If the universe was a sawdust joint full of rednecks, with a jukebox filled with Toby Keith records and a door leading to a two stall bathroom, which contained a broken toilet (which people had kept on using anyway), then somewhere in amongst all that country, Good Old Boy, diarrhea shit would be the small floating turd of Brexit. This is our gift to you, America, that moment when you could look away from the gruesome spectacle of the cartoon character squatting in the White House, and once more laugh at someone else’s self-inflicted fuckerry.
You know something? The British cultural running joke about American arrogance and American exceptionalism has always been amusing to people here in Scotland. This is because much of the fury directed against that concept of the US as the shining city on the hill has been an objection from those whose own national ideal is even more preening, even more up its own arse.
Nobody preens like a self-important little Englander; they, after all, are the pride of the Empire, one time masters of the universe, the land of Shakespeare and King Henry VIII, who founded a church and beheaded two wives. What’s that chant of theirs? Two World Wars and one World Cup. And the Falklands. Let’s not ever forget the Falklands, the most fetid war England ever fought, which sometimes seems as if it was waged less over 3200 islanders than it was about a couple of rocks, Margaret Thatcher’s lust for blood and 480,000 sheep.
English exceptionalism was here ahead of America and it will be here when Uncle Sam’s land of the free is nothing more than a FEMA prison camp and Alex Jones the 3rd runs the nation from a gilded seat in Fort Worth, Texas, a chair that makes the Iron Throne look like your dad’s favourite barstool.
England will truly stand alone then, if by standing alone its people mean as the 57th state of the American Global Empire, whilst here in Scotland and in Ireland and Wales we’re building our own walls and watch-towers to keep the crazy people out.
Far-fetched? Only if you don’t watch the news.
The expected maelstrom of Brexit chaos will not transform Britain overnight, but then the machinery of it wasn’t built in one day either, it was assembled, piece by piece, over years. This island will fragment in a lot less time; first Scotland will go as we almost did back in 2014, and then it’ll be the turn of the Irish, and the historical reunification. Wales might hang in there, for a time, like a dead tic up a cats arse, but the choices will be to go down with the sinking ship or leap into the foaming seas … no choice at all really, if you value even one minute of life.
Foremost among the architects of the looming shit-show was the man who most benefited from what was finally unleashed. Boris Johnson, the current Prime Minister, our Poundland Trump; an adulterer, a liar, a charlatan, a fool. A floppy blonde tit poked in our faces, to remind us of what put the Great in Britain. For it was men like this, public school educated, born to rule fuckwits who would never have made it in the straight world without daddy and his gold-card. Who would never have made it without his daddy and his. Ad infinitum.
These are the fathers of Brexit, the bastard sons of George II, another slimy prick for whom Rule Brittania was written, a song by a Scot, to commemorate English imperialism, ruled over by a German. No wonder so many of these people feel a profound identity crisis. What a shame that it’s the rest of us who continue to suffer for it.
Brexit is a national disaster before it’s even happened. That takes some doing. The UK economy is already contracting. Politics is in complete paralysis.
Public trust in politicians has collapsed, and let’s face it when you consider how much the populace on both sides of the Atlantic have been consistently fucked by those in office without it ever coming to this – where parliamentarians are finally getting death threats and many refuse to run for re-election as a result – well, that should tell you how shit things are.
There are some in the British media and amongst the commentariat, who tell those of us on the side of the angels, on the side of the sane, we who voted Remain, that we should aim to find common ground with those who voted Leave in 2016.
They tell us these people are deserving of a hearing, and of understanding, because their grievances were real, if not legitimate, and that their point of view should be respected.
But how can you respect those who voted for something illogical, with implications they don’t understand, on the strength of lies and deceptions, and out of nothing but fear of folks with dark skin?
Fuck these backward, thick, bigoted shit-kickers, who whether they know it or not, or like it or not, are the proof that there is one global family. Because they are our version of the hillbilly trailer-park trash who voted for Trump not in spite of his racism, misogyny and the laser focus of his hatred but because of it. What else are the Brexiteers but their idiot cousins twice removed, and just as gurning, ignorant, vicious and jumbled in their thinking?
Respect the outcome? After The People, in the darkness of their own prejudices, voted to leap off a cliff? Since when do we run things like this? Since when does the world turn based on the stupidity of the uneducated and uniformed?
Welcome to the New World Order; mob rule by the most fucked in the head.
Ask your average Brexiteer why they voted to leave the EU and the mind-boggling nature of their ignorance is revealed in all its ghastly majesty.
If you’ve been part of the “national conversation” you will have heard it all; no more straight bananas; we want the right to stomp our own grapes; fight the proposed ban on prawn cocktail crisps; return us to the days when fish and chips was wrapped in newspaper and on and on and on, a dreadful array of nonsensical bullshit, much of it inspired by the poisoned pen of the serial dissembler who strolls through Downing Street like a gangster at the races.
Worst of all, this meaningless slogan about taking back control.
But dig a little deeper, press them for a real answer, and instead of the laws they want to see abolished but can’t name, or the freedoms they want repatriated which they can’t quite remember. How about the wealth, power and influence we’ll have but which has somehow eluded us up until now? It is there at the bottom of the pile, as old and as ugly as an 80-year-old hooker without her false teeth in; pull up the drawbridge and send the foreigners home.
That it takes you so long to get to it tells you that even those who believe in it, and embrace it with the zeal of a religious fundamentalist, knows that it’s an idea out of the scummiest stinkiest container in the bin room. That it should be left there, to rot.
But they voted for Brexit, in the hope this national disaster provided it anyway, their deliverance from having to share the local takeaway with people from Romania.
Not all Brexiteers are racist, so goes the conventional wisdom. You know what though? All the racists are Brexiteers and we wouldn’t be in this shit without their sterling contribution to the cause, and if their votes made the difference – and their votes most certainly did make the difference – then the whole thing should be treated as a national disgrace.
Respect the result? Because the swirling morass of intolerance that has always been at the dark heart of our national life, has coalesced around this central concept, an idea as toxic and evil as Rivers of Blood ever was? Since when do we run things like that? Pandering to the worst amongst us, to people’s basest emotions, instead of reaching for something better?
The opinion polls show the hardening of minds long since congealed to jelly by soaps and reality TV, proving that the only thing more dangerous than a little knowledge is having none whatsofuckingever. The malevolent whispers from the half-light of the government bunker are that we’ve been fucked out of our smooth landing by wily foreigners who don’t want to see us succeed in going it alone, and so a more hazardous course than even Brexit itself is the one we seem hell-bound to follow.
We’re truly on the voyage into Cimmerian shade.
The No Deal Brexit which nobody voted for is now the preferred option for much of the Leaver tribe, who casually admit that they would accept major damage being done to the UK economy if it finally frees us from the yoke of those bastard Germans.
That this would, of course, be a staggering act of self-harm has never been a secret to anyone; even the most fervent believer in the Brexiteer creed knows that this will bring misery and hardship to millions of people, including themselves.
And they want it regardless, like a guy whose last visit to the vice den left him beaten to within an inch of his life, but who’s first in the queue the following Friday. They are leaning into the cold wind, almost eager for the pain and suffering.
They want it just so they can have the thrill of enduring it. Of soldiering on. Of battling through. They call it “the bulldog spirit.” It would be better termed the bullshit spirit, because that’s what it’s based on, the idea that Britain won the war but lost the peace, that the Europe we defeated and the Europe that we saved have come together with no other intent but to fuck us, some to erase the shame of us rescuing them and the rest to erase the stigma of the defeat.
And the only way that we can finally show these Frogs and these Krauts that Britain is best after all is to turn our backs on all of them, to voluntarily retreat to the language and circumstances of the war in which we were amongst the victors …back to the time of national struggle …and therefore national triumph. Britons never, ever, ever, shall be slaves.
They don’t even bother to hide this anymore; Johnson calls the parliamentary act which binds him to seek another extension to our membership whilst we try to get our shit together “the surrender bill” knowing full well what the connotations are, as if our European partners and friends really were hated enemies, making war on us for no reason.
And all the while, Trump looks on like a fat fuck in a barbecue joint, eyeing up the steak that is sizzling on the grille. Chlorinated chicken is the least of what’s going to be shoved up the arse of the British body politic. The Special Relationship has always been an abusive one. If we thought escaping the Europeans was hard, good luck getting the fuck out a deal with this guy or whoever comes after him if you find out later than you don’t like the terms.
To defend this Brexit now, when so much that was hidden is known, when the consequences are staring us in the face, when the totality of what’s about to be inflicted on us can no longer be denied, and when those leading the charge into madness are behaving like men who can’t wait to put the country back on a front line footing …well it is not just wrong but an abrogation of individual duty and moral responsibility to the nation’s children and grandchildren which ought to guarantee the fires of Hell for every single person who would cast their Leave vote again.
I cannot respect that.
I will not respect that.
I cannot respect those who have done it to us any more than I respect those who would drive us over the cliff even knowing what it means. A mere 37% of the voting population brought this misery down on the rest of us, so they can’t even call it a majority.
Scotland voted Remain. The part of Ireland that calls itself the North voted Remain. Wales voted to go and they will very soon regret having done so, but this is the Revenge of Little England, this is the true face of English exceptionalism; insular, backward, racist. This is payback for the rest of us not letting them send home the blacks when Enoch Powell was riding high and gagging for it.
Some of them call themselves Thatcher’s children, but whilst she was a brutal bastard she was at least a pragmatic one and never would have endorsed this lunacy.
No, the Brexiteers are the wall-nutting offspring of the lunatic fringe. They are the ghastly end product of a threesome between Katie Hopkins, Nigel Farage and Jeremy Kyle.
Respect that? Never.
Fuck the Brexiteers. Fuck the lot of them.
–James Forrest, Scotland