While millions struggle in food and fuel poverty, while the NHS leaves people waiting months and even years for urgent treatment and while schools are literally falling to pieces, a few thousand middle class, middle aged luvvies descended on London yesterday to march for something that isn’t going to happen, perhaps not in our lifetimes, maybe not ever, which is to rejoin the EU. There was a time when I was sympathetic to rejoining the EU, which is probably a very strange form of words from a card-carrying Remoaner, a lifelong EU supporter, who understands and accepts that there are no benefits to Brexit. But rejoin; well that bird has flown, that ship has sailed. I’ve finally come to accept the inevitable. And while Brexit will always be the turd that can never be polished, at least not much, we somehow have to make it work for us.
My social media echo chamber, X (formerly twitter) in particular, is full of angry people, condemning the hated mainstream media (MSM) for not covering the march. I didn’t realise there were conspiratorial types on the remain side, too, but there are many who all seem to think that the BBC and Sky failed to turn up because of government decree. Nonsense, I tell you. The reality is that it isn’t news, not in the pure sense. It’s a meeting of a few thousand similarly minded, well intentioned people who have a King Cnut vision of reversing the tide.
They tell us that the Great British Public now recognises that Brexit was a mistake, that they now wish to rejoin. The polls say so, apparently. But do they? Really? What kind of rejoin do they want? A full-on, fully integrated Schengen-type rejoin, free movement with membership of the Euro? Or something akin to what we enjoyed before? My feeling is that the overwhelming Brexit emotion in the UK is this: “We’ve had enough of Brexit. We know it’s nothing like we were promised and in fact it’s a bit shit but actually we need to live in the world that we’re in, there here and now. Everything is broken and nothing works and we’d like politicians to sort that out rather than bang on about something that to all intents and purposes is done.”
Banging on about the EU helps no one. There was a time, before 2019, when some thought stopping Brexit was a possibility. It’s entirely possible I may have blogged in favour of a second referendum on leaving, but that would have been an aberration, a mistake. I don’t think I did, but when you write as much as I do, there’s always the chance I wrote a rogue piece. For most of the time since the disastrous referendum of 2016, all I wanted was a good deal with the EU, rather like the one Norway has. That’s still where I am today.
Bar those who actually turned up to march around London yesterday, I put it to you that most people want to forget about Brexit, even hardline remoaners like me. And while the polls on going back into Europe don’t lie, they don’t tell the whole truth, either. We have priorities, maybe not the same ones as the rejoiners yesterday have. Mine are outlined in the opening sentence of this blog, although I have others, like perhaps the biggest of them all, climate change. That solving today’s problems would be far easier if we were at the heart of Europe, is a given, but we aren’t.
The extreme remainers are at least honest in what they believe, unlike the liars and chancers who took us out of Europe in the first place but, like it or not, we are out of the EU and that, for the unforeseeable future, is that.
On top off all this, we need to unite around the one thing this country needs: getting rid of this Tory government. Nothing, not even Brexit, is more important than that.
