Well, they’ve voted for the WA (and PD) at the Second Reading, though not for the accelerated timetable https://www.theguardian.com/politics/blog/live/2019/oct/22/brexit-boris-johnson-deal-leave-eu-live-news?page=with:block-5daf4c148f08142786c4ffcd - they need to make sure the egg is fully addled before stamping the lion mark https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egg_Marketing_Board on it.
Some call this BRINO (Brexit In Name Only), calling
to mind a horned but myopic and generally placid herbivore. No, it’s a
Brocodile: a sly and lethally patient raptor, waiting for a bumbling gnu
new Prime Minister to blunder into its wide, toothy smile. Old and crafty, it strikes
with saurian speed at a negotiator’s vulnerability, and Boris is just a guy who
can’t say no https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A18kYnP4Pec
, which is why his domestic and our public affairs are in a terrible fix. (Yet De
Gaulle could say “Non,” which is fifty per cent longer.)
At this point, the waterhole metaphor breaks
down, for it’s not BoJo’s neck that will be twisted off in the EU’s death-roll.
He spoke airily of dying in a ditch rather than delay Brexit; now we do have
that delay, and absent a miracle we shall certainly not have Brexit. But
ABdeP Johnson will be all right – perhaps he’ll take his little black book of
contacts to an investment bank, like ACL Blair.
No, it is we who shall pay the price. In
cash, in EU disenfranchisement, in the semi-detachment of Northern Ireland, in ceding
control over fishing, taxation, business subsidies and other areas. In financial
ruin, if the Eurozone collapses while we are still co-guarantor for the EIB’s
debts; finally, perhaps, in blood and wreckage, if the EU’s ambitions for Empire
and command of UK forces tempt them into fatal overreach.
Our leaders were never going to outwit the EU’s,
who resemble the kind of lawyer who could write your will and surreptitiously
make himself the sole beneficiary. The incompetent amateurism of HMG’s half-hearted
efforts to free us are matched only by the Heath government’s in the process of
joining.
Nor does our Government have much to fear
from the Opposition, who are only determined that whichever way Pussy goes
through the catflap she should still be stuck in the house. With all their
procedural tricks, they are not an Opposition but a Subversion. Yet it’s not HMG
that they are subverting: really both sides are after the same result – one is playing
for time to complete their sabotage, the other is signing surrender terms while
trumpeting victory.
No, it is we who are the enemy. How long and
at what cost did we fight to cage an overmighty Crown within Parliament; and
how much longer was the battle for universal suffrage, even now less than a
century old https://www.parliament.uk/about/living-heritage/transformingsociety/electionsvoting/womenvote/case-study-the-right-to-vote/the-right-to-vote/birmingham-and-the-equal-franchise/1928-equal-franchise-act/
? We are John Major’s “bastards”, we, who opted to Leave, with our stubby
pencils.
Yet so powerful are our combined votes, our
Horton’s Who voices https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horton_Hears_a_Who!
, that they, too, must be muted. First Past The Post and the Boundary
Commission result in a House of Commons where only some 220 MPs secure a
majority of votes cast in their constituencies. In 1931 the HoC was for the Alternative
Vote, but the Lords wanted PR, and the matter fell https://api.parliament.uk/historic-hansard/commons/1931/jun/02/representation-of-the-people-no-2-bill
; 80 years later we reopened the issue https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_United_Kingdom_Alternative_Vote_referendum
but by then it suited both major parties to keep things as they are, whereby
psephologists and their databanks can calculate how to sway the swing voter in
the swing seat.
But that’s not enough. Democracy depends on
informed consent, and Power wants it to be managed consent instead. Enter mass
communication technology (from newspapers to radio, TV and beyond) and mass psychology;
and the counter-evolution of the masses’ awareness of power relations. Over the
last few years, growing numbers of us have become sceptical about mainstream news,
feeling that our perceptions are being moulded by selection and suppression of
facts, and spin.
The new social media have allowed a hundred flowers
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hundred_Flowers_Campaign
to bloom, briefly - some of them hermetic and rank, but that’s democracy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overton_window
; now policed in the West, and suppressed in China in their tightly-controlled Internet.
After the flowers, weeds: online disinformation campaigns have sprung up – the paid
political trolls, the 77th Brigade https://www.wired.co.uk/article/inside-the-77th-brigade-britains-information-warfare-military
and so on.
Moreover, in our modern atomised society,
where we drive to the supermarket in closed cars rather than rub shoulders in
the classic forum, offline we have limited direct experience of what our
fellows are thinking. So the dead tree Press have an opportunity to shape public
opinion by the way they report the results of opinion polls.
For example, The Sun said “Brits tell MPs to
vote for Boris Johnson’s agreement” https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/brexit/10165122/brits-back-boris-johnsons-brexit-deal/ based on a YouGov poll https://yougov.co.uk/topics/politics/articles-reports/2019/10/18/two-thirds-leave-voters-say-parliament-should-acce
which also revealed - further down – that only 17% of the general population
thought it was a good deal, as opposed to 23% who considered it a bad one!
Or how about the Daily Mail, which did a
savage handbrake turn on Brexit when Geordie “independence for Scotland, but
not for the UK” Greig took over the editorship? It commissioned a Survation
poll and concluded https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-7589705/Daily-Mail-poll-reveals-Britain-wants-MPs-stop-delay-Boris-Johnson.html
that half the nation backs Boris’ deal. Yet if you drill into the poll https://t.co/kiRyQXmIJA
and look at Tables 59 and 60, you’ll see that more people “strongly opposed”
the deal than “strongly supported” it (and only two-thirds of respondents
answered that question anyway).
This is a complex issue, one where facts do
matter and as Thoreau said https://www.nytimes.com/1987/10/25/opinion/l-one-man-s-majority-654087.html
, “Any man more right than his neighbours constitutes a majority of one.” I
wonder what results we'd have got if respondents were restricted to those who
did more than read the Daily Mail or watch BBC News, and instead looked at the
online commenters' analyses of the pros and cons of the full deal.
It’s Them v. Us, I’m afraid. It was deeply
ironic to watch ex-PM Mrs May castigating the Opposition in Parliament https://www.express.co.uk/news/politics/1192892/Theresa-may-speech-brexit-vote-today
for failing to honour the statutes they helped enact - withdrawal from the EU,
and the triggering of Article 50.
Did they mean it? she asked. Well, did she,
when she then came to the Commons three times with her Withdrawal Agreement? Or
her successor, who has returned with much the same, plus lipstick? Or those who
now call for another Referendum, with a choice of a rotten deal or Remain - the
latter being the one thing that was definitively ruled out in 2016?
Yes, we are being pushed into the jaws of the
Brocodile. And I’m not smiling.
1 comment:
"Our leaders were never going to outwit the EU’s"
They never intended to and never tried, any unshackled businessman given the go ahead would have wrapped this whole thing up in no time at all or we would simply have left, all this has been stage managed by an elite who have the numbers to thwart whatever is put before them, no and I'm not smiling either.
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