It's been a little over a month since
the election result (in fact, you might now be more interested in the election's
Wikipedia page instead), and I never came here to complain because, like the rest of the Remain side, the prevailing attitude was one of stunned silence. This is the issue that defined the entire decade of the 2010s in this country (the referendum was in 2016, but that was only after a few years of people demanding it), and for the first time since everything went mad, we finally have convincing political closure. At last, we know what's going to happen, and instead of conflict and perpetual disagreement which honestly felt like the build-up to a civil war at times, so intractable was this issue, my entire side has been profoundly obliterated. We've been steamrollered and downright wiped out. On the 11th of December 2019, the Remain side was the terrifying kaiju enemy of democracy, stomping through cardboard Tokyo with our messages of unity and prosperity and openness. On the 13th of December, we were a couple of twitching severed tentacles and a giant bloodstain. What the hell do you say in that situation?
(
Side note: As it happens,
more people actually voted for Remain parties.
Here are some links. But the first-past-the-post electoral system is horseshit, designed specifically to
fuck over smaller parties. The big parties stay big, and the small parties can drink Boris's cold piss forever. It's such a complete outrage that Nigel Farage, architect of Brexit and
surprisingly principled man, agrees with this and is just as angry that UKIP, followed by the Brexit Party, have been screwed over harder than any other party in history about this. As a result, he has said that once Brexit is done, the Brexit Party will
rebrand itself as the Reform Party, to campaign for electoral reform so that smaller parties stand a chance. Given that Nigel Farage has a phenomenal track record of persuading an entire country to obsess over a previously minor political detail that didn't really matter to anyone, he's an excellent man to have on our side. If it wasn't for his policies, I'd vote for him. If he adopts good policies that I like, I will be delighted. Three cheers for my #1 mortal enemy!)
But anyway. After the election, there were a lot of questions: "Why did Labour do so badly?" Dozens of left-wing commentators, both reasonable and insufferable, came forward with their own theories about why constituencies that had never voted for anyone other than Labour suddenly decided to oppose the redistribution of wealth and vote for the party of
the Great Satan who had closed all their coal mines, annihilated the local economies of their entire regions, and plunged everyone they'd ever met into decades of inescapable destitution that continues to this day. How could Jeremy Corbyn be worse than that? Now, I have my own theory, but it's definitely worth pointing out that these commentators all made very cogent points, and they each blamed some other element of the current Labour Party. Was it the stance on Brexit? Was it the allegations of anti-Semitism? Was it a widespread conspiracy by the hated mainstream media? Was it Jeremy Corbyn himself, the man who invited the IRA to the House of Commons after the Brighton bombing, who was repeatedly photographed laying wreaths at the graves of dead terrorists, and who broke political tradition with such classic quotes as "Hamas are my friends"? The fact that each and every one of those points is entirely valid makes it impressive that anybody voted for Labour at all. Obviously, Labour supporters might dispute the validity of the accusations of anti-Semitism, but on an unrelated note,
here's a link about the dreaded Jews being responsible for Labour's defeat (warning: I looked for Labour supporters blaming the Jews and picked the first link I found; you probably shouldn't click that because it might well be a genuinely anti-Semitic website).
Even my militantly pro-Corbyn social media bubble shifted noticeably in tone in the lead-up to the election. In 2017, and 2015, it had mostly been "Glorious Corbyn will bring justice to the downtrodden, and we are all downtrodden and will remain so until we elect the mighty JC to smite our enemies", or words to that effect. This election, it was mostly words to the effect of, "You don't have to like him, you just have to vote for him." Hardly a ringing endorsement from his biggest fans there.
I said above that I had my own theory about why Labour bit the dust so hard. I'm really proud of it so I hope you haven't stopped reading yet. I don't think this election was entirely about Brexit, or the NHS, or whether or not we want to be the sort of country that would elect either Boris or Corbyn. It wasn't a battle between metropolitan elites and "real people", or a class war, or racism vs tolerance. It was, in the end, the final showdown between people who like politics and people who fucking hate politics. Just look at the Conservative campaign: all they ever said was "Get Brexit Done". That was their slogan, and they repeated it so frequently, in response to literally any question, that it must have felt downright embarrassing to some of the more normal Conservatives. They didn't threaten that Jeremy Corbyn would sell your house and send you to a gulag, as they have in the past, but instead they threatened "dither and delay" with the utterly baseless claim of "two more referendums in 2020". The Conservatives never said they were good; they just said that if you elected them, you wouldn't have to worry about any more voting. Fuck your involvement in democracy; you've had your vote and Boris is now King. Hope you like the taste of rich people's feet. Even
Boris Johnson's New Year message features the promise of "no more elections, no more referendums" (at 1:57).
And people voted for it! That's what they appear to have wanted! And I, meanwhile, love voting. I'd have a referendum on everything if I could. The government could ring me up every night and ask me to get involved with every single law that gets passed, and I would do it till the day I died. It's
direct democracy, baby, and it's delicious. I love it. And whenever there is an election, I always pick the loser. I voted for Change UK in the European elections back in May; look how they did. So Boris Johnson was offering us the chance to never have to vote again until I'm 37 years old, and of course I found that abhorrent. But everyone else seems to have loved it. Meanwhile, Jeremy Corbyn's stance on Brexit was to "renegotiate a credible new deal, then put it to the people in another referendum with the option to Remain also on the ballot paper". That's an abysmal campaign slogan, yes, but it shows he loves democracy. And indeed, if you ever asked him for any kind of leadership, old Jezza would umm and ahh and invite you to the library to go looking for the best possible answer. Again, it's great, and everyone should be like that, but it's not leadership, is it? You might as well have no Prime Minister at all at that point. So I suspect that the message from the people was not, "We love the philandering liar and international laughing-stock", nor was it, "We really hate communism and immigrants", but it was just, "For the love of God, change the record already. Shut up; I'm begging you. Just leave us alone."
This would also explain how Boris Johnson managed to win an election in spite of all his catastrophes. He
refused to participate in multiple interviews because he might be asked (gasp!) difficult questions. Every prospective leader always does these interviews as part of their campaigning, except Boris who pussied out continuously because he is a little bitch. When the Labour manifesto was published, the Conservative Party
registered a fake website to deceive people looking for the real manifesto. They did this mere days after rebranding their own press office's Twitter account as an independent fact checker, which obviously posted pro-Conservative, anti-Labour messages which were not independent at all. The party we now have in government are effectively a party of cyber-squatters. They're one step above installing ransomware on all our computers. But, most importantly, remember that if you don't follow politics that closely, because you hate it, all of this will have passed you by. If you don't watch or read the news, you won't have seen Boris Johnson hide in a fridge to avoid an interviewer. He could have shat his pants in every single debate, and I mean literally soiled himself, and done the rest of the debate dressed as an adult baby, but what ratings do these debates get? A lot of people don't watch them.
Most people don't watch them. And that's who Boris Johnson was targeting. And it worked, because a lot of people really just don't like politics the way anyone still reading this now likes politics.
So what now for Brexit?
The Withdrawal Agreement has been passed by Boris's "stonking majority", and we're outta the EU at the end of this month. Then, we have a transition period of the rest of this year to renegotiate all our deals with the EU. In theory, if we can't do this, we will have a no-deal Brexit after all. And head of the EU Ursula von der Leyen says doing this is
effectively impossible. So that's not ideal if you want the British economy to do well. But the EU have been very patient with us, and Boris abandoned the red line about the border in the Irish Sea to get a backstop agreement in place, and then played it off as a triumph of skilled negotiation. And, as the election has shown, it worked. So my prediction is we will get the Brexit deal done. I won't like it, but I was never going to. None of us will ever read it, but the anti-Conservative keyboard miltia will hate it even if it's good, and the print media and Conservative sycophants will love it even if it's bad, so it's perfectly possible none of us will ever know the truth. Just like we will never see
the report into whether or not there was Russian interference in the Brexit referendum.