Dear English friends.
Don’t read this if you’re easily offended. It’s about Brexit the UK but I’m not
even sure what that means any more.
On 23rd June 2016, you were asked a ludicrously banal binary question.
To leave the EU or stay in it? Two boxes, one tick. There was no manifesto. The two scenarios were not fully explained.
You were told nothing about what would happen if you opted to leave. If you were told, I don’t believe people would have voted for it because without EU money huge parts of Britain are unsustainable sovereign or not.
Even with a majority vote on an advisory referendum peddled on lies, this does not represent democracy where 16 – 18-year-olds weren’t allowed to vote on the single biggest issue to affect their future.
And you tell me this was a democratic vote?
But people bought it. Because clowns were saying – like Trump – what people *really* wanted to say but were too bound up by social mores to do so.
As far as I can see Brexit has made it ok to be racist, xenophobic, misogynistic and has given many millions license to say appalling things to complete strangers on Twitter.
But this is making Britain Great Again, isn’t it??
Of course, not all people who voted to Leave are racist. That’s like saying everybody who voted to Remain is passionate, whole-heartedly in favour of every single thing the EU does. Brexit has given racists license to spread their hate.
After two years of table banging about Project Fear and how facts explaining the dire economic, social and legal consequences of leaving the EU were all a hoax, no one in the fifth-wealthiest country in the whole world of sane mind should be compleating that an act of colossal self-harm really is an appropriate reaction.
Why?
Because now if you plough on with Article 50 to its terrible, dystopian conclusion, you won’t be able to live, work, love or study in Europe in quite the same way ever again.
The referendum was won not by UKIP but by populist papers appealing to prejudices and rage. They exploited people living in communities who were suffering under Osborne’s austerity.
And now you are being told BY EXPERTS that these communities – the communities who voted most strongly to leave – will suffer the most after Brexit.
Cop on.
I believe that instead of leaving, you need to negotiate a new Treaty with the EU.
You don’t need a divorce from the EU. You need medication and a helluva lot of counselling. But leaving – like this – because of such lies, with no plan, not enough civil servants to cope with the workload and a dire lack of trained negotiators, will mean you are likely to be fucked for lack of a better word.
Today there is a monumental effort on the part of the press to convince people that triggering Article 50 is the point of no return. It isn’t. And here’s why.
There is a European election in May next year and both France and Germany are running scared of the far right not to mention member state both would benefit greatly as has been offered to withdraw and stay in and fight your quarter for reforms.
Thanks to the Good Law Project, there is a chance that a truly democratic vote *could* succeed. If you really care about democracy and everything that brings, now’s your chance to prove it.
Demand a peoples vote.
Up to now the political architecture of Britain insulates those imposing austerity from the wrath of those on the receiving end. A refashioned British society, making it less like the rest of Western Europe, is akin to setting your house on fire and then revelling in the community spirit as neighbours come running to help extinguish the blaze.
A perverse sense of community.
16 million British voters are being fucked over. Their views – in this amazingly democratic referendum – don’t matter. The views of the 48% have been fucked right off.
This will only be a “done deal” if people don’t put up a fight for something better.
It’s about politics abandoning vulnerable people.”
You want something more than just economics.
I only hope that, as Brexit goes tits up and when the current generation dies out, the young have a chance of salvaging a decent life from this appalling mess your political leaders are creating – a slow bleed, broken monument to another age.
Setting aside the lowlights of English history — the slave trade, colonial barbarity the global economy is now in the throes of negotiating a wrenching transition to technological economies — with no hours contracts jobs replacing full-time positions and robots substituting for human labour this is no time to be hight and mighty.
With virtually every public agency struggling to do more with less while attending to additional problems wealthy Britons remain among the world’s most comfortable people, enjoying lavish homes, private medical care, top-notch schools and restaurants run by chefs from Paris and Tokyo.
When one looks from the outside in here is a country with a vast deficit problem, with its debt growing, spending billions on worthless Aircraft Carriers, Trident missiles while many measures of social well-being — are being ignored
The poor, the elderly, the disabled and the jobless are increasingly prone to Kafka-esque tangles with the bureaucracy to keep public support.
It not just that your democracy will be bankrupted, you will see the rats of profit abandoning the sinking ship depressing growth for years to come.
Remember that London bankers concocted a financial crisis, multiplying their wealth through reckless gambling; then London politicians used budget deficits as an excuse to cut spending on the poor while handing tax cuts to corporations.
Perhaps this is the real reason you are now looking down the barrel of a social crisis called Brexit.
Finally:
Will a peoples vote solve the impasse?
Only if the question to decide is set by a Citizens assemble and not by any political party.
All human comments appreciated. All like clicks and abuse chucked in the bin.
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