Churchill once said the best argument against democracy is a five minute conversation with the average voter. While this may still hold water, it is increasingly the case that five minutes spent listening to our elected leaders today yields much the same conclusion.
Over the last eighteen months or so since David Cameron’s ill-fated attempt to quash Euro-sceptic rebellion within Tory ranks, the UK has been in a holding pattern uncertain how or where to touch down in the promised land of Brexit.
Despite a seemingly inexhaustible supply of hot air to keep the dream aloft, with the clock running down it now appears that hyperbole is morphing into denial. Confronted with reality, accounts of positions previously voiced with great gusto and patriotism are swept under a Union Jack rug and forgotten.
In proving even a stopped clock is right sometimes; Boris Johnson in late 2016 claimed Brexit would be a Titanic success. So caught up in his own theatricality, he forgot the Titanic was a microcosm of societal inequality and poor standards culminating in disaster en route to the Promised Land. Nonetheless he bumbles on unchecked with any variance from fact chalked up to boyish charm, bombast, and downright good egg-ism.
Akin to watching pennies drop in near zero gravity, Teresa May’s March 2nd admission that things weren’t going to be quite so rosy came as little surprise to anybody following this painfully slow paced saga from its much heralded launch to the current tawdry and ungainly spectacle. Unconvinced of her own cause and bullied onward by her public school cabinet, she cuts an ever more hunched and jaded figure, reduced to an emaciated version of the erstwhile aspirant to Margaret Thatcher’s crown. A leader by default and looking everyday more the victim of a Shakespearian rise to heights never intended for her.
David Davis in the role of Mad Hatter cheerily sidesteps all his prior claims of how it was going to be a sinch. This would be more remarkable had his sleight of hand not already been manifest on other occasions. In a move worthy of Houdini, the number of reports that had been commissioned in wide ranging studies into the impacts of Brexit went from around 58 in ‘excruciating detail’, to subsequently being laughed off as none. One would surely be forgiven for seeing it as at least backtracking if not bold faced lying or perhaps just plain incompetence. But no, just another day at the office with no political capital lost and no professional price paid.
The poor and disenfranchised who wanted their country back are pressed into the service of those who would happily see them on indefinite zero hour contracts whilst pursuing an altogether different agenda for themselves. Once again foot soldiers in someone else’s war they are fed on myth and their sense of belonging caressed with the trappings of a nation’s proud history. A history in which they have always been on the lowest rung and although no more than subjects, they clamour for the return of their sovereignty.
That most incongruous champion of the poor and disenfranchised, Jacob Reese Mogg completes an unholy trinity of bombast, self interest, and a yearning for yesteryear when Britain was great for at least some of its population. This may chime with those who feel a kinship with Trump’s coalminers in bemoaning they have been left behind. However, unbeknownst to them the yesteryear in this script has them cast in Dickensian squalor as Mogg et al take on their roles in the oak panelled board rooms of a post apocalyptic Honourable East India Company.
The truth has long been a casualty of war but it’s now just an outlier in so many political assertions. Donald Trump is hardly the first to disregard facts and espouse flagrant lies knowing that the next news cycle or twitter storm will render it irrelevant with the press pack chasing to keep up. It has been adopted widely as a tactic and disconcertingly accepted without enough question.
It is theatre and although the admission is free, leaving will cost dearly.
©David Sanders 3rd March 2018
