I expect that, in years to come, people will read blogs such as mine and think that we were off our collective rockers, talking and writing obsessively about something that really turned out to be not that important at all.

But the truth is that, for us, as of now, it does matter.  It matters a lot.

What matters is that we have no idea what’s going to happen to our country, and its relationship with other EU nations, the U.S., China – and every other nation in the world, particularly in the area of trade.  Trade is important because for centuries we have used it to make lots of money.  Money is the object of trade, it’s what keeps our political elite on their yachts, in their mansions and swanning around their parklands.

And, just as importantly, we don’t know what’s going to happen to our relationship with ourselves.

Europe, with the help of our beloved news media, has divided this country like no other issue has ever done before.  Not World War II, not the F.A. Cup, not Blur vs. Oasis, not The Beatles vs. The Rolling Stones – nothing has split this nation asunder like Brexit.

There, I said it; Brexit.  Brexit, Brexit, Brexit, Brexit, BREXIT!!!!!

It’s a word that was first coined on Twitter in 2012; and, almost seven years later, it’s a word used in almost every household almost every day, by almost everyone in it.

I know folk who have already begun to stock up on dry and tinned food, not to mention stuffing their freezers full of perishables, ready for that big day when we wake up on March 30, 2019, stateless (well, not quite, but it sounds good) and alone.

We will, however, be an isolated state, a fractured state, and an aimless state, gently floating away from the European mainland as we begin our slow journey across the Atlantic, before eventually tapping on the East Coast of the U.S.A., swallowing our pride and asking Donald J. Duck for help.

There are times, I must admit, when I think this whole thing is a media stunt, designed to scare the stuffing out of the population and then divide them right down the middle.  You know the old adage: divide and rule.  Then, slowly but surely, and always just at the last minute, things get sorted out and by the time the deadline – or any agreed later deadline – comes along, all has been agreed and, phew!, we got there by the skin of our national teeth.

Brexit isn’t going to happen, is it?  It’s all a political and media stunt, isn’t it?  After all, politics has long been showbusiness, played out on our news media to fit snugly between EastEnders and the latest remake of Pride & Prejudice.

Actually, thinking about it, it seems that Jane Austen’s title of 1812/13 is somehow prophetic as of today, and could well be used as a title, or subtitle, of The Brexit Story.  Pride – you are not going to change my position on the EU, and Prejudice – well, that one’s pretty obvious.  Foreigners go home, just because you are foreigners.  The island mentality comes pouring back.

Some ‘Brexiters’, the term used for those who have stated they wish to leave the E.U., say that the 2016 Referendum attracted the biggest turnout in British political history.  Well, that’s not quite true; indeed, analysts who examine this sort of thing have determined that, purely in terms of percentage of those eligible to vote, the EU Referendum only makes fifteenth on the list of postwar elections and referenda, with 72.2%.  The highest turnout in the United Kingdom (excluding the Scottish Referendum) was the 1950 General Election, with 83.9% of the electorate turning up to vote.

In terms of pure numbers, things are a little bit different, but still the 2016 Referendum does not come out on top.  It’s still a lie to claim the highest turnout in British political history.  Furthermore, the numbers rarely take into account the most obvious caveat which is the sharp rise in population since 1945.

Then there is The Deal.  According to our beloved news sources, Puppet Prime Minister Theresa May has been running backwards and forwards to Brussels trying to get a deal that is supposed to be best for the United Kingdom, who voted to Leave the EU in 2016.

God, there are so many issues here, I hardly know where to begin.  First of all, the country did not vote to leave the EU.  A slight majority of 1.9% did, it’s true; but in matters of such political and economic importance, should the majority required be higher than that?  In badminton, for example, you can only win a game if you are leading by two clear points or more.  No-one complains if, at 21-20, you haven’t one the game; those are the rules and you accept them.  David Cameron ought to have said, look, we need a clear majority of, say, two thirds or more, in order to get this one through.  Otherwise, it’s going to look like the country is as divided as my political party is, which is the reason I called the referendum in the first place.  In Parliament, a political party needs 326 seats out of 650 in order to call itself a majority government, so that, if all their members vote with official party policy, they can still outvote all of the other political parties combined.  It doesn’t have to be that way, it just makes common sense, and we accept that.

Secondly, Mrs May is trying to get a deal that contravenes other deals that her predecessors – even prime ministers of her own political persuasion – worked hard to achieve.  I write, of course, of the Good Friday Agreement, reached in 1998 after years of negotiation over an issue that had divided the country right down the middle.  Sound familiar?

Only one party walked out of the discussions for that agreement – the Democratic Unionist Party, or DUP, who funnily enough are currently (as of 2019) propping up the Conservative government, who failed to get the kind of majority of which I wrote earlier in the 2017 General Election.  Now, the DUP must love the fact that any deal that Mrs May could finally achieve is one that will shit on the Good Friday Agreement from a great height.  On 22 May 1998, Northern Ireland held a referendum on the agreement, and 71% of those who voted accepted it, on an 82% turnout.

The sticking point is the border between Northern and Southern Ireland, who will be staying in the EU, and still using the Euro as its currency.  Since the Good Friday Agreement, there has been an ‘open and barely discernible’ border between the North and South; the only noticeable changes will be between the use of imperial and metric measurements for distances, and from the Pound to the Euro for its prices.

In the ‘unlikely’ event of a deal not being reached and the UK leaving the EU anyway (which, by the way, the Prime Minister promised to try and stop before the March 29 deadline), there is a ‘backstop’ in place that would prevent, or so we are told, a hard border being introduced on one of the most politically sensitive pieces of land in the entire EU.

To get Parliament to pass any legislation that involves this backstop, Mrs May’s minority government will need the 10 votes offered by the DUP.  Only problem is, the DUP opposed the Good Friday Agreement, and they oppose the backstop.  They definitely want a hard border between Northern Ireland and the Republic south of it.

So, at the moment, the Prime Minister is unable to reach a deal with the EU that Parliament will accept, and, if the country leaves the EU before any deal has been reached, the DUP will oppose that and give the opposition a chance to defeat the government on the backstop.

Holy crud, that’s complicated.

Under the terms of the Good Friday Agreement, there must be free movement between the North and the South, and, perhaps even more importantly than that as far as our money-grabbing conservative government is concerned, the North and South must share trade deals that are signed with the EU.  There are a whole raft of reasons why this is important, but I don’t think it’s helpful to go through them all here.

Right, where are we?  Oh yes, Mrs May is in the position whereby she cannot gain sufficient majority to achieve an overall majority concerning any deal she can get with the EU, and she cannot guarantee an overall majority over the backstop, which must form part of the deal if Parliament were to agree to it, but she cannot get a majority of agreement about what to do with Ireland if, as seems likely, the UK leaves without a deal.  Stuck between a rock and a hard place, it would seem that the Prime Minister really has no idea what to do.

Northern Ireland, the movement of its citizens, and its involvement in any trade deals that the UK or the Republic might agree in future with the EU, looks set to be the issue that could bring down Brexit and, most likely, the present government also.

As a lifelong anti-Tory, I couldn’t be happier; however, it doesn’t mean that any replacement government would not be Conservative.  Once Theresa May goes, it will only allow Boris Johnson in – Britain’s Donald Trump.

STRONG LANGUAGE ALERT:

Britain is fucked.  Fucked right up the arse with a broken broom handle.  Britain has bent over, opened its cheeks and taken it right up the backstop from its own government, its own government’s own party, the EU, and its so-called coalition partners, the DUP.  The Labour Party, under the ‘leadership’ of Jeremy Corbyn, decided not to participate.

The part of the British opposition party in all of this really could be the subject of an entire blog post on its own.  When Jeremy Corbyn got elected in September 2015, it seemed like he was the saviour of the Labour Party; but of course, if it seems too good to be true, it almost invariably is.  And so it proved, as Mr Corbyn got shafted by his own party; those pesky ‘centrists’ took him aside and said, Look, Jezza, mate, we don’t want any of your pro-union, pro-Nationalisation, pro-fairness for everybody, oh – and anti-Semitic nonsense here, otherwise we’ll make it so you have a really nasty accident and end up forced out of your job.  So, when it came to being buggered by the EU, I expect the Labour Party declined because they were just tired.

In the last few days, Mrs May announced that she would, if Parliament rejected the deal she had reached with the EU, ask to extend the Article 50 process of departing Europe as a trade partner.  Remember, the Tories would like it if we left the EU but still had all of its benefits, like profits of trade agreements that look like EU deals, but aren’t, because we’re not in it anymore.   Labour’s response to this, well done Mr Corbyn by the way, was to announce that they would support a ‘People’s Vote.’  This, apparently, is a watered-down ‘second referendum,’ offered by the Labour Party, who, like the Tories, are split right down the middle over Europe.  Instead of opposing the government, like any good opposition should, they have promised to ‘honour the will of the people’ – see my rant above on that issue – and carry out Article 50 and our departure from the EU to the bitter end.  And the end will be bitter. Their ‘People’s Vote’ would be on the deal itself.  The result of that would be very interesting indeed.

There is so much more to write about Brexit that I shall have to reserve it for a future blog; I’m tired, and I’ve got other stuff to do.  But I will conclude this episode by quoting from the Beatles: “And in the end, the love you take, is equal to the love you make.”  Think about that, and then apply it to Brexit.  If, at the end of the day, this issue ends up fracturing the United Kingdom into tiny pieces, which is entirely possible here, then we could be in real trouble for all sorts of reasons, and this current Parliament could go down in history as simultaneously the most dangerous yet ineffective Parliament here has ever been in the whole history of Britain. x