It’s understandable that we unrepentant Brexiteers should be annoyed with Andy Burnham for creeping around whispering sweet nothings to the very same European popinjays who promised to give us a kicking if we dared disobey them a decade ago. They don’t need much encouragement, the rotters. Look at spiteful old Michel Barnier, rising Dracula-like to have another bash. Now, like a shark smelling the blood of an Englishman, Barnier has pushed up the lid of his sustainably-sourced coffin and returned to his first love: attempting to put Perfidious Albion in its place.
I, for one, will admit that I yearn to re-open old wounds. If the Remainers want a Forever War, I am so in
Talking to Laura Kuenssberg this week, Barnier could hardly contain his excitement as he listed the ways he looked forward to the EU making us squirm. Some politicians thrive on power while others seem worn out by it; this was the first time I’ve seen one turn to the other, as the years were visibly falling from the face of Barnier as he emoted excitably about the contortions he was anticipating from this very naughty nation-state.
If the message before Brexit, boiled down to the cliches of a failing love affair, was ‘You’re fat and no one else will want you’ then this was like ‘It won’t be like it was before, you know. Things are going to have to change round here before I take you back. I’m the boss now!’
Hence Barnier warned us that we would not be permitted to ‘cherry-pick’ or go ‘a la carte’ and scolded that ‘There will be no possibility to have one freedom and not the other. The four freedoms are clearly the four conditions to be inside a single market.’ Off to the Red Room of Pain with you, bold Britannia!
But along with the natural irritation which this teacher-knows-best performance naturally evoked in me, I could detect in myself a hint of…excitement, perhaps? Those were brilliant times, the years of the ‘Brexit bundle’, which I’d compare to the way people had sex with strangers during the Blitz.
Political precariousness perhaps heightens other emotions – if you’re not a wimp, that is. If you, are, you’ll find it ‘divisive’. But divisiveness – like populism’ – is only democracy in action; except on very rare occasions such as war against a foreign power or the defence of freedom in our own society from those who would curtail it, people aren’t meant to agree. When they do, they’re generally living in a dictatorship.
So yes, though I’ve got to pay lip-service to the idea that I totally hate the way Burnham and his fellow Labour quislings are going back on a decision decided democratically a decade ago, I’m also ‘up for it’ as we used to say back in the day.
And don’t tell me the other side aren’t looking forward to another round; we well recall how the Remainers, who had stolidly lived such dreary consensus-seeking lives, seemed to become quite unhinged as they got behind ‘Project Fear’’s argument that Brexit would be a catastrophe for the UK. Indeed, they were practising a brand of thinking which is popularly known as ‘catastrophising’: to make a resolvable situation into an absolute nightmare. This was perhaps most luridly seen in the predictions of a strain of ‘super gonorrhea’ which would be the sprinkling on the top of the planes grounded and stock market crashes which Brexit would cause.
A group of people who had prided themselves on being moderate all their lives discovered the visceral thrill of getting one’s knickers in a twist and didn’t ever get over the glow of righteous anger they felt – hence their recklessness in coming back for more when they must know how duplicate it makes them look.
So as it’s going to happen anyway, let’s stop carping from the sidelines; I, for one, will admit that I yearn to re-open old wounds. If the Remainers want a Forever War, I am so in.
It helps that I don’t fancy their chances. The Europe we voted to leave in 2016, though objectionable in its smugness, could not be said to be a scary place. That’s all changed now, thanks to economic stagnation, mass immigration and self-immolation; the Remainers land of lost content is gone. The blue remembered hills reek of tear-gas, due to the pitched battles between the strengthened Islamo-Left and the enfeebled forces of authority.
Madame Le Pen stands poised to take power – surely not a suitably fragrant bedfellow for Gina Miller! Spat Barnier on Laura K; ‘We have our own Farage. It is Mrs Le Pen. The same populism, the same lies, the same false promises.’
This time around we have the wonderful Mrs Badenoch leading the Conservatives
I was going off Farage, but hearing him snap back – ‘It’s the same old Barnier – arrogant, out of touch and a bully. He vindicates our decision to leave every time he opens his mouth’ – brought back all the old feelings.
And of course this time around we have the wonderful Mrs Badenoch leading the Conservatives, whose maiden speech in 2017 concluded: ‘Democracy is not always predictable; its results are not always elegant; it can throw up results that no one expected – but we adjust. The British Parliament always has adjusted, and that is why it is the oldest in the world: it takes its lead from the British people. People are rightly concerned about what Brexit will mean for the country, for their jobs and for their families. But I do not believe that winter is coming. I believe that the vote for Brexit was the greatest ever vote of confidence in the project of the United Kingdom.’
Though my words will not be as measured, I’ll be looking forward to taking on the monstrous regiments of Remainers once more; I’m especially keen to re-examine Emma Thompson over her profoundly moronic, stunningly misanthropic statement that the land of Shakespeare and the Smiths is merely ‘a tiny little cloud-bolted, rainy corner of sort-of Europe, a cake-filled misery-laden grey old island’.
Let’s accept the challenge in the mean-minded, underhand spirit that Retraining – as we might call this new twist on Remaining, having in it as it does sinister undertones of George Orwell’s ‘Goodthink’ – intended it. Bring it on!
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