People get upset

Britain, right now, is a little bit shit
And most of the news is so grim
But people of humour do relish their wit
And relieve themselves quipping on things

They’re clever and silly with memes and fresh banter
So wry in contempt, it can get rather mean
But just look at the farce of the national cantor
And wonder no more that they’re letting off steam

The Bexiteer Right and the humourless Left
Hate the refuge of weaponised humour
But this is the British way civic life checks
Against rumours and bloomers and tumours

 

Here’s The Increasingly Batshit Story That Eventually Led To Priti Patel’s Resignation

Is this the night of the living dead? No, it’s Britain’s Brexit team

The joke’s over – how Boris Johnson is damaging Britain’s global stature

If you didn’t laugh, you’d cry…

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neither democrats nor patriots

The times are crazy, so, perhaps it is not surprising that those who deliberately frame Brexit as an act of patriotism and every reasonable challenge to it as being anti-democratic would be the same people who are actively undermining both. Still, it is shocking. Depressing enough that Brexit was allowed to be framed this way, in the first place. But, since it is…

The dumb vitriol and intimidation of our wilfully ignorant right-wing press is a disgusting assault on intelligence and the shortsightedness and selective deafness of our MPs and certain celebrity lobbyists beggars belief. Almost.

Hardened Brexiteers who cheer Theresa May on, as she and her team rush to craft our cultural and economic suicide and who bay indignantly, at all thoughtful doubters; influential Brexiteers, who manufacture, insist, threaten and coerce, in order to act, self-evidently, against the national interest and well-being of the citizens. They are neither democrats nor patriots. They are nihilists.

It is also difficult to stomach those politicians and journalists who spend their print space and airtime expressing very real concerns over all aspects of this Brexit foolishness, only to vote, anyway, with those who are intent on driving us as deeply and quickly into it as possible. Would-be Remain politicos who buy into Brexit’s illogical crap, for fear of a mythologised Will, are turning themselves into the sorry enablers of Britain’s treacherous course.

Adding to this vainglorious chapter is the cognitive dissonance of ’ordinary’ Leave voters who, impatient or bored already, suddenly cannot fathom how Brexit is now the default prism through which all our social, political, economic policies and debates – domestic and global – will be expressed for at least another generation. This, despite their own stuck record insistence that they all knew, absolutely, exactly what they were all voting for, all along.

Hubris and Denial continue to need scapegoats for the myriad political betrayals that they could have smelled, with or without a referendum. Not surprising, perhaps. After all, scapegoaters scapegoating is what started this folly. Still, it is shocking.

I can’t stand it.

The democrats and the patriots are those who are openly resisting or at least earnestly trying to mitigate a national act of completely unnecessary self-sabotage. You’d have to be very cowardly or arrogant, indeed, to think that their caution, scrutiny and counsel are bad things. Or a bit thick.

Becalmed

Into vacuity pours every salivating nihilist
To vault bridges and dance the day invisible.

The disarmed pray
As hedonists look away
And the powerful wring their hands.

All prey, standing side-on;
Humanity, becalmed and haunted, waits
For spark and wind to wake the auditors.

asymmetric power licks its lusty lips

Brexit is all smitten
With the label ‘Global Britain’
Reminiscent of the time the Sun
Was always in position;

Gonna give EU a kicking
If it doesn’t get its way.

[Every self-entitled bulldog has its day]

Gonna threaten, preach and overreach,
Cajole and whine and then beseech,
As self-inflicted victims,
Sudden keen on Foreign Aid.

Gonna get an awful shocking
At the mocking they engage,
When the only offers knocking
Are from profiteers and souvenir
Collectors making hay.

Having doubled down on doublespeak,
Perfidious Blighty’s gonna reap
Some karma as alarming sway
of asymmetric power licks its lusty lips
And squeezes dry
A desperate pipsqueak’s isolated
Pips.

From not being reliably good at football, any more, to being the actual football.

The hardest Brexit. Freedom to be buffeted by whim and wind. Sacrificing goods, capital and services because of some people’s scapegoating resentment and fear of… people. There’s no strength or honour in that.

Theresa May and her Brexit dullards are leading us into a wholly reckless period of unforced instability, expense and acrimony. At home and abroad. Not only is a fresh plebiscite vehemently denied but the parliamentary vote that, mind-bogglingly, actually had to be fought for, is now rendered almost pointless. This is because it will come after the invocation of Article 50 and so reduces the choice of MPs to either a crappy deal or no deal at all – an abyss; Hobson’s choice, at best. There is a lot of careless assuming going on that Article 50 can just be reversed but this is optimism without good cause: no voice with the authority to do so has, as yet, permitted this. If Article 50 is to be invoked, at all, Parliament and the Public need to be on the same page.

Government’s approach to Brexit is a wet dream for the knows-jack-shit that is Ukip with all the potential for socio-economic suicide for Britain. Labour’s strategy is to rightly try to avoid a race to the bottom but by pointing at some of the very real race-to-the-bottom flaws in May’s plan and then voting for it anyway. ‪The Lib Dems’ approach, albeit the best, is being squandered because they are still a widely unforgiven, oppositional shell of their own making and may not have sufficient time to recoup effectively.

We now risk feeling quite alone in a precarious and rapidly shifting world; the smallest partner in most meaningful circumstances; the one with the most urgent need and the least clout. Prey. Prey to allies and foes, alike – from country to corporation. What then of our rights and ethics? What then for our economy and society? For our environment? What then of our integrity? How does such a reckless course not lead to even less sovereignty and our democracy being further undermined?

Leave behaves as though Brexit were a rebirth into that golden age when ‘Global Britain’ captured half the world under single governance and imagined having claim to the benevolence of the Sun. Remainers tended to think that Britain was pretty global, already and that it was also already in the sunniest position, both practical and possible.

From politicians, Media and Public, understanding is trailing at an unhealthy distance behind the decision-making. From referendum build-up, to campaign proper, to the vote, to the ‘plan’, to the A50 trigger, to the now meaningless final vote in Parliament: everything has been done in the wrong order. If Brexit is not a catastrophe, it will be more by sheer luck than by good judgement.

Britain lurches from not being reliably good at football, any more, to being the actual football and yet Brexiteers act as though we were the referee. By the time reality bites and Leave voters realise the folly of their hubris and hopium, it may well be too late.

Scary is what happens in the unknowable space before and until they do. What will it take to reach that critical mass of enlightened consciousness and rebalancing of Will? What will have to have happened? What will have filled that vacuum? Will it be bearable? Will it have been worth it? I have my doubts.

#BritishValues

[June, 2014 – Tragic pertinence needs must rework and repeat]

 

What would you have us value, then?
What passes for these British traits?

Is it the wilful diminution of democracy
That separates the people from the State?

Or maybe our incessantly insistent view
That what we do is “help” the world for its own sake?

Oh, wait!
I think I’ve got it: it’s that fair play code we think we own!
How righteously polite we are!
Perhaps we should commission us a global honour mission
Thus we won’t feel so perceptibly alone.

So, is it in our famous law and order you’ve translated into Money talks?
Our globe-anointed tolerance that shadow-stalks the local masses?
Could it be the age-old choreography between the economic classes?
Is it in our Blighty-quaint ability to wait in lines? The neoliberal culture of
I’ll only pay for mine?

Stiff upper lip, is it?
The non-complaining strategy that manifestly rhymes
Neurotic and sclerotic with our passive-born aggression?
Or perhaps it’s that amazing, self-congratulating way
We tend to trip out on our history’s big lessons?

No, wait! Don’t tell me! Let me guess:
You mean like how you cherish our belovèd NHS?

Hang on..!

Or could it even be our undeniable capacity
To finger-point with swinging lead and buried heads?
Or might it be our deep, rich, grass-root, time-was Cool Britannia,
Now, by Cowell’s ilk and cynical palaver, made an operatic lather?
Is it in the way we gush and gift a paltry nobody to unreserved celebrity
And rush to make pariahs of the stars beyond our knowing?
Is it how we gloat and glower over uncontested power?
Yes! It surely has to be the Press, with all its freedom to impress?

Or is it how we toe the line
When Lord America decides
We might be useful hand-tools, after all?
Is it our poodle disposition or our sniffy exhibition
That defines our island character?

Do Britain’s expositions make her values truly worthy
Or just pompously perfidious and small?

Well?
What the hell and where the heck
Are all these dandy ‘British values’?
Suffer me my ignorance but,
Is it in the way you favour those already able?
Is it how you keep your brother
Or the fear that looks for other
In the refugee and immigrant?
The prisoner? Disabled?
Is it how you treat the NEETs?
The homeless, sleeping on the streets?
The single parent? Needy elders?
Every worker like a serf?

Is it how you are transfixed by everybody’s patriotic worth?

Perhaps you’d like our babies stamped at birth, like eggs,
With redly roaring lions? Then, once they’re schooled and duly cloned,
Be branded with a standard – maybe tractors backed by Union Flags
To make their British value known –
For, what is value worth that can’t be shown?

Means means

“Brexit means Brexit”. “Means” means:

Small-minded
Base
Skilfully
Resources
Nasty
Result
Method
Signifying
Average
Miserly
Intention
Equals
Meagre
Ability
Explains
Matters

Extreme

Out at the edges
A sense of humour bypass
To be avoided

U UK hun?

You used to be so contained;
so certain of that ‘Great’ bit;
so full of it…

Referendum Day!

Hey quibble quibble,
The vote is a wriggle,
The ciao slumps over the tune,
The whistle fog barks in Adlibport
And the wisps damn away in the gloom.