“Yes!!!  Finally the old dragon is gone!!!  Pushed out by her own party over Europe!!!”

About whom am I writing?  Theresa May?

Well, no.  The above words were spoken after a huge sigh of relief on November 28, 1990, after then-Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher was driven away from No.10 Downing Street for the last time, having resigned when Deputy Prime Minister Geoffrey Howe resigned, followed by a leadership challenge from Michael Heseltine, which had gone to a second ballot.

I remember that day well.  I remember it because I was working in a Westminster City Council library, on Marylebone Road, and some of the staff, not exactly Thatcherites, went out and bought a bottle of champagne.  To celebrate Thatcher’s downfall.  Because she refused to entertain the thought of joining the Exchange Rate Mechanism, which went on to become European Monetary Union, which went on to become the Euro.

Despite Mrs Thatcher’s resignation, and former Chancellor John Major taking the job, Britain never did join the Euro, never did drive on the right, and never did swap its miles per hour for kilometers per hour.

Therefore, we as a nation have had a soft Brexit since 1993.

Fast forward 28 years or so (God!!! Is it really that long?) and this very day, May 24, 2019, Britain’s second female Prime Minister, Mrs Theresa May, resigned after all but being pushed out of her own party by MPs frustrated over Europe.  Does it sound familiar?  It should do.

In her resignation speech, Mrs May alluded to the fact that she was the second female British Prime Minister, but certainly not the last.  Of the potential candidates for her replacement, there are two who have declared their candidacy, while four others are thought to be considering a stand, who are female.  No reason to suppose that there will not be two consecutive female Prime Ministers in a row, although Boris Johnson, former guest host of Have I Got News For You, and the man I like to call BloJo, is the front runner and evens favourite to win the job.

God help us.

I have suggested elsewhere that, should BloJo get the job, two of the West’s biggest allies, the UK and the USA, will be run by ginger maniacs, barely distinguishable the one from the other, between Donald Toilet – sorry, John – Trump and Boris Johnson.

God help us.

Today, the Financial Times published an article which spelled out its view of the future of the UK after Brexit. It’s not good.  I wish I could link to the article, but sadly, it will not let me do so without a subscription, so, if you’ve not used up your free article limit, go to the Financial Times‘ website and search for:

Goodbye EU, and goodbye the United Kingdom

Copy and paste that, because I got that title from their website.  Many apologies for not being able to link it.

One interesting statistic that it discusses is that not only was Brexit a largely English phenomenon, but that the majority of Brexit voters lived in rural areas; most of those in large towns and cities voted to remain, with a few exceptions.  It also characterised Brexit as a runaway train.

Yes, that’s exactly it, and its driver is David Cameron, who lost control of the train within 24 hours of starting the journey.  His staff, the Conservative Party, said, ah, Theresa May will do it, get Britain out of the EU quickly and easily, because after all, she campaigned for Remain, didn’t she?

Promising to stand by the Referendum result of 2016, and putting Theresa May in charge of departure once they decided to call the whims of around 600,000 people ‘the will of the people,’ were two of the most calamitous political decisions ever made in the Twentieth Century, and that century had two world wars in it.

Mrs May wanted to Remain in the EU, she campaigned for it, and during that campaign she spelled out the reasons why the UK would be better off in the European Union.  Then, as Prime Minister in charge of Brexit, she spelled out, with equal passion, the reasons why the UK would, in “her mind,” be better off out of the EU.

She, and Nigel Farage, are the two most obvious examples of politicians lying to our faces, but I am sure there are many more, particularly within the context of Brexit.  If you are reading this from the US, you will know that both Trump and Clinton lied to you during the election campaign during that momentous year of 2016.

You will know that previous presidents have lied to you about wars, and rumours of wars – Vietnam was subject to a massive series of cover-ups, as were both wars in Iraq of 1991 and 2003.

Back to the present.  Back to Brexit.  So much has been written and talked about it that I sincerely believe that there is nothing more to say that hasn’t been said already.  I suppose in part because of social media, and the internet in general, it has been possible to gauge more accurately the amount of discourse that has taken place over it, much more so than previous political crises.  Maybe many people wrote down their own private thoughts about World War Two, say, in 1939, but of course then there was nowhere for those thoughts to go, except maybe in a bin or at the bottom of a box in the loft, or similar.

Theresa May fought for her vision of Brexit, which was a “Brexit Lite,” and in many ways merely a slightly altered version of the Brexit we have already had since 1992, when the Maastricht treaty was signed.  We never joined the Euro – remember all that Exchange Rate Mechanism business around 1992?  We had loads of trade deals with the EU, that profited both us and them.  That’s the essence of a fair trade deal.  But the Euro threatened to beat us around the head as we sat on the netty of our European involvement.  Boy, were we glad when countries that used it began to go down one after the other, like dominoes, after the major financial crash of 2008: Greece, Italy, Ireland, Portugal…

But Brexiteers wanted to kick all that away, completely remove ourselves from every advantage that belonging to the EU has, pull up our drawbridge across the English Channel, and go home.  And they chose Mrs May to do it.  But she had a completely different vision of Brexit than they did.  It still appears crazy to me that they even elected her; far more stupid than Labour’s election of Jeremy Corbyn as their leader.

She negotiated, and she fought.  She negotiated with the EU, taking all the credit herself, by the way, and she fought her own party and her own parliament.  She thought she could take them all on alone and defeat them, the Brexiteers, like John Wayne punching the lights out of ten bad guys on his own, standing over their writhing bodies, and drawling “Let’s get out of here!” with a wry smile.

Sadly, that vision she had in her mind was not to become a reality.  The rebels in her party, and Parliament in general, were simply too strong for her.  She had to go, and on May 24, she finally admitted defeat.  No wonder she was in tears.

Or are the reasons for those tears really that obvious?  Were they tears for the country that she loved, for her failed ambition, for herself as a failed Prime Minister, for her dog, for what?  There are so many options to choose from that, unless she says so at a later date (and she is honest about it, of course), we’re never really going to know the correct answer.

From July 2016, when Mrs May was elected, it was all sadly so inevitable that she would go and be replaced by yet another unelected Prime Minister in Boris Johnson.  The only surprise here is that it has taken so long, almost three years, but that can be easily put down to her own personal ego.

I used the title Mrs May May Resign in May because it was an attempt to be clever, despite the fact that it is inaccurate on so many levels.  Mrs May is going to resign in June, on June 7 to be exact, and then stay on in the job, should another national crisis occur, until the party has managed to choose itself a new leader, one who will automatically become the next Prime Minister of Great Britain.  And one, no doubt the rhetoric will exclaim, who will immediately unite the party and the country from its deep division, wider than Moses’ parting of the Red Sea in The Ten Commandments (1956), over Brexit and its implications for the UK and its national identity.  x

Yesterday, May 22, 2019, I watched UK Prime Minister Theresa May deliver a speech to Parliament, which outlined ten changes she and her ‘government’ were prepared to make to the European Union Withdrawal Agreement Bill, which needs to be passed by Parliament before Mrs May can sign the bit of paper that means bye-bye EU.

Now, everything is politically motivated.  The Conservative Party, the party currently in government here, are doing really, really badly in the opinion polls at the moment, so it is no coincidence that this speech was delivered on the day before the country votes in the European Elections.  Hmmm… I’ve said for many years politics is show business; and it is.  It’s all about making sure that viewers get to see them doing stuff just at the right moment so that they change their minds and vote for them, whoever them may be.

So, these statements, and the timing of them, is not about Government doing something, it is about Government being seen to be doing something.

Mrs May, her policy advisors, her civil servants, indeed her cabinet, must all be smoking crack or something.  She really seems to believe she can unite the country with this shit, and if you’re looking for evidence that Mrs May’s delusion was now to the point of requiring medical intervention, you do not need to look any further than this speech and its contents, in which she kept referring to ‘deliver the change the British people so clearly demanded.‘

They did?

That clarity of demand came from 1.9% of the 33 or so million people that voted!  That’s roughly 600,000 people, out of a total population of 66 million.  That is how clear it was, Mrs May.  If the demand was so clear, why would there be any argument?  Why would there be calls left, right & centre for a second referendum, if it was so clear a demand from the British people?

The answer is that Mrs May, and our political class, whatever their party or political colours, will basically say and do whatever it takes to keep themselves riding the gravy train that is politics in the United Kingdom – indeed, in many so-called ‘democracies’ – around the world today.  That doesn’t sound very technical, political, or come from any sense of deep thought or clever analysis, but that’s the truth of it.  They’ll just say anything to keep themselves getting nice and rich.

I doubt citizens of many countries in the world care that much about Brexit, other than perhaps watching it from a safe distance and offering a wry chuckle as they witness the United Kingdom, once the proud lioness as she ruled an Empire that stretched from here to New Zealand, that soon changed its name to a Commonwealth, now imploding into a pool of its own sick, red-nosed and drunk, muttering something about losing their keys and forgetting the way home.

Yesterday’s speech by Mrs May is being seen here in the UK as something of a last-chance saloon, a final attempt at making her vision of Brexit stick, before the vultures that are already circling in the air around her fast-dying political corpse, swoop down and start picking away at it until there is nothing left but bare bones, lying in the desert still banging on about delivering the will of the British people.

The only reason Mrs May is still Prime Minister today is because she resolutely refuses to quit; they’re going to have to drag her kicking and screaming from Number 10 Downing Street, London SW1.  But, count your blessings; as long as that idiot holds the keys to No.10, us Remainers will have our way and Brexit will never be delivered.  By rights, she really, really, really ought to go, but as long as she is there, there is some glimmer of hope; who knows, we might even get that second referendum out of it?  Although I doubt it.  I have history when it comes to political predictions; I predicted that Leave would be heavily defeated in the Referendum, and that Donald J. Trump will never be President of the United States.

Because the alternative for us in Britain to Theresa May is really very scary.

The alternative is called Boris Johnson, or BloJo as I like to refer to him, because the moment he is given the keys to No.10, he’ll have his chops around Donald J. Chump’s charlie so quick it’ll make your teeth chatter.  Indeed, as a holder of both a UK and US passport (he was born in the USA…), he could, in theory at least, become a candidate for the US Presidency as well – a true Illuminati Globalist World Leader.

And Johnson will attempt to deliver his own vision of Brexit.  Johnson wants what they call a ‘hard’ Brexit – a snap withdrawal, no deals, no trade agreements, nothing that will tie us to the EU in any way, kick out Johnny Foreigner back to the country they came from, especially the European ones for now, and, in another Trump-like move, build a wall – a psychological one in our case, but who knows? – right round the coastline of the United Kingdom, no matter how many peace agreements that rips up.

For now, it will mean that both the United Kingdom and the United States of America will be ruled by ginger lunatics.  Both want to pick up their respective balls and take them home to play with on their own.  Both want to destroy the values enshrined in their constitutions that made their countries great, even if it means using those very same constitutions as justification for their very unconstitutional acts.

But back to Britain.  What of our opposition, the Labour Party, led since 2015 by Mr Jeremy Corbyn, MP for Islington North or somewhere like that.  He is true dyed-in-the-wool Labour, espousing its traditional values of fairness and equality, that I have held dear for many, many years.  Indeed, when he was elected in one of the most surprising results I have ever known in any election, I joined the bandwagon and believed him to be the great white hope for Labour which, under the multi pronged attack of Blair, Brown and their clones, had moved to the ‘centre’ of politics, changing their many principles simply to stay elected.

Surely Mr Corbyn, with the might of the Labour Party behind him, can slay the Prime Minister and her ridiculous plans for ‘compromise’ on Brexit, and send her to the back benches where she belongs.

No, he can’t, and don’t call me Shirley.

The Conservatives reached out across the political divide and offered to talk to the Labour Party to see if they could find some sort of level of agreement.  Mr Corbyn agreed, they talked for six weeks, then the Leader of the Opposition chose to end it one day last week, no reason given other than they weren’t getting anywhere, and he was effectively bored with them.  Oh right, OK then…

Mr Corbyn keeps demanding a General Election because Labour will beat the Tories, form the next Government and deliver the Brexit that the British people supposedly so clearly wanted.  First off, he too is deluded, the smoke from Mrs May’s crack* must have wafted across the Commons chamber, if he thinks that Labour could beat the Conservatives in what they both want to be a two-party system.

If the country thinks anything like I do, they do not want either the Conservatives or Labour in the driving seat, especially where Brexit is concerned.  They want a new kind of politics, and unfortunately that seems to be appearing in the shape of one of the most detested men in the history of British politics: Nigel Farage.

Farage formed a new party, the Brexit Party (guess what they want?), just a few short weeks ago, some say from questionable funding but I don’t know about that, and already that party shot to 27% of the vote in a recent poll (YouGov last week sometime).  That’s over a quarter of the electorate in about three weeks!  Nothing like that has happened, to my knowledge, among the political class in my lifetime.

In truth, we shouldn’t be fighting these elections.  The Referendum was in June 2016, Article 50 triggered in March 2017, and we were supposed to have left the EU in March 2019, but the EU granted us an extension until October 31.  Mrs May still wanted us to leave earlier than that, so we did not need to fight these elections.  But, she has failed in every single aspect of the Brexit negotiations.  What the hell were the Conservatives thinking when they elected an openly Remain politician to negotiate and lead us out of the European Union?

So, broadly speaking, the situation is this: Mrs May and her government are supposed to be delivering Brexit, but they never will, because her own party – the one Mr David Cameron wanted to unite by holding this referendum in the first instance – is completely divided, as it always was over Europe, and as it always will be.  Really, as long as Mrs May is in charge, I would dare to predict (see above) that we have no chance of leaving the EU.

However, from a political standpoint, Mr Corbyn should be offering opposition to Brexit, but he is not; he is simply and very weakly proposing a different way to do the same thing; get themselves elected to power.

And don’t get me started on the Liberal Democrats… they slept with Mr Cameron in a coalition because in the 2010 General Election, Cameron could not command a majority, and they facilitated all of the government’s actions against the people of Britain, especially those in a lower income bracket.  The destruction of the NHS in 2012?  The failure to get rid of students’ tuition fees?  Remember those?

For me, the only party that can establish and sustain not only opposition to Brexit, but also a cleaner and healthier environment in which to live, is of course the Green Party.  In the European Election constituencies, I believe most, if not all, have Green candidates.  In our area, the Greens already have someone sitting in the European Parliament, and I know that there are several more in other parts of the country.  The Greens aren’t perfect, nobody is; but of all political parties, they will do their very best to stick to the core values that I believe in such as honesty and decency in politics, or die tryin’.

To sum up: Brexit is not happening, and it has no opposition anyway.

Isn’t that a unique place to be in for a country under a Prime Minister who promised ‘strong and stable leadership’?  Isn’t this a unique time in British political life, where a country narrowly voted to leave the EU but cannot agree on how to do it, and there is no opposition to it anyway?  When was the last time a Government imploded, and its main opposition imploded at the same time?  Three years, it’s taken, three bloody years to get us into a state of seemingly terminal chaos.

This is why I believe a Second Referendum will be democratic.  It will say to the Government, sort this mess out.  This is what we want.  I believe the next referendum will be much more decisive, I hope, and clearly a required majority of, say, two thirds either way will make sure that, whichever way it goes, the Government will be carrying out what it says will be the Will of the British People, instead of this chaotic mess, which will never be corrected as long as the same old faeces – sorry, faces, keep popping in and out of No.10 Downing Street, for those all-important ‘Cabinet meetings.’

But not Boris Johnson, or any of his ilk, and definitely not Nigel Farage.  These kinds of discussions, in which nobody has a single clue what to do, should never have happened at all; the fact that they are is because previous PM David Cameron arrogantly assumed he would win.  Even if they were to happen, they should have done so three years ago – not way past the original deadline that was agreed by Parliament, one of the few things that were.

So, let us have that Second Referendum, and vote once and for all that Remaining in the EU is the only way to keep the United Kingdom together, not to reinvoke the troubles in Northern Ireland, and to keep the UK trading happily with its European partners, enjoying freedom of movement (don’t forget, inasmuch as you don’t want foreigners coming over here and taking our jobs, the same will happen to you the other way around.  What if you want to retire to Spain after working and paying your taxes for all those years?  Sorry mate, you can’t.  What if you want to pop over to Italy for a quick break as you work hard and pay your taxes?  Sorry mate, you can, but you’ll need to apply for a visa.  My sense is that, if Brexit were to happen, other EU nations would fall to the temptation to give the UK and its citizens an unnecessarily hard time, just because they can.

I want that Second Referendum because I want to Remain in the EU and I want to be able to prove that the majority of the UK want it, too.  Of course, it could go the other way which, as long as it is achieved via a fair and democratic vote, I will accept because I am a law-abiding citizen, but I will also campaign against because free speech is important to me also, as is the fundamental position of staying in the EU.

Thank you so much for reading this long and rambling diatribe, I repeat myself, I am not a great writer, and I repeat myself.  But thank you so much, dear reader(s), for my taking so much of your time. x

* Having read this sentence back to myself, it induced involuntary laughter which I then had to explain to my dear wife… it reads pretty disgustingly, it’s true, but it was meant to pertain to a drug reference I made earlier…honest…

…look like they’re going to be the biggest load of old toss in four decades.

But we can stop that, ladies and gentlemen.

And the tactic is hardly new, I’m sure it’s been used in many an election prior to now.

It’s just that, when we need it, we seem to forget about it.  I know I did, until I was reminded of it by a friend on Facebook.

It’s called Tactical Voting.

Current polls (remember these fluctuate hour by hour), show that YouGov predicted a whopping 27% share of the UK vote for Nigel Farage and his new party, The Brexit Party.  That’s extraordinary for a party that launched just a couple of weeks ago.  And it shows how quickly people can unite behind a party that seems to speak immediately and clearly to their core values, even if those core values are fundamentally xenophobic, neo-fascist and whatever other professorial-sounding term can be applied to these people who are so short-sighted that they cannot seem to think beyond their own island mentality – all this self-governing, sovereign state, independent nation shit.

Twenty-seven percent – that’s extraordinary.  That’s put the 100-year-old Labour Party into second place and the 200-year-old Tories into third – possibly even fourth, behind the Green Party, depending upon the exact outcome, of course.  That’s over a quarter of the vote for one country.

This blog is basically a plug for this site: https://www.remainvoter.com/.

This web site tells you why tactical voting is important, both mathematically and logically, and tells you whom you might like to consider voting for, based upon the area that you live in.

That is presuming, of course, that you voted to Remain, as I did, in the 2016 Referendum, or have changed your position (as many hundreds of thousands have, indeed there are some, to give a balanced and fair analysis, who have gone the Other Way) since the Referendum.

People say to me, what do you prefer, feet & inches or metres & centimeters; I say, feet & inches, because that’s what I grew up with.  Ha!  They say, but you still voted to Remain, and the Tories have kept us out of the single currency, out of km/h over mp/h, etc. etc.  Yes, they have, but we’re still an EU state – we’ve had a soft Brexit since 1993, and here are a so-called ‘majority’ of Leavers wanting to kick all that away, tear up those agreements, and instead of telling the EU to fuck off, we tell them to fuck right off instead, and to another planet as well.

If you are reading this and you voted Leave, I would encourage you to change your position; but the whole point of a democracy, which I hold dear above all else, is that you are freely entitled to vote as you please.  The most important thing is to vote.  Just vote.

I hold democracy dear, yet at the same time I join the calls for a Second Referendum.  I must admit, after the result was announced, and Remain lost, Cameron went, I thought that a second referendum was undemocratic; we should not go down that road.  But, the more information that came out about the Referendum, the more I thought that the whole thing was mismanaged from the start.  It was, if you like, undemocratically organised.  Just as a for example: I thought a simple 50-50 split of the vote was far too lenient for a vote as fundamentally important to the people of Britain such as this one.  It had to be at least a two-thirds majority one way or the other for it to carry any authority with Parliament, who could then justifiably act ‘on behalf of the people of Britain.’  Every time I hear Theresa May say that she is carrying out the wishes of the people of Britain, I want to vomit.  No, she is carrying out the wishes of a little over half of the people of Britain, who are currently desperately clinging on to the democratic card because they can see their beloved Brexit running down the plug hole of this dirty sink we call politics.

I can admit that Leave won by a simple majority, I accept that, but at 1.9% difference, it’s not enough; not enough for it to be used as ‘the wishes of the country’ or of ‘the people of Britain.’

So, to make the vote democratic, it needs to be predetermined as a necessary two-thirds (or some other figure clearly in the majority) figure one way or the other to be a clear win.  If Leave won that, I would be deeply unhappy about it, but I would accept it and that would be that, except that I would continue to campaign for Britain to rejoin the EU, if first of all they will have us, and second if we could get that majority to swing the other way.  That, my friends, is democracy.  It was not democratic for Mr Cameron to hold a Referendum and not have a plan for what to do if the ‘majority’ voted to Leave.  That’s what happened, and no-one was prepared for it; you’ve ended up with three years of chaos, with nobody truly getting their way at all.  Is that what you Leavers voted for?  Of course not!

For a party to have a clear majority in Parliament, they cannot simply have more seats than the nearest opposition.  No, sir.  They have to have more seats than the rest of the parties combined, so that they can act like a government and push through their policies in the form of Bills, etc.  That’s called democracy, because it was predetermined before any election.  We understand that that is what we need to do.  Why not, then, for a Referendum?  Oh, no, because that would be undemocratic; a Remain Prime Minister held a referendum with all the arrogance of a dictator, suddenly finding he lost it (the referendum, that is), and not having any idea what to do.

If you want to discuss democracy, I think you have to have those thoughts in mind, and I’ll happily discuss it with you.  Nigel Farage tried to argue the democracy card on The Andrew Marr Show a couple of weeks back, forgetting (and not reminded by Marr) that, in June 2016, he argued that, if Leave were to lose by, say, 49% to 51, Leave would not get a recommendation for a Second Referendum agreed by Parliament.  No sign of “Of course not, it would be an affront to democracy!”, but “well, we could do, but Parliament would never agree to it anyway.”  That’s Nigel Farage for you, a proven liar and one whom you expect to lead your Leave charge for you.

So, please, consider tactical voting; it is the one way that we have – in the context of the EU elections, at least – to kick Farage and all who sail in his Brexit ship with him into touch.  I’m not a violent person; Farage must be stopped peacefully and democratically, but he has hinted at violent protest should Leave’s No-Deal Brexit desire not get through.  I would hope that, should Remain lose and we do end up leaving the EU, our fellow Remainers do not go down the road to violence just the same.  Just vote, and vote tactically, following the best advice that you can from the site that I linked to above.  Try, as much as possible, to deny Farage the mandate from the UK to crow about democracy, immigration and all his other favourite topics.  Because, I’m sorry, whatever a Leave voter tells you, that’s what it is essentially about, otherwise why would an entire nation become so het up about lines on a map and trade deals?  That’s not democracy.

Thank you for reading this far.  If you did, please type “Olivia Newton-John has the voice of an angel!” in the comments, just for my statistics you understand, so I can see if this style of rant is working for the reader. x