brexit (my last words, promise)…

The UK is no longer a member of the EU… and, although I’ve found the whole process hugely depressing and extremely difficult to come to terms with, I now have to accept this and move on.
As you well know, the outcome of the EU Referendum was 51%: 49% in favour of Leave… but it’s interesting to note that, on 22 June 2016, these were MPs’ declared voting intentions ahead of the imminent Referendum: Tories 185 Remain/138 Leave; Labour 218 Remain/10 Leave; SNP 54 Remain/0 Leave; Liberal Democrats 9 Remain/0 Leave.
Depressingly, we call it Democracy.
(It saddens me to think how little the Labour leadership did in the run-up to the Referendum to positively endorse the Remain cause. If only…).
 
And so began the embarrassing four-and-a-half year process of our government painfully trying to work out what an exit ‘deal’ might be. Throughout the process, the EU negotiators seemed to be organised and knowledgeable, while their UK counterparts appeared to struggle to understand their ‘brief’ or their specific objectives.
I found the whole process both embarrassing and depressing… BUT (clutching at straws), I’m hugely relieved that the UK and the EU have at least (and at last) ‘agreed a deal’ (the alternative would have been unthinkable)… or, as Michael Heseltine puts it: “We must welcome the news that Brexit does not end in the chaos of no deal, but only with the sense of relief of a condemned man informed that his execution has been commuted to a life sentence”. 

To my mind, Brexit has been the biggest UK political disaster of my lifetime.
How many of the 51% who voted to leave, still think it was a really wonderful idea?
How many of them had any clue as to how much the process would cost the UK financially (and that’s just up to the end of 2020)?
How many of them have any clue of how the rest of the world now regards the UK?
How many of them knew what on earth they were voting for?
It seems to me to have been all about ‘immigration’… what a narrow-minded, bigoted nation we’ve become.

So, more than 40 years of cooperation for peace and prosperity has been reversed and Britain’s destiny has been re-shaped for a generation. It will be much harder for Britain to sell services to EU countries, where we were once advantaged (Britain will now be outside the world’s largest single market). We will lose the right to freely travel, work and settle in other European countries. Britain will be throwing up new barriers to trade with our closest neighbours. The Institute for Fiscal Studies reckons it will reduce the economy by 2% and add 3.5% inflation.
 
To my mind, AA Gill got it absolutely right in an article he wrote for ‘The Sunday Times’ (12 June 2016) just prior to the Referendum… and his own death:
“We all know what ‘getting our country back’ means. It’s snorting a line of the most pernicious and debilitating Little English drug, nostalgia. The warm, crumbly, honey-coloured, collective ‘yesterday’ with its fond belief that everything was better back then, that Britain (England, really) is a worse place now than it was at some foggy point in the past where we achieved peak Blighty…
“Culture works and grows through the constant warp and weft of creators, producers, consumers, intellectuals and instinctive lovers. You can’t dictate or legislate for it, you can just make a place that encourages it and you can truncate it.
You can make it harder and more grudging, you can put up barriers and you can build walls, but why on earth would you?
This collective culture, this golden civilisation grown on this continent over thousands of years, has made everything we have and everything we are, why would you not want to be part of it”.
Amen to that. 

february 2015 books

More book stuff:

The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner (James Hogg): This is a strange book. I picked it up under the “Classics” section of the £3 book shop and decided to give it a go. Set in Scotland at the beginning of the 18^th century, it was first published anonymously in 1824, as if it were the presentation of a found document from the previous century offered to the public with a long introduction by its unnamed author. Many of the events of the novel are narrated twice; first by the 'editor', who gives his account of the facts as he understands them to be, and then in the words of the 'sinner' himself.
It’s been described as a “study of religious fanaticism through its deeply critical portrait of the Calvinist concept of predestination” – a mix of madness, the supernatural, and religious intolerance! Despite the book’s fictitious nature, it does provide a haunting reminder of the Spanish Inquisition of the 15^th century or, indeed, the radical Islamist group, the Islamic State (IS) of today in huge expanses of eastern Syria and across northern and western Iraq.
A Delicate Truth (John Le Carre): This is our next Book Group book. I think it’s only the second Le Carre novel I’ve read. Amongst other things, this book is about the shadowy, apparently ever-expanding world of non-government insiders from banking, industry and commerce who have influence within the UK government. It might be fiction, but you get a firm sense of reality when it comes to descriptions of mandarins within the Foreign Office and dealings with influential, but unethical, private companies – especially those with interests in the arms trade. Morality (or lack of it) and conscience is at the heart of this novel - and a firm sense that politicians are betraying all of us. I enjoyed it, despite being left with a feeling that it was very formulaic in nature and simply the last of Le Carre’s production line (which is probably very unfair!). 
Lucia’s Progress (EF Benson): My fifth Benson “Mapp+Lucia” book (written in the 1920s and set in Rye). Beautifully observed. Funny... and all the other things I’ve written about the previous books in the series. Very pleasurable reading.  
Italian Ways (Tim Parks): Writer Tim Parks, an Englishman, has lived in Italy for the past 30 years. This is a book about Italy, about Italians and about Italian railways. I’ve not a travel book… and, yet, perhaps it is. More than anything, it’s a charming, really rather lovely, gentle, amusing book about Italian ways… from the very good and the appalling bad barmen serving coffee in Milan station to the unfathomable depths of railway timetables (and trains) in Sicily. I loved it.
The Sayings of the Desert Fathers (Benedicta Ward): This is a book of sayings of fourth century ascetics who fled to the desert to live out their Christian faith… and who were sought out by admirers for counsel. It’s a remarkable book about the desert fathers’ vision, courage, endurance and integrity. But, at times, it’s also completely bizarre and contains impenetrable (for me) and sometimes completely nonsensical (again for me!) snippets of “wisdom”. One of those books I’ll continue to dip into over the coming years.