No.116 - There be Dragons Out There!
Dear James,
I must apologize. I was working in Paris last week and therefore unable to write my normal letter to you or even say thank you for your own rare response to me. But needs must and work must take first priority. As it happens I was well aware that my Eurostar trip would be my last as a European Citizen. From January 31st I shall become a ‘Third Country National’ with all the minor inconveniences that this will entail such as queuing in the ‘Non-Eu ‘ line at Immigration. Much more serious is the fact that the forty five years of close cooperation with our nearest neighbours with all the benefits that that has brought us is being ‘discontinued’. We are heading out into the wild seas of the mid-Atlantic, about to be buffeted between the large liners of the world in our plucky little tug boat. But will Britannia rule the waves or simply rue them? That is the big question!
Your party James, has been programmed to have no doubts. The psychological therapy of ‘visualization’ as promoted by your party ‘brain’ Mr Cummings, has worked well until now. ‘Visualize your aim...Create Goal Pictures... Create an Affirmation for Each Goal... Use Affirmations to Support Your Visualization ... Expect Results.‘ This is how the therapy is described by experts. In other words, anything is possible if you believe in it. Fine at the individual level. At the national level? Scary!
Your party and Mr Farage see Brexit as a ‘revolutionary moment’ in our history but there will be no revolution. We are not escaping subjugation. There was no suppression by the EU. There was no economic constraint by them. There was no real excess of rules to trample on our national ‘genius’. These were all illusions and yet the illusionists won because your party had inflicted austerity on the many and then managed, with help from Mr Corbyn, to blame the EU for it! There is now in the nation a sense of exhausted disinterest. Brexit may be done but we shall now have to watch with no enthusiasm as we push out into the mid-Atlantic, a small nation desperately seeking friends amongst the big players. Yesterday’s bid for African trade in London was merely the first of many minor punts in that direction. It was quite touching.
But ‘the victors’ must have their day! Despite Boris having discussed a scheme to ‘bung a bob for a Big Ben bong’ on January 31st, he has decided he doesn’t want to gloat - he reserves that for his private sessions. So on Brexit Day, Big Ben will, conveniently, continue to be out of order and Boris will merely be putting up a son et lumiere clock on the walls of Downing Street. Mr Cummings's countdown timepiece, so rudely interrupted last October, will finally triumph. However, the real Brexit poster boy, Mr Farage is insisting on a party on Parliament Green at 23.00 on the night. To the victor, his spoils. Nigel will have his rapture as Boris begins his unequal struggle to blend old Tories and your unlikely new recruits in the North.
So all next week’s game playing will be merely camouflage. Sajid Javid has already warned the nation that we are heading for non-alignment and that companies should start preparing. There will be no single market, no customs union, only the bracing fresh air of being outside Europe. We will no longer be ‘rule takers’, only ‘rule makers’. Again I hear the voice of Cummings, loud and clear but ignoring the fact that all the coming negotiations will require massive compromise on our part i.e we shall have to take rules if we want to make rules! Meanwhile, Mr Cummings’s other diktat is that Boris, being unable to bear the demands of close intellectual scrutiny of the Andrew Neil kind, will become the Chairman of the Board rather than the CEO. That position will be reserved to someone who can actually think. Which possibly means Mr Gove although the ultimate thinker will be Mr Cummings himself. Boris is good at the ‘sunlit uplands’ stuff so best keep him to that. But Mr Cummings is now our unelected leader.
So the real agenda now begins and the signs are not good. FlyBe has been bailed out and Matt Hancock has said that the public doesn’t need to change their flying habits. Boris is calling for a ‘levelling of the playing field’ so that everyone has a stake in the system. How about beginning with the fpp voting system which disenfranchises so many and allows your government its ‘false majority’? A crazy idea? Not half as crazy as the all the other ideas behind Brexit.
But of one thing I can assure you James. As your new majority takes us into the terra incognita of your grand experiment, we shall be watching. For out there, on the horizon, there be dragons! Good luck! You’re going to need it!
Kind regards,
BH - Your Concerned Constituent