I've been trying to promise myself that I'm not going to get on my high horse about Brexit (again). It's so patently a clusterfuck that you, intelligent people that you are, have no need of me telling you how this is an absolute shitstorm of head-banging incompetence, and how our alleged leaders are clearly the most nakedly self-centred shower of money-grubbing arseholes since Sir Phillip Green's disastrous interaction with a cloning machine.
However, in these fraught times, it's imperative that we cling on to any ray of hope that may shine amidst the Stygian gloom, so what I will do is note that there's a rich comedic sub-plot to the whole fiasco, and in this hilarious sub-routine lies an idea which may yet save the world, not just Britain.
It is this: it's possible that arrogance has finally reached the point where it's a hindrance to the powerful, rather than a help. This whole sorry farrago may yet mark the point where we, as a nation, stopped listening to rich white men who only want to get richer. With Brexit, they've overreached themselves. Even if it does go through, the fury unleashed by their antics has been righteous and proper, and this is typified in the hardening of attitudes to the vote of confidence plotters.
Remember last Friday, when Jacob Rees-Mogg draped himself languidly over the news like a sitter for Manet with plummier vowels. Paint me like one of your French venture capitalists, Theresa. Ministers scattering like piglets, the sense that the government could fall at any moment. The ERG confidently stating they had more than enough signatures to trigger a no confidence vote. And then....nothing. It's like the first Iraq war, when we were confidently told all about the Iraqi military's awesome power and incredible weapons right up to the point where it turned out just to be a couple of old geezers with catapults.
At the time of writing, they still haven't got the 48 letters, and that after scrabbling around for days. It's becoming increasingly apparent that the country has been held to ransom by a tiny, tiny proportion of the Conservative party, like the one person at the works do who insists you go on to one more bar long after everyone else has decided that they're bored out of their skull. This weeny fraction has been arrogant enough to imagine that they, and only they, know how all this works, and watching the panic rising in Rees-Mogg's eyes is his irrelevance becomes more apparent daily has, at the very least, given me a bloody good laugh.
The wider point to be drawn from all this though is that we've had a once in a generation masterclass of how the people nominally in charge are just as clueless as the rest of us. You can either view this as depressing, or as an opportunity. The time has never been better to get out there and fight for whatever it is you feel worth fighting for. Be it climate change, your local library, equal wages, whatever your fight is go for, because all the voices in your head which said you didn't know what you were doing can now be countered with "so what? Neither does anybody else, clearly". If nothing else, arrogance has, this time, lost
However, in these fraught times, it's imperative that we cling on to any ray of hope that may shine amidst the Stygian gloom, so what I will do is note that there's a rich comedic sub-plot to the whole fiasco, and in this hilarious sub-routine lies an idea which may yet save the world, not just Britain.
It is this: it's possible that arrogance has finally reached the point where it's a hindrance to the powerful, rather than a help. This whole sorry farrago may yet mark the point where we, as a nation, stopped listening to rich white men who only want to get richer. With Brexit, they've overreached themselves. Even if it does go through, the fury unleashed by their antics has been righteous and proper, and this is typified in the hardening of attitudes to the vote of confidence plotters.
Remember last Friday, when Jacob Rees-Mogg draped himself languidly over the news like a sitter for Manet with plummier vowels. Paint me like one of your French venture capitalists, Theresa. Ministers scattering like piglets, the sense that the government could fall at any moment. The ERG confidently stating they had more than enough signatures to trigger a no confidence vote. And then....nothing. It's like the first Iraq war, when we were confidently told all about the Iraqi military's awesome power and incredible weapons right up to the point where it turned out just to be a couple of old geezers with catapults.
At the time of writing, they still haven't got the 48 letters, and that after scrabbling around for days. It's becoming increasingly apparent that the country has been held to ransom by a tiny, tiny proportion of the Conservative party, like the one person at the works do who insists you go on to one more bar long after everyone else has decided that they're bored out of their skull. This weeny fraction has been arrogant enough to imagine that they, and only they, know how all this works, and watching the panic rising in Rees-Mogg's eyes is his irrelevance becomes more apparent daily has, at the very least, given me a bloody good laugh.
The wider point to be drawn from all this though is that we've had a once in a generation masterclass of how the people nominally in charge are just as clueless as the rest of us. You can either view this as depressing, or as an opportunity. The time has never been better to get out there and fight for whatever it is you feel worth fighting for. Be it climate change, your local library, equal wages, whatever your fight is go for, because all the voices in your head which said you didn't know what you were doing can now be countered with "so what? Neither does anybody else, clearly". If nothing else, arrogance has, this time, lost
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