Three straw men standing in a field. The rare Scottish air can do that to a person.
Democracy was not served with that UK referendum. Why not? Because the people were not given the chance to study a considered, straightforward set of facts and figures options based on reality; you know as well as I do that the population was fed a pack of lies, false representations and the hysterical, rabble-rousing bile of a newspaper and commercial tv system that saw one mother of a chance to pick up on something that they knew was going to run and run for at least three years or so, and boy, did they leap in with typical screams and Sun-style headlines! What a heavenly chance to throw mud at Johnny Foreigner - that's sure to be popular! Have you forgotten who owned Sky and the Sun at the time? You expect love and care for Britain to shine through after having to close down a newspaper that hacked private telephones?
Was anybody given a breakdown of the possible/probable business losses? The bankers and traders were almost waved a fond good riddance by the envious crowd of have-nots, of no-hopers filled with the class hatred that has always crippled Britain at one critical stage or another. That wonderful car builder guy in Sunderland, who laughed and confidently crowed that Japan needed our British engineering skills and could never leave the little island for other places was back, if not in person at least in tribal body, a day or so ago after the Nissan statement of intent, and what had the guy to say? "Let 'em go." How many thousands work there for Nissan? My granddaughter is a doctor in a hospital in Manchester: she tells me that if all the foreigners go home, the government might just as well close the doors on the National Health Service because it's held together by foreign blood and expertise.
Democracy had nothing to do with it; it was lies, disinformation and ignorance of the harsh realities of the state of the British economic dependency on international, and that includes European partnerships. The irony here is that for once, many of both the lower and the upper classes had people with similar fantasies of rebuilding the Empire and becoming the new, independent powerhouse of this world.
The B of E has just written a further half-percent or so off the prospects for the coming year, with a good chance of joining Italy in recession; they also suggest the current level of the pound is not sustainable: and it is already in the ditch! How low can it go?
There is still hope: maybe Parliament will find the balls to declare that it cannot accept its new rôle of assisting national suicide, and produce some eleventh-hour display of guts and call this slo mo crash off. Poor Mrs May is sleepwalking: you just need to look at her close-ups on tv to see it: she's working on reflex. As with Blair, Obama and Trump, the ravages of political life show in the face, not on that portrait up in the attic.
I remember those years of Wilson, Foot and Callaghan so very, very well. Beer and pies at No.10; maybe this is where and what it's actually all about: the prole revolution.
This was not politics either, just a little musing over the madness of those God appears about to destroy through hubris.
