Brexit Breaking Point
Not since Thatcher's time, in fact, when those of us watching Westminster from afar could be heard to mutter: 'Who are these people?' as they happily started a war in the South Atlantic to take our minds off the dire state of the UK economy; and drove the miners to strike and then shut their industry down in its entirety, along with most manufacturing in the UK. Do you remember that wee creep John Selwyn Gummer force-feeding his child a burger to prove fastfood was safe? Or Heseltine telling us the best thing to do about Liverpool (and a few other industrial cities 'in the North') was to leave it to rot? Do you remember us all being exhorted to join the 'property-owning' middle classes, only to have the mortgage rate rise to 14%?
Or maybe you remember the poll tax. I do. My painter vanished halfway through painting the inside of my house. He was sofa-surfing to avoid paying the poll tax. He explained he could either pay the poll tax or maintenance for his kids. And if things got too hot for him, he'd be off to his granny's wee hoose in Donegal, which is where I suppose he went when I lost track of him and had to get another painter in to finish the job.
But I digress.
This lot. We've got used to dismissing them as incompetent. But I'm revising that view of them.
Why did Chris Grayling offer a contract to a non-existent company to operate non-existent ferries out of a port that wasn't in operating order? This has ended up costing the tax payer millions in compensation. And will probably cost more in the future.
Why did Karen Bradley defend rogue forces operating in Northern Ireland with the 'Nuremburg Defence'? She must have known 'they were only obeying orders' wasn't going to wash with people who had lost family members in The Troubles.
Why did Jeremy Hunt come to Scotland and use his speech to tell Scottish people we couldn't have a second referendum on independence when he must have known that was not a tenable position?
Why does Theresa May get up in Westminster every week and lie her wee kitten heels off about brexit? She must know the press gallery will spot her lies, just as the MPs on the floor do. Not that the press will react much. They seem to be treating brexit as some sort of training session for cub reporters: how many ways can you report May's refusal to call a vote on brexit without calling it what it really is? A refusal to operate a democratic mandate.
So, to come back to my original question, why do Tory politicians do this?
I've told you part of how they get away with it: press complicity. But the main reason they get away with it is the English electorate. The accepted nonsense about brexit is that the electorate voted to leave the EU and the wishes of the electorate have to be obeyed (well, there's a first time for everything). But here's a revelation all the way from Scotland: Naw. The electorate didny vote to leave the EU. Scottish people and voters in Northern Ireland voted to remain in the EU. Voters in many parts of Wales, London and most of the big cities of England also voted to remain. Beside that, the turnout overall was 72%. So a helluva lot of people (about 28%) didn't vote at all.
Tory politicians are reacting to brexit in the same way as the morons in everyday life do since the brexit vote when they hear people speaking a language other than English: they feel entitled to say whatever the hell they like. They tell people to 'go home.' One moron even told a woman and her child (in Wales) they should speak in English when they were speaking Welsh. So it is with Tory politicians, especially those in May's faction. They can say what they like. They can be as daft as they life. She doesn't dare sack them. They don't feel obliged to resign. They're earning good money and their wages count towards a decent pension (more than you or I will ever have) when they are eventually kicked out of office.
And there's a good chance they won't be kicked out, because the English electorate has to be the most spineless, supine bunch of voters in the whole of Europe. I suppose those of us who live in Scotland had the advantage of an earlier referendum on independence in 2014, which got quite a lot of people interested in politics. We also took a right scunner to the media - press and TV - from which some newspapers and TV stations have never recovered.
English voters seem to be unable even to move from Tory to Labour as a protest. Not that such a move would be all that impressive: from Tory: pretty far right - to Labour: still on the right.
So what happens next? It's the 11th of March. 18 days until brexit. Maybe May will postpone the vote in Westminster again so that the Tory bastards (as Major called them) have even less time to manipulate events and are, in the end, forced to accept that if they don't vote for May's plan they will be left carrying the can for a total disaster.
Brexit will be signed off. And then the real brexit - not the phoney Tory war that's been going on - will start. And we, the poor schmucks who have to pay for all this - and not just in money - will find out exactly how badly off we're going to be. So what do you think? Will we be paying for this fiasco for a decade? 50 years? Longer than that?
For the first time in my life, I've found myself thinking: Well, I'm 70 so it's not going to affect me. But then my conscience takes over: did we really expect to hand over Scotland to people who would make things worse for our kids and grandkids?
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