It’s time I took some personal credit for keeping the issue of the UK’s membership of the European Union at the top of the political agenda. Well. Ok, if you insist, I’ll share the credit with my wonderful fellow campaigners.
We marched, leafleted, wrote and stood in burning sun and teaming rain to keep alive the benefits of EU membership and highlight the enormous and enormously expensive failures of Brexit. We kept the flame alive.
We were helped in our cause by the UK having a parade of hopeless Tory governments
Everything the Tories have touched has ended in failure, from the non-existent car ferries of Chris Grayling to the many millions of pounds of PPE money that has enriched the offshore bank accounts of the least deserving. We are more heavily taxed and now we are less well looked after in our public services than any of us can recall. Most of the country can sense that the UK is a land in decline. Brexit was meant to see the rebirth of global Britain.
On the political horizon awaits a triple whammy for the Conservative and Unionist Party. While Labour may not win the forthcoming General Election, the Tories will heavily lose. With that defeat will evaporate the Spirit of Leave. The central ethos that small government is always better government will wither and, at least for a time, retrace its steps to the obscurity of Right wing think tanks lounging in Westminster’s Georgian streets. The final kick in the teeth for Brexit will be a game-changing election in Scotland that will see the SNP wipe out the Tories, take almost all Westminster seats and secure over 50% of the popular vote.
As predicted, the electorate has begun to see the emptiness of the Brexit promises
The mood music in 2023, as we approach the great electoral showdown, will be ugly. All that the extreme British Right dreamed of now stands in danger. Leaving the EU was to be the key to unlocking massive deregulation that would create, in this green and pleasant land, Singapore on Sea.
Business would boon, taxes slashed, enterprise released from its chains and a new, bright, glad, confident morning would witness Britain rising from the socialist slough of despond that had enslaved it since 1945. Lord Rothermere, Rupert Murdoch, the Barclay family and the True Blue regional media that exists from Lands End to John O Groats will not let the dream die without a bloody fight.
“Remainers” can expect to be cast as the Devil’s Spawn, an anti-democratic rabble of comfortable middle-class elitists sworn to steal from the people the 2016 instruction to quit the EU. Ian Botham gave vent to this very sentiment when guest editor on one of BBC Radio’s year end editions of the Today programme. He thinks Remainers should just shut up.
Everyone but the people who have been in charge since 2010 will be blamed for national decline
Other groups likely to be fodder for an increasingly desperate Media of the Right are trades unions, Scottish and Welsh national parties, Greens, the hierarchy of the Church of England, local government bosses and NHS managers, The Guardian and, of course, the BBC. A special place in Hell will be reserved for a mysterious and secretive group known as the “Permanent Leftist Elite.” They will all be accused of being at the heart of the nation’s failings. For good measure, pictures of Harry and Meghan will be strategically placed next to pictures of Keir Starmer.
Railways, schools, trade, car sales, crime, culture wars, breaking up the UK? Anyone but the Tory government. When things get really tough for the Right expect to see many pictures of the late Queen, of Churchill and union flags. If it’s a slack news day there’s always immigrants and the near-drowned of the English Channel.
It will be different from the past; nastier, more personal and more brutal. Everyone not with them will be deemed against
