still the most likely conclusion of the referendum process) we are not going to go quietly. Little other than an all-out revolution will satisfy us after a ‘remain’ vote.

If – please, please, please – we leave, then every bank failure, company relocation, currency instability, increased cost of living, etc will be immediately branded as being all down to our departure. Brexit will be the whipping boy for every government fuck up for years. Climate change? Brexit’s fault. Price of oil? Brexit. Nuclear war? Brexit. In fact the otherwise sober UK government is embarked on promulgating such an apocalyptic fantasy of post-Brexit decline that even ten-year olds will be insufficiently gullible to swallow it.

As each side seeks to find chinks in the other side’s arguments – Stuart Rose’s gaffes have been absolute gifts - It’s clear to me that nothing is clear to anybody and the quantitative arguments for in or out are nebulous, unsubstantiable and frankly irrelevant. Each side will vote in its own self-interest although, from my admittedly partisan view it seems that the balance of altruism is firmly with the Leave camp as evidenced by the sniping, doom-laden and personally insulting attacks of the massively pro-EU biased, big-state-dependent parts of the United Kingdom. (Yes Scotland, I’m looking at you.)

I'm talking to YOU!

So forget the numbers game, there is little enlightenment to be found in the figures of either side and few verifiable facts will be deployed. Instead, embrace the emotional and vote with your heart. If you love the thought of being European, by nationality and by inclination then vote to become an ever closer part of that proto-nation. But if you feel even a little bit British and especially if you identify as English there can only be one direction of travel in relation to the EU – hard astern. Let’s back out of that cul-de-sac as fast as we can, blame our unfortunate wrong turn and subsequent 40-year dissatisfaction on a dodgy satnav and get back on the right road.

Carry on Camping

Ah, Brexit beckons and the starting gun has been fired for the referendum on 23^rd June this year. Cameron’s chaos is all around as Boris does the entirely expected and does what’s best for Boris; it is expected that a number of other Tory MPs will now break ranks with the PM and campaign to leave. This, of course, is the cue to ramp up the rhetoric. Tarzan Heseletine has waded in, although nobody could stay awake long enough to hear him repeat his Euro-drivel and blah, blah, blah, blah, blaaaah.

It’s sickening, all this fear-mongering. Despite forty years of contrary evidence David Cameron’s side (which will probably win, but be despised forever when it does) is trotting out all the usual, lazy blather: Our security is at risk outside the EU – it’s looking pretty dodgy as it is, thank you very much. Outside the EU our economy will suffer – yet our current success is despite, not because of the moribund union. More migrants will come if we try and control our own borders – only if you let them, you fools. And my personal favourite; Britons will no longer be able to get cheap flights to cheap holidays if we leave.

Because of course, Spain will be closed for business and British holidaymakers’ Euros will be worthless. Yes, the airlines will immediately hike the prices for the filthy foreigners that keep them in the air. The hotels will auto-demolish because British tourists will no longer be able to afford the punitive visa charges levied by the now enemy nations. And of course, Brits and their cash will be so unwelcome in the Eurozone that they will in future only be allowed to take their holidays in the UK.

Okay then, let’s assume that all those hilarious threats are true. Dodgy Dave, from whose camp comes such prophecies of doom said “We want to end the something for nothing society”. Well here’s the late news, Dishface, it’s already here and thriving. So much so in fact that entire families, indigenous and otherwise, live their whole lives on the state. We effectively pay them to be on holiday all the year round and they already do it right here in Britain. As Keith Moon famously sang on stage and on screen, “When you come to Tommy’s, the ‘oliday’s forever!”

Just as Blackpool has already done – or so it would seem if you ever dared to walk through its blighted streets – we could make all British resorts into enclosed exclusive holiday camps for the permanently unemployable. We already pay for their every comfort anyway – food, shelter, entertainment, healthcare, etc – so why not formalise it? Forget the concept of all-in holidays on the Costa Del Crime, we could have all-in lives on the Costa Dem Taxpayers, all packaged up and out of sight... behind razor wire fences.

Redcoats... so much nicer than brownshirts.

Natives and migrants alike, once you have lived in Britain without working for four years you get to wear the special wrist-band which identifies you as being entitled to a life free of care and worry. And furthermore, to the greater good of society, you get to live that life far out of everybody else’s sight. Some would say this solves nothing but it’s a solution all right; it may be the last solution we’d ever need. When you come to Britain, the ‘oliday’s forever...