The Old Is Dying And The New Cannot Be Born

So...Brexit then... I have to say (along with everyone else in the universe) I did not expect that.

I admit that the last four blogs I wrote on this topic were penned (fingered?) firm in the certainty that Remain was going to win and that the status quo ex ante would soon reassert itself like it always does.

Except it didn’t.

Brexit as it has come to pass is an abomination. I didn’t have to be, but it is. There is seemingly no plan for what to do now, despite the Eurosceptics having had 30 years since the passage of the Single European Act to prepare for this moment.

The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear

He was funny in American Pie

So said the Marxist Antonio Gramsci, who would surely have interpreted Brexit as a “morbid symptom” like fascism was in the aftermath of the First World War.

Oh, there he goes - how far did we get before he mentioned fascism again?

But I think that it’s a valid comparison at the sociological level (if not the practical political YET) because this vote is only a vote FOR the UK leaving the EU on the surface. Its true nature is not a vote FOR anything, but a vote AGAINST everything. It is a vast NO - a howl of rage, frustration and anguish at the perceived state of our society from a whole host of different and often incompatible perspectives.

In the brutal light of hindsight, it was entirely rational – if utterly cynical – of the Leave campaign to avoid putting forward any visionof what a post-Brexit UK would look like. Not as cynical as admitting within hours of the result that they had no intention of keeping the promises that were made, but getting there.

Only as a purely destructive force, an instinctive lashing-out could Leave have won. Any positive programme would have given the game away and alienated a part of their angry brigade into making a more-or-less rational choice between commensurable options, instead of just putting on a Halloween party for the collective Id.

But here we are.

Well, ok Leavers – you’ve smashed the system. You’re in charge now. What are we going to do?

Perhaps this will release the pent-up energies of that half of the British population who have been excluded and downtrodden by the EU and the political elite. Perhaps we will see a flourishing of creativity as we, the people, take the initiative and start to forge a new destiny.

Or perhaps not.

I fear not. Ever experience to date suggests that - rather than being capable of rising to the challenge it has set itself - the British public is like a toddler who has (i) been denied a second packet of crisps, and (ii) has then shat in his hands, (iii) wiped it on his face and the furniture and (iv) is screaming “MUMMY CLEAN ME UP NOW!”

I feel it’s only fair to point out that this scenario has never happened with my kids – in all of its details.

Who do they expect to make everything better? Who exactly is going to run this country you’ve taken back?

Postwar consumerism and our collective inability to realise that the party is over have generated such a sense of entitlement that we take for granted everything we have and see everything we don’t have as a conspiracy against us.

And when it doesn’t get better – because Vote Leave don’t deliver any of the things the Brexiters voted for; because the immigrants are still here, offending you by speaking Polish; because there are even fewer jobs to go round; because all the hospital staff have left to work in Germany – who will be the first to cry “betrayal”?

Even if Brexit doesn’t end in disaster, it will get worse before it gets better.

I might manage to be constructive about this next time and think about how we can all pull together to make the best of it - because there are opportunities alongside the risks and at the end of the day we are all stuck with each other for better or worse. Part of me wants to look be constructive, part of me wants to take the piss out of the tantruming Remainers who are now ironically keen on overturning democracy - and part of me wants to entitle this blog "I For One Welcome Our New Dipshit Overlords". I guess this is my compromise.

For now, as we prepare to turn London in the Pyongyang of Europe, I will leave you with these thoughts from 19th Century constitutionalist Walter Bagehot:

A people never hears censure of itself. No one will tell it that the educated minority whom it dethroned governed better or more wisely than it governs. A democracy will never, save after an awful catastrophe, return what has once been conceded to it, for to do so would be to admit an inferiority in itself, of which, except by some almost unbearable misfortune, it could never be convinced.