Brexit, Lexit, Fucked it.
It’s taken me a while to get round to writing about this for many reasons, but mostly because it’s been hard to know what to say without being engulfed in rage.
Sadly, on 23rd June (also my birthday) 52% of the UK decided to vote to leave the European Union, and that 4% is a little too hard to swallow. A landslide victory of 60%-40% might have been easier, but this feels like a deep injustice.
The fact of the matter is that there is a large portion of that 52% who have expressed already their anger at the outcome, their anger at the lies and deceit forced down their necks from the numbers on immigration to the £350m available for the NHS and rightly so, they should feel angry, they should feel enraged that everything they believed in has been shattered, in fact, two of biggest driving factors of the Leave campaign crumbled within hours of the result.
The problem for me is that now we’re left with a country that is completely divided, divided by lies and anything else that takes our fancy, everyone is angry and no-one is benefitting from this absolutely ridiculous farce we’ve had to endure for the last 6 months. 6 months of shit, 6 months of men in suits telling everyone what’s best, men who were elected (though only by 37%) to make decisions on our behalf - the entire fucking point of having a government. So what do they do? They take their £74k a year and hand the BIGGEST decision of pretty much any of their political careers over to the public. The public who are so uninformed and so turned off from politics that we are now seeing Google searches of “What is EU?” rise 250%.
A public so let down by their government, so full of mistrust that they just wanted to kick back at something. Anything (as we saw in Middlesborough). Their future, their children’s future, anything to have their voice heard - not actually understanding the implications of such a decision - both Leave and Remain voters are guilty of this. Scaremongering fucked us all.
Then, we have people right across social media platforms sharing memes about how Facebook is turning into the House of Commons and statuses claiming “I’m bored of hearing it, shut up now”
NO. Don’t shut up, never shut up, because this is exactly why we’re in the position that we’re in - people are disengaged, people feel disenfranchised, people feel let down, and we need to talk about it. We need to talk about how young people can engage with politics in a meaningful way instead of having their politics shouted at some poor Polish woman nursing her baby, or some poor chap on a tram in the middle of Manchester at 10am on a Tuesday morning.
WE NEED TO TALK ABOUT THIS. We need to have an open dialogue about how to deal with the rise of nationalism and xenophobia that is sweeping the country and turning it into a cesspit of toxic hatred.
We need to work out how the young and old can compromise on the reshaping of the country, we need to talk about how self-interest gets no one anywhere fast, or anywhere at all for that matter.
We need to talk about it because no one (apart from Nicola Sturgeon) seems to have any idea about where to go from here - no one in government had even planned for this, this is how out-of-touch they are with the entire country, not even one plan.
There also needs to be some responsibility taken on both sides of the argument, there’s little point in bickering over who voted for what when we’re about to see the rise of the far-right across many countries in Europe - this is not where we want to be, this is exactly the kind of world we said would never happen again. Never again would we Other a people.
The worst thing is, this rhetoric has been building for years, media outlets such as The Daily Mail forcing absolute tripe down people’s throats “you’re losing your country” “what about your identity?” “immigrants are stealing your jobs” - no, they’re not, you simply cannot steal someone else’s job, you cannot rob someone of their identity by residing in their country, you cannot lose your country because it’s anchored to the seabed with shit tonnes of rock. Jesus, this all feels so meaningless. Another thing I’m concerned with is what seems to be absolute confusion that has become apparent from some Leave voters, between Ideology, second/third generation immigrants, refugees, and the free movement of EU citizens. There’s an entire album on Facebook that documents this confusion, people who have been born here, but their grandparents came from India and Pakistan being told to “fuck off home” after the EU result - I mean, what the fuck? People who work harder than, and pay more into the system than the people shouting abuse at them. People are making no differentiation between anything and are fighting the world with a “it aint white, it aint right” attitude and it’s fucking scary.
Nigel fucking Barage of shit, with his Nazi-esque poster, a photograph of SYRIAN refugees making an incredibly dangerous and deathly journey to find peace and a marginally better life than the current multitude of shit and terror they’re going through, and he uses it for his shitty campaign against free movement of people, it’s unbelievable, it’s honestly the most disgusting shit - and he has the bare faced cheek to stand up and say ‘politicians lie, i am a man of the people’ - whose fucking people? Not in my name, Nige. Not in my name.
I’ve lost myself to rage so, peace out.
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I’d like to think that someone, somewhere has a really good plan, a plan that can appease both remainers and leavers, because at it stands, it seems there is no plan. Both mainstream parties are currently at loggerheads, meaning no one is really concentrating on Brexit and where we go from here, whilst across the pond, everyone is feeling nervous and impatient, the chances of retaining what we currently have as a member state within the EU are fanciful and wet-dream worthy, it’s just not going to happen. I’m not entirely convinced (unless it’s happening right now as I type) that article 50 will even be triggered - Cameron states that the (advisory) vote must be respected and carried out, yet he is handing that over to someone else, that someone else, while looking like it might be Boris Johnson, may well have a different take on this - though I feel that the political fallout might be too much to handle unless we can use that as leverage for actual renegotiations on reform, but here, I am being idealistic.
I know the EU is a bureaucratic nightmare for some people, but I genuinely believe Britain has made the wrong decision and that we might feel this much faster and much deeper than some of us would care to admit.
I received a text from an old friend this afternoon (our friendship broke down a while ago - though perhaps now is the right time to change that, symbolism and all that) stating that now is the time for revolution, and I hope he’s right, I hope through this we can actually (at some point, because now is too painful and raw) come together and realise that hate and division will get us nowhere, that people are stronger than governments, and that the world can be a good place for everyone regardless of creed or colour, or geographical location.
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