I’ve held off writing or even thinking about Brexit and the election. it was all a bit too raw. The Labour Party is still agonising over what went wrong and, in any case, there have been plenty of acute analyses of why things turned out this way. What I think has really hurt many of us is the evidence offered by the election that the country we call home is not the natural home of liberal, humanitarian values. I know that fewer people voted Tory/pro-Brexit than didn’t and that, if only we had had PR life would be different but ……we don’t have PR and the sheer numbers voting for a return of this government despite their record and their leader, means I can empathise with those who say ‘this no longer feels like my country’.
I was going to ask ‘what have we become?’ but it seems pretty clear that there is no ‘we’ anymore; perhaps there never was but many of us bumbled along with a sense of this country as reasonably compassionate and with some sense of social connection at least, if not community. It’s difficult now to believe that stuff. So I’ll avoid the ‘we’ word and consider what the country has shown itself to be, not just around the edges but to a far greater extent than many of us thought possible.
Enough voters wanted to ‘get Brexit done’ to re-elect a party which had already done significant harm to many of them. That’s a bit of a puzzle in itself and the kind of vox pops that feature still in the press and on radio and TV don’t do much more than illustrate an incredible level of believed myth and lie about the EU and what’s coming down the line now we’ve left. What happened to allow government to escape blame for the state of the country and many people’s lives by projecting it all on the EU? I can’t get much beyond most people, and certainly most lower income people, read the Mail or Sun and seem to believe what they read. The word ‘read’ itself may need some qualification. There’s not a lot to read in the redtops but I’m not sure they are read cover to cover. What I guess readers see and internalise are headlines and they clearly move and shape opinion for many voters.
Daily Mail, 05/11/19 17:22
Jeremy Corbyn desperately dodged when challenged over whether he would be prepared to revoke the Article 50 process to win over Jo Swinson’s pro-Remain party.
Daily Mail, 03/11/19 13:34
Boris Johnson wants to get his ‘oven-ready’ Brexit wrapped up by Christmas if he wins decisively in the UK General Election in December, saying his deal will be passed easily in the Commons.
If Boris Johnson wins today, a bright future begins… but if Jeremy Corbyn gets in, the lights will go out for good.
The Sun, 11 Dec 2019, 22:30
Updated: 12 Dec 2019, 7:15
I guess there were lots of reasons why Labour did so badly, a couple of reasons why the Lib Dems bombed (the leader and a pro-remain stance) and really only one reason why the Tories did so well; not ‘the economy stupid’ but Brexit, Brexit, Brexit. Think about that; the economy was thought to be less important than Brexit by lots of voters. In live interviews ‘real’ people said they didn’t care if it made them poorer, it would be worth it to be ‘out’. The sentiment was something like ‘we’ve done it on our own before and we can do it again’. The history I’ve studied says we haven’t done it before (if ‘it’ is stand alone and compete and dominate through our genius, industry or military might) and I don’t think we’ll do it this time either. Maybe that’s the other lesson to draw from all this; myth and lie will quite likely beat conviction and truth. We joined the EU, (Common Market as was) because our economy was tanking, not least because our business and industry was (and is) run by the same tribe who run the country and they’re not very good at it. Government, the professions and business are dominated by ex-public schoolboys (with some honourable exceptions, particularly in the Labour Party) who are a million miles away from understanding the lives lived by the poor or even ordinary working people (often the same thing).
Our PM has learned a lot from the US and the ‘Leader of the Free World’
He doesn’t just want a trade deal from America; it’s the first port of call for the Conservative Party when they are short of ideas, hence our education free for all, our impoverished health service, the reduction of benefits to below subsistence level, noises off about politicising the judiciary, racism, loud announcements of policy commitments but no action to deliver them and, oh yes, big, big lies. Post-war and post-imperial has been a rocky road for us; post-EU in a post-truth world is going to challenge Bozzer, but it will challenge the people who voted for him, and those who didn’t, even more.
How we stood alone (not)
When Britain first went to war (1939), it was as the ally of both Poland and France. Australia and New Zealand declared war on the same day as Britain did. They were joined by South Africa three days later, and Canada four days after that. In the following months British troops also fought alongside the Norwegians, the Belgians and the Dutch. In other words Britain was just one part of an international effort.
In May 1940, the British Expeditionary Force fielded a little more than 300,000 men. The French had almost 10 times that number.
If Britain had plenty of allies at the beginning of the war, then the same is true of the end of the conflict. In July 1941, the Soviet Union signed a military pact with Britain. Less than six months later, the United States also joined the alliance, followed by Cuba, Mexico, Brazil and eventually every other state in Latin America. China also joined the Allies.
………Britain was little more than a junior partner in this Grand Alliance. The Soviets did most of the fighting in Europe, while the Americans provided most of the resources. This was reflected at all of the major conferences that took place towards the end of the war, where the two superpowers took the lead on almost everything. At the conference of the so-called ‘Big Three’ in Yalta, in February 1945, British diplomats were already joking that it was actually a conference of the ‘Big Two-and-a-Half’.
WW2: When Britain stood (not quite) alone (https://www.historyextra.com/period/second-world-war/britain-stood-alone-ww2-myths-brexit-debate/)
The 8th Army, that’s the Desert Rats, was 25% British and three quarters ‘imperial’; it contained soldiers from Australia, Britain, India, New Zealand, South Africa, Southern Rhodesia, Basutoland, Bechuanaland, Ceylon, Cyprus, the Gambia, the Gold Coast, Kenya, Mauritius, Nigeria, Palestine, Rodrigues, Sierra Leone, the Seychelles, Swaziland, Tanganyika, and Uganda. The 14th Army, which fought the Japanese, contained soldiers from India, Nepalese Gurkhas, Kenyans, Nigerians, Rhodesians, Somalis and, oh yes, Englishmen. From a population of under 3 million 43000 wicked fenians from the neutral Irish Republic served in the British armed forces.
It’s called helping people when they’re in trouble.
(https://tiredandemotional.org.uk/learning-from-history/)
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