Yahoo News If you think Brexiteers are angry now, just wait until the wonders of Brexit fail to materialise
I have just read Tom Peck’s article, "Parliament Square was a knuckle-dragging carnival of irredeemable stupidity". Were it not so true, it would be acerbically-funny.
It is clear that there are many Brexiteers who would like to go back to an imagined past of imperial superiority. If it were possible, they would emigrate there. What they fail to remember is that the forgotten and the left behind were far, far more left behind then than they are in our modern welfare state, impaired though it is.
For most people in Britain, prior to the relative wealth of the 1980’s, life was nasty, brutish and short. Under imperial and feudal systems, the vast majority are not in charge, they do not reap the benefits, they do not live lives of comfort and ease. My life today is immeasurably better than the lives of my parents, grandparents and all those who went before; a large part of that has been due to our membership of the EU. Before that, our lives were lives of relative austerity.
The great benefit of Brexit, for which we should all be thankful, is that it will slay the myth of Britain as a major player on the global stage. It will reveal us as a small, creative, inventive, energetic country, helping us find our realistic place in the modern world. This will enable us to have the comfort of punching at our weight, without the imposition of an illusion that we are punching, or can punch, above it. We will now receive absolutely clear, demonstrative evidence of exactly what Brexit means for the United Kingdom. All we have to do to see the truth is to be patient, clear-sighted and observe.
I have no doubt that Nigel Farage, Iain Duncan Smith, Mark Francois, and all who deride the EU as the source of all our problems, will first find reasons, then excuses and then just incoherent rage to explain why it isn’t working, but it will be too late. They will be exposed as the irrational, impractical, unintelligent, backward-looking, foam-flecked charlatans that they will be proved to have been all along. Peck is right when he writes that the two sides will not become reconciled; we will not "come back together". If you think Brexiteers are angry now, wait until you see how they behave when the sunny uplands of a newly-triumphant economic powerhouse fail to materialise, then everything really will be Europe’s fault.
At the same time, it will be an amusing sideshow to watch Boris Johnson and the Tories attempt to be both the Conservative and Unionist Party and the Pretend Labour Party, as they attempt to keep both their old and their new voters onside. If a party, which has been in power for 10 years, cannot plan ahead sufficiently to ensure that Big Ben is available to chime on the night which represents the pinnacle of their achievement, then I give little for their chances of significant success in other, more important, areas.
Boris is Boris, he will do what he knows, which is to wing it. It'll be riveting as a spectacle but will not work as a political, commercial or international strategy. Tory factional infighting will commence in the spring and will make the ERG (remember them?) look like new-born lambs gambolling in the spring fields of their new lives. Politically, things will get much, much worse before they get better. Still, I look forward to watching the Tories in their terminal decline. After the coming failure and the inevitable extinguishing of their demographic base, these are the twilight times for them.
The other cause for celebration, as part of the natural way the world works, is that over the next few years a lot of older people (and I write as one) will die and younger, more open, more imaginative people will take the lead. They will be unburdened by the memory of empires, kings and queens, wars, nationalism, shallow patriotism and the old, broken ways and so be free to help us evolve into societies where we all make better choices about how to co-exist on our small planet, preserving it as a blue and green beacon in the dark immensity of space.
All things pass...and so will Brexit.
Nick Kell
Address supplied
Brexit tensions
I found the sight of jubilant Brexiteers celebrating the UK’s departure from the European Union on Friday night very reminiscent of Neville Chamberlain’s return from the Munich Agreement in 1938.
To the cheering crowds he declared that he had a piece of paper in his hand that promised "peace for our time", that all would well, heed not the prophets of doom. Less than one year later, we were at war.
Ron Dawson
Dorset
A US-based niece tells me that Americans are holding Brexit parties, which they think are very funny. There is nothing quite like “new best friends“ who mock you.
John Scott Moncrieff
Edinburgh
Trade deal optimism
I think you are being unduly pessimistic about the possibility of rapidly concluding trade negotiations. It is always possible to reach an early agreement in any negotiation, just agree with all the other side’s proposals.
David Wallis
Cirencester
Divine intervention
If the US Ambassador to Israel, David Friedman, believes that God put Donald Trump into the White House and "puts people in certain places in certain times, for such a time as this [...] at all times", he could possibly think that the world's worst atrocities were ordained by God too. If true, I wonder how he would square such a statement with those horrors?
Patrick Cleary
Gloucestershire
A new dawn for Britain
As the coronavirus, bushfires in Australia, the Arab-Israeli conflict and global terrorism have demonstrated, we live in a world plagued with interminable conflicts, wars, quarrels, environmental hazards and diseases that are able to transcend national borders and cause death, distrust and mayhem.
Britain cannot live as an isolated, narrow-minded and inward-looking nation. Her relationship with Europe was one of courage, creativity, innovation and talent. They fought together to keep alive the flames of liberty and freedom. Let us hope that tomorrow will herald a new dawn of friendship and cooperation, not that of isolationism and protectionism.
Munjed Farid Al Qutob
London NW2
