No.34 - Two Dreams and an Awakening
Dear James,
I hope you won’t mind my being rather intimate with you but I’d like to share a dream I had last night. In fact I had two. I suppose they were both a reaction to the current lull in proceedings as the Attorney General wrestles in Brussels with his two week futility exercise to create a fig leaf of a concession to the ERG. At least mine were dreams. His is a living nightmare.
My first dream was a day after Mrs May finally won her deal by pushing the Attorney General’s new recommendation through parliament by a majority of one. The streets the next day were full of victorious Leavers, shouting their slogans and daubing graffiti such as ‘At Last - Out, Out, Out!’ Mrs May appeared on the steps of Downing Street and made one of her infamous speeches about equality for all and delivering on the vote of the British People in 2016. The Daily Express’s headline screamed, ‘Liberation Day! At Last’. And, strangely, the pound rose on the currency exchanges by 2%. Finally, Jacob-Rees Mogg appeared outside parliament and made a frock-coat speech about an investors’ paradise once we are free of the ECJ. Meanwhile Remainers throughout the UK were enduring a rerun of the morning of June 24th 2016. One week later the negotiations with the EU started up again just as Mrs May was turfed out as PM. A new PM, one Boris Johnson, took over and there was an immediate clash with M. Barnier in Brussels. Within days the clashes had become open warfare. The initial negotiations broke down when Johnson walked out on Barnier. The pound shrank again and what everyone thought had been the end of discussions became the start of eighteen months of ‘out of the frying pan into the fire’ rhetoric. The pound declined further and reached an all time low again the Euro within six months. Messers Dyson and Rees-Mogg retreated to their new HQ’s in Singapore and Dublin while those at home gritted their teeth to show true British resilience. I don’t much like that kind of dream.
In my second dream the Remainers won, also by a single vote. Mrs May made a resignation speech from Downing Street as the Tory Party went into its final death throes. Steve Bray was out there with his EU Top Hat and his flags, waving endlessly at the Houses of Parliament. Remainers flooded the streets in celebration of a glorious semi-victory. The Leavers cried betrayal, rioted for a few days in the north and then went back to plotting. Big business took a deep breath, started eating into its stocks of raw materials and relaxed into business as usual. In the Boardrooms of London, bottles of bubbly were surreptitiously opened and quaffed while CEOs and traders looked forward to the latest bonus round. Meanwhile people in the north went back to sullen despair as life gradually returned to normal. It was not much better than my first dream.
Something else happened when I woke up. I was in one of those semi-dream, semi-conscious states of half-life in which reality mingles haphazardly with unreality. For a moment I thought I saw a new House of Commons, located somewhere between Birmingham and Manchester, selected by proportional representation and peopled by MPs with common sense, debating in a half moon debating chamber. They were discussing the establishment of a National Commission of Enquiry into the ‘Brexit Crisis.’ There were no crowds on the street, no riots in the north. Just a quiet determination to understand ourselves and offer a blueprint for the complete restructuring of our political, economic and social lives. For a moment I felt hope. Then reality set in. I realised that we are still waiting.
Do you dream James? I suppose life in parliament at the moment must resemble something between a dream and a nightmare? How long will it drag on? How much longer will our nation be stretched so painfully between the outdated nationalism of the ERG and the fantasies of the Corbyn cabal?
There is of course, one way to break the current nightmare. It is to wake up and put the vote back to the people.
Kind regards,
BH - Your Concerned Constituent