Yesterday, March 29, 2019, marked the day that the United Kingdom, us, we, the country I live in, should have left the European Union, with a deal in place so that we can, I don’t know really, still be a part of the EU without actually having any powers in that context.

But, you guessed it, we didn’t.  Leave, that is.  Why?  Because our Prime Minister, Theresa May, our government, our Parliament, are the most inept bunch of incompetents it has ever been my misfortune to have heard of.

And Brexit is the biggest national – indeed, international – disaster to have befallen this country since the English Civil War of 1642.  Well OK, there was the plague of 1665, and a number of wars since then, but in 1642 our Parliament conspired to cut the king’s head off, which they did, in 1649.  That’s the baddest thing Parliament has ever done, in my view.  OK, apart from voting for a completely illegal war, ignoring two million protesters, in Iraq in 2003.  Apart from all that, Brexit, and Parliament’s handling of it, is the worst thing they have ever done.

I’ve written before that David Cameron promised the 2016 Referendum as an election booster the previous year, and it worked.  So he had to follow through, so to speak.  He also made the mistake of promising that the government would honour the wishes of the majority result, and that majority turned out to be 1.9% in favour of Leave the EU.

Now, here’s where the cockups start.

The day after the Referendum, David Cameron resigned as Prime Minister.  He should not have done that.  He had campaigned to Remain in the EU, this is true, but I see no reason why he could not have said, OK, I lost, but I’ll continue to work for the majority vote and honour Brexit, as it was now called.  But, no, he threw his toys out the pram, didn’t he, and said right, that’s it, someone else can pick them all up.  Big mistake, especially in the light of who that someone else turned out to be: Theresa May, one of Cameron’s fellow Remain campaigners, who had said, as Home Secretary, that Britain was better off Remaining in the EU.

Now, she replaced David Cameron as Prime Minister, her political ambition realised, she told the country: Britain is better off Leaving the EU.  How can anyone trust a politician that does that?

Turns out, not only was she a lying hypocrite, she was completely inept at anything remotely connected with being Prime Minister.  She was supposed to ‘lead’ the negotiations but she left that up to her minions while she insisted on the big stuff, like the Irish Backstop.

Oh, I forgot to mention that in 2017, to shore up her political advantage in the House of Commons, she called a snap general election, just to make sure that she had a mandate from the country to do what needed to be done.  In that election, she ended up losing her majority and, for some crazy reason, aligned herself and her party with the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP), who now had ten seats in Parliament and could help her form a majority government.  Hardly a mandate from the nation, is it?

Oh, I also forgot to mention that, having called the Referendum, David Cameron – so arrogantly sure was he that Remain would win – that he didn’t, ever, at any time, consider what to do if Leave the EU won.  There was no backup plan, no Plan B.  There was no BREXIT PLAN.

You couldn’t make this shit up.

The next two years were spent in negotiating the ‘best deal’ for the country, but when it finally came after that period, it was so shabby that Parliament couldn’t support it.  She lost the vote for Parliament to accept the deal and Leave the EU by what I believe was the biggest margin in political history.

Somehow, she managed to bring the deal to Parliament a second time.  She lost that, too, although the margin was less.  Speaker John Bercow intervened and told the Prime Minister, in front of everyone, that she could not bring the same deal back to the House of Commons unchanged.  All right, she said, I’ll split it into two, and we’ll just vote on the deal bit of it, and leave the ‘Political Declaration’ to leave the EU out of it for now.

That vote happened yesterday, March 29, 2019, the day we should have left the European Union.  Mrs May lost that vote, too.

Now, we hear she’s planning to bring the f***in’ thing back to Parliament a fourth time.  True, the scale of defeat has lessened each time, but there are 34 ‘rebels’ in the Tory party who will never back this deal, and neither will the 10 members of the DUP.  According to the BBC, she will never get those on her side, and she is truly delusional if she thinks she’s going to win them over, especially since her tagline is: You’d better accept this deal, there isn’t going to be a better one.  That’s it.  After two – almost three -years, there isn’t going to be a better one.

The Conservative Party has been in civil war over Europe since, well, the beginning of time.  That’s why Cameron called the Referendum.  He was attempting to heal the rift in his party, and ended up dividing the nation.

Britain is now in a kind of civil war itself; instead of bullets, people are using social media posts to fire off missives to their enemy.  So far, mercifully, there has been no violence but I wouldn’t rule it out, given the strength of feeling, particularly in certain areas of the country that are prone to outbursts of a physical nature.  Whichever side eventually has their way, Leave or Remain, this tension is going to simmer below the surface for many decades to come, a bit like radiation.

But, as of yesterday, unless Theresa May does manage to pull off a miracle, Brexit, as we know it, looks dead in the water.  Personally, I am pleased about it.  But I do not look forward to the resulting protests from the Leave side if the UK ends up revoking Article 50 and staying in the EU; although, of course, I would share their view that democracy has been shat on from a great height.  It has, whichever way you voted.  And as for David Cameron goes, he thinks the government should hurry up and get on with it, completely unaware as he is of the shitstorm he has created.   It was all his doing.  It’s his fault, sir, his fault. x

P.S. By the way, the narrowing of the defeat in the third vote was partly down to some hardline Brexiteers, who would never vote for this deal come hell or high water, voting for the deal.  These included: Dominic Raab, Jacob Rees-Mogg and, most crucially of all, Boris Johnson, long touted as a Prime Minister, God knows how and God knows why, but there we are.  He is our very own Donald Trump and, I suppose, it is inevitable that he will at least get a chance at the top job.  But, as John Crace wrote in The Guardian today, you can never trust a politician who, like Johnson, has traded his principles for his career.  After all, that’s what Theresa May did, and look where we are. x