June 23, 2016 is a date that “will live in infamy,” to quote the great Franklin D. Roosevelt. On this day, the UK voted by the narrowest of margins to leave the European Union. Since then, the country has been thrown into chaos as it decides how, when, and indeed even IF it should still Brexit.
I’m a born and bred Brit (although I now live in Berlin), and even I find this whole mammoth clusterfuck confusing. I can’t even begin to imagine then how confusing it must be for everybody else around the world trying to make sense of this sorry farce, in between laughing fits at how the UK has completely taken leave of its senses Hence, I’ve decided to demystify the whole topic for you. I’m going to explain Brexit’s origins, how the UK ended up voting for it, where we are right now in the process, and how, if at all, we’re ever going to be able to sort out this giant catastrofuck of shittery.
Lots of non-Brits may not know this, but the UK actually comprises four constituent nations: England, Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland (there’s some argument over whether Northern Ireland is actually a nation, a province, or a region, but that’s for another day). In my opinion Brexit is a direct result of English nationalism. Point blank, period. Scotland and Northern Ireland both voted to remain, and although the Welsh were sucked in by the Vote Leave’s campaign lies, consistent polling shows they have now seen sense and are firmly back in the remain camp. So what makes the English so particularly blind in this scenario? Their history for one. Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland are all effectively conquered nations, and it was England that conquered them. England has always been an aggressive little country with ideas above its station, and this is paired with a nasty streak of exceptionalism. The empire is this belief made concrete. The English saw it as their God-given duty to civilise the dark recesses of the globe, for example Australia (but who’s laughing now? We sent a load of convicts to live in paradise, and kept the cold, dark, dank, windy rock in the North Sea for ourselves. Winning). This idea that somehow English shit doesn’t stink carries on to this day. It’s taught in our schools and is championed on a daily basis by the UK’s disgusting, out of control right-wing press. A large part of English society still believes the falsehood that it was little old Blighty who stood up to Hitler all alone in the Second World War (with a little help from Uncle Sam). Anybody who knows anything about history knows this to be absolute bollocks (best English swear word ever), but can you see the point I’m getting at? This false belief of greatness pervades British society at every level. It makes us incredibly arrogant as a nation and leaves the door to power wide open for anyone who’s going to feed our ego, tell us what we want to hear and, basically, suck our dick
It’s because of this inflated sense of self-worth, and an inflated sense of self-preservation, that in 2015, our then PM David Cameron (he of allegedly stuffing his genitals into a dead pig’s mouth fame. Google it) decided in his infinite wisdom to call a referendum on EU membership. He did this because his party, The Conservatives (think Republicans with worse teeth, mummy issues, and bang into BDSM), were afraid of losing seats in Parliament to UKIP (the UK Independence Party). UKIP at the time was led by Nigel Farage (perhaps you’ve heard of him? Friends with Trump. Think the bubonic plague and Ebola had a baby. Out of wedlock of course, the man’s a bastard in every sense of the word), and its sole reason for existence was to take us out of the EU. So in order to try and secure seats in parliament, and put to bed the never-ending Tory (another name for the Conservative party) rift over Europe, Cameron offered up the UK as a sacrificial lamb. He never thought for one second, nobody did, that the leave campaign would win. Little did he know…
The campaign to leave the EU was one of the most mendacious, divisive ever. I mean we all know politics is a dirty game, but these guys really excelled themselves. Ten points to Gryffindor, or rather to Slytherin. Harry, Hermione, and Ron would never have allowed Brexit to happen. So many lies were told, perhaps the biggest being splashed across the side of a bus and toured up and down the country, claiming we would benefit from another £350 million a week for our National Health Service. Lies. They claimed Turkey was about to join the EU, meaning that 80 million Turkish citizens would have the right to come and live in the UK. Lies. They claimed the UK would have to join a nascent EU army. Lies. They claimed doing a free trade deal with the EU would be “one of the easiest in human history.” Lies. A cornucopia of lies, all of which have since been proved to be total untruths. They’re splashy, headline grabbing lies though. Lies that make it onto the evening news. Couple this with an easy to remember slogan, “Take Back Control”, that gets right to the heart of white people’s totally unfounded fears about being replaced in their own country (yes I said it), and you have electoral dynamite. You have to give the leave campaign credit I suppose. They managed to tap into the fears of both the older generation, (who hearken back to the 1950s where every face was white, and women knew their place) and the “left behind”, people who have seen falling living standards and wages, and have had their access to things such as education and housing affected. The campaign took people’s, in many cases, righteous indignation, and focused it on the big bad EU. It’s the most brilliant use of diversion tactics I’ve ever seen. The problem of course is not the EU, it’s our failed political and economic system. But when you have such a convincing narrative, a population that was (and in large part still is) ignorant to the benefits of being an EU member, and a press that hammered home the Vote Leave lies non-stop, after having poisoned the well against the EU pretty much every day since we joined in 1973, and you have a recipe for disaster.
The morning after the referendum, a stunned David “the pig molester” Cameron emerged from 10 Downing Street to offer his resignation. That’s right Dave, light the blue touch paper and then run the hell away. In his place we got Theresa “The Grand High Witch/Lizard Queen” May. And this is where it all really begins to fall apart.
The referendum result was 52% leave, versus 48% remain, the narrowest of margins. The country was pretty much split right down the middle. A real leader would have reached out to both sides of the argument, to try and heal the wounds and build consensus on how to move forward together. Not the Maybot. She interpreted this narrow win (based on lies don’t forget. It has also since been proven that Vote Leave broke electoral law) as a mandate to pretty much sever all ties with the EU and place us firmly in the pocket of Trump’s hellish USA. She did this because she wanted to keep her precious Tory party together, and in order to do that she had to appease the lunatic hard-right, EU hating fringe of her party, a grouping of MPs known as the European Research Group, or ERG. The members of the ERG are like a sad reunion of characters from a now defunct 50s UK sitcom. Their leader Jacob Rees-Mogg, (aka the haunted Victorian pencil) and his views belong firmly in the era of Downton Abbey. He’s anti-gay, anti-abortion, anti-everything pretty much, Mark Francois pops up on the news most days red-faced and screaming about how we won the war, and then spewing some nonsense about the German car industry, and Sir Christopher Chope has tried to block legislation banning upskirting and female genital mutilation. You get the picture, they’re a lovely bunch. Theresa May has been running scared of these buffoons since the jump off and has done everything in her power to placate them. Indeed, at many points along this journey, it has seemed as if the ERG are the de facto rulers of the UK as May quakes in the corner in her kitten heels, ashen faced and impotent.
The ERG are the fantasists who believe that leaving with no deal, i.e. saying fuck you to our commitments to the EU, both financial and otherwise, throwing a massive tantrum á la Love and Hip-Hop reunion, and storming off is the best course of action. It has been proven beyond a shadow of a doubt by every economist worth their salt that no deal equals national suicide. We might as well all hold hands and jump off the white cliffs of Dover together. Adios. More than that though, no deal would be like the worst divorce ever. The EU and Britain have been married for more than forty years. We have a house together, kids, and a timeshare on the Costa del Sol. A break up of this magnitude requires patience, tact, a great deal of effort, and acting in good faith from both sides. Yet time and time again May has shown how bad she is at negotiating, antagonising the EU and parroting the line “no deal is better than a bad deal.” Bullshit Theresa. No deal is not better than a bad deal. No deal is the nuclear option. There’ll be food shortages, rapidly rising prices, the army on the streets, hell the NHS has even started stockpiling medicines. We’re basically on a war footing. Maybe it’ll be ok for you and your rich crony friends who’ll be able to ride out the economic storm in luxury. The rest of us will be reduced to foraging for scraps and cannibalising Grandma when she slips into a coma because there’s no fucking insulin to treat her diabetes.
May has the interpersonal skills of a block of granite with Asperger’s, and her cabinet has become a byword for incompetence over their handling of the negotiations. The British public has been forced to take front row seats and watch in horror as these amoebas destroy our standing in the world and dry up the well of EU goodwill towards us. The Torys couldn’t negotiate themselves out of a paper bag.
So where are we now? We were supposed to leave on March 29 of this year. That didn’t happen however, because the deal May brought back from Brussels was such a monumental turd, it has now been defeated three times (one of them by the largest majority in parliamentary history) in the House of Commons. She has been forced to go cap in hand to the EU and beg for more time to reach an agreement in parliament, so we don’t crash out without a deal. The overwhelming irony of a country that was supposed to be taking back control, pleading for more time from the very organisation it was supposed to be wresting back sovereignty from cannot be overstated. Face palm emoji. Right now, it looks as if the UK will receive an extension until the end of the year to finally decide what the hell we’re doing. However, with Brexit things move faster than Mike Pence closing down Pornhub Gay when Karen walks in on him, so by the time this article is published, things may well have changed.
It’s not all doom and gloom though. One of the positive things to come out of this is the way people are organising to try and reverse Brexit. There is now a real chance that we might be able to hold a second referendum, this time based on facts, and remain in the EU. There are so many gammons (the pejorative name given to Brexiters) aghast at this option. They claim it’s undemocratic to let people vote again. That we made the decision and the “will of the people” must be respected. Sieg heil! They seem to conveniently forget that parliament was allowed to vote on May’s deal three times. Nothing undemocratic in that though. The very definition of a democracy is that people are allowed to change their minds. The only reason Brexiters don’t want a second referendum, or People’s Vote as it’s being branded, is because they know this time they’d lose. Enough people have now woken up and unplugged themselves from the Brexit matrix that Leave wouldn’t stand a chance this time.
For someone like me, who feels equally British and European, the last three years have been a waking nightmare. I have seen the country that I love taken over by swivel-eyed, ideological, madmen. Every story about a Brexit related spike in hate crime, or about some innocent person speaking their mother tongue on the street and being abused for it is like a stake in my heart. I have fought bitterly with some of my closest friends on the subject, and when I go home for a visit now, there is a part of me that looks askance at everybody and wants to know which way they voted. This, apart from everything else, is the legacy of Brexit. It has made us suspicious of those we love and made the polarisation of the UK complete, Brexiters or Remainers. One or the other. There doesn’t seem to be any middle ground. Perhaps that’s the problem.
The only solace I take from this whole sorry situation, is that demographics and time are on our side. In my opinion, Brexit, and indeed Trump’s election are two sides of the same coin. The death knell of a system and mentality that knows its time has come. The US and the UK are both getting browner and queerer. Marginalised groups are finally finding their voice and are refusing to take the bullshit anymore. Brexit is a last desperate attempt to take us back to an imagined time of greatness. It won’t work. Even if we do end up leaving, 78% of young people would now vote to remain if we held the referendum again today. Their voices won’t be able to be ignored for long and we will end up rejoining the EU. Fact.
So, fuck you Nigel Farage.
